The methodology of non-inferential claims

(DRAFT)

Stellan Petersson

November 5, 2013

1 Introduction

The statement that ’intuitions’ (or explicated variants of that notion) playa key role in the science of language is not completely controversial. Wefind variants of this claim in methodological discussions of (the practicesof) syntax [Maynes and Gross, 2013], [Textor, 2009], [Devitt, 2010], seman-tics [Stanley, 2000], pragmatics [Recanati, 2004] and foundational theoriesof reference [Mallon et al., 2009]. We also find explicated variants of thenotion of ’intuitions’ in methodological discussions of epistemology. For in-stance, in [Williamson, 2007], ’intuitions’ of thought-experiments (e.g. theGettier-case) are claimed to be assessments of counterfactual sentences, andin [Malmgren, 2011] such judgements are taken to be evaluations of sentenceswhose logical forms are fronted by a possibility operator. Epistemology isnot our main focus here, but as we will see below, Williamson’s and Malm-gren’s ideas are important for our methodological discussion.

But as Cappelen points out, statements of methodological strategies areoften made without careful studies of the practices under study [Cappe-len, 2012]. Cappelen, who broadly focuses on contemporary philosophy (afocus different from ours), therefore presents case-studies of philosophicaltexts, and argues (somewhat surprisingly) that appeals to intuitions (or ex-plicated variants of ’intuitions’) do not play an important evidential role incurrent philosophical theorizing. The explicit use of “intuition-vocabulary”(i.e. the use of expressions such as ’intuition’, ’intuitively’ and ’intuitive’)does not have an evidential function in the analyzed texts, according toCappelen. Such expressions, Cappelen claims, rather have a hedging func-tion, or a function of clarifying what is taken as obvious before inquiry. Andsometimes, such claims have no clear function at all. Moreover, there isno implicit reliance on anything like ’intuitions’ either: philosophical ac-counts are typically not based on non-inferentially supported claims, specialphenomenology, or conceptual competence, Cappelen argues.

Now, as I mention above, Cappelen’s focus is different from ours, since we

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are interested in central methodological strategies in the science of languageand nothing else. But Cappelen’s thought-provoking claims raise a worry:even if there is, in a discipline, a consensus concerning the evidential role ofintuitions, or explicated variants of ’intuition’, we should not rest contentwith this consensus if it is not based on inquiries of methodological practices.

If it turns out that intuitions, or something like it, indeed play a key rolein current theorizing of language, the problems do not, however, disappear.The theorist who gives a pride and place for intuitions should provide acoherent and empirically plausible account of what they are and why theyhave the status of evidence for empirically adequate theories of language.

But first, what does ’intuitive’, ’intuitively’ and ’intuition’ mean? Doesthe use of these expression have a (non-defined) technical meaning amongscientists of language or is it there used with its ordinary meaning?

2 ’Intuitive’, ’intuitively’, ’intuition’

There are uses of ’intuitive’ and ’intuitively’ in ordinary (non-technical)English, where these expressions indicate1 a lack of explicit inference process,or so I will argue. Consider the following examples, where an object (anoperating system or a gadget) is claimed to be ’intuitive’:2

(1) When the Palm Pre was announced, many people immediately com-pared it to the iPhone, due to its fluid menus, intuitive operatingsystem, and sleek design.(http://toshibatouchscreenlaptop.com/429/intuitive-phone-interfaces-the-new-black/)

(2) On the grounds that a gadget should be instinctive, intuitive, some-thing you can start playing with straight away, this fails.(“Wand remote control,” Jannie Gibson, Guardian, October 2, 2009.)

Cappelen tentatively suggests that ’intuitive’ in these examples indicatessome sort of spontaneity, effortlessness or some kind of ease [2012:33]. Thissuggestion is indeed reasonable to some extent. But have a look at thefollowing examples, where an event (chess playing and singing) is claimedto be carried out (or have been carried out) ’intuitively’:

(3) Kasparov plays aggressively and somewhat intuitively, while Karpovis a technician, cool and precise, often taking his opponents apartbit by bit.(NYT, September 5, 2009)

1I mean nothing specific by ’indicate’. One could perhaps speak of ’necessary condi-tions’ or ’entailments’, but what I have in mind is weaker than that.

2All examples in this section are taken from [Cappelen 2012:30-48].

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(4) ‘I didn’t do it intellectually’, Ms. Streisand said. ‘I did it intuitively,unconsciously. I kind of like that’.(“Streisand’s Fine Instrument and Classic Instinct,” Anthony Tom-masini, NYT, September 24, 2009.)

Cappelen claims that such uses challenge the suggestion of effortlessnesscharacterized above. Instead, Cappelen claims, we should think of ’intu-itive’ and ’intuitively’ as context-sensitive expressions that characterize someevents as intuitive in comparison to other events; both Karpov and Kas-parov’s chess-playing involves intuitive elements, but Kasparov’s intuitiveway of playing has more significance in the salient context.

I disagree with Cappelen here. I don’t think that we need to assumethat ’intuitive’ and ’intuitively’ are context-sensitive in a gradable sense (as’tall’ is taken to be by most theorists). Instead I suggest, as I mentionedabove, that ’intuitive’ and ’intuitively’ indicate a lack of explicit inference.This analysis accounts for example (1), (2), (3) and (4) above. In all cases,the following inference seems valid:

Analysis 1. If x is classified by ’intuitive’ or ’intuitively’, then x is takento not be dependent on an explicit inference process

There are of course cases where spontaneity or easiness is a result of a lackof explicit inference. But there are also cases where there is no spontaneity,but where there is a lack of explicit inference. As I read (3), the sentenceis neutral concerning Kasparov’s level of spontaneity and effort, but thesentence expresses, as I take it, that Kasparov’s choice of where to move thepieces were (in general) not made by relying on explicit inferences. Now by’explicit’ I mean something like available to the subject on the personal level.Of course there may be sub-personal inferences that are not available to thesubject, but I suggest that ’intuitive’ is neutral concerning such inferences.

I therefore agree with Cappelen’s statement that we should not excludereliance on memory in our analysis of ’intuitive’ [Cappelen 2012:33], sincememories are partly sub-personal (and the competencies mentioned by Cap-pelen – dancing, chess playing, and singing – are uncontroversially, I sup-pose, partly dependent on sub-personal processes) . I disagree, however,with Cappelen’s claim concerning reasoning-chains. According to Cappelen,the Kasparov-sentence suggests that we should not rule out that ’intuitive’is used of events that are characterized by “excessive chains of reasoning”[2012:33]. But, as I have already said, I don’t take the Kasparov-sentenceas indicating such a chain of reasoning, so Cappelen’s counterargument tomy suggestion fails.

There is, however, an obvious form of context-sensitivity associated with’intuitive’ and ’intuitively’ (pointed out by Cappelen): they are subject-sensitive (or perhaps assessor-sensitive). What is intuitive to me may not beintuitive to you. In the following examples, where propositions are claimedto be ’intuitive’, the claims clearly show this sort of sensitivity:

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(5) It is intuitive that government spending financed by taxes merelyredistributes existing dollars.(“The Fatal Flow of Keynesian Stimulus”, Brian Riedl, WashingtonTimes, August 31, 2010)

(6) It is intuitive that the approximation improves as h becomes smaller.(Wikipedia, “The Fundamental Theorem of Calculus).

Some of us, but not all of us, would speak truly by using these sentences.Interestingly, in contrast to the examples above, there is no explicit sub-ject in these examples. If there is a syntactically covert, or pragmaticallymandated, reference to a subject, or if ’intuitive’ should be treated alongrelativistic lines, is something I will leave out here, since it is not impor-tant for our current purposes. The subject-sensitivity is anyhow quite easilyincorporated in the analysis as follows:

Analysis 2. If x is classified by ’intuitive’ or ’intuitively’, then x is takento not be dependent on an explicit inference process for A.

The use of ’intuitively’ as a hedge is explained on our account. Thesuggestion that ’Intuitively’ indicates a lack of explicit inference process isa first shot at why ’intuitively’ is used as a hedge. Consider the followingexample:

(7) A: Why does the dollar get stronger even though the US stock markethas collapsed?B: Intuitively, it is because investors expect stock markets aroundthe world to follow the US market.

By putting ’Intuitively’ in front of the main point of the utterance, B indi-cates that the following sentence is not put forward as the conclusion froma set of premises. This is why B’s commitment to the truth of the mainpoint is taken to be weaker than if ’Intuitively’ was left out. Our suggestedanalysis therefore accounts for this use, in contrast to Cappelen’s analysis,where the hedging function of ’Intuitively’ is mentioned but not related toother uses of the expression.

Finally, I wish to point out that I agree with Cappelen’s preliminarysketch of the connection between the adjectival use (’intutive’) on the onehand, and the noun (phrase) ’intuition’ on the other. Cappelen suggests thefollowing truth-conditions for sentences where the noun phrase ’intuition’occur:

’A has the intuition that p (at t)’ is true just in case p is intuitiveto A (at t). [Cappelen 2012:39]

I will remain neutral of the generality of this claim. But, importantly, thereare uses in English where the noun should be regarded as a nominalization ofthe adjective, and where the nominalization inherits its semantics from the

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adjectival use. For instance, (5) and (6) could be reformulated as follows,with no change in expressed content:

(8) I have the intuition that government spending financed by taxesmerely redistributes existing dollars.

