The Metaphysics and the Epistemology of Meaning 9783110321180, 9783110320954

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Jonas Pfister The Metaphysics and the Epistemology of Meaning

Jonas Pfister

The Metaphysics and the Epistemology of Meaning

ontos verlag Frankfurt I Paris I Ebikon I Lancaster I New Brunswick

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Livraison pour la France et la Belgique: Librairie Philosophique J.Vrin 6, place de la Sorbonne ; F-75005 PARIS Tel. +33 (0)1 43 54 03 47 ; Fax +33 (0)1 43 54 48 18 www.vrin.fr 2007 ontos verlag P.O. Box 15 41, D-63133 Heusenstamm www.ontosverlag.com ISBN 978-3-938793-49-7 2007 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in retrieval systems or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use of the purchaser of the work Printed on acid-free paper ISO-Norm 970-6 FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) This hardcover binding meets the International Library standard Printed in Germany by buch bücher dd ag

Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................5 Introduction ..............................................................................................7 I. THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING ...............................................9 1. What is meant .......................................................................................9 2. What is said .........................................................................................12 2.1. Utterance-type meaning..................................................................12 2.2. Different notions of what is said .....................................................15 2.3. Grice’s definition............................................................................17 2.3.1. A first attempt...........................................................................17 2.3.2. Conventional implicatures ........................................................18 2.3.3. Central meaning........................................................................21 2.4. A different definition ......................................................................26 2.4.1. The myth of conventional implicatures.....................................26 2.4.2. What is primarily said...............................................................28 2.4.3. One more improvement ............................................................30 2.5. The full identification of what is said..............................................31 2.5.1. Ambiguities ..............................................................................31 2.5.2. Indexicals .................................................................................32 2.5.3. The time of utterance ................................................................34 2.5.4. Inexplicit references .................................................................34 2.5.5. Definite descriptions.................................................................35 2.5.6. Quantifiers................................................................................36 2.5.7. Comparative adjectives.............................................................37 2.6. The problem of semantic underdetermination.................................38 2.6.1. Semantic underdetermination ...................................................38 2.6.2. Against universal underdetermination ......................................41 2.6.3. Against semantic minimalism...................................................47 2.7. The solution: An extended notion of what is said ...........................51 2.7.1. Definition .................................................................................52 2.7.2. What is said and what is implicated..........................................53 2.7.3. What is said and semantics .......................................................62 2.7.4. Against restricting the notion of what is said ............................70

3. What is implicated.............................................................................. 76 3.1. Grice’s definition of implicature .................................................... 76 3.2. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature .................................. 77 3.3. What is implicated and what is meant ............................................ 84 3.4. What is implicated and what is said................................................ 90 II. THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF MEANING ........................................ 92 1. Understanding what is meant ............................................................ 93 2. How we understand what is meant.................................................... 94 2.1. The code theory.............................................................................. 94 2.2. A Gricean theory ............................................................................ 97 2.2.1. Rationality................................................................................ 97 2.2.2. Grice’s theory of implicature derivation................................... 98 2.2.3. A Gricean theory of understanding......................................... 101 2.2.4. The differentiation problem.................................................... 103 2.3. Sperber’s and Wilson’s relevance theory...................................... 105 2.3.1. The theory .............................................................................. 106 2.3.2. The differentiation problem.................................................... 115 2.3.3. Magic and ungrounded immunization .................................... 117 2.4. The game-theoretic theory............................................................ 119 2.4.1. Game theory........................................................................... 120 2.4.2. Signaling games ..................................................................... 122 2.4.3. Games of partial information.................................................. 125 2.4.4. A new definition of speaker meaning? ................................... 127 2.4.5. How we understand what is meant ......................................... 131 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 133 References............................................................................................. 136 Index of names...................................................................................... 147

Acknowledgements This book is a modified version of my PhD thesis written under the supervision of Andreas Graeser and Klaus Petrus and submitted to the University of Berne in December 2006. I would like to thank Andreas Graeser especially for his continuous support and Klaus Petrus for his extensive comments. I would like to thank Annina Schneller, David Lüthi, Sarah-Jane Conrad, Laura Mercolli, Manuela Di Franco, Thomas Ruprecht, participants of the meaning.ch Donnerstagskolloquium in Berne and participants of the Colloque du lundi in Fribourg for their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank David Lüthi, Lorna MacMenamin and wortkiosk.ch for proofreading. The remaining mistakes are my own. I am immensely grateful to Verena Thaler for her comments, her support, and for being the one she is. I am deeply indebted to Klaus Petrus for the philosophy he taught me. I dedicate this book to him. I would also like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for supporting a project out of which this study evolved (Nr. 100011-105658), and the Berne University Research Foundation for funding the printing costs. Berne, May 2007, J. P.

Introduction Meaning and understanding are intimately connected. For a speaker to mean something is to produce an utterance with a certain meaning; and for a hearer to understand the utterance is to know what the speaker meant in producing the utterance. But one might still ask: What determines what is meant? How do we understand what is meant? These are the questions I wish to answer. The answer to the first question I call the metaphysics of meaning and the answer to the second the epistemology of meaning (see Neale 2004: 76 or 2005: 180). First, I look at the metaphysics of meaning. What determines what is meant? Paul Grice has provided an answer to this question. To mean something is, roughly, to have the intention of producing some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention. What is meant is therefore determined by the speaker’s intention. When some speakers have repeatedly used a sign of a certain shape with a certain meaning, we might at some point start to say that this type of sign has meaning, or that the sign has type-meaning. It then becomes possible for speakers to use that sign to mean with it what its type means, and also to mean something else instead of or above of what its type means. For example, when I utter the sentence “The sun is shining”, I may thereby mean that the sun is shining. This is what I have said. By uttering this utterance I may also mean that we should go for a walk outside in the sunshine. This is what I have implicated – to use one of Grice’s technical terms. There is, however, a problem for this simple and plausible view of what is said. Very often, the type-meaning does not correspond to what is said. For example, when I utter the sentence “He is Paul Grice”, I have thereby not said that some particular male person is identical to Paul Grice. What I have said is that the particular male person I am referring to with “he” is identical to Paul Grice. In such cases the sentence underdetermines the thought the sentence is used to express. This problem, known as the problem of semantic underdetermination, leads to a number of questions. How far does semantic underdetermination reach? Do we have to extend or restrict the Gricean notion? Is what is said semantic or pragmatic? I argue that semantic underdetermination is not universal in the sense that no sentence ever expresses the thought it is used to express, that we have to extend the Gricean notion and that this notion is best called a pragmatic notion.

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Second, I look at the epistemology of meaning. I define what understanding is. Then I inquire about how we understand what is meant. I discuss four answers, the code theory, the Gricean theory, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and the game-theoretic theory. I argue that the first is insufficient and that the third lacks explanatory power; the second is basically on the right track and can be made more precise by attending to the fourth solution. I distinguish between the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of meaning. I believe that some of the criticism voiced against Grice’s theory of meaning and against his theory of conversation is based on not taking into account this distinction. I hope to show that some of the points made in the debate about semantics and pragmatics simply do not affect the metaphysics of meaning.

I. The metaphysics of meaning 1. What is meant When we speak of what something means or meant, we need to distinguish between two kinds of meaning, between what Grice calls “natural meaning” and “non-natural meaning” respectively (Grice 1957: 213-214). Natural meaning is the meaning a particular sign has in virtue of its causal relations to other events. A natural meaning of smoke is that there is fire. A natural meaning of black clouds is that there will be rain. And a natural meaning of a smile might be that the person smiling feels happy or insecure. The same sign may have many different natural meanings; in fact, it will have as many natural meanings for us as we know causal relations in which it stands. Non-natural meaning is the meaning a particular sign has in virtue of being used by someone to mean something. The non-natural sign of smoke might be that someone needs help. The non-natural meaning of a smile might be to invite someone to conversation. Each sign, having non-natural meaning or not, has natural meaning. However, some signs do not have any interesting natural meanings for us because we do not know any interesting causal relations in which they stand.1 The non-natural meaning of a sign is what someone means. The question may be asked: What does it mean to say that someone means something? Paul Grice has answered this question: To mean something by an utterance means to intend to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention (Grice 1957: 219; 1968: 122). Introducing the following abbreviations: U: utterer, producer of a sign

1

For a discussion of the distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, see Petrus (2002).

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x: utterance, including almost any kind of sign (linguistic and non-linguistic) A: audience r: response Grice formulates the definition more precisely (1989: 92)2: “U meant something by uttering x” is true iff, for some audience A, U uttered x intending: (1) A to produce a particular response r (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1) (3) A to fulfill (1) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2). Grice (1968:123) abbreviates the analysis using “M” for “meaning”: U uttered x M-intending to produce in A effect E. To mean something is to have an M-intention. The closely connected question what is meant may be answered accordingly: What is meant is the M-intended response or effect (1957: 220). In “Meaning” (1957) Grice took the effect to be an action in the case of imperative-type utterances and a belief in the case of indicative-type utterances. Later he made two changes in his analysis (Grice 1968: 123). First, in the case of imperative-type utterances the effect is an intention. This simplifies and unifies the account so that the effect is always a propositional attitude. Second, in the case of indicative-type utterances the effect may sometimes be that the hearer should think that the utterer believes something. This introduces a difference between what Grice calls “exhibitive” and “protreptic” utterances. Exhibitive utterances are utterances by which the utterer M-intends the hearer to believe that the utterer has a certain propositional attitude; protreptic utterances are utterances by which the utterer not only M-intends this but also that the hearer should himself have that propositional attitude. Using “*ψ” as a dummy to represent a specific mood-indicator that corresponds to the propositional attitude ψ-ing,3 and “p” for a specific 2

This is only one version of Grice’s definition, sufficient for my concerns here. For more refined versions see Grice (1969: 93-116). 3 For example, “‫ ”–׀‬corresponds to believing and “!” to intending. This makes clear that Grice does not use “mood” in the syntactic sense (verbal inflection) but in the semantic sense (force of the utterance). In his John Locke Lectures delivered at Oxford in 1979 and published as Aspects of Reasons (2001), Grice speaks of “modes” rather

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proposition4, Grice gives the following more precise definition (1968: 123): “By (when) uttering x U meant that *ψp” = df. “(∃A) (U uttered x Mintending (i) that A should think U to ψ that p and [in some cases only, depending on the identification of *ψp] (ii) that A should, via the fulfillment of (i), himself ψ that p).” Let’s look at an example. U utters the following sentence: (1) The sun is shining. By uttering (1) U meant that the sun is shining, that is to say, U Mintended that the audience should think that U believes that the sun is shining and (in this case) that the audience should believe that the sun is shining via the thought that U believes that the sun is shining. I believe that Grice is basically on the right track. Several philosophers have produced counterexamples in order to show that the analysis of meaning is either too weak or too strong (Strawson 1964, Searle 1965, Ziff 1967, Schiffer 1972), but these counterexamples only show that Grice’s analysis might be improved, not that it is fundamentally wrong.5 than of “moods” in order to make clear that he is not trying to analyze what linguists call “mood” (Grice 2001: 68). Richard Warner remarks that this is a result of an objection by Julius Moravcsik during Grice’s delivery of the Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford in 1977. Moravcsik objected that Grice’s use of “mood” did not correspond to standard use in linguistics, so Grice switched to “mode” (Warner 2001: xiv). See also the discussion of different notions of what is said in § 2.2. below. 4 A proposition is what can be true or false and be the content of a propositional attitude. 5 Some, like Donald Davidson and Michael Dummett, do not have much faith in Grice’s project. Davidson expresses “doubts about the possibility of defining linguistic meaning in terms of non-linguistic intentions and beliefs” (1974: 143) and claims “that making detailed sense of a person’s intentions and beliefs cannot be independent of making sense of his utterances” (1974: 144; see also 1975, 1982a, 1997, 2001a). Dummett writes that “thought, by its nature, cannot occur without a vehicle, and that language is the vehicle whose operation is the most perspicuous and hence the most amenable to a systematic philosophical account” and that “to analyse linguistic meaning along Gricean lines is to pursue an altogether misconceived strategy” (1989: 171; see also 2006). I believe that Jonathan Bennett (1973, 1976) has shown how it is conceptually possible to attribute intentions without using the notion of language.

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There are at least two alternatives to Grice’s analysis. One is to define meaning in purely behavioral terms (Stevenson 1944). But Grice has shown that all one gets out of such an analysis is natural meaning (Grice 1957: 215-217). Another is to define meaning in terms of conventions or rules (Wittgenstein 1953). But in order to say what a convention or rule is we need to make use of the notion of meaning. It is therefore not possible to define meaning in terms of conventions or rules without giving a circular definition. Some philosophers (e.g. Burge 1979, 1986, 1989) claim that the meaning of utterances are independent of speakers’ intentions and rather dependent on what people of a certain speech community think. But this seems to be wrong. Assume for the sake of the argument that the community was the master on this matter. It would follow that we could explain successful communication only in the case both speaker and hearer knew the correct meaning of the words. In all other situations successful communication would remain unexplainable. It is therefore very implausible, if not absurd, to claim that the meaning of utterances is independent of speaker’s intentions (Davidson 2005: 50-51).

2. What is said 2.1. Utterance-type meaning When some speakers have repeatedly used a sign of a certain shape with a certain meaning, we will at some point start to say that the sign, or the type of sign, has that certain meaning. The signs then have what one might call “utterance-type meaning” or “conventional meaning”. One has to be cautious here. Types (a sentence or a non-linguistic utterance-type) do not, strictly speaking, have meaning. They are abstractions from utterances. Only utterances, being datable events in space and time, have meaning. Types of utterances, being abstract objects, do not have the properties of events. (Likewise, a cat has eyes, but the concept of a cat does not.) Yet, one could still say that a token of a type has meaning: a token is a datable event in space and time and can have the property to mean something. But Furthermore, it is not altogether clear whether Grice’s project in fact presupposes nonlinguistic intentions or is rather a conceptual analysis of a notion of us who are already in possession of a language.

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tokens do not have meaning in the strict sense either because there can be a token without there being any speaker meaning it. For example, a scribble in the sand might look like your name, but you know it has been created unintentionally by a lucky coincidence of the movement of wind, water and sand. It is only when the token is uttered by a speaker who means something by uttering it that it has meaning. We nevertheless say that a certain utterance-type has meaning; what we have in mind is that there is a regularity in the use of tokens of that type to mean something.6 This formulation sounds not very precise. Using material from the definition of speaker-meaning (see above § 1.) and introducing “ψ†” to mean “that A should think U to ψ that p” and in other cases “that A should ψ that p via thinking U to ψ that p” (1968: 124) Grice tries to be more precise and defines utterance-type meaning as follows (1968: 127): “For group G, utterance-type X means ‘*ψp’” = df. “At least some (many) members of group G have in their repertoires the procedure of uttering a token of X if, for some A, they want A to ψ† that p, the retention of this procedure being for them conditional on the assumption that at least some (other) members of G have, or have had, this procedure in their repertoires.” Grice grants that it would be difficult to explain what it is to have a procedure in one’s repertoire, and abandons the task to give a full definition.7 David Lewis (1969, 1975) has taken up that task. He agrees with Grice’s general approach to meaning, but arrives at a slightly different definition, characterizing successful communicative acts as solutions to coordination problems and defining “convention” in terms of “conformity to a regularity” and “common knowledge”8. More precisely (1975: 5-6): a regularity R, in action or in action and belief, is a convention in a population P if and only if, within P, the following six conditions hold. 6

Bach agrees that sentence meaning is an abstraction from utterance meaning, but he confines it to sentence-types (1987; 2005). I admit not to understand Bach’s reasons for this last claim (see also below Fn. 56). 7 For structured utterance-types, the analysis is of course much more complex (see Grice 1969: 129-137). 8 The notion of common knowledge was introduced by David Lewis (1969) and has subsequently been used in philosophy and game theory. See also the definition of “implicature” below in § 3.1. and game theory in part II, § 2.4.

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(Or at least they almost hold. A few exceptions to the “everyone”s can be tolerated.) (1) Everyone conforms to R. (2) Everyone believes that the others conform to R. (3) This belief that the others conform to R gives everyone a good and decisive reason to conform to R himself. […] (4) There is a general preference for general conformity to R rather than slightly-less-than-general conformity. […] (5) R is not the only possible regularity meeting the last two conditions. […] (6) Finally, the various facts listed in conditions (1) to (5) are matters of common (or mutual) knowledge: they are known to everyone, it is known to everyone that they are known to everyone, and so on. The question whether the notion of common knowledge is necessary need not be answered here.9 It is sufficient to say that some sort of convention is involved in linguistic communication. What such conventions do not yet explain is how to determine the meaning of new sentences. Competent speakers of a language are able to understand indefinitely many sentences, sentences that have never been heard or used by the hearer (or even by anybody) before. This ability of competent speakers of a language can best be explained by a compositional theory of meaning for the language. The meaning of the sentences is determined by the meaning of the parts of the sentences and by the way these are put together (see Davidson 1965 and 1967). Once there is linguistic utterance-type meaning, it becomes possible for speakers to use a sentence to mean with it what it means. This act may be called “saying”, and the content of it “what is said”. However, it is important not to confound this Gricean notion of what is said with other notions bearing the same name.

9

For a defense of Lewis’ account of convention against some objections by Ruth Millikan (1998) see Pfister (2003).

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2.2. Different notions of what is said In our everyday language we have different notions of what is said. When we hear a speaker U uttering the sentence (1) The sun is shining. We may report: (2) U said that the sun is shining. More generally, when U utters a sentence S having the utterance-type meaning “p” we may report that U, by uttering S, said that p. What do we mean when we say this? We may mean at least one of the following: (1) U uttered S and U meant that p. (2) U uttered S and S means “p”. (3) U uttered S and U asserted that p. These three uses correspond to three different notions of what is said. The first notion focuses on what the speaker means and disregards the meaning of the utterance-type. For example, we may report in a particular situation that U said that the sun is shining when what U uttered was: “The yellow god is on fire”. According to this notion of what is said the only necessary and at the same time sufficient condition for U to say something is that U means it. However, if there is to be a difference between “what is meant” and “what is said” then this is not the notion of interest here. There is no reason to duplicate the terminology. The second notion focuses on the meaning of the utterance-type and disregards what the speaker means. It is what Austin (1962: 95) calls the “phatic act” (see also Schiffer 1972: 111-112). It is used in phrases like “I said this, but this is not what I wanted to say”. For example, we may report that U said that the sun is shining even if what U meant by uttering “The sun is shining” was that the sun is setting.10 According to this notion, what is said need not be meant. Again, there is no reason to duplicate the terminology. This second notion of what is said is captured by Grice’s notion of utterance-type meaning. 10

It may be, for example, a slip of the tongue.

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Grice uses “saying” in the sense of this second notion at some places (Grice 1969b: 142). But at other places (Grice 1968: 120-122), and later, in the passage added to “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” in the reprint in Studies in the Way of Words (1989: 86-88), he makes it explicit that he intends what is said to be meant by the speaker: “I want to say that (1) ‘U (utterer) said that p’ entails (2) ‘U did something x by which U meant that p.” (Grice 1989: 87). The third notion takes into account both what the speaker means and what the utterance-type means. For example, we report that U said that the sun is shining if U has uttered the sentence “The sun is shining” and means that the sun is shining. However, if U utters “Is the sun shining?” we do not report that U said that the sun is shining, but rather that U asked whether the sun is shining. According to this third notion what is said is what is asserted. Many, if not all, of Grice’s examples (in Grice 1967, 1968 and 1969) suggest that the notion he had in mind is in fact the third one. But to interpret “U said that p” as “U asserted that p” does not seem to fit well with Grice’s definiendum in the analysis of “what is meant”, that is, “by (when) uttering x U meant that *ψp” where “*ψ” stands as a dummy for a specific mood-indicator, that is, for the force of the utterance (see above § 1.). The force of what is meant need not be assertive, and neither does the force of what is said. To be precise, one would have to write: “U said that *ψp”. It is not clear whether Grice wanted saying to have the force of an assertion or to be a generic verb for whatever the force of the utterance is, but the latter interpretation seems much more plausible (for a more detailed assessment see below § 2.3.3.). Summarizing these findings, one may say that the notion of what is said of interest here has to fulfill at least the following two conditions of adequacy: (1) What is said is meant. (2) What is said is closely related to the conventional meaning of the words uttered. These conditions will not suffice to give a unique definition of “what is said”. But they are conditions that any definition of “what is said” (in Grice’s sense) necessarily has to satisfy.

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2.3. Grice’s definition The main source for Grice’s definition is the passage added to “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions” in the reprint in Studies in the Way of Words (1989: 86-88). Grice is careful not to present a definition of what is said. He rather wishes to draw a “sketch of direction” (1989: 87). One may take Grice’s result as a definition, or at least as a fairly good sketch of a definition. I present his reasoning in three steps. First I present the first attempt at a definition in Grice’s reasoning. I try, second, to explain why Grice was not content with it and, third, to capture what Grice had in mind when he introduced the notions of conventional implicature and of central meaning. 2.3.1. A first attempt “U said that *ψp” entails “U did something x by which U meant that p”. This, however, does not specify what is said for one may mean something by refraining from turning on the lights of the car and one has not thereby said anything (Grice 1989: 87). A possible solution is to add that what one means must be part of a type that has that meaning. But this is not sufficient for one may mean something by a hand-signaling and one has not thereby said anything (Grice 1989: 87). Doing x must be a linguistic act. A possible solution is then given by the following definition (based on Grice 1989: 87):11 “U said that *ψp” is true, if and only if, U did something x (1) by which U meant that *ψp (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance type S (sentence) such that (3) S means ‘*ψ p’ (4) S consists of a sequence of elements (such as words) ordered in a way licensed by a system of rules (syntactical rules) 11

The dummy “*ψ” does not appear in Grice’s characterization of “what is said”, but if the first condition is to be read as what is meant as Grice defined it, then it should appear.

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(5) S means ‘*ψ p’ in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements of S, their order, and their syntactical character. The condition (1) ensures that what is said is always meant, conditions (2) and (3) ensure that what is said is determined partly by type-meaning, and conditions (4) and (5) ensure that the types belong to a language for which there is a compositional semantic theory. Following Grice (1989: 88), the definition may be abbreviated as follows: “U said that *ψp” is true, if and only if U did something x (1) by which U meant that *ψp (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance-type S which means ‘*ψp’ in some linguistic system. This definition satisfies the two conditions of adequacy mentioned above: what is said is meant and is closely related to the conventional meaning of the words uttered. What is said is a coincidence of what the speaker means and what the utterance-type means. 2.3.2. Conventional implicatures Grice is not yet content with the definition. He remarks (1989: 88): This is still too wide. U’s doing x might be his uttering the sentence “She was poor but she was honest.” What U meant, and what the sentence means, will both contain something contributed by the word “but,” and I do not want this contribution to appear in an account of what (in my favored sense) U said (but rather as a conventional implicature). I will not be concerned right now with what an implicature is (for an analysis of the notion see below § 3.), but only with Grice’s reason for excluding part of the conventional meaning from what is said. By uttering (1) She was poor but she was honest.

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the speaker expresses a contrast between poverty and honesty. This is part of the conventional meaning of the utterance, but, according to Grice, it is not part of what is said. The idea goes back to Frege’s line of argument pursued in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (“On Sense and Reference”). There Frege writes that expressions like “although”, “but” and “yet” do not change the sense of a sentence but only illuminate it in a peculiar way.12 And later in “Der Gedanke” (“The Thought”) he reaffirms that such locutions do not affect the thought expressed.13 Similarly, Grice writes on an utterance containing the connective “therefore” (1967: 25): If I say (smugly), He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, I have certainly committed myself, by virtue of the meaning of my words, to its being the case that his being brave is a consequence of (follows from) his being an Englishman. But while I have said that he is an Englishman, and said that he is brave, I do not want to say that I have said (in the favored sense) that it follows from his being an Englishman that he is brave, though I have certainly indicated, and so implicated, that this is so. I do not want to say that my utterance of this

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These are Frege’s words (1892: 59-60): Auch in Nebensätzen mit “obgleich” werden vollständige Gedanken ausgedrückt. Dieses Fürwort hat eigentlich keinen Sinn und verändert auch den Sinn des Satzes nicht, sondern beleuchtet ihn nur in eigentümlicher Weise. [Fussnote: Ähnliches haben wir bei “aber”, “doch”.] Wir können zwar unbeschadet der Wahrheit des Ganzen den Konzessivsatz durch einen anderen desselben Wahrheitswertes ersetzen; aber die Beleuchtung würde dann leicht unpassend erscheinen, wie wenn man ein Lied traurigen Inhalts nach einer lustigen Weise singen würde.

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These are Frege’s words (1919: 37): Mit dem Satze „Alfred ist noch nicht gekommen“ sagt man eigentlich „Alfred ist nicht gekommen“ und deutet dabei an, dass man sein Kommen erwartet; aber man deutet es eben nur an. Man kann nicht sagen, dass der Sinn des Satzes darum falsch sei, weil Alfreds Kommen nicht erwartet werde. Das Wort „aber“ unterscheidet sich von „und“ dadurch, dass man mit ihm andeutet, das Folgende stehe zu dem, was nach dem Vorhergehenden zu erwarten war, in einem Gegensatze. Solche Winke in der Rede machen keinen Unterschied im Gedanken.

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sentence would be, strictly speaking, false should the consequence in question fail to hold. Grice does not want to say that the speaker has said (in his favorite sense) that to be brave is a consequence of being Englishman.14 The reason is the same as Frege’s: That being an Englishman is a consequence of being brave is not part of the thought expressed. The utterance of the sentence is true if the person referred to is an Englishman and brave. We may say that a proposition is a conventional implicature if it satisfies the following three conditions: (a) It depends on the conventional meaning of the utterance, (b) the speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition, and (c) its falsity is compatible with the truth of the utterance (Bach 1999: 29-31). If this is correct, then the theoretical utility Grice sees in opting for this particular notion of what is said (1968: 121) might be found in Grice’s general philosophical project: My primary aim is rather to determine how any such distinction between meaning and use is to be drawn, and where lie the limits of its philosophical utility. […] In my eyes the most promising line of answer lies in building up a theory which will enable one to distinguish between the case in which an utterance is inappropriate because it is false or fails to be true, or more generally fails to correspond with the world in some favored way, and the case in which it is inappropriate for reasons of a different kind. If we do not attend to this distinction we are likely to commit mistakes. It is a mistake to conclude that the Causal Theory of Perception (see Grice 1961) is wrong from the claim that the use of “it looks red to me” is incorrect when one does not have any doubt about the color of the object perceived (Grice 1989: 5-6; 1987: 374). It is also a mistake to conclude that Russell’s theory of descriptions (Russell 1905; see Grice 1970) is wrong from the claim that we do not mean that there is one and only one table in the world when we say, “The table is covered with books”. This type of argument rests on an inappropriate understanding of conceptual analysis as “linguistic botanizing” (Grice 1987: 376) and on a “blurring of the logical/pragmatic distinction” (Grice 1987: 374). We need to make a 14

At a different place Grice remarks: “I would wish to maintain that the semantic function of the word ‘therefore’ is to enable a speaker to indicate, though not to say, that a certain consequence holds” (1968: 121).

