King (2014) and Bach (2001)

Despite taking his lead from Kaplan (1989a), King’s claim that speaker intentions should be included in the “semantically relevant context” is also not properly understood as an expansion of the formal context. For King, the “semantically relevant context” is

“whatever context plays a role in constitutively determining semantic values” (p. 233). Furthermore, King is primarily concerned with rebutting Bach’s (2001) arguments for excluding speaker intentions from the semantically relevant context, which itself is contrasted with the broad, epistemically relevant context.26 Here’s what Bach says about speaker intentions:

26 _{Bach (2001) writes,}

To say that content is determined in context is just to say that it can vary from context to context, whereas to say that it is determined by context is to say that it is a function of context. The latter occurs only when the sentence contains context-sensitive elements whose semantic values are functions of objective contextual parameters. This is context, i.e., contextual information, in the narrow, semantic sense (p. 29).

He is explicit that “The speaker’s communicative intention is distinct from and not part of the context of utterance” (p. 30). King’s initial response is that “the coordination account claims that the semantically relevant context is “bigger”—contains more features—than Bach claims it does” including

the fact that a competent, attentive, reasonable hearer who knows the common ground of the conversation would take the speaker to intend that a certain thing be the value of a given occurrence of a demonstrative must be a feature of the semantically relevant context as well on the coordination account (2014, p. 233).

It should always raise the suspicion of confusion or a terminological debate when, in a dispute between theorists over a contested notion, one of them claim’s their’s is “bigger”.

if context were defined so broadly as to include anything other than linguistic meaning that is relevant to determining what a speaker means, then of course the speaker’s intention would part of the context. However, if the context is to play the explanatory role claimed of it, it must be something that is the same for the speaker as it is for his audience, and obviously the role of the speaker’s intention is not the same for both (p. 30).

In response, King notes,

Bach is not fully explicit about what he means by “be the same”, but I think he must mean that speaker and hearers have to be epistemically related to the features of the semantically relevant context in the same way [. . . ] Bach’s argument here fails because the premise that speaker and hearer must bear the same epistemic relations to features of the semantically relevant context is false (p. 234).

It is evident that neither Bach, nor King, are talking about the formal context, since it

is would be a matter of confusion to argue about whether or not speakers and hearers bear an (a)symmetric epistemic relation to the formal context. Kaplan (1989b) is clear

that

The contexts ofDemonstratives [i.e., 1989a] are metaphysical, not cognitive.

They reach well beyond the cognitive range of the agent. Any difference in world history, no matter how remote, requires a difference in context [footnote: As noted, the entire world history is an aspect of context; it is the parameter for the indexical “Actually”.] (p. 597).

The parameters offormal contexts represent possible worlds and certain features therein,

namely, individuals, times and locations. If the most remote difference in world history results in a distinct assignment of values to the formal context, however, it’s doubtful

such information could ever be within the cognitive range of a speaker or hearer.27 Setting aside the epistemic relation issue, we noted in section 2.5 that the formal context is ill-equipped to play a metaphysical role. Rather, what is equipped to play

the metaphysical role is the speech context. Nevertheless, it’s not clear that the debate

about narrow context has to do with the speech context either. On the one hand,

thespeech context locates an utterance in logico-space-time and, as Lewis says, “has

countless features, determined by the character of the location.” As such the speech

27 _{Perhaps, then, Bach is right, in that both speaker and hearer bear the same opaque relation to the} formal context. I discuss this issue in more detail in chapter 4.

3.3 Speaker Intentions in Context | 97 contextpresumably includes all the attendant facts surrounding the utterance, including

the intentions of the speaker, the cognitive capacities of the hearer, the demonstrated object, etc. So understood, however, there is little room for debate that the speech contextincludes speaker intentions. On the other hand, thenarrow context, as discussed

by King, Stokke and Bach, is meant to include only those facts that are relevant to the constitutive determination of content. The speech context, however, includes all of

those facts (whatever they are) and much more besides (e.g., the number of grains of sand on Each Sands, a beach in St Andrews, Scotland).