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Review of Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language
Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006) 1360–1365 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Review of Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press, 2005, viii + 198 pp. Stefano Predelli has written a defense of a certain sort of traditional approach to semantics. What he thinks he has to defend it from are challenges based on the pervasive context-relativity of interpretation. Predelli succeeds in describing a framework in which we can sensibly discuss the issue, and he very effectively shows that contextualists cannot rely on just the easy points that they have sometimes tried to get by on. But I think the concessions he makes to contextualism are somewhat larger than he imagines (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and there are contextualist arguments against him of a sort he does not consider at all. In essence, Predelli’s ‘‘traditional approach’’ is that of David Kaplan in his famous paper, ‘‘Demonstratives’’ (widely circulated for many years prior to its publication in 1989). An interpretive system, as Predelli defines it, is a function from what he calls clause-index pairs to what he call t-distributions. A clause is a representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. An index collects together the values of a number of parameters, such as time, place and possible world. A t-distribution is a function from what Predelli calls points of evaluation to truth-values (more on points of evaluation below). Readers who already feel at sea in what I have said will not get much help from Predelli. A good understanding of Kaplan’s paper, including the technical parts, is a prerequisite to understanding this book. In terms of this framework, one can explain very clearly the relation between the semantic value of a sentence and the semantic value of an utterance of that sentence. A sentence is never true or false simpliciter but only relative to its representation as a clause, to an index and to a point of evaluation. For each utterance of a sentence, there will be a clause-index pair that is appropriate to the utterance (p. 23). The appropriate clause will be a representation of the grammatical structure of the sentence uttered, and the appropriate index will specify the appropriate interpretation of words such as ‘‘I’’, ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘actually’’. In addition, for each utterance there will be a relevant point of evaluation (pp. 143–146). Thus we can say that an utterance is true if and only if the t-distribution assigned to the clause-index pair appropriate to the utterance assigns truth to the point of evaluation relevant to the utterance. Of the topics Predelli takes up, probably the one that will most interest most readers is adjectival modification (chapter 4). In an example from Charles Travis, we have to deal with some russet leaves that have been painted green. The sentence ‘‘The leaves are green’’ is used to make an utterance u, spoken to a photographer. That same sentence is also used to make an utterance v, spoken to a botanist. Utterance u is presumably true, while utterance v is presumably false. The index appropriate to the one utterance will not be the same as the index appropriate to the other, but since the sentence does not contain any of those terms the interpretation of which is 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.03.001
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determined by the index, the same t-distribution may be assigned to the two clause-index pairs that are appropriate to them. (Predelli himself does not mention the index in this context.) Tradition defines points of evaluation as possible worlds, or possible-worlds-cum-times. But we can suppose that u and v belong to the same world and take place at the same time. So if we follow tradition, the single t-distribution assigned to the clause-index pairs appropriate to the two utterances will determine the same truth value for each of them, contrary to intuition. Predelli’s solution is to buck tradition and deny that points of evaluation are possible worlds (or possible worlds and times). A word he frequently uses to describe them is ‘‘scenarios.’’ The two utterances may have different truth values, even if a single t-distribution is assigned to the clause-index pairs that are appropriate to them, because those two utterances occur in different scenarios and that single t-distribution may assign different truth values to those two scenarios. This maneuver might work, but we need to know more about the nature of scenarios, and unfortunately Predelli does not tell us much about them. In part they are to be distinguished by the purposes that the interlocutors have in speaking (p. 145), but that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Are they complete? That is, for every n-ary atomic predicate, and every n-tuple consisting of objects in the world, may we assume that that n-tuple is either in the extension of the predicate or in its antiextension? Or might there be gaps? If we think of scenarios as encompassing only limited regions of the world, then presumably there will be gaps. There may be an object that is in the world but not in a given scenario and which therefore belongs to neither the extension of ‘‘green’’ nor the antiextension of ‘‘green’’ (i.e., the extension of ‘‘not green’’) relative to that scenario. Even without a fuller account of scenarios and of how a scenario determines an extension for a predicate, Predelli’s proposal looks like a good idea and does some real work. The good thing about it is that it shows us how we can have a compositional semantics and a precise definition of logical validity for natural languages while allowing that the truth value of an utterance depends on the local circumstances in which it occurs. We can say that an argument (conceived as a sequence of sentences) is logically valid (relative to an interpretive system) if and only if for every index i and every point of evaluation p, if the premises are all true at i in p, then the conclusion is true at i in p as well. Predelli’s own definition (on pp. 84–85) does not include the quantification over points of evaluation, because he assumes that indexes include a specification of possible world and time, but this would seem to be the definition we should give after we have taken scenarios rather than possible worlds as our points of evaluation. (Predelli’s definition, like the one I have just stated, does not quantify over interpretative systems. I cannot tell whether that is just a simplification or whether Predelli thinks the definition does not need to quantify over interpretive systems.) However, while Predelli advertises himself as conservative, in fact his proposal amounts to a radical departure from traditional ways of thinking. What Predelli calls a ‘‘t-distribution’’ is what others have called a ‘‘proposition’’. Contemporary semantics often models the traditional concept of a proposition as a set of possible worlds or (what comes to the same thing) as a function from possible worlds into the values true and false. For such functions, Predelli substitutes functions from scenarios into truth values (perhaps including the value neither, although he does not say that). When propositions are modeled as functions from possible worlds into truth values, it makes a certain amount of sense to think of propositions as things that are passed from speaker to hearer when communication is successful. But if propositions are defined in Predelli’s way, that no longer makes sense. We cannot say that propositions defined in Predelli’s way are passed from speaker to hearer when communication is successful, because two people may express the same proposition though what one says is true and what the other says is
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false (because different scenarios are relevant to their utterances). So, Predelli deprives us of traditional ideas about communication (which for many reasons we might wish to be done with) without replacing them with anything else. Moreover, as I pointed out, we have to consider that functions from Predelli’s points of evaluation to truth values may be partial. That is, we may have to allow that at some points of evaluation a predicate may have extensions and antiextensions that do not exhaust the universe of the system. This may have a bearing on logic. For example, we might have to allow that the law of excluded middle is not logically valid. If ‘‘a’’ is the name of a certain leaf that is not part of a certain scenario, then ‘‘Either a is green or a is not green’’ may be neither true nor false in that scenario. Also, it is not entirely clear that Predelli’s proposal does answer the contextualists’ objections to compositional semantics. The concepts in terms of which we define logical validity have to mean something in the context of a larger theory of linguistic communication. Commonly compositional semantics has been thought to tell us something about how sentences are understood. The notion has been that in some sense the mind computes the semantic value of a compound expression on the basis of a prior grasp of the semantic values of the components. Precisely this has come under attack from the contextualists (such as Recanati, 2004, and Carston, 2002). One of their themes has been that we cannot use what we know about the context to interpret the components until after we see the compound expression of which they are components. For example, we cannot compute the meaning of ‘‘fast’’ until we know whether it will be used to form the phrase ‘‘fast car’’ or ‘‘fast snow’’. We cannot compute the reference of ‘‘The ham sandwich’’ until we know whether it will to be used to make the sentence ‘‘The ham sandwich was delicious’’ or ‘‘The ham sandwich wants his check’’. Predelli makes no attempt to show that his substitution of scenarios for possible worlds provides some defense of compositional semantics against this kind of criticism or to answer the objection in any other