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Language Adds to Context

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Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 1))

Abstract

Contextualism deems that the meaning of most utterances, if not any, varies from context to context. Here, I argue, instead, that utterances added to a context change the context by shifting salience. Considering truth conditions together with appropriateness, I try to show that utterances claimed to make the same assertion—such as ‘Rain is over’, ‘Here, rain is over’, ‘In Florence, rain is over’ and ‘Here in Florence, rain is over’—differently affect salience, and hence in an important sense do not assert the same. The idea is rather that ‘Rain is over’, for instance, says the same in any context, but that it differently shifts salience in different contexts, and the various assertions listed may get at the same salience only in different contexts.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Kaplan lists the following indexicals and demonstratives: «…the pronouns ‘I', ‘my', ‘you', ‘he', ‘his', ‘she', ‘it', the demonstrative pronouns ‘that', ‘this', the adverbs ‘here', ‘now', ‘tomorrow', ‘yesterday', the adjectives ‘actual', ‘present', and others.» (1989: 489).

  2. 2.

    There are other relevant parameters, over which I skip for the sake of simplicity.

  3. 3.

    We could also imagine to expand «Marco is tall» to «Marco is tall for his age», in which no real contextual parameter surfaces.

    Fara remarks that not all contextual dependency can be reduced to a comparison class, and offers as an argument the case in which by a dreadful coincidence all tall children die, a case which could not yet induce us to say tall the tallest of the surviving children. I think that this depends on our memory surviving the tragic accident. (2000: 54-9).

  4. 4.

    Indexical and demonstratives are token reflexives. ‘Who utters I’ can’t therefore be substituted for I, because then I would have been quoted but not really uttered, whereas Adelaide can say ‘Marco is a tall child’ instead of ‘Marco is tall’, even if, as we will see, the two expressions aren’t synonymous.

  5. 5.

    An argument to this effect can be found, for instance in (Travis 1985 (2008) and in Bezuidenhout (2002). Most authors are well aware of the difference between context-sensitivities.

  6. 6.

    There are two other problems, which I believe convergent with the contextualist’s.

    1. (a)

      A sentence might be true in indefinitely many different situations. ‘The President gives a party for Independence Day’ might be true of any U.S. President of any year of Presidency, and if other countries have their Independence Day, it might be true of any President of theirs and of any year of their Presidency too. Again, the alternative possibilities do not depend on any utterance role of ‘President’ or of ‘Independence Day’. Indeed, the possibilities point to different circumstances of evaluation, among which the sentence doesn’t discriminate—which it could do if there occurred an indexical. The sentence ‘The President gives a party for Independence Day’ in almost any of its uses speaks of a particular President and of a particular Independence Day. Of course, ‘President Barack Obama gives a party for Independence Day 2011’ seems to tell which is the relevant situation. But we could imagine another year counting with another 2011 year and another President whose name be ‘Barack Obama’, not impossible if you remind yourselves that the U.S. have already had two President John Adams and two President George Bush! Besides, there are indefinitely many aspects under which the sentence ‘President Barack Obama gives a party for Independence Day 2011’ allows for alternative possibilities. The time and the place the party is at, the people invited—relatives, relatives and friends, officials, US officials, foreign ambassadors, etc. Turn the sentence to the past, ‘President Barack Obama gave a party for Independence Day 2011’. All the data could presumably be filled in, but any filling will leave us a choice among indefinitely many alternative possibilities.

    2. (b)

      Speaking of truth, John L. Austin, claimed that the truth of a statement depends on Descriptive and on Demonstrative conventions. The Demonstrative convention correlates the words with the historic situations in the world. (Austin 1950 (1979): 121) But there are not demonstratives in the two sentences considered a moment ago—‘The President gives a party for Independence Day’ and ‘President Barack Obama gives a party for Independence Day 2011’. The two sentences aren’t equivalent respectively with, say, ‘This President gives a party for our Independence Day’ and ‘This President Barack Obama gives a party for our Independence Day 2011’. In a historical text the author might not substitute the one for the other, if he were writing of a President different from the actual one, and if the author were not a U.S. citizen, as I am not. If there are no expressions whose meaning depends on their utterance role, a sentence isn’t demonstrative.

  7. 7.

    A misplacement is indicated by the offer or the request of a repair—especially of a reformulation, adding or taking something back.

  8. 8.

    A champion of the covert unpronounced constituent idea is Stanley (2000 and 2007). Writes Stanley:

    for each alleged example of an unarticulated constituent [mentioned in the literature], there is an unpronounced pronominal element in the logical form of the sentence uttered, whose value is the alleged unarticulated constituent. (2000: 410).

  9. 9.

    Stanley speaks of indexicality in the broad sense (2007: 38) and before him Strawson claimed there to be an indexical element. The idea looks more fitting for incomplete descriptions, which are the case Strawson originally had in mind, though I think there are better ideas even for that case.

  10. 10.

    The covert constituent is a variable, or better a function variable which applies to an object variable «The value of ‘‘i’’ is an object provided by the context, and the value of “f” is a function provided by the context that maps objects onto quantifier domains.» (Stanley 2007: 115).

  11. 11.

    See Recanati (2004: 18): «Insofar as it is pragmatically rather than linguistically controlled, free enrichment is taken to be irrelevant to ‘what is said’, on the non-pragmatic construal of what is said.»

  12. 12.

