[in J. Keim Campbell, M. O'Rourke, and D. Shier, eds., Meaning
and Truth, New York: Seven Bridges Press (2002), pp. 21-33]
SEEMINGLY SEMANTIC
INTUITIONS
Kent Bach
From
ethics to epistemology to metaphysics, it is common for philosophers to appeal
to “intuitions” about cases to identify counterexamples to one view and to find
support for another. It would be interesting to examine the evidential status
of such intuitions, snap judgments, gut reactions, or whatever you want to call
them, but in this paper I will not be talking about moral,
epistemological, or metaphysical intuitions. I’ll be focusing on semantic ones.
In fact, I’ll be focusing on semantic intuitions about sentences, not
individual words (although the contributions of individual words may ultimately
be at issue in some of these cases), and on closely related intuitions about
what is said in utterances of those sentences. Such intuitions play an
important role in philosophy of language. For example,
intuitions about the informativeness of identity statements give rise to
Frege’s problem. Intuitions about the failure of substitution in attitude
contexts are used to impose a constraint on an adequate theory of attitude
ascriptions. And intuitions about sentences containing definite descriptions
used referentially or incomplete definite descriptions have been relied upon to
cast doubt on Russell’s theory of descriptions.
Although I have my doubts about such
appeals to intuition in regard to these long-standing problems in the
philosophy of language, I will not state them here. The cases I will consider
are philosophically less interesting, but they are the sorts of examples that
provide data for answers to the controversial question of how to draw the line
between semantics and pragmatics (for my answer see Bach 1999). Such examples
are often cited, e.g. by François Recanati in his paper, “The Pragmatics of
What is Said” (1989), and by the psycholinguists Ray Gibbs and Jessica Moise,
in their paper “Pragmatics in Understanding What is Said” (1997), to undermine
the orthodox view that, to put it crudely, semantics provides input to
pragmatics without any feedback from semantics. Here are a few examples thought
to provide evidence for so-called “pragmatic intrusion,” in which pragmatic
factors allegedly contribute to semantic interpretation:
(1) Billy
will get promoted if he works hard.
which
is intuitively understood to mean that Billy will get promoted if and only
if he works hard,
(2) Mary
has three cars.
which
is intuitively understood to mean that Mary has exactly three cars,
(3) Bobby
hasn’t taken a bath.
which
is intuitively understood to mean that Bobby hasn’t taken a bath lately,
and
(4) Molly
got infected and went to the hospital.
which
is intuitively understood to mean that Molly got infected and then, because
of her infection, went to the hospital.
As I see it, these are all examples of
what I call (in Bach 1994a) conversational “impliciture” (as opposed to Grice’s
implic-a-ture). In each case, I claim, what the speaker means is distinct from
he is saying, because what he means includes an implicit qualification on what
he is saying, something that is not really part of what is said. However,
people’s intuitions tend not to be sensitive to the difference, at least not
until they’re sensitized. That’s because they tend to ignore what I’ll call the
“Syntactic Correlation Constraint,” as expressed by Paul Grice’s stipulation
that what is said must correspond to “the elements of [the sentence], their
order, and their syntactic character” (1989, p. 87).
Since this is pretty much all that Grice
says about what is said, I should add a few things about how I understand it.
What is said is determined compositionally by the semantic contents of the
constituents (“elements”) of the sentence as a function of their syntactic
relationship. To allow for the presence of tense and sometimes indexicals, we
should add that what is said in a context is the semantic content of the
sentence relative to that context. Notice that I do not speak of the semantic
contents of utterances. If “utterance” means what is uttered, then an
utterance is just a sentence. And if “utterance” means an act of uttering, then
the content of an utterance is really the content of the speaker’s
communicative intention, which can depart in various ways from semantic
content. Also, although what is said is sometimes described as the “proposition
expressed” by the sentence (relative to the context), this mistakenly assumes
that every sentence expresses a complete proposition. In fact, the syntactic
requirements on well-formed sentences do not exclude the case of sentences
whose semantic interpretation is not a complete proposition. There are many
sorts of sentence that do not express a complete proposition, not even relative
to a context (see (15) and (16) below and Bach 1994a, sec. 2).
