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Wittgenstein and Situation Comedy

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Abstract

Wittgenstein discusses speakers exploiting context to inject meaning into the sentences that they use. One facet of situation comedy is context-injected ambiguity, where scriptwriters artfully construct situations such that, because of conflicting contextual clues, a character, though uttering a sentence that contains neither ambiguous words nor amphibolous contruction may plausibly be interpreted in at least two distinct ways. This highlights an important distinction between the (concise) sentence that a speaker uses and what the speaker means, the disclosure of which may require considerable spelling out. Understanding this phenomenon of nonindexical contextualism is the key to solving, inter alia, problems where, puzzlingly, exchanging a singular term in a statement with a co-referential one fails to preserve truth-value. This is a rare case where there is a huge debate in the recent literature that is decisively settled by Wittgenstein’s approach.

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Notes

  1. For further discussion and examples, see Goldstein (2002).

  2. There are connections that the reader may wish to explore between the injectionism advocated here and other less plausible forms of externalism.

  3. Consideration of indexicals inclines Recanati to the view that lekta are context-dependent, so different indexical utterances of the same type can express different lekta. And the lekton expressed in the utterance ‘It is raining’ differs from the one expressed in the utterance ‘It is raining here’ (Recanati 2007: 48, 116). Our intertranslatability criterion is, of course, consistent with this characterization.

  4. Aristotle, at Metaphysics 1006a13-15 uses the same figure to insult anyone who does not embrace the Law of Non-Contradiction.

  5. This is William Hague, ex-Leader of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom, disparaging the chances of the small third main party, the Liberal Democrats.

  6. It is doubtful that sentences used in normal conversation can generally be ‘eternalized’—a point pressed by David Cockburn in discussion.

  7. This distinction between the physical and the conversational vicinity is what is needed to explain the referent of the demonstrative ‘that’ in Chris Gauker’s example (2008: 363), where what is being spoken about is not the physically nearest ladder but a ladder in a neighbouring house that two of the conversants know to be broken (and know that the other knows it).

  8. Here I disagree with Gauker (2008: 367) who denies that the speaker’s intention determines the context for an utterance. He claims ‘that the determinants of the content of a context pertinent to the interpretation of an utterance must be accessible to the speaker’s audience’. In our example of the traffic accidents, one audience (the victim) assigns a different content to the policeman’s utterance than does another audience (an onlooker who overhears the conversation). I say that the onlooker grasps the correct content through correctly identifying the intentions of the policeman (not, of course, by peering into the policeman’s mind but by attending to the same contextual features as the ones that the policeman relies on when framing his utterance). For a different kind of response to Gauker, see Åkerman (2009).

  9. This seems so obvious as to be hardly worth stating, yet, for any truth however obvious, there will always be some philosopher who denies it. Jason Stanley (2000) has done so, arguing that it is impossible to perform a genuine speech act with a sub-sentential expression. For a careful refutation of Stanley’s position, see Elugardo and Stainton (2004).

  10. Our concern is therefore with what ordinary speakers mean, not with ‘perfect’ speakers. Compare Anthony Grayling’s ‘perfect speaker theory’ (1995); also Blutner (2006).

  11. Another way of putting this would be: meaning does not transcend use.

  12. In the actual script, Will says ‘I couldn’t do it because I was thinking of you, Grace’. Arguably this is a case of single-word ambiguity, with ‘thinking’ connoting ratiocination contrasted with its connoting imagining, fantasizing.

  13. Note also the compression here achieved by ‘’s’ (apostrophe-s). The statue is not owned by Michaelangelo, but was created by him. And ‘have the body’ is a compression of ‘bears a striking resemblance to the body’—compare the joke cited earlier about Binny having Grace Kelly’s nose.

  14. Merchant (2001) is a particularly sophisticated example.

  15. Crispin Wright put this point to me in conversation.

  16. Review in South China Morning Post, June 23, 2004.

  17. This case also creates problems for theorists such as Bach (2002) and Braun and Saul (2002) who think that our semantic intuitions are unreliable, so that we need some coaching if we are to assign truth-values correctly.

  18. This is an area of huge current controversy. See Pelletier (2003), Dever (2006); and on Fodor vs. Wittgenstein, Piatelli-Palmarini (2004). For an authoritative overview, see Szabó (2007).

  19. Answer this question and you have fallen prey to the fallacy of the simple question (Goldstein 1993).

  20. This type of example was first introduced into the literature by Jenny Saul. See, for example, her (1993, 1997, 2007).

  21. For a sensitive discussion of Wittgenstein’s position, see Williams (2006: 232–3), and, for an explicit link to the substitutivity puzzle, pp. 246–9.

  22. In PI, this example occurs in an additional remark situated between §139 and §140. It is not quite clear what point Wittgenstein is trying to make with it. He says that a Mars dweller (Marsbewohner) would perhaps describe the picture as being of an old man sliding backwards downhill. The form of life on a planet with a gravitational pull six times greater than that on Earth might not include climbing steep mountains as a popular pastime (especially among the aged) but might involve activities such as backwards skiing. (The Anscombe translation of ‘Marsbewohner’ as ‘Martian’ makes us think of little green men, which was not, I believe, Wittgenstein’s intention.)

  23. I am grateful to members of the Leverhulme Network on Context and Communication for useful discussion at the Canterbury workshop, September 2008.

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Goldstein, L. Wittgenstein and Situation Comedy. Philosophia 37, 605–627 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9192-6

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