Conflictos sociales en torno a la tierra y al trabajo

The first important thing to note about Kaplan’s theoretical notion of context, in contrast with Stalnaker’s, is that it is formulated without making any appeal to

utterance events, speech acts, the purpose(s) of conversation, propositional attitudes such as belief or presupposition, addressee(s), or even speakers (recall that the context of use has an agent, rather than a speaker, parameter). To be sure, Kaplan has

“sometimes said that the content of a sentence in a context is, roughly, the proposition the sentence would express if uttered in that context” – though he notes that “[t]his description is not quite accurate on two counts” (1989a, p. 522). First, as noted, Kaplan is careful to distinguish his semantic notion of an expression in context from one that would figure in an account of utterances and speech acts. As he puts it, the theory is “concerned not with the vagaries of actions, but with the verities of meanings” (1989b, p. 585). In this sense, Kaplan’s is a traditional semantic theory that deals with word-world relations and is concerned with the properties of language as such – “the semantic mechanisms whereby indexicals and demonstratives are connected to their referents” – rather than what speakers do with language.10 _{Second, the truth of} sentences containing indexicals is relativized to a context – an abstract formal structure – whereas a proposition expressed by an actual utterance is generally taken to be true

simpliciter if true at all.

On Kaplan’s account, the indexical expressions of the language are associated, in virtue of their semantic properties, with rules that determine their content in any possible context, i.e., any possible world containing an agent at a location at a time in that world. That is, Kaplan’s characters are defined over the set of centered possible worlds, which, we noted, is subset of the set of possible worlds. Put informally, in the case of ‘I’, for example, “[t]he speaker refers to himself when he uses ‘I’, and no pointing to another or believing that he is another or intending to refer to another can defeat this reference” (1989a, p. 491). So when Daniels utters the sentence ‘I am bald’, for example, what is said – the content expressed by the sentence relative to the context of use in which Daniels is the value of the agent parameter – is the

proposition that Daniels is bald, regardless of whom Daniels believes himself to be, or

what an addressee of such an assertion believes about the speaker. And the content of the sentence relative to that context of use is true just in case Daniels is bald in

the possible world that is the value of the possible world parameter of thatcontext of use, regardless of what world Daniels, or anyone else, believes he inhabits (and, indeed,

regardless of whether Daniels even utters the sentence at all).

10 _{(1989b), p. 576. Kaplan (1978) took his theoretical lead from the “Golden Age of Pure Semantics”}

which aimed at “developing a nice homogeneous theory, with language, meaning, and entities of the world each properly segregated and related to one another in rather smooth and comfortable ways” (p. 223).

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A peculiar result of Kaplan’s account of indexical expressions is the possibility of what I’ll call, following Åckerman and Greenough (2010),content blindness.

Content Blindness: The speaker is ignorant of what (Kaplanian) content is

expressed by an utterance of a sentence containing an indexical.

This result is peculiar insofar as Kaplan takes his notion of content to capture, in some sense, our pre-theoretic notion of “what is said” when an individual utters a sentence.11 It would be odd if Kaplan had explicated such a notion in a way that speakers could be ignorant of “what is said” given that, pre-theoretically, speakers are presumably aware of what they say. Nevertheless, it is clear that speakers and hearers are susceptible to

content blindness given Kaplan’s account. For example, if Daniels is talking to O’Leary,

but both are mistaken and take Daniels to be Jones and O’Leary to be Smith (where Daniels ̸= Jones and O’Leary ̸= Smith), then when Daniels utters ‘I am bald’, what

is said – the content of the sentence relative to the context of use in which Daniels is

the value of the agent parameter – is that Daniels is bald, even though both Daniels

and O’Leary will take the former to have said that Jones is bald. For on Kaplan’s

account “[i]gnorance of the referent does not defeat the directly referential character of indexicals” (1989a, p. 536).12

More peculiar still, if we consider this case from the perspective of Stalnaker’s pragmatic theory, we see that the content delivered by Kaplan’s theory need not play any role in successful communication. Consider the case just mentioned in which Daniels is addressing O’Leary and asserts ‘I am bald’. What is in the common ground

is that Jones and Smith are participating in a conversation, and when the former utters the sentence ‘I am bald’, the context set – the set of possible worlds consistent with

the common ground – is updated in two ways. First, it becomes part of the common ground that Jones has just asserted that he is bald, and he did so under the assumption

that the contextual information relevant to interpreting the utterance – namely, whom the speaker is – is available to Smith. Second, provided that O’Leary accepts the proposition asserted by Daniels, the context set is updated to reflect the content of the

proposition: the context set is reduced to include only those possible worlds in which

Jones is bald.

