Critical Pragmatics: Ten years on

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Critical Pragmatics: Ten years on

The Language, Action and Thought (LAT) group at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) invites contributions in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Critical Pragmatics (CP). This witty and elegant book is the result of the creative and collaborative exchanges over a number of years between Kepa Korta and John Perry (KP). The ideas in the book provide important insights into the received framework of pragmatics. One of the guiding ideas, following Austin and Grice, is that language is action whereby intentions and beliefs take centre stage. KP claim that although Austin and Grice vindicated pragmatics from the classic code model, remnants of it remain fully intact. For example, the authors observe that it is commonplace in action theory to distinguish a plurality of contents for an act—the things that one does. In pragmatic research, there is a tendency to take utterances to have a single truth conditional content—the thing that is said (Korta & Perry, 2011, xii). We can refer to this tendency as the ‘dogma of mono-propositionalism’. KP are pluralists of content, and accordingly treat utterances (and information-carrying events) as involving different levels of contents from minimal utterance-bound content to ordinary referential content. By acknowledging the various contents associated with an utterance, CP carves out a unique and comprehensive framework which is semantically minimalist and pragmatically contextualism.

Over the last ten years, the book and the ideas therein continue to be a driving force in research, inspiring a wide audience working in diverse areas, including but not limited to action and communication, rhetoric, pragmatics/semantics interface and touches upon issues including but not limited to fiction, non-literal uses of language, unarticulated constituents, and reference.

WORKSHOP DETAILS:

The theme of the workshop is Critical Pragmatics: Ten years on and welcomes a broad spectrum of contributions such as recent developments in CP, critical and comparative reflections, as well as avenues for further research. Its principal aim is to bring together linguists and philosophers for the purpose of dialogue and discussion of CP.  

The workshop will be held online, hosted by the Language, Action and Thought (LAT) research group at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). It will take place December 15th to 17th 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. (tentative) each day, Central European Time. There is the potential to publish selected papers in a special series.

Submission deadline: September 30th, 2021

Notice of acceptance: October 25th, 2021 (via email)

Abstracts must be written in English and should not exceed 500 words. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Please attach abstracts as a document to the email and include in the body of the email the author’s name, affiliation, and title of paper. Interested candidates must submit to the email address [email protected]

Accepted candidates should be prepared for a 20-minute presentation, plus 10 minutes of Q&A, which will be held alongside our keynote speakers, John Perry and Kepa Korta.

For query, you can contact [email protected] and visit https://latgroup.wixsite.com/home/critical-pragmatics-ten-years. For those interested in submitting, please keep the website handy.

Organizing Committee: Josu Acosta, María de Ponte, Ekain Garmendia, Joana Garmendia, Chris Genovesi (chair), Larraitz Zubeldia.

Scientific Committee: Eros Corazza, Kepa Korta. Genoveva Martí, Eleonora Orlando, Ernesto Perini, John Perry, Stefano Predelli, Richard Vallée.

The conference is supported in part by the Basque Government (IT1032-16), the Spanish Government (PID2019-106078GB-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE), and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (756-2019-0813). 

References:

Kepa Korta and John Perry (2011). Critical Pragmatics. An Inquiry into Reference and Communication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.