Encuesta: Diagnóstico de TIC en Pyme No.2

Travis maintains that words can only be said to express anything truth- evaluable (or in some way evaluable for correctness or appropriateness) on an occasion of utterance, upon which they can be correctly understood to be saying that things are a certain way. Thus, he treats utterances as the primary linguistic bearers of truth-values—as has presumably become clear, I follow him in this respect—but he is reticent to suggest anything resembling contextual parameters or criteria that fix what is expressed by an utterance, or what an utterance’s truth-value is. The certain ways that particular words or sentences can describe things as being, given certain understandings of them, are not, according to Travis, the kinds of things that can be determinately individuated in discrete ways, as it is often thought propositions can be (Travis 2008, p. 7). Nor is there anything like a determinate set of factors that determine how one ought to understand an utterance on an occasion, or how things need to be for an utterance to be true given how it is to be understood. Travis offers some insight into when utterances are true, making use of the locution ‘counts as being’. In response to the question of what sometimes makes it true to say of given leaves that they are green, and sometimes that they are not, he says:

What could make the given words ‘The leaves are green’ true, other than the presumed ‘fact that the leaves are green’, is the fact that the leaves

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

counted as green on the occasion of that speaking. Since what sometimes counts as green may sometimes not, that may still be something to make other [token] words ‘The leaves are green’ false, namely, that on the occasion of their speaking, those leaves (at that time) did not count as green. (Travis 1997, p. 125)

This locution does not itself tell us much more about what it is about the contextual circumstances of an occasion of utterance that determine whether or not the utterance is true, since we are left to ask what might make a leaf count as green. Travis will again respond, correctly, I think, that there are no determinate kinds of general criteria to be offered that would answer such a question. However, examples Travis provides throughout his work do offer insight into the kinds of pragmatic factors that, on particular occasions, appear to be relevant to whether something counts as being so described. Travis (1996) discusses several cases in which the purposes or the interests of interlocutors appear to affect whether things count as being correctly described. In other cases it appears that there is a certain kind of charity at play in finding the ‘truth near to mind that could be so expressed’ (Travis 2008, p. 9).

This positive view of truth and utterance content represents one aspect of occasion-sensitivity. It arises in parallel to, and is made more perspicuous by, another aspect, which is Travis’s negative position about what the meaning of words and sentence cannot be. This aspect, and to some extent the positive aspect, is motivated, at least in part, by consideration of examples of discourse, known as Travis cases, that demonstrate the complexity and volatility of truth- value judgements, and the pervasive rôle of context in such judgements. Travis cases, and other arguments for occasion-sensitivity, can be found throughout Travis’s work in various forms.13

I will give three examples of Travis cases, before going on to address what it is that they purport to show, and, in doing so, present a characterization of them. A well known case from Travis (1996) involves whether a ball is round: A game of squash is in progress, and two groups of people are watching from the viewing gallery. One of the groups contains a viewer who has never come across squash before. He asks one of his group what shape the ball is, since it is moving around the court too fast to see, and she replies ‘The ball is round’, and, in so doing, speaks a truth. The other group viewing the game are engineers interested in squash ball dynamics, who are monitoring the shape of the ball during play. Just as the ball hits the wall, one of the engineers asks what shape the ball is, and her colleague replies ‘The ball

13

Travis (1985, pp. 199–203); Travis (1989, pp. 18–20) Travis (1996, p. 97); Travis (1997, pp. 111– 113); Travis (2000, pp. 3–4); Travis (2006a, pp. 152–153); Travis (2006b, pp. 21–24); and Travis (2008, p. 2).

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

is round’, coincidentally, at the very same time as the member of the other group. However, this time the reply is false, because at that moment, the ball has been squashed into a very non-round shape. It is plausible to suppose the meaning of the sentence ‘The ball is round’ is not different in its two utterances—in both cases the same ball is being referred to, and there seems to be no variation in the meaning of the predicate being applied to it. There is not even a variation in the standards of roundness being applied to the ball. But despite the constancy of the meanings of the utterances, they cannot have the same truth-conditions, since they have different truth-values, despite being spoken at the same time with reference to the same object.

Another example of a Travis case comes from Travis (1985). Here, Travis presents two separate but parallel stories, that are equivalent to the two separate groups of interlocutors in the squash ball case.

Story I: Smith is quite proud of the results of the rigorous diet he has followed. He has lost easily 15 kg. Stepping on the scales one morning, he notes with satisfaction that they register a thick hair or two below 80 kilos. At the office, he proudly announces, ‘I now weigh 80 kilos’ But the tiresome Melvin replies, ‘What! In that heavy tweed suit? Not very likely’ and, pulling a bathroom scale out of his bottom desk drawer and pushing Smith on to it, notes with satisfaction, ‘Look. 83 and a bit.’ (For good measure, let us suppose Smith not yet to have taken off his overcoat, so that the scale actually reads 86.) Of course, we would say, what Melvin has demonstrated does not count against what Smith said. (Contrasting) Story II: Smith, dressed in the last way, is about to step into a crowded elevator. ‘Wait a minute.’, someone says, ‘This elevator is really very delicate. We can only take 80 more kilos.’ ‘Coincidentally, that’s exactly what I weigh.’, replies Smith. In he steps, and down they plummet. So it appears that what Smith said this time is false. (ibid., pp. 199–200)

In this case, nothing changes about the way Smith is, but the situations he finds himself in shift the truth of whether or not he weighs 80kg.