way. Predelli devotes two chapters (out of only five total) to typical indexicals such as ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘now’’. One of the issues he discusses is the fact that, contrary to what is commonly supposed, it is just not true that ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘here’’ always refer to the time and place of utterance, respectively. If written on a note, ‘‘now’’ can refer to the time at which someone reads it. On a map, ‘‘here’’ can refer not to a place on the map but to a place on the earth that a point on the map represents. Predelli’s answer to this is that while for every utterance there is still an appropriate index and it still provides an interpretation to words like ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘here’’, the appropriate index cannot always be identified just by applying some simple-minded rule that takes the time of the index to be the time of utterance and the place of the index to be the place of utterance. That answer seems very sensible in comparison with some others he reviews, but it does leave us with the question: How in general are the values of the index to be identified? In particular, are the speaker’s intentions in any way a relevant factor? Predelli acknowledges the issue (p. 24), but he doesn’t want to get into it. This is another place at which I think Predelli perhaps does not see how radical what he is saying is. In Kaplan’s terminology, the character of an expression is supposed to be a function from indices to contents. (As we have already seen, in Predelli’s framework contents are functions from points of evaluation to truth values.) Apparently, Predelli thinks this is still a useful notion, because the term ‘‘character’’ keeps cropping up throughout his book. But now it turns out that an index is just an assignment of objects to indexicals and demonstratives, and there are no formal limits on the combinations of assignments that an index may provide (even if in real life certain references are hard to come by). For example, there is no requirement that the
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assignment to ‘‘I’’ be at the location assigned to ‘‘here’’ at the time assigned to ‘‘now’’. Consequently, as Predelli himself emphasizes (p. 103), there will no longer be any special kind of logical validity that depends on the restriction of indexes to those that obey such limits. What he does not say is that this eliminates most of the rationale for countenancing characters at all. Character no longer tells us anything about the use of an indexical and no longer provides any guidance to correctness in translation. The character of ‘‘I beat you’’ remains distinct from the character of ‘‘You beat me’’, but only in the way that the character of ‘‘This1 beat this2’’ would be distinct from the character of ‘‘This2 beat this1’’. Given that propositions are no longer functions from worlds (or worlds-cum-times) into truth values, there is nothing evidently to be gained in separating character and content as distinct aspects of meaning. We might as well combine Predelli’s indices with Predelli’s points of evaluation, call the result contexts, and countenance just one kind of meaning, namely, functions from contexts into truth values. One of the problems that Kaplan had to deal with, but did not deal with very effectively (see Braun, 1996), was that a sentence may contain multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative (e.g., ‘‘that’’), referring to different objects. Predelli notices the problem (p. 34), but he offers no solution. This seems to be the source of the strangest claim Predelli makes in the whole book. Predelli makes the claim that some sentences are logically true, although some of their utterances are false, which will strike most of us as outlandish. As an example, he gives us: (1)
If Giorgione was so-called because of his size, and if Giorgione is Barbarelli, then Barbarelli was so-called because his size (p. 106).
As Predelli observes, ‘‘so-called’’ in this sentence is a demonstrative. It means ‘‘called that’’. Since Predelli countenances only one demonstratum per demonstrative in an index (p. 20), he assumes that for every index, both occurrences of the expression ‘‘so-called’’ in (1) have to have the same reference. Consequently, (1) is a logical truth. But for any utterance of (1), says Predelli, the index appropriate to the utterance of the antecedent will make the antecedent true, and the index appropriate to the consequent will make the consequent false. So the utterance as a whole is false. Predelli does not provide any excuse for evaluating an utterance of a single sentence by means of two indices, but in any case it seems fairly clear that we have to allow indices that provide different values for the two different occurrences of ‘‘so-called’’, so that (1) does not qualify as logically true. In this same context, Predelli uncovers a harder logical puzzle (p. 111 ff.). Consider the inference from (2) to (3): (2)
This table is 120 cm long.
(3)
This table is more than 119.999 cm long.
