Grice’s work contains scattered discussions of colouring.
“The vital clue” for dealing with the phenomenon, Grice suggests, is
“that speakers may be at one and
the same time engaged in performing
communicative acts at different but
related levels.”
(WoW, p. 362).
It is this idea that shapes the framework I want to explore.
“The vital clue” for dealing with the phenomenon, Grice suggests, is
“that speakers may be at one and
the same time engaged in performing
communicative acts at different but
related levels.”
(WoW, p. 362).
It is this idea that shapes the framework I want to explore.
Notoriously, Grice disagrees with Strawson about the semantics of the English words ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘if’, ‘every’, ‘a’, and ‘the’: the formal devices capture the essence of their meanings.
The implications that Strawson latched onto, Grice suggests, although very common, are not determined by linguistic conventions governing the use of ‘or’ and ‘and’
They are conversational implicatures, context- dependent, pragmatic implications that do not contribute to what the speaker says (in Grice’s technical sense), which is to say they do not impinge upon the truth- conditions of utterances containing them.
Both what is said and what is conversationally implicated should be regarded as propositional in nature.
That these non-truth-functional implications attaching to utterances containing ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘if ’ are conversational implicatures is meant to be borne out by
(i) the fact that they can be cancelled
without fear of linguistic transgression
(e.g. without fear of contradiction),
(ii) the fact that the presence and content
of such an implication can be explained
by appeal to Grice’s Co-operative Principle
and maxims of conversation
(themselves explained by a philosophical
psychology), and
(iii) the “fact” that the same implication would
arise in a language for which the
semantics of ‘and’ and ‘or’ are
given explicitly by the
truth-tables for ‘&’ and ‘v’.
Similar points are meant to hold in
connection with ‘if’, ‘every’, ‘a’, and ‘the’.
For Grice, such implications are different in kind from those attaching to utterances of sentences containing words like ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘although’, ‘whereas’, ‘so’, ‘therefore’, ‘moreover’, and ‘furthermore’.
The latter class Grice calls conventional implicatures: they are determined, at least in part, by the linguistic conventions governing the uses of the words in questions.
In short, unlike conversational implicatures, conventional implicatures have a genuinely semantic dimension.
They do not bear on what speakers say (on the truth conditions of utterances), says Grice; but they are not (mere) conversational implicatures because they are not cancellable without linguistic transgression and depend for their existence not just upon facts about context and rational interaction (as embodied in the Co-operative Principle and maxims) but also upon the presence of those very words themselves, used with their conventional meanings, rather than words that are equivalent in respect of their contributions to the truth-conditions of utterances.
As Grice puts it, what is implicated in such cases is implicated (at least in part) by virtue of the words used.
A speaker’s selection of ‘but’ over ‘and’ contributes in some way to the generation of an implicature. This, in fact, forms the basis of Grice’s proposal for distinguishing between conversational and conventional implicature: conversational implicatures are non-detachable in the following sense: if one uses an expression φ and thereby conversationally implicates that ψ, one will not be able find an alternative expression φ/ with which one could have used and thereby said (e.g. stated) exactly what one actually said by uttering φ, that does not itself give rise to the same implicature.4 In the case of ‘but’, says Grice, there are good grounds for
3
I do not mean to be endorsing Grice’s account of ‘and’ here. My sympathies—as will become clear at the end of this section—lie with Carston’s (1988) theory, which seems to sit well with the general approach I am taking here.
4
The way Grice appeals to the maxim of Manner creates an obvious problem for this test. 16
suspecting that the implicature in question is detachable, since in place of (1) one could use (2),
(1) She is poor but she is honest
(2) She is poor and she is honest
and be saying the same thing; yet the implication of contrast between honesty and poverty (or her poverty and her honesty) would be lacking. In short, we are meant to regard the implicature in question as somehow connected to a difference in meaning between ‘and’ and ‘but’.5
5
The existence of conventional implicature presents a difficulty for one of Grice’s dearest projects: an analysis of the philosophically important notion of saying. Grice proposes to analyze the notions of utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning in terms of such psychological notions as intention, belief, and recognition. And, very naturally, he proposes to analyze the notion of saying by focusing on the terrain in which there is overlap in utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning. Abstracting away from ambiguity and indexicality—both of which create further difficulties for Grice’s project—the following captures the main idea behind his preliminary definition of saying (Grice, 1989, pp. 87–88 and pp. 118–121):
By uttering a token x (of type X), U said that p iff
(i) (at least part of) what U meant by uttering x, was that p
(ii) X means “p” (in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements in X and their syntactic
structure).
