Soporte lúteo

In the previous section, the semanticist embraced a pro igate mean- ing ontology, positing as many ‘and’ senses as there are cross- conjuncts relations.

_{An objection along these lines is in Posner (1980: 187).}

_{Oen enough, see e.g. Davidson (1967: 30), the claim is thatas long as we match ambiguity for} ambiguityacross the bi-conditional all will be well. But here instead of doing that we are in factde- couplingOL ambiguity from ML univocality!—‘and’ means somethingdifferenton the two sides of the bi-conditional. Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 128-29) are aware of (some) of the problems thrown up by ambiguity accounts.

 | Chapter 

In this section, Occam-like, we posit just one (semantically con- veyed) sense and let pragmatic principles explain away what we now claim to be mereassertibilityissues (felicitousness concerns aside, the conjunction will remain true as long as the conjuncts are).

In contrast to the MSA analysis, according to the Single Sense Account (SSA) in () there is a mere illusion of truth-conditional variation (one that is pragmaticallyimplicated, not semantically ex- pressed). Unintuitive as it may be, a switch of the conjuncts only gen- erates animpressionof falsehood. _{e speaker has merely violated} the fourth maxim of Manner: “Be orderly”.

On this story, then, we disqualify sentences that misde- scribe the temporal ordering of the events on purely pragmatic grounds—uttering them does not amount to expressing an outright falsehood (a conjunction literally says that the events described by its conjuncts happenedbut is otherwise silent regarding their ordering and the connections, if any, putatively holding between them).

e rich network of (potential and actual) connections and rela- tions between the conjuncts is thus entirely a product of pragmatic calculations.

Now, for all the woes of MSA, the prima facie evidence for SSA is rather indecisive. Recall two of the main features of the classic Gricean account of conversational implicature:

i) pragmatically in ected content is derived from semantic content via an inference that is triggered by some overt violation of conver- sational maxims;

ii)pragmatically conveyed content is cancellable.

_{For Grice’s invocation of his Modi ed Occam Razor see his (1978: 47) and (1981: 186). Inter-}

estingly, Neale (2005: 177, fn. 23) is keen to stress that the widely-held opinion that Grice rescued semanticists from the onslaught of pragmaticists is badly off-target—Grice con ded to Neale that he counted himself as a pragmati[ci]st. Grice’s strategy could also be mobilised against Girard’s (1995: 2) ‘I bought a packet of Camels’ (presumed) counterexample to idempotency. See Frege (1923: 59, fn. 15) for a different response.

_{See e.g. Levinson’s (1983: 100) summation of the view: “once pragmatic implications […] are}

taken into account, the apparently radical differences between logic and natural language seem to fade away”.

_{See Grice (1967b: 27). Grice (1981: 186) seems to consider it a violation of the more general}

supermaxim: “Be perspicuous”.

_{Echoing Eric Morecambe, the Gricean could say that both conjuncts are true, although uttered}

not necessarily in the right order.

_{In Grice (1981: 185) it is stated that an appearance of violation was necessary for (at least)}

some conversational implicata to arise (was Grice being compliant with his own maxims when using ‘some’ here?). Elsewhere, (1967a: 32), he also considers cases where there is noclearviolation, but it is not obvious to me that the example he gives (the garage case) is violation-free (there’s ajumpin the narration that needs lling in by inference).

NoButsandIfs |  By Grice’s own lights, the cancellability test is not crucial either way. For the cases we have examined, however, it seems fairly plausible (butnotcompelling). Uttering ‘AandB’ and then adding the appro- priate disclaimer (e.g. “but I did not mean to say thatBhappened aer A”) seems a bit odd but not contradictory.

e question of maxim violation is by no means settled, however. In standard cases of implicatures, withoutsomeviolation there is no triggering of the implicatures. _{And Grice (: ) was adamant} that the “ nal test” for the presence ofconversationalimplicatures had to be the availability of an explicit (i.e. phenomenologically salient) derivation of it.

Given that there appears to be no detectable violation of any of the maxims, _{and thus no triggering of mandated pragmatic inference,} conjunction would then have to be a case ofconventionalimplicature. But if we go that way, it then seems to me that the fundamen- tal problem is thatthere is no single type of non-Boolean conjunction that might be conventionally triggered by pragmatics (like Strawson, Grice seems to have considered only the temporal case: we now know better than that).

