The What-Is-Said

For any meaning μ and utterance θ, there is a context C in which θ expresses (would express, could express, should express) μ. This is not a particularly interesting fact; all that it demonstrates is that logical space is an exceedingly large place. It becomes a much more interesting question if we impose a constraint upon it: in a particular language system L, is it true that there will be a context such that the any given pair (θ , μ) will result in a possible juxtaposition of utterance and meaning?

An example. I am in discussion with a friend prior to prior to the 2008 election. This friend is encouraging me to vote for John McCain, and by way of doing so delivers a fatal refutation of Keynesian economics. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) I understand very little of economics, and everything she says seems like nonsense to me. I reply by quoting Chomsky, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," and she understands me to mean—as I intended her to—that I found the economics lecture to be nonsense.

Certainly an act of communication took place. I was an English speaker speaking to another English speaker, using English words. Was I communicating in English? If so, was I communicating using Standard English? In American English? In my regional dialect? Would the answer be different if I knew French (which I do, sort of)? If I had used German words?

It is tempting to respond that my (purely hypothetical) Chomsky-quoting described above, while certainly an act of communication, is not a natural one. It does not grow organically from the language-system which is English (Standard English, American English, South Jersey English, pick your poison). It is simply too context-bound.

It is this notion of naturalness, set up against that of contextuality, which fuels all of the well-worn semantics vs. pragmatics debates. Sure, one might feel compelled to admit, any utterance could express any meaning under sufficiently ingenious conditions, like my Chomsky economics example, but there is a notion of meaning more robust which will not permit of such contortions.

Grice gives us such a notion, that of the what-is-said, set against that which is only implied or implicated:

In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered. Suppose someone to have uttered the sentence He is in the grip of a vice. Given a knowledge of the English language, but no knowledge of the circumstances of the utterance, one would know something about what the speaker had said, on the assumption that he was speaking standard English, and speaking literally. (Paul Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words, p. 55.)

Implications are almost radically free, able to change wildly from context to context, but that which is said is much more constrained—although it too is subject to change with context. Even semantic minimalists like Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore admit that utterances involving indexicals like there or now are context-sensitive. So in a case of an implicature like uttering "There's a shovel in the toolshed" in order to indicate that the hearer should go and fetch the shovel in the toolshed, the speaker is first saying that there is a shovel in the toolshed, and then also implying that the hearer should go fetch it. Each of these meanings is complete in and of itself; the what-is-said is propositional, or has truth conditions, or has whatever it is one considers necessary for meaning in general.

But is really there a need for this more robust notion, this what-is-said, in the first place? This is the question I intend to address in future posts. Stay tuned.