On Methodology of Experimental Philosophy, Testing for Implicatures, and Semantics of “or”

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to investigate a methodological problem facing the experimental research in philosophy. The difficulty concerns a commonly applied questionnaire method involving truth-value evaluation tasks: the data obtained by using such a method cannot provide conclusive evidence in developing a semantic theory of language due to the risk that the respondents focus on pragmatic properties of the statements under evaluation instead of the semantic ones. In particular, they may confuse truth-conditions of a statement with its implicatures. We propose a model which can help to establish — to a certain degree — whether the content assigned by respondents to a given statement is rather pragmatic or semantic (i.e. if it is an implicature or not). This model appeals to "practical" tests for implicatures, widely recognized in linguistic literature. We illustrate our proposal with some experimental research on the semantics of "or" in the Polish language ("lub") which aims to specify the status of the exclusive sense of this connective.