1.3.2. Some complications

Probably no one ever believed that the simplified model of language we have been considering was entirely accurate. But it, or something like it, was until recent decades the working model most logicians used for thinking about the function of language. Around the middle of the 20^th century, philosophers became interested in a number of features of language that suggest this picture is inadequate; and these features have been incorporated into a number of richer models of language. The norms of deductive logic that we will study do not rest on the richer structure of these new models, so we will not consider them in detail. But some of the further features of language that they attempt to capture are intertwined with those we will study, so we need to take some time now to disentangle ourselves from a few of these features once and for all and to lay the groundwork for disentangling ourselves from others at later points in the course.

The complicating phenomena that we need to consider have come to be studied under the rubric of pragmatics. This term was originally introduced (by Charles Morris) as an alternative to semantics in order to distinguish issues concerning the relation between language and its users from the issues concerning the relation between language and what is spoken of. The use of the term pragmatics is no longer closely tied to this definition, and I know of no definition that really captures the way it is now used. Probably the best way to understand current usage is to consider some commonly agreed examples of pragmatic phenomena. The following ones are the most important for our purposes.

1) Sentences are not always used to express propositions. When a sentence is used to express a proposition, the question of its truth value is a significant one. But not all sentences have truth values or raise questions of truth value. And even when a sentence does have a truth value, its truth value may not be its most important feature. There are many ways of using sentences, many speech acts, besides assertion, and the way a sentence is used is one aspect of its meaning. The term force is often used for this aspect of meaning.

2) The information we derive from the use of sentences is not limited to what follows from accommodating them as true. Assertions can be expected to have properties other than truth, and there can be forms of accommodation associated with these other properties. In particular, the assumption that an assertion has a given property can be the basis for deriving information from the assertion. This produces the phenomena of implicature, in which a sentence suggests more than it says. Even when everything a sentence literally says is true, an additional false suggestion can make it misleading.

These two complications suggest that propositions are not quite as central to the use of language as the simple model suggests: sentences do not serve merely to convey the propositions they express. Several further complications concern the relation between language itself and propositions: saying simply that sentences express propositions is at best a rough approximation to their meaning.

3) The proposition expressed by a sentence (and thus its truth value) may vary with the context in which it is used. For example, there is no way to judge the truth value of a sentence like I put that here yesterday when it is taken out of context. This dependence on context is due to various phenomena known collectively as indexicality or deixis. Both terms are etymologically related to terms for pointing, and the functions of words this and that are paradigm examples. The term character has been used for the way the proposition expressed depends on the context.

4) Even with regard to a given context, a sentence may not have a definite truth value. The meaning of vague terms like small and hot will vary with the context; and even in a given context there will be no sharp delineation of the cases where they apply truly. We can continue to speak of the character of a sentence containing such terms but only if we allow the proposition expressed to be depend on factors that are not fully determined by actual contexts of use.

5) Sentences may have truth values in some possible worlds and not in others. There can be preconditions for a sentence to have a truth value at all. Anything implied by these preconditions counts as a (semantic) presupposition of the sentence, and it constitutes another way in which information can be derived from it.

The force, implicatures, character, and presuppositions of a sentence are parts of its meaning in the fullest sense of the term. We will consider each at least briefly to distinguish it from the narrower sense of meaning that will be our focus. It is easy to disentangle our topic from some of these phenomena but others require more detailed consideration, and some forms of entanglement are more likely to trip us up than others. As a result we will consider some of these sorts of meaning only to dismiss them quickly, and we will set others aside without completing disentangling ourselves from them. Implicature is the only one of these aspects of meaning that we will need to pay much attention to in later parts of the course.