A note on two dogmas in pragmatics

The author claims that in certain cases the assumption of rather complicated pragmatic processes as being at work when a proper understanding of sentences is aimed at is unnecessary: ordinary decoding on the level of semantics is sufficient. He examines two well known cases often dealt with in the existing pragmatic literature: first, that of the alleged “scalar implicature” which is supposed to “narrow down” the concept some (of) compared to all (of), and second, that of numerals in their relation to the ‘exactly n’ and the ‘at least n’ interpretations. He argues that the expression some of semantically contrasts with its “strong counterpart” all from the very beginning and its use is different in this respect from explicit existential statements based on the verb exist or there is/are which indeed are semantically indeterminate with regard to the question of exhaustiveness/non-exhaustiveness. To show the contrast, he uses a test based on structures constituted by namely, to wit or viz. A similar difference can be found in statements with numerical quantification: numerals, in principle, show the power of the respective sets to be equal to that of the corresponding sets of successive elements of the arithmetical series as used in counting. A complication of the picture may arise, basically, when it is unclear which particular set the speaker has in mind; but this is a very general problem of how to fix reference made by a speaker one encounters.