Abstract
In this paper I discuss a paper by Wedgwood in which he considers the possibility that Relevance Theory and Semantic Minimalism share at least some common resources. I maintain that the two theories have different aims and different orientations and that it might be fruitful to understand why Cappelen and Lepore stick to Semantic Minimalism despite the various objections levelled to their theory. I explore certain minimalist solutions along the lines of considerations by Michel Seymour, adopting Jaszczolt’s considerations on parsimony of levels of interpretation. I assume that logical forms contain certain variables which can be filled (or saturated) in context. As a final proposal, I broach the idea that pragmatic enrichment at the level of the predication can be avoided by resorting to a more complex enrichment at the level of the subject. I resort to ideas by Jaszczolt (specifically POL), to argue that parsimony considerations require that enrichments be operated at the level of subjects, if possible, thus avoiding a less parsimonious view according to which both subject and predicates should be enriched.
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Notes
- 1.
The addition of ‘in virtue of what is contributed…’ serves to overcome the objection that—unless such a modification is added—one could hold that all utterances of a sentence S shared content p but that p was pragmatically enriched in ways not traceable to standard indexicals.
Wayne Davis (personal communication) considers that this definition must be conjoined with another definition which C & L provide: Semantic Minimalism holds that “the semantic content of a sentence S is the proposition that all utterances of S express (when we adjust or keep stable the semantic values of the obvious context sensitive expressions)” (C & L 2005: 2).
- 2.
One should note that the shared content assumption is not shared by all versions of minimalism [for instance, it is rejected in Borg (2004)].
- 3.
One could cast doubt on my idea that there is a limit to what contextualist claims can say about meaning. Consider, for example, one of C & L’s examples: ‘John went to the gym’. Did he go to the vicinity of the gym? Did he enter the gym? Or suppose we grant that the example is so heavily context dependent and that we resolve for this type of context-dependence, by saying that on a plausible interpretation the speaker meant that John entered the gym. Is not there a limit to what context-dependence could say about this example? Should we continue the context-dependent claims and say that under-determination is there because we are still able to articulate the purpose of getting into the gym? Ok. Let us suppose that we also provide a purpose constituent: ‘John went to the gym to keep fit’. Let us suppose that we can go on providing implicit constituents until our imagination allows us to do so; is not there a limit to the number of constituents we can provide by free enrichment? My intuition is that it is not possible to add implicit constituents ad libitum, for one thing: the intentions of the speaker are finite and, thus, going on to add implicit constituents will not realistically model finite speaker’s intentions.
- 4.
Someone might say that this is something that C & L explicitly reject. Yet, as my quotation of Seymour makes clear, it is reasonable to suppose that C & L are compelled to accept that when linguistic structure mandates a gap, such a gap must be filled by saturation. Of course, it is possible to have different views of the various examples discussed here or by Stanley. However, in principle C & L cannot deny that, when there is a gap, it must be saturated; in the same way they cannot deny that a deictic requires saturation; a pronominal requires saturation: pro and PRO require semantic values, either assigned by the grammar or by the linguistic co-text (Rizzi 1982).
- 5.
Wayne Davis (personal communication) considers that we have two uses of ‘John is ready’. In one use, ‘John is ready’ is elliptical for ‘John is ready to go to dinner’. In this case, it is not plausible to think that ‘John is ready’ is elliptical for ‘John is ready for that’. Davis thinks that the sentence is elliptical for ‘John is ready for dinner’. He thinks we need to distinguish two views: (1) ‘ready’ is elliptical for phrases of the form ‘ready for NP’; (2) ‘ready’ means ‘ready for that’. On (2) ‘ready’ is indexical; on (1), it is not indexical and does not have a meaning although it is elliptical for phrases that do have a meaning. According to Davis, there would not be any independent meaning that ‘ready’ contributes to the meaning of ‘ready for dinner’ or ‘ready for that’.
My reply is that considerations of parsimony militate against Davis’s story. His story amounts to positing an ambiguity. At most we can grant an interpretative ambiguity. A common denominator could be ‘X is ready for x’ and allow that in some contexts x has the force of a demonstrative.
- 6.
Intentionality is a notion that makes sense of the content of speaker’s mind during the process of uttering a certain sentence as correlated to the utterance. Intentionality that follows the social path of interpretation is undispersed intentionality, according to Jaszczolt (2005). From Jaszczolt’s picture, we understand that the hearer is allowed to reconstruct the speaker’s intentions on the basis of conventions correlating sentences and meanings and conventions of use correlating utterances in context with interpretations. Speakers’ intentions and hearers’ reconstructed intentions should converge if both speaker and hearers follow the social path of intentionality.
- 7.
If am asked ‘What did you mean by saying S in context C?’, the set of my answers should be heavily restricted by the rules of language and the rules of use (the rules valid for the language game I am playing). I cannot reply by saying what might be convenient to me at that point of the interaction. The latitude in possible answers is severely restricted by the severe judgments of those who could reconstruct the meaning on the basis of what I said and the context in which I said that.
- 8.
It was pointed out to me that there is no way to make this equivalence statement syntactically correct. But this is exactly the point of the example, there can be no equivalence statement of this sort.
- 9.
As Zwicky and Sadock (1975: 14) say, “If the semantic representation of certain sentences lack specification of some piece of meaning, then the applicability of transformation to them cannot possibly depend on whether or not this piece of meaning is present. If a sentence is unspecified with respect to some distinction, this lack of specification must be preserved by every transformational operation. But if a sentence is ambiguous, then it is possible for a transformation to apply in some but not all, of the cases, so that the effect of the transformation is to eliminate one or more understandings of the sentence”. In our case, the crossed reading can be obtained because the underspecified interpretations are preserved by the transformation of conjunction reduction. Since under-specification is preserved, the crossed readings can obtain.
- 10.
My paper on ‘de se’ attitudes (Capone 2010b) shows that ‘de se’ constructions are cases of intrusive constructions à la Levinson. ‘De se beliefs’ like ‘John remembers being in Oxford’ are beliefs about the self—they have first-personal readings which are truth-conditionally different from ‘de re’ readings. In my paper I argued that the mode of presentation ‘I’ is implicit in de se attitudes and furnished through pragmatic intrusion. Pragmatic Intrusion is also instantiated in the internal dimension of PRO in ‘de se’ constructions. See also Lewis (1979).
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Appendices
Appendix 1
1.1 Abbreviations
In this paper, I make use of the following abbreviations:
- SM:
-
Semantic minimalism
- RT:
-
RT
- RC:
-
Radical contextualism
- MC:
-
Moderate contextualism
- C & L:
-
Cappelen and Lepore
Appendix 2
Wedgwood, in replying to my paper, was bothered by the fact that C & L allow pragmatic intrusion for indexicals but not for predicates. However, on my view that at least in some cases, predicates subcategorize for null prepositional phrases a limited form of pragmatic intrusion could be allowed for predicates as well. On my view, the asymmetry could be dissolved. Of course, this approach may be suitable for some cases; I am not saying that it should be suitable for all predicates. In fact, it is plausible that some forms of modulation à la Recanati should be accepted.
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Capone, A. (2013). Further Reflections on Semantic Minimalism: Reply to Wedgwood. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_19
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