Abstract
The semantics/pragmatics distinction was once considered central to the philosophy of language, but recently the distinction’s viability and importance have been challenged. In opposition to the growing movement away from the distinction, I argue that we really do need it, and that we can draw the distinction sharply if we draw it in terms of the distinction between non-mental and mental phenomena. On my view, semantic facts arise from context-independent meaning, compositional rules, and non-mental elements of context, whereas pragmatic facts are a matter of speakers’ mental states and hearers’ inferences about them. I argue for this treatment of the distinction by comparing it to some other extant treatments (in terms of “what is said,” and in terms of the involvement of context) and then defending it against several challenges. Two of the challenges relate to possible intrusion of mental phenomena into semantics, and the third has to do with possible over-restriction of the domain of pragmatics.
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Notes
Maite Ezcurdia and Robert J. Stainton provide a helpful overview of some of the very different ways in which the terms ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ get used (2013, pp. xiii–xix).
Context-independent expression meaning is the public meaning of an expression in a language. Below I will sometimes refer to this kind of meaning as just ‘expression meaning’ or ‘context-independent meaning,’ as a matter of emphasis.
Although the notion of conversational implicature as a clearly pragmatic phenomenon enjoys fairly widespread acceptance, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone have argued that “the category of conversational implicature does no theoretical work” (2015, p. 83). They contend that some phenomena that Griceans have categorized as implicatures are conventional and thus semantic, and that the rest involve mental processes too diverse to be captured by Grice’s Cooperative Principle and maxims (Lepore and Stone 2015, pp. 147–148, 191). Rebutting these points is beyond the scope of the present paper, but I will say that I think it’s a mistake to assume that everything conventional must be semantic. Conventions appear in language at many levels—the level of phonemes, the level of syllable formation, the level of semantics, and even the level of pragmatics. Additionally, Lepore and Stone’s claims about the diversity of interpretive processes center on phenomena such as metaphor, sarcasm, and hinting, for which excellent resources for implicature-based accounts are available.
We also need to clearly distinguish semantics from pragmatics because theorists often talk past each other due to their different ways of using those terms (Ezcurdia and Stainton 2013, p. xxxi), because the distinction is closely connected to questions about “the propositional content we are responsible for” when we produce utterances (Bianchi 2004, p. 9), and because the distinction plays a prominent role in other philosophical debates such as the debate about contextualism about knowledge (Ezcurdia and Stainton 2013, p. xxx). The distinction can also be seen as more generally “fundamental to philosophical theorizing, because much philosophical theorizing takes the form of claims about the content of philosophically central discourse” (King and Stanley 2005, p. 112).
On this point, see John Perry’s discussion of automatic indexicals (2001/2012, p. 68ff.; cf. King and Stanley 2005, p. 113). But, some cases seem to suggest that ‘today’ and other automatic indexicals do not actually exhibit universal regularity of reference. For instance, in answering machine recordings of ‘I am not in the office today,’ ‘today’ seems to refer to the day on which someone hears the recording, rather than the day on which the recording was made (Kaplan 1989a, p. 491 n. 12). However, if we think of answering machines as devices that delay utterances, the event of the recorded message playing when someone calls actually is the utterance, and so the token of ‘today’ still refers to the day of utterance (Sidelle 1991; Cohen 2013). There are also what Perry calls “undexical uses” of automatic indexicals: bound variable uses (e.g., ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today’) and anaphoric uses (e.g., ‘Last week I arrived on Wednesday for the reading group. But then I realized the group wasn’t meeting today but tomorrow’) (2017, pp. 49–50). I’m inclined to treat these undexical uses as non-literal, or as idioms. ‘Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today,’ for instance, is clearly an idiom, and thus its meaning may differ from the composed meanings of its parts. For the anaphora case, we can think of the anaphoric level of content as just pragmatic. It’s fairly intuitive to imagine a hearer interpreting ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ as referring to the day of utterance and the day after the utterance, realizing that this is incompatible with the semantics of the rest of the utterance, and then discovering the pragmatic content.