While the context set so updated by Daniels’s assertion is, so far as the description

of the case goes, compatible with Daniels being bald, it is also compatible with Daniels

11 _{For example, Kaplan (1989a) remarks, “I began my investigations by asking what is said when a}

speaker points at someone and says, “He is suspicious.” [in Kaplan (1978)]” (p. 489).

12 _{Thus, similar cases can easily be constructed for the other indexicals that target the time (‘now’,}

not being bald. More importantly, however, the updatedcontext set does not include

any possible worlds in which Daniels just addressed O’Leary and uttered the sentence ‘I am bald’, since it is mutually presupposed that Jones just addressed Smith and uttered the sentence ‘I am bald’, and the participants to the conversation are ignorant of the fact that the individuals they mutually believe to be Jones and Smith participating in a conversation with one another are in fact Daniels and O’Leary, respectively. In other words, Daniels and O’Leary are involved in a conversation with each other in which their respectivecontexts of use are not a part of the context set. Stalnaker (2014)

writes,

When a statement is made in a possible world x, the world of the context

(in the Kaplan/Lewis sense) is world x, whatever the speaker may believe

and whatever may be presumed common knowledge that defines the context in the other [epistemic] sense. The context set that defines the common ground for the speaker in a given K[aplan]-context will not even include the world of the [Kaplan] context, if the participants happen to be presupposing something that is in fact false (p. 29).

Nevertheless, it seems that Daniels succeeds incommunicating with O’Leary since they

both come to believe what Daniels intended them to believe as a result of his utterance, namely, that Jones is bald. Moreover, communication was successful despite the fact

that Daniels and O’Leary are both ignorant of the content, or what was said, delivered by Kaplan’s account, which is that Daniels is bald. Thus, rather counter intuitively,

Kaplan’s notion of “what is said” does not necessarily figure in an account of successful communication.

Given the possibility not only of content blindness on Kaplan’s account, but that

successful communication can occur in the face of content blindness, we can see why

Stalnaker might prefer the epistemic first construal of the relation between the two

notions of context. The epistemic notion of context has an important role to play when it comes to the interpretation of concrete utterance events and an explanation of the dynamics of communication. As Stalnaker (2014) notes,

The “contexts” that are relevant to interpreting what [a speaker] said are the K[aplan]-contexts that are compatible with the common ground, and not the actual K-context in which the statement is made (p. 30).

The epistemic first construal gets this right by associating an utterance with the set of contexts of use compatible with the common ground. The metaphysical notion, on the

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other hand, has a role to play when it comes to the truth of propositions expressed by sentences containing indexical expressions, regardless of the beliefs or intentions of speakers and hearers. Nevertheless, it appears to be explanatorily idle when it comes to accounting for utterance interpretation and linguistic communication.

Stalnaker in fact suggests a more fundamental reason to avoid the metaphysics first construal in light of his broader conception of conversation as a process whereby

conversational participants aim to locate themselves within the “live options” of the

context set. He notes that,

the information about what specific possible world we are in cannot be part of the information represented by the context set – the information that is presumed to be available, in common, to the participants in the conversation. (If it were, context sets would all be unit sets, and communication would

be unnecessary.) (2014, p. 29).

In the above Daniels-O’Leary case, the participants were merely ignorant of the actual identity of the speaker (i.e., the correct value of the agent parameter), but given

Stalnaker’s account of (the purpose of) communication, the participants had better be ignorant of the actual world they are in (i.e., the correct value of the possible world

parameter). For if the aim of conversation is, generally speaking, to whittle down the number of possible worlds consistent with what is mutually presupposed by the conversational participants so that they (might) eventually ascertain which world they actually inhabit, then if it is part of the common ground which world they actually

inhabit, the game is over.

In light of the overarching conception of conversation underlying Stalnaker’s prag- matic account, then, the parties to any particular conversation are presumed to be ignorant of which particular possible world they are in, and hence, which metaphysical context they are a part of. In fact, this is not surprising given the way Kaplan individu- ates contexts of use in terms of possible worlds, which he acknowledges are beyond the

ken of actual speakers.13 _{But it’s worth noting that this entails that content blindness} is necessary and not merely a possibility. And this, in turn, raises serious doubts about what role, if any, the metaphysical notion of context has to play in a pragmatic account of communication, and hence what role Kaplan’s theory of indexicals might play when accounting for real life situations in which natural language is used. I return to this worry below (s. 4.4.3).

13 _{Kaplan notes, “The contexts ofDemonstratives[1989a] are metaphysical, not cognitive. They reach}

well beyond the cognitive range of the agent. Any difference in world history no matter how remote, requires a difference in context” (1989b, p. 597).