Abstract
Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker (or thinker) : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the force inherent in the content of an embedded sentence is cancelled. Indrek Reiland has recently objected to Hanks’s proposal that it faces a dilemma: either force cancellation dissolves the unity of the proposition secured by the cancelled act of assertion (and Hanks’s proposal does not work), or Hanks’s proposal reduces to Soames’s. In this paper, I respond to Reiland by offering an analysis of force cancellation which gets rid of the alleged dilemma. The proposal is based on a set of distinctions from speech act theory : between two senses of ’force’, two types of act, and two types of context. The role of simulation in force cancellation is emphasized, and connections drawn to broader issues such as the evolution of complex language.
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Notes
As a reader for this journal pointed out, the extension of the Hanks account to non-indicative sentences raises potentially difficult issues and can proceed in different ways. In this paper, however, I am not concerned with that particular problem, but with another, more pressing problem which Hanks’s account raises: the problem of force cancellation (see below, Sect. 2).
See (Hanks 2007, 2011, 2015). Hanks uses ‘predication’ for the act of (assertively) ascribing the property to the object, but that term is used by Soames in the ‘noncommittal’ sense, so I avoid it and I use ’assertion’ instead. (Reiland 2013, quoted below, uses ‘predication*’ for Hanks’s notion and ‘predication#’ for Soames’s notion.) It is true that Hanks himself distinguishes between predication as a multiple relation (between the subject, the property he or she ascribes, and the object to which s/he ascribes it) and assertion as a binary relation between the subject and a unitary proposition (construed itself as a type of act of predication) (Hanks 2015, pp. 161–166); but that distinction seems to me unimportant since to stand in the relevant ’tokening’ relation to the type is to actually predicate the property of the object.
I take Modus Ponens to be valid only if the sentence which occurs embedded in one premise (the conditional ‘If P then Q’) and unembedded in the other (‘P’) expresses the same content in both premises. If the assertive component is integral to content, then removing that component through embedding changes the content, and detaching the consequent becomes an illicit move (tantamount to the transition from ‘If P then Q’ and ‘R’ to ‘Q’).
That is actually debatable. ‘Although it is unclear that an informative answer can be given to this question’, Soames writes, ‘it is equally unclear that this is anything to worry about. Some logical and semantic notions—like negation—are primitive. Since this elementary point does not provoke hand-wringing, it is hard to see why the primitiveness of predication should’ (Soames 2010, p. 29).
Russell also seems to have held that thought is by nature assertoric. In the Principles of Mathematics he writes that ‘In every proposition, (...) we may make an analysis into something asserted and something about which the assertion is made’ (Russell 1903, p. 43). Soames cites that passage, and rejects the formulation as confused (Soames 2010, pp. 27–28). In Hanks’s framework, however, Russell’s statement can be accepted as it is.
The same objection can be found in Hom and Schwartz (2013), pp. 20–22.
Thus Dummett characterizes ‘force’ as that part of the meaning of an sentence in virtue of which it is ‘conventionally understood to express an assertion and not e.g. a command’ (Dummett 1973, p. 302). For representing the force (in that sense) of imperative and interrogative utterances, Reichenbach (1947, pp. 339–343) introduced special signs, ‘!’ and ‘?’, on a par with the assertion sign.
My notion of a locutionary act is similar to Barker’s notion of a proto-illocutionary act (Barker 2004, p. 45ff), and (though less closely) to Clark’s and Carlson’s notion of an ‘informative’, i.e. an act directed at all the participants in a conversation and intended to inform all of them jointly of the illocutionary act being performed (Clark and Carlson 1982, p. 332).
The locutionary context roughly corresponds to Kaplan’s notion of context.
On echoicity, see Ducrot (1980a, b, 1984, 1986), Sperber and Wilson (1981, 1986), Recanati (1987, 2000, 2007, 2010, Chap. 6), Wilson and Sperber (1992, 2012), Clark (1996, Chap. 12), Wilson (2000, 2006), Stokke (2013), and the papers in De Brabanter (2005a). The label ‘echoic’ comes from Sperber and Wilson (Ducrot talks of ‘polyphony’, Clark of ‘staging’, etc.).
