In Defense of Common Content

Abstract

In this essay, I critically discuss a theory of utterance content and de re communication that Anne Bezuidenhout has recently developed in a series of articles. This theory regards the significance of utterances as more pragmatic in nature than allowed by traditional accounts; further, it downplays logical considerations in explaining de re communication, choosing instead to emphasize its psychological character. Included among the implications of this approach is the rejection of what can be called ‘common content’, or utterance content that is held in common by speaker and listener. After describing this theory, I argue that Bezuidenhout does not supply a compelling reason to prefer her account of utterance content over more traditional alternatives that make room for elements of content held in common between speaker and listener. Further, I argue that her account of de re communication supplies even more reason to reject the view of content to which she subscribes. In the end, it will be clear that she has no principled reason for rejecting common content.     

Relevance theory,pragmatic inference and cognitive architecture

Relevance Theory (RT) argues that human language comprehension processes tend to maximize “relevance,” and postulates that there is a relevance-based procedure that a hearer follows when trying to understand an utterance. Despite being highly influential, RT has been criticized for its failure to explain how speaker-related information, either the speaker’s abilities or her/his preferences, is incorporated into the hearer’s inferential, pragmatic process. An alternative proposal is that speaker-related information gains prominence due to representation of the speaker within higher level goal-directed schemata. Yet the goal-based account is still unable to explain clearly how cross-domain information, for example linguistic meaning and speaker-related knowledge, is integrated within a modular system. On the basis of RT’s cognitive requirements, together with contemporary cognitive theory, we argue that this integration is realized by utilizing working memory and that there exist conversational constraints with which the constructed utterance interpretation should be consistent. We illustrate our arguments with a computational implementation of the proposed processes within a general cognitive architecture.

Abbreviations: ACT-R Adaptive Control of Thought - RationalCOGENT Cognitive Objects within a Graphical ENvironmenTCS/SS Contention Scheduling/Supervisory SystemRBCP Relevance-Based Comprehension ProcedureRT Relevance Theory     

Children's comprehension of presupposed information: Logical and pragmatic inferences to speaker belief

This study explored the ability of young children (5 and 8 years old) to make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief in uttering a sentence. Presuppositional information is the information a speaker believes to be common between himself and the hearer. The information is cued by a speaker either logically, by the use of specific lexical items, or pragmatically, by the use of an utterance in violation of conventional rules of conversation. Comprehension of the information may require a reading of the context of utterance. Kindergarten and thirdgrade children and adults were read paragraphs containing both logical and pragmatic presuppositional information, as well as a sentence that could be treated in a logical or a pragmatic manner depending on the context of utterance. The results showed that both groups of children and the adults could make presuppositional inferences to a speaker's belief, and that the responses of the children and adults were context sensitive.     

Contributing to Discourse

For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations.     

The Pragmatics of Moral Motivation

One of the most prevalent and influential assumptions in metaethics is that our conception of the relation between moral language and motivation provides strong support to internalism about moral judgments. In the present paper, I argue that this supposition is unfounded. Our responses to the type of thought experiments that internalists employ do not lend confirmation to this view to the extent they are assumed to do. In particular, they are as readily explained by an externalist view according to which there is a pragmatic and standardized connection between moral utterances and motivation. The pragmatic account I propose states that a person’s utterance of a sentence according to which she ought to ϕ conveys two things: the sentence expresses, in virtue of its conventional meaning, the belief that she ought to ϕ, and her utterance carries a generalized conversational implicature to the effect that she is motivated to ϕ. This view also makes it possible to defend cognitivism against a well-known internalist argument.     

ALTERNATIVE QUESTIONS AND KNOWLEDGE ATTRIBUTIONS

We discuss the 'problem of convergent knowledge', an argument presented by J. Schaffer in favour of contextualism about knowledge attributions, and against the idea that knowledge- wh can be simply reduced to knowledge of the proposition answering the question. Schaffer's argument centrally involves alternative questions of the form 'whether A or B'. We propose an analysis of these on which the problem of convergent knowledge does not arise. While alternative questions can contextually restrict the possibilities relevant for knowledge attributions, what Schaffer's puzzle reveals is a pragmatic ambiguity in what 'knowing the answer' means: in his problematic cases, the subject knows only a partial answer to the question. This partial knowledge can be counted as adequate only on externalist grounds.     

