Abstract
Traditional accounts of the conditions on communicative success are invariantist. For example, some authors claim that, for communication to succeed, a hearer must always grasp the very content that the speaker expressed with her utterance; others claim that success is always proportional to the degree to which the hearer understands this content. In this paper, I argue that these invariantist approaches cannot offer a comprehensive account of communicative success. When we attempt to communicate, it is usually with the intention to secure some perlocutionary effect beyond the communicative exchange itself (for example, to get our interlocutor to pass the salt, or to convince her to form a particular belief). I argue that, relative to these intentions, it may not matter whether a hearer perfectly understands the speaker; it may not even matter if the hearer’s understanding is quite poor overall. In place of invariantist conditions (or perhaps, in addition), I propose an approach that is context-dependent in the following sense: holding fixed the content expressed by the speaker, differences in features of the broad context of the speech exchange can determine differences in the standards for communicative success. On this approach, success requires that the hearer understand the content expressed by the speaker in ways that are relevant to the speaker’s perlocutionary intentions.
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Notes
- 1.
I understand ‘utterance’ broadly here, to refer to the signal in a communicative exchange; I intend this to include signals that are written, signed, spoken aloud, etc. Similarly, I use ‘speaker’ and ‘hearer’ to refer to the sender and receiver of this signal, respectively. (cf. Grice 1957: 380)
- 2.
Here I am roughly following Pagin (2008). Pagin offers a more detailed, and more general, characterisation of the structure of a communicative event; however, many of these details are not important for my purposes.
- 3.
These theories of content individuation are also relevant to the determination of the linguistic meaning of words and sentences, where linguistic meaning can be thought of as distinct from utterance content.
- 4.
Utterance content need not always match the content of the thought expressed – subjects may sometimes misspeak, for example. Cases in which the two diverge cause complications. I think that grasp of utterance content itself is not required for communicative success. In Pollock (2015), I argue that, on sociolectical theories, what must be grasped by a hearer is not utterance content, nor even thought content, but a speaker’s understanding of the thought content she expresses (Thanks also to Andrew Peet for helpful discussion of this issue). I ignore this complication in what follows.
- 5.
- 6.
Note that the account is not contextualism about the term ‘communicative success’.
- 7.
These aren’t the only conditions you might include. For example, perhaps the hearer must recover whatever attitude the speaker takes towards the content she expresses, as well as things like the illocutionary force of the utterance.
- 8.
Longworth (2010) examines several options.
- 9.
This approach could be framed as a traditional propositional theory of linguistic understanding, according to which understanding an utterance, u, amounts to knowing that u means that p, where p is some correct specification of u’s content (e.g., Heck 1995; Evans 1982; Dummett 1978); however, I think it is also compatible with weaker theories that do not treat understanding in terms of propositional knowledge about what was said (e.g., Longworth 2018).
- 10.
Goldberg uses the phrase ‘reliable comprehension’; this is because he is interested in how hearers can acquire testimonial knowledge. As my focus here is not testimony, the reliability dimension of Goldberg’s account is not important for present purposes.
- 11.
- 12.
Pagin (2008) discusses several knowledge requirements on communicative success.
- 13.
‘Uptake’ is Austin’s terminology. Uptake involves understanding the force and the content of an utterance.
- 14.
- 15.
Some aspects of my account might be in tension with Clark’s picture of communication. For example, I claim that the speaker’s perlocutionary intentions are central to determining the standards for communicative success; Clark (1996: 212), in contrast, emphasises how the aims of a communicative exchange are jointly developed and amended by the speaker and hearer throughout the course of a conversation. I think a version of my account could be made compatible with Clark’s approach, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore this issue.
- 16.
Tomasello (2008) also provides a thorough development of the conception of communication as central to the coordination of cooperative projects.
- 17.
When authors do consider perlocutionary intentions in relation to communicative success, it is usually to discuss whether communicative intentions include perlocutionary intentions of the sort present in Grice’s (1957) account. This issue is discussed in, e.g., Recanati (1986) and Bach (1987). The perlocutionary intentions that I appeal to in my account are not communicative intentions in this sense; rather, they are intentions that aim at effects beyond the exchange itself. Moreover, I do not claim that communicative success requires their satisfaction.