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distinction between logical inferences and pragmatic inferences, and that means that we need to distinguish between those aspects of an utterance which determine its conditions of truth and those which do not. Grice’s idea is that there are aspects of conventional meaning of an utterance that do not affect the truth of that utterance. Some of these aspects are part of conventional implicatures. In order to distinguish between what is conventionally implicated and what is said, the conditions in which the conventional meaning is part of what is said need to be specified. It is here that Grice’s notion of centrality comes into play. 2.3.3. Central meaning In order to distinguish between what is said and what is conventionally implicated one will have to specify conditions that will be satisfied only by speech acts that are “central or fundamental” (Grice 1968: 121). What is said may then finally come out as meaning what U “centrally meant” (1989: 88).15 This raises the question: What is centrality? In Strand Five of “Retrospective Epilogue” Grice tries to clarify centrality (1987: 359-368). Centrality is supposed to distinguish “primary from nonprimary ranges of signification”. Two features are candidates to specify centrality: “formality” and “dictiveness” (Grice 1987: 359-362). These notions are introduced to account for two different distinctions: The distinction between those elements of meaning that are present in virtue of convention and those which are not, and the distinction between those elements which are part of what a form of words or the user asserts and those which are part of what the words or the user implies or otherwise conveys (1987: 340-341). Formality is present if the relevant signification is part of the conventional meaning. Dictiveness is present if the relevant signification is part of what the expression or its user “says” as distinct from implies, suggests, etc. (1987: 360-361). For each of the four possible combinations of the two notions and their negation Grice offers at least one example (361-362). 15

The definition, or the sketch of the definition, of “what is said” is this (Grice 1989: 88): “U said that p” may finally come out as meaning: “U did something x (1) by which U centrally meant that p (2) which is an occurrence of a type S part of the meaning of which is ‘p’”

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dictive

non-dictive

(1) “The chairman of the Berkeley Philosophy formal Department is in the Department office”

(2) “My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I” (3) “Heigh-ho” to mean (4) “Excuse me, madam” “Well that’s the way the (or, alternatively, an non- world goes”; “He’s just an elaborate courtly bow) to formal evangelist” to mean “He is a mean that the person sanctimonious, hypocritical, addressed has been racist, reactionary, money- behaving like a prima grubber” donna (1) In the utterance “The chairman of the Berkeley Philosophy Department is in the Department office” both formality and dictiveness are present: the words are used in their conventional meaning and they are used to assert what the words say. (2) In the utterance “My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I” formality is present as the words are used in their conventional meaning. But dictiveness is not present in the use of the expression “on the other hand”. The speaker does not mean to assert any contrast between the residential location of his brother-in-law and the activities of someone’s great aunt; we would say that he has misused the expression, but we would not say that his utterance is false. (3) In utterance “Heigh-ho” to mean “Well that’s the way the world goes” and in “He’s just an evangelist” to mean “He is a sanctimonious, hypocritical, racist, reactionary, moneygrubber” formality is not present, because the words are not used in their conventional meaning, but dictiveness is present, because what the words mean is asserted.16 (4) In the utterance “Excuse me, madam” or an 16

It seems difficult to understand what Grice had in mind here. It seems tempting to interpret the speaker uttering “He’s just an evangelist“ to be implicating “He is a sanctimonious etc. moneygrubber”. But this cannot be how Grice wanted the example to be understood for he categorizes it under the heading “dictive”. Robert Ardundale, as quoted by Wharton (2002: 240, Fn. 39), interprets the example as purporting to show that there is dictiveness without formality on the grounds that a special

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elaborate courtly bow performed to mean that the person addressed has been behaving like a prima donna neither formality nor dictiveness is present: the words and the bow are not used in their conventional meaning and they do not say that the person addressed has been behaving like a prima donna. There are two questions to answer: (1) Does “dictive” mean “assertive”? (2) How is it possible that there is formality present without dictiveness? Does “dictive” mean “assertive”? The passage about Strand Five at the beginning of “Retrospective Epilogue” in which Grice explains that he wants to capture the difference between what a form of words or their user “asserts” rather than what the words “imply” seems to favor a positive answer to this question (Grice 1989: 341). This is also the interpretation of Wharton (2002: 239 and 245).17 However, at the end of Strand Five Grice convention shared by a small group is not shared by a larger group. This cannot be right because in such a case formality would in fact be present, as Wharton correctly remarks. Wharton interprets the example as showing that there exists “occasionspecific senses”, “nonce-senses”, constructed in the situation. This interpretation seems plausible to me: The speaker uttering “He’s just an evangelist” says something (or even: asserts something) without using signs in their conventional meaning and without implicating anything. This does not contradict my previous claim that one can only say something once there are linguistic utterance types (see above § 2.1.). It is only when there is language that Grice’s examples of dictiveness without formality become possible. 17 Wharton (2002: 245 Fn. 48) thinks he is in good company and quotes Schiffer (1972: 114): “(I should like to add that, as far as my intuitions go, in uttering σ S stated (asserted) that p just in case in uttering σ S said that p.)” Schiffer argues that “asking” cannot imply “saying” because one may ask a question by performing a nonconventional sign (1972: 115). But this is also true of “saying”: dictiveness might be present without formality. Schiffer’s second reason (or “suggestion of a reason”) why saying is especially tied to the indicative and imperative moods is that one can understand the conventional meaning of the sentence without the sentence being uttered with a particular mood; but in the case of asking one will not understand the conventional meaning of the sentence unless one knows that it is a conventional means for asking (Schiffer 1972: 115-116). I disagree. The fact that we use conventional signs to indicate that a sentence is a question seems to be just a contingent matter of our language. It could as well be that we had the imperative mood as basic and would use a specific sign to indicate anytime we were performing a statement.

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makes clearer what he means by “dictive” by referring to a distinction between phrastics and neustics (1987: 367): […] we shall perhaps be in line with those philosophers who, in one way or another, have drawn a distinction between “phrastics” and “neustics,” philosophers, that is to say, who in representing the structure of discourse lay a special emphasis on (a) the content of items of discourse whose merits or demerits will lie in such features as correspondence or lack of correspondence with the world and (b) the mode or manner in which such items are advanced, for example declaratively or imperatively, or (perhaps one might equally well say) firmly or tentatively. The most prominent of the philosophers he is alluding to here is presumably Richard M. Hare (Wharton 2002: 238). In 1952 Hare introduced these notions18 as an improvement over notions he had already used in an article in 1949. There he compared the following two sentences (Hare 1949: 27): (1) Mary, please show Mrs. Pendlergast her room. (2) Mary will show you your room, Mrs. Pendlergast. Both sentences refer to something which might be the case. Hare calls the part of the sentence that performs the descriptive part the “descriptor”. To make it explicit one may write the following (Hare 1949: 27): (1*) Showing of her room to Mrs. Pendlergast by Mary at time t, please. (2*) Showing of her room to Mrs. Pendlergast by Mary at time t, yes. Hare then remarks (1949: 28): “Yes” and “please” in the above sentences do nothing but indicate the mood of the sentence, whether indicative or imperative or whatever it is. We need a generic name for the function which these words 18

Hare writes (1952, § 2.1.): “I shall call the part of the sentence that is common to [assertive and imperative] moods (‘Your shutting the door in the immediate future’) the phrastic; and the part different in the case of commands and statements (‘yes’ or ‘please’) the neustic.”

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perform; I shall call it the “dictive” function, because it is they that really do the saying (the commanding, the stating, etc.) which a sentence does. The descriptor, on the other hand, describes what it is that is being said. I shall call that part of a sentence which performs the dictive function the “dictor”. Dictors, like descriptors, can be either implicit or explicit. If Grice follows Hare, then “saying” is not synonymous to “asserting” but functions as a generic verb for the force of the utterance. This notion of saying does not have a counterpart in natural language and is therefore somewhat artificial. Its legitimacy is derived from theoretical purposes: this special sense of “what is said” serves to distinguish between cases in which an utterance is inappropriate because it fails to be true and cases in which it is inappropriate because of a different reason. How is it possible that there is formality present without dictiveness? Grice explains (1987: 362): The vital clue here is, I suggest, that speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in speech-acts at different but related levels. One part of what the cited speaker in the example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lowerorder speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of a higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, “on the other hand”. The truth or falsity and so the dictive content of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value, and so not the dictive content, of the speaker’s words.19 19

The same suggestion is made by Grice in (1968: 122): “The problematic elements are linked with certain speech-acts which are exhibited as posterior to, and such that their performance is dependent upon, some member or disjunction of members of the central range; for example, the meaning of ‘moreover’ would be linked with the speech-act of adding, the performance of which would require the performance of one or another of the central speech-acts.”

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2.4. A different definition I think that Grice was right in introducing the notion of centrality but wrong in introducing the notion of conventional implicature. I will first argue against the existence of conventional implicatures. Then I will explain in what ways Grice went wrong and how one can bring in the notion of centrality without bringing in the notion of conventional implicature. 2.4.1. The myth of conventional implicatures The expression “on the other hand” belongs, if one attends to Grice’s examples, to a list of expressions including “but”, “therefore” and “moreover”. According to Grice, these locutions do not affect the truth conditions of the utterance they are part of. But what is the reason for this claim? The claim seems to rest almost entirely on intuitions, going back to Frege (see above § 2.3.2. and Bach 1999: 328-336). Intuitions are hard to attack or defend. Yet when analyzing natural language we do not seem to be able to do without intuitions. What we can do is look how well founded the intuitions are. Kent Bach lists four factors that could lie behind the intuition shared by Frege, Grice and their followers that these locutions generate conventional implicatures, and he explains for each factor why one need not accept it (Bach 1999; and see already Bach 1994: 144-149). First, these locutions do not encode a single meaning and so they do not provide a uniform contribution to truth-conditional content. The word “but” for example can be used to express a contrast between two properties or between the ascription of one property but not the other: I can say “Shaq is huge but he is agile” to mean that there is a contrast between huge and agile, but if in a conversation someone has said that Shaq is huge, I can also say “Shaq is huge but he is agile” to mean that he has another property not mentioned so far. However, from this it does not follow that “but” generates a conventional implicature. Second, what locutions like “but” often convey is not part of what the speaker is asserting but rather part of the common ground. But what is common ground is not what is conventionally implicated.

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Third, the intuition is a result of a forced choice. Is “Shaq is huge but he is rich” true or false? If we are forced to answer this question we will have to settle either for truth or falsity, but there might be another option. For example, in an utterance like “Ann’s computer, which she bought in 1992, crashes frequently” it is not so easy to say if it is true or false when she has bought the computer in 1993. Many people, if forced to make a choice, would say the utterance is true. But this does not show that what is expressed between the commas does not belong to what is said. So if we give up the forced choice between “simply true” and “simply false” we might see that “but”, after all, contributes to the truth conditions of the utterance. Fourth, spelling out the contribution of a word like “but” requires an extra clause. To formulate what is said in “Shaq is huge but he is agile” we would have to say that Shaq is huge, Shaq is agile, and there is a certain contrast between being huge and being agile. So we would end up positing more conjuncts than the sentence uttered has clauses. But we need not do this for we can report what the speaker said with “She said that Shaq is huge but that he is agile”. These are the factors Bach lists. I think that they are not apt to explain the intuition shared by Frege and Grice because I know of no textual evidence for these factors either in Frege’s or Grice’s writings. I also think that Bach does not list the real factor behind Frege’s intuition. Frege was interested in constructing a formal theory for a language free of all subjective elements, free of ideas in the speaker’s mind (Vorstellungen), free of the tone and coloring of words (Färbungen). These aspects do not affect the thought (in Frege’s sense) expressed in the utterance.20 What is said in a sentence is what is objective if anything is. The contrast expressed by “but” is subjective. Therefore that contrast does not belong to what is said. This is a powerful intuition by itself, and it becomes even more powerful if it turns into a tradition. Ideas in the speaker’s mind should not affect the truth of an utterance about the world outside of the mind. But the situation is different if one 20

These are Frege’s words (1892a: 70, Fn. 7): [E]s darf nicht verkannt werden, dass man denselben Sinn, denselben Gedanken verschieden ausdrücken kann, wobei denn also die Verschiedenheit nicht eine solche des Sinnes, sondern nur eine der Auffassung, Beleuchtung, Färbung des Sinnes ist und für die Logik nicht in Betracht kommt.

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speaks about the mind. If I say “I feel angry” I have said that I feel angry. The utterance is true if I feel angry and false if I do not feel angry. For the construction of a formal scientific language such sentences are of no concern, but if we want to explain our ordinary language we have to include sentences about mental states and events. If this is acknowledged, then there is no reason to exclude the contrast expressed by “but” from what is said. When I say “She was poor but she was honest”, I express a contrast between poverty and honesty. Contrary to what Frege and Grice claim, the utterance is false if the contrast does not exist. There is no reason to exclude attitudes from what is said. Although I do not agree with Bach’s argument, I agree with his conclusion: the existence of conventional implicatures is a myth (Bach 1999).21 2.4.2. What is primarily said I think Grice went wrong in two ways. First, he thought that all his examples should be analyzed in the same way and so he missed out on an important distinction. We should distinguish between (a) locutions that express an attitude about the world, and (b) locutions that are used to perform second-order speech acts.22 21

In his argument Bach (1999; and already 1994) introduces the „IQ-Test“ (Indirect Quotation Test): An element of a sentence contributes to what is said in an utterance of that sentence if and only if there can be an accurate and complete indirect quotation of the utterance (in the same language) which includes that element, or a corresponding element, in the ‘that’-clause that specifies what is said.” (1999: 340). ACIDS (Alleged Conventional Implicature Devices – e.g. „but“) pass the test and therefore belong to what is said. Utterance modifiers do not pass the test and therefore do not belong to what is said; they are not conventional implicatures either, but rather vehicles for performing second order speech acts. As the introduction of the IQ-Test does not seem to be necessary for the argument against conventional implicatures and generates the question of how intuitions of speakers are a good ground for semantic theorizing, I left it out here (see below § 2.7.4.). 22 Grice speaks of „higher-order“ speech acts, but it seems preferable to use the term “second-order” speech acts because there is no reason to account for the mere theoretical possibility of higher than second-order speech acts (Bach 1999, Fn. 19).

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The locutions “moreover” and “on the other hand” belong, at least according to one use of them, to the latter category. Bach (1999) calls them “utterance modifiers”, vehicles for performing second-order speech acts. As Grice explains (see quote above), the speaker uttering “My brother-inlaw lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I” is not expressing a contrast between the location of his brother-in-law and the activities of someone’s great aunt, but rather expressing a contrast between two things he utters. Or, to take Bach’s example: When someone utters, “Confidentially, Al’s wife is having an affair” the speaker, characterizing his utterance as confidential, said that Al’s wife is having an affair. This characterizing is another speech act: “Al’s wife is having an affair. I mean this as a confidential utterance”. The locutions “but” and “therefore” do not belong to the latter category. The speaker uttering “She was poor but she was honest” does not perform a second-order speech act of expressing a contrast between his saying that she was poor and his saying that she was honest. Rather, he is expressing a contrast between the fact that she was poor and the fact that she was honest. If we take the distinction into account, then the meaning of locutions in the second category is part of what is said even in Grice’s favorite sense – or at least one would have to give an argument for excluding it, an argument different from the one based on Frege’s intuition (see above). Second, Grice does not discuss the possibility that the content of a second-order speech act may be part of what is said. We often say more than one thing at a time. We may say things about the world and things about our utterances about the world. To perform second-order speech acts is therefore to say something about the utterance. In order to prevent confusion with Grice’s notion I suggest introducing the notion of “what is primarily said”. What a speaker primarily said is what she primarily meant, that is, what she meant not about her utterance but about the world. What is primarily said may then be defined as follows: “U primarily said that *ψp” is true, if and only if U did something x (1) by which U primarily meant that *ψp (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance type S which means ‘*ψp’ in some linguistic system.

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This definition of what is primarily said captures Grice’s notion of centrality without introducing the problematic notion of conventional implicature. However, for many discussions of the notion of what is said, including the one to follow about the full identification of what is said, the notion of what is primarily said is not necessary. 2.4.3. One more improvement Since what is said is part of what is meant, the conventional meaning of an utterance can only be what is said if the speaker intends to say this, that is, if he believes that the utterance has that conventional meaning. Consider a case in which the speaker by uttering “x” means that p and “x” means p in some linguistic system but the speaker does not believe this. As an example I will use an adapted version of Searle’s famous example of the American soldier captured by Italian troops in the Second World War. In the original example the soldier utters (1) Kennst Du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen? without knowing the correct meaning of the uttered words in German. Searle uses this example to show that what a speaker means cannot be analyzed with speaker intentions alone. But contrary to what Searle says, the American soldier has meant that he is a German, although he has not said it. If the soldier utters (2) Ich bin ein Deutscher. without knowing what the uttered words mean in German (“I am a German”) he would have meant that he is a German; but he would not have said it, even though this is precisely the utterance-type meaning of his utterance. The reason is this: In order to say something one must mean what one says, and in order to do so one must know the meaning of the uttered words, or at least believe that the words have that meaning that one wishes to express. Grice’s original definition of “what is said” thus needs to be expanded in the following way:

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“U primarily said that *ψp” is true, if and only if U did something x (1) by which U primarily meant that *ψp (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance-type S which means ‘*ψp’ in some linguistic system, and (3) U believes (2). 2.5. The full identification of what is said There is, as Grice remarks, another problem. The definition given so far does not suffice to fully determine what is said. If someone utters the sentence (1) He is in the grip of a vice. one would know, according to Grice (1967: 25): that he had said, about some particular male person or animal x, that at the time of the utterance (whatever that was), either (1) x was unable to rid himself of a certain bad character trait or (2) some part of x’s person was caught in certain kind of tool or instrument (approximate account of course). But for a full identification of what a speaker said, one would need to know (a) the identity of x, (b) the time of utterance, and (c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of utterance, of the phrase in the grip of a vice [a decision between (1) and (2)] Let’s take, in order of the felt magnitude of the problem, (c) first, then (a) and then (b). 2.5.1. Ambiguities In order to fully determine what is said we need to resolve ambiguities. There is no problem with ambiguous expressions as long as one of the meanings of the expression is not meant, for in that case condition (1) of the definition of what is said is not satisfied. If someone utters (1) and means that a certain person is in the grip of a certain kind of instrument, then this is what the speaker said. In this case there is no metaphysical

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problem. The question how the hearer determines what the speaker meant is epistemological. I will turn to it later (see part II, § 2.).23 In cases where the speaker means both of the meanings of an ambiguous expression – or, more generally, when the speaker means more than one meaning of a polysemous expression – the following problem may arise. If the speaker utters “He is in the grip of a vice” to mean that the person referred to is in the grip of an instrument, and by saying this wishes to mean that the person is in the grip of a bad character trait, then according to the definition he would have said that the person is in the grip of a bad character trait; but since he means this by saying that the person is in the grip of an instrument this is what he implicates, so it cannot be what he said. Therefore the meaning referred to in the definition of what is said must be the utterance-type meaning after resolution of possible ambiguities. 2.5.2. Indexicals Expressions whose reference cannot be determined without attending to the particular context of utterance, for example personal pronouns (“I”, “you”, “his”, “hers”, etc.), adverbs of location and time (“here”, “there”, “now”, “then”, etc.) and demonstrative pronouns (“this”, “that”, etc.), are called “deictic expressions” (Peirce), “shifters” (Jespersen 1922), “egocentric particulars” (Russell 1940), “indexicals” (Bar-Hillel 1954) or “token reflexives” (Reichenbach 1947: 284). I will use the now common term “indexical”. In order to determine what proposition is expressed by an utterance of a sentence containing an indexical, the reference of the indexical needs to be fixed. This cannot be done without attending to the particular context of use.24 The fixing of the reference of an indexical commonly takes the form of a rule. For example, a simple and elegant rule can be given for the pronoun “I”: Each token of the type “I” refers to the speaker of the utterance. Kaplan categorizes the pronoun “I” as one of the “pure indexicals”, that is indexicals for which a linguistic rule exists that fully determines the referent for each context (Kaplan 1989: 491). The pronoun 23

In discussing the problem of ambiguity, metaphysical and epistemological questions are often confused (see for example Levinson 2000: 172-177). 24 For recent developments on this topic in formal semantics see Forbes (1989), Kaplan (1989) and Perry (1986, 1998, 2001).

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“I” is one of the few if not the only indexical belonging into this category. The category definitely does not encompass more than a few expressions. For these expressions a simple and elegant rule can be given. However, there would still be the question of when to apply the rule, for the rule by itself does not say that (Wittgenstein 1953). For example, if someone quotes an utterance containing “I”, then the utterer of “I” is not the referent of “I”. More difficult are cases of indexicals for which the respective rule is not that elegant. Take the pronoun “he” or the demonstrative “there”. Kaplan calls such indexicals “true demonstratives” and states (1989: 490): The linguistic rules which govern the use of the true demonstratives “that”, “he”, etc. are not sufficient to determine their referent in all contexts of use. Something else – an associated demonstration – must be provided. The linguistic rules assume that such a demonstration accompanies each (demonstrative) use of a demonstrative. There is no rule of demonstration. And to try to formulate a rule for such expressions without assuming demonstration does not lead very far. But let’s try nevertheless. The rule for the pronoun “he” for example could be this: “A token of ‘he’ refers to the male most salient in the context of the utterance”. This rule leaves the referent not fully determined because the notion of salience itself is unclear. Although the notion has been relied upon in game theory since Schelling (1960), there does not exist any theory of salience up to today (Bach 1994: 155). Note that the problem is not that we do not know the exact reference of “he” – whether it refers to Peter, Paul or Philip. The problem with the rule for “he” is that it does not fix the reference. The rule for “I” fixes the reference – it refers to whoever is speaking. Even if for the utterance “I am Swiss” we do not know whether it is Peter, Paul or Philip who is speaking, we know that the utterance is true iff the speaker is Swiss. The referent is fixed as soon as it is uniquely identified. But the rule: “… refers to the male most salient” does not fix the reference as long as we do not know what “salience” means.

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2.5.3. The time of utterance Grice suggests to include the time of utterance in the full identification of what is said. But the time of utterance will obviously not suffice to identify the time that determines what is said. For example, if someone utters “He is running wild” to narrate what has happened the day before, then the time of utterance will not be the time the utterance refers to. The time the utterance applies to, not the time of utterance, is needed to determine a proposition and therefore what is said. Grice’s suggestion as to what is needed for a full identification of what is said does not lead far enough. First, there is no rule to fix the reference of indexicals. Second, the time of utterance does not suffice to determine the time the utterance refers to. Third, context sensitivity does not end here but affects many more linguistic phenomena. Here are some examples. 2.5.4. Inexplicit references When we speak, we often make reference to time without mentioning it. Not only do we make inexplicit references to time, but also to people and location. For example, by uttering “Come here!” we speak to a specific person, although there is no indexical present in the sentence.25 In order to refer to a location we sometimes make use of an explicit formula, for example “She lives in Paris”. Very often we make no such explicit reference. Consider the utterance of the following sentence: (2) It’s raining. Barwise and Perry (1983: 287) comment: It seems pretty clear now that the statement “It is raining” describes a certain simple state of affairs: in s: at l: raining; yes.26 And Perry (1998: 7) comments: 25

In languages like Italian, Spanish and Russian the phenomenon is even more widespread. 26 Barwise and Perry develop what they call “situational semantics”. Semantic underdetermination is a problem independently of this particular theory.

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Fred hears Mary say [‘It’s raining’]; he doesn’t know whether she is talking about the location where they are; or some other location – perhaps the location of the person to whom she is talking on the phone. So, in a sense, he doesn’t know what she has said. We may make a default assumption, but we can only verify that assumption and thus determine the location referred to in the context of the utterance. 2.5.5. Definite descriptions Incomplete definite descriptions are another case of context sensitive expressions. Consider the utterances of the following sentences: (3) The yellow house is on fire. (4) The train will arrive at 7 pm. (5) The table is large. These sentences contain definite descriptions that are incomplete. They do not fix a single object, for there is more than just one yellow house, more than just one train and more than just one table in the world. Quine (1940: 146) writes about the definite description in (3): Everyday use of descriptions is often elliptical, essential parts of the condition “…x…” being left understood; thus we may say simply “the yellow house” … when what is to be understood is rather “the yellow house in the third block of Lee Street, Tulsa”. Reichenbach (1947: 228) comments on (4): The necessary addition then is understood. It usually consists in a reference to a preceding utterance; for instance, it may be assumed in the form “the train of which we spoke”. Sellars (1954: 199) writes about (5):

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[T]he context functions to give the statement the force, for example, of “The table over here is large”. 2.5.6. Quantifiers The case of quantifiers is very similar to the one of definite descriptions. Here are some examples: (6) Everyone was sick. (7) I have nothing to wear. (8) There is no beer left. Stephen Neale (1990: 95) writes about (6): Suppose I had a dinner party last night. In response to a question as to how it went, I say to you: “Everyone was sick.” Clearly I do not mean to be asserting that everyone in existence was sick, just that anyone at the dinner party I had last night was. Kent Bach (1994: 136) comments on (7):27 [Y]ou might use “I have nothing to wear” to mean that you have nothing appropriate to wear to a certain wedding. Anne Bezuidenhout (2002: 112-113) writes about (8): Let us take an example of a sentence that most would agree does involve some incompleteness. Suppose for instance I utter the sentence “There is no beer left”. The quantifier phrase “no beer” is incomplete and in context it must be completed, either by restricting the domain or by adding ellipsed material (depending on your favorite view of the matter).

27

See already Bach and Harnish 1979: 65-70.

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2.5.7. Comparative adjectives Another kind of expressions said to be context sensitive are comparative adjectives. A paradigmatic comparative adjective is “tall”.28 Consider the utterance of the following sentence: (9) Paul is tall. Compared to the average height of a European the utterance is true, let’s say. Compared to the members of the local basketball team the utterance is false. And in comparison to members of Paul’s family we do not really know what to say because they are all about the same height. In different contexts of utterance the utterance has different truth-values. This phenomenon troubled Plato. What is tallness, he wondered, if Paul can gain it in one context and lose it in another without altering his constitution. The answer is simple: “tall” is not an absolute, but a comparative predicate. What is needed in order to determine the truthvalue is a comparison class: relative to one particular class Paul is tall, relative to another, he isn’t. As long as there exists no comparison class no proposition is being expressed.29 Consider another example: (10) Steel isn’t strong enough. Bach explains (1994: 127):

28

The category of comparative adjectives also includes expressions like „valuable“, „interesting“ etc. which only apply to an object relative to certain propositional attitudes of the speaker or other persons (see Harth 2003, 74, who calls the phenomenon „respect-dependent predication“; this terminology does not seem to me to be fortunate because the problem is not that the predicates apply to an object only in some specific respect, but that the application depends on a measure with respect to which it is evaluated. However, this remark does not affect Harth’s substantial point). 29 Comparative adjectives can be analyzed as predicate modifiers. A sentence containing a comparative adjective is incomplete as long as there is no predicate it is modifying (see Ludlow 1989).

