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Bratman, Michael. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Broome, John. Normative Practical Reasoning. 175193. Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 2001. Dancy, Jonathan. Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993. Darwall, Stephen. Impartial Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Gibbard, Alan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Hill, Thomas E., Jr. Dignity and Practical Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by D. F. Norton and M. Norton. New Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, edited by A. Zweig and T. E. Hill, Jr. Translated by A. Zweig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Korsgaard, Christine. The Normativity of Instrumental Reason. In Ethics and Practical Reason, edited by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Korsgaard, Christine. Skepticism about Practical Reason. Journal of Philosophy (1986): 525. McDowell, John. Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives? Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume (1978): 1329. McDowell, John. Virtue and Reason. Monist 62 (1979): 33150. Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Rawls, John. Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory. Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 515572. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Raz, Joseph. Practical Reason and Norms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Ross, W. D. Foundations of Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939. Scanlon, Thomas. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schmidtz, D. Rational Choice and Moral Agency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Smith, Michael. The Moral Problem. New York: Routledge, 1995. Stocker, Michael. Desiring the Bad: An Essay in Moral Psychology. Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 73853. Velleman, David. The Possibility of Practical Reason. Ethics 106, No. 4 (1996): 694726. Wallace, R. Jay. How to Argue About Practical Reason. Mind 99 (395) (1990): 355385. Wallace, R. Jay. Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason. Philosophers Imprint. 1 (3) (2001): 126, http://www.philosophersimprint.org/001003. Wiggins, David. Deliberation and Practical Reason. In Essays on Aristotles Ethics, edited by A. O. Rorty. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Williams, Bernard. Internal and External Reasons. In Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers, 19731980. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Robert N. Johnson (2005)

practical reason approaches

See Rationalism in Ethics (Practical Reason Approaches)

pragmaticism
See Peirce, Charles Sanders; Pragmatism

pragmatics
Pragmatics was defined by Charles W. Morris (1938) as the branch of semiotics that studies the relation of signs to interpreters, in contrast with semantics, which studies the relation of signs to designata. In practice, it has often been treated as a repository for any aspect of utterance meaning beyond the scope of existing semantic machinery, as in the slogan Pragmatics = meaning minus truth conditions (Gazdar 1979). There has been some doubt about whether it is a homogeneous domain (Searle, Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980). A more positive view emerges from the work of Herbert Paul Grice, whose William James Lectures (1967) are fundamental. Grice showed that many aspects of utterance meaning traditionally regarded as conventional, or semantic, could be more explanatorily treated as conversational, or pragmatic. For Gricean pragmatists, the crucial feature of pragmatic interpretation is its inferential nature: the hearer is seen as constructing and evaluating a hypothesis about the communicators intentions, based, on the one hand, on the meaning of the sentence uttered, and on the other, on contextual information and general communicative principles that speakers are normally expected to observe. (For definition and surveys see Levinson 1983.)
the semantics-pragmatics distinction

In early work, the semantics-pragmatics distinction was often seen as coextensive with the distinction between truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning

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(Gazdar 1979). On this approach, pragmatics would deal with a range of disparate phenomena, including (a) Gricean conversational inference, (b) the inferential recognition of illocutionary-force, and (c) the conventional meanings of illocutionary-force indicators and other non-truth-conditional expressions such as but, please, unfortunately (Recanati 1987). From the cognitive point of view, these phenomena have little in common. Within the cognitive science literature in particular, the semantics-pragmatics distinction is now more generally seen as coextensive with the distinction between decoding and inference (or conventional and conversational meaning). On this approach, all conventional meaning, both truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional, is left to linguistic semantics, and the aim of pragmatic theory is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and utterance interpretation is inferentially bridged. A pragmatic theory of this type is developed in D. Sperber and D. Wilson (1986).
implicature

(1) The status and content of the cooperative principle and maxims have been debated, and attempts to reduce the maxims or provide alternative sources for implicatures have been undertaken (Davis 1991, Horn 1984, Levinson 1987, Sperber and Wilson 1986). (2) Grice claimed that deliberate, blatant maxim-violation could result in implicatures, in the case of metaphor and irony in particular. This claim has been challenged, and alternative accounts of metaphor and irony developed, in which no maxim-violation takes place (Blakemore 1992, Hugly and Sayward 1979, Sperber and Wilson 1986). (3) Pragmatic principles have been found to make a substantial contribution to explicit communication, not only in disambiguation and reference assignment, but in enriching the linguistically encoded meaning in various ways. This raises the question of where the borderline between explicit and implicit communication should be drawn (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). It has even been argued that many of Grices best-known cases of generalized conversational implicature might be better analyzed as pragmatically determined aspects of what is said (Carston 1988, Recanati 1989). (4) The idea that the context for utterance interpretation is determined in advance of the utterance has been questioned, and the identification of an appropriate set of contextual assumptions is now seen as an integral part of the utterance-interpretation process (Blakemore 1992, Sperber and Wilson 1986).
prospects