Imagine that we utter (2) in a context in which very precise measurements do not matter. So it’s true. Does (3) logically follow? Well, by arithmetic, since 120 is greater than 119.999, if the table is 120 cm long, then it has to be more than 119.999 cm long. So apparently it follows. But when we accepted (2) we were speaking in a context where precision to the thousandths place did not matter. So (2) would be true even if the table were 119.998 cm long. So (3) might be false even if (2) is true. So (3) does not follow from (2). In defense of the validity of this argument, Predelli points out that it would be wrong to judge the argument invalid on the grounds that (2) is true relative to an index permitting imprecise measurements while (3) is false relative to an index that permits precise measurements, because to show that an argument is invalid we have to show that there is a single index at which the premises are true and the conclusion is false. (We’re supposing
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our concept of index to be extended to include standards of measurement.) But that just does not address the hard problem that this example poses: In the case where the table is, in reality, exactly 119.998 cm long, isn’t (3) false also relative to the index permitting imprecise measurements in which (2) is true? There is another sort of case in which I think Predelli does not face up to the consequences of his own conception of logical validity. In a footnote (p. 116n), Predelli writes: . . . utterances of ‘Everyone is a liberal’ may be uttered truly as a comment at a Socialist convention, but may not truly be followed by an utterance of, say, ‘George Bush is a liberal’. This obviously hardly impinges on the validity of the rule of universal exemplification (see Gauker, 1997b). What readers will see if they do ‘‘see Gauker 1997b’’ (Gauker, 1997) is a flat denial of what Predelli has here claimed. Predelli does not tell us whether the domain of discourse is determined by the index or the scenario; but we can suppose that somehow it is determined by the context, defined as the sum of an index and a scenario. Consider a context in which ‘‘Everyone is a liberal’’ counts as true, because everyone in the domain of discourse specified by the context is indeed a liberal. But George Bush is not a liberal, not even relative to a context in which the domain of discourse is exclusively liberals. The fact that the domain of discourse is confined to liberals does not make the name ‘‘George Bush’’ into the name of a liberal. So ‘‘George Bush is a liberal’’ is not true relative to that context. (I would say that relative to that index it is neither true nor false.) So there is a context relative to which ‘‘Everyone is a liberal’’ is true and relative to which ‘‘George Bush is a liberal’’ is not true. But that argument certainly is an instance of the formal rule of universal exemplification (also called ‘‘universal instantiation’’). So by Predelli’s own definition of logical validity, universal exemplification definitely is not valid. (More precisely, perhaps, what follows by universal exemplification from the premise is, ‘‘If George Bush is a person, then George Bush is a liberal.’’ We may assume, for the sake of argument, that George Bush is a person.) I have suggested that we might use the term ‘‘context’’ for the sum of an index and a scenario (and have just now used it that way), but that is not what Predelli says. In fact, Predelli has no settled use for that term at all. Toward the start he tells us that he will use the term ‘‘index’’ for what is customarily called ‘‘context’’ (p. 17). Here he is clearly thinking of the use of that term that one finds in Kaplan. But then later, in a passage in which he is putting his own peculiar notion of points of evaluation to work in explicating belief-sentences, he starts to use ‘‘context’’ interchangeably with ‘‘scenario’’ (for example, p. 172). The book has a central theme—that we can hold onto the ideal of interpretive systems for natural languages. But it does not attempt to be comprehensive; it deals with a selection of issues that Predelli happens to have worked on. The book doles out many arguments and ideas in brief compass; but in places I found the prose a bit hard to penetrate. The important thing is that the book brings out a lot of issues, new and old, offers interesting perspectives on all of them, and presents a clear picture of a framework in which to think about these and many other issues in contemporary philosophy of language. For that reason, I really think that everyone working in the philosophy of language should read this book. References Braun, David, 1996. Demonstratives and their linguistic meanings. Nouˆs 30, 145–173. Carston, Robyn, 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: A Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, Blackwell.
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Gauker, Christopher, 1997. Universal instantiation: A study of the role of context in logic. Erkenntnis 46, 185–214. Kaplan, David, 1989. Demonstratives. In: Joseph, Almog, John, Perry, Howard, K., Wettstein, (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 481–563. Recanati, Franc¸ois, 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Christopher Gauker, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, is the author of Thinking Out Loud: An Essay on the Relation between Thought and Language (Princeton, 1994), Words without Meaning (MIT, 2003) and Conditionals in Context (MIT, 2005).
