Abstract
This chapter discusses speakers’ conceptions of reported entities as evident in reporting practices. Pragmatic analyses will be offered to explain the diversity of permissible reporting practices. Several candidate theses on speakers’ conceptions of reported entities will be introduced. The possibility that there can be a unified analysis of direct and indirect reporting practices will be considered. Barriers to this unification will be discussed with an emphasis on the cognitive abilities speakers use in discerning the entities referred to in reporting contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
This confusion also arises from treating pure quotations as phenomena similar to other kinds of reporting practices. They ought to be treated as different in kind, despite the fact of their shared use of quotation marks; they are not operating according to the same linguistic mechanisms. See discussion in Sect. 3 for additional remarks.
- 2.
I do not include pure quotation on this list because it’s not a proper reporting practice. Instances of pure quotation involve using language to talk about a piece of language (e.g., “‘Bachelor’ has eight letters”) rather than to report an utterance.
- 3.
- 4.
There are interesting exceptions to this. Consider Ann Banfield’s (1973) examples:
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(i) Mary said yesterday that she would be in Chicago (by) now.
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*(ii) Mary said yesterday that she is in Chicago (by) now.
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- 5.
For a helpful overview, Maier (manuscript draft).
- 6.
- 7.
A note to explain the use of ‘linguistic’ and ‘non-linguistic’ here: the analysis of this paper is meant to hint at some metaphysical conclusions. These are that it might not be possible to exhaustively analyze the content of a report by linguistic means. The reporter might take her report to convey moods, feelings, or events in addition to linguistic content. Elsewhere I describe this as a problem of describing the individuation and containment conditions of language. Ben Caplan has suggested to me that I am actually interested in the individuation and containment conditions of content. In either case, the problem is how to determine the limits of the entity being reported and the extent to which it is linguistic (as ordinarily understood).
- 8.
Neither may be a report. I don’t know if singing can be reported. But it is interesting to consider whether it can be, and how.
- 9.
A discussion of this possibility can be found in Cappelen and Lepore (1997). Here they consider a view called MA: “an adequate semantic theory T for a language should assign p as the semantic content of a sentence S in L iff in uttering S a speaker says that p” (1997, 278). They conclude that the plurality of ways that speakers use the locution ‘said that’ do not pose a problem for semantic theory (although they appear to have changed their view on this by Cappelen and Lepore (2007)). Instead, they concur that there are probably an indefinite number of correct indirect reports for any given utterance. They do not defend a formal mechanism for generating or explaining this but suggest, reasonably, that it will be governed by pragmatic constraints. In this paper I use variations on some of their examples, in part in order to illustrate the same point that there are indefinitely many correct indirect reports for any given utterance, my goal differs. I think the indefinite number should prompt reflection about how to individuate and contain the content of the original utterance; I’m neutral as to whether this is a proper concern for semantic theory.
- 10.
The author would like to thank the Lewis & Clark Philosophy Department and the audience at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting (2014) for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I would especially like to thank Ben Caplan for his helpful comments at the APA meeting.
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Wieland, N. (2016). Reporting Practices and Reported Entities. 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_25
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