Literalists, Minimalists, Contextualists and Others

References

1. Horn L. R. A Natural History of Negation / Laurence R. Horn. – Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989.

2. Horn L. R. Implicature / Laurence R. Horn // The Handbook of Pragmatics / [Laurence R. Horn, Grogory Ward (eds.)]. – Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. – P. 3-28.

3. Horn L. R. Toward a New Taxonomy of Pragmatic Inference: Q-based and R-based Implicature / Laurence R. Horn // Meaning, Form and Use in Context / [D. Schiffrin (ed.)]. – Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1984. – P. 11-42.

4. Levinson S. Presumptive Meanings / Stephen Levinson. – Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 2000.

Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics are often classified by their view of the two models discussed in Lecture 7. ‘Literalists’ think that semantics is basically autonomous, with little ‘pragmatic intrusion’; ‘contextualists’ adopt the basic outlines of the relevance theory view of the importance of pragmatics at every level, while perhaps demurring on many of the details and the psychological orientation.

Take, for example, an utterance of "It is raining" by John now in a telephone conversation with Kepa, who is in Donostia. John is talking about the weather in Stanford. Arguably, what John says is that it is raining in Stanford. This is what he intends for Kepa to understand, and it is the content of the belief, formed by looking at the weather around him, that motivates his utterance. Stanford, then, seems to be a constituent, part of the subject matter, of John's remark. But how did it get there? It seems that it is a matter of pragmatics; it is a fact about the context of John's remark that the conversation is about Stanford, and that suffices. This is an example of what John Perry calls ‘unarticulated constituents’, and an instance of a more general phenomenon we will call ‘unarticulated content’ [13].

The same basic choice, about what to do with apparently unarticulated content that seems to be part of what is said, presents itself in connection with a number of other phenomena: ‘enriched’ uses of logical operators and numerals ("Mary got married and [then] had [exactly] three children), quantifier domain restriction ("Nobody [in the class] was paying attention"), comparative adjectives ("John is short [for a football player]"), and a long list of phenomena reconsidered now as possibly being part of what is said, the explicature or the content of the utterance, but not in terms of implicatures.

Most contemporary theorists would acknowledge that in such cases one might describe ‘what is said’ in terms of the unarticulated content: John said that it was raining at Stanford; the speaker said that Mary got married and then had children, and so forth. And there is general agreement that intuitions about ‘what is said’ cannot by themselves carry much theoretical weight, and there is considerable disagreement about theoretical intepretation of unarticulated content.

Literalists argue that the important divide, traditionally marked by ‘what is said,’ should be maintained, although marked by new terminology. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore's term is ‘semantic content’ [4]. On the near side of semantic content will be only the factors acknowledged by Grice: conventional meaning of words and modes of composition; resolution of ambiguity (including, perhaps, issues of standards of precision and vagueness), and resolution of reference of indexicals, demonstratives and names. On the far side are Gricean implicatures.

Among literalists, we may distinguish between minimalists and ‘hidden indexical’ theorists. Literalists, do not accept any pragmatically determined element in utterance content that is not triggered by grammar, i.e., by a particular context-sensitive element in the sentence used. Minimalists try to keep context-sensitive expressions to a minimum — Cappelen and Lepore are in this camp — and those who pose a context-sensitive expression whenever is needed [4, 5]. The latter, ‘hidden indexicalists,’ admit the ‘unarticulated’ content into the proposition literally expressed by the utterance, but hold that it is not ‘really’ unarticulated, since below the surface grammar, at some deeper level, say logical form, the sentence provide an indexical to be resolved pragmatically [15, 16].

Cappelen and Lepore are both literalists and minimalists. They use the term ‘semantic content’ for propositions determined solely by conventions of meaning, precisification, disambiguation and reference fixing. They allow that semantic content, so conceived, is often not what ordinary speakers would identify as ‘what is said’; but they take what is said to be a pragmatic concept, and so do not see this as an objection to their scheme. The semantic content of John's utterance above, for example, is something like the proposition "Rain is occurring", a relatively trivial proposition, that will be true if it is raining anywhere on earth (or perhaps, anywhere in the universe) [5, 12]. The triviality of John's remark, literally interpreted, sets Kepa on the search of some relevant proposition he may have meant to convey, and this proposition, that it is raining in Palo Alto, is what satisfies our intuitive concept of ‘what is said.’ But that shows only that ‘what is said’ is basically a pragmatic concept, that shouldn't be used to delineate true semantic content. On the near side of semantic content we find only conventional meaning, disambiguation, and resolution of reference and vagueness. On the far side we find implicatures, that contribute not only what is suggested, conveyed, and the like, but even what is said, as ordinarily conceived.

