Abstract
In this chapter, I question the Gricean notion of ‘what is said’. I give an outline of arguments supporting the thesis that there are more pragmatic elements of the ‘what is said’ notion than just disambiguation and reference assignments. These additional elements are referred to as ‘pragmatic enrichments’ by neo-Griceans and are distinguished by them from conversational implicatures. I argue that such pragmatic enrichments are subject to the same strategic framework as strong pragmatic effects such as conversational implicatures.
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Notes
- 1.
‘It is possible to recover the proposition literally expressed by a well-formed declarative sentence (its semantic content) simply on the basis of knowledge of the lexical entries for the expressions involved and an understanding of the syntactic construction of that sentence, plus, for sentences which contain genuinely context-sensitive elements, a merely minimal conception of the context within which the sentence was produced.’ (Borg 2012).
- 2.
E. Borg was inspired by J. Fodor and his claims on the modularity of the human mind, see (Fodor 1983).
- 3.
This example works on the assumption that this sentence does not have a hidden, syntactical argument for the place. Recanati assumes this on the basis of the following example: imagine a crazy scientist that wants to control the amount of rain across the entire planet (or universe etc.) and places rain detectors all over its surface. Whenever it rains somewhere on Earth, a bell rings. If the scientists says ‘It is raining!’, he does not have in mind a concrete location on Earth (Recanati 2004).
- 4.
‘When the relevant parameter – the comparison class in the case of ‘small’ – is contextually provided rather than made explicit in the sentence, there is an obvious sense in which the parameter in question is not articulated: no word or morpheme in the sentence stands for it. But there is also a sense in which it is “articulated”. As we have seen, there is an expression in the sentence, namely the adjective “small” itself, that triggers the search for a relevant comparison class, just as an indexical triggers the search for an appropriate contextual value. A truly unarticulated constituent resulting from free enrichment must not even be articulated in that second, weaker sense. It must not result from an obligatory process of saturation or “completion”.’ (Recanati 2002).
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- 9.
‘The critique of the claim on the binding of the interpreting person proves that due to the semantics of language, legal language included, a textualist approach to language is impossible, as is the limitation of lawyers’ discretion proposed by textualists. Language is contextual by its very nature, which means that we cannot talk about the stability of meaning and the clarity of legal text because understanding a text is directly dependent on the context constituted by the features of the reader as well as the circumstances of reading. (…) The pragmatic nature of language is against the claim on the possibility of restricting lawyers’ discretion through the text, especially the influence of pragmatics on semantics – the influence of varying circumstances, in which we employ the same text, on the changes in the meaning.’ [translated by IS] (Matczak 2007).
- 10.
Worrall v. Commercial Banking Co of Sydney Ltd (1917) 24 CLR 28 at 32.
- 11.
Asgeirsson notes that Marmor has a similar example: ‘Suppose that a municipal regulation requires cafés and restaurants to have “clean and well-kept indoor restrooms”. Given the context of such a requirement, surely it would be implicated by this regulation that the restrooms must be actually open for the patrons to use.’ (Marmor 2014).
- 12.
This is a worry that also appears when one analyses Larry Solum’s definition of construction.
- 13.
You might wonder whether such a reformulation works with an externalist account of meaning. However, to be an externalist does not mean than one is precluded from speaking about legislative intentions. It does not mean claiming that judges cannot reconstruct legislative intentions. It means only to claim that legislative intentions are not reducible to a sum of the psychological mental states of the legislator. Thus, it is always possible to reconstruct the intention on the basis of context and conventions (for instance documents issued by legislative committees about the grounds of legislation, purposes of a statute, social campaigns etc.).
- 14.
In reconstructing the legislative intention, the judge uses some facts that are independent of him; for instance, the text of the statute, committee reports, social campaigns etc. In other words, there are serious constraints on the reconstruction of intentions. Imagine a situation in which 101 members of parliament vote on a statute. 50 endorse version A and 51 endorse version B (vote against version A). An internalist would have to say that it is not possible to state clearly what the legislative intention was. By contrast, an externalist would claim that the intention is the outcome of the rules of voting, namely version B.
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Skoczeń, I. (2019). Propositionalism and the Law. In: Implicatures within Legal Language. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 127. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12532-5_4
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