An account in terms of generalised conversational implicatures would also face problems for exactly the same reasons—what would cause trouble for that proposal is its aspiration to full generality: the fact that so many non-Boolean conjunction-senses are (or seem to be) available seems to exclude both a fully conventionalised and a generalised (default-led) approach to the problem.

_{See for instance Grice (1981: 186-7).}

_{If ‘and’ is ambiguous, however, the relative ease of cancellability may be due to that very am-}

biguity—cancelling is equivalent to saying: I wasn’t saying ‘A∧_T B’; I wasjustsaying ‘A∧B’. e test in this case, just as Grice had noted more generally, is inconclusive.

_{As I’ve already discussed in footnote 33, Grice (1967b: 32) does contemplate a group of im-}

plicatures where, he claims, there is no direct violation of a maxim. e garage case he discusses, however, is precisely a case where there is theappearanceof a violation of the maxim of relevance. We thus derive the implicated contenton the basis of a repair strategythat assumes the violation was only apparent. It seems to me that the distinction Grice had in mind there was betweenin- tentionalandapparentviolation of a maxim: correspondingly, we can havesharpdiscourse gaps (which signal overt violations of maxims) andmilddiscourse gaps (which signal compliance with the maxims). Without aprocessing joltof either kind, however, we would not in fact be mandated

inferentiallyto recover content that exceeds that strictly expressed by the linguistic material de- ployed.

_{See also Grice (1967b: 31), García-Carpintero (2001) and Recanati (2004a: §10.3).} _{As noted in Levinson (2000: 216).}

_{Recanati (2010: 146) too interprets Grice as being committed to a generalised conversational}

implicature (GCI) account of conjunction. I agree that the textual evidence (Grice 1981: 186) sup- ports this reading. But it is also the case that the passage in question was excised in the reprint in

 | Chapter 

In the next section, we’ll examine a neo-Gricean view that attempts to circumvent this problem from a pragmaticist perspective, but rst I want to consider one major obstacle for the semanticist who might be hoping that the MSA account could salvage her commitment to NLB. We are nally getting, that is, to the other horn of the SD VI dilemma.

4.3.1. e Cohen Objection

Leaving aside the worries I’ve just voiced, there is another difficulty for the SSA, one of which Grice was keenly aware: embedment of implicature-carrying sentences under the scope of the connectives seems to reveal that their (supposedly) pragmatically conveyed con- tent is captured by the connectives. is worry, if genuine, is fatal to the Grice-loving semanticist.

Here’s the shape of the difficulty for the conjunction case. Consider the following Cohen-sentence :

() If Harry took off his boots and went to bed, then his mum will be happy, but if Harry went to bed and took off his boots, then his mum will be unhappy.

It seems fairly clear that we make sense of thecontrast between the two halves of () because whateverkindof sense it is that gets attached to ‘and’ does survive embedding in the conditional.

On the plausible assumption that the logical connectives only op- erate on semantic content, the contrast between the two antecedents can no longer be made sense of as a contrast between pragmatically computed content (note also that the sentences are unasserted there, so the conversational maxims would struggle to get mobilised any- way).

Patently, the purely Boolean account of conjunction would be inad- equate here, for it would predict that the two antecedents are equiva-

Grice (1989)—I suspect because Grice realised it couldn’t be made to work. For the notion of GCI see Grice (1967b: 37-40), Levinson (1983: 127), Levinson (2000: 18ff.) and Recanati (2010: §2-3).

_{e worry initially emerged in the case of negated conditionals: when the affirmed condi-}

tional carries an implicature, the Gricean will have to say that in negating the conditional what we are denying is the implicated content. e problem is that where there is no implicature at play, the negation of the conditional is just the standard Boolean clause (true antecedent and false con- sequent). See Grice (1967a: 83).

_{Adapted from Cohen (1971: 58).}

_{ere are echoes of the Frege-Geach problem here. e assumption is not just plausible: the}

NoButsandIfs |  lent (mum is just beingirrational—she’s reasoning herself into a con- tradiction).

