Abstract
People often speak loosely, uttering sentences that are plainly false on their most strict interpretation. In understanding such speakers, we face a problem of underdetermination: there is often no unique interpretation that captures what they meant. Focusing on the case of incomplete definite descriptions, this paper suggests that speakers often mean bundles of propositions. When a speaker means a bundle, their audience can know what they mean by deriving any one of its members. Rather than posing a problem for the interpretation of loose talk, the underdetermination of a uniquely correct interpretation allows for various ways in which the audience can grasp the speaker’s meaning.
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Notes
Donnellan (1968), Wettstein (1981), Blackburn (1988) and Reimer (1992) reject various analyses of incomplete definite descriptions. Stanley and Szabó (2000) reject an ellipsis view of quantifier domain restriction. Borg (2002) rejects descriptive analyses of deferred demonstrative. Clapp (2002) denies that truth-conditions are determined compositionally. Buchanan and Ostertag (2005) and Buchanan (2010, 2012) deny that speakers mean propositions by their utterances.
Schiffer (1981), Schiffer (1992), Schiffer (1993), Schiffer (1994) and Schiffer (1995) deploy the meaning-intention problem to target various other views. These arguments and those in the footnote above, are subject to the comments made here. I engage with Buchanan, Clapp, and Stanley and Szabó in Bowker (forthcoming).
We might question, as does an anonymous reviewer, whether this theory of definite descriptions is appropriately described as ‘indexical’. Schiffer does not suggest that the logical form of a definite description involves any indexical expressions ((compare his presentation of the hidden-indexical theory of belief reports at Schiffer (1995, p. 109)). Rather, Schiffer (1995, p. 114) takes the theory to be indexical “because different completing descriptions can be meant on different occasions of utterance.” I will defer to Schiffer’s terminology in what follows.
This definition of saying/stating is clearly inspired by Grice (1989, p. 87), who also assumes that saying that p entails meaning that p. As noted by an anonymous reviewer, however, this notion conflicts with some interpretations of Grice which assume that speakers say at most one proposition. Schiffer’s notion is compatible with the speaker saying multiple propositions.
This is clear because we recognise that the world contains more than one guy. If we assumed that the world contained a unique guy, you could be interpreted as meaning that the world’s unique guy is drunk. You might mean that, but of course it would remain false.
While Schiffer endorses a broadly Gricean view on which speaker-meaning involves a reflexive intention that is successful only if it is recognised, this premise ensures that the problem arises even for a less restricted view of speaker-meaning. Whether or not they intend to be understood, a speaker is understood only if their audience recognises their meaning.
I interpret ‘perfectly well’ as equivalent to ‘perfectly’. There is another interpretation of this phrase on which it is equivalent to ‘well enough’ but the second premise is very implausible on this interpretation. I can understand you well enough for our present purposes, even if I fail to grasp everything that you mean.
Borg (2012, p. 135) has recently defended a view of indexicals like ‘this’ and ‘that’ on which they refer to whatever object the speaker intends. Audiences can understand speakers by thinking of the referent as the actual object referred to by the speaker, even if they have no other way of identifying the right object. We might deny premise 5 by suggesting that I can identify the proposition you mean as the proposition of the form that the H guy is drunk that the speaker intends. Two problems with this response. First, the suggestion makes it too easy to achieve understanding. I can identify the proposition in this way whether or not I understand the context in which you are speaking, but I cannot understand you perfectly if I don’t know that you are talking about the referent of \(d_1\)–\(d_3\). A similar response to Borg’s account of indexicals is to be found in Michaelson (2013, p. 101). Second, there are other reasons to think that you mean no unique proposition of this form. Schiffer (1995, p. 120 and 2005, pp. 1154–1157) points out that you might as well utter ‘He is drunk’ in the Pergola case—your meaning is equally well conveyed by either sentence—but there is little temptation to think that someone who utters ‘He is drunk’ must mean some unique proposition of the form that the H guy is drunk. See footnote 25 for further discussion. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to Borg’s suggestion and Michaelson’s response.
Though Schiffer (1995, pp. 128–130) hints at a more radical theory.
Strictly speaking, B&O says that the speaker might respond by uttering any of \(s_1\)–\(s_3\) if they were asked what they meant. I take it to be as plausible that they might respond by prefixing \(s_1\), \(s_2\), or \(s_3\) with ‘I meant that’.
