Jagiellonian University, Kraków, 8 May 2024 Workshop 1 Saying, Implicating, and Accountability Kasia M. Jaszczolt University of Cambridge https://sites.google.com/view/k-m-jaszczolt https://cambridge.academia.edu/KasiaJaszczolt 1 Paul Grice: Speaker meaning and intentions “ ‘U meant something by uttering x’ is true iff, for some audience A, U uttered x intending: (1) A to produce a particular response r (2) A to think (recognize) that U intends (1) (3) A to fulfil (1) on the basis of his fulfilment of (2).” Grice (1969 in 1989, p.92) 2 Implicature (implicatum): inferences that are drawn from an utterance. They are seen by the hearer as being intended by the speaker. Speakers implicate, hearers infer. Horn 2004 3 Grice’s MeaningNN (what is conveyed) = what is said + what is implicated (conventionally + non-conventionally) 4 The Cooperative Principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” Grice 1975 (‘Logic and conversation’) in 1989, p. 26 5 Post-Gricean pragmatics: ▪ rearrangement of Grice’s maxims, reducing redundancy (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) Horn 1984, 1988; Levinson 2000; Sperber & Wilson 1995 [1986] ▪ moving the boundary between semantics and pragmatics to include ‘more pragmatics in the semantics’ (contextualism) Atlas 1977, 1989; Kempson 1979, 1986; Recanati 1989, 2010; Sperber & Wilson 1995[1985]; Jaszczolt 2005 6 Atlas, J. D. 1977. 'Negation, ambiguity, and presupposition'. Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 321-336. Atlas, J. D. 1989. Philosophy Without Ambiguity: A Logico-Linguistic Essay. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kempson, R. M. 1979. ‘Presupposition, opacity, and ambiguity’. In: C.-K. Oh & D.A. Dinneen (eds). Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 11. New York: Academic Press. 283-297. Kempson, R. M. 1986. ‘Ambiguity and the semantics-pragmatics distinction’. In: C. Travis (ed.). 1986. Meaning and Interpretation. Oxford: B. Blackwell. 77-103. Recanati, F.1989. ‘The pragmatics of what is said’. Mind and Language 4. Reprinted in: S. Davis (ed.). 1991. Pragmatics: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 97-120. Recanati, F. 2010. Truth-Conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition. First published in 1986. 7 “If I say to any one, ‘I saw some of your children to-day’, he might be justified in inferring that I did not see them all, not because the words mean it, but because, if I had seen them all, it is most likely that I should have said so: even though this cannot be presumed unless it is presupposed that I must have known whether the children I saw were all or not.” Mill, J. S., 1872, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer. 4th edn, pp. 517 O. Ducrot, 1972, Dire et ne pas dire: loi d'exhaustivité 8 Examples (1) ‘Some dogs are cute.’ (Quantity) Maxim of quantity is the foundation of the theory of scalar implicature. All scalar and gradable predicates are inherently lower bounded by entailment or truth-conditional meaning (cf. ‘at least some’), and upper bounded by pragmatic inference or implicature (cf. ‘not all’). <all, some> 9 (2) ‘Max won the race.’ (3) A: B: (4) ‘He broke his arm and went to the hospital.’ (Quality) Mrs Black is an old broomstick. I think it is going to rain. (Relation) (Manner) 10 ‘Flouting’ the maxims: (5) (6) (7) (8) ‘Queen Victoria was made of iron.’ ‘Boys will be boys.’ (B(x) → B(x)) ‘If he comes, he comes.’ (p → p) ‘He will come or he won’t come.’ (p  p) The interlocutors assume shared background knowledge/common ground. 11 Properties of conversational implicature: Inference in implicature is cancellable: (9) ‘Some, if not all, dogs are cute.’ Cf: Deductive inference is not cancellable ((p → q)  p) → q) Other properties of implicatures: non-detachability (via Q,Q,R but detachable if via M) calculability non-conventionality 12 Types of conversational implicature: generalized conversational implicature (derivable without any help of the context) ?Scalar implicatures: (10) ‘Somebody came.’ >> Not all people came. <all, most, many, some, few> (11) ‘You can have fruit or yoghurt.’ >> You can’t have fruit and yoghurt. <and, or> (p q)  (p  q) 13 ?Clausal implicatures: (12) ‘I believe that Max won the race.’ >> I don’t know that Max won the race. 14 particularized conversational implicature (dependent on the context of the utterance) (13) A: B: What time is it? The milkman has come. 15 Against semantic ambiguity ‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’ Grice (1978 in 1989 p.47) = Modified Occam’s Razor 16 Examples: exclusive and inclusive disjunction (‘or’) (11) ‘You can have fruit or yoghurt.’ (but not both/or both) conjunction (‘and’) + temporal or causal meaning (14) ‘Tom heard good news and had a glass of wine.’ (to celebrate/as well, among other things he did) 17 Questioning Grice’s intention-based view of communication 18 Are speakers always co-operative? (15) P(rosecutor): Do you have any bank accounts in Swiss banks, Mr. Bronston? B(ronston): P: B: No, sir. Have you ever? The company had an account there for about six months, in Zurich. (from Solan, L. & P. Tiersma. 2005. ‘Speaking of crime: the language of criminal justice’. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) 19 Rhetorical cooperativity There are public and private commitments. Asher, N. and A. Lascarides. 2013. ‘Strategic conversation’. Semantics & Pragmatics 6: 1-62. “Rhetorical cooperativity makes a speaker appear to be Gricean cooperative although he may not actually be so. This is a frequent feature of strategic conversations, in which agents’ interests do not align.” (p. 3) 20 Whose meaning? Grice’s meaningNN is speaker meaning (it is intersubjective because of common ground) ? Should pragmatic theory focus on speaker meaning, hearer meaning, or jointly constructed (co-constructed) meaning in discourse? (Different views among post-Gricean pragmaticists) 21 Communication is sharing and negotiating commitments. (see e.g. Geurts, B. 2019, ‘Communication as commitment sharing: Speech acts, implicatures, common ground’. Theoretical Linguistics 45: 1-30) There are linguistically encoded commitments, as well as practical ones, such as accountability, responsibility, or legal liability. 22 Co-constructed speaker meaning e.g. Elder, C.-H. & M. Haugh. 2018. ‘The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Toward a formal account of conversational inference. Intercultural Pragmatics 15: 593-625. A model of operational meaning. They emphasize that “speaker meaning is not simply a theoretical construct grounded in (a presumed) cognitive reality, but a deontological one with real-world consequences for speakers” (p. 594) and propose to focus on “the most salient propositional meaning that is ostensively made operative between interlocutors”. 23 Accountability Haugh, M. 2013. ‘Speaker meaning and accountability in interaction’. Journal of Pragmatics 48: 41-56. “…what a speaker is held accountable for goes beyond the veracity of information to include other moral concerns, such as social rights, obligations, responsibilities and the like.” (p. 53) 24 Lying and accountability: food for thought “…a comprehensive notion of lying should include lying by deliberately using false implicatures and false presuppositions. Implicatures and presuppositions are additional propositions that are derived from an utterance in an interactional context”. Meibauer, J. 2014. Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 234. 25 Or… A lie is a form of insincerity but it has to be an insincere assertion. Lies need not involve an intention to deceive; they do, however, have to be insincere assertions. Stokke, A. 2018. Lying and Insincerity. Oxford: OUP. (See also contributions to Meibauer, J. (ed.). 2019b. The Oxford Handbook of Lying. Oxford: OUP. ) 26 Liability: Food for thought Borg, E. 2019. ‘Explanatory roles for minimal content’. Noûs 53: 513-539. Two kinds of liability: strict liability, for the minimal proposition uttered, and degrees of conversational liability for potential interpretations. 27 Untruthfulness “…we need to extend the scope of untruthfulness both from utterance insincerity (lying and misleading) to discursive insincerity (withholding), and from intentional insincerity to epistemic irresponsibility”. Heffer, C. 2020. All Bullshit and Lies? Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Oxford: OUP, p. 6 28 Conclusions so far Grice’s MeaningNN (what is conveyed) = what is said + what is implicated (conventionally + non-conventionally). Some problems: ➢ Whose meaning should pragmatic theory study? ➢ What kinds of meaning are speakers accountable for? ➢ Which aspects of meaning count as ‘what was said’? 29 → Where is the boundary between semantics and pragmatics? 30 → Where is the boundary between semantics and pragmatics? (and why does it matter?) 31 Suggested reading Gricean pragmatics: Jaszczolt, K. M. 2023. Semantics, Pragmatics, Philosophy: A Journey through Meaning. Cambridge; CUP, chapter 7. Allan, K. & K. M. Jaszczolt (eds). 2012. The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP, chapters 3-5 (Bach, Horn, Haugh & Jaszczolt). Grice, P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (esp. ‘Logic and conversation’, ‘Further notes on logic and conversation’, ‘Meaning’). Horn, L. R. 2004. ‘Implicature’. In: L. R. Horn & G. Ward (eds). The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. 3-28. Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Accountability and liability: Borg, E. & P. J. Connolly. 2022. ‘Exploring linguistic liability’. In: E. Lepore & D. Sosa (eds). Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language. Vol. 2. Oxford: OUP. 1-26. Elder, C.-H. 2021. ‘Speaker meaning, commitment and accountability’. In: M. Haugh, D. Z. Kádár & M. Terkourafi (eds). The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 48-68. 32