Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and Their Interface

Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and Their Interface JAY DAVID ATLAS OXFORD...

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Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and Their Interface

JAY DAVID ATLAS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Logic, Meaning, and Conversation

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Logic, Meaning, and Conversation Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and Their Interface

JAY DAVID ATLAS

1 2005

3 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright © 2005 by Jay David Atlas Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Atlas, Jay David. Logic, meaning, and conversation : semantical underdeterminacy, implicature, and their interface. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13 978-0-19-513300-4 ISBN 0-19-513300-5 1. Pragmatics. 2. Semantics (Philosophy) I. Title. B831.5 .A75 2000 121'.68—dc21 99-030797

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Morton G. White, Paul Benacerraf, Rogers Albritton, philosophers, to Stephen C. Levinson, Frans Zwarts, Laurence R. Horn, Jerrold Sadock, linguists, to Sean D. P. Fennessy, John Robert Purvis, and to John Francis Walter


PREFACE

T he flight to Frankfurt on the Lufthansa 747-400 passed slowly, as August flights from the summer afternoon sun of Los Angeles into the European darkness tend to do. The seat was comfortable enough, even for my six-foot one-inch frame, the cuisine was German bourgeois respectable, and I managed to sleep. The charm of the trip was awakening to a large, healthy, hot breakfast, but only after the stretching exercises were completed. With attention to detail, hygiene, and the physical culture of northern Germany, some Mephisto at the airline had mandated a wake-up video that taught passengers a way to stretch their chair-encased muscles while they remained in their seats. It was a show and practice exercise video, done while strapped in one’s seat, that loosened and stretched the feet, ankles, calves, upper legs, arms, and neck. So, at the command of the celluloid instructor, I rolled, waggled, extended, raised, and kneaded my body back to life, as did most of my fellow passengers, except for some unruly nonconforming Americans who decided to remain cramped and caged in their seatformed postures. By the end of the video, I felt awake and physically alive. “Damn the Germans,” I thought; “Such a good idea!” I enjoyed the breakfast. Transferring in Frankfurt for a short flight to Brussels, I then took a train to Leuven in Belgium, a university city where I was to lecture for a week in August 1990 at the Second European Summer School on Language, Logic, and Information. It was to be an advanced course on “Implicature and Logical Form: The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface” for graduate students in philosophy, logic, linguistics, and computer science from universities in the European Union. Some six hundred graduate students had assembled for two weeks, 30 July–10 August 1990, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven for this intellectual feast of a summer school, and I was on the menu. “I’m an hors d’oeuvre,” I thought, and I expected about six students to show up at the lecture hall on Monday morning for the week’s ten hours of course lectures that I had written. I had even bought my first laptop computer in May, a Sharp 8088 laptop with two 720K disk drives, in order to compose the lectures, realizing that without electronic help in editing I would never write, type, revise, and retype the body of lectures in time.

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The commuter train was packed with students, bureaucrats, grandmothers, and me. I barely found a seat and a place to put my small backpack containing my precious lectures and my bulgy, denier nylon, soft luggage. To call it “luggage” would be infelicitous; it was a sack with cloth handles, but wonderfully light and commodious, just awkward to stow, and I had bought it on a whim at Crate and Barrel where my cousin Pamela had been working between her usual six-month walk-abouts: eight countries in Africa, or five provinces of China, or sixteen blocks of Santa Monica. I couldn’t really decide, in my jet-lagged state, whether the luggage was properly a nylon crate or a nylon barrel. Fatigue made me more and more sodden as we crept away from Brussels on little steel wheels. Then, intruding into this linguistical musing, came the slightly accented, youthful voice of a university student speaking English to me. “Are you going to Leuven?” he asked. I looked up into the cheerful, handsome Flemish face of a student, who sat across the aisle from me, next to his comely girlfriend. “Yes,” I admitted. “There is a summer school, and I shall be lecturing.” “Where are you staying?” he asked, and I told him the name of the hotel. “It’s not far from the station. I will show you the way.” I thought, he even uses the first-person ‘will’ form correctly; hardly any of my American students could, but putting this Henry Higginsish thought aside, I accepted his aid, thanked him for his kindness, and marveled at his manners. I registered at the hotel, examined my first room, asked to be moved to the back of the hotel where there would be no street noise, and enjoyed a hot shower—those splendid German showerheads again—and a short nap before lunch. At lunch I encountered Frans Zwarts of Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands, and his American wife, Sharon Parry. I had spent five days talking with Zwarts at a week’s conference in Stuttgart a year before, the last afternoon of which put me and Hans Kamp on the platform together. My usual luck: playing the other bookend to someone like Hans Kamp. I had also had fascinating talks with Jaap Hoepelman, Hoepelman’s and Zwarts’s doctoral student Peter Blok, and Sjaak de Mey. The Dutch semanticists, I discovered, had read my published work, particularly my (1988) article on negative existence statements, which showed that the Russellian problem of the relationship between meaning and ontology had been fundamentally misconceived. Until then I knew only three people who had liked, been convinced by, or even read, the essay: Mark Richard; the Waynefleet Professor of Metaphysics in Oxford, Sir Peter Strawson; and the Most Famous Syntactician in the world at MIT, who had written me that “It is a convincing piece, and does indeed cut through a hoary tradition” (Noam Chomsky, personal communication, 12 February 1989). Everybody else had ignored it as far as I knew, until I met the Dutch semanticists. But at the end of the Stuttgart conference, Zwarts had asked whether I would like to give a course in Leuven the following year at the European summer school. After I asked whether he thought more than five students would show up, I said “Sure.” Why not? Perhaps it was time to summarize what I thought was right and what was wrong with Paul Grice’s (1989a) theory of conversational inference, a model of talk as rational activity in which Grice tries to explain the grounds for the addressee’s inference from what (he believes) a speaker asserts to what (he believes) the speaker “implies, suggests, or conveys” by, in, or when making the assertion. Then I’d have to try to explain my own (Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979) wildly popu-

PREFACE

ix

lar view that a radical, nonspecific semantics would be required by any theory of pragmatic inference, if the theories of the pragmatic module and the semantic module of the mind/brain’s language faculty were to provide a consistent, descriptively adequate and explanatory account of utterance-interpretation (see Lakoff 1977; K. Bach 1987; Kempson 1988a; Horn 1989; Iten 1998: 63, 67; and Levinson 1997, 2000). So this book began life in the lecture halls of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, during the Second European Summer School in Language, Logic, and Information in August 1990. It turned out that more than one hundred graduate students from universities throughout the European Union and a dozen or so members of the summer school faculty—even once George Bealer—showed up for my lectures. More copies of my course book of readings were sold to the graduate students for my course than for any other course in the summer school. (These people are obviously nuts, I thought.) Out of my Leuven lectures, and my lecture in Stuttgart in 1989, the invitation for which I am much indebted to Jaap Hoepelman, grew three doctoral dissertations; those of Ana von Klopp (Edinburgh, 1993) on negation, Peter Blok (Groningen, 1993) on focus, and Michiel Leezenberg (Amsterdam, 1995) on metaphor. Von Klopp began her dissertation with the piquant remark, “At the 1990 European Summer School in Language, Logic, and Information, Jay Atlas told me about the dangers of wasting one’s youth on negation. I was foolish enough not to listen, and this is the result.” After the last lecture in the series, Richard Oehrle suggested that the lectures might serve some intellectual and pedagogical purpose if published, and my theneditor Angela Blackburn at Oxford University Press, U.K., agreed. Angela wanted my lectures right then, August 1990. After all, sitting at lunch in Oxford, she had the notebook containing the typed lectures in her hand. Well, I said, perhaps a little polishing would be appropriate, as usual barely controlling my desire to rush into print, contribute papers to the annual meetings of the APA, shower the journals with paper, and generally festschrift it up. Eleven years later I have finished this little, chatty, nontechnical book, written with the easy accessibility that I have made my trademark, supplemented with much new material but inspired by my 1990 Leuven lectures on the semantics-pragmatics interface: the relationship between literal meaning, logical form, and interpretative inference. After remonstrances from John Francis Walter, Stephen Levinson, and Thomas James Rankin, I did not throw the 1997 version of the manuscript off a cliff; actually, I was at the Max Planck Institute for Psycho-linguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, at the time (fall 1997), and there wasn’t a cliff within two hundred kilometers. What I realized in Groningen during my visiting research professorship in 1995, and it was reinforced when I finally read Alberto Coffa’s fascinating 1991 book The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap, was my commitment to a semantic tradition originating in the views of the mathematicians Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, and Hilbert and in my tutelage at Amherst College by Robert Breusch, himself Zermelo’s assistant in the editing of Cantor’s collected papers, the semantic tradition that survived in the Vienna Circle among Schlick, Waismann, and the early Wittgenstein. My admiration for the writings and teaching of Nelson Goodman, Morton White, Noam Chomsky, Donald Davidson, Sir Peter Strawson, Jonathan Cohen, Jerrold Katz,

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PREFACE

Paul Benacerraf, Arthur Prior, Hao Wang, and Dana Scott, my formative schoolboy reading of Morton White, Ernest Nagel, Stephen Toulmin, and Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser’s anthology in the philosophy of science during my last year at Phillips Exeter Academy, and my study of the problems and rigorous arguments of the semanticists of the fourteenth century, a century that was as catastrophic for Europe as our own twentieth century (Tuchman 1978), resulted in an antipathy to behaviorist and epistemologically motivated views about meaning. These views are adulterated by post-positivist epistemology and have caused much philosophical misunderstanding of language—for example, see C. Peacocke (1992). I rejected neo-Kantianism and various forms of verificationism in the theories of meaning of Neurath, Reichenbach, Carnap, the middle Wittgenstein, and even those of my teacher Sir Michael Dummett, who provided so much of the philosophical stimulus to my thinking about negation and presupposition. Their views have resulted in confusions about meaning that are almost impossible to remedy in our current intellectual climate. But there are now signs of a reconsideration taking place: see Chomsky (1995b, 1996b,c) and J. A. Fodor (1998); for his re-thinking of his own views, see Michael Dummett’s splendid work (1993: 157–61); for discussion of the role that Dummett’s views can play in actual psycholinguistic theorizing about the acquisition of language, see Atlas (2001). This book presents an account of the interface between literal meaning and interpretative inference that purports to be more “descriptively and explanatorily adequate” than Grice’s William James lectures of 1967, but it is not a neo-Kantian essay on the conceptual possibility of any future pragmatics of language. The linguistic data are explicable if we hypothesize that the literal meanings of sentence-types are quite different from either truth conditions or assertibility conditions of sentencetokens and that idealized interpreters conform to, and perhaps employ, certain pragmatic principles of inference. But my hypotheses are not considered by me to be necessary principles of any possible use of language or constitutive of the rationality of language use (or any other bits of the neo-Kantian, verificationist, or later Wittgensteinian framing of questions about language as a practical ability that even Paul Grice was tempted by). What I do claim to have shown, by actually constructing one rather than as a conclusion of a transcendental argument, is that a theory of interpretative inference that “saves the phenomena” and a theory of literal meaning that “saves the phenomena” will be congruent in the ways that I describe in this book: if there is an interface between the semantic and the pragmatic, between Chomsky’s Internalist Semantics and the Performance System, it has the character described herein (see Atlas 1978b, 1979, 1989). Two applications of my theory of the semantics-pragmatics interface are given in chapter 5, in my account of the semantics and pragmatics of comparative adjectives and adverbial approximatives, and in chapter 6, in my account of numerical adjectives. This work was begun at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, in 1983. Morton White and my colleague Robert Sleigh were wonderfully supportive and tolerant of this logical inquiry and of my youthful obsessions. The institute is my idea of heaven. Living in a Marcel Breuer–designed apartment, abutted by the woods of a wildlife sanctuary with trails for solitary or companionable ramblings, an office to work in that had once been occupied by Sir Isaiah Berlin,

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surrounded by the most intelligent conversation in the world, and when one had thought enough about logic, language, and philosophy, conversing about quantum gravity or string theory with Andrew Strominger and seeing off-off-Broadway plays with John Walter—that is intellectual heaven. My first inklings of my ideas on the semantics-pragmatics interface—that is, the relationship between semantical underdeterminacy (nonspecificity) and interpretative inference—germinated during the summer of 1973 at the Mathematical and Social Sciences Board Workshop on the Formal Pragmatics of Natural Language in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where, at the invitation of George Lakoff and Lauri Karttunen, I collaborated intensively with Stephen Levinson on thinking through Grice’s theory of conversational implicature, and I had the epiphany that ‘not’ created not ambiguous but, as it turned out, semantically nonspecific sentences (see Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989). In the spring of 1973 at the University of Texas, Austin, Conference on Performatives, Presupposition, and Implicature, Lakoff had introduced me to Stephen Levinson, then a graduate student. That was the beginning of my intellectual collaboration with Levinson on the pragmatics of language, a collaboration that has now spanned thirty years; it has been a splendid intellectual adventure enriched by a warm personal friendship with him, his wife Penny Brown, and their son Nicholas. As my late father, Jacob Henry Atlas, once remarked to me, in the persona of Atlas-Brown, Inc., Houston and Fort Worth, Texas, after dining with a group of my Princeton graduate student friends, “You have such wonderful friends. How do they put up with you?” How my father put up with me is an even more unanswerable question; I had only one conversation with him about my choice of vocation as logician and philosopher and student of language, during the Christmas vacation of my first year at Amherst College. He: “Have you thought about what you’d like to do as a vocation?” The seventeen-year-old me: “I’m enjoying physics, mathematics, and philosophy so much, I think I might continue to study one of them.” He: “It’s just like you to choose the least-paying profession.” He never said another word about it, but he paid all the bills for it. My first book was dedicated to him, and he was able to hold a copy in his hands four years before he died. The penultimate version of the penultimate version of this book was written at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, in the fall term 1997, after I had spent time in Groningen thinking about the De Morgan properties of adverbial verb phrases (Atlas 1998) brought to my attention by H. Klein (1997, 1998), Frans Zwarts, and Sjaak de Mey. The latter inquiry is a logical investigation that William of Shyreswood, Walter Burleigh, and Peter of Spain, those worthies of the fourteenth century, would understand the point of. The penultimate version was written in the spring of 1999 and the final version was written in the summer of 2001 after the appearance of Levinson’s (2000) Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Stephen, like Larry Horn in his Natural History of Negation (1989), provided essential stimulus and matter for reflection as I reconsidered neo-Gricean views that in concert with, and in reaction to, them I had been developing since the mid-1970s. My admiration for their work is surpassed only by their cosmic patience with my criticizing, not to say needling, them.


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

P

ortions of this book were written at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and I am deeply indebted to Morton G. White and to the faculty of the School of Historical Studies. Portions of this book have been delivered as invited lectures or have in earlier versions appeared in print. I am grateful to the following for permission to reprint revised material from previously published work: the editors of Linguistics and Philosophy; the editor of Journal of Semantics; D. Reidel Publishing Company; Academic Press; B.H. Blackwell, Ltd.; Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. I am grateful to audiences in Princeton University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Riverside; University of California, Irvine; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Southern California; University College, London; Cambridge University; University of Edinburgh; University of Salford, Manchester, U.K.; University of Amsterdam; University of Groningen; University of Utrecht; University of Antwerp; University of Leuven; Centre de Récherche en Épistemologie Appliquée, École Polytechnique, Paris; and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholingistics, Nijmegen. For visiting professorships I am grateful to the faculty in the department of philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles, where I gave graduate seminars in the philosophy of language in the fall terms of 1991, 1994, and 1995. I am especially indebted to David Kaplan, Keith Donnellan, Tyler Burge, and Andrew Hsu. I owe a special debt to the late Rogers Albritton with whom for over twenty-five years, week in and week out, month in and month out, I discussed metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and Wittgenstein. These conversations, and similar ones with Edmund Gettier many years ago, constitute an entire philosophical education and reeducation.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gave the course “Implicature and Logical Form: The Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface,” on which this book is based, at the invitation of the organizing committee and Frans Zwarts, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, for the Second European Summer School on Language, Logic, and Information at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in August 1990. I began work on this book at the suggestion of Richard Oehrle, made during a conversation over coffee after my last lecture. I then had the pleasure of being second promotor to Zwarts on the Groningen doctoral dissertation of Peter Blok in 1993, followed by enjoying the hospitality of the University of Groningen’s department of Dutch linguistics and its Institute for Behavioural, Cognitive, and Neuro-Sciences as a visiting scholar in the spring term 1995. I am grateful to Frans, Hoeksema, de Mey, and Victor Sánchez Valencia, Sharon Parry, and Simone Zwarts. I am grateful for support from the Nederlandse Organisastie voor Wetenschappelijk (NWO; the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) and the Institute for Behavioural, Cognitive, and Neuro-Sciences in the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. I am particularly grateful for the hospitality of the Max Planck Institute for Psycho-linguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and of its then-managing director Pim Levelt, for providing such inestimable facilities during the writing of this book. Pomona College, Claremont, has provided travel assistance and other research support, as well as sabbatical leaves; my thanks to the faculty research committee, especially for support from a National Endowment for the Humanities sabbatical grant, to former Associate Dean Fred Greiman, and to Jane Arnal. The President Emeritus of Pomona College, Peter Stanley, was wonderfully supportive of intellectual life at the college. During this lengthy project I have been aided by Rogers Albritton, Kent Bach, Paul Benacerraf, Brandon Birdwell, Diane Blakemore, Peter Blok, Peter Bosch, David Braun, Penny Brown, Tyler Burge, Noel Burton-Roberts, Robyn Carston, Noam Chomsky, Peter Cook, Robin Cooper, Mikael Dolfe, Elisabet Engdahl, Sean Diarmuid Peter Fennessy, Robert Fogelin, Jack Hoeksema, Jaap Hoepelman, Larry Horn, Yan Huang, Andrew Hsu, the late Jerrold Katz, Ruth Kempson, Henny Klein, Wim Klooster, Ana von Klopp, Eric Krabbe, Joshua Krist, George Lakoff, Michiel Leezenberg, Nicholas Levinson, Stephen Levinson, Jason Linder, Brian Maddox, A. P. Martinich, the late James McCawley, Sjaak de Mey, Jan Nuyts, the late John Robert Purvis, Thomas Rankin, François Récanati, Mark Richard, David Rosenthal, Peter Ross, Jerry Sadock, Ivan Sag, the late Victor Sánchez-Valencia, Rob van der Sandt, Joshua Seifert, Pieter Seuren, Scott Soames, Keith Stenning, Sir Peter Strawson, Henriette de Swart, Jamie Tappenden, Frank Veltman, Henk Verkuyl, John Francis Walter, Ton van der Wouden, and Charles Young. My colleague René Coppieters at Pomona College has been a rich source of criticism, appreciation, and support; few have been vouchsafed such a well-tempered and incisive, friendly critic as René has been. Michiel Leezenberg (University of Amsterdam) has been a source of intellectual stimulation, friendship, and assistance on many occasions. I am, as always, deeply grateful to the playwright John Francis Walter for his friendship, his continuing interest in my intellectual work for more than twenty years, and his intense intellectual and artistic energy.

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I continue to draw on what I learned many years ago from Dana Scott and Paul Benacerraf, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Edmund Gettier, the late Joseph Epstein, the late Robert Breusch, and Morton G. White, and from the late Rogers Albritton in our conversations. I am indebted to the Atlas family, especially to my cousins Daniel and Marlene Bergman; to my Aunt Rose Atlas Bergman Weiss and Sol Weiss; to Morris Atlas, LL.B, and Rita Atlas; to Joe Atlas, M.D.; to William A. Atlas, M.D., and Marnie Atlas, M.D.; to Scott Atlas, LL.B., and the Honorable Nancy Atlas, LL.B.; to Robert Atlas, Ph.D., Pamela Atlas, and John Atlas; and to Leon T. Atlas, M.D., who saved my life. Someday I hope to write a book that more of them will be interested in reading. The manuscript was typed by me using PC WRITE LITE, Version 1.01, programmed by Bob Wallace, and LQMATRIX, a font design program by J. David Sapir, and, as Jay Rosenberg said in a similar context, I’m everlastingly grateful to me for doing it. I am also grateful to these brilliant programmers for making old-fashioned DOS programs such effective instruments for writing (see J. D. Atlas, “Do It in DOS,” PC LapTop Computers Magazine, November 1994, volume 6, number 11: 40–45). My editors Peter Ohlin and Catharine Carlin at Oxford University Press, New York, have been wonderfully patient and supportive; I am grateful to them and to the production staff for dealing gracefully with a complex manuscript.


CONTENTS

1 Semantical Underdeterminacy

3

2 Grice’s Theory of Conversational Inference: A Critical Exposition

45

3 The Rise of Neo-Gricean Pragmatics

80

4 The Post-Gricean Theory of Presupposition

118

5 Assertibility Conditions, Implicature, and the Question of Semantic Holism: Almost but Not Quite

149

6 The Third Linguistic Turn and the Inscrutability of Literal Sense

185

Appendix 1 On G. E. Moore’s Term ‘Imply’

225

Appendix 2 On Hitzeman (1992) on ‘Almost’

231

Appendix 3 The Semantics and Pragmatics of Cleft Sentences

234

Appendix 4 A Note on Notation

248

Bibliography

253

Index

273


Conversation is like playing tennis with a ball made of Krazy Putty, that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape. . . . The same axiom, every decoding is another encoding, applies. . . . In ordinary spoken discourse the endless cycle of encoding-decodingencoding may be terminated by an action, as when for instance I say, “The door is open” and you say, “Do you mean you would like me to shut it?” and I say, “If you don’t mind,” and you shut the door, we may be satisfied that at a certain level my meaning has been understood. David Lodge, The Practice of Wriring

We cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truth-conditions. At most they can have something more complex: ‘truth indications’ in some sense. . . . There is no reference-based semantics. There is a rich and intriguing internalist semantics, really part of syntax, on a par in this respect with phonology. Both systems provide ‘instructions’ for performance systems, which use them . . . for articulation, interpretation, inquiry, expression of thought, and various forms of human interaction. Noam Chomsky, “Language and Nature”

The linguistic turn was, I think, an uncompleted revolution; to really turn from theories of knowledge to theories of meaning, you would have to stop construing content in epistemological terms. Many analytic philosophers can’t bear not to construe content in epistemological terms because they think of philosophy as conceptual analysis, and of conceptual analysis as displaying a concept’s possession conditions, and of possession conditions as characteristically epistemic. If, as I believe, that whole picture is wrong, a certain kind of analytic philosophy is ripe for going out of business. Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition


Logic, Meaning, and Conversation


1

Semantical Underdeterminacy

1 Metaphor, nonspecific meaning, and utterance interpretation: Two dogmas of literary modernism Twentieth-century studies of literary style and early, influential studies in philosophy of language have been conditioned in large part by a dogma.1 It is a belief in 1The first version of this chapter was written in 1975 in response to a question posed to me by Mark Allen Phillips (aka Kontos), publicly presented in a faculty research lecture series in December 1977 at Pomona College, Claremont, but heretofore unpublished. Its inspiration was an essay by William Gass (1970), and it is offered to him as a modest gesture of appreciation. I am also indebted to the Educational Foundation of America for its sponsorship of this research through a Pomona College, Claremont, research award in 1975–76 to me and Mark Allen Phillips. The anti-Fregeanism in it bears a family resemblance to Hilary Putnam’s (1975) views on natural kind terms, except Putnam preserves the thesis that meaning determines reference while rejecting that meaning (including the determination of reference) is “in the head.” In February 1978 Donald Davidson (1984a: 245–64) read his “What Metaphors Mean” at the University of Chicago, and in the Hilary Term 1978 I heard him read a version in a lecture in the University of London. I was struck by some of the similarities in our views of metaphor, which I had never heard him discuss in his seminars at Princeton, but I was unsurprised that I had absorbed from his teaching an approach that brought me close to his position. Yet I discovered that the position that I had taken in 1975 and continue to defend here was semantically more radical than his (see my Philosophy without Ambiguity [1989]), and my semantic problem of metaphor, unlike his, was formulated as a choice between “abstraction” and “homonymy”/“ambiguity” explanations, in the fashion to be found later in G. Lakoff’s (1977) “Linguistic Gestalts” and in G. Lakoff and M. Johnson’s (1980: 106–14) Metaphors We Live By. Again there is a superficial resemblance between my 1975 view and a position taken by Sperber and Wilson (1986a) in their “Loose Talk,” but the problem for Sperber and Wilson is their notion of “looseness,” not to speak of their explanation of meta-

3

4

LOGIC , MEANING , AND CONVERSATION

some fundamental cleavage between language that is figurative or literary, containing terms used metaphorically, and language that is standard or ordinary, containing terms used literally. This dogma, I shall argue, is ill founded. One effect of abandoning it is a revision of Fregean semantics, a departure not only from the view that meaning determines reference but from the view that literal meaning is determinate. A second effect is the disappearance of the supposed boundary between linguistic art and linguistic life. 1.1 The first dogma The American philosopher and novelist William Gass’s (1970: 60) thesis is that “fiction is life in terms of . . . ,” that fiction “is incurably figurative, and the world the novelist makes is always a metaphorical model of our own.” For Gass, art, metaphor, and imagination are all linked. To adapt a figure of W. H. Auden’s, Gass should describe works of literary art like racehorses: Art is out of Metaphor by Imagination. For Gass, imagination is the writer’s talent for constructing metaphors, including lengthy ones called ‘novels’. Since, in Gass’s view, metaphorical language is literary language, we are back to the original Auden figure: Verse is out of Language by Poet. Gass would claim that Clifford is a mouse and My life is an “Omensetter’s Luck” are statements of the same logical type, both metaphors, both presentations of imaginative transfigurations at the touch of a word. Anyone wishing to understand the modernist view of the relationship between art and life must understand an earlytwentieth-century view of metaphor. To take a recent example of the view, James Wood, in reviewing Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full, contrasts Wolfe’s treatment of character with Charles Dickens’s, in these words: Wolfe’s prose always prefers the most ordinary, the most vulgar word. His descriptions are always the most ordinary details, without any capacity for simile or metaphor (which is one of the absolute definitions for the literary). But Dickens finds the unexpected detail, the vivid simile. Think of Joe Gargery in Great Expectations, “With eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites.” Or, in David Copperfield, Dora’s cousin “in the Life-Guards, with such long legs that he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else.” Or Uriah Heep in the same novel, his mouth “open like a post-office.” Or Mr. Trabb, who “had sliced his hot roll into three feather beds, and was slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up.” The delight of such wit has little to do, at

phorical utterance. For interesting comment on my view, see Noel Burton-Roberts (1991: 169), who had read a samizdat copy. Since the essay elaborates the theme of this book in a rather different form, and uses the concept of semantical nonspecificity in analyzing a part of language that many humanists and literary critics find interesting, I have included it here as a foil to Grice’s brief comments on the subject of metaphor. There has been an extraordinary amount of work on metaphor in the last twenty years—for example, Bergmann (1982), Fogelin (1988), Glucksberg (2001), Johnson (1981), Kittay (1987), Leezenberg (1995, 2001), Ortony (1993), Sacks (1981), Searle (1979), Stern (1983, 1985, 1991, 2000), and Sperber and Wilson (1986b). None of it makes the point that I want to make here and made in 1975. For discussion of my view, see Leezenberg (2001: 211–13).

SEMANTICAL UNDERDETERMINACY

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times, with accuracy; a mouth never really looks like a post-office. The joy, the literary joy, is in the local fizz of each detail, and in the relation of each detail to the other, and then in the moral revelation that such similes provide. (Uriah Heep is like a postoffice, that is, he is everyone’s willing courier.) (Wood 1988: 40)

It is notable how, in literary rhetoric, the terms ‘ordinary’ and ‘vulgar’ and the words ‘simile’, ‘metaphor’, and ‘literary’ juxtapose. Paul Horgan tells the following story: My neighbor’s very small boy, not quite four years old, came charging across my garden where I was working on a very hot summer morning. He was pursuing an imaginary enemy. He wore only a cowboy hat and the briefest of under-trunks, and he carried a toy shotgun. Suddenly, on becoming aware of me, he was abashed by his near-nakedness and his imaginary game. He paused in his chase and said angrily to me, “I am really a United States Marshal, but sometimes I go around like this.” I nodded seriously, and, reassured, he ran on. (Horgan 1974: 94)

An imaginary enemy is a nonexistent enemy, which, as Gilbert Ryle (1949) would have remarked, is not a special kind of enemy; it is an enemy only “in” the child’s imagination. The child’s activity is an “imaginary game,” in Horgan’s words, but if that means ‘game played in the imagination’, it is a false description of the activity. The boy’s was a real game, but a game “out of” the imagination, with pretend villains and mock beliefs. We might also say that the boy played his game imaginatively. When the child announces angrily that he is really a United States marshal, we credit him with an understanding of storytelling (as contrasted with lying) and the strength of imagination that energized his pursuit of his imaginary villain. But shall we say that he was sincere, even though his tone was serious? (Does the fouryear-old really believe that he is a United States marshal? Surely not. Was he really asserting that he is a United States marshal? Surely not.) But, if, say, Paul Benacerraf and David Kaplan, dressed in shorts, cowboy hats, and carrying toy shotguns, ran into my seminar and said to me in angry seriousness, “We are really United States marshals, but sometimes we go around like this,” should I say they were the possessors of dramatic and vivid imaginations, or should I take them to be simply deluded? Interestingly, one is common-sensically inclined to say that the adults are childishly deluded while saying that the child is culturally sophisticated. Common sense is wrong on both counts, as I shall show in what follows. In describing the craft of the writer, phrases like these tend to come to mind: ‘a work of the imagination’, and ‘the writer’s task . . . to revive his imagination every day during his working hours’. ‘Imaginative’ is applied to the writer’s mental state while composing, to kinds of literary product, and to the ability of a reader to understand the product created. But what do we know of these literary abilities, powers, motives, and products when we know them all to be imaginative in this sense or these senses? Have we said anything more than that these literary abilities, powers, motives, and products are . . . well, literary? The answer, I believe, is “No.” And if imaginative art is just art, we most focus on that. In the opening of the essay “The Medium of Fiction,” Gass writes:

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It seems a country-headed thing to say: that literature is language, that stories and the places and the people in them are merely made of words as chairs are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth or metal tubes. Still, we cannot be too simple at the start, since the obvious is often the unobserved. . . . That novels should be made of words, and merely words, is shocking really. It’s as though you had discovered that your wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years, the fears . . . from sponge. (Gass 1970: 27)

Modernist writers like Gass keep announcing to us the “obvious,” excusing themselves in advance for doing so, because what they are after is not “really” obvious, and the claim that it is is just a rhetorical trick. They have a philosophical belief about the literary use of language, a belief shared by the mid-twentieth-century W. H. Auden, the late-century William Gass, and the early-century Karl Kraus, among others: Auden It is both the glory and the shame of poetry that its medium is not its private property, that a poet cannot invent his words and that words are products, not of nature, but of a human society which uses them for a thousand different purposes. (1968: 23) Gass

The novelist makes his book from boards which say Ladies and Gents. Every scrap has been worn, every item handled; most of the pieces are dented or split. The writer may choose to be heroic—poets often are—he may strive to purify his diction and achieve an exclusively literary language. He may pretend that every syllable he speaks hasn’t been spit, sometimes, in someone else’s mouth. Such poets scrub, they clean, they smoothe, they polish, until we can scarcely recognize their words on the page. “A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness,” wrote Gertrude Stein. . . . The use of language in fiction only mimics its use in life. (1970: 30–31)

Kraus

My language is the universal whore whom I have to make into a virgin. (cited in Auden 1968: 23)

The distinctions between literary and ordinary, figurative and literal, or poetic and standard language were systematically employed throughout the 1920s and 1930s by the Russian formalists and members of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Their intent was the development of poetics as a rigorous science of “poeticality” and “literariness” comparable to structural linguistics as a rigorous science of “grammaticality.” In Jan Muka6ovský’s highly influential essay of 1932, “Standard Language and Poetic Language,” literary language is asserted to be independent of standard language, although related, in that “the standard language is the background against which is reflected the aesthetically intentional distortion of the linguistic components of the work, in other words, the intentional violation of the norm of the standard” (1970: 42). In poetic language attention is primarily on the words themselves and only secondarily on their communicative use. This attention is focused by special intonation, unusual vocabulary, and startling semantic juxtapositions of words. Of course, there is more to this view than dispassionate linguistic analysis. Muka6ovský quotes approvingly from a pre–World War I (1913) essay of Ferdinand Brunot:


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Modern art, individualist in essence, cannot always and everywhere be satisfied with the standard language alone. The laws governing the usual communication of thought must not, lest it be unbearable tyranny, be categorically imposed upon the poet who, beyond the bounds of the accepted forms of language, may find personalized forms of intuitive expression. It is up to him to use them in accord with his creative intuition and without other limits than those imposed by his own inspiration. (cited in Muka6ovský 1970: 52)

In the view of the early modernists the language least like Muka6ovský’s poetic language is, of course, the language of natural science. It is here that the literary aesthetes join forces with the logical empiricists. Both agree that scientific sentences are true or false and are communicative of thought, whereas poetic sentences are neither true nor false and are emotive. We find this supposed difference in language noted in a passage of John Locke’s, who in Essay Concerning Human Understanding writes: If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats. (Locke 1690: 3.10.34)

Speaking of things as they are! How far this seventeenth-century phrase seems from our self-conscious, post–World War II philosophical rhetoric! Upholders of the literal/figurative distinction have typically claimed that ordinary language is truthfully descriptive of the world and clearly communicative of thought, but figurative language is neither. Let us consider Muka6ovský’s arguments in favor of the distinction. He first observes that literary language makes use of lexical and syntactic resources that are allegedly unavailable to the standard language—for example, slang in poetry; a combination of nonstandard dialect in dialogue and standard dialect in narrative within a novel; and archaic forms, like Locke’s “hath.” Although it is true that these features are absent from discourse in standard dialect, similar kinds of differences obtain between the standard and almost any nonstandard dialect. Such nonstandard dialects are just as clearly, cognitively communicative as the standard. One cannot conclude that such features make literary language uncommunicative of thought when ordinary language with such features is communicative of thought. Moreover, that the properties mentioned hold of literary texts is obviously not sufficient to show the existence of a coherent literary “language,” a genuine literary dialect. Other devices mentioned by Muka6ovský include unusual intonation, choice of words, and uncommon combinations of meanings, but, I would have thought, the four-year-old’s remark, describing his father’s bald spot, “Daddy has a hole in his head,” is not literature. Muka6ovský’s (1970: 53–54) final argument concerns poetic neologisms, which, he says, are invented for aesthetic purposes, are “unexpected, unusual (in form and meaning), and unique.” The argument for neologisms of a poetic kind proceeds as

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follows. The aesthetic function of a term is incompatible with communicative function. Terms with standard form and meaning function communicatively. If neologisms that functioned aesthetically had standard form and meaning, they would function communicatively. If they functioned communicatively, they would not function aesthetically. Since they do function aesthetically, they do not have standard form and meaning. And, hence, they are not part of standard language. This is a valid argument, but it begs the question. The distinction between poetic and standard language is just the distinction between aesthetic and communicative terms. The question of the intelligibility of the former distinction is the same as that of the latter distinction. Muka6ovský offers no noncircular defense of the literal/ figurative distinction. In “The Medium of Fiction,” which closely follows Paul Valéry’s (1961) “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” Gass looks for the difference between literary and literal language in the effects that language has on its audience rather than in its syntactic and semantic properties: The purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are that patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed. (Gass 1970: 33)

Fiction and poetry provide the reader with a new self. Valéry supports the same view: A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state of mind by means of words. . . . Poetry is an art of language; certain combinations of words can produce an emotion that others do not produce, and which we shall call poetic. What kind of emotion is this? . . . I recognize it in myself by this: . . . that things and beings—or rather the ideas that represent them—somehow change in value. They attract one another, they are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary; they become . . . musicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically related. (Valéry 1961: 79, 64, 59)

Valéry is more candid than Gass in revealing the logic of this position. Left with Gass’s description of the reader’s new and imagined sensibility—one characterized by attention to and absorption in the poem, the story, or the novel—it is unclear why this effect on the mind is characteristic of literary language. Could not a theoretical physicist like Steven Weinberg or a biologist like Stephen Jay Gould, in reading an essay on general relativity or the theory of evolution, experience the same absorption Gass describes? Valéry is more explicit. The answer to the question “What can poetic language do that ordinary language cannot?” is “Create a poetic state of mind in the reader.” Insofar as our mental states are individuated by their causal antecedents and consequents, and by their objects, to be in a poetic state of mind is to be in a state caused by reading poetry and in a state having as its object a literary text, the poem read. The thesis now goes: poetic language differs from ordinary language because the former produces the poetic state of mind and the latter does not. Of course, the poetic state is just that state caused by and having as its object poetic language. Thus Valéry’s claim reduces to this: poetic language differs from


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ordinary language because poetic language produces the mental state caused by and having as its object poetic language. Obviously Valéry has not advanced the understanding of the difference between poetic and ordinary language; he has merely restated the difference in terms of mental states. Valéry’s claim is not quite so vacuous as I’ve just made it seem. He characterizes the receptive state as follows: Observe the effect of poetry on yourselves. You will find that at each line the meaning produced within you, far from destroying the musical form communicated to you, recalls it . . . as though the very sense which is present to your mind can find no other outlet or expression, no other answer, than the very music which gave it birth. (Valéry 1961: 72)

What characterizes the poetic state of mind in the reader is the feeling of this intimate union between sound and sense. We shall de-psychologize Valéry’s description and say that in literature, especially poetry, the sound and the sense of a sentence or of a word are inseparable; in ordinary language, they are not. To emphasize the consequences of Valéry’s view, I generalize his criterion of literariness: A sentence S of English is literary if and only if (a) there is no sentence T of English, T not identical to S, that “paraphrases” S, and (b) there is no sentence T* in any natural language L, L not identical to English, that “translates” S.

Our readerly intuitions about poetry support Valéry’s claim, as long as we look none too closely at the relations of translation and paraphrase. But this calls for a little example, taken from Robert Frost, who held a view similar to Valéry’s: It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry There is more unmixed color on the wing Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. But there are flowers that fly and all but sing, And now from having ridden out desire They lie closed over in the wind and cling Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire. (Frost 1979: 225)

Even in as uncomplicated a structure as this, it is evident that paraphrase into prose loosens the taut connection between sound and sense that makes those words worthy of attention. How would one flatly begin? Would one say, It’s spring here, and there are lots of blue butterflies around today? It is not unfair to take Gass and Valéry to claim that paraphrase or translation of poetic language into prose language is impossible because any change of wording or grammar changes the sound and so alters whatever relation between sound and sense obtains in a poetic line. But then it is equally impossible to “translate,” in the sense of preserving those linguistic features of the phrase, ordinary prose into different ordinary prose. By the criterion of literariness just mentioned, this

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makes a prosaic sentence poetic—and this is far from Valéry’s intent. The only translation he allows is the homophonic one that paraphrases the clause ‘It is bluebutterfly day here in spring’ by the sentence ‘It is blue-butterfly day here in spring.’ The employment of this question-begging conception of paraphrase and translation is not, I believe, defensible in a criterion of literariness that is intended to defend the autonomy of literary language. But even if we adopt a more conventional notion of translation, as Robert Frost did, the criterion is still in difficulty. Auden comments illuminatingly: Frost’s definition of poetry as the untranslatable element in language looks plausible at first sight, but, on closer examination, will not quite do. In the first place, even in the most rarefied poetry, there are some elements which are translatable. The sound of the words, their rhythmical relations, and all meanings and association of meanings which depend upon sound, like rhymes and puns, are, of course, untranslatable, but poetry is not, like music, pure sound. Any elements in a poem which are not based on verbal experience, are, to some degree, translatable into another tongue, for example, images, similes, and metaphors which are drawn from sensory experience. (Auden 1968: 23)

Obviously I do not believe the matter is quite as simple as Auden makes it seem, but it is a more reasonable assessment than Valéry’s, Frost’s, or Gass’s. In turn, Auden’s account will not quite do. For good translations of literature not only preserve sense and convey the connotations of the original text, it is possible for them to capture relations of sound and rhythm. If translation could capture only sense and certain implications of sense, translations of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from Through the Looking Glass would be impossible (see Guenthner and Guenthner-Reutter 1978 and Atlas 1980b). You’ll recall the first verse: ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe, All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. (Carroll 1963: 191)

Not only are there two Latin “translations,” a French “translation,” and a German “translation,” but it is possible to judge their relative quality. In my view the German “translation” by Robert Scott is better than the French one by Frank Warrin: Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave, Enmimés sont les gougesbosqueux, Et le mômerade horsgrave. Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; Und aller-mümsige Burggoven Die mohmen Räth ausgraben. (Carroll 1963: 193)


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By any reasonable standards “Le Jaseroque” and “Der Jammerwoch” are successful translations of “Jabberwocky.” And Valéry’s criterion notwithstanding, “Jabberwocky” is still a literary achievement, even if it is nonsense. Let us review. I have argued that the term ‘imaginative’ in classifying literary works is nonexplanatory. The classification rests instead on a notion of “literary” as opposed to “ordinary” uses of language. I have considered several attempts to defend this distinction: Muka6ovský’s classic, 1930s account of the distinction between poetic and standard language in which poetic language is (a) a violation of linguistic norms and (b) language used for its own sake; Valéry’s and Gass’s account of the distinction between poetic and literal language in which poetic language is (c) untranslatable and (d) creates a poetic state of mind. The arguments put forth to defend the figurative/literal distinction are circular, presupposing versions of the distinction itself, but in my discussion I have not confronted directly the central question. Is there a theoretical distinction to be drawn between metaphorical and ordinary language? Will this distinction do any explanatory, linguistic work? Gass writes wonderfully about the opening scene of Hamlet: Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus walk upon the castle platform awaiting midnight and Hamlet’s father’s ghost. Hamlet says, “The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold,” and Horatio answers, “It is a nipping and an eager air.” Hamlet and Horatio do not think of it as cold, simply. The dog of air’s around them, shrewd and eager, running at heels. The behavior of this dog is wittily precise in their minds. It nags— shrewishly, wifelike. The air is acidulous, too, like sour wine. Hamlet and Horatio, furthermore, are aware of the physical quality of their words. Horatio not only develops Hamlet’s implicit figure, he concludes the exchange with the word that began it, and with sonorous sounds. The nature of the weather is conveyed to us with marvelous exactitude and ease, in remarks made by the way, far from the center of action; so that we find ourselves with knowledge of it in just the offhand way we would if, bent on meeting a king’s ghost, we too went through the sharp wind. Yet Hamlet’s second clause is useless. “The air bites shrewdly” is the clause that tells us everything. It is cold. The wind is out. The wind is alive, malevolent with wise jaws. The two clauses have a very clear relation. The first is metaphorical, the second literal [my emphasis]. Both are about the weather, but one is art, the other not [my emphasis]. . . . We are forced, in what is really a very complicated and very peculiar manner, to infer [the state of the weather] from logical absurdities, strange comparisons, and silly riddles. The speed with which we make our inferences should not deceive us of the fact we make them. The air bites, therefore the air is alive. The air bites shrewdly, therefore the air is wise. It is eager, so it feels. These deductions, upon the information that it nips, and the immediate conclusion that it nips as dogs nip, give us the dog of the air itself. To communicate the nature of the weather, Shakespeare has introduced an altogether novel set of concepts; novel, that is, with respect to the idea of weather as such; and it is through these concepts that we understand the kind of wind and cold we’re in. (Gass 1970: 60–62)

Of course, ‘bites shrewdly’ is not literally true of the air; air is not the sort of thing that literally bites. But let us agree that ‘bites shrewdly’ is figuratively true of the air.

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The first systematic discussion of metaphor in Western philosophy occurs in book III of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. He notes what we all intuitively would observe about an example like ‘The air bites shrewdly’. The predicate ‘bites shrewdly’ has apparently shifted its sense and has been applied to a thing of a different category. As Nelson Goodman (1976: 69) has metaphorically put it, “a metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.” For what is special about the metaphor is that, in context at least, the application of an old term in a new way is both perfectly intelligible and linguistically odd. 1.2 The second dogma The oddity has been characterized by some philosophers, following Bertrand Russell (1956b [1908]) and G. Ryle (1949), as a type-theoretic or “category mistake” (or the violation of a selectional restriction; Chomsky 1965) in which facts of one logical category are described in the vocabulary appropriate only to another category. Air, not being animate, cannot literally have jaws that bite. Air neither bites nor doesn’t bite. It is common to believe that many (not all) metaphorical sentences are literally anomalous category mistakes, that nonetheless they do make sense, that “the meanings”—interpretations—they have may vary from person to person, are probably not recursively specifiable, and are highly sensitive to the context. It is also usual to believe that the oddity and intelligibility are in conflict, as in Goodman’s elegant metaphorical formulation: metaphor is an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting. It would usually be said that, literally, the sentence ‘The air bites shrewdly’ is nonsense; it is a category error. It would make as much sense to say that √2— is six feet tall. Some theories of the understanding of metaphor will claim that the reader or listener constructs an alternative metaphorical interpretation of the sentence-token (which is taken to be a metaphorical “sense”) because a literal interpretation is blocked—for example, by a category error. We would interpret the sentence-token literally if we could, but since we can’t, we have to search for another interpretation, the “metaphorical” one, or relinquish the assumption that the speaker intends to be intelligible. The sentence-token is viewed as having a “pseudoambiguity,” possessing both an anomalous literal and an acceptable, though odd and hard-to-specify, metaphorical reading. Thus one standard story goes. (On my view, by contrast, the alleged shift in sense is not the creation of an ambiguity, since in the metaphor the “new” use is a transformation of the “old” use in a way uncharacteristic of an ambiguous or homonymous term. ‘Bank’ in ‘money bank’ is not a metaphorical use of ‘bank’ in ‘river bank’. A semantical explanation of metaphor will not rest on the notion of ambiguity.) Even Grice characterized figurative language as floutings—that is, blatant violations, of Grice’s Conversational Maxims—namely, of the First Maxim of Quality (“Do not say what you believe to be false”), by category errors: Examples like You are the cream in my coffee characteristically involve categorial falsity, so the contradictory of what the speaker has made as if to say will, strictly speaking, be a truism; so it cannot be that that such a speaker is trying to get across. The most likely supposition is that the speaker is attributing to his audience some


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feature or features in respect of which the audience resembles (more or less fancifully) the mentioned substance.2 (Grice 1989b: 34)

The second dogma of literary modernism is the reduction of metaphoricity to semantical anomaly. Most philosophical views recognize the importance of verbal context in guiding the reader or listener to make the correct inference in understanding the “metaphorical meaning” of the utterance. Consider what one would say the line meant if one confronted the single sentence: The air bites shrewdly.

Contrast this with the sequence of lines: The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. It is a nipping and eager air.

The semantic information of those lines obviously interacts in the reader’s mind, guiding his inferences. The problem is, Why is this special to metaphor? In the sentence ‘The cold bites shrewdly’, ‘bites shrewdly’ is true of the cold. It is then possible to explain the figurative application of ‘bites shrewdly’ to the air. Suppose we antecedently know ‘The cold bites shrewdly’. We read or hear the sentence ‘The air bites shrewdly’. To understand the appropriateness of such an utterance, we construct this argument: if anything cold bites shrewdly, and the air is cold, it follows that the air bites shrewdly. We infer the premise—viz., that the air is cold, that we need to deduce the metaphoric utterance we heard—thereby “making sense” of it by making explicit the deductive relationships in which it figures. (This is an inference analogous to what C. S. Peirce called ‘abduction’; in Atlas and Levinson 1981 it was called by me, suggested by analogy with G. H. Harman’s 1965 phrase ‘inference to the best explanation’, ‘inference to the best interpretation’.) This premise that the air is cold is what we understand to be conveyed, or to be implicated as Grice (1975a) would say, by, in, or when asserting the sentence ‘The air bites shrewdly’. We fix on this implicatum because of prior knowledge of ‘The cold bites shrewdly’. We sometimes use metaphors to understand metaphors via their implicata, and thus inference analogous to abduction is essential. (In fact, the same formal analogy holds of Practical Syllogisms; see Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987 and Kenny 1966. It is a mistake, though, to think that an analogy is an identity. Interpretative inference is not identical to abductive, explanatory inference. Psychological explanation is not the same as semantic interpretation, I shall claim, contra Grice (1989a) and Hobbs et al. 1993; see chapter 2, Section 5.) 2Grice

fails to consider that the notion of “fanciful resemblance” is parasitic on the metaphorical use rather than conversely. Occasionally I have mused on Grice’s choice of example You are the cream in my coffee. The American edition of Sir John Mortimer’s (2000) third volume of autobiography appeared in his 79th year. He reports that “one of my earliest memories is of a bungalow my parents rented at some seaside where, each morning, my father would run a Union Jack up an improvised flagpole and we would ceremoniously burn the contents of the wastepaper-baskets and bury the leavings of the sink to the accompaniment of a song which went, ‘You’re the cream in my coffee, You’re the sole of my shoe’, scratchily played on a wind-up gramaphone. At least I learned a respect for rubbish” (Mortimer 2000: 138–39).

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Horatio’s remark, that it is a nipping and eager air, illustrates how the use of a term licenses the use of another term semantically related to the first. ‘Bites shrewdly’ licenses the use of ‘nipping’. Metaphorical understanding is achieved by tapping a whole system of concepts (Black 1954c; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Again, the problem is, Why is this special to metaphor? 1.3 The third use argument I shall now argue that the modernist distinction between the literal and the figurative is precisely the wrong conception to use in understanding language and art. I am not claiming that the distinction is rather one of degree—tight versus loose—than of kind (Sperber and Wilson 1986a), or that it is hard to know how to make it. This distinction is not susceptible to conversion from one of kind to one of degree and still be an intelligible distinction between terms, or of meanings, or of uses of language. I am claiming that there is no distinction. It is not there to be drawn. And it gives a false picture of the way language functions. Consider the negative sentence: My cousin isn’t a boy any longer.3

One can understand a use of this sentence to make a statement that the speaker’s male cousin is now an adolescent or an adult. One can also understand a use of this sentence to make a statement that the speaker’s young cousin has had a sex-change operation. These two understandings of the sentence do not constitute an ambiguity.4 But there is a third, possible, intelligible use of that sentence. One can also understand a use of this sentence to make a statement that the speaker’s cousin, who is a hermaphrodite, has grown up. Notice that there is a temptation here to say that the sentence cannot be taken “literally” and understood in this third way. One might be tempted to say that one must understand the statement “metaphorically.” Has the predicate ‘isn’t a boy any longer’ experienced a transfer of meaning from [ISN’T A YOUNG MALE HUMAN ANY LONGER] to . . . , to what? To [ISN’T A YOUNG HUMAN ANY LONGER]—that is, to [ISN’T A CHILD ANY LONGER]? Then is the sentence ‘My cousin isn’t a boy any longer’ used to state figuratively that the speaker’s hermaphroditic cousin isn’t a child any longer? This might be an example, I suppose, of J. M. Sadock’s (1984) Principle of Loose Talk, which I will discuss, skeptically, in chapter 6. But the suggested metaphorical analysis is not plausible: [CHILD] is not the figurative meaning of ‘boy’ in the speaker’s use of the sentence. He meant [BOY], not [CHILD], but it is true that the predicate ‘isn’t a boy any longer’ is being applied to an entity that is not in an extension of the predicate’s stereotypical application—that is, to a hermaphrodite possessing ovaries. For any literal statement of the sentence might be thought to entail that the speaker’s 3This sentence is first discussed, for different theoretical purposes, in D. Terence Langendoen, “Presupposition and Assertion in the Semantic Analysis of Nouns and Verbs in English,” in Steinberg and Jakobovits (1971: 343). It was also used by Robert Stalnaker, for his own purposes, in his “Pragmatic Presuppositions,” published in Munitz and Unger (1974: 204). 4See

Langendoen, “Presupposition and Assertion”; Atlas (1975a,b, 1977b, 1989).


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cousin was a boy in the past, but, note, one’s hermaphroditic cousin has never been just a boy—has never been a stereotypical boy (cf. Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40–41, Atlas 1984a). Of course, the application of the predicate is made easier by its being applied to an entity that possesses all the commonsense stereotypical properties of boys (Putnam 1975). The semantic features of this understanding of this sentence—the apparent shift in sense to something “odd” and not readily paraphrased and the apparent shift in the predicate’s application to objects—have been taken to be characteristic features of metaphor. Also like metaphorical uses, this use of the sentence remains perfectly intelligible. This use of the sentence satisfies all the traditional criteria of metaphorical use. Nevertheless, its use is a perfectly “ordinary” use of the sentence in which the predicate is applied to an entity that satisfies the commonsense stereotypical properties of biologically normal boys. And the ordinary, literal meaning [YOUNG & MALE & HUMAN] of the predicate is consistent with this use and interpretation of it. Young, human hermaphrodites are biologically male (just not only male). What does this mean? It means that the traditional criteria of metaphoricity do not suffice to distinguish between so-called metaphorical and ordinary uses of language. Faced with this consequence, one may assert that, for reasons unknown to ourselves, our traditional characterization of metaphor is faulty and we must look for subtler and more adequate criteria, or one may take a more radical position, which was my choice in 1975. I asserted that so-called metaphors were semantically ordinary—that metaphorical use of the poetic sort is of the same logical type as the third, ordinary use of ‘My cousin isn’t a boy any longer’. My claim was that the semantics of metaphorical language is no different from the semantics of ordinary language: not looser (Sperber and Wilson 1986a), not a matter of different usage or inference (Grice 1975a,b; Davidson 1981), not a matter of a special “metaphorical” sense. There is no difference whatever in logical type, however different the perlocutionary effects of the “metaphorical” utterance upon the addressee may be (Austin 1962/1975). There is a deep semantical reason for this similarity in logical type, and for the failure of classical semantical theories to note it. Although it has different uses, the negative sentence ‘My cousin is not a boy any longer’ is semantically unambiguous. It has one sense. So does the term ‘boy’. Yet in its third use the term applies to an individual, a hermaphrodite, that lies outside the extension of a predicate with the intension [YOUNG & MALE & NONFEMALE & HUMAN] but lies inside the extension of a predicate with the intension [YOUNG & MALE & HUMAN]—that is, of the predicate ‘boy’. In the framework of Atlas (1974, 1975a,b, 1978b, 1979, 1989), one would say that the English lexeme ‘boy’ is semantically nonspecific with respect to [NONFEMALE]. There are not two lexemes ‘boy1’ and ‘boy2’ with intensions [YOUNG & MALE & HUMAN]1 and [YOUNG & MALE & NONFEMALE & HUMAN]2. Rather, the use of ‘boy’ suggests—by an inference formally akin to Peirce’s “abduction,” or to Aristotelian practical syllogisms—the more specific interpretation, the sense attributed to the lexeme ‘boy2’. The felt anomaly of the example sentence arises from the unexpected defeasibility of this inference in the application of ‘boy’ to the young hermaphrodite. The wordform boy is neither ambiguous nor used metaphorically in my example, and certainly it is not ambiguous between a literal sense and a “metaphorical” sense, although the standard accounts of metaphor would lead one to think so. The standard accounts of

16


metaphoricity cannot explain these linguistic observations, and the classical distinction between the literal and the figurative is not, I suggest, sustainable. This special kind of nonambiguity of the word-form boy is pervasive in language and of great theoretical interest. I (Atlas 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989) have argued elsewhere that a logical and linguistic notion as basic as negation, the meaning of the free morpheme ‘not’, has a quite different, semantically nonspecific, meaning in English and in all other natural languages from that of the extensional truth-functional negations of two- and many-valued mathematical logics. The classical distinction between exclusion and choice negation senses of ‘not’ is not sustainable.5 This difference between natural and formal language derives from the conceptual economy of ordinary language. (For more on this theme, see Ziff 1972b and Horn 1984b.) Likewise, the “metaphorical” use of ordinary language, which is an ordinary use, provides us the economical alternative to vast elaborations of primitive vocabulary and conceptual distinctions. Better to leave matters a little semantically underdeterminate (I do not mean ‘underdetermined’; see section 2.3 of this chapter) than make the language impractical to use or impossible to learn. (For more on this theme, see Atlas 1989: 7–24.) In my view, human genius has shown its most original linguistic achievement not in creating a purely “literary” use of language, which Gass rightly admires as an aesthetic creation in Gertrude Stein’s writing, but in creating a purely “literal” use of language, as in mathematics and physics. It is a greater linguistic leap, and it puts one farther from one’s biological and evolutionary roots, to create the language of pure mathematics than to borrow the language of the shopclerk to write a novel, as Gass so poignantly noted.6 Modernist writers since Mallarmé have struggled to separate literary from ordinary language, science from art, and writers from the populace.7 If only language weren’t so public! What Gass and other literary modernists fail to perceive, for philosophical and linguistic reasons of their own, is the theoretical banality of fictive, or ordinary, language, and the theoretical abnormality of factive, or extraordinary, language. The literary modernist aesthetes and the logical empiricists made the same mistake in accepting the language of science as the norm. Aesthetes saw art only in the abnormal language of the imaginative/literary minority. Positivists saw factuality only in the normal language of the unimaginative/vulgar majority. The aesthete had the right conception of language and the wrong conception of the imaginative. The positivist had the right conception of the imaginative and the wrong conception of language. Neither got what he wanted, and each got what the other wanted. In the 5For a language L, and the set V of admissible valuations val, val ∈ V, the choice negation –A of a sentence A is such that val(–A) = 1 iff val(A) = 0, and the exclusion negation ¬A of a sentence A is such that val(¬A) = 1 iff val(A) ≠ 1. Put sloppily, the difference is one between ‘false’ and ‘not true’. In a bivalent language the negations are extensionally identical. In a non-bivalent language they diverge. 6For

an analogous argument differentiating ordinary seeing from artistic and scientific observation, see N. R. Hanson (1969) and B. Russell (1913: 9). 7As noted earlier, James Wood (1998: 42) criticizes novelist Tom Wolfe for his use of “the most vulgar word.” See Steiner (1975a).


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weary, war-torn, irony-laden twentieth century I suppose that this result was to be expected.8

2 Semantical nonspecificity, utterance interpretation, and psychological modularity In this section9 I review the distinction between semantical ambiguity and semantical nonspecificity, with particular focus on the modularity versus nonmodularity of mental processing and on the conceptual question of where to draw the boundary line between the modular and the nonmodular. In doing so I examine the influential views of Jerry Fodor (1990a). I discuss the distinction between semantical nonspecificity and ambiguity in both the visual and the verbal. I discuss the senses in which perceptual mechanisms are inferential in character and introduce the distinction between encapsulated and unencapsulated processes. Then I turn explicitly to the question whether speech perception is a modular process and criticize the account of Fodor (1990b). I draw on my discussion of visual and verbal nonspecificity to develop an alternative account of speech perception and interpretation of utterances. I pose the problem of speech perception in a novel—and what I take to be its correct form—under the heading “A Language of Thought and the Nonmodularity of Communicative Intentions: How Utterance-Interpretation can be both Hermeneutic (Nonmodular) and Enormously Reliable (Functionally Modular).” And in the concluding subsection I summarize my argument and point out the philosophical errors underlying the ill-formedness of the old problem of speech perception. 2.1 Visual/verbal nonspecificity versus visual/verbal ambiguity Plane figures drawn without converging perspective offer no depth cues. Described by the Swiss crystallographer L. S. Necker in 1832, the classic example is a figure we take to display a cube (fig. 1.1.). The back face and front face are drawn the same size; thus no size difference—the smaller as the back, the larger as the front—serves to indicate which is the front and which the back. What is curious is that although we recognize the figure as a cube-picture (and not as a truncated pyramid-picture, which the figure would display if we always imposed converging perspective [Hochberg 1972: 56–57]—and I can see fig. 1.1 as a figure of a truncated pyramid, the back face serving as the top, the pyramid being seen from above), what we see spontane8The

argument of this section explains the linguistic foolishness to be commonly found in the views of literary theorists such as Stanley Fish (1989: 4, 164). See also A. Sokal and J. Bricmont (1998) and Thomas Nagel (1998). 9Parts

of this section have appeared in my “On the Modularity of Sentence Processing: Semantical Generality and the Language of Thought,” in Jan Nuyts and Eric Pederson (eds.), Language and Conceptualization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 213–28, and in chapter 1 of Atlas (1989) and appear here with the permission of Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press.

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FIGURE

1.1 Necker cube

ously reverses in depth. Alternately, the figure is seen as a left-directed, downwardprojecting cube seen from above or as a right-directed, upward-projecting cube seen from below. (Occasionally, a viewer will see the figure as just a set of intersecting line segments in the plane.) Here is a story that the English psychologist Richard Gregory (1970, 1973, 1986) tells: Given a (roughly) two-dimensional image on the retina, the brain tries to determine what three-dimensional object is being seen, or, what distal three-dimensional object causes the proximal two-dimensional stimulus. Although the retinal image could be the result of any number of different projections onto a plane of any number of different three-dimensional objects, the brain either rejects or never considers odd or complex possibilities. The absence of standard cues for perspective in the figure means that no unique solution to even the brain’s reduced problem can be computed, so, in turn, it entertains a small, finite number of probable solutions. As the viewer continues to look at the drawing, the seen cube spontaneously flips in and out of the page. Psychologists have described multistable figures as depth-ambiguous. The ambiguity of the noun phrase (NP) ‘the chicken that is ready to eat’ is syntactic: ‘the chicken’ is either an underlying subject NP or an underlying object NP. The phrase manifests distinct grammatical analyses, or underlying structural descriptions; it is the superficial outcome of encoding distinct syntactical roles for the noun phrase ‘the chicken’. A multistable Necker cube figure is not a figure that manifests distinct perspectival analyses; it is not the outcome of encoding distinct depth cues. Rather, it is constructed without conventional perspectival cues; the construction is depthperspective free. So the figure is neutral with respect to depth perspective. This absence from the construction of the figure of perspectival cues for depth creates the multistability, the spontaneous reversals of depth in what is seen.


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The ambiguity of a description differs from the spontaneous multistability of a figure. Unlike what is seen in the Necker figure as the mind tries to see what the figure “displays,” the different senses of an ambiguous phrase do not spontaneously exchange places in the understanding as the mind tries to grasp what the phrase means. An ambiguous sentence does not spontaneously perform semantic flips, overruling the meaning being attended to by the mind. Nor does the grasp of one sense exclude the simultaneous grasp of another sense: one can understand both meanings of a presented two-ways ambiguous sentence. These observations emphasize important differences between the mental processing of an ambiguous phrase and the processing of figure 1.1. It is sometimes forgotten that in 1967, in his Beckman lectures “Language and Mind” at the University of California, Berkeley, Noam Chomsky pointed out an observation of J. R. (Haj) Ross that a necessary condition of syntactical deletion was sameness of sense of the deleted element with a formally identical element in the sentence. Chomsky wrote: (8) I don’t like John’s cooking any more than Bill’s cooking. (9) I don’t like John’s cooking any more than Bill’s. Sentence 9 is ambiguous. It can mean either that I don’t like the fact that John cooks any more than I like the fact that Bill cooks, or that I don’t like the quality of John’s cooking any more than I like the quality of Bill’s cooking.* However, it cannot mean that I don’t like the quality of John’s cooking any more than I like the fact that Bill cooks, or conversely, with “fact” and “quality” interchanged. That is, in the underlying structure [associated with] 8 we must understand the ambiguous phrases “John’s cooking” and “Bill’s cooking” in the same way if we are able to delete “cooking.” (Chomsky 1972a: 33)

——— * There may also be other interpretations, based on other ambiguities in the structure “John’s cooking,” specifically the cannibalistic interpretation and the interpretation of “cooking” as “that which is cooked.”

It is characteristic of an ambiguity of this type that (9) is two-ways rather than per impossibile four-ways ambiguous. Crossed interpretations are not possible as literal meanings of the sentence. The reduced form allows only parallel interpretations as possible meanings. George Lakoff (1970) and A. Zwicky and J. Sadock (1975) adopt the following two criteria: 1. 2.

The impossibility of a crossed, literal paraphrase for a conjunctionreduced sentence S entails the ambiguity of S. The possibility of a crossed, literal paraphrase for a conjunctionreduced sentence S entails the nonambiguity of S. (The distinct, parallel paraphrases do not express distinct senses.)

If my analysis of the depth-nonspecification, rather than depth-ambiguity, of the Necker cube drawing is correct, there should be a visual analogue to the ambiguity

20


test just mentioned. One ought to be able to see a conjoined, reduced, double Necker cube drawing so that simultaneously one cube is seen in one perspective and the other cube in the other perspective. When I made this prediction in Jerry Sadock’s presence, he promptly drew figure 1.2. If you fill in the two missing edges of that figure, you will discover that you will see two intersecting Necker-cubes in their respective, different perspectives. The Necker cube drawing fails a spatial “reduced conjunction” test for depth-ambiguity. One paradigm example of an ambiguous figure is W. E. Hill’s maiden/hag figure (fig. 1.3). Like the alternative readings of an ambiguous sentence that are often unnoticed by listeners in conversation, the alternative displays of an ambiguous figure are often unnoticed by viewers. In both cases, unlike the Necker cube figure, prompting is sometimes necessary before the alternative reading or display is perceived or comprehended. And unlike the Necker cube figure, seeing the figure as a young woman and seeing it as an old woman do not freely, attention-independently alternate, though with attention to different parts of the figure, one can see it as a young woman and then as an old woman. Once the several displays are recognized, like the ambiguous sentence whose different senses can be grasped simultaneously, the different “objects” displayed by an ambiguous figure, unlike the different presentations (the differently oriented displays) of the Necker cube figure, can be seen simultaneously. For example, though many find it difficult to do, if I focus fixatedly on the ‘+’ in figure 1.3 I can see Hill’s figure simultaneously as the maiden and as the hag. (This is not a neurophysiological claim; this is a perceptual claim about what it is possible to see.) This is not typical of spontaneously multistable figures like the Necker cube drawing. It is the “split” aspects of multistable figures that make them seem properly describable as ambiguous, but, ironically, it is precisely this character that marks them psychologically as not ambiguous.

FIGURE

1.2 Double Necker cube


FIGURE

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1.3 Old woman—young woman

The parallel I am drawing is this: in a non-display-ambiguous but display-general figure like the Necker cube drawing, the figure is pictorially “nonspecific” with respect to depth; in a non-sense-ambiguous but sense-nonspecific sentence, the sentence is semantically nonspecific with respect to a semantic feature F—for example, unspecified for either semantic gender [MALE] or [–MALE] in the case of ‘I’, ‘my’, and ‘neighbor’. I want to contrast both the Necker cube drawing and sense-nonspecific sentences with the ambiguous maiden/hag drawing and sense-ambiguous sentences as follows (see Atlas 1989): Ambiguity: Visual (e.g., Maiden/Hag Drawing) and Verbal a. Two (or more) underlying, specific structures of a figure/expression b. Seeing-as can be overridden; it is possible to: See displays two (or more) simultaneously Grasp senses c. Fixation is possible: No spontaneous, attention-independent flips between displays of a figure/expression.

{

}

{

}


22

d. Prompting is sometimes required to recognize alternate displays of a figure/expression. e. The figure/expression passes a Conjunction Reduction Test for ambiguity. Nonspecificity: Visual (e.g., Necker Cube Drawing) and Verbal a. One underlying, nonspecific structure of a figure/expression b. See presentations two (or more) only alternately10 Grasp contents c. No fixation is possible: Spontaneous, attention-independent flips between presentations of a figure/expression. d. Prompting is never required to recognize alternate presentations of a figure/expression. e. The figure/expression fails a Conjunction Reduction Test for ambiguity.

{ }

{

}

2.2 Are perceptual mechanisms inferential and modular? Now I want to introduce into my discussion a story from Jerry Fodor: Changes in states of the retina, for example, register changes in the properties of incident light, which are in turn caused by alterations in the arrangement of the distal objects that radiate and reflect the light. To the extent that such proximal effects are specific to their distal causes, cognitive processes with access to the one have grounds for inference to the other. So, the picture is that certain organic states register the proximal stimuli that cause them, and that certain cognitive processes infer the arrangement of local distal objects from the organic effects of these proximal stimulations. In particular, I assume that it’s the function of perceptual mechanisms to execute such inferences. (1990b: 209)

Of course, in Fodor’s own view the organic states do not merely register the proximal stimuli that cause them, they represent them. In addition, Fodor holds a Modularity Thesis, according to which the mechanisms that execute these inferences are both dedicated and encapsulated. Why should we conceive of this perceptual process as inferential? One standard argument, supported by the Necker cube phenomenon, is that sensation underdetermines perception—that is, the proximal stimulation contains “less information” than the perceptual beliefs that result. The extra information presumably must come from a store of background knowledge. Thus perception is a “top-down” process. Hence, it is inferential. Fodor usefully points out that this argument from underdetermination actually is independent of the inferentiality of perception: “Even if the information in the 10This

claim can be elaborated; see my comment in Atlas (1989: 18, n.4).


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proximal light uniquely determines the visible properties of the distal layout, the inferentiality of the mental process that proceeds from representing the one to representing the other would not be impugned” (1990b: 210). The argument is, rather, that perception fixes beliefs about distal objects. If the organic effects—for example, on the retina—represent at all, they represent the proximal stimuli that cause them. So we conceive of perception as a process in which “representations of proximal stimuli causally determine beliefs about distal layouts,” and that is what Fodor means by perception being inferential. Of course, by the same argument, the secretion of hydrochloric acid in the stomach represents the ingesting of boeuf bourgignon, and the representation of that ingestion causally determines the belief that one is no longer hungry, from which, on Fodor’s views, it follows, absurdly, that digestion and satiation are inferential. Whatever the correct account of the relationship between inference and perception is, it cannot be Fodor’s. The problem with Fodor’s account, as I suggest later (see section 4), may lie in its very first step, the notion that “stimulus meanings” (the proximal stimuli) are “represented” at all. It is at least clear that in so far as the question of an inference to a perceptual belief’s being justified is reduced to the question of there being the “right” causal chain, Fodor has joined the ranks of classical representationalists, theorists of knowledge who, knowingly in Fodor’s case, blur the difference between causality and justification (Rorty 1979: 139–48, 1998b; Putnam 1992b, Fogelin 1994: 175). 2.3 Is speech perception modular? It does not follow from the fact that perception is, on Fodor’s view, inferential that it is “conscious” or that it is “thinking” in the sense of problem solving. Take the case of speech-perception. When an addressee hears a sound that is produced by another human being whom the addressee believes to speak his (the addressee’s) language and that is analyzed to be a token of an utterance-type in that language, an acoustic representation has been unthinkingly transformed into a linguistic representation if the addressee is in command of the language. Similarly, one points one’s head at the Necker cube drawing, opens one’s eyes, and looks. The result in each case, nearly instantaneously, is, respectively, an understood utterance-type and the perception of a cube-picture. These processes are notable for the following features: speed; not being consciously accessible; not being voluntary; and at least hypothetically, being algorithmic, in the sense that a computable function succeeds in assigning to an acoustic argument a linguistic value (Fodor 1975: 151–52; Fodor 1990c: 239, 1990b: 212, 214). (One worry about these features is the existence of “garden-path sentences” like The horse raced past the barn fell, which may well cause the parser to halt and the mind to shift to a general-purpose problem solver [Fodor 1990b: 229, n.9].) Otherwise, these features suggest the use of a dedicated, special-purpose processor rather than the use of a generalized problem solver. Furthermore, the linguistic description of the speaker’s utterance is one that the addressee shares with other hearers of the speaker’s utterance-token who are colinguals with the addressee. Anyone who knows the language is in a position to give a description of “what the speaker uttered,” despite differences among hearers in

24


background beliefs. By virtue of those differences in background beliefs, hearers may disagree about what the speaker meant when, in, or by uttering what he uttered, but they will not, ceteris paribus, disagree about the identity of the sentence the speaker uttered (Fodor 1990b: 213). So far, I agree with Jerry Fodor, though I have been careful to distinguish the product of my “sentence-understander” as a linguistic description of an utterance- and sentence-type, from the product in which Fodor is most interested—namely, the propositional content P of the speaker’s communicative intention that the addressee believe that the speaker believes P. Furthermore, Fodor (1990b: 215) believes that what is most important for his argument for a dedicated sentence-processor is the truth of a causal claim; for example, the truth of the statement ‘Tokens of It’s raining are caused by intentions to communicate the belief that it’s raining’, just as what is most important for his argument for a dedicated visual processor is the truth of the statement ‘Tokens of a Necker-cube-drawing-retinal-display-type are caused by a distal layout of a Neckercube-drawing’. The truth of such causal statements skips the part of the story in which I am most interested: the intermediate step of the utterance-type between the acoustic form and the inferred belief of the speaker. Furthermore, unlike Fodor, I doubt that an inference to the mental state of the speaker is algorithmic, in the sense of a computation guaranteeing the assignment of a canonical description of a speaker’s mental state to a canonical description of an acoustic representation of the speaker’s utterance, even when the mental state is the speaker’s intention to utter a sentence of a certain type, much less when the mental state is the speaker’s intention to communicate his belief P. Fodor (1990b: 212) inexplicably takes the view that of all the inferences we make about others’ intentions from their behavior, there is just one class of inference that is algorithmic: inference to communicative intention. On Fodor’s view, one would have to conclude, absurdly, that when a bush burns there is always oxidation of cellulose except in the one case in which Moses is watching. Fodor (1990b: 214) more cautiously says, at just one point in his discussion, that what the processor assigns to the acoustic representation is “the literal content of what the speaker says,” a description from which talk of intention is absent. This description almost fits the description that I have given. Fodor ignores this description because he wishes to minimize the importance of the conventionality of language in order to maximize the similarity of sentence perception with ordinary visual perception as he conceives it and, hence, to maximize the significance of causal relations rather than conventional rules. 2.4 What do semantical and visual nonspecificity mean? I shall turn Fodor’s argument upside down. My discussion of the Necker cube drawing suggests that visual perception is more like sentence perception, as I conceive it, than Fodor realizes. Like the product of a sentence-processor, the product of the visual processor is not at first a presentation of an external object, where the presentation is the “content” of the visual representation; it is a display of an object, but the display, in the case of the Necker cube figure, is not determinately of one content (the presented inward-projecting cube) or another content (the presented outwardprojecting cube). Nor is it ambiguous between them. It is a display that is nonspecific


25

between the two presentations (contents). An ambiguous figure would conventionally display both contents; a semantically nonspecific figure conventionally displays neither content—the figure is a conventional drawing of neither an inward-projecting cube nor an outward-projecting cube. The “natural” opposition between the linguistic and nonlinguistic is the opposition between “proposition” and “image.” What this description of the opposition misses is the contrast for images that is exactly parallel to the contrast for sentences between meanings, thoughts, and states of affairs: the contrast between display, presentation, and portrayal (Atlas 1989: 27–28). This is the contrast, for both sentences and images, among what is uttered/displayed, what is meant, and what is referred to. In Atlas (1989) I had suggested the existence of previously unnoticed similarities in visual and verbal processing. The relationship between stimuli and interpretation in each respective case shows some strikingly similar properties: semantical nonspecificity versus semantical ambiguity and the mental processing thereof. If I am right about this parallel between visual processing and sentence processing, there should be something in the perception of ordinary physical objects that corresponds to the conventions of language in the perception of sentences. I think there is. Why should an ordinary perceiver, “knowing the rules” of perspective common in our culture, see a three-dimensional cube picture when viewing the Necker cube diagram rather than a two-dimensional pattern of lines in a plane? (Why should an ordinary speaker, “knowing the grammar” of English, hear a statement that the cat is on the mat rather than a pattern of sounds in a time interval?) Shimon Ullman’s (1979) work long ago suggested that built into the computations that produce interpretation of even quite minimal visual information about physical objects is the computational equivalent of assumptions about the rigidity, three-dimensionality, and surface continuity of the causal sources of the retinal stimuli. In the information processing of which we are speaking, it plays the same role of constraining the interpretation of retinal data that the grammar plays in constraining the interpretation of the acoustical data. What is the point of emphasizing what Fodor deemphasizes? The point is that without what Fodor calls “literal content” rather than the content of the speaker’s intention, one would not have the features of a dedicated sentence-processor that make utterances immediately understandable without conscious awareness of the process. Although a semantically nonspecific sentence-meaning will not provide all the information in the content of the speaker’s utterance-meaning, it will either constrain the range of possible specific interpretations or provide the base for further inference. But upon receipt of the acoustical information, it will provide a semantical information sketch fast. Then the sketch can be filled in from contextual information or collateral beliefs of the addressee by processors that are not dedicated. Information at the level of semantically nonspecific sentence-meaning or visually general pictorial display is the product, probably, of dedicated processors. These processors are not cognitively penetrable; they are encapsulated. Their processes are features of the “functional architecture” of the system, since they yield the interpretations they do whatever one’s conscious beliefs in the context may be: the displayed object is a three-dimensional rigid object, whatever its depth orientation is; or the understood object is an English sentence with a “literal meaning,” whatever else the

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speaker meant by it. These features are immune to bias from background information (Fodor 1990c: 242): whatever depth orientation you think the cube should have, it will still flip in and out of the page; whatever Nietzsche meant by what he uttered, his sentence still means in English ‘God is dead’.11 If one could not tell relatively quickly and accurately by bottom-up processing that a sound was an English word or sentence, and what English word or sentence it was, when one heard it, one’s ability to communicate would not be an efficient, hierarchically structured general capacity—that is, a capacity that takes as input any word, bounded sequences of words, or sentences of English, even if your knowledge of your own name makes recognition of that one word by top-down processing relatively fast, and faster than your recognition of some arbitrary word or sentence of English. If what I have just said is plausible, then sentence-understanding at the level of a computation of a semantically nonspecific semantic representation of a sentence-type is a “modular” process in Fodor’s sense. In nonmodular processes, by contrast, search mechanisms have access to any or all of my beliefs. Furthermore, for each new bit of information that I access, I would have to recalculate the credibility of a belief on the new evidence base. If memory searches are “costly” in time, and if reconsideration of a belief in light of further evidence is also “costly” in time, an encapsulated process would be a relatively faster process (Fodor 1990b: 219). I am quick to understand what the sentence the speaker uttered meant, even if I am not as quick to understand what the speaker meant by, in, or when uttering the sentence. On Fodor’s (1983: 91) own account in The Modularity of Mind, the questions about modular systems that must be answered are, “What is the most that an encapsulated processor should be supposed to compute? Which aspects of the input can plausibly be recognized without generalized appeal to background data?” On my view, the most would be literal meanings of a sentence-type exemplified by an utterancetoken. Inferences to the communicative intention of a speaker of a sentence-token— that is, to the content of a mental state of the speaker—fall outside the domain of a modular system. Fodor’s account of the modularity of sentence-perception seems to me mistaken. 2.5 A language of thought and the nonmodularity of communicative intentions: How utteranceinterpretation can be both hermeneutic (nonmodular) and enormously reliable (functionally modular) I am of course committed to the mind’s having acoustic representations of utterances, semantic representations of sentences, understandings of the contents of utterances— that is, of what the speaker intended to mean—an addressee’s interpretation of what 11As

an example of the prevalence of mistaken views about processing among philosophers, consider Paul Churchland’s remark that “one learns very quickly to make the figure flip back and forth at will . . . by changing one’s assumptions about the nature of the object or about the conditions of viewing” (1988: 8). Churchland makes the usual mistake of treating the Necker cube drawing as an ambiguous figure. It is obvious that the upward Necker cube image does not flip when one thinks to oneself, “Now I believe this is a downward Necker cube.”