At any rate, the Syntactic Correlation
Constraint entails that if any element of the content of an utterance, i.e., of
what the speaker intends to convey, does not correspond to any element of the
sentence being uttered, it is not part of what is said. So when people
intuitively think that what is said includes such elements, their intuitions
are illicitly including something that just isn’t there. Now Grice did not
think that people’s intuitions deserve cavalier dismissal. He could have just
explained them away by appealing to the distinction between what is said and
what is implicated in uttering a sentence or to the distinction between what a
sentence means and what a speaker means in uttering it, but he was worried by
what struck him as a kind of paradox:
We
must of course give due … weight to intuitions. … For in order that a
nonconventional implicature should be present in a given case, my account
requires that a speaker shall be able to utilize the conventional meaning of a
sentence. … This … seems to lead to a sort of paradox: if we, as speakers, have
the requisite knowledge of the conventional meaning of sentences we employ to
implicate, when uttering them, something the implication of which depends on
the conventional meaning in question, how can we, as theorists, have difficulty
with respect to just those cases in deciding where conventional meaning ends
and implicature begins? If it is true, for example, that one who says that A or
B implicates the existence of non-truth-functional grounds for A or B, how can
there be any doubt whether the word ‘or’ has a strong or weak sense? I hope
that I can provide the answer to this question, but I am not certain that I
can. (1989, p. 49)
In
my opinion, Grice accorded intuitions too much respect. In fact, there’s
nothing at all paradoxical about how theorists can disagree about matters on
which people’s intuitions tend to agree.
However, Grice’s paradox will seem
troubling to anyone who supposes that the central aim of semantics is to
account for such intuitions, especially ones about the truth-conditions of
sentences. But this anxiety, like many others, is unfounded. It is the central
aim of semantics to account for semantic facts, not intuitions. People’s
spontaneous judgments or “intuitions” provide data for semantics, but it is an
open question to what extent they reveal semantic facts and should therefore be
explained rather than explained away. Since, as I am suggesting, they are often
responsive to non-semantic information, to what is implicit in what is said but
not part of it, they should be treated cautiously. They should certainly not be
given the respect accorded to them by Recanati’s so-called “Availability
Principle,” which prescribes that intuitions about what is said be “preserved”
in our theorizing. Nor should they be taken as seriously as they are by Gibbs
and Moise, who “examined people’s intuitions” and claimed to find that data
about what people say about what is said “lend support to theories of utterance
interpretation [according to which] pragmatics strongly influences people’s
understanding of what speakers say [as well as what they] communicate” (1997,
p. 51).
Aside from the question of the
reliability of such intuitions and their relevance to semantics and its
relation to pragmatics, there is the question of what role, if any, they play
in the process of communication. It seems their role is marginal at best. In
the course of speaking and listening to one another, we generally don’t
consciously reflect on the semantic contents of the sentences we hear or on
what is said in their utterance. We are focused on what we are communicating or
on what is being communicated to us, not on what is said. Moreover, we don’t
have to be able to make accurate judgments about what information is semantic
and what is not in order to be sensitive to semantic information. To “preserve
intuitions” in our theorizing about what is said would be like relying on the
intuitions of unsophisticated moviegoers about the effects of editing on a
film. Although people’s cinematic experience is dramatically affected by such
factors as cuts and camera angles, there is no reason to suppose that their
intuitions are reliable about what produces what effects. Intuitions about what
is said may be similarly insensitive to the difference between the contribution
that is made by the semantic content of a sentence and that made by
extralinguistic factors to what an utterance communicates. So, I say, what
worried Grice was not a real paradox but just an ordinary philosophical
problem.
Let’s get down to cases. In discussing
them, I should stress that I am not claiming that semantic intuitions are
totally unreliable and shouldn’t be trusted at all. Rather, they should be
relied upon judiciously, and only after being fed an ample diet of examples,
including contrasting ones. For instance, although it might intuitively seem
that (1),
(1) John
will get promoted if he works hard.
says
or at least entails that John won’t get promoted if John doesn’t work hard,
this apparent entailment can be explicitly canceled without contradiction:
(1x) John
will get promoted if he works hard, though he might get promoted
even
if he doesn’t work hard.
