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Semantics withoutpragmatics?

Emma Borg

Philosophers of language (following the seminal work of Paul Grice) oftendistinguish two types of linguistic content: literal or semantic content (usu-

ally discussed in the context of sentences) and pragmatic content or speaker

meaning (usually discussed in the context of utterances). For instance, imag-

ine I come to tea at your house and, on entering the kitchen, utter the

following sentence:

(1) The cake on the table looks delicious.

Traditionally, since (1) is a well-formed sentence of a natural language, many

theorists have been inclined to think that there is a proposition expressed

by the sentence which gives its literal meaning. So, at least at a first approx-

imation, (1) might be held to literally express the proposition that

(2) the cake on the table looks delicious.

However it also seems that, by uttering this sentence in this specific context,

I may well succeed in conveying an alternative or additional proposition (or

propositions). So, for instance, in this situation I may succeed in conveying

a further proposition like:

(3) I would like to have a slice of that cake.

It might initially be tempting here to think that what we have is one kind of

content – the literal meaning in (2) – which is entirely independent of a context

of utteranceand another – thepragmatic speaker meaning – which is entirely

dependent on the context of utterance. If this were right, we could construe

semantic content as context-invariant content and speaker meaning as that

which covaries with changes in the context of utterance, and we could expect

a semantic theory to be freed from any appeal to pragmatics.

Holding that semantic content is context-invariant might seem to be

worthwhile for a number of reasons. First, there might be negative rea-

sons concerning the complex, holistic and perhaps rather nebulous nature

513





514 EMMA BORG

of pragmatics itself: it might be thought, as Chomsky has suggested, that the

search for a theory of pragmatics is a search for ‘a theory of everything’ and

this might speak in favour of isolating a context-invariant kind of content as

that which stands a chance of being theoretically tractable. Second, on thepositive side it seems that aspects of our linguistic competence point to a

need for context-independent content. For instance, it seems we need there

to be a stable, invariant core to linguistic meaning to ensure the learnabil-

ity of natural languages. If all aspects of linguistic meaning are in constant

contextual flux it is entirely unclear how anyone could ever come to acquire

a language in the first place. Furthermore, we might think that we need a

context-invariant element to capture the apparently normative dimension

to linguistic meaning: the fact that there is such a thing as using a sentence

correctly or incorrectly.1

Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, context-invariant content seems

to be needed to explain features of our linguistic ability like productivity

and systematicity.2

Respectively, these are the ideas that an ordinary subjectis capable of understanding an indefinite number of novel sentences and

that our patterns of linguistic understanding have a systematic character (so

that, for instance, a subject who understands ‘Bill loves Jill’ will also, ceteris

paribus, understand ‘Jill loves Bill’). This ability to understand sentences we

have never encountered before and to manipulate and reconstruct words to

form novel yetmeaningful arrangements would be explained if thesemantic

content of sentenceswas fully determined by themeanings of words andtheir

modes of syntactic composition. This is the constraint of compositionality

andalthoughexactlyhow it shouldbe spelt out is a tendentious matter, still it

seems to point to a need for a discrete, recursively definable and essentially

context-independent level of semantic content.3 There are, then, it seems,

reasons to think that a semanticsfree from pragmatics could be explanatorily worthwhile and this view of semantics (as essentially a rule-driven, recursive,

context-independent level of content, required to explain features of our

understanding like productivity and systematicity) has formed a starting

point for so-called formal semantics.4

However a moment’s reflection shows us that there are significant issues

with carving things up in exactly this way, for at least part of what we

might intuitively think of as the literal content of some sentences apparently

depends on thecontext in which those sentencesare uttered. So,for instance,

in our imagined case above, I might, instead of uttering (1), have uttered:

(4) That looks delicious.

(4) contains an overtly context-dependent expression (‘that’) whose semantic

contribution is only fixed relative to a context of utterance (the referent of a

token of ‘that’ can vary from utterance to utterance). Thus sentences like (4)

seem to show the initial idea of treating semantic content as entirely context-

independent was mistaken. Furthermore both (1) and (4) are tensed sentences

and as such will require a context of utterance to relativise the claims they





Semantics without pragmatics? 515

express to a specific time. Thus even for sentences like (1) the idea of a ‘pure’,

entirely pragmatics-free semantics looks dubious on reflection.5

There are, however, two responses available to an advocate of formal

semantics in light of this recognition of an essentially context-dependentelement within natural languages. One option would be to admit that these

elements of meaning, since they depend on a context of utterance, should

be classified as falling outside the remit of semantics, being treated instead as

elements of pragmatic speaker meaning. In this way, one could hang on to

the idea of a pure semantics without pragmatics but at the apparent cost of

sacrificing the assumption that whatsemantics trades in is propositional con-

tent. For on this model, features like the disambiguation of ambiguous terms

or structures, the resolution of reference for demonstratives and indexicals,

and the relativisation to a time for tensed sentences, along with genuine

implicatures like (3) above, would all fall on the pragmatic side of the divide.