    Writes Recanati:

    On this view the enrichment process through which, in context, we reach the proposition actually communicated […] is not linguistically but pragmatically required; hence it is not an instance of saturation, but an optional process of ‘free enrichment’. (2004: 10).

  13. 13.

    Recanati (2004: 17).

  14. 14.

    The idea of a statement composed of strictly linguistic elements and non-linguistic ones is analogous to the text that mix words and images, these playing a linguistic role without being given a linguistic profile.

  15. 15.

    Kaplan (1975) introduced singular propositions looking at Russell (1903). Writes Russell:

    But a proposition, unless it happens to be linguistic, does not itself contain words: it contains the entities indicated by words. (47)

    Kaplan introduced valuated sentences in (1986): 245f.

  16. 16.

    See Recanati (2004: 56).

  17. 17.

    The unarticulated constituent view was originally championed by Perry (1986 and 1998) and later, as we are seeing, by Recanati (2002, 2004, 2010). The proclivity to linguisticisize the move was already there in Wilfrid Sellars’ talk of proposition (1954).

  18. 18.

    Words determining what they speak of is the most classical problem in philosophy of language since before Socrates, and is connected with that of how word and thing connect. The problem is different from another, intriguing one, which is that words telling what they state or stand for, stating their own truth, look paradoxical. Austin 1950 (1979) hints at either issues, to the first when he speaks of demonstrative conventions. (See, respectively, p. 122 and p. 126, fn. 2.)

  19. 19.

    Donnellan makes the point for reference of definite descriptions [see his (1966) and (1977)]. The remark can be extended to any form of reference—that of predicative names as well as that of sentences describing an event or a state of affairs.

  20. 20.

    If the utterance of ‘Ann is ready’ were redundant, it would still change the context, though in a different way. For instance, it might suggest that someone else is not ready.

  21. 21.

    Notice that words too are elements of the state of affairs.

  22. 22.

    After Heim (1983). The change can be smooth or abrupt, see Lewis (1979)—by abrupt I mean what Lewis describes as follows: «If what I say requires that, then straightway it is so. By saying what I did, I have made Bruce more salient than Albert.» (1979 [1983]: 242).

  23. 23.

    Burge (2010) suggests that our knowledge is integrated at the propositional level, and that this is at the origin of objectivity. Although I think that the matching problem between our representation and how thing are, whatever that mean, is at the origin of objectivity, I wouldn’t have it that that requires a propositional representation, i.e. a representation run on abstract elements.

    To limit my citations to another few, already Stalnaker (1974), (1978) and (1998), Ballmer (1978) and (1981), Lewis (1979), Kamp (1981), Kamp and Reyle (1993), Heim (1982), (1983) and (1992), Sbisà (2002) have suggested something of what I have in mind, which is not that linguistic meaning is context dependent but the other way around. All of them, anyway, share a propositional understanding of the phenomenon perhaps apart from Sbisà.

  24. 24.

    See Kaplan (1989: 559).

  25. 25.

    Ibid. This, whether or not an utterance says or seems to say what words in what language it utters.

  26. 26.

    Searle (1983: 145).

  27. 27.

    Adding anything to «Rain is over» may reverberate on the speaker. If it is misplaced, the conditions being different from any case in which an addition is proper, the misplacement would reverberate on the speaker, who would be deemed mouthful or boring, or incompetent.

  28. 28.

    A good symptom of the difference is that in most, if not all, languages there is no indexical for the on going activity.

  29. 29.

    My claim may remind you of analogous ones by Cappelen and Lepore (2005). My point is not specific to supposedly contextual expressions. As Cappelen and Lepore, I don’t see any difference between ‘Ian is ready’ and ‘Ian went to the movie’. If Ian went to the movie, he went to movie X or he went to movie Y, or … But I believe that a report of what has been said in different circumstances uttering ‘Ian is ready’ may require saying rather different things.

  30. 30.

    As I suspect.

  31. 31.

    One way to conceive of such an expansion is Recanati (2004: 27 and 107-9). Writes Recanati:

    The effect of an ‘expansive’ variadic function of the sort contributed by adverbial modifiers is to add an argument-role. The output relation therefore contains the same argument-roles as the input relation, plus the extra argument-role provided by the variadic function. (2004: 107).

  32. 32.

    This extends to predication, assertion etc., what Donnellan (1966) and (1968) argues for reference of definite descriptions.

  33. 33.

    See Bach (2001: 29): «It is one thing for content to be determined in context and quite another for it to be determined by context.»

  34. 34.

    On the notion of repair see Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks (1977).

  35. 35.

    The most careful of my readers asked me at this point: «Isn’t it more than just focusing attention? Isn’t it often aimed at getting people to believe specific things?» Yes, it is, because taking notice recalls memories, allows to reason about, etc. As my reader would have had it in other cases, here I go minimalist.

  36. 36.

    The placement of what is said allows to determine what language and what words (à la Kaplan, what things the expressions used are associated with) are used. Meanings of expressions are generated and evolve historically, and the history of an expression is in the many heres and nows of its uses.

    I want to thank you for criticism and suggestions Delia Belleri, Paul Horwich, SebastianoMoruzzi and Marco Santambrogio.

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  1. Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Paolo Leonardi

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  1. Barcellona PG ME, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

  3. University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Marco Carapezza

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Leonardi, P. (2013). Language Adds to Context. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_12

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