Intentions et signification de l’énonciation

J’évalue de manière critique un certain nombre de thèses concernant la façon dont l’intention peut compléter ou supplanter la convention dans une théorie de l’interprétation. Je soutiens que la signification de l’énonciation ne peut être identifiée aux intentions du locuteur, qu’elles soient réelles ou attribuées. Ou bien l’identification de la signification de l’énonciation aux intentions réelles ne réussit pas à attribuer un rôle déterminant véritable à ces intentions, ou bien elle échoue à rendre compte de la manière dont ces intentions peuvent déterminer la signification de l’énonciation. L’identification de la signification de l’énonciation aux intentions attribuées suppose implicitement : a) que la signification attribuée au locuteur ne détermine pas réellement la signification de l’énonciation ; b) qu’elle n’est pas en mesure de rendre compte des contextes « davidsoniens » dans lesquels un locuteur réalise ses intentions sémantiques par des moyens non conventionnels. Je mets en avant « l’intentionnalisme interprétatif », qui accorde un rôle déterminant à la « saisie » tout en respectant l’idée anti-conventionnaliste selon laquelle les significations de l’énonciation ne peuvent être attribuées qu’à ce que l’on peut supposer être les véhicules d’intentions sémantiques. Ce point de vue permet aussi de fonder une distinction entre l’interprétation dans les arts et l’interprétation dans des contextes conversationnels ordinaires.I critically assess a range of proposals as to how intention supplements or supplants convention in a theory of interpretation. Utterance meaning, I argue, cannot be identified with utterer’s intentions, whether actual or ascribed. Identifying utterance meaning with actual intentions either fails to ascribe a genuine determining role to such intentions, or lacks an account of how such intentions are able to render utterance meaning determinate. Identifying utterance meaning with ascribed intentions either (a) involves the tacit admission that ascribed utterer’s meaning is not the real determinant of utterance meaning, or (b) is unable to account for “Davidsonian” contexts in which a speaker realizes her semantic intentions through unconventional means. I propose an alternative account —“interpretive intentionalism”— that accords a determining role to “uptake” while respecting the anti-conventionalist observation that utterance meanings are only ascribed to presumed vehicles of semantic intentions, and that also grounds a principled distinction between interpretation in the arts and interpretation in ordinary conversational contexts

Persuasion and Manipulation: Relevance Across Multiple Audiences

A speaker who is addressing multiple audiences has split intentions. In order to derive the optimal benefit toward accomplishing her intentions, the speaker crafts her utterance to be relevant to her various audiences in different ways and to differing degrees. Similarly, the hearer will infer meaning based largely on how much he thinks that the speaker intended her utterance to be relevant to him, while also considering how the utterance may have been intended to be relevant to others. The goal of this paper is to describe how the presence of multiple audiences affects both the speaker’s formation of an utterance and the hearer’s interpretation of it. I particularly focus on utterances that are aimed at persuading or manipulating the speaker’s various audiences. Using the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995), I analyze a hearing in which eight bank CEOs testified before the US House Committee on Financial Services regarding how they used money that the government had invested in their banks in the midst of a severe financial crisis. I show that when communicating to multiple audiences, the speaker’s utterance is frequently less than fully ostensified to his various audiences. I conclude that Relevance Theory can be used to explain communicative stimuli that are less than fully ostensified by making a modification to the Relevance Theoretic notion of the presumption of optimal relevance to account for such cases of scalar ostension

Theory of mind in utterance interpretation: the case from clinical pragmatics

The cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is an area that continues to provoke intense theoretical debate among pragmatists. That utterance interpretation involves some type of mind-reading or theory of mind (ToM) is indisputable. However, theorists are divided on the exact nature of this ToM-based mechanism. In this paper, it is argued that the only type of ToM-based mechanism that can adequately represent the cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is one which reflects the rational, intentional, holistic character of interpretation. Such a ToM-based mechanism is supported on conceptual and empirical grounds. Empirical support for this view derives from the study of children and adults with pragmatic disorders. Specifically, three types of clinical case are considered. In the first case, evidence is advanced which indicates that individuals with pragmatic disorders exhibit deficits in reasoning and the use of inferences. These deficits compromise the ability of children and adults with pragmatic disorders to comply with the rational dimension of utterance interpretation

Are explicatures cancellable?

