Philosophy 1760: Schedule

Grice has two main goals in this paper. The first is to distinguish 'natural' from 'non-natural' meaning. Ultimately, Grice's primary interest is in non-natural meaning, which is supposed to be the kind of meaning the linguistic utterances have (and so the kind of meaning that language has). The second is to offer an account of 'non-natural' meaning, or at least one important variety of it.

So one main reason we are reading this paper is to try to get a little more clear about what notion of meaning concerns the philosophy of language. However, when Grice talks about 'meaning' here, even 'non-natural' meaning, he does not have in mind 'meaning' in the sense in which words have meaning, but rather in the sense of what someone means, which may or may not correspond to the meanings of the words they use (e.g., in cases of irony, or metaphor, or what have you).

There have been attempts to reduce the notion of non-natural meaning to that of natural meaning. The motivation for this is that natural meaning seems, in some cases, to be a natural phenomenon. Consider, e.g., the case of tree rings: that the tree has 36 rings means that it is 36 years old. So some philosophers (such as Fred Dretske) have wanted to start with that notion and use it to try to explain non-natural meaning, which is more puzzling. We will not discuss such issues, however, as they are more in philosophy of mind.

• Grice mentions five 'tests' that can be used to separate natural from non-natural meaning. How good are these tests? Are some better than others? (One of the tests just seems wrong to me.) One good way to check your understanding of Grice's distinction would be to try to give some examples on your own of the two kinds of meaning.
• Grice very much seems in this paper to be trying to 'analyze' certain ordinary uses of the verb "mean". That, presumably, is what justifies the close concern that some of his tests display for the niceties of ordinary usage. But is that really what Grice's focus is? What else might one read him as really trying to do?
• Grice's second goal is to offer an account of non-natural meaning. He first considers and rejects a 'causal' account due to Charles Leslie Stevenson. Our main attention will be elsewhere, but you should nonetheless read this part of the paper (at least quickly), as it helps to motivate Grice's own view.
• Note that Grice's target here is not what words or sentences mean. It is, rather, what someone might mean by an utterance of certain words, which might diverge from what those words mean in their own right. (We'll discuss this distinction later when we read Grice's paper "Logic and Conversation", and then in yet more detail when we get to the unit on Contextualism.) Note that Grice also means his analysis to apply to gestures and other non-conventional forms of communication. So Grice's goal is to explain what it is for a particular 'utterance' (in a very general sense) to mean something, in the non-natural sense. He restricts himself, for convenience, to 'informative' utterances.
• Grice's account may be formulated as follows: S meant by the 'utterance' U to an audience A that p iffS made this utterance with the intention that A should come to believe that p as a result of A's recognizing that very intention. There are three main aspects to this account:
  1. It incorporates Stevenson's idea that meaning something is, in some sense, connected with trying to get someone to believe something. But, as he notes, there are different ways in which that can be done, so there has to be more to it. (Here again, a good way to check yourself is to try to come up with your own example that serves the same purpose as Grice's.)
  2. It incorportates an 'overtness' condition: that one's intention to get someone to believe something should be one that one intends the audience to recognize. But that is not enough, either, to rule out certain cases that Grice think should not be included. (Try to formulate your own example again.)
  3. It incorporates a condition that (1) and (2) should be connected: The recognition of the speaker's intention is supposed to play a role in getting the audience to believe something. Grice motivates this condition with a single example involving a photograph. Is that really enough?
  (As Grice notes, there is something strange about the 'self-referential intention' with which he is supposing people speak. But this is not usually taken to be a problem.)
• Can you think of any cases that pose a problem for Grice's account? (There are plenty!)
• Grice finishes the paper by making some remarks about the notion of intention that is deployed in his account. What is the purpose of those remarks?

Strawson refers in this discussion to a number of 'logical laws' that he had listed earlier in the book. These are:
(6) ~(p . ~p), i.e., the law of non-contradiction
(7) p ∨ ~ p, i.e., the law of excluded middle
(9) ~~p ≡ p, i.e., the law of double negation elimination
(11) p . q ≡ q . p, i.e., the commutativity of conjunction
(19) ~p ⊃ (p ⊃ q)
(20) ~p ⊃ (p ⊃ ~q)
(21) q ⊃ (p ⊃ q)
(22) q ⊃ (~p ⊃ q)
(23) ~p ≡ [(p ⊃ q) . (p ⊃ ~q)]
(19)-(22) are all forms of the so-called 'paradoxes of material implication' (and there are some redundancies here, too). Note that Strawson uses "." for conjunction and "⊃" for the material conditional (as Goldfarb does).

The main question Strawson discusses here is: What is the relationship between the truth-functional connectives studied in basic logic and the corresponding words of natural language? With the possible exception of negation, Strawson argues that none of the usual identifications are really correct. For example, "and", according to Strawson, does not mean truth-functional conjunction.

• As said, Strawson is prepared to accept the claim that "not" means truth-functional negation, though of course there are complications involving how negation is expressed. The remarks at the end of §7, about truth and falsity, result from his view that some sentences, though perfectly meaningful, do not always have truth-values. An example would be "Alex has stopped smoking crack", if Alex has never taken crack. But this will not be a central concern of ours.
• Strawson raises two sorts of objections to the identification of truth-functional conjunction and "and". The first is that "and", in English, has other uses than as a sentential connective. The most interesting of these involves cases such as "Alex and Drew got married", where that may not be equivalent (in any sense) to "Alex got married and Drew got married". But, as Strawson notes, the identification can reasonably be restricted to the case of 'sentential' "and". In that case, however, Strawson observes that (a) "They got married and they had a child" is "by no means logically equivalent" to (b) "They had a child and they got married". This seems to show that "and", in English, can have some sort of temporal meaning.
• Questions: (1) Can you think of similar examples where the 'additional content' is not temporal but some other kind of relation between the clauses? (2) What is Strawson's argument that (a) and (b) are not logically equivalent? What assumptions does that argument make?
• Strawson raises lots of objections to the identification of "⊃" with "if...then...". Unfortunately, however, he plays fast and loose with the distinction between indicative and subjunctive conditionals. A standard example of the contrast involves:
  (c) If Oswald did not shoot Kennedy, then someone else did.
  (d) If Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have.
  Note that (c) seems clearly true—someone shot Kennedy—but (d) is much less clear. Conditionals like (d) are known as "counterfactuals", because the antecedent is contrary to (known) fact. No one thinks, or (so far as I am aware) has even thought, that the conditional in (d) was material.
• If we set aside Strawson's objections concerning subjunctive conditionals, then there seem to be two sorts of worries left. First, Strawson claims (p.83) that we 'use' a conditional when (i) we do not know whether the antecedent or consequent is true but (ii) believe "that a step in reasoning from [the antecedent] to [the consequent] would be a sound or reasonable step...". (See also the restatement of this point on p.88.) This implies that it would be a misuse to assert a conditional whose antecedent one knew to be false or when there was no connection between the antecedent and consequent. Is that right, as an observation about correct English usage? If so, does it follow that the English conditional is not material?
• Second, Strawson claims that the "joint assertion in the same context" of "If it rains, the match will be canceled" and "If it rains, the match will not be canceled" is "self-contradictory" (p.85), whereas "p⊃q" and "p⊃~q" are consistent (and imply ~p). Is that right? If so, does it follow that the English conditional is not material?
• Perhaps most surprisingly, Strawson rejects the identification between "∨" and "or". He gives two very different sorts of reasons, both of which involve the rejection of the inference from P to "P or Q". What are these? How do they differ? What argument does Strawson have for the claim that "P or Q" can be true even if "Q or P" is not true?

Grice's central goal in this paper is to distinguish what is "strictly and literally said" in an utterance from other things that might be "meant" or "communicated" in the making of that utterance and, in particular, to articulate a notion of what is implicated by an utterance that is not part of what is said but is part of what is 'meant'.

As you will see at the outset, Grice's target here is, in part, Strawson. He does not, in this lecture, however, actually formulate his reply to Strawson. His target is really more general, though. There was a common sort of claim at this time that Grice also wants to oppose. For example, people would often say such things as that it is only appropriate to say "X knows that p" if there is some doubt whether p, so "X knows that p" is only true if there is some doubt; "X performed action A voluntarily", only if there is some question whether X's action was coerced; and so forth. In a larger sense, then, Grice is interested in the question when facts about 'correct usage' are facts about meaning and when they are not.

• Grice begins by distinguishing between what is "said" and what is merely "meant". He gives an example to illustrate this distinction. Its chief advantage is that the 'implication' (e.g., that C's colleagues are treacherous) is clearly no part of what B's words mean. Grice then makes some very general remarks about the nature of this distinction. What is said is supposed to depend upon the "conventional meaning of the words used" plus certain other factors, such as the resolution of ambiguity and 'context-dependence' (e.g., who was referred to by "he").
• Among the things that are merely "meant" are what Grice calls "implicatures". He distinguishes two types of these, which he calls "conventional" and "conversational". What is the difference between them? Make sure you can give a couple examples of your own, of each type.
• Grice proceeds to sketch an account of how conversational implicature works. It has two parts: The "Cooperative Principle" (on p. 26) and four "maxims" (on pp. 26-7). But there is, in a way, an even deeper underlying principle, namely, that speaking is a form of acting, and so something that is (typically) done for reasons.("...[O]ne of my avowed aims is to see talking as a special case or variety of purposive, indeed rational, behavior..." (p.28).) Grice's idea is that people's reasons for saying what they do can sometimes be revealing of other of their attitudes and that, when this is so, it can lead to their meaning things they do not (strictly and literally) say.
• The maxims can be thought of as consequences of the Cooperative Principle for the case in which we are dealing with conversations whose main purpose is the efficient exchange of information. (Of course, conversations can have many other purposes, but there are reasons to think that this one is fairly basic and universal.) Can you sketch an argument for one of the maxims of the form: If one wants to exchange information in an efficient way, then one should obey that maxim? It would also be worth checking your understanding by giving your own examples of implicatures that "flout" each of the four maxims.

  Grice spends a bit of time in the middle of the paper exploring the question what the basis of the Cooperative Principle is: Is it merely an empirical facr? Or is it somehow inherent in the nature of conversation? Our main focus will be elsewhere, but feel free to comment on this if you wish.)