Christopher Gauker* Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA *Tel.: +1 513 556 6333; fax: +1 513 556 2939. E-mail address: [email protected] 27 February 2006
Book review Review of Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press, 2005, viii + 198 pp. Stefano Predelli has written a defense of a certain sort of traditional approach to semantics. What he thinks he has to defend it from are challenges based on the pervasive context-relativity of interpretation. Predelli succeeds in describing a framework in which we can sensibly discuss the issue, and he very effectively shows that contextualists cannot rely on just the easy points that they have sometimes tried to get by on. But I think the concessions he makes to contextualism are somewhat larger than he imagines (which is not necessarily a bad thing), and there are contextualist arguments against him of a sort he does not consider at all. In essence, Predelli’s ‘‘traditional approach’’ is that of David Kaplan in his famous paper, ‘‘Demonstratives’’ (widely circulated for many years prior to its publication in 1989). An interpretive system, as Predelli defines it, is a function from what he calls clause-index pairs to what he call t-distributions. A clause is a representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. An index collects together the values of a number of parameters, such as time, place and possible world. A t-distribution is a function from what Predelli calls points of evaluation to truth-values (more on points of evaluation below). Readers who already feel at sea in what I have said will not get much help from Predelli. A good understanding of Kaplan’s paper, including the technical parts, is a prerequisite to understanding this book. In terms of this framework, one can explain very clearly the relation between the semantic value of a sentence and the semantic value of an utterance of that sentence. A sentence is never true or false simpliciter but only relative to its representation as a clause, to an index and to a point of evaluation. For each utterance of a sentence, there will be a clause-index pair that is appropriate to the utterance (p. 23). The appropriate clause will be a representation of the grammatical structure of the sentence uttered, and the appropriate index will specify the appropriate interpretation of words such as ‘‘I’’, ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘actually’’. In addition, for each utterance there will be a relevant point of evaluation (pp. 143–146). Thus we can say that an utterance is true if and only if the t-distribution assigned to the clause-index pair appropriate to the utterance assigns truth to the point of evaluation relevant to the utterance. Of the topics Predelli takes up, probably the one that will most interest most readers is adjectival modification (chapter 4). In an example from Charles Travis, we have to deal with some russet leaves that have been painted green. The sentence ‘‘The leaves are green’’ is used to make an utterance u, spoken to a photographer. That same sentence is also used to make an utterance v, spoken to a botanist. Utterance u is presumably true, while utterance v is presumably false. The index appropriate to the one utterance will not be the same as the index appropriate to the other, but since the sentence does not contain any of those terms the interpretation of which is 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2006.03.001
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determined by the index, the same t-distribution may be assigned to the two clause-index pairs that are appropriate to them. (Predelli himself does not mention the index in this context.) Tradition defines points of evaluation as possible worlds, or possible-worlds-cum-times. But we can suppose that u and v belong to the same world and take place at the same time. So if we follow tradition, the single t-distribution assigned to the clause-index pairs appropriate to the two utterances will determine the same truth value for each of them, contrary to intuition. Predelli’s solution is to buck tradition and deny that points of evaluation are possible worlds (or possible worlds and times). A word he frequently uses to describe them is ‘‘scenarios.’’ The two utterances may have different truth values, even if a single t-distribution is assigned to the clause-index pairs that are appropriate to them, because those two utterances occur in different scenarios and that single t-distribution may assign different truth values to those two scenarios. This maneuver might work, but we need to know more about the nature of scenarios, and unfortunately Predelli does not tell us much about them. In part they are to be distinguished by the purposes that the interlocutors have in speaking (p. 145), but that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Are they complete? That is, for every n-ary atomic predicate, and every n-tuple consisting of objects in the world, may we assume that that n-tuple is either in the extension of the predicate