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations

Saying Without Knowing What or How

In response to Stephen Neale (2016), I argue that aphonic expressions, such as PRO, are intentionally uttered by normal speakers of natural language, either by acts of omitting to say something explicitly, or by acts of giving phonetic realization to aphonics. I argue, also, that Gricean intention-based semantics should seek divorce from Cartesian assumptions of transparent access to propositional attitudes and, consequently, that Stephen Schiffer's so-called meaning-intention problem is not powerful enough to banish alleged cases of over-intellectualization in contemporary philosophy of language and mind

Can there ever be a theory of utterance interpretation?

In this paper, I tackle what appears to be a rather simple question: can there ever be a theory of utterance interpretation? It will be contended that a theory of utterance interpretation is not beyond the intellectual grasp of present-day pragmatists so much as it is a construct which lacks sense and is unintelligible. Although many of our most successful theories exhibit desiderata such as simplicity, completeness and explanatory power, it will be argued that these same desiderata are problematic when it is utterance interpretation that is the focus of theoretical efforts. The case in support of this claim sets out from a detailed analysis of the rational, intentional, holistic character of utterance interpretation and draws on the insights of the American philosopher Hilary Putnam. To the extent that a theory of utterance interpretation is not a difficult empirical possibility to realize so much as it is an endeavour which leads to an unintelligible outcome, we consider where this situation leaves pragmatists who have a substantial appetite for theory construction

Metaphor, indeterminacy, and intention

David Cooper has argued that it is a constraint on any acceptable theory of metaphor that it account for the 'indeterminacy' of metaphorical content, that is, the sense that many metaphors admit of more than one acceptable interpretation, none of which can be uniquely demonstrated to be correct. He further argues that the 'speaker's meaning' model of metaphorical content proposed by Searle and others cannot meet this constraint, and thus must be disregarded as a prospective account of such content. In this paper I argue firstly that Cooper's characterisation of the proposed constraint is misguided, and that we should be careful to distinguish the role that intention plays in determining metaphorical content from the question of whether we can have satisfying interpretations of metaphors that do not take speaker intention into account. I then give my own characterisation of the problem, relating it to a more general tension between the intuition that first person ascriptions of intentions carry a certain authority, and the fact that it seems to misrepresent the phenomenology of metaphor production to ascribe to the speaker a pre-existing and precise cognitive content which his metaphorical utterance is intended to convey. I go on to argue that we can resolve this tension by following Crispin Wright in viewing self ascriptions of intention as essentially response dependent; with our best judgements constituting rather than tracking the facts about what we intend. I conclude that while such an account must be refined in order to distinguish intentions related to specifically metaphorical content from the literal case, the general shape of the account is sufficient to remove the intuitions that Cooper's objection trades on

Tenses, Dates and Times*

This paper presents a theory of utterance content that is neutral with respect to some of the key issues in the debate about the proper semantics of tense. Elaborating on some ideas from Korta & Perry (2011), we defend a proposal according to which utterances of both temporally specific and temporally unspecific sentences have a systematic variety of contents, from utterance-bound to incremental or referential. This analysis will shed some light on the contribution of tense to what is said by an utterance

Communicative Content and Legal Content

This essay investigates a familiar set of questions about the relationship between legal texts (e.g., constitutions, statutes, opinions, orders, and contracts) and the content of the law (e.g., norms, rules, standards, doctrines, and mandates). Is the original meaning of the constitutional text binding on the Supreme Court when it develops doctrines of constitutional law? Should statutes be given their plain meaning or should judges devise statutory constructions that depart from the text to serve a purpose? What role should default rules play in the interpretation and construction of contracts? This essay makes two moves that can help lawyers and legal theorists answer these questions. First, there is a fundamental conceptual distinction between communicative content (the linguistic meaning communicated by a legal text in context) and legal content (the doctrines of the legal rules associated with a text). Second, the relationship between communicative content and legal content varies with context; different kinds of legal texts produce different relationships between linguistic meaning and legal rules