Wittgenstein as a Gricean Intentionalist

According to the dominant view, the later Wittgenstein identified the meaning of an expression with its use in the language and vehemently rejected any kind of mentalism or intentionalism about linguistic meaning. I argue that the dominant view is wrong. The textual evidence, which has either been misunderstood or overlooked, indicates that at least since the Blue Book Wittgenstein thought speaker's intentions determine the contents of linguistic utterances. His remarks on use are only intended to emphasize the heterogeneity of natural language. Taking into account remarks written after he finished the Investigations, I show how Wittgenstein anticipated the basic tenets of Gricean intention-based semantics. These are, in particular, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning and the distinction between what a speaker means by an utterance and what the expression uttered means in the speaker's natural language. Importantly, Wittgenstein also believed that only the meaning of the speaker determined the content of ambiguous expressions, such as ‘bank’, on a particular occasion of utterance     

Phrasal Unit Boundaries and Organization of Turns and Sequences in Korean Conversation

This paper examines an aspect of the grammar-interaction interface with respect to how participants orient to intra-turn phrasal unit boundaries as a locus that has interactional import for turn and sequence organization in Korean conversation. Phrasal unit boundaries in Korean serve as a space within a turn in which the speaker of the turn in-progress invites the recipient to acknowledge the speaker's point expressed up-to-that-point and collaboratively display his/her understanding thereof. In a sequentially and topically 'ripe' context, such unit boundaries often constitute places where more active participation on the part of the recipient is invited in the form of collaborative completion in which the recipient co-constructs the primary speaker's on-going turn. Phrasal unit boundaries also provide interactional resources which the speaker may exploit to sequentially delete out a problem in talk, e.g., by a sort of tying operation in which a subsequently added phrasal unit ties back to the speaker's previous utterance to the effect that the intervening talk containing a problem is canceled out by way of being shown to have been an interruption of the speaker's turn in-progress. This practice points to an aspect of the way in which the 'agglutinative' grammatical process involving the use of phrasal units shapes interactional patterns as observed in the course of organizing turns/sequences and managing problems in talk.     

Conventions’ Revenge: Davidson,Derangement, and Dormativity

Davidson advocates a radical and powerful form of anti-conventionalism, on which the scope of a semantic theory is restricted to the most local of contexts: a particular utterance by a particular speaker. I argue that this hyper-localism undercuts the explanatory grounds for his assumption that semantic meaning is systematic, which is central, among other things, to his holism. More importantly, it threatens to undercut the distinction between word meaning and speaker’s meaning, which he takes to be essential to semantics. I argue that a moderate form of conventionalism can restore systematicity and the word/speaker distinction while accommodating Davidson’s insights about the complexities and contextual variability of language use.     

Surface form and memory in question answering

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.     

When children are more logical than adults: experimental investigations of scalar implicature

A conversational implicature is an inference that consists of attributing to a speaker an implicit meaning that goes beyond the explicit linguistic meaning of an utterance. This paper experimentally investigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of implicature in which a speaker's use of a term like Some indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative term from the same scale, e.g. All; thus, Some implicates Not all. Pragmatic theorists like Grice would predict that a pragmatic interpretation is determined only after its explicit, logical meaning is incorporated (e.g. where Some means at least one). The present work aims to developmentally examine this prediction by showing how younger, albeit competent, reasoners initially treat a relatively weak term logically before becoming aware of its pragmatic potential. Three experiments are presented. Experiment 1 presents a modal reasoning scenario offering an exhaustive set of conclusions; critical among these is participants' evaluation of a statement expressing Might be x when the context indicates that the stronger Must be x is true. The conversationally-infelicitous Might be x can be understood logically (e.g. as compatible with Must) or pragmatically (as exclusive to Must). Results from 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds as well as adults revealed that (a) 7-year-olds are the youngest to demonstrate modal competence overall and that (b) 7- and 9-year-olds treat the infelicitous Might logically significantly more often than adults do. Experiment 2 showed how training with the modal task can suspend the implicatures for adults. Experiment 3 provides converging evidence of the developmental pragmatic effect with the French existential quantifier Certains (Some). While linguistically-sophisticated children (8- and 10-year-olds olds) typically treat Certains as compatible with Tous (All), adults are equivocal. These results, which are consistent with unanticipated findings in classic developmental papers, reveal a consistent ordering in which representations of weak scalar terms tend to be treated logically by young competent participants and more pragmatically by older ones. This work is also relevant to the treatment of scalar implicatures in the reasoning literature.     