Yet if resolution of reference for a term like ‘that’ is not treated as part of

semantics, then it is clear that what semantics delivers for a sentence like (4)(‘That looks delicious’) will not be something capable of truth evaluation as

it stands. Rather it will be a propositional fragment or ‘radical’, something

with a gap which requires filling prior to truth evaluation. As we will see

later (with respect to Kent Bach’s ‘radical minimalism’) this is an option at

least some have been willing to pursue in the face of problems about context-

sensitivity. However, it is I think fair to say that this quite drastic response

has been the less popular of our two options. The more popular route has

been to seek to ‘tame’ certain aspects of context-sensitivity and attempt to

make them suitable for inclusion within formal semantics.

Perhaps the most well-known attempts to tame pragmatics come in the

work of David Kaplan, John Perry and Robert Stalnaker, all of whom sug-

gest formal frameworks for capturing at least some of the contributionscontext makes to linguistic meaning. So, for instance, in Kaplan’s 1989a

model, context is conceived of simply as an ordered set of relatively objec-

tive parameters (things like world of utterance, time of utterance, place of

utterance, speaker etc.) and Kaplan specifies rules attaching to demonstra-

tives and indexicals which allow us to supply a referent for any utterance

of one of these expressions relative to the parameters set by its context of

utterance. So for instance, we might specify a character rule for ‘I’ which

demands that its value is always the speaker of an utterance or a rule for

‘that’ which specifies that it refers to the object demonstrated by thespeaker.

In this way, although we need to treat the semantic content of a sentence

like (4) as fixed only relative to a context of utterance and thus not as entirely

context-insensitive, still theonly kind of appealto a context of utterancefrom

within the semantic domain appears to be a formally respectable one. It looks

only to objectively set parameters and rules for operating over those para-

meters. This circumscribed and constrained notion of context and its place

within the semantic domain has thus seemed to many to be non-threatening

to the ethos of formal semantics.6





516 EMMA BORG

However, this idea that formal semantics has a plausible story to tell about

the role of pragmatics in determining literal meaning has come under sig-

nificant pressure from advocates of so-called ‘radical pragmatics’ (see, for

instance, work by Jay Atlas and Ruth Kempson, their contributions to this volume). What makes radical pragmatics radical, it seems, is the idea that

rich pragmatic processes (that is to say, processes which might look to the

whole breadth of a context and which are thus potentially open-ended and

non-discrete in nature) must be treated as integral to the determination

of literal linguistic meaning. On this model, full-blown pragmatics is not

an optional add-on that takes one from literal meaning to implied speaker

meaning, rather it pervades throughout what is standardly conceived of

as the semantic realm. So, why might we think that the ‘semantics plus

tame pragmatics’ model sketched above is inadequate? Why might one

think that semantics is systemically infected by rich, open-ended pragmatic

processes?

Well, a first point to note is that even for the expressions for which theabove account was designed (indexicals and demonstratives) it is not abso-

lutely obvious that the attempt to tame context works. So, as Predelli (1998b)

and others have noted, determining the character rules for these expressions

looks much more complicated than formal theorists traditionally assumed

and in many (perhaps all) cases the rules seem necessarily to appeal to

the speaker’s intentions. For instance, note that a demonstrative may be

used to pick out both objects in the current environment (‘That cake looks

tasty’) and (via what is sometimes called ‘deferred reference’) objects merely

related to those in the current environment (as when one points at a pic-

ture and says ‘That artist is my favourite’). Or again, that indexicals like ‘I’

and ‘now’ may have a range of different referents (consider ‘I am not here

now’ as said on a telephone answering machine, or written by a colleagueand stuck on my door). Once we recognise these kinds of uses it becomes

very tempting to think that the rule attaching to an expression like ‘that’

(or any other context-sensitive term) must itself make appeal to rich fea-

tures of the context of utterance like the speaker’s intentions. As Recanati

writes:

It is generallyassumed . . . that thedemonstrativerefers to theobject which

happens to be demonstrated or which happens to be the most salient, in

the context to hand. But the notions of ‘demonstration’ and ‘salience’

are pragmatic notions in disguise . . . Ultimately, a demonstrative refers to

what the speaker who uses it refers to by using it. (Recanati 2004a: 57)

Yet if this is right then the idea that we have tamed context in the case of overt

indexicals seems pretty suspect, for we still have rich, inferential contextual

processes (required to work out to what the speaker intends to refer) in

play within the semantic domain.7 Thus the formal semanticists’ idea that

context be construed as a set of objectively determinable parameters seems

mistaken.8






Perhaps more fundamentally, however, radical pragmatists have also

stressed the idea of semantic underdetermination: the idea that the content

which is recoverable on the basis of the meanings of words and their mode

of composition alone often or always falls short of the content we take speak-ers to literally express when they utter that sentence. As they argue, if all we

have to go on is the meaning of words (where this is construed in an atomic,

context-independent way, see below) and the ways they are put together we

will never deliver a semantics which is capable of tracking our intuitions of

literal linguistic meaning. So for instance, take the following sentences:

(5) Ted is tall.