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the speaker uttered, and functions from classes of one to classes of the other: mappings from sentence-meanings into speaker’s/hearer’s meanings, from mental semantic representations into thoughts, which, of course, are identified by Fodor and others with “sentences” in a “language of thought.” I appeal to a notion of semantic representation in the mind, a mental “language” of sentence meaning. Fodor and others have appealed to the notion of thinking as computation, so thoughts are entities on which computations may be defined—thus “sentences” in a language of thought. Stephen Levinson reviews arguments that I and others have proffered in support of the conclusion, as Levinson puts it, that “semantic representations and conceptual representations are not only distinct kinds of representations . . . they are not isomorphic” (1997: 24). They are distinct kinds of representations, “contrary to assumptions in many diverse quarters, including not only Fodoreans, Cognitive Linguists and those of similar views, but also most branches of computational linguistics” (1997: 24). But the contrast that I defended was not, without further assumptions, one between types of representations. It was one between semantically specific thoughts and semantically nonspecific sentences. In the history of modern philosophy and psychology, from John Locke forward, philosophers have underemphasized the autonomy of the language faculty (Chomsky). My arguments were intended to redress the imbalance. But my argument did not require that thoughts be “representations” in some computational sense—for example, syntactical objects on which algorithms can be defined. For those philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists who accept a version of a “computational theory of cognition” for mental states like belief and desire (Cummins 1989)—or a representational theory of the mind in general (Fodor 1975, and others)—the moral of my argument was that many thoughts—that is, their “sentences” in Mentalese—were not identical to, or synonymous with, any single sentence in English, even after the parameters of tense, deixis, demonstratives, and pronouns had been given values. (The content of a thought might be describable by a complex relation among sentences of a natural language but not given by a single syntactically well-formed sentence. [Note: a logical connective, such as the conjunction symbol ‘&’, is not a relation-symbol.]) The problem with the computational view is that to the extent that Mentalese is “representational” like a human language, it will, like all human languages, possess the semantical features, reviewed by Levinson, that distinguish sentences from thoughts. If Mentalese is actually a human, not a formal, language, as is the language of thought, the inevitable semantical nonspecificity of its semantically interpreted syntax could no more be identical with the contents of some of our thoughts than are the literal meanings of sentences of English or Guugu Yimithirr. To the extent that Mentalese does precisely express the contents of all our thoughts, to that extent it will not be a linguistic representation; it will be a medium of thought, but it will not be a language of thought. One English sentence can express the content of a thought, but that does not entail that the meaning of the sentence is identical to the content of the thought (Atlas 1989: 27–31). The mistake of conflating “a meaningful sentence expressing an intentional content” with “the meaning of a sentence being an intentional content” afflicts almost all philosophical discussion of the matter (e.g., Crane

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1995: 194). Of course, it might have happened that thoughts are really thought in the medium of an extensional formal language whose intended interpretations are expressed in classical model theory, but I’m betting that the biology of the brain is unlikely to have evolved in such a Hilbertian and Tarskian manner. Ultimately, the problem may not be the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations. The problem may be, with a rich enough notion of representation for there to be an interesting problem, the relationship between the “representational” and the nonrepresentational. Where I differ from Fodor is with his claim that [what] is usually required in the intentional analysis of behavior is a kind of hermeneutic sophistication that’s as far as can be from the execution of a rote procedure. The notable exception is inferring intentional content from utterance form. Show me an English speaker who utters “it’s about to rain” and I’ll show you an English speaker who is, in all likelihood, thinking about the weather. This sort of inference is enormously reliable.12 All you have to know about an English speaker is that he made a certain sort of noise, and the intentional interpretation of his behavior is immediately transparent. (Fodor 1990b: 213)

Unfortunately for Fodor’s view, science is not in the business of making notable exceptions. Inferring communicative intentions from verbal behavior is not, pace Fodor (1990b: 214), a solved problem. Although hermeneutic sophistication is a symptom of a problem whose solution is never an “all likelihood,” “enormously reliable” one, unlike ordinary utterance interpretation, the problem, rather, is to explain how utterance-interpretation can be both hermeneutic and enormously reliable. As I have argued elsewhere: Linguists and philosophers find it natural to split their analyses of language into three levels: the sentence (grammar), the statement (speech-act theory), the speaker (pragmatics). There is a very strong tendency for logicians and syntacticians to focus on the sentence, and for philosophers to want to reduce statements to speakers’ meanings. I inveighed against this in Atlas (1975[a]), when I argued that Frege had three notions of presupposition, one at each level. The sentence may be thought of as an abstract object, e.g. as in Katz (1981), and studied mathematically. The speaker may be thought of as a mental entity and studied psychologically. What, then, has happened to that convention-bound, truth-bearing, but intention-laden stuff that is parole? (Atlas 1989: 3–4) 12A counterexample to Fodor’s claim: I meet you on Tottenham Court Road and say to you, “Rainy weather, isn’t it?” and you reply, “Yes, it is” and pass on. In fact, only in the most etiolated sense was either of us thinking about the weather. This commonsense philosophical observation is supported by the results of brain scans using positron-emission tomography (PET). Regions of the left frontal and temporal lobes (Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas) are not activated during mere speech production (e.g., repeating presented words out loud); they become activated during conscious attention to a presented word-meaning and the selection of a semantically relevant verbal response. But even then, with fifteen minutes practice in the task, the task of choosing a semantically relevant word in response to a stimulus is taken over by the motor areas of the brain, with no involvement of the temporal and frontal lobes. Thus it becomes possible to utter words, and make sense of, for example, “Yes, it is,” without thought (Raichle et al. 1994).


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I take all three levels of meaning seriously (see Levinson 1995: 110, 112; Lyons 1995b: 235, 237–39), but my topic in this book is the relation between literal sentence-meaning and mid-level parole: convention-bound (“reliable”) and intentionladen (“hermeneutic”). A sketch of just such an explanation of reliable and hermeneutic utteranceinterpretation was given in Atlas (1979, 1984a, 1989), where semantically nonspecific, nonpropositional (hence non-truth-value-bearing) semantic representations of sentences are arguments of inferential mental relations whose co-domains are thoughts—for example, a speaker in asserting the sentence ‘I had a drink’ generally conversationally implicates (Grice 1975a) the sentence ‘I had an alcoholic drink’, which is notated by: “I had a drink” » I had an alcoholic drink. These relations produce reliable hermeneutic utterance-interpretations. Semantically nonspecific Semantic Representations of sentence-types and, thus, the inferential function called by Atlas and Levinson (1981) “inferences to stereotypes” constrain the interpretation of sentence-tokens (utterances), making interpretation reliable even though nonmodular (see also Atlas 1989; Horn 1984b; Levinson 1990; Récanati 1993: 260–68). 2.6 Conclusion There is an issue about what processes it makes sense to model as modular processes, and I have drawn the line between the modular and nonmodular at a different place from Fodor (1990b). For me the modular stops at semantically nonspecific Semantic Representations of sentences or semantically nonspecific pictorial representations of objects. The mental contents of speakers’ intentions will have to be taken care of by what I once called “inference to the best interpretation” (Atlas and Levinson 1981), which is a formal analogue of, but not reducible to, “inference to the best explanation” (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 50; Fodor 1983: 88), a concept central to American philosophy of science since Charles Sanders Peirce’s discussion of “abductive inference.” And that, as the world knows, is not an inference that is encapsulated or cognitively impenetrable. So, to summarize: (a) My observations on the Necker cube drawing show that figures have the same semantic properties of ambiguity and sense-nonspecificity as do sentences. Visual perception is more like sentence-perception than Fodor suggests. Further, (b) Fodor’s (1990b: 210) account of what it means for perception to be inferential absurdly makes digestion and satiation inferential as well. (c) There is no justification for the claim that a scientific understanding of intentions should divide into two subclasses, communicative intentions and all the rest. A dedicated sentence-processor that makes utterances immediately understandable will not provide the information in the content of the speaker’s meaning. Rather, it will constrain the range of possible specific interpretations of the speaker’s meaning or provide the basis for further inference. I am quick to understand what the sentence meant, even if I am not as quick to understand what the speaker meant. (d) The important issue is where to draw the line between the modular and the nonmodular. Fodor has drawn it the other side of communicative intentions, but such a division of intentions into the modular communicative and the nonmodular noncommunicative has no concep-

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tual or scientific defense. It is just another version of the mistaken Kantian division of knowledge into the a priori and the a posteriori: linguistic knowledge of communicative intentions and empirical knowledge of other sorts of intentions. That epistemological division, as Morton White (1950), W. V. O. Quine (1980c), Hilary Putnam (1983b), and latterly Jerry Fodor (1998b) himself, have taught us, is an untenable dualism. This book is devoted to an examination of the relationship between literal sentence-meanings and utterance-interpretations, where the interpretations derive in part from a form of inference that is both reliable and hermeneutic—generalized conversational inferenda, either defined on a domain of propositions—as Grice’s (1975a) generalized coversational implicatures from “what is said” to what a speaker meant or what a hearer thought the speaker meant (see chapter 2)—or defined on a domain of semantic representations of sentences, including the semantically nonspecific, nonpropositional representations of literal meanings (Atlas 1978a,b, 1979; Bach 1987, 1994a,b,c; Récanati 1993: 267 n.7). As I have noted (1978a,b, 1979), the pragmatic inference mapping PRAGatlas: {} → PROPOSITIONS, mapping a pair consisting of a context and a semantic representation of, say, a negative sentence into an exclusion or choice negation proposition, is unlike Grice’s conversational implicature mapping PRAGgrice: {} → PROPOSITIONS. My (Atlas 1979) class of mappings takes contexts with Semantic Representations (SRs) into propositions (thoughts)—the class [ → P]. If the sentence with that SR was asserted, then the content of the statement made in the context by the asserting of that sentence is given by the proposition in the co-domain of the relation. Grice’s class of relations takes contexts with asserted propositions into propositions (thoughts) conveyed by what was asserted, namely the class [ → P]. In certain special cases, as in certain sets of “eternal sentences” (Quine 1960), an SR is equivalent to the proposition standardly expressed in any context by asserting the sentence whose semantic representation is SR. If we can understand the logic of these sorts of inference, we will have taken an important step in solving the logical aspect of the problem of utterance-interpretation and in so doing begin to formulate a theory of the semantics-pragmatics interface.

3 Semantical underdeterminacy and pragmatic interpretative inferences In Seven Types of Ambiguity William Empson (1930) discusses a Samuel Johnson poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” used for illustrative purposes, as I do here, by Jan Kooij: What murdered Wentworth, and what exiled Hyde, By kings protected, and to kings allied? What but their wish indulged in courts to shine, And power too great to keep, or to resign? (quoted in Kooij 1971: 122)


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Line 3 of this quatrain has an “ambiguity” that we mark by the following syntactic differences: [their wish to shine] [indulged in courts] [their wish [to shine in courts]] [indulged].

A further alleged “ambiguity” concerns the readings of the elliptical ‘their wish to shine indulged’, where one may expand the phrases to ‘their wish to shine indulged by themselves’ or to ‘their wish to shine indulged by others’. The elliptical phrase is syntactically and sematically neutral between these expansions (Atlas 1989: 25; Bach 1994a,b). Another type of ambiguity is lexical ambiguity. The verb ‘indulge’ can describe a dispositional or occurrent state, and so be classed as having the semantical feature [GENERAL] or [TEMPORAL] (Kooij 1971: 122). There is also a lexical ambiguity in ‘allied’ as in ‘connected by marriage’ and ‘connected by treaty’. Both these cases are instances of polysemy—having different but related senses for one word. This is to be contrasted with homonymy—as in the linguistic word-form port, where the same form realizes two words: ‘port1’ meaning [HARBOR], and ‘port2’ meaning [FORTIFIED WINE] (Lyons 1977: 550). Ambiguities arising from word-sense or syntactic structure are “inherent” in the sentence. In understanding poetry, a reader selects one or more “readings” from those his or her knowledge of the language can provide him that seem to him appropriate in the poem. Line 4 presents a rather different problem. ‘Power too great to keep’ can be understood (in specific ways) as either (a) “power too great for Wentworth and Hyde to keep (but not too great for others to keep)”; or (b) “power too great for anyone to keep.” Likewise, ‘power too great to resign’ can be understood as (a') “power too great for Wentworth and Hyde to give up (but not too great for others to give up) willingly”; (b') “power too great for anyone to give up willingly”; (c) “power too great for Wentworth and Hyde to give up without danger from having exercised it”; or (d) “power too great for anyone to give up without danger from having exercised it.” These are contextually relevant “specifications” of the generalized, nonspecific, literal sense of the words, distinct and relevant fillings-in, so to speak, of the senses of the words, but not themselves distinct senses of those very words. One is reading meaning into the words, not reading meaning out of them. For example, in various contexts, the word-tokens of the girl with the flowers can be literally and felicitously be used to “present” the more specific contents “the girl wearing flowers,” “the girl selling flowers,” “the girl carrying flowers in her hand,” “the girl strewing flowers,” and so on. Each of the relations between the girl and the flowers is subsumable under the [WITH] relation, but ‘with’ is not four or more ways ambiguous in sense (Kooij 1971: 110; Weydt 1972: 573; Brugman 1981). One should distinguish this phenomenon of nonspecificity of sense from lexical and syntactic ambiguity (Zwicky and Sadock 1975; Cruse 1986: 51–68). The existence of various interpretations (contents) of ‘with’, appropriate to different contexts in which ‘the girl with the flowers’ is uttered, does not entail that ‘with’ is ambiguous in sense among ‘the girl wearing flowers,” “the girl selling flowers,” and so on. These contextual specifications are not listed in my dictionary—the one

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on my desk or the one in my head. I do not search an antecedently given list for a sense that fits the context of utterance and select it as the interpretation that ‘the girl with the flowers’ presents in that context. Rather, it seems that knowing the meaning of ‘with’, knowing what ‘the girl with the flowers’ displays as its meaning, I understand the fitting interpretation of ‘the girl with the flowers’ in the context to be, for example, “the girl wearing the flowers.” Rather than select a specific sense, I construct a specific interpretation. Perhaps I may reinforce the point with a different example from Ruth Kempson (1977: 132–35). Kempson’s example is a negation. The sentence ‘It wasn’t a woman that came to the door’ may be used to state a proposition that would be true if a girl came to the door or a proposition that would be true if a man came to the door, but as Kempson (1975, 1977, 1988a) and I (Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1989) argue, it is not ambiguous in sense merely because it may express the distinct propositions “It was a non-adult, human female that came to the door” and “It was an adult, human non-female that came to the door.” Kempson and I demonstrate that the sentence is sense-nonspecific, not ambiguous, between these interpretations; the literal meaning of the sentence is neutral between them. The literal meaning of the sentence is neither one nor the other. The literal meaning of the sentence, the product of wordmeanings and the syntactical rules of their combination, is neutral between the interpretations. It is identical to neither of them. The sense of a sense-nonspecific sentence is not a proposition, the bearer of determinate truth or falsity (Atlas 1974, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989). In our language, general terms (those with divided reference like the common noun ‘apple’) contrasted with singular terms (like the definite description ‘the president of the United States in 2004’) are general in sense; that is, their meanings are nonspecific with respect to certain predicates, some of which are “basic” vocabulary in constructing a lexicon of English. For example, to say that an object is an apple is not by virtue of the meaning of ‘apple’ to attribute a size to the object, unlike ‘dwarf’, or a color, unlike ‘palomino’. (Redness is only stereotypical for apples; ‘pumpkinsized green apple’ is not an oxymoron.) These “basic” predicates are those from the lexicon of any successful grammar that would be employed to state the meanings of English words, especially the contrasts among those lexemes that are members of “contrast sets,” as [MALE]/[–MALE] and [MALE]/[FEMALE] for {‘father’, ‘mother’}, {‘stallion’, ‘mare’}, and so on (see Grandy 1987: 261, 272; Lehrer 1974; Lyons 1977; Pulman 1983). Examples may be found in decompositional theories of meaning proposed by J. J. Katz (1972), G. Lakoff (1971b), and G. A. Miller and P. N. Johnson-Laird (1976), but I shall not assume the correctness of any particular lexical decomposition theory for lexemes of English. Some of the difficulties with them have been interestingly discussed by Pulman (1983) and Grandy (1987). I would be content if ‘basic’ were a psycholinguistic metapredicate in a theory of language acquisition (see Lakoff 1987; Hornstein 1989: 40 n.6). By contrast, images, especially mental ones, like Bishop Berkeley’s (1710) ideas, have been supposed to be quite specific. The mental image that I conjure up when I imagine a speckled chicken has been supposed to be an image of a chicken with eightyseven speckles, or one with eighty-eight speckles, for instance. Nevertheless, it seems


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to me that I can have a perfectly good image of a speckled chicken without my image being specified for the number of speckles. As Paul Ziff once wrote, “Staring at a pictorial representation of a man in ordinary black opaque unbulgy riding boots we need not ask: is that man a web-footed or a nonweb-footed fellow? A real live man must be one or the other, but a man in a picture is not a real live one” (1972d: 136). The same goes for feathered bipeds as well. In Princeton, New Jersey, on 16 March 1972, Paul Grice put a dittographed copy of “Logic and Conversation,” the second of his 1967 William James lectures in Harvard University, into my hands. A year later the deeper significance of his distinction between the literal meaning of an expression and what a speaker might have suggested, implied, or conveyed by, when, or in asserting it—its “conversational implicata” as he termed them, or more generally its “pragmatic interpretative inferenda,” as I term them— became more apparent. Like Kempson (1975), I realized that negative, definite description sentences were not scope-ambiguous among external and internal negation readings nor were they lexically ambiguous among exclusion and choice negation readings but, as I demonstrated in June 1974 using Zwicky and Sadock’s (1975) ambiguity tests, they were semantically underdeterminate: semantically nonspecific for scope interpretations or nonspecific among the exclusion and choice negation interpretations (see Kempson 1988a; Horn 1989; Iten 1998).13 The free morpheme ‘not’ in English does not generate an ambiguous sentence but rather a sentence semantically nonspecific with respect to the exclusion and choice-negation interpretations. It was then that I realized that a hearer’s pragmatic inferences would have to “take up the semantic slack” (as Kent Bach 1994c would later put it) for there to be specific and precise interpretations of a speaker’s utterance even in the case of an “eternal sentence” in Quine’s (1960) sense. The exclusion/sentence-negation interpretations and the choice/predicate-negation interpretations were pragmatic, interpretative inferenda, the products of pragmatic interpretative inferences. Kempson (1975) came to similar conclusions about ‘not’ but tried, wrongly I believe, to give an extensional, logical disjunction account of the semantical nonspecificity of ‘not’ (Atlas 1984b, 1989; Kempson 1988a). Much has since been made of the notion of semantical nonspecificity (with respect to a semantical property) since I first wrote about it.14 But semantical nonspecificity is not merely semantical underdetermination. Of the latter, Sperber and Wilson wrote: “As is well known, linguistic structure grossly underdetermines the interpretation of an utterance: the linguistic meaning is generally ambiguous, it may be elliptical or vague, it contains referential expressions with undetermined referents, the intended illocutionary force is often not fully specified, and implicatures

13 For a language L, and the set V of admissible valuations val, val ∈ V, the choice negation –A of a sentence A is such that val(–A) = 1 if and only if val(A) = 0, and the exclusion negation ¬A of a sentence A is such that val(¬A) = 1 if and only if val(A) ≠ 1. Put sloppily, the difference is one between ‘false’ and ‘not true’. (I shall sometimes use the abbreviation ‘iff’ for ‘if and only if’.) In a bivalent language, the negations are extensionally identical. In a non-bivalent language, they diverge. 14Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978b, 1979, 1989; see Zwicky and Sadock (1975), Bach (1982, 1987, 1994a,b,c), Gillon (1990), Récanati (1989, 1993), Sperber and Wilson (1986b), Taylor (1998), and Wilson and Sperber (1981).

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are not linguistically encoded” (1991: 544). None of this—except the infelicity of saying that a meaning is ambiguous—would have surprised a student of sentence structure. But my observations in the mid-1970s were about the semantical nonspecificity or underdeterminacy of negative eternal sentences (in Quine’s 1960 sense of ‘eternal sentence’), not just about the phenomena of semantical underdetermination that Sperber and Wilson (1986a) describe. These were not the usual problems of disambiguation, deixis, fixing references, tense, ellipsis, and vagueness (in the logician’s sense of the term ‘vague’; see Williamson 1994, Keefe and Smith 1996). My observations indicated a radical semantical nonspecificity of the literal meaning of negative sentences in natural language. It is this radical semantic claim and its consequences for the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of mind, not to mention classical problems in the philosophy of language, that were my focus in Atlas (1989, 1997a). In contemporary Chomskyan (1996c) terms, my investigation was, in Atlas (1989), and continues to be in this book, one of Internalist Semantics and the pragmatics that must complement it. In Atlas (1978b) and in a lecture in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics in University College, London, in 1978, and later in a subsequently published paper (Atlas 1979), I showed how semantical nonspecificity with respect to a semantical property—for instance, the nonspecificity with respect to [MALE] and [–MALE] of ‘neighbor’ by contrast with the specification of the lexical feature [–MALE] in ‘poetess’—requires inferential mechanisms to produce from the semantically nonspecific literal meanings of sentence-types the interpretations of speakers’ utterances of sentence-tokens. These inferences were similar to those that Grice (1975a) had described for producing the pragmatic implications of what a speaker has asserted, but the domain of my pragmatic inference relation, unlike Grice’s (1975a), as I (1978a,b, 1979) indicated, were not assertions but non-truth-evaluable semantic representations, and its co-domain were propositions. As observed by Récanati fifteen years later: The mechanism of implicature generation suggested by Grice is intended to account for the step from what is said to what is communicated. But how are we to account for the step from sentence meaning to what is said? What bridges the gap instituted by there being a ‘free’ type of context-dependence pervasive in natural language? Grice does not address this issue. However, as many people have suggested (e.g., Katz (1972: 449), Walker (1975: 157), Atlas (1979: 276–8), Wilson and Sperber (1981: 156)), the pragmatic apparatus by means of which Grice accounts for conversational implicatures can also be used to account for the determination of what is said on the basis of sentence meaning. (Récanati 1993: 236)

In the work cited by Récanati, Katz (1972: 449) notes the use of pragmatic inference in determining speaker’s reference for a singular term, as does Walker (1975: 157), who also mentions pragmatic inference in disambiguating the sense of a speaker’s utterance. Only Atlas (1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979), Atlas and Levinson (1981), Bach (1982), Kempson (1975), Levinson (2000), and Wilson and Sperber (1981) generalize to cases involving semantical underdetermination and semantical underdeterminacy (i.e., semantical nonspecificity). Atlas (1974, 1975a, 1977b,


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1978a,b, 1979), Kempson (1975), and Atlas and Levinson (1981) cite semantically nonspecific negative sentences; Wilson and Sperber (1981) cite the example of the underdetermined John plays well, and Bach (1982) cites the example of the semantically underdeterminate (nonspecific) I love you too. Wilson and Sperber observe: Nor is it just disambiguation and the assignment of reference in which the maxims play role. Quite often, they lead the hearer to ascribe to an utterance some propositional content that is not strictly warranted by semantic rules alone. Suppose John Smith is playing the violin in front of us, and I say to you: (4) John plays well. In these circumstances, I would naturally be taken as having expressed the proposition in (5): (5) John Smith plays the violin well. The fact that John is taken as referring to John Smith, and that play is taken as meaning ‘play a musical instrument’ rather than ‘play a game’, has already been accounted for [in our earlier discussion]. The resulting proposition should be (6), where the missing direct object in (4) is semantically interpreted in terms of a specific indefinite phrase: (6) John [sic] plays some musical instrument well. It is clear, though, that the hearer of (4) will normally interpret it as expressing not (6), but the more specific (5). We shall not attempt a full account of this fact here.15 Note, however, that (5) entails (6), so that whenever (5) is true (6) will also be true, but not vice-versa. [Statement] (5) therefore has more chances of being informative than (6), and one can conceive of circumstances in which (5), but not (6), would satisfy the maxims of informativeness, and (5) would thus be preferred to (6).16 It seems clear that any adequate account of how (4) is interpreted as expressing (5) rather than (6) will have to appeal to the maxims of informativeness, and that these may lead the hearer to choose a more specific interpretation than is warranted by the semantic rules alone. (Wilson and Speber 1981: 158)

Bach, cited in Atlas (1989: 30), discusses another phenomenon—not semantical underdetermination but semantical underdeterminacy (nonspecificity): Jack tells Jill, ‘I love you too’. He could mean any one of several things, (a) that just as Jill loves him, so he loves her, (b) that he loves Jill and someone else too, (c) that like someone else, he too loves Jill, or (d) that he has love as well as some other feeling for Jill. Whatever he may mean, he would be speaking literally and

15Atlas and Levinson (1981) had given an account of the interpretation of indefinite noun phrases. This account was adopted by Horn (1984b) and discussed by Mey (1993). Bach (1994a) discusses the expansion of sentences like (4) into propositions like (5). For decades Morton White, following J. L. Austin (1962/1975), has made philosophical use of the expansion of ellipitical sentences; see White (1965, 1979, 1993). 16Grice’s

(1975a) Maxims of Quantity were: (a) Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the present purposes of the exchange) and (b) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.


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yet, I claim, the meaning of the sentence he is using, though univocal, does not fully determine what he means in using it. The point is not merely that what he means is a matter of his communicative intention, but that the sentence [type] is semantically non-specific. It does not have a definite truth-condition, even with Jack and Jill fixed as the values of ‘I’ and ‘you’.17 A condition necessary for its [i.e., the utterance’s] truth is that Jack loves Jill, but one of the four other conditions is necessary as well, depending on which of the (a)–(d) is meant. However the sentence is not thereby ambiguous, but merely semantically non-specific.18 (Bach 1982: 593)

Récanati (1993: 236) appeals to an example of reference specification and either meaning disambiguation or the specification of a semantically nonspecific expression John’s book, depending on whether one thinks that John’s book is ambiguous, which is the classical view (including Chomsky’s); in this passage he is notably noncommittal about the semantics of the expression, but in Récanati (1989) he had (incorrectly) taken it to be ambiguous: In the interpretation process, the referent of ‘he’ and the relation between John and the book in ‘He has bought John’s book’ are selected so as to make what the speaker says consistent with the presumption that he is observing the maxims of conversation. The speaker might have meant that Jim has bought the book written by John or that Bob has bought the book sought by John. The hearer will select the interpretation that makes the speaker’s utterance consistent with the presumption that he is trying to say something true and relevant. (Davis 1991: 99)

Failing to cite the earlier research by Atlas, Katz, and Walker mentioned by Récanati (1993: 236), M. Taylor adds: Récanati (1989, 1993) suggests that we need to distinguish two kinds of pragmatic processes. Primary pragmatic processes play a role in determining what is strictly literally said by an utterance in context. Secondary pragmatic processes take the outputs of primary pragmatic processes and generate further “implications” as outputs. Among the further implications generated by the application of secondary pragmatic processes to the outputs of primary pragmatic processes are Gricean conversational implicatures. This nifty idea represents, I think, a great advance. (Taylor 1998: 344)

In the 1970s as I lectured to various audiences on what in 1998 was flatteringly called “a great advance,” I came to appreciate how difficult the logical and linguistic tasks that Grice’s program of philosophical analysis posed for philosophers and linguists—nothing less than a reconceptualization of the boundary between literal sentence-meaning, speaker’s meaning, and hearer’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning, 17See

Chomsky, who writes, “we cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truth-conditions. At most they have something more complex: ‘truth indications’ in some sense” (1996c: 52).

18Bach

(1987: 200–2) and, in a slightly different way, Stich (1983: 111–18, 120–23) make a similar point about the so-called ambiguities in the allegedly transparent, translucent, and opaque “readings” of propositional attitude sentences. Proper appreciation of the point would radically alter the received view on the semantics of propositional attitude sentences, but I shall not address that problem here.


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what in linguistics is called “the semantics-pragmatics interface.” In Atlas (1977b, 1978a,b, 1979) I had tried to show that both sides of the boundary as previously understood, the sentence-meaning-side and the speaker’s-meaning-side, would have to be reconsidered, not because there was no longer a proper, or Fregeanly “sharp,” boundary, but because the earlier boundary, between “propositions” as sentence-type meanings and “propositions” as utterance-token meanings was no longer a theoretically satisfactory boundary. The boundary had moved, and what it bounded had changed from “propositions” to pre-“propositional,” semantically nonspecific semantic representations of literal sentence-meanings19—syntactically combined lexical items—and from “propositions” to an addressee’s interpretation of a speaker’s utterance, which might or might not turn out to be a proposition (Atlas 1978b, 1979, 1989, 1997a). Kempson in her “Grammar and Conversational Principles” had noted: One of the few people in the mid 1970s to recognize the gap between linguistic content of a sentence and the articulation of the truth conditions of its associated propositions was Jay Atlas, who argued in a series of papers (Atlas 1975, 1977[b], 1979) that the linguistic concept of sentence negation was weaker than any concept sufficient to characterize the truth-theoretic properties of propositions that negative sentences express. (1988a: 141 n.2)

Independently Kempson (1975) had suggested an (unfortunately) extensional, disjunction version of semantical nonspecificity for ‘not’. Kempson claimed that the negative sentences were to be semantically represented by a logical disjunction of the two interpretations, the exclusion negation ¬φ and the choice negation –φ, or ¬φ ∨ –φ, without noticing that this disjunction is logically equivalent to the weaker exclusion negation ¬φ (see Atlas 1978b). But what we want is a semantically nonspecific representation of the negative sentence that is neutral in meaning, as J. L. Austin (1962) would have put it, between the statements ¬φ and –φ. The conceptual error is thinking that a representation of sentence-meaning that is neutral between statements ¬φ and –φ is the same as one whose information is expressed by the least weak statement whose information is common to both— the least upper bound (sup) of both ¬φ and –φ in the lattice of the set P of statements ordered by the logical consequence relation , viz. the join ¬φ ∨ –φ of the statements. For φ and Ψ, the “weaker” common part entailed both by φ and by Ψ is obviously φ ∨ Ψ, since φ (φ ∨ Ψ), and Ψ (φ ∨ Ψ). The “weakest” statement entailed by φ is a logical truth, e.g. (χ ∨ ¬χ) . Thus the least weak statement whose information is common to both ¬φ and –φ is ¬φ ∨ –φ. Unfortunately this is not an accurate model of the absence of semantical specification. It is extensional rather than intensional; although the English expression ‘Tom is my neighbor’ is neutral in sense between [TOM IS MY MALE NEIGHBOR], [TOM IS MY FEMALE NEIGHBOR], [TOM IS MY HERMAPHRODITIC NEIGHBOR], and so on, it is not synonymous with the logical disjunction in logical English Tom is my male neighbor ∨ Tom is my female neighbor ∨ Tom is my hermaphroditic neighbor ∨ Tom is my non-human neighbor ∨ . . . Tom is 19What

Noam Chomsky (1996c: 38) now calls “symbolic representations” of an “Internalist Semantics.”

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my ADJ neighbor (Atlas 1978b, 1984b, 1989). It is even more clear that the negative English sentence-frame containing ‘not’—A(. . . not . . .)—will not be synonymous with the logical disjunction in logical English ¬A ∨ –A, which, as noted, is logically equivalent to ¬A. A logical disjunction, though logically weak, is semantically specific. In Atlas (1979) I had argued that an account in which negative sentences The F is not G were scope-ambiguous was redundant. If pragmatic inferences were a necessary part of a theory of utterance-interpretation, and the sentences were ambiguous, the inferences would be essential to disambiguation, to the selection of the appropriate sense in the context of utterance. On the assumption that the addressee analyzes the speaker’s sentence-token and discovers two or more senses, a choice of the appropriate sense must be made in light of collateral information available in the context. Thus some inferential mechanism must produce a decision on the best “fit” between each sense and the context of utterance. By contrast, if the sentence is unambiguous but semantically nonspecific for semantic features F1, F2, . . . Fn, the inferential mechanism must give in the context an appropriate, more specific or precise, interpretation of the semantically nonspecific sentence. I hypothesized that since the same inferential mechanisms were at work in both the cases of ambiguity and of sense nonspecificity—one to select a reading, the other to construct a more specific or precise interpretation—the difference between selection and construction was that the construction of a specific interpretation operated on a pre-“propositional” semantic representation that was too underdeterminate, not merely too underdetermined, to carry a truth-value (Atlas 1979; Bach 1982). Contrary to Grice’s view that pragmatic mechanisms operated only post-“propositionally” to give what the speaker implied by asserting a sentence, what statement the speaker asserted was determined by pragmatic inference in addition to the semantic interpretation of context-dependent indexicals, demonstratives, reference-fixing of singular terms, tense, and others. I (Atlas 1979) also observed that classical Gricean theory could not give an adequate explanation of the inferential mechanism: sentence-negations Not (The F is G) were transformed into predicate negations The F is non-G, and the references of singular terms were fixed, but no coherent account was given of the case in which Grice’s sentence-negation meaning (the exclusion negation)—sometimes expressed in English by It is not the case that P, though, as I pointed out in Atlas (1974), It is not the case that P can also express the predicate/choice-negation interpretation; see Horn (1989)— passed through the pragmatic mechanism unchanged, the case in which informative enrichment was absent. According to the classical Gricean theorist, this case should have been the semantically “unmarked” case, but no Gricean principle in the theory could noncircularly explain it to be the unmarked case, the case of saying what one means. In fact, it is linguistically the “marked” case, as Sir Peter Strawson (1950) noted. By contrast, my claim (Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978b, 1979), that the negative sentence-meaning [THE F IS NOT G] is semantically nonspecific between the classical scope-interpretations meant that the inferential mechanism operated equally in both cases: it produced the more specific choice-negation interpretation [– (THE F IS G)], and it produced the more specific exclusion-negation interpretation [¬ (THE F IS G)]. In neither case has the speaker “said” something “propositional,” if by ‘saying’ one means merely the act of uttering a meaningful sentence of a semantically nonspecific sort. Or,


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in either case the speaker has “said” something interpretable, if by ‘saying’ one means performing a locutionary act of producing a token of an utterance-type that is interpreted by one’s addressee to have a determinate sense and reference.20 Or, in one case or the other the speaker has “said” what he meant, if by ‘saying’ one means performing an illocutionary act the content of which is correctly interpreted by the speaker’s addressee to have the speaker’s intended sense and reference. Having previously attempted in Atlas (1989) to put in canonical form my explanation of the nature of semantically nonspecific sentence-meaning by developing and applying to sentences the lexical notion of the semantical nonspecificity of subsentential expressions, in this book I attempt to formulate, but not “reduce” or “metaphysically explain” (whatever that means), principles underlying an addressee’s interpretation of a speaker’s utterance. As in Atlas (1979), I radically revise and extend Grice’s (1961, 1967, 1975a,b, 1989a) account of generalized conversational implicata to an account of generalized conversational inferenda. My subject is not just generalized conversational implicature; it is generalized interpretative inference. My two semantic and pragmatic inquiries together provide philosophers and linguists with the framework they need to reconceptualize traditional philosophical problems in the spirit of Grice’s Linguistic Turn (see chapter 2, section 1) and in the spririt of Chomsky’s (1996c, 2000) Internalist Semantics.21 My book Philosophy without Ambiguity (1989) examined negation, presupposition, definite descriptions, negative existence statements, and natural kind terms, the construction of the correct theory for which requires the distinction between ambiguity and semantical nonspecificity. Atlas (1977a,b, 1978a,b, 1979) and chapter 4 of Atlas (1989) showed why the concept of semantical nonspecificity was also essential for a correct account of speaker’s-utterance interpretation. My earlier book having delimited the semantics-pragmatics boundary from the semantics side of Chomsky’s (1996c, 2000) Internalist Semantics, this book attempts to construct a post-Gricean theory of generalized interpretative inference of the sort first adumbrated in Atlas (1978a,b, 1979) and Atlas and Levinson (1981), in order to delimit the semantics-pragmatics boundary from the pragmatics side of Chomsky’s (1996c, 2000) Performance Systems. Together the two books constitute a systematic study of the semantics-pragmatics interface.

20See Ziff (1972a). Similar notions of interpreting utterances surfaced in others’ theories as well, notably the “explicatures” of the Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson (1986b); the “implicitures” of Bach (1994a,b); the Pragmatic Intrusion of Katz (1972), Walker (1975), and Levinson (1988, 2000) for the interpretation of singular terms; and the two stages of pragmatic inference in Récanati (1989), who in Récanati (1993: 236) acknowledges the earlier work of Katz (1972) and Walker (1975) on reference-determination of definite descriptions and on disambiguation and of Atlas (1979) on interpretative specification of nonspecific literal meaning (see Horn 1992a: 265). 21 Not, it may have disappointed Grice to realize, in exactly the letter of Grice. In June 1980 I asked him whether, in light of my own and others’ suggested revisions of his Maxims of Conversation—e.g., Atlas and Levinson (1981) and Sperber and Wilson (1986b)—he thought his maxims as originally formulated in 1967 were both accurate and complete. He replied succinctly, “Yes.” He was being slightly disingenuous, as he himself, in Grice (1981, originally a lecture of 1970), proposed a new Maxim of Manner in order to generate the existential “presuppositions” of definite descriptions from negative definite description sentences. See chapter 4 in this volume.


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As I have suggested elsewhere (Atlas 1975, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1981, 1989), for theoretical purposes I distinguish among sentence-types or -tokens, utterancetypes or -tokens, literal meanings of sentence-types or -tokens, speaker’s interpretations of utterance-types or -tokens, and addressee’s interpretations of a speaker’s utterance-types or -tokens. My Chomksyan Internalist Semantics claims that a sentence-type or -token, which is a syntactical entity—a well-formed syntactical combination of lexical items—has a literal meaning. I represent that literal meaning by a semantic representation. An assertion (statement) or utterance of a sentence-token will have its literal sentence-type meaning but also a semantic interpretation in the context of utterance. A semantic interpretation of the utterance in a context will be determined when it fixes the references of singular terms, indexicals, demonstratives, and tense and will be determinate when it makes “precise” or makes “specific” the interpretation of semantically nonspecific general terms in the utterance. The semantic representation of a sentence will be semantically underdeterminate, by virtue of its semantical nonspecificity, so that it might not “express a proposition” or carry a truth-value (depending on the relevance of the specific information to the context of evaluation), as well as semantically underdetermined, by virtue of its lacking values for its referential variables, so that it would not “express a proposition” or carry a truth-value (depending on the relevance of determining the values of the referential variables to the context of evaluation). The semantic interpretation of a statement or assertion will be sufficiently determined and, in addition, determinate so that it does identify the proposition expressed by the utterance and can be assigned a truthvalue. Truth-conditional semantics is for the semantic interpretations of utterance-types or -tokens, not for the semantic representations of sentence-types or -tokens. Classical Gricean pragmatics takes a semantic interpretation of an utterance and its context and generates a pragmatic interpretation of the utterance in the context, something intuitively described as “the addressee’s understanding of the speaker’s intended meaning,” by combining the semantic interpretation of the assertion with the asserter’s conversational implicata: something the addressee understands the speaker to convey, suggest, or imply by, in, or when asserting the sentence-token in the context. The Atlas (1979) version of post-Gricean pragmatics allows pragmatic inference to map (a) semantic representations of sentences into semantic interpretations of utterances of the sentences and (b) semantic interpretations of assertions (statements) of the sentences into further semantic interpretations, which are further interpretations by the addressee—what the addressee understands the speaker to have communicated in making the asertion in that context. The latter interpretations are the classical Gricean conversational implicata. Thus, the architecture of the theory is this: 1.

2.

Internalist sentence semantics. Sentence strings, well-formed sequences of lexical items, are meaningful; they have semantic representations. Externalist statement semantics. Utterances of sentence-string-tokens will, when nonspecific items have specific interpretations, when vagueness is sharpened, and when variables have values, have welldefined truth conditions in a context. An utterance with a well-


3.

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defined truth condition in a context will be said to “express a proposition.” The truth condition of an utterance in the context is described by the semantic interpretation. Some utterances are assertions (statements). Externalist speaker/addressee pragmatics. A speaker, in, by, or when asserting a sentence-string-token, will convey, suggest, or imply to an addressee further propositions [implicata]. The contents of the assertion and of the implicata constitute the “total signification” of the speaker’s utterance for the addressee.

Psycholinguistically the picture is this: the mental realization of language L, L = <Syntax, Vocabulary>, generates φ. Speaker S asserts utterance U, a phonetic realization of φ. Addressee A interprets Uφ in the context K in order to know what assertion S has made and what else S conveys by making the assertion. This twoleveled semantics—internalist and truth-conditional—is an essential feature of the Atlas (1979) version of post-Gricean pragmatics. (For discussion of these three levels of representation and interpretation, see Atlas 1989, Levinson 1995, and Lyons 1995b). Chomsky (1996c, 2000) limits his semantics to Internalist Semantics of the syntactically well-formed strings and relegates both truth-conditional semantics and Gricean implicatures of utterances to the pragmatics of Performance Systems. This difference between me and Chomsky is merely terminological, but a parallel difference between me and Jerry Fodor is not merely terminological (see section 2). In section 1, “Metaphor, Nonspecific Meaning, and Utterance Interpretation,” I took a classical problem, that of metaphor, and approached it from the point of view of my Internalist Semantics notion of semantical nonspecificity (with respect to a semantical property). That section provided a gentle introduction to the notion of semantical nonspecificity in an application to an old and familiar problem. In section 2 “Semantical Nonspecificity, Utterance Interpretation, and Psychological Modularity,” I discussed the philosophical consequences of my semantical and post-Gricean pragmatic theory for Fodor’s account of utterance-interpretation. I posed the problem of utterance-interpretation in a new and, I suggested, conceptually more satisfactory way. Unlike me, Fodor thinks that language is an exception in the realm of intentional action—that what “is usually required in the intentional analysis of behavior is a kind of hermeneutic sophistication that’s as far as can be from the execution of a rote procedure. The notable exception is inferring intentional content from utterance form” (1990b: 213). On my view, though hermeneutic sophistication is, as Fodor notes, normally a symptom of an analysis of intentional acts whose results are never “all likelihood,” “enormously reliable” ones, the challenge, rather, is to explain how utterance-interpretation can be both hermeneutic and enormously reliable. That is the challenge that has directed the construction of the accounts discussed in Atlas (1979, 1989) and in the present work. In my view, a satisfactory explanation of utterance interpretation requires the recognition of two linguistic phenomena: semantical nonspecificity of sentence and predicate expressions and generalized interpretative inferences, either from semantic representations or from assertions.


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Without semantical nonspecificity of the sentences, generalized conversational interpretative inferences are “blind”; and without the contents of generalized interpretative inferenda, the contents of semantically nonspecific sentences are “empty.” Together they yield by hermeneutic means a reliable interpretation of a speaker’s “meaning” in asserting a sentence. That is the post-Gricean thesis stated in Atlas (1979), Atlas (1989: chap. 4) and developed further in this volume. In chapter 2, “Grice’s Theory of Conversational Inference,” I expound on Grice’s views, selectively and critically, from his first publication on the subject in 1961 to his last remarks from his collected essays Studies in the Way of Words of 1989. My treatment is not encyclopaedic or exhaustive. My focus is on a critical evaluation of Grice’s views. It has been clear to me at least since Atlas (1975a,b, 1977a,b, 1978a,b, 1979) that assumptions of the classical, 1967 version of Grice’s account in the William James lectures in Harvard University would require revision in a radical way, for two types of reasons: 1.

2.

Since the literal meanings, and so the semantic representations, of many sentences being asserted are semantically nonspecific (for some semantical feature) and thus in the philosophers’ sense nonpropositions (not articulations of truth conditions and not bearers of a determinate truth or falsity), independently even of deixis, reference-fixing, tense, and so on, “what is said” is not a simple function of context and literal meaning, as I demonstrated in Atlas (1978a,b, 1979). Grice’s Maxims of Conversation and his “idealized model” or “theory” of conversational implicature entail inadequate taxonomies of inference and are insufficiently constrained to avoid “overgenerating” implicata that are logically contrary or contradictory. The post-Gricean account expounded here is intended to remedy the descriptive inadequacy in Grice’s and the neo-Griceans’ account, without despairing of Grice’s program entirely (cf. the enthusiastic attempt at “debunking” Grice in Davis (1998), who throws out the baby with the tub and keeps the dirty bathwater) and without begging further questions of the account’s explanatory adequacy.

On the first problem of semantical nonspecificity, negative, definite description sentences are a notorious case in point (see Horn 1989). As I argued in Atlas (1974, 1975b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989), pragmatic inference is antecedently required even to construct a truth-value bearing interpretation (a “proposition,” Grice’s “what is said”) from the literal, semantically nonspecific meaning of a negative sentence uttered. Noam Chomsky recently suggested that “we cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truthconditions. At most they can have something more complex: ‘truth indications’ in some sense” (1996c: 52). He added: There is no question of how human languages represent the world, or the world as it is thought to be. They don’t. . . . There is no reference-based semantics. . . . There is a rich and intriguing internalist semantics, really part of syntax, on a par in this


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respect with phonology. Both systems provide ‘instructions’ for performance systems, which use them . . . for articulation, interpretation, inquiry, expression of thought, and various forms of human interaction. (Chomsky 1996c: 53)

I had written in Atlas (1979: 278 n.2), “The sentence The A is not B in one context may be understood as L– [an external, exclusion negation] and in another as L+ [an internal, choice negation]. These understandings [not senses] are related to the [literal] meaning . . . of the sentence as allophones are to the phoneme to which they belong.” I had been engaged in a study in Chomskyan Internalist Semantics. In chapter 2 I also discuss Grice’s (1989a) and A. P. Martinich’s (1980) views on the role of Relevance in Grice’s account, arguing that Relevance cannot subsume Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity or Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Maxims of Relativity and Informativeness. I show that the phenomena of hyperbole present obstacles to Horn’s (1984b) and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986b) attempts to reduce Informativeness to Relevance. I conclude by discussing the central philosophical problem of Grice’s pragmatics: his reduction of the semantics of utterances to the epistemology of mental states. In chapter 3 “The Rise of Neo-Gricean Pragmatics,” I discuss the project of Atlas (1978b, 1979), Atlas and Levinson (1981), Horn (1984b, 1989, 1993, 1996b), Levinson (1987a,b, 1988a,b; 1991, 2000), and Huang (1994, 2000). We revise Grice’s original account of the Maxims of Conversation so that both speaker-centered maxims of production and addressee-centered maxims of comprehension (interpretation) are formulated as part of a complete account (see Blutner 2000). Horn (1984b, 1989, 1993) has suggested a simplifying dualistic schema of Grice’s maxims—two antithetical categories of informational adequacy, Q (Quantity), and economy, R (Relevance)—the speaker saying enough for successful uptake by his addressee (Q) but saying no more than is needed (R).22 Levinson (1987b, 1988a,b; 1991, 2000) and Huang (1994, 2000) have developed and applied the theory to anaphora in English and Chinese. In chapter 4, “The Post-Gricean Theory of Presupposition,” I review the reduction of Strawsonian and Fregean presupposition to entailment and Gricean implicata, comment on the inadequacies of Stalnaker’s (1974, 1999) notion of pragmatic presupposition, and discuss the flaws in Grice’s (1981) attempted reduction. In chapter 5, “Assertibility Conditions, Implicature, and the Question of Semantic Holism,” I examine several theoretical problems in specifying the logical forms, truthconditions, and implicata of English sentences containing comparative adjectives, equatives, adverbials of degree, and adverbial “approximatives” (e.g., almost). The range of linguistic data explained and the depth of semantic analysis achieved is, I believe, not to be found in competing theories.23 I also derive some surprising consequences for the philosophical dispute concerning “meaning holism.” 22Horn (1984b: 17) notes: “The most detailed and careful discussion in the literature of Q vs. R clashes in English is due to Atlas and Levinson (1981) (cf. Levinson 1983: Section 3.2 for related discussion).” 23Manfred Bierwisch (1989: 129) remarks of the analysis of comparatives and equatives of Atlas (1984a) and in this book, “The most careful account of the relevant facts and relations concerning the comparative and the equative is given in Atlas (1984[a]).”

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In the final chapter 6, “The Third Linguistic Turn and the Inscrutability of Literal Sense,” I examine a controversial question in the study of the semanticspragmatics interface: What does the English numerical adjective ‘three’ actually mean? I reach the controversial conclusion that the meaning of numerical adjectives is highly underdeterminate, and I introduce a Context Principle for Chomskyan Internalist Semantics: only in the context of a noun phrase does a numerical adjective have a determinate meaning. I attempt to put post-Gricean pragmatics in historical perspective and consider its consequences for a philosophical theory of meaning and for Chomskyan internalist semantics.

2

Grice’s Theory of Conversational Inference A Critical Exposition

1 The third linguistic turn Thirty-five years ago Richard Rorty (1992 [1967]) published an anthology of essays on the philosophical methods of the logical empiricists in the interwar years and of the “ordinary language” philosophers in prewar and postwar Oxford, an anthology entitled The Linguistic Turn. The phrase has caught on. But there has been a third linguistic turn in philosophy—less dramatic than that of the early Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and more systematic than the nuanced analysis of language characteristic of J. L. Austin’s essay “A Plea for Excuses” (1956–57). It has not been as ideological as either of the first two; it has been more tentative in its claims, more sophisticated in its methodology, more sensitive to the demands of theory construction. Its tutelary deities have been Noam Chomsky and W. V. O. Quine; its progenitors Donald Davidson, Zeno Vendler, H. Paul Grice, and Robert Fogelin; and its charter the texts of Fogelin (1967), Evidence and Meaning; Grice (1967), “Logic and Conversation: The 1967 William James Lectures”; Vendler (1967), Linguistics in Philosophy, Davidson (1967), “The Logical Form of Action Sentences”; Davidson and Harman, eds. (1972), Semantics of Natural Language; and Davidson and Harman, eds. (1975), The Logic of Grammar. The Gricean strand of this development began with P. H. Nowell-Smith’s concept of “contextual implication” in his 1954 book Ethics; it emerged with Paul Grice’s notion of “conversational implication” from his 1961 essay on the causal theory of perception, and it matured in Grice’s Maxims of Conversation of his 1967 William James lectures “Logic and Conversation” and in Robert Fogelin’s “Rule of Strength” 45

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from his 1967 Evidence and Meaning. Patrick Nowell-Smith and Paul Grice were part of J. L. Austin’s Saturday morning meetings in Oxford in the 1950s. Fogelin expresses his intellectual indebtedness to both Austin and Nowell-Smith. What distinguishes Grice’s approach is his emphasis on “the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply; a distinction seemingly denied by Wittgenstein, and all too frequently ignored by Austin” (Grice 1986: 59). By his own testimony, Grice (1986: 59) was influenced by Quine’s work, which “helped to throw light on the problem of deciding what kind of thing a suitable theory [of linguistic phenomena of the kind with which in Oxford we had long been concerned] would be, and also by his example exhibited the virtues of a strong methodology”; he added that “Quine’s influence on me was that of a model: I was never drawn towards the acceptance either of his actual methodology or of his specific philosophical positions” (1986: 60). Geoffrey Warnock (1973) reports that Austin’s Saturday Morning Meeting group read Chomsky’s (1957) Syntactic Structures in the Michaelmas term of 1959. Grice (1986: 60) describes Quine and Chomsky as his “chief theoretical mentors.” He then describes his work of the 1960s as “principally . . . an attempt to show, in a constructive way, that grammar (the grammar of ordinary discourse) could be regarded as, in Russell’s words, a pretty good guide to logical form, or to a suitable representation of logical form” (1986: 60). For Grice this was principally “the suggestion of notational devices together with sketchy indications of the laws or principles to be looked for in a system incorporating these devices; the object of the exercise being to seek out hitherto unrecognized analogies and to attain new levels of generality” (1986: 60). Grice’s notational devices—for example, his square brackets—of the 1967 William James lectures and of the 1970 University of Illinois lecture “Presupposition and Conversational Implicature” (Grice 1981), have seemed to me unsuccessful in reaching his objective, as I discussed in my essay “On Presupposing” (Atlas 1978b). Ironically, given his goal, his informal discussion of the Maxims of Conversation have been more adapatable to systematic theoretical linguistic explanations than were his syntactical innovations. The syntactic way in which grammatical form could be a guide to logical form was not successfully demonstrated by Grice, but the GriceStrawson Condition (Strawson 1954, 1964) that statements carry presuppositions of the existence of a noun phrase designation only if the NPs are topic NPs has proven fruitful in the linguistic and philosophical analysis of negative existence statements (Atlas 1988, 1989) and justified Grice’s confidence in Russell’s Theory of Definite Descriptions. A development of this idea in my Focal Noun Phrase Limitation Principle (Atlas 1991a) determined the choice of logical subject NPs in logical forms for cleft statements (Atlas and Levinson 1981; appendix 3 here) and for statements of the surface form Only Tom VP, where ‘VP’ is a metavariable taking as values verb phrases (Atlas 1991a, 1993, 1996b, 1997a, 2001). Grice’s interest in and emphasis on the logical form of ordinary language sentences parallel contemporaneous interests of Quine’s in chapter 4 (“Vagaries of Reference”) and chapter 5 (“Regimentation”) of Quine’s 1960 Word and Object; of Anthony Kenny’s in his 1963 Action, Emotion, and Will; and of Davidson’s and

GRICE ’S THEORY OF CONVERSATIONAL INFERENCE

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Vendler’s in their individual essays of 1967. Vendler self-consciously notes in his preface to Linguistics in Philosophy that his essays represent “the gradual introduction of a new technique into analytic philosophy,” the point of which is “to show that the more or less sophisticated data provided by structural linguistics can be used in philosophical arguments” (1967: vii–viii). Grice’s project—like other projects of the Third Linguistic Turn, and unlike that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and logical empiricism or that of the later Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin—is characterized by the conscious selection from, or creation of, concepts in Chomskyan theoretical linguistics whose appropriation, development, and application to problems in philosophy proper can reconceptualize, and so overcome, the stalemates of competing, traditional philosophical “solutions.” Cases in point, in addition to the Russell-Strawson debate on definite descriptions, negation, and presupposition (Atlas 1977b, 1978a,b, 1989) and the question whether ‘ought’ logically implies ‘can’ (Sinnott-Armstrong 1984)1, are (a) the meaning of causal statements (Vendler 1967), (b) the logic and linguistics of negative existence statements (Atlas 1988), (c) the adequacy of propositional attitude sentences as analyses of intentional locutions (Searle 1983; Marti 1993), (d) the semantics of natural kind terms (Atlas 1980b, 1989; Chomsky 1995b, 2000: 148–53; Donnellan 1983, 1993), and (e) the reference of singular terms (Bach 1987). In Grice’s view, his investigation of “logic and conversation” was a prolegomenon to any future metaphysic (Grice 1986: 53, 59). That is the larger philosophical significance of Grice’s account of “logic and conversation.” But it has been Grice’s concept of conversational implicature, and for philosophical purposes his notion of a generalized conversational implicature, that has been a focus of both philosophical and linguistic discussion.2 As Grice emphasized, the importance of the notion was its role in distinguishing what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply. This distinction and its ramifications took Grice beyond Wittgenstein and Austin, as he notes (Grice 1986: 59).3 It also significantly influenced debates in linguistic theory on the semantical reductions of pragmatic facts, 1See Atlas (1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978b), Bach (1987), Boër and Lycan (1976), Grice (1981), Russell (1905, 1919, 1959), Sinnott-Armstrong (1984), Strawson (1950, 1952, 1964), and White (1993). 2Generalized conversational implicata are contents conveyed, suggested, or implied by a speaker in, when, or by asserting a sentence, as a default, standard, or normal feature of the asserting of the sentence in any and every speech context. Particularized conversational implicata, by contrast, are nonce implications by a speaker that are implied by virtue of the sentence’s being asserted in a particular speech context. 3Grice himself thought that his theory of implicature would cast light on problems of perception, knowledge, and modality so as to correct what he saw as a mistaken and unreflective Wittgensteinian formulation of these problems popular in the 1950s and 1960s among British philosophers (Grice 1961, 1986: 66). As P. M. S. Hacker remarks:

Grice’s distinction between the meaning of an expression and its conversational implicatures can be brought to bear upon Wittgenstein’s accounts of the meaning of various expressions in terms of use. For if Grice’s argument is correct, then Wittgenstein attributed features of the use of expressions to their meaning, which are correctly ascribable not to their meaning but to pragmatic principles of discourse. (Hacker 1996: 245)

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illustrated by Gordon and Lakoff’s highly influential 1971 paper “Conversational Postulates” and by the seminal Horn (1972).4 To quote R. A. Harris: Ordinary language philosophy grew more important for generative semantics in the seventies. Beginning with [J. R.] Ross’s fairly direct importation of Austin’s insights about performatives [Ross 1970], which [Jerrold] Sadock and [Alice] Davison took up at Chicago under [James] McCawley, it gained considerable momentum under the influence that philosopher H. P. Grice’s [1967] conversational implicature work had on both Lakoffs [Robin and George], on their students, and on [James] McCawley. It is from this period that linguists began to develop a sense of something they called pragmatics, as distinct from what [is] called semantics. (Harris 1993: 185)

A decade later, in 1983, Geoffrey Leech published his Principles of Pragmatics and Stephen Levinson published his survey Pragmatics. The latter book summarized the extraordinary amount of creative work in philosophy of language and linguistics that began in 1969 with Searle’s Speech Acts and in 1970 with Ross’s “On Declarative Sentences” and that continued through the 1970s. Levinson chose to discuss deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure, establishing a curriculum that continues to influence textbooks years later— for example, Green (1989), Grundy (1995), and Thomas (1995).

2 The language of perception In 1961, in an essay in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, H. Paul Grice, then a tutorial fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, addressed a problem in the theory of knowledge that had exercised distinguished Oxford philosophers, in particular H. H. Price in his 1932 book Perception. According to Price’s account, if one is perceiving a material object M, the statement so describing one’s experience, namely ‘M is present to my senses’, is equivalent to ‘M causes a sense-datum with which I am acquainted’, and “perceptual awareness” amounts to an inference from a psychological effect to its material cause. Grice observed that since the phrase ‘present to my senses’ was used by Price for one sense of the verb ‘perceive’, Price’s account of the causal theory of perception gives it that (1a) and (1b) are equivalent: (1)

a. I am perceiving M. b. I am having (or sensing) a sense-datum which is caused by M.

This talk of ‘sense-datum’ and ‘acquaintance’ is resonant with reminders of the 1910– 11 lectures of G. E. Moore (Some Main Problems of Philosophy, 1953) and Bertrand Russell’s “shilling shocker,” Problems of Philosophy (1913). By the 1950s and 1960s,

4Gordon and Lakoff’s position was criticized in J. L. Morgan’s 1977 “Conversational Postulates Revisited” and in Gazdar’s 1979a Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form (see Newmeyer 1996: 139–40).


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Oxford philosophers were concerned to show how the philosophical term of art ‘sensedatum’ should be understood, and thus to show what sense, if any, could be made of the claims of a causal theory of perception. The philosophical statement in (2a) would be explained by the ordinary statement in (2b) or by (2c): (2)

a. I am sensing a red sense-datum. b. It looks red to me. c. I seem to see something red.

In the Oxford of the late 1950s (at the time his essay appeared Grice was forty-eight years old) a sense-datum theory of perception of this kind was under attack.5 What interested Grice was the type of this attack, which he described as follows: When someone makes such a remark as “It looks red to me” a certain implication is carried. . . . It is implied either that the object referred to is known or believed by the speaker not to be red, or that it has been denied by someone else to be red, or that the speaker is doubtful whether it is red, or that someone else has expressed doubt whether it is red, or that the situation is such that though no doubt has actually been expressed and no denial has actually been made, some person or other might feel inclined towards denial or doubt if he were to address himself to the question whether the object is actually red. . . . Let us refer to the condition which is fulfilled when one or other of the limbs of this disjunction is true as the D-or-D condition (‘doubt or denial’ condition). (Grice 1965: 441)

Grice then admits that “there would be something at least prima facie odd about my saying ‘That looks red to me’ (not as a joke) when I am confronted by a British pillar box in normal daylight at a range of a few feet.” But the critic’s thesis goes beyond this, as Grice observes: (a) that it is a feature of the use, perhaps of the meaning, of such locutions as “looks to me” that they should carry the implication that the D-or-D condition is fulfilled, and that if they were uttered by a speaker who did not suppose this condition was fulfilled he would be guilty of a misuse of the locutions in question . . . , (b) that in cases where the D-or-D condition is unfulfilled the utterance employing the “looks to me” locution, so far from being uninterestingly true, is neither true nor false. (Grice 1965: 442)

But then, as Grice observes, the critic can close his attack upon the sense-datum theorist: The sense-datum theorist wants his sense-datum statements to be such that some one or more of them is true whenever a perceptual statement is true; for he wants to go on to give a general analysis of perceptual statements in terms of the notion of

5Grice (1986: 62) remarked, “I have never been very happy about Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia, partly because the philosophy which it contains does not seem to me to be, for the most part, of the highest quality, but more because its tone is frequently rather unpleasant.”

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sense-data. But this goal must be unattainable if “looks to me” statements (and so sense-datum statements) can be truly made only in the less straightforward perceptual situations [since in the straightforward situations, ones without doubt or controversy, the “looks to me” idiom would be out of order and neither true nor false]; and if the goal is unattainable the [Causal Theory of Perception] collapses. (Grice 1965: 442)

Since Grice, in his essay, wishes to defend his own version of the Causal Theory of Perception, he was forced to consider the strategy of the critic that he has described. He mentions a famous, parallel case, one that is both intellectually important for Grice and of historical interest as well. Suppose that one asserted (anomalously): (3)

??It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining.

What is it, G. E. Moore (1968: 535–44) had asked, that is peculiar about this statement? Clearly there is something odd about the statement. The oddity might be explained if there were an “implication,” ‘I believe that it is raining’, that was “part of the meaning” of ‘It is raining’, for then statement (3) would be logically contradictory. But it seems clear that such an explanation is mistaken. ‘I believe that it is raining’ cannot be, literally, part of the meaning of ‘It is raining’; the oddity seems to arise because of what “asserting” a sentence consists in. Sentence (3) is, literally, logically consistent: it is possible for it to be raining and for the speaker not to believe that it is. Grice’s diagnosis of his philosophical opponent’s thesis follows a similar pattern: If I were to say ‘it looks red to me’ in a situation in which the D-or-D condition is not fulfilled, what I say is . . . true, not “neuter”; while admitting that though true it might be very misleading and that its truth might be very boring and its misleadingness very important, one might still hold that its suggestio falsi is perfectly compatible with its literal truth. Furthermore one might argue that though perhaps someone who, without intent to deceive, employed the ‘it looks to me’ locution when he did not suppose the D-or-D condition to be fulfilled would be guilty in some sense of a misuse of language, he could be said not to be guilty of a misuse of the particular locution in question; for, one might say, the implication of the fulfillment of the D-or-D condition attaches to such locutions not as a special feature of the meaning or use of these expressions, but in virtue of a general feature or principle of the use of language. (Grice 1965: 442)

To show that the critic of the Causal Theory of Perception was mistaken, Grice undertakes an examination of the concept of implication that figures centrally in the dispute. Grice (1965: 444–45, 448–49) distinguishes four cases: (4)

a. Smith has left off beating his wife. b. She was poor but she was honest.


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c. Jones has beautiful handwriting and his English is grammatical. d. My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bedroom.

In (a) “what is implied is that Smith has been beating his wife.” In (b) “what is implied is (very roughly) that there is some contrast between poverty and honesty, or between her poverty and her honesty.” In (c) “I am reporting on a pupil at Collections. All I say is ‘Jones has beautiful handwriting and his English is grammatical’. We might perhaps agree that there would here be a strong, even overwhelming, implication that Jones is no good at philosophy.” In (d) “it would normally be implied that he did not know in which of the two rooms she was.” Of these examples Grice notes that (a) is a traditional case of “presupposition” in Grice’s pupil’s P. F. Strawson’s (1950, 1952, 1964) sense: the truth of what is “implied” is a necessary condition of the statement’s being either true or false, while (b) could be false, rather than neither true nor false, whether or not there was a contrast between honesty and poverty, if she were poor and dishonest. Grice notes that “what is said (or asserted)” in (a) is the source of the implication, but “what is said (or asserted)” in (b) is not. He also observes that in both (a) and (b), the speaker implied whatever is implied; that in (b) but not (a) the speaker’s words, in a precise sense, imply whatever is implied; and that in neither (a) nor (b) “would it be evidently appropriate to speak of his saying that, or of his saying that in that way, as implying what is implied” (1965: 446). Also in discussing examples (a) and (b), Grice (1965: 446) introduces the notions of the detachability and cancelability of the “implication.” Since these notions become important in the development of Grice’s views, it is of interest to consider the first account that Grice gives. Of detachability in example (4a) Grice writes: One cannot find a form of words which could be used to state or assert just what the sentence ‘Smith has left off beating his wife’ might be used to assert such that when it is used the implication that Smith has been beating his wife is just absent. Any way of asserting what is asserted . . . involves the implication in question. I shall express this fact by saying that in the case of (a) the implication is not detachable from what is asserted (or simpliciter, is not detachable). (1965: 446–47)

And then of noncancelability Grice writes: One cannot take a form of words for which both what is asserted and what is implied is the same as for (a), and then add a further clause withholding commitment from what would otherwise be implied, with the idea of annulling the implication without annulling the assertion. One cannot intelligibly say ‘Smith has left off beating his wife but I do not mean to imply that he has been beating her’. I shall express this fact by saying that in the case of (a) the implication is not cancellable (without cancelling the assertion). (Grice 1965: 446–47)

By contrast, the implication of (b) is, in Grice’s view, detachable because “what is asserted” is the same as “what is asserted” in She is poor and she is honest, but the implication is not as resistant to cancelation as that of (a) is. Grice does not go so far as to say that a denial of the implication of (b) is “unintelligible,” but he admits that

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saying ‘She is poor but she is honest, though of course I do not mean to imply that there is any contrast between poverty and honest’ is a “peculiar” way of conveying that she was poor and honest. As I have pointed out in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 20), Grice (1961), unlike Karttunen and Peters (1979), distinguished between “presupposition” and what he later called “conventional implicature” by saying, as in the case of (a) and (b), that while the conventional implicatum was detachable and, to a high degree, not cancelable, the presupposition was not detachable and not cancelable. Finally, Grice recognizes that the implication in (b) is attributable to the meaning of a particular word: ‘but’.6 When Grice considers examples (d) and (c), he observes, interestingly, that in asserting P or Q the implication that the speaker does not know whether P or whether Q is a default implication: the implication is standardly, or normally, attributable to the speaker, and to the speaker’s asserting the sentence rather than some other sentence, but there are contexts in which the implication would not be carried. The default implication is ceteris paribus nondetachable. It is also cancelable: it is intelligible and logically consistent to say ‘My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bedroom; mind you, I’m not saying that I don’t know which’. Likewise the implication of (c) is cancelable: ‘Jones has beautiful handwriting and his English is grammatical; I do not of course mean to imply that he is no good at philosophy’. But the implication is context-dependent: it is not standardly involved in the assertion of the sentence, and it is not a default implication—a special context is required to attach the implication to the utterance—for example, that it be uttered at Collections (student evaluations) in an Oxford college. It was important to Grice to distinguish the case of ‘or’ from the case of ‘but’. The implication of ‘but’ is attributable solely to its lexical meaning. Grice (1965: 450) wished to argue that the implication of ‘or’ is not attributable solely to its lexical meaning but to a “general principle governing the use of language.” His “first shot,” as he put it, at formulating the principle was: One should not make a weaker statement rather than a stronger one unless there is a good reason for so doing. On the explicit assumptions that P is “stronger” than P or Q because P entails P or Q and not conversely, and that an “obvious” reason for not making a statement is lack of justification, warrant, or adequate evidence, Grice suggests that his proposed principle of language use will explain the implication of the assertion P or Q. The form the Gricean argument takes must be something like this: 1. S asserted Ψ or χ. 2. S did not assert the logically stronger Ψ or assert the logically stronger χ. 6It is notable that in Grice’s (1965: 446–47) argument for the non-cancelability of the presupposition, he only considers the cancelability of the presupposed sentence for the affirmative statement Smith has left off beating his wife. Strawson (1950) had claimed that presuppositions were preserved under negation, so Grice should have considered the implication of the negative Smith has not left off beating his wife as well. He does finally do so in Grice (1981), with the result that he concludes that Strawsonian presuppositions are not detachable but are, in fact, cancelable. See chapter 4 in this volume for more on this subject.


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3. A good reason for not asserting a statement φ is not having adequate grounds for asserting φ. 4. So the speaker, it is presumed, does not have adequate grounds for asserting Ψ and does not have adequate grounds for asserting χ. 5. If so, then the speaker does not know Ψ, and the speaker does not know χ. 6. So the speaker means to imply in asserting Ψ or χ that the speaker does not know that Ψ and does not know that χ. Not only is it assumed in this form of argument that a speaker is capable of having and of recognizing good reasons for his or her actions, it is assumed by Grice that what counts as a reason for the action of making a statement—actually, in this case, an inaction: not making the statement Ψ—is the same as what the speaker means to imply in performing the alternative action by asserting the disjunctive sentence Ψ or χ. But this assumption on Grice’s part is gratuitous, as I shall discuss further later in this chapter. It follows from Grice’s claim about (4d), that the speaker does not know in which of the two rooms his wife was; that in asserting P or Q, the speaker does not know that P and the speaker does not know that Q [¬KsP & ¬KsQ]. So ¬P is compatible with all that speaker S knows, and ¬Q is compatible with all that speaker S knows. But when one considers assertions of logical disjunctions in mathematical reasoning, a paradigmatic use of a disjunction is to prove a theorem θ by deducing it from a disjunction, from both a statement φ and its contradictory ¬φ, since whatever is a logical consequence of the necessary truth φ ∨ ¬φ is itself a necessary truth. The advantage of such a proof is that one need not know whether φ is a mathematical truth or whether ¬φ is a mathematical truth. One may, of course, use this proof technique even when one does know which is true. When I assert (R) My car keys are either in my pants pocket or on my desk, it is true that an explanation for my act of asserting (R) may appeal to my not knowing which, but I do not think that I should be interpreted to imply, convey, suggest, or mean by, in, or when asserting the disjunctive sentence (R) that I do not know which, anymore than in asserting It’s raining Moore actually intended to convey, suggest, or imply in, when, or by asserting that sentence that he believed that it was raining, so that the total signification of the utterance would be [IT’S RAINING & I BELIEVE IT], even if the best explanation for Moore’s act of asserting ‘It’s raining’ was that he believed that it was (see section 5 in this chapter). Thus I disagree fundamentally with Grice (1965, 1967, 1975a) and especially with linguists Gazdar (1979a) and Levinson (1983, 2000), who construct a theory of “clausal” implicature to explain this misguided intuition about or sentences (see chapter 3, section 2). Grice’s view here seems just a lapse, as he later appeals to Moore’s Paradox sentences—for example, It’s raining and I do not believe it, to distinguish between what a speaker “implicates” and what a speaker “expresses.” In asserting U a speaker S expresses his belief that U is true; he does not implicate that he believes U. A speaker can assert You can/may have chocolate or vanilla and not implicate that the speaker does not know which you can have. In fact, the speaker implicates

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what is not entailed: you can/may have chocolate, and you can/may have vanilla. You just cannot have them both. Possible (P or Q) Possible P & Possible Q “Possible (P or Q)” » Possible P & Possible Q “Possible (P or Q)” » ¬Possible (P & Q)

Similarly for You can go to Grandma’s or you can go to the movies. In S’s offer of a choice of alternatives, S is normally in a position to assert both limbs of the disjunct, which is why S is in a position to assert the disjunction. (Shades of Mathematical Intuitionism!) When I say pointedly to Jason Linder of a “choice” of dessert at my dinner table: (T) You may have tartufo or you may have tartufo, I am not in doubt as to which he may have, nor do I convey in or by asserting the disjunction that I do not know which he may have. Such alleged implicata do not arise as generalized conversational implicata from sentential ‘or’ as features of the meaning of P or Q, at least in the case P or P. The classical Gricean theorist may riposte that my example merely illustrates the intervening role of the Maxims of Manner: P or P is a circumlocution for P, but an arch or joke one, so one should not expect the usual conversational implications to be produced. But the mistake is already made: P or P is not a circumlocution for P. It is certainly the case that one allegedly typical conversational implication but not both of asserting a disjunction P or Q, such as You may not have both an eclair and pie in asserting You may have an eclair or pie, would not be produced in asserting P or P, namely, You may not have both the tartufo and the tartufo—that is, You may not have the tartufo. The modest point of the or statement was to offer the tartufo or nothing, not to imply conversationally that Jason could have no tartufo at all. Since 1973 I have been pointing out the problem of conflating two claims: (a) “P or Q” » ¬(P and Q) and (b) a speaker S’s asserting P or Q is explained by ¬KsP and ¬KsQ. The first claim is about the implicata of asserting ‘or’. The second claim is purportedly explanatory of the behavior of asserters of ‘or’. Claim (b) does not entail (a), and (a) is false as a general claim about ‘or’. Rather, English ‘or’ is semantically nonspecific (rather than ambiguous) between inclusive disjunction and exclusive disjunction. By Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) inference to the best interpretation (discussed in chapter 3) the form P or Q is interpreted by default as exclusive disjunction, unless blocked—for example, by the use of ‘and/ or’, by the different form P or P, or by collateral contextual information (Fowler 1965: 422). This interpretation entails ¬(P & Q). Thus the alleged scalar implicature from or to not and is actually another Atlas (1984a) hybrid: implicaturecomposed-with-entailment inference. Thus the correct claim is (a') “P or Q” ° » ¬(P & Q). Both the ambiguity theorists and the classical Griceans were mistaken about ‘or’, but the ink continues to run (see chapter 5, section 1). I do not, unlike Grice in 1961, think that (b) entails that asserting the or statement implicates that the speaker does not know which alternative holds. But I shall pretend otherwise in the rest of this section, for the sake of Grice’s argument. It seems to me that to this day the phenomena of clausal implicatures have been misdescribed


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and misunderstood. The theoretical situation is nearly as bad as the one for English conditional if . . . then sentences (see Sanford 2003). The philosophical interest of the semantic distinction between ‘but’ and ‘or’, let us recall, is an issue in the philosophical theory of perception. The critic of the causal theorist’s explanation of sense-datum statements as statements using ‘looks to me’ or ‘seems to me’ claimed that a ‘looks to me’ statement implied that there was, or naturally could be, doubt or denial that an object is the way it looks. Since ordinary statements describing the perception of observable properties of material objects are not cases in which there is normally a doubt or denial, the critic rejects the account of ‘looks to me’ statements, and so the account of sense-datum statements, that the causal theorist requires. Furthermore, the objections are (a) that the doubt-or-denial condition is a semantic “presupposition” of a ‘looks to me’ perceptual report and (b) that the occurrence of the doubt-or-denial implication is attributable, according to the critic, to the presence of the words ‘looks to me’ or ‘seems to me’. These two features are philosophically important in the debate because they allow the critic to claim that the causal theorist is committed to statements that, on the theorist’s own view, are, in general, neither true nor false; since such statements are obviously true or false, in adopting ‘looks to me’ language, the causal theorist has shown himself or herself not to be using ordinary English and, presumably, not understanding what he or she was saying. It is also important that the implication be nondetachable and (to a high degree) noncancelable, because it would not be enough for the critic of the causal theory to show that just one way of characterizing sense-datum statements failed. It is essential that all ways of (equivalently; therefore nondetachably) characterizing sensedatum statements should fail. Grice then proceeds to argue that That pillar box looks red to me does not semantically presuppose doubt-or-denial. His argument was this: Suppose that I am confronted in normal daylight, by a perfectly normal pillar-box; suppose further that I am in the presence of a normal, unsceptical companion; both he and I know perfectly well that the pillar-box is red. However, unknown to him, I suffer chronically from Smith’s Disease, attacks of which are not obvious to another party; these attacks involve, among other things perhaps, the peculiarity that at the time red things look some quite different colour to me. I know that I have this disease, and I am having (and know that I am having) an attack at the moment. In these circumstances I say, ‘That pillar-box looks red to me’. I would suggest that here the doubt-or-denial condition is not fulfilled; my companion would receive my remark with just that mixture of puzzlement and scorn which would please my objector; and yet when he learnt about my attack of Smith’s Disease, he would certainly think that what I had said had been false [rather than neither true nor false]. (Grice 1965: 452–53)

Although this is an intuitively plausible counterexample to the critic’s claim that the doubt-or-denial condition is semantically presupposed by statements of That pillarbox looks red to me, the critic also wants to hold that the implications of these statements are nondetachable and noncancelable.

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In the course of discussing these claims, Grice (1961/1965:456) notes that if the doubt-or-denial condition is nondetachable (from what is asserted), it is not nondetachable by virtue of the implication’s being a logical implication. It is simply not a logical implication that if this pillar-box looks red to me, then I, or someone else is, or might be, inclined to deny that it is red or to doubt whether it is red. And even if the implication is nonlogical but nondetachable, there is no reason to think that it is, in consequence, not cancelable.7 What Grice now argues is that That pillar-box looks red to me nonlogically “implies” the doubt-or-denial condition, but the implication is nondetachable and cancelable. Like the implication of ‘or’, the implication is standardly implied by the speaker, or by the speaker’s asserting what he did. Since such standard implications are a matter of the use of language, not solely a matter of the meaning of words, the implication is not solely a part of the meaning of the expression ‘looks to me’. So the objection to explicating sense-datum statements in a causal theory of perception by paraphrase into ‘looks to me’ statements fails. It is particularly useful to note that the principle of language use in question is “giving preference to the making of a stronger rather than a weaker statement in the absence of a reason for not so doing” (Grice 1965: 459). One instance of such a case, the stronger φ and the weaker φ or Ψ, was explained by the semantic

7Indeed,

Grice’s example of ‘or’ would show why this is true. Interestingly Grice (1961, 1965: 456– 57) feels the need to dispose of a potential counterexample to his last thesis. He assumes that the implication of ‘but’ is nonlogical, and he has argued that it is (to a high degree) noncancelable. Now he argues that if the implication of ‘but’ is noncancelable, the reason for its being noncancelable is that it is detachable (by the use of ‘and’). Then, surprisingly, he wishes to conclude that if an implication is nonlogical and not detachable, then it is cancelable: (D → ¬C) ∴ (¬D → C). Grice (1961, 1965: 457) writes that “if you say that the implication of the fulfillment of the [doubt-or-denial] condition is (a) not logical in character and (b) not detachable, then you must allow that it is cancellable.” If this were correct, the objection to the Causal Theory would fail, as the objection claims that the D-or-D implicatum is neither detachable nor cancelable. The implicit argument here seems to be that since ‘but’ and ‘and’ are truth-functionally equivalent yet distinct lexical items with distinct uses in the language, and since the occurrence of two nearly synonymous items in the language would be superfluous unless some difference in use attached to them, so the difference in form makes a difference in use by way of a difference in (noncancelable) “conventional implicata” that the word-forms carry. Plausible as this argument is, even if detachability of an implication φ from “what is asserted” were to entail φ’s noncancelability, surely one should not conclude, as Grice seems to, that its nondetachability entails its cancelability; that is just the Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, as well as an example of a conversational inference from ‘if’ to ‘if and only if’ (see chapter 3 in this volume). What Grice has to show to defeat the critic is that it is possible for an “implication” to be cancelable while not detachable; on Grice’s own showing the default implication of ‘or’ is nondetachable yet cancelable. He has shown what he needs to show. He does not need yet a further, bad argument. It is noteworthy that Grice was surely assuming here, plausibly enough, that semantic presupposition is not a classical logical implication, since Strawson (1950, 1952) had explicitly tried to distinguish presupposition from entailment, but since Grice had granted that presupposition is nondetachable and (erroneously) that it is noncancelable, if it is also nonlogical, its properties would be a counterinstance to the very thesis he has just tried to defend (by fallacious reasoning!).


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entailment: φ φ ∨ Ψ, and the failure of the converse: φ ∨ Ψ φ (assuming it is false that φ Ψ). Grice notes that It looks red to me and It is red are not instances of an entailment ordering; they are logically independent.8 Nonetheless, Grice suggests that, intuitively, one regards It looks red to me as the weaker. If that is correct, his principle of language use will justify the “standard implication”: if a speaker asserts It looks red to me, he is in some doubt, or someone could have denied, that it is red. Yet the implication is not part of the meaning of the sentence ‘It looks red to me’. Thus Grice concludes that he has disposed “of what [he has] found to be a frequently propounded objection to the idea of explaining the notion of a sensedatum in terms of some member or members of the suggested family of locutions,” as in ‘It looks red to me’ (1965: 460). And he suggests that a budget of philosophical objections of a like kind will be undercut by a like analysis: 1. You cannot see a knife as a knife, though you may see what is not a knife as a knife. 2. When [G. E.] Moore said he knew that the objects before him were human hands, he was guilty of misusing the word ‘know’. 3. For an occurrence to be properly said to have a cause, it must be something abnormal or unusual. 4. For an action to be properly described as one for which the agent is responsible, it must be the sort of action for which people are condemned. 5. What is actual is not also possible. 6. What is known by me to be the case is not also believed by me to be the case. (Grice 1965: 459–60)9

It is, I hope, clear that a distinction between semantic features of statements, like semantic entailment, semantic presupposition, and what Grice later called “conventional implicature,” and pragmatic features, like what he later called “particularized conversational implicature” and “generalized conversational implicature,” is crucial to the success of Grice’s undercutting the criticism of the anti-sense-datum theorist. In particular, the distinction between ‘but’ and ‘or’—that is, between what Grice

8I have referred to such orderings of lexical items as “Levinson scales,” but, as we see, Grice discusses the sentential version in 1961. To my astonishment a referee for a prominent linguistics and philosophy journal questioned my introduction of such an ordering on the grounds that no such notion had been previously discussed in the published linguistics literature! Aside from the attitude to conceptual innovation that such a remark betrayed, Paul Grice himself had published the sentential version of my notion in the philosophical literature thirty years before I appropriated the lexical version of it for my use in discussing implicature. For students of Grice’s work the matter was, I thought, common knowledge, but apparently not. I withdrew the essay and published it elsewhere as Atlas (1991a); it has since been the subject of discussion by de Mey (1991), Blok (1993), Horn (1992b, 1996b), and others. It is now part of the linguistics literature. 9On

(1), see “seeing as” in Wittgenstein’s (1967) Philosophical Investigations; on (2), see Wittgenstein’s (1969) On Certainty; on (3), see J. Searle (1969b), “Assertions and Aberrations”; on (4), see SinnottArmstrong (1984) and M. White (1993: 48–49); on (6), see Vendler (1975a), “On What We Know”; Aune (1975), “Vendler on Knowledge and Belief,” and Vendler (1975b), “Reply to Professor Aune.”