Grice’s unhappiness with this definition (or this sort of definition) derives in large part from the existence of conventional implicature. If U sincerely and nonironically utters ‘She is poor but she is honest’, U says only that she is poor and that she is honest; U does not say that there is some sort of contrast between poverty and honesty (or between her poverty and her honesty). So for Grice, the conjunction of (i) and (ii) above characterises not “by uttering a token x (of type X), U said that p” but only “by uttering a token x (of type X), U conventionally meant that p.” On Grice’s account, what U meant by uttering a token x (of type X) is broken down as follows:
what U meant
what U what U
conventionally meant conversationally implicated
what U said what U conventionally implicated
In short, a conventional implicature attaching to an utterance of X gives rise to a mismatch between what U conventionally meant by uttering X and what U said by uttering X (again, abstracting away from indexicality and other forms of context-sensitivity). In such a case, the latter underdetermines the former, and the gap is bridged by what U conventionally implicated by uttering X. There is a further complication for Grice: as Sperber and Wilson have argued in detail, the precise content of what U said—and, for that matter, what U conventionally implicated—by uttering a sentence that means “p” is often underdetermined by the fact that the sentence means “p”.
17
A conventional implicature is not a presupposition, as originally characterised by Strawson (1952, p. 175) and adopted by others: A is a presupposition of B, just in case the truth or falsity of B requires the truth of A. (If the truth of B requires the truth of A, but the falsity of B does not, A is an entailment of B). Put another way, if B presupposes A, B lacks a truth value if A is false. In the case of an utterance of (1), says Grice,
. . . even if the implied proposition were false, i.e. if there were no reason in the world to contrast poverty with honesty either in general or in her case, the original statement could still be false; it would be false for example if she were rich and dishonest. One might perhaps be less comfortable about assenting to its truth if the implied contrast did not in fact obtain; but the possibility of falsity is enough for the immediate purpose. (1961, p. 127)
So the implication in question is not a presupposition, at least not on the standard semantic conception of that notion.6
Grice proposes to handle conventional implicatures by supposing them to stem from uses of conventional devices signaling the performance of “higher-order” (“noncentral”) speech acts parasitic upon the performance of “ground-floor” (“central”) speech acts. The basic idea can be brought to life with one of Grice’s examples, worth quoting in close to its entirety:
If a man says “My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I,” his hearer might well be
6
There may be other conceptions that prove to be of utility to a theory of communication—so- called “pragmatic” presuppositions (see, e.g. Stalnaker (1974) and Heim (1988)). In standard cases of alleged semantic presupposition there is a strong inclination to say that what the speaker said does the implying (indeed this has motivated some people to promote many presuppositions of the type just exemplified to entailments). In the case of an utterance of (1), one does not feel particularly inclined to say that what the speaker said implied that there was a contrast between e.g. poverty and honesty. An unargued for, but very intuitive, test Grice proposes here is the following:
If accepting that the implication holds involves one in accepting an hypothetical if p then q where p represents the original statement, and q represents what is implied, then what the speaker said (or asserted) is a vehicle of the implication, otherwise not.. (1961, p. 127-8)
One does not feel at all compelled to accept the hypothetical If she is poor but honest then there is some contrast between poverty and honesty, or between her poverty and her honesty. This observation, together with the observation that what is asserted by uttering this sentence can be false even if what is implied is false, invites the suspicion that talk of ‘‘presupposition” is well off target in such cases. Even if the implication were false, i.e. even if there were no reason on earth to suppose that there is any contrast between poverty and honesty, what is stated could still be false, say if she were rich and honest.