(6) Alfie’s car is red.

In both of these cases the content we can recover simply from the lexico-

syntactic content of the sentence seems to fall short of the literal content we

would ascribe to someone who uttered one of these sentences. For instance,an utterance of (5) seems to literally commit the speaker to Ted’s being

tall relative to some contextually set standard (tall for a six-year-old, say),

while in (6) we need to look to the context of utterance to discover the

relationship between Alfie and his car (the car he owns, built, is driving,

etc.) and the way in which it is red (on the inside or outside, etc.). In both

these cases, then, there seems to be additional material relevant to literal

content which is unmarked by anything at the syntactic or lexical level.

Such additional elements, apparently provided to the semantic content of

the sentences (though unmarked in the syntax or the lexical content) are

commonly known as ‘unarticulated constituents’ and the form of systemic

context-sensitivity they represent has been taken by the radical pragmatists

to sound the death knell for any semantics which doesn’t cede a central roleto pragmatics. Context-sensitivity is not, as semantic underdetermination is

supposed to show, an isolable, limited feature of a natural language but is

instead an all-pervasive, core feature of linguistic meaning which demands

proper semantic-level accommodation.

Radical pragmatists have tended to appeal to two main arguments to sup-

port the intuitive existence of unarticulated constituents.9 First, it is argued

that we have to posit unarticulated constituents in order to explain ordi-

nary subjects’ judgements of truth conditions. For instance, take sentence

(5) and a state of affairs where Ted is 3ft tall: here it intuitively seems that

an utterance of (5) might be true in a context where six-year-olds are under

discussion, but will be false in another context, where Ted remains 3ft tall,

but where basketball players are under discussion. Such a shift in truth val-

ues in conjunction with shifts in conversational contexts seems to reveal

that, although not obvious on the surface, the sentence ‘Ted is tall’ must

be context-sensitive in some more covert way (this kind of argument has

been labelled ‘context-shifting arguments’ by Cappelen and Lepore 2005a).10

The second argument for unarticulated constituents is that without them





518 EMMA BORG

some sentences would apparently fail to determine propositions at all. So,

consider:

(7) Alfie is ready.

(8) Ted has had enough.

In both of these cases it is plausible to think that we do not get a truth-

evaluablecontent until we lookto a context of utterance (seeing, respectively,

what Alfie is ready for and what Ted has had enough of). So again it seems

that we must posit hidden constituents of the propositions these sentences

literally express.

Radical pragmatists are united, then, in claiming that thereach of context-

sensitivity is much greater than formal semanticists have traditionally

allowed. Beyond this, however, we find a fracturing into a myriad of dif-

ferent approaches. One might choose to accommodate an increased role for

pragmatics within the semantic realm by being an indexicalist, a contextual-

ist, a semantic relativist or an occasionalist, or adopting some combination of these different views (and note also that beneath these general headings we

again find splintering into further distinct varieties). While therole accorded

to pragmatics in each of these approaches is greater than in standard for-

mal semantics, the role played by contextual features also differs in each,

thus it will be helpful to have a rough sketch of these dominant schools of

thought before us when considering the possibility of a semantics without

pragmatics.

Indexicalism cleaves fairly closely to standard formal semantics in main-

taining that all context-sensitivity is marked at the syntactic or lexical level

and that the standard (e.g. Kaplanian) model for context-sensitivity is suf-

ficient for accommodating the more pervasive kind of context-sensitivity

highlighted in radical pragmatics. Thus, on this school of thought, ‘unartic-ulated constituents’, though potentially unarticulated at the surface level,

are nonetheless held to be marked at the syntactic or lexical level. ‘Ted is

tall’ literally means, say, that Ted is tall for some contextual standard but this is

because a syntactic or lexical element in the sentence demands this contex-

tual contribution. Indexicalism comes in many distinct forms, for instance

there is the hidden indexical view of Stanley (2000 and elsewhere), whereby

all nouns are taken to cohabit with hidden, context-sensitive variables at

the level of logical form. Alternatively there is the predicate indexicality

of Rothschild and Segal 2009, which sees all predicate terms as requiring

context-sensitive lexical axioms which put them in the same semantic cate-

gory as obviously context-sensitive terms like ‘this’ and ‘that’. Finally there

is the kind of property-indexicality displayed by Hawthorne’s (2004) and

Stanley’s (2005) take on epistemic vocabulary, whereby a term like ‘know’ is

held to pick out a context-sensitive property: a subject may know or fail to

know a proposition depending on features of the context such as how much

shehas riding on thetruth of theproposition. According to all these different

versions of indexicalism, although there may be more context-sensitivity in






our language than was dreamed of in traditional formal semantics, still it

is essentially just more of the same kind of context-sensitivity as dealt with by

Kaplan and others.