(9) I have the intuition that the approximation improves as h becomessmaller.

Summing up, I suggest that there are uses of ’intuitive’ and ’intuitively’that indicate a lack of explicit inference process. This use is subject-sensitive(in ways to be spelled out by a more detailed account). The suggestionhas two merits compared to Cappelen’s: 1) it does not postulate context-sensitivity in terms of gradability, and it is therefore simpler, and 2) it ex-plains why ’intuitively’ is used as a hedge. I have also defined, in agreementwith Cappelen, the noun ’intuition’ in terms of the adjectival use.

3 Distinctions between some common non-inferentialclaims

3.1 From ’intuition’ to ’non-inferential claim’

In the subsections below, I will elucidate a family of related claims. Theform of the claims, the phenomenology attached to them, their problem-atic aspects, and plausible methodologies for verification or falsification ofthem, distinguish them from one another. But the claims have one thing incommon: they are non-inferential.

By classifying a claim as ’non-inferential’, I suggest that the claim isnot dependent on explicit inference for the person who makes the claim. Inthat sense, the claims are stated ’intuitively’, and they may, on this basis,be classified as ’intuitions’. I have, however, chosen to label such claimsas ’non-inferential claims’, since that phrase has other connotations than’intuitions’. I also take it to be a more theoretically neutral starting pointto start the discussion from a certain type of public claim, than from aconception of the type of judgement that such claims express.

3.2 Form, function and psychological implications

There are no constraints on form in my definition of ’non-inferential claim’.The claim rather acquires its status as non-inferential through its role in thediscourses under discussion. But in order to distinguish between differentsorts of non-inferential claim, and in order to highlight the status of someclaims as non-inferential, I will exemplify each type of claim with a numberof alternative formulations below.

The classification of a claim as ’non-inferential’ does not, however, ex-haust its role. First, there is a discursive coherence relation that goes in

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two directions. The claim is always made of an example (i.e. a sentence, ause of a sentence, an expression etc.), but it also functions as evidence fora theoretical proposal. Secondly, the claims below share the aspect of non-inferentiality, but the detailed description of the claims will also highlightdifferences in the roles of the claims. There is, for instance, a differencebetween being interested in the claim itself and being interested in whatthe claim is about. In the former type of case, we may be interested in themental state that caused the claim, in the latter case we may take the claimas a reliable guide to external facts.

But in order to understand, and to justify, the claims under considera-tion, description of the claims is not enough. We will therefore discuss thepsychological implications of each claim. and address the question of whatpicture of the mind/brain the form and function of the claims implicate.

The plan for the following four sections is as follows. I will discussfour different types of non-inferential claim and elucidate three aspects ofeach claim: 1) the typical form of the claim and its typical function, 2)advantages and problematic aspects of the type of claim, and 3) a sketchof the psychological mechanisms that the claim implicates. In the end ofeach section I will point out how the claim under discussion is used in thedebate on the semantics/pragmatics-interface (which is the overall focus ofthe dissertation).

3.3 Acceptability claims

In discussions about natural language syntax (but not only there, as we willsee below), claims often focus on acceptability. Claims of the following typeare quite common:3

(10) That sounds OK.

(11) I think I can say that.

And quite often you can hear the expression “intuition” in discussions ofacceptability:

(12) There are robust intuitions in English . . . you cannot say ”he hasfinished a paper yesterday”, you can say “he finished a paper yester-day”.

A central aim in discussions of natural language syntax is to distinguishacceptable sentences from not acceptable sentences (and perhaps to pointout intermediate cases). A theoretical task is then to characterize a formalsystem that only generates the sentences that are acceptable from a set of

3The examples in this subsection are modeled on authentic claims, spontaneously ut-tered by linguists at linguistic seminars.

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lexical items. 4. Clearly, there are two stages here: a stage of determiningthe acceptability of a sentence, and a stage of theory construction. Thesestages may of course overlap in practice, but they should be separated froman analytical viewpoint.

3.3.1 Psychological implications

Acceptability claims are somehow related to the device that generates (ac-tually) grammatical sentences. One way of spelling out this relation is byassuming that ordinary speakers have internalized in the mind/brain some-thing like a formal system and that this system is causally related to theacceptability claims (or whatever such claims express). This view is putforward in e.g. [Textor, 2009].5 Textor argues that the formal systems ofgrammar describe a state that influences the performances and processes ofthe mind. When it comes to acceptability claims, the mental state is takento influence the processes that underlie what is reported by the claim.

For Textor, acceptability claims are expressions of a certain kind of quasi-perceptual state. Some sentences just do not feel right and acceptabilityclaims report such feelings [Textor 2009:401].6 But even if there is an elementof feelings or perceptions at play, the acceptability claim itself is anyhowa public statement, and in that sense acceptability claims are judgementsand not only seemings/feelings/perceptions, as Maynes and Gross point out[Maynes and Gross, 2013].

Devitt [Devitt, 2010], however, argues that there is no reason to postu-late a special psychology for acceptability judgements. Acceptability judge-ments are theory-laden theoretical judgements, on this view. For Devitt,there is therefore no theoretically interesting distinction between acceptabil-ity judgements and clearly theoretical judgements about e.g. co-referenceand ambiguity. The most plausible psychological account of such judgementsis, according to Devitt, that they are central-processor responses to linguisticphenomena. Judgements of acceptability are therefore, in principle, not dif-

4Chomsky’s distinction between ’grammatical’ and ’acceptable’ is, I suppose, quiteuncontroversial. In the terminology of Chomsky, a central aim of linguistics is to constructa grammar of L (L=a set of sentences), i.e. is a device (a formal system) that generatesthe ’grammatical’ sentences of L. The system correctly describes an aspect of a naturallanguage if the grammatical sentences are “actually grammatical, i.e. acceptable to anative speaker, etc.” [Chomsky 1957:13]. But note that in [Chomsky, 1957] the notion of’acceptability’ is, after some discussion, put aside. Instead of using acceptability claimsas evidence, Chomsky suggests an explication of ’grammatical’, and applies this to clearcases of grammatical sentences. In unclear cases, we should not consult our intuitions,but let the theory decide, according to [Chomsky, 1957]

5Textor refers to [Chomsky, 1995] who is claimed to have this view.6A similar stance is taken in [Engdahl, 2009]. Engdahl uses the Swedish expression

“sprakkansla”, which literally translates as ’linguistic feeling’, in order to characterize”the unreflective feeling of language users that something they hear, read or say soundsright or wrong” (my translation).

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ferent from judgements concerning touch-typing or swimming. Judgementsdirected at hypothetical swimming-events and touch-typing events may ofcourse be of some value for theorists of swimming and touch-typing, butthere is no sense in saying that such judgements are caused by or influencedby the capacities of swimming and touch-typing. Therefore, the acceptabil-ity judgements themselves are not data that the theory should account for,on Devitt’s account, even though such judgements may play a role in for-mulating linguistic hypotheses (which can be confirmed or disconfirmed bycorpus studies, experiments etc.).

But perhaps there are reasons for postulating a special psychology foracceptability judgements. Even though Devitt is right in saying that thehypothesis that grammatical rules are internalized does not in itself warrantthe claim that acceptability judgements are caused by the internalized rules,as Textor suggests, there may be reasons for assuming that linguistic judge-ments of acceptability are different from judgements of e.g. swimming andtouch-typing. Maynes and Gross argue that some linguistic evidence suggestthat the ability to monitor and correct one’s own linguistic production playan important role in judgements of acceptability. This idea is consistentwith sociolinguistic theories according to which “monitoring the productionof others plays a crucial role in establishing in-group and out-group bound-aries and thus, for example, determining levels of trust” [Maynes and Gross2013:720]. If this line of reasoning is correct, we have a reason to assumethat meta-reflective capacities focused on language function differently fromsuch capacities focused on e.g. swimming.

Moreover, Devitt’s account fails to account for cases where a languageuser experiences a construction as acceptable, but nevertheless makes thejudgement that the construction is unacceptable. Textor presents a thought-experiment that illustrates this point:

Assume that I give you a misleading defeater for your folk-linguistic theory about English. I convince you that you wereincorrectly trained in the past. More often than not, when youheard a sentence and took it to be acceptable it was not. Your fel-low speakers would normally have criticised you, but you are nowtold that they were bribed not to do it. Moreover, you have noclue how to repair your folk-linguistic theory. In this situation itis not rational for you to make grammaticality judgements basedon your folk-linguistic theory. As a rational speaker, you won’tjudge in this situation that a sentence is acceptable. Nonethelessmany sentences will strike you as acceptable. Even if I give yougood reasons that ’The the the’ is acceptable, and you are swayedby my reasons, the string will still strike you as not acceptable.[Textor 2009:402]

Textor’s point can be illustrated by the common phenomenon of self-corrections

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influenced by prescriptive grammars. For instance, in some Swedish dialectsthe pronoun ”han” (’he’) is not used in its accusative form in object position:

(13) Kalle sag hanKalle saw he’Kalle saw him’

But this is wrong according to well-known prescriptive principles; in objectposition you should use the accusative case:

(14) Kalle sag honomKalle saw him’Kalle saw him’

Therefore, it is plausible that some (educated) speakers whose idiolects areinfluenced by the dialects in which the the pronoun occurs in its nominativecase in object position will judge (13) as wrong but nevertheless experi-ence the sentence as natural or acceptable. Such cases are difficult, if notimpossible, to account for, if we accept Devitt’s view.