Cosmides and Tooby (2000) speak of ‘decoupling’. This term is borrowed from Leslie’s theory of pretense (Leslie 1987), but Cosmides and Tooby insist that decoupling is a broader notion than pretense. Decoupling rests on ‘the ability to act as if’, an ability which underlies a diverse range of behaviours, including ‘the many categories of actions undertaken under conditions of uncertainty (e.g., we will assume they got the message about the restaurant; or we will act as if there is a leopard hiding in the shadows of the tree), actions with respect to social conventions or deontic commitments (which are by themselves incapable of being either true or not true, at least in an ordinary sense; e.g., Elizabeth is the rightful Queen of England; it is praiseworthy to make the correct temple sacrifices), adapting oneself to the wishes of others, hypothesis testing, and so on. Pretense (Leslie 1987) and deception (Whiten and Byrne 1997) are simply extensions of this same competence, in which the agent knows the representations on which she is acting are false’ (Cosmides and Tooby 2000, p. 64).
‘Some [cognitive acts]—judging and asserting that o is red—involve further cognitive acts in addition to predicating redness of o, whereas others—seeing and imagining—do not. To judge or assert that o is red is to think of o as red and to do something else. In the case of judging, this something else is endorsing, in the sense of adopting that way of thinking—of o as red—as potential basis for further thought or action’ (Soames 2014b, pp. 228–229).
There are indications that Soames may be changing his mind on these matters. In the January 2014 manuscript version of his Hempel lectures of 2013, we read: ‘judg[ing] or assert[ing] that B is red does involve doing something over and above predicating [redness of B]... In such cases we represent B as red, while taking a further stance towards our representational act. All events of judging B to be red involve predicating redness of B plus this further cognitive doing’. In the published version, this becomes: ‘whether or not [judging or asserting that B is red] involves doing something distinct from and independent of predicating redness of B, as opposed merely to predicating redness of B in a distinctive way, is less clear than one might think... I incline to the latter [option].’ (Soames 2015, pp. 22–23; emphasis mine). Soames says he is not sure ‘how much it matters what we say about this question’ (2015, p. 23), but I think a good deal of the present debate hinges on it.
See his comment on an earlier version of this paper: ‘The structure of your view looks like it preserves the structure of the Fregean view, and in that respect it is like Soames’s account. By ‘structure’ I mean the two-component model of assertion. In an assertion there’s a non-commital act (Fregean entertainment, Soamesian predication, locutionary act), which determines propositional content, and then on top of that there’s a commital act, an act of endorsing or subscribing or something similar. I worry that if this structure is in place then we’ll be able to reconstruct something that looks an awful lot like the content-force distinction.’ (Hanks, personal communication, August 2013).
See e.g. Davies and Stone (eds.) 1995.
The displacement of perspective we find in oratio obliqua is limited: by and large, the indexicals in the embedded sentence are still interpreted with respect to the speaker’s actual context (the locutionary context) ; that is part of what Quine means when he says that we say ‘in our language’ how things stand from the alien perspective we temporarily espouse. In oratio recta, arguably, both the illocutionary context and the locutionary context shift (Recanati 2010, pp. 202–204).
In philosophy, the opacity phenomena characteristic of speech and attitude reports are standardly treated as involving a shift of perspective: substitution of equivalent expressions in the embedded portion of the report may fail to preserve truth if the expressions in question are not equivalent for the subject whose speech or thought we are reporting. In psychology, it has been shown that mastery of intensionality develops together with mastery of perspective shifts. Perspective-shifts in attitude sentences are also a fruitful area of investigation in linguistics.
