Thursday, January 31, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Grice: The Deep Berths of Language
Speranza
See how high the seas of language run here!
But the waves subside soon enough. -- cited by Dummett, "The Seas of Language". Cfr. Kripke, "the seas of language" in "Naming and Necessity".
(Courtesy of R. Paul).
Witters, P. I.
194.
"When does one have the thought: the possible movements of
a machine are already there in it in some mysterious way?"
"Well, when one is doing philosophy."
"And what leads us into thinking that?"
"The kind of way in which we talk about machines."
"We say, for example,
that a machine has (possesses) such-and-such possibilities of movement."
"We speak of the ideally rigid machine which can only move in
such-and-such a way."
"What is this possibility of movement?"
"It is
not the movement., but it does not seem to be the mere physical conditions
for moving either—as, that there is play between socket and pin,
the pin not fitting too tight in the socket."
"For while this is the empirical
condition for movement, one could also imagine it to be otherwise."
The possibility of a movement is, rather, supposed to be like a shadow
of the movement itself.
But do you know of such a shadow?
And
by a shadow I do not mean some picture of the movement—for such a
picture would not have to be a picture of just this movement.
But the
possibility of this movement must be the possibility of just this
movement.
See how high the seas of language run here!
The waves subside as soon as we ask ourselves.
How do we use the phrase "possibility of movement" when we are talking about a
given machine?
But then where did our queer ideas come from?
Well, I show you the possibility of a movement, say by means of a
picture of the movement: 'so possibility is something which is like
reality'.
We say: "It isn't moving yet, but it already has the possibility
of moving"——'so possibility is something very near reality'.
Though
we may doubt whether such-and-such physical conditions make this
movement possible, we never discuss whether this is the possibility
of this or of that movement: 'so the possibility of the movement
stands in a unique relation to the movement itself; closer than that of a
picture to its subject'; for it can be doubted whether a picture is the
picture of this thing or that.
We say "Experience will show whether
this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not say
"Experience will shew whether this is the possibility of this movement":
'so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility
of precisely this movement'.
We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these
things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them.
When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who
hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on
them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.
See how high the seas of language run here!
But the waves subside soon enough. -- cited by Dummett, "The Seas of Language". Cfr. Kripke, "the seas of language" in "Naming and Necessity".
(Courtesy of R. Paul).
Witters, P. I.
194.
"When does one have the thought: the possible movements of
a machine are already there in it in some mysterious way?"
"Well, when one is doing philosophy."
"And what leads us into thinking that?"
"The kind of way in which we talk about machines."
"We say, for example,
that a machine has (possesses) such-and-such possibilities of movement."
"We speak of the ideally rigid machine which can only move in
such-and-such a way."
"What is this possibility of movement?"
"It is
not the movement., but it does not seem to be the mere physical conditions
for moving either—as, that there is play between socket and pin,
the pin not fitting too tight in the socket."
"For while this is the empirical
condition for movement, one could also imagine it to be otherwise."
The possibility of a movement is, rather, supposed to be like a shadow
of the movement itself.
But do you know of such a shadow?
And
by a shadow I do not mean some picture of the movement—for such a
picture would not have to be a picture of just this movement.
But the
possibility of this movement must be the possibility of just this
movement.
See how high the seas of language run here!
The waves subside as soon as we ask ourselves.
How do we use the phrase "possibility of movement" when we are talking about a
given machine?
But then where did our queer ideas come from?
Well, I show you the possibility of a movement, say by means of a
picture of the movement: 'so possibility is something which is like
reality'.
We say: "It isn't moving yet, but it already has the possibility
of moving"——'so possibility is something very near reality'.
Though
we may doubt whether such-and-such physical conditions make this
movement possible, we never discuss whether this is the possibility
of this or of that movement: 'so the possibility of the movement
stands in a unique relation to the movement itself; closer than that of a
picture to its subject'; for it can be doubted whether a picture is the
picture of this thing or that.
We say "Experience will show whether
this gives the pin this possibility of movement", but we do not say
"Experience will shew whether this is the possibility of this movement":
'so it is not an empirical fact that this possibility is the possibility
of precisely this movement'.
We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these
things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them.
When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who
hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on
them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.
Grice Now ---- palaeo-Griceanism and beyond
Speranza
To mark "Philosophy Now’"s 21st Birthday, we posted a questionnaire on various e-mail lists read by academic philosophers (where the reference to "Hekademos" is indirect), asking which thinkers (or philosophers), trends and books they regarded as the most interesting or important, or both.
This isn’t because we’ve suddenly decided that only the opinions of professional (as opposed to amateur, or gentlemanly) philosophers matter.
We just thought all our readers might be interested in the results.
--- where "all" is to be read _substitutionally_. Cfr. "Some of our readers would be at least interested in many of the results."
The 75 respondents were self-selecting.
57 were academics
12 graduate students and
6 ‘others’.
-- In Latin, 'alteri'.
Just under a third (24) were female.
Most respondents were from the British English-speaking countries and regions (including, but not excluding England) though there were a few each from Germany and Brazil -- where English is she not speek.
******************************************************************************
A)
Please name the five historical (i.e. dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
PHILOSOPHER TOTAL VOTES
Aristotle -- Greek philosopher -- 44
Immanuel Kant -- German philosopher -- 37 -- Grice would have voted Ariskant/Kantotle
Plato -- Greek philosopher -- 31
David Hume -- Scots philosopher -- originally spelt "Home" 26
Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Austrian philosopher of Jewish descent -- 25
René Descartes Renatus Cartesius -- European philosopher -- 15
G.W.F. Hegel -- German philosopher -- 12
Friedrich Nietzsche -- German philsopher, friend of opera composer Richard Wagner -- 11
Bertrand Russell -- Welsh philosopher and aristocrat 10 -- cfr. Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"
Michel Foucault -- French philosopher -- 8
Gottlob Frege -- German philosopher -- 8
Willard van Orman Quine -- American philosopher of Manx descent -- 8
Martin Heidegger -- German philosopher 7
Simone de Beauvoir -- French philosopheress -- 6
Baruch Spinoza -- Jewish European philosopher -- 6
David Kellogg Lewis -- American philosopher of Scots descent -- 5
Thomas Hobbes -- my favourite English philosopher EVER -- 5
Edmund Husserl -- German philosohper -- 5
John Rawls -- American philosopher of Irish descent -- 5
Socrates -- teacher of Aristotle's teacher -- 5
John Locke -- my favourite English philosopher ever -- mostly influential in Oxford: The John Locke Lectures 4
Karl Marx -- German philosopher -- 4
Elizabeth Anscombe -- English philosopheress, married to Prof. Geach -- 3
Thomas Aquinas -- my favourite Italian philosopher -- 3
John Stuart Mill -- English philosopher almost, his father was a Scot. 3
G.W. Leibniz -- German philsopher -- 3
Wilfrid Sellars -- American philosopher -- 3
Bernard Williams -- London-born philosopher of Welsh descent -- Oxford educated. 3
Confucius non-Western "philosopher" 3
Chrysippus -- Greek philosopher -- 2
Cicero -- my favourite Roman philosopher EVER -- he was murdered -- 2
George Berkeley-- my favourite Irish philosopher and name of Grice's uni in California -- 2
Michael Dummett -- London-born philosopher, critical of Grice's Play Group 2
Epicurus -- Greek philosopher -- cfr. Walter Pater, "Marius The Epicurean" 2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- French philosopher of perception" 2
Thomas Reid -- Scots philosopher -- 2
Jean-Paul Sartre -- French philosopher -- 2
Schopenhauer -- German philosopher -- 2
Xunzi (Hsun Tzu) -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Zhuangzi -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Iris Marion Young 2
******************************************
In addition to those listed, 34 other historical philosophers received one vote each.
Aristotle came top, with Kant dramatically beating Plato to second place (though if Socrates’s votes are added to those for Plato, it would be a close thing).
David Hume, whose reputation has fallen and risen dramatically since his death, came 4th.
The subject of this issue, Friedrich Nietzsche, came 8th.
Fifty years ago he was often seen as a proto-Nazi, and twenty one years ago he was still dismissed by many philosophers as "more a poet than a philosopher" and as "more of a philosopher than a poet" by many poets.
*******************************************************************************
B) Please name the five living (i.e. non-dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important, and not just because they gave you a good grade in the course you took with them.
An astonishingly high total of 178 different living philosophers were named altogether, 45 of them women.
The philosophers mentioned most often were:
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Saul Kripke -- American philosopher of Jewish descent -- 14
David Chalmers -- Australian philosopher -- 11
Timothy Williamson -- British philosopher, Stockholm-born, Wykeham prof. logic, Oxford 10
Daniel C. Dennett -- American philosopher, Oxford educated at All Souls -- 8
Hilary Putnam -- American philosopher of Puritan pedigree -- 8
Judith Butler -- American philosopheress -- 8
Jürgen Habermas -- German philosopher 8
Derek Parfit -- Oxford philosopher 7
Graham Priest -- Scottish philosopher -- 6
Martha Nussbaum -- American philosopheress -- 6
Alvin Plantinga -- American philosopher 5
Ian Hacking -- Canadian philosopher, married to Grice's collaborator, Judith Baker -- 5
John McDowell -- English philosopher, Oxford educated -- 5
John Searle -- American philosopher, Oxford-educated (tutor: Strawson) 5
Linda Martin Alcoff 5
Thomas Nagel -- a student of Grice's at St. John's, Oxford -- 5
***********************************************************************************
C) Please name the rising star among younger philosophers (under 40) who you consider the most worth watching.
A small number of philosophers were OUTRAGED (if that's the word) by us even asking this question, fearing that it would feed into a tendency towards ‘ranking’ young academics.
However, although 52 philosophers were mentioned in the responses to this question, nearly all of them were named only once each, which would make any kind of ranking entirely meaningless anyway.
They included thirteen women philosophers.
Only two philosophers were mentioned even FOUR times each.
They were the logician Dr Rachael Briggs and Prof. Mark Schroeder, who works mainly in meta-ethics.
Interestingly, both have published papers in recent years which have later been collected in
"The Philosopher’ Annual"
(This is a publication a bit like The Beano Annual, except that it contains what its editors judge to have been the ten best philosophy papers of the year just past.)
**************************************************************************
D) Other than palaeo-Griceanism, what current philosophical movement, tendency or approach do you consider to be the most interesting?
There was an extremely wide scattering of answers, with none being mentioned by more than two or three respondents.
One or two people said they expected the answers to this question to be dominated by experimental philosophy, as being the most visible current trend.
However, this was not the case.
The results suggested instead an astonishing variety of approaches in current philosophy.
Answers included, in alphabetical list:
analytical philosophy
anti-realism;
anti-theory in ethics
applied epistemology
applied ontology
attempts to move beyond the analytic/continental divide
Australian realism
Buddhist ethics
causal modelling approach
Chinese philosophy
communism as defined by Badiou
Confucian virtue ethics
Constitutivism (in the theory of reasons and agency)
contemporary continental political philosophy
contemporary naturalism
debate about practical reasoning and rationality
definite description approach
dialethism and more generally paraconsistency in logic
disability studies
disjunctivism
dispositional essentialism
distributed cognition and extended mind
dynamic strict conditional approach
----
E
----
enactivism
experimental philosophy
---
F
----
feminist epistemology
feminist philosophy
formal epistemology
the Frankfurt School
---
G
---
genetic epistemology
grounding/fundamentality in metaphysics
Hegelian idealism
hermeneutic philosophy of science
indirect realist theories of perception
intersectionality
intentionalism
knowledge-first epistemology;
liberal naturalism in the philosophy of mind (i.e. panpsychism)
modal rationalism
moral psychology
narrative identity
naturalism
new materialisms;
new realism
non-ideal ethical theory
non-Western philosophy
normative dimensions of epistemology
phenomenology in relation to democracy
philosophers interacting with cognitive scientists
philosophy of management where it relates to continental philosophy
philosophy of music -- especially OPERA
philosophy of social and science policy
philosophy of technology
postcolonial (decolonizing) theory;
post-Lacanian readings of contingency and fate
pragmatism
promiscuous realism in philosophy of science
non-positivist analytic philosophy
social epistemology and feminist epistemology
studying and naming philosophical methodology
the (revived) attempt to ground normative judgments in emotional responses
the combination of ecological approaches and phenomenology in the philosophy of mind
the new dualism in philosophy of mind
the various critical replies to experimental philosophy
virtue ethics.
**********************************************************************
E) Which two areas of philosophy (i.e. ‘Philosophy of X’) do you consider to be the most active at the present time?
AREA OF PHILOSOPHY TOTAL VOTES
Philosophy of Mind -- or "Philosophical Psychology", as Grice corrected it -- 20
Epistemology 10
Metaphysics -- including Eschatology, alla Grice 8
Ethics -- or Moralia7
Metaethics -- alla R. M. Hare 6
Philosophy of Cognitive Science 6
Philosophy of Science -- alla Popper 5
Experimental Philosophy 4
Philosophies of Gender and Race 4
Applied Ethics 3
Marxism (Eastern and Western) 3
Philosophy of Perception -- alla Grice, "Causal Theory of Perception" 3
Philosophy of Psychology 3
Ecological Philosophy 3
There were many other areas of philosophy which received just one or two votes.
*****************************************************************
F) What is the most interesting (not necessarily the most expensive) philosophy book published in the last five years in a language that you understand?
*****************************************************************
Sixty one books were recommended, but no book was recommended more than once except for Derek Parfit’s recent blockbuster
"On What Matters", which was named four times.
Parfit’s masterly synthesis of leading ethical theories circulated in photocopied form for several years before finally being published, with commentaries by four other moral philosophers, in 2011. (It was reviewed in Philosophy Now Issue 87.)
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the survey.
You're welcome!
Cheers
David Chalmers
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher of mind perhaps most famous for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The problem is not in explaining how we can detect and respond to the world (mindless robots can do that), but explaining how what might generally be called our experiences (or ‘phenomena’), can be produced through the activity of the brain. Chalmers has argued that since zombies (i.e., mindless but animate human bodies and brains) are conceivable, there must be a conceptual distinction between brains and experienced phenomena, meaning that experiences are not just physical things.
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke is an American philosopher from Princeton who is known for focusing on an analysis of language and on modal logic, which is concerned with how to talk about possible worlds. For instance, his 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that names are ‘rigid designators’ and refer to the same thing in all possible worlds, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon’ would refer to the same man whether or not he had become President. Kripke also makes the point that different names for the same thing can highlight how the way we refer to something can affect the truth of propositions about that thing, e.g. it’s true that Mary Jane knows that Peter Parker is Peter Parker, and that Spiderman is Spiderman, but it’s not true that she knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman.
To mark "Philosophy Now’"s 21st Birthday, we posted a questionnaire on various e-mail lists read by academic philosophers (where the reference to "Hekademos" is indirect), asking which thinkers (or philosophers), trends and books they regarded as the most interesting or important, or both.
This isn’t because we’ve suddenly decided that only the opinions of professional (as opposed to amateur, or gentlemanly) philosophers matter.
We just thought all our readers might be interested in the results.
--- where "all" is to be read _substitutionally_. Cfr. "Some of our readers would be at least interested in many of the results."
The 75 respondents were self-selecting.
57 were academics
12 graduate students and
6 ‘others’.
-- In Latin, 'alteri'.
Just under a third (24) were female.
Most respondents were from the British English-speaking countries and regions (including, but not excluding England) though there were a few each from Germany and Brazil -- where English is she not speek.
******************************************************************************
A)
Please name the five historical (i.e. dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
PHILOSOPHER TOTAL VOTES
Aristotle -- Greek philosopher -- 44
Immanuel Kant -- German philosopher -- 37 -- Grice would have voted Ariskant/Kantotle
Plato -- Greek philosopher -- 31
David Hume -- Scots philosopher -- originally spelt "Home" 26
Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Austrian philosopher of Jewish descent -- 25
René Descartes Renatus Cartesius -- European philosopher -- 15
G.W.F. Hegel -- German philosopher -- 12
Friedrich Nietzsche -- German philsopher, friend of opera composer Richard Wagner -- 11
Bertrand Russell -- Welsh philosopher and aristocrat 10 -- cfr. Grice, "Definite descriptions in Russell and in the vernacular"
Michel Foucault -- French philosopher -- 8
Gottlob Frege -- German philosopher -- 8
Willard van Orman Quine -- American philosopher of Manx descent -- 8
Martin Heidegger -- German philosopher 7
Simone de Beauvoir -- French philosopheress -- 6
Baruch Spinoza -- Jewish European philosopher -- 6
David Kellogg Lewis -- American philosopher of Scots descent -- 5
Thomas Hobbes -- my favourite English philosopher EVER -- 5
Edmund Husserl -- German philosohper -- 5
John Rawls -- American philosopher of Irish descent -- 5
Socrates -- teacher of Aristotle's teacher -- 5
John Locke -- my favourite English philosopher ever -- mostly influential in Oxford: The John Locke Lectures 4
Karl Marx -- German philosopher -- 4
Elizabeth Anscombe -- English philosopheress, married to Prof. Geach -- 3
Thomas Aquinas -- my favourite Italian philosopher -- 3
John Stuart Mill -- English philosopher almost, his father was a Scot. 3
G.W. Leibniz -- German philsopher -- 3
Wilfrid Sellars -- American philosopher -- 3
Bernard Williams -- London-born philosopher of Welsh descent -- Oxford educated. 3
Confucius non-Western "philosopher" 3
Chrysippus -- Greek philosopher -- 2
Cicero -- my favourite Roman philosopher EVER -- he was murdered -- 2
George Berkeley-- my favourite Irish philosopher and name of Grice's uni in California -- 2
Michael Dummett -- London-born philosopher, critical of Grice's Play Group 2
Epicurus -- Greek philosopher -- cfr. Walter Pater, "Marius The Epicurean" 2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- French philosopher of perception" 2
Thomas Reid -- Scots philosopher -- 2
Jean-Paul Sartre -- French philosopher -- 2
Schopenhauer -- German philosopher -- 2
Xunzi (Hsun Tzu) -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Zhuangzi -- non-Western "philosopher" 2
Iris Marion Young 2
******************************************
In addition to those listed, 34 other historical philosophers received one vote each.
Aristotle came top, with Kant dramatically beating Plato to second place (though if Socrates’s votes are added to those for Plato, it would be a close thing).
David Hume, whose reputation has fallen and risen dramatically since his death, came 4th.
The subject of this issue, Friedrich Nietzsche, came 8th.
Fifty years ago he was often seen as a proto-Nazi, and twenty one years ago he was still dismissed by many philosophers as "more a poet than a philosopher" and as "more of a philosopher than a poet" by many poets.
*******************************************************************************
B) Please name the five living (i.e. non-dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important, and not just because they gave you a good grade in the course you took with them.
An astonishingly high total of 178 different living philosophers were named altogether, 45 of them women.
The philosophers mentioned most often were:
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Saul Kripke -- American philosopher of Jewish descent -- 14
David Chalmers -- Australian philosopher -- 11
Timothy Williamson -- British philosopher, Stockholm-born, Wykeham prof. logic, Oxford 10
Daniel C. Dennett -- American philosopher, Oxford educated at All Souls -- 8
Hilary Putnam -- American philosopher of Puritan pedigree -- 8
Judith Butler -- American philosopheress -- 8
Jürgen Habermas -- German philosopher 8
Derek Parfit -- Oxford philosopher 7
Graham Priest -- Scottish philosopher -- 6
Martha Nussbaum -- American philosopheress -- 6
Alvin Plantinga -- American philosopher 5
Ian Hacking -- Canadian philosopher, married to Grice's collaborator, Judith Baker -- 5
John McDowell -- English philosopher, Oxford educated -- 5
John Searle -- American philosopher, Oxford-educated (tutor: Strawson) 5
Linda Martin Alcoff 5
Thomas Nagel -- a student of Grice's at St. John's, Oxford -- 5
***********************************************************************************
C) Please name the rising star among younger philosophers (under 40) who you consider the most worth watching.
A small number of philosophers were OUTRAGED (if that's the word) by us even asking this question, fearing that it would feed into a tendency towards ‘ranking’ young academics.
However, although 52 philosophers were mentioned in the responses to this question, nearly all of them were named only once each, which would make any kind of ranking entirely meaningless anyway.
They included thirteen women philosophers.
Only two philosophers were mentioned even FOUR times each.
They were the logician Dr Rachael Briggs and Prof. Mark Schroeder, who works mainly in meta-ethics.
Interestingly, both have published papers in recent years which have later been collected in
"The Philosopher’ Annual"
(This is a publication a bit like The Beano Annual, except that it contains what its editors judge to have been the ten best philosophy papers of the year just past.)
**************************************************************************
D) Other than palaeo-Griceanism, what current philosophical movement, tendency or approach do you consider to be the most interesting?
There was an extremely wide scattering of answers, with none being mentioned by more than two or three respondents.
One or two people said they expected the answers to this question to be dominated by experimental philosophy, as being the most visible current trend.
However, this was not the case.
The results suggested instead an astonishing variety of approaches in current philosophy.
