[H]ow determinate does a proposition have to be to count as the - TopicsExpress



          

[H]ow determinate does a proposition have to be to count as the proposition expressed? It seems to be accepted that much of linguistic communication suffers from the meaning-intention problem (Schiffer 1995; see also Wettstein 1981): for cases of quantifier domain restriction, propositional attitude reports, and so on, no facts about either the context or the speaker’s intentions can identify a unique proposition expressed. But the construal of this as a problem assumes that there is some abstract interpersonally or metaphysically determined entity that is ‘the proposition expressed’. It is agreed that hearers cannot actually recover such an entity, even assuming that it has some reality. So there is no sense in considering this abstract entity the object of explanation of a theory that aims to account for how hearers really interpret utterances online... To avoid an obviously question-begging argument (if it’s indeterminate, it’s not a speech act; if it’s determinate, it can’t be free enrichment so it’s elliptical), there would have to be some evidence that the result of such pragmatic development is inevitably too indeterminate to count as a speech act. But I predict that no such evidence would be forthcoming: after all, there are undoubtedly cases where the results of optional pragmatic inference are determinate and there is practically no freedom for the hearer to construct a different interpretation: take the case of scalar implicatures where “some” implicates “not all”, or indirect answers to “yes/no” questions, as simple examples. This is a further reason why, from the fact that a given apparently subsentential utterance has determinate content, it cannot be concluded that, because pragmatic processes are inherently too imprecise to have succeeded in arriving at this particular content, the utterance is syntactically elliptical. Indeterminacy has to be allowed in assigning values for indexicals (“here”, “now”, and “there” being obvious examples where there can be considerable leeway in the exact values for locations or times that the hearers assign), quantifier domains, etc. So I see no principled justification for allowing indeterminacy resulting from saturation to be part of the proposition expressed, but excluding any indeterminacy that cannot be traced to saturation, if intuitions are that these pragmatically supplied elements contribute to truth conditions... Allison Hall. Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment* goo.gl/sdgD2o
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 20:44:52 +0000

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