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[10], though syntactically well-formed, [is] semantically or conceptually incomplete, in the sense that something must be added for the sentence to express a complete and determinate proposition (something capable of being true or false). With [10] we need to know strong enough for what. Notice that [10] does not express the weak proposition that steel isn’t strong enough for something or other. […] the conventional meaning of the sentence determines not a full proposition but merely a proposition radical; a complete proposition would be expressed, a truth condition determined, only if the sentence were elaborated somehow.30 All of the examples show that the utterance-type meaning does not suffice for a full identification of what is said by the speaker. 2.6. The problem of semantic underdetermination 2.6.1. Semantic underdetermination The problem arises already in the case of sentences containing indexicals: the reference of an indexical can only be determined in the particular context of utterance, and therefore the proposition an utterance is used to express can only be determined in the particular context. We may say that the linguistic meaning of a sentence underdetermines the proposition expressed by the utterance of that sentence (see e.g. Neale 1990: 114 n. 46). This applies not only to sentences containing indexicals, but to all sentences containing context sensitive expressions. Let’s call the following claim “semantic underdetermination”: (SU) The linguistic meaning of an utterance containing context sensitive expressions underdetermines the proposition the utterance is used to express and therefore underdetermines what is said.

30

I am puzzled by the terminology: If a proposition is what can be true or false, there are no incomplete and therefore no complete propositions, but only propositions! The puzzling terminology is not only Bach’s but also other participants’ in the discussion of semantic underdetermination (among others Recanati 1989: 302; see § 2.7.2.).

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This claim has been widely accepted.31 It is important to note that the problem is not about sentence ellipsis. The problematic sentences are wellformed sentences of English, unlike for example the sentence “Bill did too” where syntactical material is suppressed. Neither is it a problem about communication in an indirect or roundabout way as in the case of an implicature. The problem is that the linguistic meaning of the utterances of the sentences underdetermines the proposition they are used straightforwardly to express (Neale 2004: 97-105). Without an analysis of utterance-type meaning for sentences containing indexicals – or any other kind of context sensitive expressions – it will be impossible to define what is said in Grice’s manner (Neale 1992: 553-554). More precisely, there are in fact two problems: (1) The linguistic meaning of a sentence containing indexicals – or any other context sensitive expressions – does not determine a proposition at all. If the linguistic meaning of the sentence does not determine a proposition, then the second condition in Grice’s definition of what is said is not satisfied. (2) The proposition determined by the linguistic meaning of a sentence containing indexicals – or any other context sensitive expressions – does not correspond to the proposition the speaker wants to express. If the speaker does not want to express the proposition the sentence expresses, then the first condition in Grice’s definition of what is said is not satisfied. Sometimes the discussion seems to be about (1). However, the claim that sentences express propositions does not help to save Grice’s notion of what is said if the proposition expressed by the sentence is not the proposition meant by the speaker. This becomes particularly apparent in examples like “I have had breakfast”. What the speaker meant is not that he has had breakfast once in his lifetime but that he has had breakfast that day. Recanati writes (1989: 313): In the case of [“I have had breakfast”], if what the speaker says is that he has had breakfast at least once in his life, then the speaker does not 31

Wittgenstein 1914-16; Quine 1940; Sellars 1954; Travis 1975; Atlas 1977; Searle 1978, 1980; Wilson and Sperber 1981; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Bach 1982; Carston 1988; Recanati 1989; Neale 1990.

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know what he says, because he does not know that this is what he says (were he to be told, he would be very surprised); therefore, this is not what he says. The real problem of semantic underdetermination is therefore (2). This leads to the general question about the relation between thought and language. There are two views to be distinguished (following Carston 2002: 29): (A) For each underdetermined utterance a sentence could be supplied that fully encodes the thought expressed. (B) No sentence ever fully encodes the thought it is used to express. There is also the intermediate view that only for some underdetermined utterances a sentence could be supplied that fully encodes the thought expressed. Examples could be (Carston 2002: 30): (1) Lions are animals. (2) The earth goes round the sun. (3) Two plus two is four. But this intermediate view is not stable. If there are sentences such as (1) to (3) that do encode the thought they are used to express then we can supply for each utterance expressing a thought a sentence that fully encodes the thought expressed.32 Consider one of the examples discussed above (see § 2.5.7.): (4) Paul is tall. This sentence does not express the thought the speaker wants to express. But we can supply a sentence that does express the thought: (5)

32

Paul is tall relative to the average height of adult men.

This does not exclude the view that there are thoughts we cannot express in words. The claim is only that if something is meant by producing a linguistic utterance, then a sentence that fully encodes the thought expressed can be supplied.

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The intermediate view thus collapses into the view (A). I will call this view “moderate underdetermination” and the view (B) “universal underdetermination”. I believe that the correct view is (A). In doing so I take sides with Cappelen and Lepore (2005). I will argue for view (A) indirectly by arguing against view (B). View (A) is not to be confounded with what is often called “semantic minimalism”, the view that underdetermination affects only a small number of sentences, only those containing indexicals. This seems to have been held by Grice, by a large number of formal semanticists and to have been taken up recently by Cappelen and Lepore. I believe that this view is wrong.33 2.6.2. Against universal underdetermination In order to argue for the view that underdetermination is universal, Charles Travis (1975, 1981, 1985, 1996), John Searle (1978, 1980, 1983), Julius Moravcsik (1990, 1998) and François Recanati (1989, 1993, 2004) argue that no sentence ever expresses a proposition. Travis asks as to consider for example the following utterance: (1) This apple is green. In a situation in which the aim is to distinguish the ripe from the unripe apples, one speaks truly when one says of an unripe MacIntosh that it is a green apple, but one speaks falsely when one says of an unripe Granny Smith that it is a green apple (Travis 1981: 61-62). The same sentence has different truth-values in different situations. The sentence itself does not say what situation it is about. Therefore the sentence itself does not have truth conditions. As Travis explains (1981: 2): [W]hile words, sentences and other expressions may mean things, and accordingly form a proper domain of semantics, they do not have the right properties for saying things to be so, hence are fit bearers neither of truth or falsity, nor of truth conditions. 33

For overviews of the discussion from different sides, see Recanati’s Literal Meaning (2004) and Cappelen and Lepore’s Insensitive Semantics (2005). The heated debate about the latter led in 2006 to a large number of comments and replies in Mind & Language, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Protosociology.

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And again (Travis 1985: 188): If there is nothing which is said in a sentence, in particular, nothing which is said to be so, then, one would think, the sentence as such, even under the best of circumstances, could not be true. That not being its business, one would also expect that there could not be a (substantive) condition for its truth. And again (Travis 1996: 451): What words mean plays a role in fixing when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. Meaning leaves room for variation in truth conditions from one speaking to another. Here is another example (Searle 1978: 122): (2) The cat is on the mat. We can imagine a situation in which the cat is hovering a few millimeters above the mat. Is the cat on the mat? We can, if we like, give a list of the conditions that should be satisfied in order for the sentence to be true. But however long that list is, we will always be able to imagine a new situation in which the spelled out conditions hold and the utterance of the sentence does not express a proposition relative to that situation. For example, what are the truth conditions of (2) if the cat and the mat are floating freely in outer space? (Searle 1978: 122) A similar reasoning can be put forward with respect to the next example (Searle 1980: 222): (3) Bill cut the grass. Although it looks as though the predicate “to cut” had a clear conventional meaning and that a sentence containing it had definite truth conditions, this is not correct, for there are situations in which the predicate has a different meaning, for example in “Sally cut the cake”. Searle writes (1980: 222223):

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Though the occurrence of ‘cut’ is literal in utterances of [‘Bill cut the grass’ and ‘Sally cut the cake’], and though the word is not ambiguous, it determines different sets of truth conditions for the different sentences. The sort of thing that constitutes cutting the grass is quite different from, e.g., the sort of thing that constitutes cutting a cake. One way to see this is to imagine what constitutes obeying the order to cut something. If someone tells me to cut the grass and I rush out and stab it with a knife, or if I am ordered to cut the cake and run over it with a lawnmower, in each case I will have failed to obey the order. That is not what the speaker meant by his literal and serious utterance of the sentence. The predicate has a literal meaning but this meaning does not give us the truth-conditions of its applications. Actually, it might give us the wrong truth-conditions, that is, not the truth-conditions of the speaker’s utterance that he literally meant. As Recanati (2004: 91) remarks on Searle’s example: The abstract condition we can associate with that sentence [...] is, precisely, too abstract to enable us to tell the worlds in which the condition is satisfied from the worlds in which it is not. It is not determinate enough to give us specific truth-conditions or obedienceconditions. The argument of Travis, Searle and Recanati seems to be this: (1) If the same sentence can be at the same time both true and false, then the sentence does not have specified truth conditions and therefore does not express a proposition. (2) Every sentence can be at the same time both true and false, because one can always imagine a situation in which we would count the sentence as false although all of the features of the initial situation are present which would make the sentence true. Therefore: (3) No sentence ever expresses a proposition. Premise (2) is supposed to be true, not so much because of the possible ways the world might be, but because of the different ways we evaluate the situation. The same utterance may be true in one situation of evaluation

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and false in another. The utterances “This apple is green”, “The cat is on the mat” and “Bill cut the grass” may be very different from the perspective of a cultivator, a photographer, a painter, a botanist, a child learning the language, etc. This, however, does not show that premise (2) is true. We can include the standard of evaluation in the meaning of the sentence (see below § 2.7.1).34 One might object that this only shifts the problem. As long as there are no standards of evaluation the sentence does not have truth conditions. For the sentences in the above examples no standards of evaluation can be given for all possible contexts of use of sentences containing the predicate in question. Of course this is true of most predicates in natural languages. But it does not follow that one cannot fix the standard of evaluation for a particular sentence in a particular context. Proponents of the view of universal underdetermination deny, and I accept, that the standard of evaluation can be fixed for a particular sentence in a particular context. I have three arguments against the argument for universal underdetermination. First, the examples apparently supporting universal underdetermination can be accommodated in a more moderate view; that means, universal underdetermination is not well grounded. Second, the argument is itself inconsistent. Third, the view, if true, would lead to absurd consequences. First example. Let’s say that the speaker who utters (1) The apple is green. thereby means (1*) The apple is unripe. This sentence expresses a proposition. It is true if the apple is unripe and it is false if the apple is ripe. One might be tempted to go for an ambiguity analysis in this case: “green” can mean “of the color between blue and yellow” or “unripe or unseasoned” (Oxford Concise Dictionary). This will work to solve part of the problem, but there is still a problem with 34

The standard of evaluation is not to be confounded with Kaplan’s circumstance of evaluation. Kaplan’s circumstance of evaluation is the possible world to be considered in order to determine the truth value of the utterance. What I call “standard of evaluation” is part of the meaning of the predicate. For a development of the view on the basis of Kaplan, see Corazza (2004) and Predelli (2005).

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“unripe”. When does an apple count as unripe? There probably are no unique standards of evaluation for this sentence because an apple might be unripe to pick or unripe to eat. But let’s say it means: (1**) The apple is not ready to be eaten. When is the apple not ready to be eaten? It is not ready to be eaten when the taste of the apple doesn’t correspond to our taste, a taste shared by many people, which could be measured with a level of acidity. To make the level of acidity fully precise, one would have to give a number, but for the purposes of everyday talk a more relaxed and possibly vague notion is sufficient: this apple is too sour to eat for us, this one isn’t, and this one may be too sour for some and not too sour for others. Second example. Let’s say that the speaker who utters (2) The cat is on the mat. thereby means (2) The cat is on the mat. The sentence is true if the cat is on the mat and false if the cat is not on the mat. What about the situation in which the front legs of the cat are on the mat and its back legs aren’t? Part of the cat is on the mat – so the sentence is true – but part of the cat is not on the mat – so the sentence is false. I do not know what we would say in this situation. There are three possibilities. Either we say that in this case the cat is not on the mat – then the sentence is false. Or we say that in this case the cat is on the mat – then the sentence is true. Or we say that we do not know whether the cat is on the mat or not.35 Many predicates of natural language are vague, that is, there is no precise border as to what counts as a fulfilling of the predicate and what not. It seems that the predicate “to be on something” is vague.36 But it would not be appropriate to conclude from a predicate being vague that there is no fulfilling of the predicate at all. (Compare: There might be a 35

The same holds for the situation in which the cat is hovering a few millimeters above the mat or if the cat and the mat are in outer space. 36 It is important not to confound lack of standard of evaluation and vagueness. The standard of evaluation may be fixed („Paul is tall relative to the local basketball team“) and the predicate nevertheless vague („to be tall relative to the local basketball team“).

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situation in which it is impossible to decide whether something is a cloud or not; but it does not follow that clouds do not exist.) Third example. The predicate “to cut” does not have a uniform meaning either. One of them is: “to trim or reduce the length by cutting” (Oxford Concise Dictionary). Let’s say that the speaker who utters (3) Bill cut the grass. thereby means (3) Bill trimmed or reduced the length of the grass by cutting. The sentence is true if Bill trimmed or reduced the length of the grass by cutting and false if he didn’t. If Bill stabbed the grass with a knife, the sentence is false. What if Bill uses a pair of scissors? If he reduced the length of the grass with the pair of scissors, the sentence is true. If one disagrees with this result, then supposedly one does not agree about the meaning of “cut”. The discussion of the examples shows that the sentences do express a proposition – contrary to what the proponents of the view of universal underdetermination claim. The view of universal underdetermination is thus not well grounded. This is a first objection to the argument. There is a deeper problem about the argument. The conclusion is that no sentence ever expresses a proposition; that means predicates would not have conditions of fulfillment, and that means there would not be any literal meaning of words and sentences. In their argument, Travis, Searle and Recanati presuppose that there is literal meaning – otherwise it would not make sense to speak at all of a sentence being true. Therefore the argument implicitly contains the claim that literal meaning exists and the claim that literal meaning does not exist. The view of universal underdetermination is thus inconsistent (see Cappelen and Lepore 2005: 132-136). Finally, imagine, for the sake of argument, that the view of universal underdetermination were correct. This would lead to absurd consequences. First, as just explained, there would be no literal meaning. Second, if underdetermination were universal, no sentence would express the content of our thoughts. We would have no way to determine the content of our thoughts, and therefore we could not think. Third, if underdetermination were universal, we could not think, and since communication is essentially

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the communication of thoughts, communication would not be possible (see also Cappelen and Lepore 2005: 123-127). I take this to be a reductio ad absurdum of the view of universal underdetermination. One might still claim that the proposition expressed by the sentence is not the one meant by the speaker. But in the examples it is assumed that the proposition is meant by the speaker. I do not deny the true claim that most sentences we in fact use underdetermine what we straightforwardly mean by them. But this is not the claim of universal underdetermination that no sentence ever expresses the thought the speaker means.

2.6.3. Against semantic minimalism According to the semantic minimalism of Cappelen and Lepore (1997, 2005)37 context sensitivity does not go further than the (slightly extended) class of indexicals. The idea behind semantic minimalism is to single out the content that all utterances share no matter how different the contexts of utterance are. The so called “minimal proposition”, the “proposition semantically expressed”, can then be easily computed by a competent speaker by fixing the reference of the extended class of indexicals, the genuinely context sensitive expressions (2005: 143). This class of indexicals includes personal pronouns, demonstratives, temporal and locational adverbs like “here” and “then”, adjectives like “actual” and contextuals38 like “enemy”, “foreigner” and “friend”, although Cappelen and Lepore express their doubts about the last category (2005: 1). They further claim (2005: 144): All semantic context sensitivity (i.e. context sensitivity that affects the proposition semantically expressed) is grammatically triggered, i.e. it is triggered by a grammatically (i.e. syntactically or morphemically) articulated sentential component. In order to determine the proposition semantically expressed by an utterance of a sentence S one has, besides specifying the meaning of the 37

See also the “minimal semantics” of Emma Borg (2004, 2004a), following Cappelen and Lepore. 38 Levinson (2000: 191) coins the term „contextuals“ for expressions which „contain within their semantic representation variables requiring contextual identification“. Two examples given by Levinson are „behind“ and „tall“.

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expressions and the compositional meaning rules, to disambiguate ambiguous and polysemous expressions, specify vague expressions and fix the reference of the context sensitive terms. Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 145) illustrate this with the following example: (1) She’s happy. There are (at least) two “indexical elements”: “she” and the tense of the verb. If one fixes the reference of these elements one gets the contextually salient female b39 and the time of utterance t. The proposition semantically expressed can then be represented as an ordered triple . This is too easy. As I already explained (see above § 2.5.2.), the rule “The pronoun ‘she’ refers to the contextually salient female” is not a rule in the strict sense because the notion of salience cannot be made more precise. The pronoun “she” only refers to a certain female person if it is accompanied by a demonstration. And there is no rule for demonstration. Recanati writes (2004: 57): The reference of a demonstrative cannot be determined by a rule, like the rule that ‘I’ refers to the speaker. […] Ultimately, a demonstrative refers to what the speaker who uses it refers to by using it. To be sure, one can make that into a semantic rule. One can say that the character of a demonstrative is the rule that it refers to what the speaker intends it to refer to. As a result, one will add to the narrow context a sequence of ‘speaker’s intended referents’, in such a way that the nth demonstrative in the sentence will refer to the nth member of the sequence. Formally that is fine, but philosophically one is cheating. Recanati uses the notion of “narrow context” he takes from Bach. According to Bach (2001: 29), context in the narrow or semantic sense is the one used when one says that the content is a function of context, that is, the semantic values of the elements of the sentence are „functions of objective contextual parameters“. Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 148) claim to agree with Recanati that semantic content depends on speaker’s intentions. But they do not see themselves to be cheating. They would be cheating, they say, if they claimed that semantic content did not depend on 39

Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 145) say they take no stand on the exact nature of the reference fixing rule for “she”.

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speaker’s intentions. Since they do not claim that, they are not cheating in this respect (2005: 149). But Recanati’s point is that to speak of a function (or rule) from context to semantic content only makes sense if the context does not contain intentions. Cappelen and Lepore speak of rules (e.g. 2005: 149), but they do not think that the issue of how to characterize these rules has any bearing on their arguments (2005: 150). I think it does have a bearing on their arguments, maybe not in their arguments against universal underdetermination, but surely in their argument for semantic minimalism. If they accept the claim that intentions play a role in determining the reference of indexicals, then they will have to accept it for other expressions as well. And this mean that they will have to abandon their position. Consider the reference to time. Cappelen and Lepore, like Grice, take the time of utterance to be relevant to determine the proposition, and, additionally, they take the tense of the verb as the indicator of the time the utterance refers to. But the time of utterance is not necessarily the time the utterance refers to, and a verb in the indicative tense can be used to speak about a time different from the present (e.g. in narration) or about no time at all (e.g. the utterance of „Two times two equals four“). But how does one fix the reference to time? In order to fix the reference it seems appropriate to turn to intentions of the speaker: the time referred to is the one intended by the speaker. Since both the expression „she“ and tense are “indexical elements”, and Cappelen and Lepore accept that the intentions of the speaker determine the reference of „she“, they should accept that the intentions of the speaker determine the time too. And if they accept this, they should accept it for all other context sensitive terms. There is another problem for Cappelen and Lepore’s position.40 It about the notion of “grammatical trigger”. What counts as a grammatical trigger? Take the sentence: (2) It’s raining. According to Cappelen and Lepore (2) semantically expresses the proposition „It’s raining now“.41 But (2) only has truth-conditions if it 40

The same problem applies to another minimalist view called „indexicalism“. According to indexicalism, defended by Jason Stanley, „all effects of extra-linguistic context of the truth-conditions of an assertion are traceable to elements in the actual syntactic structure of the sentence uttered” (Stanley 2000: 391; see also Stanley and Szabó 2000 and King and Stanley 2005).

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refers to a particular location. This leads to a dilemma for Cappelen and Lepore’s semantic minimalism. Either this sentence does not or it does semantically express a proposition. If it does not, then semantic minimalism is wrong because it would have the consequence that only very few sentences of English express a proposition. If it does, semantic minimalism is wrong because context sensitivity would then go beyond the (slightly extended) class of indexicals including the locution “to rain” as a grammatical trigger of location. Therefore Cappelen and Lepore’s position must be wrong. A special case in which the problem for Cappelen and Lepore’s view becomes apparent is the one of comparative adjectives. According to Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 155) “an utterance of ‘A is tall’ expresses the proposition that A is tall and it is true just in case A is tall”. Their argument for this surprising claim is the following (2005: 157): one might have a metaphysical objection against the claim that “A is red” expresses the proposition that A is red. This objection amounts to a general objection against the claim that two objects can share the same property or engage in the same activity. But there is no problem about this claim, and hence no problem about the claim that “A is red” expresses the proposition that A is red. Then Cappelen and Lepore show that if there is no problem with respect to the claim that “A is red” expresses the proposition that A is red, then there is no problem with respect to the claim that “A is tall” expresses the proposition that A is tall. The first part of the argument is unproblematic. It is a repetition of one of their main arguments against the view of universal underdetermination. The entire burden rests on the last step. How do Cappelen and Lepore show that if there is no problem with “red” then there is no problem with “tall”? They claim that one cannot but agree that there’s a property of tallness. But there is no property of tallness that is not relational!42 They argue that if one denies that there is a property A and B 41

In their illustration of semantic minimalism using the example „She’s happy“, Cappelen and Lepore clearly ask for the fixing of time (p. 144); however, elsewhere they leave this out, e.g. on p. 155 in a list of the propositions expressed by six sentences including „It’s raining“. I take it that the illustration on p. 144 makes it clear that the time must be added for all six sentences. I interpret their position so as to say that „It’s raining“ expresses the proposition „It’s raining at the time of utterance“ and that they have omitted the time only for expository reasons. 42 Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 171) try to define the property of tallness, but none of their four „preliminary options“ is promising. The problem is not that their proposals are not thoughtful, but simply that there is no property of tallness. It is a little

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have in common if A is tall for a G and A is tall for an F, then one would have to deny that there is any such thing as being tall with respect to a comparison class (2005: 171). This reasoning is wrong. It is exactly the other way around: If one denies that the property of being tall for a G and the property of being tall for an F are different properties, then one has to deny that there is a property of being tall for a G and the property of being tall for an F. The reason is that these properties are relational. An object has these properties only relative to some other object. Imagine that A is a French basketball player. A is tall for a French, but he is not tall for a basketball player. Now if the reasoning of Cappelen and Lepore were correct, it would follow that A is both tall and not tall. And this result is intolerable, for it would, as Cappelen and Lepore have pointed out in respect to the view of universal underdetermination having the same result, undermine logic, philosophy and the natural sciences. From this it follows that Cappelen and Lepore cannot make their case for the claim that “A is tall” expresses the proposition that A is tall; it rather expresses the proposition that A is tall relative to some comparison class. And this means that Cappelen and Lepore’s semantic minimalism is wrong. Semantic underdetermation is, as the examples show, widespread, but it is not universal. However, the problem of semantic underdetermination for Grice’s notion of what is said needs to be solved somehow. 2.7. The solution: An extended notion of what is said There are in principle two possible directions in which one can alter the notion of what is said. One can either extend it to include propositions not fully determined by the conventional meaning; or one can restrict it to the conventional meaning of the utterance, accepting that this meaning does not fully determine a proposition and therefore is not meant by the speaker. Since what is said is meant by the speaker, the only acceptable direction is the first one.43 Below, I present a definition of an extended notion of what is said. I assess the objection that the distinction between an extended surprising that Cappelen and Lepore do not try a different route once they see that a definition of „tallness“ is not easy to be found along their lines. 43 Such a view is often labeled „contextualism“ (e.g. Recanati 2004). It is important to note, however, that there are many forms of contextualism that differ in how they extend the notion of what is said.

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notion of what is said and what is implicated cannot be drawn properly. Then I show in what way systematic semantic theorizing is possible under the assumption of this extended notion. Finally, I argue against two new views of how to restrict the notion of what is said. 2.7.1. Definition Here is the definition of the extended notion I advocate: “By uttering x U primarily said that *ψp” is true, if and only if, U uttered x (1) by which U primarily meant that *ψp (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance type S which means ‘*ψp’ in some linguistic system after disambiguation and the fixing of references and of standards of evaluation44, and (3) U believes (2). This extended notion of what is said solves the problem of semantic underdetermination. It allows for the widespread context sensitivity in natural language and at the same time captures Grice’s idea that what is said is both meant and corresponds to the proposition expressed by the sentence.45 In order to see how the definition works, consider for example the following utterance (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 189): (1) It will take some time to repair your watch. What has the speaker said with the utterance of this sentence? It can’t be the proposition that repairing the watch of the addressee will take some time, because this, being trivially true, is not what the speaker meant. Let’s suppose that the standard of evaluation for “some” is the time one usually is prepared to wait. The speaker then has said something like the following: 44

By „standards of evaluation“ I mean a specification of the predicate; this is part of the meaning of the predicate and therefore of the sentence; it is determined by the intentions of the speaker. 45 This may be labeled a “contextualist view”, but it does not imply universal underdetermination. Furthermore, it is not linked with any particular way of how the hearer comes to know what is said.

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(1*) It will take more time than the time of waiting to repair your watch. This is not an implicature (for an analysis of the notion, see below § 3.). The speaker does not merely imply that the time it takes for the watch to be repaired is more than the time of waiting. He straightforwardly expresses this, but it is not expressed using linguistic signs in the sentence. 2.7.2. What is said and what is implicated One important objection against widening the notion of what is said is that it has the consequence that one cannot distinguish properly between what is said and what is implicated.46 Consider again: (1) It will take some time to repair your watch. According to the wider notion, what is said here is this: (1*) It will take more time than the time of waiting to repair your watch. What is implicated, let’s assume, is this: (2) You can go home and return later to get your watch. Both (1*) and (2) are meant by the speaker. Supposedly, (1*) is said and (2) is implicated. But if (1*) is said, why is (2) not said? In order to answer this question one often attends to Grice’s characterizations of conversational implicatures at the end of “Logic and Conversation” (1967: 39-40), where he mentions the following five features conversational implicatures seem to posssess: 1. They may be cancelled.

46

It is not clear whether the distinction can be made clear even using the original Gricean notions; for Grice’s theory of implicature see below § 3.