18
somewhat baffled; and if it should turn out on further inquiry that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his bother-in-law’s residential location and the one time activities of his great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase “on the other hand” was not in fact realized and so that the speaker had done violence to the conventional meaning of, indeed had misused, the phrase “on the other hand.” But the nonrealization of this condition would also be regarded as insufficient to falsify the speaker’s statement. . . .
One part of what the . . . speaker is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-in-law and the great aunt, but at the same time he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some of these lower-order speech acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, “on the other hand”. The truth or falsity . . . of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value . . . of the speaker’s words. (1989, pp. 361-2)
Several questions are left open by these remarks. What constitutes a ground floor speech act? Are higher-order speech acts propositional in nature? Are higher-order speech acts meant to be comments on the contents of lower-order acts or on the acts themselves? How does a theory of higher-order speech acts work when simple sentences are embedded within larger sentences such as conjunctions, conditionals, and attitude reports? Will such a theory satisfy Principles of Composition and Semantic Innocence?
Within Grice’s framework, there appear to be three types of ground floor (“central”) speech act (acts of saying in his favoured sense): stating that p, asking whether p, and (roughly) enjoining someone to make it the case that p. Presumably there is meant to be a broad range of higher-order (“noncentral”) speech acts; Grice explicitly mentions contrasting (signalled by expressions such as ‘on the other hand’, ‘but’, ‘yet, ‘although’, ‘whereas’, and ‘despite the fact that’), explaining (signalled by expressions such as ‘therefore’, ‘so’, ‘hence’, ‘thus’, ‘consequently’, and ‘as a result’), and adding (signalled by expressions such as ‘furthermore’, ‘moreover’, and ‘additionally’).
19
When Grice talks of conventional implicatures, he talks of them as if they are propositional in content, and hence candidates for truth or falsity. (At the same time the falsity of a conventional implicature is insufficient to render the utterance to which it attaches false.) Since conventional implicatures are meant to be analysable in terms of higher-order speech acts, it is clear that such acts will have propositional contents on his account.
When he says that the speaker is performing a higher-order speech-act of “commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts” Grice seems to be leaving it open that the speaker could be commenting on the propositional contents of those speech acts or on the acts themselves. But his remark about “contrasting in some way the performance [my italics, SN] of some of these lower-order speech acts with others” suggests it is the acts themselves (perhaps the term “higher-order” speech act carries such an implication too).7
Getting two more of Grice’s examples on the table, one involving explaining and another involving contrasting, will help to sharpen what is at issue here and lead the way into the framework I think we should explore. Grice claims that implications attaching to the use of ‘therefore’ in utterances of (3) and (4) are conventional implicatures analysable as the products of higher-order speech acts of explaining:
(3) Bill is a philosopher; he is, therefore, brave
(4) Bill is a philosopher, therefore he is brave.8
According to Grice, someone who sincerely and nonironically utters (3) says that Bill is a philosopher, says that Bill is brave, but does not say that Bill’s being brave follows from his being a philosopher. “The semantic function of the word ‘therefore’,” he claims, “is to enable a speaker to indicate, though not to say, that a certain consequence holds” (1989, p. 121). The falsity of the proposition that Bill’s being brave follows from his being a philosopher is not sufficient, according to Grice, to render an utterance of (3) false; so it is (merely) a conventional implicature.
7
Bach and Harnish (1979) allow for the possibility that a higher-order speech act may function as a commentary upon a lower-order act in these two distinct ways. The idea is being developed in work in progress by Bach.
8
Notice that ‘so’ can replace ‘therefore’ in (4) but not in (3). For a discussion of differences between ‘so’ and ‘therefore’ see Blakemore (1987).
20
Some share Grice’s intuition on this matter, others do not: according to McCawley (1993) the falsity of the connecting proposition renders an utterance of (3) false.9 I am inclined to think that neither party has the full story here and that the divergent intuitions need to be explained rather than argued for. Indeed, I take the fact that intuitions differ to be important semantic data. According to the position that attracts me, Grice is right in thinking that an utterance of (3) is not equivalent to an utterance of the conjunction of (5)-(7) but wrong in thinking that the falsity of (7) cannot be sufficient to render and utterance of (3) false:
(5) Bill is a philosopher
(6) Bill is brave
(7) Bill’s being brave follows from his being a philosopher.
