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               Meaning, Reference & Modality.  Assignment 4
                           Andreas van Cranenburgh, 0440949
                              Friday, December 18, 2009

Exercise 1

1) That is the man who swam the channel twice on one day

This sentence is what Strawson calls an identification statement,
which presupposes that the hearer already knows that a person like the
one identified exists. This presupposition is only part of Strawson's
theory, whereas the other theories trivialize such sentences to an "A
is A" tautology.

For Russell's theory "that" is difficult to deal with, whereas for
Strawson's theory it is natural to interpret "that" as it is being
used in an assertion with a supplied context.

Although the first "the" does specify a clear uniqueness condition
(swimming the channel twice on one day is quite a feat), the second
occurrence of "the" points to a specific channel by convention (ie.,
the British channel), not by description, which is a feature fitting
well with proposals which acknowledge the role of context.

Donnellan's proposal adds an extra dimension to this, distinguishing
between attributive and referential descriptions. While the other
proposals would have difficulty accounting for a reaction such as:

 - No he only swam the channel once, a storm came.

Donnellan's proposal deals with this by stating that the description
is referential, instead of attributive, which is the standard
Russelian way for a description to function. Thus his proposal makes a
distinction between semantic and speaker reference, which the other
proposals neglect and dismiss as some extra-linguistic phenomenon.


2) Put your garbage here

The fact that this is an imperative sentence is already a problem for
all of the proposals. There is a lot of information in the message
that is not part of the sentence. For example, the message is not
intended to convey that the Napolitan mafia is welcome to use this
location for their purposes; the message is meant for people from the
neighborhood with a reasonable amount of appropriately packaged
garbage.

Furthermore the sentence is very indexical. It has no subject, so it
is unclear whose garbage is talked about. The word `here', curiously,
refers to itself, just like the ``you are here'' signs on maps. These
aspects make the sentence a good example arguing for the context
sensitivity of Strawson's proposal.  Relying on the context is
preferrable to assuming that there exists an exact and complete
eternal logical form hidden somewhere, as assumed by Russell's
proposal, which would need to specify such details as precisely how
much garbage is reasonable to put there, where exactly it is
permissible to put the garbage (demarcating the borderline between
`here' and `not here'), etc. Such attention to detail is possible (and
needed) in mathematics, but not feasible for everyday language. Humans
make sense of this sentence without considering these details, so an
account of semantics should not insist on filling them in.


Exercise 2
 
3) George sorted red apples, and Susan did too.

Susan must have done whichever it was that George did, because `too'
implies a similarity is at play, not just that a similar description
holds. This seems to imply that what Susan did depends on a context
where George did something, which favors a contextualist reading.

On the other hand, I would consider the sentence infelicitous if Susan
did a different kind of red apple sorting than George, so it
contributes to the intuitions of the truth-conditions, which makes it
a semantic issue. Even so, one can always come up with a situation or
with a longer utterance to make the sentence correct after all, e.g.,
George's apple sorting work might be contrasted with Susan's apple
shopping as a joke: 

  George sorted red apples, and Susan did too, in a way.

What it comes down to is that there is a strong default reading where
Susan and George did exactly the same thing, but this is accompanied
by an endless stream of possible exceptions and special situations
when the sentence is used in a suitable context, due to the elastic
nature of language.



Exercise 3

4) The last five years every MSc student interviewed an ILLC
   researcher because the Core Logic professor told him to do so, and
   the next five years this will unfortunately be the same.

Dekker's problem is that the sentence may receive a mixed reading,
with 'an ILLC researcher' being read both specifically and
non-specifically, e.g., in the last five years the students each
interviewed some ILLC researcher of their choice, and in the next five
years the Core Logic professor might specify a specific ILLC
researcher everyone has to interview. The problem here is that the
choice of reading upsets the neatly defined division of labor of
structure versus pragmatics, because ruling out such readings requires
that pragmatics interferes with logical form.

Recanati-Stanley discussion:
The minimalists will surely claim that this phenomena can be accounted
for with structural explanations (for example, a quantifier ambiguity
might introduce an internal referent so that its reading can be
re-used later). Contextualists might prefer an account in terms of the
context supplying a plausible reading (e.g., there being too many
students for the specific reading). I think neither of these explain
the issue. I think the mixed reading is blocked by being so strange
and unlikely as to require a very explicit and elaborate description,
whereas the sentence as it is now is simple and thus goes with a
simple interpretation. So the issue is resolved neither by structure
nor context, but by shortcuts in interpretation. I also think the
focus on scope ambiguities in general to be an artefact and bias of
logical languages, so the issue is somewhat artificial; I suppose this
makes me a contextualist.
 

Exercise 4

Humpty Dumpty:
 - Russell-Strawson & Donnellan-Kripke debate: 
   Humpty-Dumpty would prefer Donnellan's and Strawson's side, because
   they are more ambiguous, giving him more freedom `to be master.' 
 - Recanati-Stanley debate: Humpty-Dumpty is squarely in the
   contextualist camp, because he is basically arguing for completely
   free pragmatic enrichment and arbitrary sense-transfer.

Alice:
Alice would be, mutatis mutandis, in the opposite camps, opting for
the more literal and eternal interpretations, if only to win the
discussion, perhaps.

Humpty Dumpty is sort of right that every word can mean what you want
it to mean, consider pathological cases such as poetry where it is
licensed to do all kinds of strange things. One variable that
constrains this is how difficult it is to recover the intended
meaning. What should be kept in mind is that normally one actually
wants to communicate effectively, and because of this we rely on
conventions which form the path of least resistence. Another thing to
keep in mind is that the arbitrariness of language is limited. While
single words have a primary, arbitrary meaning, such as `bottle'
meaning BOTTLE, most of language consists of derived meanings such as
compound terms and metaphors that are motivated somehow by appealing
to human imagination. The `amount' of meaning also has to remain
tractable, it is not possible to claim some new word stands for the
collected works of Shakespeare and hope to impress.

Humpty-dumpty and Alice's discussion is ultimately not at all about
language, but about him not being co-operative.

I think in the end all proposals and formalisms break down somewhere,
and that makes it perhaps counterproductive to look for problematic
example sentences, especially when they are not particularly realistic
and only meant as a `nice knockdown argument.' It is better to measure
success using naturalistic data, starting with more common language
and leaving obscure ambiguities for later.  Much of the philosophy of
language literature seems to take too narrow a view of language and
ignore how much ambiguity is a cognitive phenomenon, dealt with
throughout subjective experience, not purely through linguistic
mechanism.


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