Imagination and Convention: Distinguishing Grammar and Inference in Language

How do hearers manage to understand speakers? And how do speakers manage to shape hearers’ understanding? Lepore and Stone show that standard views about the workings of semantics and pragmatics are unsatisfactory. They offer a new account of language as a specifically social competence for making our ideas public. They argue that this approach is a good way to target the distinctive mechanisms and problems at play in explaining the human faculty of language. At the same time, this view embraces the diverse dimensions of meaning that linguists have discovered. This is the right way to delimit semantics.