Abstract
Capone and Bucca offer a socio-pragmatic analysis of President Trump’s utterance, ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’ to show that Trump illicitly tried to persuade Comey to drop the investigation of Flynn. I do not dispute that claim. Instead, I offer an overview of their argument—with one potential point of disagreement. Capone and Bucca assume, As pragmatic investigators typically do, that speakers have determinate intentions and reason in complex ways about how to realize those intentions. I suggest that speakers may not have determinate intentions and may not engage in the complex types of reasoning pragmatics typically attributes to them. I do not suggest that this point undercuts Capone and Bucca’s claims; rather, it suggests that their emphasis on a normative component in pragmatic analysis is correct, and suggests that a focus on the normative component supports their claims.
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Notes
- 1.
It is possible that Trump was requesting that Comey abandon the entire investigation and uttering ‘I hope you will let Flynn go’ as a disguised way of doing so. But there are other equally plausible possibilities. He might have been requesting exactly what he uttered—that Comey let Flynn go. Or, he might have been requesting the collection of propositions P, where P incudes the propositions that he cease to investigate Flynn, that he abandon the entire investigation, that he immediately declare Flynn innocent, that he make a show of continuing to investigate Flynn but charge him with any wrong doing, that he genuinely investigate Flynn but not charge him with any wrong doing—and so on. P is a collection with a fuzzy membership relation. To request a collection of propositions is to request that at least one of its members be made true. See Richard Warner, “Indirect Reports in the Interpretation of Contracts and Statutes: A Gricean Theory of Coordination and Common Knowledge,” in Further advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy, Vol. 1, eds. A. Capone, M. Carapezza, F. Lo Piparo). Cham, Springer, forthcoming. To request a fuzzy collection of propositions is to make a request that is indeterminate to the extent that membership in the collection is indeterminate. So far, I think I agree with Capone and Bucca observations in the opening paragraph of their article in which they emphasize the importance of both ‘I hope you will’ and ‘let Flynn go’ to determining whether Trump made a request as opposed to expressed a hope. Their point is well supported by Stephen Schiffer, Meaning, Chapter IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). Schiffer offers a detailed discussion of the factors that enter into determining what speech a speaker performs. I may disagree with Capone and Bucca on the question of whether there is enough evidence to decide whether Trump intended a specific proposition P. I do not think there is, and I think that is very often true in cases of speaker meaning, as I argue in “Indirect Reports in the Interpretation of Contracts and Statutes: A Gricean Theory of Coordination and Common Knowledge.” I interpret Capone and Bucca as more optimistic about narrowing the range of propositions Trump intended. In the text, I focus on other issues raised by the claim Trump was making a request.
- 2.
Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals, “The New York Review of Books, February 23, 1967.
- 3.
Personal communication.
- 4.
Stephen Schiffer, Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
- 5.
Citing Peter Strawson, Capone and Bucca attribute this view to Austin. It is not clear to me that Austin holds the view. The argument that he does rests on his claim that “the [illocutionary] act is constituted not by intention or fact, essentially but by convention.” As he explains elsewhere, “illocutionary act” is “conventional in the sense that at least it could be made explicit by the performative formula.” The “could be made” claim is consistent with thinking that one can warn, request, and the like without using explicit performatives. Austin can hold that one must invoke “conventions” to perform an illocutionary act without holding that one can only invoke them through explicit performatives. It is worth noting that he never explains what he means by “conventions.” In a remark that highlights this fact, he asks one to consider a quack dentist: “We can say ‘In inserting the plate he was practicing dentistry.’ There is a convention here just as in the warning case.” J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, (Urmson and Sbisà eds., 1976: 128, n. 1, emphasis added). Austin never explains what concept of ‘convention’ covers both professional activities and illocutionary acts. In general, How To Do Things With Words does not report the results of a completed program; it outlines a program to be carried out. It was a great loss when Austin’s untimely death in 1960 prevented him from carrying out the program.
- 6.
18 U.S.C. § 1503.
- 7.
Self-ascription is the critical challenge, and Trump’s denial would not be overturned by Jared Kushner’s claim that his father in law is crystal clear when issuing orders or requests is certainly not enough to meet this standard. Even if that is true, Trump can, like everyone else depart from what he usually does.
- 8.
For a much fuller discussion, see Richard Warner, “Incorrigibility,” in Howard Robinson (ed.) Objections to Physicalism, Oxford University Press, 1993, and Richard Warner, Facing Ourselves: Incorrigibility and the Mind-Body Problem, Jonathan Shear (ed.), Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem (Bradford Books, 1997).
- 9.
Alessandro Capone, “Presuppositions as conversational phenomena,” Lingua (2017), forthcoming.
- 10.
105 S.W. 777, 777 (1907).
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Litigants and courts do incur those costs in tort and criminal proceedings when the relevant cause of action requires that the alleged perpetrator have a certain mental state.
- 13.
Emphasis added.
- 14.
See See Richard Warner, “Indirect Reports in the Interpretation of Contracts and Statutes: A Gricean Theory of Coordination and Common Knowledge.
- 15.
See Paul Grice, Aspects Of Reason, (Richard Warner ed.) Oxford University Press, 2002; Paul Grice, “Meaning Revisited”, in Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press 1982; J. Robert Thompson, “Still Relevant: Grice’s Legacy in Psycholinguistics and Philosophy of Language,” Teorema 77 2007; Richard Grandy and Richard Warner, “Paul Grice,’ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; and Richard Warner, “Coordinating Meaning: Contractual Promises, Common Knowledge and Coordination in Speaker Meaning.”
- 16.
“Meaning Revisited.”
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Warner, R. (2019). A Reply to “I Hope You Will Let Flynn Go”. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_32
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