And
intuitively it does not seem redundant to utter the strengthened version of
(1),
(1+) John
will get promoted if and only if he works hard.
Here
are a few more examples of faulty intuitions. In each case, rather than take
the intuition at face value, we can describe what is going on in a way that
explains both the occurrence of the intuition and its falsity.
(5) Jack
and Jill went up the hill.
(6) Jack
and Jill are engaged.
(7) Jill
got married and became pregnant.
Although
these sentences express complete propositions, in uttering them a speaker is
likely to have meant something more specific, a qualified version of what he
said:
(5+) Jack
and Jill went up the hill together.
(6+) Jack
and Jill are engaged to each other.
(7+) Jill
got married and then became pregnant.
where
the italicized words, which are not part of the original sentence,
indicate part of what the speaker meant in uttering (5), (6), or (7). He would have
to utter those words (or roughly equivalent words--the exact words don’t
matter) to make what he meant more fully explicit (let’s call the fuller
version an “expansion” of the original and what is left out is its “implicit
qualification”). Utterances of sentences like (5) - (7) illustrate what I call
“sentence nonliterality” (Bach, 1994b, pp. 69-72), as opposed to constituent
nonliterality, since no expression in the sentence is being used nonliterally.
What the speaker means is not the exact proposition, as compositionally
determined, that is expressed by the sentence, and the difference between the
two propositions is not attributable to any particular constituent of the
sentence. A speaker who utters (6), for example, is not saying that Jack
and Jill are engaged to each other, any more than he would be saying this if he
uttered “Jack and his sister Jill are engaged.” That he means they’re engaged
to each other is implicit in what he is saying or, more precisely, in his
saying of it. It is not part of what is said, since it passes Grice’s test of
cancellability. That is, it may be taken back without contradiction. There is
no contradiction in uttering (6x),
(6x) Jack
and Jill are engaged but not to each other.
or, for that matter, (5x) or (7x),
(5x) Jack
and Jill went up the hill but not together.
(7x) Jill
got married and became pregnant but not in that order.
Utterances
of (5), (6), and (7) are all cancelable.
Even so, for many people the apparent
content of each of sentences (5) - (7) includes something that is not
predictable from the compositional semantics of the uttered sentence. Taking
semantic intuitions seriously would make life miserable for semanticists, even
more miserable than it already is. It would require doing semantics from the top
down: starting with the supposed meaning of a sentence and working down to the
meanings of its constituents. Covert constituents would have to be posited to
provide the “residue” of meaning not accounted for by the overt ones. Or,
alternatively, special meanings, hence ambiguity, would have to be attributed
to certain of the overt constituents, insofar as their ordinary meanings seem
not to make the right contribution to what is said. All this can be avoided if
we don’t take people’s seemingly semantic intuitions too seriously.
Why are
such intuitions unreliable about the semantic contents of sentences like those
we’ve considered? Part of the reason is that typical utterances of them
involve sentence nonliterality. Unlike cases of metaphor or metonymy, there are
no constituents which intuitively are being used nonliterally. Moreover, there
is a recurrent pattern of nonliterality associated with such sentences.
Phenomenologically, their nonliteral use seems literal, at least insofar as our
intuitions are insensitive to the difference between conventionalization and
mere standardization (Bach 1998). As with what Grice called “generalized”
conversational implicature, where there must be specific contextual reasons for
supposing that an implicature is not present (for a monumental study of
generalized conversational implicature, see Levinson 2000), in the above cases
the sentence is typically used to communicate something that is not predictable
from its meaning alone. So it’s no wonder that when people are asked for their
intuitions about such a sentence, they will tend to imagine it uttered in a
normal context and count its typical implicit qualification as part of its
content. They tend to attribute something to the conventional meaning of the
sentence which in fact is attributable only to typical utterances of it.
Recent experiments by Gibbs and Moise
(1997) have sought to establish the reliability of semantic intuitions, as with
examples like (8):
(8) Martha
gave John her key and he opened the door.
People judge that part of what is said is
that John opened the door with the key Martha gave him. But Gibbs and Moise’s
experimental design was clearly flawed. For one thing, it imposed a false
dichotomy on their subjects by forcing them to choose between what is said and
what is implicated. Subjects weren’t offered the in-between category of
implicit qualification (that which is implicit in the saying of what is said).