Those over on the contextualist side, in contrast, see the level corresponding to Grice's ‘what is said’ as determined not only by semantics, disambiguation and reference-fixing, but also by a number of other pragmatic processes that ‘intrude’ on the near side and enrich semantic content. Contextualists include relevance theorists and such philosophers as Recanati [14], Travis [17], Korta and Perry [6, 7, 8, 9, 10] and Neale [11]. Contemporary contextualists do not insist on the term ‘what is said,’ but provide other criteria for the boundary between the proposition more or less directly expressed and implicatures. Recanati argues that this level — which he sometimes calls ‘what is said _max ’ in contrast of the ‘what is said _min ’ of minimalists — should consist of a proposition that is consciously available to the speaker and the proposition he intends to express, and that any planned implications should also be consciously accessible [14]. Cappelen and Lepore's proposition would not usually pass this test. In our example, John would not be consciously aware of having expressed a proposition that would be true if it was raining on Venus, nor would he at any remotely conscious level have planned for Kepa to reason from the triviality and irrelevance of the proposition that rain occurs to the one he meant to convey, that it rains at Stanford.

In Korta and Perry's ‘critical pragmatics’, the concept of ‘what is said’ is replaced with two concepts [8]. The ‘reflexive content’ of an utterance is its truth-conditions, as determined by the conventional meanings of the words used and modes of composition, and thus corresponds to the ‘semantically determined content.’ This content will not be the proposition expressed, but rather a set of conditions on the utterance and the proposition it expresses, with quantification over all relevant factors not determined by meaning — including factors that resolve ambiguity and reference. At this level, then, critical pragmatics is radically minimal. For example, an utterance u of "Elwood touched that woman" will be true (roughly) if and only if there is an x and y such that the speaker of u refers to x with ‘Elwood,’ refers to y with ‘that woman,’ and uses ‘touches’ with for some action A permitted by the conventions of English, and at some time prior to the time of u, x A'ed y. The condition on the utterance given to the right of the ‘if and only if’ comprise the reflexive content of the utterance. On the other hand, the referential content of u, will be the proposition that, say, Elwood put his hands on Eloise, if the actual facts about u provide Elwood, Eloise as the referents and putting one's hands on as the relevant sense of ‘touches.’ Critical pragmatics emphasizes the speaker's plan, a hierarchy of intentions, as the main source of the facts that supplement conventional meaning to get us from reflexive to incremental meaning.

The second concept employed to do the traditional work of ‘what is said’ is ‘locutionary content.’ The intended locutionary content is basically the referential content the speaker intends to express, given his conception of the context — that is, roughly, the speaker, time, place and whom and what he points at. The locutionary content is fixed by the actual contextual facts, so a speaker's intended locutionary content may not be the locutionary content of the utterance he produces.

An intermediate position — called ‘syncretic’ by Recanati — has been subtly defended by Kent Bach [1, 2, 3, 14]. Bach is on the literalist, minimalist side of the spectrum with respect to semantic content (for which he continues to use the term ‘what is said.’) But he agrees with contextualists that these unarticulated contents are not implicatures, and are not triggered by the meaning of the sentence uttered. He introduces an intermediate category between what is said, in his minimalist sense, and implicatures, which he calls ‘implicitures’ — with an ‘i’ — to include these elements.

In conclusion, we must say that contemporary pragmatics is a large, active, interdisciplinary field. Philosophers, the founders of the discipline, continue to play an important role in this field. Philosophically oriented pragmatists (to give an old term a new meaning) usually consider pragmatic issues with an eye towards large issues in the philosophy of language and beyond. But in the course of this, they provide detailed analyses and consider a wide variety of cases that continue to provide ideas and inspiration for pragmatists from other disciplines.

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