Kent Bach

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'.

From ethics to epistemology to metaphysics, it is common for philosophers to appeal to “intuitions” about cases to identify counterexamples to one view and to find support for another. It would be interesting to examine the evidential status of such intuitions, snap judgments, gut reactions, or whatever you want to call them, but in this paper I will not be talking about moral, epistemological, or metaphysical intuitions. I’ll be focusing on semantic ones. In fact, I’ll be focusing on semantic intuitions about sentences, not individual words (although the contributions of individual words may ultimately be at issue in some of these cases), and on closely related intuitions about what is said in utterances of those sentences. Such intuitions play an important role in philosophy of language..

I’ve known about conversational implicature a lot longer than I’ve known Larry. In 1967 I read Grice’s “Logical and Conversation” in mimeograph, shortly after his William James lectures, and I read its precursor “(Implication),” section III of “The Causal Theory of Perception”, well before that. And I’ve thought, read, and written about implicature off and on ever since. Nevertheless, I know a lot less about it than Larry does, and that’s not even taking into account everything he has uncovered about what was said on the subject long before Grice, even centuries before. So, now that I’ve betrayed my ignorance, I’ll display my insolence. I’m going to identify the most pervasive and pernicious misconceptions about implicature that I’ve noticed over the years.

Language is used to express thoughts and to represent aspects of the world. What thought a sentence expresses depends on what the sentence means, and how it represents the world also depends on what it means. Moreover, it is ultimately arbitrary, a matter of convention, that the words of a language mean what they do. So it might seem that what they mean is a matter of how they are used. However, they need not be used in accordance with their literal meanings. One can speak nonliterally, and convey something other than what the sentence means ('The look on his face spoke volumes'), or speak indirectly, and convey something more than what the sentence means ('I wonder if you know the time'). Linguistic communication requires knowledge of linguistic meaning, on the part of both the speaker and his audience, but it requires extralinguistic knowledge as well.

Minimalism about truth-aptitude, if correct, would undercut expressivism about moral discourse. Indeed, it would undercut nonfactualism about any area of discourse. But it cannot be correct, for there are areas, about which people hold beliefs and make statements, to which nonfactualism uncontroversially applies. Or so I will argue. I will be thereby challenging John Divers and Alexander Miller’s [3] appeal to minimalism about truth-aptitude in defending a certain argument against expressivism about value. But I will not be defending expressivism. For what is wrong with minimalism about truth-aptitude is, in my view, also what is wrong with expressivism: both mistakenly assume that for an utterance to qualify as a statement or a psychological state as a belief, it must be capable of being true or false.

Puzzles about sentences containing expressions of certain sorts, such as predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and ‘know’, have spawned families of views that go by the names of Contextualism and Relativism. In the case of predicates of personal taste, which I will be focusing on, contextualist views say that the contents of sentences like “Uni is delicious” and “The Aristocrats is hilarious” vary somehow with the context of utterance. Such a sentence semantically expresses different propositions in different contexts, depending on what standard or perspective (or whose standard or perspective) is implicitly adverted to. According to relativist views, the propositional content of such a sentence is fixed, but what it takes for that proposition to be true varies somehow with the context, depending on the relevant standard or perspective. I will argue that such views are neither well supported by the data nor well motivated by the puzzles themselves. Even so, there is an element of truth in each. I will sketch an alternative view, dubbed Radical Invariantism, according to which the appearance of context sensitivity is illusory. Rather than impute either kind of context sensitivity to these sentences or to their contents, Radical Invariantism says that these sentences are distinguished by what they don’t do. Because they are not explicitly relativized, they leave a certain semantic slack. They fall short of fully expressing a proposition, instead expressing merely a “propositional radical.” We can explain away the appearance of semantic context sensitivity pragmatically, by taking into account facts about how, and under what conditions, speakers who use or encounter these sentences manage to pick up the slack. This can occur in either of two ways. Speakers either take a certain standard or perspective as understood, or else they treat the sentence as if it expresses a standard- or perspective-independent proposition even though it does not..

Once upon a time it was assumed that speaking literally and directly is the norm and that speaking nonliterally or indirectly is the exception. The assumption was that normally what a speaker means can be read off of the meaning of the sentence he utters, and that departures from this, if not uncommon, are at least easily distinguished from normal utterances and explainable along Gricean lines. The departures were thought to be limited to obvious cases like figurative speech and conversational implicature. However, people have come to appreciate that the meaning of a typical sentence, at least one we are at all likely to use, is impoverished, at least relative to what we are likely to mean in uttering it. In other words, what a speaker normally means in uttering a sentence, even without speaking figuratively or obliquely, is an enriched version of what could be predicted from the meaning of the sentence alone. This can be because the sentence expresses a “minimal” (or “skeletal”) proposition or even because it fails to express a complete proposition at all.1 Indeed, it is now a platitude that linguistic meaning generally underdetermines speaker meaning. That is, generally what a speaker means in uttering a sentence, even if the sentence is devoid of ambiguity, vagueness, or indexicality, goes beyond what the sentence means. The question is what to make of this Contextualist Platitude, as I’ll call it. It may be a truism, but does it require a radical revision of the older conception of the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers mean in uttering them? Does it lead to a major modification, or perhaps even outright rejection, of the semantic-pragmatic distinction? I think..

