Pragmatic meaning and accountability

One key issue that came up repeatedly in our discussion of whose meaning we are talking about was that of accountability. We are held to (normatively) mean what we say. We are also held to be meaning what we don’t say in many situations. As Cavell (1958) noted very early on in the development of pragmatics, “the ‘pragmatic implications’ of our utterances are meant ... and what we mean to say, like what we mean to do, is some-thing we are responsible for” (1958: 197). When pragmatic meanings arise in actual interactional contexts, then someone is always held responsible or accountable for those meanings, a point which was made in the early work of both ordinary language philosophers (Austin [1962]1975; Cavell 1958) and sociologists (Garfinkel 1967; Goffman 1967). To be held accountable means that the person concerned is taken to be committed to that belief, thought, desire, attitude, intention and so on (Carassa and Colombetti 2009), and/or responsible for the interpersonal and real-world consequences of making this belief, et cetera, a part of the conversational interaction (Garfinkel 1967). The question, however, is why a speaker can be held committed to or accountable for a particular pragmatic meaning, even though it has not been expressed. The answer lies, we would suggest, in the assumed intentionality of linguistic acts and the presumed agency of speakers (Haugh 2013d). Linguistic acts are held to be directed, to be about something, and we are presumed to be exercising our agency in producing them. This is why we are held accountable for producing them. How addressees figure out what these linguistic acts are about is a separate question (which we have already addressed). Accountability thus arises as a consequence of presumptions about intentionality and agency, not exclusively speaker intentions, as has often been assumed.