Answers included, in alphabetical list:
analytical philosophy
anti-realism;
anti-theory in ethics
applied epistemology
applied ontology
attempts to move beyond the analytic/continental divide
Australian realism
Buddhist ethics
causal modelling approach
Chinese philosophy
communism as defined by Badiou
Confucian virtue ethics
Constitutivism (in the theory of reasons and agency)
contemporary continental political philosophy
contemporary naturalism
debate about practical reasoning and rationality
definite description approach
dialethism and more generally paraconsistency in logic
disability studies
disjunctivism
dispositional essentialism
distributed cognition and extended mind
dynamic strict conditional approach
----
E
----
enactivism
experimental philosophy
---
F
----
feminist epistemology
feminist philosophy
formal epistemology
the Frankfurt School
---
G
---
genetic epistemology
grounding/fundamentality in metaphysics
Hegelian idealism
hermeneutic philosophy of science
indirect realist theories of perception
intersectionality
intentionalism
knowledge-first epistemology;
liberal naturalism in the philosophy of mind (i.e. panpsychism)
modal rationalism
moral psychology
narrative identity
naturalism
new materialisms;
new realism
non-ideal ethical theory
non-Western philosophy
normative dimensions of epistemology
phenomenology in relation to democracy
philosophers interacting with cognitive scientists
philosophy of management where it relates to continental philosophy
philosophy of music -- especially OPERA
philosophy of social and science policy
philosophy of technology
postcolonial (decolonizing) theory;
post-Lacanian readings of contingency and fate
pragmatism
promiscuous realism in philosophy of science
non-positivist analytic philosophy
social epistemology and feminist epistemology
studying and naming philosophical methodology
the (revived) attempt to ground normative judgments in emotional responses
the combination of ecological approaches and phenomenology in the philosophy of mind
the new dualism in philosophy of mind
the various critical replies to experimental philosophy
virtue ethics.
**********************************************************************
E) Which two areas of philosophy (i.e. ‘Philosophy of X’) do you consider to be the most active at the present time?
AREA OF PHILOSOPHY TOTAL VOTES
Philosophy of Mind -- or "Philosophical Psychology", as Grice corrected it -- 20
Epistemology 10
Metaphysics -- including Eschatology, alla Grice 8
Ethics -- or Moralia7
Metaethics -- alla R. M. Hare 6
Philosophy of Cognitive Science 6
Philosophy of Science -- alla Popper 5
Experimental Philosophy 4
Philosophies of Gender and Race 4
Applied Ethics 3
Marxism (Eastern and Western) 3
Philosophy of Perception -- alla Grice, "Causal Theory of Perception" 3
Philosophy of Psychology 3
Ecological Philosophy 3
There were many other areas of philosophy which received just one or two votes.
*****************************************************************
F) What is the most interesting (not necessarily the most expensive) philosophy book published in the last five years in a language that you understand?
*****************************************************************
Sixty one books were recommended, but no book was recommended more than once except for Derek Parfit’s recent blockbuster
"On What Matters", which was named four times.
Parfit’s masterly synthesis of leading ethical theories circulated in photocopied form for several years before finally being published, with commentaries by four other moral philosophers, in 2011. (It was reviewed in Philosophy Now Issue 87.)
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the survey.
You're welcome!
Cheers
David Chalmers
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher of mind perhaps most famous for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The problem is not in explaining how we can detect and respond to the world (mindless robots can do that), but explaining how what might generally be called our experiences (or ‘phenomena’), can be produced through the activity of the brain. Chalmers has argued that since zombies (i.e., mindless but animate human bodies and brains) are conceivable, there must be a conceptual distinction between brains and experienced phenomena, meaning that experiences are not just physical things.
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke is an American philosopher from Princeton who is known for focusing on an analysis of language and on modal logic, which is concerned with how to talk about possible worlds. For instance, his 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that names are ‘rigid designators’ and refer to the same thing in all possible worlds, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon’ would refer to the same man whether or not he had become President. Kripke also makes the point that different names for the same thing can highlight how the way we refer to something can affect the truth of propositions about that thing, e.g. it’s true that Mary Jane knows that Peter Parker is Peter Parker, and that Spiderman is Spiderman, but it’s not true that she knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman.
Grice Now
Speranza
To mark Philosophy Now’s 21st Birthday, we posted a questionnaire on various email lists read by academic philosophers, asking which thinkers, trends and books they regarded as the most interesting or important. This isn’t because we’ve suddenly decided that only the opinions of professional philosophers matter! We just thought all our readers might be interested in the results. The 75 respondents were self-selecting. 57 were academics, 12 graduate students and 6 ‘others’. Just under a third (24) were female. Most respondents were from the English-speaking countries though there were a few each from Germany and Brazil.
A) Please name the five historical (i.e. dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Aristotle44
Immanuel Kant37
Plato31
David Hume26
Ludwig Wittgenstein25
René Descartes15
G.W.F. Hegel12
Friedrich Nietzsche11
Bertrand Russell10
Michel Foucault8
Gottlob Frege8
Willard van Orman Quine8
Martin Heidegger7
Simone de Beauvoir6
Baruch Spinoza6
David Lewis5
Thomas Hobbes5
Edmund Husserl5
John Rawls5
Socrates5
John Locke4
Karl Marx4
Elizabeth Anscombe3
Thomas Aquinas3
John Stuart Mill3
G.W. Leibniz3
Wilfrid Sellars3
Bernard Williams3
Confucius3
Chrysippus2
Cicero2
George Berkeley2
Michael Dummett2
Epicurus2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty2
Thomas Reid2
Jean-Paul Sartre2
Schopenhauer2
Xunzi (Hsun Tzu)2
Zhuangzi2
Iris Marion Young2
In addition to those listed, 34 other historical philosophers received one vote each. Aristotle came top, with Kant dramatically beating Plato to second place (though if Socrates’s votes are added to those for Plato, it would be a close thing!) David Hume, whose reputation has fallen and risen dramatically since his death, came 4th. The subject of this issue, Friedrich Nietzsche, came 8th. Fifty years ago he was often seen as a proto-Nazi, and twenty one years ago he was still dismissed by many philosophers as “more a poet than a philosopher.”
B) Please name the five living philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
An astonishingly high total of 178 different living philosophers were named altogether, 45 of them women. The philosophers mentioned most often were:
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Saul Kripke14
David Chalmers11
Timothy Williamson10
Daniel C. Dennett8
Hilary Putnam8
Judith Butler8
Jürgen Habermas8
Derek Parfit7
Graham Priest6
Martha Nussbaum6
Alvin Plantinga5
Ian Hacking5
John McDowell5
John Searle5
Linda Martin Alcoff5
Thomas Nagel5
C) Please name the rising star among younger philosophers (under 40) who you consider the most worth watching.
A small number of philosophers were outraged by us even asking this question, fearing that it would feed into a tendency towards ‘ranking’ young academics. However, although 52 philosophers were mentioned in the responses to this question, nearly all of them were named only once each, which would make any kind of ranking entirely meaningless anyway. They included thirteen women philosophers. Only two philosophers were mentioned even four times each: they were the logician Dr Rachael Briggs and Professor Mark Schroeder, who works mainly in meta-ethics. Interestingly, both have published papers in recent years which have later been collected in The Philosopher’ Annual. (This is a publication a bit like The Beano Annual, except that it contains what its editors judge to have been the ten best philosophy papers of the year just past.)
D) What current philosophical movement, tendency or approach do you consider to be the most interesting?
There was an extremely wide scattering of answers, with none being mentioned by more than two or three respondents. One or two people said they expected the answers to this question to be dominated by experimental philosophy, as being the most visible current trend. However, this was not the case. The results suggested instead an astonishing variety of approaches in current philosophy. Answers included:
Analytical philosophy; anti-realism; anti-theory in ethics; applied epistemology; applied ontology; attempts to move beyond the analytic/continental divide; Australian realism; Buddhist ethics; causal modelling approach; Chinese philosophy; communism as defined by Badiou; Confucian virtue ethics; constitutivism (in the theory of reasons and agency); contemporary continental political philosophy; contemporary naturalism; debate about practical reasoning and rationality; definite description approach; dialethism and more generally paraconsistency in logic; disability studies; disjunctivism; dispositional essentialism; distributed cognition and extended mind; dynamic strict conditional approach; enactivism; experimental philosophy; feminist epistemology; feminist philosophy; formal epistemology; the Frankfurt School; genetic epistemology; grounding/fundamentality in metaphysics; Hegelian idealism; hermeneutic philosophy of science; indirect realist theories of perception; intersectionality; intentionalism; knowledge-first epistemology; liberal naturalism in the philosophy of mind (i.e. panpsychism); modal rationalism; moral psychology; narrative identity; naturalism; new materialisms; new realism; non-ideal ethical theory; non-Western philosophy; normative dimensions of epistemology; phenomenology in relation to democracy; philosophers interacting with cognitive scientists; philosophy of management where it relates to continental philosophy; philosophy of music; philosophy of social and science policy; philosophy of technology; postcolonial (decolonizing) theory; post-Lacanian readings of contingency and fate; pragmatism; promiscuous realism in philosophy of science; non-positivist analytic philosophy; social epistemology and feminist epistemology; studying and naming philosophical methodology; the (revived) attempt to ground normative judgments in emotional responses; the combination of ecological approaches and phenomenology in the philosophy of mind; the new dualism in philosophy of mind; the various critical replies to experimental philosophy; virtue ethics.
E) Which two areas of philosophy (i.e. ‘Philosophy of X’) do you consider to be the most active at the present time?
AREA OF PHILOSOPHYTOTAL VOTES
Philosophy of Mind20
Epistemology10
Metaphysics8
Ethics7
Metaethics6
Philosophy of Cognitive Science6
Philosophy of Science5
Experimental Philosophy4
Philosophies of Gender and Race4
Applied Ethics3
Marxism (Eastern and Western)3
Philosophy of Perception3
Philosophy of Psychology3
Ecological Philosophy3
There were many other areas of philosophy which received just one or two votes.
F) What is the most interesting philosophy book published in the last five years?
Sixty one books were recommended, but no book was recommended more than once except for Derek Parfit’s recent blockbuster On What Matters, which was named four times. Parfit’s masterly synthesis of leading ethical theories circulated in photocopied form for several years before finally being published, with commentaries by four other moral philosophers, in 2011. (It was reviewed in Philosophy Now Issue 87.)
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the survey!
David Chalmers
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher of mind perhaps most famous for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The problem is not in explaining how we can detect and respond to the world (mindless robots can do that), but explaining how what might generally be called our experiences (or ‘phenomena’), can be produced through the activity of the brain. Chalmers has argued that since zombies (i.e., mindless but animate human bodies and brains) are conceivable, there must be a conceptual distinction between brains and experienced phenomena, meaning that experiences are not just physical things.
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke is an American philosopher from Princeton who is known for focusing on an analysis of language and on modal logic, which is concerned with how to talk about possible worlds. For instance, his 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that names are ‘rigid designators’ and refer to the same thing in all possible worlds, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon’ would refer to the same man whether or not he had become President. Kripke also makes the point that different names for the same thing can highlight how the way we refer to something can affect the truth of propositions about that thing, e.g. it’s true that Mary Jane knows that Peter Parker is Peter Parker, and that Spiderman is Spiderman, but it’s not true that she knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman.
To mark Philosophy Now’s 21st Birthday, we posted a questionnaire on various email lists read by academic philosophers, asking which thinkers, trends and books they regarded as the most interesting or important. This isn’t because we’ve suddenly decided that only the opinions of professional philosophers matter! We just thought all our readers might be interested in the results. The 75 respondents were self-selecting. 57 were academics, 12 graduate students and 6 ‘others’. Just under a third (24) were female. Most respondents were from the English-speaking countries though there were a few each from Germany and Brazil.
A) Please name the five historical (i.e. dead) philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Aristotle44
Immanuel Kant37
Plato31
David Hume26
Ludwig Wittgenstein25
René Descartes15
G.W.F. Hegel12
Friedrich Nietzsche11
Bertrand Russell10
Michel Foucault8
Gottlob Frege8
Willard van Orman Quine8
Martin Heidegger7
Simone de Beauvoir6
Baruch Spinoza6
David Lewis5
Thomas Hobbes5
Edmund Husserl5
John Rawls5
Socrates5
John Locke4
Karl Marx4
Elizabeth Anscombe3
Thomas Aquinas3
John Stuart Mill3
G.W. Leibniz3
Wilfrid Sellars3
Bernard Williams3
Confucius3
Chrysippus2
Cicero2
George Berkeley2
Michael Dummett2
Epicurus2
Maurice Merleau-Ponty2
Thomas Reid2
Jean-Paul Sartre2
Schopenhauer2
Xunzi (Hsun Tzu)2
Zhuangzi2
Iris Marion Young2
In addition to those listed, 34 other historical philosophers received one vote each. Aristotle came top, with Kant dramatically beating Plato to second place (though if Socrates’s votes are added to those for Plato, it would be a close thing!) David Hume, whose reputation has fallen and risen dramatically since his death, came 4th. The subject of this issue, Friedrich Nietzsche, came 8th. Fifty years ago he was often seen as a proto-Nazi, and twenty one years ago he was still dismissed by many philosophers as “more a poet than a philosopher.”
B) Please name the five living philosophers you consider the most interesting or important.
An astonishingly high total of 178 different living philosophers were named altogether, 45 of them women. The philosophers mentioned most often were:
PHILOSOPHERTOTAL VOTES
Saul Kripke14
David Chalmers11
Timothy Williamson10
Daniel C. Dennett8
Hilary Putnam8
Judith Butler8
Jürgen Habermas8
Derek Parfit7
Graham Priest6
Martha Nussbaum6
Alvin Plantinga5
Ian Hacking5
John McDowell5
John Searle5
Linda Martin Alcoff5
Thomas Nagel5
C) Please name the rising star among younger philosophers (under 40) who you consider the most worth watching.
A small number of philosophers were outraged by us even asking this question, fearing that it would feed into a tendency towards ‘ranking’ young academics. However, although 52 philosophers were mentioned in the responses to this question, nearly all of them were named only once each, which would make any kind of ranking entirely meaningless anyway. They included thirteen women philosophers. Only two philosophers were mentioned even four times each: they were the logician Dr Rachael Briggs and Professor Mark Schroeder, who works mainly in meta-ethics. Interestingly, both have published papers in recent years which have later been collected in The Philosopher’ Annual. (This is a publication a bit like The Beano Annual, except that it contains what its editors judge to have been the ten best philosophy papers of the year just past.)
D) What current philosophical movement, tendency or approach do you consider to be the most interesting?
There was an extremely wide scattering of answers, with none being mentioned by more than two or three respondents. One or two people said they expected the answers to this question to be dominated by experimental philosophy, as being the most visible current trend. However, this was not the case. The results suggested instead an astonishing variety of approaches in current philosophy. Answers included:
Analytical philosophy; anti-realism; anti-theory in ethics; applied epistemology; applied ontology; attempts to move beyond the analytic/continental divide; Australian realism; Buddhist ethics; causal modelling approach; Chinese philosophy; communism as defined by Badiou; Confucian virtue ethics; constitutivism (in the theory of reasons and agency); contemporary continental political philosophy; contemporary naturalism; debate about practical reasoning and rationality; definite description approach; dialethism and more generally paraconsistency in logic; disability studies; disjunctivism; dispositional essentialism; distributed cognition and extended mind; dynamic strict conditional approach; enactivism; experimental philosophy; feminist epistemology; feminist philosophy; formal epistemology; the Frankfurt School; genetic epistemology; grounding/fundamentality in metaphysics; Hegelian idealism; hermeneutic philosophy of science; indirect realist theories of perception; intersectionality; intentionalism; knowledge-first epistemology; liberal naturalism in the philosophy of mind (i.e. panpsychism); modal rationalism; moral psychology; narrative identity; naturalism; new materialisms; new realism; non-ideal ethical theory; non-Western philosophy; normative dimensions of epistemology; phenomenology in relation to democracy; philosophers interacting with cognitive scientists; philosophy of management where it relates to continental philosophy; philosophy of music; philosophy of social and science policy; philosophy of technology; postcolonial (decolonizing) theory; post-Lacanian readings of contingency and fate; pragmatism; promiscuous realism in philosophy of science; non-positivist analytic philosophy; social epistemology and feminist epistemology; studying and naming philosophical methodology; the (revived) attempt to ground normative judgments in emotional responses; the combination of ecological approaches and phenomenology in the philosophy of mind; the new dualism in philosophy of mind; the various critical replies to experimental philosophy; virtue ethics.
E) Which two areas of philosophy (i.e. ‘Philosophy of X’) do you consider to be the most active at the present time?
AREA OF PHILOSOPHYTOTAL VOTES
Philosophy of Mind20
Epistemology10
Metaphysics8
Ethics7
Metaethics6
Philosophy of Cognitive Science6
Philosophy of Science5
Experimental Philosophy4
Philosophies of Gender and Race4
Applied Ethics3
Marxism (Eastern and Western)3
Philosophy of Perception3
Philosophy of Psychology3
Ecological Philosophy3
There were many other areas of philosophy which received just one or two votes.
F) What is the most interesting philosophy book published in the last five years?
Sixty one books were recommended, but no book was recommended more than once except for Derek Parfit’s recent blockbuster On What Matters, which was named four times. Parfit’s masterly synthesis of leading ethical theories circulated in photocopied form for several years before finally being published, with commentaries by four other moral philosophers, in 2011. (It was reviewed in Philosophy Now Issue 87.)
Many thanks to everyone who took part in the survey!
David Chalmers
David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher of mind perhaps most famous for formulating the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. The problem is not in explaining how we can detect and respond to the world (mindless robots can do that), but explaining how what might generally be called our experiences (or ‘phenomena’), can be produced through the activity of the brain. Chalmers has argued that since zombies (i.e., mindless but animate human bodies and brains) are conceivable, there must be a conceptual distinction between brains and experienced phenomena, meaning that experiences are not just physical things.
Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke is an American philosopher from Princeton who is known for focusing on an analysis of language and on modal logic, which is concerned with how to talk about possible worlds. For instance, his 1980 book Naming and Necessity argued that names are ‘rigid designators’ and refer to the same thing in all possible worlds, e.g. ‘Richard Nixon’ would refer to the same man whether or not he had become President. Kripke also makes the point that different names for the same thing can highlight how the way we refer to something can affect the truth of propositions about that thing, e.g. it’s true that Mary Jane knows that Peter Parker is Peter Parker, and that Spiderman is Spiderman, but it’s not true that she knows that Peter Parker is Spiderman.
Monday, January 14, 2013
pi.hi.y pi.hi.y (Grice's Hopi)
Speranza
After Ziff.
Ref.:
Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, p. 114.
International Phonetic Association.
By uttering "pi.hi.y pi.hi.y", Utterer U meant that p.
On being inducted into the army, George is compelled to take a test to establish sanity. George is known to be an irritable academic. The test he is being given would be appropriate for morons. One of the questions asked is "What would you say if you were asked to identify yourself?". George replied to the officer asking the question by uttering:
"pi.hi.y pi.hi.y"
Perversely speaking in Hopi, George meant by the utterance "pi.hi.y pi.hi.y" (and what he said) was that he didn't know.
After Ziff.
Ref.:
Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality, p. 114.
International Phonetic Association.
By uttering "pi.hi.y pi.hi.y", Utterer U meant that p.
On being inducted into the army, George is compelled to take a test to establish sanity. George is known to be an irritable academic. The test he is being given would be appropriate for morons. One of the questions asked is "What would you say if you were asked to identify yourself?". George replied to the officer asking the question by uttering:
"pi.hi.y pi.hi.y"
Perversely speaking in Hopi, George meant by the utterance "pi.hi.y pi.hi.y" (and what he said) was that he didn't know.
Gleeg gleeg gleeg
Speranza
In "H. P. Grice's Account of Meaning:
Notes on Lycan" Curtis Brown explains that Grice has a two-stage project:
(a) explain speaker meaning in terms of other mental states, especially intentions and beliefs
(b) explain sentence meaning in terms of speaker meaning.
By uttering x (to an audience A), S meant that P if and only if:
S uttered x intending that A form the belief that P, and
S intended that A recognize that (1), and
S intended that A form the belief that P (in part) because of A's recognition that (1)
Objections that the Conditions are Not Necessary
Objection 1: No Audience Required
In "H. P. Grice's Account of Meaning:
Notes on Lycan" Curtis Brown explains that Grice has a two-stage project:
(a) explain speaker meaning in terms of other mental states, especially intentions and beliefs
(b) explain sentence meaning in terms of speaker meaning.
Defining Speaker Meaning in Terms of Intentions
Grice's definition (as simplified by Lycan):By uttering x (to an audience A), S meant that P if and only if:
S uttered x intending that A form the belief that P, and
S intended that A recognize that (1), and
S intended that A form the belief that P (in part) because of A's recognition that (1)
Objections that the Conditions are Not Necessary
Objection 1: No Audience Required
It seems that I can meaningfully utter a sentence without having an audience. Examples:
Grice's response: counterfactual intentions. S utters x intending that if there were an audience A, they would form the belief that P; they would recognize that S intends this; and their forming P would be because they recognize this.
- soliloquies
- talking to yourself (I do this in the car all the time)
(One might suggest that in these cases S = A, but it doesn't seem that in most cases S intends to produce beliefs in him- or herself.)
Objection 2: No Intention to Produce Belief by Means of Intention
Two cases:
Response: weaken the conditions again. Perhaps S intends only that A should form the belief that S believes P.
- Intend to produce belief, but not because of this very intention: conclusion of argument. I present an argument with conclusion C. I want A to form the belief that C, so condition 1 is satisfied. Probably condition 2 is also satisfied. But condition 3 seems not to be satisfied. I don't want my audience to believe C because they recognize my intention that they come to have this belief; rather, I want them to come to believe it because the argument is so compelling.
- Don't intend to produce belief at all: answering questions during an oral exam. The examiner already has the relevant beliefs, so there is no intention to produce them. In this case condition 1 is not met.
C. Objections that the Conditions are Not Sufficient
Objection 3:
Uttering Nonsense
Ziff:
"Ugh blugh blugh ugh blugh."
Uttered to express contempt. S intends that A form the belief that S feels contempt; S intends that A recognize that S has this intention; and S intends A to form the belief that S feels contempt because they recognize S's intention that they form this belief. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem that S's utterance means that S feels contempt.
(You could say that S is communicating his or her contempt, but not by saying something that means "I feel contempt." Compare: I hit my thumb with a hammer and say "ouch" I may communicate that I'm in pain, but
"ouch"
does not mean "I'm in pain": it expresses pain, it doesn't state that I'm in pain.)