Also, they were not given the opportunity to make cancellability judgments or
comparative judgments about what is said by explicitly qualified utterances as
opposed to unqualified ones. Gibbs and Moise didn’t ask subjects if there is a
contradiction in a sentence like (8x),
(8x) Martha
gave John her key and he opened the door, but not with the key she
gave him.
Gibbs
and Moise predict that subjects would find a contradiction here; I predict that
they wouldn’t. Similarly, they didn’t ask subjects to compare (8) with (8+),
(8+) Martha
gave John her key and he opened the door with the key she gave him.
and
to judge whether they say the same thing. Gibbs and Moise predict that subjects
would judge that (8) and (8+) do say the same thing; I predict that they
wouldn’t.
Even if Gibbs and Moise are right about
people’s untutored intuitions about the original examples, it would be easy to
sensitize their intuitions about what is said to Grice’s cancellability test
for what is not said. Just present them with sentences like (5) - (7) followed
by cancellations of what is not explicit in the utterance, as in (5x) - (7x)
above. Ask them if they sense a contradiction or just a clarification. Or ask
them, with a stress on “say,” whether what a speaker says in uttering
explicitly qualified versions of (5), (6), or (7), i.e., (5+) - (7+) above, is
the same as what a speaker says with (5), (6), and (7) themselves, and
they are likely to discern the difference. If so, this contradicts the
intuition that the implicit qualifications are part of what is said in the
original utterances. So the verdict of intuition is reversed when we appeal to
people’s cancellability judgments and their comparative judgments about what is
said by explicitly qualified vs. unqualified utterances.
I could discuss Gibbs and Moise’s
experiments in detail (in fact, Nicolle and Clark (1999) have done so, and
report that their own experiments often delivered different results, sometimes
with people deeming clear cases of implicature to count as what is said), but
the main difficulty with their research, which shows how misguided it was, is
that it tested for the wrong thing. They thought they could get data about what
is said, and thereby test the empirical validity of Recanati’s Availability
Principle, by asking people what is said by a given utterance, or by asking
them whether something that is conveyed by a given utterance is implicated or
merely said. Evidently they assumed that what people say about what is
said is strongly indicative of what is said. In fact, what it is
indicative of is how people apply the phrase “what is said” and perhaps of what
they mean by the word “say.” It tells us little about what is said, much less
about the cognitive processes whereby people understand utterances.
To appreciate how small a role semantic
intuitions play in utterance comprehension, consider the case of ambiguity.
There are many ambiguous sentences one of whose meanings is far more likely to
be operative than the other. The following headlines illustrate what I mean:
SURVIVOR OF SIAMESE TWINS JOINS
PARENTS
PROSTITUTES APPEAL TO POPE
PANDA MATING FAILS; VETERINARIAN
TAKES OVER
STUD TIRES OUT
BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLAND
ISLANDS
TEACHER STRIKES IDLE KIDS
SQUAD HELPS DOG BITE VICTIM
ENRAGED COW INJURES FARMER WITH
AX
STOLEN PAINTING FOUND BY TREE
We find these headlines funny because we notice their
unintended meanings, but evidently these weren’t noticed by the editors who
allowed the headlines to run. Similarly,
we are not likely to notice the ambiguity of (9),
(9) Bill scratched the car with an umbrella.
considered by itself, or the ambiguity of (10),
(10) Bill scratched the car with a broken tail
light.
considered by itself, but their ambiguity is obvious as
soon as we compare them with each other or with the obviously ambiguous
sentence,
(11) Bill scratched the car with a broken
antenna.
Similarly, by itself neither of the following sentences is
likely to seem ambiguous,
(12) The soldiers exchanged their arms for
food.
(13) The soldiers used their arms to protect
their faces.
but their ambiguity is evident once we compare them with
each other or with the obviously ambiguous (14),
(14) The soldiers celebrated by waving their
arms in the air.