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(1967) later called a case of conventional implicature and a case of generalized conversational implicature—is the crux for Grice’s refutation of the criticism of the causal, sense-datum theory.10 Having made good philosophical use of his division between the semantic and pragmatic against the casual Wittgensteinianism of some 1950’s Oxford philosophizing, six years later Grice presents a more systematic account of his principles of the use of language. It is clear from his 1961 discussion that Grice wishes to characterize, at least in the paradigm cases, the differences among semantic entailment [E], semantic presupposition [SP] (4a), conventional (let us call it “lexical” for convenience) implicature [LI] (4b), and particularized (4c) and generalized (4d) conversational implicatures [PCI and GCI].11 If we look at the logical properties of the classical semantic entailment relation—its reflexivity, transitivity, and monotonicity—and compare semantic presupposition, conventional (lexical) implicature, and conversational implicature with it, we have the mostly obvious results shown in tables 2.1 and 2.2. The pragmatic properties of entailment, conventional implicature, presupposition, and particularized and generalized conversational implicature—namely, detachability, cancelability, and calculability (to be discussed in section 3)—are as shown in table 2.2 (see Walker 1975 and Sadock 1978): Grice was certainly not wrong to see differences here. In particular, his emphasis on the importance of the distinction between conventional implicata and generalized conversational implicata (e.g., between the implicata of ‘but’ and ‘or’), however subtle their manifestations, seems well founded. Although Sperber and Wilson (1986b, 1995) reject (incorrectly, I believe) the distinction, without it the philosophical defense of Grice’s version of the Causal Theory of Perception would have foundered. 10It

is inexplicable or worse that Stephen Neale (1992: 524, n.18) should write, “The distinction between ‘generalized’ and ‘particularized’ conversational implicature is not represented in this diagram . . . because it is theoretically inert (for Grice).” Grice himself writes: I also distinguished . . . particular conversational implicatures that depended on particular contextual features . . . and ones that I thought of as relatively general which I called GENERALIZED IMPLICATURES. These are the ones that seem to me to be more controversial and at the same time more valuable for philosophical purposes, because they will be implicatures that would be carried (other things being equal) by any utterance of a certain form, though, as with all implicatures, they are not to be represented as part of the conventional meaning of the words or forms in question. (It is important that what is conversationally implicated is not to be thought of as part of the meaning of the expressions that are used to get over the implication.) And I thought that this notion of a GENERALIZED conversational implicature might be used to deal with a variety of problems, particularly in philosophical logic, but also in other areas. In these areas there seemed to me to be quite good grounds for suspecting that some people have made the mistake of taking as part of the conventional meaning of some form of expression what was really not part of its conventional meaning, but was rather a non-conventional implication which would normally be carried, except in special circumstances, by the use of that form. (Grice 1981: 185)

11Grice

notes that particularized conversational implicatures are “cases in which an implicature is carried by saying that p on a particular occasion in virtue of special features of the context, cases in which there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is normally carried by saying that p” [a case of a generalized conversational implicature]. (1989b: 37)


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2.1. Logical Properties of Semantic and Pragmatic Relations (1 = “yes”; 0 = “no”)a TABLE

Semantic Entailment

Lexical Implicature

Semantic Presupposition

Conversational Implicatures

Reflexive

1

0

0b

0

Monotonic

1

1

0c

0

Transitive

1

1

1

0

of a relation R among sentences: for every φ, φRφ. Transitivity: for every φ, Ψ, χ, (φRΨ & ΨRχ) → φRχ; Monotonicity: for any set A, ARφ → A∪{φ} R Ψ. See D. S. Scott (1971, 1973) and van Fraassen (1971). aReflexivity

bThe

reason that The king of France exists does not presuppose that the king of France exists is discussed in Atlas (1988, 1989: 91–118).

cShowing

the failure of monotonicity of semantic presupposition is left as an exercise for the reader.

3 Rationality, cooperation, and the imperatives of conversation In the second of his William James lectures “Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1975a,b, 1989b, 1989c), at Harvard University, 1967, Grice briefly presents a description of conversation as rational, cooperative, goal-directed behavior and formulates the Cooperative Principle: (5)

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.

Then Grice describes the means by which this overarching goal of rational, cooperative, conversational exchange is to be achieved: by following, or at least conforming to, the conversational maxims, or what Grice (1989f: 370) later called “conversational imperatives,” the observance of which promotes conversational rationality. Following the example of one of his favorite philosophers, Grice divides linguistic rationality into four categories: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner (Grice 1986: 66, 103). (6) Maxims of quantity 1. 2.

Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

(7) Maxims of quality Try to make your contribution one that is true. a. Do not say what you believe to be false. b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.


60 TABLE

2.2. Pragmatic Properties of Semantic and Pragmatic Relations (1 = “yes”; 0 = “no”)

Cancelable

Semantic Entailment

Lexical Implicature

Semantic Presupposition

Generalized Conversational Implicature

Particularized Conversational Implicature

0

0

0a

1

1b 0d 1

Detachable

0

1

0

0c

Calculable

0

0

1e

1f

aCompare

to treating presupposition as a GCI; see Grice (1978).

He didn’t {a. {b.

STOP} stop}

beating his wife —{he never beat her} — {?he never beat her}

The focal stress negation in (a) interrupts the default GCI and permits the acceptable continuation (Atlas 1991a) (see chapter 3, section 1). The (b) implicature is a GCI He used to beat her, which makes the continuation odd. See chapter 4, section 6, and chapter 6, section 5. bSadock (1978: 293) points out that cancelability will not be sufficient to show that a sentence is implicated, as the failure of the utterance to be inconsistent with the denial of the sentence may be due to the ambiguity of the utterance: the denial of the sentence forces an alternative reading on the ambiguous utterance. More plausibly, cancelability is necessary; Grice (1989c: 44) certainly thought so. cDefault

value.

dNondetachability,

as Grice (1989c: 43) himself points out, is neither necessary nor sufficient for the presence of a conversational implicatum: it is not necessary since the implicatum may depend on manner of utterance, not on its sense, so another utterance with the same sense but uttered in a different manner may not carry the same implicatum; it is not sufficient since entailments and semantic presuppositions are also nondetachable. Its importance depends on its distinguishing between conversational and conventional implicata. Sadock observes: Whether there are absolutely equivalent paraphrases or not, the fact that it is difficult to tell if two expressions have the same meaning makes the nondetachability test less useful in practice. Suppose the claim is made that a sentence such as Can you open the door? does not conversationally implicate a request to open the door but rather conventionally implicates it and that this claim is backed up by the observation that the implicature fails to go through if the synonymous periphrastic modal be able is substituted for can. Since the paraphrase detaches the implicature, the argument goes, it cannot be conversational. This claim can all too easily be countered with the claim that can and be able are not synonymous and that in fact this example PROVES that they are not. (Sadock 1978: 289) For what it is worth, I can get the implicatum from Are you able to open the door?; in any case, Sadock’s point is well taken. Happily for Grice, Sadock concludes: Nevertheless, [detachability] is a pretty good [test], at least in extreme cases. Detachability in the absence of obvious meaning differences of the right kind is a suspicious fact, and the more apparent paraphrases there are that succeed in detaching an implicature, the more it looks as if the implicature must be conventional. On the other hand, the more apparently synonymous expressions there are that fail to detach an implicature, the less the situation looks accidental and the more it looks as if some principle, such as the Cooperative Principle, is in force. (Sadock 1978: 290) eSee

Grice (1978, 1989a: 269–282); nonmonotonicity suggests calculability.

fThough

calculable, generalized conversational implicata are not typically calculated; see Morgan (1978).


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(8) Maxim of relation Be relevant. (9) Maxims of manner12 Be perspicuous. a. b. c. d.

Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly.

Of course Grice (1989b: 28) recognizes that conversation is pursued in conformity with other sorts of maxims—for example, Be polite—and that one may convey messages by conforming or failing to conform to such norms of conversation (see Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987). What Grice explicitly has in mind is a description of the means by which the conversational goal of “a maximally effective exchange of information” can be achieved. These maxims and the Cooperative Principle are offered in explanation of what a speaker “implies,” “suggests,” or “means,” as contrasted with “what he said (asserted),” in uttering a sentence. Grice writes: Suppose that A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies, Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been to prison yet. At this point, A might well inquire what B was implying, what he was suggesting, or even what he meant by saying that C had not yet been to prison. The answer might be any one of such things as that C is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by his occupation, that C’s colleagues are really very unpleasant and treacherous people, and so forth.13 . . . It is clear that whatever B implied, suggested, meant in this example, is distinct from what B said, which was simply that C had not been to prison yet. (Grice 1989b: 24)

The explanation of this example that Grice gives is this: In a suitable setting A might reason as follows: “(1) B has apparently violated the maxim ‘Be relevant’ and so14 may be regarded as having FLOUTED one of the

12See

also Grice (1981) and chapter 4, section 10 in this volume.

13 This

‘so forth’ is important. The speaker’s utterance-interpretation of the sort illustrated in Grice’s example is obviously “open-ended.” We shall encounter other cases in which the interpretation of what the speaker meant by the statement is much more constrained. 14Grice evidently thought that a violation of relevance (Maxim of Relation) implied a failure to be perspicuous (Maxim of Manner), or he thought (more likely) that one way for the speaker to violate relevance would be to fail to be perspicuous, or he thought (even more likely) that if an addressee thought that a speaker had failed to be perspicuous, the addressee would surely also be unable to see the relevance (if any) of the speaker’s remark. I take it that Grice was not being perspicuous.

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maxims conjoining [sic] perspicuity, yet I have no reason to suppose that he is opting out from the operation of the Cooperative Principle; (2) given the circumstances, I can regard his irrelevance as only apparent if, and only if, I suppose him to think that C is potentially dishonest; (3) B knows that I am capable of working out step (2). So B implicates that C is potentially dishonest.” (Grice 1989b: 31)15

By “flouting a maxim” Grice means ‘blatantly failing to satisfy it’ and remarks: On the assumption that the speaker is able to fulfill the maxim and to do so without violating another maxim (because of a clash), is not opting out, and is not, in view of the blatancy of his performance, trying to mislead. . . . How can his saying what he did say be reconciled with the supposition that he is observing the overall Cooperative Principle? This situation is one that characteristically gives rise to a CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE; and when a conversational implicature is generated in this way, I shall say that a maxim is being exploited. (Grice (1989b: 30)

In his later reflections, reported in “Retrospective Epilogue” to his Studies in the Way of Words, Grice describes the arising of an implicatum from an assertion in this way: An implicatum . . . is the content [my emphasis] of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; (a) that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifiable, at least in his eyes, or (b) that what appears to be a violation by him of a conversational maxim is only a seeming, not a real, violation; the spirit, though perhaps not the letter, of the maxim is respected. (Grice 1989f: 370)

It is essential to conversational implicature that the content of the psychological state of the speaker be one that the addressee is capable of reasoning out, the general pattern of which Grice outlines as follows: Calculability: Implicature argument schema He has said that P; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that Q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that Q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that Q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that Q; and so he has implicated that Q. (Grice 1989b: 31)

Of course, if a speaker violates or flouts one of the conversational maxims at the level of “what is said (asserted),” it is important to have some, even rough, charac15Obviously

Grice meant “enjoin” instead of “conjoin” in this passage. It is also worth remarking on the form of Grice’s argument. In step (2) Grice supposes that the speaker believes that C is potentially dishonest. In step (3) the speaker implicates that C is potentially dishonest; he does not implicate that he believes that C is potentially dishonest.


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terization of what “what is said (asserted)” consists in. (After all, the reasoning just described above begins with [The speaker] has said that P’.) So let us consider more carefully “what is said” or “asserted.” Grice (1989b: 25) notes that in the case of an ambiguous sentence, such as (10), one’s knowledge of the English language would permit one to know that there are two possible senses. (10) He is in the grip of a vice.

This sentence, independently of knowledge of context, could be expressed by either (a) a male person or animal is unable to rid himself of a bad character trait or (b) a male person is caught in a type of clamping tool. Context permits semantic values to be given for parameters like tense and the reference of ‘he’ and a choice of sense(s) to be made. Then one possesses an interpretation of the utterance in the context, not merely the sense(s) of the sentence, that Grice calls “what is said (asserted)” (Grice is indifferent whether or not what is asserted in uttering ‘John is handsome’ and ‘The first student whose last name begins with ‘w’ in the Pomona College class of 1980 is handsome’ is the same, when ‘John’ and ‘the first student whose last name begins with ‘w’ in the Pomona College class of 1980’ denote to the same individual.) In sum, fixing of reference, of tense, of deixis, and disambiguation is assumed to yield, with literal sense(s), “what is said (asserted)” in asserting a sentence-token.16

4 Relevance: Quantity [informativeness] subsumed by relation [relevance]? In “Retrospective Epilogue” Grice (1989f: 371–72) reflects on certain dependencies among the maxims. The first concern, present even in the William James lectures of 1967, is whether the Second Maxim of Quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”) is superfluous, being supplanted by the Maxim of Relation (“Be relevant”). The second concern is whether violations of the Second Maxim of Quantity amount to violations of cooperativeness at all. On this second concern Grice is inclined to think that overinformativeness can be misleading to an addressee, and thus uncooperative, in that the addressee will think that there is some point in the speaker’s discursiveness. (Grice [1989b: 27] writes, “there may also be an indirect effect, in that the hearers may be misled as a result of thinking that there is some particular point in the provision of the excess of information.”) On the first concern, Grice (1989f: 372) reiterates his view that relevance and information are dependent notions, but neither early nor late does he explain just how the Second Maxim of Quantity could be explained, or entailed, by the Maxim of Relation. A. P. Martinich (1980: 218) provides a provocative discussion of this difficulty. The reductive claim would argue: (a) if what a speaker says is relevant, it will not 16The notion of “what is said” has since come in for considerable discussion and notable disagreement among philosophers and linguists: see Bach (1994a), Carston (1988), Levinson (1988b, 2000), Récanati (1989), and Sperber and Wilson (1986b).

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provide more information than is required, and (b) if what a speaker says is not relevant, it is more informative than is required. If (a) were true, the Maxim of Relation would subsume the Second Maxim of Quantity; if (a) and (b) were both true, the Maxim of Relation and the Second Maxim of Quantity would be equivalent. Martinich’s counterexample to (a) is a line from François Mauriac’s Vipers’ Tangle. Recalling his deceased grandson Luc, the miser says, “Everyone loved him, even I.” In Gricean terms, the statement is, Martinich alleges, overinformative: ‘everyone loved him’ entails ‘the miser loved him’; thus, alleges Martinich, the miser’s phrase ‘even I’ is overinformative. Yet, observes Martinich, the statement is relevant: it indicates that Luc was highly lovable and that, although the miser does not love widely, he was at least able to love Luc. Martinich takes this example to show that some statements are both more informative than is required and relevant, contrary to the reductionist claim (a). If φ entails Ψ, the statement φ & Ψ is logically equivalent to φ and is truthconditionally neither more nor less informative than φ. If ‘even’ carried a conventional implicatum, so that Even I loved him were logically equivalent to I loved him (as Karttunen and Peters 1979 once suggested), the statement Everyone loved him, even I would be, like φ & Ψ where φ entails Ψ, logically equivalent to Everyone loved him. Since what is relevant in the context is the even I, what is overly informative is not the phrase even I, contrary to Martinich’s claim, but rather its conjunction with Everyone loved him, since that conjunction is, on the assumptions made here, logically equivalent to Everyone loved him. And the proposition Everyone loved him is, in the context, overly informative if taken literally (and not, as would be appropriate in this kind of case, hyperbole for Luc was lovable). With this redescription of Martinich’s case, I think it is plausible to say that the speaker has literally “said” (asserted) more than is required but was not thereby failing in relevance. Thus the reductionist claim (a) is, indeed, false. The observation that I have just made concerning hyperbole, which was not considered by Martinich (1980), itself raises an interesting issue for Grice’s views. Grice considers hyperbole under a class of conversational implicatures in which the First Maxim of Quality (“Do not say what you believe to be false”) is flouted—that is, blatantly violated.17 Grice’s (1989b: 34) example was Every nice girl loves a sailor. (Apparently love and universal quantification just don’t mix.) Curiously, Grice gives 17The classic example of a flout (C-type) implicature is a flout of the First Maxim of Quantity, namely of “exploitation, . . . a procedure by which a maxim is flouted for the purpose of getting in a conversational implicature by means of something of the nature of a figure of speech” (Grice 1989b: 33). This is a variant of an example originally introduced in Grice (1965: 448–49). This is Grice’s account:

A is writing a testimonial about a pupil who is a candidate for a philosophy job, and his letter reads as follows: “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.” (Gloss: A cannot be opting out, since if he wished to be uncooperative, why write at all? He cannot be unable, through ignorance, to say more, since the man is his pupil; moreover, he knows that more information than this is wanted. He must, therefore, be wishing to impart information that he is reluctant to write down. This supposition is tenable only if he thinks Mr. X is no good at philosophy. This, then, is what he is implicating.) (Grice 1965: 448–49) The other cases Grice discusses, briefly, are the assertions of logical truths, such as War is war.


65

no gloss on his example at all. Hyperbole should have been of greater theoretical interest to Grice, to Horn (1984b), and to Sperber and Wilson (1986b), for it demonstrates the incorrectness of the subsuming of the Second Maxim of Quantity by the Maxim of Relation [relevance], pace Horn (1984b) and Sperber and Wilson (1986b). The statement John was loved by everyone could be relevant in a context, as hyperbolic statements are, but, of course, it is “stronger” than would be required for the simple exchange of information and, if taken literally of John in the example, surely incorrect. At the level of what is implicated, by contrast, it would communicate precisely what is required by the context: John was lovable. Thus it is the Second Maxim of Quantity (“Don’t make your contribution more informative than is required [for the current purposes of the exchange]”) that is more efficacious than the Maxim of Relation (relevance), just as the First Maxim of Quality (“Don’t say what you believe to be false”) is more efficacious than the Maxim of Relation: they both guide utterance-interpretation at the level of what is implicated. The Maxim of Relation is incapable of guiding the interpretation of hyperbole, and violations of the First Maxim of Quality alone will not distinguish hyperbole from meiosis (understatement), from metaphor, or from irony. At the level of “what is said (asserted),” the reduction thesis (a) is clearly false, as my reanalysis of Martinich’s example shows. At the level of “what is implicated,” the Second Maxim of Quantity plays an explanatory role that the Maxim of Relation cannot play, and it cannot be subsumed by it. As Levinson (1987a: 76) points out, both Wilson and Sperber (1981) and Horn (1984b) incorrectly hold a reductionist view. Horn (1984b: 12) poses a rhetorical question: “What would make a contribution more informative than required, except the inclusion of material not strictly relevant to and needed for the matter at hand?” The answer to this question commits Horn to reductionist theses: (a) (if what a speaker says is relevant, it will not provide more information than is required) and (b) (if what a speaker says is not relevant, it is more informative than is required). I have argued against (a). Thesis (b) is strictly a nonstarter: its falsity is obvious. Consider the context about John’s lovableness, and suppose that War is war is, gratuitously, and irrelevantly, uttered. Thesis (b)—if what a speaker says is not relevant, it is more informative than is required—would predict that War is war is more informative than is required, which is obviously absurd. Martinich then offers a different argument against the subsumption of the Second Maxim of Quantity (Quantity-2) by the Maxim of Relation (relevance). It is an important instance of a familiar philosophical tactic: If [Relation] and [Quantity-2] are jointly de trop, one could just as easily argue that [Relation] is superfluous. For, if a speaker contributes more information than is necessary, then the excess information of his contribution is irrelevant; and, conversely . . . what is wrong with the objection against [Quantity-2] is that it assumes that . . . faced with a choice . . . one should sacrifice [Quantity-2]. (Martinich 1980: 218)

If, as in Horn’s (1984b) rhetorical question, one were committed to a reductive equivalence, so that on the grounds that φ Ψ, one reduced Ψ to φ, on the same grounds

66


one could just as well reduce φ to Ψ. Suppose further that one had a reductive definition of “more information” in terms of “relevance.” That, alone, would not show that the notion of “more information” was irrelevant (pardon the expression); it would merely show that whether or not it was logically irrelevant, it was no longer logically primitive in the vocabulary of the theory, and that if the notions used in the supposed definition were justifiable in the theory, then the notion of “more information” would be justifiable in the theory. The remaining case, one in which some of the other maxims entailed the Maxim of Relation, subsuming it, would be the safest claim to make if one thought that the Maxim of Relation were redundant, and, conversely, if one thought that the Maxim of Relation could be specialized to yield the other maxims, the other maxims would be redundant. What conversational relevance consists in is a large and disputed subject. I shall briefly consider some of Grice’s own, late remarks in the “Retrospective Epilogue,” which give us some clear indication of what Grice had in mind by relevance. In assessing the Maxims of Quantity, Grice remarks: To judge whether I have been undersupplied or oversupplied with information seems to require that I should be aware of the identity of the topic to which the information in question is supposed to relate; only after the identification of a focus of relevance can such an assessment be made; the force of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposed to sever the notion of relevance from the specification of some particular direction of relevance. (Grice 1989f: 371–72; see also Wilson and Sperber 1981 and Sperber and Wilson 1986b)

The role of topic in “what is said,” as in the logical form of cleft statements in English, was emphasized in Atlas and Levinson (1981) (see appendix 3 of this volume), and its role in “what is implicated” was emphasized in Atlas (1984a) (see chapter 5), where it is needed to resolve contradictions in the implicata that standard applications of the First Maxim of Quantity can generate from statements like John is not as tall as Brian. Statement-topic reappears again decisively in determining the correct logical form for Only John loves Sonia (see Atlas 1996b). Statement-topic is crucial for a theory of implicature, as Grice (1989a) noted. Any theory that ignores it, like Sperber and Wilson’s (1986b) Relevance Theory, cannot be a descriptively adequate theory. Grice’s notion of “a particular direction” in a conversation was anticipated, and elaborated, by linguistic work in Conversational Analysis (see Levinson 1983: 284– 370) on rule-specified adjacency of two speech-acts (Sacks 1972; Levinson 1987a: 78; Martinich 1980: 220–21), where what is “relevant” is what “should be done next” (as in (11a)), and on sequential expectations, where what is “relevant” is what is “required or wanted to achieve goals of the interaction” (as in (11b); Levinson 1987a: 77): (11)

a. A: Hello. B: Hello. b. A: Do you stock LT 188? B: Big or small?


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Finally, there is a notion of conversational topic, as contrasted with statement topic, that describes the coherence of a discourse (see “formulation” in Sacks (1972)).18 The philosopher A. P. Martinich independently observed the function of adjacency-pairs and of goal-directed sequential expectations in meeting the (vaguely described) needs of “relevance.” Following Strawson (1964) he also emphasized topical connectedness. In light of his observations, he suggests two Submaxims of Relation: a. Make your contribution one that moves the discussion towards its goal. b. Express yourself in terms that will allow your hearer to tie your contribution into the conversational context. (Martinich 1980: 220–21)

Martinich understands ‘context’ to include “the speaker and hearer, their common perceptible environment, their previous utterances, and all of their relevant [my emphasis] beliefs” (1980: 221). This notion of context is about as roomy as one could ask for; unfortunately, it is not helpful to characterize the admittedly polymorphous notion of relevance by introducing submaxims intended to specify the notion and then undermine the analysis by reintroducing the notion of “relevant belief” in characterizing the concept of “conversational context” employed in the submaxims themselves. What is important and clear from Martinich’s (1980) discussion is the nonreducibility of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity to the Maxim of Relation (relevance). This is a significant result, and it is one to which I shall return, as a revised and restructured, addressee-centered version of Grice’s speaker-centered Second Quantity Maxim will play a significant role in the post-Gricean theory of inferenda (e.g., Atlas and Levinson’s 1981 Maxims of Relativity and Principle of Informativeness to be discussed in chapter 3 of this volume). Grice is looking at “information” from only one point of view: the speaker’s. Grice’s point of view on quantity of explicit information was this: “Don’t say Ψ & φ rather than φ if only φ is required.” A different post-Gricean point of view on the Second Maxim of Quantity (“Don’t make your contribution more informative than is required”) would be this: “Don’t say χ & φ rather than χ if it is evident to

18In his Principle of Relevance, Strawson (1964/1971a: 92) anticipates, the “topical connectedness” of both conversational topic and statement topic, although he is not concerned to develop a theory of their relationship:

We do not, except in social desperation, direct isolated and unconnected pieces of information at each other, but on the contrary intend in general to give or add information about what is a matter of standing or current interest or concern. There is a great variety of possible types of answer to the question what the topic of a statement is, what a statement is “about”—about baldness, about what great men are bald, about which countries have bald rulers, about France, about the king, etc.—and not every answer excludes every other in a given case. This platitude we might dignify with the title, the Principle of Relevance. (Strawson 1964, 1971a: 92)


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both speaker and addressee that what is required—namely, χ & φ—is inferrable from χ by the addressee (i.e., the speaker knows or is justified in presuming that the addressee can infer it, and the addressee knows or is justified in presuming that the speaker intends him to infer it).” In this case, too, if the speaker does provide an excess of explicit information—something beyond χ—the addressee may be misled, or, a possibility that Grice ignores, he may be correctly directed to the intended interpretation by thinking that there is some particular point in the provision of the excess of explicit information. Grice had simply ignored the possibility of implicit, “evidently” inferrable, information playing a role in the Maxims of Quantity.19 A post-Gricean theory will not ignore that possibility.

5 Nontrivial applications, violations, and flouts of the maxims I have already indicated that Grice requires that a conversational implicature must “be capable of being worked out” and that “to calculate a conversational implicature is to calculate what has to be supposed in order to preserve the supposition that the Cooperative Principle is being observed” (1989b: 31, 39–40). In the third William James lecture “Further Notes on Logic and Conversation,” Grice puts an interesting restriction on the character of implicata. He writes: When I speak of the assumptions required in order to maintain the supposition that the Cooperative Principle and maxims are being observed on a given occasion, I am thinking of assumptions that are nontrivially required; I do not intend to include, for example, an assumption to the effect that some particular maxim is being observed, or is thought of by the speaker as being observed. (Grice 1989c: 41–42)

Let us refer to this condition as: The nontriviality restriction on implicata No implicata are of the types: a. [Maxim] is fulfilled. b. Speaker believes that [Maxim] is fulfilled.

Grice (1989c: 42) points out that this restriction has a consequence for understanding G. E. Moore’s “paradox,” which, I observed, is a touchstone for Grice. The “paradoxical statement” is an anomalous assertion (12b) instantiating the schema (12a): (12)

19This

a. ?P but I do not believe P. b. ?It’s raining but I do not believe it.

was a role for information that I had imputed to “presupposition” in my (1975a) discussion of Frege and Dummett. See my discussion of the post-Gricean theory of presupposition in chapter 4 of this volume.


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The interpretation of this statement seems to require a speaker to have made a statement the acceptance of which by any addressee (not excluding himself) the speaker himself undermines by denying that he himself believes what he has said. Grice writes: On my account, it will not be true that when I say that P, I conversationally implicate that I believe that P; for to suppose that I believe that P (or rather think of myself as believing that P) is just to suppose that I am observing the first maxim of Quality [“Do not say what you believe to be false”] on this occasion. I think that this consequence is intuitively acceptable; it is not a natural use of language to describe one who has said that P as having, for example, “implied,” “indicated,” or “suggested” that he believes that P; the natural thing to say is that he has expressed (or at least purported to express) the belief that P. He has of course committed himself, in a certain way, to its being the case that he believes that P, and while this commitment is not a case of saying that he believes that P, it is bound up, in a special way, with saying that P. (Grice 1989c: 42)

There are British linguists such as Stephen Levinson (1983: 105), and American philosophers such as Al Martinich (1980: 224–25), who have rejected Grice’s view of Moore’s “paradox.” In fact, the conversational implicature analysis of Moore’s paradox now seems to have become a “received view” (see comments in D. S. Clarke 1994: 145). Levinson’s explanation of the pragmatic anomaly is that the second conjunct of statement (13) contradicts an alleged Quality Maxim (“Don’t say what you believe to be false”) implicature of the first conjunct of the statement, which is that one believes what one asserts. (13)

??It’s raining and I don’t believe that it is.

Although he claims that “when one asserts something one implicates that one believes it,” Levinson (1983: 105 n.7) nicely observes a major flaw in his own claim and a fortiori in the current “received view” among philosophers. If S believes P were implicated by S’s asserting that P, the implicatum would be consistently and intelligibly cancelable—for example, like the cancelability of the implicatum not both of or in The PM is patriotic or nationalistic—in fact she’s both. Note the absence of linguistic anomaly in this utterance-type. By contrast, Moore’s “paradox” statements are anomalous. Conversational implicata are deniable without inconsistency (with “what is asserted”) and without anomaly. This evidence suggests that Moore’s “paradox” statement is not a case of implicature, despite the current popularity of the view among philosophers.20

20Daniel Sperber (in conversation) questioned this argument, but his concern rests at best on an implicature of what I said, not on what I said. My claim was that cancelability was a necessary condition on the existence of an implicatum; I was not claiming that cancelability was a sufficient condition for the existence of an implicatum. Once one shows that the anomaly of Moore’s Paradox cannot be explained by appeal to implicature, it remains open just what the explanation should be. If I understand Sperber’s views (Sperber and Wilson 1986b), he is inclined to explain the anomaly by some kind of “entailment,” and it is a thesis of this section that “entailment” is not a correct explanation.

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2.1 Inadequacies of Grice’s implicature argument schema Is there any reason for one to believe that an implicatum Bs[P] of S’s assertion P exists? In fact, there is, and Grice himself unfortunately provides a rationale for one.21 Recall Grice’s sketch of implicatural reasoning: Implicature argument schema He has said that P; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that Q; he knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks that Q is required; he has done nothing to stop me thinking that Q; he intends me to think, or is at least willing to allow me to think, that Q; and so he has implicated that Q. (Grice 1989b: 31)

Martinich plausibly suggests the following instance of the Argument Schema: “He has said that it is raining; there is no reason to suppose that he is not observing the maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; he could not be doing this unless he thought that he believed that it is raining; etc.” (Martinich 1980: 224–25). On Grice’s grounds and Levinson’s grounds there is no implicatum Speaker believes that P from the speaker’s assertion P, so the oddity of a lack of cancelation of the (nonexistent) implicatum Speaker believes that P by the speaker’s denial I don’t believe that P, and hence an inconsistency between what is implicated and what is asserted, cannot be the correct explanation of the linguistic anomaly in Moore’s paradox statements. There must be something wrong with the formulation of Grice’s Argument Schema. The flaw in Grice’s formulation of his Argument Schema is in the clause he could not be [observing the maxims or at least the Cooperative Principle] unless he thought that Q. On Grice’s (1989f: 370) own view, an implicatum arises as the content of that psychological state that a hearer needs to attribute to a speaker in order to explain, from the speaker’s point of view, why a maxim has been violated—for example, because its fulfillment is less imperative than the fulfillment of another maxim, a case of maxim clash (Grice’s class B implicata)—or arises as that part of the content of the total signification of the utterance that constitutes what the speaker “meant,” in order to explain, from the speaker’s point of view, why, contrary to appearances, a maxim or the Cooperative Principle has not really been violated or flouted—that is, blatantly violated (Grice’s class C implicata).

21Interestingly, from the historical perspective, in 1942 Moore (1968:542), unlike Grice (1989b: 31), apparently thinks that speaker S’s assertion of P does “imply” BS[P], in some sense of ‘imply’. In the same year, in response to Moore, the American logician C. H. Langford (1968: 333) gives an explanation of the Moore statement of the variant (Grice 1989b: 31) form B1st pers.[P] & ¬P, a form later favored by Wittgenstein, that uses the Sincerity Condition on assertion and a Consistency Condition of rational belief to derive the contradiction B[P] & ¬B[P]. Nevertheless, as I have discussed elsewhere (Atlas 1995), the linguistic anomaly of Moore’s “paradox” statements is not explained by the rational speaker’s insincerity or by the sincere speaker’s irrationality. Likewise, logical inconsistency is not an explanation of linguistic anomaly. See appendix 1 for a discussion of Moore’s sense of ‘imply’.


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I shall argue that Grice’s own formulation confuses the class B problem of explanation of cooperative linguistic behavior with the class C problem of speaker’s utterance-interpretation. The letter of Grice’s formulation in the Implicature Argument Schema is too imprecise to discriminate between these problems, and I will argue that the conflation of these problems is the result of certain philosophical assumptions about the explanatory roles of the semantic contents of assertions and the mental contents of belief-states. In particular, Grice argued that semantic contents of assertions could be subsumed, by analysis, under mental contents of psychological states—of communicative intentions (Grice 1989a: 213–23, 117–37), for instance— and that whatever was to be explained by semantic contents ultimately would be explained by those mental contents. I shall show how Grice’s reductionist program in the theory of meaning undermines his account of conversational implicature. (Ironically there is an immediate parallel to Russell’s 1903 error in his theory of denoting concepts. Russell’s assumption that meanings were intentional objects undermined his theory of reference.) Grice suggests that conversational implicata can arise from violations of the maxims or from exploitations (via blatant violations) of the maxims. (I discussed an example of exploitation in section 3.) His example in which a maxim is violated but its violation is to be “explained by the supposition of a clash with another Maxim” is this: A is planning with B an itinerary for a holiday in France. Both know that A wants to see his friend C, if to do so would not involve too great a prolongation of his journey: (14)

A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere in the South of France. (Gloss: There is no reason to suppose that B is opting out; his answer is, as he well knows [my emphasis], less informative than is required to meet A’s needs. This infringement of the first maxim of Quantity [”Make your contribution as informative as is required . . .”] can be explained only [my emphasis] by the supposition that B is aware that to be more informative would be to say something that infringed the second maxim of Quality, “Don’t say what you lack adequate evidence for,” so B implicates that he does not know in which town C lives.) (Grice 1989b: 32–33)

The gloss that Grice provides is interesting because it indicates the distinct roles that Grice, explicitly, thinks that implicature plays. He has written in the recent “Retrospective Epilogue” to Studies in the Way of Words that “an implicatum . . . is the content of that psychological state or attitude which needs to be attributed to a speaker in order to secure one or another of the following results; [e.g.] . . . that a violation on his part of a conversational maxim is in the circumstances justifiable, at least in his eyes” (Grice 1989f: 370). But this content is not content that, intuitively and pretheoretically, I would have thought that a speaker “implied,” “suggested,” or “meant” by, in, or when saying what he said. It is, rather, as Grice notes in his gloss, a hypothetical explanation of the speaker’s infringement of the First Maxim of Quantity, the hypothesis being that the speaker does not know in which town C lives, and in

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conforming to the Second Maxim of Quality, the speaker says no more than Somewhere in the South of France.22 A’s hypothesis that B does not know where C lives is inferred as A’s best explanation why, assuming that B is conforming to the Cooperative Principle, B has failed to conform to the First Maxim of Quantity and was less informative than the context required. Nevertheless, it is not clear in the example that when B “said” (asserted) Somewhere in the South of France, B meant or suggested or implied in “saying” Somewhere in the South of France that he did not know in which town C lived. It is not clear that B intended by his choice of words to convey that, and, hence, it is not clear that B meant it in saying what he said. (Despite animadversions by some linguists, I claim, in agreement with Grice, that there are default implicata standardly conveyed by the uttering of sentences, whether or not the speaker specifically intended them to be conveyed—for example, generalized conversational implicata— but in such cases, the speaker may have misled his addressee by his choice of words.) What we have is a plausible explanation of B’s uninformative response. What we do not have is a case of B’s intentionally conveying to his addressee a content that he has not explicitly asserted. It certainly need not be the case that B utters ‘Somewhere in the South of France’ with the intention that by virtue of B’s utterance A will come to believe that B does not know in which town C lived. For B to have this communicative intention (M-intention in Grice’s 1969: 155; 1989a: 105 sense) it must be true that B utters the sentence ‘Somewhere in the South of France’ intending A (a) to believe that B does not know in which town C lives, intending A (b) to think B intends A to have the belief in (a), and intending A (c) to think B intends the fulfillment of the first intention, that of (a), to be effected by the fulfillment of the second intention, that of (b). The example, as Grice describes it, gives us no reason to think that these conditions for a communicative intention are fulfilled. There is a further peculiarity in Grice’s account. He has stated that B’s infringement of the First Maxim of Quantity can be explained only by the hypothesis that B is conforming to the Second Maxim of Quality. Why is it the only such explanation? Couldn’t one also say that if B were aware that to be more informative would be to say something (e.g., C lives in Marseilles) that infringed the First Maxim of Quality, “Do not say what you believe to be false” (or even, “Do not say what you don’t believe to be true”), B should not say it? So, according to Grice’s reasoning, B could implicate, again, that he does not know in which town C lives. There is more than

22Although

Grice leaves the matter undiscussed, there is reason to think that he would accept the following generalization: if the Maxims of Quantity and Quality compete, the imperative to conform to quality supersedes the imperative to conform to quantity. As he remarks in the “Retrospective Epilogue”: The [super] maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious) does not seem to be just one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to spell out the difference between something’s being and (strictly speaking) failing to be, any kind of contribution at all. (Grice 1989f: 371)

And he (Grice 1989b: 27) had said already that “other maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this [super] maxim of Quality is satisfied.”


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one plausible explanation of B’s infringement of the First Maxim of Quantity, more than one reason to attribute the same psychological content to B’s mental states. There are two subjects of concern to Grice. One is the rational explanation of behavior, especially verbal behavior: the hypothesizing of reasons for which an agent does what he or she does. The other is the nature of linguistic meaning: utterance(type)-meaning and sentence(type)-meaning. The two concerns intersect at speaker’s-meaning, what a speaker means by, in, or when saying what he or she has said. So Grice wishes implicata to do double duty: first, as part of explaining why agents, including speakers, do what they do; second, as part of interpreting the sentence-tokens produced by speakers. In philosophy this is a familiar demand to put on propositional contents. In the case of belief, the attribution to an agent of an attitude toward the content of a beliefreport, the content of the that-clause, is part of commonsense explanations of the agent’s actions, while the attribution of a particular content to an agent’s utterance is part of commonsense interpretations of the agent’s speech. The propositional content is both a psychological item, the content of a belief, and a semantic item, the meaning of a speaker’s utterance. The two roles converge when the agent intentionally states his beliefs in words: when he makes sincere assertions. The difficulty is that the contents of implicata are not suited to play the double role, in psychological explanation and in semantic interpretation, that Grice expects them to play. It is plausible that whatever (in the way of reasons) explains why an agent did (in a context) what he did is, at least in part, what the agent believed. By contrast, whatever (in the way of reasons) explains why a speaker said (in the context) what he said is not necessarily, even in part, what the speaker meant. B did not mean, in saying Somewhere in the South of France, that he did not know in which town C lived, even if his ignorance was his reason for saying it. Grice (1989f: 370) was mistaken to view implicata as coherently playing both roles: disant-en and disantpour.23 The role for implicata is the one of conveyed speaker’s meaning. Grice himself, not surprisingly, understood the difficulty. As he summarized his analysis of ‘A meantNN something by x’ (1989a: 89), he claimed that the analysandum of nonnatural (NN) meaning was equivalent to ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention’; and we may add to that to ask what A meant is to ask for a specification of the intended effect (though, of course, it may not always be possible to get a straight answer involving a ‘that’ clause, for example, ‘a belief that . . .’).

And then he proceeded to raise the pertinent question: Will any kind of intended effect do, or may there be cases where an effect is intended (with the required qualifications) and yet we should not want to talk of meaningNN? Suppose I discovered some person so constituted that, when I told him

23 For another unsatisfactory reductionist monism of meaning to action, see Donald Davidson (1980: 238–39, 1984a: 148–49).

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that whenever I grunted in a special way I wanted him to blush or to incur some physical malady, thereafter whenever he recognized the grunt (and with it my intention), he did blush or incur the malady. Should we then want to say that the grunt meantNN something? I do not think so. (Grice 1989e: 220–21)

And Grice makes the significant observation: This points to the fact that for x to have meaningNN, the intended effect must be something which in some sense is within the control of the audience, or that in some sense of “reason” the recognition of the intention behind x is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause. (Grice 1989e: 221)

But then Grice notices the problem: It might look as if there is a sort of pun here (“reason for believing” and “reason for doing”), but I do not think this is serious. For though no doubt from one point of view questions about reasons for believing are questions about evidence and so quite different from questions about reasons for doing, nevertheless to recognize an utterer’s intention in uttering x (descriptive utterance), to have a reason for believing that so-and-so, is at least quite like “having a motive for” accepting so-and-so. Decisions “that” seem to involve decisions “to” (and this is why we can “refuse to believe” and also be “compelled to believe”). . . . It looks then as if the intended effect must be something within the control of the audience, or at least the sort of thing which is within its control. (Grice 1989e: 221)

Actually, Grice’s worry was appropriate. There was a pun here, and unlike Grice I do think that it was serious. When Grice makes a remark of the form “a is at least quite like b,” one wonders just what he had in mind. For on the face of it, having a motive for accepting the divorce court judge’s statement that you owe your former wife $2 million does not seem at all the same as having a reason to believe that you owe your former wife $2 million; in such a case having a reason for believing soand-so does not at all seem quite like having a motive for accepting so-and-so. How would a decision “that” involve a decision “to”? Brevet’s decision that Throckmorton was offside does not logically or causally require that Brevet should decide to do anything, not even if Brevet is the referee. (If Brevet is the referee, he has an obligation, under the rules of the game, to make his decision known, but is that what Grice meant by ‘involves’?) Decisions are a misleading case for Grice’s purposes. And Grice’s observation that decisions “that” involve decisions “to” because one can “refuse to believe” and be “compelled to believe” is even more peculiar. I believe “that” there is a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose, and, in fact, there is a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose, but am I compelled to believe that there is a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose? Some “evidence” is said to be “compelling”—in fact, the feelings of pressure upon my nose and the visible rim of my spectacles might constitute such—but to translate the “compellingness” of the evidence into my “being compelled” to acquire a belief-state does seem just a bad pun.


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Can I refuse to believe that there is a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose? Suppose I am wearing my spectacles, and in the face of the supposed compulsion to believe that I am wearing my spectacles, can I refuse to believe that I am wearing my spectacles? I really don’t know what to say here. Suppose there is no pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose; now, can I refuse to believe that there is a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose? My face is a spectacle-free-zone, but Rogers Albritton says to me, “There’s a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of your nose!” Under what circumstances would I say, “I refuse to believe it”? In another case, I know what I would say. Rogers says, “Atlas, take out the garbage!” I say, “I refuse.” Now, in this case of a response to a command, I know what a refusal is. But when Rogers asserted, “There’s a pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of your nose,” in what sense was his assertion a command that I should believe it? Rogers may have, in a Gricean way, an intention that I should believe it, and I might come to accept it by virtue of recognizing Rogers’s intention that I should accept or believe it, but how does having that motive for accepting his statement come even close to showing that my recognition of Rogers’s intention that I should believe it itself constitute a good reason for my believing that the proposition is true? It would seem to be necessary, at least, that I not believe that Rogers is a trickster, joker, or all-around con artist, believe that he is a reliable observer of my face, that his reliable observations are reliably connected with his verbal assertions, and so on. Since an assertion is not a command that one believe what is asserted, the application of notions like refusal and compulsion to assertion, and so to belief, seems an unjustified extension of those notions if one is to take the notions literally. Can I refuse to believe that there is no pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose? I certainly do not believe that there is no pair of spectacles perched on the bridge of my nose, but am I by not believing it refusing to believe it? Not taking out the garbage tout court is not refusing to take out the garbage (though one can refuse to take out the garbage without saying that one is refusing to take out the garbage, of course.) If all that ‘I refuse to believe it’ means is ‘I do not believe it’, I have no difficulty with Grice’s claims. But in that case, the claims make no philosophical point about a connection between reasons for believing and reasons/motives for doing. In sum, the observations from Grice’s essay “Meaning” do not succeed in securing his claim that in the audience’s recognizing the intention of the speaker for the audience to accept the utterance x the recognition is a reason for believing x and not merely a cause of accepting it. He was acutely aware of the problem, wondered whether it was serious, and found an interesting strategem to deny its seriousness. The strategem, unfortunately, fails in its purpose. The audience’s recognition of a reason or motive for or cause of a speaker’s saying x—namely, the intention to produce a belief in the audience by means of the recognition of the speaker’s intention— is not so far a reason for rather than a cause of believing the content of what is said, at least not for the reasons that Grice offers. In his original 1957 “Meaning” essay (reprinted in Grice 1989e), Grice put his finger on a central difficulty in his own account of “meaningNN.”

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We can see Grice’s difficulty more explicitly if we consider an example of a flouting of a Maxim, not merely a violation of one. If, in the same context Grice described above, the discourse had been: (15)

A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere on the planet Earth.

B’s remark would have been a flouting of the First Maxim of Quantity, not a violation of it. Like the tautologies discussed by Grice (1989b: 33)—War is war—Somewhere on the planet Earth is a blatant infringement of the injunction to be as informative as required to meet A’s needs for information. If B is not opting out of the conversation, A can explain B’s response by hypothesizing that B does not know more precisely where C lives. Explanation, though, is an inquiry-specific and question-specific activity: what needs explanation, and of what type, depends on how problematic the “facts” are taken to be (Bromberger 1992b). For us Earthlings, B’s response is highly uninformative. For Luke Skywalker, possessing an intergalactic spaceship and having this discussion with Han Solo in a far-off galaxy, B’s (Solo’s) response is not quite so uninformative. If B’s (Solo’s) reply is “informative enough”—for the purposes of the questioner (Luke), merely specifying the galaxy might have been sufficient to answer ‘Where does C live?’—that is because the point of the question could have been the identification of C’s place of origin, broadly understood, or his biological identification as a carbon-based organism of an Earth species, or . . . et cetera. Luke’s explaining Solo’s choice of utterance Somewhere on the planet Earth requires Luke to judge whether Solo has understood the point of Luke’s question and to hypothesize what point Solo has in fact taken Luke’s question to have if it is not the one Luke intended. But explaining Solo’s choice to utter Somewhere on the planet Earth is not eo ipso to interpret the content of Solo’s utterance. The interest of this point about explanation is that in the case of War is war, the blatantly uninformative logical truth of the statement makes Grice say that the statement is “informative at the level of what is implicated, and the hearer’s identification of [its] informative content at this level is dependent on his ability to explain the speaker’s selection of this particular patent tautology” (1989b: 33). That is, Grice asserts the dependency of interpretation on explanation that I have just denied. Grice explicitly makes the semantic content of the utterance-object’s “conveyed meaning” depend on the psychological content explaining the speaker’s intentional utteranceact. Yet, though it is inferrable from Solo’s behavior that Solo does not know more precisely where C lives, I claim that there remains an “open question”: What did Solo “imply,” “suggest,” or “mean” in “saying” the hypothetical sentence-token Somewhere on the planet Earth? (Let me dub this point contrasting meaning with explaining “the Open Question Argument.”) Now, to return to our original example (14), why should A take a sentence to be an implicatum of B’s utterance when the sentence is not a relevant response to A’s WH-question, ‘Where does C live?’? Even if Grice’s statement “I don’t know” is taken partially to explain why B answered as he did, why is it taken to be what B


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meant when he answered as he did (the Open Question)? At the level of what is implicated, the Maxim of Relation (“Be relevant”) is not being satisfied by that putative implicatum, nor is “I don’t know” satisfying the requirement of the First Maxim of Quantity, insofar as what is needed is an informative reply to a WH-question. A reason for saying P, or “I couldn’t justifiably say anything else,” is not necessarily the same as what the saying of P is good for accomplishing in the way of communicative goals: conveying an “implication.” If one didn’t know in which town C lived, and one thought the name of the town was “relevant”—that is, what A needed (and in his gloss Grice does describe B as knowing that he has said less than A needs), one could have said I don’t know where C lives. That utterance, or the shortened I don’t know, would have been as brief a reply as Somewhere in the South of France. One was not obeying a Maxim of Manner (“Be brief”) in uttering Somewhere in the South of France that one would have failed to obey by uttering I don’t know. Why would one bother to implicate I don’t know which town C lives in when one could have asserted it? The answer cannot be merely ‘to be truthful’—to obey the Maxim of Quality at the level of implicature rather than at the level of assertion, since one was being truthful, in the example, in asserting ‘Somewhere in the South of France’. Is one being informative at the level of what is implicated? No, not if what is desired is information about where C lives and not about what one doesn’t know. That one does not know something is only in special circumstances useful information about one: for example, what one’s inability to answer a question or solve a problem tells an examiner, an interviewer, or a court of law. It tells A something informative, in that sense, only if one should have known where C lives, but it still doesn’t answer A’s WHquestion. If, at the level of the implicatum, one is not being notably truthful, more informative about where C lives, more perspicuous, or more relevant than at the level of “what is said (asserted),” in what sense is one being more “cooperative” in implicating than in asserting? Surely the answer for this example is “in no sense.” So why does Grice think that I don’t know where C lives is implicated? Of course, one could object that I am using an example from Group B in Grice’s lecture, an example in which the point is only to illustrate the violation of a maxim and to illustrate the explanation of the violation by the hypothesis of a clash with another maxim. It is the Group C examples, not violations but flouts—blatant violations—where the Cooperative Principle is satisfied at the level of what is implicated. The objector thinks that I should not judge example (14) by the standards set for examples like (15), and so I should not conclude that there is something odd in Grice’s claiming that in (14) B “implies,” “suggests,” or “means” that he does not know in which town C lives by, in, or when asserting Somewhere in the South of France. But it seems to me that every question that I can raise about the flout in (15) can also be properly raised about the violation in (14) as well, for not only are the grammatical features of the examples the same, but the “flouting” character of (15) also applies to (14) in the right context. (14)

A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere in the South of France.

78 (15)


A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere on the planet Earth.

Just imagine a conversation (14) taking place when A and B are both in the South of France and think that the South of France is the world. In that context, example (14) would be both a Group B and a Group C example: there is a violation of Quantity to be explained by a clash with Quality, and the violation is so blatant, as blatant as a tautology (see Quine 1960: 66), as to count as a flout of the First Maxim of Quantity. Example (14) in that context would be like (16): (16)

A: Where does C live? B: Somewhere.

In cases (14), (15), and (16), one would infer from B’s reply that he does not know more precisely where C lives, but it does not follow from that inference-to-anexplanation of his “saying” what he did (and not something more precise) that he is “implying,” “suggesting,” or “meaning” (as contrasted with “asserting”) in asserting what he did that he does not know where C lives. A good explanation of, or reason for, his saying what he did is not necessarily a good interpretation of what he meant in saying what he did. Of course I am not denying that sometimes the two might coincide, nor am I denying a quite different claim: the converse claim that a good interpretation of what he meant in saying what he did is at least part of, or necessary to, a good explanation of, or reason for, his saying what he did.24 The tendency by philosophers, especially Grice, to substitute one of these distinct claims for its converse is just a logical mistake. It is also a mistake, as Richard Rorty (1998b: 296) emphasizes, of a representationalist theory of knowledge (or perception) in which causality (causal explanation) and justification are conflated, a conflating common to both British empiricism and British idealism. What discourses (14), (15), and (16) also show is that this putative distinction between Class B violation-implicata and Class C flout-implicata is not a real distinction. Grice’s B-type “implicata” are not implicata at all. Grice uses B-type “implicata” for purposes of psychological explanation, but they will not simultaneously serve the purposes of C-type implicata as semantic interpretation. To distinguish B-type explanations of maxim-clash from C-type flout implicata, Grice would have to draw a principled distinction between discourses (14), (15), and (16), but there is none to be drawn. Since Grice conflates speaker’s-utterance interpretation with psychological explanation, Grice’s Implicature Argument Schema is inadequate. That the speaker could not be observing the maxims and the Cooperative Principle unless he believed that Q does not show that Q is what the speaker “meant,” or even part of what the speaker “meant,” in his utterance. (It does not even show, in Grice’s terms, that the

24This

is a point occasionally emphasized by Hilary Putnam—for example, in “Reference and Understanding” (Putnam 1978b: 110–11). See also Atlas (1979: 276–77).


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speaker S intends his addressee A to believe that the speaker S believes that P by virtue of A’s recognizing that speaker S has the intention that A believe that speaker S believes that P.25) The First Maxim of Quality enjoins the speaker not to say what he believes to be false, and the Supermaxim of Quality enjoins him to try to make his contribution one that is true. If the speaker aims to speak truly, we would expect the speaker to say what he believes he has good reason to believe, but that he believes that P is not part of what he “means” in uttering P (as if, for any P, S believes that P could be logically entailed by the speaker- and context-dependent utterancemeaning of P!). Thus, satisfying the implicature argument schema is not sufficient for a sentence to be an implicatum of an utterance, because the schema conflates the psychological explanans of an utterance-act with the linguistic implicatum of an utterance-content. By Grice’s Implicature Argument Schema, the First Maxim of Quality fails to justify treating the Speech Act Sincerity Condition for assertions (Searle 1969a) as an implicature. Grice’s Nontriviality Restriction on Implicatures (that the satisfaction of a maxim is not implicated) is defensible. If a sentence is “calculable” from the Implicature Argument Schema, it is not necessarily a conversational implicatum. Some, such as Martinich (1980), treat the satisfaction of the Argument Schema as a sufficient condition for a sentence being a conversational implicatum. Grice himself merely claims that it is necessary: if a sentence is to be a conversational implicatum, it must be possible to “work it out” according to the inferences in the Argument Schema. Grice’s Argument Schema will not distinguish between sentences needed for the psychological explanation of a speaker’s mental or verbal actions and sentences needed for the interpretation of a speaker’s utterances. Semantic interpretation is not equivalent to psychological explanation, and the interpreted semantic contents of statements are not to be identified with the explanatory mental contents of belief-states, whatever Grice’s hopes in this matter for his reductionist program of meanings to speaker’s intentions (Avramides 1989; Schiffer 1987). Grice’s intuitions that conversational implicature did not provide an explanation of Moore’s “paradox” were correct.

25See T. Baldwin (1992: 228) on Moore. M. Burnyeat (1967–68) makes Grice’s (1989d: 105) Mintending essential to the concept of assertion. But even though speaker S asserts P BECAUSE S believes that P, it does not follow that a speaker S ASSERTS P because S believes that P (Dretske 1972; Böer 1979).

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3

The Rise of Neo-Gricean Pragmatics

1 The inconsistency of maxims and the principle of informativeness There seems to be a natural parallel between saying (1) and communicating the more informative proposition (2) and saying (3) and communicating the more informative (4).1 (1) (2) (3) (4)

John has three children. John has three children and no more than three children. The king of France is not bald. There is a king of France and he is non-bald.

The inference whereby (1) is used to communicate (2) by generalized conversational implicature has been much discussed under the rubric “scalar implicatures” (Horn 1972; Gazdar 1976, 1977, 1979a).2 The parallel suggests that a similar ac1This section contains in part a revised version of sections 8–10 in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 32–43) and appears with the permission of Academic Press. 2It is a First Quantity Maxim implicature from what the speaker did not say. He did not say four et al. In the class of contexts in which it would be informative to say how many children John has, not saying four, . . . is, ceteris paribus, behavior that conforms to the maxims. So the speaker would not be conforming to the maxims, or being cooperative, if he had said four. . . . He would not be cooperative unless he thought that John has no more than three children. He knows (and knows that the addressee

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THE RISE OF NEO - GRICEAN PRAGMATICS

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count might be given for the negative sentences. However, closer inspection indicates that the parallelism between the implicatures induced by scalar items and those induced by negation is illusory. The apparent parallelism exists merely because the conjunction of any implicatum, however arrived at, with the logical consequences of “what is said” will typically be more informative than those consequences alone.3 In the case of many expressions, we may construct an ordering of items that meets at least this condition: For an appropriately defined class of sentences, any sentence containing the ith term of the ordering will entail a sentence like the original except for “containing” the i+1st term of the ordering at one occurrence of the ith term in the original sentence. Such an ordering we will call a “Horn Scale.” (We ignore several complexities; see Gazdar 1979a: 55–58.) For example, consider the Horn Scales in (5): (5)

a. b. c. d. e. f.

< . . . , . . . , four, three, two, one> <must, should, may>

Sentences employing scalar words have generalized conversational implicatures of these sorts: 1. If a speaker asserts a sentence A(. . .) containing a later, “weaker” term in the scale—for example, A(three), A(possibly), A(some)—he implicates the falsity of the “stronger” scalar variants: for example the falsity of A(four), of A(necessarily), and of A(all). 2. If a speaker asserts the negative of a sentence containing an earlier, “stronger” term in the scale—for example, not-A(four), notA(necessarily), not-A(all)—he implicates a “weaker” variant: for example, A(three), A(possibly), A(some). The explanation of the first sort of scalar implicature involves Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity and the Maxims of Quality. If a speaker is in a position to assert that John has five children, he should not say that John has three children; if he does assert the latter, he may be taken to be in no position to assert a stronger statement— for example, John has five children—and, in conformity with a consequence of the

knows that he knows) that the supposition that he thinks that John has no more than three children is required to be cooperative. He has done nothing to stop the addressee’s thinking that John has no more than three children and so intends the addressee to think that. So the speaker has implicated that John has no more than three children. 3I assume that “what is implicated” is not a logical consequence of “what is said.” Here informativeness is narrowly understood so as to satisfy the condition that if φ is more informative than Ψ, Ψ does not entail φ, and φ is neither logically true nor logically false. See Atlas (1975a,b), Harnish (1976: 362, n.46), O’Hair (1969), Quine and Ullian (1978: 68), and Smokler (1966).

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Maxim of Quality (namely, “Do not say what you do not know”) be taken not to know whether John has five children. Thus from the fact that the speaker has not asserted the stronger variant, it will be inferred that he does not know whether the stronger variant is true. Gazdar (1979a) argues that in the case of Horn Scales, it will be inferred that the speaker knows that the stronger variant is false. If a similar explanation were to be given for negatives, we should posit a logical scale (6) where choice negation –φ precedes exclusion negation ¬φ:4 (6)

<not –φ, not ¬φ>

Then there should be two scalar implicatures: (a) if a speaker asserts an exclusion negation, he implicates the falsity of the choice negation, and (b) if a speaker asserts the negation of a choice negation, he implicates the exclusion negation. Thus Gazdar’s (1979a) account predicts that the exclusion negation understanding of (3) will pragmatically imply (7) and (8). (3)

The king of France is not bald.

(7)

The speaker does not know that there is a king of France and that he is non-bald.

(8)

The speaker knows that it is not the case that there is a king of France and that he is non-bald.

Of course, what should be pragmatically implied is (9): (9)

The speaker knows that there is a king of France and that he is non-bald.

One response to the conflict between the apparent pragmatic implications would be to abandon the Gricean claim that the literal meaning of ‘not’ in English is that of exclusion negation. One account of negation introduces an updated version of the traditional scope distinction and identifies ‘not’ with choice negation (Karttunen and Peters 1979), just as Strawson (1950) did, but it has been argued that this suggestion has serious defects (Atlas 1980a). An alternative nonclassical account argues that the literal meaning of the free morpheme ‘not’ is neither a choice negation nor an exclusion negation but is semantically nonspecific with respect to narrow versus wide scope interpretations (i.e., between choice and exclusion interpretations; Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989). But no matter whether classical or nonclassical semantics is preferable, it will still be necessary to find a pragmatic principle, different from the one involved in scalar implicatures, that will offer an account of the inference from (3) to (4)/(9).

4–φ, a choice negation of φ, is true (false) if and only if φ is false (true) for every admissible valuation val∈V of the language. ¬φ, an exclusion negation of φ, is true if and only if φ is not true, for every admissible valuation val∈V of the language. In a bivalent language exclusion-negation and choicenegation functions are extensionally identical. In a non-bivalent language—one with truth-value gaps— they are extensionally distinct.


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An obvious problem to be solved is the inconsistency between such an inference and the typical Gricean arguments involving the First Maxim of Quantity, that is, the epistemic inconsistency between the First Maxim of Quantity inference from (3) to (8) and the intuitive inference from (3) to (9). The difference between the inferences from the scalar expressions and from ‘not’ statements that we have described is a general difference between kinds of pragmatic inference for two classes of expression. The Gricean inference from the First Maxim of Quantity accounts for one class but not for the other. I am concerned with the pragmatic principles that could be used to explain how and why what is conveyed or communicated by an utterance is more definite or more precise (or, what is not the same, more specific; see my discussion of these terms later in this chapter) than the literal, or conventional, meaning of the sentence uttered.5 For convenience in exposition, I follow Grice (1961, 1967, 1975a,b, 1978) in identifying “what is said” with the sense of “the statement,” that is, with the truth conditions that determine the truth-value of the statement.6 Where I intend to refer to those inferences falling under maxims of conversation I shall speak of “conversational implicatures.”7 The conjunction of “what is said” with “what is implicated” will be “what is communicated,” the meaning a speaker conveys, what Grice (1989a: 118–20) called “the total signification of the utterance.” I am interested in data in which “what is said” is augmented by generalized conversational implicata so that “what is communicated” is standardly more informative than “what is said” (see Bach 1995). Here are familiar examples in which the (b) sentences are implicata of asserting the (a) sentences (Gazdar 1979a; Horn, 1972, 1973; Grice, 1961, 1967, 1975a,b). Examples (10b1), (11b1), (14b1) are scalar; (12b2), (13b1), and (14b2) are so-called clausal; (15b1) is negative scalar; and (16b1) is negative clausal. (10)

a. Some of the boys are at the party. b1. Not all of the boys are at the party.

(11)

a. Morton has three children. b1. Morton has no more than three children.

5I

do not identify the literal with the conventional. See Lakoff (1986).

6This

is carefully put. What determines a truth-value does not have to be identical with a proposition, or a Fregean Gedanke, although it is typically thought of as expressing truth conditions. Furthermore, it presupposes that the spoken utterance, or written inscription, has a truth-value. Sense, in Frege’s or in Grice’s usages, is certainly not the same as the linguistic meaning of the sentence-type of which the statement is a token (see Burge 1990). For more on ‘what is said’, see Grice (1989a: 24–25, 87–88, 118–22). Had Grice not stuck me with it, I would have followed the advice of Paul Ziff (1972a), in his “What Is Said,” and abjured in Atlas and Levinson (1981) the phrase ‘what is said’ as philosophically obscurantist and conducive to a debate that confuses disagreement between theories with differences in terminologies. The notion of “what is said” has since come in for considerable discussion and notable disagreement among philosophers and linguists: See Bach (1994a), Carston (1988), Levinson (1988, 2000), Récanati (1989), and Sperber and Wilson (1986b). 7Grice uses “conversational implicature” in the narrow sense for inferences from floutings, or blatant violations, of the maxims.

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(12)

a. Rick is a philosopher or a poet. b1. Rick is not both a philosopher and a poet. b2. Rick may not be a philosopher. Rick may not be a poet.

(13)

a. If John is at home, the brain machine will be on. b1. John may not be at home. The brain machine may be on.

(14)

a. Marjorie believes that Babette is a Phi Beta Kappa. b1. Marjorie does not know that Babette is a Phi Beta Kappa. b2. Babette may be a Phi Beta Kappa. Babette may not be a Phi Beta Kappa.

(15)

a. Not all of the boys are at the party. b1. Some of the boys are at the party.

(16)

a. It’s not the case that Rick is both a philosopher and a poet. b1. Rick is either a philosopher or a poet.

These implicata limit “what is said” by shrinking the range of possible states of affairs whose descriptions are consistent with “what is said” to a smaller range of those states of affairs whose descriptions are consistent with “what is communicated”—that is, “what is said” plus “what is implicated.” “What is communicated” is more definite than “what is said.” I shall argue that these more definite propositions are derivable by the Gricean inference from the First Maxim of Quantity. Other pragmatic inferenda enrich “what is said” by reshaping the range of the possible states of affairs in the truth-set of “what is said” to a narrower range of possible states of affairs in the truth-set of “what is communicated.” “What is communicated” is either (a) more precise or (b) more specific than “what is said.” The Atlas and Levinson (1981: 35–36) contrast between the definite and, to coin a term, the precific (a genus term), corresponds roughly to the Sperber and Wilson (1986b) contrast between the implicatum (a proposition that the addressee understands to have been conveyed by the speaker in stating the proposition that the addressee understands him to have expressed in the sentence he uttered) and the explicatum (the proposition understood by the addressee to have been expressed by the speaker in asserting the sentence). With important qualifications to be noted, my (1981) subcontrast in the “precific” between the precise (a species term) and the specific (Levinson’s 1987a term) is roughly approximated by Récanati’s (1989) contrast between the strengthened and the saturated and by Bach’s (1994a,b) contrast between the expanded and the completed among implicitures (not implicatures). What is understood by the addressee to have been communicated to him via the proposition [YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DIE], expressed by the speaker’s utterance You are not going to die, would be the latter conceptually strengthened, or fleshed out, by the addressee: [YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DIE FROM THIS CUT ON THE FINGER]. The speaker could have been more explicit if he had inserted the words from this cut on the finger


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into the utterance. Bach (1994a) calls the addressee’s making-what-is-meant-by-thespeaker explicit “expansion”—a filling-out of the proposition understood by the addressee to have been uttered by the speaker (see also White 1965: 59, 1993; Atlas 1989: 25). By contrast, “completion” is an addresse’s filling-in of a nonpropositional, semantically nonspecific sentence-meaning of a sentence uttered by a speaker to yield an understood proposition (see also Atlas 1974, 1975b, 1977b, 1979, 1989). The source of the semantical nonspecificity in a sentence might be lexical—such as take (see Ruhl 1989: 87; Cruse 1992)—or phrasal, as in the genitive John’s book. The genitive phrase is traditionally taken to be ambiguous (e.g., by Chomsky 1972a); Leech (1974) and, following Kay and Zimmer (1976: 29), Récanati (1989: 298, Davis, 1991: 99) take the genitive to be univocal but logically weak, merely expressing the existence of a relation ρ between John and the book, as in [THE BOOK THAT BEARS SOME ρ TO JOHN], rather than, as by Atlas, semantically nonspecific. Views on univocality similar to Leech’s, Kay and Zimmer’s, and Récanati’s were held by Grice, the classical Griceans, and Kempson and Cormack (1981). By contrast Bach (1994a: 129–30) and I hold that such words, phrases, and sentences are semantically underdeterminate—that is, semantically nonspecific with respect to a semantic feature, such as [–MALE], with respect to a constituent, as Gentlemen prefer blondes [to brunettes], or with respect to structure, as The king of France is not bald, McFee almost shot himself last night in the park in a plastic bag. (For discussion of the differences among semantical nonspecificity, weak semantical univocality, ellipsis, and indexicality, see Atlas 1977b, 1978b, 1979, 1984b, 1989 and Bach 1982, 1994a: 130–33).) My main concern has been with structural semantical underdeterminacy: semantical nonspecificity of sentences containing quantified noun phrases, definite descriptions, adverbial modifiers, numerical adjectival modifiers, and extensional (e.g., ‘not’) and intensional (e.g., ‘believes’) operators. (For an attack on the ambiguity of ‘believe’ sentences, see Bach 1987: 210–14 and Stich 1983: 111–23.) Structural nonspecificity has been my concern as a philosophical logician because my interest is in the logical and semantical structure of natural language (both classical logical syntax and model theory, as well as what Chomsky 1996c calls “Internalist Semantics”) and its relation to thought and to what Chomsky calls “Performance Systems.” These structural questions, the most difficult and subtle kind of semantical nonspecificity, are the ones that have the most significant bearing on logical form. Some examples of generalized conversational inferenda in (19)–(27) and particularized conversational inferenda in (17)–(18) follow. Examples of precisification are (17b1), (18b1), (19b1), (21b1), (22b1), and (23b1). Examples of specification are (20b1), (24b1), (25b1), (26b1), and (27b1). (17) Asymmetric conjunction (Schmerling 1975) a. Kurt went to the store and bought some wine. b1 Kurt went to the store in order to buy some wine and then bought some wine.

(18) Conjunction buttressing (Atlas and Levinson 1981) a. Mart turned the switch and the motor started. b1. First Mart turned the switch and then the motor started.

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b1. Mart’s turning the switch indirectly caused the motor’s starting. b3. Mart’s turning the switch directly caused the motor’s starting. b4. Mart’s intentionally turning the switch caused indirectly/directly the motor’s starting.

(19) Conditional perfection (Geis and Zwicky 1971) a. If you mow the lawn, I’ll give you five dollars. b. If you don’t mow the lawn, I won’t give you five dollars.

(20) Mirror maxim (Harnish 1976: 359) a. Mart and David moved the cabinet. b1. Mart and David moved the cabinet together.

(21) Continuity (Atlas and Levinson 1981) a. Mikael ate the cake. b1. Mikael ate the whole cake.

(22) Continuity (Atlas and Levinson 1981) a. Eve ate the apples b1. Eve ate all the apples.

(23) Membership categorization (Sacks 1972) a. The baby cried and the mother picked it up. b1. The baby cried and the mother of the baby picked it up.

(24) Bridging/definite reference (Clark and Haviland 1977; Hawkins 1975, 1978) a. It was a vase made of bronze and on the base of the vessel was the maker’s mark. b1. It was a vase made of bronze and on the base of the vase was the maker’s mark.

(25)

Inference to stereotype (Atlas and Levinson 1981) a. Mikael said “Hello” to the secretary and then he smiled. b1. Mikael said “Hello” to the (female) secretary and then he (Mikael) smiled.

(26) Negative specification (Atlas 1975a,b, 1977b; Horn 1978b, 1989) a. The largest prime integer is not even. b1. The largest prime integer is {not-even/odd} b2. There is no largest prime integer that is even [or odd].8 8I did not paraphrase (26b ) as: It is not the case that the largest prime integer is even, since I showed 2 in Atlas (1974, 1977b, 1989) that this natural language version of the external sentence negation actually has just the same interpretations that (26a) does, contrary to decades of philosophical doctrine (see Boër and Lycan 1976; Horn 1989). And one needs the “expansion” or odd to avoid an implicatum of (26b2): There is a largest prime integer that is odd.


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Negative incorporation (Horn 1989) c. I do not like N.N. c1. I dislike N.N.

Negative lowering (Horn 1989) d. I do not believe Tom is tall. d1. I believe Tom is not tall.

(27) Preferred local coreference (Levinson 1987a,b) a. Tom came in and he sat down. b1. Tom1 came in and he1 Tom1 sat down.

I shall argue that there is a general principle that licenses an inference from “what is said” to the more precise or specific content of “what is communicated” even though the particular ways in which the inferred proposition is constructed may differ from case to case.9 I am interested in understanding the character of this inference from informativeness. But first I shall discuss the Gricean inference from the First Maxim of Quantity. 1.1 The inference from the first maxim of quantity and its limitations The implicata in (10)–(14) are alleged to be derivable by appeal to Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity, namely, “Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange.” A prototypical Gricean argument for this class of implicatures goes as follows (Grice 1975a: 50): (28)

a. The speaker S has said φ. b. There is a proposition Ψ, related to φ by virtue of entailing φ and/or by being more

9It is interesting to apply Kent Bach’s (1994a,b) taxonomy to examples (17)–(27). His notion of “expansion” implicitures covers the particularized conversational inferendum of Conjunction Buttressing of (18b1), as well as the generalized conversational inferenda of the Mirror Maxim (20b1), Continuity (21b1, 22b1), Membership Categorization (23b1), and Inference to Stereotype (25b1). His notion of “completion” implicitures covers Negative Specification (26b1). Bridging/Definite Reference (24b1) and Levinson’s (1987a,b) Preferred Local Coreference (27b1) are put by Bach into a separate category of reference determination. Conditional Perfection (19), Conjunction Buttressings (18b2, 18b3, and 18b4), and Negative Incorporation (26c1) are not implicitures but are particularized or generalized implicatures on his view; he presumably does not accept my semantical nonspecificity of ‘not’ in (26c), although he does elsewhere (see Bach 1987: 99n.). On my view a specification of (26c) is I do not-like N.N., which then, in a process of negative incorporation, becomes I dislike N.N. Asymmetric Conjunction (17) does not fit Bach’s taxonomy, since he sees no generalized impliciture or implicature in that case; I agree that the implicata are particularized. The Inference to Stereotype example (25b1) could also be regarded as a lexical completion, as well as an expansion, since ‘secretary’ is nonspecific for semantical gender. That last point raises the question of how well defined completion and expansion are: Are they intended to be mutually exclusive? Does it matter for Bach’s account if they are not? And how much does Bach’s notion of expansion depend merely on adding to surface structure, without consideration of underlying semantical properties?

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informative than φ, which it would be desirable to convey in view of the current purposes of the exchange. (Here there is reference to the Maxim of Relation, “Be relevant.”) c. Proposition Ψ can be expressed as briefly as φ, so S did not say φ rather than Ψ simply in order to be brief—that is, to conform to a Maxim of Manner. d. So S must intend the hearer to infer not Ψ or at least It’s not the case that S knows that Ψ, for if S knew that Ψ, he would have infringed the First Maxim of Quantity by saying φ. e. Therefore, saying φ implicates not Ψ or at least It’s not the case that S knows that Ψ.

Various versions of this argument have been rehearsed by Gazdar (1979a), Harnish (1976), and Horn (1972). Schema (28) will suffice to represent these various arguments. For purposes of our discussion, the salient feature of such an argument is its derivation of implicata from what is not said. Given that there is available an expression of roughly equal length that is logically stronger or more informative, the failure to employ the stronger expression conveys that the speaker is not in a position to employ it. The inference will always result in a delimitation of what has been said, in a more definite proposition being conveyed as “what is communicated.” The argument relies crucially on the existence of equally brief expressions that can be ordered in a Horn Scale of relative informativeness. When the items in the scale are elements in a semantic field (see Grandy 1987), and where alternatives are psychologically salient, the stronger inference to The speaker knows that the more informative alternatives do not obtain is licensed. These are the well-known scalar implicatures illustrated in (10b1), (12b1), and (14b1) and formalized by Gazdar (1979a: 58–59), relying partly on the work of Horn (1972).10 In other cases, the assertion of φ will implicate that the speaker is not in a position to assert a stronger, more informative statement Ψ. Instead of an inference from φ to S knows that not Ψ, as in the scalar cases, there is an inference from φ to S does not know that Ψ and so to It’s compatible with what S knows that not Ψ. Some of these cases have been formalized by Gazdar (1979a: 59) as “clausal implicatures.” These will allegedly arise when a compound or complex sentence φ—for example, Ψ ∨ χ— has a constituent sentence Ψ such that φ entails neither Ψ nor not Ψ and, on Gazdar’s theory, presupposes neither as well. As there is usually a similar assertion that would entail Ψ (e.g. Ψ itself), or entail its negation, the speaker is presumed not to know whether Ψ is true. This theory allegedly accounts for (12b2), (13b1), and (14b2).

10It seems to have been assumed in the literature that only Horn Scales give rise to these strong implicatures, but other types of cases exhibit the same behavior. The implicatum of Jane’s skirt is blue (Harnish 1976) is not The speaker doesn’t know whether the skirt is any other color but rather The speaker knows that the skirt is not any other color. Similarly, to say Jones is a doctor is to imply The speaker knows that Jones is not (e.g.) an architect rather than The speaker does not know whether Jones is an architect. It may be sufficient that a set of lexical items be “about” the same domain and provide presumptively exclusive alternatives of equal saliency in order for the stronger implicata to obtain. The theory of such matters remains highly underdeveloped.


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For example, Levinson writes, “for the clausal alternates , the use of the weaker conditional stands in opposition to the use of constructions that would entail the embedded sentences (e.g., since φ, Ψ)” (2000: 36). The scale <since, . . . , if . . .> is supposed to parallel . Levinson (2000: 36 ex. (15b)) claims that the following example exhibits clausal implicata: “If there is life on Mars, the NASA budget will be spared.” » {There may be life on Mars; There may not be life on Mars.}

Now, exactly how do we use the set of salient alternates as in the scalar cases to get the clausal inference? How does the contrast between if and since give us {There may be life . . . ; There may not be life. . . .}? From the assertion of the conditional, do we get a scalar-like implicatum It is not the case that since there is life on Mars, the NASA budget will be spared? And if so, how do we go from that implicatum to There may be life on Mars? Levinson’s (2000: 36) suggestion is that the implicatum of asserting if φ is φ is uncertain, since we have a contrast with since φ, which would entail φ. Is the mechanism to deny since? That would not produce φ is not true. If someone asserts If John comes, I’ll go, how does the speaker in general implicate {Maybe John will come; Maybe John won’t come}?—or as Levinson (2000: 36) puts it, It is uncertain whether John will come. Does the use of the if-clause by the speaker generally implicate that it is epistemically contingent that John comes—that as far as the speaker knows, it is possible that he will come and possible that he won’t? Even if an explanation for the speaker’s asserting the conditional if φ, Ψ rather than φ, so Ψ or Ψ since φ is the speaker’s uncertainty that φ, is Maybe φ, maybe not φ what the speaker normally conveys, suggests, or implies by asserting if φ, Ψ? I doubt it. There are plenty of cases in which the truth-value of the antecedent of the conditional is certain for the speaker, as in If 7 + 5 = 13, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. One does not have the speaker implicating that he is uncertain that 7 + 5 = 13; he is quite certain that it is not. So there is no clausal implicatum Maybe 7 + 5 = 13 and also no implicatum Maybe 7 + 5 ≠ 13. Consider some other examples: (a) If you want dessert, you’ll have to eat your spinach; (b) If the president is a genius, then I’m a monkey’s uncle; (c) If 2 + 2 = 5, then 0 = 1; (d) If 7 + 5 = 12, then 7 + 6 = 13; (e) If Verdi were French, then he and Bizet would be compatriots. In cases (b) to (e) it seems clear that a speaker, at least myself, is not uncertain whether the antecedent clause is true; the clauses are not epistemically contingent. The truth-values of the antecedent clauses of (b) to (e) are certain for the speaker, at least for myself: false, false, true, false. In the case of example (a), in the normal circumstances of utterance, the speaker is likewise in no doubt that the antecedent clause is true—the parent expects the child to want dessert—but it could be that, in a particular context of utterance, as far as the speaker actually knows, the antecedent clause is false. The parent does not know that the child wants dessert. Yet that is not the normal case of use of (a). That use is You’ll get dessert only if you eat your spinach. I certainly do not think that asserting those conditional sentences conveys, generally, that the antecedent clause is uncertain for the speaker or that it is possible as far as the speaker knows that the clause is true or that it is possible as far as the speaker knows that the clause is false. In short, there is no reason to think that there exist any

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generalized clausal implicata of conditionals, pace Gazdar (1979a) and Levinson (2000). The data of (15) and (16) seem to require a more elaborate theory (q.v. Horn 1972). It is tempting to hypothesize, after the fashion of Generative Semantics, Bertrand Russell, or Fred Sommers (1982), that not all derives from an underlying some are not and none derives from an underlying all are not (and possibly further, from an under-underlying not some). Then by the usual scalar implicature, saying not all (i.e., some are not) implicates not all are not (i.e., not none), which by double negation elimination is equivalent to some. Thus the pragmatic quantity scale, ordering “deeper” or otherwise “designated” readings, motivates a particular hypothesis about semantic representations and about meaning postulates for lexical items like ‘not’ in the mental lexicon. A more “surfacey” alternative would be the positing of scales of negative items: , and <none/no, . . . , not all, . . .>. But then one would have to give criteria for an item being a “negative” one and theorize about the difference between lexicalized and periphrastic negative items in a Horn Scale.11 The implicata of (17) to (27) are not derivable by the inference from the First Maxim of Quantity. Indeed, the inference from the First Maxim of Quantity yields results inconsistent with the data of (17) to (27). I have already discussed ‘not’ sentences. Another example is Conditional Perfection. For example, saying (19a) intuitively implicates (19b1), and thus communicates the conjunction of (19a) and (19b1), given in (19c). (19)

a. I’ll give you five dollars if you mow the lawn. b1. If you don’t mow the lawn, I won’t give you five dollars. c. I’ll give you five dollars if, and only if, you mow the lawn.

But by the First Maxim of Quantity, the speaker should have said the stronger sentence (19c). As the speaker has not said (19c), the hearer must be intended to infer its denial. Therefore, according to the inference from the First Maxim of Quantity, (19a) implicates either its own falsehood or the falsehood of its intuitive implicatum (19b1). Saying (19a) cannot implicate (19b1) through an inference from the First Maxim of Quantity, but there is an implicature nonetheless.12 We must explain the data by ap-

11For

more on the introduction of negative scales, see Atlas and Levinson (1981: 39, n.9), and on negative items, see (Atlas 1991a, 1993, 1996a,b, 2001). See also Sommers (1982: 61, 290, 360) and Englebretsen (1996).

12Sentence (19b ) is only an implicatum; not all conditionals convey a biconditional, indicating the 1 defeasibility of the inference. Compare:

(i) I have a key in my pocket if the door is locked. (ii) I have a key in my pocket if, and only if, the door is locked. Sentence (ii) is not communicated by saying (i) because (ii) is incompatible with noncontroversial presumptions and so is blocked, a mechanism formalized for background presumptions in Gazdar (1979a). For alternative analyses of the “conditional perfection” inference, see J. van der Auwera (1995). For discussion of the difference between “background” and “noncontroversial” presumptions, see the following discussion and chapter 4.