In Reference and Reflexivity, John Perry tries to reconcile referentialism with a Fregean concern for cognitive significance. His trick is to supplement referential content with what he calls ‘‘reflexive’’ content. Actually, there are several levels of reflexive content, all to be distinguished from the ‘‘official,’’ referential content of an utterance. Perry is convinced by two arguments for referentialism, the ‘‘counterfactual truth-conditions’’ and the ‘‘same-saying’’ arguments, but he also acknowledges the force of two Fregean arguments against it, arguments that pose the ‘‘coreference’’ and the ‘‘no-reference’’ problems. He sees these as genuine problems for referentialism and does not share Howard Wettstein’s (1986) view that semantics has ‘‘rested on a mistake,’’ the mistake of thinking that semantics is obliged to come to grips with ‘‘cognitive significance’’ and, in particular, to explain the fact that coreferring terms can differ in cognitive significance and that terms lacking in reference can still have cognitive significance. Perry points out that ‘‘there is nothing in [the arguments for referentialism] to show that the official content, rather than the reflexive content, is the key to understanding the cognitive motivation and impact of utterances’’ (Perry 2001, 193).1 In other words, ‘‘a theory of direct reference provides no argument for ignoring reflexive content, and, properly understood, has no motivation for searching for such an argument.’’ Thus Perry uses the notion of reflexive content to complement referentialism with a theory of cognitive significance. Frege drew a fundamental distinction between the reference of a term and the means by which its reference is determined. In his view, however, it is not the references themselves but the means by which they are determined that enter into propositions (‘‘Thoughts’’) expressed by sentences in which the terms occur. So we might call Frege an ‘indirect reference’ theorist. Echoing the introduction to Kaplan’s ‘‘Afterthoughts’’ (1989a), Perry stresses that ‘direct’, as it occurs in ‘direct reference’, does not imply that ‘‘the mechanism of reference is unmediated by the relation of fitting identifying conditions’’ (188).

Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention our perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to what both contextualists and relativists take for granted. Although they rightly reject propositional invariantism, the implausible view that a bare EP sentence expresses the same classical (absolutely true or absolutely false) proposition in any context, they maintain that a change in perspective shifts either the sentence’s propositional content (to a proposition involving a different perspective) or its truth-value (the same perspectivally neutral proposition now evaluated from a different perspective). I deny that the semantic contents of bare EP sentences shift at all. But I also deny that these contents have truth-values. Rather, according to the radical invariantism I defend, these contents are not full-fledged propositions but merely propositional radicals. Only explicitly relativized EP sentences manage fully to express propositions, and these perspective-involving propositions are the only EP propositions there are. Nevertheless, bare EP sentences are perfectly capable of being used to assert EP propositions, because utterances of them implicitly allude to the relevant perspective. Various problem cases challenge radical invariantism to explain pragmatically which perspective is read into the utterance of a given bare EP sentence. Unlike contextualism and relativism, it can do this without having to resort to any semantic bells and whistles..

No contemporary philosopher has tried harder to demystify the mind than Fred Dretske. But how to demystify it without eviscerating it? Can consciousness be explained? Many philosophers think that no matter how detailed and systematic our knowledge becomes of how the brain works and how it subserves mental functions, there will always remain an "explanatory gap." Call it a brute fact or call it a mystery, trying to explain consciousness, they think, is as futile as trying to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Dretske is not exercised by the explanatory gap-he'd rather exorcise it. He thinks we can get all the explanation we need by understanding what consciousness does. Consciousness is at bottom sensory experience and what it does, essentially, is to represent the world. Explaining consciousness, therefore, comes down to understanding the representational character of experience.

The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible approach to the semantics of belief reports. But this approach must confront a puzzle of its own: it turns out that every case is a Paderewski case, at least potentially

I defend russell's main views on names and descriptions against recent objections. Ordinary names are not logically proper names (or rigid designators) but really are disguised descriptions (of the form "the bearer of "n""). And russell's theory of descriptions really works. The common objections to russell all suffer from a confusion of use with meaning. However, Russell was wrong to think that there are or need to be any logically proper names (at least for particulars). That is because, So I argue, There are no singular propositions

This article makes a number of points about reference, both speaker reference and linguistic reference. The bottom line is simple: reference ain't easy — at least not nearly as easy as commonly supposed. Much of what speakers do that passes for reference is really something else, and much of what passes for linguistic reference is really nothing more than speaker reference. Referring is one of the basic things we do with words, and it would be a good idea to understand what that involves and requires before worrying about the linguistic means by which this is done.