Let us now move away from Grice’s own terminology to talk of propositions expressed. (For present purposes, I shall not distinguish the locutions “U’s utterance of X expressed the proposition that p”, “by his utterance of X, U expressed the proposition that p” and “relative to U’s utterance of it, X expressed the proposition that p”. In a more serious exposition these would need to be separated. I will sometimes use the outrageous shorthand “X expresses the proposition that p”.) For the moment, I want to appear agnostic about the nature of propositions; it will suffice to say that they have truth conditions. The leading idea here is that an
9
sentence position:
McCawley prefaces his argument by claiming that neither (3) nor (4) can occupy an embedded
(i) ? John doubts(/believes/hopes/said) that: Bill is a philosopher, therefore he is brave
(ii) ? It is not the case that: Bill is a philosopher, therefore he is brave
(iii) ? If Bill is a philosopher, therefore he is brave, then I am mistaken.
(i)-(iii) do seem very odd, and perhaps McCawley is right to say they are ungrammatical rather than just semantically odd in some way yet to be elucidated (the counterparts of (i)-(iii) containing (3) rather than (4) are surely ungrammatical). Suffice to say that an adequate theory of English must explain somehow why replacing ‘therefore’ by ‘and’ yields perfectly good English sentences. McCawley’s view is that whereas ‘and’ functions syntactically as a two-place sentence connective, ‘therefore’ functions as a sentence-modifying adverb (effectively a one-place sentence connective) in (3) and (4), hence the attempted embeddings are grammatically deviant. (Notice that ‘whereas’ appears to function as a two-place sentence connective in the previous sentence, producing a clause that serves as the complement of ‘McCawley concludes that . . .’.) Incidentally, McCawley is incorrect in supposing that Grice’s account of ‘therefore’ treats it as a two-place sentence connective in (4); Grice says nothing that commits him to either that view or the view that it is a sentence-modifying adverb.
21
utterance of (3) expresses a sequence (rather than a conjunction) of the three propositions expressed individually by (5)-(7), the expression of the third proposition in the sequence being parasitic upon the expression of the other two. The semantics of ‘therefore’ encodes the instructions that a first and a second proposition are to be seen as standing in some sort of consequence relation, the precise nature of which is no doubt determined contextually just as the precise relation between Tom and a particular horse is determined contextually when the noun phrase ‘Tom’s horse’ is used. (To put matters back into Grice’s language for a moment, although the presence and shape of a conventional implicature are signalled conventionally, the precise contents of at least some of those that are conceived as higher-order acts of explaining—those signalled by the presence of (e.g.) ‘therefore’, ‘so’, hence’, etc.—may have to be worked out in much the same way that the contents of conversational implicatures are worked out, viz. by appeals to context and pragmatic principles such as those embodied in Grice’s Co-operative Principle and maxims. This should occasion no surprise: it has been noted already that aspects of what is said (the content of a ground-floor speech act) must often be worked out in this way;10 so there is nothing odd about those propositions serving as the contents of conventional implicatures having contextually determined dimensions.)
Intuitions about the truth-value of an utterance are a function of the perceived truth-values of the particular propositions that make it into the sequence of propositions expressed by that utterance. In situations in which the three propositions expressed by (5)-(7) are judged true, an utterance of (3) will be judged true; in situations in which the three propositions are judged false, the utterance will be judged false. If (5) and (6) are judged true, in many situations an utterance of (3) will be judged true even if (7) is judged false; but in certain circumstances it may be judged false because the alleged connection between being a philosopher and being brave, or the (contextually determined) nature of the connection, might be of such importance to the particular conversational context. I am inclined to think that Grice and McCawley had different sorts of contexts in mind and that this explains their conflicting intuitions. The following preliminary generalisation suggests itself:
10 See, e.g. Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Carston (1988). 22
an utterance is judged true (false) if and only if some contextually weighted number of the propositions it expresses are judged true (false).
