Abstract
Says-based definitions of lying require a notion of what is said. I argue that a conventions-based notion of utterance content inspired by Korta and Perry’s (in: Tsohatzidis (ed), John Searle's philosophy of language: Force, meaning, and thought, Cambridge University Press, 2007a) locutionary content and Devitt’s (Overlooking conventions. The trouble with linguistic pragmatism, Springer, 2021) what is said meets the desiderata for that theoretical role. In Sect. 1 I recall two received says-based definitions of lying and the notions of what is said that have been proposed for them. In Sect. 2 I recall the desiderata that a notion of content must fulfil in order to cover the role of what is said in says-based definitions of lying. In Sect. 3 I discuss the points that Korta and Perry’s locutionary content and Devitt’s what is said have in common with respect to the centrality that linguistic conventions have for the constitution of utterance contents. In Sect. 4 I argue that a conventions-based notion of utterance content meets the desiderata for the role of what is said in says-based definitions of lying and has some important advantages over the notions of what is said that have been so far proposed. In Sect. 5 I point out the impact that the debate over the definition of lying has on the semantics/pragmatics divide in philosophy of language.
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Notes
To read: what is said by S in c relative to a question under discussion (QUD) q is the weakest proposition p such that (i) p is an answer (partial or complete) to q and p either entails or is entailed by the minimal content expressed by the utterance of the sentence S in c. (A proposition p is weaker than a proposition q if and only if q entails p but p does not entail q).
Borg (2019: 522) stresses the point that the misleading speaker who avoids lying can protest that the content of her assertion is not the content that the audience understood.
Korta and Perry do not call ‘semantic’ their locutionary contents because on their view the output of semantics are token-reflexive contents, whereas Devitt calls ‘semantic’ his what is said because it is governed by rules of language, mainly established by conventions.
Devitt rejects the intentionalist view and speaks of intentional states rather than intentions.
The examples Perry (‘red’) and Devitt (‘run’, ‘ cut’) discuss are different, but their approaches are conceptually very similar.
One might call them ‘permissive rules’, borrowing Perry’s terminology. I am not attributing to Perry the view that most generalized implicatures are to be explained in terms of meaning conventions as Devitt maintains.
Scholars who defend says-based definitions of lying acknowledge that John can reply this way. Critics of says-based definitions reject that intuition. But this is besides the point of my paper.
John chooses the truth functional meaning and can think in good conscience that he is saying that Jack got married and had two children in one order or the other. Suppose John’s moral precepts prohibit him from telling falsehoods. John can truly think that he is keeping faith with his moral precepts.
If some readers do not feel that the intuition that John lied is strong, they can test their intuitions with the following scenario. At a trial a witness wants to protect the defendant, who is accused of shooting a man after entering his house, and says: ‘I heard the shot and I saw the defendant entering the house of the victim’. The prosecutor presses the witness to answer the following question with emphasis on the two occurrences of ‘and’. ‘Did you hear the shot and did you see the defendant entering the house of the victim or did you see the defendant entering the house of the victim and did you hear the shot?’. If the defendant is guilty, as he first entered the house and then shot the man, and the witness knows that he is guilty, then if the witness answers the question by repeating the sentence ‘I heard the shot and I saw the defendant entering the house of the victim’, the intuition is strong that the witness is lying and can be charged with perjury.
Compare this case with the first version of the rich Catholic case. There, John’s assertion is uncooperative, because he knows that the rich Catholic’s interest is in the temporal order of the events. Yet, supposing that the rich Catholic’s request is unspecified for information about Jack, nothing compels John to use the conjunction ‘and’ with the temporal meaning, and John’s assertion is a fine response to that request.
The explanation of how the local QUD is raised might be complicated, but the idea seems intuitive enough.
This is not to say that it is the context that performs the saturation. Speakers’ intentions (intentional states) perform the saturation, although they are constrained by the context. How the context constrains speakers’ intentions is a delicate matter, and I cannot give an account of it here. But the idea seems intuitive enough. For example, Fred cannot defend himself from the charge with lying claiming that he said that Dave had had enough tea, and Mary claiming that she said that Helga was not ready to give her driving test. Of course, misunderstanding might occur, but when a misunderstanding is disclosed the speaker must cancel her utterance as a faulty move in the discourse game.
Récanati (2010: 84) discusses the ‘no idea’ test.
This does not mean that the speaker has a (informative) descriptive representation of the place or of the demonstratum. The only way to make them explicit might be to use locutions like ‘the place where I am’ and ‘the thing over there’ pointing to the demonstratum.
Wettstein deals with incomplete definite descriptions but his point can be generalized to all expressions that are in need of contextual supplementations.
Stokke (2018: 112) discusses an example with ‘ready’ in which the speaker retreats to a particular completion and not to a generalized proposition in order to avoid commitment to lying.
For a discussion and an endorsement of this point see Kissine (2013: 65, 75–76).
Token-reflexive contents fix the conditions that must be fulfilled in order for an utterance to express a truth. For example, if a speaker A utters the sentence ‘I am tired’, the token-reflexive content is that the speaker of u is tired, where u is the utterance made by the speaker. What is said, instead, is that A is tired.
Korta and Perry (2006) show that implicatures can also be derived from token-reflexive contents.
Devitt (2021: 295) says that there is a convention of using N in order to say q because of N in response to a why-question like why q?. N is a sub-sentential phrase. For example, one can use the phrase ‘Bad weather’ in order to say that the game has been cancelled because of bad weather in response to the question ‘Why has the game been cancelled?’. Elaborating on this idea, it seems that Devitt might welcome the idea that there is a convention of using the sentence p to say q because p in reply to a why-question like why q?. I am grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for pointing me out the exact reference in Devitt’s book.
Elugardo and Stainton (2004) wonder what a shorthand might be. Devitt answers that it is just the existence of a linguistic convention. Such linguistic conventions are posited to provide the best explanation of regularities of use.
The objection is due to an anonymous reviewer of this journal.
The distinction is between material and behavioral implicatures. The derivation of behavioral implicatures requires premises about the speaker’s communicative intentions.
I borrow this terminology from Kaplan (1999).
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Vignolo, M. Lying and What is Said. Erkenn (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00648-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00648-1