The Future of Post-Human Pragmatics
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is meaning really supposed to be clarified in the right context, in the field of pragmatics, that Victoria Jackson once advised: “But, don’t take anything out of context!”? (TE 2015)

This positive defense of clarity in meaning (with the appeal to an appropriate context) can be contrasted with an opposing claim by Henry Brooks Adams, who instead argued that “no man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.” (TE 2015a)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), pragmatics (in relation to clarity and vagueness) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe of course, this questioning of the opposing views does not mean that pragmatics is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to pragmatics)—like semiotics, semantics, speech act theory, conversational implicature, philosophy, sociology of language, linguistic anthropology, cognitive science, machine learning, language games. aesthetics, history, religion, sociolinguistics, literature, psychology, ethnology, ethology, folkloristics, anthropological linguistics, and so on—should be set aside. (WK 2014) Indeed, neither of these extreme views is plausible.

Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of pragmatics in regard to the dialectic relationship between clarity and vagueness—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the multi-valued theory of pragmatics) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way.

This seminal project here will fundamentally change the way that we think about clarity and vagueness (especially, though not solely, in the context of pragmatics), together with other debates as will be discussed in the rest of the book, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.