Asking for properties and asking for predicates; the distinction between Calling questions and Describing

questions

Suppose I want to find out what something is called. Although I might say What is that called?, I might also say What is that? In this last case, several things might be meant, and care would have to be taken that, when I say What is that?, I will be understood to be asking what it is called. Whichever way the question is asked, what is desired to be produced is a bit of language. This point is easy to miss, due to an assumption, commonly made, concerning the semantic structures of sentence-types. It is commonly held that, in the case of sentence-types that are used to express singular propositions, the subject refers to an item and the predicate to a property. There are various doctrines as to what an item is, what a property is, and how one cashes in the idea that an item has a property, but accounts generally agree that if the item has the property, the sentence, or a statement making use of it, counts as true. But this picture can lead to the conclusion that, when a wh-expression ‘covers’ the position of a predicate, as it does in What is that? (which, recall, is of the form ‘[what [that is ]]’), a property is always being asked for, not a predicate. That is not correct, as the current example shows: when a question such as What is that? is used to ask someone what he calls a thing, as it quite often is, a predicate is being asked for, not a property.

Let’s look at some cases. An adult French speaker learning English might hold up a screwdriver and ask What is this? Now in a perfectly straightforward sense, most adults know what screwdrivers are, and screwdrivers are common in France. What French speakers learning English might well not know is what screwdrivers are called in English, and to alleviate that ignorance, one of them might well hold up a screwdriver and say What is this? The point can be made within a single language as well. Suppose that you hold up an odd-looking tool from my collection and say What is this? And suppose that you intend to be

taken as asking me what I call that thing, and suppose further that I correctly divine your intentions and respond: That is a croze. The first thing to see is that, as the question is intended and as I have taken it, mine is a perfectly adequate response. On hearing the answer, you might not know what the tool is used for or what sort of person uses the tool—if, for example, you were unfamiliar with the predicate ‘croze’—but that is not what you were asking for. You wanted to know what I call the thing, and I have told you. I did my job completely, and performed what Austin termed a Calling speech-act.

Now suppose that your curiosity goes further, and you go on to ask What is a croze? ([what [a croze is ]]). (Or suppose, exasperated, you say again What is that?) Here it is unlikely that you are asking what I call a croze. I just told you that. I call a croze a croze. Rather, you now wish to know what the thing that you now know I call a croze is. And taking you that way, I might answer: A croze is a cooper’s tool. Now here my goal is not primarily to produce a predicate, but rather to produce a property. I produce a property by uttering a predicate, and there are related properties that I could have produced by saying other things: I could have said A croze cuts the groove for the head of a barrel. Both responses are appropriate because, when you ask What is a croze?, you do not know what property the term ‘(is a) croze’ refers to, and want to find out. You want now to get past the verbiage and find out what the thing is. In my answer, I perform what Austin termed a Describing speech-act.⁶

So Calling and Describing are distinct assertive speech-acts that one may be performing when answering Calling and Describing questions. The speaker who asks What is that? may be angling either for a predicate or the property that it denotes; one sentence-type serves for both purposes. The distinction between Calling and Describing is perhaps easiest to see when we want to find out someone’s name. If you ask me of the strange pet I own Who is that? and I respond That’s Teddy, you cannot ask me to further unpack the name I have provided you with. That names, like predicates, are unpackable is something that Frege believed, and Mill did not. In common discourse, we treat them as not unpackable, and perhaps, from a certain point of view, this is an argument for Mill. In any event, in the case at hand, you ask for the name, I give it to you, and that is that. You may want to know more about Teddy, however, and, if you do, you may ask the Describing question What’s Teddy? ([what [Teddy is ]]).

One last case. Suppose we are gazing at a flower in normal lighting conditions, both of us having normal vision, and I say to you What color is it? ([what color [it is ]]). You might respond It is vermilion. Plainly, I have again asked a Calling question, and you, answering appropriately, have performed a Calling. I have

⁶ Here we touch the complicated question what speech-act defining is, and how defining relates to Austin’s quartet. If I say If something is a croze, it is used to cut the groove for the head of a barrel, I describe crozes. If I say The word ‘croze’ refers to tools that cut the groove for the head of a barrel, I define ‘croze’. Both respond to the question What is a croze? Or is it that we may ask both What is a

Properties and Predicates 153 asked you to produce a bit of language. I could not, without misleading, ask you to produce the color itself (by whatever means), since I have that, being able to see it clearly. What I do not have, and what you correctly take me not to have, is the name of the color. Notice that if instead you reply It is a bright showy red, you have failed me. I can see it is a bright showy red; what I want to know is the name of the color. I don’t need you to Describe, I need you to Call. On the other hand, suppose we are discussing a flower that grows in Argentina that I have never seen. In this case, I might ask What color is it? to ask for the property, not a bit of language, a property that may be provided by name (‘vermilion’), or by description (‘a bright showy red’).

It has been my doctrine that ignorance is a lack, and that, when questioning, one displays incompleteness either in the sentence-type chosen or in the performing of the speech-act in which the sentence-type is used. Open questions may be asked using sentence-types that display ignorance of predicates, and open questions may be asked by using sentence-types that display ignorance of properties. Let’s now briefly revisit confirmation questions. Confirmation questions reveal incompleteness in their performance, and, at least sometimes, the completion requires the utterance of a predicate. A natural question arises. How are open questions that ask for predicates different from confirmation questions that do? To address this, we may compare Calling questions to those confirmation questions in which the predicate is covered by a wh-expression. Consider the open Calling question What is that? and the similar confirmation repeat question That is what? Both, it would appear, may be asked to elicit the Calling of a bird. Both may be answered by producing a predicate, such as ‘a nuthatch’. Yet there are differences. If the confirmation question is a repeat question, the difference is obvious. In the open Calling case, the speaker asks by what predicate the item is called. In the confirmation repeat case, such as would occur when I have said That is (mumble), and you ask That is what?, you are asking what predicate I have just called the item; you are asking that the previous utterance be completed. Though their answers may be the same, these are, of course, quite different questions.

Interrogation scenarios provide a closer contrast. Suppose that the district attorney has me on the stand, and, pointing to a tool from my collection, says That is what? Here I have not previously said That is a croze, as in the case of the repeat question. And, just as in the case of the open Calling question What is that?, my interrogator wants me to produce a predicate, a predicate by which the item is called. How do these two cases differ? Only in terms of how the questioner presents herself. By asking What is that?, the speaker presents herself as not knowing what predicate applies to that. By asking That is what?, the speaker presents herself as unable to complete her utterance.⁷ Again, the answers are the same, but, also again, the questions are different.

⁷ In leading questions, this presentation is often pretense; as is often said, a good lawyer never asks a question she does not know the answer to.

To return to the main argument, there is good reason to believe that open Calling questions ask for pieces of language to be produced. It is wrong to think that it is always a property that one is angling for, not a predicate; to think this is to assume that we always ask Describing questions, and never Calling questions. In the next section, we will see that when a speaker asks for a bit of language, the wh-expression deployed does not always cover ‘predicate position’. In Austin’s minimal language, and in the croze and vermilion examples, this was true, but when more complicated sentence-types are taken on board, it becomes clear that the phenomenon is more extensive.