Reviewed by Jason Stanley, Rutgers University

François Recanati

Literal Meaning

François Recanati, Literal Meaning, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 188pp, $22.99 (pbk), ISBN 0521537363.

Reviewed by Jason Stanley, Rutgers University

In philosophy, the Twentieth Century began with the thought that the context-dependence and vagueness of natural language undermined the possibility of providing a systematic account of the meaning of natural language sentences. Philosophical reflection on language continued through its middle period with an even more explicit emphasis on the unsystematic character of language. But then Paul Grice showed how to explain some of the unruly effects of context on linguistic communication by appeal to general conversational principles. From the other direction, Richard Montague and his students showed that much of what appeared to be unsystematic was in fact explicable. Indeed, Montague and his coterie approached this task using the tools developed by the descendants of the very philosophers who had despaired of the possibility of providing a rigorous semantics for natural language. As syntax and semantics became increasingly sophisticated, vagueness and context-dependence became objects of formal study, rather than phenomena whose existence demonstrated the impossibility of such work. From the perspective of those fluent with the tools of Chomsky, Grice, and Montague, conclusions from premises about the unsystematic nature of natural language began to look a bit like a previous era's skepticism about the possibility of a systematic physical theory of the universe.

It is somewhat surprising, then, that philosophy of language in the Twentieth Century, and the beginning of the Twenty-First, has been dominated by a wealth of papers and books seeking to return us to the pessimistic conclusions of the past. François Recanati is one of the major figures in this literature. In Recanati (1993, pp. 227-274), he argued that what is intuitively said by an utterance is affected by context in ways that could not be explained by any combination of Chomsky, Montague and Grice (that is, ordinary syntax and semantics, together with Gricean pragmatics). Since the publication of that work, he has been developing this thesis in detail. His arguments for the thesis he calls contextualism are brought together in characteristically clear and concise form in Literal Meaning. According to contextualism (p. 4), ". . . the contrast between what a speaker means and what she says is illusory, and the notion of 'what the sentence says' is incoherent." Literal Meaning is devoted to defending the thesis of contextualism against rival views, and exploring some of its consequences for particular linguistic phenomena.

For Grice, implicating a proposition was a species of conscious intentional action. A speaker uses a sentence, and thereby intentionally expresses one proposition in order to implicate another. For Grice, then, speakers are aware of the propositions they express when they utter sentences. But according to Recanati's Contextualism, virtually any proposition we are aware of asserting is one that is thoroughly affected by what he calls "primary pragmatic processes". So Recanati holds that Grice's notion of what is said by an utterance (the input to implicature) is a thoroughly non-semantic notion.

There are a number of other theorists who agree with Recanati that Grice's notion of what is said by an utterance cannot be what is delivered by a systematic semantic theory. First, there are other contextualists. Relevance Theorists, such as Robyn Carston, Dan Sperber, and Dierdre Wilson, agree with Recanati that any notion of what is said is thoroughly pragmatic in nature. Relevance theorists also believe that there is a systematic account of the sort of pragmatic inferences by means of which interpreters grasp what is said in context. Other contextualists, such as John Searle and Charles Travis, are grim pessimists who reject the possibility of any such systematic account. Then, there is an apparently non-contextualist position, which Recanati calls The Syncretic View. Adherents of the Syncretic View agree with contextualists that what speakers consciously intend to express by their utterances is not usually the semantic content of the sentences uttered (even relative to that context of use). But adherents of the Syncretic View nevertheless maintain that sentences, relative to a context of use, do have a semantic content, and that the fact that they do is in some sense important for the theory of meaning. Both contextualists and adherents of the Syncretic View agree, however, that what is consciously available to the speaker as what she primarily intended to express by her utterance is not in general what is delivered by the semantic interpretation of the sentence she uttered (even relative to that context of use).

The Syncretic View is a position particularly popular among philosophers of language, in part for sociological reasons. Philosophy of Language in the 1980s was dominated by disputes between Millians, who held that the semantic content of a name is exhausted by the object in the world to which it referred, and those who maintained that there is some other semantic content associated with a name, e.g. a mode of presentation of the object to which that name referred. Millians in the 1980s defended the thesis that the semantic content of the sentence "Hesperus is Phosphorus" (relative to a context of use) expresses the same proposition as the semantic content of the sentence "Hesperus is Hesperus", despite our inclination to believe otherwise. Similarly, Millians believed that "John believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus" expresses the same proposition, relative to a context of use, as "John believes that Hesperus is Hesperus", despite the fact that ordinary speakers who assertively utter the first generally believe that they are saying something different from what they would be saying if they had uttered the second. So Millians are antecedently committed to the Syncretic View, since they think that sentences do express semantic contents, and that the semantic content a sentence has relative to a context can be quite distinct from the content the speaker intends to assert (or thinks she asserts) by her utterance of that sentence in that context. Those who upheld the Millian line in the 1980s have spent some portion of the ensuing period defending their Syncretic commitments (see the work of Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames). But Millians and their descendants are not the only defenders of the Syncretic View among philosophers. Kent Bach has argued for years for a certain version of the Syncretic View, where the semantic content of many sentences, even relative to a context of use, is not a full proposition. Most recently, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore have argued for a version of the Syncretic View, where semantic contents of sentences are always propositional.

