Abstract
I will sketch a semantics of saying reports within the expression theory of meaning I have developed and its extension to indexicals. After summarizing my general theory, I apply it to indexical descriptions like the cat, ideo-reflexive descriptions like the idea of grass or the thought that grass is green, and auto-reflexive descriptions like the word ‘grass’ or the sentence ‘grass is green.’ I argue that ideo-reflexive and auto-reflexive descriptions express specific indexical concepts with presentational determinants. Saying reports are classified as locutionary or illocutionary, and the latter as opaque or transparent. On the semantics I sketch, the locutionary reports are auto-reflexive and the illocutionary are ideo-reflexive. I explain how this theory differs from the familiar views of Frege and Davidson. The final section reviews the limited extent to which pragmatic factors determine the truth conditions of saying reports, and the large variety of non-literal uses. What people mean when they use a saying report commonly differs from what they say. Most if not all of the common forms of implicature can be observed. I argue that Carston’s “pragmatic intrusion” theory and Cappelen & Lepore’s “speech act pluralism” are unfounded.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Lyons (1977: 660) observed that when ‘he’ is anaphoric in sentences like (1), it is uttered with normal stress. When deictic or demonstrative, it has heavier contrastive stress. The terms ‘anaphoric,’ ‘demonstrative,’ and ‘deictic’ are common in linguistics, but there is little consensus on their usage. There are many ways of classifying the great variety of indexical uses.
- 3.
I focus on ‘I’ in Davis (2013a).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Cf. Quine 1940: §2.7; Strawson 1950: 14–5; Sellars 1954; Donnellan 1968, 1977; Geach 1975: 198; Chastain 1975; Peacocke 1975: 208; Evans 1977, 1980; Grice 1981; Wettstein 1981; Salmon 1982; Barwise and Perry 1983: 152–3; Soames 1986; Bach 1987: §6.4; Recanati 1989a: 232–3, b: 314; Neale 1990: §3.7; Schiffer 1995: 114–6; Bezuidenhout 1997; Reimer 1998a; b; Powell 2001: 80ff. See also Braun (1994), who focuses on the complex demonstrative ‘that F.’
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
‘Idea of φ’ is a general term, however, when ‘idea’ means “conception” rather than “thought part.” There are many ideas of justice, in this sense.
- 12.
‘ρi’ and ‘φi’ need restrictions for reasons indicated in Sect. 9.
- 13.
- 14.
We sometimes say “quote-unquote” before using a word or sentence, but not when the word is auto-reflexive. “Quote-unquote” functions like scare quotes or direct quotes. We sometimes use gestures called “air quotes” when using words auto-reflexively in speech, but not very often.
- 15.
The parallel for ‘expression’ implies that “the expression ‘Chicago’” is ambiguous in English, most commonly referring to the name of a city, but also possibly referring to that name in quotes.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
A syntactic difference with no evident semantic significance is that a comma after ‘said’ is optional in (a), but prohibited after ‘said’ in (b). Commas are needed in illocutionary reports when ‘said’ follows or interrupts the subordinate clause, as in Boeing makes planes, John said or Boeing, John said, makes planes.
- 19.
- 20.
By ‘ambiguous’ in this paper I mean semantically rather than pragmatically ambiguous: the sentence (or other expression) has two or more meanings in the language. A sentence is pragmatically ambiguous if speakers conventionally use it to mean something other than what the sentence means, as when it has a generalized implicature. Pragmatic ambiguities are the subject of Sect. 10.
- 21.
Cf. Capone (this volume, p. 59), who says that “in some cases (rare though they are) a direct report sounds very much like an indirect report.” This does not mean that “the border between direct and indirect reports has been corroded” (Capone, this volume, p. 60), only that the syntactic difference between quote-clauses and that-clauses is not a perfectly reliable indicator of whether a locutionary or illocutionary saying is meant on a given occasion. I submit that once one gives up the notion that quotation marks entail a quotation, and carefully examines what sentences of the form S says “p” are used to express, one will find that illocutionary uses are very common, and as conventional as locutionary uses.
- 22.
Kaplan (1977: 511) credited this observation to Carnap. Kaplan mistakenly assumed, however, that a sentence like (a) mentions the quoted words. As an illocutionary report, (19)(a) is not like Simpson uttered ‘I killed him.’ If the quoted expression in (7) were simply auto-reflexive, the pronouns in (7) could not have referents or differ in what antecedents they can have.
- 23.
Cf. Giorgi (this volume).
- 24.
I argue at length against the various attempts of Millians to argue that the opaque interpretations are implicatures rather than senses in Davis (2005: §§11.4–11.6).
- 25.
The spoken directions offered by Google maps and other devices are borderline cases we need not address here.
- 26.
‘S said that p at t’ is to mean “S said at t that p,” not “S said that p-at-t.”
- 27.
Grice (1969: 87) was idiosyncratic in taking ‘S says that p’ to entail ‘S means that p.’ So he was forced in the case of metaphorical usage to say that the speaker “makes as if to say,” and would deny that the speaker even makes as if to say in the case of verbal slips. Cf. Neale 1992: 523–4, 549; Bach 2001: 17; 2010: 134; Davis 2007; Carston 2010: 220.
- 28.
- 29.
Capone (2008: 1022–3) makes a similar claim about belief reports with appositives or parenthetical assertions. But unlike (b), Lois believes that the Caped Crusader (Batman) is in Gotham has only one interpretation, on which the parenthetical intrusion expresses what the speaker rather than Lois believes about the Caped Crusader.
- 30.
- 31.
See Capone (2010) for a discussion of the role played by the situation of utterance in shaping the obligations of the reporter.
- 32.
The technical term ‘implicature’ was introduced and defined by Grice (1975: 24). See also Neale (1992: 519, 528); Davis (2014, forthcoming a).
- 33.
Capone (this volume: §6 and §7) notes a number of quotation practices that involve loose use: “purging” quotations of irrelevant grammatical errors, which serves to avoid distracting the reader and embarrassing the subject; summarizing as opposed to paraphrasing; and avoiding taboo words. In each case the result is a locutionary report that is not strictly speaking true but is close enough to being true for the purposes of the context.
- 34.
I discuss sense-generalist and pragmatic explicature theories at greater length in Davis (2013b), and discuss numerical predicates in Davis (forthcoming b: §7.3).
- 35.
See Davis (1998: 6–7; 2014: §2; forthcoming a: §4).
- 36.
Cf. Cappelen and Lepore’s (2005: 202) French woman case.
- 37.
In another appearance of the moronic clown, Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 200) claim that “B said that the guy we (in such and such contexts) tend to describe as a moronic clown wrote a book.” This report would be literally true on the transparent interpretation.
- 38.
- 39.
Contrast Bach (1994: 140).
- 40.
- 41.
I thank Alessandro Capone for many helpful comments on early drafts, and for editing this volume and inviting me to contribute.
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Davis, W.A. (2016). A Theory of Saying Reports. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_15
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