A second (and perhaps the most popular) variety of radical pragmatics iscommonly known as ‘contextualism’. What unites positions under this ban-

ner is, I’d suggest, the idea that pragmatics can contribute to semantics even

when such a contribution is not required by anything in the lexico-syntactic

content of the sentence. Thus the elements we above labelled ‘unarticulated

constituents’ really do turn out to be unarticulated: they are delivered not

by something in the syntactic form or lexical content of the sentence but are

put there purely by the pragmatic demands in play when a speaker utters

a given sentence in a given context.11 So, for instance, the sentence ‘Jack’s

car is red’, as uttered in a context c, might literally express the proposition

that the car which Jack is driving is red, even though the additional restriction

which he is driving is not, apparently, contributed by any word or syntactic

element in the sentence. On this new model rich pragmatic processes get toact twice: once, in an inherently semantic guise, prior to the determination

of literal meaning and once in a standard, post-semantic manner to deter-

mine the implicatures of an utterance (hence the label of ‘dual pragmatics’

deployed in Borg 2004 for this kind of approach). Under the contextualist

banner, then, it seems we find theorists such as Recanati (2004a), Relevance

theorists like Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Carston (2002), and Discourse

Representation theorists like Heim (1982) and Kamp (1981).

Though contextualism provides perhaps the most common current

response to arguments for increased context-sensitivity, recently an alter-

native school of thought, that of semantic relativism, has enjoyed a growing

popularity.12 According to semantic relativism, the framework for handling

context-sensitivity set up by theorists like Kaplan, Perry and Stalnaker isessentially sufficient for handling the increased context-sensitivity stressed

in radical pragmatics (in this respect, then, the approach agrees with the ear-

lier approach of indexicalism). What is required, however, is not an increase

in contextual contributions to the propositions sentences literally express (as

assumed in both indexicalism and contextualism), rather what is required

is an increased contextual contribution to the conditions under which a

proposition is evaluated for truth. The move here is easiest to appreciate

via a consideration of possible treatments of tense: on one model, that of

eternalism, time forms an integral part of the proposition expressed by a

tensed sentence. So if I say, at t1, ‘Obama is president of America’ the propo-

sition I literally express is taken to have three constituents: Obama, the

property of being president of America, and the time t1. On the other hand,

according to temporalism, there are only two elements of the proposition I

literally express in this case, namely Obama and the property of being pres-

ident. However by uttering the sentence at t1 I make it the case that the

proposition I express should be evaluated for truth or falsity only relative

to t1. Eternalism and temporalism both yield exactly the same results in





520 EMMA BORG

practice (a proposition will be true or false in all the same situations

whichever model it is analysed under); what differs is simply whether time is

treated as makinga contributionto theliteralpropositionexpressed or to the

parameters required for truth evaluation. Advocates of semantic relativismsuggest that temporalism is the correct treatment for tense and they seek to

extend this general strategy (of moving contextually determined content out

of the proposition expressed and into the parameters for truth evaluation) to

the other kinds of context-sensitivity noted above.13 In this way, an utterance

of, say, ‘Ted is tall’ is taken to express the proposition that Ted is tall simpliciter

but this proposition is held to be true or false only relative to a contextually

determined parameter of tallness.

Finally, perhaps the most radical move in the light of the systemic contri-

bution of context argued for by radical pragmatists is to throw everything

(or almost everything) open to the pragmatic winds and adopt the kind

of neo-Wittgensteinian approach advocated by Charles Travis (see Travis

2008 amongst other works, also Dancy 2004; ch. 11). On the occasionalistapproach, representation itself occurs only within a context of use and for a

purpose, determinacy of meaning is thus a property only of an utterance or

an act of thinking:

The point of the discussion of language games, with which [ Philosophi-

cal Investigations] begins, is that naming, or referring . . . underdetermines

conditions for correctness of wholes, notably, where relevant, conditions

for their truth. Wholes with given referents, embedded in different lan-

guage games, would be true under any of many very different sets of

conditions. . . [T]rue and false are in the first instance evaluations of par-

ticular historical events – speakings of words on particular occasions, in

particular circumstances – and of the fittingness of the words for those

circumstances. (Travis 2008: 254)14

For the occasionalist, words essentially require application in a context of

use to fix their meaning; though words might possess some kind of open-

ended, holistically specified meaning this could at most serve to constrain,

rather than determine, the truth conditions of any sentence in which they

appear (see Pietroski 2005).

