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Semantic minimalism and the “miracle of communication”

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Abstract

According to semantic minimalism, context-invariant minimal semantic propositions play an essential role in linguistic communication. This claim is key to minimalists’ argument against semantic contextualism: if there were no such minimal semantic propositions, and semantic content varied widely with shifts in context, then it would be “miraculous” if communication were ever to occur. This paper offers a critical examination of the minimalist account of communication, focusing on a series of examples where communication occurs without a minimal semantic proposition shared between speaker and hearer. The only way for minimalists to respond to these examples is by restricting the scope of their account to intra-lingual communication. It can then be shown (1) that the minimalist’s notion of a language shrinks to a point, such that practically no instances of communication will fall under that account, and (2) that the retreat to intra-lingual communication is in any case self-defeating, since the only way for minimalists to account for the individuation of languages is by resort to precisely the kinds of contextual considerations they abjured in the first place. In short, if, as minimalists allege, contextualism founders because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a context, it can now be seen that minimalism faces a parallel problem because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a language. I end by arguing that the possibility of communication cannot, as minimalists assume, be grounded in shared semantic conventions; rather, successful communication must precede the establishment of any particular set of semantic conventions.

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Notes

  1. The idea of a “basic set” is drawn from Kaplan (1989). The precise extension of this set remains a matter of contention even among minimalists. It will certainly include indexicals and demonstratives, but might or might not, for instance, also include terms like “foreigner” and “native.” Be that as it may, Cappelen and Lepore’s major point is that however widely we construe the basic set, context-sensitivity in natural language will only ever be “grammatically (i.e., syntactically or morphologically) triggered” (Cappelen and Lepore 2005, p. 2; see also Borg 2004, p. 20). In other words, no genuine context-sensitivity will arise from factors like “unarticulated constituents” (Perry and Crimmins 1989) or “phonetically null elements” of sentences (Stanley 2007).

  2. See, for instance, Borg (2004, pp. 18–19, 58), Cappelen and Lepore (2005, pp. 134–135).

  3. Cappelen and Lepore (2005, pp. 39–40) operate with a distinction between Moderate and Radical Contextualism, and one of their more controversial claims is that Moderate Contextualism is an inherently unstable position which must eventually collapse into Radical Contextualism. I will refrain from taking a stance on this particular contention. Contributors whom Cappelen and Lepore (less contentiously) identify as Radical Contextualists include Austin (1962), Searle (1980), Sperber and Wilson (1986), Travis (1996), Carston (2002), and Recanati (2004).

  4. Borg’s term (e.g., 2004, p. 18) is “literal-conventional sentence meaning.”

  5. This is the contrast that Cappelen and Lepore seek to capture in terms of a distinction between semantic minimalism and speech-act pluralism. This distinction also underlies minimalism’s characteristically two-sided approach communication. On the one hand, there is the modest claim that minimalism in no way seeks to account for all or even most of what might transpire in a particular communicative encounter (see, e.g., Cappelen and Lepore 2005, pp. 53–58; Borg 2004, pp. 2–3, 259–272). On the other hand, there is the strikingly immodest claim that minimalism nonetheless captures or explains that without which no linguistic communication could transpire at all, namely the core semantic transaction involving a minimal semantic proposition. Literal-conventional meaning, then, grounds the possibility of all linguistic communication, even in cases where communicated content goes well beyond the literal-conventional meaning.

  6. See, e.g., Cappelen and Lepore (2005, p. 143), Borg (2004, p. 20).

  7. For variations on this kind of objection, see Korta and Perry (2007, p. 109), Leslie (2007, p. 161). Cappelen and Lepore (2005, pp. 176–177) attempt to address such worries.

  8. See Pagin (2008) for a recent overview.

  9. These conditions invoke what Heck (2002) calls the “naïve view of communication.” Heck asks whether communication of thoughts involving indexicals and demonstratives can serve as counterexamples (see also McDowell 1984, pp. 289–291). But since indexicals and demonstratives fall outside the scope of the present study, we can leave these complications aside for now. The guiding idea here is precisely to seek an irenic (and in this sense perhaps “naïve”) conception of communication to serve as our starting point.

  10. I derive this argument sketch from Cappelen and Lepore (see, e.g., 2005, pp. 123–125). Borg does not put the matter in quite these terms, but repeatedly emphasizes how (context-insensitive) literal sentence meaning is a “non-cancellable feature” of any linguistic exchange, and that knowledge of such meanings is a “crucial element in” communication, without which communication would be “impossible” (Borg 2004, pp. 58, 61, 263).

  11. See also Borg (2004, p. 88).

  12. Borrowing terminology from Kaplan (1990, pp. 93–94).

  13. For instance, we can think of it as a highly idealized version of the relation between Swedish and Danish. Swedes and Danes are able to communicate smoothly and effortlessly despite much greater lexico-semantic divergences than are involved in the current example.