The use of pronoun anaphora and speaker mood in the interpretation of conversational utterances by right hemisphere brain-damaged patients.

Understanding utterances in conversations requires a listener to weigh the disparate pieces of information present in a discourse. In this study, we examined how right hemisphere brain-damaged (RHD) patients and non-brain-damaged control subjects interpreted responses to questions concerning the location of a person (e.g., "Where's Dad?"). Stimulus vignettes included variation on three factors relevant to discourse comprehension: the mood of a speaker, the plausibility of the answer to a question, and whether the answer contained an anaphoric pronoun linking the response to the preceding question. Relative to the control subjects, the RHD patients made greater than normal use of the presence/absence of an anaphoric pronoun in their utterance interpretations, less than normal use of the speaker's mood, and marginally less than normal use of a response's plausibility. These data show how RHD patients rely on their largely intact linguistic abilities when understanding discourse and how their comprehension goes awry due to their reduced appreciation of other essential aspects of natural communication. The discussion focuses on the variable roles of speaker mood, plausibility, and pronoun anaphora in supporting inferences about a speaker's intended meaning and on the selective nature of RHD patients' impairment in this domain.     

Experimental pragmatics and what is said: a response to Gibbs and Moise

Gibbs and Moise [Gibbs, R., Moise, J., 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62, 51-74], present experimental results which, they claim, show that people recognize a distinction between what is said and what is implicated. They also claim that these results provide support for theories of utterance interpretation (such as Relevance Theory) which recognize that pragmatic processes are involved not only in understanding what is implicated but also in working out what is said (the 'explicature'). We attempted to replicate some of these experiments and also adapted them. Our results fail to confirm Gibbs and Moise's claims. Most significantly, they show that, under certain conditions, subjects select implicatures when asked to select the paraphrase that best reflects what a speaker has said. We suggest that our results can be explained within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford) if we assume that subjects select the paraphrase that comes closest to achieving the same set of communicated contextual effects as the original utterance. When an utterance gives rise to a single strong implicature, subjects tend to select this as the paraphrase that best reflects what is said; in other cases (for example in Gibbs and Moise's stimuli) subjects tend to select the explicature.     

Psychologism and Completeness in the Arts

When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspective on his or her work. For the artist, the question is not about his or her own psychology, but about the character of the work and the context in which he or she works. A nonpsychological account of completeness, on which completeness is a question of whether the work satisfies the conditions implicit in the artist's plan, avoids this problem and is equally or better able to explain the metaphysical, epistemic, and normative phenomena which appeared to support psychologism.     

Monitoring and self-repair in speech

Making a self-repair in speech typically proceeds in three phases. The first phase involves the monitoring of one's own speech and the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. From an analysis of 959 spontaneous self-repairs it appears that interrupting follows detection promptly, with the exception that correct words tend to be completed. Another finding is that detection of trouble improves towards the end of constituents. The second phase is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the use of so-called editing terms. Which editing term is used depends on the nature of the speech trouble in a rather regular fashion: Speech errors induce other editing terms than words that are merely inappropriate, and trouble which is detected quickly by the speaker is preferably signalled by the use of ‘uh’. The third phase consists of making the repair proper. The linguistic well-formedness of a repair is not dependent on the speaker's respecting the integrity of constituents, but on the structural relation between original utterance and repair. A bi-conditional well-formedness rule links this relation to a corresponding relation between the conjuncts of a coordination. It is suggested that a similar relation holds also between question and answer. In all three cases the speaker respects certain structural commitments derived from an original utterance. It was finally shown that the editing term plus the first word of the repair proper almost always contain sufficient information for the listener to decide how the repair should be related to the original utterance. Speakers almost never produce misleading information in this respect.It is argued that speakers have little or no access to their speech production process; self-monitoring is probably based on parsing one's own inner or overt speech.     

