Negotiating, Accepting, and Referring. Elements of a Contractualist Theory of Semantics

Peter Stockinger (1, 2)

1 ESCOM - Equipe Sémiotique Cognitive et Nouveaux Médias
2 PLIDAM EA 4514 - Pluralité des langues et des Identités : Didactique, Acquisition, Médiations

This article deals with the interpretation of the notion of acceptance as the assertion of some proposition p by an actor who not only knows p but also prefers it with respect to some other proposition q. To know p is not for an actor A a sufficient reason to accept it, but it must be a good or an appropriate proposition for him - or at least it must be a preferable one to other alternative propositions. The central problem we deal with is what is called the conventional dimension of language, where "conventional" should not be understood in a restrictive or in a stipulative sense but in a more general one. It concerns the fact that people partially share "visions" that enable them to coordinate their actions when such an effort is required, and discuss these situations by means of verbal and non-verbal (for instance, visual) signs. We argue that the description and the explanation of this dimension could be based on the so-called contractual hypothesis which in short states that people negotiate (knowledge) standards or common "views" to which they refer, in order to deal with a situation of reference r or to revise a given standard and to (partially) substitute it for another one by means of which they "view" in a (more or less sensibly) different perspective the same situation r.

Mots clés: cognition and language; convention and language; contractualist theory of semantics; standard; norms and rules

Domaines: Linguistique

Peter Stockinger. Negotiating, Accepting, and Referring. Elements of a Contractualist Theory of Semantics. Sémiotiques, In press, Théories sémantiques et modélisation, 9, pp.117-152. ⟨hal-03189666⟩