• Toward the end of the paper, Grice introduces the notion of generalized conversational implicatures. These are, in a way, similar to conventional implicatures, because they are supposed to be, in a way, the normal case. The examples Grice gives here are not terribly convincing, it seems to me. A better one involves the word "most". If someone says, "Most of the students passed the final", then one would normally suppose that not all of the students passed. This is a conversational implicature. (Which maxim is involved?) One of the signs that it is so is that it can be explicitly "canceled": It would be fine to follow up by saying, "In fact, all of them did". This is what Grice will use, in later lectures, to answer Strawson. Can you see how he might do that? What might he say, for example, about Strawson's denial that "A or B" is always true when A is true?
• It's a reasonable thought that conversational implicature is a type of non-natural meaning, in Grice's own sense. Can we argue for this claim? I.e., can we show that what someone conversationally implicates, according to the definition Grice gives on pp. 30-31, is also meant by them? One interesting question here is what guarantees that the overtness condition for meaning will be satisfied.

What is distinctive of language, as opposed to other forms of communication, is that words have "conventional meaning" as Grice put it, and that this meaning is partly determinative of one core part of the meaning of an utterance: what is said. But note that we think of both individual words and sentences as having meaning: Somehow, it seems, the meanings of the words in the sentence "Snow is white" 'combine' to give one the meaning of the sentence. The central question of the next couple papers we will read is what all that really means: What is sentence meaning? What is word meaning? And how do the meanings of words "combine"?

In this paper, Davidson is concerned to motivate what has come to be called the "principle of compositionality", which asserts that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of the words of which it is composed, and of how that sentence is composed from those words. Additionally, he argues that compositionality imposes genuine constraints on theories of meaning, i.e., that some theories of how some constructions work can be ruled out on the ground that they conflict with compositionality.

• Davidson begins by considering a dispute between Strawson and Quine over whether there could be a natural language that contained no singular terms (roughly, names of objects). You need not worry too much about the details of this discussion. Davidson's main point is just that claims about what is required for a language to be learned are empirical and cannot be established a priori. We'll discuss this point in much more detail later, when we read Chomsky.
• At the beginning of section II, Davidson outlines, very quickly, a set of considerations that are supposed to motivate compositionality. He first introduces an analogy with syntax: It must be possible, he says, for us to "define a predicate of expressions...that picks out the class of meaningful expressions", that is, roughly, the grammatical ones. He does not explain why, but the thought, presumably, is that this is something that ordinary speakers know (e.g., which expressions are grammatical sentences of their language), and so that there is some answer to the question how they are able to tell whether an expression is a (grammatical) sentence, and so (in principle) that we could tell some story about what features of an expression make it a sentence (or not).
• Similarly, then, for semantics (the study of meaning): Ordinary speakers are able to determine, even of sentences they have never previously encountered, what those sentences mean; there must be some way they do this; there must be some story to be told about how; the only reasonable hypothesis seems to be that they know what the words comprising some "novel sentence" mean, and they are able to put those word-meanings together to determine the meaning of the sentence.
• Consider now a language that (i) contained, as natural languages do, infinitely many sentences and (ii) did not satisfy the principle of compositionality, so that there was no story to be told about how one could generate, from some finite basis (of word-meanings), the meanings of all the sentences of that language. Then, Davidson claims, the language would be unlearnable in principle. What is his argument for this claim?
• Davidson goes on to argue that English, e.g., must contain finitely many "semantic primitives" from which the meanings of all other expressions can be generated. To what extent does the argument depend upon there really being infinitely many sentences of English? Are there really infinitely many sentences of English? In what sense? Does each of us actually understand infinitely many sentences? In what sense?
• Davidson gives four examples of theses philosophers have held about language that would imply that English contains infinitely many semantic primitives. We will work through Davidson's discussion of quotation in class, in some detail. The key point here is that a quotation name (such as: "snow") cannot be thought of as having its meaning determined as some function of the meaning of the word contained within the quotation marks. (This is what Davidson means when he says that quotation marks are not a functional expression.) The contained word is simply not used at all, and its meaning is irrelevant. This is particularly clear in the case of quotation names of non-words, e.g., in the sentence: The expression "snaw" is not a word of English.
• Here are some questions to think about ahead of class: Why might all of that have led Church to say that quotation is "misleading"? Why does Davidson insist that the claim that a quotation names its interior (i.e., what is within the quotes) does "not provide even the kernel of a theory"? Quine's proposal, which Davidson mentions but does not explain, was to replace quotation by a form of spelling out: Thus, instead of "'snow'" we would have: ess + en + oh + double-u. How would that help solve the problem? Does it solve the problem?
• Davidson considers three more examples which we probably will not discuss in class. But you should read the second and third examples at least, as they will be mentioned in later readings.

In "Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages", Davidson argued that, if a language is learnable, we should be able to give a compositional theory of meaning for it: a theory that shows how the meaning of a sentence depends upon, and is determined by, the meanings of its parts. In this paper, Davidson argues that a theory of truth can play this role and, moreover, that nothing else can. This amounts (or is intended to amount) to an argument that the meaning of a sentence is the condition under which it is true, i.e., for what is known as a truth-conditional theory of meaning. This sort of view is well represented in the history of analytic philosophy, having been held by Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus), Rudolf Carnap, and many others.

The central question of the paper is thus: What is required to give a genuine explanation of how sentence-meaning is determined by word-meaning? The paper largely proceeds by dismissing various proposals until only one is left.

• One desideratum on a proper solution is to avoid a certain regress that Davidson mentions in the second paragraph. If you just take each word to denote some entity as its meaning, then you have the problem how to combine them into the meaning of the sentence. What you cannot do is identify some further thing (instantiation, e.g.) as what does that. For then you just have yet another thing that needs to be combined with the rest.
• Davidson then considers the problem of explaining the meaning of all terms of the form "the father of ... the father of Annette". He notes that the following two axioms will allow us to at least some of that work:
  • "Annette" refers to Annette.
  • "the father of NN" refers to the father of whoever "NN" refers to.
  From these two principles, one can prove, e.g., that "The father of the father of Annette" refers to the father of the father of Annette. And, Davidson says, we have done that without assigning any "entity" as meaning to "the father of". Implicit here is the idea that an "explanation" of sentence-meaning in terms of word-meaning might amount to a theory with axioms specifying what the words mean that allow us to derive theorems saying what the sentences mean.
• Davidson then argues that, although we can try to extend this treatment to sentences, that will not work. His argument for this claim is known as the Slingshot, and it is a large topic in its own right. Suffice it to say that Frege's own approach takes sentences to refer to their truth-values. (The Slingshot purports to show that this choice is forced.) But then it turns out that all true sentences refer to the same thing, as do all false ones, which seems a bit odd if we're thinking of meaning as being reference.
• As Davidson notes, however, Frege himself insisted (in part for this kind of reason) that we distinguish meaning from reference. E.g., he thought that the names "Mark Twain" and "Samuel Clemens", though they refer to the same person, have different meanings, because "Mark Twain is Mark Twain" seems to be a logical truth, whereas "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" is not. So the next set of proposals attempts to work with the notion of meaning rather than that of reference.
• Davidson considers two such approaches on pp. 306-8. The first is alleged to fail because we have been given no substantive account of what the meaning of "flies" is or how it "yields" the meaning of "Theaetetus flies" when given the meaning of "Theaetetus" as argument. The problem with the second proposal is that it embodies no substantial conception of the structure of a sentence, that is, how its words are combined into a sentence. (There is a paper of mine that develops these arguments in detail.) We'll discuss this point in class, but one important instance with which you are already familiar involves quantification: In effect, what Davidson is pointing out is that while quantifers work grammatically very much like names, they work semantically in a completely different way: To understand how the meaning of "Someone smokes" is determined by the meanings of "Someone" and "smokes", we need to understand this difference. Can you develop that point a bit?
• Davidson traces the underlying problem to a lack of clarity about what 'meaning' is and a corresponding lack of clarity about what a 'theory of meaning' is supposed to do: We want the theory to show us how the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of its parts, but we do not even seem to know what kind of thing the meaning of a word or sentence is! (I.e., we do not know how properly to specify these things in our theory.) Davidson concludes that the shift from reference to meaning has not accomplished what we hoped.
• On p. 309, Davidson introduces his positive proposal. It seemed, Davidson suggests, that what we needed was a theory that would somehow deliver, from 'axioms' that specified the meanings of the words, theorems of the form:
  • S means that p
  where "S" is replaced by a name of a sentence (that is close enough to what Davidson means by a 'structural description') and "p" is replaced by that very sentence (or a translation of it), e.g.:
  • "Alex runs" means that Alex runs
  • "Drew smokes" means that Drew smokes
  The problem is that it is very unclear how to do this. But, Davidson suggests, maybe "the success of our venture depends not on the filling but on what it fills", that is, not on the words "means that" but on the relation between "S" and "p" that the theory secures. So we might instead take the target to be theorems of the form:
  
  • S is true if and only if p
  where, again, "S" is replaced by a name of a sentence and "p" is replaced by that very sentence. (This is Tarski's "Convention T" which says, more or less, that such sentences will always be true.) What we want, that is to say, is for our theory to deliver such results as:
  • "Alex runs" is true iff Alex runs
  • "Drew smokes" is true iff Drew smokes
  on the basis, again, of 'axioms' specifying the meanings of the words. Note that, on this approach, saying what a sentence means amounts to saying what is required if it is to be true, i.e.: the meaning of a sentence is the condition for it to be true, its 'truth-condition'.
• The great advantage to this proposal, for Davidson, is that we have some idea from logic how to do this, at least for a reasonable range of sentences, thus:
  • "Alex" refers to Alex
  • The extension of "runs" is the set of things that run
  • A sentence of the form "name one-place-predicate" is true iff the thing to which the name refers is in the extension of the predicate
  Those three principles imply that "Alex runs" is true iff Alex runs. And we can do similar things for relational predicates, like "loves", and even for quantifiers (although the formal details get messy in that case).
  As it happens, Davidson prefers a slightly different theory:

  • "(1) runs" is true of x iff x runs
  • "t F" is true iff the predicate "F" is true of the thing to which "t" refers

  We'll see other people talk this way, but for now the difference will not matter. This is more or less how Alfred Tarski did things. Davidson mentions him here because he is the one who first sorted out all the details (though most of them are already present in Frege).
• Question: Does Davidson really have an argument for this proposal?
• On pp. 311-2, Davidson considers an important objection, one that hearkens back to the Slingshot. Both the following sentences are true:
  • "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white
  • "Snow is white" is true iff grass is green
  (That is because "iff" here is the material conditional.) For all that has been said so far, then, a theory that yielded the latter would be as good as one that yielded the former. But surely that has to be wrong? Surely the latter gets the meaning of "Snow is white" wrong? What is Davidson's response? How good is it? (We will consider this issue in more detail in a week or so.)