Objection 4: Kennst du das Land . . .
The American soldier who tries to convince his Italian captors that he is German by uttering the only sentence of German he knows. Satisfies the conditions (with P = "I am a German soldier") but he doesn't seem to mean that he is a German soldier.
General Issue about the Definition of Speaker Meaning
The general idea that what a speaker means must be explainable in terms of the speaker's intentions and beliefs seems plausible (to me, anyway!). What is strange about Grice's view is the attempt to explain speaker meaning without any reference to the semantic meaning of the sentences used.
Of course, that's because Grice wants to explain the linguistic meaning of sentences in terms of speaker meaning, so to avoid circularity he can't use linguistic meaning in his explanation of speaker meaning. But isn't there something backward about this? Well, let's see . . . on to the definition of sentence meaning!
Defining Sentence Meaning in terms of Speaker Meaning
A. First attempt at a definition:
A sentence E of a natural language L means that P if and only if, when speakers of L utter E, they normally speaker-mean that P.
B. Obstacles to the Definition
Obstacle 1:
Glyting elly beleg and
Gleeg gleeg gleeg
Q: what's the point of this "obstacle"? What Lycan seems to have in mind is that in fact sentence meaning constrains speaker meaning: I can't express the proposition that P by uttering sentence S unless S actually means that P. (I may be able to express or communicate P by using S, but P still won't be what S means when I utter it.)
How is this a criticism of the above definition of sentence meaning? I think L's point is that it seems backward: it seems that sentence-meaning constrains what speakers can mean; if so, then it looks as though trying to define sentence-meaning in terms of speaker-meaning goes the wrong way around, or is circular.
Obstacle 2: Sentences that are Never Uttered
Most sentences of English, for example, never have been and never will be uttered. So there's no way to define their meaning in terms of what people usually speaker-mean by them.
Obstacle 3: Novel Sentences
The first time a sentence is uttered, its meaning is already determined: we don't need to wait to find out what speaker-meaning is statistically most often associated with it.
(At least, I think this is Lycan's point with this objection.)
Obstacle 4: Nonliteral Uses
Metaphor, colloquialisms, hyperbole, etc. -- we often use sentences to communicate things other than their literal meanings. But then if we tried to analyze sentence meaning as what people usually speaker-mean by a sentence, we might get the result that sentences mean something other than their literal meaning.C. Revising the Definition
An unstructured expression x means that P in S's idiolect if and only if S has in his or her repertoire the following procedure: to utter x if for some audience A, S intends A to believe that S believes that P.
An unstructured expression x means that P in the dialect of a group G if and only if:
A structured expression x means that P in the dialect of a group G if and only if . . . ?????
- many members of G have in their repertoires the procedure of uttering x if, for some A, they want A to believe that they believe that P;
- they will continue to retain this procedure in their repertoire only if other members of G have the same procedure.
(At this point Grice appeals to a resultant procedure that is constructed somehow out of the basic procedures so far mentioned. But the resultant procedure has to be abstract, because it will never be realized for most sentences of the language.)
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Grice Memorial Home
Speranza
Harborne Parish Lands Charity - Charity Performance
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Under a scheme of the Charity Commissioners dated 16 November 1990 "The Harborne Parish Lands Charity" and "Grice Memorial Homes" are administered ...
Harborne Parish Lands Charity - Charity Performance
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Under a scheme of the Charity Commissioners dated 16 November 1990 "The Harborne Parish Lands Charity" and "Grice Memorial Homes" are administered ...
Grice Memorial Home
Speranza
Harborne Parish Lands Charity - Charity Performance
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Under a scheme of the Charity Commissioners dated 16 November 1990 "The Harborne Parish Lands Charity" and "Grice Memorial Homes" are administered ...
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Under a scheme of the Charity Commissioners dated 16 November 1990 "The Harborne Parish Lands Charity" and "Grice Memorial Homes" are administered ...
Born and raised in Harborne
Speranza
Born in 1913 and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham -- but then part of Staffordshire -- if not Warwickshire -- never West Midlands!), in the United Kingdom, Grice was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Born in 1913 and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham -- but then part of Staffordshire -- if not Warwickshire -- never West Midlands!), in the United Kingdom, Grice was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
The Grices of Harborne
Speranza
Men's 1st Team - Players & Coaches - Peter Grice - Harborne
...
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Harborne Hockey Club Hockey club West Midlands - England Hockey League - Men's Conference North.
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Harborne Hockey Club Hockey club West Midlands - England Hockey League - Men's Conference North.
Griceiana
Speranza
Herbert Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 15 March 1913 and died in Richmond, California on 28 August 1988.
After a classical education at Clifton, he began his formal philosophical studies with W. F. R. Hardie at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later at Merton.
Later he held various positions at Oxford, notably as Fellow of St. John's, and served in the Royal Navy during World War II.
In 1967 he moved to California, taking a position at the University of California, Berkeley.
He retired from Berkeley in 1979, but continued to teach afterwards until 1986.
Grice is best known for his work on meaning, in particular for his work on the pragmatic dimensions of meaning.
He gave an analysis of what it is for a person to mean something by his or her words and gestures, where that might depart from what the words literally or standardly mean (this he did in an informal talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society, "Meaning" (1948)), and offered a theory of the phenomenon of conversational implicature (This he first did in "Causal Theory of Perception", for the Aristotelian Soceity, 1961).
He wrote on reasons and reasoning, perception, value, justice and happiness, -- but also on pirots and immanuels, sometimes engaging with classical philosophers, such as hisself.
Grice can be characterized as a systematic philosopher.
He appealed to the notion of a speaker's intentions in communication to explain meaning, and further explored the role of intentions in reasoning.
His interest in the pragmatic elements of meaning seems to have been sparked by his reactions to some applications of ordinary language philosophy, a movement in which he participated early in his career ("Put the blame on Austin," he'd say).
Those works that have had the greatest impact include his early article ‘Meaning’ published in 1957 (drafted in 1948), and his William James lecture series, ‘Logic and Conversation’ given at Harvard University in 1967.
The second of the set of seven lectures was published under the same title in 1975, edited by his friends Harman and Davidson.
Other lecturers were published as ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’ in "Foundations of Language", edited by his friend J. F. Staal, in 1968, and ‘Utterer's Meaning and Intentions’ in 1969, for the "Philosophical Review" which had published (due to Strawson submitting the 1948 draft, as typed by Ann Martin Strawson) the original "Meaning".
In 1989 many of Grice's works, including a revised version of the original William James lecture series, and a seminal paper on perception, were published as WoW, or Studies in the Ways of Words.
The Conception of Value appeared in 19991, and Aspects of Reason in 2001.
The vast collection of his genialities rest with the UC/Berkeley, Bancroft. They include tape recordings, too. NOT TO BE MISSED.
Herbert Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 15 March 1913 and died in Richmond, California on 28 August 1988.
After a classical education at Clifton, he began his formal philosophical studies with W. F. R. Hardie at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and later at Merton.
Later he held various positions at Oxford, notably as Fellow of St. John's, and served in the Royal Navy during World War II.
In 1967 he moved to California, taking a position at the University of California, Berkeley.
He retired from Berkeley in 1979, but continued to teach afterwards until 1986.
Grice is best known for his work on meaning, in particular for his work on the pragmatic dimensions of meaning.
He gave an analysis of what it is for a person to mean something by his or her words and gestures, where that might depart from what the words literally or standardly mean (this he did in an informal talk to the Oxford Philosophical Society, "Meaning" (1948)), and offered a theory of the phenomenon of conversational implicature (This he first did in "Causal Theory of Perception", for the Aristotelian Soceity, 1961).
He wrote on reasons and reasoning, perception, value, justice and happiness, -- but also on pirots and immanuels, sometimes engaging with classical philosophers, such as hisself.
Grice can be characterized as a systematic philosopher.
He appealed to the notion of a speaker's intentions in communication to explain meaning, and further explored the role of intentions in reasoning.
His interest in the pragmatic elements of meaning seems to have been sparked by his reactions to some applications of ordinary language philosophy, a movement in which he participated early in his career ("Put the blame on Austin," he'd say).
Those works that have had the greatest impact include his early article ‘Meaning’ published in 1957 (drafted in 1948), and his William James lecture series, ‘Logic and Conversation’ given at Harvard University in 1967.
The second of the set of seven lectures was published under the same title in 1975, edited by his friends Harman and Davidson.
Other lecturers were published as ‘Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning’ in "Foundations of Language", edited by his friend J. F. Staal, in 1968, and ‘Utterer's Meaning and Intentions’ in 1969, for the "Philosophical Review" which had published (due to Strawson submitting the 1948 draft, as typed by Ann Martin Strawson) the original "Meaning".
In 1989 many of Grice's works, including a revised version of the original William James lecture series, and a seminal paper on perception, were published as WoW, or Studies in the Ways of Words.
The Conception of Value appeared in 19991, and Aspects of Reason in 2001.
The vast collection of his genialities rest with the UC/Berkeley, Bancroft. They include tape recordings, too. NOT TO BE MISSED.
Herbert Paul Grice (b. Harborne, Staffs., 1933, d. Richmond, Calif., 1988)
Speranza
Herbert Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 15 March 1913 and died in Richmond, California on 28 August 1988.
Herbert Paul Grice was born in Harborne, Staffordshire, on 15 March 1913 and died in Richmond, California on 28 August 1988.
Barry Stroud and G. J. Warnock, Grice, (Herbert) Paul (1913-1988), Dictionary of National Biography
Speranza
Barry Stroud, G. J. Warnock, ‘Grice,
(Herbert) Paul (1913–1988)’, rev. first published 2004, 1063
words
Griceiana
Speranza
Herbert Paul Grice, 1913-1988.
English philosopher of language.
Educated at Clifton and Corpus Christi (and Merton), Oxford, Grice became a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford in 1939.
In 1967 he emigrated to a chair at Berkeley, retiring in 1980.
He introduced the important concept of "implicature" into the philosophy of language, arguing that not everything that is said is direct evidence for the meaning of some term, since many factors may determine the appropriateness of remarks independently of whether they are actually true.
The point undermined excessive attention to the niceties of conversation as reliable indicators of meaning, a methodology characteristic of linguistic philosophy.
In a number of very elegant papers (he was an elegant man) Grice also introduced an approach to the concept of the meaning of a sentence which identifies it with a complex of intentions with which it is uttered.
The psychological is thus used to explain the semantic, and the question of whether this is the correct priority has prompted considerable subsequent discussion.
Studies in the Way of Words (1989), The Conception of Value (1991) and Aspects of Reason (2001) were published posthumously.
Herbert Paul Grice, 1913-1988.
English philosopher of language.
Educated at Clifton and Corpus Christi (and Merton), Oxford, Grice became a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford in 1939.
In 1967 he emigrated to a chair at Berkeley, retiring in 1980.
He introduced the important concept of "implicature" into the philosophy of language, arguing that not everything that is said is direct evidence for the meaning of some term, since many factors may determine the appropriateness of remarks independently of whether they are actually true.
The point undermined excessive attention to the niceties of conversation as reliable indicators of meaning, a methodology characteristic of linguistic philosophy.
In a number of very elegant papers (he was an elegant man) Grice also introduced an approach to the concept of the meaning of a sentence which identifies it with a complex of intentions with which it is uttered.
The psychological is thus used to explain the semantic, and the question of whether this is the correct priority has prompted considerable subsequent discussion.
Studies in the Way of Words (1989), The Conception of Value (1991) and Aspects of Reason (2001) were published posthumously.
Grisotto
Speranza
Grice, Herbert Paul
Filosofo britannico (Harborne, Staffordshire, 1913 - Berkeley 1988).
Insegnò nell’univ. di Oxford, poi (dal 1967) nell’univ. della California a Berkeley.
Esponente della «filosofia del linguaggio ordinario», ha sviluppato in modo originale alcune tesi di Wittgenstein e di Austin.
Di particolare rilievo è la sua teoria dell’«implicatura conversazionale», tramite cui ha cercato di rendere conto dei complessi meccanismi di presupposizione che regolano la comunicazione linguistica, esercitando notevole influenza su Strawson, J. Searle, e Davidson. Molti dei suoi saggi sono stati pubblicati in Studies in the way of words (1989; trad. it. Logica e conversazione. Saggi su intenzione, significato e comunicazione, 1993).
Grice, Herbert Paul
Filosofo britannico (Harborne, Staffordshire, 1913 - Berkeley 1988).
Insegnò nell’univ. di Oxford, poi (dal 1967) nell’univ. della California a Berkeley.
Esponente della «filosofia del linguaggio ordinario», ha sviluppato in modo originale alcune tesi di Wittgenstein e di Austin.
Di particolare rilievo è la sua teoria dell’«implicatura conversazionale», tramite cui ha cercato di rendere conto dei complessi meccanismi di presupposizione che regolano la comunicazione linguistica, esercitando notevole influenza su Strawson, J. Searle, e Davidson. Molti dei suoi saggi sono stati pubblicati in Studies in the way of words (1989; trad. it. Logica e conversazione. Saggi su intenzione, significato e comunicazione, 1993).
Grisotto
Speranza
Grice ‹ġràis›, Herbert Paul. -
Filosofo inglese del linguaggio (Harborne, Staffordshire, 1913 - Berkeley 1988).
Esponente della "filosofia del linguaggio ordinario", ha contribuito sostanzialmente allo sviluppo della scienza della comunicazione elaborando alcune teorie, soprattutto nel campo delle analisi pragmatiche del linguaggio, che hanno influito su studiosi quali P. F. Strawson, J. R. Searle e D. Davidson e sono tuttora al centro dell'interesse di filosofi e linguisti.
Tra di esse appare centrale quella sui meccanismi di presupposizione che regolerebbero la comunicazione ("implicatura conversazionale").
Vita e pensiero
Dalla fine degli anni Trenta professore nell'Università di Oxford, dal 1967 ha insegnato nell'Università della California a Berkeley.
Esponente della "filosofia del linguaggio ordinario", ha sviluppato in modo originale alcune tesi dell'ultimo Wittgenstein e di J. L. Austin, fornendo contributi di rilievo nelle analisi pragmatiche del linguaggio, cioè nello studio del significato in connessione con la comunicazione e con il comportamento.
In tale prospettiva, in contrasto con l'orientamento della semantica formale, ha sottolineato la connessione tra significato e psicologia, definendo il significato degli enunciati proferiti da un parlante nei termini del riconoscimento, da parte di un uditorio, delle intenzioni comunicative retrostanti al loro proferimento.
Di particolare rilievo è inoltre la sua teoria dell'"implicatura conversazionale" (conversational implication), tramite cui ha cercato di rendere conto dei complessi meccanismi di presupposizione che regolano la comunicazione linguistica.
Opere
Autore di numerosi saggi, molti dei quali pubblicati in Studies in the way of words (1989; trad. it. Logica e conversazione. Saggi su intenzione, significato e comunicazione, 1993). Postume sono state pubblicate le raccolte di saggi Conception ofvalue (1991) e Aspects of reason (2001).
Grice ‹ġràis›, Herbert Paul. -
Filosofo inglese del linguaggio (Harborne, Staffordshire, 1913 - Berkeley 1988).
Esponente della "filosofia del linguaggio ordinario", ha contribuito sostanzialmente allo sviluppo della scienza della comunicazione elaborando alcune teorie, soprattutto nel campo delle analisi pragmatiche del linguaggio, che hanno influito su studiosi quali P. F. Strawson, J. R. Searle e D. Davidson e sono tuttora al centro dell'interesse di filosofi e linguisti.
Tra di esse appare centrale quella sui meccanismi di presupposizione che regolerebbero la comunicazione ("implicatura conversazionale").
Vita e pensiero
Dalla fine degli anni Trenta professore nell'Università di Oxford, dal 1967 ha insegnato nell'Università della California a Berkeley.
Esponente della "filosofia del linguaggio ordinario", ha sviluppato in modo originale alcune tesi dell'ultimo Wittgenstein e di J. L. Austin, fornendo contributi di rilievo nelle analisi pragmatiche del linguaggio, cioè nello studio del significato in connessione con la comunicazione e con il comportamento.
In tale prospettiva, in contrasto con l'orientamento della semantica formale, ha sottolineato la connessione tra significato e psicologia, definendo il significato degli enunciati proferiti da un parlante nei termini del riconoscimento, da parte di un uditorio, delle intenzioni comunicative retrostanti al loro proferimento.
Di particolare rilievo è inoltre la sua teoria dell'"implicatura conversazionale" (conversational implication), tramite cui ha cercato di rendere conto dei complessi meccanismi di presupposizione che regolano la comunicazione linguistica.
Opere
Autore di numerosi saggi, molti dei quali pubblicati in Studies in the way of words (1989; trad. it. Logica e conversazione. Saggi su intenzione, significato e comunicazione, 1993). Postume sono state pubblicate le raccolte di saggi Conception ofvalue (1991) e Aspects of reason (2001).
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
Grice, Presupposition and Conversational Implicature: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul
Speranza
Commentary on C. Cummins, P. Amaral, & N. Katsos, "Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers".
Herbert Paul Grice was WELL AWARE that Sir Peter Frederick Strawson's misnotion of "presupposition" was a misnomer. As evidence of this, Grice would show how Strawson was unfamiliar with what right word to use. In "On referring", Strawson keeps using "implies"!
i.e.
"The King of France is NOT bald" IMPLIES that there is a King of France.
----
Grice had been using "implies" in similar fashions by then. The last straw (by Strawson) was his "Introduction to Logical Theory", where he presupposes a lot of what some call "nonsense" referring to the simplest connective like "if". It was Grice's turn to build a stronger defense of the "Ordinary Man" against philosophical concoctions like Strawson's. Hence his idea of conversational implicature.
In the 1989 (posthumous) collection of essays, however repetitive, Herbert Paul Grice had occasion to repeat the claim in his famous ('infamous' for Strawsonians and neo-Strawsonians like Noel Burton-Roberts) essay, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature", which should REALLY read as: "Presupposition IS Conversational Imlpicature".
The behaviour of so-called "presupposition triggers" in human language has been
extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals.
One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to
argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not
contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may
not be challenged or refuted by discourse participants. However, there
are a wide range of presupposition triggers, some of which can
systematically be used to introduce new information. Is there, then, a
clear psychological distinction between presupposition and assertion?
Do certain expressions vacillate between presupposing and asserting
information? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a
gradient phenomenon? In this paper we argue for the value of
experimental methods in addressing these questions, and present a pilot
study demonstrating backgrounding effects of presupposition triggers,
and suggesting their gradience in nature. We discuss the implications of
these findings for theoretical categorisations of presupposition triggers.
Keywords: presuppositions; accommodation; experimental pragmatics;
information structure; QUD.
In conversation, information is exchanged in several different ways. One
dimension of variation concerns the foregrounding and backgrounding of
information. A speaker may introduce information that is available for the other
conversational participants to accept or reject, and at the same time introduce
other information that is in some sense ‘taken for granted’, which is typically
not available for discussion. The former class of information is considered
“foregrounded” and the latter “backgrounded”.
Natural languages provide various devices to allow speakers to manipulate
information structure in this way. These include lexical items such as stop,
only, manage, again, and so on; and syntactic devices such as cleft
constructions. For example, the speaker of (1) is understood to foreground the
prediction that Balotelli will start the match (a point that invites potential
disagreement), while describing him in the backgrounded content as an
“outstanding striker” (in a way that does not invite disagreement). Similarly,
the speaker of (2) foregrounds the prediction that Balotelli will be sent off,
backgrounding the information that this has happened before.
(1) Balotelli, who is an outstanding striker, will start the match.
(2) Balotelli will be sent off again.
From a theoretical perspective (both philosophical and linguistic), various
attempts have been made to characterise the difference between the
foregrounded and backgrounded content of sentences. One influential
approach asserts that the foregrounded meaning is that which contributes to
context update (Stalnaker, 1976; Lewis, 1979) and addresses the Question
Under Discussion (QUD; Roberts, 1996). However, the appropriate
treatment of backgrounded content is relatively unclear, due to a great extent
to the heterogeneity of this type of content.
From the perspective of experimental semantics and pragmatics, this issue
invites empirical attack. Despite the intuitively appealing nature of the
theoretical analysis, there is as yet little evidence that the distinction between
foregrounded and backgrounded content is a psychologically real one for
native speakers of a language. In particular, one might question whether these
are the appropriate levels of description, or whether the heterogeneity of
backgrounded content is also reflected at a psycholinguistic level. We can
consider whether types of linguistic content that admit a unified theoretical
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 3
analysis also exhibit a comparable level of unity when they are used to elicit
behavioural data from linguistically untrained participants (and conversely
whether theoretically distinctive materials yield unexpectedly similar
behavioural signatures). We wish to know, broadly speaking, whether the
various ways of manipulating information structure (distinguished from one
another on theoretical or philosophical grounds) actually differ from one
another at a psychological or behavioural level.
Recent work in experimental pragmatics has attempted to apply some of the
psycholinguistic techniques used in research on implicature (Bott & Noveck,
2004, among many others) to the problem of information structure. In
particular, attention has focused on presupposition triggers, with respect both
to their ability to background information and their ability to “project”
semantic content. This study examines the former attribute, but both are
discussed in the following section.
1. Presupposition phenomena in
experimental semantics and pragmatics
Lexical items such as again, stop, and so on are customarily analysed as
presupposition triggers. These have two distinctive properties: first, as
discussed above, they tend to signal the presence of further meaningful content
(the “presupposition”), additional to the main declarative meaning of the
sentence, but intuitively less available for further discussion, e.g. for direct
refutation. Secondly, unlike other forms of additional meaning such as (most)
implicatures, presuppositions survive embedding under negation and other
operators among the “family of sentences” tests (Chierchia & McConnell-
Ginet, 1990), while the declarative meaning does not. If we negate (2), as in
(3), the presupposition (that Balotelli has been sent off in the past) remains
intact. This is referred to as the presupposition “projecting” from under the
scope of negation.
