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Glossary




Ambiguity: In general, an expression is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. When a word (e.g., ‘bank’) has multiple meanings, we have lexical ambiguity. A sentence can be ambiguous even if none of its words is ambiguous. Sometimes the ambiguity is considered syntactic because the alternative meaning correspond to a alternative syntactic configurations (e.g., ‘Mary saw John with a telescope’). If there is only one syntactic configuration, the ambiguity is structural (e.g., ‘ Every man admires a woman’). It is not always clear what kind ambiguity is at stake, or even if there is any ambiguity at all (Grice's theory of implicatures and his Ockham's modified razor had a great impact on this issue). In any case, ambiguity — the existence of several meanings for an expression — should be distinguished from nambiguity (the existence of many different bearers of a proper name), from vagueness (meanings with unclear boundaries of application), and underdetermination (failure to fully specify a meaning). It is usually assumed that resolving ambiguity is a pragmatic process, involving determining which meaning the speaker intends to be exploiting, although ambiguity itself is a semantic condition.

Attitude report: ‘Propositional attitude’ is Bertrand Russell's term for designating mental states with propositional content, conceived as relations between an agent and a proposition. Propositional attitude verbs include ‘believes,’ ‘wants,’ ‘desires,’ ‘intends’ or ‘knows’ and many others — basically, the core of our vocabulary for describing minds and language. Sentences like ‘ Kepler thought that the Earth was spherical’ embed other sentences — ‘ the earth was spherical’ — in oblique (or opaque or intensional (with an ‘s’)) contexts. Oblique context are not truth-functional. Substituing other true sentences for ‘ the earth was spherical’ will not necessarily preserve truth. Moreover, even substituting co-designative terms for ‘the earth’ may not preserve truth. Kepler did not, one supposes, think that Frege's favorite planet was spherical (assuming the earth was Frege's favorite planet). According to Frege, in such contexts the usual sense of the sentence, the ‘Gedanke’ or proposition expressed, becomes the reference. Since Frege's "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892) and Russell's "On Denoting" (1905) the study of reports of these attitudes has been one of the central topics of the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics.

Character/Content: Since Kaplan's work on indexicals and demonstratives, [Kaplan 1989] it is commonplace to distinguish between the character of an expression and the content of an utterance of an expression. For example, the character of the word ‘I’ in English doesn't change from context to context, although the content does. Knowing the character of a sentence like ‘I am a philosopher’ doesn't imply knowing the content of a particular utterance of that sentence; for the latter, you need to know the ‘semantic’ context of the utterance. Character is a property of linguistic expressions (types); content is a property of utterances —sentences-in-context — (tokens) of them.

Context: ‘Context’ is an all-pervasive concept in pragmatics. For some authors ‘context’ is the defining concept of pragmatics. But many, perhaps too many, different concepts are included under this term. In Linguistics, ‘context’ commonly means the previous and subsequent linguistic material in a given text. In Kaplan's scheme, the context is objective, it comprises the actual basic facts about an utterance: the speaker, time, place, and possible world in which it occurs. In Stalnaker's scheme, context is basically subjective: a matter of common ground: that is, shared beliefs that serve as common presuppositions for the interpretation of assertions. Often the term is used for anything in the indefinitely large surrounding of an utterance, from the intentions of the speaker to the previous topics of conversation to the object discernible in the environment. Here are a number of distinctions that have been made with respect to the concept(s) of context that the reader may find helpful. The list is not intended to be exhaustive, mutually exclusive, or to represent a single coherent view of pragmatic phenomena.

Linguistic context versus extralinguistic context: Considering the context of an utterance, one of the most intuitive distinctions is between the context as consisting of its previous and subsequent utterances — the linguistic contexts — and any other extra-linguistic circumstance surrounding the utterance. In the case of ellipsis and anaphoric (and cataphoric) pronouns the designation is determined, or at least constrained, by the linguistic context of the utterance, while the designation of deictic demonstratives is fixed by contextual extralinguistic facts.

Narrow versus broad: Narrow context is usually understood as the list of parameters for basic indexicals, parameters that correspond to basic facts about the utterance. Speaker, place and time are on almost everyone's list, as required for the interpretation of ‘I,’ ‘here,’ ‘now’ and tense. Kaplan adds the possible world, for the interpreation of ‘actual.’ Arguably, every utterance occurs in a world, at a time, in a place, and with a speaker.