Interestingly, it has long been known (Lackner and Garrett
1973) that people unconsciously access irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words,
but only very briefly, and only immediately (about 150 msec.) after hearing
them. People’s failure consciously to “intuit” the irrelevant meaning has no
bearing on the process of utterance comprehension. And no one would seriously
claim that their failure to do so is strong evidence against the existence of
the ambiguity.
I have stressed that
people’s semantic intuitions tend not to respect the Syntactic Correlation
Constraint. Now I’d like to consider some objections to that constraint and to
the so-called “minimalist” conception of semantic content that goes with it.
There are two objections that I’ll
mention just briefly. The first notes the fact mentioned earlier, that some
sentences, like (15) and (16), do not express complete propositions, not even
relative to a context.
(15) Bonnie is ready. (for what?)
(16) Clyde is finished. (doing what?)
In
such cases, there is something not semantically specified that is needed to
yield a complete proposition. However, so the objection goes, what is said must
be a complete proposition. Therefore, what is said in such cases is not a
projection of the syntax of the sentence; it includes some element that does
not correspond to any constituent, or feature of a constituent, of the
sentence. However, why must what is said be a complete proposition? What’s
wrong with using (15IQ) and (16IQ) to report, and report
fully, what a speaker says in uttering (15) or (16)?
(15IQ) S said that Bonnie is ready.
(16IQ) S said that Clyde is finished.
It
may be true that a speaker, in using a sentence to communicate
something, must communicate a complete proposition, but it hardly follows that
any sentence used to communicate a complete proposition must itself express
one. Sentences that are syntactically complete but semantically incomplete do
not. To understand such utterances the hearer must figure out how the speaker
intends what is said to be turned into a complete proposition. I call this
process “completion.” Utterances requiring completion, like those requiring
expansion (utterances with an implicit qualification on what is said), carry
implicitures along with what is said.
A second objection is based on resisting
what Robyn Carston has called “the compulsion to treat all pragmatically
derived meaning as implicature” (1988, p. 176). Once it is recognized that the
contribution of pragmatic processes is not limited to the determination of
implicatures, “there is no reason,” according to Carston, “why pragmatics
cannot contribute to the explicature, the truth-conditional content of the utterance,”
which she equates with what is said. However, Carston is implicitly assuming
that if something is not implicated, it is part of what is said. Since what she
calls the explicature, which needn’t be fully explicit, can be the
truth-conditional content of the result of an expansion or completion of the
utterance, it cannot be identified with what is said.
A third objection is based on the fact
that on minimalism what is said is often false even in cases when the utterance
of the sentence in question is true. Sentence (3), for example,
(3) Bobby
hasn’t taken a bath.
though
likely to be used to convey that Bobby hasn’t taken a bath lately, can itself
be true only in the unlikely event that Bobby has never taken a bath.
Similarly, (17) and (18), though used to convey truths, are likely to be
literally false by minimalist standards:
(17) That
car doesn’t look expensive--it is expensive.
(18) Nobody
goes there any more--it’s too crowded.
(once uttered by Yogi Berra)
Why
should the prediction that these sentences are literally false lead to an
objection to minimalism? Because intuitively they are true. Well, that’s one
consideration, but it has little weight, once we invoke the distinction between
what is said and what is meant, and remember that intuitions tend to be
insensitive to that distinction and to be responsive to as implicit
qualifications, as explicitly included in (17+) and (18+),
(17+) That
car doesn’t merely look expensive--it is expensive.
(18+) Nobody
important goes there any more--it’s too crowded.
Another
basis for the objection is that, given this distinction, it can only be the
obvious falsity of what is said that explains the hearer’s inference to what
the speaker means. Evidently, the objection assumes that minimalism must treat
these cases as Gricean quality implicatures. In those cases, the hearer’s
inference is triggered by his recognition that the utterance, if taken at face
value, violates Grice’s first maxim of quality, “Do not say what you believe to
be false” (1989, p. 27). However, the obvious falsity of these sentences has
nothing to do with how the hearer figures out what the speaker is conveying (or
with how the speaker intends him to do so). These cases we’re concerned with
are quite unlike an utterance of, say, “I could eat a million of those potato
chips,” which conveys how irresistible they are. In that case it is the obvious
falsity of what is said that triggers the hearer’s search for something other
than what is said. But in the examples in question it is not obvious falsity
that does that. Consider one more example. Suppose a child is crying because of
a tiny cut and his mother tries to calm him by uttering (19),
(19) You’re
not going to die.
