Abstract
A semantic theory aims to make predictions that are accurate and comprehensive. Sometimes, though, a semantic theory falls short of this aim, and there is a mismatch between prediction and data. In such cases, defenders of the semantic theory often attempt to rescue it by appealing to Gricean pragmatics. The hope is that we can rescue the theory as long as we can use pragmatics to explain away its predictive failures. This pragmatic rescue strategy is one of the most popular moves in philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and formal semantics. In this paper I argue that this strategy fails whenever the predictive failures at issue can be recast in epistemological or metaphysical terms. This general “reformulation argument” undermines a wide variety of pragmatic rescue attempts.
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Notes
Following the dominant trend in linguistics and formal semantics, I will use the term inference in an idealized sense. As Harman (1986) has emphasized, when it comes to the rationality of the inferences we make, many factors come into play. I focus on those factors concerning meaning and conversation.
There are many ways of characterizing semantic entailment. One might, for example, adopt a dynamic approach, according to which one claim semantically entails another just in case the assertion of the former claim necessarily creates a context in which it would be appropriate to assert the latter claim. See van Benthem (1996) for a discussion of different ways of characterizing semantic entailment in dynamic terms. For our purposes in this paper, a simple static characterization in terms of conventional and truth-conditional content suffices.
If you believe that we do not assert sentences and only ever assert propositions, then feel free to replace each instance of “asserting S” with “assertively uttering S”.
Grice presented these ideas in his William James Lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in 1967, and which were reprinted in Grice (1989).
See Grice (1989: 26–27).
At this juncture, two points should be briefly addressed. First, there is a large literature on how exactly the semantic/pragmatic distinction should be drawn. I hope to avoid making any controversial remarks on this front. For an in-depth, and admittedly opinionated, discussion of this literature, see King and Stanley (2005). Second, Grice, and subsequent theorists, have thought that there are, even beyond semantic entailment and conversational implicature, additional ways for an assertion to convey information. An assertion might presuppose a piece of information, for example, or it might conventionally implicate it. In this paper, I will confine my attention to semantic entailment and conversational implicature, bracketing presupposition, conventional implicature, and other ways of exchanging information.
We need to be careful here. Green (1995) shows that there is no conversational rule demanding that speakers, all else equal, make maximally informative assertions. Even with the all else equal clause, speakers need only prefer more informative assertions when the additional information is required by the purpose of the conversation.
You might worry that one can believe a proposition yet not feel confident enough in its truth to assert it. Assuming a knowledge norm for assertion and a knowledge norm for belief, such a scenario could not happen if the relevant person were adhering to these norms. If you prefer a stronger norm for assertion or a weaker norm for belief, then the problematic scenario could arise even if the relevant person were adhering to these norms. In such a case, I suspect you could reformulate my example in slightly different terms to bypass the worry. At any rate, this issue is orthogonal to the main argument I will develop later in this paper.
In linguistics, there is a trend towards conceptualizing pragmatics as involving covert syntactically realized operators. These operators, by way of convention, transmit “pragmatic” information. I have in mind the work of Chierchia (2004), Chierchia (2006), and Fox (2007), among others. On this conception of pragmatics, a pragmatic explanation need only involve an operator and this operator’s conventional role; it need not reference a speaker, an audience, a conversation, and the rules of conversation. In this paper, I will be setting aside such grammatical approaches to pragmatics. There are many foundational worries one might raise about this project, but here is not the place to raise them. For my present purposes, I will merely focus on traditional pragmatics, and the use of traditional pragmatic explanations in philosophy. Such explanations are ubiquitous.
See Grice (1989: 58–85).
At least as long as we make the assumption that rational commitment is closed under logical consequence. If this assumption is too strong for your tastes, practically any reasonably weakened principles along these lines will do the work that I need it to do. Furthermore, one might worry that our intuitions in these cases track conditional beliefs, as opposed to beliefs in conditionals. To address this worry, we could assume that a belief in a conditional implies a conditional belief. In this context, this assumption will not be problematic.
Speaks (2008) applies something similar to the epistemological reformulation strategy to names, definite descriptions, and quantifier domain restriction.