In contrast, wide or broad context is understood as all other kinds of information, in particular, information relative to the speaker's communicative intention, used for the interpretation of ‘pragmatic aspects' of the utterance. In Bach's words: “Wide context concerns any contextual information relevant to determining the speaker's intention and to the successful and felicitous performance of the speech act. Narrow context concerns information specifically relevant to determining the semantic values of indexicals” [Bach 1999]. Bach goes on to say, narrow context is semantic, wide context pragmatic. But on this there would be some disagreement, as many would hold that information about the speaker's intentions, and perhaps also about causal and informational chains, ongoing topics of conversations, and much else, are needed for semantics.

Epistemic versus doxastic: It is sometimes assumed, particularly by writers with a psychological orientation, that, together with speaker's intentions, it is speaker's beliefs what determine the content of expressions in her utterance, with the issue of the truth (or falsity) of her beliefs having no relevance. So, belief rather than knowledge is the relevant concept to characterize context. According to this view, there would not be a significant difference between ‘intending to say’ (and, for that matter, ‘believing that it having had said’) and ‘saying,’ which goes about some truths of intentions and general: one usual way of failing to perform an action comes from the falsity of some agent's belief. This is related to another possible distinction between objective and subjective contexts.

Objective versus subjective: There are a number of cases, however, in which the speaker's beliefs, even if shared by everyone in the conversation, do not seem to determine content. Suppose, for example, that Elwood's hero worship of John Searle has reached such a point that he now takes himself to be John Searle. He introduces himself to the new class of Stanford graduate students by saying: "I'm John Searle, from across the Bay." It seems that even if he and everyone in the conversation believes he is Searle, what he has said is the falsehood, that Elwood is John Searle. Or, suppose a group of golfers is standing on the small portion of the Stanford golf course that juts into San Mateo County, but none of them realize it. "The county seat of this county is San Jose," one of them says, for some reason or other. He believes he has informed them of the truth that the county seat of Santa Clara County is San Jose, and in fact the other members of the foursome learn this fact from what he says. Nevertheless, many would argue, what he said was false, and only fortuitous ignorance led his partners to learn a truth from the falsehood he uttered.

Pre-semantic context: Pre-semantic context provides information for identifying the utterance: which words in which language with which syntactic structure, and with which meanings are being used.

Semantic context: Semantic context comprises those contextual features that determine or partly determine the content of context-sensitive expressions. This is the case of pronouns, whose linguistic meanings do more or less strictly constrain but do not determine their designata. Their meaning direct us to the context (linguistic context, in cases of anaphoric co-designation; extra-linguistic context in cases of indexicals and deictic uses of demonstratives) to look for the designation of the pronoun. But there are more context-sensitive expressions than indexical, deictic and anaphoric pronouns. Sentence mood, for instance, is an indicator of illocutionary point, but it does not determine the precise illocutionary force of an utterance without the help of contextual factors. The contribution to utterance-content of some particles like ‘but’ (that, according to Grice, produce ‘conventional implicatures) are another case in point.

Post-semantic context: Third, there is (or may be) what Perry calls post-semantic context. This comprises facts that provide unarticulated content. For example, the fact that a conversation is about Palo Alto may determine, perhaps together with speaker intentions, that the statement "It is raining," has the content that it is raining in Palo Alto. Arguably, such contextual contributions are not triggered by the meaning-rules of the words used, but more global considerations. The fact that we usually are talking about rain in a particular place has to do with the nature of rain and the way humans are concerned with it and conceptualize the phenomena, rather than the syntax of ‘rain.’

(Far-side) Pragmatic Context: It comprises those contextual factors needed to get at (calculate, infer) what is communicated or done in and by saying what one says. This importantly concerns the speaker's intentions concerning indirect speech acts, implicatures, and non-literal contents. It may also include institutional facts and indeed, all sorts of other things relevant to the effects of the utterance.

Communicative intention: Communicative intention is what characterizes, an action as communicative. Following Grice's definition of M(eaning)-intention, it is widely agreed that communicative intentions have three particular properties:

· it is perlocutionary, that is, it is an intention that seeks a mental effect (certain belief(s) or intention(s)) on the part of the addressee;

· it is overt, that is, the speaker wants the addressee to recognize his communicative intention;

· the satisfaction of a communicative intention consists precisely in its recognition by the addressee.

Communicative intentions need not be carried out by linguistic means [Clark 2003]. In human linguistic communication planning and inference processes have a role at least as important as besides coding and decoding processes. The speaker plans his speech act according to his communicative intention; the addressee uses, among other sources, the information decoded to infer (recognize) the speaker's communicative intention.