All of these diverse accounts meet the apparent need elaborated by rad-

ical pragmatics of treating contextual input to linguistic content as more

pervasive and systemic than traditionally assumed. However, I think it is

fair to say that all the approaches also face significant difficulties further

down the road and it remains an open question as to whether these difficul-

ties can ultimately be overcome.15 Thus alongside this plethora of positions

which embrace the core idea of radical pragmatics (that pragmatic processes

must reach well within the semantic domain), there has also emerged an

alternative school of thought which we could perhaps characterise as ‘radi-

cal semantics’. According to the radical semanticist the fundamental move

of standard formal semantics to eliminate or strictly constrain the input

of pragmatics to semantics is essentially correct and we should fight to






maintain clear blue water between literal meaning, on one side, as substan-

tially context-independent, and speaker meaning on the other, as essentially

context-dependent. This idea of a return to a semantics which is to a large

extent free from contextual input forms the cornerstone of minimal (orsometimes ‘invariant’ or ‘insensitive’) semantics.

According to minimal semantics, sentences express minimal contents (say

minimal propositions or minimal truth conditions), which are recoverable

via a grasp of word meaning and sentence structure alone and which do not

require significant appeal to a context of utterance prior to their recovery.

The minimalistrecognises, as radical pragmatics suggests, thatsuch contents

will (often) not match our intuitions about what a speaker uttering a given

sentence is likely to convey. So, for instance, a minimalist might claim that

the sentence ‘Alfie’s car is red’ literally expresses the propositions that the car

bearing some relation to Alfie is red in some respect , even though it is clearly the

case that what a speaker uttering this sentence conveys will be a much more

fine-grained and informative proposition. However, the minimalist arguesthat a semantic theory need not and indeed should not be required to track

our intuitive judgements about what is said. This is because judgements of

speech act content are too variable and various to help in isolating a notion

of genuinely semantic content (see e.g. Borg 2004: ch. 2; Cappelen and Lepore

2005a). Minimalists suggest that although the process of recovering speaker

meaning clearly involves some kind of grasp of genuinely semantic content,

this forms only a tiny part of the story about how speech act content is

recovered – judgements of speech act content are massive interaction effects

which might, in principle, call on anything the hearer knows. Furthermore,

the minimalist claims that there is no way to start with rich attributions of

what is said by a speaker and somehow move to abstract out an account of

semantic content from there. Instead, she suggests, we should start with thecentral requirements on a semantic theory (for instance, the requirement

to accommodate features of our linguistic comprehension like productivity

and systematicity) and then allow the theory thus determined to dictate the

boundary between semantic and pragmatic content.

As with most of the other positions in this area, minimalism does not have

a single canonical form and the approach has been understood in a number

of ways in recent works. So, for instance, the minimalism of Cappelen and

Lepore (2005a) differs in certain key respects from the minimalism of Borg

(2004) (these differences are discussed in Borg 2007 and Borg forthcoming:

ch. 2 ), while the ‘radical minimalism’ of Kent Bach differs from both of these

(we’ll return to Bach’s position below). However, one way to understand

minimalism (as given in Borg forthcoming) is as the conjunction of the

following four claims:16

(i) Semantic content for sentences is truth-evaluable content.

(ii) Semantic content for sentences is fully determined by syntactic struc-

ture and lexical content: the meaning of a sentence is exhausted by the

meaning of its parts and their mode of composition.





522 EMMA BORG

(iii) There are only a limited number of context-sensitive expressions in

natural language.

(iv) Recovery of semantic content is possible without access to current

speaker intentions (crudely, grasp of semantic content involves ‘wordreading’ not ‘mind reading’).

This sort of approach seeks to capture the old-fashioned idea that semantic

content is that content recovered via lexico-syntactic interpretation alone,

with context playing a role only where there are explicit lexico-syntactic

items which require such an input. Furthermore, the claim is that there

are only a limited number of genuinely (i.e. lexico-syntactically marked)

context-sensitive expressions in our natural languages and that the features

these context-sensitive elements call into play are themselves pretty limited

(specifically, they do not involve substantial appeal to the current mental

states of speakers). What we have on the minimal semantics approach then

is not semantics without pragmatics (since it allows for some genuinely

context-sensitive expressions) but it is semantics with a very constrained role

for context at the semantic level: only what we might think of as ‘formal

pragmatics’ can find a home within the semantic domain according to the

tenets of (this version of) minimalism.

There are, however, at least three problems which minimalism, with its

appeal to the tamest of tame pragmatics, faces. These are, first, the prob-

lem of inappropriateness, second incompleteness, and third internalism.17

According to the challenge of inappropriateness, though there might be such

things as minimal propositions, any such entities are explanatorily redun-

dant: they are not psychologically real and play no part in an account of the

communicativesuccess of ordinary interlocutors. This challenge emerges, on

the one hand, in the kind of context-shifting arguments we looked at above

which seek to show an intuitive change of truth value for distinct utterances

of a type-identical sentence uttered with respect to a single state of affairs (so

that ‘Ted is tall’ might be true in a conversation about 6-year-olds but false in

a conversation about basketball players). Yet this intuition of shifts in truth

value is apparently problematic if we take the sentence ‘Ted is tall’ to express

a univocal, context-independent content like Ted is tall simpliciter . The mini-

mal content assigned to this sentence thus seems inappropriate given our

intuitions about the content speakers express when they utter the sentence.