The end of the paper is a catalog of open problems that such an approach to semantics suggests. Why, in particular, does "Bardot is a good actress" pose a problem? How is that similar to or different from the problem posed by "Katelyn is a tall gymnast"? (Hint: She might be short for a 21-year old woman.)

Strawson is concerned in this paper to mediate a dispute between two approaches to questions about meaning. As you will see, he is not exactly a neutral party.

• The central question, as Strawson sees it, concerns meta-semantics: what it is (a metaphysical question) for sentences to have meaning (to have semantic properties)? What is it for it to mean the specific thing it does? As Strawson sees it, there are two broad approaches to the problem, represented by Grice and Davidson (among others).
  • The 'theorists of communication intention' hold that a sentence's meaning what it does consists, somehow, in speakers' communicative intentions: their using that sentence with the intention to communicate some particular proposition. Of course, that will not always be true (due to implicature, irony, and the like), but the hope is that those issues can be finessed somehow. Strawson sketches some of the ideas on pp. 173-6, but you need not worry too much about them. The crucial issue does not lie there (at least according to Strawson).
  • The 'theorists of formal semantics', on the other hand, hold that there are 'rules' that determine the meaning of sentences but that these rules are not, in any sense, rules for communicating. These are 'rules' that fix truth-conditions. As Strawson sees it, Davidson's claim is that someone who knows the truth-condition of a sentence knows what it means, without necessarily having any idea how that sentence might be used to communicate with someone.
• On p. 179, Strawson arrives at what he takes to be the crucial question: how the notion of truth-condition might be explained, without any appeal to the notion of a communicative intention. Or, more precisely, how the notion of truth is to be explained. What Strawson initially suggests is that truth should be regarded, primarily, as a property of 'sayings', characterized roughly as follows: "One who makes a statement or assertion makes a true statement if and only if things are as, in making that statement, he states them to be" (p. 180). If so, Strawson continues, then the very notion of truth (as applied to sayings) is bound up with the notion of what is stated by someone who makes a given utterance. And that, one might think, can only be explained in terms of the notion of 'making a statement' itself, that is, in terms of that sort of 'speech act', which is, in the normal case, performed with certain communicative intentions. Indeed, Strawson suggests, what it is to 'make a statement' is, at least in the normal case, to speak with such intentions.
• On this conception, then, the 'rules' that determine the meaning of a sentence determine what that sentence can conventionally be used to say, in Grice's sense, and so what that sentence might (in otherwise unexceptional circumstances) be used to mean or communicate (see p. 181).
• I think the line of thought here might be articulated as follows:
  1. An utterance of "Snow is white" is true iff what the utter states to be the case is in fact the case. (Connection between truth and stating.)
  2. An utterance of "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white. (The 'rule' for that sentence.)
  3. What is in fact the case if things are as someone who utters "Snow is white" states them to be is that snow is white. (From 1 and 2.)
  4. How things are stated to be by someone who utters "Snow is white" is that snow is white. (From 3.)
  So it is in that way that the 'rule' fixes what is stated. Does that seem right? What is less clear is why there is any need for a reference to communicative intentions here.
• In some ways, Strawson's formulation of the "crucial question" is imprecise. What is really at issue here is not so much the notion of truth-condition but what it is for a given utterance to have a certain truth-condition. To answer that question, we do need to know, among other things, what it is for an utterance to be true.
• The discussion on pp. 182-3 pushes the issue from a slightly different direction, noting that merely 'associating' the sentence "Snow is white" (say) with the 'state of affairs' of snow's being white cannot suffice. The discussion recalls, for me, an example due to Sir Michael Dummett. Suppose that we take Davidson's theory but substitute some nonsense word for "true", say, "alby". So we have such theorems as: "Snow is white" is alby iff snow is white. Clearly, this does not carry any information about the meaning of "Snow is white". But why not? What was it about the use of the word "true" that was so important? Why should truth-conditions seem to have any essential connection with meaning as opposed (to recall issues from Grice) to the sorts of conditions for appropriate utterance that are fixed by the Co-operative Principle and the maxims? or anything else?
• Seeing no possibility of progress in that direction, Strawson offers the formal semanticists another option: to connect the notion of 'what is stated' not with the notion of belief-communication but rather with the notion of belief-expression, where expressing a belief need not involve any intention to communicate it to someone else. So, on this account, "...the meaning-determining rules for a sentence of the language are the rules which determine what belief is conventionally articulated by one who...utters the sentence (p. 184). (Chomsky, to whom Strawson also refers, has certainly made this kind of suggestion.)
• The main objection Strawson pushes here (on pp. 185-6) is that it less clear that it might seem what 'expressing a belief' really is. The really important point is that it cannot be something one does with the intention of getting other people to think one has that belief. That would be a communicative intention, which is what we're supposed to be trying to avoid. But if we don't think of it that way, then what is it?
• Strawson goes on to suggest that, even waiving that point, such a view would make it a mystery why people who live in the same area tend to speak the same language, rather than all having their own way of expressing their beliefs. The thought, I take it, is that, if it's just incidental whether one's expressions of belief are understood as such by other people, then why can't one just have one's own special way of expressing one's beliefs? But Strawson does not really have much to say about this matter, other than that it seems to him to lead to a view that is "too perverse and arbitrary to satisfy the requirements of an acceptable theory" (p. 188). But this issue, though interesting in its own right, is very complex and, as we shall see, the theorists of formal semantics will have wanted to get off this train long before it reached this station.
  That said, the issue is dear to my own heart, and I've written on it, in this paper.

Lewis here offers a different perspective on the sorts of questions that exercise Strawson in "Meaning and Truth". Lewis himself advertises it as a 'synthesis' of the two sorts of positions that Strawson considers (although he does not mention Strawson, and this paper actually pre-dates Strawson's, though it was only published later). In particular, Lewis argues that (what he calls) languages, which are the concern of "formal semanticists", are central to an account of (what he calls) langauge, which is the social phenomenon of concern to philosophers like Grice. In particular, Lewis wants to explain what it is for a sentence to have a certain meaning in a given speech community by analyzing the relation: L is the language used by some population P, where that relation is itself explained in terms of a particular convention that prevails in P. In the background is a general account of what a convention is.

• Lewis suggests that we think of a language, as far as meaning is concerned, as a function from sentences to 'meanings', which he takes to be truth-conditions. Following many then, and inspiring many now, he suggests that we may think of truth-conditions as sets of "possible worlds" (situations, circumstances, ways that the world might be). So, e.g, the truth-condition of "Dogs meow" is the set of possible worlds in which dogs meow. Note that this is an entirely formal notion.
• The notion of language as a social phenomenon is harder to characterize, but Lewis does so in which should, at this point, be recognizably Gricean terms. What he emphasizes more than Grice does is the conventional character of the association between "sounds" and certain kinds of communicative intentions.
• Lewis then offers a philosophical analysis of the general notion of a convention. Whether it is correct is a controversial issue in its own right, quite independent of questions about language. So we'll not pursue that issue and, for now, let Lewis have this analysis. Test your understanding of the definition by explaining, say, why, according to it, it really is a convention (in the US) to drive on the right.
• On pp. 7-8 (pp. 166-7), Lewis turns to the question what connects languages (as formal objects) with language (the social phenomenon). His answer is: certain kinds of conventions. As usual, Lewis focuses on informative uses of language (assertion and the like). The trick is to say what the convention is. To focus on just one sentence: Lewis's proposal is S means that p in the population P iff there prevails amongst the members of P a convention (i) to utter S only if one believes that p and (ii) to "tend to respond" to someone else's utterance of S by coming to believe that p.
• Quick question: Why not "iff" in (i)? Less quick question: Might it be better to modify (ii) so that people tend to believe that the speaker believes that p? Why or why not? (If you look closely at the two papers from Grice that we read, you will see that his view changes between them in exactly this way.) Paper- or book-length question: How exactly is Lewis's view related to the Grice-Strawson view?
• On pp. 8-9 (pp. 167-8), Lewis argues that, if some language L is used by a population P, then there always will be convention of truthfulness and trust in L that prevail in P. The argument consists in checking that the six conditions that characterize conventions are all satisfied. It would be worth working through these for the case of a single sentence. Must all these conditions be satisfied? That is: Are there really conventions of truthfulness and trust?
• On pp. 17-23 (pp. 175-9), Lewis considers a series of objections based upon the fact that languages, as he describes them, only pair sentences with meanings and do not involve any sort of compositionality. The first of these is clearly a version of Davidson's main idea in "Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages". In response, Lewis articulates an account of what (perhaps following Noam Chomsky) he calls grammars. These assign meanings to sub-sentential components of sentences (i.e., words, roughly) and explains how these combine to determine the meanings of complete sentences. The details are not crucial, so you can skim pp. 18-19 (pp. 175-6), until the objection is re-iterated.
• The new version is: We need to be able to say that grammars are used by populations, not just languages, i.e., that words have certain meanings for speakers, not just sentences. In response, Lewis says that he simply does not know how to make sense of that idea or, more precisely, that he does not know what a convention to use a certain grammar would be like. (On pp. 22-3 (pp. 178-9), he insists that it cannot be a convention to use a word with a certain meaning.) Of course, one might reply that that only reveals a limitation of the notion of convention. But what other option might there be?
• The second objection again seems to echo Davidson: If we want to explain how it is that speakers can have an 'infinite capacity' to understand novel sentences, then we need to think of them as 'knowing' grammars, i.e., knowing what their words mean and how those combine to determine sentence meanings. Lewis's response is that this is an empirical hypothesis that has no role in an analysis of what it is for a language to be used by a population. What does this say about how Lewis understands his project?
  Oddly enough, Davidson ends up holding a similar view in "Reality Without Reference", but I have never understood how to reconcile that view with what he argues in TMLL.