So, what picture of the language faculty is implicated by the use ofacceptability claims? Maynes and Gross point out that since the capacityfor forming acceptability judgements is different from the capacity of usingand understanding language, the acceptability judgements cannot be yieldedby the grammatical system alone (e.g. children may have difficulties withengaging in the activity of making acceptability claims, even if they have noproblems with production and comprehension). Maynes and Gross therefore(tentatively) suggest that a ’linguistic input analyzer’ is implicated by theuse of acceptability judgements:

Consider, for example, the following crude picture of how atleast some acceptability intuitions might be produced [. . . ]. Alanguage-like stimulus sets the syntactic parser to work. If it failsto generate a string satisfying its embodied grammatical con-straints, this causes a judgment of unacceptability in someoneattending to the matter; if it does succeed, then ceteris paribusthis causes a judgment of acceptability. The output of the mod-ule, on this picture, is not an attribution of (un)acceptability, butrather a parse (a structural description), or the absence thereof,that ceteris paribus causes such a judgment. [Maynes and Gross2013:719]

But, as Engdahl notes, acceptability judgements are, in many cases, depen-dent on the ability to imagine a suitable context of utterance. Therefore anegative judgement may be dependent on an inability to imagine a suitablecontext and not a manifestation of a linguistic feeling or intiution [Engdahl2009:6]. The picture of a parser that gets going as soon as it is confrontedby a language like stimuli (and then causes a judgement) may anyhow be

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correct, but we should note that the parser may function differently in caseswhere the stimuli is a sentence S and when the stimuli is S plus context (wewill come back to this below).

3.3.2 Advantages and disadvantages of acceptability claims

A clear advantage of acceptability claims is that they provide us with neg-ative evidence. As Maynes and Gross point out, and as we have knownat least since [Chomsky, 1957], ungrammaticality is not equivalent to lowstatistical frequency.

But there are problematic aspects of acceptability judgements. As men-tioned above, Engdahl argues that acceptability judgements may be depen-dent on the ability to imagine a suitable context of utterance. Engdahltherefore suggests that acceptability judgements should be complementedby corpus studies and measurements of brain responses to linguistic stimuli(e.g. by using measurements of event-related potential, an approach com-mon in neuroscience). Moreover, the public claim may be influenced byirrelevant factors, such as (the informant’s conception of) prescriptive rules,as I mentioned in section 3.3.1 [c.f. Ichikawa et al. 2011:4]. This also sug-gests that investigations of acceptability claims should be complemented byother approaches.

And even if acceptability claims, on the approach we have chosen here,report a subjective state and are strictly speaking evidence for an individ-ual’s internal grammatical system, we are often not interested in idiosyn-cratic aspect of idiolects but of more general aspects of grammars. There-fore, an extensive reliance on one’s own acceptability judgements in theoryconstruction may of course lead to unwarranted generalizations. This pointmotivates experimental investigations of acceptability claims (see Maynesand Gross 2013 for a recent overview of such experiments).

3.3.3 Acceptability claims in the debate on the semantics/pragmatics-interface

In Recanati’s discussion of weather reports [Recanati, 2010], the contrastbetween two dialogues plays a quite important role.7 Recanati argues that

7Recanati suggests, in contrast to standard views on the matter, an account of “It’sraining” according to which the logical form of that sentence does not contain an argument-place for location. The logical form of “It’s raining” is suggested to be an existentiallyquantified sentence of the following form, where the variable ’e’ ranges over events (I amignoring tense here):

(1) ∃eRAINING(e)

The logical form accounts for the reading that it rains somewhere, since it is a part ofour general conception of events that they take place at some spatio-temporal location[2010:90]. And it accounts for location specific readings (e.g. the reading that it is rainingin Paris), if it is combined with the (optional) pragmatic process of free enrichment.

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there is a distinction between the logical form of “arrive” and “dance” (andthat “rain” rather patterns with “dance” than with ”arrive”). This conclu-sion is partly arrived at by the claim that the A’s answer in the dialoguein (15) is “infelicitous” whereas it is assumed that A’s answer in (16) is notinfelicitous [Recanati 2010:83]:

(15) A: John has arrived.B: Where?A: *I have no idea.

(16) A: John has danced.B: Where?A: I have no idea.

A presupposition in this methodology is that the parser that reacts to incom-ing linguistic stimuli is context sensitive, in the way sketched above (section3.3.1)

*To be continued*

3.4 Conditional claims

In this section, I will focus on a type of claim that is quite common indiscussions of foundational semantics.8. The claims in this category haveeither the form of indicative conditionals (If P, then Q) or the form ofcounterfactual conditionals (If P had been the case, then Q would have beenthe case).

In such cases, the process of free enrichment may add an argument place for location[2010:93]:

(2) ∃e[RAINING(e) ∧ LOCATION(Paris, e)]

Alternatively, one could think of free enrichment in terms of domain restriction [2010:110-114]. The unrestricted reading would in that case be accounted for by letting the quantifierrange over a domain that includes every event in the world (this would give rise to locationindefinite readings), and the restricted reading would be accounted for by letting thequantifier range over a restricted set of events (this restriction could give rise to verylocation specific readings, such as the reading that it is raining at the context of utterance).The restricted reading that it is raining in Paris is formulated as follows:

(3) (∃e: LOCATION (Paris, e)) [RAINING(e)]

Importantly, both additions of argument places or domain restriction takes place on prag-matic grounds, according to Recanati.

8In the terminology of Stanley and Szabo, the aim of foundational semantics is to settlewhat makes it the case that a type of expression has a given semantic value, whereasdescriptive semantics starts from the assumption that expressions have certain semanticvalues and focuses on e.g. compositional analyses and the like. C.f. [Stanley and Szabo,2000] for discussion

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Kripke uses such claims extensively in Naming in necessity [Kripke,1980].9 Throughout lecture 1 and 2 [Kripke 1980:22-105], in which Kripke’smain discussion of the reference of proper names is presented, we find de-scriptions of what people say when they think of counterfactual situations(I have written the counterfactual claim in italics):

Not only is it true of the man Aristotle that he might not havegone into pedagogy; it is also true that we use the term ’Aristotle’in such a way that, in thinking of a counterfactual situation inwhich Aristotle didn’t go into any of the fields and do any of theachievements we commonly attribute to him, still we would saythat was a situation in which Aristotle did not do these things.[Kripke 1980:62]

We also find assumptions about how we would use language, in counterfac-tual situations (my italics below):

Most of the things commonly attributed to Aristotle are thingsthat Aristotle might not have done at all. In a situation in whichhe didn’t do them, we would describe that situation as a situationin which Aristotle didn’t do them. [Kripke 1980:61]

Finally, we find assumptions about the interpretation of what people meanwhen using names in counterfactual situations:

Suppose that ’Godel’ was not in fact the author of this theorem.A man named ’Schmidt’, whose body was found in Vienna un-der mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did thework in question. His friend Godel somehow got hold of themanuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Godel. On theview in question, then, when our ordinary man uses the name’Godel’, he really means to refer to Schmidt, because Schmidtis the unique person satisfying the description, ’the man whodiscovered the incompleteness of arithmetic’. [. . . ] So, since theman who discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic is in factSchmidt, we, when we talk about ‘Godel’, are in fact always re-ferring to Schmidt. But it seems to me that we are not. Wesimply are not. [Kripke 1980:83-84]

This last passage does not include any conditional sentences. But the pas-sage as a whole has a clear conditional structure (and the text could be

9The semantic aim in [Kripke, 1980] is two fold. Firstly, Kripke seeks to refute thedescriptivist view of reference held by Frege and Russell, and to refute the cluster theoryof reference, a view held by the later Wittgenstein [Kripke 1980:22-31]. Secondly, Kripkeaims at giving us a “better picture” [Kripke 1980:97] of how names refer, i.e. a sketch ofa theory that is consistent with the alleged facts about reference put forward in Namingand necessity.

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rewritten as a conditional sentence, even if that would be stylistically objec-tionable). The antecedent is expressed by the following sentences:

Suppose that ’Godel’ was not in fact the author of this theorem.A man named ’Schmidt’, whose body was found in Vienna un-der mysterious circumstances many years ago, actually did thework in question. His friend Godel somehow got hold of themanuscript and it was thereafter attributed to Godel.

After this part, Kripke formulates the consequent clause as follows:

On the view in question, then, when our ordinary man usesthe name ’Godel’, he really means to refer to Schmidt, becauseSchmidt is the unique person satisfying the description, ’the manwho discovered the incompleteness of arithmetic’.

The consequent is clarified and reformulated in the following sentence:

So, since the man who discovered the incompleteness of arith-metic is in fact Schmidt, we, when we talk about ‘Godel’, are infact always referring to Schmidt.

