Abstract
Stalnaker’s conception of context as common ground (what he calls CG-context) possesses unquestionable explanatory power, shedding light on presupposition, presupposition accommodation, the behavior of certain types of conditionals, epistemic modals, and related phenomena. The CG-context approach is also highly abstract, so merely pointing out that it fails to account for an aspect of communication is an inconclusive criticism. Instead our question should be whether it can be extended or modified to account for such a phenomenon while preserving its spirit. To that end, this essay assesses the prospects of the CG-context approach for making sense of the variety of ways in which interlocutors accept propositions as well as non-propositional contents, some different types of conversation and the norms distinctive of these different types, some pre-illocutionary pragmatic phenomena, conversational injustice, and fictional discourse.
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Notes
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Context Workshop at the University of Connecticut in April, 2016, and at the Mutual Belief in Pragmatics Workshop at Shanxi University, China, in August, 2016. I am grateful to participants on those two occasions for their comments, and am particularly indebted to Liz Camp, Sandy Goldberg, Claire Horisk, Mandy Simons, Robert Stalnaker, Rob Stainton, and Zoltan Szabo for their insights.
Although the two approaches are often lumped together, the CG-context approach is distinct from the conversational scorekeeping approach, at least as the latter is commonly understood. For the CG-context approach is characterized in terms of the psychological states of the interlocutors, whereas the scorekeeping approach reifies a notion of a scoreboard that is not obviously reducible to anyone’s psychological states.
The purposes built into conjectures and suppositions for the sake of argument are evidently ones of which agents are aware. However, it is doubtful that in believing something, I am aware of myself as doing so for a purpose. A more likely candidate for the relevant purpose is that in conjunction with desires, beliefs tend to help us navigate the world. If this is a purpose of belief, then we should note that for Stalnaker, the purposes built into his conception of acceptance states need not be ones of which agents are aware, and may instead be akin to the way in which a purpose of the heart is to pump blood and of the skin is thermoregulation.
In his (1984), pp. 79–81, Stalnaker also characterizes acceptance states as ones that can be characterized as either correct or not depending on whether the content of that state is true. Thus a belief that P is correct just in case p; likewise for a guess. On the other hand, none of a degree of belief, contemplation of a proposition, or entertainment of a mental image has this feature.
Stalnaker later (2014, p. 122) reformulates the definition of CG in terms of the notion of centered worlds. However, that refinement is not germane to the questions I shall ask below, and so I will work with the formulation of CG given in the text.
Green forth a offers an elucidation, refinement and defense of the force/content distinction thus described.
Here I focus only on theoretical questions, leaving aside practical questions such as, how does one tie a Marlinspike Hitch. Practical questions may often be answered without speech acts but instead by demonstrating the proper technique for doing something: I might answer your knot-tying question by silently and overtly tying a Marlinspike. When we accept an answer to a practical question, we have a plan for doing something. (This is not to say that in the present cases one plans to tie a Marlinspike; rather, one plans to adhere to the instructions if the situation arises).
Although it will not be possible to develop the approach here, we should also consider what it would mean to proffer and accept a plan, understood as the semantic content of an imperative. So construed, a plan is a function from choice—points to histories, where a history is a series of world-stages as understood by a “branching time” model of time and modality. Assuming indeterminism, there will be points in the history of a world in which there are more than one way in which things might progress; this might be due to chance events such as the decay of a radioactive atom, or to the choice of a free agent. The latter may (though it need not) be the realization of a plan. When interlocutors settle on a plan, they in effect commit themselves to a function (not necessarily the same function for each agent) from choice-points to histories. Belnap et al. (2001) provides further details.
For instance, Stalnaker elsewhere writes, “To engage in conversation is, essentially, to distinguish among alternative possible ways that things may be.” (1978, p. 85) Similarly, Roberts remarks, “…I assume that the primary goal of discourse is communal inquiry—the intention to discover with other interlocutors, “the way things are,” to share information about our world.” (2006, p. 208). One could take a sufficiently expansive view of “the way things are” as to include those courses of action we plan to perform. I propose, however, to permit conversations aimed at formulating courses of action to stand on their own in order that their distinctive features might emerge.
In a volume of essays dominated by sociolinguists examining the prospects of extending the scope of speech act theory to discourse analysis, Searle (1992) issues a challenge to any such project: he denies that there could be a theory of conversations parallel to that of speech acts, and his central reason is that unlike speech acts conversations do not as such have a point or purpose. If this is meant as a claim that there is no point that all conversations have, then it may be granted without posing a threat to the utility of studying what a conversation requires. For it is consistent with this denial that nevertheless every conversation has some point or other.
In what follows I use ‘speech act’ to refer to an act that can be performed by speaker-meaning that one is doing so. Promising, asserting, conjecturing, and excommunicating are speech acts on this criterion; offending, surprising, and convincing are not. Accordingly, speech acts are not to be confused with acts of speech. (One can perform a speech act silently, and one can speak without performing a speech act.) For further discussion of the notion of speech act as used here see Green (2014).
Here is an effort to describe some familiar types of conversation in terms of our taxonomy: Gossip will often be a symmetrical or didactic Inquiry concerning the actions of others not part of the conversation. Monday-morning quarterbacking is a deliberation about events in the past; schmoozes are generally deliberations in which one interlocutor cajoles others to do something that is presented as being in the interest of all interlocutors. Kibitzes are typically deliberations that concern the actions of someone not part of the conversation. Taking the piss is a conversation in which at least one interlocutor is unaware that others are bullshitting. Small talk may be any of the above, but will often be verbal exchanges rather than conversations.
The Embedded Implicature Hypothesis ran as follows: If assertion of a sentence S conveys the implicatum that P with nearly universal regularity, then when S is embedded the content that is usually understood to be embedded for semantic purposes is the proposition (S & p).
I develop these ideas in more detail under the rubric organic meaning, in Green forthcoming c.
For more on these issues see Green (2014), and Green forthcoming b.
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Green, M. Conversation and common ground. Philos Stud 174, 1587–1604 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0779-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0779-z