Availability to intuitions

Recanati (1989b/91; 1993, 245-250) makes a strong psychological claim about the level of ‘w hat is said’. The claim is that we have conscious access to/awareness of this level. This distinguishes it from linguistic meaning (logical form), to which we do not have such access. Furthermore, we have distinct conscious representations for both ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’, and we are consciously aware of their distinctness. These claims are at odds with the apparent assumption of Grice and others who take the minimal view of ‘what is said’ and siphon off all pragmatically derived meaning to implicature; they seem to assume that ‘what is said’ is not accessible to hearers’ consciousness, and that all that we can be conscious of is the overall ‘what is com m unicated’ as some kind o f undifferentiated mass. The two views are illustrated below: (A) is the general Gricean view; (B) is the one that Recanati argues for.

(A) what is communicated

what is said what is conversationally implicated

sentence meaning contextual ingredients of what is said

(B)

w hat is communicated:

(top level,

consciously accessible)

what is said conversational implicatures

sub-doxastic level: sentence meaning

contextual ingredients of what is said

Recanati’s aim is to use this property of conscious access as a criterion for distinguishing ‘what is said’ from ‘what is implicated’. A need for some means of making this distinction has been felt by those who have taken the underdeterminacy principle seriously, because its obvious implication is that when some aspect o f utterance meaning is derived pragmatically, that meaning could be either an implicature or part of what is said. The old clearcut view that if it’s pragmatic then it’s an implicature cannot hold. Here is the criterion that Recanati proposes:

A vailability P rin cip le: In deciding whether a pragmatically determined aspect of utterance meaning is part of what is said, that is, in making a decision concerning what is said, we should always try to preserve our pre-theoretic intuitions on the matter.

(Recanati 1989b, 310)

This principle seems to gain some support from recent experiments by Gibbs & Moise (1997). They presented their subjects with sentences such as those in (53a) and (54a) below, and asked them to select "the paraphrase which best reflects what speakers said in uttering these sentences"; the choice was either between a minimal paraphrase (a G ricean'w hat is said), as in the (b) cases, and an enriched what is said (explicature) as in (c), or between an enriched what is said and an implicature, as in (d):

(53) a. Robert broke a finger last night.

immediately prior to the time of utterance.

c. Robert broke his own finger on the night immediately prior to the time of utterance.

d. Robert can’t play in the game today.

(54) a. It will take us some time to get there.

b. The time between our departure and arrival is unspecified. c. It will take us a fairly long time to reach our destination. d. W e w on’t have to go shopping on the way.

Across a range of experimental conditions, the vast majority of subjects favoured the enriched paraphrases ((c) in the two cases above). The different experimental arrangements included one which involved preliminary training in the Gricean saying/implicating distinction, another in which a piece of text preceding the utterance made the implicature highly manifest, and another in which the context provided was quite favourable to the minimal paraphrase. Their results appear to confirm that speakers have reasonably clear intuitions about what is said, that they take it to be quite richly pragmatically augmented, and that they can distinguish it from assumptions that the speaker merely implicates.

Although I agree that intuitions will always play a role in getting an analysis going, I doubt that they can be relied on to help much in disputed cases. The variety of views that have been expressed in the literature about the level at which, for example, the pragmatically derived relations between conjuncts, or the differences between a referential and an attributive understanding of definite descriptions, should be captured, reflects the variability of intuitions. There are at least three views on each of these issues, represented in the following literature: Grice (1981), Levinson (1988), Carston (1988, 1990), Recanati (1993), Bach (1994a, 1994b), Rouchota (1992, 1994); those bearing on the relations expressed in a/i(f-conjunctions are discussed in the next chapter.

H ere’s another type of case. Recanati (1996) discusses an utterance of ‘Claire has a good hand’, where the speaker is watching a poker game: ‘If I [the speaker] am mistaken and Claire is not a constituent of the situation (if she is not among the players of the game I am watching, contrary to what I believe), my utterance is not true - even

if Claire is playing poker in some other part of the city and has a good hand there’ (Recanati 1996, 446). But intuitions about this are ju st not consistent. Many semanticists would take it that what the speaker has said is in fact true despite it being very different from what he intended to say. For instance, misuses of definite descriptions, similar to this misuse of a name, have given rise to a great variety of intuitions among philosophers. Consider a referential use of a definite description such as ’Sm ith’s m urderer’, in the utterance ’Smith’s murderer is insane’, used to refer to the man behaving oddly in the dock of the courtroom: suppose he (Perkins) is not in fact Sm ith’s murderer and he is not in fact insane (just extremely nervous), but the actual murderer, who is still at large, is indeed insane. Some people (Russell, Grice, Neale, Larson & Segal) would say that this utterance does express a true proposition; it is not the one that the speaker meant/intended (that is pragmatically derived and so is an implicature), but it is what is strictly and literally said. Others (including Donnellan and Recanati) would claim that the proposition expressed here is ’Perkins is insane’, which is false. O f course, you might say that each of these writers has his or her own theoretical axe to grind, and so does not reflect the sort of pretheoretical intuitions Recanati is appealing to. Unfortunately, though, my experience of consulting students new to pragmatics is that their pretheoretical intuitions are just as varied.

Recanati’s Availability Principle seems inert in a great many cases, and there is a good reason for this, in my view. The assumption on which the principle depends (shown in diagram B above), that we have no access to sentence meaning, is incorrect. W e are not completely bereft of intuitions about what the words in our language mean, so that in fact we have two sorts of intuitions about ‘what is said’: intuitions about what proposition the speaker intended to express and intuitions about what the sentence she used means (or, at least, about the meaning of some of the lexical items in it). In certain sorts of problematic case, such as those just discussed, these two sets of intuitions pull in opposite directions. This is especially evident in cases of nonliteralness; for instance, metaphors such as ‘John is a lion’. Some would say that the one robust intuition we have about this is that it is false, a categorial falsehood in fact, and that it is recognition of this that leads us as hearers-processors to look for the intended implications, which can be potentially true, or at least not ruled out as false on grounds of sortal incorrectness. That’s essentially how metaphors work, according to

Grice and others.

However, Recanati (1995)’s position on nonliteralness entails that ’John is a lion’ can be true and so does the move to an explicit level treatment of metaphor within relevance theory (see chapter 6). Informal inquiries into pretheoretic intuitions indicate that judgem ents are mixed here too. Even in a clearly delineated context (say, John has just performed some act of great courage and nobility), some will judge that an utterance of ’John is a lion’ is true (because he is brave, etc.), some will judge that it is false (because he is a human being). Everyone might be prepared to agree that what the speaker meant is that John has a quality of majestic courage, and that we pragmatically infer this from her use of the word ’lion’, and yet intuitions appear to be divided about w hether this is what the speaker can be said to have said or not. The same goes for the cases o f ’C laire’ and ’Sm ith’s murderer’ above. So while intuitions about what a speaker has said are worth consideration, they have to be regarded as unclear data, judgem ents which might have more than one possible source; they cannot provide a criterion for distinguishing what is said from what is implicated. I return briefly to this interesting matter of intuitions and their sources in chapter 6.

To conclude this section, the Travis/Recanati concept of ‘what is said’, as inevitably involving extensive pragmatic input, is very close to the relevance-theoretic view, though there the terms are ‘proposition expressed’ and ‘explicature’. Given that the term ‘what is said’ is essentially Grice’s term and so is most salient in people’s minds as a minimal unenriched prepositional form, I think Travis and Recanati would do well to find some other term(s), perhaps ‘proposition expressed’ and ‘explicature’.