Kripke then points out that the consequent is false, given the truth of theantecedent (so the conditional is false):

But it seems to me that we are not. We simply are not.

This overview is not meant to be exhaustive.10 It shows, however, that as-sumptions about how people in fact use language and assumptions how theywould use language in counterfactual circumstances, as well as assumptionsabout interpretation of speech in counterfactual situations, play a major rolein Kripke’s discussion. These assumptions are presented in the form of con-ditionals whose truth or falsity is not supported by any evidence (the truthor falsity of the statements are likely intended to be obvious). Therefore,

10Instead of descriptivism about proper names, Kripke suggests a causal-historical pic-ture of how speakers refer to individuals by the use of proper names:

Someone, lets say, a baby, is born; his parents call him by a certain name.They talk about him to their friends. Other people meet him. Throughvarious sorts of talk the name is spread from link to link as if by a chain.A speaker who is on the far end of this chain, who has heard about, sayRichard Feynman, in the market place or elsewhere, may be referring toRichard Feynman even though he can’t remember from whom he first heardof Feynman or from whom he ever heard of Feynman [. . . ] [A] chain ofcommunication going back to Feynman himself has been established, byvirtue of his membership in a community which passed the name on fromlink to link, not by a ceremony that he makes in private in his study: ’By“Feynman” I shall mean the man who did such and such and such and such’.[Kripke 1980:91]

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Kripke may be said to use non-inferential claims to a large degree.

In Grice’s ’Logic and conversation’ [Grice, 1975], we also find several condi-tionals, whose truth are taken to be obvious. In the following passage, therelation between talk-exchanges and non-verbal joint activities is described.At some points, Grice uses a declarative sentence in order to simply statewhat speakers expect from others in such activities, and exemplifies his claimwith a conditional in most cases:

QUANTITY. If you are assisting me to mend a car, I expectyour contribution to be neither more nor less than is required.If, for example, at a particular stage I need four screws, I expectyou to hand me four, rather than two or six.

QUALITY. I expect your contributions to be genuine and notspurious. If I need sugar as an ingredient in the cake you areassisting me to make, I do not expect you to hand me salt; if Ineed a spoon, I do not expect a trick spoon made of rubber.

RELATION. I expect a partner’s contribution to be appropriateto the immediate needs at each stage of the transaction. If Iam mixing ingredients for a cake, I do not expect to be handeda good book, or even an oven cloth (though this might be anappropriate contribution at a later stage).

MANNER. I expect a partner to make it clear what contributionhe is making and to execute his performance with reasonabledispatch. [Grice 1989:28]

3.4.1 Psychological implications

In the preceding section we established that a common type of non-inferentialclaim (in foundational semantics) has a conditional structure. Such claimsare not supported by any evidence; on a charitable reading, Kripke andGrice just assume that the truth/falsity of the conditionals is obvious tothe reader. In this respect, the conditional claims bear resemblance to theacceptability claims discussed in section 3.3.

In section 3.3 we noted that the non-infererential character of acceptabil-ity claims is unproblematic, if we think of them as evidence for an internalgrammatical system that stands in a causal relation to the judgement thatunderlies the claim. Is the same strategy open for conditional claims? Theanswer to the question just posed will be negative. Even if conditional claimsfunction as evidence for semantic and pragmatic systems, the judgementsthemselves are not caused by the systems they describe. I will now give twoarguments for this assertion.

First, one of Kripke’s main points in Naming and necessity is that whatyou believe about referents does not fix the reference of your use of proper

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names. So for Kripke, it does not matter what is in your mind, on anylevel of representation (the only thing that Kripke claims is in the head of acompetent speaker that uses a proper name is the intention to “use it withthe same reference as the man from whom he heard it” [Kripke 1980:96]).Kripke’s causal-historical picture of how names refer is charitably read asa sociolinguistic picture, not a cognitive picture, of what makes it the casethat proper names refer to what they refer to (see the footnote in section3.4). There is of course a cognitive story to tell about the usage of names aswell, but Kripke holds that the community’s role is constitutive for referenceof proper names, whereas the cognitive level is not constitutive. The ideathat there is a mental state in the mind of every competent speaker thatfixes the reference of their uses of names, and that the conditional claims aresomehow influenced by this state, is hence not consistent with the pictureof reference presented in Naming and necessity.

Now Kripke may of course be wrong in this conclusion (we will not seekto settle that question here). But there is nothing odd with arguing forthe thesis put forward by Kripke by the use of conditional claims. If suchclaims were caused by the semantic system they aim to elucidate, Kripke’sreasoning would simply be incoherent. Therefore, the analogy between ac-ceptability comments and counterfactual comments fails.

Secondly: Another consideration that puts the idea that the psycholog-ical picture of acceptability claims can be carried over to conditional claimsin doubt, is that different psychological processes seem to be involved in dif-ferent evaluations. Following Williamson [Williamson, 2007], I suggest thatwe distinguish between non-inferential and inferential conditionals, and thatthe processes involved in an evaluation of a conditional is dependent on thecontent of the conditional.

The following conditional is rather non-inferential than inferential. Imag-ine that you are in the mountains and that a rock crashes down the slopeand that you come to know the following:11

(17) If the bush had not been there, the rock would have ended in thelake.

It could be the case that you arrived at a true evaluation of this conditionalby first assuming the antecedent, then unconsciously added premises derivedfrom an internalized folk-physics and and then arrived at the consequent bythe use of some internalized derivation rules. In such a case, the truth ofthe conditional would be arrived at inferentially. But, as Williamson pointsout, such a story is unlikely, since if we have something like a folk-physicsinternalized, it is probably not spelled out in propositional form but ratherembodied [Williamson 2007:145]. The evaluation of counterfactuals such as17 should therefore not be thought of as inferential (in a deductive sense).

11Example (17), (18) and (19) are taken from [Williamson, 2007]

15

We rather seem to apply an expectation-forming capacity in order to evaluatethis type of conditional [c.f. Williamson 2007:142-153].

In other cases, reasoning (deductive inference) is clearly involved in as-sessments of conditionals:

(18) If twelve people had come to the party, more than eleven peoplewould have come to the party.

In this case it is clear that we can deduce the consequent on the basis of sup-posing the antecedent (with some help from basic knowledge of arithmetics).This case is clearly inferential, and it does not involve the expectation-forming capacity used in the evaluation of (17).

Now consider this sentence:

(19) If twelve people had come to the party, would it have been a largeparty?

Exactly how to describe the processes involved in evaluations of conditionalssuch as (19) is controversial, and a discussion of that would lead us off track.But clearly, neither expectation or knowledge of arithmetics suffice in orderto evaluate it.

So there is no specific mental state that causes (or influences) every con-ditional claim (and the judgements such claims express). Conditionals maybe evaluated inferentially and non-inferentially, and the processes at workin the evaluation seem to be dependent on the content of the conditional.

*More on the psychology of conditionals here*

3.4.2 Advantages and disadvantages with conditional claims

On the approach we have outlined above, conditional claims do not functionas evidence for an internalized semantic or pragmatic system. A commonfunction of conditional claims in foundational semantics is rather to statewhat is obvious (which, in the right context, may have non-obvious conse-quences). Kripke’s conditionals seem to have just that function: they areof course not obvious beforehand, but once stated, they put Russell’s andFrege’s descriptivism in doubt. But we should not forget that non-inferentialclaims are subject-sensitive, in the sense that their status as obvious truthsvaries as a function of the subject or perhaps the assessor (as we pointed outin section 2). Now this may not be a problem, since the conditional may beobviously true to everyone. Grice’s statements concerning non-verbal jointactivities is probably of that kind: I guess that it is obvious to all of us thatpeople expect that their interlocutors do not hand them a good book whenthey are mixing ingredients for a cake. If we couldn’t make any assump-tions of that kind, inquiries would not get off the ground but be stuck inpointless data gathering. But in other cases, evaluations of non-inferentialconditionals may vary.

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There are some experimental results in the literature that suggest thatthe Kripke’s evaluations of conditionals are not obvious to everyone, andthat the cultural background of the informant influences the informant’sassessment of the claims presented in (3.4) [Machery et al., 2004], [Mallonet al., 2009].

We will not review Machery et al’s experiments here, but just point out adifference between their methodology and the empirical investigations of ac-ceptability judgements mentioned in section 3.3.1. In Machery et al’s inves-tigations, informants are asked to evaluate so-called ’Kripke cases’, and, aswe have established above, such ’cases’ have the form of conditional claims.Such experiments thus gives us data on speakers expectations, since theconditionals under discussion are evaluated by the use of expectation form-ing capacities. This is an important difference between conditional claimsand acceptability claims. Given that the informant doesn’t lie and that sheunderstands the point of the judgement, an acceptability judgement is true,since it reports on a subjective state that is accessible for the informant(but as we have seen above, such claims may be held to not be reliableindicators of reactions or feelings of unacceptability in all contexts). Butthe informants’ expectations of how they would use language may of coursenot match their actual use of language. People may in general be reliablein such judgements, but what I want to point out here is the difference inprinciple between conditional claims and acceptability claims.