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peal to another form of argument, one that yields interpretations that supplement “what is said” by positing that “what is meant” is a stronger proposition compatible both with presumptions in the context and with “what is said.” 1.2 Informativeness To account for the data, I formulated in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 40) the conversational maxims of relativity: (29)

Maxims of relativity Speaker-centered 1. Do not say what you believe to be highly noncontroversial—that is, to be entailed by the presumptions of the common ground in context K.

Hearer-centered 2. Take what you hear to be lowly noncontroversial—that is, consistent with the presumptions of the common ground in context K.

The essential notion here was “noncontroversiality,” which I contrast with what is already presumed in the background of the context of utterance. So something needed to be said about what noncontroversiality might consist of. I elaborated the notion of noncontroversiality as follows: (30) Conventions of noncontroversiality (among which are) 1. Convention of intension (common knowledge) The obtaining of stereotypical relations among individuals is noncontroversial for hearer H and speaker S in context K with respect to a statement A . (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40)

For example, if a predicate π(x) is semantically underdeterminate—semantically nonspecific—with respect to semantical metapredicates Fi, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, that express aspects of lexical meaning—for example, semantical gender, but for some k, 1 ≤ k ≤ n, a species fk of the semantical genus Fk expresses a stereotypical property of x, for example as [FEMALE] expresses femaleness, then in saying π(τ) a speaker will convey π(τ)fk to the addressee in accordance with the Second Maxim of Relativity and the Convention of Intension. This is illustrated by sentences (25a) and (31a) to (32a), the assertion of which communicate (25b1), (31b), and (32b), generalized implicata that are more informative than “what is said”: (31)

a. The secretary smiled. b. The female secretary smiled.

(32)

a. John had a drink. b. John had an alcoholic drink.

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Returning to the Conventions of Noncontroversiality, we have: (30) 2. Convention of extension (Quine’s 1956/ 1976: 190 exportation) If the statement A(t) is “about” t13, or if t is a topic noun phrase in the statement A(t), then: a. If t is a singular term, t exists is noncontroversial for speaker S in context K with respect to A(t).14 13The semantic aspects of the intuitive notion of ‘aboutness’ that I am employing have been in part explicated in Putnam (1958). Generalizing from a suggestion of Popper (1959: 122), I shall say that if a statement φ is “about” the set σ and a statement Ψ is “about” the set β, φ is more informative than Ψ if β is properly contained in σ [β ⊂ σ]. For example, All birds have wings and All crows have wings are “about” birds and crows, respectively, but not “about” winged creatures, and the first statement about birds is more informative than is the second about crows. On Putnam’s explication of “aboutness,” φ is “about” σ if and only if Ψ is “about” σ, provided that φ and Ψ are logically equivalent. All birds have wings and All crows have wings are also “about” the nonwinged, as they are equivalent to All nonwinged things are nonbirds and All nonwinged things are noncrows. Thus the sentences may be taken to be “about” the set-theoretic union of birds and the nonwinged and “about” the set theoretic union of crows and the nonwinged, respectively. Because the former set properly contains the latter, by Popper’s criterion All birds have wings is the more informative. It is also a feature of Putnam’s account that a sentence and its negation are “about” the same thing and that φ(a) is “about” {a}. A further feature of the commonsense notion of “aboutness” that is worthy of mention is its intensionality. This is indicated by the nonreferential occurrence of t in φ is “about” t. The sentence All winged horses are unridable is pre-theoretically “about” winged horses; All golden mountains are unclimbable is “about” golden mountains. Of course, the extension of the predicates ‘winged horse’ and ‘golden mountain’ is the same: the null set ∅. But intuitively, that is intensionally, All winged horses are unridable is not “about” golden mountains, nor is All golden mountains are unclimbable “about” winged horses. The defeasible inference from φ is “about” t to ∃x(φ is “about” x) is an inference dubbed “exportation” by W. V. O. Quine (1956/ 1976: 190). Quine, in a happy choice of terminology, called his inference “implicative.” However logically dubious the existential “aboutness” inference is, it is dubious in precisely the way Quine’s exportation is dubious. Quine’s classic example of exportation is that inference from Ralph believes that Ortcutt is a spy to Ralph believes u(u is a spy) of Ortcutt: namely, Ralph believes spyhood of Ortcutt, from which it follows, assuming one treats English proper names as individual constants in classical first-order logic, (∃x)(Ralph believes u(u is a spy) of x): namely, Someone is believed by Ralph to be a spy (1956/ 1976: 190). Our need for ∃x(φ is “about” x) is as pressing as the need Quine recognizes for “relational” statements of belief. By the Convention of Extension, the exported existential proposition is a matter in the context of utterance of (a) background presumption or of (b) noncontroversiality. The proposition does not need to be true; it merely needs (a) to be presumed or (b) needs to be taken for granted by the parties to the discourse. It is their propositional attitudes that affect how utterances in the context will be understood. (For other philosophical uses of the topic/comment (aboutness/predication) distinctions, see Russell 1903 and Atlas 1988, 1989, 1991a, 1993, 1996b.) 14Gazdar dismisses a similar idea. He writes, “Naturally one can add to Grice’s maxims, perhaps along the lines of: Assume referents exist unless you know they don’t, but then one can always invent no less unreasonable sounding conversational maxims to deal with any example at all” (1977: 127). The resemblance between my suggestion and Gazdar’s strawman is only superficial. I do not conceive the Convention of Extension as a “maxim” of conversation at all. It is part of a theory of context and noncontroversiality. Its role is emphatically not that of a conversational maxim. Its acceptability will rest on its value within such a theory of context and on its contribution to a neo-Gricean theory as a whole.


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b. If t denotes a set, ∃x(x ∈ t) is noncontroversial for speaker S in context K with respect to A(t). c. If t denotes a state of affairs or a proposition, t is actual and t is true are noncontroversial for speaker S in context K with respect to A(t).

The two Conventions of Intension and Extension are theoretical principles of noncontroversiality—principles of default interpretations—but what is noncontroversial in a context K for a speaker S is not necessarily common ground with respect to a statement in that context, even though what is common ground in a context for the speaker and addressee is noncontroversial in the context. Common ground includes already established mutual knowledge or belief, as well as what has already been mutually taken for granted, whereas the takings-for-granted associated with an utterance U in a context K can occur simultaneously with the utterance of U. In Atlas and Levinson (1981: 40, n.11), I wrote, “We do not conceive the Convention of Extension as a ‘maxim’ of conversation at all. It is part of a theory of background presumption, of noncontroversiality. Its role is emphatically not that of a conversational maxim.” The concept of stereotypicality enters into just one of the Conventions of Noncontroversiality—that is, the Convention of Intension. My maxims of conversation are the Maxims of Relativity, which are speaker-centered and addressee-centered revisions of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”). The notion of noncontroversiality plays an essential role in the formulation of the Maxims of Relativity, but stereotypicality only plays a role in one of the postulates of noncontroversiality. Levinson (2000: 37) comments on Grice’s second maxim that the “underlying idea is, of course, that one need not say what can be taken for granted.” Indeed, Levinson’s formulation is one consequence of one construal of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity, because if the speaker does offer more information than is required— for example, information that is already mutually assumed in the context—then, as Grice (1989b: 27) himself notes, “hearers may be misled as a result of thinking that there is some particular point in the provision of the excess of information.” Another consequence of excessive information is inferrable from Grice’s comments on the maxims as examples of imperatives governing rational behavior. Grice noted, “If you are assisting me to mend a car, I expect your contribution to be neither more nor less than is required. If, for example, at a particular stage I need four screws, I expect you to hand me four, rather than two or six” (1989b: 28). In Grice’s example the excess is an obstacle to getting on with the job. In Atlas and Levinson (1981) I made explicit the relationship between stereotypicality and the conversational Maxims of Relativity; the maxims appeal to a notion of noncontroversiality, and the theory of noncontroversiality appeals to stereotypicality. Atlas and Levinson wrote, “If a predicate Q is semantically nonspecific with respect to predicates Pi (1 ≤ i ≤ n), but for some j (1 ≤ j ≤ n) Pj is stereotypical of Qs, then in saying Qt a speaker will convey Pjt in accordance with the second maxim of Relativity and the Convention of Intension” (1981: 41). This was then illustrated by the understanding of John had a drink as John had an alcoholic drink. The noun ‘drink’ is semantically nonspecific with respect to [ALCOHOLIC], but

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in saying John had a drink, speaker and addressee know that being alcoholic is stereotypical of what is described by ‘a drink’ (unlike, for example, what is described by the marked ‘a drink of water’). That common knowledge is part of their common ground. The second Maxim of Relativity instructs the addressee to take what he hears to be noncontroversial and consistent with the presumptions of the common ground, which means, according to the first Convention of Noncontroversiality, to take what he hears to be noncontroversial and consistent with the presumption that ‘. . . is a drink’ is understood as ‘. . . is an alcoholic drink’. As it happens, the stereotypical understandings of the utterances are more informative than the literal sense of the sentences uttered; they are more specific. Levinson (2000: 37) takes the heuristic principle “what is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified” to be the essence of Atlas and Levinson’s (1981: 40–41) Principle of Informativeness, saying that a “version of such a [heuristic] principle is given by Atlas and Levinson (1981), who dubbed it the Informativeness Principle, and following this, I [Levinson] call the heuristic the I-principle” (Levinson 2000: 38). In the application of his heuristic, Levinson formulates a gloss as follows: “minimal specifications get maximally informative or stereotypical interpretations” (2000: 37). This gloss may well cause misunderstandings of Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Principle of Informativeness. In Levinson’s formulation it is unclear whether he thinks (a) that an interpretation is maximally informative if and only if it is stereotypical, or, more weakly, whether he thinks (b) that an interpretation is stereotypical if informative, or (c) that it is informative if stereotypical, or (d) that being maximally informative and being stereotypical are inclusive or exclusive alternatives. I should have thought that none of (a), (b), (c), (d) is correct. Atlas and Levinson (1981) is committed to none of them. How should one characterize addressees’ understandings of utterances that are more informative in a context than the literal senses of the sentences uttered by a speaker? The context involves the background of presumptions common to speaker and addressee, and it involves information that is understood by the addressee to be noncontroversial for the speaker and so for the addressee’s interpretation of the speaker’s utterance, about the topic of the utterance by, in, or when uttering the sentence. I proposed in Atlas and Levinson (1981) and do so again here that among the possible interpretations of the utterance in the context, the “best” interpretation is the one—and my principle guarantees that there is a unique one if there are any— that (a) is consistent with the presumptions of the common ground, (b) is consistent with the propositions about the topic of the utterance that are understood by the addressee to be noncontroversial for the speaker at the time of utterance, and (c) is the logically strongest among those satisfying the preceding conditions (a) and (b). Thus the best interpretation for the addressee of a speaker’s utterance U in context K is as informative a proposition as consistency with the common ground and consistency with the noncontroversial propositions associated with U permit. In the common ground and among the noncontroversial propositions are predications of stereotypical properties of objects being talked about in an utterance. Thus stereotypicality is a constraint on interpretations of utterances, by making the most informative interpretation consistent with common knowledge of stereotypical properties of objects. The analysis does not identify the most informative interpretation with one that expresses stereotypical relations or properties, but it does constrain the


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most informative interpretation to be the logically strongest interpretation that is consistent with whatever stereotypes the speaker’s and addressee’s presumptions of common ground and presumptions of noncontroversial information contain. As I use it, ‘stereotype’ is a technical term, derived from Hilary Putnam’s (1975) discussion in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” of natural kind terms, such as gold, water, and tiger. Stereotype-predicates in the entry in the mental lexicon for the word tiger include [TAWNY WITH BLACK STRIPES], [LARGE CAT], [CARNIVOROUS]. As is well known, the related notion of a prototype has been developed by Rosch (1977) and Lakoff (1987), among others. Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) account is not captured by the brief description in Levinson (2000: 37) that “brief and simple expressions thus encourage, by this heuristic, a tendency to select the best interpretation to the most stereotypical, most explanatory exemplification,” or in Levinson’s remark (2000: 40) that “I-inferences [are] based primarily on stereotypical presumptions about the world.” The latter claim is just false. So what was Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Principle of Informativeness? It was a technical formulation of the notion of “best interpretation” for an addressee of a speaker’s utterance in a context. I shall repeat it here in the form that I gave it in Atlas and Levinson, with some clarifying emendations: (33) Principle of informativeness Suppose a speaker S addresses a sentence A to a hearer H in a context K. If H has n competing interpretations U i (1 ≤ i ≤ n) of A in the context K with . . . information contents INF(Ui), and GHA,K is the set of propositions that H takes to be noncontroversial for S in K with respect to A at the stage in the conversation at which A is uttered, then the “best” interpretation U* of A for H in K is the most informative proposition among the competing interpretations Ui that are consistent with the common ground CGK in the context and with the noncontroversial propositions GHA,K associated with the uttering of A in the context K. (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40–41)

This “best” interpretation I called ‘the pragmatic content of A’—PRON(A) in the notation of Atlas and Levinson (1981: 41). Informational contents INF had several explications. Among the ones discussed in Atlas and Levinson (1981), I chose a variant of the logically most straightforward, the set of a statement’s logical consequences. So the “best” interpretation of A for the addressee is the logically strongest proposition that is consistent with what is noncontroversial for the addressee H in K with respect to A, namely with GHA,K, and consistent with the common ground CGK. The notion of “competing interpretations” was left as a primitive notion in the formulation of Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) theory. It was a complex function of the literal meaning of the sentence uttered, stress, tone, and other aspects. The context will enter to fix pronoun reference, and so on. The principle permits the literal meaning of the speaker’s sentence φ to differ from—and in particular to be logically weaker or semantically less informative than— any of its hearer’s interpretations φui. This allows a speaker’s production strategy correlative with the addressee’s comprehension strategy (Atlas 1975a): Literally say

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less if you can count on the addressee to compensate for the less said by interpreting more. Or, as Grice (1975a, 1989a) rather inexplicitly puts it in his Second Maxim of Quantity, “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.” In Atlas and Levinson (1981: 40–41) I adopted a two-level explication of the best interpretation of an utterance φ. The first level was INF(φU*); the second level was PRON(φ). INF gave me the logically strongest interpretation consistent with the common ground, and PRON gave me the strongest INF that was consistent with the noncontroversial propositions about the topic of the utterance. Thus the “best” interpretation of φ was PRON(φ). The construction I used in Atlas and Levinson (1981) for the intuitive notion of the “best interpretaiton” went like this: Let φu* be φuj for the least j, 1 ≤ j ≤ n, such that INF({φuj} ∪ GK(φ)) = maxi INF({φui} ∪ GK(φ) ), 1 ≤ i ≤ n. The sentence φ will tend to convey the pragmatic content PRON(φ) to the addressee H: PRON(φ) = INF({φu*} ∪ Gφu*) where Gφu* is the set of propositions that are noncontroversial in the context Kφ,that are “about” what φu* is “about,” and that are logically consistent with φu*. The constraint of consistency with the common ground was, in fact, a strong and conservative constraint (Quine and Ullian 1978: 59, 66–68), as the obtaining of “stereotypical” properties and relations would be elements of the common ground, since both speaker and addressee would have the same information about stereotypes mentally readily accessible to them, and each could be expected to expect the other to access easily such information. Two explications of the qualitative concept of a statement’s informational content have long been familiar to philosophers; they were proposed by Rudolf Carnap (1942), Carnap and Y. Bar-Hillel (1952), John Kemeny (1953), Sir Karl Popper (1959), and Carl Hempel (1960). The first explication identifies the informational content of a statement with the set of its logical consequences—that is, IN(φ) = {Ψ: φ Ψ}. The second identifies the content with the set of possible falsifiers of the statement, descriptions of possible states of affairs incompatible with it: CON(φ) = {Ψ: Ψ ¬φ}. The two views are subsumed under one notion of “semantic content” in Carnap and Bar-Hillel (1953–54), and a quantitative concept is introduced. The Carnapian definition given by H. Smokler restricts the classical logical consequence relation (see Smokler 1966: 207, 210). The standard application of Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity does not explain the linguistic data. On Grice’s view, a speaker should tailor the form of his utterances to what he thinks his hearer’s needs or interests in the conversation might be. If a specification would enable the hearer to satisfy his needs or interests, there is a presumption that the speaker should issue such a specification in his utterance. If the speaker fails to be specific, it is assumed that he cannot be (Grice 1975a: 57). Thus it would be predicted that in saying (25a) or (31a) or (32a) a speaker would not convey that the secretary was female or that the drink was alcoholic. Temporal, causal, and teleological relations between events are stereotypical in our “commonsense” conceptual scheme. But (18) and (19) fall under the Maxims of Relativity and the Convention of Intension as particularized, not generalized, conversational implicata. The (a) sentences of (18) and (19) may be understood in different ways in different contexts. In any particular context of utterance, the


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chosen understanding results from an ‘inference to the best interpretation’, the understanding that best “fits” both the shared background presumptions in the context and the communicative intentions attributable to the speaker by the addressee in light of “what he has said,” including what the addressee takes to be noncontroversial for the speaker and addressee with respect to the utterance in the context. We have explicated this notion of best interpretation in our hearer-centered Principle of Informativeness (33) (Atlas and Levinson 1981).15

2 The alleged inconsistency of scalar and clausal implicata Gazdar (1976, 1979a: 136) had suggested that asserting P or Q scalar-implicated not both P and Q; for example: (34)

“John did it or Mary did it.” » Speaker knows that not(John did it and Mary did it.)

Asserting P or Q also produced the clausal-implicata of (35), which are inconsistent with the scalar implicatum of (34): (35)

“John did it or Mary did it.” » {It is compatible with what the speaker knows that Mary did it; It is compatible with what the speaker knows that John did it.}

That is, Gazdar claims that asserting P or Q implicates {Maybe P; Maybe Q}. The clausal-implicata of (35) were alleged by Gazdar to be inconsistent with the scalar implicatum of Speaker’s knowing not(John did it and Mary did it). So, to resolve the alleged inconsistency, Gazdar (1979a: 132) adopted the hypothesis that the clausalimplicata took precedence over the scalar-implicata, the former excluding the latter. Gazdar’s argument committed a modal fallacy, since (It is compatible with what the speaker knows that P) & (It is compatible with what the speaker knows that Q) does not entail It is compatible with what the speaker knows that (P & Q). To see this, let Q be not P. But that fallacious assumption is required to make the alleged clausal-implicata of (35) inconsistent with the scalar implicatum of (34). So the Gazdar mechanism of clausal implicata excluding scalar implicata in order to resolve an alleged inconsistency was not justified; the supposed implicata were not inconsistent. When Grice (1989b: 26–27) first introduced the Second Maxim of Quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”), he immediately raised questions about its status: whether it really is an imperative of cooperation, whether it might be subsumed under “relevance”—and his doubts arise again in his “Retrospective Epilogue” when he remarks that “the impact [on implicature] of a real or apparent oversupply [of information] is . . . problematic” (1989f: 372). (Notice that Grice fallaciously infers that a speaker’s contribution that is more informative than the addressee requires for purposes of their successful communication entails a 15Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity, “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required,” is the speaker-centered maxim correlative with our hearer-centered maxim of relativity.


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speaker’s contribution that is an oversupply for the addressee.) Yet in his original remarks he indicates just where an important role for the Second Maxim can be played, when he writes that “there may also be an indirect effect, in that the hearers may be misled as a result of thinking that there is some particular point in the provision of the excess of information” (Grice 1989b: 27). It is just that Grice is looking at “information” from only one point of view. Grice’s point of view on quantity of explicit information was this: “Don’t say Q & P rather than P if only P is required.” Another point of view on the maxim would be this: “Don’t say S & P rather than S if it is evident to speaker and addressee that what is required, namely, S & P, is inferrable from S (where “inference” is not restricted to logical deducibility).” In this case, too, if the speaker does provide an excess of explicit information—perhaps something beyond S—the addressee may be misled, or, a possibility Grice ignores, he may be correctly directed to the intended interpretation by thinking that there is some particular point in the provision of the excess of explicit information. Grice had simply ignored the possibility of implicit, evidently inferrable, information playing a role in the Maxims of Quantity.16 Being more informative also appears in Gazdar (1976, 1979a). For example, consider his First Maxim of Quantity argument to support his (mistaken) rule for clausal quantity implicata: IF one utters a compound or complex sentence [e.g., P or Q] having a constituent which is not itself entailed or [potentially presupposed] by the matrix sentence and whose negation is likewise neither entailed nor [potentially presupposed], THEN one would be in breach of the maxim of quantity if one knew that sentence to be true or false, but was not known to so know, since one could have been more informative by producing a complex sentence having the constituent concerned, or its negation, as an entailment or a presupposition [e.g., P]. It follows that, ceteris paribus, the utterance of such a complex sentence implicates that both the constituent sentence and its negation are compatible with what the speaker knows. (Gazdar 1979a: 60–61)

Gazdar concludes that the speaker implicates Maybe P and Maybe ¬P. How can we make Gazdar’s argument perspicuous? Here is one attempt. On the assumption that the speaker is being cooperative in saying P or Q, that the Speaker has not said the logically stronger/more informative P indicates that if P would be informative in the context, the speaker is not in a position to assert P. So the speaker does not know or believe P, and so ¬P is compatible with what the speaker knows or believes. By symmetry, ¬Q is compatible with what the speaker knows or believes. So on this reconstruction of Gazdar’s argument, asserting P or Q implicates Maybe ¬P and maybe ¬Q, but only on the assumption that P, Q would each be appropriately informative in the context. On this reconstruction it does not follow from the First Maxim of Quantity that asserting P or Q implicates Maybe P and maybe Q (see Atlas 1990). 16This

was a role for informativeness that I had shown to be possible, and in fact necessary, in my (Atlas 1975a) discussions of “presupposition” in Frege and Dummett and in my (Atlas 1977a) discussion of what David Lewis (1979) later called “accommodation.” See chapter 4 in this volume.


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On a similar reconstruction of the argument for If P then Q, one could conclude that asserting the conditional sentence clasually implicates Maybe P and Maybe notQ if one took the meaning of the English conditional to be the classical truth-functional conditional. But there is no reason to hold such a view. In section 1 I argued that there is no generalized conversational implicatum from assertions of the English conditional either to Maybe P or to Maybe not-P. The first problem, then, is that Gazdar’s Gricean argument does not support his claim in (35). The second problem, already discussed, is that even if it did, there would not be an inconsistency with the scalar implicature of (34). But the quantifiers present a different case. For instance: (36)

Some, if not all, of the students were there.

It is alleged (Gazdar 1979a: 136) that asserting (36) scalar-implicates Speaker knows: Not all of the students were there but clausal-implicates It is compatible with what the speaker knows that: All of the students were there. And this is a genuine inconsistency. Of course, this analysis of clausal-implicata assumes, and Gazdar (1979a: 136) is explicit about it, that the semantic representation of (36) is the same as that of (37): (37)

If not all of the students were there, some of them were.

Gazdar (1979a: 137) remarks that “this assumption is not critical,” but, in fact, it is critical. The assumption is plausible but no more than plausible. For (37), on the assumptions deployed in Gazdar’s (1979a: 136) reasoning, should be logically equivalent to and, in this case, even a paraphrase (Sommers 1982) of (38): (38)

If some of the students were not there, some of them were.

This is because Gazdar takes not to be a sentential modifier of the if-clause of (37). But (38) is not synonymous with (36). Sentences (36) and (37) do not have the same semantic representation. Consequently, ‘if’ and ‘not’ in (36) do not generate the clausal-implicata of a conditional statement (37) that Gazdar claims that they do, even if Gazdar were correct, contrary to fact, that conditionals generate clausal implicata. So there is no inconsistency with the scalar-implicatum Not all of the students were there, and Gazdar has failed to explain the absence of the scalar-implicatum in (36) by its inconsistency with an alleged but actually nonexistent clausal-implicatum of an if-clause, which would take precedence over it and exclude it. We need a better explanation of the absence of the scalar-implicatum (39) in assertions of (36): (39)

Not all the students were there.

(36)

Some, if not all, of the students were there.

The ‘if’ here is a “concessive” phrase (König 1988, 1991), like the ‘if’ in (40):

100 (40)


He’s guilty of manslaughter if not murder.

It does not contradict the scalar-implicatum Not all of the students were there of some; the “concessive” if not all does not contradict not all. Rather, the “concessive” if not concedes the possibility expressed by all but also refuses to exclude not all, so that the statement is used to implicate (41) or (42): (41)

It’s more than merely possible that all of the students were there.

(42)

It’s more than likely that all of the students were there.

In effect, what the if not seems to do, as Horn (1972) noted, is to suspend the scalar implicatum of (43): (43)

Some of the students were there.

The if not suspends (44) by indicating (implicating) (45), which is consistent with (46) and is not as strong as to assert (47): (44)

Not all of the students were there,

(45)

It’s not inferrable that not all of the students were there,

(46)

It’s likely that all of the students were there,

(47)

All of the students were there.

Thus Horn’s (1972) description of if not suspension anticipates the kind of analysis given later by Horn (1985, 1989) for what he, somewhat misleadingly in my view, calls “metalinguistic negation” but which I (Atlas 1983, 1990, 1996b) prefer to call “focal negation.” Asserting the contrastively stressed (48) is consistent because not in the first clause is used by the speaker to reject the corresponding affirmative assertion of unstressed some on the grounds that its generalized conversational default implicatum—not all—is false. (48)

SOME of the students were not there—ALL of them were.

Thus in asserting the stressed statement (48) the speaker implicates (49) and does not mean the inconsistent (50) or the inconsistent (51): (49)

It is not felicitously assertible that some of the students were there—ALL of them were

(50)

There were students who were not there—all of them were (there),

(51)

Not any of the students were there—all of them were.


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Notice that (52) is synonymous (on its natural reading) with (53) or with (54): (52)

He’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter if not murder.

(53)

He’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter if not a grisly murder.

(54)

He’s guilty of, if not a grisly murder, a grisly manslaughter.

This would be impossible if Gazdar’s analysis were correct, for Gazdar’s analysans (55) of (52) is not synonymous with Gazdar’s analysans (56) of (53): (52)

He’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter if not murder.

(55)

If he’s not guilty of a murder, then he’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter.

(53)

He’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter if not a grisly murder.

(56)

If he’s not guilty of a grisly murder, then he’s guilty of a grisly manslaughter.

So Gazdar’s conditional analysis of the concessive if not cannot be correct.

3 The resolution of inconsistent implicata 3.1 Conflicting implicata for negation and conditionals I wish to resolve these apparent clashes between the Gricean generalized implicata from the First Maxim of Quantity and Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) generalized inferenda from informativeness. My strategy is to argue that <not—, not¬> and are not scales properly so-called. If they are not, then there are no generalized scalar implicatures of the sort just described, and so no clash between informativeness and the First Maxim of Quantity. Only informativeness actually applies to these cases. In fact, there are natural and independently motivated restrictions to put on Horn Scales. First, to constitute a genuine scale for the production of generalized scalar implicatures, the stronger item must be lexicalized to a degree equal to or greater than that of the weaker item (see Levinson 2000: 80). Second, to constitute a genuine Horn Scale, sentence-frames containing each item in a position on the scale entail sentenceframes containing those in positions to its right, and all the items are “about” the same property or relation (Gazdar 1977: 72, 181; 1979a: 57–58).17 The first restriction will eliminate the generalized First Maxim of Quantity implicatures incompatible with “negation specification” (26) and with “conditional perfection” (19). There is no negation scale because there is no free negative morpheme in English that 17Some caveats to this claim are offered in comments on Levinson scales in section 4 of this chapter. See also Hirschberg (1985/ 1991) and Matsumoto (1995), and criticism of the latter in Levinson (2000).

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yields sentences that mean just choice negation or just exclusion negation or that is ambiguous between them.18 There is no argument of the form “Since the speaker did not say The king of France is non-bald, he cannot mean it. And so he knows that it is false.” Similarly, because there is no unitary lexeme in English like if that standardly means the same as if and only if (the technical abbreviation iff does not count), there is no Horn Scale 〈φ if and only if Ψ, if φ then Ψ〉 to support First Maxim of Quantity generalized conversational implicata. 3.2 Implicatures of negated conjunctions There are further cases of apparent clashes between First Maxim of Quantity generalized conversational implicata and informativeness inferenda. Saying not (φ and Ψ) seems to implicate φ or Ψ. Thus saying (16a) It’s not the case that Rick is both a philosopher and a poet seems to implicate (16b1) Rick is either a philosopher or a poet. The principle involved is the implication of the weakest item on the Horn Scale by the denial of a strong one. The scale is .19 By contrast, saying It’s not the case that Kurt went to the store and bought some wine (colloquially, Kurt didn’t go to the store and buy some wine) does not generalizedly implicate Kurt went to the store or he bought some wine. The inference from the Principle of Informativeness results in “conjunction buttressing” (18) in particular contexts. Sometimes φ and Ψ is informatively understood as φ in order to Ψ and then Ψ. The two actions described separately in φ and in Ψ are teleologically related as means to end. The sentence indicates one action under a complex description. The implicature from the saying of not (φ and Ψ) to φ or Ψ that implicates the possibility of independent alternatives cannot coherently arise. Indeed, saying Kurt didn’t go to the store and buy some wine can in a particular context implicate Kurt neither went to the store nor bought some wine. So, for some φ, Ψ, saying not (φ and Ψ) implicates not φ and not Ψ. 18In

fact, the nonexistence of the Horn Scale negation “implicata” is evidence in support of my semantic claim (Atlas, 1975b, 1977b) that not sentences are semantically nonspecific with respect to the choice and exclusion interpretations and thus univocal rather than ambiguous between them. That is, not φ literally means neither ¬φ nor –φ. Classical Gricean theorists also make a univocality claim but identify the sense of not sentences with exclusion negation. Gazdar (1979a: 66) has held the latter univocality view. Gazdar writes: Allwood (1972), Atlas (1975[b]), and Kempson (1975: 95–100) have produced a series of arguments which show that natural language negation is unambiguous, and consequently that the Russellian and ambiguity invoking Strawsonian accounts of sentences like (3) [The King of France is not bald.] and (11) [John doesn’t regret having failed.] are equally inadequate. . . . None of them have, to my knowledge, been challenged in the literature. (Gazdar 1979a: 66) The former, semantical nonspecificity, univocality view was articulated in Atlas (1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989). Kempson (1975) offered an extensional disjunction of exclusion and choice negations as an analysis of the univocality of natural language negation that does not capture the concept of semantical nonspecificity (Atlas 1984b), and Allwood (1972) offered a purely wide-scope, exclusion-negation account of negative sentences. 19Equivalently, the implicatum is predicted from the negative Horn Scale (neither . . . nor, . . . , not ( . . . and . . .) ) where A(W) » –(A(S)); for instance, “not both” » not(neither . . . nor)—that is, or.


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However, for Gazdar (1979a: 59) not(P and Q) potentially clausal implicates, by appeal to the First Maxim of Quantity, It’s possible for all the speaker knows that P and It’s possible for all the speaker knows that Q. If the inference from informativeness yields The speaker knows that not-P and The speaker knows that not-Q in cases like the one in question, the Principle of Informativeness is inconsistent with Gazdar’s rule. A simplified version of that rule is phrased informally by Gazdar (1979a: 60) as follows: X potentially clausal implicates that for all the speaker knows Y, and, for all the speaker knows, not Y, if and only if Y is a part of X but neither Y nor its negation is entailed by X. In our example X = not (P and Q) and Y = P, where in the stereotypical course of things P is necessary for Q, P is a part of not (P and Q), and neither P nor its negation is entailed by not (P and Q). Thus not (P and Q) potentially clausal implicates It’s possible for all the speaker knows that P. Apart from Y (or not Y) being entailed by (or being presupposed by) X, Gazdar’s rule takes no semantic relations into account; in particular, no consideration is given to semantic relations between parts of X. But that relation is crucial to the Kurt example earlier. The same issues arise for potential scalar quantity implicatures. Saying P or Q implicates not (P and Q). But if one says Socrates is mortal or everyone is mortal, which is equivalent to Socrates is mortal, does one thereby implicate not (Socrates is mortal and everyone is mortal), which is equivalent to not (everyone is mortal)? (It seems most unlikely that a speaker would intend his assertion of the disjunction generally to convey an obvious falsehood—except for some linguistically subtle doctors of theology who do not believe the implicatum is a falsehood.) The contexts in which one could appropriately employ Socrates is mortal or everyone is mortal may be a little odd; it is not as if it were a premise for an argument that continues Socrates isn’t mortal; therefore, everyone is mortal. No such argument could possibly be sound, although it certainly has a valid form. The fact remains that, whatever an appropriate context might be, assertoric use of a disjunctive sentence equivalent to Socrates is mortal is predicted to implicate a sentence equivalent to Someone is not mortal in the same way that use of P or Q is predicted to implicate but not both. If it is not obviously false, it also is not obviously true that there is this generalized scalar implicature. I take it that it is an open question whether Gazdar’s rules are adequate as they stand. Properly reformulated in light of the semantic relations between P and Q, Gazdar’s rules for the sentence not (P and Q) may not yield scalar or clausal implicata that would contradict the implicata derived by the Principle of Informativeness. 3.3 Definite and indefinite noun phrase togetherness cases As my third class of examples in which the First Maxim of Quantity and the Principle of Informativeness apparently conflict, I discuss cases examined by Harnish (1976). When a speaker asserts (57a) he implicates (57b), and when a speaker asserts (58a) he implicates (58b). (57)

a. Russell wrote “Principia Mathematica.” b. Only Russell wrote “Principia Mathematica.”

104 (58)


a. Russell and Whitehead wrote “Principia Mathematica.” b. Russell and Whitehead jointly wrote “Principia Mathematica.”

By the First Maxim of Quantity, we may infer that as the speaker of (57a) failed to be specific where it would be informative and generally useful to be so, the speaker was in no position to assert (57b). Yet this conclusion conflicts with a stereotypical relationship between books and authors, the norm of “one author per book” (cf. Harnish’s 1976: 319 example, Leibniz and Newton invented the calculus). Given that it is held—for example, by Gazdar (1979a)—that possible implicata inconsistent with background presumptions are defeated, it is plausible to analyze the defeat of the First Maxim of Quantity implicatum as one of this kind. However, incorrect inferences from the First Maxim of Quantity will not always be neutralized through the fortuitous intervention of contextual assumptions—the very ones that are employed in my Principle of Informativeness. Perhaps we will finally find a real clash between Gricean maxims and my Principle of Informativeness. For example, there is a strong intuition that (59b), (60b), (61b), and (62b) are the preferred interpretations of (59a), (60a), (61a), and (62a): (59)

a. Gilbert and Sullivan wrote “The Mikado.” b. Gilbert and Sullivan jointly wrote “The Mikado.”

(60)

a. Mart and David moved the cabinet. b. They moved it together.

(61)

a. Mart and David bought a piano. b. They bought it together.

(62)

a. Mart and David went to San Francisco. b. They went there together.

Harnish (1976: 328) argues, correctly I believe, that the (a) sentences are not ambiguous between “independent” and “cooperative” understandings. The preferred interpretation is implicated. Harnish (1976: 358) points out that it is not at all clear that the First Maxim of Quantity can explain this implicatum. He does not explicitly say what the First Maxim of Quantity implicatum would be. The hearer might argue that the speaker is in no position to make a relevant “cooperative” claim, as he did not say Mart and David bought a piano together. Thus the hearer would infer the “independent” understanding of the sentence. However, he could also argue that because the speaker did not say Mart and David bought pianos separately, the speaker was in no position to make that claim. So the hearer understands him to mean the “cooperative” understanding of the sentence. The first Maxim of Quantity implicatum is not well defined. (In chapter 5 we will again meet this fundamental logical problem with the formulation of Grice’s maxims.) Harnish proposes a Gricean submaxim of manner: namely, insofar as possible, if objects a, b, c, . . . F together, put their names together when reporting this F-ing. This maxim is intended as one instance of a more general Grice-type maxim: “Make your saying mirror the world” (Harnish 1976: 359). But such additional Gricean


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maxims and submaxims of manner will not account for the data. For example, the preferred interpretation of (63a)—in reply to Who took a shower? or in reply to What did Mart and David do?—is (63b) rather than (63c): (63)

a. Mart and David took a shower. b. Mart and David took showers separately. c. Mart and David took a shower together.

In this example the “independent” interpretation is the preferred one. The assertion (63a) conveys (63b), and, given our social norms, (63b) is predicted by our Second Maxim of Relativity, the Conventions of Noncontroversiality, and the Principle of Informativeness. The inference to the best interpretation of the assertion (63a) yields the “independent” understanding (63b). Because the First Maxim of Quantity implicata for (59) to (63) are not well defined, there is no clash between the First Maxim of Quantity and our Principle of Informativeness. And the Maxim of Manner is simply not a general explanation. We shall now sketch an account of the implicata of (59) to (62). The literal meaning of the sentence (61a) Mart and David bought a piano leaves it open whether there was one piano-buying or two. The usual implicature restricts the understanding to one. If the sentence is indeed a reduced form of Mart bought a piano and David bought a piano, the literal meaning, under the assumption that this reduction preserves meaning, is predictable. The conjunction also leaves it open whether one or two pianos were bought. The same observation holds for Mart bought a piano and so did David, which requires identity of sense of the deleted constituent. I (Atlas 1977b: 329–30, 1989: 76–77) argued that it would follow from the last sentence that David did what Mart did. The sentence requires sameness of action, but that does not yet determine whether one or two piano-buyings are involved unless the relevant criteria of identity of actions have been fixed. Given the meaning of the sentence, at least it is clear that the criteria cannot require that the action-token (as contrasted with action-type) be the same for David as for Mart. Thus the piano need not be one and the same. The “independent” implicatum entails that the event-tokens are different. Normally this would mean that more than one piano was involved, but it is imaginable that in a short period of time Mart could buy and then sell a piano, which David then bought, perhaps from Mart himself. It would not be semantically unacceptable, and though unusual because incomplete, it certainly would not be false, to describe that situation—one piano, two buyings—by (64a). We should represent such a situation, following Davidson (1967), by (64b). The normal case would be (64c). (64)

a. b. c. d.

Mart and David bought a piano. ∃x∃e∃e' (Piano(x) & Buy(m,x,e) & Buy(d,x,e') & ¬(e=e')) ∃x∃y∃e∃e' (Piano(x) & Piano(y) & ¬(x=y) & Buy(m,x,e) & Buy(d,y,e') & ¬(e = e')) ∃x∃e(Piano(x) & Buy(m,x,e) & Buy(d,x,e))

By contrast the “cooperative” implicatum entails that the action-token (including the piano) is the same for David as for Mart. Mart and David bought a piano

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would then convey (64d). These implicata are not directly comparable: neither (64c) nor (64d) entails the other. Nonetheless, we intuitively feel that the “cooperative” implicatum (64d) is more specific or precise, perhaps because it is in Popper’s (1959) sense a “riskier” proposition and more easily refuted. The fewer existential quantifiers there are in an affirmative sentence, the more highly valued the sentence is. This is a case in which the relevant notion of information is that determined by the class of possible falsifiers of a proposition. Such a proposition is preferred as an interpretation by my Principle of Informativeness unless it contradicts my background Conventions of Noncontroversiality, as described in my Principle. 3.4 More indefinite noun phrase cases As a further example of a class of cases in which the Principle of Informativeness may clash with the First Maxim of Quantity, I consider sentences discussed by Grice (1975a: 56), which I discussed first in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 49); for remarks on this analysis, see Horn (1984b: 19) and Mey (1993: 78–79).20 (65)

a. John is meeting a woman this evening. b. The person to be met is someone other than John’s wife, mother, sister, or perhaps even a close platonic friend.

(66)

a. I broke a finger yesterday. b. The finger is mine.

Grice argues plausibly that an inference from the First Maxim of Quantity will yield (65b) from (65a). The failure to use a more informative expression than the indefinite description a woman suggests that the speaker is in no position to provide a more definite description of the kind normally relevant. The reverse implicatum in (66), which Grice mentions in passing, presents an explanatory difficulty for the inference from the First Maxim of Quantity. According to the First Maxim of Quantity, if the speaker meant his own finger, he should have said so. Because he did not, he is assumed not to be in the position to make that claim, that is, the finger was not his. But the negation of this proposition is actually implicated. Once again, the explanation of the inference lies in what speakers take as stereotypical or conventional behavior. The use of the indefinite description a finger leaves it indeterminate whose finger was broken, but the speaker’s breaking someone else’s finger would be regrettable if unintentional and contrary to our social norms if intentional. As noted in the Second Maxim of Relativity, we are loathe to interpret the utterance so as to impute an abnormal or unnatural act unless there are specific indications to that effect. A similar explanation accounts for the implicatum in (67): (67)

20Jacob

a. I lost a book yesterday. b. The book is mine.

Mey (1993: 78) says of this analysis, in the version reported by Horn (1984b: 15), that “it deserves close attention for its painstaking analysis and elegant formulations of some original thoughts on the subject of maxims.”


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By contrast, First Maxim of Quantity implicatures seem in force in the following cases (68) to (70):21 (68)

a. I slept on a boat last night. b. The boat is not mine.

(69)

a. I slept in a car last night. b. The car is not mine.

(70)

a. I found a ring yesterday. b. The ring is not mine.

The First Maxim of Quantity is part of an account of the speaker’s role in cooperative communicative behavior. Informativeness is part of an account of the addressee’s role in efficient communicative behavior. If one can communicate some specified proposition P by asserting a less semantically specified sentence A, then in general it will be more efficient to assert A and let the hearer make his inference to the best interpretation (Atlas 1975b). In light of the distinct theoretical roles of Grice’s maxims and of the Principle of Informativeness, it is not a surprise that conflict might be possible. For the class of indefinite descriptions just discussed, the empirical generalization on the data seems to be that where there is an implicature at all (not all indefinite descriptions yield them) the First Maxim of Quantity takes precedence over the Principle of Informativeness unless the result contradicts our background Conventions of Noncontroversiality. That is, ceteris paribus, constraints on production take precedence over constraints on comprehension. (71)

Q > I.

If inconsistency with the network of background beliefs or incoherence with the background abilities or capacities occurs (Searle 1983: 141–59, 1992: 175–96, 1995: 127–47, 1998: 31, 107–9), consistency requires that the informativeness inferendum or implicatum be adopted instead. The case of indefinite noun phrases is the first genuine case of clash between the First Maxim of Quantity, a speaker-centered principle, and our Principle of Informativeness, an addressee-centered version of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity. If this is the correct generalization from the data, the question remains how to explain it. The inconsistency in this first genuine clash, in indefinite noun phrase examples, between inferences from the First Maxim of Quantity and from my Principle of Informativeness is resolved by a linguistic preference for the First Maxim of Quantity implicatum unless background knowledge intervenes in favor of informativeness. After all, where the First Maxim of Quantity implicature may be employed appropriately, it is reasonable to do so on the grounds that speakers are being cooperative in Grice’s sense. Speaker and addressee have knowledge of each other’s reflexive com21Data in (67) to (70) are from Grice (1975a: 56) and Harnish (1976: 350). My intuitions differ from Harnish’s on (68); he does not believe saying (68a) implicates (68b). Harnish provides no explanation of his data. I provide a partial explanation in the following paragraphs.

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municative intentions (Grice’s M-intentions). An addressee’s understanding the utterance of a speaker relies on the addressee’s supposition that the speaker’s intentions with which the utterance is performed are intended to be recognized by the addressee. In particular, each expects the other to be truthful, relevant, perspicuous, and informative in what he or she says, and each expects the other to expect him or her to be so. Unless knowledge by the addressee intervenes, and the more so if the knowledge can be presumed to be mutual, as is knowledge of stereotypes, frames, scripts, and so on, the normality of the speaker’s use of the language—its conformity with Grice’s imperatives for rational communication—is not questioned; thus an addressee’s inferences from the First Maxim of Quantity are not standardly defeated. Although addressees must share responsibility for successful uptake with the speakers, speakers have the primary responsibility. When effective communication of information is at stake, speakers’ utterances should conform to the First Maxim of Quantity. The addressees, competent in the language, understand the limitations of the resources of a speaker and of the grammar of their language in the speaker’s production of sentencess. When appropriate, an addressee will pay the cost of comprehension and conform to the Maxims of Relativity, the Conventions of Noncontroversiality, and the Principle of Informativeness. The addressee-centered Maxims of Relativity work on what the speaker said. The speaker-centered First Maxim or Quantity contrasts what the speaker actually said with what he might have said. The speaker’s choice among contrasting linguistic items is causally antecedent to the interpretation of what he said, but the speaker’s choice is made strategically (Atlas 1975a), anticipating how the addressee will interpret what will be said. The form has to convey the content. As Levinson remarks, “inferences based on highly constrained set of lexemes (Q-inferences) block those based on . . . stereotypes about the world and the inference of maximal cohesion (I-inferences)” (2000: 161). As in morphology and syntax, “the more specific rules block the application of more general rules.” Unless there are special cognitive features in the situation to disrupt these normal communicative and linguistic expectations, the ships in the conversational fleet sail the seas of language undisturbed and undistressed. This ordering Q > I, like those in Gazdar (1979a), is intended to save the linguistic phenomena. The rationale offered in the preceding paragraphs is a sketch, a gesture in the direction of a deeper explanation, in the form of a “plausibility argument.” But like Newton, I say, hypotheses non fingo.22

22There

has been some unnecessary confusion about the goal of a rationale for the ordering principles. A Gricean account of conversational inference is one sort of model by “reasons” and “rational behavior” for the manifest linguistic facts: that addressees do in fact understand speakers to have conveyed, suggested, or meant something more than what they literally asserted. By contrast, the preceding sketch of a rationale for the ordering principle is an attempt at making sense of the particular ordering hypothesis that generalizes over linguistic data. To confuse the latter, modest explanatory project in linguistic and logical theory with the former philosophical attempt to characterize conversational inferences by a model of communicative rationality is to fall into an error that one might have thought would have been averted by careful reading of Atlas and Levinson (1981); for a cautionary example of such an error, see W. Davis (1998: 58).


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4 Reformulating the neo-Gricean maxims and extending the ordering principle To resolve the apparent conflict between scalar and clausal First Maxim of Quantity generalized conversational implicata and to constrain the types of implicata, Horn (1972) and Gazdar (1979a) had suggested that Horn Scales, composed of stronger expressions S and weaker expressions W, would require that occurrences of S and W in sentence frames A( ) should satisfy the entailment relation: (72)

a. A(S) A(W)

They would belong to a class of expressions in which they would be “expression alternatives” (Gazdar 1979a): (72)

b. { . . . , S, . . . , W, . . . }.

Gazdar (1979a) noted that these constraints (a) and (b) permit the existence of a scale , yet asserting “John knows that Columbus discovered America” does not implicate John does not regret that Columbus discovered America. So I propose here, as I did originally in Atlas and Levinson (1981), further constraints on the formation of Horn Scales: (72)

c. Aboutness: Expressions must be from a semantic field and be “conceptually homogeneous.” (E.g., * fails to satisfy this constraint.) d. Lexicalization and Negative Scales (Levinson 2000): Expressions in a scale <S, W> must be such that S is lexicalized to a degree equal to or greater than W. (E.g., * and * are not scales). We permit the generation of negative scales, which I posited in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 39, n.9) to explain: “Not all of the boys are at the party” » Some of the boys are at the party. “It’s not the case that Rick is both a philosopher and a poet” » Rick is either a philosopher or a poet. We permit the generation of Negative Scales from <S, W>, e.g. <none, not all> from .

In Atlas (1991a) I made use of Levinson scales (see Grice 1965: 459), which record the obvious fact that one can get generalized scalar implicata from items that are not ordered by entailment, as in <succeed, try>, where “John tried to swim the Channel” » John did not succeed in swimming the Channel, but where the scale is not ordered by entailment, as the consistency of John succeeded without even trying demonstrates.23 23Grice (1961, 1965: 459) had already noted this fact in his earliest discussion of implicata. Levinson (1988a), in his Nijmegen lectures, has expanded the discussion of implicata arising from the structure of the lexicon, and Hirschberg (1985) has done the same.


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Finally, as a consistency requirement, Atlas and Levinson (1981: 50) suggested an ordering, reminiscent of Gazdar’s (1979a) ordering of clausal over scalar implicata, so that ceteris paribus First Maxim of Quantity (Q) generalized conversational implicata would take precedence over, and exclude, Principle of Informativeness (I) inferenda that were inconsistent with them: (73)

Consistency 1.

Q > I.

We have supplemented Grice’s speaker-centered Second Maxim of Quantity with the speaker- and addressee-centered Maxims of Relativity and the addressee-centered Principle of Informativeness. A descriptively adequate account of pragmatic inferences requires a communicative equilibrium between the two: the Division of Pragmatic Labor (see Horn 1984b). Since these ideas were first formulated in Atlas and Levinson (1981), Horn (1984b, 1993) and then Levinson (1987a,b, 2000) have tried, in different ways, to reorganize, revise, and extend them. Levinson (1987a, 2000) has suggested the following versions: (74)

Maxims of relativity (after Levinson 1987a: 66) Speaker’s Maxim: “Don’t bother to say what is noncontroversial.” Recipient’s Corollary: “Hear what is said as consistent with what is noncontroversial.”

To give content to the maxims, we need to characterize the “noncontroversial,” which I did in Conventions of Noncontroversiality and the Principle of Informativeness (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40, and section 1 here), reformulated by Levinson (1987a: 66) as follows: (75)

Convention of noncontroversiality a. It is noncontroversial that referents and situations have stereotypical properties. b. The existence or actuality of what a statement is about is noncontroversial (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 42).

(76)

Principle of informativeness The “best” interpretation of an utterance among its competing interpretations is the most informative one that is also consistent with what is noncontroversial in the speech-context.

Levinson (1987a: 66) then indicates the effect of these principles, remarking that the “effect of this apparatus is to induce a more specific interpretation: what is communicated is a sub-case of what is said. Very often, the ‘best interpretation’ of what is said will be a more specific interpretation in line with stereotypical expectations.”24 24Atlas

and Levinson (1981) had distinguished between “precise” interpretations and “specific” interpretations. What Levinson means here are the interpretations that I dub “precific.”


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Horn (1984b: 13) suggested a super-categorization of Grice’s maxims into just two opposing maxims (excluding the admittedly special case of the Maxim of Quality): a Q principle (”Make your contribution sufficient,” or Say as much as your hearer needs, given the R principle) and an R principle (”Make your contribution necessary,” or Say no more than your hearer needs, given the Q principle). Horn’s Q principle subsumes the First Maxim of Quantity and its explanation of scalar and clausal implicata; the R principle was intended to subsume Grice’s Maxims of Relation and of Manner and Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Principle of Informativeness inferenda (the addressee-centered version of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity). After Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) discussion of the inconsistencies between Q and I implicata, Horn (1984b: 22–23) suggests, for his parallel Q and R principles, a division of pragmatic labor: While the Q Principle and the R Principle are diametrically opposed forces in inference strategies and language change, it is perhaps in the resolution of the conflict between them that they play their major role in both ‘langue’ and ‘parole’. The most general pattern for this resolution, the synthesis of the two antitheses, is summarized in (16) and derived more explicitly in (17a–f). (16) The use of a marked (relatively complex and/or prolix) expression [e.g. Larry caused the car to stop] when a corresponding unmarked (simpler, less ‘effortful’) alternative expression is available [e.g. Larry stopped the car] tends to be interpreted as conveying a marked message (one which the unmarked alternative would not or could not have conveyed). In particular, the reasoning goes as follows: (17a)

The speaker used marked expression E' containing ‘extra’ material . . . when a corresponding unmarked expression E, essentially coextensive with it, was available.

(17b) Either (i) the ‘extra’ material was irrelevant and unnecessary, or (ii) it was necessary (i.e. E could not have been appropriately used). (17c)

17b(i) is in conflict with the R Principle and is thus (ceteris paribus) to be rejected.

(17d)

Therefore, 17b(ii) . . .

(17e)

The unmarked alternative E tends to become associated (by use or—through conventionalization—by meaning) with an unmarked situation S, representing a stereotype or salient member of the extension of E (and E') [e.g. the situation of stopping the car by the driver’s applying the sole of his shoeclad foot to the brake pedal]. (R-based inference; cf. Atlas and Levinson (1981), (8b), (8c)).25

25Horn

(1984b: 18) writes:

(8b) The Principle of Informativeness: “Read as much into an utterance as is consistent with what you know about the world.” (Levinson 1983: 146–47) Atlas and Levinson (1981: 42) formulate their informativeness-based inference as an inference to the best interpretation:


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(17f) The marked alternative E' tends to become associated with the complement of [the situation] S with respect to the original extension of E (and E'). (Qbased inference; cf. (6.12) [sic]). (Horn 1984b: 22–23)26

“The result,” Horn (1984b: 23) continues, “is an equilibrium which I shall call the division of pragmatic labor.” Horn then proceeds to discuss special cases of the division of pragmatic labor, including: (a) Chomsky’s (1982: 65) Avoid Pronoun Principle, Kiparsky’s (1982) Avoid Synonymy Principle, and McCawley’s (1978) account of the distribution of lexical and periphrastic causatives, which is of particular interest to Horn. He remarks: Lexical causatives (e.g. (28a)) tend to be restricted in their distribution to the stereotypic causative situation: direct, unmediated causation through physical action. This restriction can be viewed as a straightforward R-based (28a)

Black Bart killed the sheriff.

(28b) Black Bart caused the sheriff to die. conversational implicatum—an inference ‘to the best interpretation’, in the language of Atlas and Levinson (1981). The use of the relatively marked, morphologically more complex periphrastic causative (e.g. (28b)) will then Q-implicate that the unmarked situation does not obtain. (Horn 1984b: 27)

Horn’s example is of particular theoretical interest, in that asserting his (28a) Iimplicates the stereotypical, or usual, direct action, while the synonymous (28b) Mimplicates a nonstereotypical manner rather than the stereotypical action of the I implicatum. In this case, the M implicatum excludes the I implicatum. And so, it seems from the evidence of lexical causatives, M takes precedence over I: (77) Consistency 2.

M > I.

Finally, in light of the hypothesis (Consistency 1) in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 50) and the hypothesis (Consistency 2), one would naturally hypothesize:

(8c) If a predicate Q is semantically nonspecific with respect to predicates Pi, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, but for some j, 1 ≤ j ≤ n, Pj is stereotypical of Qs, then in saying Qt a speaker will convey Pjt. [That is: “The secretary smiled” » The female secretary smiled. “John had a drink” » John had an alcoholic drink.] 26Horn

(1984b: 21), section 7, writes:

(12) Q-based implicata: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)

S entails W. ‘W’ Q-implicates –S. Normally, ‘not W’ = ‘less than W’, incompatible with S. ‘not W’, asserted where S is given, reinterpreted as metalinguistic negation [see Horn (1985, 1989)].


(78)

Consistency 3.

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Q > M > I.

The evidence in support of the hypothesis (Consistency 3) was provided not by me but by Stephen Levinson (1987a,b, 1991), as we shall shortly see. It was Horn’s (1984b) discussion of pronouns that led Levinson (1987a,b) to extend Atlas and Levinson (1981), modify Horn (1984b), and, drawing inspiration from T. Reinhart (1983), make a serious attempt at a pragmatic explanation of Chomsky’s (1982) binding conditions. Let us take an example and see the pragmatic reasoning in operation (Levinson 1991: 112). Consider the interpretation of the pronouns in the indexed noun phrases in the following sentences: (79)

a. a'. b. b'. c.

John1 likes him2. John1 likes himself1. John1 told her2 that he1 gave her2 a valentine. *John1 told her2 that himself1 gave her2 a valentine. John1 told her2 that the man3 gave her2 a valentine.

Now, let us consider the following hypothetical explanation of the coreference conditions in the preceding sentences. In (a), since a reflexive could have occurred in the sentence in place of ‘him’, the non-use of a reflexive pronoun Q-implicates that the reflexive interpretation is not intended, and the preferred interpretation is that the NPs are not coreferential. In (b), since a reflexive ‘himself’ cannot occur grammatically in the position that ‘he’ occupies (cf. (b')), the use of the pronoun ‘he’ cannot give rise to a Q implicature of non-coreference; so there is no higher-priority implicature to exclude the I inference to coreference. In (c), since ‘the man’ is prolix by contrast with a ‘he’ that could grammatically occur in the same position, the use of ‘the man’ M-implicates non-coreference. Levinson writes: A pragmatic account of anaphora begins by noting that anaphoric expressions are usually semantically general. Thus a locally anaphoric (coreferential) reading is encouraged where a more semantically general term like ship follows a more semantically specific term like ferry; and the reverse ordering discourages a locally coreferential reading: (1) a. The ferry hit a rock. The ship capsized. b. The ship hit a rock. The ferry capsized. The preference for a locally coreferential interpretation (as in (1)a.) can be attributed to the Gricean second maxim of Quantity, which I shall call the Informativeness Principle or I-principle for short (see Atlas and Levinson 1981; Levinson 1987a,b). This principle induces maximally informative and cohesive interpretations from minimal linguistic specification. It is balanced by a Manner maxim or M principle, which induces from the use of a prolix or marked expression an interpretation that is complementary to the one that would have been induced by the I-principle from the use of a semantically general expression (this is what Horn 1984b calls the ‘division of pragmatic labour’). Hence the association of anaphoric potential with pronouns and NP-gaps (both semantically general), and of independent reference with full lexical NPs:


114 (2)

The general anaphora pattern as M vs. I: lexical NP > pronoun > NP-gap

(Levinson 1991: 110)

In this ranking, Levinson argues, the higher-ranked, longer, more semantically specific NP manner-implicates non-coreference, while the lower-ranked, shorter, more semantically general, i.e. nonspecific, NP informativeness-conveys coreference. Levinson continues: A third inferential principle, Grice’s first maxim of Quantity (which we shall call the Q-principle), provides a further essential ingredient. This induces a contrastive interpretation between paired expressions of differential semantic strength or informativeness. For example, the pair of quantifiers form a Horn Scale of this kind, such that the use of the semantically weaker some (as in some of the boys came) Q-implicates the inapplicability of the stronger all to yield the interpretation ‘not all of the boys came’. Only linguistic expressions that meet certain criteria—notably salient opposition—form such Horn-scales capable of giving rise to such Q-implicatures (see Atlas and Levinson 1981). One such salient contrast is the opposition between ordinary pronouns and reflexives (see Levinson, 1987b, for justification): (3)

The contrast

forms a Horn Scale, so that the use of the Pronoun Q-implicates that the stronger Reflexive could not truthfully have been used. A final ingredient in the pragmatic account is a projection rule for generalized conversational implicatures, to the effect that, when inconsistent implicatures arise, priority is given according to the following hierarchy: Q > M > I. Thus any tendency to read a pronoun as locally coreferential by the I-Principle will be over-ruled by a Q-implicature to disjoint reference just where a stronger reflexive could have been used to express coreference. (Levinson 1991: 111)27

Levinson formulates the following Conversational Norms for speakers and addressees: (a) Where the syntax permits, a speaker intending coreference should use an Anaphor [reflexive or reciprocal] by the Q-principle; the use of the weaker Pronoun will Q-implicate disjoint reference by the Horn Scale .

27Levinson

then importantly remarks:

A point that needs to be stressed (in the light of current fashions in pragmatics) is that it is a special kind of implicature [implicata and inferenda] that is involved in these generalizations, namely GENERALIZED conversational implicature [or inference] (or GCIs or short). GCIs are default interpretations, or preferred readings, in short, properties of utterance-types not utterance-tokens. They are generated by certain stable interpretive heuristics, not by nonce-inference of the sort promoted in Relevance Theory or many kinds of computational pragmatics (see Levinson 1989). Thus GCIs are stable, but defeasible, tendencies of interpretation; just the sorts of things easily mistaken for grammatical stipulations. (Levinson 1991: 111–12)


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(b) Otherwise, where a semantically general expression (e.g. a Pronoun) is used it will I-implicate local coreference UNLESS: (i) an Anaphor (e.g. reflexive) could have been used; (ii) a prolix form has been used which will M-implicate the complement of the I-interpretation [of] a reduced form. (Levinson 1991: 112)

Now I can summarize Levinson’s partial pragmatic explanation of Chomsky’s Binding Conditions. 1. Binding Condition A: “Anaphors (reflexives and reciprocals) are ‘bound’—i.e., coindexed with a c-commanding NP, in their minimal governing category.” This has no pragmatic account. 2. Binding Condition B: “Pronouns must be free—i.e., not coindexed with a c-commanding NP, in their minimal governing category.” Levinson’s (1991: 7) pragmatic explanation is that, given a Horn scale like , a use of the weaker, less-specific him will Q-implicate disjoint reference wherever the reflexive could have been grammatically used; if one had meant the stronger, more specific coreferential interpretation, one should have used the form that encodes coreference. 3. Binding Condition C: “Lexical NPs must be free—i.e., not coindexed with a c-commanding NP throughout the sentence.” Levinson’s pragmatic explanation involves two points: (a) As in Binding Condition B, there will be a Horn-like scale, e.g. , such that wherever a speaker could have used a reflexive grammatically, he should have used it if coreference were intended. (b) Unlike Binding Condition B, there will be an opposition between the potential use of the pronoun and a use of a lexical NP, an example of Horn’s (1984b) Division of Labor. For example, he, a minimal form, will encourage an I-inference to local coreference; the man will M-implicate disjoint reference, since the speaker would seem to be avoiding the I-implicata induced by a use of the pronoun. Nothing here is said about the empty categories NP-trace and WH-trace, and there are other data that do not have fully plausible, pragmatic explanations. The interest, I take it, of Horn’s (1984b) and Levinson’s (1987a,b, 1991) efforts is their success in giving genuinely plausible, pragmatic accounts of syntactic and semantic phenomena by extending and revising the notions developed in Atlas and Levinson (1981).28 I conclude this section with Levinson’s summary account of the two Maxims of Quantity:

28For an application of Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) theory and its later developments to genuine problems of syntax, see Levinson (1987b, 1991, 2000) and Huang (1994), the latter providing the beginnings of an adequate account of anaphora in Chinese.

116 (80)


Q Principle. Speaker’s Maxim: Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your knowledge of the world allows, unless providing the strong statement would contravene the I-principle. Recipient’s Corollary: Take it that the speaker has made the strongest statement consistent with what he knows, and therefore that: (a) if the speaker asserted A(W), and <S,W> form a Horn scale, then one can infer not-A(S) [e.g. “some” » not all]; (b) if the speaker asserted A(W), and A(W) fails to entail an embedded sentence Q, which a stronger statement A(S) would entail, and {S,W} form a contrast set, then one can infer that the speaker does not know Q [e.g. “believes” » does not know]. Levinson 1987b: 401–2, 2000: 76)

Levinson formulates the I Principle as follows: (81)

I Principle Speaker’s Maxim (the Maxim of Minimization): Say as little as necessary—i.e., produce the minimal linguistic information sufficient to achieve your communication ends, unless providing the minimal statement would contravene the Qprinciple. Recipient’s Corollary (the Enrichment Rule): Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance, by finding the most SPECIFIC [or PRECISE] interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s M-intended point (see Grice 1989a: 105). [The ‘M’ here does not abbreviate ‘Manner’ but denotes Grice’s reflexive communicative intentions.] Specifically: (a) Assume that stereotypical relations obtain between referents or events, UNLESS (i) this is inconsistent with what is taken for granted [what is “noncontroversial”]; (ii) the speaker has broken the maxim of Minimization by choosing a prolix expression. (b) Assume the existence or actuality of what a sentence is “about” if that is consistent with what is taken for granted. (c) Avoid interpretations that multiply entities referred to (assume referential parsimony); in particular, prefer coreferential readings of reduced NPs (pronouns or zeros). (Levinson 1987b: 402, 2000: 114–15)

Finally, as we have seen earlier, we have the following: (82)

Projection rule for generalized conversational implicata When inconsistent implicata arise, priority is given by the hierarchy Q > M > I.

Quantity implicata take precedence over incompatible Manner implicata, which, in turn, take precedence over Informativeness inferenda or implicata. Thus any tendency to read a pronoun as locally coreferential by the I principle will be overruled by a Q implicatum to distinct reference just where a stronger reflexive could have been used to express coreference.


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5 A concluding remark In this chapter I have expounded the neo-Gricean theory for generalized conversational inferences that was developed by Horn (1972, 1976), Atlas and Levinson (1981), Horn (1984b, 1993), Levinson (1987a,b, 1991, 2000), and Huang (1994). I have tried to show that these principles not only improve on Grice’s formulations (especially as they indicate the equilibrium required by both speaker-centered and addressee-centered principles, and hence illustrate the proper relationship between production and comprehension principles) but also have descriptive adequacy for a wide range of linguistic phenomena. No competing linguistic theory or philosophical account has these predictive virtues with such modest theoretical commitments and with such empirically verifiable constructs. In the next chapter I employ my post-Gricean theory in the philosophical analysis of Fregean and Strawsonian presupposition, whose properties have raised important questions in twentieth-century philosophy of language and philosophical logic: questions of assertion, entailment, negation, existence, and, of course, implicature. We shall see that there has not always been a careful division in the analyses between what is properly semantic or logical and what is properly pragmatic, just as Grice had suspected. In chapter 5 I examine the post-Gricean theory in the philosophically interesting case of comparative adjectives and adverbials of degree. These sentences provide a superb case study for the philosophical ideas of Donald Davidson and Paul Grice, Peter Geach, and Sir Peter Strawson, and their analysis has consequences for current philosophical debates over Meaning Holism. In chapter 6, I consider the theoretically vexing case of numerical adjectives, and I draw some morals for the role of post-Gricean pragmatics.

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4

The Post-Gricean Theory of Presupposition

T his chapter undertakes to illustrate how one type of post-Gricean pragmatic theory of presupposition could be constructed and defended. In the course of the discussion, most of the substantive problems about presupposition will be encountered. I press the case for one type of post-Gricean pragmatic theory, reducing the concept of presupposition to its component concepts of entailment and generalized conversational inferenda along the lines of Atlas (1975a,b; 1977a; 1979), Atlas and Levinson (1981), and Grice (1981), and I pay particular attention to Grice’s (1981) attempt to make the same reduction. Grice uses the concept of ambiguity rather than the concept of semantical nonspecificity that I have for so long insisted is crucial in any successful theory. I also discuss Grice’s and Stalnaker’s (1974) use of the notion of common ground, which I believe is misapplied by them. I argue for a paradigm shift in treating presupposition, arguing that the notion introduced by Strawson (1950), Ballmer (1975), Karttunen (1973), and Atlas (1975a,b), later popularized by David Lewis (1979) under the name “accommodation,” offers the basic notion to reconstruct our theories of “presupposition.”

1 The linguistic phenomena of “presupposition” The data of presupposition are represented by the relationships a competent speaker of English takes to hold among his understandings of the affirmative, negated, and modal statements in (1), (2), and (3), of the questions in (4), and the inferred statements in (5). The inferred statements are preserved under negation, modals, and question-formation. 118

THE POST - GRICEAN THEORY OF PRESUPPOSITION

119

(1)

a. The king of France is bald. (Russell 1905, Strawson 1950) b. After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria quarreled. (Frege 1892) c. All of John’s children are asleep. (Strawson 1952) d. John has stopped smoking. e. Brian regrets that he drank too much. f. Only Josh threw up at Carnivale in Venice. g. It’s the queen of England who raises the best racehorses.

(2)

a. The king of France is not bald. b. After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria did not quarrel. c. Not all of John’s children are asleep. d. John has not stopped smoking. e. Brian does not regret that he drank too much. f. Not only Josh threw up at Carnivale in Venice. g. It’s not the queen of England who raises the best racehorses.

(3)

a. The king of France might be bald. b. After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria might have quarreled. c. All of John’s children might be asleep. d. John might have stopped smoking. e. Brian might regret that he drank too much. f. Maybe only Josh threw up at Carnivale in Venice. g. Maybe it’s the queen of England who raises the best racehorses.

(4)

a. Is the king of France bald? b. After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, did Prussia and Austria quarrel? c. Are all of John’s children asleep? d. Has John stopped smoking? e. Does Brian regret that he drank too much? f. Did only Josh throw up at Carnivale in Venice? g. Is it the queen of England who raises the best racehorses?

(5)

a. b. c. d. e. f. g.

There is a king of France. Schleswig-Holstein did separate from Denmark. John has children. John smoked. Brian drank too much. Josh threw up at Carnivale in Venice. Someone raises the best racehorses.

Each of the statements and questions (contrast to sentences) in (1) to (4) is, on utterance, understood as “implying,” in some sense to be explained, the correspond-

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ing sentences in (5). Competing theories have explained the “implication” (a) as a semantic or logical one (using a nonclassical logical implication—e.g., Bergmann 1981; Martin 1979; Seuren 1985, 2000; van Fraassen 1971); (b) as a condition on the use of statements to perform felicitous speech-acts (Gordon and Lakoff 1971); (c) as a Gricean inference (Grice 1989b), from the literal understandings of the statements in context to what speakers in, by, or when making the statements communicate (“inference,” by contrast with an entailment relation between sentences, is understood as a change in cognitive attitude by a speaker and addressee), or (d) as a feature of speakers’ and addressees’ background information already available, or created in real time, when the statements are made (Stalnaker 1974; Thomason 1990). All these approaches manifest varying degrees of “semanticity” or “pragmaticity.” Recent efforts by linguists—for example, the Discourse Semantics of Seuren (1985) and van der Sandt (1988) or the Discourse Representation Theory of Kamp (1981) and Kamp and Reyle (1993) and a similar approach of Heim (1982), or Dynamic Semantics, illustrated in Chierchia (1995) and Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (2000)—reveal the hybrid, semantico-pragmatic nature of the theoretical frameworks adopted. Rather than survey all of these approaches to presupposition, and there are excellent surveys to be found elsewhere, as in Beaver (1997), Horn (1992a), and Soames (1989), I describe here a post-Gricean, pragmatic theory, distinct from those just mentioned, which I and others have developed from H. P. Grice’s (1989a) account of conversational inference (see Atlas 1975a,b, 1977a, 1979; Kempson 1975, 1988a; Wilson 1975; Atlas and Levinson 1981; Horn 1984b, Kempson 1986; Bach 1994a; Levinson 2000).

2 Preserving presupposition under negation One of Frege’s employments of the notion of presupposition occurs in a footnote to a discussion of adverbial clauses in “On Sense and Reference” (1892/1970a). Frege wrote: The sense of the sentence ‘After Schleswig-Holstein was separated from Denmark, Prussia and Austria quarreled’ can also be rendered in the form ‘After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria quarreled’. In this version it is surely sufficiently clear that the sense is not to be taken as having as a part the thought that Schleswig-Holstein was once separated from Denmark, but that this is the necessary presupposition in order for the expression ‘after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark’ to have a reference at all. (Frege 1970a: 71n.)

I shall call this notion of Frege’s “referential presupposition.” Since Frege took places, instants of time, and time intervals to be logical objects, to be designated by singular terms, if there were no true thought that SchleswigHolstein was once separated from Denmark, there would have been no event of Schleswig-Holstein’s separating from Denmark, and there could be no specification of an event at which Prussia and Austria quarreled as after the event of the alleged separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark. The existence of the event—an event in which and hence a time of occurrence at which Schleswig-Holstein sepa-


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rated from Denmark—is required to give a reference to a singular term designating a time interval that would include a time or temporal subinterval at which Prussia and Austria quarreled. Thus, suppose the logical form of the main clause Prussia and Austria quarreled is (6)

∃tQ(p,a,t) There is some time or time-interval at which Prussia and Austria quarreled.

If so, one way to understand the semantical effect of a subordinate clause is for it to determine the relevant domain of temporal instants or intervals that fixes the truth conditions of the main clause. If the domain is restricted to times later than that of the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark—namely, later than time to— then the logical form of Prussia and Austria quarreled after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark would be (7a): (7)

a. ∃tQ(p,a,t) t ∈T

where T = {t: t > to}. The truth of the clause Schleswig-Holstein separated from Denmark at to is then a semantical determinant of the truth conditions of the original sentence, since it specifies the domain of quantification T (Thomason 1973). In such circumstances it is understandable that Frege should write of someone who believes that it is false that Schleswig-Holstein was separated from Denmark, so that the domain of quantification of (7a) is ill defined: He will take our sentence . . . to be neither true nor false but will deny it to have any reference [on Frege’s view, a truth-value], on the ground of absence of reference for its subordinate clause. (Frege 1970a: 71)

It is clear that on Frege’s semantical account of presupposition, on which the falsity of a presupposition entails the lack of truth-value of the sentence with that presupposition, the negative sentence Prussia and Austria did not quarrel after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark would have either the logical form (7b) or the logical form (7c): (7)

b. ¬∃tQ(p,a,t) t∈T At no time after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark did Prussia and Austria quarrel. c. ∃t ¬Q(p,a,t) t∈T At some time after the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria did not quarrel.

On either the wide-scope (7b) or the narrow-scope (7c) negation understanding, the negative English sentence preserves the presupposition that there was a time at


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which Schleswig-Holstein was separated from Denmark, since the specification of the domain of quantification is antecedent to the assignment of truth conditions to the negative sentence. Thus the notion of a semantical presupposition as a semantical determinant of the truth-value of the sentence possessing the presupposition offers one explanation of the preservation of the presupposition under ordinary, main-verb negation (see the data in (1), (2), and (5)). The invariance of presupposition under negation is also noted by Frege in an example sentence that contains a proper name and a one-place predicate, but his discussion of this example has features notably distinct from the example just discussed. It raises a number of questions about negation that recur in the discussion of presupposition.

3 Alleged ambiguity of negation and contrasts among presupposition, assertion, and direct entailment For Frege, a logically perfect language would be one in which each well-formed singular term designates an object. In ordinary, logically imperfect languages, singular terms do not satisfy this requirement: for example, Vulcan and the cold-fusion reaction are not guaranteed a reference merely by virtue of being singular terms in the language. Frege claims: If anything is asserted [my emphasis] there is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have reference. If one therefore asserts [my emphasis] ‘Kepler died in misery’, there is a presupposition that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something; but it does not follow that the sense of the sentence ‘Kepler died in misery’ contains the thought that the name ‘Kepler’ designates something. If this were the case the negation would have to run not: Kepler did not die in misery but: Kepler did not die in misery, or the name ‘Kepler’ has no reference. That the name ‘Kepler’ designates something is just as much a presupposition for the assertion [my emphasis]: Kepler died in misery as for the contrary assertion. (Frege 1970a: 69)

In this passage Frege claims that the presupposition of an assertion and of its mainverb negation are the same, and he offers an argument to support it. It is evident from his argument that the notion of P contains a thought Q was assumed by Frege to be representable by P has the form Q & . . . or by P directly entails Q. (The quotation marks around ‘φ’ in ‘φ’ are Quine’s 1981 quasiquotation marks. The notion of “direct entailment” is, roughly, the entailment of a subformula; see Atlas 1991a). In the case of the negative assertion Not P, it was


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obvious to Frege that the Fregean senses (the truth conditions) of Not P and Not P ∨ Not Q were not the same, as long as Not Q did not entail Not P. That condition would be guaranteed if ‘‘Kepler’ has no reference’ did not entail ‘Kepler did not die in misery’. But what ensures that this non-entailment obtains? If the negative sentence ‘Kepler did not die in misery’ is interpreted as an exclusion negation, paraphrased in English by ‘It is not true that Kepler died in misery’, a vacuous singular term in the complement clause might be thought to yield for the statement the value “true” (rather than as Frege might have thought, because ‘Kepler’ would lack a reference, no truth-value at all). Since the exclusion negation ¬φ of a statement φ is true in a valuation if and only if φ is not true, even if φ is not true because neither true nor false, ¬φ will be true. But then there is an entailment of ‘Kepler did not die in misery’ by ‘‘Kepler’ has no reference’, and Frege’s argument, which supports the claim that statements and their main-verb negations that contain singular terms share the presupposition that the terms are referentially nonvacuous, fails! Thus Frege’s argument requires that the main-verb negation not be an exclusion negation, but a choice negation. The choice negation –φ of a statement φ is true (false) in a valuation if and only if φ is false (true). If the choice negation is paraphrased in English by ‘Kepler didn’t die in misery’, but ‘Kepler’ has no reference, one’s intuition is that the choice negation is not true. So Frege’s argument survives. But it survives on the assumption that the negative, ordinary language sentence expresses a choice negation, typically a narrow-scope negation, not an exclusion negation, typically a wide-scope negation. The choice negation permits a failure of truthvalue for a sentence with a false (not-true) presupposition, but an exclusion negation will be true even though a presupposition is not true, as we have seen. For these reasons, van Fraassen (1971) formalizes the semantical notion of presupposition using choice negation, but it commits a theorist of semantical presupposition to a false claim about English: the ambiguity of simple ‘not’ sentences. Frege’s argument also illustrates another aspect of presupposition. Since Not P is not equivalent to Not P ∨ Not Q, P is not equivalent to P & Q. So Q is not contained in P. The thought that ‘Kepler’ has a reference is not contained in the affirmative assertion. If the thought is not contained in the assertion, not asserted as part of it or directly entailed by it, it must be presupposed. Here we have the contrast of presupposition with both assertion and direct entailment. If one asserts Kepler died in misery or asserts Kepler did not die in misery, one does not therein assert ‘Kepler’ has a reference. Similarly, if one asserts these statements, the proposition ‘Kepler’ has a reference is not a subformula (or clausal constituent) of the asserted content. If ‘not’ is understood as a choice negation, ‘‘Kepler’ has a reference’ will be semantically entailed by the negative sentence ‘Kepler did not die in misery’ but not directly entailed by it, just as ‘‘Kepler’ has a reference’ will be semantically entailed by the affirmative sentence but not directly entailed by it. The difference between the affirmative statement semantically entailing that ‘Kepler’ has a reference and the negative not semantically entailing ‘‘Kepler’ has a reference’ depends on construing the negative statement as expressing an exclusion negation. Note that although the exclusion negation does not entail ‘‘Kepler’ has a reference’, even the exclusion negation could be understood to have the referential

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presupposition that ‘Kepler’ has a reference. It is just that if the name does have a reference, the exclusion negation will be equivalent to the choice negation. The point is that the exclusion negation can be true whether or not the name has a reference. Its truth-value is unaffected by the obtaining of the referential presupposition. Hence it is not the case that in a use of the negative sentence understood as an exclusion negation a speaker cannot presuppose that the name has reference. But if the presupposition fails, the exclusion negation will be true, while the choice negation will be neither true nor false.1 In reconstructing Frege’s argument I, speaking for Frege, have implicated that not only is the English sentence ‘It’s not true that Kepler died in misery’ capable of expressing the exclusion negation of ‘Kepler died in misery’ but that it is only capable of expressing the exclusion negation—that the sentence just means the exclusion negation. This is a traditional linguistic assumption in twentieth-century logic and philosophy—for example in Whitehead and Russell (1970: 6), Frege (1970b: 123), and Strawson (1952: 78).2 Frege’s argument for the preservation of referential presupposition under mainverb negation will not succeed without the assumption that main-verb negation ‘not’ (or ‘nicht’ in his case) is semantically a choice negation, which allows for sentences that are neither true nor false. For further, independent reasons, Frege also accepts a negation that is a wide-scope, exclusion negation. Both Frege and Russell (1905, 1919) assume that ‘not’ (or ‘nicht’) sentences are ambiguous.3

4 Frege, the first pragmatic presuppositionalist The roles of context and background knowledge were seen very early to be important for one conception of presupposition. Frege himself, in addressing the anti-realist prejudices of his late-nineteenth-century philosophical audience of German idealists, made use of the notion. He wrote: Idealists or sceptics will perhaps long since have objected: “You talk, without further ado, of the Moon as an object: but how do you know that the name ‘the Moon’ 1So

exclusion negation is not a presupposition “plug” in Karttunen’s (1973) sense.

2The

assumption is, I have argued, false (see Atlas 1974, 1975a, 1977b, 1978b, 1989; Bach 1987; Kempson 1988a; Horn 1989). 3This assumption too, I have argued, is false. The free morpheme ‘not’ does not create ambiguities in English. It is semantically nonspecific with respect to scope or with respect to exclusion and choice negation just as ‘neighbor’ is semantically unspecified for gender, unlike ‘stallion’ or ‘poetess’ (see Zwicky and Sadock 1975; Atlas 1974, 1975a, 1977b, 1978b, 1979, 1989; Horn 1989). Happily the semantical nonspecificity (generality) of ‘not’ will not undermine Frege’s argument, since he couched the argument in terms of assertions rather than sentences. A semantically negative sentence can be used to make a specific, choice-negation assertion. Just as long as one treats assertions—tokens of utterance-types in which a possible specification of a semantically nonspecific sentence is achieved, for example, by the use of collateral information available to speakers and addressees (mutual “knowledge”) in a context of utterance—as the carriers of presuppositions, Frege’s argument for the preservation of referential presuppositions under main-verb negation in sentences of the form Proper Name + Verb Phrase will be sustained.


