Abstract
When A utters a declarative sentence in a context to B, typically A can mean a proposition by the sentence, the sentence in context literally expresses a proposition (i.e. has a truth-condition), there are propositions A and B can agree the sentence literally expressed, and B can acquire knowledge from this testimonial exchange. In recent work on linguistic communication, each of these four platitudes has been challenged, and on the same basis: viz. on the ground that exactly which proposition the sentence expressed in context is not discernible given the information provided by the context. I argue that, even if this is true, there will be propositional parts of the proposition expressed by the sentence in context which can be identified and that, consequently, the partial understanding afforded by the existence of such identifiable parts undermines the soundness of the arguments against the platitudes.
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Notes
This is a partner paper of Davies (forthcoming), where I defend an analysis of indirect speech reports according to which they can be used to report parts of the content of the sentence whose utterance is being reported. My hope is that what we get when we combine the arguments of the present paper with the arguments of its partner is a view on which verbs of indirect speech are built with a semantics that allows us to report what people say in contexts whose content-sha** details we don’t know exhaustively.
One subset or other of these platitudes has been called ‘an intuitively compelling and fairly standard picture of communication’ (Abreu Zavaleta, 2019, p. 1), ‘a simple account of communication’ (Bowker, 2019a, 2019b, p. 1), ‘a view implicit in much of twentieth-century philosophy of language’ about linguistic communication (Buchanan, 2010, p. 340), and an assumption which is implicit in formulations of the conditions for testimonial knowledge or justification (Peet, 2016, p. 396).
We could show Donnie a series of possible dates, with different heights, and identify, to a certain degree of precision, where the threshold is, specified as such in the imperial or metric system. The fact that we can only ever do this to a certain degree of precision means we cannot find the exact threshold—perhaps there isn’t one. But regardless: we can always find the lower-bound of the threshold for the degree of precision attainable and be confident that a proposition with this threshold is a part of the total proposition expressed in the specified context. Given that the degree of precision is small enough, this proposition (the same as that described in the main text, but described in other terms) is very likely to be as informative as anyone in the context is going to need.
Abreu-Zavaleta momentarily asks us to assume that neither Anna nor John know what each other think about the heights of objects outside their current fields of vision. But he abandons this assumption to make a more general statement, which I’m reporting above. If we don’t abandon this assumption, the context discernible to Anna and John is reduced. This means they cannot identify as large a part of the total proposition Anna expressed as we can without the assumption. There still will be something. But it will be pretty uninformative. However, that seems to be a correct description of how people in such extreme circumstances would understand the utterance: as uninformative. The assumption is unusual and not reflective of the information ordinarily available to those communicating in a context.
I say “appear to be” or “seemingly” because Bowker aims to show that they are not in fact context-sensitive. Although that part of his discussion is not relevant to us here, I register this in order to acknowledge that Bowker is not trying to establish a conclusion that applies to all sentences.
Although I am very sympathetic to Bowker’s incredulousness about unknowable semantic properties, I’m not certain whether to accept it. There do appear to be some semantic properties that are unknowable. No one will ever know what the referent of “The last words of Amelia Earhart” is. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a referent. Perhaps a sentence in context can express a proposition that no one is ever in a position to completely grasp.
Though see (Peet, 2018a).
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the two referees for this journal who commented on this paper for hel** me to improve the paper markedly beyond the initial submission. Their comments and objections were on point and have been a great help in improving the thing. The research that led to this paper was supported by the European Union’s Regional Development Fund through the Centre of Excellence in Estonian Studies.
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Davies, A. Communicating in contextual ignorance. Synthese 199, 12385–12405 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03337-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03337-8