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Prof. Kate Ritchie (UC, Irvine)
Thursday, April 23, 2026, 03:00pm - 05:00pm
Social Structural Pragmatics (Joint work with Jessica Keiser (UNC Chapel Hill))
Abstract: Much work in pragmatic theory makes use of social structural explanation. Yet, there is a disconnect between these pragmatic theories and the formal frameworks that are commonly used by philosophers of language to build models that represent pragmatic phenomena. These frameworks typically, represent just at the level of individual psychological facts (such as propositional attitudes, preference orderings, attentional states, intentions, etc.). Our aim is to motivate a multilevel framework for formal pragmatics. We argue that in order to reveal macro-level linguistic patterns among similarly situated linguistic agents–as well as micro level facts about how an individual’s linguistic behavior may depend upon and update their social position–pragmatic frameworks cannot rely solely on psychological facts; they must be supplemented by social structures. A social structural pragmatic framework bridges an existing gap across branches of pragmatic theory and provides resources to integrate formal pragmatics with social ontology and social epistemology.