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has any reference? I reply that when we say ‘the Moon’, we do not intend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfied with the sense alone, but we presuppose a reference. . . . Now we can of course be mistaken in the presupposition, and such mistakes have indeed occurred . . . ; in order to justify mention of the reference of a sign it is enough, at first, to point out our intention in speaking or thinking.” (Frege 1970a: 61)

This passage is actually the first in “On Sense and Reference” in which Frege uses the notion of presupposition. He was making a commonsense, linguistic and philosophically realist objection to the views of philosophical skeptics and idealists. Ordinary speakers take for granted the existence of the Moon, the satellite of the Earth—not an idea in the mind or a concept—and intend to be referring to it, the object, when they utter the singular term ‘the Moon’. In summary, then, two of Frege’s three notions of presupposition are as follows (Atlas 1975a): (8) a. Semantical presupposition The thought P semantically presupposes the thought Q if and only if the truth of Q is a necessary condition on P’s having a truth-value. (The paradigm case for Frege is where the presupposition is a semantical determinant of the interpretation of P. For example, the truth of Schleswig-Holstein separated from Denmark is a semantical determinant of the truth-valuedness of After the separation of Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussia and Austria quarreled.)

b. Pragmatic presupposition A speaker S pragmatically presupposes a thought P in speech context C if and only if in C the speaker S assumes, believes, or takes for granted that P is true.4

5 Pragmatic presupposition continued In “Pragmatics” Stalnaker wrote: To presuppose a proposition in the pragmatic sense is to take its truth for granted, and to presume that others involved in the context do the same. This does not imply that the person need have any particular mental attitude toward the proposition, or that he need assume anything about the mental attitudes of others in the context. Presuppositions are probably best viewed as complex dispositions which are mani4Frege’s third notion of presupposition in “On Sense and Reference” is what I call “assertoric presupposition”; this is roughly that the speaker literally means what he says and that it has a truth-value. I glossed this in Atlas (1975a) by:

(iii) Assertoric presupposition An assertion by a speaker S of a sentence A presupposes (a) that the speaker S intends to mean what his words literally mean, and (b) that the semantical presuppositions of the thought expressed by A are true.

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fested in linguistic behavior. One has presuppositions in virtue of the statements he makes, the questions he asks, the commands he issues. Presuppositions are propositions implicitly supposed before the relevant linguistic business is transacted. (Stalnaker 1972: 387–88)

Karttunen (1973, 1974) and others took Stalnaker’s notion to be a sincerity condition on the utterance by a speaker of a sentence in a context. Stalnaker’s notion, in contrast with Frege’s notion of pragmatic presupposition, requires that the suppositions of the speaker be assumed by him to be those of his audience as well. Stalnaker’s presuppositions are what the speaker takes to be common background for the participants in the context. Grice (1967, 1981), Schiffer (1972), and Lewis (1969) had employed similar notions. Stalnaker uses a Gricean formulation: A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions, or has these beliefs. (Stalnaker1974: 200)

6 Accommodation in conditionals and factive-verb statements Karttunen (1973), seconded by Atlas (1975a, 1977a), had noted a weakness in Stalnaker’s account. Karttunen pointed out that a counterfactual conditional like If Bill had a dime, he would buy you a Coke is sincerely uttered in some contexts in which the speaker does not assume that his audience assumes that Bill does not have a dime. One point of uttering the sentence is to inform the audience that Bill does not have a dime. On Stalnaker’s (1972) account, the proposition that Bill does not have a dime is not a pragmatic presupposition in that context, and, on Stalnaker’s general principle that “any semantic presupposition of a proposition expressed in a given context will be a pragmatic presupposition of the people in that context,” not a semantic presupposition of the counterfactual conditional. That was a conclusion that Karttunen rejected, so he rejected Stalnaker’s general principle. Likewise Atlas (1975a: 37) emphasized that “the assumption of common background knowledge is too strong to be applicable to speech-situations as universally as Stalnaker and others would like.” Atlas also noted that “there are two strategies of The Communication Game that are especially relevant to the problem of presupposition, the strategy of Telling the Truth and the complementary strategy of Being Informative” (1975a: 40). As noted in (1d,e) and (5d,e) factive-verb statements, so-called because, for example, Geoffrey knows that P is analyzed as Geoffrey knows the fact that P, are said to presuppose P. It is clear that there is an entailment of the complement from the affirmative statement: Geoffrey knows that P P, and of the object-language version of the referential presupposition: Geoffrey knows that P Geoffrey exists. From an understanding of the negative statement, we may also infer these propositions. For the neo-Gricean the question was how to explain the inferences from the negative statement by appeal to Grice’s (1967) model of conversation as a rational, cooperative communication of information.


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If we take the Kiparskys’ (1971) analysis of factive sentences seriously, we have, in effect, two referential presuppositions: ‘Geoffrey’ has a reference; ‘the fact that P’ has a reference; and in the object-language: ‘Geoffrey exists’, P. According to Grice, when a speaker means more than he literally says and expects the hearer to recognize that he does, the speaker’s expectations and the hearer’s interpretation are governed by Grice’s (1967) Maxims of Conversation. One particularly important pair, for our purposes, are the Maxims of Quantity: (a) Make your contribution as informative as is required by the current purposes of the exchange and (b) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. The Post-Gricean account of a factive presupposition of a ‘know’ statement can then be sketched as follows. Negative sentences of the form Geoffrey does not know that P are not scopeambiguous but rather semantically nonspecific between presuppositional and nonpresuppositional understandings (Atlas 1975a: 42, n.23). On the semantical nonspecificity view, the negative sentence is not ambiguous; it is univocal, and the exclusion-negation and choice-negation “senses” are instead contextual specifications of the indeterminate literal meaning of the negative sentence. The literal meaning is neither the exclusion-negation nor the choice-negation interpretation, but it is something to which contextual information is added to produce in the hearer a choicenegation understanding of the speaker’s utterance or an exclusion-negation understanding of the speaker’s utterance in the context. On Strawson’s (1950) view, the choice negation will be true or false if P is true, and neither true nor false if P is not true. On the post-Gricean view, the truth of P is inferred by the hearer in order to construct a more informative understanding of the negative sentence than the sentence-meaning that is semantically nonspecific between exclusion and choice negation. The syntax and meaning (the syntactical combination of its meaningful parts) of the sentence constrain, but do not alone specify, what a hearer understands a speaker to mean literally by an utterance of the sentence. The specification of ‘not’ as a choice or an exclusion negation is also made by the hearer in interpreting the speaker’s utterance. The semantical nonspecificity of ‘not’ in the sentence leaves it open to the hearer to make an “inference to the best interpretation” of the utterance (Atlas and Levinson 1981; see also chapter 3 in this volume). The hearer’s inference that ‘Geoffrey’ has a reference is an interpretative one, in order to explain most plausibly the speaker’s asserting Geoffrey does not0 know1 that P2, instead of the differently stressed utterance Geoffrey1 does not know that P0— Geoffrey1 doesn’t exist, and may be a real-time accommodation, taking the speaker at his word: thus, ‘Geoffrey’, as referring to an actual individual. I observed, like Karttunen in the case of conditionals, that speakers can make use of presuppositional sentences to be informative. The analysis was as follows (Atlas 1975a: 42–43): If a speaker intends to be informative, in this case about Geoffrey’s ignorance, the speaker must intend, and the hearer recognize, another understanding of the negative sentence (i.e., one other than the nonpresuppositional, exclusionnegation understanding). This understanding is one in which the speaker presumes that the proposition expressed by the complement of ‘know’ is true and hence a possible object of Geoffrey’s knowledge. This presumption by the speaker is necessary whenever he intends his utterance to be informative [to the hearer about Geoffrey’s

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ignorance]. Likewise, the hearer presumes that the speaker intends to be informative, and so assumes that the speaker presumes that the complement is true. If the hearer does not know or believe, prior to the speaker’s utterance, that the complement is true, his or her presumption, ceteris paribus, that the speaker’s utterance is meant to be informative provides him or her with good reason to accept that the speaker believes that the complement as true and, hence, assuming that the speaker has good reason for his belief, to accept that the complement is true. In this way, the speaker, by reporting Geoffrey’s ignorance, can remedy the hearer’s ignorance. Thus was recognized, for conditionals (Karttunen 1973), and for factive-verb statements (Atlas 1975a: 42–43), the possibility of unpresupposed “presuppositions,” which were given a theoretical explanation as part of the strategy of being informative in the communication game. Later the notion was given the name “accommodation” by Lewis (1979) in his “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” and an earlier variant of the concept than Lewis’s appeared in Ballmer (1975, 1978) and in the last few sentences of Strawson (1950). Having explicitly introduced accommodation into my discussion of presupposition in 1975a, I (1975a: 43) went on to claim that the best explanation of the “presuppositions,” either presupposed or accommodated, of factive-verb statements could be sketched as follows. The more informative use of the negative sentence to report ignorance depends on a semantic property of ‘know’: S knows that P entails P. For a person S to have his ignorance reported by S does not know that P, P must be true. The informative use of the negative sentence is one in which the sentence is understood in such a way that its truth conditions are “factive”; the complement of ‘know’ is taken to be true. This understanding of the negative sentence allows one to infer the truth of P, just as the affirmative sentence S knows that P entails the truth of P. The description just given was, I believed, the best way to account for the linguistic claim that S knows that P “presupposes” P. Stalnaker (1974: 206) had given an account of factive-verb statements that missed the significance of accommodation, and one that merely demonstrated the alleged infelicity of asserting x knows that P in a context in which speaker and hearer had not mutually acknowledged the truth of P. Thomason (1984) gave a less detailed explanation of the factive-verb presuppositions but had recognized the importance of accommodation (see Thomason 1990). Later discussions differed from my 1975a,b account in their various emphases on mechanisms of inference—practical reasoning about plans in Thomason (1990) or abductive inference (inference to the best explanation) in Hobbs et al. (1993), although practical reasoning in implicature had been discussed by Atlas and Levinson (1973) and inference to the best explanation by Atlas and Levinson (1981)—and in their appeal to a Stalnakerian (1974) assumption that strict felicity conditions on the assertion of sentences containing singular terms or factive verbs must be presumed to be satisfied in the speaker’s and hearer’s common ground. For Stalnaker and Thomason, accommodation is the repair of the alleged infelicity. I, by contrast, believe that there is no infelicity in asserting negative factive statements in these contexts.


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Since presuppositions were, pre-theoretically, preserved under main-verb negations, the explanatory task was to explain inference to the “presupposition” from both the affirmative and the negative assertions. Part of the explanation was semantic, as Frege noted: (a) The discoverer of the elliptical orbits of the planets died in misery Some unique individual discovered the elliptical orbits of the planets; (b) Geoffrey knew that Strayer was a first-class medievalist Strayer was a first-class medievalist. The explanation for the presuppositional inference from the negative assertions was both pragmatic (in Grice’s sense) and semantic. Some notion of an “informative interpretation” of the negative utterance, and some “strategies of communication” by virtue of which an informative interpretation could be arrived at, were obviously necessary.5 What distinguishes presuppositional phenomena from pragmatic phenomena like conversational implicature is that presupposition is a heterogeneous relation. A presupposed proposition is a semantical entailment from the affirmative statement and the content of the conversationally implicated, specific interpretation of the negative statement in a context, an interpretation that is beyond the literal meaning of the semantically nonspecific negative sentence; the same content is “contained in” the interpretation that is implicated by the speaker in the assertion of the negative sentence as is entailed by the asserted content of the affirmative sentence. Since Grice (1967) did not recognize the existence of semantically nonspecific negative sentences, nor did Boër and Lycan (1976) in their attack on the semantic definition of presupposition, and Stalnaker (1974) and Thomason (1990) did not recognize the existence of felicitous accommodation, the Atlas (1975a, 1979) and Atlas and Levinson (1981) account of presupposition was unavailable to them.

7 Grice on presupposition, implicature, and the ambiguity of negation In this section I compare the post-Gricean treatment (Atlas 1975a, 1978b, 1979; Atlas and Levinson 1981) of presupposition as a heterogeneous relation combining entailment and an extended concept of Grice’s generalized conversational implicature with that given independently by Grice (1981) himself in his essay “Presupposition and Conversational Implicature.” Atlas, Levinson, and Grice agree that There is a king of France is entailed by The king of France is bald, although Grice takes the view, unlike myself, that the negative sentence ‘The king of France is not bald’ is structurally ambiguous between a wide-scope and a narrow-scope ‘not’. When a speaker asserts the (allegedly) ambiguous negative sentence, then, according to Grice, “without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of The king of France is not bald as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of a king of France. 5My own discussion (Atlas 1975a) was indebted to Grice’s (1967) model of conversation in which there was a rational constraint on the communication of information, to Aristotle’s model of informativeness (Categories 2b7–2b22), and, under the influence of Schelling (1960), to my introduction of the notion of a strategy, and not just maxims, of communication. It is the notion of a strategy that led me to recognize and emphasize how unpresupposed “presuppositions” could be communicated—that is, to recognizing the importance of what Lewis (1979) later labeled “accommodation.”

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This is intelligible,” Grice continues, “if on one reading (the strong one), the unique existence of a king of France is entailed, on the other (the weak one), though not entailed, it is conversationally implicated. What needs to be shown, then, is a route by which the weaker reading would come to implicate what it does not entail” (Grice 1981: 189). What is notably common to Atlas (1975a, 1978b, 1979), to Atlas and Levinson (1981), and to Grice (1981) is the claim that Strawson’s classic presupposition of the existence of a reference of a singular term in a statement is a heterogeneous relation between the statement and its presupposition, an entailment of the affirmative, and somehow a conversational implicature of the asserter of the negative statement. Nevertheless, the differences between the views are also striking. The first striking difference between Grice (1981) and Atlas (1975a etc.) is Grice’s claim that the negative sentence is ambiguous and Atlas’s contrasting claim that the unambiguous negative sentence is semantically nonspecific between the “weak” and “strong” understandings, which are not readings or senses. This subtle semantic difference has often been misunderstood, and its consequences have been underappreciated. Grice’s (1981) account allows us to see, in a more dramatic way than usual, the consequences of this apparently small difference in theory. What is incoherent in Grice’s (1981: 189) account—incoherent because it combines assumptions of Grice’s ambiguity account with implications of Atlas’s (1975a) semantical nonspecificity account—is the remark that hearers somehow “without waiting for disambiguation . . . understand an utterance of The king of France is not bald as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of a king of France.” On Grice’s own (1967, 1989b) original discussion of conversational implicature, sentences were taken as disambiguated, so that statements had well-defined truth conditions, before the reasoning resulting in a conversational implicatum was applied to the statement in its context. But the intent of Grice’s remark as quoted here is that on either sense of the negative sentence there will be an implication “in some fashion,” an entailment from the strong sense and a conversational implicatum from the weak sense. The implication of the existence of a unique king of France is overdetermined; it is a double implication, the same from each sense but on semantic grounds for the first sense and on pragmatic grounds for the second sense. But if hearers really do not wait for disambiguation (and Grice’s justification for that claim is an utter mystery), then there is no need to generate a conversational implicatum from the (alleged) weak sense. Before disambiguation, all that can be required for there to be any implication at all from the sentence is that there be an implication from some sense of the negative sentence—not from all senses of the negative sentence. Since the strong sense will entail the existence of a unique king of France, the implication, of some fashion, can be explained without appeal to any conversational implicature at all. Grice (1981: 189) claims that the affirmative ‘The king of France is bald’ logically implies the existence of a unique French king, and its ambiguous negative ‘The king of France is not bald’ has a double implication: an entailment from its strong negative sense and a conversational implicatum from its weak negative sense.


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By contrast, the post-Gricean claims that the affirmative statement The king of France is bald logically implies the existence of a unique French king, and the semantically nonspecific negative sentence ‘The king of France is not bald’ may, when asserted, be understood by an addressee in a context to “implicate”—in the Atlas (1979, 1989), post-Gricean technical sense (see Levinson 2000: 256–59)—distinct propositions constructed (or inferred) from the nonpropositional, semantically nonspecific literal meaning of the negative sentence. The strong implicatum in a context entails the existence of a unique French king; the weak implicatum in a context does not. (I do not rule out a speaker misleading an addressee, and an addressee misunderstanding a speaker, by an addressee constructing both propositions in a context, analogous to what on the ambiguity account would be the addressee recognizing both [alleged] senses of the sentence. It is an empirical fact that for asserted sentences in most contexts addressees do not consciously recognize more than one of the alternative senses or consciously recognize more than one of the inferred alternative understandings. I discuss the mechanism of the interpretative inference in the following section 10.) It is actually interesting how the philosopher who once proposed a Modified Occam’s Razor, Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity (Grice: 1989c: 47), lands in this commitment to ambiguity. Sluga had pointed out to him (Grice 1981: 188, n.2—an acknowledgment omitted from Grice 1989a: 271)—that one could treat the king of France either as a quantifier or as a primitive singular term. If the former, then the sentence would be open to scope-ambiguities, like typical quantified sentences. But, Grice notably observes: If there were a clear distinction in sense (in English) between, say, The king of France is not bald and It is not the case that the king of France is bald (if the former demanded the strong reading and the latter the weak one), then it would be reasonable to correlate The king of France is bald with the formal structure that treats the iota operator [Russell’s definite description operator] like a quantifier. But this does not seem to be the case; I see no such clear semantic distinction.” (Grice 1981: 188)

I want to emphasize Grice’s (1981: 188) last remark, since it was also made independently by me (Atlas 1974) and S.-Y. Kuroda (1977: 105), who also saw no such clear semantic distinction. Unlike Grice, I noted that the observation suggested that there was no scope-ambiguity for these negative English sentences—they were semantically nonspecific with respect to scope, which further suggested that the formalization of these English sentences in a formal language whose structure imposed a scope-ambiguity would miss a semantically important feature of negative English sentences. Rather than draw that conclusion, Grice (1981: 188) used his observation to motivate his choice of the formalization of the definite description as a logically primitive singular term and concluded, “We are then committed to the structural ambiguity of the sentence The king of France is not bald.” As a result, Grice’s explanatory task was to show how, from an ambiguous negative sentence, Strawson’s presupposition that there exists a unique French king (at the time of utterance) can be explained.

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Grice had already observed that in the original version of Strawson’s truth-gap theory, he did not recognize any particular asymmetry as regards the presupposition that there is a king of France, between the two sentences, ‘The king of France is bald’ and ‘The king of France is not bald’; but it does seem to be plausible to suppose that there is such an asymmetry. (Grice 1981: 187)

8 The evidence of cancelability Grice then continues: I would have thought that the implication that there is a king of France is clearly part of the conventional force of The king of France is bald; but that this is not clearly so in the case of The king of France is not bald. . . . An implication that there is a king of France is often carried by saying [The king of France is not bald], but it is tempting to suggest that this implication is not, inescapably, part of the conventional force of the utterance of [‘The king of France is not bald’], but is rather a matter of conversational implicature. (Grice 1981: 187)

Then, as had I (Atlas 1975a, 1979), Boër and Lycan (1976), and Atlas and Levinson (1981), among others, Grice argues that the so-called presupposition of the negative statement is (a) cancelable, (b) nondetachable, and (c) justifiable by argument from Grice’s Maxims of Conversation as a conversational implicatum. (Roughly, this means that (a) one can assert the statement and deny the “presupposition” without inconsistency; that (b) other statements synonymous with this statement, but not differing wildly in manner, will carry the same “presupposition”; and (c) the inference to the existence of a unique king of France is justifiable by principles governing rational information exchange in conversation.) Grice argued that the proposition that there is a king of France is both explicitly cancelable (by outright denial) and contextually cancelable (by inconsistency with background information). Grice offered the following support for those pragmatic features of the “presupposed” proposition. He wrote, “if I come on a group of people about whether the king of France is bald, it is not linguistically improper for me to say that the king of France is not bald, since there is no king of France” (Grice 1981: 187). As I have mentioned earlier, speakers rarely notice the ambiguity of their utterances, and Grice is a case in point. He did not notice the ambiguity of his wording and placement of the comma in his indirect discourse sentence; he should have written in direct discourse: “for me to say The king of France is not bald, since there is no king of France.” He also argued that the proposition was contextually cancelable. He described an example as follows: It is a matter of dispute whether the government has a very undercover person who interrogates those whose loyalty is suspect and who, if he existed, could be legitimately referred to as the loyalty examiner; and if, further, I am known to be very sceptical about the existence of such a person, I could perfectly well say to a plainly loyal


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person, Well, the loyalty examiner will not be summoning you at any rate, without, I would think, being taken to imply that such a person exists. (Grice 1981: 187)

But the more compelling example is the one he then goes on to give: Further, if I am well known to disbelieve in the existence of such a person, though others are inclined to believe in him, when I find a man who is apprised of my position, but who is worried in case he is summoned, I could try to reassure him by saying, The loyalty examiner won’t summon you, don’t worry. Then it would be clear that I said this because I was sure there is no such person. (Grice 1981: 187)

Notice, as I (Atlas 1974) observed, felicitousness does not require Grice to have said It’s not the case that the loyalty examiner will summon you, don’t worry.

9 Pragmatic intrusion The issue of nondetachability is more subtle. Here one looks for roughly synonymous ways of making an assertion in which differences of manner are not so pronounced as to swamp the similarities of meaning. Levinson writes, “Most analysts hold that presupposition cannot be reduced to matters of implicature and that presuppositions are attached to their lexical or syntactic triggers (and are thus not detachable in Grice’s sense . . .)” (2000: 111), as if nondetachability were a problem for the post-Gricean reduction. To the contrary, one expects generalized conversational implicata to be nondetachable. Syntactic triggers, like the syntactic structure of clefts, are accounted for on the post-Gricean view if, as Atlas and Levinson (1981) show, the logical form of clefts, from which the implicata are generated, is distinct from that of the related simple declaratives, whose syntax does not trigger a “presupposition.” As for lexical triggers, ‘knows that P’ and ‘believes justifiably and non-accidentally the fact that P’ will trigger the same “presupposition” that P is true. Grice’s (1981) and my arguments are designed to show that the post-Gricean account “saves the phenomena” of presupposition. Of course, one must understand the phenomena first. For example, as suggested in Atlas (1974, 1975a, 1977b), The king of France is not bald and It’s not the case that the king of France is bald can have the same presupposition that there is a king of France, contrary to the tradition in philosophical logic that claimed the latter statement to express only the wide-scope or exclusion negation interpretation. Grice (1981: 188) agrees with this linguistic judgment. But Grice holds that these sentences are semantically ambiguous and that the narrow-scope, choice negation sense entails the existence of a king of France, while the wide-scope, exclusion negation sense, when asserted, conversationally implicates the existence of a king of France. Atlas (1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979) holds that these sentences are not ambiguous but univocal, semantically nonspecific between the choice negation and exclusion negation understandings. Thus the inferential mechanism of conversational implicature will map semantically nonspecific, nonpropositional semantic representations into choice negation or into exclusion negation propositions, depending on the

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context (Atlas 1978a, 1979). As discussed in Atlas and Levinson (1981), those singular terms in the statement that are Topic NPs are “noncontroversially,” by default, given status in the interpretations as referring terms. This is not a processing model, but it does raise the further question of the processing of these interpretations. Do we resolve the nonspecificity of ‘not’ before identifying singular terms as topic NPs? Or do we interpret the utterance The king of France is not bald in the left-to-right surface string order, determining the topic NP status of the singular term and then the interpretation of ‘not’? How does information in different contexts affect the processing? The post-Gricean account is non-Gricean, since the classical Gricean view took the semantic representation of sentence-types to be literal meanings incomplete only in contextual specification of the reference of singular terms, demonstratives, indexicals, tense, and so on and took the semantic interpretations of sentencetokens (utterances) to be completed propositions, the content of “what is said.” Thus I was committed to what later was labeled by Levinson (1988b, 2000) pragmatic intrusion: the intrusion of pragmatically inferred content into the truth conditions of what Grice (1989b) called “what is said.”6

10 Reduction of presuppositions to conversational implicata Grice (1981: 185) briefly characterizes the speaker’s implicatum as the content that “would be what he might expect the hearer to suppose him to think in order to preserve the idea that the [conversational] maxims are after all, not being violated.” The neo-Gricean explanation of referential, factive, and cleft presuppositions (Atlas 1975a, Atlas and Levinson 1981) depended on the hearer supposing the speaker not to be violating Atlas and Levinson’s (1981: 40) neo-Gricean Maxims of Relativity, which were refinements of Grice’s First and Second Maxims of Quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the purposes of the exchange)” and “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required” (Grice 1989b: 26). (9) Maxims of relativity 1. Do not say what you believe to be highly noncontroversial—that is, to be entailed by the presumptions of the common ground. 2. Take what you hear to be lowly noncontroversial—that is, consistent with the presumptions of the common ground.

The first maxim is a speaker-orientated production maxim; the second maxim is a hearer-orientated comprehension maxim. It is important that the production maxim 6The view of Atlas (1978a, 1979) bears a strong family resemblance, noted by Horn (1989: 433; 1992a), to the views developed by the “London School,” in their notions of “explicature” in Relevance Theory, and Kent Bach’s notion of “impliciture”; see Kempson (1986, 1988a), Sperber and Wilson (1995), Carston (1988), Blakemore (1992), Récanati (1989, 1993), Bach (1994a).


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is a prohibition, a “do not” maxim, and that the comprehension maxim is an obligation, a “must do” maxim. It is also important to note the difference between a sentence being entailed by a set of sentences in the common ground and a sentence being merely logically consistent with a set of sentences in the common ground. The consistency requirement was designed to permit the kind of informative statement accommodation for referential and factive presuppositions that I described in Atlas (1975a, 1977a). If a singular term were introduced by its use in a statement that would be more informative under an interpretation requiring the singular term to be a referring term in that statement, and its having a reference was consistent with the previously established common ground, nothing in my maxim would stand in the way of such an informative interpretation—it would be “noncontroversial”—whether or not the existence of the reference of the singular term had already been established as part of the common ground. Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Maxims of Relativity were designed to accommodate accommodation. It also should be noted that my Maxims of Relativity were couched in terms of noncontroversiality and of common ground, constrained by a mini-theory of noncontroversiality. Among the axioms of that mini-theory were: (10)

Axioms of noncontroversialty a. If A(t) is “about” t, or if t is a topic NP in the statement A(t), then if t is a singular term, the proposition t exists is noncontroversial for speaker S in context K with respect to A(t). For example, if one asserts The king of France is not a good philosopher, the proposition that the king of France exists is, in the context, noncontroversial. b. The obtaining of stereotypical relations among individuals is noncontroversial for speaker S and addressee H in context K with respect to A(t). For example, if one asserts The king of France had a drink, that the king of France had an alcoholic drink would be noncontroversial. (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40)

What I showed in Atlas (1975a,b) and Atlas and Levinson (1981) and have reviewed here is the explanation for the inference to There is a king of France from a speaker’s assertion of The king of France is not bald (see (10a)). The construction of reasoning to a default, noncontroversial, informative interpretation of a semantically nonspecific negative sentence is required if Grice’s third criterion for the existence of a conversational inference is to be met, and the reasoning I constructed depended on an elaboration and a revision of Grice’s Maxims of Quantity (being as informative as is required). This in-my-technical-sense “implicated” interpretation of the semantically nonspecific sentence-token makes use of what is noncontroversial with respect to the utterance, as long as it is consistent with the common ground of the context in which the sentence-token is uttered. The existential proposition that there is a king of France is entailed by that interpretation, but the interpretation is originally constructed from the existential proposition’s being noncontroversial with respect to the utterance in the context. Grice himself adopts a Russellian analysis of The king of France is bald, a conjunction of three independent clauses (cf. Strawson 1950, 1971b: 5):

136 (11)


The king of France is bald. (A) There is at least one king of France. (B) There is not more than one king of France. (C) There is nothing which is a king of France and is not bald. (Grice 1981: 189)

The account of presupposition that Grice gave of the presupposition of the negative statement The king of France is not bald depends on a distinction between denied and undenied conjuncts: It would be reasonable to suppose that the speaker thinks, and expects his hearer to think, that some subconjunction of A and B and C has what I might call commonground status and, therefore, is not something that is likely to be challenged. One way in which this might happen would be if the speaker were to think or assume that it is common knowledge, and that people would regard it as common knowledge, that there is one and only one [king of France]. (Grice 1981: 190)

Thus the speaker who asserts The king of France is not bald would be understood to deny only the third conjunct (C) {Nothing that is a king of France is not bald, Whatever is a king of France is bald}, since the argument just quoted was supposed to “show that, in some way, one particular conjunct is singled out” (Grice 1981: 190). Of course, if one takes it as common knowledge that there is a unique king of France, and then denies conjunct (C), as Grice proposes, one gets the conjunction (a) There is a unique king of France & there is at least one king of France that is not bald, which is supposed to be an interpretation of (b) The king of France is not bald. The (weak) denial, namely the interpretation of It’s not the case that the king of France is bald as ¬((A & B) & C), conjoined with the common ground (A & B), is supposed to give ((A & B) & ¬C) as the interpretation of The king of France is not bald. But the question is, why should the common ground intervene in utterance-interpretation in this way? Grice believes that its commongroundedness is a sufficient and obvious explanation; I do not. A theory of how and why common ground enters into utterance-interpretation is needed. Grice does not offer one; Atlas and Levinson (1981) do, in their notions of noncontroversial propositions that are consistent with common ground propositions in a context of utterance and that enrich the sentencemeanings of the utterances with respect to which they are noncontroversial. Sentence (a) entails There is a unique king of France, and an utterance of (b), on Grice’s (1981: 189) own showing, “without waiting for disambiguation,” implies “(in some fashion) the unique existence of a king of France.” Grice (1981: 189) has already remarked that “what needs to be shown is a route by which the weaker reading could come to implicate what it does not entail.” But what Grice (1981: 190) has just shown is how the (weak) denial of The king of France is bald, in conjunction with the common ground, entails There is a unique king of France, which is what he has explicitly claimed a speaker implicates by it, but that it does not entail alone. Does this mean that Grice reduces implicature to a context-relative entailment, an entailment from the assertion and the propositions of the common ground of the context of utterance? If he were to do so, he would start to sound like a Sperber and Wilson (1986b) Relevance Theorist. But a common-ground-dependent entailment


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from the (weak) denial is merely a fact about context and the assertoric content of a weak negation. It is not a theory of an inference to the best interpretation of the negative utterance in the fashion of Atlas and Levinson (1981). Unlike Atlas, Grice thinks the negative sentence already has an interpretation; it is the weak negation. The question for Grice is, why should that interpretation generate the “implication” that there is a unique king of France? Pace Grice (1981: 190), the answer cannot be that the existential proposition is already assumed in the context. The existence of a context-relative entailment is no explanation of “the route by which the weaker reading could come to implicate what it does not entail,” since context-relative entailment does not possess the logical properties of implicature or presupposition. Even though the context provides premisses, the relation is an entailment; it is monotonic, unlike implicature (which is defeasible), and it is unlike presupposition (which is preserved under main-verb negation). Unlike an entailment of a statement, an implicatum of a speaker can also be canceled (i.e., negated without a resulting contradiction). Although the existential proposition is entailed by the hearer’s choice-negation interpretation of the speaker’s utterance, the proposition can be negated without an inconsistency with what the speaker literally uttered, since the literal meaning of the speaker’s semantically nonspecific, negative sentence-token does not entail the existential proposition. What makes it plausible to Grice that a speaker could assert the weak denial ¬((A & B) & C) and in the context mean [implicate] ((A & B) & ¬C) by his assertion is that the truth of the latter is a way of guaranteeing the truth of the former—and so Grice is fallaciously thinking that the latter is a way of expressing what a speaker could mean by the former, not merely a way of entailing its truth. G. E. M. Anscombe (1981b) long ago warned us against this fallacy of taking a truth-guaranteeing condition—a fact that verifies a statement—to be a meaning (see Atlas 1989: 62–64), what I shall call ‘The Anscombe Point’. Further, Grice has given an analysis of the presupposition of The king of France is not bald as a pragmatic presupposition (in Stalnaker’s 1974 sense) of speakers and addressees even when they assert the so-called weak sense “It’s not the case that the king of France is bald.” But as Stalnaker (1974) explicitly notes, speaker’s presupposition is not an account of presupposition as a generalized conversational implicature! The sources of these difficulties in Grice’s (1981) analysis of The king of France is not bald are clear. The first source is his self-consciously accepting the conjunction of three independent propositions as an analysis of The king of France is bald (for reasons that I discuss next) and his concomitant commitment to the scope ambiguity of The king of France is not bald. The ambiguity assumption, combined with his ignoring the Anscombe Point, leads Grice into an incoherent account in his attempt to derive the referential “presupposition” from his (weak) external negation reading of the negative sentence. It is here that the subtle difference between ambiguity and semantically nonspecific univocality has blatant and devastating consequences for the success of Grice’s (1981) attempt to reduce referential presupposition to implicature. And it is here that the Atlas (1975a, 1979) and Atlas and Levinson (1981) analysis succeeds where Grice’s (1981) fails. Most extraordinarily, Grice (1981: 189) adds to his 1967 Maxims of Manner the maxim “Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply that would be

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regarded as appropriate” and adopts as the canonical form of what is to be denied in the negative sentence ‘The king of France is not bald’ the Russellian expansion (R) There is at least one king of France & at most one king of France & whoever is a king of France is bald of the abbreviated, affirmative form (D) The king of France is bald. Then Grice (1981: 192) argues that because a speaker has uttered the abbreviated affirmative form (D) rather than (R), the hearer, noting that the speaker did not say (R) when he could have done so, and assuming that the speaker is conforming to the new Maxim of Manner—namely, that the speaker is to tailor his assertions to possible denials by the addressee—intends his (the hearer’s) possible denials of (D) to deny the third Russellian conjunct, which Grice assumes to be equivalent to denying baldness rather than existence or uniqueness. Then, Grice (1981: 192) adds, a speaker who now asserts the syntactical negative of (D) is speaking as one who himself would have interpreted the denial of (D) as denying baldness of the king of France. To generalize, perhaps unfairly, Grice’s analysis: a Speaker S typically implicates Ψ in asserting φ if there exists a φ' such that (a) φ' paraphrases φ, (b) in asserting φ' one asserts or otherwise explicitly raises the question of the truth of Ψ, (c) in asserting φ one does not assert or otherwise explicitly raise the question of the truth of Ψ. Such an analysis is prima facie an absurd account of the implicatures of φ. One problem, among several, with Grice’s analysis is that the denial of the third Russellian conjunct (that someone is a non-bald French king) is not equivalent to denying baldness of the king of France. Once this is admitted, Grice’s analysis loses all plausibility as an explanation of the inference from the exclusion-negation interpretation of The king of France is not bald to its choice-negation interpretation. Of course, in addition, it is antecedently questionable that Grice should assume that the underlying structure for The king of France is bald is just the three-conjunct Russellian analysis, which he does, circularly, by asking what structure would be most suitable for distinct denials expressing scope-distinct choice negations. And, as I have already mentioned, the lack of evidence of disambiguation has an even simpler explanation than the one Grice considered: the negative, definite description sentence is not ambiguous. But no one, except Atlas (1974, 1975a,b, 1977b) and Kempson (1975, 1988), had argued for the theoretical possibility that the sentence was semantically nonspecific with respect to the scope of negation, although Sir Peter Strawson (personal communication 1978) informed me that he had entertained a similar hypothesis. What Grice (1981: 187) has argued successfully is that the inference to the existence condition for the use of a definite description is not a Strawsonian presupposition; it is a cancelable and highly nondetachable inference, on the now familiar ground that it is linguistically acceptable and logically satisfiable to assert Don’t worry, the bogeyman won’t get you; there is no bogeyman, which should have been a linguistically anomalous and, if the second conjunct is true, a truth-valueless conjunction on a Strawsonian theory of the presuppositions of these main-verb negation sentences (Atlas 1988, 1989). Let me emphasize this: Grice (1981: 187) shows that existence of the denotation is not a semantical presupposition of the use of a definite description. It is an implicatum or inferendum. Grice (1981: 188) has also partially anticipated the point made in Kuroda (1977) and in Atlas (1974), in which I observed that the English sentences The king of France


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is not bald and It is not the case that the king of France is bald have precisely the same range of interpretations, both presuppositional and nonpresuppositional alike (for discussion, see Boër and Lycan 1976; Horn 1978b, 1989). The point of my observation was to support my claim of the absence of scope-ambiguity for ‘not’ in the semantic representation of the English sentences. Grice, instead, noted that it was not plausible to think that The king of France is not bald expressed just the predicate negation sense in which the sentence entailed the existence of a unique French king— the reading that Strawson (1950) had given it—or to think that It is not the case that the king of France is bald expressed just a sentence negation sense in which the existence of a unique French king was not entailed. Grice inferred from these observations that the English sentence The king of France is not bald is structurally ambiguous. He made two correct observations, so far as they went, and then drew just the wrong conclusion. The theoretical situation, as I described it in “Reservations about the Standard Grice View,” was this: Taking the negative sentence [The king of France is not bald] in isolation, competent speakers know that it has (at least) two uses or understandings. Independently of context, the understandings are phenomenologically of equal status, neither judged less a function of the meaning of the sentence than the other. But the account in the [classical Gricean, but not Grice’s (1981)] theory is “unequal,” in that it is split between the semantics and the pragmatics, and the understandings are of different theoretical status [the exclusion negation understanding is semantic; the choice negation understanding is pragmatic]. (Atlas 1979: 275–76)

In the neo-Gricean view the literal sense of the sentence ‘The king of France is not bald’ is the wide-scope, exclusion negation. It is not held to be ambiguous, unlike what Grice (1981) himself thought. The neo-Gricean pragmatic view, motivated in part by theoretical considerations from the linguistic theory of Generative Semantics, was that the correct syntactical analysis of the negative sentence gave it a clauseexternal negation, and the semantic representation of a sentence with that syntactical structural description was the wide-scope exclusion negation. I continued: The classical pragmatic view, without the semantical generality of negation, permits the negative sentence interpreted as a sentence negation to implicate the existential “presupposition” [as Grice 1981 suggests but fails to justify]. The negative sentence interpreted as a predicate negation staightforwardly entails it. And of course there are contexts in which no implicature of the sentential negation is intended. Letting L– stand for the sentential negation, L+ for the predicate negation, the function PRAG for the Gricean inference, and K for kinds of context, we may abbreviate the claims by the formulas: PRAG(K*,L–) = L+, PRAG(K**,L–) = L–. In the second case [in which the sentential negation meaning of the negative sentence is passed through the pragmatic inference machine unchanged] the pragmatics adds nothing to the semantical interpretation; in the first case [in which the sentential negation meaning of the negative sentence is transformed into the predi-

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cate negation implicatum] it obviously does. The standard view permits this kind of asymmetry in the theory. The first case is paradigmatic; the second case is degenerate. Why should there be this difference? (Atlas 1979: 275)

Grice (1981: 189) had remarked, recall, that “without waiting for disambiguation, people understand an utterance of The king of France is not bald as implying (in some fashion) the unique existence of a king of France.” For the radical pragmatist in linguistics, and for Grice (1981), too, the first case was paradigmatic. What neither asked was my question, “Why should there be this difference?” The postGricean answer I gave in Atlas (1979) was, “There should not.” I continued: A Gricean view combined with the representation of the semantical generality of negation, which was among the positions I advanced as viable options in the early 1970’s, remedies this theoretical “asymmetry” in the standard Gricean view. Let L# stand for the nonspecific semantic representation of The A is not B. Then the pragmatic theory does theoretical work in BOTH cases: PRAG(K*,L#) = L+ PRAG(K**,L#) = L–. Understandings that phenomenologically are of equal status are theoretically of equal status—produced in the same way by the same mechanism. The problem of explaining the degenerate case, that is, the case where PRAG(K**,L–) = L–, simply vanishes. (Atlas 1979: 278)7

It is important to understand that the semantic representation L# of ‘The king of France is not bald’ does not express a proposition, is not a description of truth conditions, or of a set of possible worlds, and so on. It is a semantically nonspecific, prepropositional, nonpropositional representation of the literal meaning of the English sentence string. Ruth Kempson in her “Grammar and Conversational Principles” had noted: One of the few people in the mid 1970s to recognize the gap between linguistic content of a sentence and the articulation of the truth conditions of its associated propositions was Jay Atlas, who argued in a series of papers (Atlas 1975[a], 1977[b], 1979) that the linguistic concept of sentence negation was weaker than any concept sufficient to characterize the truth-theoretic properties of propositions that negative sentences express. (1988a: 141 n.2)

Noam Chomsky has recently suggested that “we cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truth conditions. At most they can have something more complex: ‘truth indications’ in some sense” (1996c: 52). And he added: 7[Note in the original text] “It may be helpful to linguists to consider a parallel with phonology. The sentence The A is not B in one context may be understood as L– and in another as L+. These understandings are related to the . . . meaning L# of the sentence as ALLOPHONES are to the PHONEME to which they belong.”


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There is no question of how human languages represent the world, or the world as it is thought to be. They don’t. . . . There is no reference-based semantics. . . . There is a rich and intriguing internalist semantics, really part of syntax, on a par in this respect with phonology. Both systems provide ‘instructions’ for performance systems, which use them . . . for articulation, interpretation, inquiry, expression of thought, and various forms of human interaction. (Chomsky 1996c: 53)

I had written, “The sentence The A is not B in one context may be understood as L– [an external, exclusion negation] and in another as L+ [an internal, choice negation]. These understandings [not senses] are related to the literal meaning . . . of the sentence as allophones are to the phoneme to which they belong” (Atlas 1979: 278 n.). It seems that I have been engaged in a study in Chomskyan Internalist Semantics. I continued: On my view understanding the speaker’s utterance is knowing a proposition that the context [permits one to] construct from “the meaning” of a univocal, semantically nonspecific sentence. Not only is the nonspecific meaning of the sentence made specific in the understanding of the utterance, but the propositional content of the utterance that is constructed by inference is one that contributes to [but is not exhausted by (see Chapter 2)] an explanation for the uttering of the sentence in the context. (Atlas 1979: 278)

Again it is important to note that the propositional content of the utteranceinterpretation is constructed by pragmatic inference PRAG from a semantically nonspecific, nonpropositional representation of the literal meaning of the sentence. I finished the discussion with a rhetorical flourish: In seeing concretely for the first time how linguistics contributes to the solution of philosophical problems, we discover that Fregean semantics is inadequate to our explanatory tasks. The age of classical semantics is over, and we are finally expelled from the Cantorian paradise. (Atlas 1979: 279)

In a similar vein Noam Chomsky recently wrote: Turning to principle III of the [Fregean] model [i.e., “Language is a set of wellformed expressions, and its semantics is based on a relation between parts of these expressions and things in the world”], human languages differ radically from Fregean symbolic systems in just about every crucial respect. (Chomsky 1996c: 48)

11 Common ground and context as the source of presuppositions The second source of Grice’s difficulties is his appeal to common ground in the simple way he appeals to it and the way that Stalnaker (1974) appeals to it in “Pragmatic Presuppositions.” An explanation using speaker’s presupposition is not equivalent to an account using conversational implicatures.

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Grice’s error was the tacit assumption that by putting There is a unique king of France into the common ground, its common-groundedness would explain its presuppositional—as contrasted with “assertoric” and with “entailed”—status. But common-groundedness of a proposition can provide no such contrast with the assertoric status or entailments of a proposition. It matters not whether There is a unique king of France belongs to the speaker’s and addressee’s “common knowledge” if what needs to be explained is why and how Grice’s weak reading of The king of France is not bald, if asserted, yields as an implicatum There is a unique king of France. Grice’s attempted explanation by appeal to common knowledge of ‘There is a unique king of France’ still results on his account in an entailment of ‘There is a unique king of France’ from the common ground and the weak reading of The king of France is not bald, because it is entailed by the common ground alone. What is missing is an account of why using the common-ground status of ‘There is a unique king of France’, when combined with the weak negation interpretation of ‘The king of France is not bald’, explains an inference to the presuppositional interpretation of the utterance The king of France is not bald, an inference to the token of the type The king of France having a reference, where the token’s having a reference is neither entailed by the literal meaning of the utterance (on either my view or Grice’s view of the literal meaning of the negative sentence) nor asserted in it. If one needed more proof that “common knowledge” is not essential to explaining why people understand an utterance of The king of France is not bald to “imply (in some fashion)” the existence of a unique king of France, it is the existence of accommodation. And, despite his own (misguided) attempt to explain presupposition as an implicatum somehow arising from common ground, Grice was aware of accommodation: It is quite natural to say to somebody, when we are discussing some concert, My aunt’s cousin went to that concert, when one knows perfectly well that the person one is talking to is very likely not even to know that one had an aunt, let alone know that one’s aunt had a cousin. So the supposition must be not that it is common knowledge but rather that it is noncontroversial, in the sense that it is something that you would expect the hearer to take from you (if he does not already know). . . . That is, to take my word for. (Grice 1981: 190)

That is why the account in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 40–41) appealed to noncontroversiality in stating the Maxims of Relativity, and why the referential “presuppositions” are expressed as Conventions of Extension, a subclass of Conventions of Noncontroversiality: (12)

If a speaker’s statement A(t) in context K is “about” t, or if t is a topic NP in a statement A(t) , then: a. if t is a singular term, t exists is noncontroversial for the speaker S in context K with respect to A(t) ; b. if t denotes a state of affairs or a proposition, t is actual and t is true are noncontroversial for the speaker in context K with respect to A(t) .


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It is also why among the Conventions of Noncontroversiality is the following Convention of Intension: (13)

The obtaining of stereotypical relations among individuals is noncontroversial for the speaker and addressee in context K with respect to A(t) .

If others were not as clear about the notion of noncontroversiality as Grice was, others were clear about accommodation. Lewis (1979) acknowledges Stalnaker’s discussion, and Stalnaker is quite explicit: A speaker may act as if certain propositions are part of the common background when he knows that they are not. He may want to communicate a proposition indirectly, and do this by presupposing it in such a way that the auditor will be able to infer that it is presupposed. In such a case, a speaker tells his auditor something in part by pretending that his auditor already knows it. When a conversation involves this kind of pretense, the speaker’s presuppositions, in the sense of the term I shall use, will not fit the definition sketched above. That is why the definition is only an approximation. I shall say that one actually does make the presuppositions that one seems to make even when one is only pretending to have the beliefs that one normally has when one makes presuppositions. (Stalnaker 1974: 202)

I shall return to the bizarreness of Stalnaker’s (1974) account in the second paragraph of the preceding quotation. I merely want to note here the evident utility of the phenomena of accommodation in understanding presupposition and to distinguish the linguistic phenomena from Stalnaker’s analysis of it as a pretended “speaker’s presupposition.” (Stalnaker’s 1974: 200 definition of a speaker’s pragmatic presupposition in a context is “A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions, or has these beliefs.”) The notion that is required to explain presupposition is not the common knowledge that is appealed to in Stalnaker’s (1974: 200) definition of a speaker’s pragmatic presupposition in a context. Common-ground status of a proposition for a speaker and addressee will in a speech-context be sufficient for a proposition to be noncontroversial in that context, but common-ground status is not necessary for it to be noncontroversial. The trouble with Stalnaker’s analysis of accommodation is that accommodation supposedly occurs against a background of common knowledge in which, for example, the existence of Grice’s aunt’s cousin is established and in which an individual is identifiable as the reference of ‘my aunt’s cousin’. Among users of language who draw on a shared family or work experience, or a fund of media-instilled popular culture, or twelve years of primary and secondary education for purposes of a particular conversation, the amount and significance of common knowledge may on occasion be important and on other occasions unimportant. The point is that for purposes of a theoretical explanation of presupposition, common knowledge does not matter. The theoretically important notion, as Grice

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(1981) and Atlas and Levinson (1981) recognized, is noncontroversiality, not commongroundedness. What is common ground in a context for a speaker and addressee is also noncontroversial with respect to a speaker’s utterance and an addressee’s interpretation of the utterance, but what is noncontroversial with respect to a speaker’s utterance in a context at the time of utterance need not antecedently have been in the common ground of speaker and addressee but achieves its status simultaneously with the utterance (Atlas 1975a, 1977a). Lewis’s (1979) notion of accommodation does not distinguish between the addition of a proposition to the common ground simultaneously with the making of a statement and the specification of a proposition as noncontroversial simultaneously with the making of a statement. The speaker’s implicata that constitute the “presuppositions” of assertions can reinforce propositions already in the common ground of a conversation, or they can introduce propositions into the common ground, or they can be recognized and then dismissed, never even entering the common ground of a conversation, because they belong to a separate store of information that we characterize as noncontroversial. This store of noncontroversial information is accessible for use in a conversation; it need not be explicitly a part of the common ground, or part of mutual knowledge, for purposes of a particular conversation. But what is noncontroversial on the occasion of an utterance need not have been stored at all. A speaker’s expectation that an addressee will charitably take the speaker’s word that a singular term t is nonvacuous is not the same as a speaker and addressee’s expectations that they have in common the thought t exists. What they linguistically have in common is not a background belief; it is a language-based practice or convention of interpretation that allows certain bits of language, such as singular terms, charitably to have a takenfor-granted semantic evaluation in the course of making and understanding assertions, but only if the singular terms are topic noun phrases in the assertions or if the singular terms purport to designate what the statement is “about.” (See Davidson 1967; Grandy 1973; Atlas 1988, 1989: 112.) Reflecting on accommodation, Stalnaker (1974: 202) remarks that “presupposing is thus not a mental attitude like believing, but is rather a linguistic disposition— a disposition to behave in one’s use of language as if one had certain beliefs, or were making certain assumptions.” This is certainly closer to the truth than his notion of a speaker’s pragmatic presupposition; it is his notion of a speaker’s pretended pragmatic presupposition. But is pretense the theoretically useful notion in explaining presupposition and accommodation? I shall now explain to you my use of the predicate ‘x leaps tall buildings at a single bound and flies faster than a speeding bullet’. The predicate is true of x if and only if x leaps buildings at a single bound and flies faster than a speeding bullet or x pretends to. Now I assert Rogers Albritton leapt buildings at a single bound and flew faster than a speeding bullet and delight in its truth: in Rogers’s wrapping himself in a blue cape, extending his arms into the air above his head, and taking little leaps off the ground. Is Grice (1981: 190) pretending to believe that his aunt has a cousin? Is he pretending to believe that his addressee believes that Grice’s aunt has a cousin? Is he pretending to believe that his addressee recognizes that he is pretending to believe that his aunt has a cousin? And what does any of this have to do with Grice’s taking


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it for granted that his addressee will take it for granted that Grice’s aunt has a cousin when Grice asserts My cousin’s aunt went to that concert? But, then, I am not saying anything that Stalnaker and Sadock have not already recognized. Stalnaker (1974: 202–3, n.3) reports a counterexample of Sadock’s (personal communication): (14)

I am asked by someone whom I just met, “Are you going to lunch?” I reply, “No, I’ve got to pick up my sister.”

Stalnaker admits that the I of the example “seems to presuppose that [he] has a sister even though [he] does not assume that the [first] speaker knows this. Yet the statement is clearly acceptable,” which it would not be if Stalnaker’s view were correct that absent the mutual beliefs or assumptions, an assertion relying on them would be infelicitous.8 Stalnaker continues, “and it does not seem right to explain this in terms of pretense.” Indeed. The situation for Stalnaker’s (1974) account of pragmatic presupposition is now this: first, “mutual knowledge” was seen to fail to account for accommodation; so, second, mutual knowledge was changed to pretended mutual knowledge; finally, pretended mutual knowledge was seen to fail to account for accommodation. What now? Stalnaker (1974: 203, n.3) has two replies, in the first of which he appeals to a notion of Gricean implicature, the very notion that in his essay “Pragmatic Presuppositions” Stalnaker proposes for explanatory purposes to replace by his notion of a speaker’s presupposition in a context! Unfortunately this cannot rescue Stalnaker, since he glosses Grice’s notion of implicature in terms of the notion of common background knowledge: “the addressee infers that the speaker accepts that Q from the fact that he says that P because normally one says that P only when it is common background knowledge that Q,” thus missing his own point about accommodation.

8In

(14) ‘my sister’ is not a topic NP, so on the Grice-Strawson condition (Atlas 1989: 112) that the existence of a referent of a simplex singular term is presupposed in making a statement only if the singular term is a topic-designating expression in the statement, or only if the statement is “about” my sister, the existence of a referent of ‘my sister’ is not presupposed in the statement. Although the statement carries no referential presupposition with respect to ‘my sister’, if it is obligatory for me to pick up my sister, and I did not have a sister, I could not fulfill the stated obligation. So a “preparatory condition” (Searle 1969a) on statements of obligation, that it be possible to meet the condition expressed, would not be satisfied. On the informative understanding of the denial of the obligation, the same preparatory condition for the obligation denied still holds, had I replied, “Yes, I’ve not got to pick up my sister.” On the uninformative understanding of the negative sentence, in which I have no sister, it is nonetheless true (vacuously) that I’ve not got to pick her up. The sentence in question is a modal sentence, and Atlas (1988, 1989) explicitly restricts the discussion of presupposition to extensional statements; the application of the theory to intensional contexts was given in Atlas (1991b). The example in (14) is not a case of referential presupposition, but it is case in which, for Stalnaker and others, presuppositions have been identified with Felicity Conditions on the performance of speech-acts (Austin 1962/1975; Searle 1969a). ‘My sister’ could have been a topic NP in a statement similar to the one in example (14): As for my sister, I’ve got to pick her up. But that would not have been an answer to the question Are you going to lunch?, where the topic NP is you in the normally stressed utterance of the question.

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Stalnaker’s second reply to Sadock’s example is to consider the option of denying that there is a presupposition at all in the example, to claim that the example is an exception to the usual cases of presupposition. Stalnaker refuses to undertake this strategy of dealing with Sadock’s example, on the grounds of the complexity of accounting for both cases in which a speaker does presuppose the existence of a unique reference of a singular term and cases in which he does not and the consequent loss of the simplicity of the generalization that “a speaker always presupposes the existence of a unique referent.” (A falsehood is no loss. The falsity of Stalnaker’s simple generalization follows from the Grice-Strawson Condition (Atlas 1988, 1989) that a statement A(t) presupposes t exists only if t is a topic NP in A(t) or only if A(t) is about t.) Stalnaker describes his program in “Pragmatic Presuppositions” as follows: The contrast between semantic and pragmatic claims can be either of two things, depending on which notion of semantics one has in mind. First, it can be a contrast between claims about the particular conventional meaning of some word or phrase on the one hand, and claims about the general structure or strategy of conversation on the other. Grice’s distinction between conventional implicatures and conversational implicatures is an instance of this contrast. Second, it can be a contrast between claims about the truth-conditions or content of what is said—the proposition expressed—on the one hand, and claims about the context in which a statement is made—the attitudes and interests of speaker and audience—on the other. It is the second contrast that I am using when I argue for a pragmatic rather than a semantic account of presupposition. (Stalnaker 1974: 212)

Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) and Grice’s (1981) claim is that no adequate theory of presupposition can maintain the contrast that Stalnaker proposes. Pragmatic intrusion (Levinson 1988b, 2000) and semantical nonspecificity (Atlas 1975a, 1989) show that the content/context distinction is just one more philosophical myth—another untenable dualism like the figurative/literal distinction (chapter 1) and the a priori/a posteriori distinction (Putnam 1976). As Sadock’s example shows, Stalnaker’s theory of context manifestly fails to save the presuppositional phenomena, and his only hope of responding to the counterexamples is the Gricean theory of conversational implicature that he wants his theory of context to supplant. But there is an even simpler objection to Stalnaker’s account of presupposition as a speaker’s pragmatic presupposition. Consider the case of simple conditionals: If P then Q. Stalnaker’s account of conditionals is given briefly: We need first the assumption that what is explicitly supposed becomes (temporarily) a part of the background of common assumptions in subsequent conversation, and second that an if clause is an explicit supposition. (Stalnaker 1974: 211)

So, If the king of France is a serial killer, his mother will be ashamed of him now requires for its felicitous assertion that the speaker assume (temporarily) that there is a king of France, assume that his addressee assumes that there is a king of France, and assume that his addressee recognizes that the speaker is making these assump-


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tions and that the speaker assume (temporarily) that the king of France is a serial killer, assume that his addressee assumes that the king of France is a serial killer and assume that his addressee recognizes that the speaker is making these assumptions. Note that the condition imposed by Stalnaker is not that one “entertains the thought,” or “considers the consequences of,” but rather that one assumes . . . But do you? Assume, I mean. I don’t assume, even temporarily, that there is a king of France when I reflect on the conditional If the king of France is a serial killer, his mother will be ashamed of him. (I would so reflect if I interpreted the conditional in the following way: As for the king of France, if he is a serial killer, then his mother will be ashamed of him. But that is not the interpretation in question.) And I don’t assume, even temporarily, that the king of France is a serial killer. I know that there is no king of France; why should I assume that he’s a serial killer? Do I pretend to assume these things? No, I don’t do that, either. How about “taking it for granted”? I might take it for granted that there was a king of France if a speaker asserted the conditional, not myself knowing whether there was, but do I take it for granted that the king of France is a serial killer if a speaker asserts the conditional If the king of France is a serial killer . . . ? No, I don’t, precisely because the king of France is a serial killer occurs in an if clause. I don’t take the contents of if clauses for granted. So, on Stalnaker’s theory of contexts, I cannot felicitously or appropriately assert If the king of France is a serial killer, his mother will be ashamed of him. Yet, surely, I can felicitously assert this conditional. What is worse, Stalnaker’s position is inconsistent with his own view of conditionals. Consider for the moment that asserting If P then Q has the feature of requiring the common background assumptions that Stalnaker claims: the speaker temporarily assumes P, etc. Hence, according to Stalnaker, the speaker pragmatically presupposes P. But Stalnaker (1974: 208) writes, “if a speaker explicitly supposes something, he thereby indicates that he is not presupposing it, or taking it for granted. So when the speaker says ‘if I realize later that P,’ he indicates that he is not presupposing that he will realize later that P.” So Stalnaker’s (1974) account of the context of conditionals commits him to a speaker both presupposing and not presupposing the content of the if clause. None of the attitudes of the speaker and addressee that Stalnaker has considered—believing, assuming, taking for granted—correctly characterizes the linguistic behavior or associated psychological states of speakers of a language, their attitudes toward what they say or hear. Stalnaker believed that to explain the presuppositions of assertions one should use the concept of “speaker’s pretended presuppositions” to give a theory of linguistic contexts in which assertions are made. I believe, with Grice, that in order to explain the presuppositions of assertions, one should use the concept of “speaker’s conversational implicata of an assertion.” Stalnaker (1974: 202– 3, n.3) never answered Sadock’s counterexample to his theory of contexts. It is peculiar that some of those who first noted the phenomena of accommodation have largely misunderstood its implications. The phenomena of accommodation show that the word ‘presupposition’ misnames the linguistic facts. Referential presuppositions are a special case of accommodations; accommodations are not a special case of presuppositions. What we want a logical and linguistic theory of is accommodation, not presupposition. Accommodations are linguistically primary;

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presuppositions are secondary—they are special cases in which t exists is not merely accommodated as noncontroversial but also in which t exists already belongs to the common ground. (The Newtonian motions that are primary and paradigmatic are those at constant speed in a straight line, at constant velocity, not those that require the application of a net force. Sadock’s objection is to Stalnaker’s account of presupposition as Galileo’s objections are to Aristotle’s account of motion.) A postGricean theory of conversational implicature is a theory of one type of utterer’s meaning; it is a theory of accommodation, or, more broadly, as Levinson (2000) has recently put it, a theory of presumptive meanings. Noncontroversiality, taking the speaker at his word, not common-groundedness, is the notion for describing the basic paradigm.

12 A final remark According to the post-Gricean account in Atlas (1975a, 1979, 1989) and Atlas and Levinson (1981), the resources for an explanatory pragmatic theory of “presuppositional” inference consist in these elements: (a) the semantical nonspecificity of ‘not’, nonspecific between choice-negation and exclusion-negation understandings; (b) a post-Gricean mechanism for utterance-interpretation of semantically nonspecific negative sentences; (c) principles of noncontroversial, default interpretations of statements containing singular terms that are topic NPs; (d) a defensible topic/comment distinction for statements; (e) the Grice-Strawson Condition that permits a presuppositional inference to the referentiality of a simplex singular term in a statement only if the term is a topic NP (see Atlas 1988, 1989) or only if the statement is about the purported reference of the term; and ( f ) a distinction between propositions that are noncontroversial and propositions that are in the common ground. In this chapter I argued for a shift in paradigm. Accommodation is not a peripheral notion of presupposition: it is the central notion of presupposition. An adequate theory of presuppositional phenomena will place the data within a Gricean theory of presuppositional inference as an entailment of a proposition from an affirmative statement and its “implicated” interpretation from an assertion of the related main-verb semantically non-specific negative sentence, as suggested by Atlas (1975a, 1979), and Atlas and Levinson (1981), and, in part and ignoring Grice’s mistaken appeal to ambiguity and his mistaken application of the notion of common ground, by Grice (1981).9

9A shorter version of this chapter has appeared in L. Horn and G. Ward (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), and appears here with the permission of B. H. Blackwell, Ltd.

ASSERTIBILITY CONDITIONS , IMPLICATURE , AND SEMANTIC HOLISM

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5

Assertibility Conditions, Implicature, and the Question of Semantic Holism Almost but Not Quite

1 Comparative adjectives, adverbials of degree, and adverbial approximatives 1.1 Disposing of the entailment view In The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, Principle Six of the Principles of Clear Statement is “There should never be any doubt left as to how much, or how long” (1979: 83).1 Graves and Hodge offer the following information about English usage: There is a popular scale of emotional approximation (not to be found in any dictionary or table of measures) for estimating the comparative degrees of success in, say, catching a train. It may be legitimately used in prose and goes something like this: “Not nearly, nearly, almost, not quite, all but, just not, within an ace, within a hair’s breadth—oh! by the skin of my teeth, just, only just, with a bit of a rush, comfortably, easily, with plenty to spare.” (Graves and Hodge 1979: 83)

Just how do Graves and Hodge know this about almost and not quite? A simple beginning in trying to explain a logical ordering of almost and not quite would be to suggest that the statement Moore almost understood the notion “material object” analytically entails Moore did not understand the notion “material ob1The first section is a revised version of Atlas (1984b) and appears with the permission of the editors of Linguistics and Philosophy and Reidel Publishing Co.

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ject.” If it were also true that Moore did not understand the notion “material object” entails Moore did not quite understand the notion “material object,” it would follow that Moore almost understood the notion “material object” entails Moore did not quite understand the notion “material object.” So almost and not quite would be ordered because any almost-state-of-affairs would also be a not-quite-state-of-affairs, but not conversely. The use of almost with understand indicates that there are comparative degrees of success in understanding and that Moore “approximately” understood the notion “material object”; after all, Graves and Hodge refer to their scale as one of approximation. Even so, there is something odd in claiming that the statement Moore did not understand the notion “material object” is necessitated by Moore almost understood the notion “material object.” If the former is part of the meaning of the latter, it is to my ear a wee, small part of it. So I offer an intuitive datum: it is not selfevident that x almost F’d analytically entails x did not F. The normal counterargument to demonstrate the entailment would be to examine the conjunction of x almost F’d with the denial of x did not F for the presence of a contradiction, thus: Moore almost understood the notion “material object” and he understood it. But, surely, that is no obvious contradiction. So I offer another intuitive datum: it is not self-evident that x almost F’d and x F’d is contradictory. What, then, is the relationship between the statements, if it is not entailment? For it is equally clear that asserting Moore almost understood the notion “material object”—or, to change the example, Tom almost swam the English Channel—permits an inference to something like Tom didn’t swim the English Channel or Moore didn’t understand the notion “material object.” These intuitions are fine, but in addition I offer two arguments reductio ad absurdum to show that x almost F’d does not entail x did not F. Suppose for adjectives, determiners, or verbs F, the statement schema A(almost F) entails the schema A(not F). (a) Then Almost all swans are almost white entails Almost all swans are not white, which entails Not all swans are not white, which entails Some swans are white. But the proposition Some swans are white is just what a speaker who asserts Almost all swans are almost white chooses the word almost to avoid conveying. (b) It is intuitively evident that if there were no white swans, it could still be true that almost all swans were almost white. However, if A(almost F) entailed A(not F), and there were no white swans, it would be false that almost all swans were almost white, as we have just seen in (a). Conclusion: A(almost F) does not entail A(not F). The simple explanation of the ordering of almost and not quite is the wrong explanation.2 What is the relationship between almost and not quite? 1.2 Post-Gricean pragmatics The answer to the question requires an enriched pragmatic theory, which for convenience I will dub “post-Gricean pragmatics,” to distinguish it from early views pro-

2Hitzeman (1992: 236–37) challenges this argument. See appendix 2 for my reply to her instructive argument.


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pounded by Grice (1967, 1975a), Horn (1972, 1976), Sadock (1981), the early Levinson (1983), and others, whose views I shall refer to by the Sadockian term “radical pragmatics.” In this chapter I show that the standard, radical pragmatics application of Grice’s Maxims of Conversation are inaccurate, inadequate, and logically incoherent, thus reinforcing the discussion of chapters 2 and 3. The correct account of the logical, semantic, and pragmatic relationships among statements containing degree and approximative adverbials with gradable predicates or comparative similarity (equative) predicates is given by a post-Gricean, neo-Gricean pragmatics. Such a pragmatic account contains Conventions of Noncontroversiality (Atlas and Levinson 1981; see also chapter 3 in this volume), which involve common knowledge of stereotypes, cognitive preferences for some assertibility conditions (not truth conditions) to others, the use of first-person-based (egocentric) concepts of spatial orientation, and “metaphorical” extensions of those concepts. Post-Gricean pragmatics has greater explanatory value in linguistics, more philosophical plausibility, logical consistency, and stronger connections with recent work in cognitive psychology than the canonical views of Grice’s “Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1967, 1975a,b; see Lakoff 1987; Horn 1989). In expounding these views I shall use as a foil an account of almost but not quite that would be typical of one kind of classical Gricean account, an account not necessarily held by any linguist or philosopher, one that in this chapter I shall attribute to the radical pragmatist. By criticizing this account I wish to show the need for, and advantages of, post-Gricean pragmatics. In the course of this chapter, I shall answer the following questions: 1. a. For gradable predicates F, does x does not F mean, or entail, x does not quite F? b. Conversely, for which predicates F, if any, does x does not quite F mean, or entail, x does not F? 2. a. Does x does not quite F presuppose, or does its assertion conversationally implicate, x almost F’s? b. If either, how is this to be explained? 3. For which predicates F, if any, does x almost F’s entail, or does its assertion conversationally implicate, x does not F? 4. a. Does asserting x almost F’s conversationally implicate x does not quite F? b. If so, how is this to be explained? 5. a. Does John is as tall as Brian mean John is exactly as tall as Brian (i.e., John’s height is the same as Brian’s), as some radical pragmatists hold? Or does John is as tall as Brian mean John is at least as tall as Brian (i.e., John’s height is equal to or greater than Brian’s), as some logical conservatives hold? Or does it mean neither, as post-Gricean pragmatists hold? b. Which view can explain the semi-redundancy of John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John? 6. a. Does asserting John is not as tall as Brian conversationally implicate John is shorter than Brian as some radical pragmatists


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b. 7. a. b. 8.

9. a. b.

hold, or does the former entail the latter? Does asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian conversationally implicate John is shorter than Brian, as some radical pragmatists and post-Gricean pragmatists hold, or does the former entail the latter? How are the implicatures, or entailments, to be explained? Can John is as tall as Brian be used to mean that John and Brian are the same height (so, John is exactly as tall as Brian)? If so, how? What are the entailments and implicata among John is exactly as tall as Brian; John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John; John is as tall as Brian; Brian is not taller than John; John is at least as tall as Brian and their negations? What is the logical form of John is as tall as Brian? What are the logical forms of the other sentences in (8)?

My answers to these questions rely on the following semantic and pragmatic claims, which I defend in the course of this chapter: A. It is essential to distinguish simple gradable predicates from gradable accomplishment and achievement predicates (Vendler 1967: 103–7). (a) For gradable F, x does not F entails x does not quite F. (b) Conversely, for gradable accomplishment and achievement predicates G, x does not quite G analytically entails x does not G. B. It is essential to construct a Horn Scale S of degree adverbials, analogous to , from which implicata can be predicted (see Gazdar 1979a: 55–59; Atlas and Levinson 1981: 33; Levinson 1983: 132–36; see also chapter 3 in this volume): (S)

Here, mostly means for the most part/ mainly / more than half; the approximative almost means for the greatest (proper) part; and quite is polysemous between wholly and rather. Scale S shows that (a) for gradable F asserting x almost F’s implicates x does not quite F; (b) for gradable accomplishment and achievement predicates G, asserting x almost G’s implicates x does not quite G, which analytically and “directly” entails x does not G. Thus “x almost G’s” D ° » x does not G. That is, x almost G’s does not entail x does not G; x almost G’s “quasi-entails” x does not G. Notice that a quasi-entailment is not an entailment; it is the composition of the implicature relation » with the entailment relation . (c) For gradable F asserting x does not quite F implicates x almost F’s. C. For unmarked, gradable F in a comparative similarity relation (an “equative”) expressed by x is as F as y—for example, x is as tall as y, x is as F as y means Whatever (measures of) F-ness y has, x has also.


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My notion of measures of F-ness is not a notion of the “extent” to which an individual x exemplifies the gradable predicate F. In that case, it is natural to identify the extent of x’s tallness with x’s height. If the extent of John’s tallness is ej, and the extent of Brian’s tallness is eb, John’s height is the same as Brian’s if and only if ej = eb. John is taller than Brian if and only if ej > eb. This is not my conception of measures of tallness. On the conception of extents, an individual exemplifies tall to a unique extent; on my conception of measures, an individual exhibits many measures of tallness. On the conception of extents, the extent to which an individual exemplifies tall is the individual’s height; on my conception of measures, the individual’s height is the least upper bound of the measure of tallness that the individual has (i.e., x’s height = sup {m: x has m of tallness}). Of course on my view, if an individual has measure m of tallness, he has m' if 0 < m' ≤ = m. It is essential to note that x has some measure m of tallness does NOT entail x is tall; “having tallness” and “being tall” are distinct concepts. One difference between scientists and pure mathematicians is that scientists are interested in the results, whatever the proofs, while mathematicians are interested in the proofs, whatever the results. The impatient reader who wants the neo-Gricean answers to my nine questions immediately will find them summarized in the footnote.3 The patient reader who enjoys argument may proceed to subsection 1.3. The use of almost but not quite is part of our daily linguistic practice. My post-Gricean 3

1a. For gradable predicates F, x does not F entails x does not quite F. 1b. x does not quite F does not mean x does not F; for gradable, accomplishment and achievement predicates G, x does not quite G analytically and directly entails x does not G. 2a. x does not quite F does not presuppose x almost F’s; asserting x does not quite F conversationally implicates x almost F’s. 2b. Quite and almost form a Gricean Horn (1972, 1976) Scale of degree adverbials analogous to , where all of the N VP entails some of the N VP, where asserting some implicates not all, and asserting not all implicates some. The Horn Scale is , where mostly means {for the most part/mainly/more than half}; almost means for the greatest proper part; and quite is polysemous: (i) wholly, (ii) rather. 3. x almost F’s does not entail, does not presuppose, and its assertion does not conversationally implicate x does not F; for accomplishment and achievement predicates G, asserting x almost G’s implicates x does not quite G, which analytically and directly entails x does not G. 4a. Asserting x almost F’s conversationally implicates x does not quite F. 4b. By the Horn Scale described in 2b. 5a. John is as tall as Brian means neither John is exactly as tall as Brian nor John is at least as tall as Brian. 5b. Only the neo-Gricean view can explain the semi-redundancy of John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John. 6a. John is shorter than Brian entails John is not as tall as Brian, but not conversely. Asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian conversationally implicates John is shorter than Brian. 6b. The implicature cannot be explained by Grice’s (1975a) or Sadock’s (1981) radical pragmatics. Post-Gricean pragmatics will explain it. 7a. Asserting John is as tall as Brian implicates, in a post-Gricean fashion, John is exactly as tall as Brian.

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pragmatics makes explicit what the tacit linguistic knowledge underlying this practice consists in, and that brings us a certain kind of philosophical enlightenment, in the spirit of Wittgenstein, Austin, Dummett, Strawson, and Grice. 1.3 Post-Gricean criticism of the radical pragmatics account The radical pragmatics analysis that I criticize here, as discussed in Sadock (1981), is the following: x almost F’d (D) i. asserts x almost F’d (A) ii. implicates x did not F x did not quite F (C) i. asserts x did not F (B) ii. presupposes x almost F’d

For purposes of argument, I shall take this analysis as a paradigm of a kind of radical pragmatics account and attribute it to a hypothetical figure, the radical pragmatist. The pattern of analysis is clever and familiar. In 1971 Charles Fillmore suggested that criticize and blame had assertoric and presuppositional parts; blame presupposed that the object of blame is at fault while asserting that he is responsible; criticize presupposed that he is responsible while asserting that he is at fault. The radical pragmatist makes the pattern more pragmatic by a substitution of implicates for presupposes. Does saying almost implicate not? The radical pragmatist believes that in answer to Did Tom swim the English Channel? Almost but not quite is acceptable, but ?Almost and not quite is not. Accordingly, a substitution of and for but that similarly fails to preserve acceptability occurs in the pair: (a) John ate some, but not all, of the cake, (b) ?John ate some, and not all, of the cake. (The latter sentence may be used acceptably to deny that John ate all of the cake, as Sadock (1981: 264) notes, so there is some oddity in the radical pragmatist’s questioning the acceptability of the sentence.) If saying John ate some of the cake implicates John did not eat all of the cake, a speaker can make the implicatum explicit, reinforcing it, by an assertion. If the implicatum had been an

7b. The explanation is provided in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 44). 8. See table 5.1 and 5.2 in chapter 5. 9a. John is as tall as Brian means Whatever (measures of) tallness Brian has, John has also. Quantifying over the measures of tallness that each has, or j* and b*, the logical form is (∀b*)(∃j*)( j* = b*). 9b. j is exactly as tall as b (∀b*)(∃j*)( j* = b*) & (∀j*)(∃b*)(b* = j*); b is taller than j ( j is shorter than b) (∃b*)(∀j*)( j* j*); thus for each measure of John’s tallness there is some measure of Brian’s tallness that exceeds it.) Hence John is not quite/wholly as tall as Brian entails Brian is taller than John. Interestingly, from the point of view of our formalization, Brian is taller than John does not in our formalization entail Brian is as tall as John. That is because though there is a measure of tallness that Brian may have, a measure of “highness” as it were, that is greater than any measures that John may have (and hence for any measure that John has, there is some measure that Brian has that is greater), it does not thereby follow that for any measure that John has, there is some measure that Brian has that is identical to it. Thus, a mockingbird sitting at the top of a California live oak tree could be “taller” than I am, in the sense that it is higher off the ground than I. ‘High’, according to some, is polysemous between ‘great extension, as distance from bottom to top’ and ‘great elevation’. ‘Tall’ according to the lexicographers of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003) at the G. & C. Merriam Co., Springfield, Massachusetts, is restricted to the former sense; according to the lexicographers of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. (1996) at Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, Massachusetts, ‘tall’ is not so restricted. According to the latter, the mockingbird is taller than I am; according to the former, the mockingbird is merely higher than I am. Having been educated in western Massachusetts, I always knew that Bostonians couldn’t speak (American) English. The Springfield lexicographers are right, of course; the mockingbird in question is not taller than I am. Now, whether ‘tall’ is actually polysemous, or whether it is really monosemous and semantically nonspecific between [EXTENT] and [ELEVATION], I shall not be tempted to discuss here (and, as far as I can tell, neither was Ruhl 1989). If the latter is the case, then I shall stipulate that in the cases in question in my arguments, I mean ‘tall’ in the [EXTENT] interpretation (not sense). But in one of its senses or in that interpretation, one needs to guarantee that if Brian is measurewise taller than John, then Brian is as tall as John, if one wishes to guarantee that there is an “analytical entailment” from Brian is [uniformly] taller than John to Brian is as tall as John. One would need a Carnapian Meaning Postulate for English ‘taller’ and ‘as tall as’: English (∀x)(∀y)(x is [measurewise] taller than y → x is as tall as y). (In the formalization that I have adopted: E (∀x)(∀y)((∀y*)(∃x*)(x* > y*) → (∀y*)(∃x*)(x* = y*)).) If one adopts that Meaning Postulate for English, then John is not quite/wholly as tall as Brian becomes analytically equivalent to Brian is [uniformly] taller than John; the former does not merely entail the latter. But entailment suffices for my argument. I have already defended proposition (a): saying John is almost as tall as Brian implicates John is not quite/wholly as tall as Brian. The further entailment proposition (d) that John is not quite/wholly as tall as Brian entails John is not as tall as Brian is intuitively evident, and my formal analysis predicts it. My explanation actually makes a confirmed linguistic prediction. (The entailment in (d) is equivalent to: Brian is as tall as John & Brian is [uniformly] taller than John entails John is not as tall as Brian. That obviously (and my analysis agrees) reduces to the question whether Brian is [uniformly]

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two relations a technical name—‘quasi-entailment’—whose relata are an assertion and a sentence (proposition). Thus the assertion John is almost as tall as Brian quasientails the sentence (proposition) ‘John is shorter than Brian’. (Do not forget that a quasi-entailment is not an entailment.)9 By contrast, the classical Gricean theorist explains this implicature as follows: (a) Saying John is almost as tall as Brian implicates John is not as tall as Brian; (b) saying John is not as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian; (c) therefore, by an assumption of transitivity, saying John is almost as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian.10 My interest particularly lies in the classical Gricean theorist’s provocative argument for (b): saying John is not as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian:

taller than John entails John is not as tall as Brian. My formal analysis confirms that the entailment holds.) The implicature from x is almost as F as y to x is not quite/wholly as F as y and the analytical entailment from x is not quite/wholly as F as y to x is not as F as y make the equative as F as similar to an achievement predicate G—for example, swam the English Channel. Thus we should expect to get sentences with modifiers like easily, and we do: John is easily as tall as Brian, John is within a hair’s breadth of being as tall as Brian. 9There is another possible explanation of the inference on the theory that I am offering, but it is not adequate, and the reasons for its inadequacy are of some theoretical interest, so I shall take the opportunity to mention it. One could argue: (a) Saying John is almost as tall as Brian implicates John is not quite as tall as Brian; (b) John is not quite as tall as Brian entails John is not as tall as Brian; (c) John is not as tall as Brian entails John is not as tall as Brian or Brian is not as tall as John; (d) John is not as tall as Brian or Brian is not as tall as John entails John is not exactly as tall as Brian; (e) saying John is not exactly as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian. So John is shorter than Brian is, loosely speaking, inferrable from saying John is almost as tall as Brian. There is nothing incorrect in the premises of this argument, and I have hedged the conclusion by the phrase “loosely speaking.” Nonetheless there are problems. The first problem is that premise (c) requires the classical “irrelevant” entailment from P to P ∨ Q. The entailment is classically valid but in this argument linguistically unmotivated. Premises (c) and (d) show that John is not as tall as Brian entails John is not exactly as tall as Brian, which is the intuitively acceptable, logically equivalent contrapositive of John is exactly as tall as Brian entailing John is as tall as Brian. The problem is that the linguistic, as contrasted with the purely logical, justification, for (c) lies nowhere to hand. Nothing independently motivates it; thus it would be better to reduce the argument to one in which (c) and (d) are replaced by one premise (cd) John is not as tall as Brian entails John is not exactly as tall as Brian. But there is a remaining problem. Premise (e) introduces the “saying” of John is not exactly as tall as Brian into an argument that proposes to explain why “saying” John is almost as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian. But in saying John is almost as tall as Brian one does not say (assert) John is not exactly as tall as Brian, even though the latter is entailed by an implicatum of the former, unless one goes in for an act of mentally asserting one of the entailments of an implicatum of a verbal assertion when one needs to generate a further implicatum—namely, that John is shorter than Brian. So if such an argument is to have psycholinguistic plausibility, one would have to explain why this particular entailment gets “mentally” asserted in order to yield the appropriate implicatum. That is a problem for which I have no, and expect no, good solution, at least in the immediate future. For further discussion of this sort of argument, see Horn (1996b), and Atlas (1996b, 1997b). 10Sadock writes: “I assume that conversational implicatures are ordinarily transitive; that if A conversationally B, and B conversationally implicates C, then A conversationally implicates C as well.[*]” He continues in his footnote, “[*] William Lycan (personal communication) has pointed out that there is no particular reason to expect conversational implicatures to be transitive. A conversational implicature, according to Grice, is generated on the basis of the fact that a particular linguistic form,


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Without the implicature [John] is not as tall as [Brian] would say only that [John] and [Brian] are not exactly the same height. This is not an especially interesting fact since two people chosen at random rarely are. Therefore implicatures are strongly favored with negative statements like [John] is not as tall as [Brian]. Furthermore, it is clear why the implicature of [John] is not as tall as [Brian] is that [John] is less tall than [Brian], rather than vice versa. The sentence is about [John]. It would clearly be saying more about [John] to say that his height was greater than [Brian’s] than to say that it was not greater. So by failing to say that [John] is taller than [Brian], the speaker of [John] is not as tall as [Brian] . . . conveys that [John] is not taller, via [Grice’s First] maxim of Quantity [”Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange”]. (Sadock 1981: 269)

Quite important in this argument, and unfortunately ignored in most classical Gricean arguments, is the question of topic—what a statement is about.11 However, the claim

with a particular meaning, is uttered. Since the first-order implicature is not uttered, we should not expect it to produce further conversational implicatures. Yet Grice himself talks at times as if it can. In discussing the effect of an abrupt change of topic in a conversation, following the remark ‘Mrs X is an old bag’, Grice writes: ‘B has blatantly refused to make what he says relevant to A’s preceding remark. He thereby implicates that A’s remark should not be discussed and, perhaps more specifically, that A has committed a social gaffe’ (Grice 1975a: 54). Here it is quite reasonable to suppose that the more specific implicature is a result of the conveyance of the more general one. After all, if B had changed the topic by saying That remark should not be discussed, the more specific implicature would also go through” (Sadock 1981: 269). From sympathy with Sadock and Grice I once tried to make out the case for the following kind of transitivity: P entails Q; Q presupposes R; R pragmatically implies T; so P pragmatically implies T. (I failed miserably, as William Harper, Rob van der Sandt, and Scott Soames pointed out to me.) But were this transitivity correct, the classical Gricean theorist’s analysis—saying x almost F’s asserts x almost F’s and implicates x does not F; saying x does not quite F asserts x does not F and presupposes x almost F’s—would be structurally absurd, no matter what the truth conditions x almost F’s of x almost F’s are. My argument was this: If x does not quite F means [X DOES NOT F], the former entails the latter. But by contraposition, satisfied by entailment, x F’s entails x quite F’s. If x does not quite F presupposes x almost F’s, by the invariance of presupposition under negation, x quite F’s presupposes x almost F’s. If asserting x almost F’s implicates x does not F, one says that the assertion-content x almost F’s “pragmatically implies” x does not F. It follows, by the transitivity in question, that x F’s pragmatically implies x does not F, which is obviously absurd. Still, the structure of the analysis does not seem all that absurd, so one suspects that the transitivity principle is incorrect, which indeed it is. For example, let P = Jonathan knew that Mart regretted that Laura seduced Jim or Rick, Q = Mart regretted that Laura seduced Jim or Rick, R = Laura seduced Jim or Rick, and T = Laura did not seduce both Jim and Rick. It is absurd that Jonathan knew that Mart regretted that Laura seduced Jim or Rick pragmatically implies Laura did not seduce both Jim and Rick, or so it seems to many. A simpler and clearer case is a counterexample to the transitivity schema P entails Q, Q pragmatically implies R; so P pragmatically implies R. Rob van der Sandt’s simple counterexample is: Let P = φ, Q = φ ∨ Ψ; R = ¬(φ & Ψ). My own objection to the principle of transitivity for implicatures is the following reductio ad absurdum argument: according to the principle, asserting some implicates not all; asserting not all implicates some; so, asserting some implicates some. And that is absurd. 11As I have emphasized in a study of cleft sentences undertaken with Stephen Levinson, topic and comment enter in an essential way into Gricean reasoning (Atlas and Levinson 1981; Atlas 1981, 1988, 1989, 1991a,b, 1993a, 1996b; Horn 1981a; chapter 4 and appendix 3 in this volume).