  14. It is important to note that the example could involve E* being locally bilingual, i.e., as knowing that the extension of the English term “cousin” differs in such-and-such a way from that of its English* homophone. But this certainly need not be the case. E* may be unaware of the precise extension of “cousin” in his own language and think that E’s usage is a legitimate one. Or he may think that “cousin” in E’s language means the same as “cousin” in his own, but that E is simply confused about its meaning. In neither case will he have any problem understanding what E has communicated to him.

  15. This line would be unattractive not just because it would force us to deny the appearance of successful communication in a whole range of cases, but also for more general, theoretical reasons. In particular, this line would entail that a speaker would have to become bilingual before such time as he could successfully communicate with a speaker of a different language. This is surely not a sustainable view. For more on this, see Begby (2011).

  16. It is, however, explicitly stated in Fodor and Lepore (2007). Drawing a contrast between an account of communication (such as they aim to provide) and an account of interpretation (such as one might associate with Donald Davidson), they write: “An account of communication takes for granted a speaker and hearer who share a language; the issue is how they can use the shared language to exchange information between them” (Fodor and Lepore 2007, p. 686). However, they offer no account of what it is to share a language in this sense.

  17. See, e.g., Borg (2004, pp. 18–19), Cappelen and Lepore (2005, pp. 134–135).

  18. We can see this and the ensuing examples, then, as giving further substance to Nellie Wieland’s suspicion (2010, p. 41) that “Cappelen and Lepore confuse indirect semantic reports with indirect phonetic reports, thereby failing to explain how it is that speakers achieve the former most of the time and only rarely aspire to achieve the latter.” Similar motivations may also underlie Cappelen and Hawthorne’s move (2009, Chap. 2) from a ‘say-based’ to an ‘agree-based’ platform for diagnosing shared content.

  19. In British English, “to table” means to put forward for consideration, whereas in American English it means to remove from consideration.

  20. See, e.g., Nathan Salmon (2005, p. 343): “An expression is used correctly from the point of view of pure semantics if and only if it is used with its literal meaning” (italics in original).

  21. See, e.g., Richard Heck’s (2006, pp. 73–77, 80–81) analysis of aberrant uses of the term “livid”.

  22. Compare “Stravinsky rose to notoriety with The Rite of Spring,” uttered in 1950.

  23. See Williamson (2003, 2009) for attempts to account for pejoratives in general in terms of Gricean implicature.

  24. See, e.g., Heck (2006, p. 74), Ludlow (2006). The reader would also be correct to note an echo of Davidson (1986), to which I will return shortly.

  25. Lepore and Sennet (2010, p. 583n1) acknowledge that “[c]ontext helps determine which language is spoken.” Unfortunately, they decline to offer further elaboration.

  26. Strictly speaking, even this weaker claim may be false. For instance, many Norwegian and Swedish speakers will be unable to tell whether particular border region dialects are dialects of the one language or the other.

  27. See the claim concerning Uniqueness in Sect. 2.

  28. See, in particular Carston (2002, pp. 170–183), Recanati (2004, pp. 64–64); and for further exploration, Elugardo (2007), Jackman (2007). By contrast, Scott Soames, whose account of semantic content bears a strong resemblance to minimalism, explicitly disavows any such concern with psychological reality. On his view, what is semantically expressed by an utterance of a sentence S is “determined by rational reconstruction, not psycholinguistic research” (Soames 2010, p. 172). However, Soames (2010, p. 173) has little to say about how such rational reconstruction might proceed, except as he relies on notions such as “literal uses of S,” “normal contexts,” and “what an ideally rational agent would have to master […] in order to communicate”. But these notions can hardly be treated as explanatory primitives in the current dialectical context. Even on Soames’ (2010, p. 172) account, it is an open question whether there is, for any sentence S, a “least common denominator” that we can rationally reconstruct from all uses of S even in “normal contexts” (unless, of course, we beg the question by defining the “normal context” as the set of all those contexts in which S expresses this particular semantic content).

  29. “Does Humanitarian Aid Prolong Wars?” The Observer, Sunday (25 April 2010).

  30. An alternative approach would have it that the aberrant use of “elision” is now so widespread that there is, in effect, a secondary semantic convention according to which “elision” has the sense of “conflation.” This might be correct, but provides no consolation for semantic minimalists, since it would take us right back to the argument made at the end of Sect. 5.

  31. E.g., Sperber and Wilson (1986), Carston (2002).

  32. For an exposition of similarities between semantic minimalism and Relevance Theory, see Wedgwood (2007).

  33. By contrast, recall Fodor and Lepore (2007, p. 686): “An account of communication takes for granted a speaker and hearer who share a language; the issue is how they can use the shared language to exchange information between them.”

  34. I am here inspired by Derek Bickerton’s exploration of the creole continuum. See, e.g., Bickerton (1975).

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Acknowledgments

For feedback on various drafts of this paper, I am indebted to Holly K. Andersen, Georg Kjøll, and Rob Stainton, as well as audiences at Simon Fraser University, Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature, and the 2010 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. Work on this paper was supported by a Post-Doctoral Research Grant from the Research Council of Norway.

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    Endre Begby

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Begby, E. Semantic minimalism and the “miracle of communication”. Philos Stud 165, 957–973 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-0004-7

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