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2. They are non-detachable, that is to say, it will not be possible to use another way of saying the same thing that would lack the implicature. 3. They are not part of the meaning of the expressions used. 4. They need not be true if what is said is true. 5. They have a kind of indeterminacy. The second feature, non-detachability, cannot serve as a criterion of distinction because what is said is equally non-detachable. The fourth feature presupposes that there is something said, therefore it cannot be used as a criterion of distinction either. The other features may possibly serve as the distinctive feature, and I will discuss them as well as other criteria in the following order: a) Syntax, b) Logical Independence, c) Cancellability, d) Embedding in the scope of logical operators, e) Meaning, f) Indeterminacy, g) Minimal proposition, h) Availability and i) Commitment. This list is far from exhaustive. But it is sufficient for my present purpose as the discussion and the conclusion should make clear. a. Syntax The syntactic criterion tries to distinguish what is said and what is implicated by claiming a special relation between the elements of the utterance and what is said. Utterance-type meaning, and therefore what is said, is dependent on the words used, their order and syntactical character (Grice 1989: 87). But the meaning of what is implicated is also dependent on the meaning of the words used. Therefore the criterion must be strengthened somehow. For example, by claiming that the elements of the utterance must be part of what is said (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 181).47 In the example above, (1*) contains the words used in the utterance, and (2) doesn’t. But the criterion is still too weak. Any implicature may be phrased such as to include the elements of the utterance. For example, by uttering, “It will rain tomorrow”, one may say, “It will rain tomorrow” and

47

In relevance-theoretic terminology it would be formulated as follows: representations of explicatures must contain the semantic representation of the utterance as a subpart.

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implicate, “It will not rain tomorrow” (Recanati 1989: 320).48 If one strengthens the criterion further so that what is said is allowed to include only elements of the utterance, then it is too strong. It would exclude all of the examples above. So it seems that the linguistic criterion is either too weak or too strong. One might try to say that only those elements are to be included which are linguistically triggered. But whatever a linguistic trigger exactly is, one will always be able to construct a trigger that forces elements into what is said that one does not want to have there, and one will always be able to imagine an utterance in which parts of what is said are not linguistically triggered (see above § 2.6.3). The reason for this is that “what is said” is not a purely syntactic category. b. Logical independence Carston (1988: 158) claims that what is said – in her terminology: the explicature – has a „functional independence“ from implicatures, where “functional” means “logical” (see Recanati 1989: 316-318). Recanati calls this the „Independence Principle“ (Recanati 1989: 316): Independence Principle: Conversational implicatures are functionally independent of what is said; this means in particular that they do not entail, and are not entailed by, what is said. When an alleged implicature does not meet this condition, it must be considered as part of what is said. This principle, however, is not sufficient. There are counterexamples to it. Here is one by Recanati (1989: 320-321):

obvious

A: If anybody was there, Jim was there. B: Somebody was there – this I know for sure (I saw John going there). The utterance of B has the implicature that Jim was there. But this logically entails that somebody was there, and should, according to the independence principle, be counted as part of what is said. That means that B would have said with his utterance that Jim was there. This seems to be wrong. 48

Another example is the utterance of “John’s three children came to the party”; the corresponding scalar implicature can be phrased as, “The totality of John’s children of cardinality 3 came to the party” (Levinson 2000: 196).

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Here is another example (García-Carpintero 2001: 113): (3) I saw John with a woman. This utterance may have the implicature that this woman is different from John’s wife or one of his relatives. And “The woman I saw John with is different from his wife or relatives” entails the linguistic content that I saw John with a woman. The independence principle therefore fails to separate what is said from what is implicated. c. Cancellability Another possible criterion is that what is implicated may be cancelled, that is, one can add without contradiction a clause that denies what is implicated (see above and Grice 1967: 39; 1978: 44). In the example (1) above, one may say without contradiction: “It will take some time to repair your watch but you should wait”. If the criterion is to be sufficient to distinguish what is said from what is implicated, it would have to be the case that one cannot add without contradiction a clause that denies what is said. In the example (1), the speaker would contradict himself if he said: “It will take some time to repair your watch but it will not take any time”. However, there are other cases, in particular when one is using words in a “loose or relaxed way” (Grice 1978: 44). In the example (1), the speaker can say without contradiction: “It will take some time to repair your watch but not more than the time worth waiting”. To illustrate the problem with loose talk, here is what Grice writes (1978: 44): If we all know that Macbeth hallucinated, we can quite safely say that Macbeth saw Banquo, even though Banquo was not there to be seen, and we should not conclude from this that an implication of the existence of the object said to be seen is not part of the conventional meaning of the word see, nor even (as some have done) that there is one sense of the word see which lacks this implication. The criterion that what is implicated is cancelable is therefore not sufficient to distinguish what is said from what is implicated. d. Embedding in the scope of logical operators

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Another possible criterion is that what is said is what falls within the scope of logical operators (Recanati 1989: 325): Scope Principle: A pragmatically determined aspect of meaning is part of what is said (and therefore not a conversational implicature) if – and perhaps only if – it falls within the scope of logical operators such as negation and conditionals. This principle serves to solve a problem posed by Jonathan Cohen (1971) to Grice’s view that what is said with an utterance containing “and” is the truth-functional conjunction between two sentences, and that temporal order, causal relation and other conveyed meanings are part of the implicature. For example the following two sentences: (4) The king died and a republic has been declared. (5) A republic has been declared and the king died. express the same proposition, but have different implicatures. The first implicates that the king died first and then the republic was declared, and the second implicates that first the republic was declared and then the king died. If Grice’s view were correct, then the following two sentences would also express the same proposition: (6) If the king died and a republic has been declared, then Tom will be happy. (7) If a republic has been declared and the king died, then Tom will be happy. But we can deny one utterance and accept the other without contradiction. A similar problem arises with negation: (8) It is not true that the king died and a republic has been declared. (9) It is true that a republic has been declared and then the old king died. If Grice’s analysis were correct, these two sentences would contradict each other. But in fact, one can accept both without contradiction. The problem posed by the sentences (4) and (5) is solved if one accepts that these sentences express different propositions (Carston 1988;

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Recanati 1989: 323). But the criterion does not distinguish between “It will take more time than the time of waiting to repair your watch” and “You can go home and return later to get your watch” in the example above. The criterion is therefore not sufficient, and there is the suspicion that no logical criterion can do the job (Recanati 1989: 318). e. Meaning What is implicated is not part of the meaning of the words used (Grice 1967: 39). But then, in the example (1), (1*) would have to count as an implicature. As the discussion of semantic underdetermination has shown, what is said is not only constituted by the meaning of the words alone, but can only be identified by fixing the reference of indexicals and other context sensitive terms. f. Indeterminacy One may claim that what it said is the determinate meaning, and what is implicated is indeterminate (Grice 1967: 39). But the meaning of the extended notion may also be indeterminate (see above § 2.6.). Therefore this cannot be the distinctive feature either. g. Minimal proposition One might claim that what is said is the minimal proposition expressed by the sentence. Recanati calls this the “Minimalist Principle” (Recanati 1989: 302): Minimalist Principle: A pragmatically determined aspect of meaning is part of what is said if and only if its determination is necessary for the sentence to express a complete proposition. The proposition expressed by the sentence in the example above is – according to the interpretation I’m assuming – that it will take more time than the time of waiting to repair the watch. This is what is said. Sperber and Wilson (1986: 186-190) and Carston (1988) do not agree with the interpretation of the example because they think that the proposition expressed by the sentence in the example above is the trivial

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proposition that it will take some time to repair the watch. But this view need not be taken; one can claim that “some” involves a quantification over time, and the domain of quantification needs to be fixed for the sentence to express a proposition. Once this is done, the proposition expressed by the sentence is in fact that it will take more time than the time of waiting to repair the watch (Recanati 1989: 304-307). Recanati objects to the Minimalist Principle that it can only be used to tell whether an aspect of meaning is part of what is said if it has already been decided what variables have to be contextually instantiated for the proposition to express a proposition (1989: 307-308). Therefore, the Minimalist Principle begs the question and cannot be used to distinguish what is said from what is implicated. h. Availability According to Recanati (1989, 1993, 2001, 2004), what is said is “available or accessible to the unsophisticated speaker-hearer”. “Available” is to mean “accessible to our ordinary, conscious intuitions” (1989: 310). The “Availability Principle” states that these intuitions must be respected (1989: 310): Availability Principle: In deciding whether a pragmatically determined aspect of utterance meaning is part of what is said, that is, in making a decision concerning what is said, we should always try to preserve our pre-theoretic intuitions. Later, Recanati states the principle differently, but the idea remains basically the same (2004: 20): Availability What is said must be intuitively accessible to the conversational participants (unless something goes wrong and they do not count as ‘normal interpreters’). The Availability Principle is a constraint on what is said. It does not define what is said, it only states that what is said must be conforming to our intuitions, that is, it has to be accessible to the competent speaker. This is supposed to be in the spirit of Grice who in “Logic and Conversation” (1975) undertook to elaborate our everyday distinction between saying and

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implicating (Recanati 1989: 326). Our intuitions concerning what is said not only constitute the starting point for the study of what is said, but are part of “what the theory is about” (1989: 327). To put such a heavy burden on our intuitions in this respect leads at least to the following problems: (1) Relevance theorists (and others) have the intuition that the constituents of what is said correspond to the constituents of the utterance (Bach 1994: 137). (2) The intuitions of speakers can be educated to the effect that people would not say that the speaker has said the same thing with “I haven’t eaten breakfast” and with “I haven’t eaten breakfast today” (Bach 1994: 137). (3) Some people are disinclined to say that what is said with “Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith are in love” is “Mr. Jones and Mrs. Smith are in love with each other” (Bach 1994: 137-139). (4) In non-cooperative circumstances like crossexamination in a court of law, what would normally be taken to be what the speaker is committed to but has not explicitly said is often queried, indicating that our intuitions about what is said are relative to the mode of talk (Levinson 2000: 197). (5) If one tries to elicit what people say by asking people what is said, one assumes that what people say about what is said is indicative of what is said. However, this is only indicative of how people use the phrase “what is said”, not of what is said (Bach 2002: 27). It seems as if none of these problems threatened Recanati’s position, for he is not denying that our intuitions may be “fuzzy” or “conflicting”; the Availability Principle is only to rule out some analyses of “what is said” (Recanati 1987: 313). However, if one agrees with this, then the principle is not sufficient to mark a clear distinction between what is said and what is implicated. Furthermore, I think that Recanati misjudges the role of intuitions in the metaphysics of meaning. According to him, the theory of what is said is about our intuitions concerning what is said. But although Recanati has a point, namely that intuitions do play a role in a philosophical theory of meaning, the claim is wrong. In order to assess Recanati’s claim one needs to go back to the role of intuitions in Grice’s theory. According to Grice, the utterance-type meaning (and therefore what is said) can be traced back to what particular speakers have meant with particular utterances. This notion of speaker-meaning is basic in Grice’s theory. What is meant is entirely determined by the intentions of the speaker (see above § 1.). No intuitions from the hearer’s side can affect what a speaker means. When we construct the notion of utterance-type meaning, we have to rely partly on what we have understood other speakers to have meant. These intuitions – if our conscious understandings

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of what is meant are intuitions – concern, first, not what is said, but what is meant.49 Second, the intuitions – in the sense explained – which are important for determining utterance-type meaning concern not a particular utterance, but the systematic contribution of particular units to the meaning of different utterances. As García-Carpintero (2001: 124) has formulated it: Recanati (and others) concentrate on “local psychological matters”, the intuitions about concrete utterances, but Grice encourages us “to focus on more global issues”, the intuitions about the systematic contribution of signs to different utterances. i. Commitment Another idea is to use a social feature as a criterion. The social feature that seems most promising is commitment. The criterion might then be the following: what is said is what the speaker is committed to have meant, whereas there is little or no commitment of the speaker to accept what he implicates.50 But this criterion is not adequate; the speaker can be as much committed to what he implicates as to what he says (Bach 1999: 331). For example, if the speaker says “X went into a house yesterday and found a tortoise inside the front door” (Grice 1975: 37) he is committed to the claim that the house was not his own although this is not something he has said but only implicated. None of the criteria evaluated so far seems to be successful in distinguishing what is said from what is implicated. Some are inadequate or insufficient, others merely state the problem. Maybe there is no clear general criterion to be found at all. This, however, does not imply that there is no distinction between what is said and what is implicated. What is said is the proposition expressed by the sentence and meant by the speaker. But what counts as the proposition expressed by the sentence seems not to

49

When Recanati writes that “we generally start with some intuition concerning what is said (or, at least, what is communicated), and end up with a theory about what the sentence means” (Recanati 1987: 308), he misses the fact that there is a difference between what is said and what is communicated. 50 Grice suggests that there might be different degrees of commitment in “asserting”, “suggesting” and “hinting” (1987: 368).

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be easily pinned down.51 This is also the view taken by Grice (1978: 4243)52: In suggesting […] five features which conversational implicatures must possess, or might even be expected to possess, I was not going so far as to suggest that it is possible, in terms of some or all of these features, to devise a decisive test to settle the question whether a conversational implicature is present or not – a test, that is to say, to decide whether a given proposition p, which is normally part of the total signification of the utterance of a certain sentence, is on such occasions, a conversational (or more generally a nonconventional) implicatum of that utterance, or is, rather, an element of the conventional meaning of the sentence in question. […] Indeed I very much doubt whether the features mentioned can be made to provide any such knock-down test, though I am sure that at least some of them are useful as providing a more or less strong prima facie case in favor of the presence of a conversational implicature. 2.7.3. What is said and semantics I turn now to another objection against an extended notion of what is said. This objection is that an extended notion would not lend itself to systematic semantic treatment. This presupposes that “what is said” is a semantic notion. In order to assess this claim, it needs to be clarified what semantics is. I present different notions of semantics and try to explain which one of them is the most adequate. By doing so, I hope to show in what way what is said may be studied systematically. a. Semantics as the study of the relation of signs to objects The traditional distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics was first introduced by Charles Morris in his Foundations of the Theory of 51

The situation is in this respect similar to the one concerning the question about the analytic/synthetic distinction: we have the distinction, it is important and the idea is quite clear, but we cannot pin it down. 52 In the quoted passage Grice wants to characterize conversational implicatures as not being part of conventional meaning, but since I have equated conventional meaning with the content of what is said, the quote may be taken to apply here.

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Signs (1938). In the spirit of the unification of science – the monograph appeared in Volume 1 of Foundations of the Unity of Science, which was part of the project of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science – Morris looks at the study of signs as a science co-ordinate with other sciences. This study, which Morris, inspired by Peirce, calls “semiotic”, is at the basis of all sciences since every science makes essentially use of signs. Morris defines “semiosis” as “the process in which something functions as a sign”. The whole process of semiosis is analyzed by Morris (1938: 84-85) along three dimensions:53 In terms of the three correlates (sign vehicle, designatum, interpreter) of the triadic relation of semiosis, a number of other dyadic relations may be abstracted for study. One may study the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable. This relation will be called the semantical dimension of semiosis, symbolized by the sign ‘Dsem’; the study of this dimension will be called semantics. Or the subject of study may be the relation of signs to interpreters. This relation will be called the pragmatic dimension of semiosis, symbolized by ‘Dp’ and the study of this dimension will be named pragmatics. One important relation of signs has not yet been introduced: the formal relation of signs to one another. […] This third dimension will be called syntactical dimension of semiosis, symbolized by ‘Dsyn’ and the study of this dimension will be named syntactics.54 53

This division is more important in earlier than in the later work of Morris, where he stresses again the unity of semiotic (1946: 219): „The present study has deliberately preferred to emphasize the unity of semiotic rather than break each problem into its pragmatical, semantical, and syntactical components“. 54 Carnap (1938: 146-147) takes up Morris’ triadic distinction: „The complete theory of language has to study all these three components. We shall call pragmatics the field of all those investigations which take into consideration the first component [the action, state, and environment of a man who speaks, or hears, say, the German word ‚blau’], whether it be alone or in combination with the other components. Other inquiries are made in abstraction from the speaker and deal only with the expressions of the language and their relation to their designata. The field of these studies is called semantics. Finally, one may abstract even from the designata and restrict the investigation to formal properties – in a sense soon to be explained – of the expressions and relations among them. This field is called logical syntax“. – This formulation is at the same time less precise than Morris, namely in the characterization

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Each of these three studies has its own rules. (1) In syntactics, what is nowadays called “syntax”, the formation rules determine the permissible combinations of signs to form sentences and the transformation rules determine the sentences that can be obtained from other sentences (1938: 92). (2) In semantics, the rules determine “under which conditions a sign is applicable to an object or situation; such rules correlate signs and situations denotable by the signs” (1938: 101). An instance of a sentence in semantics is “‘Fido’ designates A” where “ ‘Fido’ ” denotes ‘Fido’ and ‘A’ is an indexical sign of some object (1938: 100). The statement of the conditions designated by a sign vehicle yields the semantic rule for that sign vehicle. The semantic rule for an indexical sign such as pointing is that the sign designates what is pointed at (1938: 102). Sign vehicles which do not seem to designate anything, like “all”, “some”, “the”, “not”, “point at infinity” or “-1”, are introduced either to determine how much of a certain determined class is to be taken account of (the first four examples in the list) or in order to state certain formulas in their full generality (the last two examples in the list). Signs which indicate the reaction of the user to the situation being described – e.g. “fortunately” – have a semantic dimension only at a higher level. These examples show that the designata of some signs must be looked for at the level of semiotic not of the thinglanguage; such signs indicate, but do not designate, relations of the other signs to one another or the interpreter (1938: 105-107). (3) Pragmatics, according to Morris (1938: 108), “deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of signs”. The pragmatic rules determine the conditions under which the sign vehicle is a of pragmatics, and more precise, noting that especially semantics and syntax are abstractions from the use of signs in concrete situations. Morris’ triadic distinction is a distinction pertaining to the metalanguage. This becomes clear in the formulation of the rules of the three studies. Reichenbach (1947: § 3), who follows Morris’ distinction, credits Russell (1922) as having introduced the hierarchy of languages for the first time and Carnap, Tarski and Morris for having developed it, the former two especially semantics and logical syntax, the latter pragmatics. Reichenbach gives the following examples for terms used in syntax, semantics and pragmatics respectively: „conclusion“ and „deducible“; „true“, „probable“ and „possibly“; „assertion“, „unbelievable“ and „of course“. This way of talking is at a level more abstract than the one of Morris when he gives the example „Come here!“, but the basic idea remains: pragmatics deals with expressions relating the speakers to signs.

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sign. In this wide sense of pragmatics there is a pragmatic component in all rules. Morris has also a narrower notion of pragmatics. According to that notion, pragmatic rules state the conditions under which terms are used in so far as these cannot be formulated as syntactic or semantic rules. As examples, Morris gives the rules for interjections such as “Oh!”, commands such as “Come here!”, value terms such as “fortunately” and expressions like “Good morning!” (1938: 113). According to Levinson (1983: 2), Morris’ characterization of pragmatics is wider than what goes under the label of „linguistic pragmatics“ and includes what is now considered as the domains of psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, neurolinguistics and other fields. This objection is not entirely fair to Morris’ theory. First, pragmatics in Morris’ theory is restricted to the phenomena occurring in the „functioning of signs“, that is, to those phenomena which are relevant for something to be a sign; certain psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic studies would thus be excluded. Second, Morris has also a narrower notion of pragmatics. Therefore Levinson’s objection does not seem appropriate. Morris’ second notion, however, has another defect: it is too narrow. The themes studied in linguistic pragmatics include much more, in particular deixis, speech acts, presuppositions and implicatures (see Levinson 1983). Whatever the problems with Morris’ characterization of pragmatics are, his characterization of semantics seems to be on the right track, and I will adopt a refinement of it below. b. Semantics as the study of context independent meaning According to some formal semanticists, semantics is the study of context independent languages whereas pragmatics is the study of context dependent languages. Paradigmatic cases of context sensitive expressions are indexicals. The semantic value of indexicals cannot be determined independently of the context of use. Philosophers investigating the structure of formal languages tried to define indexical expressions with the help of non-indexical expressions and the single indexical word “this” (Russell 1940: ch. VII, 1948: ch. IV; Reichenbach 1947: § 50). The problem with such a solution is that “this” is not unambiguous (Bar-Hillel 1954: 81-82). Philosophers interested in formal languages nevertheless continued to devise formal theories to account for indexicals. Some have even equated “pragmatics” with the study of languages containing

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indexicals, for example Kalish (1967) and Montague (1968).55Kalish (1967: 356) writes: Pragmatics, so conceived, is simply the extension of the semantic truth-definition to formal languages containing indexical terms. To call the extension of a semantic theory “pragmatics” is, at least, misleading – it would be better to call it “indexical semantics” (Gazdar 1979: 2-3). More importantly, it is a too narrow characterization of pragmatics, for pragmatics should at least include implicatures, and the present characterization does not do so. To account for this deficiency, one might simply widen the context. In a widely discussed article, Katz and Fodor (1963) suggest that a pragmatic theory, or theory of setting selection, would be, as part of the performance in the sense of Chomsky (1957), concerned with the disambiguation of sentences by the context in which they were uttered. But context would need to do much more than just select between available interpretations of sentences. The Katz-Fodor theory of semantics – as it is sometimes called (BarHillel 1969: 185) – identifies semantics with lexicology supplemented with projection rules. Such a conception, even with the amendments in Katz (1966), is implausible, because it is too atomistic; for many theoretical terms no individual meaning specification can be given, as Bar-Hillel (1969) remarks, pointing out the superiority of the theory of the logical semanticist such as Carnap. The critique by Katz (1966) of the formal approach to language has been shown to be irrelevant (see Martin 1971). Nevertheless, Katz did not give up on his project and came up with a criterion for the semantics/pragmatics-distinction, the “anonymous letter situation” (1977: 14): The anonymous letter situation is the case where an ideal speaker of a 55

But not Russell, Reichenbach and Bar-Hillel. Levinson (1983: 4) writes that „BarHillel (1954) took the view that pragmatics is the study of languages, both natural and artificial, that contain indexical or deictic terms“ and Bach (1999) writes that BarHillel (1954) used „pragmatics“ to mean „indexical semantics“. But there is no such view to be found in the mentioned article by Bar-Hillel. The author investigates the problem of indexicals, criticizes some of the approaches and uses „pragmatic“ to define the context, but nowhere does he give a definition of what pragmatics is. From other essays in the collection (1970), for example (1969), it becomes clear that BarHillel has a much wider view of pragmatics.

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language receives an anonymous letter containing just one sentence of that language, with no clue whatever about the motive, circumstance of transmission, or any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on the basis of its context of utterance. (...) We intended to draw a theoretical line between semantic interpretation and pragmatic interpretation by taking the semantic component to properly represent only those aspects of the meaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer of the language would know in such an anonymous letter situation. This is an approximation to the empty or “null context”. But it poses some difficulties. First, it is not clear how this criterion should be applied. The following two anonymous letters (1) (2)

Tom’s doggie killed Jane’s bunny. Tom’s dog killed Jane’s rabbit.

are truth-conditionally equivalent, but according to Katz’s criterion – and despite his claim to the contrary (1977: 21) – they are not synonymous. The ideal-speaker of English would infer from (1) that either the author is a child or is addressing a child, whereas this inference would not be made in (2). So the criterion seems to yield results that go counter to Katz’s own intentions (Gazdar 1979: 3-4). Second, the null context does not exist. Strictly speaking, types of utterances do not have meaning. It is only in the context of an utterance that an utterance has meaning. Semantics has to give us at least part of the meaning of an utterance in context. A certain amount of abstraction from the particular context of utterance is needed, but a complete abstraction, the null context, is impossible. If context is to mark the difference between semantics and pragmatics, the context left to pragmatics must be wider than just the information needed to determine indexicals, and the context left to semantics must be wider than the null context. c. Semantics as the study of conventional meaning Wilson (1975), interested in the cognitive process of interpretation, equates semantics with those aspects of meaning which are conventional, and pragmatics with those aspects of meaning which are arrived at by principles of preferred interpretation. The conventional meaning of a

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sentence need not be propositional. Bach (1999) characterizes this way of drawing the distinction as follows: semantic information pertains to utterance types (sentences and their constituents) and pragmatic information pertains to utterances and facts surrounding them.56 The problem with this way of drawing the distinction is that we do not have a formal theory that could be used to describe the semantic aspects so defined. The only valuable formal theory we have up to today is a truth-theory along the lines of Tarski (1944; see Davidson 1967). If we are prepared to give up on formal semantics for natural languages, we may define semantics as the study of conventional meaning. But the price of such a deal seems to be too high: we would have to give up on the best theory available (Levinson 1983: 14-15) and we would give up on relations such as entailment, analyticity and synonymy (Levinson 2000: 191). This does not seem to be a promising option. d. Semantics as the study of truth-conditional content The characterization of semantics as the study of truth-conditional content is fraithful to the spirit of Morris. It has been used to differentiate semantics from pragmatics for example by Gazdar (1979: 2): Pragmatics has as its topic those aspects of meaning of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforward reference to the truth conditions of the sentences uttered. (Fn: The “straightforward” qualification is necessary because some Gricean implicatures rely crucially, though indirectly, on truth-conditional properties of the sentence.) Put crudely: PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH CONDITIONS.

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Bach objects to the drawing of the distinction along the line „linguistic (conventional) meaning vs. use“ that there are aspects of conventional meaning which are characterized with reference to use, e.g. encoded forces, and some which cannot even be characterized without such a reference, e.g. expressions used for second order speech acts (see above § 2.4.1.). His own characterization, however, is just another instance of the distinction between conventional and non-conventional meaning. Bach is reluctant to speak of utterances having semantic content. It is, according to him, primarily sentences which have such a content, and utterances only derivatively. If we keep this in mind, I do not see any problem in attributing semantic content to utterances.

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The crude equation is misleading: The view is not that the meaning studied by pragmatics is not truth-conditional – for implicatures have truth conditions too – but that it cannot be determined by straightforward reference to the truth conditions of the sentence uttered. If one interprets the characterization of semantics as studying truth conditions independently of context, then it is inadequate. The problem of semantic underdetermination has shown that the truth conditions of many sentences cannot be determined independently of speaker’s intentions. Therefore, these intentions need to be taken into account. Combining the truth-conditional approach and the view that the proposition expressed can only be determined in the context of utterance by attending to the intentions of the speaker yields what seems to me to be the most promising characterization of semantics: semantics is the study of truth-conditional content of utterances in context where this content can only be determined by attending to intentions of the speaker. This characterization is in the spirit of Morris’ original one, and it makes it at the same time more general and more precise by leaving out the notion of reference to an object and by introducing the notion of truth conditions. We may say that the truth-conditional content of what is said is studied by semantics in the sense characterized immediately above. But what is said seems to be more than the truth-conditional content for it includes the force of the utterance. It is, following Grice’s terminology, not just “p” but “*ψp” (see above § 1.). Possibly, one can include the force of an utterance in a truth conditional semantics, for example using the paratactic theory of Donald Davidson (1968, 1979, 1982), in which the mood-indicator is analyzed as a sentence referring to another sentence; both sentences are devoid of mood; the first sets the mood of the second. For example: The assertion of Galileo that the Earth is round may be analyzed as: “Galileo asserted this with assertive force. The Earth is round”. But it is doubtful if this can be carried out (see Davidson 2005: 53, Fn. 6). If one assumes that the force of an utterance cannot be included in a truth-conditional semantics, then the notion of what is said is pragmatic: it goes beyond the truth-conditional content of the utterance. We would then have to restrict the domain of systematic semantic treatment to the content of the utterance devoid of mood.