The worry that theory of the practice and the practice itself may differis discussed in [Marti, 2009]. Marti argues that there are many areas inwhich theory and practice differ in important respects. For instance, if wewant to test whether or not people in fact use modus tollens in reasoning,we should not ask them to reflect on a valid argument with the structure ofmodus tollens. Rather, we should engage them in spontaneous reasoning andconstruct our theory on the basis of actual reasoning processes (that are notcontaminated by theoretical biases) [Marti 2009:45]. Moreover, differencesin theory but similarity in actual practice is shown in the philosophicaltradition: Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill most likely used names insame sort of way, but they had radically different theories about the usage[Marti 2009:45].

I have nothing against experiments on expectations of use, since I takesuch expectations to be reasonably reliable. Marti’s suggestion is anyhowinteresting, since it indicates how we could broaden the empirical basis.Marti sketches a proposal of an experiment:

Here is a proposal for a test which, although not decisive, is,I contend, a step in the right direction: in order to determinewhether users of names in the two experimental groups use ordon’t use ’Godel’ according to what is predicted by the causal-historical picture, it would be best if the end of the story, and

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the question asked, went along the following lines:

One day, the fraud is exposed, and John exclaims: ’Today is asad day: we have found out that Godel was a thief and a liar’.

What do you think about John’s reaction? [Marti 2009:47]

Another proposal of an experiment that could be carried out is presented in[Ichikawa et al., 2011]. Ichikawa et al. show a passage from Kripke in whichan empirical prediction is made [Ichikawa et al. 2011:45; Kripke 1980:86n]:

If I mistake Jones for Smith, I may refer (in an appropriatesense) to Jones when I say that Smith is raking the leaves [. . . ]Similarly, if I erroneously think that Aristotle wrote such-and-such passage, I may perhaps sometimes use ’Aristotle’ to refer tothe actual author of the passage [. . . ] In both cases, I will with-draw my original statement, and my original use of the name, ifapprised of the facts. [Kripke 1980:86n]

As Ichikawa et al. argue, what Kripke says here could very well be checkedexperimentally. We may for instance compare if people in different parts ofthe world think that John should withdraw a previous statement in which“Godel” is used or not. Or we might check if people in different parts ofthe world really do withdraw their claims in which “Godel” is used whenapprised of the facts. So, here we have a suggestion of how an experimentcould be carried out: let us check how people in fact use proper names whenconfronted with new facts about the person who they assumed that theyreferred to (of course such an experiment does not have to be modeled onKripkes Godel/Smith-case, whose importance in Kripke’s overall argumentis questioned by Ichikawa et al.).

3.4.3 Conditionals in the debate on the semantics/pragmatics-interface

In their discussion of quantifier domain restriction, Stanley and Szabo (hence-forth “SS”) consider a variant of the so-called ’syntactic ellipsis approach’,where domain restriction is claimed to be the result of a covert indexicalexpression (e.g. the sentence “Every bottle is empty” is an ellipsis of “Ev-ery bottle which is one of those is empty”).12 In order to put that view indoubt, SS make the following claim:

12Stanley&Szabo’s aim in ‘On quantifier domain restriction’ [Stanley and Szabo, 2000] isto determine the locus of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction and to provide a(descriptive) semantics for it. They argue against syntactic approaches (according to whichdomain restriction is a result of covert linguistic expressions) and pragmatic approaches(according to which domain restriction should be treated along the lines of conversationalimplicatures). After a critical discussion of syntactic and pragmatic approaches theysuggest a semantic approach where a contextual parameter is placed in the logical formof quantified sentences. More specifically, they suggest that the terminal node that is

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Suppose that Max is not a fully competent speaker of English.In fact, he started to learn the language only a few weeks ago.As it happens, the first lessons in his language book focus onprepositions and the use of ‘every’ and ‘some’ as well as a fewbasic nouns like ‘bottle’. The use of demonstrative pronouns isnot discussed until unit 7 and Max is not there yet. We believethat under these circumstances Max could grasp the propositionmeant by Lisa in the normal way.

I take this passage to be a conditional statement, where the antecedentis supposed to be true, although the conditional is not expressed by a sen-tence but buy a text. The same conditional may, however, be expressed bya (molecular) sentence:“If Max is not a fully competent speaker of English,and he started to learn the language only a few weeks ago, and. . . , thenMax could grasp the proposition meant by Lisa in the normal way”. In thereformulation, I have substituted “if” for “suppose that”13, replaced the fullstops with conjunctions, and substituted “then” for “under these circum-stances”. I have also left out “we believe that”, since I take the statementof believing a conditional to be distinct from the conditional believed.

The understanding of this passage as a conditional claim is coherent withits role in the argument. The account under discussion claims that readingsof restricted universal quantification is a result of the addition of a covertindexical. This view is taken by SS, as I understand them, to entail that if aspeaker manages to get domain restricted readings of quantified expressions,the speaker is competent with indexical expressions. But in the antecedentof the conditional in the passage above, one of the predicates of Max is thathe is not a competent speaker – he manages despite that to get a domainrestricted reading. So it can’t be the case that a speaker is capable of domainrestriction only if she is competent with indexicals. The syntactic approachis therefore false.

immediately dominated by the label N in the noun phrase (i.e. the noun in the nounphrase) is co-habited by a function and an argument variable. The argument variabletakes a contextual value, and the function, which is also contextually specified, applied tothis argument yields a domain of quantification that intersects with the denotation of thenoun on its literal reading. The following tree structure illustrates the logical form of thesentence ’Every man runs’, on this proposal:

S

NP

DET

every

N

<man,f(i)>

VP

V

runs13In Merriam-Webster Online, one of the meanings of “if” is claimed to be “supposition”,

and this warrants our substitution. See http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/if.

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The reasoning here may be clarified by some formalizations. As I un-derstand this passage, SS claim that the syntactic approach entails thatthe following formula is true, where ’U’ stands for ’understands domain re-striction’ and ’C’ means ’is a competent speaker’: ∀x[U(x)→C(x)], whichentails ¬∃x[U(x)∧¬C(x)]. The conditional claim could then be thought ofas follows (where ’a’ refers to Max and ’P’ means ’has just started to learnEnglish a few weeks ago and has no knowledge of demonstratives in English’:[[P(a)∧¬C(a)]→U(a)]. SS assume that the antecedent and the consequentis true, and in that case it entails ∃x[U(x)∧¬C(x)].

The claim here is non-inferential, in the sense that the conditional itselfis not supported or backed up by any evidence (and there is no explicitinference that shows how the supposition of the antecedent warrants theconsequent). SS therefore seem to use their expectation-forming capacitiesrather than reasoning in order to evaluate the conditional as true. Now itis of course an empirical question if a person like Max could or could notunderstand domain restricted quantification, and the claim could be verifiedor falsified by empirical investigation, in principle quite easily. We could justcheck if a non-native speaker of, say, Swedish (why not Stanley himself)could understand the sentence “Varje flaska ar tom”14 (’Every bottle isempty’) in a domain restricted manner, without knowing the meaning of“de dar” (’those’). But the claim is taken to be obvious, and therefore nosupporting evidence is shown. (If the argument is relevant or not is anotherquestion.)

The following passage also has a conditional structure:

Suppose Lisa went to the store to buy some bottles to give toMax, who wanted to fill them with his home-made beer. Maxasks whether the bottles Lisa bought need to be emptied first.In response, Lisa utters (1):

(1) Every bottle is empty.

In this situation, we can plausibly assume that by uttering (1)Lisa conveyed to Max the proposition that every bottle she justbought is empty. She succeeded in conveying this by relying,in part, on the context of her utterance. [Stanley and Szabo2000:231]

This passage is followed by a counterfactual claim. SS state that if Lisa hadbeen more explicit, she could have used the sentence ’Every bottle I justbought is empty’. This claim, which is made in order to illustrate the dif-ferences between syntactic, pragmatic and semantic approaches, has a clear

14The underlying sentence would then be “Varje flaska som ar en av de dar ar tom”,which sounds quite strange in Swedish, even though it is not strictly speaking unaccept-able.

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conditional (counterfactual) structure. But does the illustration of Lisa’sand Max’s readings (i.e. what Lisa conveyed to Max) also have a condi-tional structure? It is certainly possible to read it like that. The passage inthe quote above begins by “suppose that”, which could be taken as express-ing antecedence, and the part which may be understood as the consequentbegins by ”in this situation” (compare with “under these circumstances” inthe paragraph above). And as in the conditional discussed above, there isneither explicit inference nor evidence for the truth of the claim. So SS usestheir expectation-forming capacities here as well.

There is, however, an alternative understanding accessible for these pas-sages. One could read the passages as describing a type of situation, and thestatements of Max’s and Lisa’s readings (or Max’s understanding of domainrestricted quantification) as characterizations of the minds of the interlocu-tors in the situation (or in any situation of a kind like the one described).This is, as I take it, the methodology used by Grice [Grice, 1975], who be-gins by explicating concepts, goes on by characterizing dialogues, ends upwith a hypothesis of how people reason in linguistic interchanges, and thenapplies this reasoning path to idealized examples of dialogues. But eventhough such an understanding is possible here, the conditional reading isbetter motivated by the actual formulation. The expression ‘Suppose that’is conventionally used in order to highlight antecedence, and ‘In this situa-tion’ and ‘under these circumstances’ are also conventionally used to markconsequence (just like ’in that case’).

