4 - Procedural meaning

Summary

Constraints on relevance: new questions

According to the arguments of the previous chapter, the distinction between conceptual and procedural encoding cross-cuts the speech act theoretic distinction between describing and indicating: not all of the expressions defined within the speech act theoretic framework as indicators can be analysed as encoding procedures, and not all expressions which encode procedures are analysed within the speech act theoretic framework as indicators. In view of the fact that the two distinctions are not co-extensive, the decision to take the relevance theoretic distinction as the fundamental one in a theory of linguistic semantics could be construed as a recommendation to simply forget the speech act theoretic distinction, and in particular, as a recommendation to drop the notion of indicating or signalling or pointing altogether. After all, it seems that we now have something less metaphorical to work with, namely, coded means for constraining the inferential tasks involved in utterance interpretation. However, in this section I shall show that we still have much to learn about what it means for an expression to encode a procedure. Moreover, it seems that it may be illuminating to compare such expressions with natural or non-coded means for pointing to something.