Let us return now to ‘but’ and ‘although’. On Grice’s account, by uttering ‘She is poor but she is honest’ or ‘although she is poor, she is honest’, the speaker is performing three speech acts: he is saying that she is poor, saying that she is honest, and contrasting the two things he has said. (On the account I am attempting to motivate, the utterance expresses three propositions.) But what exactly does the higher-order act of contrasting involve? A cursory look at common examples indicates that it is not something that can be wrapped up succinctly. Dummett seems to be on the right track when he says, in his discussion of Frege’s account of colouring, that
[t]he word ‘but’ is used to hint that there is some contrast, relevant to the context, between the two halves of the sentence: no more can be said, in general, about what sort of contrast is hinted at. It is the indefiniteness of the contrast, and the vagueness of the notion of relevance, that resolve the mystery of the distinction between asserting and suggesting: while we should regard a man’s use of ‘but’ as inappropriate if he was unable to mention a contrast we considered relevant, or genuine, examples of this kind can furnish no foundation for the view that we can assign any definite condition for the appropriateness rather than the truth of a statement. (1980, p. 86)
It is common to suppose that someone using ‘but’ or ‘although’ is always indicating, or suggesting, that he thinks the truth of one or other of the pair of sentences in the construction is surprising, unexpected, or remarkable given the truth of the other. But even this is too rigid: if someone were to claim that all poor people were dishonest, it would be perfectly acceptable to counter with the sentence ‘Martha is poor but she is honest’ thereby indicating one’s refusal, or at least reluctance, to accept the other’s claim of contrast. And sentences such as ‘Volvos are safe but Porsches are fast’, ‘Porsches are fast but John won’t get a speeding ticket’, ‘I prefer tea but my wife prefers coffee’, ‘Jones is tall but Smith is (even) taller’ create further problems for too rigid an account of the contents of higher-order speech acts associated with uses of ‘but’. (We see very clearly here that even though the presence and shape of a conventional implicature are signalled conventionally, the precise contents of those that are conceived as higher-order acts of contrasting may have to be
23
worked out in much the same way that the contents of conversational implicatures are worked out, viz. by appeals to context and pragmatic principles.)11
In view of the position that is emerging, it is tempting at this point to revisit a controversial case of what Grice views as conversational implicature. According to the ambiguity theorist, ‘and’ has at least three distinct meanings—logical, temporal, and causal—exemplified in ‘Bill is English and Joan is Welsh’, ‘Bill took off his boots and he got into bed’, and ‘the president entered the room and everyone stood up’. Grice, by contrast, views the temporal and causal implications attaching to utterances of these sentences as only conversational implicatures. Many people find that the aesthetic appeal of Grice’s view is offset by a problem it seems to encounter in connection with the Principle of Composition. It is at least arguable that when a sentence of the form ‘φ and ψ’ is embedded in a larger sentence—e.g. when it serves as the antecedent or consequent of a conditional—the truth-value of the larger sentence might be sensitive to the temporal or causal implication that Grice sees as only conversational. Uncontroversial examples are, perhaps, not easy to find, but the following might help Grice’s opponent. Let A and B be children, and let C be one of their parents. Now consider utterances of the following sentences:
(8) If B yells and A hits B, then C will punish A and B
(9) If A hits B and B yells, C will punish A and B.
It is arguable that (8) and (9) can differ in truth value. E.g., if C thinks that A should not be punished for a yelling induced by being hit, couldn’t (9) be false even if (8) were true? If so, there would appear to be a problem for Grice. If something pertaining to the order of the proceedings described in the antecedents of (8) and (9) is only conversationally implicated, how is it possible for (8) and (9) to diverge in truth value? It looks as though Grice will have to say that a conversational implicature of the antecedent of a conditional somehow gets into the truth conditions of the conditional as a whole. And the unacceptability of this might
11 Although ‘although’, ‘but’, and ‘on the other hand’ are all used to signal the higher-order speech act of contrasting, there are important syntactic differences: as Grice observes, ‘but’ functions as a two-place sentence connective whereas ‘on the other hand’ functions as an “embedded enclitic.”
24
suggest that Grice will have to concede that at least some occurrences of ‘and’ have a genuinely temporal (or causal) component.