(3) Balotelli will not be sent off again.
These two properties have given rise to rich sets of competing theoretical
proposals. With respect to projection, the question arises of how the
presuppositions of a complex sentence are calculable from the presuppositions
of the component sentences. At least two classes of theories have been
advanced to account for this: the dynamic semantic approach advanced by
Heim (1983) and Van der Sandt (1992) aims to explain projection in terms of
semantic composition, while the pragmatic approach endorsed by Schlenker
(2008) appeals to principles of conversational organisation.
The involvement of experimental work in addressing this question parallels
the developments in the study of scalar implicature over the past 10 years. As
in that case, competing theories can no longer be evaluated on the basis of
introspection, as there is little controversy about the ultimate interpretation of
the examples under discussion (Katsos & Cummins, 2010). The theories are
instead distinguishable by the fact that they posit different processes, and
therefore make distinctive predictions about the time-course of processing.
For instance, in a case such as (4), it is not controversial that the
presupposition (5) does not ultimately project, but it is also not introspectively
clear whether the presupposition is calculated and then cancelled, or simply
not calculated.
(4) I didn’t know that whales are fish, because whales are not
fish.
(5) Whales are fish.
For similar reasons, experimental work has recently commenced on the
question of how presuppositions are backgrounded. An intuition is broadly
shared in the literature that presupposed content is generally not addressable:
that is, it is not possible for an interlocutor straightforwardly to object to a
presupposition. Instead, infelicitous presuppositions must be dealt with in a
more metalinguistic way, e.g. by objecting to the utterance as a whole. This
observation underlies the “Hey, wait a minute” test (Shanon, 1976; von Fintel,
2004). This test is proposed on the basis that presuppositions not in the
common ground can be challenged as in (6), while assertions not in the
common ground cannot.
(6) A: John realised that whales are fish.
B: Hey, wait a minute! Whales are not fish.
*B: Hey, wait a minute! John didn’t realise that.
However, the “Hey, wait a minute” test may not be the most sensitive
diagnostic for presupposition per se ; it seems felicitous to use “Hey, wait a
minute” to object to any precondition of the utterance, no matter how obscure
(and perhaps even to an aspect of foregrounded meaning, if it is particularly
surprising). Moreover, there are good reasons to suppose that the delineation
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 5
of backgrounded and foregrounded content is not entirely straightforward.
First, presuppositions differ in their logical relation to the content of the
sentence (Zeevat, 1992), which could have implications for their
addressability. Second, many researchers have observed differences in the
family of presupposition triggers, e.g. between “soft” and “hard” triggers
(Abusch, 2010), or have proposed a continuum ranging from structural “hardcore”
triggers like clefts to “heavily context-dependent presuppositions” not
associated with any particular trigger (Kadmon, 2001). Third, presuppositions
can be exploited to convey information in an assertion-like fashion, i.e. to
introduce new information through accommodation (Lewis, 1979; Von Fintel,
2000). Consequently, the relation between the two aspects of presupposition
discussed above – the potential for presuppositional content to project, and its
tendency to be informationally backgrounded – is not a trivial one.
We discuss these issues in the following subsections of this paper, and then
proceed to motivate and discuss a pilot study that aims to investigate the
typology of presupposition triggers with respect to their backgrounding
behaviour. In this case, the broad justification for experimental work is that
subtle gradations in the acceptability of forms may exist but not be available to
introspection. Our aim is to test the psychological reality of the distinctions
that are posited.
2. Resolution and lexical triggers
Zeevat (1992) observed that presupposition triggers could be categorised into
three broad classes, differing in the extent to which they are anaphoric
(following Van der Sandt 1988). One class of triggers, including for instance
definite descriptions, “collect entities from the environment in order to say
new things about them” (Zeevat, 1992, p. 397). By analogy with the process of
anaphora resolution, these are referred to as resolution triggers . The second
class of triggers, termed lexical triggers by Zeevat, are lexical items that encode
preconditions for their main declarative content. Stop and continue both have
this property: in (7) and (8), it is logically necessary that John smoked at some
point prior to the time of utterance.
(7) John stopped smoking.
(8) John continues to smoke.
The third class, typified by too and again, is also anaphoric, in that it
involves the retrieval of an entity or eventuality previously salient in the
discourse. Deviating from Zeevat’s use of the term, we will consider these also
to be “resolution triggers”. Note in particular that the backgrounded content
of such items is typically unrelated, logically speaking, to the foregrounded
content. For instance, in (2) and (3), the backgrounded content (that Balotelli
was sent off at some time in the past) neither entails nor is entailed by the
foregrounded content (Balotelli being sent off in the past is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for him to be sent off in the future). Contrastingly, in
(7) and (8) the relation between foregrounded and backgrounded content is
closer, as each may only end or prolong a preceding eventuality.
It is theoretically coherent to assume that all these categories of
presuppositions behave in the same way, in respect of the foregrounding and
backgrounding of information. However, intuitively, there appear to be
important differences as regards the addressability of the presupposed content.
For the resolution triggers, denial of the backgrounded content does not
provide any information about the foregrounded content. For the lexical
triggers, denial of the backgrounded content amounts to denying the truth of
the statement as a whole. Therefore, it should be possible to address the
presupposed content while at the same time addressing the QUD, in Roberts’s
(1996) terms1.
The question of whether there are psychologically real differences between
the treatment of resolutional and lexical triggers by native speakers is an
empirical one. A binary judgment such as the “Hey, wait a minute” test
obviously does not distinguish different levels of backgrounding. From an
experimental point of view, this suggests a role for a gradient acceptability
judgement task, such as we use in the pilot study presented later in this paper2.
3. Different strengths of presupposition trigger
Several strands of research on presupposition share the intuition that there are
further systematic differences that are not necessarily coterminous with the
1 Note that to Roberts, addressing the QUD involves entailing an answer to it, but no
stipulation is made as to how direct this entailment relation must be.
2 We avoid using the “Hey, wait a minute” test in conjunction with a gradient judgment task,
as there is a risk that the judgments will reflect the acceptability of using this particular kind of
objection in different contexts, rather than being a direct measure of backgrounding.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 7
above classes. Kadmon (2001) argues for a continuum of presuppositions,
based on their projection behaviour (and specifically considerations such as
cancellability and context-dependence). Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008)
consider certain triggers, such as too and again, to be more strongly
presuppositional than others. They situate this observation in the context of
research by Abusch (see Abusch, 2010), proposing a distinction between
“soft” and “hard” presupposition triggers, and Simons (2006), who argues
that too and again serve no purpose within the sentence other than triggering a
presupposition (which suggests that their presence should be a reliable cue to
the presupposition being intended by the speaker).
It is tempting to interpret this as a prediction that the strongest
presupposition triggers should have the most pronounced backgrounding
effects. However, this may be a misinterpretation. In fact, one might argue
instead that the use of a sentence that goes out of its way explicitly to convey a
presupposition should render that presupposition more addressable, in that its
importance is heightened by comparison with the declarative content of the
sentence.
Once again, the role of experimental work here is to discern whether the
intuitions of theoreticians have a psychological reality. We share the intuition
that the class of presuppositions is diverse, both in respect of the nature of the
material presupposed and in the extent to which that material is made
cognitively salient, and consider that information structure is a useful measure
of this. Our hope in this respect is that findings about the nature of
backgrounding may enable us to help further refine the typology of
presupposition triggers that has been proposed in the theoretical literature.
4. Exploiting accommodation
Another aspect of presupposition behaviour is that presuppositions can be
used to convey additional information. When a sentence felicitously
presupposes information that is not taken for granted in the context, that
information is said to be accommodated (Lewis, 1979, drawing upon the work
of Stalnaker 1976 i.a.). The possibility of exploiting accommodation to convey
new information further blurs the distinction between foregrounded and
backgrounded content. Consider for example (9).
(9) I just found out that John is having an affair.
8 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
In terms of information structure, this sentence declares the fact of
discovery (‘I just found out that p’) and presupposes the proposition ‘John is
having an affair’3. However, intuitively, sentences such as (9) can also be used
to assert the propositional content that appears to be presupposed. Moreover,
felicitous responses to (9) appear more naturally to address that proposition
than the overt declarative (“He isn’t!” seems a more likely response than “You
didn’t!”) In short, the presupposition does not appear to be backgrounded to
any appreciable extent in such a construction.
Conversely, presuppositions can in principle be exploited to convey
information that is controversial, with a view to adding this information to the
common ground or causing the hearers to update their situation model
accordingly. This is exploited in loaded questions, such as the classic example
(10), where either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response can be taken to endorse the
presupposition of ‘stop’. Unlike examples such as (9), however, this technique
exploits the fact that the presupposition is backgrounded, and is therefore
difficult to address.
(10) Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
A general question here relates to how regularly speakers intend
presuppositions to be accommodated: here we might make competing
theoretical observations. On the one hand, the use of a presupposition is
informationally redundant unless it goes to updating the situation model of the
interlocutors in some way4. We might therefore expect that non-lexical
triggers are canonically used to convey new information of some kind (e.g.
again to convey explicitly that the event under discussion has happened
before). On the other hand, if it is crucial that new information should be added
to the interlocutors’ situation model, it might appear uncooperative for a
speaker to convey this information in the form of a presupposition, where it
cannot be easily contested if it is controversial, and where it might conceivably
be overlooked entirely. This raises the very broad and much-discussed issue of
how a speaker most efficiently conveys information to a hearer, and the specific
question of how presuppositions enter into this process.
3
This is assumed to be a presupposition based on projection, specifically that “I didn’t just
realise John is having an affair” also conveys that he is.
4
This might include bringing already known information more immediately to the attention of
the interlocutor.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 9
For the purpose of this research, the crucial point here is that the role of
presupposition triggers in backgrounding information is potentially
negotiable. It appears quite possible for theoretically similar constructions
either to background the presupposition or to foreground it at the expense of
the declarative content. This suggests that we should also be interested in caseby-
case variation among instances of identical triggers, as well as being
concerned with the patterns that arise across the class(es) of triggers.
5. Foregrounded and backgrounded presuppositions:
a pilot experimental study
In our pilot study, we aimed to investigate the extent to which a set of
presupposition triggers accomplish the backgrounding of their corresponding
presuppositions. We selected as a sample of triggers the resolutional again,
and the lexical stop and continue. We also considered only, a trigger with
debatable status (presupposition or entailment; cf. Horn, 1969; 1996,
Roberts to appear); and a syntactic resolution trigger, the comparative
construction, using which for instance the sentence (11) presupposes (12)5.
(11) Jane is a better doctor than Mike.
(12) Mike is a doctor.
5.1. Methodology
Participants were presented with question-answer (Q-A) pairs and asked to
rate, on a 1-5 scale, “how natural” the answer was. Response latencies were
also measured and recorded. In the critical items, a presupposition trigger
appears in the question, and the question was answered in the negative. In the
“Foreground” condition, the negative answer addressed the foregrounded
content of the question, as in (13); in the “Background” condition, the
negative answer addressed the backgrounded content of the question, as in
(14).
(13) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she smokes.
5
This also projects from under the scope of negation: “Jane isn’t a better doctor than Mike”
conveys that Mike is a doctor.
10 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
(14) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she didn’t use to smoke.
For each trigger, two Q-A pairs were administered to each subject. Two
versions of the experiment were constructed, such that the items presented in
the Foreground condition in version 1 were presented in the Background
condition in version 2, and vice versa. The experiment was implemented in EPrime.
Participants (n=30) were native English speakers, recruited from the
student body of the University of Cambridge, and were allocated randomly to
either version 1 or version 2 of the experiment.
5.2. Predictions
Our general predictions are as follows. If native speakers are sensitive to the
distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information in
discourse, Q-A pairs in the Foreground condition should receive higher
naturalness ratings than those in the Background condition. Moreover, under
the assumption that backgrounded information is harder to retrieve, we would
predict a slowdown in response time (while we measure response time of the
judgment, admittedly a more natural measure would be response time of the
reading time of the critical segment). Comparing the resolutional to the lexical
triggers, we would expect the acceptability of negating backgrounded
information in the latter case to be higher than in the former case, as for lexical
triggers the presupposition is entailed by the declarative content of the
sentence, and therefore its failure is sufficient reason to give a felicitous
negative response to the sentence.
5.3. Results
Results for the triggers continue, stop and only are as follows. As the materials
with again and the comparative gave rise to unintended ambiguities in one test
condition in this pilot study6, we are unable to report counterbalanced results
for these triggers. The following results are based upon each participant’s
6
The problematic sentences described two individuals of the same gender; in these cases, as
well as a reading of ‘he’ or ‘she’ in which the presupposition was contested, there was a
possible reading in which the declarative content was contested.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 11
rating of two items for each trigger, both with either foreground continuations
(for 15 participants) or background continuations (for the other 15).
Trigger Mean rating (SD) Mean response time, ms (SD)
Foreground Background Foreground Background
Again 4.13 (0.97) 2.87 (1.11) 4509 (2906) 4052 (3268)
comparative 4.37 (1.00) 2.60 (0.77) 3460 (2006) 4464 (3080)
These preliminary results show that, as predicted, refutations in foreground
conditions are preferred to those in background conditions for each type of
presupposition trigger. Paired t-tests applied to the counterbalanced
conditions reveal a highly significant preference in judgements for foreground
rather than background conditions (all p < 0.001). Similar planned
comparisons using paired t-tests for response times also show a preference for
foreground conditions over background (continue, t = 1.68, p < 0.05; stop, t
= 2.40, p < 0.01; only , t = 3.55, p < 0.001; all one-tailed).
Between triggers, comparisons show a significant preference in the
background condition for only versus stop (t = 3.46, p < 0.001 two-tailed) and
for only versus continue (t = 3.08, p < 0.01 two-tailed). However, these
preferences are also significant in the foreground condition, as is the
preference for continue versus stop which does not approach significance in
the background condition (only versus stop, t = 5.48, p < 0.001 two-tailed;
only versus continue, t = 2.77, p < 0.01 two-tailed; continue versus stop, t =
2.70, p < 0.01 two-tailed). Each of these comparisons remains significant at p
< 0.05 with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
Note that the reaction times exhibit a great deal of variability, possibly
because these also include reading times. There is a numerical preference for
foreground conditions; the exception is again, but this may reflect the failure to
counterbalance materials in this condition.
5.4. Discussion
The results of this pilot study demonstrate that native speakers are sensitive to
the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information, and that
this is accessible to a methodology involving naturalness ratings of dialogue
fragments. Conditions in which backgrounded information was refuted were
12 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
perceived as less felicitous than those in which foregrounded information was
refuted. For the counterbalanced test items, foreground conditions also
yielded significantly faster response times. This suggests that the retrieval of
backgrounded information, which is not being used actively to update the
conversational record, may result in additional processing load.
There is also considerable variability between triggers as to the
acceptability of refuting backgrounded content. Our results suggest that this is
significantly easier in the case of only than continue or stop, with again and the
comparative construction yielding numerically intermediate acceptability
ratings. This might be taken as support for the psychological reality of the
distinction between resolution and lexical triggers.
Two important caveats must be taken into account, however, in attempting
to interpret these findings. First, as discussed above, the status of the prejacent
of only (e.g. the proposition John went to the library in the sentence Only John
went to the library ) is a theoretically-contested issue. The acceptability ratings
of only in the background condition could be interpreted as providing support
for the view that the prejacent is an entailment of only (cf. Horn, 1996 and
Roberts, to appear).
Secondly, and more problematically, the differences that were manifest in
the Background conditions were also exhibited in the Foreground conditions,
in violation of our expectations. This renders any conclusion about the relative
behaviour of the presupposition triggers in this experiment necessarily very
tentative. It could be that the apparent disparity between these conditions is
attributable simply to the materials in question varying in felicity, which might
apply to both experimental conditions. An alternative conjecture is that the
Foreground materials were not optimally felicitous because it is more natural
to respond to a presupposition-triggering question with a response that also
acknowledges the presupposition than with one that does not: compare for
instance (15) and (16). In this case, the infelicity of the Foreground items
might be independent of the Background items, and thus would not invalidate
the comparison between presupposition triggers discussed above.
(15) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: ?No, she smokes.
(16) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: No, she still smokes.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 13
In our ongoing work, we are addressing this issue, with a view to obtaining
a suitable baseline for comparing the backgrounding behaviour of
presuppositions (by constructing refutations that are reliably judged to be
entirely felicitous).
6. General discussion and future directions
In this paper, we have aimed to give show the potential of experimental work to
shed light on theoretically-contested aspects of information structure in
general, and presupposition in particular. It must be acknowledged that this is
a complex phenomenon, as witnessed both by the extensive theoretical
literature and the relatively late development of experimental approaches to the
problem. The above pilot study illustrates both some of the potential of
empirical work to demonstrate the psychological reality of the distinctions
posited by theoreticians, and some of the difficulties encountered in
attempting to operationalise these distinctions in a meaningful way. Our study
illustrates the difficulty in isolating presuppositions from other types of
content in actual interpretation, and the individual variability among
presupposition triggers that seems to elude neat theoretical groupings.
Empirical work in this field has the potential to throw light on whether the
classes of presuppositions posited in some approaches (e.g. Zeevat, 1992) are
coherent, or whether it is more appropriate to situate presuppositions on a
continuum (as in Kadmon, 2001). In either case, a further question concerns
the status of presupposition phenomena as a potential semantic universal (cf.
Von Fintel & Matthewson, 2008). The results from experimental research
have shown that fine-grained judgements about types of presupposed content
cannot be obtained solely from introspection. On the surface, it appears that
presuppositions can take many different forms and be related to the declarative
content of their triggering sentences in various different ways. If it is true that
presuppositions can be organised cross-linguistically into a small set of natural
kinds with a consistent behaviour, that is potentially instructive for our view of
conversational interaction and indeed cognition. We hope to contribute to the
cross-linguistic empirical examination of presupposition and information
backgrounding in future work.
We also hope to unify this work with research on some of the other open
questions about presupposition discussed in this paper. For instance,
presupposition projection is plausibly linked to information backgrounding:
14 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
we have seen how information may be presented at different levels of
‘grounding’ in order to achieve particular cognitive effects. The question of
how this aspect of information structure is used to influence the interlocutor’s
situation model does not appear to have been tackled in any generality.
Nevertheless, there is a strong and widely-shared intuition that
presuppositions may be used to introduce information into the discourse. By
better understanding how presupposition triggers are processed by speaker
and hearer, we will better be able to offer an account of the role of
presupposition in efficient communication. Appeal to experimental data
should enable research in this field to proceed within a constrained and
tractable hypothesis space.
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time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language , 51, 437-
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Chierchia, G., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1990). Meaning and Grammar . Cambridge
MA: MIT Press.
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Heim, I. (1983). On the projection problem for presuppositions. In D. Flickinger et
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Linguistics. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 114-125.
Horn, L.R. (1996). Exclusive company: Only and the dynamics of vertical inference.
Journal of Semantics, 13, 10-40.
Horn, L. R. A brief history of negation.
Kadmon, N. (2001). Formal pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Katsos, N., & Cummins, C. (2010). Pragmatics: from theory to experiment and back
again. Language and Linguistics Compass , 4/5, 282-295.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic,
8, 339-359.
Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of
pragmatics. In J. H. Yoon & A. Kathol (Eds.), OSU WPL Vol. 49: Papers in
Semantics. OSU Department of Linguistics.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 15
Roberts, C. (to appear). Only, presupposition and implicature. Journal of Semantics.
Schlenker, P. (2008). Be articulate: a pragmatic theory of presupposition projection.
Theoretical Linguistics, 34, 157-212.
Shanon, B. (1976). On the two kinds of presuppositions in natural language.
Foundations of Language, 14, 247-249.
Simons, M. (2006). Foundational issues in presupposition. Philosophy Compass, 1,
357-372.
Speranza, Join the Grice Club.
Stalnaker, R. (1976). Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. Munitz and P. Unger (Eds.)
Semantics and philosophy. New York: New York University Press, 197-213.
Van der Sandt, R. (1988). Context and presupposition. London: Croom Helm.
Van der Sandt, R. (1992). Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution, Journal
of Semantics, 9, 333-377.
Von Fintel, K. (2000). What is presupposition accommodation? Unpublished
manuscript, MIT.
Von Fintel, K. (2004). Would you believe it? The king of France is back!
Presuppositions and truth-value intuitions. In M. Reimer & A. Bezuidenhout
(Eds.), Descriptions and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 315-341.
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Zeevat, H. (1992). Presupposition and accommodation in update semantics. Journal
of Semantics, 9, 379-412
Commentary on C. Cummins, P. Amaral, & N. Katsos, "Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers".
Herbert Paul Grice was WELL AWARE that Sir Peter Frederick Strawson's misnotion of "presupposition" was a misnomer. As evidence of this, Grice would show how Strawson was unfamiliar with what right word to use. In "On referring", Strawson keeps using "implies"!
i.e.
"The King of France is NOT bald" IMPLIES that there is a King of France.
----
Grice had been using "implies" in similar fashions by then. The last straw (by Strawson) was his "Introduction to Logical Theory", where he presupposes a lot of what some call "nonsense" referring to the simplest connective like "if". It was Grice's turn to build a stronger defense of the "Ordinary Man" against philosophical concoctions like Strawson's. Hence his idea of conversational implicature.
In the 1989 (posthumous) collection of essays, however repetitive, Herbert Paul Grice had occasion to repeat the claim in his famous ('infamous' for Strawsonians and neo-Strawsonians like Noel Burton-Roberts) essay, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature", which should REALLY read as: "Presupposition IS Conversational Imlpicature".
