Abstract
A standard objection to Cappelen and Lepore’s (Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005) Semantic Minimalism is that minimal propositions are explanatorily idle. But Schoubye and Stokke (Noûs 50:759–793, 2016) recently proposed that minimal proposition and the question under discussion of a conversation jointly determine what is said in a systematic and explanatory way. This note argues that their account both overgenerates and undergenerates.
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Notes
Minimal propositions are so called because they are intended to be minimally context-dependent: The only way the context affects the truth-conditions of a minimal proposition is by fixing the values of indexicals, demonstratives, and covert variables. But notice that this general characterization is compatible with multiple views on the truth-conditions of minimal propositions. So it is best to fix what S&S mean by ‘minimal proposition’ with their own examples.
To follow up on the charge that minimal propositions are by themselves explanatorily idle, consider:
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(i)
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a.
Tipper’s father cooked him a mushroom, but he ate without eating it.
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b.
#The exam is difficult, but Tipper is ready without being ready for it.
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a.
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(ii)
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a.
#Every man whose father cooked him a mushroom didn’t ate. But they all ate cheeseburgers.
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b.
Every student who has a difficult exam today isn’t ready. But they are all ready to party.
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a.
Notice that these contrasts are quite robust, and they don’t depend on the context-shifting arguments and the incompleteness arguments Cappelen and Lepore (2005) rightly warned against. So they demand an explanation. But it not clear how we can explain them if the semantic content of ‘is ready’ is, as S&S assume, the property of being ready for something. See Partee (1989), Condoravdi and Gawron (1996), Stanley (2000), and Martí (2006) for related data and their analyses.
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(i)
It can also be represented as the set of propositions that are mutually accepted by the interlocutors. For our purpose, we only need to consider the intersection of those propositions.
For our purpose, we do not need to go into the semantics of questions. For instructive discussion and references, see Roberts (2012).
See Roberts (2012, p. 12, p. 21) for other ways in which a proposition counts as relevant to the QUD.
If slightly modified, this case is a potential counterexample to Stokke’s (2016) account of the lying-misleading distinction, which builds on S&S’s account of what is said.
Roberts (2012, p. 12) would describe Bob as asserting a proposition that contextually entails an answer to Anne’s question. (For a proposition \(p_1\) to contextually entail proposition \(p_2\) is for \(p_1\) and the propositions mutually accepted by the interlocutors to jointly entail \(p_2\).)
It seems clear that Bob’s utterance should count as a relevant discourse move here. We often answer a question without intending to rule out entirely an alternative (cell) raised by that question. Some examples: Q: Is it raining? A: It is wet outside. Q: Is Tipper dead? A: He isn’t breathing. Q: Do I have cancer? A: You have a tumor.
Here is another symptom of this problem. In some cases, S&S’s account fails to respect the distinction between saying and implying. For example, consider:
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(i)
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a.
Anne : Does every student like Tipper?
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b.
Bob: A student likes Tipper.
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a.
Assume that Bob is well-informed about the issue Anne raises. A natural way to describe the dialogue above is that Bob says that a student likes Tipper but implies (via the Quantity maxim) that not every student likes Tipper. But, according to S&S’s account, since the minimal proposition expressed by (i-b) is entailed by the relevant proposition that every student likes Tipper, what (i-b) says is that every student likes Tipper.
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(i)
In §5.3 of their paper, S&S use a similar strategy to explain why what the answerer says is not an answer to the QUD articulated by the questioner. The case they consider does not involve intonational stress, but, unlike (5), the minimal proposition expressed by the answer neither entails, nor is entailed by, the relevant propositions determined by the QUD.
So S&S may argue that Bob’s answer is not felicitous on my first way of making sense of Bob’s utterance.
I don’t object to this possibility; in fact, I find it plausible. My worry is only that it leads to undesirable results when combined with S&S’s account of what is said.
Grice’s (1989) Manner maxim may explain Bob’s apparent irrationality.
It is often said that pervasive context-dependence undermines compositionality at the level of what is said. But see Szabó (2010) and Lasersohn (2012) for helpful discussions on why that claim is misguided. See also Kamp and Partee (1995) and Partee (2007) for discussions on how compositional semantics interacts with context-dependence in modifier-noun constructions.
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Siu, C. Tipper is ready but he is not strong enough: minimal proposition, question under discussion, and what is said. Philos Stud 177, 2577–2584 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01328-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01328-7