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Can we retain traditional semantics?

I have suggested that the alternative model of communication can avoid the problem of underdetermination and so preserve a broader domain of viable linguistic theory than the Encoding Model. It is part of this alternative model, however, that nothing need be said by an utterance for communication to succeed. In what way, then can the alternative model preserve linguistic theories that associate sentences with propositions said?

The answer is that these linguistic theories may well be true. It may be true, for example, that an utterance of ‗The guy is drunk‘ says that the guy who authored Smells and Tickles is drunk, given a context in which the hidden-indexical refers to the property of being the author of Smells and Tickles. What our alternative model denies is that the contexts in which we actually talk need to determine what is said for communication to succeed. Nor are these linguistic theories redundant in the explanation of communication, as it is in part the conventions of the language that determine the candidates for what is uttered and said.

While we can allow for the possibility that these theories make true predictions about what is uttered or said in certain context, the alternative model also allows for another way to think about linguistic theory. The Encoding Model was conducive to a certain realism about linguistics that, on the alternative model, is a red herring. According to the Encoding Model, we utter sentences and say propositions. The question then is what sentence is uttered and what proposition is said in different cases. The hidden-indexical theory of quantifier domain restriction suggests that the sentence uttered by an articulation of ‗Every bottle is empty‘ is ‗Every bottle i is empty‘, while according to the syntactic ellipsis view, the sentence uttered may be ‗Every bottle in the cupboard is empty‘. Thinking in terms of the Encoding Model, these theories make inconsistent claims about the world, in which case at most one can be correct.

According to the alternative model, however, nothing need be uttered or said. Rather than trying to identify the nature of some object in the world – the sentence uttered – these theories should be viewed as identifying different interpretive structures, either of which might be allowable in any given context. The very same result can accomplished by positing and

resolving syntactic ellipsis or by positing and resolving hidden-indexicality in any particular case. Looking at things this way, these theories raise different interpretive possibilities but make no inconsistent claims.

Revenge problem 1: The underdetermination of what is meant

An initial and instructive revenge problem has it that denying the Utterance and Expression Constraints fails to address the core of the problem, as all the arguments from Chapter 2 can be recast as direct arguments for the indeterminacy of what is meant, rather than by way of the indeterminacy or what is said or uttered.

The point is well made via Buchanan‘s (2010) argument that speakers needn‘t mean propositions by their utterances. For the sake of the argument, Buchanan assumes

Content: What a speaker means, or intends to communicate (at least in cases of indicative speech) must be a proposition.

Success: Understanding a speaker‘s utterance U requires (minimally) entertaining what she meant by U.

The Encoding Model assumed Content, that is, that propositions are the objects of speakers‘ communicative intentions. Buchanan‘s (2010, 344-345) intended reading of Content agrees with the Encoding Model that speakers might mean multiple propositions by a single utterance. Regarding Buchanan‘s Success condition, it is not entirely clear as to what he means by entertaining a proposition. We will return to this issue later. In the meantime, we can accept Success as equivalent to our running assumption that communication succeeds only when the audience knows what the speaker intends to communicate.

From Content and Success follows

Lemma: If a speaker means a proposition p by her utterance U then her audience must entertain p if she is to understand U.

Buchanan argues that Lemma is false and lays the blame with Content. Speakers needn‘t intend to communicate propositions. His central counterexample to Lemma is the case of Chet and Tim, who are preparing for a party. They buy some bottled beer, which Chet leaves to chill in

the ice-filled bucket by their hot tub. Before the party starts, a parched Tim asks Chet where the beer is. Chet replies, ‗Every beer is in the bucket‘. Immediately upon hearing Chet‘s utterance, Tim goes to the bucket and gets himself a beer.

A few plausible stipulations. Firstly, Chet means something by his utterance. Secondly, Tim is in a position to understand Chet‘s utterance. Thirdly, Chet means at least one proposition of a form determined by the sentence he uttered. Buchanan represents the meaning of the sentence Chet utters by the following template

(TEMP) [The y: Bucket(y) & _y] ([Every x: Beer(x) & _x] (x is in y))

The role of TEMP is to restrict the propositions that can be meant by the literal speaker who utters this sentence. 103 _{TEMP represents a proposition type, the tokens of which are all those}

propositions that can be derived by replacing the underscores, which function as variables, with properties. So the proposition that every beer in the apartment is in the bucket filled with ice, and the proposition that every beer from the smallest bodega in Cuba is in the bucket which belongs to Condoleezza Rice, are both of the type represented by TEMP. As with other representations of the meanings of context-sensitive sentences that we have encountered, TEMP is a function from the contextually-assigned values of the variables to a proposition. Given that Chet is speaking literally, at least one of the propositions that Chet meant by his utterance is a substitution instance of TEMP.

