Abstract
On the issue of how much pragmatics has to do with what is said, philosophers and linguists divide into the minimalist and contextualist camps. Most members of both camps agree that in utterance comprehension, there are clear cases of “pragmatic intrusion.” The consensus is practically universal, when it comes to utterances containing indexicals, demonstratives and context-sensitive expressions in general. The basic idea is that without pragmatic provision of appropriate referents, no proposition is determined, so the hearer cannot very well understand what the speaker said (the proposition expressed or the explicature). Even “radical” minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore (2005) concede this. Recanati (2004) calls such pragmatic intrusion into the business of reference, “saturation”. Saturation is a mandatory primary pragmatic process. It is primary, in contrast with secondary processes of implicature inference. It is mandatory, in contrast with optional primary processes such as free enrichment. We will argue that the mandatory nature of saturation is a myth. Saturation is not needed to determine a truth-evaluable proposition. Indeed, at times it is not even required for an adequate understanding of what a speaker means by her utterance. We will offer several examples involving context‐sensitive expressions that make perfect sense of an unsaturated but truth-conditionally complete propositional content.