Obviously the mother is not assuring the kid
of his ultimate immortality. But the operative pragmatic anomaly here is not
obvious falsity but lack of relevant specificity. This is clear if we consider
a positive version of the same utterance. An oncologist could say to a cancer
patient who demands a frank prognosis, “I’m sorry to tell you, but there is
nothing I can do. You’re going to die.” Presumably the patient won’t take the
doctor to mean that he, like anyone else, is mortal. But it’s not the obvious
truth of what is said that enables him to understand the doctor, it’s the presumption
that the doctor is telling him something relevant to his medical condition.
Similarly, utterances of the negations of the previous examples would typically
have the same implicit qualifications as utterances of those sentences
themselves. Obvious truth, like obvious falsity, has no bearing on the hearer’s
inference in these cases.
Another objection to minimalism claims
that even if we accept the strict, minimalist conception of what is said, what
is said in that sense can have no psychological reality unless it is something
that a hearer must identify before inferring the speaker’s communicative
intention. In other words, for what is said to matter psychologically, the
hearer must identify what is said before identifying what is meant. But, so the
objection goes, introspectively at least it seems that in many cases the first
proposition one arrives at is not the “minimal” proposition (as Recanati 1989
calls it), the proposition which, according to the Syntactic Correlation
Constraint, comprises what is said. Even if this is so, that is no objection to
semantic minimalism. The process of utterance comprehension is obviously a very
interesting topic for psychology, but it’s hard to see why facts about hearers’
cognitive processes should be relevant to what a speaker says. How
could the fact (if it is a fact) that what is said sometimes has no
psychological reality for the hearer show that it is a mere abstraction? All
this shows is that hearers can infer what a speaker is conveying without first
identifying what the speaker is saying. The semantic notion of what is said
pertains to the character of the information available to the hearer in the
process of identifying what the speaker is conveying, not to what goes on in
this process (Bach and Harnish, 1979, pp. 91-93).
Moreover, suppose that it is true that
what is said, in the minimalist sense, is sometimes not consciously accessed.
It is still consciously accessible. This is evident from the fact that people
recognize, as we saw with examples (1) - (4) above, that implicit
qualifications on these utterances are cancelable. Furthermore, even if in some
cases the minimal proposition is not actually computed and plays no role in the
interpretation process as it actually occurs, because of “local processing” on
constituents of the sentence, it can still play some role. Even if a hearer
doesn’t explicitly represent what is said by the utterance of a sentence, hence
does not explicitly reject it, still he makes the implicit assumption
that it is not what is meant. Implicit assumptions are an essential ingredient
in default reasoning in general (Bach 1984) and in the process of understanding
utterances in particular. Communicative reasoning, like default reasoning in
general, is a case of jumping to conclusions without explicitly taking into
account all alternatives or all relevant considerations. Even so, to be
warranted such reasoning must be sensitive to such considerations. This means
that such considerations can play a dispositional role even when they do not
play an explicit role. They lurk in the background, so to speak, waiting to be
taken into account when there is special reason to do so.
I conclude that intuitive and related
cognitive considerations do not undermine a minimalist conception of what is
said. As Jerry Fodor says, “No doubt, intuitions deserve respect, … [but]
informants, oneself included, can be quite awful at saying what it is that
drives their intuitions. … It is always up for grabs what an intuition
is an intuition of” (1998, p. 86). In the case of seemingly semantic
intuitions, they are largely irrelevant to determining what is said. They are
influenced by semantically irrelevant information, they tend to be insensitive
to relevant distinctions, and they are likely to be biased in favor of
understandings corresponding to things that people are relatively likely to
communicate. Or so it seems to me, at least intuitively.
References
Bach,
Kent: 1984, “Default Reasoning: Jumping to Conclusions and Knowing When To
Think Twice,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 65, pp. 37-58.
Bach, Kent: 1994a, “Conversational Impliciture,”
Mind & Language 9, pp. 124-62.
Bach,
Kent: 1994b, Thought and Reference, paperback edition, revised
with postscript, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
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