THE SEMANTICS, PRAGMATICS AND MYSTERIES

This essay analyses the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, taken into account the type of arguments and entities that each of the disciplines adopts in the explanations and description of the phenomena. We argue that pragmatics relies upon the notion of a "bet", be it introduced as an appeal to the notion of speaker's cooperation or as an explanatory resource of the speaker's intention. These notions are foreign to semantics, the explanations of which rely upon the concept of a proposition, closely linked to the notions of truth conditions and literal meaning, though not coincident. Our way of conceiving the distinction may be called internal, in contrast to normative views, because it derives its conclusion from the way the arguments authors use in their researches are mobilized, and does not aim at prescribing what should be done in semantics or in pragmatics. Based on Lahud's (1977) epistemological insight, we conclude that the mysteries of pragmatics, the knowledge it presupposes, are to be found in philosophy of mind and action, whereas the mysteries of semantics are in philosophy of logic.