Abstract
The article provides an overview of linguistic context dependence and seeks to lay out some adequacy criteria that a theory of linguistic context dependence has to fulfill. Indexicals in the narrow sense are distinguished from the much more common contextuals. While indexicals proper semantically depend on a possibly shifted deictic center given by the context of a possible utterance, the broader class of contextuals are marked for and subject to additional interpretation depending on the doxastic context of a discourse participant. The interpretation of contextuals is sometimes mandatory and sometimes optional and using parametrized modal logics for these expressions as if they were pure indexicals is of limited use only. Instead, it is suggested to stipulate open argument places in the lexicon entries of contextuals and consider their interpretation a form of abductive inference to a narrowed down semantic content that is most plausible to an agent in a given context.Such a representation is desirable, because it hooks up the notion of interpretation with representations of graded belief from Formal Epistemology. An example of how to implement such an inference mechanism in a type theory with inner negation is given.
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Notes
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Cappelen and Lepore (2004) have terminologically introduced CSAs merely to criticize them, but we agree with Bach (2007a,c) that their arguments have remained inconclusive. Notice that according to Comrie (1985) there are some languages in which tenses are not grammatically realized (e.g., Burmese) or in which not all of them need to be grammatically realized (e.g., Mandarin Chinese). Nevertheless, suitable temporal relations between the reported event or situation and the time of utterance are still required from a semantical point of view.
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The test was devised by Cappelen and Lepore (2004) for checking whether an expression is context-dependent in general, but it obviously only separates expressions that semantically depend on the deictic center from others. Contrary to what Cappelen and Lepore (2005) have claimed, it is the semanticists job to determine whether or not tall is relational. Just like and cannot be regarded as a unary junctor—even in fully curried languages like \(T\tilde{y}\) of the Appendix and must be considered as the composition of two other functions—no sensible non-relational account of tallness can be given.
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In contrast to ordinary contextuals like tall or enough, anaphora and genuine text-deictics seem to depend to a large extent on the grammatical, rhetorical, and informational structure of the previous discourse in addition to how it has been interpreted so far.
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For the sake of the current argument, the potential ‘higher-order’ vagueness of the ± margins or cases when discourse participants assume different standards of precision can be ignored. It is assumed in the above example that all discourse participants agree on the margins and that they are much smaller than 1 h. From a more philosophical angle one could also claim that expressions like now or 2pm denote instants in time rather than time intervals and the above interpretations are only adequate when Alice is considered as speaking loosely. As interesting as it may be from a philosophical perspective about time, this view is not helpful for doing natural language semantics. People do not have such rigid standards in ordinary conversations.
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See (ibid.), Bach (2009).
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Note that a relativism like that of MacFarlane (2008) is quite a different story; here, a metaphysical claim about the truth or falsity of utterance content at different evaluation times is made and whether this view is adequate hinges on metaphysical arguments.
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Many thanks to Manuel Rebuschi for fruitful discussion of this issue.
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Many thanks to Richmond Thomason for having brought this to my attention.
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This view goes back to non-traditional predication theory of Sinowjew (1970), Sinowjew and Wessel (1975), and Wessel (1989). Some philosophers and logicians don’t like it, because it cannot be readily extended to deal with quantified statements and moreover one or both of \(\neg \) and \(\sim \!\) might no longer satisfy ones favorite criteria for negation. Non-traditional predication theory is nevertheless useful for expressing some form of situations without making the underlying logic partial. See Muskens (1995) for a genuine partial type theory.
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Details of the tense logic and underlying interval relations cannot be addressed here; the reader is referred to Allen (1983), Ladkin (1987), and van Benthem (1991). Notice that ‘not significantly later’ is a condition for the English present tense as opposed to, say, the German present tense which may extend significantly into the future. For simplicity the fact that the tenses like most other indexicals are also contextuals is ignored and we focus on nonindexical contextuals in what follows.
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In contrast to this, the present tense predicate PRES is indexical and therefore does depend on u. A crude definition for tall could be given as (23) Tall: = λ u λ s λ x λ C. most y(C(s, y))(height(s, y) < height(s, x)), where the quantifier and function names are self-explanatory. These details don’t matter in what follows.
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Kent Bach is one of the primary advocates of ‘propositional skeletons’, see Bach (2005). However, this position leads to a number of logical problems. Specifying the logical consequences of incomplete content and attitudes towards such content in particular is far from trivial. Apart from that, structured propositions also tend to lure philosophers of language into metaphysically dangerous parlance, as if there was an ethereal ‘third realm’ of meanings.
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Cf. Rast (2010, p. 394).
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We have chosen one particular way to interpret?P that is not the only one. In another context it could also be argued that an agent decidedly believes that?P if \(\mathcal{B}?P\) is true. Under this interpretation the above update operation would need to be adjusted to also revise by?P.
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The checking problem might be the main reason for switching to quantitative accounts, where for example belief update by Jeffrey Conditioning is available and well-understood. For it is quite obvious that a checking step only makes sense if the hearer is able to learn something from the speaker not with apodictic certainty but only to some degree. In any case, these issues are fairly complicated both from a philosophical and a technical perspective and there is no room in this article to further delve into them.
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Cf. also Stone and Thomason (2002).
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See Rast (2010) for more on this topic.
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Rast, E. (2014). Context as Assumptions. In: Lihoreau, F., Rebuschi, M. (eds) Epistemology, Context, and Formalism. Synthese Library, vol 369. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02943-6_2
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