Recall that, in "Truth and Meaning", Davidson observed that, of course, both of these "T-sentences" are correct:

1. "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white
2. "Snow is white" is true iff grass is green

• S is true iff p
• So, S means that p

3. "Snow is white" is true iff snow is white and grass is green

Davidson mentions in the paper a notion he calls satisfaction. This notion comes from Tarski, and it is a purely technical tool. It is just what we call, in logic, "truth under an assignment of objects to variables". So if we have a formula, say "x > y", where ">" means what it usually does, then we would say, in Phil 0540, that the formula is true when "x" is assigned 5 and "y" is assigned 3, but false if "x" is assigned 5 and "y" is assigned 7. Tarski simplifies this (in one sense) by thinking of the variables as coming in some fixed order, which is easiest if we think of them as being x1, x2, x3, etc. Then, instead of our needing to assign objects to variables, we can think of ourselves as just being given a sequence of objects, e.g., <5,3,4,6,...>. The first thing in the sequence goes with x1, the second thing with x2, etc. These sequences are sometimes thought of as infinite, i.e., as assigning objects to all the variables, even though only finitely many variables will ever be involved at any one time.

So Tarski would say: The sequence <5,3,4,6,...> satisfies the formula "x1 > x2", but the sequence <5,7,4,6,...> does not satisfy the formula. The reason this notion is important is just because of the quantifers: To say what it is for "∃x1∃x2(x1 > x2)" to be true, we need to be able to talk about when "x1 > x2" is true, for different assignments to the variables; i.e., we need to be able to talk about satisfaction.

• At the beginning of the paper, Davidson elaborates an approach to questions about meaning. He takes the central issue to be: What could we know that would allow us to interpret (understand) the utterances of other people? How could we come to know that? As he emphasizes, these are hypothetical rather than empirical questions. Is that a problem? Could the answer to such a hypothetical question explain our ability to understand novel sentences? In what sense? Another important question, which we'll spend significant time discussing shortly, is: What notion of knowledge does Davidson have in mind here? What notion should one have in mind?
• Davidson proceeds to eliminate a number of possible approaches and to elaborate other aspects of the problem, such as the need to account for the unbounded capacity to interpret novel utterances. He emphasizes that we need not think of a theory of interpretation as defining a function from utterances (or, in the simplest case, sentences) to 'meanings' or 'interpretations', contra Lewis, but instead simply as enabling someone who knew the theory to 'interpret', i.e., to speak and understand the language in question.
• On pp. 316-7 (128-30), Davidson considers Quine's suggestion that such a theory may take the form of a translation between the 'new' language and one's own. What is Davidson's objection to this approach? How good is it?
• Unsurprisingly, given Davidson's earlier writings, the alternative he suggests is a theory of truth that issues in T-sentences like:
  4. "Es regnet" is true at time t iff it is raining at t.
  I.e., his claim is that, if you knew a theory of truth for (say) German, then you could use that theory to interpret (speak and understand) German.
• On p. 319 (131), Davidson lists three questions about this approach. The first, whether a theory of truth can actually be given for a natural language, will not concern us (though it does much concern people who work on natural language semantics). The second and third questions are the crucial ones philosophically.
• The second question is: Can a theory of truth be verified by evidence plausibly available to a radical interpreter? The question is especially pressing because Davidson has a very austere conception of what evidence is available to the radical interpreter. It amounts to facts about what sentences are 'held true' under what sorts of circumstances. So, roughly, if Kurt tends to 'hold true' the sentence "Es regnet" when it is raining, that is some evidence for (3). Contra Grice and Strawson, then, Davidson denies the radical interpreter access to "finely discriminated" facts about beliefs and intentions. He argues for this restriction first on p. 315 (127). What is the argument? How good is it?
• The third question is: Could such a theory, if known to be justified by such evidence, be used to interpret the target language? It is here, on pp. 325-6 (138-9) that the Foster problem rears its head. It might seem plausible that a truth-theory will allow you to interpret if the theory proves (4), but not so much if it proves
  5. "Es regnet" is true at time t iff it is raining at t and grass is green.
  even though such a T-sentence is still correct. Hence, not just any correct theory of truth will suffice for interpretation. A theory of truth that is 'adequate for interpretation' must thus meet some additional condition. The additional condition is supposed to be, precisely, that the theory is verifiable on the basis of the sort of evidence that is available to a radical interpreter. What Davidson is proposing is thus that the inference from T-sentences to meanings might be understood as follows:
  1. "Schnee ist weiß" is true iff snow is white.
  2. The T-sentence (i) is a theorem of a truth-theory that is verifiable on the basis of the sort of evidence that is available to a radical interpreter.
  3. So, "Schnee ist weiß" means that snow is white.
  Davidson's argument that this works (such as it is) is contained in the final two paragraphs of the paper. What is the argument? One very important question, which Davidson does not really address, is: What is it to 'interpret' anyway?
• We'll spend the next few sessions exploring these issues further.

Our main interest here is in Soames's re-articulation of the Foster problem, on pp. 19-25, and his criticism of Davidson's response to it, on pp. 25-9. In between, on p. 25 itself, are two paragraphs about Higginbotham's view, which we shall read next. Since we have not yet read Higginbotham's paper, you need not worry about them now, but you might want to come back to them later.

Soames claims that there are basically two ways to interpret the claim that a theory of truth may "serve as" a theory of meaning. On one of these, knowledge of what an interpretive (or, as he puts it, "translational") truth-theory states is supposed to be sufficient for understanding. On the other, knowledge of what a truth-theory states is supposed to be necessary for understanding. That view comes in two forms, as well: that knowledge of everything the theory states is necessary for understanding, or that the theory states everything knowledge of which is necessary for understanding.

• Soames argues on pp. 19-21 that all forms of the sufficiency view fall to the Foster problem. The crucial argument is the one that surrounds example (3) on p. 21. Can you summarize this argument in your own words?
• The argument against the first form of the necessity view (on pp. 22-3) has two parts:
  1. Knowledge of the compositional axioms, etc, does not seem necessary for understanding, since ordinary people do not have such knowledge. (What Soames has in mind here are e.g. the axioms that govern quantifiers, or attributive adjectives, or whatever.)
  2. Even a totally trivial theory would state things necessary for understanding, so the condition seems too weak.
  Concerning (i), could one grant the point and suggest, nonetheless, that knowledge of the T-sentences was necessary? What would be lost? Alternatively, might there be a way of insisting nonetheless that ordinary speakers do have such knowledge?
  Concerning (ii), could one reply that such a trivial theory will at least say something about meaning even if it does not tell us everything there is to know about meaning?
• The argument against the second form of the necessity view is that the Foster problem applies to it, as well. Here again, see if you can sketch Soames's argument in your own words.
• All that might make one wonder whether the second form of the necessity view is really very different from the sufficiency view. What is the difference between saying that knowledge of what some theory T states is sufficient for understanding and saying that everything that T states is necessary for understanding? If one knows everything one needs to know to understand some language, then will one understand it? If there's a gap there, is it one that will matter for this argument?
• Soames interprets Davidson as holding that, if one adds to one's knowledge of a truth-theory the knowledge that the theory is "translational"—i.e., that the sentences that appear on the right-hand sides of the T-sentences it generates translate the sentences mentioned on the left-hand sides—then that will be enough information to allow one to draw inferences about what the various sentences mean. Soames finds almost every step of the argument to be problematic. But:
  1. Might it help to replace (1) by "The following is a translational truth-theory for Maria's fragment of Italian: ...", where the dots are filled by the theory? The thought is that, in that case, step (2) is unnecessary, and we can move directly to step (3).
  2. Regarding the move from step (3) to step (4), Soames is of course correct that any such theory will imply lots of T-sentences for any given sentence. (This is just because "p ≡ q" and "r" always imply "p ≡ (q & r)". So you can always conjoin any theorem of the theory to the right-hand side of any of the T-sentences it proves, and that will still be a theorem.) But any such view will have to deal with this kind of problem, i.e., find some way to specify what's meant by the 'canonical' T-sentence that the theory proves for a given sentence. There are a variety of ways to do that.
  Does that take care of Soames's objections?
• Here's a different sort of view we might consider. One way to think of the Foster problem is as raising the question what additional premise might permit the inference from "S is true iff p" to "S means that p". As Soames interprets Davidson, and as he seems to state his view in "Radical Interpretation", the idea is that the additional premise is that the T-sentence is a theorem of a truth-theory that is verifiable on the basis of the sort of evidence that is available to a radical interpreter. So what's needed is knowledge about how the theory can be known. But if we're thinking of the theory as one that someone is actually using to interpret others, then might it not be enough if we said instead that they will be able to make this inference so long as they know the T-sentence on the basis of the sort of evidence that is available to them as a radical interpreter? So what's needed in this case is knowledge that is justified in a certain way.
• One might compare this to so-called 'rules of proof' in modal logic. In such systems, there is an inference rule of the following form:

  A.
  So, it is a necessary truth that A.

  Obviously, such an inference is invalid, in general. But, in such systems, the inference is permitted only when A is itself a theorem, i.e. (perhaps), is known in a certain way.
• How much (or how little) help might all that be to Davidson?

This is an extremely difficult paper—probably the hardest paper we will read. Part of the difficulty is that the dialectical structure of the paper is very complicated. I'll provide guidance by outlining the paper and asking some questions along the way. Note that by ¶1, I mean the first full paragraph on a page; ¶0 is the paragraph continuing from the previous page, if any.

In section 1, Higginbotham introduces his own account of the relationship between truth and meaning. It is perhaps worth emphasizing that Higginbotham is looking for an account of what meaning is that is "in harmony with semantic theory as it is actually practiced", that is, with the results of theoretical linguistics. (He was himself an important contributor to linguistic theory, as well as to philosophy.)

