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QUESTION-001: To what extent can an utterance's pragmatic identity be reconstructed from a globally consistent collection of context-relative judgements, and what fails when it cannot?

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Properties7
StatusOpen
Tagscontextuality, philosophy-of-language
Linepragmatic-transport
RefinesQUESTION-021 — Is there a frame-independent communicative act that translations approximate, or is the act's identity constituted by a family of frame-relative realizations?
Refined byQUESTION-004 — Does pragmatic drift under repeated reconstruction systematically increase or reduce measured contextual dependence?, QUESTION-024 — Can a pragmatic frame be induced from examples of communicative behaviour, and does the induced frame transfer across different wordings?, QUESTION-027 — Is there a relational signature of a communicative kind that is stable under admissible transformations, sufficient for a family of decisions and discriminating on designated contrasts, and can it be identified from the available probes, for decisions outside them, when the full latent model cannot?, QUESTION-031 — When does a chosen family of observational probes separate the communicative realizations a task needs told apart, and when does it collapse distinct ones, beyond the cases in which the task's target and the probes' outcome laws are linear in one state?, QUESTION-067 — For a test of pragmatic judgements, under what probe families do renderings count as operationally equivalent, so that a test of Spekkens's generalized noncontextuality applies and not only one of the sheaf or Kochen–Specker kind?, QUESTION-102 — Can a family of interpretations each feasible in its own context fail to admit a feasible global integration when a compatible global interpretation exists?
Answered byCLAIM-005 — Pragmatic fidelity is the match between distributions of context-indexed communicative judgements across a correspondence of source and target contexts, not the similarity of one canonical meaning vector; the match constrains a translation only once one outcome correspondence is fixed across many items, and summed over source contexts alone it charges for loss and not for addition
BearingCLAIM-135 — Recovering latent structure from relational data is three achievements, reconstruction, identification up to stated ambiguities, and constitution of a communicative kind, and identifiability theory reaches the second at most, CLAIM-009 — Pragmatic judgements may be formally contextual: their context-relative distributions may admit no global extension once direct context effects are accounted for

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Why it is a question

A24: “To what extent can the pragmatic identities of utterances be reconstructed from a globally consistent collection of context-relative judgments—and what precisely fails when that reconstruction is impossible?” It replaced the question “Is linguistic meaning quantum?”, and A24 called it “a more mature descendant of our original observation about delivery frames”.

It carries A21’s narrower question: whether illocutionary force, footing, solidarity, irony and condemnation “exhibit something stronger than ordinary context sensitivity: an empirically identifiable incompatibility structure”.

What would count as an answer

Two halves. The first is a measure of how well a rendering preserves the pattern of context-relative judgements (CLAIM-005); the manuscript’s Propositions 1 and 2 (§6) say when transport preserves overlap consistency and a global extension. The second is whether real pragmatic judgements are formally contextual at all (CLAIM-009), which needs the experiment CASE-021 or its §10 successors. Neither half has data.

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