The behaviour of so-called "presupposition triggers" in human language has been
extensively studied and given rise to many distinct theoretical proposals.
One intuitively appealing way of characterising presupposition is to
argue that it constitutes backgrounded meaning, which does not
contribute to updating the conversational record, and consequently may
not be challenged or refuted by discourse participants. However, there
are a wide range of presupposition triggers, some of which can
systematically be used to introduce new information. Is there, then, a
clear psychological distinction between presupposition and assertion?
Do certain expressions vacillate between presupposing and asserting
information? And is information backgrounding a categorical or a
gradient phenomenon? In this paper we argue for the value of
experimental methods in addressing these questions, and present a pilot
study demonstrating backgrounding effects of presupposition triggers,
and suggesting their gradience in nature. We discuss the implications of
these findings for theoretical categorisations of presupposition triggers.
Keywords: presuppositions; accommodation; experimental pragmatics;
information structure; QUD.
In conversation, information is exchanged in several different ways. One
dimension of variation concerns the foregrounding and backgrounding of
information. A speaker may introduce information that is available for the other
conversational participants to accept or reject, and at the same time introduce
other information that is in some sense ‘taken for granted’, which is typically
not available for discussion. The former class of information is considered
“foregrounded” and the latter “backgrounded”.
Natural languages provide various devices to allow speakers to manipulate
information structure in this way. These include lexical items such as stop,
only, manage, again, and so on; and syntactic devices such as cleft
constructions. For example, the speaker of (1) is understood to foreground the
prediction that Balotelli will start the match (a point that invites potential
disagreement), while describing him in the backgrounded content as an
“outstanding striker” (in a way that does not invite disagreement). Similarly,
the speaker of (2) foregrounds the prediction that Balotelli will be sent off,
backgrounding the information that this has happened before.
(1) Balotelli, who is an outstanding striker, will start the match.
(2) Balotelli will be sent off again.
From a theoretical perspective (both philosophical and linguistic), various
attempts have been made to characterise the difference between the
foregrounded and backgrounded content of sentences. One influential
approach asserts that the foregrounded meaning is that which contributes to
context update (Stalnaker, 1976; Lewis, 1979) and addresses the Question
Under Discussion (QUD; Roberts, 1996). However, the appropriate
treatment of backgrounded content is relatively unclear, due to a great extent
to the heterogeneity of this type of content.
From the perspective of experimental semantics and pragmatics, this issue
invites empirical attack. Despite the intuitively appealing nature of the
theoretical analysis, there is as yet little evidence that the distinction between
foregrounded and backgrounded content is a psychologically real one for
native speakers of a language. In particular, one might question whether these
are the appropriate levels of description, or whether the heterogeneity of
backgrounded content is also reflected at a psycholinguistic level. We can
consider whether types of linguistic content that admit a unified theoretical
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 3
analysis also exhibit a comparable level of unity when they are used to elicit
behavioural data from linguistically untrained participants (and conversely
whether theoretically distinctive materials yield unexpectedly similar
behavioural signatures). We wish to know, broadly speaking, whether the
various ways of manipulating information structure (distinguished from one
another on theoretical or philosophical grounds) actually differ from one
another at a psychological or behavioural level.
Recent work in experimental pragmatics has attempted to apply some of the
psycholinguistic techniques used in research on implicature (Bott & Noveck,
2004, among many others) to the problem of information structure. In
particular, attention has focused on presupposition triggers, with respect both
to their ability to background information and their ability to “project”
semantic content. This study examines the former attribute, but both are
discussed in the following section.
1. Presupposition phenomena in
experimental semantics and pragmatics
Lexical items such as again, stop, and so on are customarily analysed as
presupposition triggers. These have two distinctive properties: first, as
discussed above, they tend to signal the presence of further meaningful content
(the “presupposition”), additional to the main declarative meaning of the
sentence, but intuitively less available for further discussion, e.g. for direct
refutation. Secondly, unlike other forms of additional meaning such as (most)
implicatures, presuppositions survive embedding under negation and other
operators among the “family of sentences” tests (Chierchia & McConnell-
Ginet, 1990), while the declarative meaning does not. If we negate (2), as in
(3), the presupposition (that Balotelli has been sent off in the past) remains
intact. This is referred to as the presupposition “projecting” from under the
scope of negation.
(3) Balotelli will not be sent off again.
These two properties have given rise to rich sets of competing theoretical
proposals. With respect to projection, the question arises of how the
presuppositions of a complex sentence are calculable from the presuppositions
of the component sentences. At least two classes of theories have been
advanced to account for this: the dynamic semantic approach advanced by
Heim (1983) and Van der Sandt (1992) aims to explain projection in terms of
semantic composition, while the pragmatic approach endorsed by Schlenker
(2008) appeals to principles of conversational organisation.
The involvement of experimental work in addressing this question parallels
the developments in the study of scalar implicature over the past 10 years. As
in that case, competing theories can no longer be evaluated on the basis of
introspection, as there is little controversy about the ultimate interpretation of
the examples under discussion (Katsos & Cummins, 2010). The theories are
instead distinguishable by the fact that they posit different processes, and
therefore make distinctive predictions about the time-course of processing.
For instance, in a case such as (4), it is not controversial that the
presupposition (5) does not ultimately project, but it is also not introspectively
clear whether the presupposition is calculated and then cancelled, or simply
not calculated.
(4) I didn’t know that whales are fish, because whales are not
fish.
(5) Whales are fish.
For similar reasons, experimental work has recently commenced on the
question of how presuppositions are backgrounded. An intuition is broadly
shared in the literature that presupposed content is generally not addressable:
that is, it is not possible for an interlocutor straightforwardly to object to a
presupposition. Instead, infelicitous presuppositions must be dealt with in a
more metalinguistic way, e.g. by objecting to the utterance as a whole. This
observation underlies the “Hey, wait a minute” test (Shanon, 1976; von Fintel,
2004). This test is proposed on the basis that presuppositions not in the
common ground can be challenged as in (6), while assertions not in the
common ground cannot.
(6) A: John realised that whales are fish.
B: Hey, wait a minute! Whales are not fish.
*B: Hey, wait a minute! John didn’t realise that.
However, the “Hey, wait a minute” test may not be the most sensitive
diagnostic for presupposition per se ; it seems felicitous to use “Hey, wait a
minute” to object to any precondition of the utterance, no matter how obscure
(and perhaps even to an aspect of foregrounded meaning, if it is particularly
surprising). Moreover, there are good reasons to suppose that the delineation
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 5
of backgrounded and foregrounded content is not entirely straightforward.
First, presuppositions differ in their logical relation to the content of the
sentence (Zeevat, 1992), which could have implications for their
addressability. Second, many researchers have observed differences in the
family of presupposition triggers, e.g. between “soft” and “hard” triggers
(Abusch, 2010), or have proposed a continuum ranging from structural “hardcore”
triggers like clefts to “heavily context-dependent presuppositions” not
associated with any particular trigger (Kadmon, 2001). Third, presuppositions
can be exploited to convey information in an assertion-like fashion, i.e. to
introduce new information through accommodation (Lewis, 1979; Von Fintel,
2000). Consequently, the relation between the two aspects of presupposition
discussed above – the potential for presuppositional content to project, and its
tendency to be informationally backgrounded – is not a trivial one.
We discuss these issues in the following subsections of this paper, and then
proceed to motivate and discuss a pilot study that aims to investigate the
typology of presupposition triggers with respect to their backgrounding
behaviour. In this case, the broad justification for experimental work is that
subtle gradations in the acceptability of forms may exist but not be available to
introspection. Our aim is to test the psychological reality of the distinctions
that are posited.
2. Resolution and lexical triggers
Zeevat (1992) observed that presupposition triggers could be categorised into
three broad classes, differing in the extent to which they are anaphoric
(following Van der Sandt 1988). One class of triggers, including for instance
definite descriptions, “collect entities from the environment in order to say
new things about them” (Zeevat, 1992, p. 397). By analogy with the process of
anaphora resolution, these are referred to as resolution triggers . The second
class of triggers, termed lexical triggers by Zeevat, are lexical items that encode
preconditions for their main declarative content. Stop and continue both have
this property: in (7) and (8), it is logically necessary that John smoked at some
point prior to the time of utterance.
(7) John stopped smoking.
(8) John continues to smoke.
The third class, typified by too and again, is also anaphoric, in that it
involves the retrieval of an entity or eventuality previously salient in the
discourse. Deviating from Zeevat’s use of the term, we will consider these also
to be “resolution triggers”. Note in particular that the backgrounded content
of such items is typically unrelated, logically speaking, to the foregrounded
content. For instance, in (2) and (3), the backgrounded content (that Balotelli
was sent off at some time in the past) neither entails nor is entailed by the
foregrounded content (Balotelli being sent off in the past is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient condition for him to be sent off in the future). Contrastingly, in
(7) and (8) the relation between foregrounded and backgrounded content is
closer, as each may only end or prolong a preceding eventuality.
It is theoretically coherent to assume that all these categories of
presuppositions behave in the same way, in respect of the foregrounding and
backgrounding of information. However, intuitively, there appear to be
important differences as regards the addressability of the presupposed content.
For the resolution triggers, denial of the backgrounded content does not
provide any information about the foregrounded content. For the lexical
triggers, denial of the backgrounded content amounts to denying the truth of
the statement as a whole. Therefore, it should be possible to address the
presupposed content while at the same time addressing the QUD, in Roberts’s
(1996) terms1.
The question of whether there are psychologically real differences between
the treatment of resolutional and lexical triggers by native speakers is an
empirical one. A binary judgment such as the “Hey, wait a minute” test
obviously does not distinguish different levels of backgrounding. From an
experimental point of view, this suggests a role for a gradient acceptability
judgement task, such as we use in the pilot study presented later in this paper2.
3. Different strengths of presupposition trigger
Several strands of research on presupposition share the intuition that there are
further systematic differences that are not necessarily coterminous with the
1 Note that to Roberts, addressing the QUD involves entailing an answer to it, but no
stipulation is made as to how direct this entailment relation must be.
2 We avoid using the “Hey, wait a minute” test in conjunction with a gradient judgment task,
as there is a risk that the judgments will reflect the acceptability of using this particular kind of
objection in different contexts, rather than being a direct measure of backgrounding.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 7
above classes. Kadmon (2001) argues for a continuum of presuppositions,
based on their projection behaviour (and specifically considerations such as
cancellability and context-dependence). Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008)
consider certain triggers, such as too and again, to be more strongly
presuppositional than others. They situate this observation in the context of
research by Abusch (see Abusch, 2010), proposing a distinction between
“soft” and “hard” presupposition triggers, and Simons (2006), who argues
that too and again serve no purpose within the sentence other than triggering a
presupposition (which suggests that their presence should be a reliable cue to
the presupposition being intended by the speaker).
It is tempting to interpret this as a prediction that the strongest
presupposition triggers should have the most pronounced backgrounding
effects. However, this may be a misinterpretation. In fact, one might argue
instead that the use of a sentence that goes out of its way explicitly to convey a
presupposition should render that presupposition more addressable, in that its
importance is heightened by comparison with the declarative content of the
sentence.
Once again, the role of experimental work here is to discern whether the
intuitions of theoreticians have a psychological reality. We share the intuition
that the class of presuppositions is diverse, both in respect of the nature of the
material presupposed and in the extent to which that material is made
cognitively salient, and consider that information structure is a useful measure
of this. Our hope in this respect is that findings about the nature of
backgrounding may enable us to help further refine the typology of
presupposition triggers that has been proposed in the theoretical literature.
4. Exploiting accommodation
Another aspect of presupposition behaviour is that presuppositions can be
used to convey additional information. When a sentence felicitously
presupposes information that is not taken for granted in the context, that
information is said to be accommodated (Lewis, 1979, drawing upon the work
of Stalnaker 1976 i.a.). The possibility of exploiting accommodation to convey
new information further blurs the distinction between foregrounded and
backgrounded content. Consider for example (9).
(9) I just found out that John is having an affair.
8 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
In terms of information structure, this sentence declares the fact of
discovery (‘I just found out that p’) and presupposes the proposition ‘John is
having an affair’3. However, intuitively, sentences such as (9) can also be used
to assert the propositional content that appears to be presupposed. Moreover,
felicitous responses to (9) appear more naturally to address that proposition
than the overt declarative (“He isn’t!” seems a more likely response than “You
didn’t!”) In short, the presupposition does not appear to be backgrounded to
any appreciable extent in such a construction.
Conversely, presuppositions can in principle be exploited to convey
information that is controversial, with a view to adding this information to the
common ground or causing the hearers to update their situation model
accordingly. This is exploited in loaded questions, such as the classic example
(10), where either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response can be taken to endorse the
presupposition of ‘stop’. Unlike examples such as (9), however, this technique
exploits the fact that the presupposition is backgrounded, and is therefore
difficult to address.
(10) Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
A general question here relates to how regularly speakers intend
presuppositions to be accommodated: here we might make competing
theoretical observations. On the one hand, the use of a presupposition is
informationally redundant unless it goes to updating the situation model of the
interlocutors in some way4. We might therefore expect that non-lexical
triggers are canonically used to convey new information of some kind (e.g.
again to convey explicitly that the event under discussion has happened
before). On the other hand, if it is crucial that new information should be added
to the interlocutors’ situation model, it might appear uncooperative for a
speaker to convey this information in the form of a presupposition, where it
cannot be easily contested if it is controversial, and where it might conceivably
be overlooked entirely. This raises the very broad and much-discussed issue of
how a speaker most efficiently conveys information to a hearer, and the specific
question of how presuppositions enter into this process.
3
This is assumed to be a presupposition based on projection, specifically that “I didn’t just
realise John is having an affair” also conveys that he is.
4
This might include bringing already known information more immediately to the attention of
the interlocutor.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 9
For the purpose of this research, the crucial point here is that the role of
presupposition triggers in backgrounding information is potentially
negotiable. It appears quite possible for theoretically similar constructions
either to background the presupposition or to foreground it at the expense of
the declarative content. This suggests that we should also be interested in caseby-
case variation among instances of identical triggers, as well as being
concerned with the patterns that arise across the class(es) of triggers.
5. Foregrounded and backgrounded presuppositions:
a pilot experimental study
In our pilot study, we aimed to investigate the extent to which a set of
presupposition triggers accomplish the backgrounding of their corresponding
presuppositions. We selected as a sample of triggers the resolutional again,
and the lexical stop and continue. We also considered only, a trigger with
debatable status (presupposition or entailment; cf. Horn, 1969; 1996,
Roberts to appear); and a syntactic resolution trigger, the comparative
construction, using which for instance the sentence (11) presupposes (12)5.
(11) Jane is a better doctor than Mike.
(12) Mike is a doctor.
5.1. Methodology
Participants were presented with question-answer (Q-A) pairs and asked to
rate, on a 1-5 scale, “how natural” the answer was. Response latencies were
also measured and recorded. In the critical items, a presupposition trigger
appears in the question, and the question was answered in the negative. In the
“Foreground” condition, the negative answer addressed the foregrounded
content of the question, as in (13); in the “Background” condition, the
negative answer addressed the backgrounded content of the question, as in
(14).
(13) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she smokes.
5
This also projects from under the scope of negation: “Jane isn’t a better doctor than Mike”
conveys that Mike is a doctor.
10 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
(14) Q: Did Julia stop smoking?
A: No, she didn’t use to smoke.
For each trigger, two Q-A pairs were administered to each subject. Two
versions of the experiment were constructed, such that the items presented in
the Foreground condition in version 1 were presented in the Background
condition in version 2, and vice versa. The experiment was implemented in EPrime.
Participants (n=30) were native English speakers, recruited from the
student body of the University of Cambridge, and were allocated randomly to
either version 1 or version 2 of the experiment.
5.2. Predictions
Our general predictions are as follows. If native speakers are sensitive to the
distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information in
discourse, Q-A pairs in the Foreground condition should receive higher
naturalness ratings than those in the Background condition. Moreover, under
the assumption that backgrounded information is harder to retrieve, we would
predict a slowdown in response time (while we measure response time of the
judgment, admittedly a more natural measure would be response time of the
reading time of the critical segment). Comparing the resolutional to the lexical
triggers, we would expect the acceptability of negating backgrounded
information in the latter case to be higher than in the former case, as for lexical
triggers the presupposition is entailed by the declarative content of the
sentence, and therefore its failure is sufficient reason to give a felicitous
negative response to the sentence.
5.3. Results
Results for the triggers continue, stop and only are as follows. As the materials
with again and the comparative gave rise to unintended ambiguities in one test
condition in this pilot study6, we are unable to report counterbalanced results
for these triggers. The following results are based upon each participant’s
6
The problematic sentences described two individuals of the same gender; in these cases, as
well as a reading of ‘he’ or ‘she’ in which the presupposition was contested, there was a
possible reading in which the declarative content was contested.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 11
rating of two items for each trigger, both with either foreground continuations
(for 15 participants) or background continuations (for the other 15).
Trigger Mean rating (SD) Mean response time, ms (SD)
Foreground Background Foreground Background
Again 4.13 (0.97) 2.87 (1.11) 4509 (2906) 4052 (3268)
comparative 4.37 (1.00) 2.60 (0.77) 3460 (2006) 4464 (3080)
These preliminary results show that, as predicted, refutations in foreground
conditions are preferred to those in background conditions for each type of
presupposition trigger. Paired t-tests applied to the counterbalanced
conditions reveal a highly significant preference in judgements for foreground
rather than background conditions (all p < 0.001). Similar planned
comparisons using paired t-tests for response times also show a preference for
foreground conditions over background (continue, t = 1.68, p < 0.05; stop, t
= 2.40, p < 0.01; only , t = 3.55, p < 0.001; all one-tailed).
Between triggers, comparisons show a significant preference in the
background condition for only versus stop (t = 3.46, p < 0.001 two-tailed) and
for only versus continue (t = 3.08, p < 0.01 two-tailed). However, these
preferences are also significant in the foreground condition, as is the
preference for continue versus stop which does not approach significance in
the background condition (only versus stop, t = 5.48, p < 0.001 two-tailed;
only versus continue, t = 2.77, p < 0.01 two-tailed; continue versus stop, t =
2.70, p < 0.01 two-tailed). Each of these comparisons remains significant at p
< 0.05 with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
Note that the reaction times exhibit a great deal of variability, possibly
because these also include reading times. There is a numerical preference for
foreground conditions; the exception is again, but this may reflect the failure to
counterbalance materials in this condition.
5.4. Discussion
The results of this pilot study demonstrate that native speakers are sensitive to
the distinction between foregrounded and backgrounded information, and that
this is accessible to a methodology involving naturalness ratings of dialogue
fragments. Conditions in which backgrounded information was refuted were
12 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
perceived as less felicitous than those in which foregrounded information was
refuted. For the counterbalanced test items, foreground conditions also
yielded significantly faster response times. This suggests that the retrieval of
backgrounded information, which is not being used actively to update the
conversational record, may result in additional processing load.
There is also considerable variability between triggers as to the
acceptability of refuting backgrounded content. Our results suggest that this is
significantly easier in the case of only than continue or stop, with again and the
comparative construction yielding numerically intermediate acceptability
ratings. This might be taken as support for the psychological reality of the
distinction between resolution and lexical triggers.
Two important caveats must be taken into account, however, in attempting
to interpret these findings. First, as discussed above, the status of the prejacent
of only (e.g. the proposition John went to the library in the sentence Only John
went to the library ) is a theoretically-contested issue. The acceptability ratings
of only in the background condition could be interpreted as providing support
for the view that the prejacent is an entailment of only (cf. Horn, 1996 and
Roberts, to appear).
Secondly, and more problematically, the differences that were manifest in
the Background conditions were also exhibited in the Foreground conditions,
in violation of our expectations. This renders any conclusion about the relative
behaviour of the presupposition triggers in this experiment necessarily very
tentative. It could be that the apparent disparity between these conditions is
attributable simply to the materials in question varying in felicity, which might
apply to both experimental conditions. An alternative conjecture is that the
Foreground materials were not optimally felicitous because it is more natural
to respond to a presupposition-triggering question with a response that also
acknowledges the presupposition than with one that does not: compare for
instance (15) and (16). In this case, the infelicity of the Foreground items
might be independent of the Background items, and thus would not invalidate
the comparison between presupposition triggers discussed above.
(15) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: ?No, she smokes.
(16) Q: Did Julia give up smoking?
A: No, she still smokes.
Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers 13
In our ongoing work, we are addressing this issue, with a view to obtaining
a suitable baseline for comparing the backgrounding behaviour of
presuppositions (by constructing refutations that are reliably judged to be
entirely felicitous).
6. General discussion and future directions
In this paper, we have aimed to give show the potential of experimental work to
shed light on theoretically-contested aspects of information structure in
general, and presupposition in particular. It must be acknowledged that this is
a complex phenomenon, as witnessed both by the extensive theoretical
literature and the relatively late development of experimental approaches to the
problem. The above pilot study illustrates both some of the potential of
empirical work to demonstrate the psychological reality of the distinctions
posited by theoreticians, and some of the difficulties encountered in
attempting to operationalise these distinctions in a meaningful way. Our study
illustrates the difficulty in isolating presuppositions from other types of
content in actual interpretation, and the individual variability among
presupposition triggers that seems to elude neat theoretical groupings.
Empirical work in this field has the potential to throw light on whether the
classes of presuppositions posited in some approaches (e.g. Zeevat, 1992) are
coherent, or whether it is more appropriate to situate presuppositions on a
continuum (as in Kadmon, 2001). In either case, a further question concerns
the status of presupposition phenomena as a potential semantic universal (cf.
