Friday, September 28, 2007
Language in Context: Stanley's motivations
I've been reading the introduction to Jason Stanley's Language in Context, which I got my hands on this week, and it gives a nicer summary of the considerations motivating his project than I think we've had previously. I'm going to be reading the essays over the next while, and I thought I'd try to blog along the way. Here I'm going to be unambitious, and simply try to get straight on the motivations for the project Jason tries to carry out over the course of the papers.
The main thesis seems to be that semantics serves up the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances in a systematic way, even given the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. There seem to be two main kinds of considerations pushing Jason towards this view:
a. Only then can we avail ourselves as semanticists of the resources afforded by speakers' judgments concerning the intuitive truth-conditions of various utterances
b. Only then can we account for our ability to effortlessly acquire information about the world from hearing utterances of novel sentences (even when those sentences are context-sensitive)
In this introduction, Jason seems to focus on three principle kinds of opponent to his project. Firstly, there are those who think that successful communication doesn't require that one grasp the same proposition as was expressed by another's utterance, but only one sufficiently similar (Jason attributes this thesis to Heck and Bezuidenhout). From his perspective, Jason just thinks this rests on an unsupported pessimism - part of his project is precisely to explain why grasping the proposition another's utterance expressed isn't nearly as demanding as people have supposed.
The second kind of opponent, represented by the authors of Insensitive Semantics, agrees with Jason that semantics should offer up something truth-conditional, but thinks that asking for the intuitive truth-conditions is demanding too much. Instead the semanticist can only offer the minimal proposition - an 'informationally impoverished monstrosity' as Jason describes it (12) - and has to leave all of the real work - explaining how we so effortlessly gain information about the world from each other's utterancs, which presumably involves entertaining something other than the minimal proposition - to pragmatics. And, as Cappelen and Lepore very explicitly stress, if my memory serves me correctly, this view cannot avail itself of the resources afforded by speaker-judgments about the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances. As far as Jason is concerned, that's like trying to do syntax whilst ignoring native speakers' judgments of grammaticality and ungrammaticality; it's tying both your arms behind your back before the big fight.
Lastly, we have those who think that semantics can only serve up things which fall short of determining truth-conditions - again, the real work is done at the level of pragmatics. Jason thinks that this just renders the whole process of interpreting an utterance of a sentence in a language one understands altogether too unconstrained and mysterious. We might be pushed to such a view should it prove that no project like Jason's can be successful, but it's not a fruitful starting point for understanding communication.
Does this seem like a reasonable summary of the kinds of pressures Jason takes himself to be responding to?
The main thesis seems to be that semantics serves up the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances in a systematic way, even given the ubiquity of context-sensitivity in natural language. There seem to be two main kinds of considerations pushing Jason towards this view:
a. Only then can we avail ourselves as semanticists of the resources afforded by speakers' judgments concerning the intuitive truth-conditions of various utterances
b. Only then can we account for our ability to effortlessly acquire information about the world from hearing utterances of novel sentences (even when those sentences are context-sensitive)
In this introduction, Jason seems to focus on three principle kinds of opponent to his project. Firstly, there are those who think that successful communication doesn't require that one grasp the same proposition as was expressed by another's utterance, but only one sufficiently similar (Jason attributes this thesis to Heck and Bezuidenhout). From his perspective, Jason just thinks this rests on an unsupported pessimism - part of his project is precisely to explain why grasping the proposition another's utterance expressed isn't nearly as demanding as people have supposed.
The second kind of opponent, represented by the authors of Insensitive Semantics, agrees with Jason that semantics should offer up something truth-conditional, but thinks that asking for the intuitive truth-conditions is demanding too much. Instead the semanticist can only offer the minimal proposition - an 'informationally impoverished monstrosity' as Jason describes it (12) - and has to leave all of the real work - explaining how we so effortlessly gain information about the world from each other's utterancs, which presumably involves entertaining something other than the minimal proposition - to pragmatics. And, as Cappelen and Lepore very explicitly stress, if my memory serves me correctly, this view cannot avail itself of the resources afforded by speaker-judgments about the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances. As far as Jason is concerned, that's like trying to do syntax whilst ignoring native speakers' judgments of grammaticality and ungrammaticality; it's tying both your arms behind your back before the big fight.
Lastly, we have those who think that semantics can only serve up things which fall short of determining truth-conditions - again, the real work is done at the level of pragmatics. Jason thinks that this just renders the whole process of interpreting an utterance of a sentence in a language one understands altogether too unconstrained and mysterious. We might be pushed to such a view should it prove that no project like Jason's can be successful, but it's not a fruitful starting point for understanding communication.
Does this seem like a reasonable summary of the kinds of pressures Jason takes himself to be responding to?
Labels: Context Dependence, Jason Stanley, Language in Context, Philosophy of Language, Relevance Theory