But the semanticist who appeals to the Gricean story fares quite badly too. In fact, she faces the unpalatable (sub-)dilemma SD VII. For either she drops the truth-functional requirement for the embed- ding connective (so PoC goes out of the window) to allow conjunction to operate on implicatures too, or she drops the implicature account for the embedded one (thus admitting pragmatic intrusion into se- manticcontent), both deeply damaging results for semanticism.

e difficulty, then, is that if implicatures get captured by logi- cal operators (and the Cohen sentence seems to show that if they exist they do get so captured), then, contrary to the tenets of Griceanism (and of the anxious semanticist), implicatures must be part of semantic content, for those operators, by de nition, op- erate truth-functionally on propositions ahead of (inferentially de- rived) pragmatic input—recall that PoC was formulated as requiring that complex meanings be a function of the meanings (and not of the inferentially-derived implicatures) of their constituents and their mode of combination.

It thus looks as if SSA leaves the semanticist in an even worse po- sition than MSA. For as we just noted the second horn of the orig- inal dilemma splits into a further dilemma: either she admits that pragmatic input gets incorporated into the semantic content of the conjuncts and then processed by the higher-level compositional op- erations, or she relaxes the compositional requirement so that some instances of embedment will out PoC (some pragmatic values get calculatedin parallelwith semantic ones).

Either way, the case of conjunction shows thateven with words of very-nearly logical statusit is doubtful that PoC can hold in full gen- erality.

4.3.2. e Scope Principle

e difficulties caused by embedment to an implicature account were already fully present to Grice. Twice he remarked that he had no idea how to solve the problem. _{But as we have just seen the difficulties}

_{Just as it is unable to make sense of the other classic example from (Wilson 1975: 151) : “Driv-}

ing home and drinking a few beers is better than drinking a few beers and driving home”. For a semanticist treatment of this sort of case involving a Stalnaker-in uenced semantics for condi- tionals see Stanley and King (2005: 165-66). Note that, as I have already stressed, it is essential to the notion of sense that it make us maximally rational in our competence with language. So the semanticistmustgive a story that can make sense of (7) (and of mum too).

 | Chapter 

are no less severe for those semanticists who had hoped a Gricean strategy would provide a good answer to NLB.

In the next section I will consider two lines of response to this problem, a broadly neo-Gricean one and an indexicalist one. First, though, to make the problem a little more precise we need to state the Scope Principle.

e Scope Principle(SP): Only semantic content can fall under the scope of logical operators.

e principle seems highly plausible and indeed constitutive of se- manticism. And we have just seen the dilemma it engenders for it. ere remains a question, however, as to what should follow from its application to a speci c case. e principle, that is, leaves unspeci ed what the proper diagnosis of cases thatfailthe obvious test set by the principle should be like.

Simplifying considerably, we seem to have two options:

i)we could take it that there are only two choices here: either MSA is true or SSA is. SP shows that SSA fails, hence we need to revisit MSA and see if we can defend it in some other way, for the temporal order- ing of the conjunctsmust be a semantic fact (if the connectives can “catch” it), not one that could be accounted for in pragmatic terms; or ii)we could take SP to show that the contrast in the antecedents in () was wrongly traced back to the meaning (or the implicatures attached to the meaning) of ‘and’; what we missed was the possibility that it could be theconjuncts themselvesthat were carrying the addi- tional semantic content captured by the conditional operator.

We have seen that the forced choice between MSA and a Gricean version of the SSA has landed the semanticist in another nasty- looking dilemma.

Perhaps there is still hope for her in an updated version of SSA that

_{A different formulation of the principle is in Recanati (1989: 325) and (1993: 271). Carston}

(2004b: 74) credits Deirdre Wilson with an earlier version and indeed she herself gives (or antic- ipates) pretty much Recanati’s principle in her Carston (1988: 172). Arguably, it all goes back to Cohen (1971). Recanati (2010: 147-48) has a fascinating discussion of a similar principle in the work of Ducrot and Anscombre (France’s answer to Grice). In general, the principle was intended as a test to separate implicatures fromexplicatures(a term of art introduced in Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 182) to denote pragmatically derived content that arises as a development of logical form, rather than as an inferencefromit). For (unconvincing) criticism of SP see García-Carpintero (2001).

_{We might be tempted by another thought, however. Grice (1967a: 68) mused that, for all the}

apparent plenitude of meanings that ‘and’ could acquire (or merely implicate), there was a strange “kind of emptiness in the notion of conjunction”. To get a feeling for that, just go back to (5) and (6) above and replace ‘and’ by a period. Not much seems to have changed—see Posner (1980: 187), Carston (2002: §3.3), Edgington (2006: 788). So, could we go eliminativist about NL conjunction?

NoButsandIfs |  shis the explanatory burden to the conjuncts. In the next section, I turn to considering this option.