or in its antiextension? Or might there be gaps? If we think of scenarios as encompassing only limited regions of the world, then presumably there will be gaps. There may be an object that is in the world but not in a given scenario and which therefore belongs to neither the extension of ‘‘green’’ nor the antiextension of ‘‘green’’ (i.e., the extension of ‘‘not green’’) relative to that scenario. Even without a fuller account of scenarios and of how a scenario determines an extension for a predicate, Predelli’s proposal looks like a good idea and does some real work. The good thing about it is that it shows us how we can have a compositional semantics and a precise definition of logical validity for natural languages while allowing that the truth value of an utterance depends on the local circumstances in which it occurs. We can say that an argument (conceived as a sequence of sentences) is logically valid (relative to an interpretive system) if and only if for every index i and every point of evaluation p, if the premises are all true at i in p, then the conclusion is true at i in p as well. Predelli’s own definition (on pp. 84–85) does not include the quantification over points of evaluation, because he assumes that indexes include a specification of possible world and time, but this would seem to be the definition we should give after we have taken scenarios rather than possible worlds as our points of evaluation. (Predelli’s definition, like the one I have just stated, does not quantify over interpretative systems. I cannot tell whether that is just a simplification or whether Predelli thinks the definition does not need to quantify over interpretive systems.) However, while Predelli advertises himself as conservative, in fact his proposal amounts to a radical departure from traditional ways of thinking. What Predelli calls a ‘‘t-distribution’’ is what others have called a ‘‘proposition’’. Contemporary semantics often models the traditional concept of a proposition as a set of possible worlds or (what comes to the same thing) as a function from possible worlds into the values true and false. For such functions, Predelli substitutes functions from scenarios into truth values (perhaps including the value neither, although he does not say that). When propositions are modeled as functions from possible worlds into truth values, it makes a certain amount of sense to think of propositions as things that are passed from speaker to hearer when communication is successful. But if propositions are defined in Predelli’s way, that no longer makes sense. We cannot say that propositions defined in Predelli’s way are passed from speaker to hearer when communication is successful, because two people may express the same proposition though what one says is true and what the other says is
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false (because different scenarios are relevant to their utterances). So, Predelli deprives us of traditional ideas about communication (which for many reasons we might wish to be done with) without replacing them with anything else. Moreover, as I pointed out, we have to consider that functions from Predelli’s points of evaluation to truth values may be partial. That is, we may have to allow that at some points of evaluation a predicate may have extensions and antiextensions that do not exhaust the universe of the system. This may have a bearing on logic. For example, we might have to allow that the law of excluded middle is not logically valid. If ‘‘a’’ is the name of a certain leaf that is not part of a certain scenario, then ‘‘Either a is green or a is not green’’ may be neither true nor false in that scenario. Also, it is not entirely clear that Predelli’s proposal does answer the contextualists’ objections to compositional semantics. The concepts in terms of which we define logical validity have to mean something in the context of a larger theory of linguistic communication. Commonly compositional semantics has been thought to tell us something about how sentences are understood. The notion has been that in some sense the mind computes the semantic value of a compound expression on the basis of a prior grasp of the semantic values of the components. Precisely this has come under attack from the contextualists (such as Recanati, 2004, and Carston, 2002). One of their themes has been that we cannot use what we know about the context to interpret the components until after we see the compound expression of which they are components. For example, we cannot compute the meaning of ‘‘fast’’ until we know whether it will be used to form the phrase ‘‘fast car’’ or ‘‘fast snow’’. We cannot compute the reference of ‘‘The ham sandwich’’ until we know whether it will to be used to make the sentence ‘‘The ham sandwich was delicious’’ or ‘‘The ham sandwich wants his check’’. Predelli makes no attempt to show that his substitution of scenarios for possible worlds provides some defense of compositional semantics against this kind of criticism or to answer the objection in any