“She is Just Not an Open Person.”: A Linguistic Analysis of a Restructuring Intervention in Family Therapy

A short exchange from a family therapy treatment with a couple is analyzed in detail according to what the speakers, in this case husband and therapist, do with each other and with the third participant, the wife, in making their utterances. They are seen to be performing a number of different acts with each utterance and an attempt is made to connect these acts with the actual linguistic properties of the utterances used; in this connection the semantic-pragmatic function of the operator, “just,” in one particular reading is discussed. These acts receive further support when the wider linguistic and situational context is considered. The exchange is of linguistic interest because the response of the therapist to the husband seems to be a non sequitur. It is shown, however, that pragmatic coherence, i.e., coherence with respect to the sequence of linguistic acts and moves between the speakers in the given situation, forces an interpretation of the two utterances as a connected text. The exchange is interesting therapeutically because the therapist's intervention brings immediate change in the husband. This striking therapeutic effect is attributed to the restructuring character of the intervention which sufficiently shifts the balance in the relationship between husband and wife. An analysis of the linguistic properties of the therapist's utterance shows that the restructuring is achieved by particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of the utterance. It turns out that restructuring, as manipulative as it may appear on the surface, is a highly complex, sophisticated and powerful technique. It is not peculiar to family therapy; comparable procedures can be found in other forms of psychotherapy, e.g., psychoanalysis and client-centered therapy, and in general in everyday conversation situations where it is necessary for one speaker to get another speaker to modify what he is saying and to adopt a different view.     

A Problem for Generic Generalisations in Scientific Communication

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers.     

Interpreting What Speakers Say and Implicate

The traditional view in pragmatic theory is that a distinction exists between what speakers say and what they mean, communicate, or implicate in context. For example, when uttering Jane has three children, a speaker might only say that "Jane has three children but may have more than three," but the speaker implicates that "Jane has exactly three children." Under this view, pragmatics plays only a small role in determining what speakers say and has a primary part in interpreting speaker's intended messages. My aim in this article is to challenge this view. I describe empirical work showing that pragmatics has a fundamental role in determining both what speakers say and implicate. Thus, when a speaker utters Jane has three children, enriched pragmatic information is used to infer that the speaker says "Jane has exactly three children" and that in specific contexts, the speaker can go on to express additional pragmatic meanings, such as "Jane is married" or "Jane is very busy because she has three children." I also describe work on the importance of complex pragmatic, metarepresentational reasoning in understanding irony and metaphor. Finally, I briefly discuss the relevance of these new developments in pragmatics for neurolinguistic research.     

Straight talk: conceptions of sincerity in speech

What is it for a speech act to be sincere? The most common answer amongst philosophers is that a speech act is sincere if and only if the speaker is in the state of mind that the speech act functions to express. However, a number of philosophers have advanced counterexamples purporting to demonstrate that having the expressed state of mind is neither necessary nor sufficient for speaking sincerely. One may nevertheless doubt whether these considerations refute the orthodox conception. Instead, it may be argued, they expose other ways of elucidating sincerity in speech. “Sincerity in speech” is ambivalent between a number of different conceptions. Against this background this paper presents two alternative conceptions, viz., Sincerity as Spontaneity and Sincerity as Presenting Oneself as one takes Oneself to be and develops a third conception which we may call Sincerity as a Communicative Virtue. This conception emphasizes the speaker’s intention in communicating her attitudes and the need to be properly justified in saying what one does.     

The impurity of “pure” indexicals

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense.