Abstract
Semantic and pragmatic theories tend to deal with context-change in two radically opposing ways. Some view it as theoretically irrelevant, interpreting each sentence relative to the context as it happens to be at the moment of its utterance. Others view it as theoretically fundamental, proposing to view context-change as the very subject-matter of the theory of interpretation. Robert Stalnaker’s book Context steers a middle course between the extremes–to keep the semantics mostly static while letting the pragmatics go mostly dynamic. Within his framework, context-change matters because interpretation is sometimes prospective, relying not on the context as it is at the time of utterance but on the context as it is anticipated to be somewhat later. This paper critically examines how Stalnaker makes use of prospective interpretation in accounting for accommodation and in capturing the insights of expressivism.
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Notes
We may presuppose things we don’t believe and fail to presuppose things we do. Court proceedings provide an example of both. The participants often come to believe that the accused is guilty well before the verdict is reached. The presumption of innocence means that in such cases they are required to presuppose something they don’t believe and that they are required not to presuppose something they do believe.
It follows from the definition of common ground that a proposition ceases to be common ground as soon as any one of the conversational participants stops accepting it. Adding p to the common ground is harder. Given Stalnaker’s assumptions about the logic of acceptance, the following holds: if everyone other than a particular participant a presupposes p and a accepts that this is so then p becomes common ground as soon as a also accepts it.
(1) is true according to the constitution of Brunei since its 2006 amendment.
This assumption is independent of the syntax and the semantics of English—it arguably follows from the fact that we are inclined to interpret what we can as soon as we can. Not all dynamic pragmatic principles are like this: to capture the behavior of definite descriptions within conditionals Stalnaker (1973) also posits that antecedents of conditionals are interpreted before their consequents—even if on the surface they happen to follow them.
The ‘Hey, wait a minute’ test for presupposition was introduced in von Fintel (2004).
Lewis (1979: 240).
Stalnaker (1974: 474).
Stalnaker (1978: 86).
Note that none of this implies that I am pretending that I believe that Brunei is a sultanate. If I don’t complain, I have tacitly accepted for the purposes of the conversation that Brunei is a sultanate but this does not count as “acting as if I believed” that this is so.
Stalnaker (2014: 46).
Stalnaker (2014: 6). In Context, the section discussing assertion follows the one discussing accommodation, and starts with the following sentence: “So far we have made no assumptions about a conventional language, with constitutive rules and rule-governed moves that change the context in the way that Austinian illocutionary acts alter an institutionally defined status.” Stalnaker (2014: 50).
Grice (1975: 28).
Stalnaker (2008: 542).
There are good reasons to deny that definite descriptions are referring expressions. We might want to explain why someone who utters ‘A Sultan of Brunei is richer than most people on Forbes’s list’ would normally presuppose that Brunei has more than one sultan, and we might think that the most promising way to do so would be by means of scalar implicature. The speaker used the indefinite article instead of its scalar alternative, the definite article, and the best explanation for this is that he does not accept the sentence with the definite article as true. But we have strong independent evidence that scalar alternatives must be semantically alike, and since we don’t want to say that indefinite descriptions are referring expressions, we should not say this about definite descriptions either. For this sort of account see Heim (1991), Horn (2007), Horn and Abbot (2012).
Lewis (1975: 24).
The original semantics of Stalnaker (1975) says that ‘if φ, ψ’ is true at w just in case ψ is true at f (φ, w), where f is a contextually given selection-function. The pragmatics adds the constraint that f should be admissible, i.e. it should not assign to worlds within the context set worlds outside the context set. The new semantics supervaluates over all admissible selection functions: ‘if φ, ψ’ is true at w if for all admissible f, ψ is true at f (φ, w), it is false at w if for all admissible f, ψ is false at f (φ, w), and otherwise it is without a truth-value.
There is, in fact, a difference. Asserting a conditional on vacuous supposition is infelicitous by Grice’s Maxim of Manner: adding a vacuous antecedent is pointlessly prolix. But I don’t think this difference should matter: it does not seem plausible that the very status of the speech act we perform by uttering a conditional should depend whether the speech act violates the Maxim of Manner.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Mike Deigan, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Kate Stanton, and Jason Stanley for their comments. Special thanks to the participants of the UConn workshop on Context for discussion. Extra special thanks to Bob Stalnaker for his response to an earlier draft at the same workshop.
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Szabó, Z.G. Prospective interpretation. Philos Stud 174, 1605–1616 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0780-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0780-6