Abstract
The main aim of the present paper is to show that the recently developed dialogical approach to Martin-Löf’s Constructive Type Theory (CTT), called Immanent Reasoning, provides the means for distinguishing François Recanati’s process of free enrichment and saturation, meets his own objections against perspectives based on unarticulated constituents and opens a new venue to pragmatic modulation, where the speaker-receiver interaction is integrated into the notion of enrichment. In such a setting enrichment operates on proof-objects that make fully articulated event-propositions true. The point is that distinguishing what makes a proposition true from the proposition made true offers a simple and clean way to avoid conflating the contextual elements that enrich a proposition with the proposition itself. Such a framework abounds in means for expressing reference structures such as anaphora, including time and/or location reference. Furthermore, the notion of dependent types of CTT (absent in Montague-style semantics) and the associated formation rules allow for a straightforward analysis of composition of meaning at work in Recanati’s cases concerning occasion meaning as determined by context. The brand of dialogical contextualism, grounded on the play-level (where propositional content is not necessarily truth-conditional), advocated herewith is not a form of propositional syncretism. The framework offers a straightforward response to the failure of third excluded in some instances of faultless disagreement without giving up the notion of propositional content. More generally, this suggests an alternative way to tackle the interface pragmatics semantics underlying the notion of pragmatic modulation by integrating into the interface the dialogical game of asking and giving reasons.
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Notes
- 1.
In a fascinating paper that displays skills proper of a detective, Gabriel et al. (2009) suggest that there are strong indications that Frege’s notion of Gedanke (thought) has been directly inspired if not borrowed from the Stoic notion of lekton.
- 2.
The process by the means of which the lekton is linked to the circumstance of evaluation should not be thought as providing unarticulated constituents to some incomplete but, in the case of enrichment, the process should be thought as pragmatic top-down modulation procedure by the means of which the contextual meaning of some lexical item is rendered more specific [cf. Recanati (2017, pp. 219–220)].
- 3.
Cf. Grant (2019), who develops a helpful general discussion on Recanati’s Contextualism.
- 4.
Notice that the kind of moderate Contextualism professed by Recanati does not commit him to the claim that every process of completing incomplete proposition must fall in one of the three categories. There are cases that are not result of enrichment, such as completing Everyone loves Sally to Everyone loves Sally and his mother. However, identifying those cases contribute to the task of identifying the class of linguistic phenomena captured by modulation – Elbourne (2008), Recanati (2010, pp. 10–12).
- 5.
In such a setting enrichment operates on proof-objects that make fully articulated event-propositions true. The point is that by distinguishing what makes a proposition true from the proposition made true offers a simple and clean way to avoid conflating the contextual elements that enrich a proposition with the proposition itself. Such a framework abounds in means for expressing reference structures such as anaphora, including time and/or location reference. As Austin once put it, ‘it takes two to make a truth’. The circumstance of evaluation is not an aspect of the content to be evaluated, but an entity with respect to which that content is evaluated. Still, according to the theory of situations to be introduced in this chapter, the circumstance of evaluation is an aspect of content in a broader sense of ‘content’. And that aspect of content is irreducibly contextual. Recanati (2004, p. 115).
- 6.
The view I have sketched escapes the difficulties that beset the traditional ‘argument analysis’ of adverbs. The problem with treating what adverbs contribute as further arguments of the relation expressed by the verb is that this assumes something patently untrue […]. As adverbs and modifiers can always be multiplied, and new dimensions of modification can always emerge, the standard argument analysis is clearly hopeless. But the view I have sketched meets both objections: the number and identity of adverbial arguments do not have to be specified in advance, and whatever information they convey does not have to be regarded as implicit when they are not provided (whether linguistically or contextually). Recanati (2002, footnote 18, pp. 322–323).
- 7.
Notice that Recanati’s analysis of John has arrived also applies to the examples brought forward by Tomohiro Sakai (2014). such as I like very much. Sakai (2014) joins Stanley (2005) in casting doubts about the (grammatical) force of Recanati’s arguments for enrichment. Perhaps, the reconstruction of enrichment within a framework of type-theoretical grammar developed in the next sections will help to dissipate some doubts.
- 8.
Kent Bach (2004, 2005, 2006), who labels himself as a radical minimalist, shares with Recanati the view that there are sentences that are semantically incomplete, such as John arrived, though he calls them propositional radicals rather than Lekta. However, different to Recanati’s contextualism Bach (2006) strongly contests the view that semantically incomplete sentences can be completed by context. Completion is a semantic and not a pragmatic process. Expansion is a pragmatic process but on Bach’s view it applies to already semantic complete sentences.
- 9.
I conclude that what characterizes genuine unarticulated constituents is the fact that their contextual provision is not mandatory - it is not required in virtue of a linguistic convention governing the use of a particular construction (or class of constructions). In context, it may be that the unarticulated constituent is ‘required’; but then it is required in virtue of features of the context, not in virtue of linguistic properties of the expression-type. A constituent is mandatory in the relevant sense only if in every context such a constituent has to be provided (precisely because the need for completion is not a contextual matter, but a context-independent property of the expression-type). This, then, is the criterion we must use when testing for (genuine) inarticulateness: Can we imagine a context in which the same words are used normally, and a truth-evaluable statement is made, yet no such constituent is provided? If we can imagine such a context, then the relevant constituent is indeed unarticulated (in the strong sense); if we cannot, it is articulated, at some level of linguistic analysis. Recanati (2002, 316).
- 10.