Implicature (conventional, conversational, particularized, generalized): Grice distinguished what the speaker says from what she implicates by an utterance. The category of implicature refers to what the speaker suggests, implies or communicates beyond what she says. Among implicatures he made a further distinction between conventional, generated by the conventional meaning of certain words, and non-conventional ones. Within non-conventional implicatures, he distinguished between conversational, affected, among other factors, by conversational principles and maxims, and non-conversational. And finally, among conversational implicatures between particularized, occurring in particular contexts, and generalized ones. Grice pointed out that conversational implicatures have the following properties:

· they are calculable, that is, inferable from, among other things, the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims;

· they are cancelable either explicitly (adding something like " but I did not meant that ") or contextually, by changing the context;

· except those implicatures based on the maxims of manner, they are non-detachable, i.e., there is no way of saying the same thing that would not carry the implicature.

The last two features, cancelability and non-detachability are known as the ‘tests’ for the presence of an alleged implicature.

Implicit/explicit meaning: In the traditional Gricean picture, ‘explicit meaning’ corresponds to the sentence's conventional meaning; or to the meaning obtained by the combination of conventional meaning and those contextual aspects required by the conventional meaning; in other words, to the result of sentence conventional meaning + disambiguation + reference fixing, i.e., what is said. The remaining of utterance meaning, in particular presuppositions and implicatures, would be regarded as implicit meaning within the Gricean picture. Grice's categories of conventional implicature and generalized conventional implicatures, however, pose problems to the distinction between the explicit and the implicit. After Grice, the limits between them are not very clear yet, despite relevance theorists' notion of ‘explicature’ or Bach's ‘impliciture.’

Indexical: To determine the reference of an indexical expression (that is, to determine what a speaker is referring to by the utterance of an indexical expression), the interpreter must resort to context. This is the most prominent property of indexical expressions: without varying their meaning, they can change their content from context to context. Paradigmatic indexical expressions are personal pronouns (‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘she’…), demonstratives (‘this,’ ‘that’), time and place adverbs (‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘now,’ ‘yesterday,’ ‘tomorrow’…). But indexicality is a more general phenomenon: verb tense and aspect point to context for determining the relevant temporal point or interval. The semantic information of some indexical expression leaves little room for doubts about what to look for in context: ‘I’ = the speaker, ‘here’ = the place the speaker is in, ‘tomorrow’ = the day starting at midnight of the day of utterance. These are called ‘pure’ or ‘automatic’ indexicals, in contrast to ‘discretionary’ indexicals, whose semantic information does not determine the referent, and it is necessary to appeal to speaker's intentions to do so [Perry 2001]. Indexical expressions have been called ‘deictic,’ ‘egocentric particulars' and ‘token-reflexive expressions.’

Intention: It is a kind of mental state, like belief and desire, for example. From the point of view of the mental cause theory of action, it is intention the cause of action, and it is precisely this, to be caused by an intention what distinguishes movements (or absences of movement) which are actions from mere events, and, among bodily movements, those which are (intentional) actions from mere reflexes. The object of intention can be represented as a proposition representing the movements (he moved his arm on purpose), or as various results expected or hoped for as a result of the movement (he checkmated his opponent, and made him cry, on purpose).

Intentionality: The word "intention" is relatively unambiguous outside of philosophy. But philosophers use the word "intention" and especially the adjective "intentional" to refer to a feature of a class of mental states that includes but is not limited to intentions ordinarily understood. This is the property of being about or directed at objects, including not only real concrete objects, but also abstract and fictional objects, properties, and states of affairs. Thus believing that it is raining, hoping to get a computer for Christmas, talking about Sherlock Holmes, figuring out the square root of six hundred and twenty five, are all intentional states and activities, as is intending to bake a cake. It is often assumed that minds, mental states, have intrinsic intentionality, and that utterances and sentences have only intentionality in a derived sense: they have it from the intentionality of the mental state they express.

Intentionality (with a ‘t’) should not be confused with intensionality (with an ‘s’). The latter is another technical expression of logic and philosophy; intensions are opposed to extensions. Russell's example is that the intension of "featherless biped that is not a plucked chicken" is quite different than the intension of "human being," although their extensions are the same. Extensions include classes, sets, and functions considered as sets of ordered pairs and truth-values. Intensions are meaning, rules, properties, functions as ordinarily conceived, and propositions. In possible-worlds semantics intensions are often identified with sets of possible worlds or functions that take possible worlds as arguments. A property, for example, might be identified with a function from worlds to set of objects (those that have the property in the world), and a proposition with a set of world (those in which it is true). Whether such an identification is meant as a reduction or explanation of intensions as extensions, or simply as a way of modeling intensions as extensions, varies from theorist to theorist.