Recanati devotes the third chapter of his book to comparing and contrasting his view with relevance theory, and the fourth chapter to criticizing the Syncretic View; I shall discuss only the latter chapter here. Advocates of the Syncretic View hold that the proposition intuitively expressed by an utterance is only rarely the semantic content of the sentence relative to the context of utterance (King and Stanley (2005) call the Syncretic View semantic modesty). The central problem for the Syncretic View is that the notion of semantic content appealed to in the theory threatens to be an idle wheel in an explanation of linguistic practice. King and Stanley (2005) argue, as against those who think that complex expressions have characters in the sense of David Kaplan (roughly standing linguistic meanings), that the characters of complex expressions play no explanatory role in an account of meaning that cannot be played simply be appealing to the characters of lexical items and the syntactic structure of sentences. Borrowing this line of thought, Recanati argues (p. 64) that what work is done by postulating the minimal proposition expressed by a sentence in a context can be done simply by appeal to the contents of individual words relative to that context, and the syntactic structure of the sentence.

I am no fan of the Syncretic View. Furthermore, as will become clear below, I suspect that Syncretism is not so different from Recanati's favored version of the thesis he calls "contextualism". Nevertheless, I suspect that Recanati cannot straightforwardly borrow King and Stanley's criticism of the view that complex expressions have characters as an objection to all forms of the Syncretic view. For King and Stanley's point is that (e.g.) sentence-level characters play no role in a semantic theory. In particular, King and Stanley assert that there are no operators that take sentence-level characters as objects. In contrast, some advocates of the Syncretic View presumably do think that there are operators that take minimal propositions as objects. I suspect that Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames (or at least relevant time-slices of them) think that modal operators such as "it is necessary that" and "it is possible that" take minimal propositions as objects. This suggests that the minimal proposition does some semantic work on some versions of the Syncretic View. [1]

There are two versions of the Syncretic View. According to the first version, which I will call propositional Syncretism, semantic contents of sentences in contexts are always propositions, but not usually the propositions the users of those sentences intend primarily to assert. Rather, semantic contents are generally "minimal propositions" (as in the work of Cappelen and Lepore (2005)). According to the second version, which I shall call non-propositional syncretism, semantic contents of sentences in context are occasionally non-propositional (as in Bach's work). Recanati provides some persuasive criticisms of propositional syncretism. For example, according to what Recanati calls the "common denominator" approach to the minimal proposition, the semantic content of a sentence S in context c is what would be asserted and conveyed in every normal context c' in which the reference of all indexicals in s is the same as their reference in c (see Soames (2002, p. 106)). [2] The common denominator approach is behind all recent presentations of propositional syncretism (see Soames (2002, pp. 56-63), Cappelen and Lepore (2005, p. 57, p. 143)). The idea behind the common denominator approach is that the semantic content of a sentence relative to a context is the minimal propositional information that is asserted by an utterance of that sentence, relative to those particular semantically relevant contextual features. Recanati argues that this characterization of semantic content will not help the propositional syncretist identify a "minimal" proposition consistently with maintaining some of the positions characteristic of the Syncretic View.

Here is an example not discussed by Recanati, but which serves to make some of the same points he does. Many advocates of (either version of) the Syncretic View hold that quantifier domain restriction does not affect the proposition semantically expressed by a sentence relative to a context (though Soames is silent on this matter). If so, then the proposition semantically expressed by "Every bottle is in the fridge", relative to any context, is the false proposition that every bottle in the entire universe is in the fridge. But this false proposition is never asserted or conveyed by an utterance of "Every bottle is in the fridge". Thus, this characterization of semantic content is inconsistent with the view, advocated by so many adherents of the Syncretic View, that domain restriction is semantically inert. The problem with using this version of the common denominator characterization of the minimal proposition is that it threatens to deliver the desired minimalist result only when "the asserted content is richer than the alleged semantic content" (Recanati (2004, p. 60)). But there are many cases (such as many cases of domain restriction) in which the semantic content, according to the advocate of the Syncretic View, is never itself asserted.

A natural response to these sorts of worries with the common denominator approach to the minimal proposition is to give up the view that the speaker must assert or intend to convey the minimal proposition, and seek some other relationship between the semantic content of a sentence relative to a context, and the information asserted by an utterance of that sentence. Indeed, Scott Soames, the target of much of Chapter 4 of Literal Meaning, has recently done just this, abandoning his earlier conception of the relation between the two levels for reasons somewhat similar to the ones given above (Soames (2005)). In its place, Soames adopts a conception of the relation between the semantic content of a sentence in context and its asserted content that permits the semantic content of a sentence in context to be less than fully propositional (in which case, it is not a suitable candidate for a content to be asserted at all).

