Abstract
Various data from communication that does not occur face-to-face are taken to be problematic for Kaplan’s account of indexical expressions, as is the case with the so-called answering machine paradox. One fix, developed by Sidelle (1991) and Briciu (2018), is the remote utterance view: recording artifacts are means by which speakers perform utterances at a distance, just as by means of other artifacts agents performs other types of actions at a distance. This view has faced an important objection, namely that remote utterances lead to Moorean paradoxes. In this paper, I defend the remote utterance view against this objection and further develop the view. I argue that worries about Moorean paradoxes can easily be dispelled if we take into consideration the artifactual nature of recording devices, their materiality, and the communicative affordances they bring about. In the first section, we’ll present the answering machine paradox and give a brief overview of the remote utterance view. The second section presents the objection against the view, while the third gives a detailed rejoinder to the objection. Answering this objection is important also because it allows us to explore some underdeveloped aspects of the remote utterance view. First, I will discuss how the theorist calibrates her model with the data she seeks to explain and predict. Secondly, I will argue that speech acts performed via recording devices have different felicity conditions than their oral counterparts. I conclude with a short discussion of some semantic and pragmatic consequences of the view.
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Notes
I use “recording device” as an umbrella term for any kind of artifact used in recording linguistic expressions: writing, video and audio devices, etc.
Corazza, Fish and Govertt (2002) claim that there are several non-linguistic conventions associated with the use of each type of recording device. There is a social convention associated with writing letters and postcards, according to which we interpret indexicals occurring in letters and postcards to refer to the time/place of the recording. There is a different social convention associated with the use of answering machines and voicemails according to which we interpret indexicals recorded on such devices to refer to the time of the playback. As (5a,b) show, this gets the data wrong. For more examples supporting the claim see Briciu (2018).
Not all utterances have illocutionary force, that is, not all involve a speech-act. Nevertheless, many of them do. If so, Sorensen is right to point out the the remote utterance view entails the possibility of post-mortem assertions.
As one reviewer has pointed out, this assumes that Moorean assertions are not acceptable. But one can accept Moorean assertions if one is ready to accept certain philosophical positions. Hájek (2007) has argued that a number of philosophical positions are implicitly committed to Moorean assertions: for example, if one claims that there are no beliefs, or if one claims that there is no truth, or that there are truth-gluts (sentences are both true and false), or that there are truth-gaps (sentences lack truth-values), etc. In a sense, adopting any such position would offer an easy way out of the charge, but it would be a heavy price to pay, just as Hájek points out. As I will argue in the next section, there is no need to accept Moorean assertions. Once we understand how recording devices are used in communication we understand that recorded sentences like (5b) do not lead to Moorean paradoxes.
Kaplan calls (1) a logical truth.
One alleged benefit of treating (1) as a logical truth is that it provides an example of a sentence that is contingent a priori. The proposition expressed by (1) at any context of utterance is only contingently true. But, given that logical truths are known a priori, and that an a priori truth is known independently of any empirical import, allegedly one can know that (1) is true without having to know anything about the agent, location, time and world of the context. But notice that there is something that one must know: whether the agent is at the time and location of the context, which casts doubt that (1) is a priori. Assuming that there are contingent a priori sentences this is not lost if we allow improper contexts into semantics. This feature is captured by the fact that in Kaplanian semantics sentences are double evaluated: their character is evaluated at a context of utterance (this captures a priority), and the resulting content is evaluated at circumstances of evaluation (this captures their modal profile). But for strong skeptical arguments against the existence of contingent a priori sentences see Stojanovic (2009).
I should point out that the remote utterance view bears certain similarities with Predelli’s (2005). He also claims that any solution to the answering machine paradox must pay attention to the presemantic decisions that the theorist makes to regiment utterances in a formally tractable way - he calls them „preparatory operations” (2005, p52). But Predelli believes that remote utterances are impossible and denies that when it comes to recorded sentences only those sentence-context pairs that correspond to utterances are semantically relevant. Thus, he decides to complicate the semantic evaluation of sentences: sentences are to be evaluated at a context of interpretation which can be distinct than the context of utterance. As I have shown somewhere else (Briciu, 2018), Predelli’s view gives different predictions than the remote utterance view.
Although Ciecierski and Rudnicki believe that this is part of the semantic rule for “I” (its character), I believe that we need not necessarily go so far. One can claim that the semantic rule for “I” is just the general Kaplanian one (i.e. “I” when used in a context refers to the agent of the context), while this is a pre-semantic heuristic rule that the theorist uses to identify the agent of a context.