Chet means something by his utterance. By Lemma, there is some proposition p such that Tim must entertain p in order to understand Chet‘s utterance. As Chet is speaking literally, there is some proposition p of the form specified by TEMP such that Tim must entertain p in order to understand Chet‘s utterance. Buchanan argues that there is no such proposition. In fact there are a number of propositions of the right form that Tim could entertain in order to understand Chet‘s utterance, but none that Tim must entertain to understand Chet‘s utterance, so none that satisfies the condition specified by Lemma; none, that is, that Chet means.

103 _{Buchanan (2010, 349) assumes that all candidates for what Chet meant are candidates for what he said,}

although his usage of the term ‗said‘ is not quite the same as the usage we have established. Buchanan (2010, 345) takes there to be ―a constitutive connection between what a speaker means and what she says: if S says p in uttering u, then at least one of the propositions that S means by uttering u must be P.‖ Given our slightly different terminology, I will try to avoid talk of ‗what is said‘ in discussing Buchanan‘s argument.

We have a situation very similar to that of the underdetermination arguments from Chapter 2. We assume that the speaker means something and that the audience can know what the speaker means. Given that the speaker has uttered a particular sentence and spoke literally, at least one of the propositions the speaker meant must have been of a certain form; in this case, the form specified by TEMP. Whichever proposition this is, it must satisfy Lemma, that is, the audience must entertain this proposition if they are to understand the speaker‘s utterance.

Buchanan identifies a number of candidates but argues that none of them satisfies Lemma. For initial simplicity, let‘s assume that there are only two candidates for the proposition that Chet means: the proposition that every beer in the apartment is in the bucket filled with ice (P₁) and the proposition that every beer for the party is in the bucket by the hot tub (P2). Both of these propositions are of the form required by Lemma and are very

reasonable propositions to communicate, given Tim‘s thirst and the knowledge that Tim and Chet hold in common about the history of the relevant beers and bucket.

The problem, however, is that neither of these propositions satisfies Lemma and so

neither can be the proposition that Chet meant. Suppose that Chet means P₁. By Lemma, if

Chet means P1, then Tim must entertain P1 in order to understand Chet‘s utterance. The

consequent is false, however. Tim needn‘t entertain P1 in order to understand Chet‘s utterance,

as Tim could understand equally well by entertaining P₂. By modus tollens, therefore, Chet could

not have meant P1. Symmetrical reasoning demonstrates that Chet could not have meant P2.

As the only propositions that Chet could have meant were P1 and P2, Chet could not have

meant any proposition by his utterance. Although in any realistic situation, there will be a great many more than two candidates for the proposition meant, Buchanan‘s contention is that no proposition will be such that the audience must entertain that proposition to understand the speaker‘s utterance.

Response

Buchanan (2010, 348) takes his argument to establish that there is no proposition that Chet could have meant by his utterance. As Chet clearly meant something by his utterance, we must reject Content: what a speaker means needn‘t be a proposition. According to Buchanan (2010, 358-359) speakers only mean to communicate types or properties of propositions. In the case of

Tim and Chet, there is no proposition of the form specified by TEMP that Chet means to communicate. What Chet means to communicate is, rather, TEMP itself, which specifies a proposition type or property. To accommodate this alternative notion of what the speaker intends to communicate, Buchanan modifies Content to allow that speakers may mean types or properties of propositions and modifies Success to allow that understanding such a speaker requires only entertaining some one or more propositions of the type the speaker meant.

This picture is not quite accurate, however. In the case of Chet and Tim, Chet will not be satisfied if Tim entertains just any proposition of the form specified by TEMP. The proposition that every beer from the smallest bodega in Cuba is in the bucket which belongs to Condoleezza Rice is of the form specified by TEMP, yet Tim clearly fails to understand Chet by entertaining this proposition. Rather, Buchanan‘s suggestion is that Chet means a narrower type of proposition, determined by TEMP and vague contextual restrictions that exclude the proposition that every beer from the smallest bodega in Cuba is in the bucket which belongs to Condoleezza Rice.

It is worth considering a point that Buchanan himself is less than entirely clear on. Is Buchanan‘s argument designed to make a merely contingent point about speakers‘ indifference to communicating truth conditions, or is his claim that the very limited common knowledge of sort shared by Chet and Tim renders it impossible for Chet to mean any proposition? If the former, then I see little reason to dispute Buchanan‘s position. Very plausibly, speakers‘ communicative intentions often exhibit the sort of indifference that Buchanan cites but I don‘t see any reason to use the language of ‗meaning‘ and ‗understanding‘ to explain the case, or to revise these notions to accommodate the case.104 _{Speakers can articulate sentences for a}

number of different reasons. One is the communication of propositions, but this is one among many. A speaker needn‘t really intend to communicate anything by articulation of a sentence, even a declarative. Speakers often intend to bring about some other effect in the world. Sometimes this might be the procurement of beer. Sometimes the speaker‘s intention might be to direct their audience to beer. On one interpretation of the case of Chet and Tim, the sum total of Chet‘s intention is just to direct Tim to the beer and Chet will be satisfied so long as his utterance leads Tim to procure beer. On this interpretation, Chet‘s intention wasn‘t to

104 _{See von Fintel and Gilles (2011) for the suggestion that epistemic modals are regularly used without the}

direct Tim to the beer by communicating any information about it, even though the case, on the face of it, might appear as one of informative communication.