In fact, also Quine’s DER-operator can do both increase or decrease the arity of a relation.
- 11.
The original text maps Eat relation to the Eat-in relation.
- 12.
Cf. Recanati (2007b, p. 133).
- 13.
I deny that there is any such tension. I agree with Kölbel that the lekton should be equated to what is said for all the reasons he gives. Indeed their being identical is one of the reasons why I use that term ‘lekton’ which means ‘what is said’ (and additionally conveys the suggestion of semantic incompleteness, due to the use of the term by Stoic logicians in connection with tensed propositions). […]. Is not free enrichment , the paradigmatic modulation process, the provision of unarticulated constituents? No it is not. In free enrichment some aspect of meaning is contributed in a top down manner by the context. This is often interpreted as the provision of ‘unarticulated constituents’, but that is not my interpretation. Free enrichment typically corresponds to a process of specifization [sic], through which we make the contextual meaning of a lexical item more specific than its literal (conventional) meaning. Is this a matter of providing unarticulated constituents? No. The contextual meaning, resulting from free enrichment, is not unarticulated, because it corresponds to something in the sentence, namely the lexical item whose meaning has been made contextually more specific. Recanati (2017, pp. 219–220).
- 14.
John Collins (2019), who in his online-paper “On Saturation in Weather Reports” pushes towards a radical pragmatism is not convinced of Recanati’s formulation of the weatherman example and offers another variant involving detectors all over the universe and including the assumption that the weatherman does not know if he is or not on Earth. Now, it seems to me that Recanati’s answer to the proposal to fill up (by default) the argument slot with on Earth still applies to Collins’ variant of raining on the Universe. Independently of the possible weatherman-variants, at the end of the paper I will come back to the dialogical view on radicalizing contextualism.
- 15.
- 16.
Recanati (2010, pp. 38–39).
- 17.
In fact, truth-making theory and CTT are quite different frameworks, but, in the present paper, in order to give a flavour of what a proof-object is, we will deploy evidence, truth-maker and proof-object as synonym. The main point of difference is that within CTT proof-object and proposition are conceived as enjoying a type-token relation: no token without type.
- 18.
- 19.
Cf. Nordström et al. (1990) .
- 20.
See Martin-Löf (1984, pp. 9–10). For a short introductory survey see Rahman et al. (2018, chapter II).
- 21.
In fact, within TTG intersectivity of adjectives is a consequence of applying projection-rules to the pair that constitutes a proof-object of a Σ-type.
- 22.
- 23.
In fact, the presentation of adjuncts and complements in TTG in the present section stems from Ranta (1994, pp. 106–109).
- 24.
Below, following Recanati (2002) we will distinguish between It is raining and It is raining (here).
- 25.
Indeed the dependence of time upon events expressed by τ(x): time (x: A) comes close to the Aristotelian thesis that time is not something that can exist independently of (essential) change. Indeed, according to Aristotle’s influential dictum time is the number of change in respect of before and after (Physics, IV, 219b 1–5) it makes no sense to speak of time during which there is no change at all.
- 26.
The idea underlying the TTG approach to indexical expressions such a here, is that some location ci has been fixed, so that here stands for the function here(c), so that if the variable c is substituted by some fixed location ci, the function here(c/ci) evaluates as ci. In our example, the location has been fixed as Lille, so that here in It is raining here, evaluates as It is raining in Lille – in the terminology of computer linguistics it is said that the sugaring of the function here(c) yields the natural language indexical expression here. Similar holds for the sugaring of now(h) – cf. Ranta (1994, pp. 98–99 and p. 119).
- 27.
- 28.
- 29.
See Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.6.
- 30.
Cf. Marion (2006, p. 245).
- 31.
The fact that these language-games must be finite does not rule out the possibility of a (potentially) infinite number of them.
- 32.
Other interesting instances of such kind of phenomena are being discussed in Chakraborty and Lion (2020) in their contribution to the present volume.
- 33.
I had the chance to be reminded of these debates during the inspiring session of the seminar on the Theaetetus held at the laboratory STL: UMR 8163, Univ. Lille on the 14th of November 2019. The meeting of that date was held by Philippe Rousseau and Thomas Bénatouïl and focused on the Theaetetus. (170a-171d and 171e-174a). The seminar is organized by Thomas Bénatouïl and Claire Louget.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Teresa Lopez-Soto (Sevilla) the editor of present inspiring volume and to the Laboratory STL: UMR-CNRS 8163 and particularly so to Leone Gazziero (STL), Laurent Cesalli (Genève), leaders of the ANR Project SEMAINO (STL) and Claudio Majolino (STL), associated researcher to that project, for fostering the research leading to the present study. The pluri-disciplinary STL-seminar on Plato’s Theaetetus lead by Thomas Bénatouïl (U. Lille) and Claire Louget (U. Lille) offered a forum for rich and inspired discussions on subjects relevant to Contextualism, particularly so on the challenges of Protagoras relativism. I am very thankful to all the participants who helped me to reflect on the philosophical and historical roots of Contextualism. Many thanks too to Zoe McConaughey, Clément Lion, and Vincent Wistrand, doctorates at the Department of Philosophy at University of Lille and members of the laboratory UMR: 8163, STL who contributed to my many fruitful discussions and specially to Bert Cappelle (STL) for his helpful remarks to an earlier version of the paper.
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Rahman, S. (2021). What the Weatherman Said: Enrichment, CTT and the Dialogical Approach to Moderate Contextualism. In: Lopez-Soto, T. (eds) Dialog Systems. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61438-6_6
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