Zero Tolerance for Pragmatics

By Christopher Gauker

The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what are the values of the context variables? Many theorists would include among these values aspects of the speaker's intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the values of the context variables never include the speaker's intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication and on a consideration of what a speaker and a hearer can reasonably expect of one another. Although I call this thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called pragmatics.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 07:48 BST

Updated: Thursday, 16 June 2005 07:59 BST

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Questioning Contextualism

By Brian Weatherson

There are currently a dizzying variety of theories on the market holding that whether an utterance of the form S knows that p is true depends on pragmatic or contextual factors. Even if we allow that pragmatics matters, there are two questions to be answered. First, which kind of pragmatic factors matter? Broadly speaking, the debate here is about whether practical interests (the stakes involved) or intellectual interests (which propositions are being considered) are most important. Second, whose interests matter? Here there are three options: the interests of S matter, the interests of the person making the knowledge ascription matter, or the interests of the person evaluating the ascription matter.
This paper is about the second question. I’m going to present some data from the behaviour of questions about who knows what that show it is not the interests of the person making the knowledge ascription that matter. This means the view normally known as contextualism about knowledge-ascriptions is false. Since that term is a little contested, and for some suggests merely the view that someone’s context matters, I’ll introduce three different terms for the three answers to the second question.

• Environmentalism – The interests of S, i.e. her environment, matter.
• Indexicalism – The interests of the person making the knowledge ascription matter, so ‘know’ behaves like an indexical term.
• Relativism – The interests of the person evaluating the knowledge ascription matter, so knowledge ascriptions are not true or false simpliciter but only relative to an evaluator.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 05:40 BST

Updated: Friday, 10 June 2005 05:42 BST

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The Stanley-Rett Debate

Nominal Restriction

By Jason Stanley

Extra-linguistic context appears to have a profound effect on the determination of what is expressed by the use of linguistic expressions. For a bewildering range of very different linguistic constructions, adhering to relatively straightforward linguistic intuition about what is expressed leads us to the conclusion that facts about the nonlinguistic context play many different roles in determining what is said. Furthermore, that so many different constructions betray this sort of sensitivity to extra-linguistic context understandably leads to pessimism about rescuing the straightforward intuitions while preserving any sort of systematicity in the theory of meaning.
A presumption motivating the pessimistic inclination is that, if we accept the ordinary intuitions, what appears to be very different ways in which context affects semantic content in fact are different ways in which context affects linguistic content. Pessimism is a natural reaction to those who adopt this presumption, because if appearance is a good guide to the facts in this domain, then there are just too many ways in which context affects semantic content to preserve systematicity. One common and natural reaction to these facts is, therefore, to deny the semantic significance of the ordinary intuitions, thereby relegating the project of explaining the apparent effects of extra-linguistic context on semantic content to a domain of inquiry outside the theory of meaning proper. So doing removes the threat context poses to the systematicity of semantic explanation, but at the cost of reducing the interest of the semantic project.
In this paper, I explore a different reaction to the situation. My purpose is to undermine the presumption that what appear to be very different effects of context on semantic content are very different effects. My challenge is of necessity rather limited, since it is too implausible to trace all effects of extra-linguistic context on semantic content to the very same source. Rather, I will take, as a case study, three superficially very different effects of context on semantic content, and show that they are due to the very same mechanism, what I call Nominal Restriction. I thereby hope to provide convincing evidence of the promise of the project of reducing all apparent effects of context on semantic content to a small number of sources.

Published in Logical Form and Language, edited by Peters and Preyer, Oxford University Press (2002)

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Context, Compositionality and Calamity

By Jessica Rett

This paper examines an attempt made in a series of articles (Stanley 2002, a.o.) to create a syntactic placeholder for contextual information. The initial shortcoming of Stanley’s proposal is that it does not easily integrate these placeholders with domain-restricting information syntactically encoded elsewhere in the utterance. Thus, Stanley erroneously predicts that a sentence in which quantifier restricting information encoded in (for example) a prepositional phrase conflicts with quantifier-restriction valued by context is internally incoherent.
I continue by exploring the space of possible solutions to this problem that are available to Stanley, demonstrating how each of these possible solutions results in its own interpretation problem and, ultimately, fails. In doing so, I argue that Stanley’s syntactic/semantic approach to context is ultimately untenable.

Source: Semantics Archive
To appear in Mind & Language

Context Dependence and Compositionality

By Francis Jeffrey Pelletier

Some utterances of sentences such as ?Every student failed the midterm exam? and ?There is no beer? are widely held to be true in a conversation despite the facts that not every student in the world failed the midterm exam and that there is, in fact, some beer somewhere. For instance, the speaker might be talking about some particular course, or about his refrigerator. Stanley and Szabo (in Mind & Language , 15, 2000) consider many different approaches to how contextual information might give meaning to these ?restricted quantifier domains?, and find all of them but one wanting. The present paper argues that their considerations against one of these other theories, considerations that turn on notions of compositionality, are incorrect.

Appeared in Mind & Language, April 2003, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 148-161(14)

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Saturday, 4 June 2005 12:55 BST

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Many-valued logic vs. many-valued semantics

By Jaroslav Peregrin

Hence the task of the logician, viewed from this perspective, is the delimitation of the range of acceptable truth-valuations of the sentences of the given language – taking note of all the "lawful" features of the separation of true sentences from false ones. Let us call this the separation problem.
Consider the language of classical propositional calculus (and consequently the part of natural language which it purports to regiment). Here the ensuing "laws of truth" are quite transparent:

(i) ¬A is true iff A is not true
(ii) A^B is true iff A is true and B is true
(iii) A∨B is true iff A is true or B is true
(iv) A→B is true iff A is not true or B is true

Every truth-valuation which fulfills these constraints is acceptable and every acceptable truth-valuation does fulfill them. But the situation is, as is well known, not so simple once we abandon the calm waters of the classical propositional calculus.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

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Knowledge and Explanation

By Carrie Jenkins

In this paper I attempt a project of this kind. I propose a necessary and sufficient condition for A knows that p which is, although recognizably similar to the traditional sets of conditions, arguably immune to the kind of counterexample which tends to deter philosophers from thinking that any illuminating conditions can be found. I present this condition, however, not as an analysis of knowledge, but rather as a way of getting a handle on the concept and furthering the effort to understand what its role in our lives might be. Taken in this spirit, the current proposal is not at odds with the principles that motivate Craig?s view.
In denying my proposal the status of a reductive analysis, I am mindful of the fact that it will tell us little more than that knowledge is ?non-accidental true belief?. What it offers is a (hopefully fruitful) way of spelling out what is meant by ?non-accidental? in this context. In what follows, I shall write ?KAp? for ?A knows that p? and ?BAp? for ?A believes that p.? I shall propose that KAp just in case BAp and it can be said (under specific circumstances, to be described shortly) that A believes p because p is true. But this is not a causal account of knowledge. The ?because? signals not causation, but explanation.

To appear in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:41 BST

Updated: Wednesday, 1 June 2005 17:53 BST

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