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that it would be saying more about John to say that he is taller than Brian rather than not taller is, taken literally, rather too unsurprising. Typically negatives are less informative than the corresponding affirmatives. The classical Gricean theorist begins his discussion of the implicatures of negative statements like John is not as tall as Brian from precisely this basic intuition. As far as this reasoning goes, one could equally well argue that it would be saying more about John to say that he is shorter than Brian rather than to say that he is not shorter. So, following this reasoning, by failing to say that John is shorter than Brian, the speaker of John is not as tall as Brian conveys that John is not shorter, via Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity. Thus saying John is not as tall as Brian, according to this reasoning, communicates John is taller than Brian, the intuitively incorrect inferendum. The earlier application of this reasoning yielded the implicatum John is shorter than Brian, the intuitively correct implicatum. As far as this reasoning goes, John is not as tall as Brian, when asserted, communicates both John is taller than Brian and John is shorter than Brian. This absurdity should be enough to make the good classical Gricean theorist question the use of Grice’s reasoning from the First Maxim of Quantity in the case of negative sentences. (This absurdity was first pointed out by Stephen Levinson; see Atlas and Levinson 1981 and chapter 3, section 1 in this volume). One might think that the question should not have been whether it would be saying more about John to say that he is more F than Brian rather than to say that he is not more F than Brian, since as we have just seen, tall and short are equally good substitutions for ‘F’ in the argument. The question should have been whether it would be saying more about John to say that he is taller than Brian rather than to say that he is shorter than Brian. This does strike me as the more provocative question; perhaps it is the question that the radical pragmatist intended to raise. Now, in what sense is it to say more about John to say that he is taller than Brian? Surely in no simple sense is there a greater quantity of information about John in John is taller than Brian than in John is shorter than Brian. As I have remarked, either would be more informative than the radical pragmatist’s interpretation of John is not as tall as Brian; Grice’s type of argument from his First Maxim of Quantity will absurdly justify both. However, the issue is not just information, it is orientation. Linguistic evidence, largely owed to J. R. Ross, suggests asymmetries in our ways of talking and thinking. Contrast, for example, bigger and better with ?better and bigger, fore and aft with ?aft and fore, more or less with ?less or more, down and out with ?out and down, That’s the long and short of it with ?That’s the short and long of it, up and down with ?down and up. Of the same family as up and down are peak and valley, rise and fall, over and under, high and low, above and below, ascending and descending, raise or lower, top and bottom. There is evidence that speakers have a general preference for stating a spatial relation between x and y as x is above y rather y is below x, or x is taller than y rather than y is shorter than x. Up also occurs more frequently as an affix, as do high and top: mountaintop/ ?mountainbottom; upstart/?downstart; highlight/?lowlight. Spatial terms also have


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wide metaphorical uses: He was in high/low spirits, His spirits rose/fell. Happiness is “up”; sadness is “down”: His income rose/fell last year, GDP is up/down this quarter, The number of papers Harman writes keeps going up. More is “up”; less is “down”: Things are looking up, He does high-quality work, His work went down last year. Good is “up”; bad is “down.” (See Cooper and Ross 1975, and Lakoff and Johnson 1980, to whom I owe the data of the preceding three paragraphs.) The important difference between John is taller than Brian and John is shorter than Brian is that tall is the unmarked, more frequently occurring item. When we ask a person’s height, we ask How tall is he?, not How short is he? The sentence John is as tall as Brian can be used to say what the classical Gricean, radical pragmatist takes it to mean literally: that John’s height is the same as Brian’s (Sadock 1981: 268). We could not use short with that understanding; John is as short as Brian “presupposes” Brian is short, but John is as tall as Brian does not “presuppose” Brian is tall.12 1.5 Post-Gricean semantics of the equative as F as There is some temptation by logical conservatives to take John is as tall as Brian to mean literally that John’s height is equal to or greater than Brian’s. There are a number of difficulties with this view. First, it would seem peculiar to say that John is as tall as John, where John is used coreferentially, means that John is identical in height to himself or taller than himself. Similarly, this analysis seems peculiar for A man is as good as his word, which does not, I suspect, mean that a man’s goodness is the same or greater than his word’s; or for a bump on his head as big as an egg, which does not mean a bump on his head whose size is the same or larger than the size of an egg. Second, if as tall as were paraphrased by at least as tall as, then John is as tall as, or at least as tall as, Brian would be redundant; but it isn’t. Third, the following pairs will distinguish between as tall as and at least as tall as: (a) x is as tall as y, if not taller/and perhaps taller and x is at least as tall as y, ?if not taller/??and perhaps taller. The first example x is as tall as y, if not taller/and perhaps taller offers a criticism not only of the account of meaning of x is as tall as y (which both the radical pragmatist and I reject) but also of the radical pragmatist’s own view. The force of this example was made manifest to me by the acceptability of the variant I know that x is as tall as y, and I suspect that he is taller.13 If x is as tall as y means x’s height is the same as y’s height, the assertion x is as tall as y, and perhaps taller would mean ?x’s height 12There are other important differences between as short as and as tall as. Contrast the paired items: x is at most as tall as y; ??x is at most as short as y; x is at least as tall as y, {?if not / ?and perhaps} taller; x is at least as short as y, {if not shorter / and perhaps shorter}. Consistent with my analysis of presupposition, I think that John is as short as Brian entails Brian is short but John is as tall as Brian does not entail Brian is tall. This is almost the only remark I shall make in this section that bears on the vexed question, Which is the correct semantical primitive, the relational predicate x is taller than y or the apparent one-place predicate x is tall? See subsection 1.5 and note 13 in this chapter. 13This example was suggested to me by Scott Soames as a criticism of the radical pragmatist’s view and as evidence for the claim that x is at least as tall as y and x is as tall as y express the same proposition. I


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is the same as y’s height and perhaps greater, which would imply ?x’s height is the same as y’s height, and perhaps not the same, a much odder remark than the acceptable x is as tall as y, and perhaps taller. Neither the logical conservative nor the radical pragmatist can account for the semantics of the expression. However, since as F as is a relation, we want a characterization of its logical structure. I have already mentioned the acceptable reflexivity of John is as tall as John. It is also obvious that transitivity holds: If John is as tall as Brian, and Brian is as tall as Mart, John is as tall as Mart. The relation is not symmetric. (a) The nonsymmetry is most obvious in the marked cases—in x is as short as y—which obviously does not entail y is as short as x.14 (b) The symmetry of x is as F as y would mean that x is as F as y entails y is as F as x; thus y is not as F as x entails x is not as F as y. Consider the sentence Atlas is not as handsome as Richard Chamberlain. If symmetry obtained, this would entail Richard Chamberlain is not as handsome as Atlas. Since the assumption of symmetry logically implies that a truth entails a falsehood, which is impossible, x is as F as y is not symmetrical. Another feature of x is as F as y worth remarking is the way in which y is a reference point for the comparison. Compare the items in the sequence <Jay is as strong as a mouse, Jay is as strong as a Welsh terrier, Jay is as strong as John, Jay is as strong as an ox, Jay is as strong as Hercules>. Negative cases can be relatively uninformative or relatively informative, depending on the reference point. On the classical Gricean, radical pragmatist’s view asserting Jay is not as tall as the tallest person in the world would implicate Jay is shorter than the tallest person in the world, which does not tell one very much about Jay’s height, except that he may be rather tall for all the speaker knows or believes. Similarly, an example like Jay is not as bald as a cue ball leaves it open that Jay may be rather bald. To accommodate (a) the acceptability of x is as F as y and perhaps F-er, (b) the transitivity, reflexivity, and nonsymmetry of x is as F as y, and (c) the role of y as a reference point for the comparison, I adopt an analysis of x is as F as y different from the radical pragmatist’s x’s F-ness is the same as y’s F-ness and from the logical conservative’s x is at least as F as y. My post-Gricean view is the following: Analysis. For unmarked, gradable F, x is as F as y means Whatever (measures of ) F-ness y has, x has also. Corollary. For unmarked, gradable F, x is not as F as y means Some (measure of ) F-ness that y has is not a (measure of ) F-ness that x has. It may be of heuristic value to give a simple model of this matter. Let the measures in question be identified with real numbers in the closed interval [a,b]. These measures

agree with the critical point and disagree with the logical conservative’s claim that [X IS AT LEAST AS is a reading of x is as tall as y. The schema x is as tall as y entails x is at least as tall as y, but not conversely. The importance of the example x is as tall as y if not taller was also emphasized by Morton White in conversation.

TALL AS Y]

14On

second thought, the invalidity of the contrapositive is more obvious.


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are thought of as measures m of F-ness that x has (abbreviated: HAS(x,u(F(u)),m)). Then we have the following formalizations: (1)

a. x is as F as y b. (∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) → (∃m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') & m' = m))15

(2)

a. x is not as F as y b. ¬(∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) → (∃m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') & m' = m))

where the variable m ranges over [a,b]. As I have already said, my notion of measures of F-ness is not a notion of the extent to which an individual x exemplifies the gradable predicate F(x). In the latter case it is natural to identify the extent of x’s tallness with x’s height. If the extent of John’s tallness is ej, and the extent of Brian’s tallness is eb, John’s height is the same as Brian’s if and only if ej = eb, and John is taller than Brian if and only if ej > eb. This is not my conception of measures of tallness. On the conception of extents, an individual exemplifies tall to a unique extent; on my conception of measures, an individual exhibits many measures of tallness. On the conception of extents, the extent to which an individual exemplifies tall is the individual’s height; on my conception of measures, the individual’s height is the least upper bound of the measures of tallness that the individual has: that is, x’s height = sup {m: HAS(x,u(T(u)),m)}. Of course, on my view, if an individual has measure m of tallness, he has measure m' if 0 < m' ≤ m. It is important to note that x has some measure m of tallness does not entail x is tall; ‘having tallness’ and ‘being tall’ are not the same concept. Confusion of the two has led to regrettable muddle about the semantic relationship between comparative and positive adjectives.16 On this model we have the following formalizations: (3)

a. x is exactly as F as y b. (∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) ↔ (∃m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') & m = m'))17

(4)

a. x is at least as F as y18 b. (∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) ↔ (∃m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') & m≤m'))

15Note

that this logical form is equivalent to the simpler (∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) → HAS(x,u(F(u)),m)).

16For

a case in point, notice the juxtaposition of sentences (1a) Sean is tall and (1b) How tall is Sean? and the discussion in Klein (1980: 1–4). The idea of extents is Pieter Seuren’s (1973). A related notion, degrees, is Max Cresswell’s (1976) and Ewan Klein’s (1980: 30). I fully agree with Klein’s remark that his notion of degrees does not “play any essential role in the interpretation of comparatives” (Klein 1980: 33). I shall criticize his proposed analysis in terms of comparison classes only briefly here (see note 19), since (a) whatever semantic analysis is proposed must account for the semantic relationships that I describe here, and (b) I am primarily concerned with the pragmatics rather than the best logical form of comparatives. All that said, I admit that I think that Klein’s construction of comparison classes is an awkward device. 17Note 18The

that this is equivalent to the simpler logical form (∀m)(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) ↔ HAS(x,u(F(u)),m))

adverbial at least in the relation at-least-as F as should be distinguished from the sentence modifier At least P, or P, at least.

168 (5)


a. y is F-er than x (x is ‘F -er than y, where ‘F is the relation converse to F) For example, y is taller than x is to be paraphrased: y is as tall as x, and y is uniformly taller than x, where ‘uniformly taller’ is a technical term, to be contrasted with ‘measure-wise taller’. The converse relation predicate ‘F is, in this example, ‘shorter’. Thus the representation of y is F-er than x is that of y is as F as x, and y is uniformly F-er than x. The logical form is: b. (∀m)[HAS(x,u(F(u)),m) → (∃m')(HAS(y,u(F(u)),m') & m' = m)] & (∃m)[HAS(y,u(F(u)),m) & (∀m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') → m > m')].

The reason for the first clause y is as F as x in the analysis of y is F-er than x is to ensure that even when the second technical clause y is uniformly F-er than x is true, according to which some measure of F-ness possessed by y exceeds any measure of F-ness possessed by x, y possesses lesser measures of F-ness that are possessed by x as well—F-ness lower down, so to speak. There is an interesting question of the range of substitutions for the relational symbol ‘F’ for which this constraint is true. If Brian is taller than John, it seems theoretically acceptable to say that Brian also has a measure of “tallness” that John has as well. If a chocolate cake is bigger than a chocolate cupcake, it seems intelligible to say that the former has a “bigness” (a size, lurking within it, so to speak) that the latter has as well. And if one mountain is higher than another, it seems plausible to say that the former also has a “highness” that the latter has as well. But if one airplane is higher (has greater altitude) than another, should we say that it also has a “highness” of the lower plane as well? “Highness,” which is not the same as altitude, is not an ordinary, commonsense property, so the question may be intuitively undecidable. But one’s intuitions seem to go against the last case. These intuitions suggest why Seuren’s (1973) analysis in terms of “extents” (distances or sizes) is so plausible, even though I am not adopting it here. I am adopting in my analysis a logically more basic notion, measures, the least upper bound of which is an extent. (See note 8 and note 19 in this chapter.) I have also adopted the technical notion “uniformly F-er” by contrast with “measure-wise F-er” to explicate the linguistic meaning of y is F-er than x: for example, y is taller than x. The rationale can best be seen by considering the converse relation predicate x is shorter than y. For example, when we judge that a rigid bar x is shorter in length than a rigid bar y, we lay one against another with an end of one coincident with the end of another, and we determine whether x’s other end is exceeded by y or not—whether some part of y fails to overlap every part of x. The same procedure holds for judging y is longer than x. As long as we wish a necessary equivalence between y is longer than x and x is shorter than y, I see no escape from this account. The concept logically weaker than “uniformly F-er” would be “measure-wise F-er,” where for each measure of F-ness that x has there is some measure of F-ness that y has, but not necessarily the same measure of y’s F-ness for all of the measures of x’s F-ness.19

19My

analysis differs from both Seuren’s (1973) and Klein’s (1980), which are, in my view, inaccurate. Seuren’s formalization would be, where e ranges over extents: (∃e)(y is tall to e & – x is tall to e).


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An alternate formalization can make these relationships more perspicuous. Let ‘x*F’ range over {m: HAS(x,u(F(u)),m)} and ‘y*F’ range over {m: HAS(y,u(F(u)),m)}. Suppressing the subscripts for the sake of cleanliness and quantifying over x’s and y’s measures of F-ness, we have the following: (6)

a. x is as F as y b. (∀y*)(∃x*)(x* = y*)

(7)

a. x is exactly as F as y b. (∀y*)(∃x*)(x* = y*) & (∀x*)(∃y*)(y* = x*)

(8)

a. x is at least as F as y b. (∀y*)(∃x*)(y* ≤ x*)

(9)

a. y is F-er than x, x is ‘F-er than y (y is as F as x & y is uniformly F-er than x) b. (∀x*)(∃y*)(y* = x*) & (∃y*)(∀x*)(y* > x*)

In the beginning of this section, I argued that x is as tall as y was synonymous with neither x’s height is the same as y’s height nor x is at least as tall as y, and so not ambiguous between them. I then claimed that an analysis of x is as F as y should reflect the role of y as point of comparison; the transitivity, reflexivity, and nonsymmetry of x is as F as y; and the acceptability of x is as F as y and possibly F-er/if not F-er, so x is as F as y should not entail x is not F-er than y. It is easy to see that the formalization (∀y*)(∃x*)(x* = y*) of x is as F as y shows it to be transitive, reflexive, and nonsymmetric. It is also obvious that the logical form of x is as F as y does not entail the logical form of x is not F-er than y. Finally, the order of the quantifiers in the logical form of x is as F as y indicates the role of y as a point of comparison. The analysis that I have proposed seems to account for the linguistic data as well or better than the alternatives, without making untenable claims of synonymy or ambiguity. It remains to deal with the questions of logical equivalence, entailment, and truth conditions and to examine the radical pragmatic analysis of x is almost as F

Klein’s formalization, where N ranges over Montaguvian functions taking, for example, the interpretation of tall into the interpretation of very tall, is similar: VN[N{^tall}(b) & – N{^tall}(a)]. Quite apart from the empty characterization of the range of values of N, typical of Montague grammar, Klein’s formula merely means that among the family of comparison classes of individuals with respect to which judgments of tallness are made, there is some comparison class relative to which b is tall, but a is not. I cannot decide whether this claim is merely a matter of metaphysical faith, but it is clear that in b is taller than a we are comparing b with a, and, unfortunately, that element is missing from Klein’s formalization. The work of comparing will have to be done by comparing the heights of individuals in Klein’s comparison classes. The formalization merely tells us that in some comparison class in which b is tall it is false that a is tall, not that some comparison class contains individuals taller than individuals in some other comparison class. We must add that information to Klein’s analysis for it to be adequate. But that relation among individuals, of course, is just what we were trying to analyze! Ironically, Klein (1980: 4) makes a related point against Cresswell (1976). For a recent discussion see Kennedy (2001).

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as y, x is not as F as y, and their implicatures in light of what we have learned about the logical form of x is as F as y. To those questions I now turn.20

20After I had developed my analysis of x is as F as y presented here and in an earlier version in Atlas (1984b), James McCawley brought to my attention the papers by Seuren (1973) and Klein (1980). I have disagreed with their accounts of x is taller than y (see note 19); there is a syntactical likeness, but a fundamental semantic difference, in Klein’s and my formalizations of x is as tall as y. (Contrast Klein’s (1980: 38) vN[N{^tall}(y) → N{^tall}(x)] with my (∀m)(HAS(y,u(Tall(u)),m) → (∃m')(HAS(x,u(F(u)),m') & m' = m)) and with my (∀y*)(∃x*)(x* = y*). Klein (1980: 38) incorrectly takes x is as tall as y to be equivalent to x is at least as tall as y and, incorrectly, either takes them to be synonymous (Klein 1980: 28) or takes the latter to express one sense of the former (Klein 1980: 29). Here I wish to consider data from Klein (1980) that bear on my analysis of x is as F as y. It has been observed that the following intuitively valid argument is linguistically in order (Klein 1980: 28):

(A)

Hussars must be at least six feet tall. John is a Hussar. So: John is six feet tall.

As expected, one may assert John is six feet tall, in fact he is six feet 2 inches without inconsistency. One would say the same of: (B)

Hussars must be at least six feet tall. John is a Hussar. Brian is as tall as John. So: Brian is six feet tall.

By contrast, in the following, McZ seems to be contradicting McY (Klein 1980: 29): (C)

McX: How tall is John? McY: Six feet tall. McZ: No, he’s six feet two inches tall.

The data in (A) and (B) suggest to some that John is six feet tall and Brian is as tall as John mean, respectively, John is at least six feet tall and Brian is at least as tall as John, where John is not more than six feet tall, or Brian is not taller than John, is only implicated, not entailed (e.g., Klein 1980: 38; see note 22 in this chapter). The data in (A), (B), and (C) together suggest to some that John is six feet tall and Brian is as tall as John are ambiguous between John is at least six feet tall and John is exactly six feet tall, or between Brian is at least as tall as John and Brian is exactly as tall as John (e.g., Klein 1980: 29). Since I have already argued that the expressions mean neither at least nor exactly, which are the views of the logical conservative and the radical pragmatist, respectively, a fortiori they are not ambiguous between them. On my analysis, (C) is understood differently from (A) and (B) because the question How tall is John? asks what John’s height is. McY’s answer, Six feet tall, means that six feet is the least upper bound of the measures of tallness that John has on our standard scale of inches and feet. Thus McZ’s statement that the least upper bound is six feet two inches is inconsistent with McY’s statement. In (A) Hussars must be at least six feet tall means that Hussars must be no shorter than six feet (tall). It follows that John is at least as tall as six feet (tall), which entails that John has a six feet tallness. So we properly conclude John is six feet tall, which means that John has that measure of tallness, which of course is consistent with his having a greater measure of tallness. The point is even clearer in (B). Brian is six feet tall is derivable from {Brian is as tall as John, John is six feet tall}—that is, from {Whatever tallness John has, so does Brian; John has a six feet tallness}. The analysis I have given seems to provide perfectly natural explanations of the linguistic acceptability of these arguments without appeal to dubious claims of synonymy and ambiguity (e.g., Klein 1980: 29, 38).


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1.6 Comparing the neo-Gricean and my post-Gricean views of equatives On the radical pragmatist’s view: a. b. c. d.

John is as tall as Brian means John’s height is the same as Brian’s. So, John is not as tall as Brian means John’s height is not the same as Brian’s. Asserting John is not as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian. Asserting John’s height is not the same as Brian’s implicates John is shorter than Brian.

One should observe that {a,b,c} entail a theoretical absurdity. The radical pragmatist takes John is as tall as Brian to be synonymous with John’s height is the same as Brian’s or John is exactly as tall as Brian. It then follows that (α) John is not as tall as Brian is synonymous with (β) Brian is not as tall as John.21 But on the view (c), asserting α implicates John is shorter than Brian; mutatis mutandis, asserting β implicates Brian is shorter than John. Thus the allegedly synonymous sentences α and β, when asserted, implicate incompatible statements. Since implicata are nondetachable from what is asserted, a difference between the generalized conversational implicata implies a difference in sense in what is asserted. One cannot maintain without absurdity that the quantity implicata of α and β are different—indeed, incompatible— while holding that α and β are synonymous. Thus {a,b,c} lead to absurd theoretical consequences. It is intuitively clear that John’s height is the same as Brian’s entails John is as tall as Brian. It also seems to me intuitively clear that John’s height is not the same as Brian’s does not entail John is not as tall as Brian; thus it does not seem contradictory to say John’s height is not the same as Brian’s, but John is as tall as Brian. So John is as tall as Brian does not entail John’s height is the same as Brian’s. In short, John’s height is the same as Brian’s (or John is exactly as tall as Brian) entails, but is not entailed by, John is as tall as Brian. Clearly, then, John is as tall as Brian cannot be synonymous with John’s height is the same as Brian’s; (a) and (b) are false. On the view that I outlined in subsection 1.5, for an unmarked F in an equative relation, x is as F as y means Whatever F-ness y has, x has also. The intuitive facts just noted are: x’s height is the same as y’s x is exactly as tall as y

⇓ ⇑ x is as tall as y These are an immediate consequence of my analysis. α and β are synonymous since α means John’s height is not the same as Brian’s and ß means Brian’s height is not the same as John’s; those are synonymous.

21Sentences

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It also seems intuitively clear that John’s height is not the same as Brian’s entails John is not as tall as Brian or Brian is not as tall as John; this intuitive fact is also predicted by my analysis. Given this fact, we can easily prove that John is exactly as tall as Brian is logically equivalent to John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John. This is an intuitively satisfying result. The proof is this: since John’s height is not the same as Brian’s entails John is not as tall as Brian or Brian is not as tall as John, it follows by contraposition (i) that (γ) John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John entails (δ) John’s height is the same as Brian’s. Since identity is symmetric, and since x’s height is the same as y’s entails x is as tall as y, it follows (ii) that (δ) John’s height is the same as Brian’s entails (γ) John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John. Thus by (i) and (ii), γ ⇒ δ ⇒ γ. So γ ⇔δ. And: x’s height is the same as y’s x is exactly as tall as y ⇓ ⇑ x is as tall as y and y is as tall as x ⇓ ⇑ x is as tall as y

As far as (c) is concerned, the anomaly of ?John is not as tall as Brian and/but John is not shorter than Brian suggests that John is not as tall as Brian entails, rather than its assertion implicating, John is shorter than Brian. Conversely, it is intuitively clear that John is shorter than Brian entails John is not as tall as Brian. These data are predicted by my analysis. Thus, the radical pragmatist’s (c) is false. I have argued that John’s height is the same as Brian’s (or John is exactly as tall as Brian) entails, but is not entailed by, John is as tall as Brian. What moves some of us to think that there is logical equivalence, or, stronger, synonymy, between these sentences? The explanation is that asserting John is as tall as Brian implicates John’s height is the same as Brian’s—that is, John is exactly as tall as Brian. This implicature is not an inference from Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity but is an underlying instance of conditional perfection (Geis and Zwicky 1971), the implicature from John has a tallness m if Brian does to John has a tallness m if, and only if, Brian does.22 If John and Brian have the same measures of tallness, then John’s height is the same as Brian’s, and conversely. This implicature explains Sadock’s observation (Sadock 1981: 268) that John is as tall as Brian “could be used to mean” that John and Brian are the same height. So far, then, we have: x’s height is the same as y’s x is exactly as tall as y ⇓ ⇑ x is as tall as y and y is as tall as x ⇓ ⇑ x is as tall as y 22See

example (101) in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 33) and discussion in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 44). The explanation of this implicature rests on a post-Gricean Maxim of Relativity and Principle of Informativeness, which includes the language user’s knowledge of stereotypes (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40–41). See chapter 3 in this volume.


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and: y is taller than x (x is shorter than y) ⇓ ⇑ x is not as tall as y

As I shall argue in section 5.7 that (d) is true, my analysis implies the relationships exhibited in tables 5.1 and 5.2.23 My post-Gricean analysis explains the errors of the radical pragmatist and the logical conservative. Those who take x is as tall as y to be synonymous with x is exactly as tall as y and those who take x is as tall as y to be synonymous with x is at least as tall as y make two errors. X is as tall as y and x is at least as tall as y are not even logically equivalent. X is exactly as tall as y and x is as tall as y also fail to be logically equivalent; they are interpolated by the nonequivalent x is as tall as y and y is as tall as x. My analysis also explains the air of semi-redundancy in asserting John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John. The at-least-as-tall-as view of the meaning of as tall as will not explain this semi-redundancy, since the sentence would mean John’s height is equal to or greater than Brian’s and Brian’s height is equal to or greater than John’s. That account of meaning imputes to the original sentence too little redundancy; one clause does not even entail the other, although the two together entail the correct truth conditions. The radical pragmatist’s view of the meaning of as tall as will not explain this semi-redundancy either, since the sentence would then mean

TABLE

—»

5.1. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Equatives x’s height is the same as y’s x is exactly as tall as y ⇓

⇑

x is as tall as y and y is as tall as x ⇓

⇑

x is as tall as y ⇓

⇑

y is not taller than x (x is not shorter than y) ⇓

⇑

x is at least as tall as y Entailment from lower to higher: ⇑, Entailment from higher to lower: ⇓, Implicature:—»

23Sadock

(1981: 269–70) claims that asserting x is not exactly as F as y does not implicate x is ‘F-er than y; thus asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian does not implicate John is shorter than Brian. What Sadock seems to deny is just what I seem to hold in (d). The resolution of the apparent conflict is that Sadock interprets not exactly as inexactly/approximately. Obviously that is not the interpretation that I intend. For pointing out errors in the versions of tables 1 and 2 in Atlas (1984a), I am grateful to Elizabeth Staegemann at the Second European Summer School on Language, Logic, and Information, University of Leuven, Belgium, August 1990. I have corrected the views of Atlas (1984a) in this section.

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5.2. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Negative Equatives TABLE

—»

x is not at least as tall as y ⇓

⇑

y is taller than x (x is shorter than y) ⇓

⇑

x is not wholly/quite as tall as y ⇓

⇑

x is not as tall as y ⇓

⇑

x is not as tall as y or y is not as tall as x ⇓

⇑

x is not exactly as tall as y x’s height is not the same as y’s

John’s height is the same as Brian’s and Brian’s height is the same as John’s. That account of the meaning imputes to the original sentence too much redundancy or repetition. My view explains just the right amount of redundancy. Asserting John is as tall as Brian implicates John’s height is the same as Brian’s. That implicatum followed by . . . and Brian is as tall as John is redundant, since the implicatum John’s height is the same as Brian’s means Brian’s height is the same as John’s, which entails Brian is as tall as John. Thus the second clause “partially reinforces” the implicatum of the first clause. Among these views my post-Gricean pragmatic analysis is the only one compatible with a simple linguistic fact: x is as tall as y, x is at least as tall as y, and x is exactly as tall as y are three distinct expressions of English whose different words make different contributions to their meanings. It is prima facie incredible that the meaning of one should be identical to that of another. I have tried to show the inadequacies of any such view—those of the logical conservative and the radical pragmatist.24

24It

is possible to be a hybrid, the conservative pragmatist. Such a theorist—for instance, Horn, E. Klein, and perhaps Levinson and Gazdar—would hold that x is as tall as y is not only logically equivalent to but also synonymous with x is at least as tall as y. The conservative pragmatist makes the further claims that asserting x is as tall as y implicates x is not taller than y, via Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity, and that the occurrence of at least in x is at least as tall as y cancels that implicatum. It is realized that this claim entails the curious consequence that nondetachability cannot be a necessary condition of conversational implicature, since the occurrence of at least, which cancels the implicatum, queerly detaches it as well (see Sadock 1978). (On my view, asserting x is as tall as y implicates x is exactly as tall as y, which self-evidently entails x is not taller than y—a straightforward process.) His view does not account for the implicature of John is shorter than Brian by asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian (see section 1.7). It does not explain the role of y as a reference point for the comparison in x is as tall as y. Lastly, it does not satisfactorily explain the semi-redundancy of John is as tall as Brian and Brian is as tall as John. For these reasons I am not yet convinced that the conservative pragmatist has an adequate theory, but I shan’t expound my criticism further here. (See Horn 1981b.)


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1.7 Post-Gricean pragmatic inference The radical pragmatist takes John is not as tall as Brian to mean John’s height is not the same as Brian’s, the assertion of the former allegedly implicating John is shorter than Brian. But if the former only entails the latter, as I hold, the sentence John is not as tall as Brian in question in the radical pragmatist’s argument, in section 1.4, should be John is not exactly as tall as Brian, and the implicature (b), section 1.4, “saying John is not as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian,” allegedly explained (Sadock 1981: 269) by the radical pragmatist’s argument, should be instead: saying John is not exactly as tall as Brian implicates John is shorter than Brian. John’s being taller than Brian, rather than John’s being shorter than Brian, would be the unmarked, preferred, stereotypical ground for asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian.25 If John’s being taller were the speaker’s ground, it would have been uncooperative of him to have asserted the less informative, negative sentence John is not exactly as tall as Brian than the sentence John is taller than Brian. From the fact that the speaker did not assert the briefer, more informative, psychologically preferred John is taller than Brian, the hearer infers that, because he or she is assumed to be cooperative in the conversation, the speaker was in no position to make that assertion, or at least that as far as the speaker knows or believes, John is not taller than Brian. The speaker’s best reason for not saying John is taller than Brian would be the speaker’s knowledge or belief that it is false.26 In light of what the speaker says, the hearer infers that John is not taller than Brian, or at least that the speaker does not know or believe that John is taller than Brian. The former, combined with what the speaker says, allows the hearer to infer John is shorter than Brian, which the radical pragmatist, unjustifiably on the principles of his own theory, takes to be implicated by asserting John is not exactly as tall as Brian—that is, by asserting John’s height is not the same as Brian’s. Grice’s reasoning, from what it would have been informative to say but the speaker did not say, does not distinguish between the two grounds for saying John is not exactly as tall as Brian: (a) John is taller than Brian; (b) John is shorter than Brian. However, it is crucial in the reasoning just sketched that users of the language “know,” as part of their background presumption in the conversation, that the first ground would be the psychologically preferred ground for the assertion. And if it were true, there would be a clear preference for asserting it instead of the negative sentence John is not exactly as tall as Brian. My analysis also avoids the following absurdity. Suppose the speaker asserted John is not exactly as short as Brian. If that meant literally that John’s height is not the same as Brian’s, then by my previous pragmatic reasoning, and in general from the argument that shows that conversational implicata are nondetachable from what is asserted, asserting John is not exactly as short as Brian would implicate John is shorter than

25It is now relevant to quote again the first sentence of the radical pragmatist’s argument, discussed in section 1.4: “Without the implicature [John] is not as tall as [Brian] would say only that [John] and [Brian] are not exactly the same height” (my emphasis). 26It is a “best” reason insofar as we are concerned with an information-exchange language game, as we are in discussing Grice (1975a,b).

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Brian. But that would be absurd. This absurdity does not arise on my post-Gricean account because John is not exactly as short as Brian does not literally mean John’s height is not the same as Brian’s (see section 1.4 and note 12 in this chapter). Stephen Levinson and I (Atlas and Levinson 1981) have characterized the interpretation of utterances in light of cognitive biases by what we call Conventions of Noncontroversiality—the language user’s common knowledge that “up” is better than “down” and that tallness is “up,” shortness is “down.” These are stereotypes that we use uncritically in the interpretation of utterances. It is essential to the explanation of the hearer’s reasoning that it considers both the truth conditions of the statement made and its various assertibility conditions, concerning which cognitive biases will operate. Some assertibility conditions are distinguishable from others by cultural and psychological preferences. This should not surprise us, as it is the nature of assertibility conditions to have such connections, unlike realistically interpreted truth conditions, or possible states of affairs. Assertibility conditions are an essential part of what a language-user knows when he or she knows the use of words and sentences in his or her language.27 When we revise the Gricean account of pragmatic inference by refining its maxims of conversation, supplementing it by Conventions of Noncontroversiality (e.g., truisms about stereotypes), and inferences from utterances to their “best” interpretations, we avoid the absurdities that the classical radical pragmatist’s Gricean inference sketch engendered (see Atlas and Levinson 1981). 1.8 Summary of the analysis Conversational implicata are predictable from a Gricean Horn Scale of degree (1972/ 1976) and approximative adverbials, , where mostly means for the most part/mainly/more than half; almost means for the greatest ( proper) part; and quite is polysemous: (i) wholly, (ii) rather. For gradable F, x does not F entails x does not quite F; for accomplishment and achievement predicates G, x did not quite G entails x did not G. Given the scale of adverbials, saying x almost F’s implicates x does not quite F. Saying x does not quite F implicates x almost F’s. For accomplishment and achievement predicates G, an analytical entailment of the implicatum of x almost G’s (namely, of x does not quite G) is x does not G. Thus “x almost G’s” ° » x does not G, for accomplishment and achievement predicates ‘G’. For unmarked F in a comparative similarity (equative) relation expressed by x is as F as y—for example, x is as tall as y, x is as F as y means Whatever (measures of ) F-ness y has, x has also. The proper account of the pragmatics of degree and approximative adverbials with comparative similarity (equative) expressions requires a coherent inference sketch, and that in turn requires post-Gricean Conventions of Noncontroversiality: common knowledge of stereotypes, cognitive preference for some assertibility (not truth) conditions to others, the use of first-person-based (egocentric) concepts of spatial orientation, and metaphorical extensions of those concepts. Those are the contributions of the post-Gricean pragmatics that I present in this book. 27For

a discussion of the relation between knowledge of use and the lexical meaning of expressions, see Atlas (1975a, 1978b, 1979, 1989). See also Dummett (1979).


(10)

177

a. Horn Scale = . b. For gradable F, x does not F x does not quite F. c. For gradable accomplishment and achievement predicates G, x did not quite G x did not G. d. For gradable F, (i) “x almost F’s” » x does not quite F and (ii) “x does not quite F ” » x almost F’s e. Hence, for gradable accomplishment and achievement predicates G, “x almost G’s” ° » x does not G. f. For equatives, “x is almost as F as y” » x is not quite as F as y; “x is not quite as F as y” » x is almost as F as y; “x is almost as F as y” ° » x is not as F as y.

2 Comparative adjectives and the semanticspragmatics interface Levinson (1988b, 2000: 199–205) discusses an example of Deirdre Wilson’s (1975: 151): (11)

Driving home and drinking three beers is better than drinking three beers and driving home.

If, in Gricean fashion, and is taken to be the truth-functional connective &, (11) would have the form: (12)

α & β is better than β & α,

where & is a symmetric connective and α and β are nominalizations of the sentences x drives home and x drinks three beers. If A & B is logically equivalent to B & A, which it is, then it seems that (12) must, trivially, be false. But, intuitively, one wants to say that (11) is true. The Atlas and Levinson (1981) explanation of its truth would be that the use of and Informativeness-implicates and then in statement (11) (see chapter 3 in this volume). Then the “total signification” of an utterance of (11) would be: (13)

Driving home and then drinking three beers is better than drinking three beers and then driving home.

This proposition could be true. This phenomenon suggests that the assignment of truth conditions that make (11) contingently true or false rather than necessarily false depends on the implicata of the statement’s parts. This Levinson (1988b) dubs “pragmatic intrusion” (Gazdar 1980; Carston 1988). Of course, this example is contentious, since and might be polysemous among [&], [& THEN], and so on, rather than univocal, as in Grice’s view. We need to find examples of “pragmatic intrusion” that are not so contentious. Parenthetically, it might be worth mentioning that there is a tendency to think that the reinterpretation of and as [& THEN] is sufficient to repair the trivial falsity of

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(11). This is evidently false for the statement in (14): (14)

Driving home and drinking no beers is better than drinking no beers and driving home.

This trivial falsity will not be repaired by the paraphrase in (15): (15)

Driving home and then drinking no beers is better than drinking no beers and then driving home,

This still amounts to: (16)

Driving home is better than driving home.

Levinson (1988: 26) suggests as an example of intrusion: (17)

Eating some of the cake is better for my health than eating all of it.

Levinson alleges that this statement is, on its literal reading, necessarily false, since that I eat all of the cake entails that I eat some of the cake, and so the allegedly less preferable state of affairs guarantees the more preferable state of affairs. So how could it be less preferable? If Levinson were right, one way out of the trivial falsity of (17) would be to use the First Maxim of Quantity implicatum not all of the cake, as in: (18)

Eating some but not all of the cake is better for my health than eating all of it.

This is an interesting example, and it certainly avoids the problems with and of example (11). The trouble is that Levinson’s argument in favor of the “nonsensicality” of (17) is simply not plausible. The phrase ‘better than’ creates an intensional, not an extensional, context: that is one complication. Thus it makes perfectly good sense to say, and it could be true so far as I know even though, necessarily, a Euclidean triangle is equiangular if and only if it is equilateral: (19)

Being equiangular is better than being equilateral.

Levinson (1988b: 26, 2000: 201–2) thinks that the comparative relations are necessarily irreflexive, but the cases he has in mind are the simple, extensional relations between individuals, such as: (20)

??John is taller than himself.

Levinson’s examples have used nominalized sentences or nominalized predicate phrases, not names or singular terms. The complexity of intensional contexts aside, Levinson’s argument that there could not be a state of affairs that necessitated another state of affairs more preferable than it is simply not convincing. It is perfectly obvious that:


(21)

179

Eating some of the cake is better for my health than eating some of the cake and drinking arsenic.

This statement is not false and is not “nonsensical,” yet the latter state of affairs guarantees the former and, on Levinson’s account, (21) should be false or “nonsensical.” The same goes for both (22) and (23): (22)

Being short or fat is better than being short and fat.

(23)

Being married to someone is better than being married to everyone.

On similar grounds, Levinson marks the sentences in (24) as anomalous, but it is precisely the semantical nonspecificity of the predicates in the subject phrase that permits these sentences to be acceptable, contrary to Levinson’s acceptability judgments, but just as Horn’s (1984b) Division of Labor predicts. In the interpretation of sentence (24a), vehicle tends to take on the reference of the complement of car within the domain of vehicles by a First Maxim of Quantity implicatum [the speaker did not say car, so he did not mean car; he meant a non-car vehicle] , and it is precisely the generality of a word like vehicle that permits its literal understanding to be so easily narrowed by the action of implicatural inferences: (24)

a. Having a vehicle is better than having a car. b. Having a child is better than having a boy.

Levinson’s efforts to demonstrate the necessity of “pragmatic intrusion” from First Maxim of Quantity implicata in order to preserve the felicity of the comparative better than seem to me to fail, while the acceptable (24), which on his incorrect analysis of comparatives with better than he takes to be semantically anomalous, does show the effect of implicatural narrowing. What is not shown is that only the effect of implicata saves the literal interpretation from trivial falsehood or a logical contradiction. This is a major problem for Levinson’s argument, since he wishes to claim that only an implicated interpretation can save such statements from an alleged semantical anomaly or necessary falsehood of a kind that I have shown does not, in fact, exist. A better attempt might be his cases of Atlas and Levinson (1981) informativeness (I)-inferenda, such as (25) (not one of Levinson’s own examples): (25)

John and Inma being married is less probable than John being married and Inma being married.

The I-inferendum of the first phrase is John and Inma being married to each other and statistically, for randomly chosen John and Inma, (25) is presumably true. Harnish (1976: 328) argued that expressions like x and y are married were not ambiguous between x and y are married to each other and x is married to someone and y is married to someone. I am sympathetic to Harnish’s claim, but I can easily imagine that anyone who took and to be polysemous could just as well take these expressions to be polysemous. So I find Levinson’s confidence that these sorts of examples are

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more compelling than the and cases misplaced. If the univocality claim can be sustained, then, literally, (25) would be paraphrasable by (26): (26)

John being married and Inma being married is less probable than John being married and Inma being married.

This would be a trivially false statement. So it does seems that the natural interpretation of (25) and the natural assignment of truth-value to it rely on the contribution of the I-inferendum of a “part” to the interpretation of the “whole.” Perhaps an example of another I-inferendum with less chance of an ambiguity analysis would add more plausibility to Levinson’s (2000: 201) thesis; for example: (27)

Hammering the nail into the wood is safer than hammering the nail some way into the wood.

The I-inferendum hammering the nail all the way into the wood, like “eating the apple” conveying eating the whole apple (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 36), suggests a nontrivial, true, inferred interpretation rather than an underdeterminate, not false, “literal” reading of (27). The semantical underdeterminacy of into the wood makes underdeterminate what proposition a token of (27) is expressing and therefore what truth-value the token possesses in various states of affairs. There is simply no answer to the question, “How far into the wood does the nail have to be to be into the wood?” (except the answer: a non-zero distance). Theorists like Leech (1974) and Récanati (1989, 1993), unlike myself, tend to treat hammering the nail into the wood as meaning hammering the nail some way into the wood. This makes the literal meaning of (27) anomalous, having the form α is safer than α. My analysis, that (27) is literally underdeterminate but has as a default interpretation Hammering the nail all the way into the wood is safer than hammering the nail some way into the wood, which, in turn, has a Gricean implicatum, Hammering the nail all the way into the wood is safer than hammering the nail some but not all the way into the wood, is consistent with the linguistic judgments we make. Levinson had hoped to show that there were cases of the form α is F-er than β in which α is entailed by, but not necessarily logically equivalent to or synonymous with, β, where the trivial falsity or semantical anomaly of the literal interpretation of the statement is repaired by an implicated interpretation. Unfortunately, this hope is unfulfilled in Levinson’s examples, since the entailment of α by β does not produce the semantic anomaly that Levinson expects, and there is no dramatic repair for an implicated interpretation to make. The implicated interpretation is not required to rescue the literal interpretation from infelicity. The upshot is that the only example free from contentious dispute about ambiguity or about synonymy is example (27) in Levinson (2000: 201). That example is complex, because for the literal, underdeterminate sense of the first phrase its possible entailment by the second phrase is not well defined until a specific interpretation is given to it. But that complexity suffices to make an important point: that although Gricean implicata are not necessary to save a statement from semantical anomaly or logical falsehood, informativeness inferenda are sometimes required to


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transform a semantically underdeterminate sense of a sentence-type into a semantically specific sentence-token to which it becomes possible to assign truth or falsity in light of the facts. Levinson thought that “pragmatic intrusion” meant that the truth condition of the whole is a function of the truth-conditions of the implicated parts. That is not only what it means. It more importantly means that whether the whole has truth conditions at all depends on whether the informativeness inferenda add their content to the meaning of the whole: the thesis is that the truth-evaluable meaning of the whole is a function of the meanings of the inferred or implicated parts. Ironically, the failure of Levinson’s examples to make a satisfactory case for the modest neo-Gricean thesis about the contribution of Gricean implicata to truth conditions (Katz 1972; Walker 1975) shows the importance of the latter post-Gricean thesis about the contributions of the contents of Informativeness inferenda to the literal meaning of the sentence (Atlas 1979).28

3 Philosophical consequences: Semantic atomism, holism, and corporatism The semanticists who think that almost VP analytically entails not VP typically do so because they view the meaning of ‘almost’ as “containing” the meaning of ‘not’, in the familiar metaphor in which the meaning of ‘bachelor’ “contains” the meaning of ‘male’. This commits such theorists to an analytic/synthetic distinction for expressions, but I agree with the view of Putnam (1983b), and later Fodor and LePore (1992), that what Quine (1980a) showed in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and White (1950) showed in “The Analytic/Synthetic: An Untenable Dualism” was that a semantical distinction between sentences cannot be reconstructed from a (nonexistent) epistemological distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Quine’s arguments do not show that there is no usable distinction between the analytic and synthetic to be drawn in linguistic theory—a point that Jerry Katz (1990: 184–94) has insisted on for many years. If there were an analytic entailment from almost to not, which there actually is not, then the explanation of speaker’s intuitions about the inferences they make from almost sentences to not sentences would appeal to linguistic knowledge of that analytical entailment from almost to not without appealing to facts about all inferences that speakers of English could make; the explanation is semantically non-holistic. Thus an analytical entailment from almost to not would make the linguistic world safe for semantical non-holism: atomism (Fodor and LePore 1992: 32–35) or molecularism (Dummett 1981: 599–600; Fodor and LePore 1992: 22–23). It is an interesting sociological fact that at a time during which almost all philosophers of language and mind were meaning holists of one stripe or another, lexi28The

thesis of “pragmatic intrusion,” in the defensible “sense” version just described, was first articulated in Atlas (1979). Variants of it now exist in the views of the London School influenced by Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance Theory (see Sperber and Wilson 1986b; Kempson 1986, 1988a; Carston 1988; Blakemore 1992; and Récanati 1989, 1993). See also Atlas (1979, 1989: 62–64).

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cal and formal semanticists of natural language remained committed to an analytic/ synthetic distinction and so to meaning non-holism. As Fodor and LePore (1992: 32) asked in 1992, “Why is almost everyone a meaning holist?” The analysis of almost inferences that I have given in this chapter, and gave in a slightly different form in Atlas (1984a), permit a reformulation of the question to “Why is anyone a meaning holist?” An explanatorily adequate linguistic theory must reject meaning holism as an empirically unsatisfactory position. What are the commitments of the kind of explanation that I have offered here for inferences among adverbials? First, I have relied on analytical entailments among adverbial predicate and sentence expressions in a language; for example, John is not wholly as tall as Brian analytically entails John is not as tall as Brian, and upon lexical relations underlying the analytical entailment from John is taller than Brian to Brian is shorter than John.29 Second, I have relied on implicatures among assertions of sentence expressions in a language. The mechanism of implicature requires that there be lexical Horn and Levinson Scales of lexical items from the language, like the adverbial scale discussed in this chapter, in order for there to be adequate explanations of utterance-interpretation. That is, a speaker of English must know that almost belongs to such a scale, and hence that almost bears a special semantic relation, not to every word in the language but to an identifiable finite set of adverbial expressions whose semantical relations to each other in the scale are known to competent speakers. And every language will possess such sets of kinds of expressions. The actual linguistic relationship between almost VP and not VP, for a certain class of VPs, shows that it is not required that every inferential relationship among sentences containing occurrences of almost VP and not VP be representable by a componential analysis or a meaning postulate of the kind found in idealized dictionaries or in the philosophical writings of semantic atomists, whether mentalistic or behavioristic. It shows that an explanatorily efficacious metalinguistic concept of a lexical scale, if it is to be psychologically realistic, imputes to a speaker the linguistic knowledge that an expression has the property of belonging to a natural linguistic kind—of being an element of a Horn or Levinson Scale. But it shows that that property may be enough to explain some inferences that on the face of them seem to be analytical entailments, such as almost VP to not VP. Thus we have replaced a purely atomistic account of the meaning of utterance-types, one in which [NOT] is a component of [ALMOST] and so justifies an analytic conditional If . . . almost . . . then . . . not . . . by a more “corporatist” (White 1981: 17–23, 1986) account that is not yet holistic. Besides the non-holism implied by the explanatory use of analytical entailments, it is clear that some semantical meta-properties, like belonging to a particular scale, are an-atomic in Fodor and LePore’s (1992: 1) sense: a property is an-atomic just in case if anything has it, at least one other thing does. (Non-an-atomic properties are atomic properties, by definition.) But the implied competence in the language is “cor29Chomsky

(1996c: 52) has recently remarked that “Among the intrinsic semantic relations that seem well-established on empirical grounds are analytic connections among expressions.”


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poratist” not holistic, since the speaker must grasp the semantic relations—the entailment relations—among almost, quite, not, and nearly within a finite set of lexemes that belong to a scale. But in order to do this, the speaker does not need to grasp entailment relations holding between all expressions in the language. Nor does the competent speaker need to grasp every linguistic kind or every “projectible” (Goodman 1983) semantical predicate that relates meaningful words, phrases, or sentences in the language to understand one lingustic kind or one “projectible” semantical predicate; his or her understanding of the meaning of the semantical metalanguage is not holistic. And if the speaker’s understanding of the metalanguage is not holistic, and the metalanguage contains a translation of the object language, it would be bizarre to think that an understanding of the predicates of the metalanguage would be non-holistic but an understanding of the relata of those predicates (the other expressions of English) must be holistic. Pragmatic inference is not directly represented in the meanings of the terms, neither as a result of derivational rules operating on the formal representations of the meanings of the words, as in formal logical implications, nor as a result of derivations from meaning postulates (even though generative semanticists and discourse representation theorists and discourse semanticists have tried to put it there). Implicatural and inferendal inference does require that a speaker understand the more global property that a term possesses by virtue of belonging to a lexical scale, a natural linguistic kind, and thus its relations to the other lexical items of the scale. Hence, it is clearly possible—since it is actual—that inferences that might have been solely explained by analytical entailments, and lexically based, might be better explained by lexical scales and inferenda and implicata combined with semantic and analytical entailments. Conversely, a language in which an inference is a composition of inferendal or implicatural relations with an entailment relation could possibly become a language in which an inference is solely explained by an analytical entailment, through conventionalization, lexicalization, and grammaticalization (Horn 1984b, 1989: 260– 62; Hopper and Traugott 1993). If the data to be explained are intuitive inferences from one utterance-type to another utterance-type, there are systematic reasons for preferring an entailment analysis or preferring a generalized inferendal or implicatural analysis, depending on which best explains the range of linguistic data (e.g., the latter in the case of almost). If one takes the phenomena of generalized conversational inferenda and implicata seriously, one cannot escape an explanation that makes essential use of lexical meaning, and hence a semantical distinction between the analytic and synthetic, and essential use of an-atomic semantic properties, like belonging to a particular Horn or Levinson Scale of lexical items. Meaning holism is inadequate if, as has been argued (Fodor and LePore 1992), it is inconsistent with a principled distinction between the analytic and synthetic, which is required by the explanatory use of analytical entailment in linguistic explanation; semantical atomism is inadequate if it is inconsistent with the essential use in linguistic explanation of an-atomic semantic properties, which are required by linguistic explanation of generalized conversational inferenda and implicata. Linguistic explanation requires the philosophically unexciting middle ground—semantic molecularism or semantic corporatism. Thus ordinary science

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deflates the views of the exciting philosophical extremes, as Quine (1960: 15–16) and Rorty (1979: 319), where philosophical battles are typically fought: on the margins of science. If philosophy of science is philosophy enough, as Quine once remarked, philosophy of linguistics is philosophy of language enough. Neither atomism alone nor holism alone has any explanatory value for empirical linguistic theory. They are both mere philosophical conceits.

6

The Third Linguistic Turn and the Inscrutability of Literal Sense

1 The problem of numerical adjectives Just at the time that the classical 1967 Gricean program received its canonical form and application in linguistics—in the radical pragmatics of Jerrold Sadock’s (1978) “On Testing for Conversational Implicature” and his (1981) elegant essay “Almost”— the neo- and post-Gricean programs began. One began in London with a lecture by Atlas (1978a), as well as in three essays: Atlas (1978b, 1979) and Atlas and Levinson (1981). The latter—“It-Clefts, Informativeness, and Logical Form: An Introduction to Radically Radical Pragmatics (Revised Standard Version)”—appeared in the same volume in which Sadock’s “Almost” essay appeared. That was followed by Atlas (1984a), “Comparative Adjectives and Adverbials of Degree: An Introduction to Radically Radical Pragmatics”; Horn (1984b), “Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature”; Levinson (1987a), “Minimization and Conversational Inference”; Levinson (1987b), “Pragmatics and the Grammar of Anaphora”; Horn (1989), A Natural History of Negation; Levinson (1991), “Pragmatic Reduction of the Binding Conditions Revisited”; Horn (1993), “Economy and Redundancy in a Dualistic Model of Natural Language”; Huang (1994), The Syntax and Pragmatics of Anaphora; and Levinson (2000) Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicatures. (Another departure from the classical Gricean program also began in London with the 1981 essay of Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, “On Grice’s Theory of Conversation,” leading eventually to the Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson 1986b.)

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There is another irony in that just as Sadock formulated the problematic for the classical Gricean approach in his lecture “Whither Radical Pragmatics?” at the Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics in 1984, Horn offered at the Round Table his “Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature,” which reformulated Atlas and Levinson (1981) and gave one compelling answer to the question in Sadock’s title. In his lecture Sadock discussed two types of pragmatic views, the Gricean and the discourse-functional. In what follows I discuss the Gricean example of what he called ‘excessive pragmatism’, other examples that he listed being my (1977b), Kempson and Cormack (1981), and his own Sadock (1975). Although I do not think that my (1977b) essay was excessive, and I defended the view more fully in Atlas (1989), I do think that some Gricean analyses have been excessive in their reduction of semantic properties to Gricean properties—Sadock’s (1981) own analysis of almost F and Horn’s (1992b, 1996b) analysis of Only Muriel voted for Hubert, for example. But it is instructive to consider Sadock’s example of “excessive pragmatism.” Saddock (1984: 142) presents a case “in the tradition of Grice where it is clear,” he claims, “that a pragmatic explanation can be taken so far as to undermine its own structural foundations.” According to Horn (1972, 1976) and Gazdar (1979a) numerical expressions like ‘two’, though alternately understood to mean [AT LEAST 2] or [EXACTLY 2], were not ambiguous. On their view a statement like Tom has two lovers literally means Tom has at least two lovers, but its assertion implicates by a generalized conversational implicature Tom has at most two lovers. Thus what is literally asserted is a lower-bound on the number of Tom’s lovers, and what is implicated is an upper-bound on the number of Tom’s lovers. Hence what is communicated is that Tom has exactly two lovers. Thus, Sadock observes, the statement would be false if Tom has 1 lover but only misleading in some contexts if Tom has 3 lovers. (I distinguish the numerical adjective ‘three’ from the arithmetic numeral ‘3’.) But Sadock imagines a more radically pragmatic analysis of the meaning of numerical expressions derived from the phenomenon of Horn Scale reversal in which a statement entails an upper bound, for example, Tom ran the 100 in ten seconds, meaning [TOM RAN THE 100 IN AT MOST 10 SECONDS], not a lower bound as in the previous example. Then Sadock suggests that scale reversal might show that ‘ten’ expresses neither a lower nor an upper bound. Then ‘ten’ would apparently mean merely [SOME NATURAL NUMBER], or [SOME POSITIVE RATIONAL NUMBER], etc. There is a simpler argument against the radical pragmatics analysis other than the one from scale-reversal phenomena, which are clearly matters of common encyclopaedic knowledge and which raise White’s and Quine’s questions of the distinction between lexical knowledge and factual knowledge (White 1950; Quine 1980c; Putnam 1983b). On the classical Gricean view to assert (a) Luckily after the car crash Tom had two hands is (implausibly in my view) to say literally that luckily after the car crash Tom had at least two hands and to implicate that luckily after the car crash he had no more than two hands (as if car crashes were in the causal business of adding hands to persons unfortunate enough to experience them, except in certain lucky cases), and to assert (b) After the car crash Tom had two fingers is (plausibly) to say that after the car crash Tom had at least two fingers and to implicate that he had no

THE THIRD TURN AND LITERAL SENSE

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more than two fingers. Sadock then asks, in effect, what does ‘two’ mean, if it does not mean [AT LEAST 2] in (a) but does mean [AT LEAST 2] in (b)? An extreme, pragmatic answer, Sadock suggests, would be merely that ‘two’ means nothing except whatever justifies the entailment of substituends with lowerscale numerical expressions—for example, A(two) A(one), and whatever fails to justify the same relation of A(two) to A(three). On this extreme view ‘two’ itself possesses no meaning that expresses a lower-bound [AT LEAST 2] or an upper-bound [NO MORE THAN 2]. Sadock remarks: On this theory, the natural number words we have in English would mean hardly anything at all.1 Such a result might offend our sense of propriety, but what is really wrong with it is that it cannot work. There is simply not enough conventional content left in the number words for a pragmatic theory to use as input.2 On a theory that gives the natural number words a semantic lower bound ([AT LEAST n]), the precise use of these words ([EXACTLY n], e.g. Two is the positive square root of four) . . . can be modeled as a contextual setting of an indeterminate upper bound equal to a semantic lower bound (as in Horn’s account). But if there is no precise upper or lower bound, it is not at all clear how we could ever account for the precise use.” (Sadock 1984: 143)

I shall argue, as I did in Atlas (1983, 1990), that English sentences containing three are semantically nonspecific among [AT LEAST 3], [EXACTLY 3], and [AT MOST 3] interpretations. This account demystifies the classical Gricean claim that three meant [AT LEAST THREE]. (One would have wondered why at least three did not mean [AT LEAST AT LEAST . . . THREE].) My claim is that three means none of [AT LEAST 3], [EXACTLY 3], [AT MOST 3]. (I distinguish the natural numerals ‘0’, ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, . . . from the English numericals ‘zero’, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, . . . .) The puzzle for the classical Gricean theorist was how ‘1 + 2 = 3’ could mean anything mathematically precise, since he interpreted its sense as that of the English sentence ‘One plus two is three’, and then analyzed the latter as [ONE OR MORE PLUS TWO OR MORE IS THREE OR MORE]. He recognized, of course, that this was no way to do arithmetic. My elementary answer was to point out a fallacy of equivocation. The cardinal numeral ‘3’ is not synonymous with the English numerical ‘three’. Since ‘3’ is a

1Atlas

(1983, 1990) agrees with Sadock’s (1984) premise that ‘two’ means neither [AT LEAST 2] nor [NO 2] but regards his conclusion that ‘two’ has hardly any meaning at all as a non sequitur and suggests how we can account for the precise use. The premises of the pure pragmatic position do have the consequence that ‘two’ cannot mean [EXACTLY 2], and I agree with that conclusion; it is clear that if two Ns] does not entail that the cardinality of the set of Ns is equal to or greater than 2 (two Ns |{x: Nx}| ≥ 2) and does not entail that the cardinality of the set of Ns is equal to or less than 2 (two Ns |{x: Nx} | ≤ 2), it does not follow that ‘two’ has no meaning. It merely follows that the meaning of two Ns does not entail that the cardinality of the set of Ns is 2 (two Ns | {x: Nx} | = 2), i.e., that two Ns does not mean [EXACTLY 2 Ns]. But it does not follow from the claim that ‘two’ means none of [2 OR MORE], [EXACTLY 2], and [2 OR FEWER] that ‘two’ is meaningless; or that ‘two’ means [SOME NATURAL NUMBER ]. MORE THAN

2Sadock thinks this because, as suggested earlier for ‘ten’ and ‘two’, the conclusion appears to be that ‘ten’, or ‘two’, merely means [SOME NATURAL NUMBER], a fallacious conclusion, as I have already explained (see the previous note).

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canonical name for the natural number 3, the integer that in Dedekind-Peano arithmetic is the successor of the successor of the successor of 0, or s(s(s(0))), and ‘three’ is a numerical English determiner (or, perhaps it is not a determiner but a numerical adjective), there should have been less temptation than there was to conflate the two (not, notice, ‘the 2’). On the classical Gricean account of “what is said” in numerical statements, a peculiarity arises that conversational inference must resolve. If one asserts Tom has one lover, one has not claimed something literally inconsistent with what one asserts in the statement Tom has two lovers. Similarly, if one asserts Tom has three lovers, one has not asserted something literally inconsistent with what is asserted in the statement Tom has two lovers; in fact, on this view, the former entails the latter. On the classical Gricean account, for sentence frames A( ) like the above, A(num) is consistent with A(num'), the strong-to-weak scale of numerical expressions being , and Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity : “Say as much as is required for purposes of the exchange.” Speaker B did not say ‘three children’, ‘four children’, . . . , so A may infer that B’s saying ‘three children’, . . . , would be saying more than is needed for purposes of the exchange. The best explanation of B’s not saying ‘three children’, not saying ‘four children’, . . . , is that B believes that Jack has no more than 2 children, the propositional content of that posited belief being the conversational implicatum of asserting a sentence containing ‘two children’. By contrast Seuren (1993: 228) claims that in the question-answer sequence B’s answer in the possible situation in which Jack has more than 2 children would be a false answer. If, as the Griceans hold, B’s answer literally meant Jack has at least 2 children, the answer in the same situation would be true, though, since B’s statement would conversationally implicate Jack has no more than 2 children, B’s answer, though literally true, would be misleading and uncooperative to assert in the situation in which Jack has more than 2 children. Seuren also claims that there is no logical inconsistency in statement (14): (14)

Jack does not have two children: he has three.

The consistency implies that there is a possible situation in which the statement is true. The truth of (14) entails that ‘two children’ in the negative clause Jack does not have two children of (14) could mean ‘exactly two children’ or could mean ‘at most two children’.6 In his theory of semantic syntax, Seuren would analyze the answer (13B) Jack has two children as The number of Jack’s children is 2, and the question (13A) How many children does Jack have? as The number of Jack’s children is what? For the topic of the question How many children does Jack have? is the number of Jack’s children, and the answer Jack has two children is assertorically equivalent to the comment of a statement with contrastive stress (15a), with topicalization (15b), or of the English cleft (15c): (15)

a. Jack has TWO children. b. As for the number of Jack’s children, it’s 2. c. It’s two children that Jack has.

Seuren distinguishes the truth conditions of statement (15a) Jack has TWO children from the truth conditions of a statement of the canonical sentence in (16). (16) Jack has two children. 6The negation expressed by ‘not’ in the statement is claimed to be descriptive, not “metalinguistic” in Horn’s (1985) sense. Kempson (1986: 80) agrees with this second observation of Seuren’s and argues that such statements as (14) can be descriptive, not “metalinguistic,” negations. I discuss “metalinguistic” negation later in this chapter.


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Briefly, for Seuren (1993) the truth conditions of the canonical statement (16) are Jack has at least 2 children; the truth conditions of the contrastively stressed statement (15a) Jack has TWO children and of the answer (13B) Jack has two children are Jack has exactly 2 children. Happily, here is where I may express agreement with Seuren. The topic/comment analysis of the statement in the question-answer sequence in (13) seems to me accurate. “Contrary to commonly held views,” as Seuren notes, “cleft constructions or constructions with contrastive (focus or comment) accent may differ truth-conditionally from non-cleft, non-contrastive (i.e. canonical) constructions” (1993: 229). My agreement with Seuren’s uncommon view is found in Atlas and Levinson (1981: 16–18, 50–55) and Atlas (1991a), where I argued that the canonical (17a), the stressed (17b), the cleft statement (17c), and the only Proper Name statement (17d) should have the logical forms (and truth conditions) in (18 a,b,c,d): (17)

a. b. c. d.

Sam wants Fido. SAM wants Fido. It’s Sam who wants Fido. Only Sam wants Fido.

(18)

a. λx(W(x, f ))(s) Sam wants Fido. b. λy(W(s,y))( f ) Fido is wanted by Sam. c. λy(y = ΓzSz)(ΓxW(x, f )) The group of individuals who want Fido is identical to the group that Sam-izes (i.e., to Sam; Quine 1960). c′. ∃xW(x, f ) & ∀y(W(y, f ) → y = s) Someone wants Fido and Sam does if anyone does. d. ∃x∀y[(x = y ↔ W(y, f )) & (W(y, f ) → y = s)] Exactly one individual, and Sam if anyone, wants Fido.

Here (18c), on the distributive reading, is logically equivalent to (18c'). I shall not defend again the logical analysis that I have given for cleft statements (Atlas and Levinson 1981) and for only Sam statements (Atlas 1996b), but I shall use these results to evaluate Seuren’s claims for his linguistic intuitions. (For a discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of cleft statements, see appendix 3.) Applying the Atlas and Levinson (1981) logical analysis to the contrastively stressed statement (15a) Jack has TWO children, or to the cleft statement (15c) It’s two children that Jack has, the logical paraphrase is The group of Jack’s children is a group of size 2, given in (19b): (19)

a. It’s two children that Jack has. b. λu(Size-2(u))(Γx(C(x,j)) The group of Jack’s children is a group of size 2. c. Jack has exactly 2 children,


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Here a group is of size 2 if and only if the cardinality of the corresponding set whose elements are the members of the group is 2. Or, more simply put, the paraphrase of (19a) It’s two children that Jack has is (19c) Jack has exactly 2 children. It follows from Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) logical analysis of clefts that the truth conditions of It’s two children that Jack has are not the same as the truth conditions of Jack has two children. The cleft entails the canonical statement, but the converse is false; the canonical statement does not entail the cleft. In fact, from my (1991a) analysis of only Proper Name statements, there are the entailment relations in (20): (20)

Only John hit Brian It was John who hit Brian John hit Brian

Here Only John hit Brian is logically equivalent to It was John who hit Brian, which entails but is not entailed by John hit Brian. (Horn 1981a, 1996b denies that It was John who hit Brian entails Only John hit Brian, and he denies that Only John hit Brian entails John hit Brian; in Horn (2002) he finally accepts the latter entailment.) Thus Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) logical analysis of clefts provides a defense of Seuren’s (1993) intuitive, linguistic claims: the truth conditions of Jack has TWO children, the answer to How many children does Jack have? are distinct from the truth conditions of the canonical statement Jack has two children. For Seuren the truth conditions of the canonical statement Jack has two children are just as the Classical Griceans supposed: Jack has at least 2 children. Thus Seuren (1993: 232) finds the following statement logically consistent: (21)

Jack has two children, and they live in Kentucky, and he has three children, and they live in Texas.

By contrast, Seuren (1993: 233–34) believes that in statement (22a) ‘they’ is a “specifically referring term” only if Jack has exactly 2 children, and ‘they’ makes reference to them: (22)

a. Jack has two children: they live with their mother. b. Jack has two children: each of them lives with his mother.

So Seuren (1993: 234) believes that one does not need to appeal to Grice’s (1975a,b, 1989a) Maxims of Conversation to produce the interpretation exactly 2 children of two children in (22a). The Theory of Discourse Anaphoric Reference takes over the explanatory task. But on Seuren’s view it remains unclear why the ‘exactly 2’ interpretation of (22a) does not also occur in the second clause of (21), producing an inconsistency in (21) if the referring character of ‘they’ requires the ‘exactly’ interpretation. I should have thought Seuren’s requirement is too strong: Jack has two children is not synonymous with, nor does it entail, Jack has only two children, as Seuren himself had noted in (15) and (16). If we give up Seuren’s requirement, (21) has a consistent interpretation in which the first ‘they’ refers to a subgroup of two, and the second ‘they’ refers to a subgroup of three children. Notice that sentence (21) does not entail that John has at least 5 children: the two children living in

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Kentucky could also live in Texas; the sentence does not say Jack has two children, and they only live in Kentucky. Thus the ‘exactly 2’ interpretation can be at best a pragmatic inference from ‘two children’ in an assertion of (21) and a fortiori in an assertion of (22a). Whether the Theory of Discourse Semantics will provide an account of anaphoric reference that makes a Gricean account unnecessary is a large issue that is tangential to my concerns in this book. I will merely mention that in light of Dowty’s (1980) and Reinhart’s (1983) suggestions, Levinson (1987b, 1991, 2000: 287) has provided the beginnings of a Gricean explanation of two of Chomsky’s (1982, 1986) Binding Conditions that unlike the syntactical accounts predicts the preferred interpretation of John told her that he gave her a valentine, and Huang (1994) argues that a Gricean account is necessary for the explanation of anaphora in Chinese (see chapter 3). An example of Robyn Carston’s (1985, 1988: 174–75) presents a prima facie difficulty for the classical Gricean view, as well as for Seuren’s claims for the truth conditions of the canonical statement forms. She alleges that statement (23) has an ‘exactly’ interpretation under which it is true and an ‘at least’ interpretation under which it is false in the same circumstances. (I shall note later in this chapter that the sentence cannot have the latter interpretation.) (23)

If there are three books by Chomsky in the shop, I’ll buy them all.

Carston (1988: 171–73) criticizes the classical Gricean view by arguing that an alleged implicatum that might alter the truth conditions of what she calls “the proposition expressed” cannot be a genuine implicatum but instead must be part of the “explicit content”—an “explicature”; classical Gricean implicata, she notes, do not affect truth conditions of “the proposition expressed.” So ‘three books’ cannot literally mean ‘at least 3 books’ but implicate ‘at most 3 books’. Carston (1988: 155) identifies “the proposition explicitly expressed”—Sperber and Wilson’s (1986b: 72–73) “propositional form of the utterance”—with Grice’s “what is said.” Unfortunately, this is a misreading of Grice. Grice’s “what is said” is, roughly, the disambiguated literal sense of the words taken with reference-, tense-, and deixisfixed values, the content of an Austinian (1962/1975) illocutionary act—and what would one expect from a regular participant in J. L. Austin’s Saturday mornings? Grice gave no attention to the specification of semantically nonspecific expressions, what Bach (1994a) terms a “completion” of a semantically nonspecific, nonpropositional expression. Pace the sanguine remarks of Bach (1994a: 141) that Grice (1978: 116, 119) also anticipated Bach’s notion of the conceptual “expansion” of a proposition expressed by a sentence used non-literally to communicate a proposition that would be expressed by an expansion of the contents of the thought literally expressed by the utterance, Bach’s notion of a conceptual expansion is also not anticipated in Grice (1978). (For expansion, see White 1965: 59 and Atlas 1989: 25.) For example, the thought expressed by You won’t die expands to the proposition YOU WON’T DIE FROM THE CUT ON YOUR FINGER. (Bach 1994a differs from Récanati 1989 in his account of “what is said”—Récanati identifying “what is said” with the expanded proposition, Bach identifying “what is said” with the proposition literally expressed by the utterance.)


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“What is said” is distinguished by Grice from what he calls “the total signification of the utterance.” The addition of the content of Grice’s conventional implicata, his generalized and particularized conversational implicata, and, at an early stage of his thinking, presuppositions to “what is said” transforms it into Grice’s “total signification” of the utterance. What is needed by Carston, Récanati, and others here is a distinction between what is indirectly suggested, implied, or conveyed—(a) what is “implicitated” (in Bach’s 1994a sense) and (b) what is implicated (in Grice’s sense)— and what is directly asserted. Unfortunately, Grice himself did not restrict his descriptions of assertions to ‘suggest’, ‘imply’, or ‘convey’ when describing what a speaker does by, in, or when uttering a sentence. He used his favorite word ‘means’ as well: what the speaker meant by, in, or when uttering a sentence. Grice simply did not have a precise notion of the content of an “assertion” and explicitly avoided constructing one. (Bach 1994a creates one for him, a Carnapian notion of a “structured proposition.” For more on the problem of “what is said,” see Levinson 2000: 170–98.) Of course, Grice realized that his minimal sense of “what is said,” as in the case of statements containing logical connectives, did not match an intuitive notion of “what the speaker meant” in uttering a sentence. His comments on or and if . . . then make that clear, but his comments on his conventional implicata of words like but make the point even more clearly. In the case of conventional implicata, “what is said” is not even the whole of the explicit lexical content of the sentence uttered. Grice merely claimed that implicata, other than manner implicata, should be partly determined by “what is said,” and he was clear that synonymous statements “say the same thing”; these claims were sufficient to justify nondetachability of conversational implicata. Carston’s (1988: 155) notion of a proposition explicitly expressed approximates Grice’s notion of what a speaker meant, not his notion of “what is said.” In Atlas (1983, 1990) I observed that in sentences like (23) with numerical modifiers of plural count nouns, the plural N books was actually a collective term, as evidenced by the phrase them all. I distinguished (23) from (24): (23)

If there are three books by Chomsky in the shop, I’ll buy them all.

(24)

If there are three books by Chomsky in the shop, I’ll buy each of them.

My thesis was that asserting three N scalar implicates no more than 3 only if N is a distributive term, not a collective term. In the case of the collective term, the numerical adjective expresses the size of a group designated by the collective term, which entails the ‘exactly’ interpretation. Seuren’s (1993: 233–34) observation that they makes “specific reference” (Seuren 1985: 459–63) to a group of Jack’s children in (22a) Jack has two children: they live with their mother is in my view a consequence of they being an anaphor for a collective term. One may contrast with the interpretation of (22a) the distributive interpretation of two children in (22b) Jack has two children: each of them lives with his mother; the default interpretation of (22b) is not Seuren’s exactly 2 children. (Carston’s alleged ‘at least 3’ interpretation of Carston’s example (23) is actually semantically anomalous. The sentence cannot have that interpretation, though my sentence (24) may.)

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To make matters even more complex, Horn (1978c) pointed out that an assertion of (25), where ‘sides’ is a plural, distributive term, possesses the no more than 3 implicatum that is absent from assertions of (26), where ‘three’ is lexically incorporated and does not mean at least 3: (25)

x is a figure with three sides.

(26)

x is a three-sided figure.

These two observations suggested that the specification of the interpretation of the noun as collective or distributive was a crucial feature in determining the interpretation of ‘three’. Or, to paraphrase Frege, only in the context of a noun phrase does a numerical modifier have a meaning. This then suggested (Atlas 1983, 1990), compatibly with the account of the semantically nonspecific meaning of ‘not’ (Atlas 1974, etc.), that the English word ‘three’ should be distinguished from the Arabic numeral ‘3’ (the name of a natural number) and that English ‘three’, like ‘not’, is semantically nonspecific: semantically unspecified for the ‘at least’ and ‘exactly’ interpretations just as ‘not’ is semantically unspecified for the exclusion and choice negation interpretations. For example, the open sentence (27) containing the numeral ‘3’ is not synonymous with (25) x is a figure with three sides, nor is (25) synonymous with (28): (27)

x is a figure with 3 sides

(28)

x is a figure with at least three sides.

Furthermore, the arithmetic statement (29) is not redundant in the way (28) would be on the classical Gricean reading of ‘three’ as ‘at least 3’ given in (30): (29)

x is a figure with at least 3 sides

(30)

x is a figure with at least [at least 3] sides.