I should note that in this paper, I use ‘determine’ exclusively in the metaphysical sense—that is, in the sense of making some state of affairs obtain, rather than in the sense of discovering that some state of affairs obtains.
King and Stanley, who support a version of the Moderate Strategy, acknowledge that they face this task, at least with respect to speaker intentions. They say that they “see no basis for skepticism about the possibility of distinguishing, in particular cases, those intentions that are semantically relevant from those that are not” (King and Stanley 2005, p. 130). But even if this task could be completed, we would still be without the additional depth that a difference in kind could provide.
This notion of pragmatic content, and in particular, the role for the speaker’s intention about what the hearer should infer, is influenced by (though certainly not identical to) Grice’s (1989) notion of speaker meaning.
In cases in which a speaker is attempting to deceive a hearer, there will of course be no actual mental state of the speaker’s of which it is true that she intends the hearer to discover its content. Rather, there will be only the speaker’s intention that the hearer draw certain inferences about the content of the speaker’s mental states.
Strictly speaking, the pragmatic content in both examples is twofold. In the first case, the professor communicates that Anne speaks fluent English and is always punctual, and also that Anne is not qualified for graduate school. In the second, I communicate that November 2, 2017 is a Thursday, as well as that I will be unable to have dinner with the hearer that evening. I confined my attention to the more interesting part of the pragmatic content in the main text, for ease of presentation.
Two differences between Gauker’s view and the adapted version just outlined are worth mentioning. First, Gauker thinks that our judgments about which object best satisfies the criteria are what actually determine reference (2008, p. 369). This is not something I can endorse because it gives mental phenomena (namely, judgments) a role to play in determining the semantic features of utterances that include token demonstratives. On my version of the view, the criteria directly determine reference. Second, Gauker requires that the referent “adequately satisf[y] the criteria,” rather than just requiring (as I do) that the referent satisfy them best (2008, p. 364). I don’t think this notion of adequacy is necessary, and furthermore, without a connection to our judgments of adequacy, it seems impossible to specify a standard for adequate satisfaction of the criteria.
The ‘speaker’s referent’ and ‘semantic referent’ terms come from Saul Kripke (1977). In connection to Kripke’s work, it’s worthwhile to discuss an additional worry about the account of demonstratives we’ve outlined. Imagine that, before a meeting begins in the conference room at A and B’s workplace, A utters ‘James is back on the throne.’ The speaker’s referent of A’s token of ‘the throne’ is the chair at the head of the conference table, where James insists on sitting for all meetings. Semantically, that token of ‘the throne’ fails to refer. Now suppose the chair is in rather poor condition. In reply, B utters ‘I don’t envy him. I wouldn’t want to sit on that.’ It might seem that B’s token of ‘that’ semantically refers to the chair at the head of the table because of A’s prior reference to that chair, despite the fact that the chair was not the semantic referent of A’s token of ‘the throne,’ which goes against my statement of criterion (2). This case is analogous to cases Kripke discusses involving pronouns that appear to take as their semantic referent the object that was merely the speaker’s referent in a previous utterance (2013, pp. 127–129). However, I think we can explain why the chair is the semantic referent of B’s token of ‘that’ using criteria other than prior reference. Although there was no prior semantic reference to the chair to which the token of ‘that’ refers, the chair does bear an important connection to the semantic features of the token of ‘throne’ that was uttered—the chair is not a throne, but it is something that James treats as if it were a throne, which makes that chair satisfy criterion (3) better than the other chairs in the conference room. That chair also satisfies criterion (4) better than the others in the room because it is in poor condition and thus less suited to sitting. A similar solution is, I believe, available for Kripke’s cases involving pronouns.
There is also promising work available concerning pronouns. Una Stojnić, Matthew Stone, and Ernie Lepore argue that the semantic value of a token pronoun is determined by which entity is “at the ‘center of attention’” on that occasion. Although the ‘attention’ terminology sounds likely to bring in mental states, in fact it does not: “what lies at the center of attention is not governed by … speaker intentions …, but entirely by linguistic rules” (Stojnić et al. 2017, p. 521).
I’m grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention.
