Kent Bach

The theory of speech acts is partly taxonomic and partly explanatory. It must systematically classify types of speech acts and the ways in which they can succeed or fail. It must reckon with the fact that the relationship between the words being used and the force of their utterance is often oblique. For example, the sentence 'This is a pig sty' might be used nonliterally to state that a certain room is messy and filthy and, further, to demand indirectly that it be straightened out and cleaned up. Even when this sentence is used literally and directly, say to describe a certain area of a barnyard, the content of its utterance is not fully determined by its linguistic meaning--in particular, the meaning of the word 'this' does not determine which area is being referred to. A major task for the theory of speech acts is to account for how speakers can succeed in what they do despite the various ways in which linguistic meaning underdetermines use.

All sorts of things are context-dependent in one way or another. What it is appropriate to wear, to give, or to reveal depends on the context. Whether or not it is all right to lie, harm, or even kill depends on the context. If you google the phrase ‘depends on the context’, you’ll get several hundred million results. This chapter aims to narrow that down. In this context the topic is context dependence in language and its use. It is commonly observed that the same sentence can be used to convey different things in different contexts. That is why people complain when something they say is ‘taken out of context’ and insist that it be ‘put into context’, because ‘context makes it clear’ what they meant. Indeed, it is practically a platitude that what a speaker means in uttering a certain sentence, as well as how her audience understands her, ‘depends on the context’. But just what does that amount to, and to what extent is it true?

This paper defends a purely semantic notionof what is said against various recent objections. Theobjections each cite some sort of linguistic,psychological, or epistemological fact that issupposed to show that on any viable notion of what aspeaker says in uttering a sentence, there ispragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on amodified version of Grice's notion, on which what issaid must be a projection of the syntax of the utteredsentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion isneeded to account for the linguistically determinedinput to the hearer's inference to what, if anything,the speaker intends to be conveying in uttering thesentence.

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is easier to apply than to explain. Explaining it is complicated by the fact that many conflicting formulations have been proposed over the past sixty years. This might suggest that there is no one way of drawing the distinction and that how to draw it is merely a terminological question, a matter of arbitrary stipulation. In my view, though, these diverse formulations, despite their conflicts, all shed light on the distinction as it is commonly applied, in both linguistics and philosophy. Although it is generally clear what is at issue when people apply the distinction to specific linguistic phenomena, what is less clear, in some cases anyway, is whether a given phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic, or both. Fortunately, there are other phenomena that are uncontroversially semantic or, as the case may be, uncontroversially pragmatic. Their example will help us get clear on what the semantics-pragmatics distinction is.

MARGA REIMER has forcefully challenged David Kaplan's recent claim ([3], pp. 582-4) that demonstrative gestures, in connnection with uses of demonstrative expressions, are without semantic significance and function merely as 'aids to communication', and that speaker intentions are what determine the demonstratum. Against this Reimer argues that demonstrations can and do play an essential semantic role and that the role of intentions is marginal at best. That is, together with the linguistic meaning of the demonstrative phrase being used, an act of demonstration determines what is said. I will argue that Kaplan's view is borne out if we consider the referential intentions specific to communication. Reimer may be correct about such intentions as she considers, but she overlooks specifically referential ones. When these are taken into account, we find that aalthough demonstrations contribute in a way to what is said, this does not make them semantically significant.

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word 'light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like 'light', 'note', 'bear' and 'over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as 'light suit' and 'The duchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase 'porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence 'The police shot the rioters with guns'. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like 'I left her behind for you' and 'He saw her duck'.

I enumerate the main disagreements between Devitt and me, and then elucidate the most fundamental one. It concerns what it takes to refer to something. Devitt takes a liberal view on this, according to which a speaker’s having a certain object in mind and intending to refer to it puts the hearer in a position to form singular thoughts about it. There is no requirement that the hearer have any independent access to the object. My view is more restrictive, not allowing “reference borrowing” of the sort that Devitt apparently thinks referential uses of definite descriptions involve. For me, if the speaker has a certain object in mind and intends to refer the hearer to it, and the hearer recognizes this intention, that merely enables him to form a general thought. It does not enable him to form a singular thought about it himself.

Nothing can be said about a nonexistent object, but something can be said about the act of (unsuccessfully) attempting to refer to one or, as in fiction, of pretending to refer to one. Unsuccessful reference, whether by expressions or by speakers, can be explained straightforwardly within the context of the theory of speech acts and communication. As for fiction, there is nothing special semantically, as to either meaning or reference, about its language. And fictional discourse is just a distinctive use of ordinary language: pretended communication and within it, pretended reference. However, discourse about fiction is not pretense but is normal communication, a kind of indirect discourse. To describe the world of a fiction is to state what the fiction says (or implies); and what seems to be reference to a fictional character is really attributing (usually implicitly) a feigned reference by the author.

In my commentary on Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s aptly titled book, Insensitive Semantics, I stake out a middle ground between their version of Semantic Minimalism and Contextualism. My kind of Semantic Minimalism does without the “minimal propositions” posited by C&L. It allows that some sentences do not express propositions, even relative to contexts. Instead, they are semantically incomplete. It is not a form of contextualism, since being semantically incomplete is not a way of being context-sensitive. In their reply to my commentary, C&L seem to miss this point. Exaggerating the force of their slippery slope argument, they continue to suppose that contextualism is the only alternative to their version of minimalism. They contend that I haven’t replied to their central criticism, but in fact they haven’t replied to mine.