Carston (1988) has come up with a story about ‘and’ that neither succumbs to the tentacles of the ambiguity theorist nor generates the compositional problem the official Gricean story faces. The meaning of ‘and’ is given by logical conjunction, but a hearer seeking a relevant interpretation will often construe the contents of the conjuncts as (e.g.) temporally sequenced or causally related. And if, for example, a temporally sequenced understanding of a sub-utterance of ‘φ and ψ’ is retrieved, it will be this (stronger) conjunction that forms the content of the antecedent of the full utterance ‘if φ and ψ then χ’.
Karttunen and Peters (1979) and Levinson (1983) point out that many more expressions than those discussed by Grice appear to generate conventional implicatures, e.g. ‘even’, ‘still’, ‘yet’, ‘anyway’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘in fact’, and ‘besides’. (Levinson also argues that the ‘tu’/‘vous’ distinction in French and a range of honorifics in, for example, Japanese, Korean, and Tamil are associated with conventional implicatures.) Frege, as we saw earlier, took (10) and (11) to have the same sense:
(10) Alfred has not arrived yet
(11) Alfred has not arrived.
On Grice’s account, what someone says by uttering these sentences is the same (that Alfred has not arrived), but by uttering (11) he is also indicating or suggesting that someone (perhaps the speaker) expects Alfred to arrive (again, this is too narrow). In the framework I am trying to motivate, the content of the suggestion is a second proposition expressed, parasitic upon the ground-floor proposition (that Alfred has not arrived). The difference is, perhaps, not very interesting in many cases (including this one), but it may make for the construction of a more systematic compositional semantics overall.
Compare the following:
(12) Alfred cashed a check today
(13) Alfred managed to cash a check today
(14) Alfred succeeded in cashing a check today.
25
Someone who utters any of these says the same thing on Grice’s view. But by uttering (13) or (14) the speaker performs a higher-order speech act of indicating that Alfred’s cashing of a check today was something of a challenge, or less of a challenge than someone might have thought, or that there was some risk of failure (again, the precise content of this conventionally signalled implication may be determined contextually). On the view I am exploring, the speaker has again expressed two propositions, one parasitic on the other, something a compositional semantics needs to explain.
The phenomena noted by Frege, Grice, and others are, I think, quite natural once we take into account the nature of communication. We do not seek to transmit information only about the world; communication may also involve the transmission of information about our attitudes and emotions; thus we convey information using expressions such as ‘It is raining’ and also sentences such as ‘Damn, it’s raining’, ‘I think it’s raining’, and ‘Damn, I think it’s raining’. That is, in many cases we use simple sentences to express a single proposition and we use modifications of those sentences to express the original proposition (or its “negation”, as in ‘Alfred failed to cash a check today’ and ‘Alfred tried unsuccessfully to cash a check today’) together with a second (third, . . .) proposition. I turn now to the idea that sequences of propositions expressed are not restricted to Fregean-Gricean examples of colouring, which may constitute only the tip of a semantic iceberg.12
12 Frege, as we saw earlier, retains the Principle of Composition in respect of reference in the face of apparent problems introduced by sentential verbs and other devices of subordination by treating a sentence occurring within the scope of such a device as either referring to its customary sense or else contributing to a second proposition (thereby abandoning Semantic Innocence). Since he was not particularly interested in coloring, he says nothing about compositionality in connection with this notion. Similarly, Grice does not examine conventional implicature in connection with embedded sentences; but Karttunen and Peters (1979) have examined the matter in detail and have come up with some generalizations about embedding constructions. For example, they claim that in structures of the form ‘A φs that p’, we need to distinguish three different classes of sentential verb φ according as the structure (i) inherits (‘know’, ‘regret’, ‘discover’, ‘forget’, ‘point out’), (ii) transforms (‘believe’, ‘think’, ‘hope’, ‘expect’, ‘doubt’, ‘fear’, ), or (iii) blocks (‘say’, ‘report’, ‘claim’) the conventional implicatures generated by p. These claims are surely incorrect as far as the original Fregean and Gricean examples are concerned. Consider the following:
(i) a. Bill knows that Alfred has not arrived yet b. Bill thinks that Alfred has not arrived yet c. Bill said that Alfred has not arrived yet
(ii) a. Bill knows that she is poor but she is honest 26
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