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2.7.4. Against restricting the notion of what is said Some people have restrained from accepting an extended notion of what is said and have tried to introduce a more restricted notion. As I have already pointed out above (see § 2.2.), there is no reason to introduce a restricted notion of what is said because we already have the notion of utterance-type meaning. I want nevertheless to have a look at two recent proposals in that direction. Kent Bach (1987, 1994, 1999, 2001, 2005) agrees alongside with relevance theorists and Recanati that the problem of semantic underdetermination demands a change in the Gricean terminology. But rather than expand the notion of what is said to include enriched and additional propositions, he pleads for a more restricted notion. He does, however, agree that there is a need for a wider notion; but he does not call it “what is said”.57 The notion of what is said plays a central role in Grice’s theory of conversation, and so does it in Bach’s. According to Grice’s analysis, what is said must correspond to “the elements of [the sentence], their order, and their syntactic character” (1989: 87). Grice allows – although he does not commit himself to this point – that someone who (in 1969) utters the following two sentences might not say twice the same thing: (1) (2)

Harold Wilson is a great man. The British Prime Minister is a great man.

From this Bach (1994: 142-144) draws the following conclusion: If word order and syntax affect what is said – as the examples show –, then the following utterances do not say the same thing: (3) John loves Martha. 57

As a name for the wider notion Bach introduces a new term, “impliciture”. An impliciture is “roughly what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call explicature. […] To spell out what the speaker could have said to make what he meant fully explicit is to indicate what was merely implicit in what he actually said” (2001: 19, Fn. 5). This is the reason why relevance theorists call the proposition expressed “explicature”: the explicatures makes explicit what is implicit; and why Bach calls it “impliciture”: the proposition expressed is only implicit in the utterance (Bach 1994: 140-141). The difference between Bach and relevance theorists here seems to be merely terminological.

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(4) Martha is loved by John. (5) It is John who loves Martha. Bach then “simply assumes” that a “criterion of close syntactic correlation” distinguishes what is said in the utterances (3), (4) and (5) despite their truth-conditional equivalence (Bach 1994: 142). I agree: word order and syntax do affect what is said. This can also be seen in the following case (Bach 1994: 142). Suppose someone utters (6) I regret going home. thereby saying that he regrets going home. This entails that he believes that he went home, because to regret having done something is to wish one hadn’t done it and this requires that one believes that one has done it. But what the speaker said was not: (7) I regret going home and I believe I went home. despite its truth-conditional equivalence to the utterance. Nor has the speaker said: (8) I regret going home and 2+2=4. Therefore, what is said cannot be defined as the truth-conditional content and has to stay in some relation to the word order and the syntax of the sentence. However, it does not follow from the claim that the truth-conditional content has to stay in some relation to the word order and the syntax of the sentence that someone who utters the sentences (3), (4) and (5) thereby says three different things. Bach seems to argue that if word order and syntax affect what is said, then two sentences having a different word order cannot be used to say the same thing. This is a non sequitur. And it would have the almost absurd consequence that there is a different thought for each sentence with a different word order. However, the thought expressed in the utterances of (3), (4) and (5) is one and the same. Therefore, all three sentences can be used to say the same thing. This is of course consistent with the claim that how something is said can affect what is implicated. For example one might use (5) to implicate that someone else does not love

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Martha, what could possibly not so easily be done with an utterance of (3) or (4). Unfortunately, Bach does not explain what his “criterion of close syntactic correlation” exactly is. The criterion of close syntactic correlation should only say that what is said depends on word order and syntax. It should not say that two sentences having a different word order couldn’t be used to say the same thing. For sure it does not say – as Bach claims it does say – that “what is said need not be a complete proposition”. There is no textual evidence in Grice (1989) for this claim, and it runs counter to Grice’s definition of what is said. The criterion of close syntactic correlation Bach introduces is not compatible with Grice’s theory and is of use only to support Bach’s own notion of what is said. Bach later (1999: 340) formulates an explicit test to determine what counts as what is said in his sense, the so called “IQ-Test” (Indirect Quotation Test): (IQ-test): An element of a sentence contributes to what is said in an utterance of that sentence if and only if there can be an accurate and complete indirect quotation of the utterance (in the same language) which includes that element, or a corresponding element, in the ‘that’clause that specifies what is said. This is supposed to be “in accordance with Grice’s strict construction of ‘what is said’” (1999: 340). The IQ-test shows that some alleged conventional implicatures like the ones introduced with “but” are actually part of what is said, because one can report the utterance of “Al is huge but agile” as “She said that Al is huge but agile”. The test also shows that some alleged conventional implicatures like the ones introduced with “moreover” do in fact not belong to what is said, because one cannot report the utterance of “Moreover, Al is huge” as “She said that moreover, Al is huge”. But the test does not show that what is said does not need to be a proposition. This is the case only if one makes the additional assumption that saying something does not entail meaning it (Bach 1994: 143). Bach introduces this notion as an alternative to Grice’s notion, and gives the following three reasons in its support (1994: 143; see also 2001: 17). (a) Grice (1967: 30) distinguishes “saying” from “making as if to say” (see below § 3.2.). For example, in irony and metaphor (1967: 34) the speaker does not mean what the sentence expresses. If the speaker does not mean what the sentence expresses he cannot say what the sentence

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expresses. Nevertheless, the speaker manages to communicate something. Grice writes that in such a case the speaker has made as if to say something. He allows that what is made as if to say can generate implicatures. As Bach claims, most of us would describe cases of irony and metaphor not as cases of making as if to say but as cases of “saying one thing but not meaning that and meaning something else instead” (1994: 143). This is the first reason: If we want to account for this kind of talk we have to allow that saying something does not entail meaning it. (b) The second reason is that there are cases in which one unintentionally says something without meaning it, for example in a slip of the tongue, a misuse of a word or another way of misspeaking (see Harnish 1976; 1991: 328). If we want to account for this kind of talk, we have again to allow that saying something does not entail meaning it. (c) The third reason is that there are cases in which one says something without meaning anything, for example in cases of translating, reciting and rehearsing in which one utters a sentence with full understanding of its meaning without using it to communicate. If we want to account for this kind of talk we have again to allow that saying something does not entail meaning it. Bach’s argument in summary: If we want to account for cases in which (a) one says intentionally one thing and means something else instead, (b) one says unintentionally one thing and means something else instead, and (c) one says unintentionally something and does not mean anything, then we have to endorse a notion of what is said according to which saying something does not entail meaning it.58 This new notion also applies to cases in which the speaker means what he says, and we thus have a notion that applies uniformly to all cases. I do not agree with this argument. The three cases Bach describes can be accounted for completely in terms of utterance-type meaning. In the first case, one utters a sentence with a certain utterance-type meaning and does not mean it. There is no need to introduce a new notion to account for this case. In the second case one utters a sentence that has a certain utterance-type meaning the speaker is not aware of. Here again no new notion is needed. Finally, in the third case, one utters a sentence with a

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Bach has recently formulated the same argument as follows: “Communicative intentions cannot affect what is said in a given context, since one could say a certain thing in a given context and mean any one of a number of things in saying it” (2005: 38).

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certain utterance-type meaning and does not mean anything. Again, no new notion is needed. Bach creates a notion of what is said in which two notions of what is said are mixed. According to the one notion, what is said is not meant, according to the other, what is said is meant. I see these as two different notions. And I do not see the need for a notion that combines these two notions, neither to account for how we use the notion in our daily life nor for theoretical purposes. Bach’s notion not only seems fruitless to me, but also confusing, for it mixes two notions of what is said that I would like to keep separate. According to Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (1997, 2005) and to Emma Borg (2004, 2004a: 110-131) there is nothing to be gained from an analysis of what is said for a semantic theory at all. Whereas Borg seems to be only interested in the proper delimitation of the field and does not expand on the notion of what is said, Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 190208) explicitly take a stand, although one for which they admit not having strong arguments but only intuitions. According to the “Speech Act Pluralism” they defend, the following holds (2005: 199): No one thing is said (or asserted, or claimed, or…) by any utterance: rather, indefinitely many propositions are said, asserted, claimed, stated, etc. One of the propositions asserted by an utterance of a sentence is the proposition semantically expressed by that utterance. Cappelen and Lepore admit not to have been able to devise an algorithm that takes the proposition semantically expressed and delivers all the propositions said; and they strongly suspect that there is no such theory devisable. They thus call their view a “nontheory theory of speech act content”. They further oppose all theories according to which the speech act content is fixed by facts about the speaker, the audience and their common context. They think that facts not known to the speaker or the hearer can make a difference to the speech act content. They illustrate their claim with the following example (2005: 201). Suppose you uttered the sentence several weeks ago: (1) The table is covered with books.

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Suppose further that in the meantime the table has been transferred to your father’s office without you knowing it. We can now report what you have said as: The speaker said that the table in his father’s office is covered with books. And you, the speaker, do not know what you have said. As corollaries of this claim Cappelen and Lepore add that speakers don’t have privileged access to the content of their speech acts, speakers need not believe everything they sincerely say and their expressed belief need not be equivalent to the semantic content. Note that it does not follow from the claim that indefinitely many propositions are said that the speaker cannot say anything at all. The speaker does say something, but he cannot know everything he says. No one can know everything that is said if there are indefinitely many propositions that are said. But one can know some of the propositions that are said, and so can the speaker. The argument with the example above is unconvincing. We cannot report what the speaker said in the manner Cappelen and Lepore claim – unless we use “what is said” in the restricted sense of utterance-type meaning. We may, however, give a de re report of what the speaker said. We can say, for example, that the speaker said of the table, which is now in his father’s office that it is covered with books. When Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 191) say that the speech act content isn’t hidden somewhere, they have in mind the content the speaker knows about and to which the audience responds. This, according to their view, is not the whole content of the speech act. But once Cappelen and Lepore agree that there is something to be known by the speaker, then their argument against theories of speech act content looses its ground. Then they have to acknowledge that there is a part of what is said in their terms that is fixed by the intentions of the speaker. I thus conclude that neither the argument of Bach nor the one of Cappelen and Lepore for restricting what is said is successful.

3. What is implicated 3.1. Grice’s definition of implicature When we speak, there are things we say, and things we merely imply, indicate or insinuate. At least there is a pre-theoretical intuition that this is so (Grice 1967: 24): Suppose that A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies, Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet. At this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting, or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison. To capture this pre-theoretic intuition and to keep this kind of implying separate from entailment, Grice introduces the technical term “implicature”. It is to name that which in a linguistic utterance is meant but is not said (Levinson 1983: 103-104, Stalnaker 1989: 526-527, Parikh 1991: 512, Kemmerling 1991: 323, Neale 1992: 528, Davis 1998: 5). Grice does not define explicitly what an implicature is, but one may nevertheless define “to implicate q”, roughly, as “to mean q by saying p”, and more precisely as follows, using the notion of meaning and primarily saying defined above: “U, who by uttering x has primarily said that *ψp, has implicated that *ϕq” is true, if and only if, for some audience A, U did something x by which U has primarily said that *ψp and means that *ϕq. This interpretation of Grice and definition of implicature has been challenged by Jennifer Saul (2002, 2002a). In order to understand her criticism I need to introduce Grice’s theory of conversational implicature.

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3.2. Grice’s theory of conversational implicature According to Grice, implicatures are of two kinds, conventional and nonconventional (Grice 1967: 26). Conventional implicatures are generated because of conventions; in the generation of nonconventional implicatures no conventions are essentially involved. I have argued above against the existence of conventional explicatures (see above § 2.4.1.) and I will now concentrate on non-conventional implicatures. These are further divided by Grice (1967: 26) into conversational and nonconversational implicatures. Conversational implicatures are, whereas nonconversational implicatures are not, generated because of certain general features of discourse.59 These features are the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims. I will turn to them below. Using these features, Grice defines a conversational implicature as follows (1967: 30-31): A man who, by (in, when) saying (or making as if to say) that p has implicated that q, may be said to have conversationally implicated that q, provided that (1) he is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required. It is important to note that Grice does not define here what an implicature is. He assumes that q is implicated and defines what a conversational implicature is. His aim is to distinguish conversational implicatures from non-conversational implicatures (Davis 1998: 16-17; Lüthi 2003: 55). How does Grice arrive at the claim that there is a Cooperative Principle? Assuming that conversation is, to some extent, rational, Grice 59

Grice (1967: 37) also makes the distinction between particularized and generalized conversational implicatures. Particularized conversational implicatures are carried by an utterance in virtue of special features of the context, generalized conversational implicatures are carried by an utterance in virtue of normal circumstances (in the absence of special circumstances). I will not use this distinction here since I am interested only in the basic idea of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, which is not affected by this distinction.

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thinks that conversation is, insofar as it is rational, to some extent also cooperative and is such that each participant recognizes, to some extent, a common purpose. Grice defines the Cooperative Principle as follows (1967: 26): Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Some objections have been raised against the formulation of the Cooperative Principle. Asa Kasher (1976: 202) argues that the Cooperative Principle is too strong because communication can take place without a common purpose. Each participant in a conversation can have aims different from those of the other participants and nevertheless cooperate. Similarly, Sperber and Wilson (1986: 161-162) argue that the Cooperative Principle is too strong because it demands of the speaker and the hearer to have a common purpose “over and above the aim of achieving successful communication” and communication may take place without such a common purpose. Again in a similar way, Robert van Rooij (2003b) argues that the Cooperative Principle does not hold in all communication because there are conversations in which the goals and preferences of the participants are not perfectly aligned. These arguments are based on a misinterpretation of the Cooperative Principle. All that the principle says is that there must be at least one common purpose, it does not say what that purpose is, nor does it exclude other purposes the participants might have. In particular, there is no reason for excluding the aim of successful communication as the common purpose of the participants of a conversation: the speaker wants to make himself understood, and the hearer wants to understand the speaker.60 Of course the speaker and the hearer each have their own further goals and preferences, but they also have the common purpose of communicating with each other.61 (One can, however, formulate the idea of the Cooperative Principle 60

On rationality in communication see Petrus (1996, 2000). Richard Grandy (1989: 521) claims that the common purpose might be just that each participant expects to benefit from the conversation; some conversations might be similar to poker games in that each of the participants is playing with the intention of winning, knowing that only one of them can win. This does not seem to me to be an adequate characterization of conversation because it would suggest that there is only one common purpose, namely the aim of successful communication. 61

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in much simpler terms by using game theory. I will turn to this in part II, § 2.4.). Under the Cooperative Principle a number of maxims are to be subsumed. Grice lists them under the categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner (1967: 26-27): Quantity 1. Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purpose of the exchange). 2. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Quality 1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Relation Be relevant.

Sperber and Wilson (2004: 611) argue that the Cooperative Principle is also too strong because there can be communication by a „self-interested, deceptive, or incompetent“ communicator. This argument is not convincing. Communication cannot be deceptive, if communication is understood as rational behavior. In order to deceive one has to make oneself understood, and this involves cooperation. It is not exactly clear to me what Sperber and Wilson mean by „self-interested“ and „incompetent“. If by the first they mean that the concerns of the hearer are in no way taken into account by the speaker then it is hard to see how one could mean anything at all. I cannot mean anything if I believe that the hearer is totally incapable of figuring out what I mean. If by the second they mean that the speaker is irrational, that she does not follow the principle and the maxims, then again it is difficult to say that someone means anything at all. A certain amount of irrationality may be tolerated; but we have no idea of what it is to say that a totally irrational speaker means something. In any case, Grice was interested in rational communication. If it turned out that people are for the most time irrational, then this would not count against the cogency of the model but only against its application. – Sperber and Wilson’s argument must probably be seen as part of an argument in favor of their own theory, which gives an answer to an altogether different project, namely the quest for a theory of utterance understanding (see below part II, § 2.3.).

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Manner 1. 2. 3. 4.

Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.

Grice (1967: 28) adds that one might need other maxims such as aesthetic, social, or moral maxims, for example the maxim: “Be polite”. He specifies that the conversational maxims above are phrased assuming that the common purpose consists in maximally effective exchange of information and that other purposes are to be included such as influencing or directing the actions of others. It is not clear what belongs to the category of nonconversational implicature (Kemmerling 1991). In particular, it is not clear why the maxim “Be polite” should not generate conversational maxims (Rolf 1994: 127). Influencing and directing the actions of others is as much a general feature of conversation as is the maximally effective exchange of information, and politeness plays an essential part in influencing other people’s actions.62 The name “conversational maxims” is misleading in that it suggests that the only purpose of conversation is maximally effective exchange of information, but, as Grice writes, this is not the only purpose of conversation. If, however, it is not the only purpose, then there is no reason not to include other maxims under the heading of “conversational maxims”.63 In particular there is no reason to exclude 62

The seminal work on linguistic politeness, Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s book Politeness. Some universals in language usage (1978/1987), is based on the Gricean theory of conversation, but Brown and Levinson do not consider “Be polite” to be a maxim of conversation. They write (1978/1987: 5): “Now if politeness principles had maxim-like status, we would expect the same robustness [as the Cooperative Principle]: it should, as a matter of fact, be hard to be impolite”. Their argument is put forward against the view of Leech (1983), who introduces a politeness principle on the level of the Cooperative Principle, but – speaking against both Brown and Levinson and Leech – the Cooperative Principle does not have the same status as the maxims. Whereas the Cooperative Principle is in fact hard not to follow, disregarding the maxims is done quite often: Implicatures, which rest on some kind of disregarding of the maxims, pervade our talk exchanges. Brown and Levinson’s argument is therefore not sound (see also Fraser 2005: 67). 63 Grice’s list of nine conversational maxims has led to the question of whether it could not be reduced to a smaller number of basic maxims. Deirdre Wilson and Dan

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aesthetic, moral and social principles. If principles are aesthetic, moral or social in virtue of including values from the respective domains, then some of the maxims in Grice’s list ipso facto belong to these categories: to tell the truth is considered by many to be a fundamental moral principle; to avoid obscurity and be orderly are the expression of aesthetic taste. So when Grice says that such principles are to be excluded he must mean something else. There are two points to take into account. First, in devising the theory of conversation Grice is interested in the general features of conversation. Aesthetic, moral and social features are not general features of conversation, but relative to particular societies or even individuals. This, however, does not prevent them to be classified as submaxims under the maxims of conversation. I suspect that they even need to be included. Second, in devising the theory of conversation, Grice is interested in rationality. Grice does not want to say what people should do from a moral point of view, but rather what they should do if they are rational. Both of these reasons do not exclude principles such as “Be polite!” understood as a general and rational maxim. The proviso in Grice’s definition that U is presumed to be observing “at least” the Cooperative Principle shows that it is in principle not irrational for a speaker to disregard a maxim. Grice (1967: 30) distinguishes between four ways of failing to fulfill a maxim: One may (1) quietly violate a maxim; in this case one is liable to mislead; (2) opt out from the operation of maxims and the Cooperative Principle; one refuses, for one reason or another, to cooperate; (3) violate a maxim because of being faced with a clash of maxims: one is unable to fulfill one maxim without violating another; or (4) flout a maxim, one blatantly fails to fulfill it; in this case, the maxim is being exploited. Sperber (1981) have tried to show that all maxims can be reduced to a single one. This led to the development of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986; see part II § 2.2.). Larry Horn (1984) has tried to show that all maxims can be reduced to two, the Q(uantity)-principle and the R(elation)-principle (see also Horn 1989; 2004). Stephen Levinson (1987) speaks of Q-implicatures and of I-implicatures – the latter name relating to a principle of informativity (Atlas and Levinson 1981) – and argues that the maxims of modality cannot be subsumed under these so that a third kind of implicatures, M(anner)-implicatures, are needed (see also Levinson 2000). The exact number and formulation seems to be a matter of controversy. I will not take it up for it does not touch upon the basic idea of Grice’s theory of implicature.

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To get clearer on these different ways of disregarding and thereby generating implicatures, let’s look at some examples (Grice 1967: 32-33): A is standing by an obviously immobilized car and is approached by B; the following exchange takes place: A: I am out of petrol. B: There is a garage round the corner. In this case, according to Grice, no maxim is being violated. But B would not be following the maxim of being relevant unless he wants to communicate that the garage round the corner is open and sells petrol, or at least that it is possibly the case. Therefore this is what B implicates. A is planning with B an itinerary for a holiday in France. Both know that A wants to see his friend C, if to do so would not involve too great a prolongation of this journey: A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere in the South of France. In this case, according to Grice, B violates a maxim because of a clash. He knows that his answer is not informative enough to meet A’s needs, but he would be saying something for which he lacks evidence if he gave a more precise location of where C lives. Therefore B implicates that he does not know in what town C lives. A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular.” In this case, according to Grice, A is exploiting a maxim. He has more information about his pupil and he knows that more information than the one he is giving is requested. He must want to communicate more information than he wants to write down. The extra information must be that X is no good at philosophy. Therefore this is what he implicates. There is also a special case, Grice notes, in which one does not say anything but only makes as if to say. Consider a case of irony (Grice 1967: 34):

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(1) X is a fine friend. The speaker of (1), speaking ironically, does not mean that X is a fine friend. She means the opposite, namely that X is precisely not a fine friend. Therefore she has only made as if to say that X is a fine friend. There seems to be a confusion of “saying” and “asserting” (see above § 2.2.). The example of (1) is better explained not in terms of “making as if to say” but in terms of “making as if to assert”. The speaker uttering (1) has said that X is a fine friend, although he has not asserted it. He has only made as if to assert it. We can say that the speaker has said it because the speaker has meant it and it corresponds to the conventional meaning of the utterance. He intended the hearer to believe that X is a fine friend – of course not as the final belief, but as a first step from which the hearer could then derive what is implicated, namely that X is not a fine friend. Consider a case of metaphor (Grice 1967: 34): (2) You are the cream in my coffee. The speaker of (2), speaking metaphorically, does not mean that the addressee is the cream in her coffee. There would be a category mistake involved: persons cannot be cream. In such a case too, Grice writes, the speaker has only made as if to say. Again Grice’s analysis does not seem to be correct. The speaker uttering (2) has said that the hearer is the cream in her coffee. Since the sentence involves a category mistake, its utterance will always be false. Nevertheless the speaker has said it. She intended the hearer to believe that she, the hearer, is the cream in the speaker’s coffee – but again only as a step from which to derive what the speaker implicated. We can thus stay with the single notion of “what is said” and leave the “as if” to the assertive part. These examples should make clear: what is implicated is what the speaker means by saying something else. Yet, as I mentioned above, precisely this claim has been challenged by Jennifer Saul.

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3.3. What is implicated and what is meant Jennifer Saul (2002, 2002a) argues against the traditional view of the Gricean theory of conversation. She writes (2002a: 228): On the version of Grice’s theory which I was taught, conversational implicature is a species of speaker meaning, and speaker meaning divides exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated. This is a common understanding of Grice, and a natural one, given Grice’s interest in speaker meaning. But it is also, as I shall argue, an unsustainable one, given Grice’s understanding of saying and implicating. According to this passage, the traditional view says that Grice’s theory of conversation is committed to the following two claims: (1) What is meant divides exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated. (2) What is implicated is always meant. Saul believes that this view about Grice’s theory is mistaken. Although she wishes to pay close attention to Grice’s actual theory, her final aim, as I take it, is not one of correct exegesis, but lies in the refutation of these two claims. In order to argue for the claim that what is meant does not divide exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated, Saul tries to show that a speaker may mean something that she neither says nor implicates. This is possible because the speaker can intend to say or implicate something and fail to say it, respectively implicate it. In support of the claim that the speaker can fail to say something, Saul presents examples of malapropisms and bad translations (2002a: 236). Suppose, for example, that someone utters: (1) We’re having a small conservative built. What the speaker means to say is not (1), but rather (1*): (1*) We’re having a small conservatory built.

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The speaker didn’t mean (1) by uttering (1); therefore this is not what is said. Neither did the speaker intend the audience to work out from (1) that what she meant is (1*). She could not even be intending this for she didn’t realize that she was using the wrong words. Therefore (1*) is not implicated either. Suppose that someone intends to say in Spanish that she is embarrassed and utters: (2) Estoy embarazado. Starting from the phonetic similarities of the words in Spanish and English one is led to utter a sentence with the conventional meaning that one is pregnant. This is not what is meant, neither is it what is implicated. Saul concludes from these two types of examples that there is something which is meant but neither said nor implicated. The Gricean taxonomy needs to be augmented by the notion of what the speaker intends to say but fails to say (2002a: 237). Saul uses a similar reasoning to argue that there are things a speaker intends to implicate but fails to do so. In the case of what is said the constraint is given by utterance-type meaning, in the case of what is implicated the constraint is given by the Cooperative Principle (2002a: 229). Saul (2002a: 230) quotes one of Grice’s characterizations of conversational implicatures: what is implicated is what is required that one assume a speaker to think in order to preserve the assumption that he is following the Cooperative Principle (and perhaps some conversational maxims as well), if not at the level of what is said, at least at the level of what is implicated. (Grice 1968: 86) From this passage Saul infers that implicatures are removed from the “control” or “possibly even awareness” of the speaker: what is implicated is not what the speaker is trying to communicate but what the audience must assume the speaker to think in order to maintain the assumption of the Cooperative Principle (Saul 2002a: 230). A speaker, then, may mean to implicate something that fails to be implicated, that is, the speaker means something which is neither said nor implicated. Saul supports her claim with the following example (2002a: 230). Suppose Jennifer Saul has been asked to write a reference letter for Fred,

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who is a bad philosopher. Since she does neither want to write explicitly that Fred should not be hired nor anything not corresponding to the truth, she writes, truthfully: (3) Fred has a good typing. She thereby hopes that the addressees understand the insinuated message, namely: (3*) Fred is not a good philosopher. Unbeknownst to Saul, Fred does not apply for a job as a philosopher, but as a typist. The addressees need not assume that Saul has meant anything else than what her words mean. Therefore, what Saul intended to convey fails to be implicated. According to Saul, the conclusion that one may fail to implicate what one intends to implicate must also be drawn if one attends to the passage by Grice quoted above (Grice 1967: 30-31; see above § 3.2.). According to this passage, someone who, by saying that p has implicated that q, may be said to have conversationally implicated that q, provided that (1) he is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) the supposition that he is aware that, or thinks that, q is required in order to make his saying or making as if to say p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; and (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required. These are three necessary conditions for the existence of a conversational implicature. Condition (3) introduces an element of speaker control, but it is not sufficient to remove the necessary condition that the audience is required to assume that the speaker is observing the Cooperative Principle, Saul remarks (2002a: 231). Now, if the analogy between the constraint on what is said and the constraint on what is implicated is to hold, then the constraint cannot depend on the audience! In the quote of Grice above, the one to make the assumptions is not the actual audience, but the competent speaker, that is,

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the rational and well-informed speaker knowing the relevant subpart of the language necessary for the comprehension of the utterance. If one takes this into account, Saul’s examples must be interpreted differently. For example, if the speaker uttering (3) has no reason not to believe that Fred is applying for a job as a philosopher, then what she implicates is (3*), and the audience fails to understand what is implicated. It might be that there is no fault on either side. This, however, does not imply that what they understand is what is implicated. If this were Grice’s idea, it would be incompatible with his speaker-oriented analysis of speaker-meaning. Furthermore, Saul’s argument leads to an introduction of notions for which there is no need in a theory of conversation. Malapropism and bad translation which are supposed to show that there are cases of near-saying can be analyzed according to the traditional view using the notions of utterance-type meaning and speaker-meaning. This analysis is far clearer and more intuitive than the one Saul gives as can be seen in looking at example (1). If someone utters (1) and thereby means (1*) the speaker has not said (1) – so far, Saul agrees. What about (1*)? Saul introduces the notion of what the speaker intended to say but failed to say to characterize (1*). But (1*) is simply what the speaker meant, nothing more! The fact that nothing is said does not exclude that nothing is meant. The same reasoning applies to (3). Of course, one can introduce the notion “intended to say but failed to say”. But the question is: What is the point in doing so (Neale 2005: 182-183)? We want to know what it is to implicate something. In devising a theory of implicature, we rely on the notion of a rational and well-informed speaker of the language. One can now look for situations in which these conditions are not met: the speaker is either not rational or not well-informed (see also part II § 2.2.4.). But these cases do not ask for a new terminology: The speaker has uttered a sentence with a particular utterance-type meaning and has meant something else. And that’s it. There is no point in introducing a new notion of what the speaker intended to say or intended to implicate. This is simply what the speaker meant. In order to argue for the claim that implicatures need not even be meant, Saul uses the following example (Saul 2002a: 238). Suppose Saul is now writing a reference letter for Roland. Roland, like Fred, is a bad philosopher applying for a job as a philosopher. Saul likes him and wants him to do well, so she describes in detail and without any value judgments the courses Roland has taught and the papers he has written.