• On pp. 3-4¶2, Higginbotham quickly sketches an account of why reference is essential to the theory of meaning. This essentially summarizes the arguments of "Truth and Meaning". (I.e., reference is the key to compositionality.) The rest of p. 4 quickly introduces the Foster problem, arguing that no appeal to structure (as Davidson had suggested in "Truth and Meaning") can solve it.
• In the rest of the section (pp. 5-6), Higginbotham articulates a positive conception of what role a theory of truth might play in an account of a speaker's linguistic competenence, in particular, of their knowledge of meaning. He proposes to regard knowledge meaning as knowledge of facts about reference. E.g., someone's understanding the sentence "Alex runs" would be regarded as consisting in their knowledge that "Alex" refers to Alex, that "runs" is true of things that run, and so that "Alex runs" is true iff Alex runs. But that is not quite all. The thought is that these are facts one not only knows but also expects other speakers to know, somewhat the way that Lewis regards conventions as commonly known. Thus:

  From this point of view, meaning does not reduce to reference, but knowledge of meaning reduces to the norms of knowledge of reference [that is, to facts about what one is supposed to know about reference]. Such norms are iterated, because knowledge of meaning requires knowledge of what others know, including what they know about one's own knowledge. To a first approximation, the meaning of an expression is what you are expected, simply as a speaker, to know about its reference. (p. 5)

  Higginbotham does not here provide much motivation for this view. As he notes in footnote 6, however, there is an obvious link to notions like overtness that figure prominently in Grice and Lewis.
• So we might ask: How might one's own knowledge of T-sentences, and ability to rely upon others' knowing them, figure in an account of interpretation and communication? Take a simple case: Bob says to Toni, "Alex runs", in an effort to communicate that Alex runs. How, on Higginbotham's account, might this lead Toni to believe that Alex runs? How does it compare to the way that Lewis uses common knowledge in his account of conventions of truthfulness and trust and their role in communication?
• What is most distinctive of this view, compared with others are have seen, is that it is unapologetically psychological: It is a view about what competent speakers actually know that allows them to speak and understand their language. Note, however, that some such knowledge is, as Higginbotham remarks at the bottom of p. 5, "tacit": These are not things one knows explicitly, but only sub-consciously. We'll spend a good deal of time, shortly, talking about this notion (which plays a major role in linguistic theory and in other parts of cognitive science).

In section 2, Higginbotham argues against certain other types of solutions to the Foster problem, and then argues that his own view does solve it. The first page or so rehearses Soames's way of formulating the problem. The question is: Why isn't knowledge of the truth-conditions of "Firenze è una bella città" compatible with false beliefs about what it means?

• At p. 7¶1, Higginbotham distinguishes two sorts of responses to the Foster problem, very briefly articulating the "immanent" response, but then turning his attention to the "transcendent" response.
• The transcendent response is discussed from p. 7¶2, through p. 8¶1. The idea (which seems implicit in some of Davidson's remarks about this issue) is to deny that there are any facts about meaning beyond what would be apparent to a radical interpreter. That is: If there really is a difference of meaning of the sort on which the Foster problem rests (e.g., between "Snow is white" and "Snow is white and arithmetic is incomplete"), then that difference will have to be one that "disrupt[s] communication". The criticism is that, insofar as that seems plausible, it is because we are, in effect, appealing to facts about the contents of speech acts, in which case such an account "swallows meaning whole". One might see this line of thought as continuous with Strawson's: What I need to know, on this account, to decide what theory of truth is correct for Gianni is to what his communicative intentions are when he speaks to me. (See esp. p. 8, ¶1: "...I guessed at Gianni's meaning based upon my beliefs about what he would be likely to be interested intelling me".)
• Higginbotham criticizes the immanent response from p. 8¶2 through p. 9¶0. This part of the argument is a bit easier to understand. What is it?
• At p. 9¶2, Higginbotham explains own response to the Foster problem, viz: The account outlined in section 1 is immune to it. On his account, we are actually to think of Gianni as knowing that "Firenze è una bella città" is true iff Florence is a beautiful city, and that this is what others also know and expect one another to know. This is of course an empirical fact (assuming it is a fact). But, Higginbotham is insisting, knowing that is different from 'knowing' that "Firenze è una bella città" is true iff Florence is a beautiful city and arithmetic is incomplete, and that this is what others also know and expect one another to know. The crucial question here is parallel to one asked above: How would 'knowing' one of these things rather than the other affect one's use of language to communicate beliefs to other people?
• In the remainder of the section, Higginbotham briefly explores the role that knowledge, and common knowledge, play in his account. He remarks that "...the theory of truth...is not something that one starts with, augmenting it with conditions or constraints so as to make it acceptable as a theory of meaning. Rather, truth comes in as something [a competent speaker] knows about, and the deliverancess of the theory are of interest only insofar as knowledge of them is part of [her] linguistic competence" (p. 10). This echoes an earlier remark that his account "makes use of the information that a person tacitly possesses about the truth conditions of her own utterances" (p. 5). There is an implicit criticism of Davidson here, and an attempt to re-orient the focus of the theory of meaning. What is the criticism, and what is the new focus supposed to be?

You will recall that Strawson claimed that 'formal semanticists', such as Davidson, could give no reasonable account of the notion of expressing a belief, without appealing to the notion of a communicative intention. Rumfitt here means to answer Strawson, though he is going to argue that, to explain that notion (or one in the same vicinity), we need both the sorts of resources typically deployed by Griceans and the notion of truth-conditions.

• The first two sections mostly summarize material we have already discussed. But there are a couple of new points. In §II, Rumfitt argues, on Strawson's behalf, that the notion of truth, as it appears in the T-sentences that are suppossed to 'give meaning', cannot be one that is simply defined in a certain way. This kind of point has a long history in the literature on Tarski. (See e.g. Hartry Field, "Tarski's Theory of Truth", Journal of Philosophy (1972), pp. 347-75. (JSTOR).) As Rumfitt says, Davidson does not (by 1990, anyway) disagree, so we need not worry too much about this point.
• The more important question, raised in §III, is whether Strawson is right that the notion of assertion, and that of the content of an assertion, can be explained in terms of communicative intentions. The question that Rumfitt presses is what, precisely, my communicative intention is supposed to be when I assert, say, that Lily is asleep. We've discussed this question before, and Rumfitt recounts some of the back and forth that led to the idea that my intention is to get my audience to believe that I believe that Lily is asleep, not that Lily is asleep. But Rumfitt argues that there are problems with that view, too, and suggests at the beginning to §IV that there is not going to be a satisfying resolution to this problem: There just isn't any intention that one must always have when asserting that Lily is asleep.
• What Rumfitt suggests is that we should abandon the attempt to explain in such terms what assertion is and attempt instead to explain a more general notion: that of expressing the thought that Lily is asleep. The key idea is to appeal to the structure of a speaker's reasons for speaking as they do, and to try to extract from those an understanding of what it is to express a thought. The main point in this section is that, whatever those reasons are, they will always have to involve (and, in a certain sense, terminate in) the speaker's reasons for uttering a particular sentence. This is what is known as a 'basic action': it is something one can 'just do' and does not have to do by doing anything else. It would be well worth trying to formulate, in your own words, Rumfitt's argument for this claim.
  As Rumfitt remarks, there is no assumption here that people consciously go through the kind of reasoning he dicusses. The point of his reconstructions are to allow us to get a sense for what people's reasons actually are, and how our beliefs and desires lead us to act. This is a common and relatively uncontroversial way to think about reasons for action.
• Rumfitt's analysis is developed in §V. The key thought here is that the speaker's reasons for uttering a given sentence will, typically, include something that establishes a link between that sentence and a certain proposition that they mean to express. (Maybe one just wants to hear that particular sound, but that is not the typical case.) T-sentences are then supposed to be able to make this connection.
• We can pose the central question this way. Consider the (A) syllogism on p. 838. Why will the students learn that the Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815 if the instructor utters the sentence "The Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815" (that is the sentence S₀? The connection between the sentence and what the students learn is left out of this account of the instructor's reasons for speaking as they do. Rumfitt's idea is that we can fill in the missing details as follows:
  1. The students know that an utterance of "The Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815" is true iff the Battle of Waterloo was fought in 1815. (Why? Because they understand basic English.)
  2. The students will regard my utterance as true. (Why? Because I'm their teacher, and they trust me to speak the truth about such matters.)
  Something similar applies in the case of the (B) syllogism. So the idea is: What thought someone expresses when uttering a given sentence is determined by the T-sentence that, as we might put it, connects a sentence to a proposition in their reasons for speaking.
• A form of the Foster problem arises on p. 841, as an objection to the analysis stated at the top of that page. The observation is that various T-sentences might appear among my reasons for speaking. (Rumfitt gives a very complicated example to show this.) The idea behind his response is that, nonetheless, among these, there will be one that is most basic. Here is a simpler case. Suppose I want you to come to believe that Alex has left, but that I already know that you know that, if Drew has left, then Alex has left. Then I could utter "Drew has left" and leave the inference to you. So one of my reasons for uttering "Drew has left" is that
  3. You will know that my utterance of "Drew has left" is true iff Alex has left.
  But my utterance does not express the thought that Alex has left, but rather the thought that Drew has left. Rumfitt's idea is that (iii) is not my most basic reason but is itself grounded upon other things, namely:
  4. You will know that my utterance of "Drew has left" is true iff Drew has left.
  5. You know anyway that, if Drew has left, then Alex has left.
  So it is (iv), the more basic T-sentence, that tells us what thought was expressed.
• There is arguably a close relationship between Rumfitt's proposal and Higginbotham's answer to the Foster problem. In particular, both of them talk about "expectations" about what one's conversational partners will know. Large question: What more can be said about the relation between these two views?

Part II explores the same sort of issue, but in connection with "taking in" or "apprehending" a thought expressed by someone else. The analysis Rumfitt eventually gives, at the bottom of p. 850, is parallel to the analysis of expressing a thought, and many of the arguments Rumfitt gives in favor of it are parallel to those that are given in Part I.

The main reason we are reading this material is so that students can get a sense for how (most) theoretical linguists nowadays think about the nature of language. Probably the most central matter is Chomsky's distinction between E-language and I-language. We will need to appreciate both what the distinction is and why Chomsky thinks that I-language should be the focus of linguistic inquiry. (Chomsky sometimes uses the term "grammar" to mean I-language and "language" to mean E-language. This is an older, somewhat confusing, terminology that he had used in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.)

