Coglunch - December 1, 2005

"Utterances, Intentions, and What is Said"
John Perry
Stanford University
We can distinguish (at least) three ways that the speaker's intentions can be relevant to the interpretation of an utterance:

Pre-semantic: the speaker's intentions determine, or have an important role in determining, which language she speaks, which words (among homonyms, say) she uses, which complex expressions she uses, and which of the meanings she exploits. All of this might be labelled "pre-semantic".

Semantic: Even with the words, meanings, and syntax fixed, and with the objective facts of contexts fixed, speaker's intentions might still be thought to be relevant in determining what is said. Eg, in the sentences listed below, 1) it seems which thing the speaker refers to with "that" is up to his "directing intentions" (Kaplan's phrase); in 2) which of the people named "David" the speaker refers to seems to be determined by her intentions; in 3) what counts as red (enclosed in red covers? red through and through? red print?) seems to be determined by the speaker's intentions; in 4) the speaker probably has a restricted domain for "everyone" in mind; and in 5) there seems to be an unarticulated constituent, where the rain is taking place, that is up to the speaker.

  1. That is a picture of Carnap
  2. David is a computer scientist
  3. Get me the red book
  4. Everyone should attend the funeral
  5. It is raining
Post-semantic: Given what the speaker says, there is still the matter of what Gricean implicatures she intended to convey, and which illocutioary acts she was performing.

The pre-semantic and post-semantic roles of speaker's intentions are relatively uncontroversial, but there are a spectrum of positions about the role of intentions in determining "what is said" or "the proposition expressed" or "what is strictly and literally said" or "the explicatures" or "the implicitures (as opposed to implicatures). In his book LITERAL MEANING Recanati plots them from the literalist, who allows no role, to the contextualist, who finds them everywhere. Cappelin and Lepore (in INSENSITIVE SEMANTICS) are over to the literalist or minmalist side, where Recanati himself, and relevance theorists, are well over on the contextualist side.

I'll discuss as many of the 5 sentences above as I have time for, seeing if by stringing together enough true remarks about how utterances work we can arrive at the truth of these heavily contested and emotion-laden theoretical issues.


Last modified: Fri Feb 10 11:17:44 PST 2006 by emma@csli.stanford.edu