The challenge of inappropriateness also emerges in Recanati’s (2004a) ‘avail-

ability principle’, whereby semantic content is required to be consciously

accessible by normal interlocutors in a conversational exchange. As Recanati writes:

What is said [i.e. literal meaning] must be intuitively accessible to the

conversational participants (unless something goes wrong and they do

not count as ‘normal interpreters’). (Recanati 2004a: 20)






It seems that minimal propositions do not meet this availability constraint:

the hearer presented with an utterance of ‘Alfie’s car is red’ will certainly

not consciously entertain the proposition that the car related to Alfie in some

way is red in some way; rather they will directly entertain a more fine-grainedproposition such as the car Alfie is holding is red on its roof . Since minimal

propositions apparently have no role to play in explaining successful com-

municative exchanges, then, Recanati suggests that they are ruled out as the

proper subject matter of semantics.

The second challenge to minimal contents is that of incompleteness. This

is a potentially more powerful objection to minimalism than inappropri-

ateness; for whereas the inappropriateness objection allows that minimal

propositions might exist (though objecting that they have no useful role

to play), the incompleteness objection argues against the very existence of

minimal contents. The argument from incompleteness is that, for at least

some well-formed sentences, there is simply no proposition to be recovered

prior to rich pragmatic input. The paradigm examples in play here are sen-tences like ‘Ted is ready’ or ‘Alfie has had enough’, where it seems that

we only reach the level of propositional, truth-evaluable content once we

know from a context of utterance what Ted is ready to do or what Alfie

has had enough of. Cases like these are thus supposed to demonstrate

that the minimalist picture, whereby all well-formed sentences are capa-

ble of expressing propositional content prior to rich contextual input, is

wrong.

The final challenge to minimalism we will consider here comes from argu-

ments against the kind of atomic, context-independent, referential view of

word meaning we find inherent in minimalism (and in favour of the kind of

radically context-sensitive view of word meanings found in Travis and oth-

ers). According to the minimalist, word meanings together with appropriatesyntactic structure are sufficient to determine a proposition, so whatever

word meanings are they must be the kinds of things which, when appro-

priately plugged together, are sufficient to result in a truth-evaluable claim.

So, the working model might be that our lexicon contains axioms of the

following kind:

‘Barack Obama’ refers to Barack Obama

‘red’ refers to the property of being red/is true of red objects

However, Chomsky and others have argued that these kinds of simplistic,

broadly referential axioms are not possible, since the entities supposed on

either side of the reference relation either fail to exist or are the wrong kind

of entities for a systematic semantics to employ (see Chomsky 2000, Collins

2009). So, for instance, consider polysemous expressions: ‘book’ can pick out

a concrete object (‘the book weighs one pound’) or an abstract entity (‘the

book she is planning will revolutionise the subject’), while ‘lamb’ can refer to

an animal or its meat, and ‘good’ seems to mean different things in ‘a good

meal’ and ‘a good friend’ (see also Allan, this volume). Even simple referring





524 EMMA BORG

terms have, on reflection, an apparently wide sphere of reference: ‘London’

can refer to a location (‘London is east of Reading’), a population or area

(‘London is bigger than Barcelona’), a form of government (‘London has ten

county councils’) and more besides (see Chomsky 2000). So the idea that wecan adopt simplelexical entries like ‘London’ refers to London, then, must be

rejected; in all cases, it turns out, words lack the kind of context-invariant,

referential meanings that would be required to underpin the claim that

sentences are capable of expressing truth-evaluable content prior to rich

pragmatic processing. Thus the idea of a semantic theory which makes use

of only tame pragmatics must be rejected.

Clearly, then, there is much work for a minimalist to do if she is to sustain

her claim that a semantics which utilises only ‘tame’ pragmatics remains

a viable option. In brief, however, we might note that there are responses

the minimalist can make to the challenges above. First, in answer to the

concerns of inappropriateness, she might argue that minimal propositions

do have an explanatory role to play, for instance they have a role to play as fallback content (the content which is guaranteed to be recoverable in

a communicative exchange even if something goes wrong with a hearer’s

grasp of context); see Borg 2007. Furthermore, she might contend that min-

imal propositions are psychologically real as they are what a psychologically

realised semantic theory is capable of delivering; see Borg 2009a. Finally,

with respect to context-shifting arguments, she might deploy a range of

manoeuvres, from claiming that some cases do reveal genuine, syntactically

marked context-sensitivity, to arguing that the phenomenon in question is

purely pragmatic in nature (i.e. concerns judgements of pragmatic speaker

meaning, not literal sentence meaning).18

Second, in response to arguments for incompleteness, it seems the min-

imalist has two distinct options: on the one hand, she might simply deny the claim that intuitions of incompleteness demonstrate that a sentence

