Communicative inferences and context of interests

Abstract

The paper examines the determination of the explicit content of communication via inferential processes based on the speakers' situational interests. The paper's argument is based on the hypothesis that the meaning of natural language expressions depends on the situational extra-linguistic interests of speakers. It is maintained that interests affect the sentences of natural language when semantic conventions, semantic context, and pragmatic context are unable to determine a unique meaning for a sentence. In particular, the paper addresses the question of the determination of meaning via inference where the speaker's interest is a premise for communicative inferences. The notion of interest is viewed as (preference for) a state of affairs which implies the possibility conditions of the agent's goal. The context of interests is viewed as the set of states of affairs that make a sentence true and contemporaneously satisfy the situational interests of the speaker. The last part of the paper illustrates a real-life case of linguistic dispute. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.