14th International Pragmatics Conference - Panel "From Pragmatism to Pragmatics"

14th IPC, Antwerp 2015

Panel “From Pragmatism to Pragmatics”

Organizers Francesco Bellucci & Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen

The purpose of the panel “From Pragmatism to Pragmatics” is to investigate the historical and theoretical connections between pragmatism and pragmatics. The organizers select 3-4 papers to be presented for the 90 minute panel  (20 minutes each + 10 minute introduction by the organizers).

Building on Charles S. Peirce’s theory of signs (semiotics), Charles Morris famously divided the study of language into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, and defined pragmatics as the study of the relation of signs to interpreters. Carnap adopted Morris’ trichotomy and popularized it in philosophy. Later Morris described pragmatics as the study of the origin, use and effects of signs. Although Morris’s and Carnap’s divisions cannot be exactly mapped onto Peirce’s division of semiotics into speculative grammar, critic, and speculative rhetoric, yet it has been shown that Peirce himself already formulated a speech-act theory ante litteram.

But this is only where the story begins. Paul Grice’s archives (Bancroft Library, Berkeley) contain striking testimony that not only did Grice know about Peirce but also that around mid-1950s he wrote a full set of lecture notes entitled “Peirce’s Theory of Signs”. His account of meaning developed, at least in part, from his reaction to Peirce.

The manifold connections, both historical and theoretical, between pragmatism(Peirce, Morris etc.) and classical and contemporary pragmatics are still to be explored in full. The aim of the proposed panel is to identify new historical sources of pragmatics, to document the influence that earlier theories of signs, meaning and language exercised upon its emergence, and to reflect on the historical and epistemological status of pragmatics. The proposed panel and its papers thus contribute to the investigation of a pragmatic, and not merely the “semantic” tradition (Coffa) in the relevant histories of philosophy of language and pragmatics.

The panel organizers invite submissions on any of the following topics.

·       From Peirce through Morris and Carnap to Grice: Historical perspectives

·       Theoretical connections between pragmatism and pragmatics

·       Historical perspectives to assertions, propositions and speech acts; philosophy of language and pragmatics

·       History of semiotics and history of pragmatics: influences and overlaps

·       Grice’s Peirce

Abstracts (min. 250 and max. 500 words, not including references) should be submitted by the 15 October 2014 deadline. For submission please follow the instructions of the 14th IPC Call for Papers: http://ipra.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.CONFERENCE14&n=1473