‘Embedded imperatives have been reported among others for Korean (Portner 2007; Pak et al. 2008), Japanese (Oshima 2006; Schwager 2006), Old Scandinavian (Rögnvaldsson 1998), Colloquial German (Schwager 2006; Kaufmann and Poschmann 2013), Slovenian (Sheppard and Golden 2002; Dvorak 2005; Rus 2005), Ancient Greek (Medeiros 2013), Mbya (Thomas 2012), and even English (Crnic and Trinh 2009)’ (Stegovek and Kaufmann 2015, p. 620). As Jary and Kissine note, ‘the main cases (...) are reports of directive speech acts’ (Jary and Kissine 2014, p. 104).
In other examples, the shift away from the locutionary context affects not only the enunciator (distinct from the speaker) but also the addressee (distinct from the hearer). See example (187) in Jary and Kissine (2014, p. 105).
Indeed French ‘puisque’ [since] contrasts with French ‘car’ [for]. ‘Car’ is not polyphonic and, for that reason, cannot substitute for ‘puisque’ in certain contexts (Ducrot 1980b, pp. 47–48).
Such instances are discussed by Ducrot (1972, pp. 175–179) and by Cornulier (1985, pp. 60–77) (under the heading of ‘bi-assertive conditionals’). Example: ‘Si la vie et la mort de Socrate sont d’un sage, la vie et la mort de Jésus sont d’un Dieu’ (Rousseau). The phenomenon is less common in English, but still exists, as witnessed by the following sentence from Antonia Fraser’s foreword to Love and Louis XIV : ‘But if gallantry is one of my themes, then religion is another.’ A related phenomenon is the non-cancelling use of modals, as in ‘Obama may be the President, he is far from having all the powers’: here the force of ‘Obama is the President’ is not cancelled even though the sentence is embedded under a possibility modal. (I am indebted to Adèle Mercier for pointing out the analogy between the two types of case, and for providing the Fraser example.)
There is an important difference between the two cases—a difference which simulation accounts of conditionals tend to underplay (see Recanati 2000, pp. 51–58). Here, however, I am only concerned with the commonalities, which simulation accounts of conditionals do capture.
There is a third type of negation in Reinach’s catalogue: ‘retraction’ negation, as in ‘Not X but Y’. (This is related to Ducrot’s ’metalinguistic negation’—see e.g. Anscombre and Ducrot 1977).
Ducrot (1984, pp. 217–218). The difference between polemical and metalinguistic negation does not matter for our purposes: in both cases the assertion which is being rejected is evoked, and a polyphonic analysis is in order (since the enunciator of the denial must be different from the enunciator of what is denied).
Ducrot is not totally clear, or consistent, on this matter since he sometimes seems to hold that any negation amenable to a polyphonic analysis counts as polemical rather than descriptive (Ducrot 1984, pp. 217–218). But I take Ducrot’s ‘on the contrary’ test to show that even if a negative utterance does not exhibit ‘opposition to the contradictory positive judgment’ (an opposition which can be indicated by using contrastive stress), still it somehow evokes the positive proposition.
That the phenomenon may occur in inner as well as outer speech is evidently not a problem for the analysis. Silent thought is still thought informed by language, in contrast to animal thought—thought available to nonlinguistic creatures.
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Acknowledgments
The research leading to this paper has received support from the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche under Grant Agreement No. ANR-10-LABX-0087 IEC and Grant Agreement No. ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02 PSL. I am grateful to Peter Hanks, Herb Clark, Indrek Reiland, and several anonymous reviewers for discussion.
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Appendix
Appendix
In the paper I follow Hanks and couch my discussion in linguistic terms (assertion, illocutionary acts, etc.). But is that legitimate ? The problem of the unity of the proposition is not confined to cases in which speech acts with propositional content are performed using language. The phenomenon characterizes thought as well as language. Now if the phenomenon in question is not linguistic, then references to speech act theory are out of place. I heard that objection a couple of times, so I think something should be said about it.