- 18.
In framing things this way, I do not mean to suggest that communication failure is always or usually solely attributable to a hearer’s failure to live up to these demands – the speaker is also responsible for choosing demands that are reasonable.
- 19.
I think the correct version of the theory is a graded version according to which communication succeeds to the degree that the hearer achieves understanding along the dimensions determined by the speaker’s perlocutionary intentions. I will ignore this complication in what follows.
- 20.
For the ‘graded’ conditions on communicative success, this would be better described as a case in which communication is poor. The same thing goes for the other example pairs.
- 21.
There is a debate concerning the conditions on successful de re communication (e.g., Bezuidenhout 1997; Recanati 1993; Buchanan 2014). However, much of this debate focuses on the question of whether utterance content includes modes of presentation of the referents of referring expressions. As my focus here is on inferential understanding of thought content, my argument is somewhat orthogonal to this debate.
- 22.
One worry that one might have with this example pair is that the speaker’s utterance plausibly has a different illocutionary force in each case – in 1b, but not 1a, the utterance is a warning. I think that a mere difference in force would not be enough to account for the difference in communicative success in these examples (e.g., the mere fact that an utterance is a warning does not obviously lessen the need to understand it). In case the reader is still concerned, the second and third example pairs do not contain this distracting feature.
- 23.
Sociolectical theories can claim that there is more to recovering content than grasping the concepts expressed by the terms apparent from an utterance’s surface form (and the manner in which they are combined). Subjects may also need to grasp the explicature of an utterance, for example.
- 24.
One might object that the change in background beliefs of the hearer affects her understanding of the content she recovers (one might think this if one was a holist about inferential understanding, for example). Thus, there has been a change in understanding across the example pairs. Fortunately, I think this interpretation of the examples is consistent with my account: the kind of understanding required for success is still different across the two examples (despite no change in the thought content expressed). And, moreover, the kind of understanding required appears to track the perlocutionary intentions of the speaker: it is not the case that the hearer simply needs better understanding for communication to succeed – she needs to understand the content along different dimensions depending on the speaker’s perlocutionary intentions. The speaker’s perlocutionary intentions may also determine which background beliefs the hearer must have regarding the project they are engaged in.
- 25.
This approach is similar to that argued for in Bezuidenhout (1997). Bezuidenhout’s primary aim in that paper is to argue that the communication of de re thoughts does not require shared content. She argues for a similar content account. However, in the course of arguing for the position, she suggests a context-dependent version of it. Her account is different from mine in that she thinks that preservation of reference is required for success, and she does not appeal to perlocutionary intentions.
- 26.
One might object that this account is simply a different kind of invariantism: one that requires that the hearer grasp the speaker’s perlocutionary intention. However, I think this claim would be an addition to the account I am offering here rather than an alternative. I do not claim that the hearer must represent the speaker’s perlocutionary intention (nor even her illocutionary intention). My claim is that success requires only that the hearer understand the content she recovers in a particular way. If we add to the account that she must also grasp the speaker’s perlocutionary intention, it will still be true that success requires that her understanding of the illocutionary content expressed by the speaker is different in different contexts. This response, I think, will also be relevant to those who would claim that what the hearer must grasp is an implicature (for those who think that implicatures can be entailments – e.g., Bach 2006).
- 27.
Negotiating behaviours are also discussed in Clark 1996.
- 28.
Humans can make mistakes and lack information, of course. The idea is that, if provided with relevant information, a typical speaker’s judgments as to success and failure of an exchange are likely to be roughly accurate.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lewis Pollock, Bryan Pickel, and Andrew Peet for very helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper. I also thank audiences at conferences and workshops at the University of Warsaw, University of Tartu, University of Edinburgh, and Ruhr University, Bochum.
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Pollock, J. (2020). Context and Communicative Success. In: Ciecierski, T., Grabarczyk, P. (eds) The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34485-6_13
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