fails to express a proposition. To support this claim she might point out,

as Cappelen and Lepore (2005a) have stressed, that the kind of behaviour

theorists standardly appeal to to show that a sentence like ‘Ted is ready’ is

incomplete is actually behaviour common to all sentences, including those

where we have absolutely no intuitions of semantic incompleteness. If this

is right, then whatever discomfort we feel with the sentence ‘Ted is ready’

can’t be due to its semantic incompleteness, at the risk of then having to

take all sentences to be semantically incomplete. The second line the min-

imalist might take in response to arguments of incompleteness is to stress

once again (as noted above with respect to inappropriateness arguments)

that there are several distinct lines of response open to the minimalist

in the face of putatively problematic cases, ranging from accepting some

cases as genuine instances of lexico-syntactically marked context-sensitivity

through to providing a purely pragmatic solution, and that this range of

responses taken together can dissolve the challenge of putatively incomplete

sentences.






Finally, with respect to the third challenge (from Chomsky-style semantic

internalism), there are two parts to any successful defence of minimalism.

First, the minimalist needs to show that the arguments Chomsky and oth-

ers have given against the kind of simple, atomic, referential lexical axiomsthe minimalist assumes can be defused.19 Second, she needs to show that the

minimalist approach itself is well equipped to accommodate the kinds of fea-

tures which Chomsky and othershave drawn attentionto as motivating their

context-sensitive view of word meaning (for instance, properties like syn-

onymy and polysemy, and patterns of apparently semantically dictated syn-

tacticdistribution);see Borg forthcoming: ch.5. These twotasks remainpress-

ing and it is, I think, this debateaboutthe differentaccounts of word/concept

content which underlie the opposing approaches that will form the next

key battleground for debates between radical semanticists and radical

pragmatists.

In closing, however, let’s return to an option we noted at the very start

of this chapter, namely the possibility of a semantics totally free from prag-matics. In the face of issues about the apparently all-pervasive nature of

context-sensitivity and the difficulty of taming pragmatics so as to make it

suitable for formal semantics, perhaps the best option for the advocate of

formal semantics here would be to retreat, to claim that all her semantic

theories concern is the kernel of (often or always) non-propositional con-

tent which lies at the heart of any natural language sentence. This would

be to deny the first clause of minimalism above, the idea (labelled ‘propo-

sitionalism’ in Bach 2006b) that all well-formed sentences express proposi-

tions and to allow instead that semantic theories often or always trade in

non-truth-evaluable content, something sub-propositional. In favour of this

move we should note that many of the motivations we gave for wanting

a context-free semantics at the start of this chapter (concerns to do withlearnability, say, and accounting for productivity and systematicity) seem

to require only that there be some element of linguistic meaning which is

context-insensitive, not that that context-insensitive element take us all the

way to a truth-evaluable proposition. Or again, we might think that concerns

about needing a context-insensitive, literal content to serve as ‘fallback’ con-

tent points only to the need for some context-insensitive content, not nec-

essarily for that something to be as rich as a complete proposition. So per-

haps the move to non-propositional views of semantic content is one worth

pursuing?

One well-known advocate of non-propositional semantics is Kent Bach

(e.g. this volume), who adopts what he calls ‘radical minimalism’ – rad-

ical precisely because it drops the commitment to semantic content being

truth-evaluable content. In fact, however, Bach doesn’t champion an entirely

pragmatics-free semantics, for he holds that context does play some role in

determining semantic content for some sentences. He draws a distinction

between what he calls ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ context and he maintains that

terms which look only to narrow context have their reference fixed as part of





526 EMMA BORG

semantics, while terms which look to wide context secure a referent only as

part of pragmatics.20 Thus for Bach, though a sentence like ‘I am hot’ yields

a complete proposition via semantic analysis alone, a sentence like ‘That is

hot’ fails to do so.

21

So, although Bach’s radical minimalism is more radicalthan minimalism per se, it is not as radical as itmight be since it doesn’t offer

us an entirely pure semantics, uninfected by pragmatic processes. However,

let’s leave this specific feature of Bach’s approach to oneside and concentrate

on the more fundamental issue of treating semantic content for sentences

as potentially non-propositional.22

A first point to note about this proposal is that taking this step is in fact,

I think, pretty much equivalent to embracing some kind of contextualist

view. For note that, on the contextualist picture there is still held to be

an element of linguistic meaning which is entirely free from contextual

input: this is the ‘incomplete logical form’ (in the terminology of Sperber

and Wilson 1986) and concentration on, and theorising about, this partial

element yields what Kempson (1986) calls ‘linguistic semantics’. On bothradical minimalism and contextualism, then, it seems we have three kinds

of content: first, an incomplete, sub-propositional, context-invariant content

(Bach’s propositional radical, Sperber and Wilson’s incomplete logical form),

second, a pragmatically enriched complete proposition which in some sense

gives the literal meaning of the speaker’s utterance(Bach’s impliciture, Sperber

and Wilson’s explicature); and, third, thefurther content a speaker mayconvey

by her utterance (the Gricean implicatures).