A third example, in which Travis contrasts different ways of understanding a situation, rather than comparing different utterances, comes from Travis (2011):

Returning from the market, Sid crosses the white rug, heading for the kitchen. As he does so, the bottom of his recycled-paper bag breaks, and the kidneys he has bought for the mixed grill fall in their butcher paper to the rug. Is there, now, red meat on the white rug? One question is whether kidneys count as meat. Though one would not offer them to vegetarians, their usual rubric (at any rate, in Sid’s parts) is offal. Meat, on one understanding of the term, is flesh. And flesh, as one typically

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

would understand that, is muscle. Thinking in this way, one should say that, however unenviable the condition of the rug, it does not, at any rate, have meat on it. On the other hand, what Sid dropped is, in fact, the meat course for Sunday brunch. So meat can be understood to be something which those kidneys are. Then there is the matter of being on the rug. The meat is still wrapped in its butcher paper. So, on one way of understanding things, it is (so far) only the paper that is on the rug. On the other hand, if Sid, now missing the kidneys, asks where they are, telling him, ‘On the rug’, may be saying no less than where they are. (Travis 2011, pp. 243–244)

Travis’s Target(s)

What Travis aims to show in investigating Travis cases is expressed, in simple terms, in the following quotation:

. . . it would seem that the meanings of sentences are not to be explained in terms of truth-conditions, sentences bearing the former but not the latter, and mutatis mutandis for sentence parts. (Travis 1985, p. 188)

The alledged gap between meaning and truth-conditions is the key issue. But exactly what this amounts to is unclear, since ‘meaning’ is used, both in ordinary language and by philosophers and linguists, in a variety of ways. It seems that the best way to understand what Travis means by ‘meaning’ is that which is held constant between uses of sentences and sub-sentential expressions. Davies (2014) has this to say about Travis on meaning:

Meaning here is defined so that it is an open question what the relation between meaning and satisfaction and truth and reference may be— something that could be investigated by seeing what else stays constant across a word’s uses when its meaning, in this sense, is held constant. This is something upon which Travis (1981b, p. 3, pp. 9-10) lays a particularly heavy emphasis. (Davies 2014, p. 502)

Davies discusses the target of Travis cases in the context of arguing that many attempts at addressing Travis’s work on language are off target. He claims that many of Travis’s alleged opponents take Travis to be attacking the compositionality of sentence meaning, i.e. that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its parts. In fact, Travis leaves such a compositionality principle untouched, and instead is attacking positions that hold that meanings (either sentential or sub-sentential) determine (in a systematic way) the content of utterances, or, put in other ways, that meanings are either contents or characters,14

or that meanings are truth-conditions. This

14

In the Kaplanian senses: content being a complete (though not necessarily wholly determinate), truth-evaluable proposition or thought (at least for assertoric utterances), and character

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

confusion stems from an ambiguity between two semantic projects that are both thought of as truth-conditional. There is a ‘compositional project of identifying properties that words may have which combine to form the truth- conditions of the sentences the words can be used to construct [. . . and there is] a reductive project of showing that the meanings of linguistic expressions are either contents or characters’ (Davies 2014, p. 501). Compositional projects may look as if they’re providing truth-conditions for sentences by providing biconditionals of the form pS is true iff Pq, but, according to Travis, they only do so in a problematic way if what occurs on the right-hand-side is determinate, or should be, according to the project. If the right-hand-side of a putative biconditional does not aim to be determinate, then it does not provide truth-conditions in the sense we are interested in.15

Projects of the reductive persuasion—what I called ‘lexical semantics’ above—may often not explicitly provide biconditionals with a determinate right-hand-side, but rather, suppose that such conditions could, in principle, be provided, i.e. they suggest that, given a sentence, or a sentence and a determinate set of contextual parameters, there is a determinate way the world must be to make the sentence true.

Meanings as Contents

Davies separates out two forms of reductive lexical semantics. One aims to show that meanings are contents, and the other aims to show that they are characters. The two projects require somewhat different responses. Most Travis cases appear to target the view that meanings are contents, and are used as part of arguments with the following form:

1. The meaning of an expression is its content only if: the meaning changes if and only if the content changes.

2. The content of an expression can change even though the meaning does not change.

3. The meaning of an expression is not its content (from 1., 2., and modus tollens).

(ibid., p. 506)

Travis cases are intended to demonstrate premise 2. They do this by providing convincing examples in which multiple utterances of a sentence vary in being a rule of use modelled as a relation between words and contents: an n-place function (or, possibly, relation) which, given n determinate contextual parameters as arguments, will return a content.