I will do this in order to keep things simple. Deontic modality arguably supervenes on speech acts, beliefs, intentions, and other mental states in tricky ways. Using deontic modality as a case study would be unnecessarily complicated.
It has been defended in Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), Alonso-Ovalle (2006), Schulz (2005), Aloni and van Rooij (2007), Fox (2007), and Geurts (2010). Some of these approaches are quite sophisticated, and go beyond the Gricean framework with which most philosophers are familiar. These complexities need not concern us here.
This is a serious simplification, and more nearly resembles Stalnaker’s theory. Lewis thinks that there need not be a unique closest world, and indeed thinks that there need not even be a closest world (e.g., in cases where we have an infinite sequence of worlds that keep getting closer and closer to the actual world). So Lewis has to complicate his semantics. These complications render Lewis’s theory substantively different from Stalnaker’s. For example, Lewis’s theory fails to validate conditional excluded middle, while Stalnaker’s does. But these differences are not relevant when it comes to the inference from (12) to (13).
Loewer (1976) emphasizes just how devastating this problem is for the Lewisian theory of counterfactuals.
See Ross (1941). As with the paradox of free choice permission, this puzzle was first discussed with respect to deontic modality, even though it arises for all varieties of modality. As before, in order to avoid the distracting complexities of deontic modality, I will pick a different variety of modality. Namely, I will focus on teleological, or goal-directed, modality. This variety of modality concerns what one may or must do, given the challenge of achieving a certain goal.
See, for example, von Fintel (2012).
This section is not intended to be an exhaustive list. Other kinds of conversational implicatures are unscathed as well.
See Grice (1989: 33).
A generalized conversational implicature depends only on general facts that are common to all, or almost all, conversations. Accordingly, generalized conversational implicatures are much more robust than particularized conversational implicatures. Slight changes to the context of utterance tend not to disrupt generalized conversational implicatures, though they can easily disrupt particularized conversational implicatures.
A scalar implicature is one based on the principle that, when additional information is required by the purpose of the conversation, speakers should prefer more informative assertions to less informative assertions. We already encountered a scalar implicature when we considered an assertion of Most spicy foods contain capsaicin.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this objection to my attention.
One might object that we do not really believe these things until we consider them and say them to ourselves. Perhaps, prior to mentally articulating a belief, we merely possess a disposition to form the belief. There are at least two responses. First, the view that we do not believe things until we consider them is at odds with the commonsense interpretation of many cases. If I am a committed vegan and firmly believe that we should not unnecessarily harm any animal, then, intuitively, I believe that we should not unnecessarily harm ducks, even if I have never explicitly considered whether we should unnecessarily harm ducks. It is contrary to commonsense to claim that I currently lack this belief, and that I instead merely possess the disposition to form this belief after considering the issue. Second, even if we accept that such cases involve dispositions to believe, we can recast my reformulation argument in terms of these dispositions. Just because I am disposed to believe that Oswald killed Kennedy, it does not follow that I am disposed to believe that if Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, a Martian did. So the reformulation argument remains intact, in one form or another, regardless of how this particular debate plays out. Thanks to Wayne Davis for raising this last point.
If these facts concern agents, that is completely incidental.
Some proponents of experimental philosophy argue for this conclusion. Consider, for example, the following claim found in Swain et al. (2008: 140): “the results of [some experimental philosophy research] challenge the legitimacy of appealing to intuitions. Weinberg et al. (2001, 2003) revealed that epistemological intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background; Machery et al. (2004) document a similar cultural variation in semantic intuitions; and Nichols and Knobe (2007) have discovered that the affective content of a thought experiment can influence whether subjects have compatabilist or incompatabilist intuitions.”
Grice first discussed the cancelability diagnostic. See Grice (1989: 44–46).
See, for example, Sadock (1978).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Heather Demarest, Josh Armstrong, Wayne Davis, Andy Egan, Thony Gillies, Ernie Lepore, Lisa Miracchi, Martin Montminy, Matthew Stone, Brian Weatherson, two anonymous referees, and many others—including audiences at Rutgers University and Purdue University—for helpful comments on the ideas contained in this paper.
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Miller, Z. The reformulation argument: reining in Gricean pragmatics. Philos Stud 173, 525–546 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0505-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0505-2