Speech act pluralism, minimal content and pragmemes

As speech acts in contexts, pragmemes serve to illustrate speech act pluralism. What is less clear is whether they play an important role in determining primary truth conditions of sentences. Semantic contextualism is the view according to which word meaning or sentence meaning cannot be detached from a conversational practice. The presence of the context of utterance is a necessary condition for sentences to express semantic properties. The true meanings are those that are expressed by verbal or mental occurrences. According to this view, pragmemes do play a role in determining the primary truth conditions of sentences. Semantic minimalism suggests another way of conceiving the relationship between truth conditions and pragmemes. Sentence-types enjoy a certain semantic autonomy relative to their occurrences in particular conversational contexts. According to this picture, some sentence-types express minimal propositions and do not require a verbal event in order express primary truth conditions. Other sentence-types may express only “proposition-radicals”, as suggested by Kent Bach. Pragmemes in this case serve to determine the missing ingredients in the primary truth conditions. However, these sentences are not counterexamples for minimalism, if the recourse to contextual features is prescribed by the very semantic rules of the sentence. Are there pragmemes that determine primary truth conditions and that are not prescribed by the very semantic features of the sentence? Carston and Recanati both argue that there are. There are cases of enrichment, loosening and transfer. They argue that pragmemes are cancelable. However, cancelability reveals the presence of a minimal content that could be expressed without these additional features. Are there pragmemes determining primary truth conditions that are not prescribed by semantic features and that are not cancelable? In this paper, I argue that there are no such examples. Pragmemes may contribute to the determination of the content of certain assertions, but they do not contribute to the determination of minimal content of the sentence-types used in these utterances. I conclude that a proper appreciation of the role of pragmemes forces us to accept speech act pluralism and bifurcationism, the idea that there are two levels of content: minimal and maximal. That is, different pragmemes produce different inferential augmentations of a minimal level of linguistic meaning. But this is precisely what semantic minimalism is all about.