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(4) Roland has taught courses s and t, and he has written the papers x and y. She knows that if the committee will read the letter carefully they will believe her to be implicating the following: (4*) Roland is a not a good philosopher. But Saul suspects that they will read the document very hastily and will therefore believe this: (4**) Roland is a good philosopher. (4*) meets the conditions for conversational implicature, but Saul wants the audience to believe (4**); what is implicated is (4*), but she doesn’t mean it. This supposedly shows that there are implicatures that are not meant by the speaker. If, as Saul admits, the speaker does not believe the audience to be able to work out the implicature, the third condition in Grice’s characterization is not satisfied. But this is irrelevant, Saul writes, because we could also describe the speaker as believing that the audience will understand the implicature and desperately hoping that they will not pick it up; in this case the speaker does not have the intention that the audience should understand the implicature, although she believes that the audience will understand it (Saul 2002a: 238). The example raises the question of what the speaker means. She doesn’t mean (4*), according to Saul, but does she mean (4**)? If the speaker believes that the audience will understand (4*) then she cannot believe at the same time that the audience will understand (4**). If she doesn’t believe that the audience will understand (4**) then she cannot mean this. Therefore, the speaker means neither (4*) nor (4**). Supposedly, she merely means (and says) (4), although what she wishes her utterance to do is more: she desperately hopes that the audience will believe (4**). The important point for Saul, however, is that (4*) is not meant and yet satisfies the conditions for being a conversational implicature. Even if the example were correctly described by Saul, it would not show that there are conversational implicatures that are not meant. The example would only show that the three conditions in the passage from Grice (1967: 30-31, see above) as interpreted by Saul may be satisfied

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without the speaker meaning what is implicated. But, again, Saul’s interpretation that the one to make the assumption is the audience and not the rational and well-informed speaker is not warranted because it would be in opposition to Grice’s speaker-oriented analysis of speaker-meaning. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that Grice does not define in the quoted passage what an implicature is but what a conversational implicature is, assuming that something has been implicated (see above § 3.2.; see also Saul 2002a: 239). In order to argue for her claim, Saul must show that nothing more than the three conditions are required for something to be a conversational implicature. Her strategy is to refute three arguments for the claim that more is needed.64 The first argument is to be found in the presentation of Grice’s philosophy of language by Stephen Neale (1992). Neale argues there that conversational implicatures are always intended since they are part of what is meant. Saul dismisses this argument as follows: Neale is supporting his claim with a certain passage in Grice’s work. This passage has been intentionally omitted in the collected papers Studies in the Way of Words. Therefore we do not know what Grice’s views on the matter were. And therefore “it would be inappropriate to draw conclusions about Grice’s views from the omitted passage” (2002a: 239). It is surprising how Saul can be so confident about her argument, which is clearly not valid. The second argument is based on the passage by Grice quoted above (Grice 1967: 24; see above § 3.1.). As an introduction to his study of the nature of implicature in “Logic and Conversation” Grice writes as if he was – at least partly – to analyze our pre-theoretic concept of implying. Saul admits that the charitable reading of this passage does lead to the received view according to which what is implicated is always meant. But the received view, she claims, suffers from the problematic consequence that in a case of poor translation, what the speaker means by uttering the wrong words would have to be what is implicated (Saul 2002a: 239). This is simply wrong. When there is nothing said, there is nothing implicated. When there is nothing said, there may nevertheless be something meant.65 64

Even if successful, this strategy would not yield a decisive result, but it would still be something. 65 Saul gives additional support to her claim in a footnote (2002a: Fn. 32), quoting another passage of Grice. The interpretation of that passage would again lead to the received view, Saul explains, but that interpretation would have to read “total signification” and “meaning” as synonymous and dispense with the qualifying phrase “for a large class of utterances”. I admit not seeing the problems Saul is alluding to here.

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The third argument is one by Wayne Davis (1998). According to Davis, an implicature is “the act of meaning or implying by saying something else” (1998: 5). Consider the dialogue: Carl: I am sick. Diane: A flying saucer is nearby. According to Davis, Diane may well be implicating that Carl could get help from the people on the flying saucer (Davis 1998: 74). Saul finds this counter-intuitive. It feels wrong because speakers do not have total authority over what is implicated and therefore cannot just implicate anything. There has to be an additional element and “the audience seems a likely candidate” (Saul 2002a: 241). As I have explained above, the audience is not a likely candidate for Grice, neither should it be for anyone. I conclude that Saul’s interpretation of Grice’s theory of conversation is based on poor arguments and fundamentally wrong (see also Neale 2005: 182, Fn. 29). What is meant (by the use of linguistic utterances according to their conventional meaning or based on their conventional meaning) divides exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated and there are no unmeant implicatures. To claim otherwise is to offer a new, alternative theory that lacks the power and elegance of Grice’s original theory. 3.4. What is implicated and what is said Stephen Levinson (2000) argues that there cannot be a clear distinction between what is said and what is implicated. According to Levinson (2000: 172-174) the fixing of the reference of indexicals and disambiguation as well as some other processes like unpacking ellipses involve the same inferential mechanisms as the calculation of implicatures. He concludes that “what is said seems both to determine and to be determined by implicature” and calls this “Grice’s circle” (2000: 186). This circle, Levinson writes, “ensures that there is no consistent way of cutting up the semiotic pie such that ‘what is said’ excludes ‘what is implicated’” (2000: 198). The picture Levinson then offers is one in which the two notions overlap (2000: 195). Levinson is not so much interested in the notion of what is said but in the question of how to determine what is said and what is implicated. He pleads for the abandoning of the traditional view of

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semantics as a mapping of sentences on to sentence meanings (propositions).66 There is no such mapping, Levinson argues, because “pragmatic” processes – processes of non-monotonic reasoning – play a crucial role in it. Instead of viewing semantics and pragmatics as two levels of representation we should view them as “being component processes that offer their own distinctive contributions to a single level of representation” (Levinson 2000: 9). We thus have two layers of “semantic” processing interweaved with two layers of “pragmatic” processing. Since the processes to determine the proposition expressed with the utterance and the processes to determine the proposition expressed by the speaker are qualitatively the same, Levinson speaks of “presemantic” and “postsemantic” processes. The semantic level is the level of modeltheoretic interpretation. The crucial difference between semantics and pragmatics is that the reasoning in the former is monotonic and the reasoning in the latter is non-monotonic (2000: 192). Levinson’s argument is a non sequitur. From the claim that the same processes are involved in the computing of what is said and what is implicated – which seems correct to me (see part II, § 2.2.) – it simply does not follow that there is no clear line to be drawn between what is said and what is implicated. It would only follow in the case these notions were defined solely in terms of their processes. This is not the case. What is said is the proposition expressed by the utterance meant by the speaker. What is implicated is what is meant by saying something else. I have presented Grice’s theory of implicatures as well as his theory of meaning and of saying as metaphysical theories: they explain what determines what is meant, what is said and what is implicated. But now one might wonder how we can know what is meant. Grice’s theory of implicature indicates a solution. Implicatures can be derived by a reasoning from the assumption that the speaker is communicating in a rational way, that is, by assuming that she is following the conversational maxims or at least the Cooperative Principle. This reasoning may generally be at work in deriving what is meant. I will follow this thread in the second part.

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For different notions of semantics see above § 2.10.1.

II. The epistemology of meaning If what is presented in part I is correct, the metaphysics of meaning is clear and simple: what is meant is determined by a certain complex intention of the speaker, the Gricean M-intention. And that is it. Metaphysically speaking, meaning is nothing more than the Gricean M-intention; no society, no conventions and no language is needed in the analysis of meaning. In the case of linguistic communication, what is meant may be factorized into what is said and what is implicated. What is said and what is implicated are meant by the speaker. Not the hearer, not the society, determines what is said and implicated; it is the speaker. Now, how do we know what is meant? This question may be one about the speaker and one about the hearer. As speakers we can and usually just do know what we mean. If we are currently unaware of what we mean, we may become aware of it by drawing our M-intention to our conscious attention. It is possible that we are mistaken about what we mean or that we do not have a belief at all about what we mean, but these are rare and special cases. In the majority of cases we have direct access to our intentions. We just know what we intend and, therefore, what we mean. Such cases not only are abundant, they also are important for our understanding of ourselves as persons. I will not discuss these (in philosophy controversial) matters and turn directly to the hearer’s side. How does the hearer know what is meant? This seems to be an empirical question. The answer to it is a cognitive theory of understanding. In devising such a theory, philosophers can help psychologists, linguists, mathematicians, biologists, computer scientists and others by attending to conceptual questions. But there is also another reason for the involvement of the philosopher: To communicate is, at least to some extent, to behave rationally. And to capture the nature of rationality is, at least in one important aspect, a philosophical project. Assuming that to mean something by an utterance is to engage in rational behavior of a special kind described in the first part, I will try to show in what way the understanding of what is meant is also a rational behavior. I start by defining the notion of understanding what is meant. Then I want to discuss four different answers to the question how we understand what is meant: the code theory; a Gricean theory based on Grice’s theory of implicature derivation; Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory; and a

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game-theoretic theory.67 I will argue that the second is basically on the right track and can be made more precise with the fourth solution.

1. Understanding what is meant What is it to understand what is meant? To understand something, following the everyday use of the term, is to know it. One understands what is meant by an utterance if one knows what is meant by it. What is it that one knows when one knows what is meant? Having followed Grice in distinguishing between natural and nonnatural meaning (see part I, § 1.), it seems appropriate to draw a distinction between understanding natural meaning and understanding non-natural meaning. To understand a natural meaning of an utterance is to know something that stands in a causal relation to the utterance, or at least in a relation that can be explained by a causal relation. To understand a natural meaning of an utterance is for example to know that the speaker of the utterance is alive, that she has a soar throat or that she is feeling insecure. To understand the non-natural meaning of an utterance is to know what the speaker non-naturally meant, that is to know the M-intention with which the utterance was produced. To understand (some of) what someone meant by uttering (1) He forgot to go to the bank. is to know that the speaker had the M-intention that the hearer is to believe that some male person (for example John) forgot to go to some financial institution and not to the river bank. To understand (some of) what someone meant by uttering (2) The sun is shining. is to know that the speaker had the M-intention that the hearer is to believe that the sun is shining at a particular time and place (for example right now (at 4 pm on October 14th 2006) here (in Berne, Switzerland)). 67

I call each of the answers a „theory (of understanding what is meant)”. What I mean is an explanation of how hearers understand what is meant. Another name could have been „model of communication“.

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2. How we understand what is meant 2.1. The code theory The code theory says that the hearer understands the speaker’s M-intention by decoding the message encoded by the speaker. This is prima facie plausible and very elegant. I will first present very briefly the basic assumptions in the theory of communication of information developed by the mathematician Claude Shannon (1949). Then I will present how Warren Weaver (1949) thought to extend these assumptions to explain the communication of meaning. I will show that the code theory is insufficient for such a task. Shannon developed a theory of communication primarily to solve problems of engineering, particularly in the domain of telephony. The fundamental problem for a theory of communication, according to Shannon, is that of reproducing at one point a message selected at another point. A message may have meaning, that is, refer to physical or conceptual entities, but these semantic aspects are irrelevant to the engineering problem; what matters is only that the message is selected from a set of possible messages. If the number of messages in the set is finite, then this number is a measure for the information produced when one message is chosen, all choices being equally likely. Any monotonic function of the number will work as well, and the logarithmic function seems to be preferable because it is practically more useful, nearer to our feeling of the proper measure and mathematically more suitable (Shannon 1949: 31-32). For example, if there are two messages to choose from, then the information produced by selecting one is the unit information: log2 2 = 1. If there are 16 messages to choose from (for example in binary digits: 0000, 0001, .... 1111), then the information produced by selecting one is log2 16 = 4. It is important to note that information is not meaning: meaning is a semantic aspect of a sign, the reference to a physical or conceptual entity; information is a measure of the choice of freedom in selecting a message. A communication system, as defined by Shannon (1949: 33-34), consists of five essential parts: 1. An information source that produces a message. 2. A transmitter that encodes the message in some way to produce

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some signal suitable for transmission over the channel. 3. The channel that transmits the signal from transmitter to receiver. 4. The receiver that decodes the message. 5. The destination, that is, the person for whom or the thing for which the message is intended. Weaver (1949: 7) uses this system to model human communication. In oral speech the information source is the speaker’s brain, the transmitter is the speaker’s voice mechanism, the channel is the air, the receiver is the hearer’s ear and the destination is the hearer’s brain. If the system is to account not only for the transmission of information, but also of meaning, then it will need additions, but these, according to Weaver, will be minor. He writes (1949: 26): One can imagine, as an addition to the diagram, another box labeled “Semantic Receiver” interposed between the engineering receiver (which changes signals to messages) and the destination. This semantic receiver subjects the message to a second decoding, the demand on this one being that it must match the statistical semantic characteristics of the message to the statistical semantic capacities of the totality of receivers, or of that subset of receivers that constitute the audience one wishes to affect. Weaver’s idea is to apply the statistical tools used for measuring information to the measuring of meaning. He thinks that this promises to help to account for the influence of context (1949: 28). There is much to doubt about Weaver’s application of the statistical methods to the measuring of meaning and the use of Shannon’s communication system to model the communication of meaning. The first problem applies directly to the idea of measuring meaning: it simply does not seem possible to measure meaning. One can measure information, if information is a syntactic category, but one cannot measure semantic relations. What one might nevertheless do is explain semantic relations with a code. This seems to be a powerful idea independently of the mathematical theory of information. But this theory is not adequate to model communication. At least three reasons speak against it. First, it is utterance-type meaning that would be encoded and decoded. Utterance-type meaning need not be meant by the speaker. By decoding the utterance the hearer arrives at the utterance-type meaning,

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more precisely at knowing that the utterance is a token of a certain type having that particular meaning. The utterance does not non-naturally mean what the type means of which it is a token, because, as Grice writes (1957: 214), one can argue from the claim that an utterance non-naturally means something in particular to the conclusion that somebody meant (or should have meant) this. It is possible that in a particular context the speaker did not mean (or should not have meant) the utterance-type meaning of his utterance. Even if the signs used belong to an unambiguous code, for example the sign SOS to ask for help, one knows only what is meant if one knows that it has been used with that intention, and was not merely some accidental product of some behavior (see part I § 2.1.). One might try to solve this problem by introducing a default position: any token of a known type is stipulated to be used with the meaning of the type of which it is a token. The hearer presumes in the absence of evidence to the contrary that the type meaning is meant by the speaker. But this solution makes use of concepts that are not available to the code theorists: the evidence that someone is not using a token of a certain type according to the typemeaning is not encoded. There is no code for reliability or truthfulness (Davidson 1982: 269). It follows that even for the simplest case of communication of meaning the code theory is insufficient. Second, the theory faces a problem in explaining disambiguation. In the utterance “He forgot to go to the bank” the word “bank” would have to be encoded as “financial institution”. The code theory assumes that ambiguous words and sentences have been disambiguated. The code theory cannot explain how words and sentences are disambiguated. Third, the theory faces a problem in accounting for semantic underdetermination (see part I, § 2.6.). Attending again to the utterance of “The sun is shining” one realizes that the type meaning does not correspond to the thought the speaker wanted to express. He did not want to express the thought that the sun is shining all the time, but that the sun is shining at a particular time and at a particular place. The reference to a particular place and time could only be encoded by a much longer sentence, for example by uttering (2*) The sun is shining right now (at 4 pm on October 14th 2006) here (in Berne, Switzerland). Assuming that the references of all singular terms in this sentence have been encoded and that the predicate “shining” has been given a definite

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meaning, the utterance of this sentence would express the thought that is encoded in it.68 But this is not how we usually speak. We rely heavily on the context of utterance in our every day conversations. Therefore the code theory is not apt to account for human communication in general. This does not completely exclude the possibility of a code theory for the explanation of the communication. Such a theory would have to encode all the signals the hearer uses to justify his presumption that the utterance is used with the type meaning of the signs and the reconstruction of the speaker’s beliefs and intentions. Such a theory would not be formulated in terms of “meaning” and “reference”, but in terms of the kind “stimulus” and “neuron firing”. Theories of such a kind are important to understand the working of the mind, but if they would be used to give an account of the communication of meaning, the fundamental rationality present in communicative behavior would not be taken into account (see also below § 2.2.1). 2.2. A Gricean theory I turn to a Gricean theory of utterance understanding. Grice did not devise such a theory, but since he views his theory of meaning and his theory of implicature as part of a rational view of conversation, these may be taken as a basis for the construction of such a theory. This is what I attempt to do. 2.2.1. Rationality In the tradition of thinking about the human mind going back at least to ancient Greek philosophers, there are two fundamentally different kinds of views. The first is that cognitive processes are to be described and explained in terms of reasons; the second is that they are to be explained in terms of simple causes (see e.g. Plato, Phaedo, 98b-99b). Grice makes clear that, at least in the analysis of non-natural meaning, the first view is the correct one (1957: 221):

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Proponents of the view that semantic underdetermination is universal claim that a thought cannot be encoded at all; I think this view is mistaken; see part I, § 2.7.1. for discussion.

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for x to have meaningNN, the intended effect must be something that in some sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of “reason” the recognition of the intention behind x is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause. Reasons need not be conscious. At the moment I am writing I believe that the sun is shining. But I do not think about the reasons for my believing this. However, if someone asked me, I could answer that my reason for believing that the sun is shining is that I see a blue sky and white clouds outside the window. The case of understanding utterances is similar. On hearing someone utter the sentence “The sun is shining” I believe that what that person meant is that the sun is shining. I do not consciously think about my reasons for believing that this is what she meant. However, if someone asked me, I could answer that the utterance I perceived was “The sun is shining”; this together with the context of utterance – to be spelled out for the particular situation – is reason for me to believe that the speaker meant that the sun is shining. We are not always conscious of our reasons, but, if asked, we can usually give a reason for what we intentionally do. This seems to be part of what it is for someone to have a reason to do something and of what lies behind the intuition that the intended effect must in some sense be “within the control of the audience”. Since the speaker relies on the reasoning of the hearer, and since both the speaker and the hearer know this, the hearer can use this knowledge to derive what the speaker meant. This is Grice’s basic idea in his theory of implicature. 2.2.2. Grice’s theory of implicature derivation I have presented Grice’s theory of implicature in part I as a metaphysical theory, as a theory that explains what determines what is implicated (see part I, § 3.). Grice also gives an answer to the epistemological question of how the hearer arrives at what is implicated. Here is what he writes (1967: 31)69:

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Grice’s theory of implicature can be seen independently of his theory of implicature derivation. It is in fact not clear whether he was interested at all in the latter, or whether he only gave the general direction to keep certain parts of the meaning of an utterance out of what is said.

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To work out that a particular conversational implicature is present, the hearer will rely on the following data: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved; (2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise; (4) other items of background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case. A general pattern for the working out of a conversational implicature might be given as follows: “He has said that p; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that q; and so he has implicated that q.” The crucial premise in the derivation of what is implicated is the third one: “he could not be doing this unless he thought that q”. How does the hearer know that exactly q is required to make the speaker’s saying p consistent with the presumption that he is following the Cooperative Principle? Grice writes at the end of “Logic and Conversation” (1967: 39-40): Since to calculate a conversational implicature is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition that the Cooperative Principle is being observed, and since there may be various possible specific explanations, a list of which may be open, the conversational implicatum in such cases will be a disjunction of such specific explanations; and if the list of these is open, the implicatum will have just the kind of indeterminacy that many actual implicata do in fact seem to possess. In some cases, the list of implicatures is closed, that is, the list is constituted by a definite number of definite implicatures that together constitute what is implicated. What is implicated, then, is not indeterminate. In other cases, according to Grice, the list is open, that is, there is in principle no end to the list of implicatures. What is implicated, then, is not determinate. This poses a serious problem for Grice’s theory of meaning. If what is implicated is meant, and if what is meant is known to

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the speaker, and if one can only know a list of implicatures that is not open, then what is implicated cannot be an open list. Therefore, if what is implicated is an open list, then either (a) what is implicated is not meant, (b) what is meant is not known to the speaker or (c) one can know an open list of implicatures. But none of these options seems acceptable. To abandon the claim (a) that what is implicated is part of what is meant would be to abandon an essential part of the theory (see part I, § 3.). To abandon the claim (b) that the speaker knows what he means would be equally damaging to the theory. The claim (c) that one can only know a list of implicatures that is closed seems to be a conceptual truth. The only solution is to abandon the claim that what is implicated may be an open list. Is there anything telling against this solution? Abandoning the claim that the list of implicatures is open does not affect the theory of implicatures. The only reason against such a move is that it runs counter to our intuition that what is implicated is sometimes indeterminate. In some cases, however, our intuition is not about real indeterminacy, but about the fact that what is implicated is deliberately ambiguous. Grice (1967: 35) quotes a line from a poem by Blake, “I sought to tell my love, love that never told can be”. In the first part of the line, “love” may either refer to an emotion or to an object, the second part may either mean that love cannot be told or that love if told cannot continue to exist. We must conclude that the ambiguity is deliberate, that is, that the author intended the implicature to be ambiguous between these interpretations. In such a case the indeterminacy is only superficial: the indeterminacy between the two interpretations is itself intended, and therefore what is implicated is determinate. In other cases the indeterminacy is not intended by the speaker. Recall Grice’s famous example: A: I am out of petrol. B: There is a garage round the corner. B has implicated that the garage round the corner is open and sells petrol. This, as Grice indicates, may not be the only possible answer. It might as well be that B implicates that it is possible that the garage is open and sells petrol. Or it might be that B implicates that he believes that there is a garage round the corner that is open and sells petrol. The sense of indeterminacy induced by this example is due to the fact that more than one interpretation seems to be possible and that there is no way to find out

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which one is correct. The hearer then doesn’t know whether what the speaker implicated is the first, the second or the third interpretation. If the indeterminacy on the hearer’s part concerns only details of the content of the implicature, as in the three possible interpretations of the example, it is unproblematic, because a small indeterminacy is present in the speaker’s mind too. The speaker might not be able to tell whether she implicates that the garage is open, that it is possible that it is open or that she believes it is open. If the speaker cannot tell, how could the hearer? It might be that indeterminacy reaches even further. Consider for example that A arrives at the conclusion that B might implicate that the garage round the corner is open and sells petrol or that B implicates that he does not know where A can get petrol (for example because of the mutually known assumption that it would be impolite not to give a positive answer to A’s request). It might be that, from the viewpoint of the hearer, both interpretations are compatible with the presumption that the speaker is following the Cooperative Principle, and from the viewpoint of the speaker only the first interpretation is compatible with it. Or consider Grice’s analysis of irony (Grice 1967: 34): The speaker utters “X is a fine friend” and what he implicates is “X is not a fine friend”. The reasoning leading to this conclusion might as well lead to the conclusion that the speaker implicated that “Y is a fine friend” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 200-201). The Gricean theory does not allow the exclusion of alternative interpretations. This is the differentiation problem.70 Since a similar problem arises in the determination of what is said I discuss it only after having generalized Grice’s theory of implicature derivation to a Gricean theory of utterance understanding. 2.2.3. A Gricean theory of understanding I intend to generalize Grice’s theory of implicature derivation to a Gricean theory of understanding what is meant. In the case of linguistic utterances, what is meant divides exhaustively into what is said and what is implicated. The question how the hearer knows what is implicated may be 70

The term is introduced by Davis (1998: 33), but the problem is well-known; Davis refers to: Kroch (1972), Kempson (1975: 152-156), Harnish (1976: 332, 334, 352), Horn (1989: 15, 18-19, 332-335), Sadock (1978: 369), Levinson (1983: 122), BurtonRoberts (1984: 200-201), Sperber and Wilson (1986: 37, 93); Brown and Levinson (1978/1987: 11), and Thomason (1990: 353-356).

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answered with Grice’s theory of implicature derivation. The question remains how the hearer knows what is said. My contention is that an adapted version of the former theory may be used as a theory of understanding what is said. Together, these will build up a theory of utterance understanding. In the calculation of an implicature the hearer relies, according to Grice (1967: 31), on the following data: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used, together with the identity of any references that may be involved; (2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; (3) the context, linguistic or otherwise; (4) other items of background knowledge; and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case. If this schema is to be used for the derivation of what is said, the first datum cannot contain the identity of the references because this is part of what needs to be explained. (2) is important and the original contribution of Grice. (3) characterizes the context, but since all of the above may be counted as context I propose to call this the “situational context” (the set of beliefs about the state of affairs in the world at the time of utterance). (4) characterizes the rest of background knowledge, but as all of the above counts as background knowledge, I propose to call this the “general context”. (5) ensures that (1) through (4) are mutually known by the participants of the conversation so that they can rely on them in communication. The data for the calculation of what is said are thus the following: (1) the conventional meaning of the words used; (2) the Cooperative Principle and its maxims; (3) the situational context (the set of beliefs about the state of affairs in the world at the time of utterance); (4) the general context (the set of all beliefs that are not included in the other sentences); and (5) the fact (or supposed fact) that all relevant items falling under the previous headings are available to both participants and both participants know or assume this to be the case.