15

This is not to say that all compositional projects are wholly innocent in truth-conditional terms.

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

the truth-evaluable content they express—usually evidenced by varying truth-values in different situations—whilst their meaning does not appear to vary. Consider Travis’s example, borrowed from Grice, of a table covered in butter (Travis 1991, pp. 67–69). The sentence ‘The table is covered in butter’ can, without any variation of meaning (given a certain understanding of ‘meaning’—see the following paragraph for discussion), be satisfied in at least two different ways: the table could be spread with a layer of butter, or there could be a layer of foil-covered butter pats on the table top. One can imagine a scenario in which an utterance of ‘Is the table covered in butter?’ can be answered affirmatively if and only if a particular one of these satisfaction- conditions is met. Imagine a disreputable butter sculptor who cheats at her work by covering non-butter items, rather than sculpting directly from blocks of butter. She might leave her assistant to smother a table whilst she works on something more complicated. If she says to the assistant ‘Is the table covered in butter?’, the assistant cannot correctly answer ‘Yes’ if the otherwise bare table is scattered liberally with packets of Anchor.

Judgements both about the truth-value of an utterance in a particular situation, and about whether or not the meaning of the words has shifted, is left to the intuitions of speakers of the language in question. Such speakers should be expected to be reasonable judges of the truth-values of utterances in their language about fairly mundane occurrences. If they were not, it would seem that there was a serious problem with the language. Of course, there may be disagreement over particular cases, but the idea behind an effective Travis case is that the relevant judgements are plausible to most language- users.16

Intuitions about whether the meanings of the words of the sentence in question shift across the utterances are less essentially reliable, especially since the word ‘meaning’ itself is used in so many different ways, and we have not settled on anything approaching a technical definition. However, there is good reason to accept that something fundamental to the semantics of the sentence and its sub-sentential expressions is being held constant across the relevant utterances—if we were to posit that words such as ‘green’ were ambiguous between subtly distinct meanings, each of which carried its own, unchanging truth-conditions, then the apparent ease with which new Travis cases are generated would suggest that there might be indefinitely many of these semantic entries for many, if not all, words. This result seems to be highly undesirable for a variety of reasons, most notably because it is very hard to see how humans could ever learn a language with indefinitely many semantic entries for each sub-sentential expression.

16

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

Meanings as Characters

As Davies (2014) observes, the project of showing that meanings are contents cannot, in reality, be wholly separate from that of showing that they are characters, since at least some lexical items are undeniably indexical in nature, and, in light of Travis cases like those just discussed that show that meanings cannot be contents, theorists may be inclined to claim that they are characters. This is a natural thought—if Travis has shown that the truth-conditions of many more expressions than we previously thought are context-sensitive, then we should adapt our treatment of the meanings of these expressions so that, together with context, they provide determinate truth-conditions. Kaplan’s (1989b) treatment of indexicals does just this, so seems a likely choice. It is effective against the type of Travis cases already considered as long as the contextual factors that seem to be relevant in shifting truth- conditions in any particular case are included in the parameters taken as arguments by the relevant characters. Including parameters in this way may be problematic since it requires identifying the right contextual factors with the right degree of specificity without being ad hoc. However, a bigger problem is the potential generation of further Travis cases that turn on contextual factors not considered by one’s parameters.

Travis does not often explicitly address the meaning-is-character project in his work (cf. Travis 1978, pp. 412–413), but Davies provides a schema for systematically developing an argument against the project, along the same lines as his schema for arguments against meanings as contents:

1. Assumption: The meaning of an expression e is a character only if there is a function F that provides a model of e such that:

a) F takes the parameters of the character as arguments and returns the contents of e as values.

b) F stays constant if and only if the meaning of e stays constant. 2. Assumption: For any expression e, let F be a function from a set of pa-

rameters to the content of e that is a model for a character proposed to be the meaning of e. The meaning of e and the parameters in the argument of F can be held constant whilst the content of e is varied by altering contextual factors that are not amongst the parameters in the argument of F.

3. Conclusion: The meaning of an expression e cannot be modelled as a function from parameters to contents, and thus cannot be a character.

2.3. Semantics and Pragmatics

The idea of this argument form is that Travis cases can be found showing that no semantic analysis can be provided for an expression such that it meets conditions a) and b) for being a character. Such cases would require taking a proposed analysis, which provided determinate parameters, and holding those parameters constant whilst varying the content of the expression by shifting contextual factors not included amongst the parameters. If those factors are added to the parameters, we then repeat the process by finding other contextual factors and showing that the content can be varied by varying those whilst holding the parameters fixed. Of course, it cannot be shown a priori that this can be done for every proposed character. This is not a general argument that shows that every set of parameters fails. Given enough imagination and dedication, the process of proposing a character for an expression, and showing that it fails, can run and run. However, the plausibility of the characters will presumably decrease as they become ever more complex, and the plausibility of the hypothesis that no character is satisfactory will increase