• Chomsky beings by motivating the study of language from a psychological point of view. He urges that there are three basic questions to be asked, which I will rephrase as:
  1. What does a competent speaker of a language know that allows them to be able to speak their language?
  2. How is that knowledge acquired?
  3. How is that knowledge deployed and employed in the actual day-to-day practice of speech?
  Question (1) can be asked in more of less specific ways. One might be interested in what some particular speaker knows; or what speakers of some language like English know; or what sort of knowledge is common to all human language-users (that being 'universal grammar', or UG). All these questions are empirical—including the question whether there is any knowledge common to all human language-users. But Chomsky thinks there are good reasons to pursue these questions. What kinds of reasons does he give? (See espeically pp. 7-13.) Which do you find most (or least) impressive?
• Regarding the distinction between E- and I-language: When Chomsky introduces this terminology in §§2.2-2.3, he remarks that E-language is external language, and I-language is internal language, and many of his remarks accord with that usage. But there is another distinction that is at least as important: between language though of extensionally and language thought of intensionally. If we restrict ourselves to semantics for the moment, then, on the extensional conception, a language would be thought of as a function from sentences to meanings (or something like that); on the intensional conception, it would be thought of as a system of rules for assigning meanings to sentences. Note that, since there can obviously be many sets of rules that yield the same function from sentences to meanings, languages in the intensional sense are finer-grained than languages in the extensional sense.
• Note that I-languages, in Chomsky's sense, are every bit as abstract as 'languages' in Lewis sense. But they are not just mappings from sentences to meanings. They are sets of rules by means of which a meaning can be determined for a given sentence. So whereas Lewis asked: What E-language L does a given population use? And what is it for L to be their language? Chomsky wants us to ask: What I-language does a given speaker 'know'? What it is for them to know it? How are I-languages acquired and shaped by experience? UG becomes the theory of the 'initial state' from which language acquisition begins and so, derivatively, a theory of what I-languages it is possible for human beings to acquire.
• Question: Think just of the case of syntax, where we are concerned not with meaning but just with grammaticality. How then would we think of languages on the extensional and intensional conceptions?
• Chomsky ends up, in §2.4.1, being very dismissive of the notion of E-language, as well as of what are sometimes called 'common' languages, like English or German). Is there something he's missing? Are there, at least, questions he should be taking more seriously?
  (Note: When Chomsky speaks of the 'language of arithmetic' here, you can think instead of the language of basic logic.)
• Much of Chomsky's discussion revolves around syntax and, in one striking passage (pp. 41ff), phonology. To emphasize a point that may seem obscure: Despite how it will seem to you, there is no "n" sound in "bent". You hear it, but it is not really there. Similarly in the other cases: What is in column (II) represents what you hear; what is in column (III) represents the sounds that are actually present.
• It would be natural—despite what Chomsky says on pp. 44-5—to want to apply these same sorts of considerations to the case of semantics. That is what we saw Higginbotham explicitly propose to do: "I am applying to semantics a research program that goes forward in syntax and phonology, asking, 'What do you know when you know a language, and how do you come to know it?'" ("Truth and Understanding", p. 13; compare p. 3 from today's reading). How might that sort of program in semantics be motivated, in a broadly Chomskyan way? One way to answer this question would be to consider the three "basic questions" that Chomsky asks on p. 3: How do they arise in the case of semantics? How are those questions similar to or different from the ones that arise in the case of syntax?
  (For those with relevant background: Chomsky clearly thinks that the psychological perspective he favors demands an internalist conception of mind and language. Whether that is so is controversial. My own view (and that of most) is that it does not. But we shall not pursue the matter.)

Evans's main goal in this paper is to try to explain what motivates the requirement that theories of meaning should be compositional, and to explain as well what might allow us to distinguish "extensionally equivalent" theories that prove all the same T-sentences.

Evans begins by insisting that, if compositionality is to be motivated at all, then it must be motivated in terms of speakers' actual abilities to understand 'novel' sentences. The question is what the relation is between a compositional (or, as Evans often says, "structure reflecting") theory of truth and actual speakers of the language. There are two options. One the weaker, one 'knows' such a theory if one acts as if one knew it. But then there is no distinguishing between extensionally equivalent theories. (Recall Lewis's skepticism about the possibility of making good sense that one 'grammar' rather than another is correct.)

The stronger interpretation is that speaker's somehow unconsciously deploy the information contained in the theory to figure out the meanings of novel sentences. The rest of the paper tries to give some substantial content to that notion.

In section II, Evans discusses a toy language with ten unary predicates and ten names, and so 100 sentences, and considers two theories of truth, T₁ and T₂, that (respectively) do and do not ascribe any sort of structure to the sentences of this language. Evans suggests that, considered as accounts of what a speaker of the language knows, these two theories can be distinguished empirically. The core idea is that the axioms of the theories can be associated with certain dispositions that the speaker has.

Evans specifies these dispositions using what are known as "substitutional" quantifiers, but we can (for our purposes, at least) rephrase the disposition that constitutes knowledge that `a' refers to John as:

(*) For any predicate P and any property φ, if U knows that P is true of the things that have the property φ, and if U hears an utterance of "Pa", then U will (ordinarily) form the belief that that utterance is true iff John has the property φ.

Evans insists that these dispositions "be understood in a full-blooded sense". Evans is alluding to a distinction generally made about dispositional properties. For something to be fragile, for example, is for it to be disposed to break easily. But (we ordinarily suppose) that is not all there is to the story: Something that is fragile has some other property that explains why it breaks easily. So, in this case, Evans wants us to think of (*) not just as saying something about what beliefs U will form under what circumstances but as saying that there is some underlying (cognitive) state corresponding to this disposition that explains why U forms the beliefs they do.

Evans goes on to argue (pp. 331-4) that there are empirical differences between the two theories, i.e., that there could be differences in the way a speaker behaved that would justify saying that they knew one or the other of these theories. What are these differences? Can you think of any other such differences we might expect to find?

In section III, Evans outlines some reasons for thinking that 'tacit knowledge' is quite different from ordinary knowledge (or belief). His main point is that it has what one might call restricted application: One's tacit knowledge of the meanings of words and the principles by which they combine is used only in one's comprehension of language. It is not available, in particular, for one to report verbally. Otherwise, semantics would be easy: If you wanted to know how adverbs work, say, you could just ask someone; after all, we all know how they work, right? But we only know tacitly, and our knoweldge is (as it is sometimes said) "modular" and unavailable to us outside certain applications.

In section IV, Evans discusses the question whether attribution of tacit knowledge of a structured theory of meaning to a speaker can explain their s capacity to understand novel sentences. Evans first concedes that, by itself, it cannot. It is, honestly, not entirely clear to me why. I think the reason is this. Suppose that the speaker regards some utterance of the sentence "Gb", for example, as being true iff Harry is happy. And suppose that we were to regard that judgement as the exercise of the dispositions that constitute their tacit knoweldge of the theory T₂. Then the judgement cannot also be regarded as explained by her having those same dispositions: that would be like explaining a sleeping pill's effectiveness (to take a famous example) in terms of its dormativity—its disposition to make people sleepy.

But the usual response to this kind of objection is that it assumes that the disposition is "thin" rather than "full-blooded", as Evans's were meant to be. So why doesn't Evans just say that, if the dispositions are full-blooded, then there is an explanation to be had, in terms of whatever the categorical basis of those dispositions is? Perhaps this is the point Evans is making when he says that "to say that a group of phenomena have a common explanation is obviously not yet to say what the explanation is": To give a satisfying explanation, we would need to know what the states underlying the dispositions actually were. It's not clear to me how this plays out, in the end. It may well turn on large questions about the nature of explanation. (Some of these get discussed in the later literature on tacit knowledge mentioned above.)

Evans goes on to suggest that we can get an explanation of "creativity" if we embed the attribution of tacit knowledge in a larger story about language acquisition. How is that supposed to go? How does it relate to the "full-bloodedness" of the dispositions? (Developing a proper answer to the various questions I've been asking here would make a nice term paper, by the way.)

Davies is interested in the question whether there is a way of making sense of the idea that a language (in roughly Lewis's sense) has a certain structure without having to claim that speakers of the language must in any sense, including tacitly, be aware of that structure. So, in particular, in the case of Evans's 100-sentence language, Davies wants to claim that, even if speakers fail to have the sorts of dispositions Evans specifies, it can still be true that the language they speak has a certain sort of semantic structure.

Davies suggests that semantic theories should meet what he calls the structural constraint:

If, but only if, there could be speakers of L who, having been taught to use and know the meanings of sentences (of L) s₁, ...,s_n..., could by rational inductive means go on to use and know the meaning of the sentence s..., then a theory of truth for L should employ in the canonical derivations of truth condition specifying biconditionals for s₁, ...,s_n resources already sufficient for the canonical derivation of a biconditional for s. (p. 138)

The kind of case Davies had in mind would be one in which someone had learned the meanings of "Fa" and "Gb" and was, on that basis, able to figure out the meanings of "Fb" and "Ga".

Note (as Davies emphasizes) that this involves what a hypothetical speaker could do, much along the lines of what Davidson suggests in "Radical Interpretation". The basic point here is supposed to be, again, that semantics need not have anything particular to do with facts about how speakers actually do understand their language.

In part I of the paper, Davies considers four objections to the structural constraint. The most important of these is the fourth. Davies' initial presentation of the objection is somewhat complicated, but he gives a concrete example on p. 146. The core of the objection is that certain actual speakers of a language might lack the ability to "project" the meanings of certain sentences they have not encountered (e.g., "Bug moving"), whereas other speakers might have that ability. If so, then it seems odd to say that the language of the speakers who cannot "project" has the same structure as that of the speakers who can project, simply because someone else could project meaning in that way.

Davies's response is to deny that, in such a case, the common sentences of the two languages (e.g., "Bug") actualy do have the same meaning. How exactly does this save the structural constraint? What does it say about how the meanings of sentences are being specified when languages are identified as Davies identifies them at the very beginning of the paper? Can we really say what the meanings of the sentences are without knowing whether they are semantically structured? That is: Is this response compatible with Davies's insistence that, even if speakers understand Evans's 100-sentence language in a non-compositional way, still the right semantics for that language is the compositional one? (We'll return to this below.)

In part II, Davies discusses what is involved in crediting speakers with "implicit" knowledge of a theory of meaning for their language. Davies first step is to introduce a notion of "full understanding" of a language: Someone fully understands a language L if she is in a "differential state" with respect to the various words (semantic primitives) of the language. The terminology here is confusing, but what Davies means is just that this speaker has the sorts of dispositions concerning acquisition and loss that Evans discusses, as well as dispositions concerning change of meaning that Evans does not mention. (This allows for answers to certain sorts of objections to Evans.) That is: If this speaker revised their view about what "Fa" meant, then that would lead to corresponding changes in their view either about what "Ga" meant or about what "Fb" meant—because what has really happened is that they have changed their view either about what "a" means or about what "F" means.

This leads to a different objection to what Davies argued in part I. Suppose there is a community that speaks the Evans language but which does not have the kinds of dispositions just mentioned. Now suppose that they come to use, say, "Fa" so that its meaning changes, but none of the meanings of any other sentences do. Should we say that now their language does not have any structure but that it did before? Would it be an alternative to say that their language only seemed to have any semantic structure before?