These semantic observations indicate a clear difference between ‘three’ and ‘3’. Unlike Carston’s Relevance Theoretic objections to Grice’s notion of “what is said,” my objection was to the internal incoherence in the classical Gricean’s view. The Gricean must argue that in assertions of (29) x is a figure with at least 3 sides, the asserted at least 3 cancels, because it is in minimal opposition to, the default, generalized conversational implicatum at most 3 sides of asserting three sides that is typically inferable from the allegedly synonymous (25) x is a figure with three sides. Since the Griceans (e.g., Levinson 1983, 2000; Horn 1972) suppose three sides to be synonymous with at least 3 sides, the synonymy claim implies that the implicatum no more than 3 sides is, bizarrely, detachable from assertions of (25) x is a figure with three sides. Since generalized conversational implicata are not detachable from synonymous assertions (except by features of the manner of the assertion), these synonymy claims suggested an internal incoherence in the Gricean theory. It is for


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these reasons—recall the analogous argument against the Gricean view of equatives in Atlas (1984a) and in chapter 5 in this volume—that I rejected the classical Gricean analysis of the meaning of three N et al. As discussed in chapter 5, a problem analogous to that of the semantic relation between three and at least 3 arose for the classical Gricean analysis of the equative x is as tall as y. That analysis would claim that x is as tall as y is not only logically equivalent to but also synonymous with x is at least the same height as y. It makes the further claims that asserting x is as tall as y implicates x is not taller than y, via Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity, and that the occurrence of at least in x is at least the same height as y cancels that implicatum. It is realized that the latter claim entails the curious consequence that nondetachability would then not be a necessary condition of conversational implicature, since the occurrence of at least, which cancels the implicatum, would, oddly, on the classsical Gricean view that x is as tall as y is synonymous with x is at least the same height as y, also detach the conversational implicatum x is not taller than y from “what is said” in x is as tall as y. My (1984a) view of as tall as, discussed in the previous chapter, will escape this anomaly of unexplained detachment, since I reject the synonymy assumption. On my view, the assertion x is as tall as y Informativeness-implicates x is exactly as tall as y, which entails x is not taller than y and y is not taller than x, and logically entails but is not entailed by or synonymous with x is at least as tall as y. Synonymy is also central to a problem that Sadock raised about detachability: Why should it not be possible to find two expressions that differ just in that one contains the denial of what the other conversationally implicates? It has been claimed, for example in Horn 1973, that my saying I ate some of the cake conversationally implicates that I did not eat all of the cake. Now the doctrine of nondetachability claims that if this is a bona fide case of conversational implicature, then there should not be a lexical item that means just what some does but which, when substituted for some in the sentence above, detaches the implicature [from the utterance]. This happens to be true for English, but the cancelability doctrine would seem to indicate that it does not need to be true. Why could there not be a word that happened to mean ‘some and perhaps all’? . . . What principle . . . prevents a lexical item in a natural language from having a partially redundant literal sense? (Sadock 1978: 290)

As a case in point, Sadock considers or and and/or: In English we have a form and/or. Logically speaking, this has just the same meaning as or, but, because of a redundancy it contains, it has the property of canceling the implicature from P ∨ Q to ¬ (P & Q). . . . But adopting [these Gricean analyses] involves giving up the claim that non-detachability is a necessary characteristic of conversational implicature. (Sadock 1978: 291)

The weakness in Sadock’s argument is the assumption that Grice’s doctrine of nondetachability should apply to statements resulting from the substitution of logically equivalent, rather than synonymous, expressions. The expressions or and and/ or are logically equivalent if or designates inclusive disjunction ∨ and and designates

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conjunction &: (P ∨ Q) ((P & Q) ∨ (P ∨ Q), but their logical equivalence does not entail their synonymy or “sameness of meaning.” Grice remarks: The implicature is non-detachable insofar as it is not possible to find another way of saying the same thing (or approximately the same thing) which simply lacks the implicature. The implicature which attaches to the word try exhibits this feature. One would normally implicate that there was a failure, or some chance of failure, if one said A tried to do x; this implicature would also be carried if one said A attempted to do x, A endeavoured to do x, or A set himself to do x. (Grice 1978: 115, 1989c: 43)

Then Grice himself observes a complication, due to the Maxim of Manner, of nondetachability being a necessary condition on conversational implicature, as follows: This feature is not a necessary condition of the presence of a conversational implicature, partly because, as stated, it does not appear if the implicature depends on the manner in which what is said has been said, and it is also subject to the limitation that there may be no alternative way of saying what is said, or no way other than one which will introduce peculiarities of manner, such as by being artificial or long-winded. (Grice 1978: 115, 1989c: 43)

Let us grant that nondetachability must take into account the matter of manner. This hardly seems a theoretical, though possibly a practical, difficulty in applying the maxims. The alleged limitation, that there may be no alternative way of saying what is said, does not strike me as a major difficulty, either, since I am prepared to allow that when there is in the language no alternative way of saying what is said, then the condition of nondetachability is vacuously satisfied. Sadock (1978: 289) mentions vacuous satisfaction of nondetachability as a problem for nondetachability being a sufficient condition for the existence of a conversational implicature, since everything conveyed by an expression is, when no paraphrase is available, trivially nondetachable. But Grice is worrying about nondetachability being a necessary condition for the existence of conversational implicature, and this seems to me to be an empty worry. In the case of Sadock’s example, the necessity of nondetachability is trivial and theoretically harmless. Since from Grice’s (1989b : 25) characterization of “what is said,” “what is said” is not invariant under substitution of logically equivalent expressions, Sadock’s putative counterexample—substituting and/or for or—does not preserve the sameness of “what is said,” and thus is no counterexample to nondetachability being a necessary condition of conversational implicature. Furthermore, the meaning of or is not the same as the meaning of and/or even if, “logically speaking” (Sadock 1978: 291), or is logically equivalent to and/or. Linguistically speaking, or is not synonymous with and/or. Since x is as tall as y is not synonymous with x is at least the same height as y, the apparent paradox of simultaneous cancelation and detachability of x is not taller than y from x is as tall as y by the supposedly synonymous x is at least as tall as y does not show that nondetachability is not a necessary condition on conversational


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implicata arising from maxims other than manner. My analysis (Atlas 1984a, chap. 5) of comparative adjectives and equatives applied now to numerical noun phrases shows that a sentence A( . . . three . . . ), if the frame A( ) contains a collective term (e.g., Three children moved the piano) or a lexically incorporating term (e.g. x is a three-sided figure), is not synonymous with A( . . . at least 3 . . . ), and a speaker asserting it does not implicate A(. . . at most 3 . . . ) , and so fails to generate an interpretation A(. . . exactly 3 . . . ) by Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity. Independently Carston (1985, 1988) came to the same conclusions. Like Kempson (1986: 82–83) I also rejected the view that ‘three’ meant literally ‘exactly 3’, on the grounds that John hit three balls is not synonymous with John hit only three balls any more than John hit Brian is synonymous with John hit only Brian (Atlas 1991a, 1993, 1996b) and on the grounds that no pragmatic principle weakening exactly 3 to at least 3 was coherent (see Kempson 1986: 82–83). If three N does not literally mean at least 3 N and does not literally mean exactly 3 N, I concluded that it must be a semantically nonspecific noun phrase. Unlike Carston (1985, 1988: 174), who also concluded that three N was unambiguous and meant none of at least three N, at most three N, and exactly three N, I (Atlas 1990) offered arguments for the semantical nonspecificity of three N, employing the ambiguity tests of Zwicky and Sadock (1975) that I had discussed in Atlas (1974, 1977b, 1989).

3 Ambiguity Tests I had employed these tests to refute the received view that negative definite description sentences, as (31), are ambiguous: (31)

The king of France is not wise.

Such sentences were alleged to have two senses and two Russellian logical forms, one the narrow-scope predicate negation (32a), usually represented in English by (32b), and the other the wide-scope sentence negation (33a) usually represented in English by (33b): (32)

a. ∃x[(Kx &∀y(Ky → y = x)) & ¬Wx ] b. The king of France is non-wise.

(33)

a. ¬∃x[(Kx &∀y(Ky → y = x)) & Wx ] b. It is not true that the king of France is wise. the case

{

}

Since Russell’s formal language is bivalent, it does not matter whether the negation in (32a) and (33a) is choice negation – or exclusion negation ¬ . (Recall that the exclusion negation ¬A of a sentence A is true if and only if A is not true, for every admissible valuation of the language; the choice negation – A is true [false] if and only if A is false [true], for every admissible valuation of the language. In a

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bivalent language, exclusion and choice negation are extensionally identical functions. In a non-bivalent language—one with truth-value gaps—they are distinct.) Russell (1919: 179) and Whitehead and Russell (1927: 69) thought of the ambiguity as a scope ambiguity, described by Russell in terms of the singular term ‘the king of France’ having “primary occurrence” in (32b) and “secondary occurrence” in (33b). Russell would have said that, if true, the two readings are true for different reasons. When (32b) is true, it is because a unique, extant king of France fails to be wise. When (33b) is true, it is either because there is no king of France or because there are more than one or because a unique, extant king fails to be wise; Russell (1905) omits to consider the case, only relevant thirty-five years later, where there might be no France. Typically it is observed that the narrow-scope predicate negation represented by (32b) entails the wide-scope sentence negation represented by (33b), but not conversely, that the logical form (32a) represented by (32b) entails that there exists a king and that he is unique, but the logical form (33a) represented by (33b) does not entail either. Since the affirmative statement The king of France is wise entails the existence and uniqueness of a French king, it is usually said that both the affirmative statement and the negative sentence (31) on its narrow-scope reading represented by (32b) presuppose the existence and uniqueness of a French king. It is said that the wide-scope reading of the negative sentence (31), allegedly represented by (33b), does not have this presupposition. There are two questions that seem never to have been raised explicitly prior to Allwood (1972, 1977), Atlas (1974, 1975a,b), and Kempson (1975). First, do the English sentences (33b), which supposedly represent univocally one reading of (31), each have two understandings instead, and, further, understandings that allegedly constitute two readings, the wide-scope one (33b) allegedly represents and the narrowscope one that (32b) allegedly represents? In short, as Allwood and Atlas asked, are (31) and (33b) paraphrases? And then, second, as Atlas and Kempson asked, do the intuitive differences in understandings in (31), and possibly (33b), constitute a genuine ambiguity, or is the difference a matter of sense nonspecificity with respect to choiceand exclusion-negation interpretations in both (31) and (33b)? I shall first simply report a fact about my own, and I believe, ordinary American English speakers’ idiolects. Just as my linguistic intuitions detect presuppositional and nonpresuppositional understandings of (31), they detect the very same understandings in (33b)! In these respects (33b) and (31) behave like paraphrases in my idiolect. The standard philosophical view that (33b) expresses only one understanding is more a logician’s prejudice than an empirical linguistic judgment. (For agreement with this paraphrase claim of Atlas 1974, see Kuroda 1977 and Grice 1981. See also Boër and Lycan 1976: 48–52 and Horn 1978b, 1985, 1989.) The question that is now before us is whether the sentences of (31) and of (33b) are each ambiguous between a nonpresuppositional understanding, which on the standard view would be “the” reading of (33b), and a “factive” or presuppositional understanding, which on the standard view would be “the” reading of (32b). The answer is that they are not ambiguous. The sentences are semantically nonspecific between the presuppositional and nonpresuppositional understandings. In defense of my answer, I shall appeal to tests for ambiguity and sense nonspecificity discussed by Zwicky and Sadock (1975). One of the difficulties of the


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example is that the presuppositional understanding entails the nonpresupppositional understanding of (31) and of (33b). This is a semantical property of what Zwicky and Sadock call “privative opposites.” For example, ‘dog’ meaning MALE CANINE and ‘dog2’ meaning CANINE are privative opposites with respect to the semantic feature [MALE]. The same is true for ‘mother’ and ‘parent’ with respect to [FEMALE]. One of Zwicky and Sadock’s tests is for ambiguity of privative opposites. If the expression is truly ambiguous, it ought to be possible to assert the general case and deny the specific case without contradiction. ‘Dog’ is ambiguous, so it is possible to say without inconsistency That’s a dog, but it isn’t a dog or That dog isn’t a dog, meaning THAT CANINE IS NOT A MALE CANINE. If such cases were inconsistent, it would indicate that the expression was not ambiguous. In our cases of negation, we have (34)

king of France is not wise { ?The ?It’s not { true / the case } that the king of France is wise,} but {he / the king of France } is not non-wise.

The second conjunct is the denial of the presuppositional understanding, which on the standard view would be the denial of the reading represented by (32). Since I find the sentences semantically anomalous, we have our first indication that neither (31) nor (33b) is ambiguous. Sadock (personal communication) has suggested that these sentences might not sound so bad to some ears because lexical negations are usually “poseurs”; ‘unhappy’ differs from ‘not happy’. There is a tendency to read ‘non-wise’ as ‘definitely stupid’. Sadock suggests, as a clearer example, that the following sentence is anomalous: (35)

?The king of France is not wise and it’s not even the case that the king of France is wise.

But it ought not be anomalous if the negative sentence were ambiguous and took its narrow-scope-of-negation reading in the first clause. Another ambiguity test is by “semantic differentia.” When a sentence has relatively similar understandings, as I suggest (31) does, or (33b) does, but these differ only by one’s being sense-specified and the other sense nonspecific for some particular semantic feature, such as [FACT], the feature must be such that the lexicons of natural languages can plausibily fail to use it. A lexical feature for the age of the referent of a third-person personal pronoun might be, unlike semantic gender, an example of a possible lexical feature that English need not adopt. Certainly in English there is no formal marking in a negative sentence for a presuppositional, or nonpresuppositional, understanding of the sentence. (Of course, this observation is also supported by my earlier claim that the form of (33b) does not specify the nonpresuppositional understanding of the negative sentence.) If the difference in understanding were very great, it would point to ambiguity rather than sense nonspecificity. But, in contrast with the two understandings of ‘They saw her duck’, the difference in the understandings of (31), or of (33b), is not very great. To see explicity that this is so, recall Russell’s (1905) argument from “On Denoting.” Suppose we could enumerate all the individuals who are wise. We look


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down the list, and we do not find the king of France. Of course the reason we do not may be either that he is extant but fails to be wise (the standard account of the truth of (32)) or that he does not exist, part of the standard account of the truth of (33b). But the similarity in the two cases is significant; we do not find the king of France on the list. This similarity is more compelling than the difference. It is at least sufficiently compelling to shift the burden of linguistic proof of the ambiguity of (31), or, on my view, of (33b), on to those parties who claim it. This argument also confronts the claim of polysemy: ambiguity among closely related meanings. A defender of the ambiguity of (31) and possibly of (33b) might well want to argue that exclusion negation and choice negation are closely related, distinct meanings. I would argue that paradigm cases of polysemy are constituted by meanings in ways quite different from the way choice negation and exclusion negation are logically and semantically related. Consider, for example, the polysemous ‘hit’ in ‘John hit Brian and the highway divider’ but the nonpolysemous ‘knocked’ in ‘Enraged, Brian knocked over his wife and also an innocent bystander’. Choice and exclusion negations are, in Zwicky and Sadock’s (1975) sense, privative opposites. The meanings of polysemous expressions are typically not privative opposites, ‘dog’ and the like being unusual cases. Nevertheless, this does not mean that ‘not’ might not be a case of polysemy like ‘dog’, so I shall consider further ambiguity tests. Of the two syntactic tests that I shall mention from Zwicky and Sadock (1975), I shall not employ here the now anachronistic but still revealing test of transformational potential. (It will be easy for readers of Zwicky and Sadock to see that the results confirm that (31), or (33b), is not ambiguous.) But I shall consider Ross’s, Chomsky’s, and Lakoff’s conjunction test. The test is an identity test, about which I wrote in chapter 1, section 2.1, in my discussion of the depth nonspecificity of the Necker cube drawing. Following Chomsky (1957: 35–36) and Grinder and Postal (1971: 269), Zwicky and Sadock illustrate the way conjunction reduction requires identity of sense (not identity of reference): If: (59)

Morton tossed down his lunch

were unspecified (rather than ambiguous) as to whether Morton bolted his lunch or threw it to the ground, then the parallel example: (60)

Oliver tossed down his lunch

would also be unspecified, and the reduced sentence: (61)

Morton and Oliver tossed down their lunches

would have four understandings, not two [as in the case of ambiguity, which permits only the two parallel readings: (i) Morton and Oliver bolted their lunches (ii) Morton and Oliver threw their lunches to the ground], because the identity condition on conjunction reduction cannot require identity of elements that are not part of syntactic structure. But (61) lacks the crossed understandings (except as a joke), and we conclude that (59) is ambiguous. (Zwicky and Sadock 1975: 18)

Thus, Zwicky and Sadock (1975) adopt criterion (A):


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(A) The impossibility of a crossed, literal paraphrase for a conjunction-reduced sentence S entails the ambiguity of S. (The distinct, parallel paraphrases express distinct senses.) In another example Zwicky and Sadock appeal to criterion (B) to demonstrate nonambiguity (semantical nonspecificity): (B) The possibility of a crossed, literal paraphrase for a conjunction-reduced sentence S entails the non-ambiguity of S. (The distinct, parallel paraphrases do not express distinct senses.) Zwicky and Sadock write: We can now return to examples (6) Melvin became as tall as any of his cousins (7) Melvin became taller than the average Ohioan (8) Melvin became the tallest linguist in America and show that they exhibit no ambiguity with respect to whether Melvin or his circumstances change. The reduced sentences: (87) Melvin became as tall as any of his cousins, and then the same thing happened to Martin. (88) Melvin became taller than the average Ohioan, and then the same thing happened to Mervyn. (89)

Melvin became the tallest linguist in America, and the next year the same thing happened to Merton.

all permit the crossed understandings. (Zwicky and Sadock 1975: 22–23)

(There are a number of subtleties in Zwicky and Sadock’s account of ambiguity tests that I discuss at length in Atlas 1989: 25–65 but shall not discuss here.) Now consider the pro-form reduced sentences: (36)

king of France is not wise {The It is not { true / the case } that the king of France is wise} and the same thing goes for the queen of England.

These are structurally related to: (37)

The king of France is not wise {It’s not { true / the case } that the king of France is wise}

and is not wise {it’sthe notqueen{ trueof England / the case } that the queen of England is wise.}

If the negations in the clauses were ambiguous between different “scope” readings, we would have four possible senses of the conjunction: factive/factive, factive/

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nonfactive, nonfactive/factive, and nonfactive/nonfactive. On the ambiguity hypothesis the pro-form, conjunction-reduced sentence in (36) would eliminate the second and third, crossed understandings as possible literal interpretations of the sentence. Ambiguity permits only the parallel readings. My idiolect accepts the crossed understanding nonfactive/factive in (38) as a literal interpretation of (36): (38)

of France is not wise {ItTheis notking{true/ the case} that the king of France is wise} (since France is not a monarchy), and the same thing goes for the queen of England (who overindulges her children).

If crossed understandings are acceptable as literal interpretations of the conjunctionreduced sentence, and if the meanings of the reduced and unreduced sentences are related by identity-of-sense constraints—as they are, then the constituents have the same, univocal, nonspecific sense, even if utterances of the constituents do not have the same understanding. This means that the sentence is not ambiguous. The same conclusions hold for adverbials other than ‘not’; in these cases the presupposition is on the verb phrase: (39)

a. Jane didn’t walk slowly (she walked rapidly) and the same goes for Max (he stood still). b. Sharon didn’t butter the toast with a knife (she used a spoon) and the same goes for Leo (he stabbed it).

The presuppositional aspects of the sentences in (39) were ignored in the Russellian treatment Davidson (1967) offered of the logical form of action sentences. They were also ignored in the lengthy debates that ensued. From the point of view of an adequate semantic theory of natural language, ignoring them was a mistake. (Again, there are subtleties to attend to in the case of privative opposition, in which one expression is more specific and entails the other more general expression but not conversely, as ‘dog1’ and ‘dog2’ and, on the standard view, ‘not1’ and ‘not2’. For discussion see Atlas 1977b: 328–30, 1989: 74–77.) According to four Zwicky and Sadock (1975) tests for ambiguity—transformational potential, conjunction reduction, semantic differentia, and anomaly of privative opposites—the difference between presuppositional and nonpresuppositional understandings of the negative sentence ‘The king of France is not wise’, or of ‘It’s not {true/ the case} that the king of France is wise’, is not a difference in sense. The sentence is not ambiguous; it does not have two or more logical forms. It does not contain syntactical “scope ambiguities” with respect to ‘not’. Nor does it contain a lexically ambiguous ‘not’, one that is an exclusion negation and another that is a choice negation. These four tests suggest that each negative sentence is sense nonspecific with respect to the exclusion- and choice-negation understandings. Quine (1974: 484) actually once remarked that “the English ‘not’ obviously is not the sign of negation in the logical sense.” But I (Atlas 1974) was never satisfied with knowing that ‘not’ is not a one-place, extensional, sentence operator; what I showed (Atlas 1974, 1975a,b,


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1977b, 1989) was that ‘not’ is a semantically nonspecific adverbial. This conclusion is not what two millennia of logical and philosophical doctrine would have led one to expect. Now let us apply the conjunction-reduction ambiguity test to sentences with numerical noun phrases. For example, the sentence in (40) is an acceptable reduced form, one grammatically possible, literal interpretation of which is (41): (40)

The council houses are big enough for families with three kids, which is enough to move a living room rug.

(41)

The council houses are big enough for families with [at most 3 kids], [exactly 3 kids] is enough to move a living room rug.

If three were semantically ambiguous between exactly 3 and at most 3, the reduced form (40) could not have the meaning of (41). Yet in fact it can. Likewise the sentence in (42) is also an acceptable reduced form one grammatically possible, literal interpretation of which is (43): (42)

The council houses are big enough for families with three kids, which, by the way, qualifies Mrs. Smith for child-care assistance and will allow her to lease a bigger house.

(43)

The council houses are big enough for families with [at most 3 kids], [having at least 3 kids], by the way, qualifies Mrs Smith for child-care . . .

If three were semantically ambiguous between at least 3 and at most 3, the reduced form (42) could not have the meaning of (43). Yet, in fact, it can. The possibility of these interpretations as literal interpretations for the reduced sentences demonstrates that three N is not ambiguous but is semantically nonspecific among at least 3, at most 3, and exactly 3. The connection between ‘3’ and ‘three’ is roughly this: in extensional contexts ‘exactly 3’ is substitutable salva veritate for ‘exactly three’. But ‘3’ is an Arabic numeral, a canonical name for a positive integer; ‘three’ is a numerical adjective of English. The inference from the semantically nonspecific three N to the specification at least 3 N or to the specification exactly 3 N is justified by Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Maxims of Relativity and the Principle of Informativeness or by Horn’s (1984b) R-implicatures. The lexical meaning of the noun phrase three N is nonspecific between these specific interpretations. Thus exactly 3 and at least 3 are products of a pragmatic, context-dependent, Gricean-like process of utterance-interpretation but not of a classical First Maxim of Quantity conversational implicature from at least 3 to no more than 3. Rather, like the inference that I have discussed from the semantically nonspecific, scope-unspecified semantic representation of The king of France is not bald to a choice-negation proposition (or, in certain contexts, to an exclusionnegation proposition), the addressee’s pragmatic inference takes a semantically nonspecific semantic representation, which is what the language-knower knows when he knows the literal meaning of the sentence-type or sentence-token, and yields a numerically specified utterance-interpretation. We now have a genuine pragmatic


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contribution to truth conditions of utterances, since antecedent to the determination of a truth-value is the construction of an interpretation that is able to carry a truthvalue (Atlas 1979). Sperber and Wilson (1986b) later made a similar point under the rubric ‘explicature’, as have Récanati (1989, 1993) and Bach (1994a), the latter under the rubric ‘completion’. The semantically specified interpretation of the utterance is not identical to the semantically nonspecific reading of the sentence; it is inferred from contextually available information (Atlas 1979). The English word ‘three’ is semantically nonspecific, semantically neutral between the exactly 3 and the at least 3 interpretations. So, ‘three’ has a meaning in combination with distributive, collective, or lexically incorporating terms, as in Three children are in the room, Three children moved the piano, x is a three-sided figure; the meaning of the whole determines the meaning of the part, or, to paraphrase Frege, only in the context of a noun phrase does a numerical modifier have a meaning. A collective term is understood to require semantically a size-term modifier (exactly 3), while asserting a sentence in which three N occurs scalar-implicates no more than 3 ONLY IF the NP is understood distributively. In neither case does the English word ‘three’, by itself, mean EXACTLY 3or mean AT LEAST 3. In combination with a collective term, or with lexical incorporation, three takes on a meaning; (e.g., the meaning of the collective term three children and of three-sided is that of exactly 3 children and exactly-3-sided, respectively), but this is not because ‘three’ means the same as ‘exactly 3’. Nor does ‘three’ mean the same as ‘3’. By partisans of Relevance Theory, the admitted weakness of the First Maxim of Quantity implicature analyses is mistakenly taken to support the program of Relevance Theory. By partisans of Seuren’s (1985) Discourse Semantics, and similar programs like Kamp’s (1981; Kamp and Reyle 1993) Discourse Representation Theory, anaphoric reference is mistakenly taken to eliminate totally the need for neo-Gricean pragmatic inference. Both theories ignore the implications of Atlas (1974, 1975b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1983), Atlas and Levinson (1981), and Horn (1984b) for the classical Gricean analysis: the development of Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity analyses as Atlas and Levinson’s (1981) Maxims of Relativity implicatures or Horn’s (1984b) R-implicatures. That post-Gricean revision, like the analysis that I have offered here, makes essential use of semantical nonspecificity. Seuren wishes to avoid the complications that semantically nonspecific expressions imply for a formal logic and to eliminate the need for Gricean explanations entirely. My discussion, although critical of certain details of Carston’s (1988) and Seuren’s (1985, 1993) views, is in large agreement with their motivating linguistic intuitions and with their justified skepticism that Grice’s First Maxim of Quantity implicata are sufficient to explain the “strengthening” (Grice 1989c: 47) of “what is said.” Their analyses focus welcome attention on two questions that have been my concern to address in Atlas (1978a,b, 1979, 1989) and in Atlas and Levinson (1981): 1.

2.

What are the literal senses that must be attributable to sentence-types to best explain what natural, conversational inferenda and implicata in fact arise from assertions of their tokens? What types of inference best explain how those inferenda and implicata arise from the literal senses of the sentences asserted?


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Horn (1992b: 172–75), reflecting on the arguments (Atlas 1990) that I have just rehearsed here and on arguments of Sadock (1984), Carston (1985, 1988), Horn (1972), and others, admits that cardinal numerals pose special problems for a classical Gricean scalar implicature analysis, though, unlike the relevance theorists, he does not wish to give up on scalar implicatures entirely. He points out a difficulty for the classical Gricean, noted by Sadock (1984: 142–43), that the arithmetic statement in (44) would be true since it would have, on the Classical Gricean analysis, the true interpretation of (45): (44)

2+2=3

(45)

2 or more plus 2 or more is 3 or more.

Horn (1992b: 173) then comments, “It is plausible, as Atlas (1990) has suggested, that mathematical values are simply lexically distinct from the corresponding numeral words of natural language, which themselves are unspecified among their ‘exactly n’, ‘at least n’ and ‘at most n’ values.” Another special feature of the numerals, noted by Horn (1972) and again by Carston (1988), Hirschberg (1985), and Sadock (1984), is the possibility of contextdependent scale reversal. For example, note the difference between (46a) and (46b) (Horn 1992b: 173): (46)

a. That bowler is capable of a round of at least 100 (and maybe even 110). b. That golfer is capable of a round of at least 100 (and maybe even 90).

A third feature, noted by Horn (1972: 37–38), Hirschberg (1985), and Atlas (1983, 1990), and as discussed here, is the behavior of numerical terms when they are lexically incorporated. As Horn remarks: A triple (three-base hit) is not (at least) a double (two-base hit), although the list of players with two base hits in a game may include those with three. . . . Atlas (1990) argues persuasively that the ‘exactly n’ interpretation of incorporated cardinal [numerals] is to be linked to the collective or group readings which themselves systematically exclude minimalist treatment. This extends to the reading of Carston’s [(a)], as Atlas points out, citing the contrast between that sentence and its distributive (and scalar-implicating) counterpart [(b)]: a. If there are three books by Chomsky in the shop, I’ll buy them all. b. If there are three book by Chomsky in the shop, I’ll buy each of them. Koenig independently notes the ‘exactly n’ intepretation of sentences like Three boys carried a sofa up the stairs (*in fact four) and comes to the same conclusion: ‘only distributed readings of count phrases give rise to scalar implicatures’ (Koenig 1991: 4). (Horn 1992b: 173–74)

Horn concludes:


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In sum, while we can accept Atlas’s argument (1990: 15) that “only in the context of an NP does a numeral modifier have a meaning,” no analogous conclusion follows for the full range of scalar values. The signs point to a mixed theory in which sentences with cardinals [i.e., cardinal numerals] may well submit naturally to a post-Gricean pragmatic enrichment analysis of what is said, while other scalar predications continue to submit happily to a neo-Gricean minimalist implicature-based treatment. (Horn 1992b: 175)

4 Classical Gricean pragmatics revived? Recently Levinson (2000: 87–90) defended the original observations of Horn (1972). The assertion (47a) is claimed to have the literal meaning of (47b) and the generalized conversational implicatum (47c). His reason for holding to the classical Gricean view is that it is possible consistently to suspend the implicatum with an ‘if not four’, a ‘and perhaps more’ and a ‘or possibly five’ as in (47d). This shows, he believes, that the implicatum (47c) is not entailed by (47a). (47)

a. b. c. d.

John has three children. John has at least three children. John has at most three children. John has three children, if not four / and perhaps more / or possibly five .

Unfortunately, nothing of the sort is shown. Even if John has three children meant what John has exactly three children does, (47d) would still be consistent under that interpretation, as illustrated in (48): (48)

John has exactly three children, if not exactly four / ?and perhaps more / or possibly exactly five.

Here there is only an infelicity, not an inconsistency, with the continuation . . . and perhaps more, and not even an infelicity with . . . if not exactly four or with . . . or possibly exactly five. The one further piece of evidence that Levinson (1983: 116; 2000: 88) adduces is an alleged contextual cancellation of the alleged implicatum at most three in a context like (49): (49)

A: Does John qualify for the Large-Family Benefit? B: Sure, he has three children all right.

Here an exact specification is irrelevant in the context. But I have already argued that the neo-Gricean hypothesis that the literal meaning of (49B) is Sure, he has at least three children all right is inconsistent with the Zwicky and Sadock (1975) tests for the semantical nonspecificity of three children. Levinson’s classical Gricean hypothesis is also prey to an infinite regress argument that the literal meaning is Sure, he has (at least)n three children all right, 1 ≤ n , for positive integers n. Nothing in Levinson’s remarks explains how the context’s failing to need an exact specification blocks the strengthening of the alleged literal meaning at least three by what is sup-


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posedly a default implicatum at most three. Does the default strengthening subconsciously occur, and then the interpreter of the utterance, understanding that the information is “de trop,” then reinterpret the utterance in a weaker form? How can this context block the exactly three interpretation, since if having at least three children qualifies John for the Large-Family Benefit, obviously having exactly three children qualifies him as well. The reinterpretation of the assertion cannot depend on the incorrectness of the answer Sure, he has exactly three children all right, since it is not incorrect, but on, if anything, the interpreter’s judgment that it is inappropriate because it gives too much information. But if cancelation depends on that judgment, the strengthening by the default implicature has already occurred, the interpretation exactly three children is already available, and though it provides more information than needed, it correctly answers A’s question in (49). So why should A take it upon himself, once his question has been answered, to reinterpret B’s utterance by subtracting the information at most three children from the original default interpretation? Just because A realizes that the weaker, allegedly literal meaning at least three children would also answer his question? Linguistic cancelation phenomena indicate, as Levinson assumes, that a proposition is not an entailment of an assertion. Contextual cancelation phenomena is another matter. Levinson has no theory at all, except the model of Gazdar’s bucket (Gazdar 1979a), which is inappropriate to Levinson’s example, that would require B’s background knowledge to include the information that John has three or more children prior to B’s assertion John has three children in order to be inconsistent with, and so cancel, B’s potential implicatum John has at most three children. But B’s knowledge does nothing for A’s interpretation of B’s assertion. And if A already knows that John has three or more children, A did not need to ask B the question in (49). Levinson has no explanation of the contextual cancelation of the alleged default implicatum at most three children of B’s asserting John has three children. In an earlier discussion of an example of the same sort, Levinson (1983: 115– 16) remarks that “implicatures can just disappear when it is clear from the context of utterance that such an inference could not have been intended as part of the utterance’s full communicative import,” because “it is clear from the context that all the information that is required is whether” in order to meet the requirements of the Benefits Scheme John has at least three children. But again, that is just a non sequitur. Even if it is clear that all that is required to answer A’s question is whether John has at least three children, that epistemic fact about the minimum that has to be known to answer A’s question does not determine the result of A’s inference to the best interpretation of B’s utterance in the context. One wonders by virtue of what miracle the default, generalized conversational implicata of assertions “just disappear” because the speaker could have meant less that what his assertion would standardly convey and he still succeed in communicating appropriate information to the addressee. On Levinson’s (2000: 37) own view of his Informativeness Heuristic, “minimal specifications get maximally informative or stereotypical interpretations,” Levinson’s heuristic would yield the irrelevant but maximally informative John has exactly three children, contrary to Levinson’s own claim about (49). Levinson (2000: 37) uses his heuristic to motivate Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity, “Do not make your contri-

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bution more informative than is required,” but they make incompatible predictions about (49). If B is conforming to that maxim, his utterance of three children possibly should have the interpretation at least 3 children. On my view of the semantical nonspecificity of ‘three children’, it can have that interpretation, and so uttering it conforms to Grice’s Second Maxim of Quantity. I have already indicated in chapter 3, section 1, of this book that Levinson’s formulation of the Informativeness Heuristic was too simple. The explanation of (49) is a case in point. Of course Levinson (2000: 88–89) is aware of the arguments of Sadock (1984) and Horn (1992b), Atlas (1983, 1990), Kempson (1986), and Carston (1985, 1988), as discussed here, as well as work by T. Fretheim (1992), J. van Kuppevelt (1996), and R. Scharten (1997), which throw doubt on the classical Gricean analysis of cardinal adjectives. But he is unwilling to give it up: Still, when due allowance is made for the special role of number words in mathliterate cultures, and consequent possible conventionalization of the ‘exactly’ readings, there are a number of reasons to hang on to a scalar interpretation of ordinary language numeral expressions in general. (Levinson 2000: 90)

And what might those reasons be? He continues: One central piece of evidence is provided by those languages that have a finite series of numerals. Many Australian languages, for example, have just three number words, which are glossed as ‘one’, ‘two’, and often ‘three’. The scalar prediction is clear in those cases: we have a finite scale , where ‘one’ or ‘two’ will implicate ceteris paribus an upper bound; but because there is no stronger item ‘four’, the cardinal [numeral] ‘three’ should lack this clear upper bounding by [generalized conversational implicature]. And this is clearly the case in, for example, Guugu Yimithirr: nubuun can be glossed ‘one’, gudhirra ‘two’, but guunduu must be glossed ‘three or more, a few’. . . . None of the other theories makes this correct prediction. (Levinson 2000: 90)

As an alternative to Levinson’s classical Gricean view, my (Atlas 1983, 1990) and Carston’s (1985, 1988) semantical nonspecificity view of the meaning of numerical noun phrases is consistent with the facts that Levinson presents; the alternative theory also makes the correct prediction. The finite scale , where “n” denotes the natural language translation of the cardinal numeral : of the cardinal number n , implies that the upper-bounding scalar implicature not “n + 1” N of asserting “n” N is not a default implicature, so on my account one would expect specifications of exactly “n” N or of at least “n” N but not at most “n” N , at least as long as the quantitative concept AT LEAST and logical concept EXACTLY, involving identity = , were expressible in the language. Nothing in Levinson’s data commits one to Levinson’s classical Gricean account of the semantics of numerical noun phrases. Levinson’s claim that only the classical Gricean analysis of numerical NPs explains the data of languages with finite scales is mistaken. As it happens, guunduu in Guugu Yimithirr, pace Levinson (2000: 90), cannot be unambiguously glossed as both ‘three or more’ and ‘a few’. ‘A few boys’ is a consistent NP in Zwarts’s (1998) sense—their predicate negations entail their sen-


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tence negations—but ‘three or more boys’ is not a consistent NP. In fact, I would treat the upward monotonic, consistent NP ‘a few boys’ in the same way I treat the downward monotonic consistent NP ‘none of the boys’ (See Atlas 2001: 16–17)— namely, as a functor (singular or collective term) instead of a classical quantifier NP. Levinson’s (2000: 178) account of “indexical resolution” is also affected by his classical Gricean view. He wishes to show that there are implicatural-like contributions to “what is said”—to the proposition literally expressed. (Many of these are the “explicatures” of Relevance Theory [Sperber and Wilson 1986b].) A typical example is (50a), whose literal meaning is allegedly (50b): (50)

a. Take THESE three drinks to the three people over THERE; take THESE four to the four people over THERE. b. Take THESE 3 or more drinks to the 3 or more people over THERE; . . . c. Take THESE 3 or fewer drinks to the 3 or fewer people over THERE; . . . d. Take THESE (exactly) 3 drinks to the (exactly) 3 people over THERE; . . .

Here the implicatum is allegedly (50c), to give the communicated content (50d). Levinson (2000: 178) wishes to challenge the assumption “that the assignment of indexical values has nothing to do with pragmatic inference,” a challenge that I support—but not because the literal meaning of (50a) is (50b). What Levinson (2000: 183) thinks is a Horn scalar implicature is actually an Atlas and Levinson (1981) Maxim of Relativity/Informativeness implicature instead—a view with which Horn (1992b) agrees. My I-implicature analysis likewise explains Levinson’s (2000: 183) “ellipsis unpacking” data in (51): (51)

A: Which side got three goals? B: Tottenham Hotspurs.

This also explains his intuition that the scalar implicata of the antecedent of a conditional can affect the truth-evaluation of the conditional: (52)

If each side in the soccer game got three goals, then the game was a draw.

Statement (52) is an example of my Fregean context-principle that only in the context of a sentence (token) does a numerical NP have a (specific) meaning. Levinson offers a further and most interesting argument, using Horn’s (1985) notion of a “metalinguistic negation.” Levinson’s (2000: 213) datum (53a) is given the classical Gricean literal meaning (53b) and the implicatum (53c): (53)

a. b. c. d.

He has four children rather than three. He has 4 or more children rather than 3 or more children. He has no more than 4 children rather than no more than 3 children. #He has at least 4 children but not at least 3 children.

The classical Gricean semantic analysis results in the hypothesis that what is negated in the understood and not three children of (53a) is the First Maxim of Quantity sca-


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lar implicatum of three children—that is,what is negated in (53a) is the implicatum at most 3 children. Hence the negation in (53a) must be metalinguistic in Horn’s (1985) sense; thus, “Do not infer ‘at most 3 children’.” For if one adopts the classical Gricean ‘at least 3 children’ analysis, simply negating ‘at least 3 children’ by the use of ‘rather than’ in (53a) would yield a literal meaning for (53a) that entails the contradictory (53d). Since our linguistic judgment is that the literal meaning of (53a) is not logically inconsistent, we need an alternative analysis of the role of negation in (53a). Levinson’s “metalinguistic negation” account avoids the mistaken prediction that the utterance-meaning of assertion (53a) is inconsistent, even though it accepts that the literal meaning of the sentence is inconsistent. But there is another explanation than Levinson’s. If one abandons the classical Gricean semantic analysis of ‘three children’ as ‘at least 3 children’ and abandons the First Maxim of Quantity scalar implicature to ‘at most 3 children’, one does not need to hypothesize a “metalinguistic negation” to avoid the mistaken prediction that the literal meaning of the consistent sentence (53a) entails the inconsistent (53d). The Principle of Informativeness and the Maxims of Relativity (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 40–41) generate implicatures from the semantically nonspecific numerical noun phrases in sentence (53a) ‘He has four children rather than three’ that give a finite range of consistent, literal utterance-interpretations (54 a–f): (54)

a. b. c. d. e. f.

He has at least 4 children but not exactly 3. He has at least 4 children but not at most 3. He has exactly 4 children but not exactly 3. He has exactly 4 children but not at most 3. He has at most 4 children but not at least 3. He has at most 4 children but not exactly 3.

None of these consistent, literal interpretations of the sentence is produced by Levinson’s (2000: 213) classical Gricean theory, which necessarily appeals to Horn’s (1985) “metalinguistic negation” of an utterance to avoid predicting an inconsistent literal meaning for an obviously consistent sentence. Abandoning the classical Gricean semantic analysis means that there is no motive to posit a metalinguistic utterancenegation; it is theoretically otiose. Since Horn’s pragmatic “metalinguistic negation” analysis is prey to various difficulties—as, for example, those discussed in Kempson (1986)—the semantical nonspecificity analysis allows one to drop the “geocentric” Gricean hypothesis that ‘three children’ has the same meaning as ‘at least 3 children’, the epicycle that negation is metalinguistic in utterances of (53a), and the false prediction that the literal meaning of the sentence in (53a) is logically inconsistent. Since I have already been accused of “the radical move of throwing out the model-theoretic baby with the ambiguist bathwater” (Horn 1989: 423) in my treatment of ‘not’, why stop there? What Levinson’s ‘rather than’ datum shows is that I was not radical enough. Levinson’s (2000: 213) justification for hypothesizing the “metalinguistic negation” of rather than utterances is to save the pragmatic phenomena of the consistency of utterance-meanings, but he fails to save the semantic phenomenon, the consistent ‘rather than’ sentence-meaning. Once one realizes that the sentencemeaning of (53a) is logically consistent, there is no justification for the “metalinguistic


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negation” analysis of utterances of (53a)! Language, like the solar system, is better understood without a static model. Having thrown out the model-theoretic baby and the ambiguist bathwater, it is now time to get rid of at least a few of the “metalinguistic negation” tubs.

5 Horn’s metalinguistic negation To that end I shall consider another case in which “metalinguistic negation” is appealed to in order to resolve an alleged contradiction. Horn (1989: 374) and Levinson (2000: 212) give examples of “metalinguistic negation”: (55)

a. b. c. d. e.

SOME men aren’t chauvinists—ALL men are chauvinists. It’s not a [vα:z], it’s a [veiz]. (Levinson 2000: 212) I didn’t trap two monGEESE—I trapped two monGOOSES. It’s not stewed bunny, honey, it’s civet de lapin. I’m not his daughter—he’s my father. (Wilson 1975: 152)

Horn notes that these examples involve contrastive intonation with a final rise within the negative clause (the ‘contradiction contour’ of Liberman and Sag [1974] or the fall-rise of Ladd [1980], as the case may be), followed by a continuation in which the offending item is replaced by the correct item in the appropriate lexical, morphological, and phonetic garb— RECTIFICATION, to borrow the label of Anscrombre and Ducrot (1977). (Horn 1989: 374)

Horn believes the same holds of the presupposition-canceling example in (56). It is clearly linguistically acceptable to assert: (56)

The king of France is not bald—(because) there is no king of France.

Horn (1985, 1989) has argued that the interpretation of ‘not’ required to explain the acceptability of this utterance does not suggest the claim that ‘not’ is semantically ambiguous, between exclusion (external) and choice (internal) negation readings. Rather, Horn believes that the statement is pragmatically ambiguous (Donnellan 1966), and in the statement above ‘not’ has the force of a metalinguistic operator, indexed to a speaker, I object to U, where U is an utterance-token or utterancetype. He further observes: The principal resemblance between the instances of marked negation [in (55)] and the classical examples of presupposition-canceling negation [in (56)] . . . is that both types occur naturally only as responses to utterances by other speakers earlier in the same discourse-contexts, or as mid-course corrections after earlier utterances by the same speakers. It is for this reason that I seek to encompass all these examples under the general rubric of meta-linguistic negation: they all involve the same extended use of negation as a way for speakers to announce their unwillingness to

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assert something in a given way, or to accept another’s assertion of it in that way. Given the behavioral resemblances just cited . . . , as well as Occamist considerations, there is no obvious reason not to collapse the presupposition-canceling negation of [(56)] with the negation attaching to conversational implicature in [(55a)], to pronunciation [(55b)], to morphology or syntax [(55c)], to register, speech level, or social attitudes [(55d)], and to perspective or point of view in [(55e)]. (Horn 1989: 374–75)

As Horn (1989: 371) also notes, the examples in (55) all have a focus of negation: some in (a), ‘[vα:z]’ in (b), -geese in (c), stewed bunny in (d), and his daughter in (e). For those reasons, I (Atlas 1983) preferred calling this use of ‘not’ a “focal negation” instead of a meta-linguistic negation, reserving the latter for metalinguistic sentences as classically understood, for example: (57)

The plural of ‘mongoose’ is not ‘mongeese’; it is ‘mongooses’.

If example (56) is really like (55), it should have the same properties of intonation, stress, and focus. Before we consider whether it does, let’s consider an example in which English syntax provides the focus, a cleft sentence: (58) It isn’t the king of France who is bald—(because) there is no king of France.

As McCawley (1981: 241) observed, the statement made in asserting (58) does not presuppose in its first clause that there is a king of France. In the cleft statement ‘the king of France’ is a focal not a topic NP. By the Grice-Strawson Condition (Atlas 1988, 1989, 1991a, 1996b) that there is a referential presupposition of a statement in which a simplex singular term occurs only if the singular term is a topic noun phrase in the statement, there would be predicted to be no referential presupposition of there being a king of France in a statement of the first clause of (58). Thus there is no reason to expect a statement of (58) to be linguistically anomalous or logically inconsistent; there is no contradiction between a presupposition of the first clause and the assertion of the second, since there is no presupposition There is a king of France of the asserted first clause at all. So the explanation of the consistency is not that there must be a “metalinguistic negation” in (58), paraphrased by (59): (59)

I (the speaker) object to ‘It’s the king of France who is bald’—(because) there is no king of France.

As Karttunen and Peters (1979: 46–47) pointed out, uses of focal negation inhibit the usual negative polarity items, such as any in (60c): (60)

a. Chris managed to solve some problems. b. Chris didn’t manage to solve any problems. c. Chris didn’t MANAGE to solve {some/*any} problems—he solved them easily.

But the negative cleft statement allows negative polarity items, such as any in (61):


(61)

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It wasn’t managing to solve {some /any} problems that Chris accomplished.

By Horn’s criterion that negative polarity items are inhibited by “metalinguistic” negation, the acceptability of example (61) suggests that ‘not’ in the cleft statement is not a “metalinguistic” negation. The same goes for the negative cleft in the first clause of (58), repeated as (62): (62) It isn’t the king of France who is bald—(because) there is no king of France.

Here an ordinary negation combined with the king of France being in focus gives us a linguistically acceptable, logically consistent statement. And the same holds for (63), understood to have its typical stress and intonation (marked by a stress accent and horizontal bars for intonation levels) and for (64): ————————— —— (63)

—– The king of France/ isn’t bald—there is no king of France.

—–— ———––– (64)

–– –

—–

The king of France1 is not 2 bald 0—there is no king of France.

In both (63) and (64) the NP the king of France typically has greater than normal stress, making clear that it is a focus and not a topic NP. Why should this be? A speaker who asserts (63) or (64) will put greater than normal stress on the king of France because the speaker’s whole utterance includes a clause there is no king of France. A speaker who believes that there is no king of France and who wishes to communicate un-misleadingly with his addressee would not utter the clause ‘the king of France is not bald’ with stress and intonation that would mislead the addressee or garden-path the addressee’s comprehension of the speaker’s utterance. Cooperativeness in the conversation would require that the speech-production mechanism produce the clause with phonetic properties that would not cause the addressee to infer that ‘the king of France’ was a referring singular term, because generating such an inference would create an inconsistency with the remainder of the speaker’s utterance. So, taking advantage of the addressee’s competence in recognizing stress and intonation of an utterance, the speaker indicates that ‘the king of France’ is not a topic NP. By the Grice-Strawson Condition, this implies that the assertion of the first sentence of (63) or of (64) will not “presuppose” that ‘the king of France’ has a reference. The presupposition is not canceled by a contradictory clause in the rest of the sentence being asserted; it was never there to be contradicted. What is doing the work here is not a contradiction intonation contour. What is doing the work is stress—a focus NP stress, or, more weakly, a non-topic-NP stress—that prevents the occurrence of the presuppositional interpretation that there is a king of France. The theoretical description ‘presupposition-canceling’ for these statements presupposes that there is a presupposition to be canceled. That is false. Without a presupposition, “presupposition cancelation” is a myth. In (63) or (64)

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there is no more a presupposition that there is a king of France than there is one in the cleft (65): (65)

It isn’t the king of France who is bald.

And as Atlas and Levinson (1981) and McCawley (1981: 241) observed, there is no such presupposition for a focal NP ‘the king of France’ in a cleft statement. Why then, one might well ask, has it been so common to describe such cases as presupposition-canceling? The answer, I believe, is an artifact: the projection problem. Linguists have assumed that compositionality applies to the presuppositions of constituent clauses of compound and complex sentences: the presuppositions of the whole are a function of the presuppositions of its parts, where it is assumed that the presuppositions of a part are independent of the presuppositions, or assertions, of another part. But that is a too-simple account of what the presuppositions of the parts are. Sometimes whether a part has a presupposition is a look-ahead function of other parts of the sentence that is being asserted. Since there is no such referential presupposition in the utterance of the first clause of (63) or (64), there is no need for a “metalinguistic” interpretation of ‘not’ in that uttered clause to resolve an inconsistency in the whole statement, since there is no logical inconsistency between the parts of the utterance. These observations undermine the explanation of (63) as a “metalinguistic” negation given by Horn (1985, 1989) and Burton-Roberts (1989a,b) (see Atlas 1991b). For what is essential here is not semantic or pragmatic properties of ‘not’ in the assertion; what is essential is the focused, non-topic, prosodic character of the occurrence of the singular term in the negative utterance. It also follows from this analysis that the attempt to assimilate classic “presupposition-canceling” examples like (63) to focal negation examples like (55) is a mistake. It is therefore no surprise to find data, from Seuren (1988: 195), Horn (1990: 498), and Carston (1998: 328), that distinguish the inconsistent focal negation examples (66a) and (66b) from the consistent, so-called presupposition-canceling (66c): (66)

a. #It’s not true that we saw some mongeese; we saw some mongooses. b. #It’s not true that he’s my father; I’m his daughter. c. It’s not true that the king of France is bald; there is no king of France.

Contrary to popular opinion, what needs to be explained, and has been explained in this chapter, is the fact that there is no contradiction—and so no cancelation— between the first clause as uttered and the second clause of the utterance. What is also explained is the fact that by conforming to Grice’s Cooperative Maxim (“Make your contribution such as is required for current purposes of the exchange.”), the speaker, by his use of stress on ‘the king of France’, avoids an interpretation of the utterance by the addressee that is logically inconsistent or linguistically anomalous, or an interpretation that imposes gratuitous processing difficulties on the addressee in comprehending such a denial of ‘The king of France is bald’. I would modify Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor to read: Do not multiply “pragmatic ambiguities” beyond necessity. The Grice-Strawson Topichood Condition on


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the existence of presuppositions of NPs removes the necessity of positing “pragmatic ambiguity” in (56), (63), and (64), since there is no inconsistency for the ambiguity to resolve.7

6 Neoclassical Semantics In Atlas (1978a,b, 1979), reflecting on the semantics of the free morpheme ‘not’ in definite description sentences, on presupposition, and on the misuse of the concept of ambiguity by philosophers and linguists, I suggested that conversational inferences had two roles. The first was the enrichment of the semantic representations of sentences to construct well-defined interpretations of utterances of the sentences that were capable of bearing a truth-value. The second was the classical Gricean inference from contents “said” to contents “implicated.” In Atlas (1978a,b, 1979), the first of these a colloquium in the Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University College, London, I explicitly claimed that pragmatic inferences must play both these roles, because the semantic representations of many types of sentences, the products of the syntactical rules and the lexicon, were semantically underdeterminate—that is, semantically nonspecific with respect to a semantical feature [F], such as semantic gender, as in the gender-nonspecific ‘neighbor’ by contrast with the specific ‘he’ and ‘she’. I had long argued that negative definite description sentences The F is not G were not semantically scope-ambiguous with respect to negation and were not ambiguous between a choice negation lexeme ‘not1’ and an exclusion negation lexeme ‘not2’ (Gazdar 1979a: 64–66).8 The semantical underdeterminacy, rather than sense ambiguity, of these sentences meant that the (meaningful) sentences did not represent, on any reading, the speaker’s meanings, which would be an exclusion negation or a choice negation (see Atlas 1975b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979). The semantically nonspecific semantic representation (SR) was not identical to any specific truth condition, either the exclusion negation or the choice negation. A negative sentence with a semantically nonspecific SR would have to be enriched, made specific or precise (see chapter 3), by an inferential mechanism exactly like the inferences made in conformity with the Maxims of Relativity and the Principle of Informativeness (Atlas and Levinson 1981), which are the hearer-centered analogues of Grice’s speaker-centered Second Maxim of Quantity (“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”). (See chapter 3 in this volume for discussion.) In Atlas (1979) I had argued that an account in which negative sentences The F is not G were scope-ambiguous was redundant. If pragmatic inferences were a necessary part of a theory of utterance-interpretation, and the sentences were ambiguous, the inferences would be essential to disambiguation, to the selection of the appropri7There is more to say about the argument that I have sketched here, but the essentials of the argument are present. See Burton-Roberts (1989a,b, 1997, 1999), Carston (1996, 1998, 1999), Chapman (1996), Foolen (1991), Geurts (1998), Horn (1985, 1989), Kempson (1975, 1986), Levinson (2000), McCawley (1991), Seuren (1990, 2000), van der Sandt (1991), Wilson (1975), and Yoshimura (1998). 8Note that this point is independent of the features of deixis, reference of singular terms, ellipsis, tense, or other parameters that must be fixed in order to produce an interpretation of the utterance.

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ate sense in the context of utterance. On the assumption that the addressee analyzes the speaker’s sentence-token and discovers two or more senses, a choice of the appropriate sense must be made in light of collateral information available in the context. Thus some inferential mechanism must produce a decision on the best “fit” between each sense and the context of utterance. If the sentence is unambiguous but semantically nonspecific for semantic features F1, F2, and so on, in the context the inferential mechanism must give an appropriate, more specific or precise, interpretation of the semantically underdeterminate sentence. I hypothesized that since the same inferential mechanisms were at work in both the cases of ambiguity and of sense underdeterminacy (nonspecificity)—one to select a reading, the other to construct a more specific or precise interpretation—the difference between selection and construction was that the construction of a specific interpretation operated on a pre“propositional” semantic representation that was too underdeterminate to carry a truth-value. Contrary to Grice’s view that Gricean mechanisms operated only post“propositionally” to give what the speaker conveyed or suggested by, in, or when asserting a sentence, what statement the speaker asserted was determined by pragmatic inference in addition to the semantical interpretation of context-dependent indexicals, demonstratives, singular terms, tense, and so on. I (Atlas 1979) also observed that classical Gricean theory could not give an adequate explanation of the inferential mechanism: sentence negations Not (The F is G) were transformed into predicate negations The F is non-G, and the references of singular terms were fixed, but no coherent account was given of the case in which Grice’s sentence-negation meaning, namely the exclusion negation (sometimes expressed in English by It is not the case that P, though, as I pointed out in Atlas 1974, and as Grice 1981 noted—see chapter 4—It is not the case that P can also express the predicate or choice-negation interpretation [Horn 1989]), passed through the pragmatic mechanism unchanged, the case in which informative enrichment was absent. According to the classical Gricean theorist, this case should have been the semantically “unmarked” case, but no Gricean principle in the theory could noncircularly explain it to be the unmarked case, the case of saying what one means. In fact, it is linguistically the “marked” case, as Strawson (1950) first noted. By contrast, as I mentioned in chapter 1, my claim (Atlas 1974, 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978b, 1979) that the negative sentence-meaning [THE F IS NOT G] was semantically unspecified for scope meant that the inferential mechanism operated equally in both cases: it produced the more specific choice-negation interpretation [–(THE F IS G)], and it produced the more specific exclusion-negation interpretation [¬(THE F IS G)]. In neither case has the speaker “said” something propositional, if by ‘saying’ one means merely the act of uttering a meaningful sentence of a semantically nonspecific sort. In neither case has the speaker “said” something interpretable, if by ‘saying’ one means performing a locutionary act of producing a token of an utterance-type that is interpreted by one’s addressee to have a determinate sense and reference (see Ziff 1972a). Nor, in one case or the other has the speaker “said” what he meant, if by ‘saying’ one means performing an illocutionary act, the content of which is correctly interpreted by the speaker’s addressee to have the speaker’s intended sense and reference. (Similar notions of interpreting utterances later surfaced in others’ theories as well, notably the “explicatures” of the Relevance Theory of Sperber and Wilson


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[1986b] and Carston [1988]; the Pragmatic Intrusion of Katz [1972], Walker [1975], and Levinson [1988, 2000] for the interpretations of singular terms; the two stages of pragmatic inference in Récanati [1989]—who later in Récanati [1993: 267] acknowledges the earlier views of Atlas [1979], as does Horn [1992a: 265]—and the “implicitures” of Bach [1994a,b].) My paradigm for Sadock’s “symbiosis” between the structure and function of sentences is the relationship sketched in chapter 1 between the semantical representation of the semantically nonspecific sentence-type and the pragmatic interpretation of the speaker’s utterance of the semantically nonspecific sentence-token (the token has the same semantic properties as the type; see Searle 1979b). Just as Sadock (1984) was asking “Whither Radical Pragmatics?”, post-Gricean pragmatics was going there—see Atlas (1984a), Horn (1984b), and Levinson (1987a,b)—while parallel developments were occurring in London and Paris (see Sperber and Wilson 1986b). The remedy for the difficulties of classical Gricean pragmatics that Sadock (1984) highlighted is a neoclassical semantics: not φ is semantically nonspecific among exclusion ¬φ and choice –φ negation interpretations (Atlas 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978a,b, 1979, 1989), and a sentence containing three Ns is semantically nonspecific among [3 OR MORE Ns], [EXACTLY 3 Ns], and [3 OR FEWER Ns] interpretations. As I (Atlas 1983, 1990) have argued, when N is a collective term, a sentence containing three Ns takes the [EXACTLY 3 Ns] interpretation. When N is a count noun, a sentence containing the noncollective term three Ns is semantically nonspecific among the interpretations, while collateral information in the context permits the addressee to construct the “best” interpretation of the statement in the context. As for what ‘not’ or three N literally means, as contrasted with the contribution that ‘not’ or the noun phrase three Ns makes to the addressee’s interpretation of a speaker’s statement in which a token of ‘not’ or three Ns occurs, the lexical meaning of ‘not’ or of three N is not a psycholinguistic observable (Atlas 1989: 145–49). An interpretation, even a self-interpretation of one’s own utterance of ‘not’ or of three Ns, is already the result of the interaction of semantic with pragmatic processing. Users of the language can no more say, on the evidence of their own interpretation of their own utterance of ‘not’ sentences or of three N sentences, what the lexical content of ‘not’ or of three N in their mental lexicon is than a quantum physicist can say what the nonsuperposed biological state, alive or dead, of Schrödinger’s cat in the unopened box is. The perception of the deadness (or aliveness) of Schrödinger’s cat in the opened box shows the vitality (or morbidity) of the cat to be a physical observable. The interpretation of statements made by asserted sentences containing ‘not’ or the noun phrase three Ns may show that the contents of statements are psycholinguistic observables, but not all subsentential meaning components of a sentence are psycholinguistic observables. My point is not Quine’s (1960) indeterminacy of radical translation or Davidson’s (1984b) indeterminacy of radical interpretation, and not Quine’s (1969) inscrutability of reference. It is the inscrutability of literal sense. Sadock (1984) was partly right. Utterances of the noun phrase three N will generally Informativeness-implicate (by default) the exact interpretation [3 N], but that intuitive linguistic observation does not entail that the literal sense of three N is [3 N]. There is a physical reality described by a Schrödinger wave function Ψt(x),

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though only |Ψt(x)|2 is measurable.9 Similarly, there is a semantical reality to ‘not’ and to ‘three’ that contributes content to the literal meaning of the constituent in which it occurs, although only statements of the sentence have context-specific truth conditions that are interpretable. The assumption that one has introspective access to the meaning of each word of a language or each lexeme of the mental lexicon that occurs in a sentence, even if one is not a behaviorist like Quine (1960) in the psychology of language, is gratutitous. The novelty of my argument was that the free negative morpheme ‘not’ is such a sense-inscrutable expression; the further novelty is that ‘three’ and similar numerical words are also such sense-inscrutable expressions. To think that the meaning of each word in every syntactical constituent must be a semantical atom whose meaning is “visible” to the mental eye of introspection is to make a naive and theoretically gratuitous assumption about the transparency of linguistic meaning to the mind, as gratuitous as the Newtonian assumption that both the position and momentum of each physical atom in each physical state must each be pointwise definable and “measurable” by Newton’s God. A successful semantico-pragmatic theory of utteranceinterpretation no more requires such an assumption than a successful atomic theory requires the Newtonian assumption. On the first page of the first chapter of Atlas (1989: 7) I quote lines from Paul Ziff’s (1972d) essay, “Something about Conceptual Schemes.” Reflecting on the same essay Ruhl (1989: 87–91) remarks (p. 86) that “a considerable part of alleged lexical meaning is actually supplied by other means: words are highly abstract in inherent meaning, often too much so for conscious understanding.” The novelty of my and Ruhl’s conclusions lay in their claims that (a) a considerable part of utterer’s-meaning is nonlexical, and, I added, nonsentential, and (b) literal meaning is abstract (Atlas 1989: 10–24) and accessible to consciousness only with difficulty if at all (Atlas 1989: 8). The assumption of the Scrutability of Literal Sense is encouraged by the assumption that the semantic representation of a sentence’s literal meaning is restricted to a representation of truth conditions in an extensional metalanguage. The well-formed formulae of First-Order Quantification Theory with identity have parsable, scrutable constituents: individual variables, sentential connectives, predicate expressions, quantifiers. The same is true of intensional languages like Dana Scott’s and Richard Montague’s (Scott 1970; Montague 1974; Dowty et al. 1981). But, to quote Chomsky once again: We cannot assume that statements (let alone sentences) have truth-conditions. At most they can have something more complex: ‘truth indications’, in some sense. . . . There is no question of how human languages represent the world, or the world as it is thought to be. They don’t. . . . There is no reference-based semantics. . . . There is a rich and intriguing internalist semantics, really part of syntax, on a par in this respect with phonology. Both systems provide ‘instructions’ for performance systems, which use them . . . for articulation, interpretation, inquiry, expression of thought, and various forms of human interaction. (Chomsky 1996c: 52–53)

9For a good layperson’s introduction to basic quantum mechanical notions, I recommend Nick Herbert’s (1985) Quantum Reality (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday).


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If, like Quine and Davidson, one rejects the existence of the analytic/synthetic distinction and accepts the indeterminacy of radical translation/interpretation, one accepts truth or reference but rejects its scrutabilty. If, like Grice, Chomsky, Katz, and myself, one accepts the existence of an analytic/synthetic distinction and rejects the indeterminacy of radical translation/interpretation, one accepts meaning but rejects its scrutability. Davidson and Quine’s position is like that of a classical physicist who, when confronted with the de Broglie wavelike nature of the electron, would conclude that electrons are “creatures of darkness”—that there cannot be any electrons. This would make the observed electrical properties of matter inexplicable. My, Chomsky’s, and Grice’s position is like that of a quantum physicist who concludes that though there are electrons, they are quite different in nature from what classical physicists had believed. The observed electrical properties of matter are explicable, although quite differently explained. It no longer makes sense to think of the electron as a tiny, Newtonian, billiard ball, the electron having precisely determinate position and momentum, and it no longer makes sense to think of the meaning of every linguistic expression as a Russellian concept, the expression having precisely determinate literal meaning and denotation. But lightning still strikes, and sentences still mean.


Appendix 1

On G. E. Moore’s Term ‘Imply’

T he form of words that generates G. E. Moore’s “paradox” arose, among other places, in a controversy between Moore and Charles L. Stevenson in the early 1940s. In a 1942 reply to a discussion of Moore’s ethical views by Stevenson, Moore wrote: I think Mr. Stevenson’s actual view is that sometimes, when a man asserts that it was right of Brutus to stab Caesar, the sense of his words is (roughly) much the same as if he had said “I approve of Brutus’ action: do approve of it too!” the former clause giving the cognitive meaning, the latter the emotive. But why should he not say instead, that the sense of the man’s words is merely “Do approve of Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar!”—an imperative, which has absolutely no cognitive meaning, in the sense I have tried to explain? If this were so, the man might perfectly well be implying that he approved of Brutus’ action, though he would not be saying so, and would be asserting nothing whatever, that might be true or false, except, perhaps, that Brutus did stab Caesar. (1968: 542)

On the matter of this notion of “implying,” Moore immediately comments on the crucial distinction between implying and asserting: There seems to me nothing mysterious about this sense of “imply,” in which if you assert that you went to the pictures last Tuesday, you imply, though you don’t assert, that you believe or know that you did; and in which, if you assert that Brutus’ action was right, you imply, but don’t assert, that you approve of Brutus’ action. (542)

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APPENDIX 1

But he goes further to give a commonsense explanation of the implication in question: That you do imply this proposition about your present attitude, although it . . . does not follow from what you assert, simply arises from the fact, which we all learn by experience, that in the immense majority of cases a man who makes such an assertion as this does believe or know what he is asserting: lying, though common enough, is vastly exceptional. And this is why to say such a thing as “I went to the pictures last Tuesday, but I don’t believe that I did” is a perfectly absurd thing to say, although what is asserted is something which is perfectly possible logically: it is perfectly possible that you did go to the pictures and yet you do not believe that you did. . . . Your saying that you did, does imply [in a sense other than logical implication] . . . that you believe you did; and this is why “I went, but I don’t believe that I did” is an absurd thing to say. 1

1Although this was Moore’s claim in 1942, it is clear from an only recently published manuscript in the Moore archive in the University Library, Cambridge University, U.K., tentatively dated by Thomas Baldwin (Moore 1993: 207–12) as 1944, that Moore was admirably explicit about both his data and the strength of his purported explanation of them. (a) “I start from this: that it’s perfectly absurd or nonsensical to say such things as ‘I don’t believe it’s raining, but as a matter of fact it is’ . . . I’m just assuming that it is absurd or nonsensical to say such things. But I want it noted that there is nothing nonsensical about merely saying these words. I’ve just said them; but I’ve not said anything nonsensical. And W. [Wittgenstein] pointed out another proof that there isn’t. He pointed out (I think) that there’s nothing nonsensical in saying ‘It’s quite possible that though I don’t believe it’s raining, yet as a matter of fact it really is’ or ‘If I don’t believe it’s raining, but as a matter of fact it really is, then I am mistaken in my belief’. In all these cases the very same identical words are said, but they are said in a context with other words, so that there is nothing nonsensical about them.” Wittgenstein’s point was later called “the Frege Point” by Peter Geach (1972b). (b) Moore (1993: 207) concludes, “It’s absurd to say them in the sort of way in which people utter sentences, when they are using these sentences to assert the proposition which these sentences express. I will call this ‘saying them assertively’. I don’t want to say that to utter sentences assertively is the same thing as making an assertion.” This last, interesting distinction is not elaborated upon by Moore. One application of it would be to Geach’s (1972b) Frege Point. In asserting the conjunction P & Q one utters Q assertively, but one does not assert Q (pro Geach 1972b and pace Stalnaker 1974). I also take it that utterances that purport to be assertions, in that they are uttered in circumstances typical of assertions with intonation and stress appropriate to assertion, including pretended assertions of the sort to be heard onstage in a play, exhibit the same phonetic, syntactic, and semantic properties as “real” assertions except in the latter case actual truth or falsity. Any explanation of the oddity of the Moore utterance-type should explain its oddity regardless of its being a “real” assertion. (c) After some discussion of the difference that tense makes and choice of pronoun makes, Moore reformulates his “paradox.” He takes it that when he asserts I don’t believe it’s raining, but as a matter of fact it is and another asserts of him Moore doesn’t believe that it’s raining, but as a matter of fact it is, the same proposition is expressed. But why should one expression of the proposition be absurd and another expression of it not be absurd? That seems paradoxical. Moreover, it is possible for the proposition in question to be true. And that, Moore (1993: 209) remarks, is paradoxical: “It is a paradox that it should be perfectly absurd to utter assertively words of which the meaning is something which may quite well be true.” These characterizations of what is paradoxical about Moore’s statements are much more interesting than the blank observation that it is absurd to utter a Moore sentence assertively. (d) Finally, Moore (1993: 211) makes the following remarkable admission: “I think the things . . . wouldn’t be absurd to say, unless it was true that by saying a thing assertively we imply that we believe it. But I don’t know that this fully explains why it is absurd [my emphasis].” How right he was!

ON MOORE ’S TERM ‘ IMPLY ’

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Historically it is of interest to see that Moore himself was never in doubt that this notion of “implication” was not logical implication and that it is a “default” inference justified by the psychological facts of speech in an “immense majority of cases.” But given Moore’s parallel between belief and approval in the factual and ethical cases, and his willingness to use the word ‘imply’ in both cases, he might have asked why it is not linguistically absurd to assert It was right of Brutus to stab Caesar, but I don’t approve of it and it is linguistically absurd to assert ?I went to the pictures but I don’t believe I did. For surely, Stevenson and Moore would admit, it is a fact, which we all learn from experience, that in the immense majority of cases a man who makes such a claim as this (Brutus’s action was right) does approve of what he is claiming. Moore’s explanation requires that the factual and ethical cases should be on all linguistic fours, but they clearly are not. Moore’s explanation is a complete nonstarter. In 1944, on Moore’s return to England from the United States after the Battle of the Atlantic had been won by the Allies, Ludwig Wittgenstein first encounters Moore’s “paradox” in Moore’s lecture to the Moral Sciences Club. Wittgenstein writes to Moore, with some detectable impatience, in October 1944, that the paradox is an “‘absurdity’ which is in fact something similar to a contradiction, though it isn’t one. . . . You have said something about the logic of assertion . . . [that] it makes no sense to assert ‘p is the case, and I don’t believe that p is the case’. This assertion has to be ruled out . . . just as a contradiction is” (Wittgenstein 1974: 177). In his 1942 essay “The Notion of Analysis in Moore’s Philosophy,” the American logician C. H. Langford mentions the “paradox” in the form I believe P but not P (B1st per [P] & ¬P):

I want to cite an example which is due to A.M. MacIver and which is worth repeating on its own account.[a] Suppose someone to remark: “He thinks that he has been to Grantchester but he has not.” The person referred to may entertain this proposition as an hypothesis. But suppose he actually asserts the proposition: “I think that I have been to Grantchester but I have not.” This sounds self-contradictory, and the reason is that he will actually be saying that he thinks that he has been to Grantchester, whereas the but-clause in the indicative mood will signify or mean pragmatically [b] that he does not think so.[c] (Langford 1968: 333)

aSee

Analysis, Vol. 5 (1937–38), 43–50, and Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 3 (1938), 158.

b[Langford

(1968: 332) wrote, “We may call what a man does not state, but intends his linguistic behavior to signify, his pragmatical meaning, and we may distinguish this from the sense of his words, which is the proposition expressed by them. (This term has been used by Charles Morris in the same or a similar sense.)”

cThe

course of Moore’s argument in “A Defence of Common Sense” will be clearer if this distinction between formal and pragmatical contradiction is carefully observed. For in saying that certain philosophers contradict themselves when they assert, in effect, “There have been many other human beings beside myself, and none of them, including myself, has ever known of the existence of other human beings,” Moore is not holding that a formal contradiction can be derived from the sense of those words, but only that the pragmatical meaning of such an assertion is incompatible with its literal meaning.

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APPENDIX 1

The peculiarity of Langford’s analysis is that he is diagnosing the “apparent self-contradiction” of a statement of the form B1st per [P] & ¬ P by the hypothesis that in saying ¬ P the speaker “pragmatically means” ¬B1st per [P]. There is no recognition from Langford of the need to discuss the obvious scope distinction between the wide-scope negative belief proposition ¬B1st per [P] that is allegedly the speaker’s pragmatical meaning and the narrow-scope negative proposition B1st per [¬P]. Without defense, Langford chooses the wide-scope negative formula in order to explain the apparent self-contradiction by an actual logical contradiction between the sense of ‘I believe I have been to Grantchester’ and the speaker’s pragmatical meaning of asserting ‘I have not’, or “I don’t believe I have.”2 Unfortunately, he thinks it is self-evident that such a logical inconsistency between these different sorts of “meaning” suffices to explain the apparent “oddness” of asserting the Moore sentence. No theory providing the explanatory connection is offered at all. George Lakoff (1975: 264–65) first discusses Moore’s “paradox” in the form P & B[¬P]. Lakoff’s solution is a version of the Speech Act Sincerity Condition and Rationality Assumption solution: In addition to the Sincerity Condition If x (sincerely) asserts P, x believes P, Lakoff makes three rationality assumptions: (a) belief conjunction-elimination: B[P & Q] → B[P] & B[Q], (b) belief-reduction: B[B[P]] → B[P], and the consistency assumption (c): B[P] → ¬B[¬P]. He uses them to deduce the contradiction B[¬P] & ¬B[¬P] from the assumption of a sincere, rational assertion of a Moore sentence. By explaining P & B[¬P] rather than Moore’s form P & ¬B[P], Lakoff avoids the dubious S4-like axiom: B[P] → B[B[P]], which would otherwise be required by his type of explanation, but Lakoff’s form does not pose the same problem as Moore’s (1968: 543) original 1942 form.3

2A plausible reconstruction of Langford’s reasoning is possible: à la Moore, in asserting ¬P the speaker S pragmatically means B1st per [¬P]. Then consistency of belief requires the axiom: B[¬P] → ¬B[¬¬P], while “modest”—that is, classically and intuitionistically acceptable—Belief Double Negation yields the axiom: B[P] → B[¬¬P], from which there follows the theorem: B[¬P] → ¬B[P]. If pragmatic meaning is preserved under logical consequence modulo the axioms of rational belief, then if the speaker pragmatically means B[¬P], he means ¬B[P]. Such consequences are plausible if a speaker intends his utterings to signify the logical consequences (or perhaps, more restrictedly, the direct logical consequences [Atlas 1991a: 137]) modulo the axioms of rational belief of what he intends his utterings to signify. 3The

derivation is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

x sincerely asserts P & B[¬P] (assumption) B[P & B[¬P] (sincerity 1.) B[P] & B[B[¬P]] (belief & elimination 2.) B[P] (simplification 3.) B[B[¬P] (simplification 3.) B[¬P] (belief reduction 5.) ¬B[¬P] (belief consistency 4.) B[¬P] & ¬B[¬P] [& introduction 6.7.]

By reductio ad absurdum, if the principles of rational belief hold, x cannot sincerely assert: P & B[¬P].

ON MOORE ’S TERM ‘ IMPLY ’

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Lakoff (1975: 265) goes on to claim that the same assumptions will allow a deduction of a contradiction from the assumption of a sincere assertion of the original Moore sentence form P & ¬B[P] to explain the latter’s “oddness,” but this claim is incorrect. To deduce a contradiction in the same manner, he needs to assume in addition the S4-like iteration axiom that he (1975: 264) agrees is dubious.4 Langford and Lakoff explain the alleged peculiarity of the assertion by deductions of a logical contradiction of two sorts. In Langford’s case, precisely because the original assertion sounds self-contradictory to him, he claims that a logical inconsistency can be derived from the conjunction of the speaker’s pragmatical meaning and the literal sense. In Lakoff’s case, because the assertion sounds odd to him, he claims that a sincere rational assertion of the Moore sentence is logically inconsistent with the principles of rational belief and of speech-act theory. It seems to me an open question whether the Moore statement does sound self-contradictory, and a closed question that even if it seemed “odd,” the alleged reductio of the rational, sincere assertion of the Moore’s paradox sentence could not explain the “oddness” of “asserting” a Moore’s paradox sentence. Of course, traditionally, that the statement sounds “odd” is the linguistic datum to be explained. Another difficulty with Langford’s explanation is that there are a denumerable number of self-contradictory statements that are perfectly felicitous, so that the logical inconsistency of the total signification of a statement cannot be sufficient for its assertoric “oddness.” In the case of Lakoff’s (1975) explanation, since neither a speaker’s insincerity nor the failure of the speaker’s beliefs to conform to Lakoff’s three axioms of rational belief could be explanatory of the Moore statement’s sounding “odd,” it is bizarre to think that the “impossibility” of the “rational,” sincere assertion of a Moore sentence could explain the “odd” sound of uttering a Moore sentence assertively (as Moore 1993: 207 would put it), even if the impossibility of a sincere, “rational” assertion explains why either the utterance is insincere, “irrational,” or not an assertion—oddities all, but not an oddity of uttering a sentence assertively. None of those consequences would explain the particular “oddity” of uttering

4The

derivation is: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

x sincerely asserts P & ¬B[P] (assumption) B[P & ¬B[P]] (sincerity 1.) B[P] & B[¬B[P]] (belief and elimination 2.) B[P] (simplification 3.) B[¬B[P]] (simplification 3.) B[B[P]] (belief iteration: B[P] → B[B[P]] 4.) ¬B[¬¬B[P]] (belief consistency 5.) ¬B[B[P]] (modest Belief Double negation: B[B[P]] → B[¬¬B[P]] 7.) B[B[P]] & ¬B[B[P]] (& introduction 6.8.)

So by reductio ad absurdum, if the principles of rational belief hold, x cannot sincerely assert: P & ¬B[P]. But this derivation requires belief iteration, contrary to Lakoff’s claim. Without going into an extensive discussion, to see that belief iteration is at least controversial, note that David Rosenthal (1993) adopts belief iteration as a criterion for conscious belief states.

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the Moore sentence assertively.5 The oddity remains even if the Moore utterance merely purports to be an assertion; furthermore, irrationality of belief and insincerity of belief are psychological properties of the asserter, not linguistic properties of the utterance, so it is a category error to think that they can explain the linguistic oddity of the sentence uttered assertively.6

5In response to this claim, Paul Benacerraf (personal communication) has remarked, correctly I believe, that an adequate account must appeal to principles that every speaker/hearer can be expected to “know,” in the sense in which we know our language and its uses. 6See

note 1(b).

Appendix 2

On Hitzeman (1992) on ‘Almost’

I

offer two arguments reductio ad absurdum to show that x almost F’d does not entail x did not F. Suppose for adjectives, determiners, or verbs F, the statement schema A(almost F) entails the schema A(not F). (a) Then Almost all swans are almost white entails Almost all swans are not white, which entails Not all swans are not white, which entails Some swans are white. But the proposition Some swans are white is just what a speaker who asserts Almost all swans are almost white chooses the word almost to avoid conveying. (b) It is intuitively evident that if there were no white swans, it could still be true that almost all swans were almost white. However, if A(almost F) entailed A(not F), and there were no white swans, it would be false that almost all swans were almost white, as we have just seen in (a). Conclusion: A(almost F) does not entail A(not F). The simple entailment explanation of the ordering of almost and not quite is the wrong explanation. What is the relationship between almost and not quite? Hitzeman (1992) believes that the transition in (a) from Almost all swans are almost white to the entailed Almost all swans are not white requires that I assume (incorrectly in her view) that almost all swans is an upward-entailing (i.e., upward monotonic in the sense of J. Barwise and R. Cooper 1981) generalized quantifier noun phrase. Actually, what I imputed to the entailment theorist was the claim that x is almost white analytically entails x is not white, for free x, or, equivalently (in Classical but not Intuitionistic logic), that ∀x(x is almost white) analytically entails ∀x(x is not white). On what I take to be Hitzeman’s assumption—viz., that {x: x is almost white} ⊆ {x: x is not white}—her claim, that the hypothesis that almost all swans is upward-entailing is a necessary condition for the correctness of my (a), is false (even 231

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though, on her, admittedly plausible, assumption about the subset relation between the extensions of the predicates ‘x is almost white’ and ‘x is not white’, the hypothesis is a sufficient condition for my claim). For example, for the non-monotonic generalized quantifier Only Tom (Atlas 1996b), the entailment theorist about almost would certainly be committed to the claim that Only Tom was almost drunk entails Only Tom was not drunk. The status of this claim as an entailment claim is unaffected by the fact that only Tom is not an upwardentailing generalized quantifier. In fact, on the traditional, and incorrect, view that only Tom is a downward monotonic generalized quantifier, the traditional entailment theorist would be caught in a logical cleft stick: he would want to claim that ‘x is almost drunk’ analytically entails ‘x is not drunk’, and so necessarily {x: x is almost drunk} ⊆ {x: x is not drunk}, and he would want to claim that the substitution of the superset Not Drunk for its set Almost Drunk in an allegedly downward-entailing quantifier only Tom necessarily preserves truth—which is an absurd conjunction of claims. So the theorist cannot both be traditional about the downward monotonicity of only Tom and simultaneously hold that almost F entails not F. (This result, alone, is worth the price of admission, since both views are standardly held, and they are logically inconsistent. No semantic theorist can consistently hold that only Tom is downward monotonic and that almost F entails not F.) The solution to the traditional difficulty is that neither part of the traditional position is correct: only Tom is nonmonotonic, and almost F does not entail not F. Hitzeman’s argument, which confuses a sufficient with a necessary condition, does not undermine my (a). Since Hitzeman (1992) thinks that my reductio argument requires the assumption that almost all N is upward monotonic, she attempts to defang my argument by arguing that almost all N is not upward monotonic. She offers an alleged counterexample to the plausible, upward monotonicity of almost all N, plausible even to Hitzeman because the following argument (A) seems valid to her: (A) Almost all dogs run, Every individual that runs moves ∴ Almost all dogs move. Her alleged counterexample is the alleged invalidity of the argument: (B) Almost all men are fathers, Every individual that is a (biological) father is male ∴ Almost all men are male. But how one could think that the premises of this argument (B) might be true while simultaneously its conclusion not true is quite beyond me. If it is true that almost all men are fathers, and that every individual that is a (biological) father is male, then it is surely true that almost all men are male, even though it is also true that all (biological, non-transsexual) men are male. So what is Hitzeman’s objection to argument (B)—that is, to the upward monontonicity of almost all N? She asserts that the concluding sentence Almost all men are male is “strange,” but not “strange” in the way she thinks that the analytical truth All men are male is “strange.” She thinks the former is “strange” because it (allegedly) entails Some man is not male! But for her to argue in this way against the validity of argument (B) fails for two different reasons: first, because the issue is not strangeness of the concluding sentence of (B) but its truth in any model in which the premises are true and, second, because even if “strange” meant ‘false’, her argument overtly begs the question against my view that almost does not entail not. She argues: almost entails not; so Almost all men are male is “strange,” thus necessarily false; so the (alleged) invalidity of argument (B) shows that Atlas cannot assume that Almost all N is an upward monotonic

ON HITZEMAN ON ‘ ALMOST ’

233

quantifier. This argument just blatantly begs the question against my position that almost does not entail not. And, as I argued above, she (falsely) thinks that upward monotonicity is necessary (by contrast with sufficient) for the first claim of my reductio argument against the entailment of not by almost to be sound. Hitzeman (1992: 236) has been kind enough to say that she “believe[s] that the most interesting argument against the entailment hypothesis is . . . due to Atlas (1984a)”—that is, the argument in question here. Since the semantically most sophisticated attack on the pragmatic position of Sadock (1981) and me (Atlas 1984a) that I am defending here is Hitzeman’s (1992), involving as it does an attempt to defeat my argument by arguing (incorrectly) for the non-monotonicity of almost all N, I find it a highly instructive argument. According to criteria for upward monotonic generalized quantifier noun phrases analogous to the ones discussed in Zwarts (1996, 1998) and Atlas (1996b: 282) for downward monotonic generalized noun phrases, we have the following obvious criteria for upward monotonicity of the NP: a. b. c. d. e.

NP(VP1 and VP2) NPVP1 & NPVP2 NP(VP1 and VP2) NPVP1 v NPVP2 NPVP1 v NPVP2 NP(VP1 or VP2) NP(VP1 and VP2) NPVP1 NP(VP1) NP(VP1 or VP2)

where and entails the Boolean intersection interpretation of the extensions of the Verb Phrases, and or means nothing more restrictive than the Boolean union of the extensions of the verb phrases. These criteria (a) to (e) have obviously correct instantiations for almost all N, for example, (a) Almost all college boys smoke and drink Almost all college boys smoke & Almost all college boys drink. Thus the evidence is powerful that almost all N is upward monotonic, contrary to Hitzeman’s (1992) claim and consistent with my argument against almost F entailing not F.