other way. Predelli devotes two chapters (out of only five total) to typical indexicals such as ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘now’’. One of the issues he discusses is the fact that, contrary to what is commonly supposed, it is just not true that ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘here’’ always refer to the time and place of utterance, respectively. If written on a note, ‘‘now’’ can refer to the time at which someone reads it. On a map, ‘‘here’’ can refer not to a place on the map but to a place on the earth that a point on the map represents. Predelli’s answer to this is that while for every utterance there is still an appropriate index and it still provides an interpretation to words like ‘‘now’’ and ‘‘here’’, the appropriate index cannot always be identified just by applying some simple-minded rule that takes the time of the index to be the time of utterance and the place of the index to be the place of utterance. That answer seems very sensible in comparison with some others he reviews, but it does leave us with the question: How in general are the values of the index to be identified? In particular, are the speaker’s intentions in any way a relevant factor? Predelli acknowledges the issue (p. 24), but he doesn’t want to get into it. This is another place at which I think Predelli perhaps does not see how radical what he is saying is. In Kaplan’s terminology, the character of an expression is supposed to be a function from indices to contents. (As we have already seen, in Predelli’s framework contents are functions from points of evaluation to truth values.) Apparently, Predelli thinks this is still a useful notion, because the term ‘‘character’’ keeps cropping up throughout his book. But now it turns out that an index is just an assignment of objects to indexicals and demonstratives, and there are no formal limits on the combinations of assignments that an index may provide (even if in real life certain references are hard to come by). For example, there is no requirement that the
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assignment to ‘‘I’’ be at the location assigned to ‘‘here’’ at the time assigned to ‘‘now’’. Consequently, as Predelli himself emphasizes (p. 103), there will no longer be any special kind of logical validity that depends on the restriction of indexes to those that obey such limits. What he does not say is that this eliminates most of the rationale for countenancing characters at all. Character no longer tells us anything about the use of an indexical and no longer provides any guidance to correctness in translation. The character of ‘‘I beat you’’ remains distinct from the character of ‘‘You beat me’’, but only in the way that the character of ‘‘This1 beat this2’’ would be distinct from the character of ‘‘This2 beat this1’’. Given that propositions are no longer functions from worlds (or worlds-cum-times) into truth values, there is nothing evidently to be gained in separating character and content as distinct aspects of meaning. We might as well combine Predelli’s indices with Predelli’s points of evaluation, call the result contexts, and countenance just one kind of meaning, namely, functions from contexts into truth values. One of the problems that Kaplan had to deal with, but did not deal with very effectively (see Braun, 1996), was that a sentence may contain multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative (e.g., ‘‘that’’), referring to different objects. Predelli notices the problem (p. 34), but he offers no solution. This seems to be the source of the strangest claim Predelli makes in the whole book. Predelli makes the claim that some sentences are logically true, although some of their utterances are false, which will strike most of us as outlandish. As an example, he gives us: (1)
If Giorgione was so-called because of his size, and if Giorgione is Barbarelli, then Barbarelli was so-called because his size (p. 106).
As Predelli observes, ‘‘so-called’’ in this sentence is a demonstrative. It means ‘‘called that’’. Since Predelli countenances only one demonstratum per demonstrative in an index (p. 20), he assumes that for every index, both occurrences of the expression ‘‘so-called’’ in (1) have to have the same reference. Consequently, (1) is a logical truth. But for any utterance of (1), says Predelli, the index appropriate to the utterance of the antecedent will make the antecedent true, and the index appropriate to the consequent will make the consequent false. So the utterance as a whole is false. Predelli does not provide any excuse for evaluating an utterance of a single sentence by means of two indices, but in any case it seems fairly clear that we have to allow indices that provide different values for the two different occurrences of ‘‘so-called’’, so that (1) does not qualify as logically true. In this same context, Predelli uncovers a harder logical puzzle (p. 111 ff.). Consider the inference from (2) to (3): (2)
This table is 120 cm long.
(3)
This table is more than 119.999 cm long.
