Experimental Pragmatics: The Making of a Cognitive Science

by Ira Noveck

How does a listener understand a sarcastic 'That was a wonderful speech' when the words point to a positive review? Why do students of introductory logic interpret 'Some cabs are yellow' as 'Not all cabs are yellow' when the meaning of 'some' is compatible with 'all'? Pragmatics aims to explain how a listener draws out a speaker's meaning from an utterance, an astonishing feat when one considers that the words in a sentence hardly suffice for fully comprehending what the speaker intended. Given the nature of pragmatics, it is going to take the interdisciplinary firepower of many cognitive sciences - including philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience - to fully appreciate this uniquely human ability. In this book, Ira Noveck, a leading pioneer in experimental pragmatics, engagingly walks the reader through the phenomena, the theoretical debates, the experiments as well as the historical development of this growing academic discipline.

Genres: Linguistics

274 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Nat]

This book is a very helpful survey of the rapidly growing experimental literature that concerns "pragmatic" phenomena, like metaphor, metonymy, irony, implicature, prosody, presupposition, and so on. In particular, I found it's historical and contemporary survey of the complex debates between pragmatic and grammatical/semantic accounts of scalar implicature (that is, the tendency of interpreters to interpret a statement like "I ate some of the cookies" as meaning that the speaker didn't eat all of the cookies) very helpful.

I share Noveck's sense that running experiments is an exercise in finding some kind of common ground among researchers with different theoretical commitments, even if they disagree about how to interpret the results of particular experiments. I think there has been a salutary return to some of the methodological commitments of the logical positivists, even if it's not combined with the more radical claims about verification being a criterion of meaningfulness. I think the philosophical study of language has been seriously enhanced by collaboration with the cognitive sciences, and by embracing a commitment to thinking harder about what kind of experimental or observational evidence could tilt debates one way or the other.