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If the generalization of Grice’s theory to a theory of utterance interpretation is correct, the hearer will work out what is said in the following way: (1) The speaker did something x which is an occurrence of an utterance type S (sentence) such that (2) S consists of a sequence of elements (such as words) ordered in a way licensed by a system of (syntactical) rules and (3) there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (4) he could not be doing this unless he thought that S means ‘p’ in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements of S, their order, and their syntactical character and for which the unique solution is that S means ‘p’ in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements of S, their order, and their syntactical character and after disambiguation and the fixing of references and of standards of evaluation; (5) he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that (4); (6) he has done nothing to stop me thinking that (4); (7) he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that p; (8) and so he has said that p. This theory of understanding, unlike the code theory, takes account of semantic underdetermination: Premise (4) asks for the fixing of the reference of all contextual parameters. These references are fixed using again the same type of reasoning, that is, by attending to the Cooperative Principle. 2.2.4. The differentiation problem The theory of understanding what is said faces a similar differentiation problem as the theory of implicature derivation. Grice’s theory of implicature derivation does not allow to exclude alternative interpretations of what is implicated. Analogously, the Gricean theory of understanding does not allow to exclude alternative interpretations of what is said. Consider the example of someone uttering (2) “The sun is shining”

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thereby meaning (2*) The sun is shining right now (at 4 pm on October 14th 2006) here (in Berne, Switzerland). The speaker thus believes that the hearer is able to work out that this is what she meant. Now, let’s assume that from the hearer’s viewpoint there is another hypothesis, namely that the hearer said that (2**) The sun is shining today (on October 14th 2006) there (at the place of the hearer, Berlin, Germany). which is equally compatible with the Cooperative Principle. The speaker knows what he means, (2*), but it does not occur to him that (2**) is equally compatible with the Cooperative Principle. Again, the problem is not that such situations cannot in principle be excluded. There are situations in which there is no fault on either side. Even if both the speaker and the hearer act according to what they can reasonably believe, there is always the possibility that the hearer may or may not understand what the speaker meant. The reason for this is that the context of utterance cannot be known with certainty in advance. Even an ideal speaker, a speaker who is perfectly rational and who knows everything about the hearer, cannot know for certain what the context of interpretation will be after the utterance has been made. During the utterance a thought might cross the hearer’s mind that changes the context. This is a kind of indeterminacy that seems unavoidable; but also one that need not bother us.71 71

The natural reaction of the hearer in a situation in which he is confronted with two equally plausible hypotheses for the interpretation of what is said is simply to ask the speaker what she meant. The speaker makes it clear, and the success of communication is secured. The same method is very often successfully used for cases in which the speaker (or the hearer) does not take the view of the other participant sufficiently into account or in which the speaker or the hearer is in some other way not ideally rational. For the practice of communication, this method works well, but theoretically the problem remains. Here is how Warren Weaver (1949: 4) puts it: One essential complication is illustrated by the remark that if Mr. X is suspected not to understand what Mr. Y says, then it is theoretically not possible, by having Mr. Y do nothing but talk further with Mr. X, completely to clarify this situation in any finite time. If Mr. Y says “Do you now understand me?” and Mr. X says

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The problem is, rather, that the Gricean theory does not seem to be able to derive the correct content of what is said in situations in which the hearer understands what is said or at least could know what is said. Must we conclude that the Gricean theory cannot explain how to derive the content of what is said? No, we need not, for in many cases the theory delivers the correct result. Can the Gricean theory of understanding be improved, and if so, how? One answer to this question is that we cannot do better. Our notion of rationality does not allow us to give better explanations and make better predictions. Grice’s theory explains the basic process of understanding, but it cannot be turned into a theory giving more precise results. The other answer is that there is a way of doing better. At least two such positive answers have been given, one is relevance theory, the other is a theory using game theory. I discuss these in turn.

2.3. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory In “Logic and Conversation”, Grice writes (1967: 27): Under the category of Relation I place a single maxim, namely, “Be relevant.” Though the maxim itself is terse, its formulation conceals a number of problems that exercise me a good deal: questions about what different kinds and focuses of relevance there may be, how these shift in the course of a talk exchange, how to allow for the fact that subjects of conversation are legitimately changed, and so on. I find the treatment of such questions exceedingly difficult, and I hope to revert to them in a later work. Unfortunately, Grice never took up this work – or at least he never published anything about it. The challenge was taken up by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. Not only did they spell out the maxim, but they “Certainly, I do,” this is not necessarily a certification that understanding has been achieved. It might just be that Mr. X did not understand the question. The same holds for the hearer’s side. The hearer cannot hope to achieve certainty by asking the speaker: “Is it this what you meant?” But this kind of certainty is not what the participants of a conversation are after. Usually the speaker can make it clear what she means by saying what she means.

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reduced all the Gricean maxims to this single one. They called the result of their work “relevance theory”. The central claim of this theory as developed in their book Relevance. Communication and Cognition (1986) and updated in Sperber and Wilson (1995; 1998; and 2002) and in Wilson and Sperber (2002), is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance guide the hearer toward what the speaker means. The aim is to give an empirically plausible account of utterance understanding or “comprehension” (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 607-608).72 I present this theory. Then I try to show that either it faces the same differentiation problem as Grice’s theory or the theory does not explain anything. 2.3.1. The theory I present the theory in three steps: First, the theory as applied to cognition, that is, what Sperber and Wilson call the “cognitive principle of relevance”; second, the theory as applied to communication, that is, the “communicative principle of relevance”; and third, the theory as an explanation of the process of understanding utterances. The basic notion of the theory is relevance. Sperber and Wilson do not wish to analyze our everyday notion of relevance but rather to define a theoretically useful concept (1986: 119); a concept that they consider to be needed in psychology. Relevance, as they understand it, is a property of stimuli and of thoughts, “conceptual representations” as opposed to sensory or emotional representations (1986: 2). Stimuli and thoughts can serve as input to a cognitive system. Sperber and Wilson first define “relevance in a context” as the having of contextual effects (1986: 122) and then “relevance to an individual” (1986: 144-145). The “classificatory definition” says: “An assumption is relevant to an individual at a given time if and only if it is relevant in one or more contexts accessible to that individual at that time” (1986: 144). The more important “comparative definition” has been revised; the latest formulation is the following (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 609):

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The name „relevance theory“ is a little misleading for it suggests that the theory is only about what relevance is, which it is not; the theory is a theory about the human mind based on the notion of relevance.

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Relevance of an input to an individual a. Other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. b. Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time.73 According to Sperber and Wilson (2004: 610), a quantitative definition of relevance might be interesting from a formal point of view but for the construction of a psychologically plausible theory the comparative definition provides a better starting point. They give two reasons. First, some aspects are not measurable in absolute numerical terms (e.g. strength of implication, level of access). Second, even in cases for which absolute measures exist the hearer has access to comparative, “more intuitive methods” of assessment which are more basic. It therefore seems preferable to treat relevance as a non-representational dimension of cognition: relevance plays a role even if it is not represented, and if it is represented it would have to be in the form of comparative judgments. What is a cognitive effect? A cognitive effect is a contextual effect occurring in a cognitive system (1995: 265). The most important cognitive effects are contextual implications; others are the strengthening, revision, or abandoning of available assumptions. A contextual implication is an implication deducible from input and context together, but not from the context or the input alone. Here is an example: On seeing my train arriving, I look at a watch and a timetable and deduce that my train is late. By itself, the perception of the train is not sufficient to deduce that the train is late (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 608). The important question now is: When are cognitive effects “positive”? Sperber and Wilson give the following definition: A positive cognitive effect [is] a cognitive effect that contributes positively to the fulfillment of cognitive functions or goals. (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 265)

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For an early formulation of a principle of economy of effort in linguistics see Zipf (1949).

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Since the function of the cognitive system is to deliver knowledge, not false beliefs (1995: 263), Sperber and Wilson are in the position to write: A positive cognitive effect is a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the world: a true conclusion, for example. False conclusions are not worth having; they are cognitive effects, but not positive ones. (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 608) Sperber and Wilson (1995: 261) assume that cognition is a biological function and that cognitive mechanisms are adaptations that have evolved through natural selection. We can expect that an enduring biological mechanism with a stable function will develop towards greater efficiency; we can therefore expect a tendency in the maximization of efficiency in the design of cognitive mechanisms (1995: 262). Since it is more efficient to process inputs that are more relevant than others, the first or cognitive principle of relevance holds. Cognitive principle of relevance Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance (2004: 610; see 1995: 260). The principle states that humans tend to process only those external and internal inputs that are the most relevant in the situation, that is, those for which the number and strength of positive cognitive effects is the highest compared to the processing effort. Sperber and Wilson are quite aware of the fact that the cognitive principle of relevance does not hold in all cases. Their principle states merely that humans “tend” to behave according to it, not that humans always do behave accordingly. The principle is strong enough to “make the cognitive behavior of another human predictable enough to guide communication” (1995: 263). It guides communication, supposedly, if the communicative principle of relevance – to which I turn below – delivers correct predictions. The central notion in the cognitive principle of relevance is obviously “relevance”, and this notion is defined in terms of “positive cognitive effects”. A positive cognitive effect is “a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the world” (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 608). But what is a “worthwhile difference”? Sperber and Wilson are

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aware of how problematic their notion of positive cognitive effect is and discuss two objections against it (1995: 266). First, isn’t the notion of “positive cognitive effect” vague? Yes it is, Sperber and Wilson admit. But they add that this is not a problem for relevance theory but for psychology in general. Second, isn’t the cognitive principle of relevance a truism: since “relevance” is defined in terms of “positive cognitive effects” the principle states that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of positive cognitive effects? Although vague and general, the principle is not trivial and is worth stating because of some of its “precise and non-trivial” consequences, in particular the second or communicative principle of relevance. Sperber and Wilson accept that their principle is vague. They admit that they could have been more precise by defining a positive effect as an “epistemic improvement”, that is, as an “increase in knowledge”. They refrained from doing so because they wanted to include in the definition improvements such as the reorganization of existing knowledge or the elaboration of rational desires (1995: 266). But since all of the examples they discuss are of the first type, there is no reason not to use the more precise notion as applied to these cases. In these cases, human cognition tends to increase knowledge if the processing effort is relatively low. The second concern is more important: Isn’t the principle a truism? No. It does not make the trivial claim that positive cognitive effects are positive; it rather states that, due to its evolution in the process of natural selection, the human mind tends to maximize the positive cognitive effects. It might have been possible that the human mind did not tend to maximize these effects but rather to increase them just sufficiently in order not to be selected out (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 266). This supposedly shows that the principle is not vacuous. I will not discuss this claim. What matters is that this principle has a non trivial consequence, the communicative principle of relevance. To this I turn now. Sperber and Wilson claim that human communication is a case of ostensive behavior. Ostensive behavior is a “behavior which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest” (1986: 49). What is it, then, to make something manifest? A fact is manifest to an individual at a given time if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true (1986: 39).

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To make manifest is to make perceptible or inferable (1986: 39) and therefore to engage in ostensive behavior. The ostensive stimulus used in communication has certain specific properties. First, in order for the speaker to intend to communicate with the hearer she must intend that the stimulus appears relevant enough to the hearer to be worth processing; otherwise she cannot expect the communication to be successful. Second, from the stimuli that are available and acceptable to her given her abilities and preferences, she will choose one that is as relevant as possible to the hearer. These two points can be formulated as a presumption of optimal relevance. Presumption of optimal relevance (a) The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s processing effort. (b) It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences (2004: 612; for previous formulations see 1986: 164; 1995: 267-270). Given that human cognition tends to maximize relevance and that human communication is a cognitive ability of humans, one can generalize the presumption of optimal relevance to all ostensive stimuli and thus arrive at the communicative principle of relevance. Communicative principle of relevance Every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance (2004: 610; see 1986: 158; 1995: 260). Both the cognitive and the communicative principle of relevance are not normative; they are descriptive principles, they describe the working of the human mind. Sperber and Wilson write that the communicative principle of relevance is a “law-like generalization”; as such, the principle “could be falsified by finding genuine communicative acts which do not convey a presumption of optimal relevance (but rather, say a presumption of literal truthfulness, or maximal informativeness, or no such presumption at all)” (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 626). Strictly speaking, the principle is not falsifiable because it ascribes a tendency. To say that an ostensive stimulus carries a presumption of

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optimal relevance is to say that it is used by the speaker according to the cognitive principle of relevance, and this principle states that humans just have a tendency to do something. This claim, however, cannot be falsified. But that should not matter here. What Sperber and Wilson mean, if I understand their claim correctly, is that it is in principle possible that another hypothesis be better supported by the available evidence than the cognitive principle of relevance. How does the communicative principle explain the process of understanding what is meant? In order to understand an utterance the hearer will use the communicative principle of relevance: He will try to construct a hypothesis about what the speaker meant by his utterance that satisfies the presumption of optimal relevance conveyed by the utterance. Since the hearer, as well as the speaker, tries to minimize the effort – as is stated in the cognitive principle of relevance – he will start with the hypotheses that require the least effort. The less effort is needed to access an assumption the more accessible it is (1986: 142). Which one of the hypotheses about what is meant is the right one to choose? Sperber and Wilson give the following answer: The right hypothesis is just the first one in the order of processing that satisfies the communicative principle of relevance. It must be the first one, because if it were not the first, then it would not satisfy the principle. Suppose the first one was not the right hypothesis and the hearer would go on to another one, finding this to be relevant enough to be worth processing, then the second part of the presumption of optimal relevance would be “almost invariably falsified” because the speaker would have chosen an utterance that would have asked more processing effort than is consistent with the principle (1986: 168). Therefore: “the correct interpretation of an ostensive stimulus is the first accessible interpretation consistent with the principle of relevance” (1986: 178). Sperber and Wilson summarize their thesis in a recent article in the following heuristic: Relevance-guided comprehension heuristic (a) Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. (b) Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied (or abandoned) (2004: 613; see also 1995: 267-270 and 1986: 168-170).

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The process of comprehension generally includes the understanding of what is explicitly communicated (explicatures) and of what is implicitly communicated (implicatures). This distinction and terminology is Sperber and Wilson’s. Before the process of understanding can get started, it is necessary for the hearer to recover the semantic representation of the utterance. The hearer has to produce beliefs of the form: “The speaker uttered the sentence S”, for example: “Mary has uttered the sentence ‘He forgot to go to the bank’”. This process of recovering the semantic representation is usually an automatic process of decoding that takes place sub-attentively: from the stream of sounds the human mind assigns automatically a semantic representation (1986: 177). The semantic representation then serves as an input to the process of recovering the explicatures and implicatures of the utterance. The first task in recovering the explicatures is to identify the propositional form of the utterance. Sperber and Wilson (1986: 72) distinguish between the propositional form and the logical form. A logical form is a well formed formula and as such need not be semantically complete and may nevertheless undergo „logical processing“. A propositional form is a semantically complete form, one that is capable of being true or false. How does the hearer know what the right propositional form is? The “right propositional form is the one that leads to an overall interpretation which is consistent with the principle of relevance” (1986: 184). It is only explicatures that have contextual effects (1986: 193), but in the case of ordinary assertions this does not matter for the propositional form is itself an explicature of the utterance (1986: 183). From the context, the propositional form, and the propositional attitude expressed all explicatures of the utterance can be inferred, using again the communicative principle of relevance (1986: 193). The same principle is also used in the inference of the implicatures of the utterance (1986: 193-202). Here is one of the examples Sperber and Wilson use to show how their theory works: a. Peter: Did John pay back the money he owed you? b. Mary: No. He forgot to go to the bank. Sperber and Wilson (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 615-617) present a schematic outline of how Peter might use the relevance-theoretic

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comprehension procedure to interpret the utterance. They write that Peter assumes that Mary’s utterance is optimally relevant to him, and that since what he wants to know is why John did not repay the money he owed, he assumes that Mary’s utterance will achieve relevance by answering this question. The first assumption to occur to Peter which together with other premises satisfies this expectation is that forgetting to go to the BANK1 (financial institution) may make one unable to repay the money one owns, and from this he derives the explicature: “John forgot to go to the BANK1”.74 Other explicatures will be computed in the same way using the principle of relevance and starting with hypotheses in order of accessibility. If what Sperber and Wilson claim at other places were true, time would have to be included in an explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 188-190). In this particular case, depending on the time John had at his disposal, the explicature might be: “John forgot to go to the BANK1 yesterday” or “John forgot to go to the BANK1 last week”. Implicatures are computed in the same way. Sperber and Wilson mention three: “Forgetting to go to the BANK1 may make one unable to repay the money one owns” (implicit premise), “John was unable to repay Mary the money he owes because he forgot to go to the BANK1” (implicit conclusion) and “John may repay Mary the money he owes when he next goes to the BANK1” (weak implicature derived from the implicit conclusion and background knowledge). Sperber and Wilson summarize the procedure of understanding of this utterance as follows (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 616):

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This is an oversimplification for one would have to make the type of financial institution more precise – it is not the World bank, but one that deals with private individuals etc. (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 617).

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(a) Mary has said to Peter “Hex forgot to go the BANK1/BANK2” [Hex = uninterpreted pronoun] [BANK1 = financial institution] [BANK2 = river bank] (b) Mary’s utterance will be optimally relevant to Peter. (c) Mary’s utterance will achieve relevance by explaining why John has not repaid the money he owed her. (d) Forgetting to go to the BANK1 may make one unable to repay the money one owns.

(e) John forgot to go to the BANK1.

(f) John was unable to repay Mary the money he owes because he forgot to go to the BANK1. (g) John may repay Mary the money he owes when he next goes to the BANK1.

Embedding of the decoded (incomplete) logical form of Mary’s utterance into a description of Mary’s ostensive behavior. Expectation raised by recognition of Mary’s ostensive behavior and acceptance of the presumption of relevance it conveys. Expectation raised by (b), together with the fact that such an explanation would be most relevant to Peter at this point. First assumption to occur to Peter which, together with other appropriate premises, might satisfy expectation (c). Accepted as an implicit premise of Mary’s utterance. First enrichment of the logical form of Mary’s utterance to occur to Peter which might combine with (d) to lead to the satisfaction of (c). Accepted as an explicature of Mary’s utterance. Inferred from (d) and (e), satisfying (c) and accepted as an implicit conclusion of Mary’s utterance. From (f) plus background knowledge. One of several weak implicatures of Mary’s utterance which, together with (f), satisfy expectation (b).

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2.3.2. The differentiation problem Since the publication of Relevance in 1986, a lot of empirical research has been carried out by linguists and psychologists to apply the theory to different kinds of linguistic phenomena.75 All this empirical research seems to suggest that relevance theory is a powerful tool for explaining linguistic communication. I think this impression is mistaken. I first show that interpreted charitably, relevance theory leads to a differentiation problem similar to the one the Gricean theory faces. Then I will show that the move Sperber and Wilson make in order to circumvent the differentiation problem leads them to adopt a theory that cannot explain anything at all. Relevance theory rests on the notion of “positive cognitive effect”, which, as Sperber and Wilson admit, is vague. If this notion is vague, then so are the cognitive and the communicative principle of relevance. But if the communicative principle of relevance is vague, then the application of the theory seems to be in danger. How are we to decide whether a certain interpretation is consistent with the communicative principle of relevance if we do not know how to determine the amount of positive cognitive effects? Sperber and Wilson deny that we can measure the cognitive effects and the processing cost in absolute terms and claim that even for those aspects for which we could deliver absolute numbers there are “more intuitive”, comparative methods of assessment more basic than these (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 610). In a particular context, the hearer can tell of two hypotheses which one has more positive cognitive effects than the other assuming that both have the same processing costs. But the question remains: How does the hearer do it? Let’s look again at the example of the interpretation of the utterance “No. He forgot to go to the bank” as an answer to the question “Did John pay back the money he owed you?”. Sperber and Wilson claim that their theory explains how the hearer Peter arrives at the correct interpretation of the utterance, namely that Mary said that John forgot to go the BANK1. The activated context is given by (a) the decoded logical form, (b) the expectation of relevance raised by Mary’s utterance, (c) the expectation that the utterance will achieve relevance by explaining why John has not 75

For results of empirical research see the bibliography on relevance theory at: ONLINE: http://www.ua.es/personal/francisco.yus/rt.html

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repaid the money and (d) that the first assumption to occur is that forgetting to go to the BANK1 might make one unable to repay money. But now imagine that Peter believes that there is money hidden at the riverside bank (BANK2), and believes that Mary believes this too, and that they both believe that John believes this. Then the first assumption to occur to Peter would be (d’) that to go to the BANK2 would make one unable to repay the money and he would understand Mary to have said (e’) that John forgot to go the BANK2. Relevance theory cannot exclude (d’) and therefore it cannot exclude (e’) either and it thus faces the differentiation problem.76 Sperber and Wilson think that the problem of differentiation leads to an incapability of empirical application. They write (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 37): Given that an utterance in context was found to carry particular implicatures, what both the hearer and the pragmatic theorist can do, the latter in a slightly more sophisticated way, is to show how in very intuitive terms there was an argument based on the context, the utterance and general expectations about the behaviour of speakers that would justify the particular interpretation chosen. What they fail to show is that on the same basis, an equally convincing justification could not have been given for some other interpretation that was not in fact chosen. There may be a whole variety of interpretations that would meet whatever standards of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity have been proposed or envisaged so far. The theory needs improving at a fundamental level before it can be fruitfully applied to particular cases. This criticism of Grice’s theory, if correct, applies word for word to Sperber and Wilson’s own theory. If the differentiation problem suffices to claim that no clear predictions can be made with the theory and that it has no empirical application, then relevance theory does not have empirical application (Levinson 1989: 463-464). But one need not take any stand on this: However one decides on the problem of empirical applicability, both Grice’s and Sperber and Wilson’s theory face the differentiation problem. 76

Of course one might reply that the context is a different one, but the question is: how does the hearer know that the context is a different one? To make the point clear: A reasoning of the type Sperber and Wilson offer could be given by Grice too: The hearer understands that the speaker means BANK1 by uttering “bank” because he is assuming the speaker to follow the Cooperative Principle etc.

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Sperber and Wilson think that they have a way for excluding (d’) in the example above and therefore of avoiding the differentiation problem. But their solution leads them to a problem much worse. 2.3.3. Magic and ungrounded immunization One reason for being suspicious about relevance theory is the domain of phenomena relevance theory is supposed to explain. Relevance theory is a “general view of human cognition” (1986: vii). Its basic principle is the cognitive principle of relevance that states that the human mind tends to a maximization of relevance. That means that relevance theory is supposed to explain everything in the domain of human cognition including everything in the domain of human communication. A lot of additional theories are to be taken into account in studying these phenomena, but all explanations in cognitive science ultimately rest on the cognitive principle of relevance. I do not want to exclude the possibility that Sperber and Wilson have discovered the “philosopher’s stone” (Levinson 1989: 464), but the way they introduce their theory, not comparing it to other psychological theories or theories developed in artificial intelligence, raises some doubts. Let’s look at the move from the principles of relevance to the relevance guided comprehension heuristic. The first part of the heuristic states that the hearer is to start with the hypothesis most accessible to him; the second part says that the hearer is to stop when his expectations of relevance are satisfied. What does that latter part mean? The hearer is to stop the interpretation process when he thinks that the hypothesis corresponds to the assumption that generates the most cognitive effects as compared to the effort of processing compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. But the most relevant is supposed to be the one that is found to be most relevant without comparing it with other hypotheses that demand more processing effort because this additional processing effort would not be compatible with the communicative principle of relevance. If this is true, the finding of the right interpretation amounts to simple magic: The hearer has to know that the interpretation he is considering is the most relevant without comparing it to hypotheses that would demand greater effort. What prevents the hearer to stop anytime, to stop when it pleases him, when he finds the interpretation plausible? Nothing. The hearer arrives at the right interpretation because he stops at

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the interpretation that seems right to him. As if it were magic, the interpretation that seems right to the hearer is the correct interpretation! Sperber and Wilson think there is an explanation for the magic. The explanation is to be found in relevance theory itself. The reason why the interpretation the hearer arrives at is the correct interpretation is that the working of the hearer’s mind is itself controlled by the cognitive principles of relevance. The mind of the hearer stops at the right interpretation because it is so designed, following the cognitive principle of relevance, to stop at the right interpretation. This, however, amounts to the claim that whatever the interpretation the hearer arrives at, it will be the correct one, because the hearer’s mind works according to relevance theory. This is in fact an immunization of the theory: The truth of the theory is assumed to argue for the truth of the theory. If a new theory is introduced such an immunization is unacceptable because it blocks any refutation of the theory. This sheds light on the reason for being suspicious mentioned above: If the theory is immune against refutation, Sperber and Wilson have a reason to claim that it explains everything. Let’s look again at the example of Peter and Mary. Relevance theorists would retort to the derivation of (d’) described above that this is a different context, and that in this context this is in fact the correct interpretation, just as relevance theory predicts. So the new context seems to be just another context that confirms relevance theory. But the question remains: how do we know what the context is? The answer is: The context of utterance is constituted by the assumptions of the hearer that are most relevant to the hearer. There seems to be a circle here: Relevance is used to determine relevance (Levinson 1989: 459). But the circle is only apparent. In computing the relevance of a certain interpretation of utterance one relies on the context of utterance, and in computing the relevance of the context of utterance one relies on a different, more general context. Therefore there is no problem of circularity here. So let’s grant that the first assumption to occur to Peter is in fact (d). But now imagine further that assumption (d’) occurs to Peter just immediately after. Then he might, after all, use (d’) to arrive at the explicature (e’). But Sperber and Wilson suggest that this is not so because the effort to compute (d’) is bigger than the one to compute (d) and therefore less relevant. But how do we know that (d’) is in fact less relevant? The only explanation that Sperber and Wilson give is that in the process of interpretation the one assumption occurs to the hearer before the other, it is more accessible than the other. But then the whole problem of

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magic and immunization opens up: How do we know that the assumption more accessible is in fact the more relevant one? It is more relevant because it is the more accessible and it is the more accessible because the mind works according to the cognitive principle of relevance. That means that the hearer, whose mind is controlled by the cognitive principle of relevance, always computes the correct interpretation. The theory cannot be refuted, but it does not explain anything either. The discussion of relevance theory leads to the following conclusion: Either relevance theory faces the same differentiation problem as does Grice’s theory and is thus not an improvement over Grice’s theory, or relevance theory does not explain anything. One might, however, claim that relevance theory is an improvement over Grice’s theory insofar as it concedes the context of utterance its adequate role in the process of understanding what is meant. But if Grice’s theory of implicature derivation is generalized to a theory of understanding, then the context of utterance is already taken care of. Can the Gricean theory of understanding be improved using game theory? 2.4. The game-theoretic theory The basic idea behind Grice’s theory of conversation is that communication, at least to some extent, is rational behavior. Rationality, in particular iterated intentions as they appear in Grice’s analysis of meaning and the reasoning as it appears in his derivation of implicatures, is studied today especially in game theory. The connection between game theory and Grice’s theory of meaning and conversation was first seen by David Lewis in his study Convention (1969). Lewis developed the model of a signaling game to describe and explain acts of communication. More recently, Prashant Parikh (1987, 1991, 2000, 2001, 2006) has generalized the model to a game of partial information.77 I start by introducing some basic notions of game theory. Then I outline Lewis’ signaling game and Parikh’s game of partial information. I present Parikh’s new definition of speaker meaning and explain why it cannot substitute the original Gricean notion. Finally, I present the game77

Other work applying game theory to the understanding of utterances includes Robert van Rooij (2001, 2003a,b, 2004), Kris de Jaegher (2003, 2006) and Robert Stalnaker (2006).

