Kent Bach

You Don't Say?

This paper defends a purely semantic notionof what is said against various recent objections. Theobjections each cite some sort of linguistic,psychological, or epistemological fact that issupposed to show that on any viable notion of what aspeaker says in uttering a sentence, there ispragmatic intrusion into what is said. Relying on amodified version of Grices notion, on which what issaid must be a projection of the syntax of the utteredsentence, I argue that a purely semantic notion isneeded to account for the linguistically determinedinput to the hearers inference to what, if anything,the speaker intends to be conveying in uttering thesentence.

The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction: What It Is and Why It Matters

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is easier to apply than to explain. Explaining it is complicated by the fact that many conflicting formulations have been proposed over the past sixty years. This might suggest that there is no one way of drawing the distinction and that how to draw it is merely a terminological question, a matter of arbitrary stipulation. In my view, though, these diverse formulations, despite their conflicts, all shed light on the distinction as it is commonly applied, in both linguistics and philosophy. Although it is generally clear what is at issue when people apply the distinction to specific linguistic phenomena, what is less clear, in some cases anyway, is whether a given phenomenon is semantic or pragmatic, or both. Fortunately, there are other phenomena that are uncontroversially semantic or, as the case may be, uncontroversially pragmatic. Their example will help us get clear on what the semantics-pragmatics distinction is.

Impliciture vs Explicature: What’s the Difference?

I am often asked to explain the difference between my notion of impliciture (Bach 1994) and the relevance theorists’ notion of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Carston 2002). Despite the differences between the theoretical frameworks within which they operate, the two notions seem very similar. Relevance theorists describe explicatures as ‘developments of logical forms’, whereas I think of implicitures as ‘expansions’ or ‘completions’ of semantic contents (depending on whether or not the sentence’s semantic content amounts to a proposition). That is not much of a difference. We agree that implicitures/explicatures go beyond what is said (in a strict sense) and yet fall short of being implicatures. So, what is the difference, or is it just terminological? As we will see, the real differences emerge when the two notions are situated in their respective theoretical frameworks with their contrasting conceptions of what is involved in linguistic communication.

Newcomb's Problem: The

The more you think about it, the more baffling Newcombs Problem becomes. To most people, at first it is obvious which solution is correct (not that they agree on which one), but their confidence can be eroded easily. Only a puzzled few are torn between the two right from the start, and for years so was I. But at last, thanks to a certain metaargument, one solution came to seem obvious to me. And yet, imagining myself actually faced with Newcombs choice, I started to worry that I might experience just enough last-minute ambivalence to unsettle my confidence in that argument. Fortunately, I have found a strategy to ensure making the right choice when the chips are down. Not only is Newcombs Problem puzzling in its own right, it is philosophically significant. The appeal of both solutions reflects a conflict between two plausible conceptions of rational choice. In making a decision, should one consider all of its probabilistic consequences or only its causal consequences? Each conception has its supporters, but some philosophers find them both defensible and see no hope of resolving the conflict. I think the conflict can be resolved, at least in the context of Newcombs Problem, by properly assessing the relevant counterfactual conditionals.

1000,000 Solution

It is now widely recognized that there is a middle ground between being literal and fully explicit in meaning something and merely implicating it. In this case what the speaker means is, unlike implicature, an enrichment of the semantic content of the uttered sentence. The hearer needs to recognize that this semantic content includes only part of what the speaker could mean, either because it falls short of comprising a proposition or because the proposition it does comprise is not specific enough to be what the speaker could plausibly be supposed to mean. The speaker intends to communicate, depending on the case, either a completion or an expansion of the semantic content. Depraetere & Salkie propose a novel conception of this distinction, on which disambiguation counts as a case of completion and resolving semantic underspecification counts as expansion (free pragmatic enrichment). Although their approach makes sense from the standpoint of the hearer’s task of figuring out what a speaker means, I will suggest that the completion/expansion distinction as well as several important subordinate distinctions should be understood more abstractly, as different relations between what the speaker means and the semantic content of the uttered sentence.

Drawing More Lines: Response to Depraetere and Salkie

“If I didn’t know any words, you wouldn’t know what I mean.” This astute observation, made by my granddaughter Sophia when she was four, might suggest that knowing what a speaker’s words mean is all it takes to know what she means in using them and, indeed, that communicating is just a matter of putting one’s thoughts into words. Sophia didn’t suggest that and, indeed, the theme of this chapter is that communication is more complicated than that. For even if you know what my words mean, you might not know what I mean uttering them.

Meaning and Communication

This book takes an approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis. The split-level approach includes an account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russells analysis of singular terms. Criticisms of competing views are provided as well.