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Appendix 3

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Cleft Statements

A unified theory? Linguists who recognize that statements may have the same truth conditions but different semantic representations have suggested that the semantic representations of (1a), (1b), and (1c) are (2a), (2b), and (2c), respectively (see Gazdar 1979a: 124–25):1 (1)

a. Sam wants Fido. b. What Sam wants is Fido. c. It is Sam who wants Fido.

(2)

a. Wants(Sam, Fido) b. λx(Wants(Sam,x))(Fido) c. λx(Wants(x,Fido))(Sam)

But with normal statement stress on the last word of (1a), Fido has “unmarked information focus” (Halliday 1967), which is consistent with the general convention that old information precede new information. Similarly, the pseudo-cleft (1b) con-

This appendix is in part a revised version of Atlas and Levinson (1981: 16–18, 50–57) and appears with the permission of Academic Press. 1For a discussion of lamba-abstraction, see Rudolf Carnap (1958), pp. 129–31. See also L. T. F. Gamut (1991), pp. 102–16 and Peter B. Andrews (1986).

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CLEFT STATEMENTS

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forms to this convention. The “focus” (Chomsky 1972b) of (1b) is Fido; its “presupposition” is Sam wants something. The same analysis would give for (1c) the “focus” Sam and the “presupposition” Something wants Fido. In other words, the cleft rhetorically parallel to the pseudo-cleft and the simple sentence is not (1c) as Gazdar and the order of items in surface structure seem to suggest, but (3), which contravenes the convention that old information precede new information. Gazdar’s logical form for (3) would be (4): (3)

It is Fido that Sam wants.

(4)

λx(Wants(Sam,x))(Fido)

The “focus” of (1b) and of (3) is Fido; the “presupposition” of (1b) and (3) is Sam wants something. In Gazdar’s logical forms for clefts and pseudo-clefts, the “focus” corresponds to the logical subject; the “presupposition” corresponds to the logical predicate. And the logical form of the pseudo-cleft What Sam wants is Fido is identical to that of the cleft It is Fido that Sam wants; that is, (2b) = (4). I take it that a statement with contrastive stress SAM wants Fido has Sam as “focus” and Something wants Fido as “presupposition.” So the contrastively stressed (5) rhetorically parallels (1c) and (6). The Gazdar logical form for the latter two is (2c): (5)

SAM wants Fido.

(2a)

Wants(Sam,Fido)

(1c)

It is Sam who wants Fido.

(6)

Who wants Fido is Sam.

(2c)

λx(Wants(x,Fido))(Sam)

Similarly, the normally stressed statement (1a) and the contrastively stressed (7) parallel (3) and (1b). The Gazdar logical form for the latter two is (2b): (1a)

Sam wants Fido.

(7)

Sam wants FIDO.

(2a)

Wants(Sam,Fido)

(3)

It is Fido that Sam wants.

(1b)

What Sam wants is Fido.

(2b)

λx(Wants(Sam,x))(Fido)

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If, like Gazdar, one were to assume that (8) parallels (9), one might also assume that (1c) parallels (1a): (8)

It was John who went.

(9)

John went.

(1c)

It is Sam who wants Fido.

(2c)

λx(Wants(x,Fido))(Sam)

(1a)

Sam wants Fido.

(2a)

Wants(Sam,Fido)

But, as we have just seen, statements (1a) and (1c) are not parallel at all. The order of items in the surface structures of (1c) and (1a) is misleading. Misled by surface structure one might assume that the “logical subject” of both sentences is Sam. On this assumption, in (1c) the “focus” corresponds to the logical subject. But in the normally stressed simple sentence (1a), the normal “focus” is Fido; the “focus” there does not correspond to the logical subject. Thus we shall be guided by “focus” rather than by surface order. I reject the suggestion that statement (8) pairs with the normal stressed (9); it pairs with the contrastively stressed (10).2 (10)

JOHN went.

I believe that the identification of logical subject and “focus” in (1c) is just as mistaken as the same identification in the normally stressed (1a) would be. It seems to me that the semantic representations offered by Gazdar and others fail to make the semantic and pragmatic data cohere. (For a discussion of the pragmatics of clefts, see Prince 1978.) One of the aims in this section is to sketch an account that will unify the semantics and pragmatics.

The logical form of clefts and its explanatory value One attraction of Grice’s views has always been its semantical conservatism. The Fregean notion that “sense” is truth conditions, the identification of a set of English expressions, which are frustratingly resistant to systematization, with the logical constants, which are our paradigm of semantic systematization, and the scrupulous

2Independently

Halvorsen (1978: 6) has argued against A. Akmajian (1970) that It was himself that John wanted Mary to describe pairs with John wanted Mary to describe HIMSELF, not with *John wanted Mary to describe himself.

CLEFT STATEMENTS

237

adherence to a policy of austerity in positing senses have contributed to theoretical simplicity in our theory of language. Simplicity is indeed a virtue of theories: simplemindedness is not. There has been a regrettable temptation to adopt a logical primitivism when theorizing about conversational inference. The canonical languages of our logical theories are constructed to achieve pellucidity, but a certain measure of complexity is compatible with, indeed on my view required by, a satisfactory use of truth-conditional semantics within a pragmatic theory. Logical primitivism would take the familiar (but incorrect) claim that (11) and (12) have the same truth conditions to imply (fallaciously) that (11) and (12) have the same logical form (13). Gazdar’s less primitive (but still incorrect) suggestion would give (11) the logical form (14). (11)

It was Max that Jane kissed.

(12)

Jane kissed Max.

(13)

Kiss(Jane,Max)

(14)

λx(Kiss(Jane,x))(Max)

In adopting a logical form, I am locating the sentence in a network of entailment relations that is described by the particular logical theory I am employing. But I am also interested in hypothesizing logical forms that are explanatory—that account for entailment relations by exhibiting semantically significant structure in the sentence. Such an account will begin to explain how the relations between the parts of the sentence contribute to the meaning of the whole. It will illuminate the similarities and differences between related sentences. It will (on the standard view) provide the extensional sentence “meaning” upon which inferential mechanisms must operate to yield the understanding of an utterance. The assignment of logical form to a sentence is not only relative to the logical theory employed, it is relative to the comprehensive theory in which logical forms have an explanatory place. Indeed, even the pragmatic features of the sentence, its use in the language, can in principle bear on the assignment of logical form, especially if the resulting form increases the overall coherence and explanatory power of the theory.3 The logical forms in (13) and (14) are logically equivalent, but they are distinct: whereas (13) has a primitive two-place predicate symbol true of Jane and Max, (14) has a complex one-place predicate symbol true of Max. Whereas (13) expresses a relation between Jane and Max—it is “about” the pair <Jane, Max>—(14) expresses a property of Max: it is “about” him. And it is precisely here that the flaws of (14) become obvious. If one recalls the semantical similarities between clefts and pseudo-clefts, the pseudo-cleft (15) will highlight the properties of (11):

3My indebtedness to the writing and teaching of Donald Davidson shows itself here, as does my divergence from his views (cf. Davidson 1967, 1970).

238 (15)

APPENDIX 3

What Jane kissed was Max.

This sentence is “about” what/whom Jane kissed, which is specified or identified as Max. Likewise (11) is actually “about” whom Jane kissed, which is then specified or identified as Max. It was argued in Atlas and Levinson (1981) that clefts exhibit the following behavior: (I)

It was Max that Jane kissed a. entails Jane kissed Max; the latter does not entail the former b. entails Jane kissed someone c. entails but does not “presuppose” Jane kissed (exactly) one person d. is “about” what/whom Jane kissed.

(II)

It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed a. entails Jane didn’t kiss Max; the latter does not entail the former b. “presupposes” or its use implicates Jane kissed someone c. does not “presuppose” Jane kissed (exactly) one person; d. is “about” what/whom Jane kissed.

The logical forms (13) and (14), and their negations, obviously cannot satisfy these conditions. Is there any logical form that will meet all these conditions and in the process yield the correct pragmatic inferences? The answer is yes; it is just a more complex logical form than is typically suggested. The correct logical form for (16a) It was Max that Jane kissed involves λ abstraction (Carnap 1958: 129–31) to formulate a complex one-place predicate-symbol and my “collection term operator” γ to formulate a singular term γxA(x) for a collective. The logical form (16b) of (16a) has precisely the properties described in (I). It may be paraphrased in English by (16c). (16)

a. It was Max that Jane kissed. b. λx(x = Max)(γxKiss(Jane,x)) c. A group of individuals kissed by Jane is identical to Max.

If ûA(u) = {a}, that is, the extension of A(u) is just one object a, Hilbert’s (1927) term ∈uA(u) designates the descriptum of |uA(u). If the extension of A(u) is larger, ∈is a choice function; ∈uA(u) designates some one of the individuals in the extension (but we do not know which). The expression ∈uA(u) may be paraphrased by a u such that if anything has A, u has A. The basic axioms governing the use of the term are ∃uA(u) ↔ A(∈uA(u)) and ∀uA(u) ↔ A(∈u¬A(u)). Thus the selection operator allows one to make a statement the force of which is purely existential while employing a designating singular term. Paul Ziff, Jaakko Hintikka (1973), and I (Atlas 1972) independently have remarked on the need for ∈-terms in giving the logical forms for sentences of a natural language. Ziff and Hintikka noted it for coreference phenomena, as in ‘John wants to catch a fish and eat it for supper’ (Hintikka 1973). I (Atlas 1972) made a system-

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atic use of the ∈-term in giving a theory of truth for English: the problem was to characterize the circumstances in which I met a man who wrote “Lolita”; therefore, the man I met wrote “Lolita” would be an acceptable inference. Once again, the heart of the matter is coreference—the coreference of event-terms. The indeterminateness of Hilbert’s ∈-term makes it attractive to some (for example, R. M. Martin 1979: 214), as a paraphrase of indefinite plural noun phrases. Although I am in agreement with Martin’s suggestions in some respects, his claim that Hilbert’s ∈-term (that is, the selection description) correctly formalizes indefinite plural noun phrases seems to me mistaken. It also seems incorrect to define contextually the ∈-term as Martin (1958: 55; 1979: 214) does. Attributing the definition to Frederic B. Fitch, Martin (1958) contextually defines the ∈-term as follows: B(∈xA(x)) = df ∃xA(x) & ∀x[A(x) → B(x)]. The second conjunct of the definiens seems too inclusive to be an accurate analysis of the definiendum. (For discussion of the ∈-term, see A. C. Leisenring 1969.) But the condition in the definiens does capture an important concept in mathematics and in linguistics, which we can use in the analysis of collective terms and so of clefts. Just as the | operator attaches to a formula A to produce an individual term |xA(x), so my γ operator attaches to a formula A to produce a collective term γxA(x). By a collective term I mean one that denotes a group. For example, the plural noun phrase the boys may be used as a collective term in The boys (collectively; that is, a group of boys) are at the party; the sentence is true if and only if there are boys and every boy (in the group) is at the party. I contextually define the formula B(γxA(x)) by ∃xA(x) & ∀x[A(x) → B(x)]. The γ operator is indifferent to the distinction between singular and plural: γxA(x) is consistent with both the singular the A and plural the As and so captures a linguistic feature of collective nouns. Collective nouns in English are sometimes grammatically plural (for example, cattle, clergy), sometimes grammatically singular (for example, furniture), and sometimes either (for example, family). A collective noun can designate a group collectively, and so behave as a denoting term, or designate a group distributively, for example, in the United States, The administration, who have . . . are . . . or in the U.K., The government, who have . . . are . . . ; plural count nouns, like the boys in our example above, can mimic the behavior of collective nouns. Martin’s definiens, which I accept as roughly correct for γxA(x), though not for ∈xA(x), captures the distributive use of the collective term in the truth conditions for sentences containing it. It is also linguistically possible for a collective noun, and so even for plural count nouns, to designate a group of one as well as a more normal group of more than one. It is a virtue of my γ-operator that it allows this possibility. The cleft sentence It was Max that Jane kissed is “about” the collectivity, not excluding a group of one, that Jane kissed. It can easily be demonstrated that the logical form for clefts that employs our γ-operator explains precisely those characteristics of clefts that I have argued in Atlas and Levinson (1981) are properly attributable to them. There is one final observation supporting formalization of collectivity by our γ-operator. Collective nouns like flock, herd, forest, and group can act as “sortal classifiers” when they are attached to count nouns—for example, flock of sheep. And it has been claimed that “sortal classifiers” have properties in common with determiners (Lyons 1977: 464). If this is correct, there is a suggestive analogy between a

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determiner like the and a “sortal classifier” like group. Likewise, there is an analogy between the |-operator and our γ-operator, which we have exploited. The advantages of this semantic representation are manifold. First, it explains the data in (I). It is easy to see that the entailment relation is as claimed in (Ia), as λx(x = Max)(γxA(x)) A(Max); but A(Max) λx(x = Max)(γxA(x)). Condition (Ib) then follows immediately from (Ia). It is easy to prove that λx(x = Max)(γxA(x)) E!|xA(x), so part of (Ic) is explained. It may be worth remarking on the reasons for this entailment. The formula λx(x = Max)(γxA(x)) is definitionally equivalent to ∃xA(x) & ∀y(A(y) → y = Max), from which it follows immediately that Jane kissed (exactly) one person. The sentence Jane kissed someone follows from the contribution of that Jane kissed to It was Max that Jane kissed. But the proposition Jane kissed (exactly) one person follows because of the contingent fact that the specification in the (surface) main-clause focus constituent of It was Max that Jane kissed lists but one item: namely, Max. That “asserted” fact adds Jane kissed (at most) one person to the “presupposed” Jane kissed someone to give Jane kissed (exactly) one person. The felicitousness of the discourse (17) was inexplicable to Halvorsen (1978). (17)

McX: Was it Mart and Rick that Laura kissed? McY: She kissed only John.

It is explained without the machinery of “ordered implications” (Wilson and Sperber 1979). What is being contradicted is not a “presupposition” but an assertion, and there is no problem of felicitousness. Furthermore, the fact that lists can be of any finite length receives a natural accommodation. Lists are sequences (or vectors), and can be the values of individual variables. The expression Kiss can be treated as a “multigrade” predicate Kiss, so a sequence of any length (including infinite length) can be one of its arguments. The sentence schema It was N1, N2, . . . Ni–1, and Ni that Jane kissed specifies a sequence [sa]ia = 1 of i terms where sa = Na. The logical form is λx(x = [sa]ia = 1)(γxKiss( j,x)) with x ranging over i-term sequences of individuals. If we wish to accommodate any number of terms, we may let sequences be infinite and identify the subsequence [sa]ia=1, sa = Na, with the sequence [ta]∞a = 1 such that ta = sa, a = 1,2, . . . , i, and ta = D, i + 1 ≤ a, where D is the domain of individuals. The logical form preserves the intuition that the cleft is a property rather than a relation statement, thereby showing that it is “about” its logical subject and removing the incoherence between the semantics and pragmatics noted in subsection 1. Thus it explains datum (Id). It is “about” what/whom Jane kissed, that is, “about” γxKiss(Jane,x).4 4If you believe in a uniqueness implicature, so that you believe that (Ic) should read ‘“presupposes” Jane kissed (exactly) one person’, you can be satisfied by the logical form λx(x = Max) (|xKiss(Jane,x)). The logically equivalent form |xKiss(Jane,x) = Max resembles an underlying syntactic structure adopted for clefts by Harries-Delisle (1978). Harries-Delisle produces syntactical arguments to show that the underlying structure of the “equational sentence” The one whom Jane kissed is Max also underlies It was Max that Jane kissed, where the one is a neutral head noun marked for person (third) and in English at least, for number and for humanness. Logically the sentence is recognized to involve

CLEFT STATEMENTS

241

Classical Gricean pragmatics posits the external negation (18b) for the negative sentence (18a).5 The Atlas-Levinson neo-Gricean revision of Gricean pragmatics, by the Principle of Informativeness, yields as a generalized conversational inferendum of (18a) the internal negation (18c). On either understanding of (18a), (IId) is explained. (18)

a. It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed. b. ¬λx(x = Max)(γxKiss(Jane,x)) c. λx(¬(x = Max))(γxKiss(Jane,x))

Condition (IIc) is explained, as the implicatum (18c) does not entail Jane kissed (exactly) one person. This completes the explanation of (Ic). The implicatum (18c) “directly entails” (Atlas 1991), and so (18a) “quasi-entails” (see chapter 5) by the composition of the generalized conversational inferendum relation with the direct entailment relation, Jane kissed someone.6 Thus (IIb) is explained. And finally, the implicatum (18c) entails Jane didn’t kiss Max, but the converse is not the case. So (IIa) is explained. My logical form for clefts, which incorporates “topic” into its singular term as logical subject, confirms Strawson’s (1954, 1964), and also H. P. Grice’s and G. J. Warnock’s, intuitions about the filling-in of truth-value gaps, explains the anomaly of It’s NO one that Jane kissed, as Ivan Sag observed (personal communication), and explains the falsity rather than truth-value-lessness of It’s the king of France that is bald, a datum noted but not explained by J. McCawley (1981: 241).

Further remarks on the analysis L. R. Horn (1981a) has discussed Halvorsen (1978) and Atlas and Levinson (1981) on the semantics of clefts. In that essay, after agreeing, mostly, with the criticisms

identity, but grammatically the underlying structure is subject/predicate, and there are various complications about the occurrence of the copula in the underlying structure. We begin from roughly the same semantic intuitions. It is interesting to discover syntactical arguments in support of an underlying structure whose basic features at least approximate those of the logical form that we have posited. The choice of the collective term as a logical subject is consistent with the Focal Noun Phrase Limitation Principle discussed in Atlas (1991a, 1993, 1996b). 5I (Atlas 1975a,b, 1977b, 1978b, 1979, 1989) argued that negation was univocal—that it was semantically nonspecific rather than ambiguous. I also suggested how a Classical Gricean theory could accept an identification of negation in English with the external negation in ordinary logic by giving up the identification of external negation with the “literal meaning” of a sentence-type. Instead, the pragmatic theory would rest content with describing the understandings of utterances, and for the sake of theoretical simplicity, though contrary to the linguistic facts of markedness, make the external negation the “unmarked” understanding of an utterance-type (Atlas 1979). My own theoretical solution was not that; it was to recognize as essential to a full theory a semantic representation of the sentence-type, the product of the grammatical rules and the lexicon, but that account entailed that for the negative sentences the semantic representation was of a univocal, scope-nonspecific rather than scope-ambiguous negative sentence. 6For the notion of direct entailment , see Atlas (1991a) and chapter 5 here: “A” » B; B D D C; so, “A” ° » C.

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that Levinson and I (Atlas and Levinson 1981) make of Halvorsen (1978), Horn presents an interpretation of those (Atlas and Levinson 1981) views and on that foundation presents some astute criticisms of those views. In what follows I shall assess (a) the interpretation of Atlas and Levinson (1981) offered by Horn (1981a) and (b) Horn’s criticism of Atlas and Levinson (1981) offered on the basis of that interpretation. I hope to show that our (Atlas and Levinson 1981) actual views, and the views of this section, survive the critical onslaught. Since there is also a parallel between my (1981) treatment of clefts and my (1991a, 1996b) treatment of only Proper Name, defusing Horn’s objections to the former will indirectly make more plausible my treatment of the latter. Halvorsen (1978) had claimed that statement (19a) had the same truth conditions as statement (19b), and so “make the same assertion,” but (19a), unlike (19b), in the sense of L. Karttunen and S. Peters (1979) “conventionally implicated,” or presupposed, (19c) and something approximating (19d): (19)

a. b. c. d. e.

It was Max that Jane kissed. Jane kissed Max. Jane kissed someone. Jane kissed only one person. Jane kissed at most one person.

“Conventional implicata,” in this sense, are preserved under negation and questioning. First, I (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 21) argued that Halvorsen was incorrect to claim that (19a) “conventionally implicates” (19c). To show that it does, using tests from Karttunen and Peters (1979), Halvorsen claimed that (20b) does not follow from (20a), by contrast with (20c), which does, he believes, follow from (20a): (20)

a. I just discovered that it was Max that Jane kissed. b. I just discovered that Jane kissed someone. c. I just discovered that Jane kissed Max.

Example (20) is supposed to parallel example (21), a paradigm case of “conventional implicature”: (21)

a. I just discovered that Max managed to write a brief. b. I just discovered that it is difficult for Max to write a brief. c. I just discovered that Max wrote a brief.

I claimed, pace Halvorsen, that (20b) no less followed from (20a) than (20c) did. So I rejected the claim that (20a) “conventionally implicated” (20b). I rejected it on the grounds that Halvorsen’s intuition was less compelling than its opposite, and also on the grounds (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 24) that Halvorsen had supposed that in the negative case It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed there should be the same “conventional implicature,” which, in turn, meant that It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed—she didn’t kiss anybody should be unacceptable. Since I found It certainly wasn’t Max that Jane

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kissed—in fact, Jane didn’t kiss anyone perfectly acceptable, I concluded that Halvorsen had no support for his claim. The claim that (19a) “conventionally implicated” the Uniqueness Implicatum (19d) Jane kissed only one person, or the Exhaustiveness Implicatum (19e) Jane kissed at most one person, was open to my objection (Atlas and Levinson 1981: 25) that on Halvorsen’s view (22) should be anomalous, which in fact, it isn’t: (22)

It wasn’t John that Mary kissed—it was Mart and Rick.

In light of data like (22), Halvorsen (1978: 16) had inferred that the correct “exhaustiveness implicatum” would have the form (23): (23)

Mary kissed n0 persons.

where n0 had “no particular value.” Horn (1981a) charitably reformulated this exhaustiveness implicatum as (24): (24)

Mary kissed at most one thing [within some contextually defined set].

But then he agreed with my rejection of Halvorsen’s claim that (19a) “conventionally implicates” (24). On my analysis of the logical form of clefts, the truth conditions of It was Max that Jane kissed are equivalent to Jane kissed someone & Jane kissed at most Max. It then follows, from a cleft sentence with a single, non-vacuous, Proper Name in focus position (and does not follow in other cases), Jane kissed (exactly) one person. The theory was formulated specifically for referring singular terms in focus position; I did not discuss indefinite noun phrases in focus position. After agreeing that my theory had the virtue of showing that the negative sentence It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed, on its exclusion negation interpretation, did not entail Jane kissed (exactly) one person, and so, unlike Halvorsen’s (1978) incorrect account, did not commit the speaker of the negative sentence to that entailment, Horn (1981a) offered three objections to my theory. I now shall discuss those objections. Using an example with an indefinite noun phrase in focus position, Horn (1981a) described my view as claiming that It was a pizza that Lauren ate entails Lauren ate a pizza but not conversely, that it entails, and its negation presupposes, Lauren ate something, and that it entails, but does not presuppose, Lauren ate (exactly) one thing. Then he further glossed my view as implying that the truth conditions of It was a pizza that Lauren ate are Lauren ate a pizza and only a pizza (alternatively, Lauren ate a pizza and Lauren ate (exactly) one thing). Unfortunately, this interpretation of my account was not accurate. On my account the truth conditions of It was a pizza that Lauren ate would be Lauren ate something and Lauren ate at most a pizza. Furthermore, on the theory of ‘only’ in Atlas (1991a, 1996b), the truth conditions of Lauren ate only a pizza would be Lauren ate (exactly) one thing and Lauren ate at most a pizza. Finally, it does not follow from my account that It was a pizza that Lauren ate entails Lauren ate (exactly) one thing; so Horn’s characterization of that

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entailment as following from my account was incorrect, as were the truth conditions that he imputed to my account. Horn (1981a) then properly objected to his version of my theory that, on the face of it, Lauren ate a pizza and Lauren ate (exactly) one thing does not express the truth conditions of It was a pizza that Lauren ate. And I certainly agree with him, but my account entailed no such claim. It claimed that the truth conditions were Lauren ate something and Lauren ate at most a pizza. So Horn’s first objection missed the mark. Horn’s second objection was that my theory failed to predict that the assertion of Lauren ate a pizza with the denial of the cleft sentence is semantically anomalous, as in (25a) or (25b): (25)

a. #Lauren ate a pizza, but it wasn’t a pizza that she ate. b. #I know Lauren ate a pizza, but it wasn’t a pizza that she ate. c. #Lauren ate a pizza but Lauren ate something and whatever Lauren ate was a nonpizza. d. #∃x[A(l,x) & Px] & ∃x A(l,x) & ∀x[A(l,x) → ¬Px].

Horn wrote, “There is no obvious way to rule out the infelicitous sequences . . . if we are to insist, with [Atlas and Levinson], that clefts entail exhaustiveness” (1981a: 130). Let us see if this is so. Since my theory states that the truth conditions of the default, choice negation understanding of the utterance-type It wasn’t a pizza that Lauren ate is analogous to that of It wasn’t Max that Jane kissed, the truth conditions of Horn’s sentence (25a) would be (25c ,d). Statement (25c) is semantically odd by virtue of expressing a blatant contradiction. Thus my account explains the anomaly of (25a) by the anomaly of (25c). The oddity is more obvious when focus position contains a singular term rather than an indefinite description, as in (26): (26)

a. #Jane kissed Max, but it wasn’t Max that she kissed. b. #Jane kissed Max, but Jane kissed someone & Jane did not kiss Max.

My theory has no difficulty explaining by appeal to my account of negative clefts the anomaly of (26a), as it derives from the anomaly in (26b). Horn also complained that my theory could not explain the redundancy (the “pointlessness”) of asserting the simple declarative and the affirmative cleft as well: (27)

a. Jane kissed Max, but it was Max that she kissed, b. Lauren ate a pizza, but it was a pizza that she ate.

My theory gives the following truth conditions for (27a,b): (28)

a. Jane kissed Max, but Jane kissed someone & Jane kissed at most Max. b. Lauren ate a pizza, but Lauren ate something & Lauren ate at most a pizza.

It seems to me that if one’s linguistic intuitions would cause one to regard (27) as redundant, so, too, mutatis mutandis, would one regard (28) as redundant. So my

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theory would explain the redundancy of (27) by the redundancy of (28). Horn’s second objection misses the mark. Finally, Horn objected that my theory could not explain the alleged oddity of (29a): (29)

a. It wasn’t John that Jane kissed, it was John and Brian. b. Jane kissed some group & Jane did not kiss John & Jane kissed some group & Jane kissed at most the group John and Brian.

on Horn’s assumption that It was John that Jane kissed entails Jane kissed (exactly) one person and Jane kissed no one else. On the choice negation understanding of the negative sentence, the truthconditions of sentence (29a) would be (29b). For myself, I do not find (29a) infelicitous, but if I were to find it infelicitous, I would find (29b) infelicitous in the same way. In either case, my theory seems able to explain the varying linguistic intuitions. Of course, the natural, felicitous understanding of (29a) would appeal to an exclusion negation, or to Horn’s (1985, 1989) “metalinguistic” negation, in which case (29a) would definitely not be anomalous and would not have the truthconditions of (29b). Thus, contrary to Horn’s claim, my theory predicts just the anomaly it should. As far as I can see, none of Horn’s three objections succeeds. The reason for Horn’s objections to fail to hit the mark is Horn’s inadvertent misconstrual of my theory. He thought that on my theory It was a pizza that Lauren ate meant Lauren ate a pizza and only a pizza or Lauren ate a pizza and Lauren ate (exactly) one thing. It does not. On my theory the truth conditions are Lauren ate something and Lauren ate at most a pizza. Furthermore, although I claimed that It was Max that Jane kissed entailed Jane kissed (exactly) one person, my theory does not imply that It was a pizza that Lauren ate entails Lauren ate (exactly) one thing. On my theory there is an important difference between indefinite noun phrases and definite noun phrases in focus position. Furthermore, on my (1991a) analysis of ‘only’ statements, It was Max that Jane kissed is logically equivalent to Jane kissed only Max, but It was a pizza that Lauren ate is not logically equivalent to Lauren ate only a pizza; contrast Lauren ate something and Lauren ate at most a pizza with Lauren ate (exactly) one thing and Lauren ate at most a pizza. On my theory it is true that Lauren ate only a pizza entails It was a pizza that Lauren ate; the converse entailment fails. My theory implies that Horn’s alleged analysans Lauren ate a pizza and only a pizza of It was a pizza that Lauren ate is logically stronger than, on my theory, it should be; my analysans is the weaker Lauren ate something and Lauren ate at most a pizza. In short: It was Max that Jane kissed Jane kissed only Max. Lauren ate only a pizza It was a pizza that Lauren ate. It was a pizza that Lauren ate Lauren ate only a pizza.

Finally, since Horn suggests that the Exhaustiveness Condition is conversationally implicated in the assertion of a cleft sentence, he is worried by the apparent difficulty in canceling the Exhaustiveness Condition in sentences like:

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a. (#)It was a pizza that Lauren ate; indeed, it was a pizza and a calzone.

The consequence of this, as Horn notes, is that: if we tentatively assume, on the basis of the (purported) deviance of [(30a)] and the difficulty of establishing context-cancelation, that the [alleged] exhaustiveness implicature is not cancelable, we arrive at a curious conclusion about the relation of cancelability and implicature. . . . If it turns out to be correct that exhaustiveness is a non-cancelable generalized conversational implicature of cleft sentences, we must conclude that non-cancelablity is . . . not a sufficient condition for concluding that an inference is conventional in nature.

This, as Horn notes, is indeed a “provocative possibility.” I would explain (30a) rather differently. On my theory, the truth-conditions of (30a) are (30b): (30)

b. Lauren ate something & Lauren ate at most a pizza; indeed, Lauren ate something & Lauren ate at most a pizza and a calzone.

In my analysis cancelability of the exhaustiveness condition properly fails, as the condition is not an implicatum, and Horn’s provocative possibility is, happily, a mere possibility and produces no anomaly in the theory of implicature.

The semantics-pragmatics interface Within the philosophy of language and linguistic theory, there have been attempts to investigate the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, to map a boundary between the two domains, and to understand the mechanics of their interaction. In the original 1981 work, our aim was to exemplify one approach through which our understanding might be improved and to make evident the explanatory power of such an approach. A benefit for linguistics is the retrieval of the hope that the phenomena known as “presupposition” can be reduced to matters of entailment on the one hand and nonconventional, generalized conversational inferenda on the other. The ingredients making this hope viable are (a) a refinement of the role of logical form, (b) the formulation of general principles of conversational inference, and (c) an appeal to a Chomsky Internalist Semantics notion of semantical underdeterminacy. (See chapter 4.) The original intuition that Levinson and I tried to explicate is that there is significant semantic structure, explicable by logical forms and by even more abstract Internalist Semantics semantic representations, over and beyond propositions, sets of possible worlds, or truth conditions. This structure meshes closely with pragmatic principles to produce via the Performance System informative, defeasible inferenda. There were two problems. First, we needed to find some independent condition on logical forms that express the same truth conditions. This condition would distinguish a semantic representation of an English sentence from a sentence logically equivalent to it. Second, we needed to make explicit that, in fact, there are two

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countervailing pragmatic principles governing informativeness, not simply a hodgepodge of conflicting inferences. The successful development of this approach would have several benefits. The one illustrated in the preceding section is the reduction of some well-known presuppositional phenomena to the case of an abstract semantic representation interacting intimately in the Performance System with pragmatic principles of the sort due to H. P. Grice to give utterance-interpretations. Alternative accounts treat presupposition as irreducible, a special species of conventional, non-truth-conditional inference that requires specific lexical items and syntactic structures to be associated with the inferences. This is accomplished not by rule but item by item (Gazdar 1979a; Karttunen and Peters 1979). On our theory a few general principles will explain a wide range of data. Apart from the strength and simplicity of theory thereby achieved, our account attempts to answer to the intuition that presuppositions arise in part because of the semantic properties of the statements yielding them, but it avoids the incoherencies of accounts of “semantic presupposition” (see Boër and Lycan 1976). One example of a simplification attributable to a more delicate use of logical form is the unification of the presuppositional behavior of clefts, factives, and definite descriptions, as illustrated in (31): (31)

a. It was Max that Jane kissed. b. λx(Gx)(γxFx) c. Mikael knows that California is exciting. d. K(m,|P(P = ^C & Tr(P)) e. The Prince of Wales is clever. f. G(|xFx)

But whatever the success of this reduction, the issues raised here bear on how the relation between semantics and pragmatics, between Chomsky’s Internalist Semantics and the Performance System, should be construed: What the relationship between semantic representations, truth conditions, inferenda, implicata, and logical forms is; what conditions of adequacy (e.g., predicting “aboutness” and reading off inferenda and implicata) semantic representations and logical forms should satisfy. These problems are central to a complete theory of sentence meaning and utteranceinterpretation. The analysis given for cleft sentences is the product of a combination of elements: (a) semantic representations, (b) inferenda and Gricean implicata, (c) logical forms, and (d) topic noun phrase constraints on the structure of semantic representations and logical forms. Only all the elements, working coherently together, manage to give an accurate and adequate explanation of how the semantic representation and logical form of the English cleft structure produces its inferenda, truth conditions, entailments, and conversational implicata.

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Appendix 4

A Note on Notation

I

use notation and typography from logic, mathematics, and linguistics in this book. There are also the usual literary conventions in the use of quotation marks to deal with. As a guide to readers, I briefly sketch my usage here. 1.

Logical symbols of a Formal Object Language x, y, . . . Individual variables a, b, . . . Individual constants F11, . . . , G11, . . . Predicate letters P, P1, P2 . . . Q, Q1, Q2, . . . Sentence letters & Truth-functional conjunction (and) ∨ Truth-functional disjunction (or) → Truth-functional conditional (only if ) ↔ Truth-functional equivalence (if and only if ) ¬ Exclusion negation (not) – Choice negation (not) ∀ Universal quantifier ( for every individual) ∃ Existential quantifier ( for at least one individual) = Identity (|x)F(x) Inverted sans-serif capital ‘I’ for definite descriptions (γx)F(x) Lower-case Greek gamma for group descriptions Logical necessity

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2. Symbols of meta-languages a. Italics Tom is clever The name of an utterance-type, a meaningful form of words in their orthographic representation, is given in italics. (This convention differs from that of Sir John Lyons [1995a: 23–24] in which italicized expressions denote form without meaning. I shall sometimes follow Sir John’s convention, but I shall explicitly say so when I do, as, for example, in (b) below.) b. Single quotation marks ‘Tom’ Single quotation marks are used to indicate the name of a name or other expression by putting the named expression between single quotation marks. ‘Tom is clever’ The name of a sentence (i.e., a system-sentence, which is generated by the grammatical rules in a generative grammar, to be distinguished from the product of an act of utterance) is expressed in single quotation marks. Single-quoted English expressions will be items with both form (written and spoken) and meaning: for example, the word ‘man’, represented by its stem-form, has the word-forms man and men. c. Double quotation marks A direct quotation. An assertoric force indicator. ‘“Tom is clever”’ names an assertoric utterance-type in English. d. Dot quotation •__• Wilfrid Sellars’s (1963: 204–5) dot quotation to denote a sortal term for inter-linguistically synonymous expressions. Thus the French sentence ‘La neige est blanche’ and the English sentence ‘Snow is white’ are both a •snow is white•. e. Square bracketed small capitals [MALE] Square-bracketed expressions denote sense components or other items of meaning. f. Greek letters µ, µ', . . . µ1, µ2 . . . Metalinguistic variables for expressions of an object language. φ, Ψ, χ, . . . Metalinguistic variables for statements of an object language, formal or informal (natural). σ, τ Metalinguistic variables for singular terms of an Object Language, formal or informal (natural).

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π, π1, π2, . . . ρ, ρ1, ρ2, Metalinguistic variables for predicate and relation symbols ∆, Γ Metalinguistic variables for sets of object language statements. g. Quasi quotation __ W. V. O. Quine’s (1981) quasi-quotation marks (corner quotes) to speak of specific contexts of unspecified expressions. For example: φ ↔ Ψ is the result of writing φ and then ‘↔’ and then Ψ, or equivalently, is the result of putting φ for ‘φ’ and Ψ for ‘Ψ’ in ‘φ ↔ Ψ’. Hence, µ is µ, since the result of putting the expression µ for the symbol ‘µ’ in the symbol ‘µ’ is just the expression µ. For example, ¬φ is true iff φ is not true. h. Schematic letters P, Q, . . . are schematic letters for statements of an object language. They are not metavariables for which one would substitute a name of a statement; they are placeholders for which one substitutes the sequence of expressions that constitutes the statement, not the name of the statement. Thus the expression ‘(P → Q)’ is a statement-schema or statement-form, an instance of which would be ‘(Tom is clever → Tom sings)’. ‘F’, ‘G’, . . . are schematic letters for predicate and relation symbols of an object language. i. Concatenation ‘^’ is the concatenation symbol for concatenating expressions. j. Double vertical bars and brackets φA The intension or propositional content of the statement φ in an interpretation A. Given an interpretation A and a set of possible worlds I, for the world i, φ iA ∈ {T,F}: for example, if the statement under that interpretation is true in world i, φ iA = 1 (letting ‘1’ stand for ‘True’). See D. S. Scott (1970a, 1971, 1973). φ[f] A specific [f] interpretation of an F-nonspecific literal sentence-meaning [φ] of an English sentence φ. µ[f] A specific [f] interpretation of an F-nonspecific literal expression-meaning [µ] of an English expression µ. For example, for the gender-nonspecific lexeme ‘he’ in English, he[FEMALE] = [she]. Also, horse[MALE] = [stallion], and horse[FEMALE] = [mare]. [[φ]] Truth-conditions for φ under the intended interpretation A* of φ. Thus, usually φA* = [[φ]].

A NOTE ON NOTATION

k. Double vertical turnstiles V Logical consequence relation between sentences or utterance-types with respect to a class V of admissible valuations val(φ) of sentences φ of a language L: for example, A V B. See Scott (1970, 1971, 1973); B. van Fraassen (1971). A B is to be read ‘A does not entail B’. » Implicatural relation between asserted (actual or possible) tokens of utterance-types and sentences (expressing thoughts or semantic contents): for example, “Snow is almost white” » Snow is not quite white. k. Horizontal turnstiles Truth in an interpretation (e.g., A φ iff φA =1). S Derivable in a formal system S. l. Linguistic judgment notations * # ? ??

Ungrammatical Semantically anomalous Unacceptable Marginally acceptable

3. Set theoretic notation ∈ Set membership ∩ Set intersection ∪ Set union ⊆ Subset relation ø Empty set û(φ(u)) The set of individuals that satisfy φ(x), viz. {x : φ(x)}. u(φ(u)) Sometimes it will be convenient to use the intensional version of the extension: the attribute of Fness. I shall denote the attribute by: u(φ(u)), where the variable preceding the open sentence is without the circumflex. A, B, . . . Sets X, Y, . . . Variables ranging over sets

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———. (1972d). “Something about Conceptual Schemes,” in P. Ziff, Understanding Understanding (pp. 127–41). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Zwarts, F. (1996). “Negation: A Notion in Focus,” in H. Wansing (ed.), Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie (Perspectives in Analytical Philosophy) (Vol. 7, pp. 169–194). Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. ———. (1998). “Three Types of Polarity,” in F. Hamm and E. Hinrichs (eds.), Plurality and Quantification (pp. 177–238). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Zwicky, A., and Sadock, J. (1975). “Ambiguity Tests and How to Fail Them,” in J. P. Kimball (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 4 (pp. 1–35). New York: Academic Press.

INDEX

||-, 37, 251 ||-», 29, 251 2, 188 ‘2’, 187, 187n.,188 and two, 188 3, 188 ‘3’, 187–8, 198, 201, 207–9 relation between and three, 207, 209. See also three N abduction, 13, 15, 29, 128 aboutness, 88n., 92n., 101, 109, 134–5, 142, 144, 148, 163, 163n., 237–9, 241, 247. See also focal noun phrase limitation principle; Grice-Strawson condition; topic abstraction, 3n. acceptability judgments, 154–8, 166, 169, 214– 17 accessibility of literal meaning, 222 accommodation, 98n., 118, 126–9, 129n., 135, 142, 144–5 versus common ground, 143–4, 148 Grice on, 142 and presupposition, 147–8 accomplishment predicates, 152, 158, 162n., 176 acquisition of language, 32 achievement predicates, 152, 156n., 158 adjacency pairs, 66–7 adverbials, 206 affirming the consequent, 56n. See also fallacy

Akmajian, A., 236n. Albritton, R., 75, 144 allophone, 43, 140n., 141 Allwood, J., 102n., 202 almost all N, 231–3 almost F 149, 152, 153n., 154, 154n., 156–7, 160, 182, 189, 231 does not entail not F, 150, 231–3 Sadock on, 154–60 almost true, 160 ambiguity, 3n., 12, 14, 24, 124, 129, 132, 137– 8, 161n., 169–70, 170n., 179–80 the chicken that is ready to eat, 18 conjunction-reduction test for, 19–20, 22, 204 criteria of, 19, 21–2, 205 depth, 18 Grice on, 63 of John’s book, 36 lexical, 33 and non-specificity, 17–22, 36, 38, 54, 118, 123–4, 124n., 127, 129–31, 133, 137 pragmatic, 215, 219 processing of, 20–22 of scope, 33, 38, 123, 127, 202 tests, 19, 33, 201–6, 206–8 types of, 31 of W. E. Hill’s maiden/hag drawing, 21 See also depth-nonspecificity of the Necker cube analytic, the, 150, 152, 153n., 161, 161n., 162n., 176, 181–2, 186, 223 anaphor, 114, 197

273

274

INDEX

anaphora, 43, 113–14, 195–6, 197, 208. See also division of pragmatic labor an-atomic property, 182 and, 51, 85–6, 154–55, 155n., 157, 177, 179, 233. See also Boolean intersection; but and/or, 54, 199–200 anomaly, 12–13, 69, 70n. Anscombe, G. E. M., 137 Anscombe Point, 137 Anscombre, J.-C., 215 any, 216 a priori/a posteriori distinction, 30, 146, 181, 186 Argument Schema (Grice), 52–3, 62, 70–1, 78– 9, 175–6. See also calculability Aristotle, 12, 15, 129n. as F as, 66, 151–2, 153n., 154n., 161, 165, 165n., 169, 173, 199–200 and achievement predicate, 162n. almost, 161 at least, 151, 165, 165n., 173 exactly, 151, 153n., 154n., 167, 169, 171–3 non-symmetry of, 166 not quite, 161 reference point of, 166 reflexivity of, 166 transitivity of, 166 assertibility conditions, 151, 175–6 cognitive biases in, 175–6 and truth-conditions, 157, 176 and use-conditions, 157 See also truth-conditions assertion, 63, 79, 79n., 122 and believing, 157, 175 and direct entailment, 123 and entailment, 123, 142 and implicature, 154 mental, 162n. and Moore’s “implication,” 225–6 and presupposition, 123, 142, 154 asymmetry, 132, 139–40, 164 Atlas, J. D., 30, 34, 37–8, 39n., 41, 89–90, 93, 118, 122, 127–9, 131, 138–41, 159n., 187, 197–8, 201–2, 209–10, 218, 220, 233, 238 Leuven Lectures (1990), 190n. at least “n,” 187, 191, 196–7, 210 at most “n,” 187, 201 atomism (semantic), 181, 183–4 Auden, W. H., 4, 6, 10 Austin, J. L., 15, 37, 45, 189, 196 Avoid Pronoun. See division of pragmatic labor Avoid Synonymy. See division of pragmatic labor Bach, K., 33, 35–6, 36n., 38, 84–5, 87n., 120, 196–7, 208, 221

background presumption, 90n., 91, 92n., 93, 143 capacities (Searle), 107 and noncontroversiality, 90n., 91, 92n. Baldwin, T., 226 Ballmer, T., 118, 128 bank, 12 Bar-Hillel, Y., 96 Barwise, J., 231 basic predicate, 32 Beaver, D., 120 begging the question, 232–3. See also circular reasoning being F 153, 167–8 and having F-ness, 153, 167 being tall, 153 belief, 50, 53, 62, 68–70, 73–5, 78, 85, 157, 160n. and conjunction-elimination, 228 and consistency, 228 knowledge of, 157 and reduction, 228 and S4 axiom, 228 and saying, 157 Benacerraf, P., 5, 230n. Bergmann, M., 4n., 120 Berkeley, G., 32 best interpretation, 54, 94–6, 105, 107, 112, 127, 137, 176, 211, 221. See also inference to the best interpretation better than, 177–9 Bierwisch, M., 43n. binding condition (Chomsky), 113, 196 pragmatic reduction of, 115 bites shrewdly, 11, 13 Black, M., 14 blame, 154 Boër, S., 132, 139, 202, 247 Boolean intersection, 233 Boolean union, 233 boy, 14–15 bridging reference, 86 Brown, P., 13 Brunot, F., 6 Burge, T., 83n. burning bush, 24 Burnyeat, M., 79n. Burton-Roberts, N., 4n, 218 but, 50, 52, 55–6, 56n., 57, 154–5, 155n., 156– 8, 197 philosophical interest of, 55 calculability, 52–3, 58, 60, 62, 79 and argument schema, 62 of conventional implicature, 60 of conversational implicature, 60 of entailment, 60 of presupposition, 60

INDEX

can, 47, 53–4 cancelability, 51, 52n., 55–6, 56n., 132–3, 137, 155, 155n., 156, 156n., 174n., 198–9, 211 of conventional implicature, 60 of conversational implicature, 60 of entailment, 60 and presupposition, 127, 133, 138, 215–18 of presupposition, 60 Carnap, R., 96, 238 Carroll, L., 10 Carston, R., 189–90, 196–8, 208–9, 212, 218, 221 category error, 12 causality and convention, 24 and dedicated process, 24 and justification, 22–3, 74–5, 78 and perception, 22 and reason, 74–5 and sense-data, 48–50, 57–8 causal theory of perception, 48–50, 57–8 causative verb lexical, 112 for Manner takes precedence over Informativeness, 112 paraphrastic, 112 See also division of pragmatic labor Chierchia, G., 120 child, 14–15 choice function e, 238 choice negation see negation Chomsky, N., 12, 19, 34, 39, 42–3, 45–6, 85, 112–13, 115, 140–1, 159n., 182n., 196, 204, 222, 235, 246–7 Churchland, P. M., 26n. circular reasoning. See petitio principii Clarke, D. S., 69 clash (maxims), 62, 70–1 clausal implicature. See implicature cleft sentence, 66, 163n., 193–5, 216–18, 234– 5, 237–8, 242 exhaustiveness condition for, 243, 245 only Indefinite NP in focus of, 243 uniqueness condition for, 243 collective term, 189, 197, 201, 208 g operator for, 238–9 See also group common ground, 93–4, 118, 128, 135–6, 141–3 consistency with, 96, 135 Grice on, 136 and noncontroversiality, 93–4, 142–4, 148 communicative intention. See intention comparative similarity. See as F as completed interpretation, 84, 196, 208 and expanded interpretation, 84, 196 See also interpretation

275

completion. See completed interpretation compositionality, 218, 237 composition of relations, implicature and entailment, 54, 152. See also quasientailment comprehension strategy, 95–6, 107–8, 134, 211, 217 computational theory of mind, 27 concept, 223 conceptual economy of ordinary language, 16 conditional perfection, 56n., 86, 90, 90n., 101, 172 conditionals, 89–90, 99–101, 126, 146–7, 191, 213 and concessive if not, 99–101 Gazdar’s analysis of, 99–101 with quantifiers, 99 Stalnaker on, 146–7 and suspension of implicatures by if not, 100 conjunction asymmetric, 85 buttressing, 85, 102 negated, 102–3 conjunction-reduction test for ambiguity. See ambiguity consistent generalized quantifier noun phrase, 212–13 constraints on interpretation. See interpretation constraints on production/ comprehension, 107 construction of interpretation. See interpretation; selection of sense content information, 96 mental, 27, 71, 73 pragmatic, 95, 141 and presentation, 24–5 propositional, 30, 32, 37, 42, 73, 141, 196 and image, 25 and psychological state, 71 semantic, 71, 73 content/context distinction, 146 context dependence, 52, 67 context principle, 198, 208, 210, 213 conventional implicature see implicature conventionalization, 111, 183, 212 conversational topic, 67, 67n. See also topic Cooper, R., 231 Cooperative Principle (Grice), 59 coreference, 113–16, 238–9 local, 87, 113 See also pronoun corporatism (semantic), 181–3. See also White, M. G. Crane, T., 27 creatures of darkness, 223

276

INDEX

Cresswell, M., 167n., 169n. criticize, 154 crossed interpretation, 19, 206. See also ambiguity (tests); nonspecificity Cummins, R., 27 Davidson, D., 3n., 15, 45, 73n., 105, 144, 159, 206, 221, 223, 237n. Davis, W., 108n. Davison, A., 48 deBroglie, L., 223 decision that, 74 to, 74 Dedekind, R., 188 dedicated processor, 23, 25 default implication, 52, 72, 83, 227 default interpretation. See interpretation defeasibility, 90n., 137. See also monotonicity (non-) definite description, 18, 38–9, 46, 159n., 201–2, 215–19 definite interpretation, 83 and “precific” interpretation, 84 and Quantity One, 84, 88 See also interpretation definite Noun Phrase, 245 degrees, 167n. degrees of truth, 160 depth-nonspecificity of the Necker cube. See nonspecificity detachability, 51, 52n., 55–6, 56n., 132–3, 171, 174n., 175–6, 197–200 of conventional implicature, 60 of conversational implicature, 60 of entailment, 60 of presupposition, 60 and synonymy, 171, 174n., 175–6, 198–9 determiner, 239–40 discourse representation theory, 120, 208 discourse semantics, 120, 208 disjunction (logical), 33, 37–8, 53–4, 97–8, 103, 162n. exclusive, 54 and Gazdar, 97–8 inclusive, 54 See also Boolean union; or display, 17, 19, 24–5 and portrayal, 25 and presentation of content, 24–5 distributive term, 189, 197–8, 208 division of pragmatic labor (Horn), 110–13, 179 and Chomsky, 112 and Kiparsky, 112 and Levinson, 113 and McCawley, 112

dog, 203–4, 206 Donnellan, K., 215 double negation. See negation doubt-or-denial condition (Grice), 49–50 Dowty, D., 196 drink, 93–4 Ducrot, O., 215 Dummett, Sir M., 176n., 181 each other, 179 Empson, W., 30 encapsulation, 17, 26, 29 Englebretsen, G., 90n. entailment, 37, 56–8, 69, 81, 81n., 96, 109, 122–3, 137, 142, 150, 155, 161, 161n., 237 analytic 150, 152, 153n., 161, 161n., 162n., 176, 181, 231 context-relative, 136–7, 142 and contraposition, 163n. direct, 122–3, 136, 152, 153n., 241 and grounds, 158 and implicature/presupposition, 137 and meaning, 237 properties of, 58–60 and reinforcement, 154–5 See also logical consequence relation equative, the. See as F as equivocation, 187, 209. See also fallacy eternal sentence, 33–4 even, 64 events, 105, 120–1 exactly as F as. See as F as exactly “n” 187, 191, 195–6, 201, 209–10 exclusion negation. See negation exhaustiveness condition for clefts. See cleft sentence existence statement (singular) negative, 8 expanded interpretation, 35, 35n., 84–5, 86n., 196 and completed interpretation, 84–5 See also interpretation expansion. See expanded interpretation explanation, 76 psychological, 13, 53–4, 70–3, 78–9 and implicature, 53–4, 70 and utterance-interpretation, 70–1, 73, 76, 78, 89, 141 explicature, 39n., 84, 134n., 196, 208, 213, 220. See also relevance (Theory) exploitation, 62, 64n., 71 and violation, 61, 61n., 64, 64n., 71 See also maxims of conversation exportation, 92n. express, 27, 41, 53, 69, 157 expressive alternatives, 109

INDEX

extension, 222, 237 convention of, 92–3, 142 extents (of F-ness), 153, 161n., 167–8 and measures (of F-ness), 161n. plausibility of, 168 factive verbs, 119, 126–8 neo-Gricean account of, 127 fallacy, 187n. of affirming the consequent, 56n. of equivocation, 187, 209 modal, 97 figurative/literal distinction, 11, 15, 146. See also metaphor Fillmore, C., 154 first dogma of modernism, 4, 11 Fitch, F., 239 flouting a maxim, 12, 17, 61–2, 64, 64n., 76–8 philosophical importance of, 76–9 See also maxims of conversation; violating a maxim F-ness, 167–8 having and being F 167 focal negation. See negation focal noun phrase limitation principle, 46, 240n., 241 focus, 217, 235–6, 242, 245 Fodor, J. A., 17, 22, 28, 28n., 181–2 Fogelin,R., 4n., 23, 45 France is hexagonal, 189 Frege, G., 37, 120–2, 141, 208 Frege Point, 226n. Fretheim, T., 212 Frost, R., 9–10 gamma [g] operator. See collective term garden-path sentence, 23, 217 Gass, W., 3n., 4, 11 Gazdar, G., 53, 97–9, 101, 102n., 103, 234–6, 247 Gazdar’s bucket, 211 Geach, P., 226n. Geis, M., 86, 172 generality (semantic, aka nonspecificity), 32, 113–15, 179. See also nonspecificity generalized conversational inferenda, 30, 38 generative semantics, 48, 90, 139 genitive Noun Phrase, 19, 36, 85 Glucksberg, S., 4n. Goodman, N., 12, 183 Gordon, G., 120 gradable predicates, 151 and accomplishment, 152 and achievement, 152 grammaticalization, 183 Grandy, R., 32, 88, 144 Graves, R., 149

277

Gregory, R., 18 Grice, H. P., 12–13, 15, 30, 33, 39, 39n., 40, 42, 46, 49, 49n., 50–51, 55, 58, 58n., 97–8, 129–33, 136, 138, 142,192, 200, 202–3 on presupposition, 132–3 on Wilson and Sperber, 66 Grice-Strawson condition, 46, 145–6, 216, 218– 19 Grinder, J., 204 grounds. See assertibility conditions group, 194 size of, 195, 239 See also collective term Guenthner, R., 10 Guugu Yimithirr, 212 Hacker, P. M. S., 47n. Halliday, M., 234 Halvorsen, P.-K., 236n., 240–2 Hamlet, 11 Harman, G. H., 13, 45 Harnish, R., 86, 103, 107n., 179 Harper, W., 163n. Harries-Delisle, H., 240n. Harris, R. A., 48 having tallness, 153 Heim, I., 120 he is in the grip of a vice, 63 Hempel, C. G., 96 high, 161n. Hilbert, D., 238–9 Hill, W. E., 20 Hintikka, K. J. J., 238 Hirschberg, J., 101n., 109n., 209 hit, 204 Hitzeman, J., 150, 156n., 231–3 Hobbs, J., 13 Hochberg, H., 17 Hodge, A., 149 holism (meaning), 181– 4 homonymy, 3n. Hopper, P., 183 Horgan, P., 5 Horn, L., 16, 43n., 65, 100, 106, 110, 120, 124n., 139, 155, 155n., 179, 183, 185, 192, 195, 198, 202, 207, 209–10, 212– 13, 215–18, 221, 241–2, 244–6 on only, 195 on Q and R principles, 111 Horn scale, 81, 88n., 90, 101, 110, 114, 152, 176, 182, 186 negative, 102n. restrictions on, 101, 109 Hornstein, N., 32 how many, 192–3, 195 Huang, Y., 115n., 185, 196

278

INDEX

hybrid implicature, 54. See also composition of relations hyperbole, 43, 64–5 I love you too, 35 imagination, 4–5, 11 implicature, 13, 30, 40, 47, 47n., 58, 58n., 83, 83n. argument schema for, 70, 78–9 and Bach, K., 87n. and belief, 62 class B and class C, 64n., 70–1, 76–8 clausal, 53–5, 84, 88–90, 97–9, 103 fallacious arguments for 97–9 inconsistency of with scalar implicata, 97 continuity, 86 conventional, 52, 57–8, 156, 197 properties of, 59–60 conversational, 47, 57, 58n., 83, 83n. generalized, 47, 47n., 57, 58n.,114n. particularized, 47, 47n., 57, 58n. properties of, 59–60 default, 52 and entailment, 69n., 137 epistemic form of, 54 and explanation, 54, 70 in explanation versus interpretation, 73, 79 inconsistent, 83 and indefinite Noun Phrases, 106 and maxim clash, 70 narrow sense of, 83n. and negative statements, 38, 82–4, 101–3, 109, 119–24, 127, 129–42, 163–4 nontriviality restriction on, 68 philosophical importance of, 57–8 problem of the degenerate case for, 140 properties of, 59–60 Quantity One not well defined reinforcement of 154–5, 155n., 156, 174 scalar, 54, 80–1, 83, 87–88, 103, 152, 153n., 155n., 156, 163n., 164, 171, 175–8, 188, 192–3, 208, 213–14 with collective Noun Phrase, 197 with distributive Noun Phrase, 197 with lexically incorporated numerical adjective, 198 inconsistency of with clausal implicata, 97 negative, 90 and speaker’s meaning, 73 suspension of, 100 and transitivity, 59–60, 163n. See also belief; calculability; cancelability; detachability; incoherence of classical Gricean semantics and pragmatics; informativeness; maxims of conversation impliciture (Bach, K.), 39n., 84, 87n., 134n., 197, 221

“imply” (Moore, G. E.), 69n., 70n., 225–6. See also assertion; Moore’s paradox incoherence of classical Gricean semantics and pragmatics, 80–7, 162–4, 171, 174n., 175–6, 198–201, 210–15 indefinite Noun Phrases, 35n., 106–8, 243, 245 for Quantity takes precedence over Informativeness, 107, 110 indeterminacy of radical interpretation, 221, 223 of radical translation, 221, 223 indexical resolution (Levinson), 213 inference to the best explanation, 13, 29, 128, 193 to the best interpretation, 13, 29, 54, 94, 97, 107, 112, 127, 137, 176, 211 conversational, 30 to stereotype, 86, 93 See also best interpretation inferendum, 33, 39 infinite regress, 187, 210 information content, 96 and existential quantification, 106 Grice on, 61, 67–8, 93, 97–8 and negative statements, 163–4 old/new, 234–5 Popper on, 106 informativeness, 43, 59, 63, 65, 67, 80, 80n., 83, 91, 94, 97–8, 105, 127–8, 135, 164, 172, 172n., 175, 177, 179–81, 199, 207, 213, 241 and efficient communication, 107 and entailment, 81n. and Levinson’s heuristic, 94–5, 211–12 and pragmatic intrusion, 180–1 principle of, 95, 110, 113 and reduction by relevance, 63–8, 97–8 and stereotypicality, 94 inscrutability of literal meaning, 221–3 of reference, 221 intension, 222 convention of, 91, 93, 143 intention communicative, 24, 28–30, 36, 41, 71–2 Grice’s M-intention, 72, 108 interface (semantics/pragmatics), 30, 37, 39–41, 246 internalist semantics, 34, 37n., 39–40, 42–3, 141, 246–7 interpretation (utterance), 13, 33–4, 38, 40–1, 63, 65, 70–3, 78–9, 94–5, 107–8, 127–8, 136–7, 144, 161n., 207, 211, 220–1 and Class C implicata, 71 cognitive biases in, 175–6 and common ground, 136 competing, 95

INDEX

completed, 84–5, 196, 208 constraining of, 25, 29, 94–5, 107, 127 construction of, 32–9, 127–8, 131, 133–5, 180–1, 219–21 and context, 211 convention or practice of, 144 default, 54, 93, 114n., 134, 148, 221 definite, 83–4, 88 expanded, 35, 35n., 84–5, 86n., 196 and explanation, 70–3, 76, 78, 78n., 79, 89, 141 hermeneutic (nonmodular) and reliable (modular), 26–30 and meaning, 161n. “precific”, 84, 110n., 220 precise, 33, 83, 85 saturated, 84 specific, 33, 83–5, 94, 110, 110n., 220 strengthened, 52–3, 84–5, 192, 210–11 See also best interpretation; explanation; representation (semantic); selection of sense intonation, 215–17 into the wood, 180 introspective access, 222 intuitionism, 54 I-principle (Levinson), 116 Iten, C., 33 it’s not the case that p/ it’s not true that p, 38, 86n., 124, 124n., 131, 133, 137, 139 Jabberwocky, 10–11 John plays well, 35 John’s book, 36, 85 Johnson, Dr. S., 30 Johnson-Laird, P. N., 32 Johnson, M., 14n. Kamp, H., 120, 208 Kaplan, D., 5 Karttunen, L., 64, 82, 118, 124n., 126, 157, 160, 216, 242, 247 Katz, J., 32, 34, 159, 181, 221, 223 Kay, P., 85 Keenan, E., 159 Kemeny, J., 96 Kempson, R., 32–3, 37, 102n., 120, 138, 140, 193n., 201–2, 212 Kennedy, C., 169n. Kenny, Sir A., 13, 46 Kiparsky, P. & C., 127, 155n. Kittay, E., 4n. Klein, E., 167n., 168n., 169n. knocked, 204 know, 126–8 knowledge of language, 181–4 Koenig, J-P., 209 König, E., 99

279

Kooij, J., 30 Kraus, K., 6 Kripke, S., 159n. Kuroda, S-Y., 131, 138, 202 Ladd, D., 215 Lakoff, G., 3n., 14, 19, 32, 48, 83n., 95, 120, 204, 228–9 Lakoff, R., 48 lamda [l] abstraction, 234n., 238 Langendoen, T., 14n. Langford, C. H., 227–9 language of thought, 26–9. See also mentalese; thought lattice, 37 least upper bound (sup), 37, 153 Leech, G., 48, 85, 180 Leezenberg, M., 4n. Lehrer, A., 32 Leibniz and Newton invented the calculus, 104 Leisenring, A., 239 LePore, E., 181–2 Levinson, S. C., 13, 27, 53, 65, 93–4, 108–10, 113–16, 164, 177–9, 185, 191n., 210, 212–15 on Moore’s paradox, 69, 129, 133 Levinson scale, 57n., 109, 182 Lewis, D. K., 98n., 118, 128, 129n., 143 lexical decomposition, 32, 203 lexical incorporation, 198, 201, 208–9 lexicalization, 101, 109, 183, 203 Liberman, M., 215 Linder, J., 54 linguistic turn (third), 39 lists, 240 literal sentence-meaning, 24–5, 32, 37, 40, 42– 3, 207 and utterance-interpretation, 30 See also interpretation; meaning literariness, 9, 11 local coreference, 87. See also coreference Locke, J., 7 logical consequence relation, 37, 58–60. See also entailment logical form, 237 logically perfect language, 122 looks red (Grice), 49–57 loose talk, 14, 188–90, 201 luckily, 186 Lycan, W., 132, 139, 162n., 202, 247 Lyons, J., 32, 239, 249 maiden/hag figure (Hill), 21 manner (maxim of), 54, 60–1, 61n., 200 Grice’s new, 39n., 137–8 See also maxims of conversation marked/unmarked [expression], 38, 111–13, 164, 171, 175, 220, 241n.

280

INDEX

Mart and David bought a piano, 105–6 Marti, G., 47 Martin, J. N., 120 Martin, R. M., 239 Martinich, A. P., 63–7 Matsumoto, Y., 101 Mauriac, F., 64 maxims of conversation, 12, 59, 61, 61n., 83, 83n., 106–16, 137–8 clash, 62, 70–1 explanatory inadequacy of Grice’s, 84, 96, 151 explanation by, 76–9 exploitation of, 62, 64n., 71 flout of, 12, 17, 61–2, 64, 64n., 76–8 Manner, 39n., 61, 61n. Manner (new), 137–8 Manner takes precedence over Informativeness, 112 Quality, 59, 72, 72n., 81 Quantity, 59 Quantity and Quality, 71–2, 72n. Quantity takes precedence over Informativeness, 107, 110 reduction of Quantity to Relation, 63–8 Relation (relevance), 61, 61n. Relativity, 91, 94, 134 violation of, 61, 61n., 64, 71 See also causative verb; indefinite Noun Phrases; manner; meaning; mirror maxim; Quality; Quantity may, 54 McCawley, J., 14, 48, 170n., 216, 218, 241 McConnell-Ginet, S., 120 meaning conventional, 83 and entailment (logical consequence) relations, 237 Grice’s account of, 73–5 Grice’s confusion of and explanation, 76–9 literal, 24–5, 30, 32, 37, 40, 42–3, 73, 83, 94, 131, 137–41, 149–53, 165–76, 185–7, 207–10, 219–23 sentence-type, 30, 37 speaker’s, 42, 73 presumptive, 148 and truth-conditions, 181, 237 and use, 157–8, 160, 172, 176 utterance-token, 37 See also explanation; interpretation meaning postulate (Carnap), 161n. measures of F-ness, 153, 161, 167 and extents, 153, 167 measure-wise F-er than, 161n., 168 meiosis (understatement), 65 membership categorization, 86 mentalese, 27, 90, 95–6. See also language of thought; thought

mental image, 32–3 metalanguage, 160, 183, 216, 222 metalinguistic negation. See negation metaphor, 3–17, 165 Grice on, 12 Mey, J., 106n. Miller, G., 32 mirror maxim (Harnish), 86, 104 modularity, 17, 22, 26 modal fallacy, 97 modernism, 3–17. See also first dogma of; second dogma of modified Occam’s razor, 131, 192 molecularism (semantic), 181. See also corporatism monotonicity (non-monotonicity), 58–9, 90n., 137 of conventional implicature, 58–9 of conversational implicature, 58–9 of entailment (logical consequence), 58–9 of presupposition, 58–9 See also defeasibility Montague, R., 159, 169n., 222 Moore, G. E., 48, 50, 68 Moore’s paradox, 50, 53, 68–69, 69n.,70, 70n.,157, 225–30 and implicature, 69 Levinson on, 69 Mortimer, Sir J., 13n. Moses, 24 mostly, 152 Muka6ovský, J., 6–8, 11 multigrade predicate, 240 multi-stable figure, 18 my aunt’s cousin, 142–3 my cousin isn’t a boy any longer, 14 natural kind term, 3n., 39, 47, 95, 159n., 182 natural number, 188 Neale, S., 58n. necessary/ sufficient conditions, 56, 60, 69, 69n., 78, 79, 143, 199–201, 208, 229, 231–3 Necker, L. S., 17 Necker cube, 17–18 double, 20 See also nonspecificity negation, 16, 16n., 32–3, 33n., 37–8, 80, 82 ambiguity tests for, 201–6 choice, 16, 16n., 33, 33n., 38, 82, 82n.,123– 4, 133, 198, 201, 204, 206–7, 219–20, 245 and clefts, 245 descriptive, 193n. double, 90 exclusion, 16, 16n., 33, 33n., 38, 82, 82n., 102n., 123–4, 133, 201, 204, 206–7, 219–20, 245

INDEX

focal, 60n., 100, 215–16, 218 lexicalized versus paraphrastic, 90 metalinguistic, 100, 112n., 193n., 213–19, 245 and presupposition, 56n., 60n., 122–4 presupposition-canceling, 127, 133, 138, 215–18 See also nonspecificity; not negative incorporation, 87 negative lowering, 87 negative polarity item, 216 negative scale, 82, 90, 90n., 109 negative specification, 86 neighbor, 34 Newmeyer, F., 190 Newton, Sir I., 222 Nietzsche, F., 26 noncontroversiality, 90n., 91–2, 92n., 93, 134– 5, 142, 144, 148, 176 axioms of 135 and cognitive biases, 176 and common ground, 90n., 91, 93–4, 136, 142–4, 148 conventions of, 91–2 and stereotypicality, 93 See also take one’s word for non-monotonic quantifier, 232 nonspecificity of sense (aka semantic generality), 15–16, 17–22, 24–6, 29–39, 41–2, 54, 93,113, 137, 146, 161n., 179– 80, 187, 196, 198, 202, 205, 207, 212, 214, 219, 241n., 246 and ambiguity, 15–16, 17–22, 32, 38, 85, 118, 124n., 127, 130–1, 133–4, 137 Bach, K. on 35–6 and constituent structure, 85 criteria of, 22 and disjunction, 38 evidence from absence of Horn Scale negation implicata, 102n. of independent/cooperative, 104 of John’s book, 36 of the Necker cube, 17–22 of not, 33–4, 37–9, 82, 127–8, 131, 138, 201–6 of or, 54 and the problem of Gricean semantics, 198 processing of, 20–22, 26 of pronouns, 113–14 and semantic features, 85 of three N 198, 207–12, 214 and underdetermination, 33 non-triviality restriction (Grice), 68, 79 not, 16, 32–3, 37–8, 80, 82, 86, 86n., 99, 122–4, 127, 129, 139, 151–2, 193, 193n., 198, 204, 206–7, 219, 221 ambiguity tests for, 201–6 not F 150–2, 153n., 154, 154n., 158, 182, 231

281

not F not entailed by almost F 150 not quite F 149, 152, 153n., 154n., 156–8, 231–3 Sadock on not quite F 154 See also nonspecificity Nowell-Smith, P. H., 45 numeral, 187, 209 numerical adjective, 44, 80, 187, 190, 209 equivocation on, 209 numerals versus numerical adjectives, 209 obligation, 145n. observable property, 221–2 observation, artistic versus scientific, 16n. only Indefinite noun phrase (focus noun phrase in clefts), 243 only Proper Name, 66, 194–5, 232, 242 open question, 76–7 and meaning versus explaining, 76 or, 51–6, 56n., 57, 69, 97–8, 196–7, 199–200, 233 clausal implicata of, 97–8 and disjunction, 38, 54 exclusive, 54 Gazdar on clausal implicatures of, 98 implicatures of, 52–4, 97–8 inclusive, 54 nonspecificity of, 54 philosophical importance of 56, 56n. quasi-entails not both, 54 scalar implicata of, 97–8 See also disjunction; nonspecificity ordered implication, 240 ordering principles for application of maxims, 107–8, 108n., 109–16. See also projection rules for application of maxims orientation (spatial), 164 Ortony, A., 4n. ought, 47 parole, 28–9 Peano, G., 188 Peirce, C. S., 13, 29 perception causal theory of, 48, 55–6 and inference, 22–3 and language, 48 and modularity, 22 and representationalists, 23 and underdetermination argument, 22–3 performance system, 39, 141, 246–7 perspicuous, 61, 61n. Peters, S., 64, 82, 157, 160, 216, 242, 247 petitio principii. See begging the question Phillips, M. A., 3n. phoneme, 43, 140n., 141 politeness, 61

282

INDEX

polysemy, 161n., 177, 179, 204 Pomona College, 3n. Popper, K., 92n., 96, 106 P or P, 54 possible world, 158–160, 160n., 189 Postal, P., 204 practical reasoning, 13, 15, 128 pragmatic intrusion, 38, 39n., 133–4, 146, 177– 81, 207–8, 221 Atlas on 181 “precific” interpretation, 84, 110n., 220 and definite interpretation, 84 See also interpretation precise interpretation, 83–5, 110n., 219–20. See also interpretation presentation, 24 presumption, 90n., 91. See also background presumptions; noncontroversiality presupposition, 46, 50–2, 52n., 55–6, 56n., 58– 60, 68, 118, 128, 137–8, 156–7, 202, 206, 216–17, 242, 247 assertoric (Frege), 125n. cancelation of, 56n., 127, 133, 138, 215–218 data of, 119 and entailment, 137 and focus, 235 “plug” for, 124n. pragmatic (Frege), 125 pragmatic (Stalnaker), 125, 128, 137, 143 projection problem for, 218 reduction (Grice) of to implicature, 137–8 referential, 120, 127 semantical, 121–2, 125 See also focal noun phrase limitation principle; Grice-Strawson condition pretense, 144–5 Prince, E., 236 Princeton University, 3n. principle of informativeness, 95. See also informativeness privative opposition, 203 processing model, 134, 211 production strategy, 95–6, 107–8, 134, 217 projectible predicate, 183 projection problem for presupposition, 218. See also presupposition projection rules for application of maxims for anaphora, 114 for Manner versus Informativeness, 112 for Quantity, Manner, and Informativeness, 113 for Quantity versus Informativeness, 107 See also ordering principles pronouns, 113–15, 236n. Horn scale 114 See also coreference; nonspecificity proper name, 122–3, 159, 243 and presupposition, 122–3

proposition. See content (propositional) propositional attitude, 36n. propositional form of an utterance, 196 prototype, 95 pseudo-cleft sentence, 234–5, 237 Pulman, S. G., 32 Putnam, H., 3n., 15, 23, 30, 78n, 92n., 95, 146, 159n., 186 Q Principle and Horn, 43, 111 and Levinson, 116 Quality (maxim), 59, 72, 72n., 81 and Quantity, 71–2, 72n. See also maxims of conversation Quantity (maxims), 59, 114, 127, 157, 163–4, 179 and Quality, 71–2, 72n. Quantity One, 81, 87, 96, 104, 107, 114, 164, 172, 174n.,179, 188, 192–3, 199, 201, 207–8, 213–14 Quantity One inadequacy, 96 Quantity One inconsistent implicata, 164 Quantity One not well defined, 104 Quantity Two, 65, 93, 97, 208, 212 Quantity Two reduction by Relation (relevance), 63–8 See also maxims of conversation quasi-entailment, 54, 152, 161–2, 241. See also composition of relations quasi-quotation, 122 Quine, W. V. O., 30, 33–4, 46, 78, 92n., 96, 122, 184, 186, 194, 206, 221–3 radical pragmatics, 151, 190. See also Sadock, J. rather than, 213–14 reality (semantic), 222 reason for believing, 74–5 and cause, 74–5 for doing, 74–5 and motive, 74–5 Récanati, F., 34, 36, 84–5, 180, 196–7, 208, 221 rectification, 215 reductio ad absurdum argument, 65, 150, 164, 166, 171, 175–6, 187–9, 228, 228n., 229, 231 redundancy, 155–6, 165, 244 reflexive pronoun. See pronoun reflexivity, 58–9 of conventional implicature, 58–9 of conversational implicature, 58–9 of entailment, 58–9 of presupposition, 58–9 regret/know problem, 109 reinforcement of implicata see implicature

INDEX

Reinhart, T., 113, 196 Relation (maxim), 61, 61n. Quantity Two reduced by, 63–8 See also informativeness; maxims of conversation Relativity (maxims), 43, 67, 91, 93, 105, 172n., 207 relevance, 61, 61n. Grice on, 66, 97–8 Martinich on, 67 reduction of Quantity Two by, 63–8, 97–8 Strawson on 67n. Theory, 114n., 134n., 136, 208, 213, 220 representation, 22–3, 26–8, 141 and interpretation, 40, 219–22 semantic, 27, 29, 34, 40, 133–4, 140, 219–22 Reyle, U., 120, 208 Rorty, R., 23, 45, 78, 184 Rosch, E., 95 Rosenthal, D., 229n. Ross, J. R., 19, 48, 164, 204 R Principle (Horn), 111, 207–8. See also informativeness Ruhl, C., 161n., 222 Russell, B. A.W., 12, 48, 71, 90, 189n., 201–3, 223 Ryle, G., 5, 12 S4 characteristic axiom, 228–9 Sacks, S., 4n. Sadock, J., 14, 19–20, 33, 33n., 48, 60n., 145– 7, 151, 154–5, 157–8, 160n., 162n., 163, 163n., 172,173n., 185–7, 199, 202, 204– 5, 209, 212, 221 on almost, 154 on not quite, 154 Sag, I., 215, 241 salient alternatives, 88 Sanford, D., 54 saturated interpretation, 84 and strengthened, 84 See also interpretation saying, 38–9 scalar implicature. See implicature scale reversal, 188, 209 Scharten, R., 212 Schelling, T., 129n. Schrödinger, E., 221 Scott, D. S., 222, 250–1 Searle, J., 107, 145n. second dogma of modernism, 12–13 selection description, 238 selection of sense, 31–2, 38, 220. See also construction of interpretation Sellars, W., 249 semantical determinant, 121 semantic differentia, 203 semantic representation. See representation

283

semantic slack, 33 semi-redundancy, 151, 153n., 173, 174n. sense-datum, 48–50, 57–8 sentence semantics (internalist), 40, 220 sequential expectations, 66–7 Seuren, P., 120, 167n., 168, 168n., 193–7, 208, 218 signification (total), 41, 53, 70, 83, 197 Sinnott-Armstrong, W., 47 Sluga, H., 131 Smokler, H., 96 Soames, S., 120, 156n., 163n., 165n. Sommers, F., 90, 99 sortal classifiers, 239–40 specific interpretation, 83, 85, 94, 110n., 219– 20. See also interpretation Sperber, D., 4n., 14–15, 33, 33n., 34–5, 65–6, 69n., 84, 120, 185, 208, 213, 220, 240 square brackets (Grice), 46 Staegemann, E., 173n. Stalnaker, R., 14n., 118, 120, 125–6, 128, 137, 141, 143–7, 226n. statement semantics (externalist), 40 stereotype, 14–15, 32, 93–6, 135, 175–6 as a constraint on interpretation, 94–5, 106, 176 conversational inference to, 29, 86, 93 and informativeness, 94 and noncontroversiality, 93, 176 See also assertibility conditions; informativeness; interpretation Stern, J., 4n. Stevenson, C. L., 225 Stich, S., 36n. Strawson, P. F., 38, 51, 52, 52n., 56n., 67n., 118–19, 124, 127–8, 130–2, 138–9, 202, 220, 241 on the negative marked case, 38 on accommodation, 128 strength (rule of), 45 strengthened interpretation, 52–3, 84, 192, 210– 11 and saturated, 84 See also interpretation stress, 60n., 79n., 100, 127, 193–5, 213, 215, 217, 235 succeed/try, 109 sufficient conditions. See necessary/sufficient conditions suspension of implicata. See implicature synonymy, 170–1, 171n., 172, 174n., 197, 199– 200. See also detachability take, 85 take for granted, 92n., 93, 144, 147 Stalnaker on 125 See also background presumption; presumption

284

INDEX

take one’s word for, 127, 142, 144, 148. See also noncontroversiality tall, 161n., 164 being tall versus having tallness, 167 and short, 164 taller, 161, 161n., 182 measure-wise taller, 161n. uniformly taller, 161 Tarski, A., 159 tautology, 64–5, 76 Taylor, M., 36 the, 189, 189n. the chicken that is ready to eat, 18. See also ambiguity; definite description third-use argument, 14–17 Thomason, R., 120–1, 128 thought, 27–8 content of, 27 expressing a versus being a 27 medium of versus language of 27 See also content; language of thought; mentalese three N 80, 187, 187n., 198, 201, 207–10, 212– 13, 221 ambiguity tests for, 206–8 equivocation on three and ‘3’ 209 See also nonspecificity; not; 3; ‘3’ three or more N, 213 together, 103–6 too, 35 topic, 46, 66–7, 92, 92n., 94, 134–5, 144, 145n., 148, 163, 192–4, 216–17, 240–1, 247 conversational, 67, 67n., 163n. See also aboutness; focal noun phrase limitation principle; Grice-Strawson condition topicalization, 193 total signification. See signification transitivity, 58–9, 162, 163n. of conventional implicature, 58–9 of conversational implicature, 58–9, 162, 162n. of entailment, 58–9 of presupposition, 58–9 translation, 9–10, 159–60, 183 constraints on, 159 transparency of meaning, 222 Traugott, E., 183 truth-conditions, 36, 40n., 83, 83n., 157–60, 173, 176, 194, 208, 222 and meaning, 40, 181, 221–2 See also assertibility conditions

truth-indications, 36n., 42, 140, 222 Twain, M., 190 two, 186, 188–9. See also ‘2’; 2 Ullian, J., 96 Ullman, S., 25 underdeterminate, 33–5, 180–1, 246 versus underdetermined, 16, 33–5, 38 understatement, 65 uniformly F-er than, 161, 161n., 168. See also taller uniqueness condition for clefts. See cleft sentence; exhaustiveness condition for clefts upward-monotonic generalized quantifier noun phrase, 231, 233 use-conditions, 157–8, 160, 172, 176 utterance-interpretation, 63, 107–8, 207, 211. See also interpretation vagueness, 34, 158–9 Valéry, P., 8–9, 11 van der Auwera, J., 90n. van der Sandt, R., 120, 163n. van Fraassen, B., 120, 123, 251 van Kuppevelt, J., 212 Vendler, Z., 45, 47, 152, 158 violation of a maxim. See maxims of conversation Walker, R., 34, 36, 221 Warnock, G., 46, 241 what is said, 42, 62–3, 63n., 81n., 83, 83n., 134, 188, 196–7 White, M. G., 30, 35n., 166n., 181–2, 186, 196 Whitehead, A. N., 124, 202 Wilson, D., 4n., 14–15, 33–5, 65, 84, 120, 185, 208, 213, 215, 220, 240 with, 31 Wittgenstein, L., 46–7, 47n., 226n., 227 Wolfe, T., 4, 16n. Wood, J., 4, 16n. word, 249 word-form, 249 you are the cream in my coffee, 12–13 Ziff, P., 16, 33, 83n., 238 Zimmer, P., 85 Zwarts, F., 212–13, 233 Zwicky, A., 19, 33, 33n., 86, 124n., 172, 202, 204–5

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