RECUENTO DE CELULAS SOMATICAS

e line of attack against this view usually involves some manifesta- tion of the Travis effect, _{the apparently inde nite diachronic vari-} ation in truth-value for sentences involving sublunary predicates, which is meant to establish their essential occasion-sensitivity (it is our interests and parochial judgements that determine the truth value of a sentence predicating, say, roundness of a given ball, not the se- mantics).

I take it as given that the Travis effect posesathreat to semanticism. In this section, I want to argue that the need to implement MDP and thus keep indeterminacy (and Travis) under control commits the se- manticist to aContent Expansion esis(CET) which I’ll make precise shortly.

e problem faced by the semanticist actually takes two forms: a weaker one, which we can call the thesis of the Underdetermination of Semantic Content (USC);and a stronger one, which we can call the Radical Pragmaticist Argument (RPA)—it’s stronger because it is an argument for theradicalunderdeterminacy ofanykind of content. USC claims that, for a sentenceS, linguistic rules only determineS’s linguisticmeaning: in (almost all cases) they do not reach far enough

_{I’m being a bit sloppy here, but I hope it’s clear what I’m up to. e point is that the character}

level rules will return the same values for the same arguments. So if two sentences intuitively differ in truth value while the character level rulesandthe entities assigned to the indices are the same, then we must have overlooked some elements that should have been included in the indices. For any variation in truth value must be traced back to the stuff in the indices.

_{Sainsbury (2001: §4.5).} _{See the essays in Travis (2008).}

_{is is very rough as it stands. Carston (2002: 19) usefully distinguishes three shapes the}

thesis can take. Two are unproblematic and uncontentious: 1) linguistic meaning underdetermines what is meant (i.e.communicatedcontent is underdetermined by linguistic content); 2) what is said underdetermines what is meant. e third one is the bone of contention between semanticists and pragmaticists: linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said (the proposition expressed). See Neale (2005: 193) for another statement of the thesis.

e Roots of Sense |  to determinetheproposition intuitively expressed by an utterance of S in a given context—the slogan: linguistic content is, properly speak- ing,propositionally incomplete.

In many cases, adherents to USC seem content with the claim that we should replace truth-conditional semantics with truth- conditional pragmatics—while still leaving open the possibility of giving a (largely systematic)theoryof meaning.

All that needs doing is adding a story aboutpragmatic competence to integrate the traditional one about semantic competence: the mis- take of the traditional paradigm was in thinking that we could (and should) keep the two separate.

e demand then is for a realignment of the theoretical and ex- planatory priorities: semantics is not the (modularly constrained) prelude to pragmatics, but rather the two are joint partners—and in fact, pragmatics can be autonomous of semantics in setting cer- tain parameters not mandated (or indeed marked for) at the level of linguistic content.

In any case, on this view wedoreach a level of propositionally com- plete content; the view differs from the semanticist’s in insisting that without pragmatic interventionright into the fabric of linguistic con- tentwe could have no truth-evaluable content at all.

By contrast, the RPA does not just endorse USC and the consequent request for theoretical reform: it adds the further claim, not strictly

_{e USC thesis in and of itself leaves it open whether the gap between linguistic meaning and}

proposition expressed may be bridged by a wider theory of linguistic communication that makes

essentialappeal to pragmatic processes.

_{See e.g. Recanati (1993: ch. 13), Bezuidenhout (2002), Kadmon (2001).}

_{See Recanati (2010) for a book-length defence of this view. Recanati’s position is an intrigu-}

ing mix of elements from the two sides of the debate, for he seems to join a belief in the theoretical tractability of contextual factors (e.g. p. 9) with a view that content may be radically underdeter- minate (he also seems happy with the contrast literal/metaphorical meaning, see p. 4). Note that Recanati’s defence of truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) makes him vulnerable to the arguments for indeterminacy that I give in the text, for TCP still espouses a version of the MDP. According to Recanati (2004a: 134-35), compositional operations process not just semantic information but also what he callsmodulated sense, that is, pragmatically enriched semantic content. Recanati is insistent though that his framework is still grammar-driven, for he wants to resist accusations that TCP is unsystematic. To an extent, TCP could be seen as an implementation of a view of composi- tionality as asemi-productiveprocess. While sense-modulation is unsystematic, sense-composition still retains systematicity. I nd this a curious failure of nerve.

_{Montague (1970c: 223, fn. 2) famously dismissed syntax as little more than a preliminary to}

semantics.

_{is is the distinctive claim of Recanati (2004a, 2010). e distinction is between satura-}

tion (roughly, the lling in of the slots in the index) and free enrichment (there is, the pragmati- cist claims, no slot at Logical Form (LF) corresponding to the pragmatically-controlled content- completion procedure).

 | Chapter 

entailed by USC, thatnosemantic theory of the kind envisaged by se- manticists and formal pragmaticists alike can explain (and/or accu- rately predict) the variations in truth value above because pragmatic effects on content cannot be captured in full generality by any the- ory—they are ineradicably interest-relative and occasion-sensitive. More seriously still: there can be no notion ofstablecontent. Our cognitive lives, that is, are immersed in indeterminacy and the se- manticist project can cover only a very limited part of our cognitive horizon.

e challenge for the semanticist (and the pragmaticist of formal leanings), then, is how to secure determinacy of content against USC and RPA.