Imagine that we utter (2) in a context in which very precise measurements do not matter. So it’s true. Does (3) logically follow? Well, by arithmetic, since 120 is greater than 119.999, if the table is 120 cm long, then it has to be more than 119.999 cm long. So apparently it follows. But when we accepted (2) we were speaking in a context where precision to the thousandths place did not matter. So (2) would be true even if the table were 119.998 cm long. So (3) might be false even if (2) is true. So (3) does not follow from (2). In defense of the validity of this argument, Predelli points out that it would be wrong to judge the argument invalid on the grounds that (2) is true relative to an index permitting imprecise measurements while (3) is false relative to an index that permits precise measurements, because to show that an argument is invalid we have to show that there is a single index at which the premises are true and the conclusion is false. (We’re supposing
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our concept of index to be extended to include standards of measurement.) But that just does not address the hard problem that this example poses: In the case where the table is, in reality, exactly 119.998 cm long, isn’t (3) false also relative to the index permitting imprecise measurements in which (2) is true? There is another sort of case in which I think Predelli does not face up to the consequences of his own conception of logical validity. In a footnote (p. 116n), Predelli writes: . . . utterances of ‘Everyone is a liberal’ may be uttered truly as a comment at a Socialist convention, but may not truly be followed by an utterance of, say, ‘George Bush is a liberal’. This obviously hardly impinges on the validity of the rule of universal exemplification (see Gauker, 1997b). What readers will see if they do ‘‘see Gauker 1997b’’ (Gauker, 1997) is a flat denial of what Predelli has here claimed. Predelli does not tell us whether the domain of discourse is determined by the index or the scenario; but we can suppose that somehow it is determined by the context, defined as the sum of an index and a scenario. Consider a context in which ‘‘Everyone is a liberal’’ counts as true, because everyone in the domain of discourse specified by the context is indeed a liberal. But George Bush is not a liberal, not even relative to a context in which the domain of discourse is exclusively liberals. The fact that the domain of discourse is confined to liberals does not make the name ‘‘George Bush’’ into the name of a liberal. So ‘‘George Bush is a liberal’’ is not true relative to that context. (I would say that relative to that index it is neither true nor false.) So there is a context relative to which ‘‘Everyone is a liberal’’ is true and relative to which ‘‘George Bush is a liberal’’ is not true. But that argument certainly is an instance of the formal rule of universal exemplification (also called ‘‘universal instantiation’’). So by Predelli’s own definition of logical validity, universal exemplification definitely is not valid. (More precisely, perhaps, what follows by universal exemplification from the premise is, ‘‘If George Bush is a person, then George Bush is a liberal.’’ We may assume, for the sake of argument, that George Bush is a person.) I have suggested that we might use the term ‘‘context’’ for the sum of an index and a scenario (and have just now used it that way), but that is not what Predelli says. In fact, Predelli has no settled use for that term at all. Toward the start he tells us that he will use the term ‘‘index’’ for what is customarily called ‘‘context’’ (p. 17). Here he is clearly thinking of the use of that term that one finds in Kaplan. But then later, in a passage in which he is putting his own peculiar notion of points of evaluation to work in explicating belief-sentences, he starts to use ‘‘context’’ interchangeably with ‘‘scenario’’ (for example, p. 172). The book has a central theme—that we can hold onto the ideal of interpretive systems for natural languages. But it does not attempt to be comprehensive; it deals with a selection of issues that Predelli happens to have worked on. The book doles out many arguments and ideas in brief compass; but in places I found the prose a bit hard to penetrate. The important thing is that the book brings out a lot of issues, new and old, offers interesting perspectives on all of them, and presents a clear picture of a framework in which to think about these and many other issues in contemporary philosophy of language. For that reason, I really think that everyone working in the philosophy of language should read this book. References Braun, David, 1996. Demonstratives and their linguistic meanings. Nouˆs 30, 145–173. Carston, Robyn, 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: A Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, Blackwell.
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Gauker, Christopher, 1997. Universal instantiation: A study of the role of context in logic. Erkenntnis 46, 185–214. Kaplan, David, 1989. Demonstratives. In: Joseph, Almog, John, Perry, Howard, K., Wettstein, (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 481–563. Recanati, Franc¸ois, 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Christopher Gauker, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, is the author of Thinking Out Loud: An Essay on the Relation between Thought and Language (Princeton, 1994), Words without Meaning (MIT, 2003) and Conditionals in Context (MIT, 2005).
Christopher Gauker* Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA *Tel.: +1 513 556 6333; fax: +1 513 556 2939. E-mail address: [email protected] 27 February 2006