Von Fintel & Matthewson, 2008). The results from experimental research
have shown that fine-grained judgements about types of presupposed content
cannot be obtained solely from introspection. On the surface, it appears that
presuppositions can take many different forms and be related to the declarative
content of their triggering sentences in various different ways. If it is true that
presuppositions can be organised cross-linguistically into a small set of natural
kinds with a consistent behaviour, that is potentially instructive for our view of
conversational interaction and indeed cognition. We hope to contribute to the
cross-linguistic empirical examination of presupposition and information
backgrounding in future work.
We also hope to unify this work with research on some of the other open
questions about presupposition discussed in this paper. For instance,
presupposition projection is plausibly linked to information backgrounding:
14 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
we have seen how information may be presented at different levels of
‘grounding’ in order to achieve particular cognitive effects. The question of
how this aspect of information structure is used to influence the interlocutor’s
situation model does not appear to have been tackled in any generality.
Nevertheless, there is a strong and widely-shared intuition that
presuppositions may be used to introduce information into the discourse. By
better understanding how presupposition triggers are processed by speaker
and hearer, we will better be able to offer an account of the role of
presupposition in efficient communication. Appeal to experimental data
should enable research in this field to proceed within a constrained and
tractable hypothesis space.
REFERENCES
Abusch, D. (2010). Presupposition triggering from alternatives. Journal of Semantics,
27, 37-80.
Bott, L., & Noveck, I.A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and
time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language , 51, 437-
457.
Chierchia, G., & McConnell-Ginet, S. (1990). Meaning and Grammar . Cambridge
MA: MIT Press.
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Grice, H. P. (1938). Negation. The Grice Papers, UC/Berkeley, California, Bancroft Library.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words.
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al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the Second West Coast Conference on Formal
Linguistics. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 114-125.
Horn, L.R. (1996). Exclusive company: Only and the dynamics of vertical inference.
Journal of Semantics, 13, 10-40.
Horn, L. R. A brief history of negation.
Kadmon, N. (2001). Formal pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Katsos, N., & Cummins, C. (2010). Pragmatics: from theory to experiment and back
again. Language and Linguistics Compass , 4/5, 282-295.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic,
8, 339-359.
Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of
pragmatics. In J. H. Yoon & A. Kathol (Eds.), OSU WPL Vol. 49: Papers in
Semantics. OSU Department of Linguistics.
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Roberts, C. (to appear). Only, presupposition and implicature. Journal of Semantics.
Schlenker, P. (2008). Be articulate: a pragmatic theory of presupposition projection.
Theoretical Linguistics, 34, 157-212.
Shanon, B. (1976). On the two kinds of presuppositions in natural language.
Foundations of Language, 14, 247-249.
Simons, M. (2006). Foundational issues in presupposition. Philosophy Compass, 1,
357-372.
Speranza, Join the Grice Club.
Stalnaker, R. (1976). Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. Munitz and P. Unger (Eds.)
Semantics and philosophy. New York: New York University Press, 197-213.
Van der Sandt, R. (1988). Context and presupposition. London: Croom Helm.
Van der Sandt, R. (1992). Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution, Journal
of Semantics, 9, 333-377.
Von Fintel, K. (2000). What is presupposition accommodation? Unpublished
manuscript, MIT.
Von Fintel, K. (2004). Would you believe it? The king of France is back!
Presuppositions and truth-value intuitions. In M. Reimer & A. Bezuidenhout
(Eds.), Descriptions and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 315-341.
Von Fintel, K., Matthewson, L. (2008). Universals in semantics. Linguistic Review,
25, 139-201.
Zeevat, H. (1992). Presupposition and accommodation in update semantics. Journal
of Semantics, 9, 379-412
Grice: Breaking The Code
Speranza
Comments on S. Assimakopoulos's "On Encoded Lexical Meaning:
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives"
Grice would never speak of the code, never mind think of breaking. Yet, scholars like a keyword, and Grice will be forever featured as a proponent of the "INFERENTIAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION", whatever that is. The idea is that there is a code, and that there is games with the code, or inferences with the code. It may even be propounded, in an exaggerated way, that Herbert Paul Grice is a non-code theorist!
The past few years have seen quite a bit of speculation over relevance
theorists’ commitment to Fodorian semantics as a means to account for
the notion of encoded lexical meaning that they put forth in their
framework. In this paper, I take on the issue, arguing that this view of
lexical semantics compromises Relevance Theory’s aim of psychological
plausibility, since it effectively binds it with the ‘literal first’ hypothesis
that has been deemed unrealistic from a psycholinguistic viewpoint.
After discussing the incompatibility of Fodor’s philosophical account
with the perspective that relevance theorists adopt, I briefly suggest
ways in which further behavioural research on the
semantics/pragmatics distinction could help advance more cognitivelyoriented
accounts of encoded lexical meaning.
Keywords: lexical pragmatics, Fodorian semantics, relevance theory,
“literal-first” hypothesis, polysemy.
(While preparing this paper the author has benefited immensely from discussions with Lewis Bott, Ronnie
Cann, Robyn Carston, Billy Clark, Felicity Deamer, Albert Gatt, Alison Hall, Anne Reboul, Nicola
Spotorno, John Tomlinson Jr, Daniel Wedgwood and Deirdre Wilson. Of course none of the above is
to be held responsible for the views expressed in this paper, which I would after all expect many of
them to find objectionable. I am also particularly indebted to Francesca Ervas for her kind invitation to
this special issue, editorial guidance, and, above all, incredible patience with me. The research
presented herein has been financially supported by a travel grant provided by the ESF Euro-XPrag
Network for collaborative research with John Tomlinson Jr, Lewis Bott and Julio Santiago de Torres,
under the title “Varieties of lexical adjustment”, as well as the Junta de Andalucía project entitled
“Contemporary Naturalism and Pragmatism” (P08.HUM.04099).
Ever since its inception in the seminal work of the Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice
(1989), contemporary linguistic pragmatics has been typically viewed as an
add-on to the more fundamental study of semantics, which deals with linguistic
meaning in abstraction of its context of use.
In this view, the recognition of
speaker intentions, albeit instrumental for the recovery of ‘what is implicated’
by the utterance of a sentence, has been supposed to play little, if any role in
the delineation of its semantic content, i.e. what Grice is customarily taken to
have originally referred to as ‘what is said’ by it.
This way of distinguishing between semantic content and pragmatic import
may still reflect the received view in the work of most contemporary
researchers who are interested in linguistic meaning, but it has been repeatedly
attacked in the past few decades. On a number of occasions, various scholars1
have pursued the argument that, even over and above the obvious contextsensitivity
of indexical expressions (such as I, you, here, now, etc), ‘what is
said’ by a sentence cannot always be identified in isolation from the context of
its utterance. Among them, relevance theorists have right from the beginning
(at least as far back as Wilson & Sperber, 1981) insisted that the linguistically
encoded meaning of an utterance, that is, its underlying sentence’s semantics,
falls short of determining the proposition explicitly expressed by it, and that
the hearer has to undertake processes of pragmatic inference in order to work
this proposition out. The thorough investigation of this claim primarily by
Robyn Carston in a number of publications, culminating in her Thoughts and
Utterances (2002), has eventually led Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) to
take up a radical version of it, according to which, “linguistically encoded
meaning never fully determines the intended proposition expressed” (Carston
2002, p. 49, emphasis in original).
The espousal of this position, which has been dubbed the linguistic
underdeterminacy thesis , has obviously placed RT in direct opposition to the
traditional way of carving the semantics/pragmatics distinction at the
propositional level. Quite predictably, this has in turn sparked the reaction of
various philosophers of language, who have criticized this deviation from the
long-established way of studying linguistic meaning, counter-proposing
1 See, for example, Searle (1978), Travis (1981, 1997), Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995), Carston
(1988, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2008), Atlas (1989, 2005), Recanati (1989, 2001, 2002, 2004,
2010), Bach (1994a, 1994b, 1999), Levinson (2000), Jaszczolt (2005).
minimalist theories of semantic content that defend the context-independence
of the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance (e.g. Borg, 2004;
Cappelen & Lepore, 2005). However, even minimalists themselves have at
times recognized that “if communication can be shown to proceed without
hearers processing the literal meaning of the sentence, i.e. without grasping
minimal propositions, then the claim that minimal propositions have a unique
role to play in actual communicative exchanges is undermined” (Borg, 2007,
p. 353). In this respect, the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis seems to be
vindicated by the existence of a quite substantial body of psycholinguistic
research which has shown that the comprehension of figurative language does
not necessarily involve the prior processing of the surface literal meaning (for
representative overviews, see, Gibbs, 1994; Glucksberg, 2001).
Moving from propositional to lexical meaning, it is this very psychological
implausibility of the so-called ‘literal first ’ hypothesis that has also motivated,
as Deirdre Wilson herself notes (2011, p. 15), one of the latest developments
within RT, that is, its account of ad hoc concept construction. Based on
experimental research which has shown that our categorisation behaviour is
highly context-dependent (e.g. Barsalou, 1987, 1992), relevance theorists
have advanced the argument that the concept communicated through the use of
some particular lexical item can be distinct from the concept it encodes, and
thus requires a spontaneous process of pragmatic enrichment to be reached at
during interpretation.
Even though the experimental investigation of the particular proposals that
relevance theorists have put forth with respect to lexical pragmatics is still very
limited, I will attempt in this short paper to show that their theoretical
proposals have far-reaching implications for the discussion of word meaning,
to the extent that they could even challenge the current view of encoded lexical
meaning within RT itself. To this end, I will start off with a brief overview of the
framework’s assumptions that are relevant to the present discussion and will
then move on to assess the account of lexical pragmatics put forth by relevance
theorists and the tension it creates for traditional approaches to lexical
semantics and, more specifically, the Fodorian one that relevance theorists
have adopted right from the beginning. Wrapping up this paper, I will consider
how the present argumentation can motivate new directions for behavioural
research on the semantics/pragmatics interface.
Right from its emergence, RT has aimed at providing a thoroughgoing
cognitive account of utterance interpretation. For this reason, relevance
theorists draw the semantics/pragmatics distinction in terms of the different
kinds of mental processing they take each of these types of meaning to be the
output of, instead of discussing them at a theoretically abstract level, as most
philosophers have so far tended to. From their perspective, semantic content is
provided via decoding, which is performed by an autonomous linguistic mental
module, while pragmatically derived meanings are taken to be generated by an
inferential processor, which is in turn dedicated to the comprehension of
deliberately communicated stimuli and effectively integrates the output of
decoding with readily available contextual assumptions in the interest of
calculating a reasonable hypothesis about the original speaker-intended
meaning. Without getting into too much detail, which is after all unnecessary
for my current purposes, RT predicts that a hearer will automatically
comprehend a deliberately communicated utterance by following a path of least
effort, according to which, he will assess interpretive hypotheses in order of
accessibility until his expectations for an interpretation that will uncover the
speaker’s intended meaning are satisfied (or, in the case of miscommunication,
abandoned).
In the current setting, the crucial aspect of the RT account is that it does
not take inference to work on the overall output of decoding during the
comprehension of a single utterance, as a traditional Gricean approach would
have it; rather, the two modules work simultaneously, with the decoding one
feeding input to the inferential every step of the way during the processing of
the linguistically encoded stimulus. Obviously, the replacement of Fregeanstyle
thoughts with subjective and context-dependent propositions – what
relevance theorists call explicatures – makes it tempting to assume, as semantic
minimalists have on occasion, that the framework encompasses some radically
contextualist notion of semantics in its premises. On closer inspection,
however, it turns out that this is not the case. As Daniel Wedgwood (2007)
extensively discusses, the sole difference between the minimalist’s way of
describing semantic content and the relevance-theoretic notion of ‘encoded
meaning’ lies in the contention of the former that sentences do actually encode
full propositions; other than that, encoded meaning is equally ‘properly’
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 21
semantic, in the traditional sense, for relevance theorists too. Considering the
following passage from Relevance, this conclusion seems to be warranted:
By definition the semantic representation of a sentence, as assigned to it by a
generative grammar, can take no account of such non-linguistic properties as,
for example, the time and place of utterance, the identity of the speaker, the
speaker’s intentions, and so on. The semantic representation of a sentence
deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.
(Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995, p. 9)
This identification of encoded meaning as essentially context-independent
within RT also follows from the adherence of relevance theorists to Fodorian
semantics. As Carston asserts (2002, p. 58), RT follows Fodor in assuming
that ‘real’ semantics deals with the explication in truth-conditional terms of the
relation between our mental representations and that which they represent,
while linguistic semantics is merely ‘translational’, in the sense that publiclanguage
forms inherit their meaning directly from the Mentalese forms they
encode. Therefore, since in the resulting picture the only actual bearer of
semantic content is Mentalese, which consists in concepts, and, as Jerry Fodor
has it, a concept is an unanalysable, monolithic atom that is individuated by
some property of the real-world entity to which it is nomologically locked, it
becomes virtually impossible for encoded semantic contents to vary across
different contexts.
Therefore, even though relevance theorists maintain that sentences cannot
be attributed any fully propositional semantics, they cannot but accept that
lexical items2 do encode context-independent meanings; that is, the ones that
they directly inherit from their associated atomic concepts.3 And this is indeed
what they seem to have had in mind ever since they first entertained the idea
that “words in a language can be used to convey not only the concepts they
encode, but also indefinitely many other related concepts to which they might
point in a given context” (Sperber & Wilson, 1998, p. 197), since, in the
standard RT picture, in order for such ad hoc concepts to be constructed, the
corresponding encoded concepts crucially need to be used as a starting point.
In order to briefly illustrate the rationale behind the RT account of ad hoc
concept construction now, let’s consider the following examples:
2 Much like most relevant discussions, the present one deals exclusively with monomorphemic ‘openclass’
lexical items, i.e. words that have some descriptive content (unlike indexicals, connectives and
the like).
3 For a recently presented, yet still speculative, alternative view, see Carston (2012).
(1) John has a temperature.
(2) The fridge is empty.
It should be pretty straightforward that in order to come up with the
proposition explicitly expressed by the utterances (1) and (2) in certain, most
likely familiar, contexts, the hearer would have to somehow adjust the encoded
meaning of ‘temperature’ and ‘empty’. In (1), the word ‘temperature’ could be
easily attributed the interpretation of ‘a high temperature’ rather than its actual
denotational content provided by the concept TEMPERATURE, as this can be
taken to be used in utterances like ‘Celcius is a scale for temperature
measurement’. Similarly, in (2) the fridge might not be interpreted as being
totally empty, but rather as being insufficiently filled with the goods that are
needed by a household on a daily basis. In this case, the encoded concept
EMPTY would again need to be adjusted so that the ‘not entirely empty, but
insufficiently full’ interpretation can be yielded.
According to the RT account, the construction of ad hoc concepts, like
TEMPERATURE* and EMPTY* (to use their common notation), is the
outcome of two pragmatic processes that can either individually or in unison
contextually adjust the meaning that a lexical item’s encoded concept carries.
The first one, which is dubbed narrowing, results in meanings that are typically
more specific than the encoded ones, such as the one of TEMPERATURE* in
(1), while the second, broadening, respectively generates looser word
interpretations. Apart from general approximation cases, like the one of
EMPTY* exemplified above, concept broadening is also assumed to mediate
the interpretation of hyperboles and metaphors, as well as category extensions
(e.g. when a brand name, like ‘typex’ is used as an umbrella term for all
products with a common function), neologisms and word coinages.4
As I have already noted in the previous section, the RT account of lexical
pragmatics was originally motivated by Lawrence Barsalou’s behavioural
research on conceptual categorisation, a point that in itself gives the account a
quite high degree of psychological plausibility. However, it has often been
noted5 that this plausibility is compromised when it is coupled with Fodor’s
philosophical semantics, which relevance theorists have adopted for the
4 For detailed overviews of the RT account of lexical pragmatics, see Carston (2002: chapter 5),
Wilson (2004), Wilson & Carston (2007).
5 See, for example, Vicente (2005), Burton-Roberts (2007), Groefsema (2007), Assimakopoulos
(2008), Reboul (2008), Vicente & Martinez Manrique (2010).
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 23
purposes of describing what gets decoded and fed into the inferential
processor during interpretation. As Anne Reboul puts it, “the notion of an ad
hoc concept has rendered visible a long-standing tension in Relevance Theory,
viz. that between the adoption of an (atomistic and externalist) view of concepts
(such as Fodor’s) and the description that Relevance Theory effectively gives to
concepts” (2008, p. 523). In the following section, I will turn to this tension
and will attempt to show that the argument that relevance theorists have used
against its existence runs into trouble when psychological considerations enter
the picture.
2. Ad hoc concepts and the literal-first hypothesis
Based on descriptions similar to the one provided above, albeit much more
detailed of course, Vicente (2005) and Groefsema (2007) have justifiably
noted that the formation of communicated lexical meanings by means of
broadening and narrowing suggests that encoded concepts must have some
kind of internal structure, as it is only by way of manipulating such a structure
that the construction of a speaker-intended ad hoc concept can be made
possible. Naturally, if this is the case, encoded concepts cannot be conceived of
as Fodorian atoms to begin with, since it is by definition impossible to either
‘narrow down’ or ‘loosen up’ a non-decomposable atom. This criticism seems
to be further motivated by the description of concepts within RT itself,
according to which, logical, lexical and encyclopaedic information is standardly
assumed to be stored in different entries of a conceptual address. Given the
explicit recognition of such different types of information associated with a
concept and their implementation in various discussions of ad hoc concept
construction, like, for example, when Carston suggests that, in narrowing, an
encyclopaedic property of a lexically encoded concept can be ‘elevated’ to a
logical (or content-constitutive) status (2002, p. 339), it certainly becomes all
the more tempting to assume that encoded concepts must have some more
substantive content than a monolithic atom would normally allow for in order
for ad hoc concepts to be constructed on their basis.
The way in which RT addresses this criticism, however, can be easily
located in Carston’s parallelism (2010a, pp. 174–175, fn.6) of the relevancetheoretic
notion of a conceptual address with what Fodor has recently called a
‘mental file’:
When you are introduced to John […] you assign him a Mentalese name and
you open a mental file, and the same Mentalese expression (M(John)) serves
both as John’s Mentalese name and as the name of the file that contains your
information about John; […] according to this story, we think in file names;
tokens of file names serve both as the constituents of our thoughts and as the
Mentalese expressions that we use to refer to things we think about. (Fodor,
2008, pp. 94–95, emphasis in original)
Taking into consideration Fodor’s description, it becomes clear that from
the corresponding RT perspective, the various kinds of information that are
thought to be associated with a concept do not form part of its semantic
content per se, and thus play no role whatsoever in the decoding process as far
as relevance theorists are concerned. Consequently, as a theoretical construct,
an ad hoc concept would not appear to pose any particular problems for the
way in which RT views semantics, as it is essentially the output of inference,
with the input from decoding being solely the respective atomic concept (i.e.
the Fodorian mental file name).
This line of argument, which Carston (2010a, 2010b) has followed in
response to a slightly different, but comparable critique that Vicente &
Martínez Manrique (2010) have put forth, is certainly reasonable when it
comes to the deflation of the argument that relevance theorists would be better
off employing a decompositional picture of lexical semantics rather than
Fodor’s atomistic account in their framework; yet, when the overall RT aim of
developing a cognitively realistic account of communication is taken into
consideration, it seems to be binding relevance theorists with a view that, as we
have seen, they otherwise explicitly seek to distance themselves from, i.e. the
‘literal-first’ hypothesis.
Given the current RT account of ad hoc concept construction, according to
which, the inferential enrichment of encoded concepts is standardly treated as
an optional, top-down process, if decoding provides the inferential processor
with the content of a word’s encoded concept, this content cannot but be the
first interpretive hypothesis that the hearer will test for relevance during the
comprehension procedure. Consider, for example, the meaning
communicated by the word ‘temperature’ during the interpretation of ‘John
has a temperature’ in the aforementioned context in which John has a fever.
Here, according to the current RT view, the output of the decoding of
‘temperature’ would be the concept TEMPERATURE, which carries the real,
context-insensitive, and hence literal semantic content associated with the
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 25
word. For the inferential processor to construct the relevant ad hoc concept
TEMPERATURE*, it will need to do so after testing the content of this
encoded concept as a plausible hypothesis about the speaker-intended
meaning, since, being by definition an unanalyzable atom, TEMPERATURE
will necessarily be wholly employed in the process. But if the comprehension of
figurative language is equivalent to that of literal meaning in processing terms,
as the relevant experimental evidence suggests, the priority of this encoded
meaning over the pragmatically enriched one is seriously compromised.6 Given
the mechanics of the cognitive systems that RT posits, even Wilson’s recent
suggestion that “the concept encoded by a word is activated during
comprehension, but not necessarily deployed (2011, p. 16, emphasis in
original) seems unsatisfactory, since again RT currently has no way of
accounting for the activation of a concept without its initial incorporation in
(and, if deemed unsatisfactory, potential discarding from) the mental
representation that the inferential processor calculates as an utterance’s basic
explicature. In general, if the encoded denotational content of any concept can
be bypassed during comprehension, it follows that the inferential processor has
some way of discarding ‘irrelevant’ lexical meanings before actually assessing
them as intended interpretations. But since the inferential processor’s task is
precisely to carry out this assessment in the first place, it has no way of knowing
beforehand which encoded concept it will eventually keep intact and which it
will need to enrich into an ad hoc concept.
If this line of reasoning is on the right track, it reveals a challenge that RT
would need to tackle in order to satisfy its overarching aim of psychological
plausibility. And while the relevant literature has focused almost exclusively on
the implications that the account of ad hoc concept construction carries for the
discussion of a concept’s internal composition (or lack thereof), I believe that
an equally important question that needs to be addressed is how well the
philosophical discussion of lexical meaning that RT clings to can fit its
6 A potential counter-argument that has been brought to my attention is that the experimental
evidence against the literal-first hypothesis only carries implications for the discussion of
propositional and not for that of lexical meaning. I think this is highly debatable since the metaphors
used in the relevant literature often consist of a topic followed directly by the metaphor vehicle, as in
the case of ‘Her surgeon was a butcher’ or ‘My job is a jail’. According to the current RT account of
lexical pragmatics then, it is only the concepts BUTCHER and JAIL that would need to get enriched
for the figurative interpretation to become available, which effectively means that metaphor
interpretation pertains more to the discussion of communicated meaning at the lexical rather than the
propositional level (in at least such cases).
psychological orientation. As I will now turn to argue the two perspectives are
quite hard to reconcile, and for good reason.