They make this more precise in the following way: “The referent of the use of ‘I’ is the object (person) responsible for the satisfaction of the felicity conditions of the speech act of which that use of ‘I’ is a part as being the speech act of the particular illocutionary type.” (Ciecierski and Rudnicki, 2023, p.1107).
How about “I am ecological” inscribed on an electric bus? I confess that I lack strong intuitions about the correct interpretation of this sentence in this context. According to one possible interpretation, favored by Ciecierski and Rudnicki (2023, p 1113), the sentence is about the bus: the bus, and not the person responsible for the inscription, is ecological. In which case, the inscription is decidedly odd: “I” refers to the bus, but buses lack agency and simply do not utter sentences. In this interpretation, “I” can be treated as involving deferred reference, where “I” is used demonstratively by an agent not to refer to herself, but rather to the bus. Alternatively, the inscription can be understood to be not about the bus, but about the agent responsible for the inscription. The agent, in virtue of running a low-emission bus is ecological. In this case, in “I am ecological” it is the predicate that undergoes meaning shift. “I” refers to the agent (whoever is responsible for the inscription) and the predicate has a transferred meaning. In virtue of running a bus that has the property of being ecological, the agent inherits a secondary property that can be rendered as having-a-low-ecological-footprint. Such an analysis would be along the lines of that proposed by Nunberg (1993, p 38–42). To see that both readings might be available, think about a bumper sticker with “I am ecological” put on a privately owned EV. Does it express the proposition that the car is ecological, or the proposition that the owner has a low ecological footprint, or both? But I should stress that the complications brought about this example have nothing to do with the fact that an inscription was used, as similar examples (of either deferred reference or meaning transfer) also appear in face-to-face conversations.
By oral counterparts I mean speech acts performed in face-to-face conversation. I take it that many speech acts (e.g. assertions, requests, orders, etc.) are what Kukla (forthcoming) calls medium-independent speech acts in that they can be performed orally, in writing, in sign language, over electronic media or via many other mechanisms.
By social and institutional felicity conditions I have in mind those identified by Austin’s remarks according to which in order for a speech act to be felicitous there must be an accepted (quasi) conventional procedure involving the utterance of certain expressions, a procedure which has certain conventional effects if it is executed in certain circumstances by people with the appropriate authority, and so on. By psychological conditions I refer to his observations that in order for a speech act to be felicitous the speaker must have the right thoughts and/or feelings. Austin argued that the two are qualitatively different and even used different typographic letters to distinguish them.
I use “materiality” and “affordances” as is more or less standard in social sciences. By the first I mean that the physical properties of an artifact have consequences for how the object is used and by the latter I mean the opportunities to action made possible by the physical properties of an artifact (see McDonnell, 2023, p. 201).
See Thomasson (2014) for this perspective on public artifacts.
One might wonder: why the clause that S doesn’t believe non-p at the time of the decoding? To account for the following situation. Imagine that I record (2) on my office voice-mail and preprogram the machine to play it when I’m not in my office according to my schedule. Suppose I change my schedule, come back to my office but decide to let the machine go and play (2). Did I lie to the caller? Intuitively, yes. In Austin’s terms, I have committed an abuse.
Someone might wonder what happens when one video records (5a) in front of a famous landmark and then sends her recording to other people. I take it that in this case she utters (5a) at the time and location of the recording and, in a sense, records her utterance to be remotely entertain by an absent audience. Semantically, (5a) is to be evaluated at a context that has the time and location of the recording as temporal and spatial parameters. Pragmatically, the speaker performs a speech act at the time and place of the recording. Her speech act is not performed via the recording device and it has the same felicity conditions as orally performed speech acts.
(6) is used in announcements in some train stations in United Kingdom. “I am not here now, so come back later” is another example whereby one performs a speech act (a request) with the help of a recording device.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at ECAP 11 in Vienna and at University of Turin and benefited from the discussion of attendees there, especially from Tadeusz Ciecierski, Fabrizio Calzavarini, Mathias Böhm, Max Kölbel, Daniel Skibra, Matteo Plebani, Alberto Voltolini, Alex Rădulescu, Agostino Pinna Pintor, and Dan Zeman. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers at Synthese for their insightful comments and suggestions.
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Briciu, A. Indexicals and communicative affordances. Synthese 203, 100 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04542-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04542-x