| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
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In this part of Lewis’ article, he surveys six examples of pragmatic phenomena, all illustrating accommodation. Below you will find some notes on each of them, but we’re unlikely to be able to discuss all of them in class. Examples and 3 and 7 are probably the most important for our purposes since they touch on topics we’ve already discussed. Example 5 is important, too, but for a different reason: it concerns an important aspect of meaning that we haven’t discussed.
• Example 3. Lewis’ main concern here is the way a feature of conversational score, which he calls “salience,” changes by accommodation. But the feature itself is of interest quite apart from its dynamics since it explains why presuppositions of existence seem more important for uses of definite descriptions than presuppositions of uniqueness.
• Example 4. This example is short and simple and is an especially good illustration because of that. Everything Lewis wants to say about it is illustrated in the two brief samples of text on p. 351.
• Example 5. Lewis’ approach to vagueness is encapsulated in the ideas of “delineations” and of being “true enough” (which, notice, is itself vague). But half of the discussion of the example concerns an asymmetry in the way accommodation works.
• Example 6. The asymmetry of accommodation in example 5 appears also in this example. Lewis ties both asymmetries to skeptical arguments, and he is one of a number of philosophers in recent decades who have pointed to contextual dependence of standards of knowledge as a way to counter skepticism.
• Example 7. This example can be compared to example 2. Lewis notes that each represents a case “use of language blends into other social practices” (p. 356). Indeed, the game of example 2 might be varied to employ the locution ‘I hereby permit you to …’ or ‘I hereby forbid you to …’. The difference would be that in example 2, the bounds of permissability are shifted by accommodating the master’s statements of what is permissable while in the variant they would be shifted by accommodating the master’s claims to be shifting them.
• Example 8. I feel less confident here than in other cases of Lewis’ reasons for considering this example, but I suspect they is tied to interests he had in hypothetical reasoning (especially in ‘what-if’ reasoning that is “counterfactual,” in the sense of “contrary-to-fact”). Any shared hypothetical reasoning is likely to involved shared commitments that behave like shared presuppositions but are not presuppositions about what is actually the case.