A stronger claim is that it is impossible for Chet to reasonably mean any proposition at all, given the very limited knowledge that Chet and Tim hold in common. This is the claim disputed by the alternative model of saying and communicating presented in this Thesis. The virtue Buchanan (2012, 359) sees in his proposal is that it does ―justice to the generality and indifference characteristic of the speaker‘s communicative intentions‖. According to any such account, however, speakers do not intend to communicate truths and falsehoods. Proposition types, for example, even restricted by context in the way Buchanan suggests, fail to determine truth-conditions. If the speaker means only a proposition type, then there is nothing true or false that the speaker intends to communicate, only a (potentially infinite) number of different truth-conditions that are compatible with the speaker‘s intention. Contrary to Buchanan (2010, 361), proposition types just don‘t seem to be ―the right kind of thing to be the object of the speaker‘s communicative intentions‖ if we want those intentions to determine truths and falsehoods.

We can agree with Buchanan that common knowledge leads to indifference on the part of speakers, while restricting this indifference to what is said and allowing that what the speaker intends to communicate is entirely determinate. The alternative account of the case should come as no surprise. What the speaker intends to communicate is not any one of the candidates to the exclusion of the others, but each and every one of the candidates. In our simplified example, there were only two candidates for what Chet meant: the proposition that every beer in the apartment is in the bucket filled with ice (P1) and the proposition that every

beer for the party is in the bucket by the hot tub (P2). Part of the reason that these are equally

good candidates for what is said is that they are locally equivalent, given the obvious presuppositions that the beer for the party is the beer in the apartment and that the bucket filled with ice is the bucket by the hot tub. Given these presuppositions, every beer in the apartment is in the bucket filled with ice if and only if every beer for the party is in the bucket by the hot tub. If Chet communicates either of these propositions, relative to these presuppositions, then Chet communicates them both. If Chet means either, therefore, he should mean them both.

Buchanan (2010, 353-354) considers and rejects what he considers three distinct responses to the puzzle. According to the first, Chet means the conjunction of each of the candidates. According to the second, Chet means each of the candidates. According to the third, Chet means the disjunction of all of the candidates. These options are not mutually exclusive, however. According to the response proposed here, what Chet means can be represented equally well by each of the candidates for what is said, by the conjunction of all those candidates, and by the disjunction of all the candidates. As long as Chet means at least one of the candidates, he means them all, given that they are locally equivalent in the context. Buchanan‘s objection is that this ―places the requirement for understanding Chet‘s utterance far too high.‖ According to Lemma, if Chet means each of these propositions, then Tim must entertain them all in order to understand Chet‘s utterance. As Buchanan has already argued, however, Tim could understand Chet‘s utterance equally well by entertaining any one of the candidates in isolation.

Buchanan doesn‘t tell us much about what entertaining a proposition amounts to, but this objection make it clear that he takes it that Tim has to do some extra work to entertain two propositions rather than one. This notion of entertainment overly intellectualises successful communication by presenting its success condition on the model of silent speech to oneself. In the sense relevant to defining successful communication, it needn‘t be any more difficult for Tim to entertain a multitude of propositions than it is for Tim to entertain a single proposition. A plausible gloss on Success, and the one that we have assumed throughout this Thesis, is that the audience understands the speaker only if, for every proposition p that the speaker intends to communicate, they know that the speaker intended to communicate p. When understanding is presented on this model, it is far less clear that the speaker has to do any more work to understand a speaker who means two propositions than they do to understand a speaker who means a single proposition.

It is a virtue of the representation of local equivalence in terms of Stalnaker‘s framework is that it very conspicuously represents this fact. Understanding a speaker comes down to knowing the update that they intend to impose on the context set and there is no reason to think it is more difficult to grasp an update that introduces two new truths to the context set than it is to grasp an update that introduces a single new truth. There are alternative representations of context in which this is less conspicuous. Suppose, for example, that the

context is represented just by a set of presuppositions. In cases devoid of sarcasm and the like, we are told to update this set with what is said, and then with any presuppositions entailed by what is said and the member of the original set. In an unrealistically simple version of Buchanan‘s case, the context is represented as {<every beer in the apartment is in the bucket filled with ice if and only if every beer for the party is in the bucket by the hot tub>}. If the