3. Philosophy and the psychology of encoded
lexical meaning (all too briefly)
As we have already seen, much like Fodor, relevance theorists take on the
commonplace assumption that semantic theory aims at providing an account of
linguistic meaning at a level of abstraction from its actual use; ‘a sort of
common core of meaning shared by every utterance of a sentence’. Given the
RT on-line processing picture, however, it is only natural to expect that the
inferential processor will have already enriched bits and pieces of an utterance
by the time it has been fully heard in an actual communicative setting. In this
respect, even though the decoding of this utterance will generate a
concatenation of context-independent conceptual representations, by the time
an utterance’s explicitly expressed meaning is constructed, it will inevitably
present various degrees of deviation from the type proposition that Fodor’s
semantic theory puts forth. Following this rationale, Carston recently observed
that even if a sentence’s encoded meaning did somehow turn out to typically
express a full proposition like the minimalist holds, the repercussions of this
discovery would not be “a devastating blow for the central tenets of RT”, as
“the propositions concerned would usually be very weak/general or absurdly
strong, often either truisms or obvious falsehoods”, which would “almost never
be the sort of contents that speakers want to communicate” (2010b, p. 268).
Indeed, considering the particular cognitive processing that mediates the
comprehension of linguistic stimuli against the traditional philosophical
context of studying semantics, Carston’s remark appears to be on the right
track, but from the very same psychological perspective, a pressing question
also arises: if, without any contextual input, the thoughts that ‘there are cats’ or
that ‘it’s raining’ that Fodor alludes to in his discussions are never ‘the sort of
contents that speakers want to communicate’, is there any principled reason
for which we need to accept that they are thoughts that we ever even entertain?
And if the answer to this question is negative, as I think it is, what is the reason
for which we need to maintain that these semantic contents are actual thoughts
- rather than artificial examples pertaining to an abstract model of thought - to
begin with?
Turning to lexical semantic content, this problem becomes even more
obvious. As Carston herself discusses (2002, p. 360),
Focusing on the word ‘happy’, let’s consider the concept that it is supposed to
encode, a concept which is to provide communicative access to a wide range of
other more specific concepts […]. The idea is that the lexically encoded
concept HAPPY is distinct from all of these; it is more general and abstract than
any of them, but provides the basis, in appropriate contexts, for processes of
pragmatic enrichment so that addressees can come to grasp one of the more
specific concepts and incorporate it into their representation of the speaker’s
thought. But what is not at all clear is whether we ever actually have (hence
sometimes try to communicate) thoughts in which this very general lexicalized
concept features as a constituent, or indeed what the property of being HAPPY
is, as opposed to being HAPPY* or HAPPY**, etc.
Clearly, this worry is not exclusive to ‘happy’, but rather seems to present
itself when the encoded meaning of any gradable adjective, where no absolute
denotational property exists, or even that of commonly used verbs like ‘open’
or ‘stop’ are put into scrutiny.7 Even when we turn to nouns, the postulation by
relevance theorists of ad hoc concepts in the mind, raises important questions
regarding their implementation in the individual’s everyday thinking too. So,
when the doctor thinks that John has a temperature in our familiar by now
context, is she thinking that he has a TEMPERATURE or rather a
TEMPERATURE*? Similarly, when Mary thinks that she wants to meet a
bachelor, to use another well-worn example from the RT literature, does she
implement in her mental processing the concept BACHELOR, whose
denotation includes all male individuals who are not married, or the narrower
concept BACHELOR*, whose denotation includes those male individuals who
are not married, but who would also be eligible candidates for her to marry
(obviously not the Pope or some very old or gay man)? If, as I take it, the
answer to these questions points to the ad hoc rather than the encoded
concept, it follows that these concepts coexist in our conceptual repertoire
alongside their Fodorian realist counterparts TEMPERATURE and
BACHELOR. And even if relevance theorists argue that “most occasional
representations of a property (or an object, event or state) do not stabilise into
a concept” (Sperber & Wilson, 1998, p. 198), they would still have to accept
that at least some ad hoc meanings, which are very often used in everyday
7 For the arguments here, see Sperber & Wilson (1998) and Carston (2012) respectively.
28 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
communication, like TEMPERATURE* and BACHELOR* (possibly also
BACHELOR**, a stereotypical bachelor who is untidy, or even
BACHELOR***, a man who seeks ephemeral relationships and so on and so
forth), eventually get to be stored in the mental lexicon; and this time these
seemingly ad hoc concepts would effectively be ‘semantic’, that is, decodable
rather than inferred.
This rampant encoded polysemy , as Vicente and Martínez Manrique
(2010) have aptly called it, would be problematic from a philosophical
viewpoint, as it effectively violates Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor. And
although Carston has noted that such a proliferation of word senses in the
lexicon would not necessarily be problematic for RT, since “within a theory of
utterance interpretation conceived as a matter of on-line cognitive processes, it
might well be more economical to retrieve a clutch of stored senses and choose
among them, than to construct an interpretation out of a single sense and
contextual information” (2002, p. 219, fn.50), when combined with the
preceding discussion of the encoded meaning of words like ‘happy’ or ‘open’,
this remark certainly raises questions regarding the relevance theorists’ need
to postulate single, general concepts that encode the meaning of such words in
the first place.
Fodor has based his account of semantics on the presupposition that the
content of a natural language sentence or a lexical item is entirely isomorphic
to some determinate thought or atomic concept that they correspondingly
encode. In this respect, apart from the few cases of homonymy, as in the two
distinct meanings of the word ‘bank’, a lexical item carries a single meaning
that is referentially derived. That is largely because of the issues that he has
sought to address in the first place; issues for which context-sensitivity has
traditionally been thought of as problematic, such as compositionality, the
assignment of satisfaction conditions to semantically evaluable expressions,
intentional explanation and so on and so forth. But this isomorphism does not
work when psychological considerations enter the picture, a point that has
been made by Sperber and Wilson themselves from at least as far back as
(1998). When it comes to actual verbal communication, even Fodor agrees
that “language is strikingly elliptical and inexplicit about the thoughts it
expresses” (2001, p. 11), but this does not compromise his account, since it
has little, if anything, to do with the actual processing of linguistic stimuli per
se; it is “an account of the metaphysical character of the (primitive) semantic
properties and relations” rather than “a specification of the semantic
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 29
properties of the expressions in a language” (Fodor, 2008, p. 18, fn.34). In
fact, like most philosophers, Fodor has emphasized time and again that
confusing psychology with semantics “is a very bad idea” and that “there is, as
a matter of principle, no such thing as a psychological theory of meaning ”,
since semantics is by definition about “constitutive relations between
representations and the world” (Fodor, 2008, p. 88, emphasis in original).
Relevance theorists are in all likelihood equally aware of the more general
dichotomy of interest between philosophers and psychologists who study
linguistic meaning as they seem to acknowledge that “it is far from obvious that
the label ‘concept’ refers to the same entity for both parties (and very clear that
the term ‘semantic’ does not) so that little conciliatory progress is likely to be
made until these differences are mapped out and resolved” (Carston, 2010a, p.
175, fn.8). Even so, they choose to ignore semantics from their research
agenda. For instance, in a recent paper, Carston indirectly responded to the
criticisms that RT has been receiving regarding what minimalists perceive to be
its semantic commitments by noting that discussions concerning semantics are
not central to what the theory is all about and suggesting that the label ‘radical
pragmaticism’ fits the theory’s orientation much better than ‘radical
contextualism’. As she argues, “it is us, the users of language, who are sensitive
to context, and, as rational communicating/interpreting agents, we are able, by
exploiting this sensitivity in each other, to get linguistic expressions to do a lot
more than simply express their standing linguistic meaning” (2010b, p. 266).
In this way, Carston distinguishes the study of the cognitive processing that
underlies linguistic communication from that of semantic content, or ‘standing
linguistic meaning’ as she calls it. Since RT’s concern has always been to
account for the ways in which the dedicated inferential process enriches and
complements the semantic representation of linguistic strings, the argument
goes, it should have nothing more to say about the nature of these
representations other than that they are structured strings of Fodorian-style
atomic concepts, which in turn need considerable contextual enrichment to
reach full propositional status.
As we have seen, however, the implementation of Fodorian-style concepts
as actual processing units that lexical decoding feeds into the inferential
processor during utterance interpretation appears to be creating problems in
its own right; from a psychological perspective, RT’s inability to escape the
literal-first hypothesis is a case in point, while from a philosophical one, the
proliferation of word senses creates an uncontrollable system, where it
30 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
becomes very difficult to keep track of how many senses a word effectively
encodes. Against this background, relevance theorists might need to explore
alternative ways of accounting for encoded lexical meaning, since abstract
philosophical models of lexical semantics of the type that Fodor offers do not
fit the bill, nor are they supposed to. Therefore, a more psychologicallyoriented
approach to the question of what an expression’s encoded linguistic
meaning effectively is seems needed and, to this effect, behavioural research
from the domain of psycholinguistics would undoubtedly have a pivotal role to
play.
4. Experimental prospects
Given the detailed account of lexical pragmatics that relevance theorists have
recently developed, it would certainly be interesting in its own right to see the
extent to which the experimental research that has challenged the ‘literal first’
hypothesis with respect to the processing of figurative language could also be
applied to the study of the processing of other types of pragmatically enriched
lexical interpretations, like narrowings, approximations, category extensions,
neologisms and word coinages. As Wilson and Carston note, some preliminary
data on examples from the last two categories (Clark & Clark, 1979; Clark &
Gerrig, 1983) suggest that they are “no harder to understand than regular
uses” (2007, p. 237), but it remains to be seen how fast the interpretation of
neologisms and word coinages takes place in comparison to the processing of
literal meaning. Turning to cases of lexical narrowing, like the one presented
in (1), and approximation, like the one in (2), I think it would be quite
counterintuitive to expect any delays in their processing, but again there is, to
my knowledge, a complete lack of experimental evidence to support this
intuition.
From the current discussion’s perspective, experimentation on different
varieties of lexical meaning adjustment would be able to give us a clearer idea
of how different types of enriched interpretations of a word relate to its literal
meaning. If no significant difference is documented, this would strengthen not
only the assumption that literal lexical meaning is in no way exceptional but
also the need to come up with more psychologically-oriented accounts of the
mental lexicon and more essentially its particular contribution during verbal
communication. One of the few experimental studies on lexical pragmatics
from an RT perspective that has surfaced in the recent years, for example,
suggests that certain context-independent properties of a word’s meaning
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 31
remain activated even after a metaphorical (Rubio-Fernández, 2007) or
narrower interpretation (Rubio-Fernández, 2008) have been reached.
However, even though this set of experiments has been extensively quoted in
the RT literature, no full explanation has been provided about what these
properties are and how they relate to the equally context-independent atomic
concept that the same word encodes. Foreseeing that a ‘core’ relevance
theorist’s response would be that they are part of the information that is
attached to the word’s conceptual address and thus not part of its content (as
per the discussion of Fodorian mental files above), it still is curious why these
particular properties are obligatorily activated during spontaneous
interpretation, which in itself gives the impression that they are decoded rather
than inferred.
It goes without saying of course that the suggested behavioural research
would not be without its limitations either. For instance, it can certainly be
argued that it is dangerous to rely too much on time-reaction measurements,
which most of the relevant experiments have implemented either way, since
they cannot, on their own provide any direct evidence for the contention that
we actually interpret literal and non-literal language by using the same types of
mental processes.8 To this effect, using more advanced experimental
techniques, and also potentially looking into what neurolinguistics would have
to say could provide us with much more solid conclusions. Regardless of any
such limitation, however, I am convinced that the tension between the
philosophical analysis of lexical meaning and its psychological consideration
that the RT discussion of ad hoc concept construction seems to have
involuntarily revealed can open up new and exciting prospects not only for
theoretical analysis, but also for experimental research on the
semantics/pragmatics interface, at a time when the field seems to be dealing
almost exclusively with tropes, scalar implicatures and presupposition
projection.
8 For a discussion along these lines from a psycholinguistic perspective, see McElree & Nordlie
(1999), a paper suggested to me by John Tomlinson Jr.
32 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
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Comments on S. Assimakopoulos's "On Encoded Lexical Meaning:
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives"
Grice would never speak of the code, never mind think of breaking. Yet, scholars like a keyword, and Grice will be forever featured as a proponent of the "INFERENTIAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION", whatever that is. The idea is that there is a code, and that there is games with the code, or inferences with the code. It may even be propounded, in an exaggerated way, that Herbert Paul Grice is a non-code theorist!
The past few years have seen quite a bit of speculation over relevance
theorists’ commitment to Fodorian semantics as a means to account for
the notion of encoded lexical meaning that they put forth in their
framework. In this paper, I take on the issue, arguing that this view of
lexical semantics compromises Relevance Theory’s aim of psychological
plausibility, since it effectively binds it with the ‘literal first’ hypothesis
that has been deemed unrealistic from a psycholinguistic viewpoint.
After discussing the incompatibility of Fodor’s philosophical account
with the perspective that relevance theorists adopt, I briefly suggest
ways in which further behavioural research on the
semantics/pragmatics distinction could help advance more cognitivelyoriented
accounts of encoded lexical meaning.
Keywords: lexical pragmatics, Fodorian semantics, relevance theory,
“literal-first” hypothesis, polysemy.
(While preparing this paper the author has benefited immensely from discussions with Lewis Bott, Ronnie
Cann, Robyn Carston, Billy Clark, Felicity Deamer, Albert Gatt, Alison Hall, Anne Reboul, Nicola
Spotorno, John Tomlinson Jr, Daniel Wedgwood and Deirdre Wilson. Of course none of the above is
to be held responsible for the views expressed in this paper, which I would after all expect many of
them to find objectionable. I am also particularly indebted to Francesca Ervas for her kind invitation to
this special issue, editorial guidance, and, above all, incredible patience with me. The research
presented herein has been financially supported by a travel grant provided by the ESF Euro-XPrag
Network for collaborative research with John Tomlinson Jr, Lewis Bott and Julio Santiago de Torres,
under the title “Varieties of lexical adjustment”, as well as the Junta de Andalucía project entitled
“Contemporary Naturalism and Pragmatism” (P08.HUM.04099).
Ever since its inception in the seminal work of the Oxford philosopher Herbert Paul Grice
(1989), contemporary linguistic pragmatics has been typically viewed as an
add-on to the more fundamental study of semantics, which deals with linguistic
meaning in abstraction of its context of use.
In this view, the recognition of
speaker intentions, albeit instrumental for the recovery of ‘what is implicated’
by the utterance of a sentence, has been supposed to play little, if any role in
the delineation of its semantic content, i.e. what Grice is customarily taken to
have originally referred to as ‘what is said’ by it.
This way of distinguishing between semantic content and pragmatic import
may still reflect the received view in the work of most contemporary
researchers who are interested in linguistic meaning, but it has been repeatedly
attacked in the past few decades. On a number of occasions, various scholars1
have pursued the argument that, even over and above the obvious contextsensitivity
of indexical expressions (such as I, you, here, now, etc), ‘what is
said’ by a sentence cannot always be identified in isolation from the context of
its utterance. Among them, relevance theorists have right from the beginning
(at least as far back as Wilson & Sperber, 1981) insisted that the linguistically
encoded meaning of an utterance, that is, its underlying sentence’s semantics,
falls short of determining the proposition explicitly expressed by it, and that
the hearer has to undertake processes of pragmatic inference in order to work
this proposition out. The thorough investigation of this claim primarily by
Robyn Carston in a number of publications, culminating in her Thoughts and
Utterances (2002), has eventually led Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) to
take up a radical version of it, according to which, “linguistically encoded
meaning never fully determines the intended proposition expressed” (Carston
2002, p. 49, emphasis in original).
The espousal of this position, which has been dubbed the linguistic
underdeterminacy thesis , has obviously placed RT in direct opposition to the
traditional way of carving the semantics/pragmatics distinction at the
propositional level. Quite predictably, this has in turn sparked the reaction of
various philosophers of language, who have criticized this deviation from the
long-established way of studying linguistic meaning, counter-proposing
1 See, for example, Searle (1978), Travis (1981, 1997), Sperber & Wilson (1986/1995), Carston
(1988, 1999, 2002, 2004, 2008), Atlas (1989, 2005), Recanati (1989, 2001, 2002, 2004,
2010), Bach (1994a, 1994b, 1999), Levinson (2000), Jaszczolt (2005).
minimalist theories of semantic content that defend the context-independence
of the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance (e.g. Borg, 2004;
Cappelen & Lepore, 2005). However, even minimalists themselves have at
times recognized that “if communication can be shown to proceed without
hearers processing the literal meaning of the sentence, i.e. without grasping
minimal propositions, then the claim that minimal propositions have a unique
role to play in actual communicative exchanges is undermined” (Borg, 2007,
p. 353). In this respect, the linguistic underdeterminacy thesis seems to be
vindicated by the existence of a quite substantial body of psycholinguistic
research which has shown that the comprehension of figurative language does
not necessarily involve the prior processing of the surface literal meaning (for
representative overviews, see, Gibbs, 1994; Glucksberg, 2001).
Moving from propositional to lexical meaning, it is this very psychological
implausibility of the so-called ‘literal first ’ hypothesis that has also motivated,
as Deirdre Wilson herself notes (2011, p. 15), one of the latest developments
within RT, that is, its account of ad hoc concept construction. Based on
experimental research which has shown that our categorisation behaviour is
highly context-dependent (e.g. Barsalou, 1987, 1992), relevance theorists
have advanced the argument that the concept communicated through the use of
some particular lexical item can be distinct from the concept it encodes, and
thus requires a spontaneous process of pragmatic enrichment to be reached at
during interpretation.
Even though the experimental investigation of the particular proposals that
relevance theorists have put forth with respect to lexical pragmatics is still very
limited, I will attempt in this short paper to show that their theoretical
proposals have far-reaching implications for the discussion of word meaning,
to the extent that they could even challenge the current view of encoded lexical
meaning within RT itself. To this end, I will start off with a brief overview of the
framework’s assumptions that are relevant to the present discussion and will
then move on to assess the account of lexical pragmatics put forth by relevance
theorists and the tension it creates for traditional approaches to lexical
semantics and, more specifically, the Fodorian one that relevance theorists
have adopted right from the beginning. Wrapping up this paper, I will consider
how the present argumentation can motivate new directions for behavioural
research on the semantics/pragmatics interface.
Right from its emergence, RT has aimed at providing a thoroughgoing
cognitive account of utterance interpretation. For this reason, relevance
theorists draw the semantics/pragmatics distinction in terms of the different
kinds of mental processing they take each of these types of meaning to be the
output of, instead of discussing them at a theoretically abstract level, as most
philosophers have so far tended to. From their perspective, semantic content is
provided via decoding, which is performed by an autonomous linguistic mental
module, while pragmatically derived meanings are taken to be generated by an
inferential processor, which is in turn dedicated to the comprehension of
deliberately communicated stimuli and effectively integrates the output of
decoding with readily available contextual assumptions in the interest of
calculating a reasonable hypothesis about the original speaker-intended
meaning. Without getting into too much detail, which is after all unnecessary
for my current purposes, RT predicts that a hearer will automatically
comprehend a deliberately communicated utterance by following a path of least
effort, according to which, he will assess interpretive hypotheses in order of
accessibility until his expectations for an interpretation that will uncover the
speaker’s intended meaning are satisfied (or, in the case of miscommunication,
abandoned).
In the current setting, the crucial aspect of the RT account is that it does
not take inference to work on the overall output of decoding during the
comprehension of a single utterance, as a traditional Gricean approach would
have it; rather, the two modules work simultaneously, with the decoding one
feeding input to the inferential every step of the way during the processing of
the linguistically encoded stimulus. Obviously, the replacement of Fregeanstyle
thoughts with subjective and context-dependent propositions – what
relevance theorists call explicatures – makes it tempting to assume, as semantic
minimalists have on occasion, that the framework encompasses some radically
contextualist notion of semantics in its premises. On closer inspection,
however, it turns out that this is not the case. As Daniel Wedgwood (2007)
extensively discusses, the sole difference between the minimalist’s way of
describing semantic content and the relevance-theoretic notion of ‘encoded
meaning’ lies in the contention of the former that sentences do actually encode
full propositions; other than that, encoded meaning is equally ‘properly’
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 21
semantic, in the traditional sense, for relevance theorists too. Considering the
following passage from Relevance, this conclusion seems to be warranted:
By definition the semantic representation of a sentence, as assigned to it by a
generative grammar, can take no account of such non-linguistic properties as,
for example, the time and place of utterance, the identity of the speaker, the
speaker’s intentions, and so on. The semantic representation of a sentence
deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it.
(Sperber & Wilson, 1986/1995, p. 9)
This identification of encoded meaning as essentially context-independent
within RT also follows from the adherence of relevance theorists to Fodorian
semantics. As Carston asserts (2002, p. 58), RT follows Fodor in assuming
that ‘real’ semantics deals with the explication in truth-conditional terms of the
relation between our mental representations and that which they represent,
while linguistic semantics is merely ‘translational’, in the sense that publiclanguage
forms inherit their meaning directly from the Mentalese forms they
encode. Therefore, since in the resulting picture the only actual bearer of
semantic content is Mentalese, which consists in concepts, and, as Jerry Fodor
has it, a concept is an unanalysable, monolithic atom that is individuated by
some property of the real-world entity to which it is nomologically locked, it
becomes virtually impossible for encoded semantic contents to vary across
different contexts.
