What the Weatherman Said_ Enrichment, CTT and the Dialogical Approach to Moderate Contextualism

Abstract

The main aim of the present paper is to show that the recently developed dialogical approach to Martin-Löf’s Constructive Type Theory (CTT), called Immanent Reasoning, provides the means for distinguishing François Recanati’s process of free enrichment and saturation, meets his own objections against perspectives based on unarticulated constituents and opens a new venue to pragmatic modulation, where the speaker-receiver interaction is integrated into the notion of enrichment. In such a setting enrichment operates on proof-objects that make fully articulated event-propositions true. The point is that distinguishing what makes a proposition true from the proposition made true offers a simple and clean way to avoid conflating the contextual elements that enrich a proposition with the proposition itself. Such a framework abounds in means for expressing reference structures such as anaphora, including time and/or location reference. Furthermore, the notion of dependent types of CTT (absent in Montague-style semantics) and the associated formation rules allow for a straightforward analysis of composition of meaning at work in Recanati’s cases concerning occasion meaning as determined by context. The brand of dialogical contextualism, grounded on the play-level (where propositional content is not necessarily truth-conditional), advocated herewith is not a form of propositional syncretism. The framework offers a straightforward response to the failure of third excluded in some instances of faultless disagreement without giving up the notion of propositional content. More generally, this suggests an alternative way to tackle the interface pragmatics semantics underlying the notion of pragmatic modulation by integrating into the interface the dialogical game of asking and giving reasons.