CFP: Topoi: A Critical Eye on Critical Pragmatics: Issues at the Frontier of Semantics and Pragmatics

We are inviting submissions of papers for a special issue to be published in Topoi, with the title “A Critical Eye on Critical Pragmatics: Issues at the Frontier of Semantics and Pragmatics”. The volume is intended to gather papers offering a critical development and discussion of the ideas presented in Kepa Korta’s and John Perry’s Critical Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Papers should be written in English, fit for blind review, and should not exceed a maximum of 8500 words. The deadline for paper submission is September 15th, 2022. More information about the special issue and the submission process can be found below.

Guest Editors

Chris Genovesi — ILCLI, University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV) 
[email protected]

Ekain Garmendia — ILCLI, University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV)
[email protected]

Special Issue Description

On December 2021, The Language, Action and Thought (LAT) research group and the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) at the University of the Basque Country organized an online workshop to celebrate 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. 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. Korta and Perry 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. We can refer to this tendency as the ‘dogma of mono-propositionalism’. Korta and Perry are pluralists of content, and accordingly treat utterances (and information-carrying events) as involving different levels of contents. 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.

We received some very interesting proposals at the open Call for Abstracts of the Workshop, and the presentations at the conference were lively and provocative, inspiring productive and thoughtful dialogue. They covered a wide range of topics and areas, offering a critical re-evaluation of the contributions made in CP, and developing the main tenets defended in CP to approach different issues in the frontier of semantics and pragmatics. Hence, we decided that it was a wonderful opportunity to ask participants to contribute papers based on their presentations to a future collective volume on Critical Pragmatics (along with other papers that we expect to receive by this open call).

We are inviting submissions of papers offering a critical examination of Critical Pragmatics. Possible contributions include not only novel applications and developments of the theory, but critical and conflicting points of view, and evaluations of the success of its applications to various issues in semantics and pragmatics, including potential limitations. So, we welcome contributions on a wide range of topics, always opening a dialogue with the positions held and advance in Critical Pragmatics. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Singular Reference.

Mono-propositionalism and content-pluralism.

Speaker-intention, speaker plan, meaning and communication.

The minimalism/contextualism debate.

Fictional and mythical names, and their uses in different sorts of contexts.

Slurred and figurative language use.

Non truth-conditional meaning.

New perspectives on classic issues in the philosophy of language, including Frege’s puzzle.

The semantics and pragmatics of attitude ascriptions.

Unarticulated constituents and reference.

Epistemic and alethic modality (along with other sorts of modalities), and content-pluralism.

The semantics of indexical expressions and their role in language and thought.

Submission guidelines

We accept submissions of full papers with a Deadline of September 15th. Papers should be written in English and respect a maximum of 8500 words (including both footnotes and references), and include a short abstract and four to six keywords. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. All the papers will be subjected to a process of blind review before acceptance.

Every paper should be submitted online by using Topoi’s Editorial Manager (you can access to the Editorial Manager by clicking here). Important: when submitting the paper, be sure that the option “SI Critical Pragmatics (Genovesi/Garmendia)” is selected from the Article Type menu. Topoi’s guidelines for authors and submissions can be found here.

We expect to print the whole special issue in mid-2023. However, papers accepted for publication will be uploaded to Topoi’s webpage as “online first” as they are accepted for publication after the reviewing process.

For any questions, comments, and queries, please contact with one of the guest editors at [email protected] or [email protected]

LAT link: https://latgroup.wixsite.com/home (navigate to CFP: Special Issue in Topoi)

Topoi link (direct): https://www.springer.com/journal/11245/updates/20279782