In §12, Davies worries that mere dispositions are not enough—compare Evans's insistence on 'full-blooded' dispositions—and so invokes causal and explanatory relations as well in giving a full account. In the case of Evans's language, for example, the claim would be that a 'full understander' would be in certain states S_a, S_b, S_F, and S_G such that are "causally operative in the production of" their beliefs about what "Fa", etc, mean; moreover, their believing that "Fa" means that John is bald is explained by their being in S_a and S_F.

Davies then raises the question whether we should attribute, to a full understander, tacit or implicit knowledge or belief that, say, "a" refers to John. He grants, in §14, that some kind of 'mechanism' must be in place that 'mirrors' the derivation of T-sentences from the axioms. But the question is whether S_a, S_F, etc, are beliefs. In §§15-17, he considers, and dismisses, a series of objection to the claim that we should attribute such beliefs. In §18, though, he offers a reason not to do so, namely: There seems to be no need to attribute anything like implicit or tacit desires with which such beliefs might interact to produce intentions. His reasons seem closely related to Evans's point that such states are not "at the service of many projects".

But one might concede that point and suggest that the emphasis on belief here is inappropriate. How would Davies's discussion be affected if we insisted upon talking instead of informational states? So we would think of our full understander as possessing information about the reference of "a" and about what things "F" is true of, but not say that these are 'beliefs'.

One might think of Fricker's goal in this paper as to try to answer Lewis's claim that there is "no promising way to make objective sense of the assertion that a grammar Γ is used by a population P whereas another grammar Γ', which generates the same language as Γ, is not" (L&L, p. 20)—and to do so on Lewis's own terms. That is, Fricker accepts that semantic facts about a language must supervene on how it is used—on the linguistic abilities of its speakers—and that these abilites relate only to what whole sentences mean. (These are principles (α) and (A), on pp. 52 and 56, more or less). And yet, she wants to claim, each language has a semantic structure that is essential to it and to which speakers of the language bear some non-trivial relation. (These are principles (β) and (γ) on p. 52.) This is a bold, which is not necessarily to say 'heroic', view. The strategy, to a large extent, is to effect a synthesis of Evans and Davies.

There's a lot of talk in this paper about 'a priori principles governing interpretation'. This not language with which I find myself entirely comfortable. But one might simply think of Fricker as claiming that there are certain methodological principles to which we ought to adhere when constructing theories of meaning—never mind if they are a priori or empirical—and that among these is, e.g., a principle of compositionality.

Fricker begins, in section I, by rehearsing what is, very roughly, the metaphysical project elaborated by Davidson in "Radical Interpretation": explaining how semantic facts are determined by (grounded in) facts about the use of language. Section II introduces the problem with which she is concerned and argues that both Davies and Evans fail properly to vindicate the idea of semantic structure. Section III formulates an argument that the assumptions mentioned above lead to Lewis's conclusion: that a theory of meaning for a language need not uncover structure.

The main argument of the paper is in sections IV and V. Fricker concludes that "...facts about sentence-meanings are not independent of facts about their structure" (p. 60). She mentions three sorts of reasons in favor of this claim:

1. Unless there were "some form of Structural Postulate requiring that sentences be seen to be composed out of a stock of semantically primitive elements which make the same characteristic contribution to sentence-meanings in all their occurrences" (p. 59), interpretation would be too indeterminate. In particular, the interpretation of one sentence needs to be constrained by how other sentences are interpreted if we're to make any progress at all.
2. There are many sentences of, e.g., English that will never be uttered and yet that have determinate meanings. But if facts about meaning supervene on facts about use, then facts about the meanings of un-uttered sentences must supervene on facts about uttered sentences, and that can only be so if the language is compositional.
3. There is a connection between the meanings we assign to sentences and the contents we assign to speakers' beliefs. And the latter, typically, will themselves be structured, involving certain concepts we take the speakers to possess. This "will tend to ensure that OL sentences are not interpreted by ML sentences with a greater degree of structural complexity" than the speakers are capable of understanding (p. 60).

Regarding (2), it's important to remember that Fricker is trying to argue here not just for compositionality, but that the structural facts about the sentences of a language are essential to it. We've of course seen considerations about creativity and productivity before, and not everyone has wanted to draw the same conclusion Fricker does. What is it about how she's understanding (2) that leads her to the stronger conclusion?

The arguments just mentioned are elaborated and interwoven in section V. Here, Fricker adapts Evans's proposal to generate a "transcendental" definition of the notion of semantic primitive according to which the semantic structure of a language mirrors the causal structure of its speakers' linguistic abilities. This leads directly to the question whether different speakers' abilities might have different structures, which is what leads to Lewis's pessimistic conclusion. (See pp. 63-4.)

Fricker's response is on p. 64: She wants to insist that, if speakers understand a sentence to have different structures, then they cannot understand it in the same way. This is because it will be implausibe to hold that the beliefs these speakers associate with the sentence deploy the same concepts. So Fricker concludes that "...the initially plausible thought", which we find in Davies, that "there could be structure in a language, though its speakers were blind to it, is wrong" (p. 65).

I take Fricker's point here to be a version of one Davies makes in response to an objection. Consider an unstructured sentence "Bugmoving" and its structured counterpart "Bug moving". It might be that the two sentences have the same truth-condition, in the sense that the conditions in which the former is true are exactly the conditions in which the latter is true. But one might nonetheless want to say that the meaning of the latter sentence involves a predication of movement to a bug, whereas the meaning of the former does not. The structure thus turns out to be present in the meaning of the sentence itself and to reflect the conceptual resources that speakers of the language deploy when they use this sentence. The upshot is that, even though you only need to know what a sentence means to understand it, you can't know what the sentence means unless (in some sense) you appreciate its structure (p. 61).

Antony's main goal in this paper is to argue that semantics should be understood as inextricably linked to psychology: to questions about what speakers actually come to know about their languages when they learn to speak (and how they come to know it). She distinguishes three sorts of alternatives to her position: Platonism, represented by Devitt, Katz, and Soames; Instrumentalism, represented by Foster and Davidson; and Reconstructive Rationalism, represented by Dummett and Wright. (Except for the first, these are my terms.) She discusses Platonism only briefly, claiming that the facts about (say) English simply cannot be completely independent of facts about how English speakers behave and gesturing in the direction of Fricker.

The discussion of Instrumentalism and Reconstructive Rationalism, which dominates section I, consists, largely, in playing them off against one another. The latter view insists that semantic theory should be concerned with speakers' knowledge, but only with a "systematized" (Dummett) or "idealized" (Wright) version of such knowledge, not with the knowledge actual speakers possess. Antony carefully reconstructs Wright's reasons for thinking we do need to attribute semantic knowledge to speakers. She then notes (on p. 185), that what Wright keeps insisting is that there are certain explanatory purposes for which Wright thinks we need to attribute such knowledge to speakers. If not, then the attribution would be merely heuristic (and thus no different from what Instrumentalism offers). But, she suggests, "...the rational reconstruction of linguistic meaning cannot explain the rationality of human language use if the posited linguistic structure is not available to speakers" (p. 188). That is: Just saying what an idealized speaker might know that would make their use of language rational cannot show that ordinary speakers' use of language is rational. But that was what we were supposed to be explaining. How fair a criticism is this? Is there some other explanatory goal that Wright's "idealized epistemology of understanding" might serve?

Antony goes on to argue that the idealizations inherent in Reconstructive Rationalism are difficult to reconcile with the professed goals of its proponents. There is, she says, a "tension between, on the one hand, appealing to human capacities in order to justify features of meaning-theoretic projects, and on the other, ignoring the actual nature of those capacities" (p. 188). The original sin here is Davidson's attempt to motivate compositionality, and the problem this observation poses for Reconstructive Rationalism is supposed to be that it is hard to see why, if we are not going to idealize away from the finitude of the language-learner, we should think it justified to idealize away from any of the other circumstances under which language is, in fact, acquired by human beings. I.e., the question is: Which idealizations are legitimate and which are not, and why?

I take Anonty's more fundamental point to be something like this. What motivates the principle of compositionality is the fact that actual speakers are actually able to interpret novel sentences. Presumably, there is some answer to the question how they do it. Either we think they do so in a way that makes their appreciation of the meaning of the new sentence rationally justified or we do not. If we don't, it's unclear why we should think that there is, as Wright supposes, any rational basis for such knowledge. But if we do, then why not just ask how people actually come, rationally, by knowledge of the meanings of novel sentences? Of what real interest is the question how some idealized agent might do so? (As Antony notes, this criticism is very much of a piece with one that Quine makes of 'rational reconstruction' more generally.)

This point then morphs into a criticism of Instrumentalism. The discussion is directed at Quine's restriction on the data on which radical translation must be based, but could equally be directed at Davidson's corresponding restriction on the data on which radical interpretation must be based (what's held true under what circumstances). Such restrictions are motivated by claims about what sort of evidence is available, in principle, to a language-learner (or, though Antony does not mention the point, to an actual speaker who is attempting to determine if someone else speaks her language—see the first couple pages of "Radical Interpretation"). Antony argues that the evidence that is allowed to a radical whatever-er is both wider and narrower than what is available to actual language-learners. How so?

But the most interesting claim Antony makes is this one:

Considered in the context of Quine's metaphysical goals, the idealization involved in permitting the linguist an unlimited amount of behavioural evidence appears concessive to the meaning realist; in fact, it is a slick piece of bait-and-switch. The cooperative tone distracts us from the fact that Quine has already begged the crucial question, by assuming that whatever physical facts metaphysically determine meaning must be identical with the physical facts that constitute the evidence children have available to them during language acquisition. (pp. 192-3)

What does Antony mean here? What might be examples of physical facts on which semantic facts supervene that are not among the facts available as evidence to a child learning language? An even more interesting question is how, if there are such facts, they might, in some other (non-evidential) sense, be "available" to ordinary speakers interpeting one another. Here's a question that might help you get at a possible answer: Suppose that, as a matter of empirical fact, there were exactly 1000 concepts humans could possess, and that they were all innate, so that we were all born already possessing all of them and could never come to possess any others. How would that affect language acquisition and interpretation?

There is thus a common criticism of both Instrumentalism and Reconstructive Rationalism: "...[T]he epistemic strategies of 'ideal' learners are of no theoretical value to the task of understanding human cognitive competencies if the idealizations abstract away from epistemic constraints that are in fact constitutive of the learning task confronting humans" (p. 193). Yes or no?