Grices distinction between saying and implicating crosscuts the semantics-pragmatics distinction as defined above. For Grice, what is said corresponds to the truthconditional content of an utterance, and what is implicated is everything communicated that is not part of what is said. Grice saw the truth-conditional content of an utterance as determined partly by the conventional (semantic) meaning of the sentence uttered, and partly by contextual (pragmatic) factors governing disambiguation and reference assignment. He saw conventional (semantic) implicatures as determined by the meaning of discourse connectives such as but, moreover and so, and analyzed them as signaling the performance of higherorder speech acts such as contrasting, adding and explaining (Grice 1989). An alternative analysis is developed in D. Blakemore (1987). Among nonconventional (pragmatic) implicatures, the best known are the conversational ones: These are beliefs that have to be attributed to the speaker in order to preserve the assumption that she was obeying the cooperative principle (with associated maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance, and clarity), in saying what she said. In Grices framework, generalized conversational implicatures are normally carried by use of a certain expression, and are easily confused with conventional lexical meaning (Grice 1989). In Grices view, many earlier philosophical analyses were guilty of such confusion. Grices account of conversational implicatures has been questioned on several grounds:

Within the cognitive science literature, several approaches to pragmatics are currently being pursued. There are computational attempts to implement the Gricean program via rules for the recognition of coherence relations among discourse segments (Asher and Lascarides 1995, Hobbs 1985). Relations between the Gricean program and speech-act theory are being reassessed (Tsohatzidis 1994). The cognitive foundations of pragmatics and the relations of pragmatics to neighboring disciplines are still being explored (Sperber and Wilson 1995, Sperber 1994). Despite this diversity of approaches, pragmatics now seems to be established as a relatively homogenous domain.

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See also Cognitive Science; Grice, Herbert Paul; Metaphor; Philosophy of Language; Reference; Semantics.

pragmatics [addendum]
A major focus of post-Gricean pragmatics is the role that pragmatic inference plays in determining the explicit content of utterances (as opposed to their conversational implicatures). As well as disambiguation and reference fixing, there are pragmatic processes of propositional completion, as in the examples in (1), and, more controversially, processes of free enrichment, as in (2): (1) a. b. (2) a. b. Its too late. Cotton is better. Ive had breakfast. Johns car hit Toms and Tom stopped illegally. [for what?] [than what?] [today] [causal relation]

Bibliography
Asher, N., and A. Lascarides. Lexical Disambiguation in a Discourse Context. Journal of Semantics 12 (1995): 69108. Blakemore, D. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Blakemore, D. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Carston, R. Explicature, Implicature and Truth-Theoretic Semantics. In Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality, edited by R. Kempson. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Davis, S., ed. Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Gazdar, G. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press, 1979. Grice, H. P. Logic and Conversation. William James Lectures. Cambridge, MA, 1967. Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Hobbs, J. On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse. Center for the Study of Language and Information (October 1985). Horn, L. A New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature. In Meaning, Form and Use in Context, edited by D. Schiffrin. Washington, DC, 1984. Hugly, P., and C. Sayward. A Problem about Conversational Implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (1979): 1925. Levinson, S. Minimization and Conversational Inference. In The Pragmatic Perspective, edited by J. Verschueren and M. Bertuccelli-Papis. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987. Levinson, S. Pragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Morris, C. Foundations of the Theory of Signs. In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited by O. Neurath, R. Carnap, and C. Morriss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Recanati, F. Meaning and Force. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Recanati, F. The Pragmatics of What Is Said. Mind and Language 4 (1989): 295329. Searle, J., F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds. Speech-Act Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980. Sperber, D. Understanding Verbal Understanding. In What Is Intelligence?, edited by J. Khalfa. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford, 1986. Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. Postface to the second edition of Relevance. Oxford, 1995. Tsohatzidis, S., ed. Foundations of Speech-Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1994. Deirdre Wilson (1996)

The pragmatic completions in (1) are mandated by aspects of the linguistic semantics of the sentences, specifically by the lexical items too and better. However, this does not seem to be the case for the examples in (2), which express complete, truth-evaluable propositions without the bracketed addition. These pragmatic inferences seem to be entirely pragmatically motivated (i.e., free from linguistic indication); they are undertaken in order to satisfy standing communicative presumptions concerning the informativeness and relevance of utterances. For instance, (2a) is strictly speaking true provided the speaker has had breakfast sometime in her life, but in most contexts a speaker intends a more specific proposition and relevant implications hinge on the enriched content (e.g., that she is not hungry at this moment). Another kind of free pragmatic process is lexical modulation: the encoded meaning of a word may be narrowed down in context (e.g., drink used to mean alcoholic drink), broadened (e.g., square used to mean squarish) or metaphorically extended (e.g., nightmare used to mean unpleasant experience). The view that free pragmatic inferences can affect explicit content in these ways is labeled truth-conditional pragmatics and is held by pragmatists across different theoretical persuasions. Various accounts of the phenomenon and its relation to conversational implicature are being developed. Stephen Levinson (2000) argues for a system of default pragmatic inferences triggered by particular linguistic forms (e.g., and, some, drink), which are distinct from the kind of inferences responsible for more context-specific implicatures. Franois Recanati (2003) makes a different distinction between two kinds of pragmatic processes: primary processes, such as free enrichment, which contribute to truth-conditional con-

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