Where the accounts differ then is, first, on the labels assigned to each

stage: specifically, Bach treats his pragmatically determined implicitures as

part of pragmatics, whereas contextualists treat their pragmatically deter-

mined explicatures as delivering literal meaning (see Sperber and Wilson

1986, Recanati 2004a). Second, the accounts differ on the range of cases where semantics may fail to yield something truly propositional. For Bach’s

radical minimalism, semantics in general may stilldeal withcompletepropo-

sitions, the claim is simply that with respect to a few exceptional cases (like

‘Ted is ready’) semantics alone will deliver something sub-propositional.

Contextualists, on the other hand, as part of the radical pragmatics tra-

dition, hold that context-free content will rarely, if ever, reach the level

of the proposition, so that linguistic semantics in general must deal with

propositional radicals. Yet these differences in terminology and in degree

of application do not, it seems, amount to fundamental theoretical differ-

ences between the two approaches (for discussion of this point see Carston

2008).

However, this kind of ad hominem argument is clearly no objection to the

move to treat semantics as truly context-free but also as sub-propositional.

That the approach collapses into contextualism is a problem only if we have

reason to think that contextualism itself is ill-advised and (although I think

that is the case) I haven’t argued for that here. Yet, even without opening the

lid on contextualism, we can still, I think, raise initial questions for the idea






of sub-propositional semantic content. For instance, it is not obvious that

a gappy-proposition approach can accommodate the gradations of judge-

ments subjects are apparently willing to make in these cases. So consider the

following:(9) ∗ Jack devours.

(10) ∗Ready to take the exam.

(11) Jack is ready.

Ordinary speakers judge (9) to be ill-formed. (10), it seems, is also judged

ill-formed, at least where it is not heard as a question (‘Are you . . . ?’). (11),

on the other hand, is perfectly acceptable. Yet if what semantics delivers

is gappy versus non-gappy contents we might wonder why the gaps in (9)

and (10) lead to judgements of ill-formedness while the alleged gap in (11)

leads at most to a judgement of incompleteness. We might also ask, I think,

whether propositional radicals could really be sufficient to play the role of

fallback content, whether they could capture our practice of giving reasonsand explaining actions via declarative sentences, and whether they could

underpin our intuitive assessment of arguments (as opposed to merely utter-

ances of arguments) as valid.

Furthermore, we might also wonder how the non-propositional view can

accommodate the intuitive distinction with which this chapter opened

between literal meaning on oneside andpragmatic, speaker meaning, on the

other, for it is clear that an indefinite amount of information can be added

to any propositional radical. Thus one might hold that the sentence ‘Flintoff

is ready’, as uttered in some context c, expresses the proposition that Flintoff

is ready to bowl, or that Flintoff is ready to bowl the next cricket ball to Tendulker , or

that Andrew Flintoff, the English all-rounder who hit nine sixes and took seven wickets

in the Edgbaston test match against Australia in 2005, is ready to bowl the next cricket ball as a bouncer at the man with the highest number of test runs in any first-class cricket

career prior to 2010. If semantics gives us nothing but a gappy proposition we

surely still want to ask which of these contextually provided fillings-in the

speaker genuinely expresses or commits themselves to. Yet since we have

given up the idea that what counts for literal content is what can be found

at the lexico-syntactic level, it becomes quite unclear how we can isolate just

one (or some) of all the possible expansions of a propositional radical as the

one(s) that delivers literal meaning.

There are then, I think, issues still to be faced by someone who advocates

sub-propositional semantics and my suspicion is that, ultimately, when we

come to consider what we will lose by dropping the idea that semantics

trades in proposition-level content it may come to seem that the game is not

worth the candle. Jettisoning the traditional idea that sentences are capable

of expressing propositions is likely to prove disruptive across a range of

philosophical inquiries and the balance between this cost and the demands

of radical pragmatists for a greater role for context within the semantic

domain will need to be weighed very carefully.





528 EMMA BORG

Clearly, then, there remain crucial issues still to be resolved within this

debate and the war is far from being won either by the radical pragmatists

or by the radical semanticists, or indeed by those who favour some kind of

middle road. Yet it is equally clear that the explosion of recent work on thesemantics/pragmatics divide has, at least, done much to clarify where and

how the battle lines should be drawn.

Semantics Wo Pragmatics_p513-528 - Borg

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