3.5 Readings

Discussion of readings is a quite common practice in discussions of composi-tional analyses (which include both syntax and semantics). A clear exampleof a discussion that is to a large extent dependent on readings is the discus-sion of the de re and de dicto readings that belief sentences are commonlyassumed to give rise to. Consider the following example:15

(20) Mary believes that a republican will win.

In [Dowty et al., 1981], the readings of the sentence in (20) is described asfollows:

On the de re reading, this example asserts that [Mary] believesof some particular person (who is in fact Republican) that hewill win. On the de dicto reading it asserts that [Mary’s] beliefis simply that, regardless of who the winner turns out to be, itwill be a Republican. [Dowty et al., 1981:167]

In [Dowty et al., 1981] the following example is discussed as well:

15I have substituted ’John’ for ’Mary’ for reasons of gender bias. On the whole, I havetherefore hopefully avoided a slight touch of sexism in the examples in this section.

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(21) John believes that Miss America is bald.

Dowty et al. claim the following about the sentence:

It has been noted by many linguists as well as philosophers thatbelief sentences like our example John believes that Miss Amer-ica is bald can be understood in two ways [. . . ]. This examplemight be understood to assert that John has a belief about acertain individual who happens to be Miss America at the “cur-rent” index, the belief being that this individual is bald. Onthis reading the example could describe a true belief of John’sabout a certain person even if John does not know that she isMiss America, does not know any name for that individual, oris mistaken about her name. Among philosophers this readingis commonly referred to as the “de re” reading [. . . ]. The otherreading, called the de dicto reading, is the one in which Johnbelieves that whoever is named by the name Miss America isbald, and on this reading the sentence can describe a belief ofJohn’s even though he does not know which individual the nameactually denotes and thus there is no specific person of whom hecan be said to hold any such belief. [Dowty, et al. 1981:165-166]

Discussions of quantifier scope phenomena are also to a large extent depen-dent on readings. Consider the following examples:

(22) Some publisher offended every linguist.

(23) Somebody offended everybody.

In [Heim and Kratzer, 1998], we find the following claims of the sentence in(22):

[(22)] has two readings. On one reading, the claim is that thereis at least one publisher who offended every linguist. The otherreading is compatible with a situation where every linguist wasoffended by a possibly different publisher. [Heim and Kratzer1998:178]

And they claim the following of (23):

[(23)] has two readings, not only one. It can mean that there issomebody who offended everybody. Or else it can mean that foreverybody there is somebody that s/he offended.

3.5.1 Typical forms

Schematically, the form of a typical reading claim is as follows: The sentenceA is understood/claims/asserts that Q’, where A and Q are both natural

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language sentences. There is clearly a similarity between this type of claimand statements of truth-conditions (e.g.’“A” is true iff A’), in the sensethat Q may be taken as a meta-language statement. But, importantly, thetruth-predicate does not occur in reading claims, and therefore I suggestthat we do not treat these claims as informal variants of truth-conditionalstatements. Q rather functions as a paraphrase: it makes explicit how thesentence is, or may be, understood by the person who utters the claim bythe use of other words that express the same content as A.

There are variants of this claim, where an attribute modifies the noun’reading’: readings may be taken to be ’likely’, ’natural’, ’possible’, ’salient’and ’intuitive’. I will exemplify these types of reading claim in the discussionof the role of readings in the discussion of the semantics/pragmatics-interfacebelow.

3.5.2 Psychological implications (very sketchy)

Reading claims implicate a meta-semantic capacity different from the ca-pacity involved in acceptability claims. We suggested above that suchclaims implicate two psychological mechanisms: a context-sensitive parserand a monitoring function. They also implicate other mechanisms than theexpectiation-forming capacity used in the evaluation of some (but not all)conditionals. These mechanisms are not sufficient for reading claims, sincereading claims concern how a sentence is understood and not how it soundsor how if feels or what is expected given a supposed state of affairs. Thisclaim presupposes that semantic content is expressed by the sentence, and,in addition, that the semantic content is possible to grasp by reflection onhow the sentence is understood. In addition to a context-sensitive parserand a monitoring function, this type of claim implicates a (mentally im-plemented) interpretation function, which assigns meaning to sentences.16

Such claims therefore bear resemblance to the acceptability claims, sincejudgements of readings seem to stand in a causal relation to the systemthey are intended to elucidate.

*More about this in forthcoming versions*

3.5.3 Advantages and disadvantages with reading claims

*This section is not written yet*

16We only have to assume that sentences have meanings in order to make this typeof claim rational. Sentences are often taken to get their meanings from the meanings oftheir parts and the syntactic mode of combination of the parts, but this assumption is notwarranted by the reading claims, but is in need of a different type of justification.

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3.5.4 Reading claims in the discussion of the semantics/pragmaticsinterface

Reading claims play a central role in the discussion of the semantics/pragmatics-interface. The reading claims in this debate are often modified with differentattributes. I will therefore exemplify central reading claims, as well as dif-ferent attributive modifications of them, below.

In Stanley and Szabo’s (henceforth “SS”) semantic account of quantifierdomain restriction [Stanley and Szabo, 2000], we find three different typesof reading claims. Some readings are claimed to be likely, some are claimedto be possible, and some are claimed to be intuitive. The attributes usedby SS provide us with a preliminary classification of subtypes of readings.However, we will see below that it is not clear what an ’intuitive’ reading issupposed to be, and I will therefore discuss what it means for a reading tobe ’intuitive’, and in what way the classification of readings as ’intuitive’ isdifferent from the classification of readings as ’possible’ and ’likely’ .

The claims concerning likely readings are not playing a part in theirargument for a semantic account of domain restriction, but it plays a crucialrole in their description of the problem. In the beginning of the article, wefind the following passage (discussed in section 3.4.3 but repeated below forconvenience):

Suppose Lisa went to the store to buy some bottles to give toMax, who wanted to fill them with his home-made beer. Maxasks whether the bottles Lisa bought need to be emptied first.In response, Lisa utters (1):

(1) Every bottle is empty.

In this situation, we can plausibly assume that by uttering (1)Lisa conveyed to Max the proposition that every bottle she justbought is empty. She succeeded in conveying this by relying,in part, on the context of her utterance. [Stanley and Szabo2000:231]

As I understand this paragraph, SS claim that there is a reading that Lisa islikely to intend to communicate, and a reading (the same one) that Max islikely to take Lisa as intending to communicate. The example is charitablyread as an idealized example of an ordinary use of a quantified sentence,and the claims about how it is (likely) read by the participants in the toy-dialogue are intended to be obvious. Note that the passage may be taken tohave a conditional structure, and I will therefore come back to this passagebelow.

SS appeal to possible readings in their discussion of the following exam-ple:

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(24) Every sailor waved to every sailor.

The claim is that it is possible to interpret (an utterance of) this sentenceas conveying that every sailor on the ship waved to every sailor on the shore(and not that that reading is likely or mandatory).

So, some readings are likely and others are possible. There is no reasonto not take these statements as face value, and it should be clear to anyonewhat it means to say that a reading is ‘likely’ or ‘possible’. But it is notclear to me what it means to say that a reading is ’intuitive’.

The claims concerning intuitive readings play a key role in SS’s discus-sion of pragmatic approaches to quantifier domain restriction. Consider thefollowing examples of quantified contexts (first discussed in [Cooper, 1993]):

(25) In most of John’s classes, he fails exactly three Frenchmen.

(26) In every room in John’s house, every bottle is in the corner.

SS claim here is that the ’intuitive reading’ of (25) is that John fails exactlythree Frenchmen in most of his classes (and that the most intuitive readingof 26 is that every bottle in every room in John’s house is in the corner).What is meant by ’intuitive’ is not spelled out. Our analysis of ’intuitive’in section 2 above, where we concluded that ’intuitive’ indicates a lack ofexplicit inference, is perhaps a little bit helpful, but it is not sufficient if wewant ’intuitive’ to contrast with ’likely’ or ’possible’ readings, which alsoarise without explicit inferences or thought-processes (even if the possiblereadings may demand some cognitive effort).

There is of course a possibility that the expression “intuitive” is a termwith no significance in SS’s text. But since such an error-theoretic conclu-sion would yield several instances of an expression in the text semanticallymeaningless and pragmatically pointless, I suggest that we put that possi-bility aside, since such an analysis is not charitable.

So what is the meaning or the function of “intuitive” here? Well, thereis a difference between the readings of (25) and (26) on the one hand, and“likely” and “possible” readings above on the other hand. The differenceis that, in the cases of quantified contexts exemplified here, there simplyis no other reading accessible than the one proposed by SS; the reading ismandatory, as far as I can see. So why call them ’intuitive readings’ andnot simply ’readings’? Well, perhaps statements of ’readings’ sounds toself-assure. It is of course always possible, at least in an epistemic sense,that someone could come up with an unforeseen reading that seemed to beinaccessible at a certain point in the course of investigation. Therefore, somehedging is always in order.