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theoretic theory I advocate, which combines the Gricean theory with Parikh’s game of partial information. 2.4.1. Game theory In game theory, a game is a decision-making situation in which the following conditions hold: There are two or more players;78 there are one or more moves with one or more players being allowed a choice at each move; and there are rules that determine for each sequence of moves whether it results in an outcome, and if it does, what the outcome is. The game can then be represented in the extensive form (as a game tree) or in the normal or strategic form (as a game table). It is further assumed that each player has a utility function for the outcomes that abides by the expected utility theorem. The expected utility theorem is the basic theorem in utility theory used to determine the utility of a proposition or an action to an agent. It was developed independently by Frank Ramsey (1926) and by John von Neumann in a series of papers in 1928.79 The work of von Neumann is much better known and distinguishes clearly between the subjective probability and utility. It culminated in the book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior he wrote together with Oskar Morgenstern (1944). The expected utility theorem states that the utility function u has the following properties: (1) The utility u of x is higher than the utility of y if and only if the agent prefers x to y. (2) The utility u of x is equal to the utility of y if and only if the agent is indifferent between x and y. (3) The utility of a lottery L giving a chance equal to w at prize x and a chance equal to 1-w at prize y is equal to the sum of the utility of x times w and the utility of y times 1-w. (4) Any u’ also satisfying (1) to (3) is a positive linear transformation of u. (see Resnik 1987: 90)

78

For convenience of exposition I will, as is usual, restrict the presentation to two person games. 79 This is also the method Davidson uses (1990, 2005); but Davidson uses it for the construction of a theory of meaning for a language, not for the modeling of the interpretation of a particular utterance in a particular context.

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Finally, it is assumed that every player knows the entire game tree or game table and that every player knows that every player knows this, that means it is common knowledge among the players. The aim of game theory is to determine the outcome or possible outcomes of a game. It is important to distinguish between the situation that is modeled, the model (the specification of the problem) and the outcome of the game (the analysis) with a solution concept. The situation may be, for example, a game of scissors, paper and stone, a war or a negotiation in a peace process. The model is the formal description of the situation as a game in a game tree or game table. The same situation may be modeled differently. For example, one may specify an outcome more precisely. Furthermore, the same model may be used for different situations. For example, the model used to describe the game of scissors, paper and stone may also be used to describe a football game. The same game may have different outcomes depending on the solution concept one uses. The outcome of a game is the pair of strategies that is optimal for each player. The tool to determine the outcome is called a solution concept. In an individual situation the most powerful solution concept is the assumption that the optimal strategy is the one that maximizes the expected utility of the agent.80 Assuming that the players of a game aim at maximizing their expected utility, the pair of optimal strategies for a game seems to be the equilibrium pair of strategies, that is the pair of strategies so that neither player can do better by unilaterally changing his strategy. This is the Nash-equilibrium, a kind of solution concept named after John Nash who proved in his dissertation, published in an article in 1950, that such equilibria must exist for all finite games with any number of players. The Nash-equilibrium is a powerful concept, yet it cannot account for games in which there are more than one equilibrium, for example in the well known prisoner’s dilemma or in the clash of wills. Sometimes the optimal strategy as predicted by game theory does not correspond to our intuitive judgment. In such a situation there are different reactions possible. If the model does not describe the situation correctly, one will have to look for a better description. If the model describes the situation correctly, it might be (a) that the optimal outcome is not correct and one will have to alter game theory so as to yield the correct solution; or it might be (b) that the outcome is not the only optimal one, and one will 80

This solution concept still leads to important paradoxes, for example Allais’ paradox, Ellsberg’s paradox, the Saint Petersburg paradox and the Predictor’s paradox; see e.g. Resnik (1987).

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have to add a different one and claim that there is more than one type of rationality; or it might be (c) that one has to accept that the result of game theory is in fact correct and alter one’s decision accordingly (Resnik 1987: 118-119). It is important to keep in mind that game theory is a theory about what it is rational to do given certain ends. It does not say what the ends must be, and it does not say how people in fact behave. Game theory, just like Grice’s theory of conversation, is a theory that uses an idealized concept – the rational agent – to model a certain situation and explain the actions of people in that situation. The theory neither describes nor prescribes anything, but it can be used both to prescribe what should be done and to describe what people do.81 2.4.2. Signaling games Signaling games have been developed by David Lewis in his book Convention (1969) to model acts whose only purpose is to communicate something to someone (Lewis 1969: 122-159; Stalnaker 2006: 89-91). The first player, the sender S, has information that is unavailable to the second player, the receiver R. This information, which is called the sender’s type,82 is determined by a move of chance. The receiver knows the range of possible types the sender might be in, but he does not know which of these is factual. The information about S’s type will normally be relevant to the choice that R will make and to the choice that S will want him to make. All S can do to influence the outcome is to send a signal to R. R can then make his choice dependent on the sent signal. In the general situation, the signal might affect the options available to R, but in a cheap talk game it does not. In a cheap talk game, the signal has no effect on the subsequent course of the game, except to give R the option of making his choice depend on which signal is sent. Here is a simple example in a table with S’s possible types represented in the rows and R’s possible actions in the columns:

81

Grice himself did not seem to have seen the connection between his theory and game theory. One reason – and it is not more than a speculation – for this might be that Grice was oriented towards a Kantian ethics with rationality grounded in autonomy, whereas game theory seems to be, at least in the well known form of utility theory, based on a utilitarian conception of ethics. 82 Not to be confounded with utterance-type!

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t1 t2

a1 10, 10 0, 0

a2 0, 0 10, 10

S is either of type t1 or t2, determined by chance with equal probability. R has the actions a1 and a2 open to him. The numbers represent the payoffs to S and R. Assuming that S may send either of two messages, m1 and m2, and that she must send one of them, S has four strategies: (S1) Send m1 unconditionally, (S2) send m1 if she is in type t1 and m2 if she is in type t2, (S3) send m1 if she is in type t2 and m2 if she is in type t1, and (S4) send m2 unconditionally. R has also four alternative strategies: (R1) respond unconditionally by choosing a1, (R2) respond by choosing a1 if m1 is sent and a2 if m2 is sent, (R3) respond by choosing a1 if m2 is sent and a2 if m1 is sent, and (R4) respond unconditionally by choosing a2. If information is to be conveyed S has to choose one of the conditional strategies (S2) or (S3), and if the information is to be exploited, R has to choose one of his conditional strategies (R2) or (R3), but nothing favors one of these strategies over the other. What is needed is that the meaning of the messages somehow influences which message is sent. Lewis’ solution to the problem is to identify a pattern or regularity of beliefs and intentions.83 This regularity is the basis for conventional meaning that can be formulated as a function from actions (utterances) to propositions.84 In the signaling game above one may find a function from the utterance-type m1 to the proposition that S is in t1 and the function that correlates m2 with the proposition that S is in t2. If the signs belong to a language, the function is more complicated because a language allows for the building of sentences out of smaller parts such as words, and in the case of natural languages for the building of an in principle infinite number of sentences. To determine the conventional meaning of these sentences a compositional theory is needed. Knowledge of conventional meaning is not enough for communication. It may be that S (intentionally or unintentionally) does not act according to the regularities and does not use the sentences in their conventional meaning. An additional principle that guarantees that S acts according to the regularities is needed. Grice’s Cooperative Principle 83 84

See above part I, § 2.1. To be precise: a function from utterance-types to propositions.

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together with the maxims of quantity,85 Lewis’ convention of truthfulness and trust in a language L,86 and Stalnaker’s constraint of credibility87 all serve this purpose. As noted by Stalnaker (2006: 91-92), the first move, the relying on conventional meaning, explains that an utterance is able to convey information without external or intrinsic connection to the information and only by recognition of the speaker’s intention (the second intention in Grice’s analysis of meaning); and the second move, the additional principle, explains that the recognition of the intention to induce a belief leads to inducing the belief (the third intention in Grice’s analysis of meaning). This way of solving the game is successful in explaining how conventions emerge, and also in explaining how communication through signs having conventional meaning is possible. However, the problem with this way of solving the game is, again, that people usually do not use a sentence that expresses their thoughts completely. Someone may say “The sun is shining” thereby meaning that “The sun is shining right now (at 4 pm on October 14th 2006) here (in Berne, Switzerland)”. There is no convention or regularity that determines that the utterance of this sentence means this! If game theory is to be of any use for the explanation of understanding what is meant, it has to be applied to situations for which no convention or regularity exists. Prashant Parikh has tried to do this. Before presenting his theory I want to note that the signaling game would have a simple solution not involving any regularities if the probability for t1 were different from the probability for t2, or if the payoff for the case (t1, a1) were different from the payoff for the case (t2, a2). If, for example, t1 was more probable than t2, or if a1 would give a greater payoff in t1 than a2 in t2, then, whatever the strategy S chose, the best strategy for R would be (R1).

85

“1. Do not say what you believe to be false. 2. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence” (Grice 1967: 26-27). 86 “To try not to utter any sentence of L that is not true in L” (Lewis 1969: 177; 1975: 7). Lewis credits Stenius (1967) for the idea. 87 “It is common belief that the content of any credible message that is sent is believed (by R)” (Stalnaker 2006: 93).

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2.4.3. Games of partial information Parikh has applied game theory to the understanding of a particular utterance. The understanding of an utterance is a complex process, which involves several interrelated inferences that take place simultaneously (Parikh 2000: 191). The hearer will have, for example, to disambiguate the sentence, determine the reference of indexicals as well as the reference of other context sensitive terms (see part I, § 2.5.). Parikh claims that the model he has developed – the game of partial information, a generalization of Lewis’s signaling game – takes all these aspects into consideration: the model “applies to any and every type of communication” (2000: 192). A game of partial information is similar to a signaling game in that the outcome of both is the same if the probabilities and the payoffs are the same and they are analyzed by means of the same solution concept. But there are some differences that render the game of partial information a more general one than the signaling game (Parikh 2006: 105-109). The most important of these are: First, in a signaling game there is a single set of messages from which the sender may choose – m1 and m2 in the example above; in a game of partial information the set of messages available to the sender is dependent on the type – in the example: ϕ and µ in s, ϕ and µ’ in s’ in the example below; of course the set may also be the same for each type. Second, in a signaling game the initial probabilities are usually common knowledge and identical for both players; in a game of partial information this need not be the case.88 What does Parikh’s game of partial information look like? Let’s take as an example again Mary’s answer “He forgot to go to the bank” to Peter’s question (see above § 2.3.1.) and concentrate on the problem of disambiguation (Parikh 2006: 101-105).89 Let ϕ stand for this utterance, p 88

Parikh (2006: 105-109) lists three more differences, but it is not clear to me in what way they make the game of partial information more general than the signaling game: (1) In a signaling game the action of the receiver can be any; in a game of partial information the action of the receiver is the interpretation of the utterance. (2) In a signaling game the game tree is common knowledge to both players before the start of the game; in a game of partial information the receiver constructs the game tree only after the sender has sent the message. (3) In a signaling game only this game is studied; in a game of partial information this so called local game is part of a global game. 89 It is important to keep in mind that the model is general. It applies to any kind of communication and to every problem of reference fixing mentioned in part I (§ 2.5.).

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for the proposition that John forgot to go to the financial institution, and p’ for the proposition that John forgot to go to the river bank. Let µ stand for the (in respect of the problematic aspect) unambiguous utterance “John forgot to go to the financial institution” and µ’ stand for the utterance “John forgot to go to the river bank”.90 Let s stand for the situation in which Mary intends to convey p, and s’ the counterfactual situation in which Mary intends to convey p’. Let t, t’, e, and e’ be the situations that result from the initial situations after the utterances. The situations t and t’ are in the same information set because Peter doesn’t know in which situation Mary is. Let ρ be the probability of s, and ρ’ the probability of s’. The game can then be represented in extensive form as shown in Fig. 1 (Parikh 2006: 103).

Fig. 1 In the presentation of the model, the focus is on one single phenomenon, but the model stays the same for all other phenomena. 90 Parikh (2001: 199) claims that it is necessary to compare the ambiguous utterance against an unambiguous one to ensure that it is more efficient and therefore to be able to disambiguate the utterance. But this does not seem right. If ρ, the probability of the speaker conveying p, is 0.9, this information is sufficient to disambiguate the utterance. But the introduction of an unambiguous yet less efficient utterance is necessary to explain the speaker’s choice for his utterance.

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In general, the payoffs result from positive and negative factors that may or may not be additive. Here the numbers result from the arbitrary numbers of utility of 15 to the speaker of conveying the right information and of 20 to the hearer for getting the right information, the cost of 5 for uttering and 7 for interpreting ϕ and the cost of 8 for uttering µ or µ’ and of 10 for interpreting µ or µ’. Adding up the costs and benefits one gets the payoffs for the speaker and the hearer as depicted in the game tree. If we let ρ be 0.9 and ρ’ be 0.1, then the game has a clear solution (if we take any standard solution concept such as the Nash equilibrium): The hearer understands the utterance as conveying p. Peter understands that Mary has said that John forgot to go to the financial institution. Now, one might ask: How does one get to the payoffs and the probabilities? Game theory does not give an answer to this question. Game theory only says what the outcome of the game is, given the players, their possibilities of action and the outcomes in each possible case. The game of partial information delivers only the framework for an explanation of the understanding of a particular utterance. 2.4.4. A new definition of speaker meaning? Parikh considers game theory to be the only option to improve not only on Grice’s theory of understanding but also on his theory of meaning. He thinks that it is not possible to improve upon what Grice, Strawson and Schiffer did using their methods; since probabilities are involved, the structure of communication cannot be handled in natural language and must be analyzed mathematically (2000: 188).91 Parikh claims that, using game theory, he is able to define the Gricean notions of communication, speaker meaning and addressee interpretation in a simpler way.92 He defines first the notion of communication and then derives from it the notion of speaker meaning and addressee interpretation. The definition of communication runs as follows (Parikh 2000: 207): Let A and B be rational agents, p a proposition, ϕ an utterance, m a function from the type of 91

Note that the relevant mathematics is quite simple: One needs to be able to multiply the probabilities and the payoffs. This introduction of simple mathematics makes the game-theoretic theory superior to the original Gricean theory. 92 Grice never defined the notion of communication and interpretation, but one can derive from his theory of meaning and conversation such notions (see above § 2.2.).

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utterance to a set of propositions – this is the meaning of the utterance-type – and g(ϕ) a game about ϕ, then: A communicates p to B by producing ϕ iff 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

A intends to convey p to B. A utters ϕ. (2) is common knowledge between A and B. B intends to interpret ϕ. B interprets ϕ. (5) is common knowledge between A and B. p ∈ m(ϕ). (7) is common knowledge between A and B. g(ϕ) has the unique solution 〈ϕ,p〉 for A and B.

The game g(ϕ) can, in principle, be any game, but it is necessary to assume, as it is standard in game theory, that the probabilities and the payoffs are common knowledge; this makes g(ϕ) and its solution common knowledge (Parikh 2000: 208, Fn. 26). Parikh defines communication in terms of a solution to a game. But there is a much simpler definition: The speaker communicates something to the hearer if and only if the hearer knows what the speaker means. What the speaker means is determined solely by the speaker’s intentions. The metaphysics of meaning is thus not affected by game theory. It is only in the process of understanding what is meant that game theory plays its decisive role.93 There are thus important differences between Grice’s and Parikh’s theory of understanding: In Parikh’s theory there is no reference to either the Cooperative Principle or the conversational maxims, and the problematic assumption that the speaker could not have made the utterance unless he meant q, which left several possibilities of interpretation of the utterance open, is abandoned. Instead, the understanding of the utterance is 93

One might worry that the game theory introduced in the epistemology of meaning has consequences for the metaphysics of meaning. Game theory does make more precise what the Cooperative Principle and the conversational maxims state. But this only constrains the formation of the M-intentions, it does not alter the definitions of the notions of what is meant, said and implicated, for in these definitions the Cooperative Principle and the maxims do not appear. The constraints on the formation of intentions are more important for the epistemology of meaning because the speaker just knows what he intends whereas the hearer has to find out.

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explained in game-theoretic terms. Parikh is right in claiming that game theory helps us to get a more precise picture of meaning; but it is not the metaphysical aspect of meaning that gets an essential refinement, it is the epistemological aspect. Game theory helps to better understand how what is meant is understood. Parikh’s definition of communication makes clear that there can be communication with signs having only natural meaning: The speaker is not required to intend the hearer to recognize his intention; instead, the speaker relies more generally on the meaning function m(ϕ) as the medium through which p is identified (Parikh 2000: 208). This function can be of any kind, as long as it is a function from the utterance-type to the utterance-type meaning. Parikh then derives from the definition of communication the definition of speaker meaning, what he calls “communicative meaning” (“meansC”) to distinguish it from “noncommunicative meaning” (2000: 210): A meansC p by producing ϕ iff there is an agent B such that 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

A intends to convey p to B. A utters ϕ. A believes that (2) is common knowledge between A and B. p ∈ m(ϕ). A believes that (4) is common knowledge between A and B. A believes that g(ϕ) has the unique solution 〈ϕ,p〉 for A and B.94

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There is also the corresponding notion of interpretation on the addressee’s side Parikh (2000: 210): B interpretsC ϕ as conveying p iff there is an agent A such that 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

A utters ϕ. B believes that (1) is common knowledge between A and B. B intends to interpret ϕ. B interprets ϕ. p ∈ m(ϕ). B believes that (5) is common knowledge between A and B. B believes that g(ϕ) has the unique solution 〈ϕ,p〉 for A and B.

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It is possible to define speaker meaning in this way to include both natural and non-natural meaning, but then one does not do justice to the intuition Grice had, namely that there is a fundamental difference between these two kinds of meaning. The second kind of meaning involves, according to Grice’s analysis, the intention of the recognition of the intention to achieve an effect in the audience. For example, if A were to leave a handkerchief of C to indicate to B that C had been around, something would be missing for communication to have taken place. The problem is not – as Parikh (2000: 190) seems to believe – that B may not be able to infer that A had intended to put the handkerchief there, but rather that B may infer what the handkerchief means without relying on the intentions of the speaker. Why does Parikh think that the recognition of the intention need not be intended by the speaker? He is not clear on this. At one point Parikh writes that it is not necessary for the speaker to intend the recognition of the intention because this recognition would logically follow from the assumption of rationality: since the hearer intends to interpret the utterance and he can only do this by figuring out the speaker’s preferences, he will have to infer his intentions (2000: 197). At another point Parikh writes that in cases where there is no ambiguity, no recognition of intention is involved, only recognition of the function m(ϕ) (2000: 208). Either it logically follows that the hearer infers the speaker’s intentions or it doesn’t. Considering Parikh’s aim of finding a very general model of communication, not taking account of Grice’s basic distinction between natural and non-natural meaning, Parikh’s second claim seems to be the more plausible interpretation. But even in the case of an ambiguous or underdeterminate utterance the first claim does not hold. It does not follow from the knowledge that the hearer knows the function m(ϕ) and the game g(ϕ) that he will use this knowledge to interpret the utterance; he might as well use different knowledge. For example, if the speaker says “The bank is over there” meaning that there is a financial institution over there, the hearer might arrive at this interpretation not by inferring the speaker’s intention, but by turning his eyes over there. This might be so even if the speaker has intended his utterance to be interpreted by recognition of his intention. This shows that the assumptions made by Parikh and Grice do not entail that the hearer in fact infers the speaker’s intentions. But whereas The notion of interpretation used in the definition only signifies B’s attempt to figure out what A’s utterance means, not the successful interpretation involving (1) through (7).

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Grice thinks it is necessary for someone to mean something that he intends that the hearer recognize his intention, Parikh thinks that this is not necessary. I do not think that there exists a definite solution that would make one or the other of these analyses the correct one. But the examples Grice gives in support of his analysis, including the one about the handkerchief, seem to show that we do have the intuition that, if the speaker does not intend the hearer to recognize his intention, something is missing for there to be a communicative act in the full sense. 2.4.5. How we understand what is meant The game-theoretic theory I advocate combines the basic ideas of the Gricean theory of understanding with the game of partial information developed by Parikh. The essential difference to the original Gricean theory is that the Principle of Cooperation is reduced to the desire to coordinate one’s actions with those of the other and that the maxims of conversation are reduced to knowledge of the solution of a game of partial information. The essential difference to Parikh’s new theory is that one of Grice’s basic insights is retained: the recognition of the intention of the speaker is a reason for the hearer to show the intended reaction by the speaker. The result is the following: In order to understand what is said by the speaker uttering x the hearer reasons as follows: (1) The speaker did something x which is an occurrence of an utterance type S, (2) there is no reason to suppose that he does not wish to coordinate his action with mine, (3) there is a game of partial information (4) for which the unique solution is that S means ‘*ψp’ in virtue of the particular meaning of the elements of S, their order, and their syntactical character and after disambiguation and the fixing of references and of standards of evaluation, (5) the speaker intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that *ψp, (6) all of (1) – (5) are common knowledge, (7) and so the speaker has said that *ψp.

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Is the game-theoretic theory an improvement on the Gricean theory in dealing with the differentiation problem? It is important to keep in mind that in many cases no differentiation problem arises because it would be irrational of the speaker to produce an utterance that he thinks cannot be understood by the hearer. It is also important to remember that the differentiation problem cannot in principle be solved because there will always remain a certain indeterminacy (see above § 2.2.4.). The question is whether the game-theoretic theory is an improvement on the Gricean theory, that is, whether it yields more correct results than the original Gricean theory. This question cannot be answered from the armchair. The answer will depend on how precisely the probabilities and payoffs can be determined. This is a Herculean task requiring the help of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, linguists and others. The philosophical task is only to set the framework. The framework is given by game theory. No other theory available delivers a more precise notion of rationality.

Conclusion I conclude by summarizing my claims. An important aim of my work has been to distinguish between the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of meaning. The metaphysics of meaning What is meant: To mean something is, following Grice (1969: 92 and 1968: 123), roughly, to have the intention to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention. Definition 1: “By uttering x U meant that *ψp” is true, if and only if, U uttered x intending (1) that A should think U to ψ that p and in some cases only, depending on the identification of *ψp, that A should, via the fulfillment of (i), himself ψ that p, (2) that A recognizes that U intends (1), and (3) that A fulfills (1) on the basis of his fulfillment of (2). What is said: To say something is, again following Grice (1989: 87), roughly, to use a sign to mean with it what its type means. Contrary to Grice’s view, conventional implicatures do not exist; but in order to distinguish first-order and second-order speech acts, the notion of “primarily said” needs to be introduced. In order to account for semantic underdetermination, an utterance type only expresses a proposition after the sentence is disambiguated and the references and standards of evaluation have been fixed. The Gricean notion thus needs to be extended to include these kinds of context sensitivity. If force is pragmatic, then so is the notion of what is said. Definition 2: “By uttering x U primarily said that *ψp” is true, if and only if, U uttered x (1) by which U primarily meant that *ψp

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(2) which is an occurrence of an utterance type S which means ‘*ψp’ in some linguistic system after disambiguation and the fixing of references and of standards of evaluation, and (3) U believes (2). What is implicated: To implicate something is, again following Grice (1967: 30-31), roughly, to mean something else of or above of what one says. Definition 3: “U, who by uttering x has primarily said that *ψp, has implicated that *ϕq” is true, if and only if, for some audience A, U did something x by which U has primarily said that *ψp and means that *ϕq. The epistemology of meaning Understanding what is meant: To understand what is meant is to know the M-intention with which the utterance was produced. How we understand what is meant: The hearer understands what is meant by reasoning what would have been rational for the speaker to have said. This procedure of understanding is described most precisely by using game theory, in particular the game of partial information introduced by Parikh. But Parikh’s model should not be taken as defining new notions of what is meant, said and implicated; it is useful for modeling the process of understanding what is said. In order to understand what is said by the speaker uttering x the hearer reasons as follows: (1) The speaker did something x which is an occurrence of an utterance type S, (2) there is no reason to suppose that he does not wish to coordinate his action with mine, (3) there is a game of partial information (4) for which the unique solution is that S means ‘*ψp’ in virtue of the particular meaning of the elements of S, their order, and their

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syntactical character and after disambiguation and the fixing of references and of standards of evaluation, (5) the speaker intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that *ψp, (6) all of (1) – (5) are common knowledge, (7) and so the speaker has said that *ψp.

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Index of names Austin, J. L. 15 Bach, K. 13, 20, 26-29, 33, 36, 37, 38, 48, 60, 61, 66, 68, 70-75 Bar-Hillel, Y. 32, 66 Bezuidenhout, A. 36 Borg, E. 47, 74 Burge, T. 12 Cappelen, H. 41, 46-51, 74-75 Carnap, R. 63, 64, 66 Carston, R. 39, 40, 55, 57, 58 Chomsky, N. 66 Cohen, J. 57

Lewis, D. 13, 14, 119, 122-124, 125 Montague, R. 66 Moravcsik, J. 11, 41 Morris, C. 62-65, 68, 69 Neale, S. 7, 36, 38, 39, 53, 76, 87, 89, 90 Neumann, J. von 120 Parikh, P. 76, 119, 120, 124-131, 134 Perry, J. 32, 34 Quine, W.V.O. 35, 39

Davidson, D. 11, 12, 14, 68, 69, 96, 120 Davis, W. 76, 77, 90, 101 Frege, G. 19, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29 García-Carpintero, M. 56, 61 Gazdar, G. 66, 67, 68 Grice, H. P. passim Hare, R. M. 24, 25 Harnish, R. 36, 73, 101 Kaplan, D. 32, 33, 44 Kasher, A. 78 Katz, J. 66, 67 Lepore, E. 41, 46-51, 74-75 Levinson, S. 32, 47, 55, 60, 65, 66, 68, 76, 80, 81, 90-91, 101, 116, 117, 118

Ramsey, F. 120 Recanati, F. 38, 39, 41-47, 48, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59-61, 70 Reichenbach, H. 32, 35, 64, 66 Rooij, R. van 78, 119 Russell, B. 20, 32, 64, 66 Saul, J. 76, 83, 84-90 Schiffer, S. 11, 15, 23, 127 Searle, J. R. 11, 30, 39, 41-47 Sellars, W. 35, 39 Shannon, C. E. 94-95 Sperber, D. 39, 52, 54, 58, 70, 78, 79, 81, 93, 101, 105-119 Stalnaker, R. 76, 119, 121, 124 Strawson, P. F. 11, 127 Tarski, A. 64, 68 Travis, C. 39, 41-47

148

Weaver, W. 94-97, 104 Wharton, T. 22, 23, 24

Wilson, D. 39, 52, 54, 58, 67, 70, 78, 79, 81, 93, 101, 105-1119 Wittgenstein, L. 12, 33, 39