On Soames's new view (Soames (2005)), the semantic content of a sentence in context may be a "propositional matrix". The relation between the asserted content and the semantic content of a sentence in context is that the former must be "an acceptable completion" of the latter (Ibid., p. 365). This is an instance of non-propositional syncretism. Non-propositional syncretism, which allows semantic contents of sentences in contexts to be at least sometimes non-propositional entities, is close to Recanati's own position (2004, p. 56) that "semantic interpretation, characterized by its deductive character, does not deliver complete propositions; it delivers only semantic schemata -- propositional functions, to use Russell's phrase." Non-propositional syncretism and contextualism agree both in the thesis that semantic contents of sentences relative to contexts are often too underspecified to be propositional, and in the thesis that whatever is consciously available to the speaker as what she primarily intends to assert is not usually the semantic interpretation of the sentence uttered in that context. The two positions therefore have a great deal of similarity.

It is true that Recanati describes his position as one in which "the notion of 'what a sentence says' is incoherent", suggesting that he thinks there is something wrong in principle with taking his non-propositional semantic schemata to be "what a sentence says", whereas a non-propositional syncretist such as Kent Bach seems happy with taking propositional radicals to be what is said by a sentence. But this distinction is merely terminological. Another difference, I suspect, is that Recanati believes that very few if any sentences, relative to contexts, have propositions as semantic contents (e.g. Recanati (2004, p. 90)), whereas advocates of non-propositional syncretism such as Kent Bach and Scott Soames think that quite a number of sentences have propositional semantic contents in context. However these positions lie upon the same continuum, and not (when one considers the degree of apparent contextual underspecification in language) very distant ones at that. The similarities between non-propositional syncretism and contextualism far outweigh their differences.

I have suggested that there is not a great deal of space between non-propositional syncretism and Recanati's favored version of contextualism. What, then, of propositional syncretism? Recanati's discussion of Soames, as well as Soames's subsequent advocacy of non-propositional syncretism, suggests that propositional syncretism is a difficult position to maintain. It is a matter of extreme difficulty to isolate the minimal proposition that is supposed to be the semantic content of a sentence in context. Cappelen and Lepore (2005) have provided an influential recent defense of propositional syncretism. Unfortunately, they do not say enough about the crucial question of how to isolate the minimal proposition. One suggestion they develop involves "[identifying] tests that help the theorist focus on the speech act content that a wide range of utterances of S have in common." (p. 57) However, as Recanati and Soames (2005) emphasize, it is unlikely that the minimal proposition expressed will be something the speaker ever intends to assert, and so it is unlikely that the minimal proposition will be a part of speech act content. In another passage, Cappelen and Lepore suggest (p. 143):

The semantic content of a sentence S is the content that all utterances of S

share. It is the content that all utterances of S express no matter how different their contexts of utterance are. It is also the content that can be grasped and reported by someone who is ignorant about the relevant characteristics of the context in which an utterance of S took place.

This passage is rather unclear. Is it the content that all assertions of S express, no matter how different their contexts of utterance? If so, "every bottle is in the fridge" has no semantic content relative to any context, since there is no one proposition that is asserted by every utterance of the sentence (and certainly not, as we have seen, the proposition that every bottle in the universe is in the fridge, since this is never asserted). If the common content of all utterances of a certain sentence is not the content of any genuine speech act, what is the motivation for thinking that common contents are always genuine propositions, rather than just Recanati's "semantic schemata"? After all, the main reason to think that the common contents are propositional is that they can be "claimed, asserted, questioned, investigated" (Cappelen and Lepore, p. 152). Once one sees that the common minimal contents are not the things claimed, asserted, questioned, or investigated, there is little motivation for believing them always to be propositions.

I share Recanati's skepticism that one can always isolate a common propositional content that can serve as the minimal content, consistently with other syncretic commitments. Furthermore, even if the propositional syncretist were to assign common minimal propositional contents to each sentence in context via some artificial method, they would play no more a role in an account of communication than non-propositional entities such as semantic schemata. For such contents, though propositional, would no more plausibly be objects of intentional actions such as assertions, questions, or commands than schemata. So there is no important difference for the theory of meaning between propositional syncretism and non-propositional syncretism. I have already mentioned my suspicion that there is no great difference between non-propositional syncretism and Recanati's contextualism. My suspicion is therefore that the most important disputes in the theory of meaning are not between contextualism and syncretism, or even between advocates of these doctrines and semantic skeptics, such as Charles Travis. Rather, the genuinely important disputes in the theory of meaning are between those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are not generally the semantic contents of the sentences they use (even relative to those contexts), and those who maintain that the contents primarily asserted by speakers are generally (not always, but typically) the semantic contents of the sentences used (relative to those contexts).