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    Literal meaning and speaker meaning can coincide even whe... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→A hearer must infer that a cooperative speaker means something different from what the speaker literally said

    Literal meaning and speaker meaning can coincide even when maxims appear violated, as hyperbole and irony can be decoded without positing a distinct non-literal intention.

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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Hearers routinely decode hyperbole and irony by applying grammatical and contextual rules without computing separate 'intended' meanings.
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    • 2.The literal proposition 'This is the best day ever' can be semantically true even when uttered hyperbolically, if we allow degree modifiers in truth conditions.
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    • 3.Positing hidden non-literal intentions violates parsimony: pragmatic decoding via maxim-violation detection explains the same phenomena more simply.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against
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    • 1.Ironic utterances assert falsehoods at the literal level (saying 'Great job' when it's terrible), so literal and speaker meaning must fundamentally diverge.
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    • 2.The entire Gricean apparatus of conventional implicature exists precisely because literal semantics underdetermines communicative intent in systematic ways.
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    • 3.Children and autistic speakers struggle with irony/hyperbole specifically because they require meta-representational reasoning absent from literal decoding.
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    Truth & Knowledge1 linkedPhilosophy of Language1 linked

    Related

    A hearer must infer that a cooperative speaker means something different from wh...Children and autistic speakers struggle with irony/hyperbole specifically becaus...Hearers routinely decode hyperbole and irony by applying grammatical and context...Ironic utterances assert falsehoods at the literal level (saying 'Great job' whe...
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    Positing hidden non-literal intentions violates parsimony: pragmatic decoding vi...The entire Gricean apparatus of conventional implicature exists precisely becaus...The literal proposition 'This is the best day ever' can be semantically true eve...

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    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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