Section II of the paper turns to questions about tacit knowledge. Antony begins (on pp. 195-8) by rehearsing some of the reasons people have found tacit knowledge puzzling. She then argues (on pp. 198-200) that the strategy pursued by Evans and Davies has a fatal flaw: It purports to justify the attribution of tacit knowlege entirely on the basis of an isomorphism between the structure of a semantic theory and the structure of a speaker's abilities: But "...isomorphisms are cheap: the mere fact that the formal structure of a particular theory can be projected onto some structure of causally related states is not enough to make it true that the set of states actually embodies the theory", that is, that those states carry the sort of information that the theory does (p. 200).

By contrast, Antony insists, what we want is for the causal processes that underlie the understanding of novel sentences to be sensitive to information about the meanings of sub-sentential constituents. And she proposes that we can have that only if we take seriously the idea that there are states in the speaker that encode the very information articulated by a semantic theory, and that these states interact causally in ways that are sensitive to that information. Accepting those assumptions means accepting a very strongly 'realist' conception of the mind and of mental processes. But, or so Antony argues, only such a conception can give us a plausible account of tacit knowledge.

Here again, then, is the big point Antony is trying to make. Almost everyone we have read seems willing to accept something like the following reasoning, which Fricker makes explicit: Whatever the truth about what expressions of natural language mean, that truth must somehow be knowable on the basis of the sort of evidence that's available to a child learning language, or to an ordinary speaker who is just trying to make sure that their conversational partners really do mean what they seem to mean. So, in some sense, meaning must be 'manifest' in linguistic behavior. Different people seem to have different ideas what 'linguistic behavior' is, and then they argue about how determinate meaning really is, whether we can really think of words (and not just sentences) as having meaning, and so forth. But Antony thinks this whole set-up is a con game. Why?

Grice writes in "Logic and Conversation":

In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered. (p. 25)

Grice is of course aware that contextual factors may play various sorts of roles in determining what is said, with respect to words like "I" and "you" and "this". But the fixed, stable meanings of the words used are supposed to play an especially important role.

We have more or less been following Grice in this respect, and assuming that we can derive the truth-condition of a sentence from semantic axioms governing its component parts. But Carston, in this paper, challenges this sort of assumption. She is particularly concerned with the requirements of a psychologically adequate account of linguistic competence. And she argues that, if we want such an account, then the difference between what is said—which she calls the explicature associated with an utterance—and what is implicated is much less stark than Grice seems to suppose.

The first lesson to learn from this paper is that it is not at all clear how we should draw the distinction between what is said and what is meant. Carston presents a whole battery of examples to show this. Her discussion of "and" is especially intriguing, since that was one of the examples in which Grice was especially interested. In particular, Carston argues that an utterance of "A and B" can assert the existence of all sorts of different relations between A and B: temporal, causal, rational, and so forth. And she argues further that neither the view that "and" is multiply ambiguous nor Grice's view that the assertion of such relations is always an implicature can be sustained. The view she proposes is instead that speakers use various sorts of pragmatic processes, very similar to those that generate implicatures, to "enrich" the linguistically specified content so as to arrive at what is said.

More specifically, Carston opposes what she calls the "linguistic direction principle", which claims that any "explicating" process must be in response to something in the linguistic form that calls for it. She sees the more traditional view as supposing that "what is said" must be truth-evaluable and that the only work context can do to fix what is said is whatever needs to be done to get us something truth-evaluable. So, e.g., the reference of demonstrative has to be determined, since otherwise one has nothing truth-evaluable; but one does not need to find any relation for "and" to express beyond truth-functional conjunction, since that is already truth-evaluable. What do you think of her arguments against this traditional view?

Our main interest will be in the sorts of arguments Carston gives that, e.g, the temporal aspect of certain uses of "and" must be part of what is said. There are four of these:

• Functional: Carston has views about the different roles the explicature and implicature play, and in particular about how the implicature is generated. These are supposed to imply that the implicature cannot logically entail the explicature. Too little seems to be said here to make it clear why she holds this view and, frankly, it does not seem overwhelmingly plausible on its face. (Can you think of any clear counterexamples to that claim?) So feel free to set it aside if you wish, though it would be nice to hear if anyone has some idea how to justify this restriction, which plays a large role early in the paper.
• Relevance: Carston argues that relevance plays a central role in communication. In particular, considerations of relevance enter not just into the determination of implicatures but into the determination of what is said, e.g., the resolution of ambiguity, the determination of the reference of demonstratives, and so forth. Claims about relevance thus fuel some of Carston's claims about what is part of the explicature. Here, though, Carston mostly gestures at work by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson, so these arguments may be difficult for us to evaluate. (That is why I said you can just skim or skip it.)
• Negation: Consider Grice's gas station case. Joe says, "Yo, Bill, I'm out of gas!" and Bill answers, "There's a gas station around the corner". Grice says that Bill implicates that the station is open and has gas to sell. Suppose Fred knows that the station is closed. Then it seems clear that Fred cannot say to Joe, "Bill's wrong", thereby meaning that the station is closed. As it's sometimes said, negation cannot "target" the implicated content.
• Conditionals: There is something similar to be said about conditionals. I'll leave it as an exercise (i.e., feel free to do this in your response) to explain how the "conditional test" is supposed to work.

Carston uses the "negation test" and the "conditional test" to argue, in a variety of cases, that the explicature is much richer than one might have supposed. As I said before, there is a whole battery of examples here. Which of these seem to you to be the strongest? which the weakest? and why? What strategies do you think might be available for resisting the conclusion that Carston wants to draw: that pragmatic processes play a surprisingly large role in determining what is said?

It's not always clear that Carston's various tests deliver the same result. She argues based on functional considerations that "The park is some distance from where I live" says something non-trivial. But how does it interact with negation and conditionals?

This paper articulates and defends the "binding argument" against contextualism, which first appeared in the optional reading mentioned above.

As Stanley makes clear in the introduction, his larger goal is to defend a form of what Carston calls the 'linguistic direction principle': "...all the constituents of the propositions hearers would intuitively believe to be expressed by utterances are the result of assigning values to the elements of the sentence uttered, and combining them in accord with its structure" (pp. 150-1). In particular, there is no place for 'enrichment' of the sort to which Carston appeals. Stanley's view is that context can affect what proposition is expressed by an utterance (what is said) only by affecting the interpretation of elements of the syntactic structure of the sentence uttered.

The first section of the paper elaborates the binding argument and places it in the context of the sorts of arguments often given in linguistic theory for the existence of "hidden" or "unpronounced" elements. If these sorts of arguments are unfamiliar, don't worry about it. The main point here is simply that the binding argument is very much of a piece with the sorts of arguments in favor of "covert elements" that linguists standardly give. That is, it's not some radically new idea.

What the binding argument is supposed to show is that that 'added' material that is allegedly provided by 'enrichment' actually corresponds to some unpronounced variable (or pronoun) that is present in the syntactic structure of the sentence. The evidence for this is that the variable in question can be bound, i.e., that its value can be made to depend upon some other aspect of the sentence. That is, the claim is that, in

(2) Every student answered every question.

The second section recounts a debate between Sellars and Strawson over the proper treatment of so-called "incomplete descriptions", such as "the table" (which, for the obvious sort of reason, are not straightforwardly amenable to Russell's treatment of descriptions). Stanley argues for two points: First, that we do not reach the 'natural' understanding (in context) of "The table is large" by supplying missing words, as we do in some other cases; Second, that what we do instead (to first approximation) is supply a 'domain' where 'the' table is supposed to be found. But the main point here is the one made at the end of the section concerning what a proper response to the binding argument would have to be like. One cannot simply say that there is some "magical" process through which the right interpretation is generated. One has actually to explain what that process is.

In the third section, Stanley elaborates such a response, drawing upon work by Robyn Carston and Kent Bach. The idea is roughly as follows. Fans of "free enrichment" already accept that, during the process of semantic interpretation, additional material can be added to the (possibly incomplete) proposition that is provided simply by the literal meanings of the words used and whatever compositional rules there might be. For example, if someone utters the sentence "Michael is tall", then this can be 'enriched' to "Michael is tall for a man" or "Michael is tall for a basketball player". Similarly, then, the thought is that the same process could also provide a pronoun (amongst other material) that can then be bound by a higher operator. E.g., in the course of interpreting "Every senator is disliked by most voters", one might 'enrich' it to: Every senator is disliked by most voters in his or her state, thus recovering the bound reading.

In the final section, Stanley argues against this sort of move by arguing that it over-generates. It is important to appreciate here that it is every bit as important that one be able to explain why certain readings of sentences are not available as that one should be able to explain why certain readings are available. For example, we want to know not just why, in "John's brother said Tom kissed him", the pronoun can take either "John" or "John's brother" as its antecedent, but also why it cannot take "Tom" as antecedent. So the worry here is that, if "free enrichment" can provide bindable material, then we would expect to get readings of sentences we cannot in fact get.

Stanley claims that:

(15) Everyone has had the privilege of having John greet.

is ungramamtical, but that it could be rescued from ungrammaticality by the addition of the word "her" to the end of the sentence:

(16) Everyone has had the privilege of having John greet her.

(This is itself ambiguous, but we are interested here in the reading where "her" is bound by "everyone".) Since that is the sort of thing that "free enrichment" is supposed to be able to do, it is then a mystery why (15) is not grammatical after all. But (15) is grammatical (and a similar point applies to (13)). Greeting is a task one might have at a church or a meeting, and so (15) can perfectly well mean that everyone has had the privilege of John's performing a certain task for them. Still, if "enrichment" could add the word "him" to the end of (15), then (15) would be ambiguous, and now the objection is that (15) simply isn't ambiguous in that way. Thus, this account "over-generates", in the sense that it predicts that (15) should have a reading it simply does not have, unless some way can be found to stop (15) from being "enriched" to (16).

It is extremely important here to keep clearly in mind that the issue is supposed to be whether utterances of (15) can express what (16) does; that is, the question is whether what is said when (15) is uttered can sometimes be that would have been said had (16) been uttered. It is not relevant if utterances of (15) can communicate what (16) does, i.e., that (16) could be what is meant. This is the point made on pp. 165-6.

Finally, then, let me mention a different series of examples.

1. Everyone who read a book skipped some pages.
2. Everyone who read skipped some pages.
3. Everyone skipped some pages.

I claim that there are readings of (i) that are not available for (ii) or (iii) but that should be if quantifier domain restriction worked through "enrichment". Can you develop this argument?