Now “Intuitively” may function as a hedge, as we see in the followingexample (presented as (7) above and repeated as (27) below) [c.f. Cappelen2012:37]:

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(27) A: Why does the dollar get stronger even though the US stock markethas collapsed?B: Intuitively, it is because investors expect stock markets aroundthe world to follow the US market.

As Cappelen notes, the use of “Intuitively” in utterances like the one abovedoes not contribute to the main point of the utterance but is rather used forindicating the speaker’s level of confidence. A problem with applying thehedge analysis to the formulation under discussion may be that we here arediscussing an attribute and not an adverbial. But, if we can hedge sentences,there is, a priori no reason to assume that we could not hedge nouns as well.In fact, SS seem to do just that. The most charitable understanding of SS’suse of ’intuitive’ that I can come up with is hence that “intuitive” is usedas a hedge, just like the use of “Intuitively” in (27).

In conclusion, the attribute ’intuitive’ plays a different role from ’pos-sible’ and ’likely’, in Stanley and Szabo’s account. The latter attributesexpress a kind of prediction: ‘likely’ signals a statistical prediction con-cerning what readings people in general get, whereas ’possible’ signals aprediction concerning what readings people could get, perhaps after think-ing really hard. ’Intuitive’ expresses no such prediction, but rather signalsuncertainty in order to lower the level of confidence expressed by the asser-tion.

*Recanati on salient readings here*

3.6 Truth-judgment of utterance in situation

The last type of non-inferential claim to be considered is here labelled ’truth-judgement of utterance in situation’. This type of claim is quite common inthe discussion of the semantics/pragmatics interface. In Stanley an Szabo’sdiscussion of Bach’s claim that indefinites are not in need of domain restric-tion (and that universal quantification should be treated in a syntacticallyparallel way to existential quantification) [Bach, 1994], SS present a descrip-tion of a situation in which a speaker utters the following sentence:

(28) A book is on the table.

They then claim that the utterance of the sentence “seems false”, if thereare books of the wrong kind on the denoted table:

Consider the following example. John and Bill are printing copiesof Naming and necessity in their printing shop. There are thou-sands of copies of this book lying around. Lunch break is ap-proaching and John complaints to Bill that he wants to read abook, since he needs to get his mind off Naming and Necessity.Bill believes that there are several detective novels lying on the

26

table beyond him, and, on this basis, utters [(28)]. If, however,all there are on the table behind Bill are more stacks of Namingand necessity, then this occurrence of [(28)] seems false. Intu-itively, this is because [(28)], relative to this context quantifiesover (copies of) books other than Naming and necessity. Ex-tending the domain in such a way that it would include copies ofNaming and necessity would result in a different interpretationfor [(28)] and under this interpretation it would express a truth.

This ’case’ shows, according to SS, that existentially quantified sentencesalso are in need of domain restriction, in some cases.

And in order to put accounts that posit a covert location argument in thelogical form of weather reports in doubt, Recanati presents ’the weathermancase’:

I can imagine a situation in which rain has become extremely rareand important, and rain detectors have been disposed all overthe territory (whatever the territory–possibly the whole Earth).In the imagined scenario, each detector triggers an alarm bell inthe Monitoring Room when it detects rain. There is a single bell;the location of the triggering detector is indicated by a light ona board in the Monitoring Room. After weeks of total drought,the bell eventually rings in the Monitoring Room. Hearing it, theweatherman on duty in the adjacent room shouts: ’It’s raining!’His utterance is true, iff it is raining (at the time of utterance)in some place or other. [Recanati 2012:81]

In short, the idea is that the standard view entails that every utterance of’It’s raining’ communicates a specific location. But here we have a case inwhich there is no specific location communicated, so the standard view ismistaken (or at least not sufficient).

3.6.1 Typical form

The structure of this claim is as follows: the author describes a situationS in which a speaker utters a sentence P. The author then claims thatP is true/false (with or without adverbial modifications such as “strictlyspeaking” or “intuitively”) in (or of) the situation described.

This type of claim is clearly associated with a common form of reasoningin several areas of philosophy, which is often labelled as ’the method of cases’or ’(the presentation of a) thought-experiment’ (c.f. [Williamson, 2007],[Malmgren, 2011], and [Cappelen, 2012]). However, the different types ofform of reasoning that are subsumed under these labels may or may nothave a shared discourse function and they may or may not have the sameform. I will not take a stance on this issue here, but just point out that I am

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only interested in discussing a specific type of claim, i.e. the type of claimwith the form illustrated in the preceding paragraph.

3.6.2 The claim in the debate on the semantics/pragmatics-interface

This type of claim occurs in Stanley and Szabo’s account of quantifier do-main restriction, and it plays an important role in Recanati’s analysis ofwhether reports, as we saw above. Below I will first discuss a claim of thistype in SS’s discussion. Since Cappelen has recently taken a skeptical stancetowards the assumption that non-inferential claims (or ’intuitions’) play animportant role in current philosophy [Cappelen, 2012], we will also motivateour classification of this claim as non-inferential in detail.17. After the illus-tration of SS’s use of this claim, we will turn to Recanati’s discussion of the’weatherman case’.

Stanley and Szabo’s (henceforth SS) claim concerns the following sentence,as we noted above in section 3.6:

(28) A book is on the table.

The following claim is a truth-judgement of utterance in situation, and Iwill begin by discussing it in detail below:

If, however, all there are on the table behind Bill are more stacksof Naming and necessity, then this occurrence of [(28)] seemsfalse

I will then turn to the last statement in the quoted paragraph:

Extending the domain in such a way that it would include copiesof Naming and necessity would result in a different interpretationfor [(28)] and under this interpretation it would express a truth.

This remark is important, for reasons that will be clarified later on. I willthen discuss the following statement:

Intuitively, this is because [(28)], relative to this context quanti-fies over (copies of) books other than Naming and necessity.

This claim is important, since it clarifies the role of the claim that the useof [(28] ’seems false’ in SS’s discussion.

17Note that Cappelen does not discuss the role of intuition or non-inferentiality inthe debate on the semantics/pragmatics-interface. One could, however, try to generalizeCappelen’s conclusions to this debate. I will show below that such a generalization is notcorrect.

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So, consider the claim that the occurrence of the sentence “seems false”.One could argue that “seems false” should here be taken to indicate a dis-tinction between the sentence seeming to be false and its being false (ortrue). But it is not clear what it would mean for a sentence to be false, incontrast to seem false, in this case. There are cases, where such a distinctionis in order. In a discussion of the Muller-Lyer optical illusion, one could say,I suppose, that it seems false that the arrows have the same length (althoughit is not false). And “seem” can also be used for hedging a claim in orderto express uncertainty about the facts (you can, for example, add “It seemsto be the case that” in the front of a claim in order to express uncertaintyabout the facts). So one could say, for instance, that a claim about, say,how tall giraffes are on average “seems false”, and by the use of “seems”indicate uncertainty of the facts of the matter.

But the use of “seems false” in the passage above is different from theusages illustrated above. In the passage quoted above, the role of the truth-judgement of the sentence is to determine whether or not existential quan-tification in English is restricted. So, first, there is no appeal to perception(as in the Muller-Lyer case above). The use of “seem” cannot express un-certainty about the facts either, since there simply are no other facts in theexample than those described. The facts of the situation are stipulated.Therefore, “seems false” must mean something else here. I take the use of“seems” here to express a hedge, but since it is not a hedge about what thefacts are, it should rather be read as a hedge concerning the application ofthe falsity-predicate itself.

Let us now move on to the claim “Extending the domain. . . ” . Theclaim here is, as I take it, that if the context somehow made salient a largerdomain of quantification, the utterance would be true (or would “express atruth”, as SS put it). We are not shown that this is the case, but it is perhapstaken to be obvious that if the context had made salient the domain of, say,every book in the world, the utterance of “A book is on the table”, wouldhave been true. Note that this is likely intended to be a counterfactual claim(even if it is not formulated in as a clear case of a counterfactual sentence):the situation as described is taken to be the actual world, and by presentinga counterfactual SS claim that if the situation were different, the utterancewould have a different truth-value. However, the counterfactual structure ofthis claim does not seem to be important in this case; SS could just the samehave constructed/stipulated two different contexts, where different domainsof quantification were salient, and they could then have made two truth-judgements (one of each utterance/context-pair). I will come back to whythis remark is important later on.

Summing up, if context makes salient a smaller domain of quantification,an existentially quantified sentence may “seem false”, but if context makessalient a larger domain, an utterance of the same sentence may “express atruth”. The difference in formulation indicates that the truth-claim is here

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asserted with more confidence than the falsity claim: it is taken as obviousthat an utterance of “A book is on the table” is true (in the constructedcontext) if the salient domain is very large, but it is not taken to be asobvious that it is false if the salient domain is of a smaller kind.