Literal/non-literal: Some take this to be a distinction about word meaning. According to this view, beyond their conventional or literal meaning, words can have figurative or non-literal meanings: metaphoric, ironic, metonymic meanings. After the rise of pragmatic studies, the distinction is considered mostly to be one at the speaker's meaning level. When the speaker's meaning is closed to the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered the speaker is said to be speaking literally. When it departs from conventional meaning is considered non-literal. Of course, the distinction is not clear cut: how much must the speaker's meaning depart from conventional meaning to be considered as non-literal? Some authors prefer to talk about a continuum rather than a two-side distinction.

Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary: In terms of Austin's speech act theory these are three main levels to be distinguished in a speech act. Every speech act is an act of saying something. This is the locutionary level. Within it Austin distinguished other three: the phonetic act (the act of producing some sounds), the phatic act (the act of uttering some words pertaining to the vocabulary of a certain language organized according to the rules of its grammar), and the rhetic act (the act of using those words with a certain sense and reference). But in saying something one does something. This is the illocutionary level. And, finally, by saying something one gets some (intended or unintended) effects in the audience. This is the perlocutionary level. Searle casts doubt on the distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts, not seeing the necessity of the former category. As it has developed, speech act theory has been almost entirely devoted to study of the illocutionary level.

Performative utterance: Austin contrasted between statements, traditionally considered as the only utterances with any philosophical importance, with performative utterances that would not be considered as being true or false, and rather than merely saying something are better considered as acts of doing something. He further distinguished between explicit and implicit performative utterances. The first are those whose main verb, called ‘performative verb,’ makes explicit the particular act that the speaker is performing in producing the utterance. These verbs usually present a canonical form: (in English) the first person singular in the present active, or the second person of the passive. Not all implicit performative utterances can be made explicit through a performative utterance. Following Austin discussion, all utterances end up being performative, so that the contrast between them and statements seems to make no sense any more. The concept of performative utterance was supplanted in the development of speech act theory by the concept of speech act.

Sentence: It is traditionally defined as the (grammatical) complex expression capable of expressing a complete thought or proposition. This definition is questioned by the assumption that thoughts or propositions are expressed by utterances (or speakers). According to the contextualist thesis, no sentence expresses a complete (truth-evaluable) proposition; i.e., there are no ‘eternal’ sentences. From the viewpoint of pragmatics, sentences can be conceived as utterance-types, resulted from abstracting all elements except the linguistic expressions used. The issue of what counts as a complete (grammatical) sentence opposed to a sub-sentential complex expression pertains to syntax, rather than to semantics or pragmatics.

Speech act: Speech acts are communicative acts performed through the oral or written use of language. Within speech acts, Austin distinguished among locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, but speech act theory has been devoted almost exclusively to the illocutionary level, so that ‘speech act’ and ‘illocutionary act’ are in practice synonymous terms. An elementary speech act consists of a propositional content and an illocutionary force. Illocutionary force concerns the act the speaker intends to do in performing the speech act. All illocutionary forces, in Searle's version of speech act theory, can be grouped into five classes, according to their basic intention or illocutionary point: assertives, commissives, directives, declaratives and expressives. The illocutionary force and the propositional content of a speech act determine its conditions of success and satisfaction.

Type-Token: ‘Alabama’: how many letters has this word? If we count letter tokens, the answer is 7. If we count letter types, the answer could be 4 (‘a,’ ‘l,’ ‘b,’ ‘m’) or 5 (if we distinguish between capital and small letters). The distinction between types and tokens has been applied to the distinction between sentences and utterances of sentences. The utterance is the token, the historical event with causes and consequences; the sentence is the type, the type of utterances of a sentence; an abstract entity. Meaning (character) would be a property of types; content, a property of tokens.

Utterance: In pragmatics, an utterance is most often taken to be a linguistic action performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment. It has, then, the ontological status of actions: each utterance is a unique historical event; it is a token, not a type; an utterance made by one speaker cannot be made by another one; an utterance made here and now cannot be made there later. In Linguistics, ‘utterance’ is often used for the action of pronouncing orally a sentence, but philosophers tend to also include writing, signing, and other modes of language use, and for the action of using a sub-sentential expression. It is the view of many but not all pragmatists that the primary bearers of truth-conditional contents are utterances, not sentences; or, even better, that truth-conditional contents or propositions are expressed by the speakers who utter sentences, not by the sentences themselves. Utterances of declarative sentences are called ‘statements.’ ‘Utterance’ suffers from the product/process ambiguity. That's why Perry distinguishes between ‘utterance’ (action) and ‘token’ (product).




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