Therefore, even though relevance theorists maintain that sentences cannot
be attributed any fully propositional semantics, they cannot but accept that
lexical items2 do encode context-independent meanings; that is, the ones that
they directly inherit from their associated atomic concepts.3 And this is indeed
what they seem to have had in mind ever since they first entertained the idea
that “words in a language can be used to convey not only the concepts they
encode, but also indefinitely many other related concepts to which they might
point in a given context” (Sperber & Wilson, 1998, p. 197), since, in the
standard RT picture, in order for such ad hoc concepts to be constructed, the
corresponding encoded concepts crucially need to be used as a starting point.
In order to briefly illustrate the rationale behind the RT account of ad hoc
concept construction now, let’s consider the following examples:
2 Much like most relevant discussions, the present one deals exclusively with monomorphemic ‘openclass’
lexical items, i.e. words that have some descriptive content (unlike indexicals, connectives and
the like).
3 For a recently presented, yet still speculative, alternative view, see Carston (2012).
(1) John has a temperature.
(2) The fridge is empty.
It should be pretty straightforward that in order to come up with the
proposition explicitly expressed by the utterances (1) and (2) in certain, most
likely familiar, contexts, the hearer would have to somehow adjust the encoded
meaning of ‘temperature’ and ‘empty’. In (1), the word ‘temperature’ could be
easily attributed the interpretation of ‘a high temperature’ rather than its actual
denotational content provided by the concept TEMPERATURE, as this can be
taken to be used in utterances like ‘Celcius is a scale for temperature
measurement’. Similarly, in (2) the fridge might not be interpreted as being
totally empty, but rather as being insufficiently filled with the goods that are
needed by a household on a daily basis. In this case, the encoded concept
EMPTY would again need to be adjusted so that the ‘not entirely empty, but
insufficiently full’ interpretation can be yielded.
According to the RT account, the construction of ad hoc concepts, like
TEMPERATURE* and EMPTY* (to use their common notation), is the
outcome of two pragmatic processes that can either individually or in unison
contextually adjust the meaning that a lexical item’s encoded concept carries.
The first one, which is dubbed narrowing, results in meanings that are typically
more specific than the encoded ones, such as the one of TEMPERATURE* in
(1), while the second, broadening, respectively generates looser word
interpretations. Apart from general approximation cases, like the one of
EMPTY* exemplified above, concept broadening is also assumed to mediate
the interpretation of hyperboles and metaphors, as well as category extensions
(e.g. when a brand name, like ‘typex’ is used as an umbrella term for all
products with a common function), neologisms and word coinages.4
As I have already noted in the previous section, the RT account of lexical
pragmatics was originally motivated by Lawrence Barsalou’s behavioural
research on conceptual categorisation, a point that in itself gives the account a
quite high degree of psychological plausibility. However, it has often been
noted5 that this plausibility is compromised when it is coupled with Fodor’s
philosophical semantics, which relevance theorists have adopted for the
4 For detailed overviews of the RT account of lexical pragmatics, see Carston (2002: chapter 5),
Wilson (2004), Wilson & Carston (2007).
5 See, for example, Vicente (2005), Burton-Roberts (2007), Groefsema (2007), Assimakopoulos
(2008), Reboul (2008), Vicente & Martinez Manrique (2010).
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 23
purposes of describing what gets decoded and fed into the inferential
processor during interpretation. As Anne Reboul puts it, “the notion of an ad
hoc concept has rendered visible a long-standing tension in Relevance Theory,
viz. that between the adoption of an (atomistic and externalist) view of concepts
(such as Fodor’s) and the description that Relevance Theory effectively gives to
concepts” (2008, p. 523). In the following section, I will turn to this tension
and will attempt to show that the argument that relevance theorists have used
against its existence runs into trouble when psychological considerations enter
the picture.
2. Ad hoc concepts and the literal-first hypothesis
Based on descriptions similar to the one provided above, albeit much more
detailed of course, Vicente (2005) and Groefsema (2007) have justifiably
noted that the formation of communicated lexical meanings by means of
broadening and narrowing suggests that encoded concepts must have some
kind of internal structure, as it is only by way of manipulating such a structure
that the construction of a speaker-intended ad hoc concept can be made
possible. Naturally, if this is the case, encoded concepts cannot be conceived of
as Fodorian atoms to begin with, since it is by definition impossible to either
‘narrow down’ or ‘loosen up’ a non-decomposable atom. This criticism seems
to be further motivated by the description of concepts within RT itself,
according to which, logical, lexical and encyclopaedic information is standardly
assumed to be stored in different entries of a conceptual address. Given the
explicit recognition of such different types of information associated with a
concept and their implementation in various discussions of ad hoc concept
construction, like, for example, when Carston suggests that, in narrowing, an
encyclopaedic property of a lexically encoded concept can be ‘elevated’ to a
logical (or content-constitutive) status (2002, p. 339), it certainly becomes all
the more tempting to assume that encoded concepts must have some more
substantive content than a monolithic atom would normally allow for in order
for ad hoc concepts to be constructed on their basis.
The way in which RT addresses this criticism, however, can be easily
located in Carston’s parallelism (2010a, pp. 174–175, fn.6) of the relevancetheoretic
notion of a conceptual address with what Fodor has recently called a
‘mental file’:
When you are introduced to John […] you assign him a Mentalese name and
you open a mental file, and the same Mentalese expression (M(John)) serves
both as John’s Mentalese name and as the name of the file that contains your
information about John; […] according to this story, we think in file names;
tokens of file names serve both as the constituents of our thoughts and as the
Mentalese expressions that we use to refer to things we think about. (Fodor,
2008, pp. 94–95, emphasis in original)
Taking into consideration Fodor’s description, it becomes clear that from
the corresponding RT perspective, the various kinds of information that are
thought to be associated with a concept do not form part of its semantic
content per se, and thus play no role whatsoever in the decoding process as far
as relevance theorists are concerned. Consequently, as a theoretical construct,
an ad hoc concept would not appear to pose any particular problems for the
way in which RT views semantics, as it is essentially the output of inference,
with the input from decoding being solely the respective atomic concept (i.e.
the Fodorian mental file name).
This line of argument, which Carston (2010a, 2010b) has followed in
response to a slightly different, but comparable critique that Vicente &
Martínez Manrique (2010) have put forth, is certainly reasonable when it
comes to the deflation of the argument that relevance theorists would be better
off employing a decompositional picture of lexical semantics rather than
Fodor’s atomistic account in their framework; yet, when the overall RT aim of
developing a cognitively realistic account of communication is taken into
consideration, it seems to be binding relevance theorists with a view that, as we
have seen, they otherwise explicitly seek to distance themselves from, i.e. the
‘literal-first’ hypothesis.
Given the current RT account of ad hoc concept construction, according to
which, the inferential enrichment of encoded concepts is standardly treated as
an optional, top-down process, if decoding provides the inferential processor
with the content of a word’s encoded concept, this content cannot but be the
first interpretive hypothesis that the hearer will test for relevance during the
comprehension procedure. Consider, for example, the meaning
communicated by the word ‘temperature’ during the interpretation of ‘John
has a temperature’ in the aforementioned context in which John has a fever.
Here, according to the current RT view, the output of the decoding of
‘temperature’ would be the concept TEMPERATURE, which carries the real,
context-insensitive, and hence literal semantic content associated with the
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 25
word. For the inferential processor to construct the relevant ad hoc concept
TEMPERATURE*, it will need to do so after testing the content of this
encoded concept as a plausible hypothesis about the speaker-intended
meaning, since, being by definition an unanalyzable atom, TEMPERATURE
will necessarily be wholly employed in the process. But if the comprehension of
figurative language is equivalent to that of literal meaning in processing terms,
as the relevant experimental evidence suggests, the priority of this encoded
meaning over the pragmatically enriched one is seriously compromised.6 Given
the mechanics of the cognitive systems that RT posits, even Wilson’s recent
suggestion that “the concept encoded by a word is activated during
comprehension, but not necessarily deployed (2011, p. 16, emphasis in
original) seems unsatisfactory, since again RT currently has no way of
accounting for the activation of a concept without its initial incorporation in
(and, if deemed unsatisfactory, potential discarding from) the mental
representation that the inferential processor calculates as an utterance’s basic
explicature. In general, if the encoded denotational content of any concept can
be bypassed during comprehension, it follows that the inferential processor has
some way of discarding ‘irrelevant’ lexical meanings before actually assessing
them as intended interpretations. But since the inferential processor’s task is
precisely to carry out this assessment in the first place, it has no way of knowing
beforehand which encoded concept it will eventually keep intact and which it
will need to enrich into an ad hoc concept.
If this line of reasoning is on the right track, it reveals a challenge that RT
would need to tackle in order to satisfy its overarching aim of psychological
plausibility. And while the relevant literature has focused almost exclusively on
the implications that the account of ad hoc concept construction carries for the
discussion of a concept’s internal composition (or lack thereof), I believe that
an equally important question that needs to be addressed is how well the
philosophical discussion of lexical meaning that RT clings to can fit its
6 A potential counter-argument that has been brought to my attention is that the experimental
evidence against the literal-first hypothesis only carries implications for the discussion of
propositional and not for that of lexical meaning. I think this is highly debatable since the metaphors
used in the relevant literature often consist of a topic followed directly by the metaphor vehicle, as in
the case of ‘Her surgeon was a butcher’ or ‘My job is a jail’. According to the current RT account of
lexical pragmatics then, it is only the concepts BUTCHER and JAIL that would need to get enriched
for the figurative interpretation to become available, which effectively means that metaphor
interpretation pertains more to the discussion of communicated meaning at the lexical rather than the
propositional level (in at least such cases).
psychological orientation. As I will now turn to argue the two perspectives are
quite hard to reconcile, and for good reason.
3. Philosophy and the psychology of encoded
lexical meaning (all too briefly)
As we have already seen, much like Fodor, relevance theorists take on the
commonplace assumption that semantic theory aims at providing an account of
linguistic meaning at a level of abstraction from its actual use; ‘a sort of
common core of meaning shared by every utterance of a sentence’. Given the
RT on-line processing picture, however, it is only natural to expect that the
inferential processor will have already enriched bits and pieces of an utterance
by the time it has been fully heard in an actual communicative setting. In this
respect, even though the decoding of this utterance will generate a
concatenation of context-independent conceptual representations, by the time
an utterance’s explicitly expressed meaning is constructed, it will inevitably
present various degrees of deviation from the type proposition that Fodor’s
semantic theory puts forth. Following this rationale, Carston recently observed
that even if a sentence’s encoded meaning did somehow turn out to typically
express a full proposition like the minimalist holds, the repercussions of this
discovery would not be “a devastating blow for the central tenets of RT”, as
“the propositions concerned would usually be very weak/general or absurdly
strong, often either truisms or obvious falsehoods”, which would “almost never
be the sort of contents that speakers want to communicate” (2010b, p. 268).
Indeed, considering the particular cognitive processing that mediates the
comprehension of linguistic stimuli against the traditional philosophical
context of studying semantics, Carston’s remark appears to be on the right
track, but from the very same psychological perspective, a pressing question
also arises: if, without any contextual input, the thoughts that ‘there are cats’ or
that ‘it’s raining’ that Fodor alludes to in his discussions are never ‘the sort of
contents that speakers want to communicate’, is there any principled reason
for which we need to accept that they are thoughts that we ever even entertain?
And if the answer to this question is negative, as I think it is, what is the reason
for which we need to maintain that these semantic contents are actual thoughts
- rather than artificial examples pertaining to an abstract model of thought - to
begin with?
Turning to lexical semantic content, this problem becomes even more
obvious. As Carston herself discusses (2002, p. 360),
Focusing on the word ‘happy’, let’s consider the concept that it is supposed to
encode, a concept which is to provide communicative access to a wide range of
other more specific concepts […]. The idea is that the lexically encoded
concept HAPPY is distinct from all of these; it is more general and abstract than
any of them, but provides the basis, in appropriate contexts, for processes of
pragmatic enrichment so that addressees can come to grasp one of the more
specific concepts and incorporate it into their representation of the speaker’s
thought. But what is not at all clear is whether we ever actually have (hence
sometimes try to communicate) thoughts in which this very general lexicalized
concept features as a constituent, or indeed what the property of being HAPPY
is, as opposed to being HAPPY* or HAPPY**, etc.
Clearly, this worry is not exclusive to ‘happy’, but rather seems to present
itself when the encoded meaning of any gradable adjective, where no absolute
denotational property exists, or even that of commonly used verbs like ‘open’
or ‘stop’ are put into scrutiny.7 Even when we turn to nouns, the postulation by
relevance theorists of ad hoc concepts in the mind, raises important questions
regarding their implementation in the individual’s everyday thinking too. So,
when the doctor thinks that John has a temperature in our familiar by now
context, is she thinking that he has a TEMPERATURE or rather a
TEMPERATURE*? Similarly, when Mary thinks that she wants to meet a
bachelor, to use another well-worn example from the RT literature, does she
implement in her mental processing the concept BACHELOR, whose
denotation includes all male individuals who are not married, or the narrower
concept BACHELOR*, whose denotation includes those male individuals who
are not married, but who would also be eligible candidates for her to marry
(obviously not the Pope or some very old or gay man)? If, as I take it, the
answer to these questions points to the ad hoc rather than the encoded
concept, it follows that these concepts coexist in our conceptual repertoire
alongside their Fodorian realist counterparts TEMPERATURE and
BACHELOR. And even if relevance theorists argue that “most occasional
representations of a property (or an object, event or state) do not stabilise into
a concept” (Sperber & Wilson, 1998, p. 198), they would still have to accept
that at least some ad hoc meanings, which are very often used in everyday
7 For the arguments here, see Sperber & Wilson (1998) and Carston (2012) respectively.
28 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
communication, like TEMPERATURE* and BACHELOR* (possibly also
BACHELOR**, a stereotypical bachelor who is untidy, or even
BACHELOR***, a man who seeks ephemeral relationships and so on and so
forth), eventually get to be stored in the mental lexicon; and this time these
seemingly ad hoc concepts would effectively be ‘semantic’, that is, decodable
rather than inferred.
This rampant encoded polysemy , as Vicente and Martínez Manrique
(2010) have aptly called it, would be problematic from a philosophical
viewpoint, as it effectively violates Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor. And
although Carston has noted that such a proliferation of word senses in the
lexicon would not necessarily be problematic for RT, since “within a theory of
utterance interpretation conceived as a matter of on-line cognitive processes, it
might well be more economical to retrieve a clutch of stored senses and choose
among them, than to construct an interpretation out of a single sense and
contextual information” (2002, p. 219, fn.50), when combined with the
preceding discussion of the encoded meaning of words like ‘happy’ or ‘open’,
this remark certainly raises questions regarding the relevance theorists’ need
to postulate single, general concepts that encode the meaning of such words in
the first place.
Fodor has based his account of semantics on the presupposition that the
content of a natural language sentence or a lexical item is entirely isomorphic
to some determinate thought or atomic concept that they correspondingly
encode. In this respect, apart from the few cases of homonymy, as in the two
distinct meanings of the word ‘bank’, a lexical item carries a single meaning
that is referentially derived. That is largely because of the issues that he has
sought to address in the first place; issues for which context-sensitivity has
traditionally been thought of as problematic, such as compositionality, the
assignment of satisfaction conditions to semantically evaluable expressions,
intentional explanation and so on and so forth. But this isomorphism does not
work when psychological considerations enter the picture, a point that has
been made by Sperber and Wilson themselves from at least as far back as
(1998). When it comes to actual verbal communication, even Fodor agrees
that “language is strikingly elliptical and inexplicit about the thoughts it
expresses” (2001, p. 11), but this does not compromise his account, since it
has little, if anything, to do with the actual processing of linguistic stimuli per
se; it is “an account of the metaphysical character of the (primitive) semantic
properties and relations” rather than “a specification of the semantic
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 29
properties of the expressions in a language” (Fodor, 2008, p. 18, fn.34). In
fact, like most philosophers, Fodor has emphasized time and again that
confusing psychology with semantics “is a very bad idea” and that “there is, as
a matter of principle, no such thing as a psychological theory of meaning ”,
since semantics is by definition about “constitutive relations between
representations and the world” (Fodor, 2008, p. 88, emphasis in original).
Relevance theorists are in all likelihood equally aware of the more general
dichotomy of interest between philosophers and psychologists who study
linguistic meaning as they seem to acknowledge that “it is far from obvious that
the label ‘concept’ refers to the same entity for both parties (and very clear that
the term ‘semantic’ does not) so that little conciliatory progress is likely to be
made until these differences are mapped out and resolved” (Carston, 2010a, p.
175, fn.8). Even so, they choose to ignore semantics from their research
agenda. For instance, in a recent paper, Carston indirectly responded to the
criticisms that RT has been receiving regarding what minimalists perceive to be
its semantic commitments by noting that discussions concerning semantics are
not central to what the theory is all about and suggesting that the label ‘radical
pragmaticism’ fits the theory’s orientation much better than ‘radical
contextualism’. As she argues, “it is us, the users of language, who are sensitive
to context, and, as rational communicating/interpreting agents, we are able, by
exploiting this sensitivity in each other, to get linguistic expressions to do a lot
more than simply express their standing linguistic meaning” (2010b, p. 266).
In this way, Carston distinguishes the study of the cognitive processing that
underlies linguistic communication from that of semantic content, or ‘standing
linguistic meaning’ as she calls it. Since RT’s concern has always been to
account for the ways in which the dedicated inferential process enriches and
complements the semantic representation of linguistic strings, the argument
goes, it should have nothing more to say about the nature of these
representations other than that they are structured strings of Fodorian-style
atomic concepts, which in turn need considerable contextual enrichment to
reach full propositional status.
As we have seen, however, the implementation of Fodorian-style concepts
as actual processing units that lexical decoding feeds into the inferential
processor during utterance interpretation appears to be creating problems in
its own right; from a psychological perspective, RT’s inability to escape the
literal-first hypothesis is a case in point, while from a philosophical one, the
proliferation of word senses creates an uncontrollable system, where it
30 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
becomes very difficult to keep track of how many senses a word effectively
encodes. Against this background, relevance theorists might need to explore
alternative ways of accounting for encoded lexical meaning, since abstract
philosophical models of lexical semantics of the type that Fodor offers do not
fit the bill, nor are they supposed to. Therefore, a more psychologicallyoriented
approach to the question of what an expression’s encoded linguistic
meaning effectively is seems needed and, to this effect, behavioural research
from the domain of psycholinguistics would undoubtedly have a pivotal role to
play.
4. Experimental prospects
Given the detailed account of lexical pragmatics that relevance theorists have
recently developed, it would certainly be interesting in its own right to see the
extent to which the experimental research that has challenged the ‘literal first’
hypothesis with respect to the processing of figurative language could also be
applied to the study of the processing of other types of pragmatically enriched
lexical interpretations, like narrowings, approximations, category extensions,
neologisms and word coinages. As Wilson and Carston note, some preliminary
data on examples from the last two categories (Clark & Clark, 1979; Clark &
Gerrig, 1983) suggest that they are “no harder to understand than regular
uses” (2007, p. 237), but it remains to be seen how fast the interpretation of
neologisms and word coinages takes place in comparison to the processing of
literal meaning. Turning to cases of lexical narrowing, like the one presented
in (1), and approximation, like the one in (2), I think it would be quite
counterintuitive to expect any delays in their processing, but again there is, to
my knowledge, a complete lack of experimental evidence to support this
intuition.
From the current discussion’s perspective, experimentation on different
varieties of lexical meaning adjustment would be able to give us a clearer idea
of how different types of enriched interpretations of a word relate to its literal
meaning. If no significant difference is documented, this would strengthen not
only the assumption that literal lexical meaning is in no way exceptional but
also the need to come up with more psychologically-oriented accounts of the
mental lexicon and more essentially its particular contribution during verbal
communication. One of the few experimental studies on lexical pragmatics
from an RT perspective that has surfaced in the recent years, for example,
suggests that certain context-independent properties of a word’s meaning
On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives 31
remain activated even after a metaphorical (Rubio-Fernández, 2007) or
narrower interpretation (Rubio-Fernández, 2008) have been reached.
However, even though this set of experiments has been extensively quoted in
the RT literature, no full explanation has been provided about what these
properties are and how they relate to the equally context-independent atomic
concept that the same word encodes. Foreseeing that a ‘core’ relevance
theorist’s response would be that they are part of the information that is
attached to the word’s conceptual address and thus not part of its content (as
per the discussion of Fodorian mental files above), it still is curious why these
particular properties are obligatorily activated during spontaneous
interpretation, which in itself gives the impression that they are decoded rather
than inferred.
It goes without saying of course that the suggested behavioural research
would not be without its limitations either. For instance, it can certainly be
argued that it is dangerous to rely too much on time-reaction measurements,
which most of the relevant experiments have implemented either way, since
they cannot, on their own provide any direct evidence for the contention that
we actually interpret literal and non-literal language by using the same types of
mental processes.8 To this effect, using more advanced experimental
techniques, and also potentially looking into what neurolinguistics would have
to say could provide us with much more solid conclusions. Regardless of any
such limitation, however, I am convinced that the tension between the
philosophical analysis of lexical meaning and its psychological consideration
that the RT discussion of ad hoc concept construction seems to have
involuntarily revealed can open up new and exciting prospects not only for
theoretical analysis, but also for experimental research on the
semantics/pragmatics interface, at a time when the field seems to be dealing
almost exclusively with tropes, scalar implicatures and presupposition
projection.
8 For a discussion along these lines from a psycholinguistic perspective, see McElree & Nordlie
(1999), a paper suggested to me by John Tomlinson Jr.
32 Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
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