This suggestion is not made explicit. Schiffer (1995, p. 120) explicitly claims that “If you ask the speaker what she meant in uttering “The guy is drunk”, you will not get a report that favours the description theory: the speaker will almost certainly offer up an object-dependent proposition involving Pergola, the intended referent of her utterance of “the guy” ”. Regarding a speaker who says ‘He is drunk’, however, Schiffer (1995, p. 125) argues that while “she might well say that she meant that the guest speaker was drunk, or that the guy staggering up to the podium was drunk ... she would be using those descriptions to refer to Pergola; she would not be intending any “de dicto” readings of those self-ascriptive meaning reports wherein the that-clauses refer to description-theoretic propositions.”
Though your intentions may be satisfied if you only meant (i.e. intended) me to believe that p. Meaning your audience to believe that p does not entail meaning that p.
Cf. (Grice 1989, p. 31).
The notion of bundling at work here is distinct from the notion of lumping found in Kratzer (1989). While bundling is a symmetrical relation, lumping is not. The proposition that every tree in your orchard is laden with wonderful golden apples lumps the proposition that this particular tree is laden with wonderful golden apples (pp. 621–622) but the reverse does not hold.
Indeed, it is not entirely clear that I could enter such a belief state. Frege cases do not easily arise when the agent knows that two descriptions are co-denoting. For Frege’s original presentation of these cases, see Frege (1892). Note his observation (p. 62) that “Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the morning star might hold the one thought [that the morning star is a body illuminated by the sun] to be true, the other [that the evening star is a body illuminated by the sun] false” and that it is restricted to individuals who do not recognize the definite descriptions to pick out the same object.
Or, more precisely, by our common presuppositions. For the purposes at hand, however, may safely assume that our common knowledge exhausts our common presuppositions at the outset of our conversation.
There is something of an ambiguity in the notion of essential effect as characterised by Stalnaker. Characterising the essential effect of an utterance as the “particular way” in which the common ground is reduced, Stalnaker says “The particular way in which the [common ground] is reduced is that all of the possible situations incompatible with what is said are eliminated.” The possible situations eliminated from the common ground by saying that p depend on the worlds in the common ground prior to the utterance. From what Stalnaker says, it isn’t clear whether he takes the essential effect of an utterance to be defined by the set of situations it eliminates from the common ground, in which case two utterances made in different contexts may have different essential effects even when both say that p, or whether he takes every utterance which says that p to have the same essential effect. In what follows, I use ‘essential effect’ in the former sense.
An anonymous reviewer notes that it will often be common ground that the speaker believes what they say and has good reasons for that belief. In adding to the common ground the proposition that the speaker says that \(p_1\), we thereby add the proposition that the speaker has good reasons for believing \(p_1\). Note, however, that the essential effect of the assertion is just the addition of \(p_1\) to the common ground, not the proposition that the speaker says this proposition. While this latter proposition may enter the common ground, it is not due to the essential effect of the utterance. Another anonymous reviewer notes that it is common ground that \(p_1\) if and only if it is common ground that \(p_1\) is common ground, so the proposition that \(p_1\) is common ground is bundled with the proposition that \(p_1\). The reviewer objects that we cannot plausible identify this bundle of propositions with what is said. Correct. If the proposition that \(p_1\) is common ground is bundled with \(p_1\) then it is meant by an utterance of \(s_1\), yet only propositions of the form required by meaning-rule \(\mathcal {R}\) are said. As the proposition that \(p_1\) is common ground is not of the right form, it is not said. The inclusion of this proposition in what is meant is not particularly problematic as it doesn’t complicate the process of interpretation (see Sect. 4.5).
One might argue that the bundling account is as susceptible to the meaning-intention problem as any other description-theoretic view. On the bundling view, the speaker means a single proposition: that \(p_1\) and \(p_2\) and \(p_3\) (or that \(d_1\), \(d_2\), and \(d_3\) is drunk). But I can understand your utterance without taking you to mean this proposition. Ergo, it is not what you mean. (See Buchanan 2010, p. 353). There are at least two ways to understand ‘taking you to mean that p’. On one understanding, I take you to mean that p only if I intersect p with the common ground. On a second understanding, I take you to mean that p only if I add p to the common ground. Here, I take the second interpretation. Though I can understand you by intersecting any of \(p_1\)–\(p_3\) with the common ground, this is because I take you to mean that \(p_1\), \(p_2\), and \(p_3\), whichever I explicitly intersect with the common ground. More generally, this challenge misconstrues the bundling approach. There is a difference between meaning a bundle of propositions and meaning the conjunction of its members. In the first case, the entirety of your meaning is given by the intersection of the common ground with any one member of the bundle. In the second, the individual conjuncts have different effects on the common ground and no one conjunct gives the speaker’s whole meaning. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that I address this concern.