The falsity-claim is followed by the following claim: ’Intuitively, this isbecause [(28)], relative to this context quantifies over (copies of) books otherthan Naming and necessity ’. I take ’intuitively’ to signal hedging here, sincethe hedge function is (presumably) the most common function of a fronteduse of ’Intuitively’. So “Intuitively” in the claim under discussion func-tions as a hedge. The hedged sentence (“this is because [(28)], relative tothis context quantifies over (copies of) books other than Naming and neces-sity”) consists of two clauses conjoined by the connective ’because’. I findit straightforwardly natural to read the sentence as presenting something tobe explained (the falsity claim, expressed by “this is”) and an explanation(“[(28)], relative to this context quantifies over (copies of) books other thanNaming and necessity”). But is there anyway of ruling out the possibilitythat what we have here is a premise and a conclusion, where the claim aboutdomain restriction is a premise and the falsity claim is a conclusion? Thisway of conceiving of several so-called ’thought experiments’ is put forwardin [Cappelen, 2012]. I have not chosen to label the passage under discussionhere as a ’thought-experiment’, but I suppose that the passage could becategorized in that way by some theorists (and that this passage is method-ologically closely connected to the cases discussed by Cappelen). Considerthe following statement:18

[S]uppose an author makes a claim c about a thought-experiment.Suppose that author goes on to present various principles andmaybe even a theoretical framework T that implies (or increasesthe likelihood of) c. I’m suggesting that we should take suchauthors to be using T as arguments for c, and this again as in-dicating that c is not treated as having Rock status. There is,however, another option: maybe the author is engaging in a kindof abductive reasoning, where, in effect, c provides evidence forT. She is, speaking loosely, arguing that since T is the best ex-planation of c, we should endorse T. So the direction of supportgoes from c to T, not the other way around. If this is what’s go-ing on, the presence of T in the paper gives us no good reason tothink that c doesn’t have the alleged Rock status (it is becausec has Rock status that it can serve as the starting point of anabductive inference). [Cappelen 2012:122]

18In Cappelen’s terminology, a judgement has “Rock status” if the judgement is non-inferential (i.e. not warranted by inferences from other premises), non-experiential (i.e.not warranted by appeals to perception or memory) and evidence recalcitrant (i.e. notdependent on good arguments) [Cappelen 2012:112].

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Now one could argue that, in the sentence under discussion, the claim con-cerning domain restriction is a premise, and the conclusion is that the ut-terance (therefore) “seems false”. In that case, we would have the directionof reasoning that Cappelen suggests. But, first, this understanding is notcoherent with other claims in the text, and, second, it is inconsistent withcontemporary theories of the semantics/pragmatics of ’because’.

Why is Cappelen’s direction not coherent with other claims in the text?Well, the role of the claim is to set Bach’s claim that interpretations ofindefinites are not domain restricted in doubt (which plays an importantrole in Bach’s argument against semantic approaches to domain restrictionof quantifiers in English). This could be done, I suppose, by showing thatwe from the assumption that there is domain restriction could infer the rightconclusions (it would follow, in that case, that ’A book is on the table’ isfalse in some but not all contexts including books and tables). But, in thepassage following the quote above, SS point out that Bach perhaps wouldnot agree with their judgement that the use of “A book is on the table”in the situation described is false. Moreover, as we have already observed,the claim is that the utterance “seems false” (not that it is false). But ifwe simply stipulate that indefinites are domain restricted, it is obvious thatthere are uses of indefinites that are false with respect to a smaller domainbut true with respect to a larger. It is therefore very unclear why SS would,in that case, hedge their falsity claim, or why they would claim that Bachperhaps wouldn’t agree with them.

And, as is pointed out in e.g. [Schneider, Forthcoming], ’because’ is oftenused in explanations, where ’P because Q’ expresses that Q is an explanation(or a part of an explanation) of P, and not the other way around (if Q isan explanation of P, P is not an explanation of Q). As Schneider argues,the use of ’because’ in explanations is neither the only use nor the primaryuse of ’because’, but it is clear that the explanatory use is one of its centralfunctions [Schnieder, Fortcoming: 3-9].19 But there is, however, a use of’because’ that could warrant the reading that the claim concerning domainrestriction is a premise and the falsity claim a conclusion. Consider thefollowing sentence:

(29) The thermometer is rising, because it is getting warmer.

’Because’ in the sentence in (29) could be used evidentially, and expressthat the (proposition expressed by) the subordinated clause is evidence (or

19Schneider argues that ’because’ is ambiguous between an evidential reading and anon-evidential reading. The non-evidential reading is given an ’Aristotelean’ analysisin terms of “objective priority”. This relation of priority can be of different kinds (e.g.causal priority, priority in essence, or priority concerning what things consist of)[Schneider,Forthcoming:11]. I will here stay neutral on the precise semantics of ’because’; the onlyclaim about ’because’ that my reasoning depends on above is that there is an ambiguitybetween the evidential ’because’ and the use of ’because’ that occurs in explanations.

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a reason) for the (proposition expressed by) the matrix clause. As Schniedermentions [Forthcoming:17], it is commonly assumed that the evidential usedoes neither allow cleft-constructions (an evidential use of ’P because Q’ can-not be reformulated as ’That Q is why P’) nor ’because of’-transformations(an evidential use of ’P because Q’ cannot be reformulated as ’P becauseof Q’). But since the sentence under discussion here could be reformulatedby the use of a cleft-construction or a ’because of’-transformation, the useof ’because’ should here not be taken as evidential. Consider the followingreformulations of the original sentence (I have left out “Intuitively”, sincethat expression is not relevant here):

(30) This is because [(28)], relative to this context quantifies over (copiesof) books other than Naming and necessity.(ORIGINAL)

(31) That 11, relative to this context quantifies over (copies of) booksother than Naming and necessity, is why it seems false.(CLEFT-CONSTRUCTION)

(32) This is because of 11’s quantification over (copies of) books otherthan Naming and necessity.(’BECAUSE OF’-TRANSFORMATION)

I have substituted “it seems false” for “This is” in the first reformulation,and this is warranted on information-structural grounds (“this is” wouldsound strange, since it occurs in the end of the sentence instead of in thebeginning). The reformulations above are acceptable, even if they may beobjectionable on stylistic grounds, and they do not give rise to other readingsthan the one in the original.

Furthermore, if you can apply a wide-scope negation of a ’because’-sentence, this indicates that the use of ’because’ is not evidential. A negationof a sentence ’P because Q’, where ’because’ is evidential, is rather expressedby ’That Q doesn’t mean that P’ [Schneider, Forthcoming:17]. But considerthe following examples, where the sentence is negated:

(33) This is because [(28)], relative to this context quantifies over (copiesof) books other than Naming and necessity.(ORIGINAL)

(34) It is not the case that this is because (28), relative to this contextquantifies over (copies of) books other than Naming and necessity.

(35) # That (28), relative to this context quantifies over (copies of) booksother than Naming and necessity, doesn’t mean that (the judgement)is false.

The sentence in (34) sounds fine, and as I read it, it is a straightforwardnegation of SS’s claim. But (35) sounds a bit odd, and if it had occurred

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in SS’s text, it would be difficult to understand in what way it was relevantfor the overall discussion.

So, in conclusion, the falsity-claim (that the utterance of (28) “seemsfalse”) is a non-inferential claim, and the claim about domain restrictionis put forward as an explanation for that claim. Importantly, neither thefalsity-claim nor the theoretical proposal is here taken to be obvious, butput forward with different kinds of hedges. The upshot of the passage istherefore that Bach’s proposal is set in doubt rather than being refuted.This is coherent with the role of the passage in the overall argument; thearguments here are not the main arguments in SS’s overall objection againstpragmatic approaches (the readings of sentences in quantified contexts playa more central role).

*Discussion of Recanati’s weatherman case here*

3.6.3 Psychological implications (very sketchy)

Before we address the psychological implications of the type of claim underdiscussion, we should point out a philosophical presupposition: it seems tome that this type of claim presupposes some sort of correspondence theoryof truth (in contrast to deflationist accounts).

We won’t go into truth-theories in any detail here, but, roughly, theoriesin the correspondence family hold that true propositions (or true statements)correspond, in some sense of “correspond”, to facts, or situations/situationtypes, or whatever you favor as truth-makers in the world. Some sentences,or uses of them, thus represent the world as being in a certain way. Secondly,this type of claim presupposes that for some, but perhaps not all, sentencesit is not straightforwardly obvious what they (or uses of them) correspondto (if they are true); what the representational properties of an utterance ofa sentence are is taken to be a question that can be settled by investigation.So, for some sentences, we cannot not just read off the structure of thefact they may correspond to from their overt syntactic structure. Thesetwo assumptions, taken together, may be taken to motivate the method ofconstructing a situation (where all facts are stipulated), and consider thequestion of whether or not a use of a sentence S is true (of the facts) in thatsituation.20

The psychological capacities implicated by the use of this type of claimis closely connected to the capacities discussed in relation to reading claimsin section 3.5.2 above. There clearly is a meta-semantic capacity involved,which allows us to reflect on the meaning. But this capacity is not enough.We also need to postulate an additional mental function: the function ofapplying meanings to situations in order to yield a truth-value judgement.

20See [Glanzburg, 2013] for a recent overview of truth-theories.

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*More about this later on (including a discussion of Experimental prag-matics)*

3.6.4 Advantages and disadvantages with this type of claim

*Not written yet*

4 Methodological skepticism: Semantic minimal-ism

*Discussion of the criticism of ’truth-judgement of utterance in situation’ in[Borg, 2012]*

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