It is true, of course, that the problem of the unity of the proposition arises not merely with respect to cases in which language is used, but also with respect to cases in which language is not used. But why should that be a difficulty ? On the sort of view developed by Hanks (and defended by me in the paper), what unifies the propositional content is what we may refer to abstractly as a committal act (or attitude) which may be either an illocutionary act in the linguistic case, or a mental act/attitude in the nonlinguistic case. The theory is exactly the same in both cases, so the extension to the mental realm is entirely unproblematic. Whenever there is a committal act or attitude with propositional content, what unifies the content is the committal act or attitude, according to Hanks’s theory. Linguistic acts of assertion are only a special case.
But we should distinguish the problem of the unity of the proposition, to which Hanks provides a solution, and the problem of force cancellation, which arises for Hanks’s account and to which I provide a solution. My solution to the problem of force cancellation crucially appeals to the notion of a locutionary act, analysed as the act of conventionally indicating the performance of a given illocutionary act. Now, the notion of an illocutionary act can be subsumed under the more general notion of a committal act (an act which can be indifferently mental or linguistic), but the notion of a locutionary act, as I analyse it, seems to be fundamentally linguistic and related to the existence of conventional forms for performing illocutionary acts. So, with respect to the problem of force cancellation, the objection makes sense: if the phenomenon (force cancellation) is not linguistic, then references to the theory of locutionary acts are out of place.
Let us first deal with the issue, whether and to what extent force cancellation might be a linguistic phenomenon. As we have seen, force cancellation occurs in two types of case: cases of displayed speech or thought, such as irony or free indirect speech, and cases in which a complex propositional content is built up with the help of logical connectives (‘compound thoughts’, to use Frege’s terminology). Now many philosophers hold that compound thoughts are made possible by language, and are therefore unavailable to nonlinguistic creatures. If that is the case, then there is no immediate objection to analysing that type of force cancellation with the help of linguistic notions.Footnote 32
Other philosophers think there can be (proto-)conditionals or (proto-)negation in animal thought, however. How, then, can a ‘linguistic’ account of force cancellation such as that I have offered be made compatible with the putative existence of the phenomenon in animal thought ? I respond that my account is not particularly linguistic, appearances notwithstanding. I have argued that the type of force cancellation at work in embedding cases should be understood in the light of the other type of force cancellation—the type which involves simulation and role-playing, as in e.g. irony or free indirect speech. Now role-playing is tied to theory of mind abilities and is found early in children in the form of pretense games. These games are precocious manifestations of the ability to engage into fiction (Walton 1990), an ability which, according to Clark (2016), also underlies the use of gestures and bodily expressions in oral communication. The relevant cognitive abilities (simulation/pretense, role-playing, etc.) do not seem to be specifically linguistic. We should acknowledge the possibility for a nonlinguistic creature with a rich theory of mind (assuming there can be nonlinguistic creatures with a rich theory of mind) to gesturally express an attitude while overtly conveying that one does not have the attitude. This can be accounted for using basically the same tools I have suggested: we can define the context of an attitude just as we define the context of an illocutionary act, and we can substitute the context of expression for the context of the locutionary act.
I conclude that if there is, in animal thought, a proto-analog of the sort of logical compounding we find in linguistic thought, there is no reason why there couldn’t be also a simulation-based analog of the force cancellation mechanism I described for linguistic thought. There is nothing specifically linguistic about that mechanism, on my account.
We may perhaps go further. The assumption that simulation mechanisms are independent of language and work in tandem with embedding suggests that a closer link may tie the two phenomena (syntactic embedding and force-cancelling simulation): the phenomenon of embedding itself may have phylogenetically developed from the interplay between the protolinguistic faculty (before the emergence of what Cosmides and Tooby 2000 refer to as ‘scope syntax’) and the ‘perspective shifting’ faculty, which crucially involves the phenomenon Clark has dubbed ‘layering’ (Clark 1996). This type of account, in the spirit of Sperber (2000), is interesting because it reverses the order of explanation with respect to theories which give a central role to the complex structures of language in the development of theory of mind abilities (see e.g. De Villiers 2005, 2007).
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Recanati, F. Force cancellation. Synthese 196, 1403–1424 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1223-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1223-9