As does an anonymous reviewer.
This point is addressed further in Sect. 5.1.
The view thus accommodates Schiffer’s (1995, p. 120) observation that the case in which you utter ‘He is drunk’ and the case in which you utter ‘The guy’s drunk’ have “exact psychological parity with respect to those psychological facts on which the relevant speaker meaning would have to supervene”. He goes on to claim, however, that this stands against the hidden-indexical theory because “Clearly, there is no property H such that the speaker [who utters ‘He is drunk’] definitely meant that the H male was drunk.” While the bundling view agrees that there needn’t be any unique such property, it denies that there is no such property. The speaker means the descriptive propositions \(p_1\)–\(p_3\) as well as the object-dependent proposition. Schiffer (2005, p. 1165) is concerned that if “the same things would be meant whether one uttered ‘He is G’ or ‘The male is G’ ... there would seem not to be any reasonable basis for attributing different [meanings] to the two sentences.” My primary basis for distinguishing the meanings of these sentences is the intuition that only the object-dependent proposition is of the right form to be said by an utterance of ‘He is drunk’. While this intuition isn’t the last word on the matter, Schiffer doesn’t offer any reason to doubt it.
In Bowker (forthcoming), I present an alternative: you mean all and only those propositions added to the common ground by the essential effect of your utterance.
Or the “say-p-
-mean-q model”, as Schiffer puts it. See Neale (1990, p. 89) for an account of this kind.Or on the basis of what the speaker has “made as if to say”. Grice (1989, p. 34).
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this argument to my attention.
Note that this presupposition is not required to be true, so we agree with Donnellan that I might successfully say something true about a man drinking water by using the description ‘the man drinking a martini’. See the following subsection.
Nor should we find it particularly surprising that audiences must sometimes identify some other proposition that the speaker means in order to know what they have said. In coming to know what you have said by your utterance of ‘She divorced Brian’, I need to work out the referent of ‘She’. I may do so by first recognising that you mean that Brian is divorced (which may be the central proposition you intend to convey) and infer that ‘She’ referred to Mary from my knowledge that Mary is the only person Brian has ever married.
Donnellan (1966, p. 295, n. 12) notes that the notion in play is “the notion of saying something true of someone”. Original italics.
“Jones might, for example, accuse us of saying false things of him in calling him insane” (p. 286)
“But where the definite description is used referentially, something true may well have been said. It is possible that something true was said of the person or thing referred to.” (p. 295)
“But when we consider it as used referentially ... the man the speaker referred to may indeed be kind to the spinster; the speaker may have said something true about that man” (p. 300)
“If we think about what the speaker said about the person he referred to, then there is no reason to suppose he has not said something true or false about him” (p. 302)
All italics my own.
Stalnaker (1978, p. 85) notes that everyone in a conversation has a motivation to converge on a mutually recognised conception of the common ground but this shows only that conversational participants will tend towards convergence, not that they will reach it.
At least if we assume that a speaker’s meaning is transparent in that speakers always know what they mean. There are reasons to be sceptical of this assumption, however. Egan (2009) describes a billboard reading ‘Jesus loves you!’ and convincingly argues (pp. 262-5) that, for any audience A, the person who made the billboard might reasonably mean that Jesus loves A. The maker of the billboard has no idea of who will eventually read it, so cannot know what proposition they mean. Perhaps a speaker’s meaning is sometimes determined by the audience’s conception of the common ground. In constructing the billboard, the maker allows for their meaning to be determined by the audience’s belief as to their own identity. We might say something similar in the Pergola case: the speaker means whichever propositions are bundled by the audience’s conception of the common ground. This response allows for the possibility that the audience may understand the speaker perfectly even if they have no idea of what the speaker is presupposing, though there is not space here to work out the details.
I take this biconditional to be at least as plausible as Schiffer’s original premise.
What about a speaker who does not determinately mean any proposition? In such cases, I defer to B&O’s account of s-meaning. While there is no proposition that the speaker means, their communicative intentions may be satisfied as long as the audience entertains some member of a set of propositions.
-mean-q model”, as Schiffer puts it. See Neale (References
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Acknowledgements
This publication was funded by LMU Munich’s Institutional Strategy LMUexcellent within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant Number AH/J500446/1). My thanks to Patrick Greenough, Andy Egan, and Andrew Peet for discussion.
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Bowker, M. Saying a bundle: meaning, intention, and underdetermination. Synthese 196, 4229–4252 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1652-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1652-0