| Phi 346-02 Spring 2014 |
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Robert Stalnaker (1940-) is, like Kaplan and Kripke, a philosopher who came into his own in the late 1960s, and he contributed to a consensus picture of the tasks of a theory of meaning that developed around that time. I’ve assigned this article in part for his presentation of that picture in §§I-II and in part for his discussion of “pragmatic ambiguity” in §IV. Stalnaker’s discussion of presupposition in §III bridges these two topics and also bridges the discussion of that idea you’ve seen in Geach and the one you’ll encounter in David Lewis (who we’ll discuss after Stalnaker).
• The triad syntax/semantics/pragmatics was first suggested by Charles Morris (1901–1979) in the 1930s. Morris had roots in pragmatism and worked with Carnap to ally pragmatism and logical positivism, and the conception of semantics Stalnaker outlines in §I owes much to Carnap (but should remind some of you also of Frege’s ideas in “The Thought”). However, the content of “pragmatics” as it developed in the 1960s owes less to pragmatism than to the interests of Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophers like Grice.
• The term “illocutionary act” that Stalnaker mentions in §II, was used by J. L Austin (one of the ordinary language philosophers mentioned on the reading guide for Grice) for what came to be called “speech acts.” The etymology of “indexical” suggests terms like ‘that’ which are associated with pointing, but the term has come to be used more broadly, and most of the examples Stalnaker gives of contextually dependent expressions might be called indexical (or “deictic,” an alternative term also associated with pointing). Stalnaker’s discussion, near the end of the section, of the separate contributions by context and by possible world to the transition from sentence to truth value points to a major theme in the latter part of the paper.
• Of the senses of “presupposition” distinguished by Stalnaker in §III, the idea you’ve seen Geach employ is closest to the semantic sense. Stalnaker says the two ideas are related, and you can see that in the case of definite descriptions: in general, a definite description is appropriately used in a given context only if its semantic presuppositions (i.e., what is required for it to have a truth value) and are taken for granted. An analogous example (which dates back to the ordinary language philosophers) is ‘All John’s children are asleep’, which is out of place unless it is taken for granted that John has children.
• Although Stalnaker’s account in §IV of “pragmatic ambiguity” is quite general, it is designed, as he notes, to deal with a distinction between “referential” and “attributive” uses of definite descriptions. He explains this distinction himself, but it may help to see how it was presented by Keith Donnellan (1931-), who introduced it. In the following pair of quotations, Donnellan first distinguishes the two uses of definite descriptions. Then he offers examples in the opposite order, of the referential use first followed by the attributive use.
… I will call the two uses of definite descriptions I have in mind the attributive use and the referential use. A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing. In the first case the definite description might be said to occur essentially, for the speaker wishes to assert something about whatever or whoever fits that description; but in the referential use the definite description is merely one tool for doing a certain job—calling attention to a person or thing—and in general any other device for doing the same job, another description or a name, would do as well. In the attributive use, the attribute of being the so-and-so is all important, while it is not in the referential use.
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Suppose one is at a party and, seeing an interesting-looking person holding a martini glass, one asks, “Who is the man drinking a martini?” If it should turn out that there is only water in the glass, one has nevertheless asked a question about a particular person, a question that it is possible for someone to answer. Contrast this with the use of the same question by the chairman of the local Teetotalers Union. He has just been informed that a man is drinking a martini at their annual party. He responds by asking his informant, “Who is the man drinking a martini?” In asking the question the chairman does not have some particular person in mind about whom he asks the question; if no one is drinking a martini, if the information is wrong, no person can be singled out as the person about whom the question was asked. Unlike the first case, the attribute of being the man drinking a martini is all-important, because if it is the attribute of no one, the chairman’s question has no straightforward answer.
This illustrates also another difference between the referential and the attributive use of definite descriptions. In the one case we have asked a question about a particular person or thing even though nothing fits the description we used; in the other this is not so. But also in the one case our question can be answered; in the other it cannot be. In the referential use of a definite description we may succeed in picking out a person or thing to ask a question about even though he or it does not really fit the description; but in the attributive use if nothing fits the description, no straightforward answer to the question can be given.
Keith S. Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions,” The Philosophical Review, vol. 75 (1966), pp. 285, 287
Kripke has suggested that these two uses be seen as an example of the difference between “speaker’s reference” and “semantic reference” (a distinction analogous to Grice’s distinction between occasion meaning and timeless meaning)—and noted that similar phenomena can occur with proper names. For example, the question ‘What does Ralph over there have in his glass?’ may be answerable in cases when the man over there is not really Ralph.