On Millikan’s picture, there are two kinds of cases: cases in which there are two entirely independent chains of past usage that just happen to involve acoustically similar sounds (as in the case of ‘bark’), and cases in which there are what Millikan calls “branching” chains of past usage, which give rise to different, but often closely related, senses of a single sound (such as the use of ‘lip’ to mean the flesh surrounding a mouth, versus its use to mean the rim of a glass) (2005, pp. 33–35, 61).
I don’t mean to obscure the fact that some utterances are influenced by multiple chains of past utterances. If one of those chains is the primary influence, that chain determines which expression was tokened, and thereby, the utterance’s semantics. For instance, if I produce a sound that is primarily influenced by chains of past uses of ‘espresso’ but also is influenced enough by past utterances of ‘express’ that the pronunciation of the first ‘s’ sounds more similar to an ‘x,’ the dominant causal influence prevails, and my utterance is of ‘espresso,’ improperly pronounced. But cases in which multiple causal chains exert equal influence are at least possible, and in such cases, which expression the speaker tokened (and thus, the utterance’s semantics) is indeterminate.
Having brought Korta and Perry’s work into the mix, I should also say something about their treatment of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Their characterization of pragmatics is similar to mine: they see it as closely connected to speakers’ intentions. But their construal of the domain of semantics implies that in an utterance of ‘That is beautiful,’ the token of ‘that’ would not have a referent at the level of semantic content (Korta and Perry 2011, pp. 54, 140; cf.2008, p. 351). Thus, they over-restrict semantics in the way we took pains to avoid in Sect. 5. Kent Bach’s conception of pragmatics is even more similar to mine in that he thinks pragmatic content is the content of the mental states a speaker intends the hearer to infer her to have (2002, p. 286). But like Korta and Perry, he over-restricts semantics. He thinks that demonstratives do not have semantic referents, and that as a result the output of semantics for a sentence containing a demonstrative is not a complete proposition (Bach 2004, pp. 36–37). Another difference between my view and Bach’s is that Bach thinks only sentences have semantic features, whereas I think utterances, too, have semantic (as well as pragmatic) features (2004, p. 28).
One could avoid this step by treating the context-independent meaning of expressions and the compositional significance of syntactic forms as basic. This would amount to declining to give foundational theories at all, which would certainly prevent mental phenomena from sneaking in. Nathan Salmon takes this approach with respect to context-independent meaning: “the semantic attributes of expressions are … intrinsic to the expressions themselves, or to the expressions as expressions of a particular language” (2005, p. 324). I won’t say much about this possibility because expression meaning and compositional significance strike me as highly unlikely to be basic or intrinsic. Or, if we emphasize Salmon’s qualification that semantic features are intrinsic to expressions only “as expressions of a particular language,” then the interesting question becomes: What makes an expression (at the type level) belong to a particular language? A similar threat of the intrusion of mental states—and thus to the Non-mental/Mental Strategy—would then reappear at that level. An analogous point can be made about the option of treating the compositional significance of syntactic forms as basic and intrinsic.
Michael Johnson and Jennifer Nado have recently offered a foundational theory of meaning that they describe as behavioral. However, they ultimately ground the meaningfulness of linguistic expressions in dispositions toward linguistic behavior, and dispositions toward behavior are surely grounded in mental phenomena (Johnson and Nado 2014, pp. 81–82). Brian Skyrms’s work on meaning is also quite behavioral in its focus, but his project is to identify causal mechanisms by which expression meaning can emerge, rather than to give a foundational theory of meaning or of compositional rules (2010, p. 1, Ch. 12). Thus, the need for behavioral foundational theories remains.
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Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to audiences at Vassar College, McMaster University, the 2017 Western Canadian Philosophical Association meeting, and the Fall 2017 New York Philosophy of Language Workshop for discussion of past versions of this paper. I’m also grateful to Bradley Shubert for research assistant work, and to two anonymous referees for Synthese for extremely helpful feedback.
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Stotts, M.H. Toward a sharp semantics/pragmatics distinction. Synthese 197, 185–208 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1733-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1733-8