Contextualism, Common Ground, and Speech Communities
Juan Colomina-Alminana
The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Usually, speakers employ an expression with the intention of talking about some objects of the world and their properties. In this case, language has a cognitive role, and can be seen as an act of identifying certain entities: It is employed referentially. There are a number of different devices that speakers may utilize to exploit this function of language, which capitalize on the truth-conditional content of these linguistic elements. Some of these linguistic mechanisms determine and admit truth-values for one and all occurrences of the sentences where they appear, by means of what Mill (1843:470) referred to as the method of “concomitant variation.”
There are other cases, however, where intention in referring to an object and its properties may exist, nonetheless the speaker does not employ any of these mechanisms, or rather there is no explicit word to determine the actual referred object, and meaning should be inferred from the context of utterance. These instances are called “occasion sentences,” since their truth-value may change and would depend upon the particular circumstances of, as Quine (1977:178) said, “what is going on in the neighborhood.” The current non-Gricean preferred solution to the truth-value determination problem for this kind of sentence is based on “unarticulated constituents.”
My main purpose is providing an explanation of unarticulated constituents in terms of pragmatic presuppositions analyzed in maximally local scenarios, which proffers a different pragmatic approach to unarticulated constituents based on two different but related theses. On the one hand, a voice of caution is raised against purely semantic strategies. The reason is that assuming the existence of a unique, literal meaning in each sentence, besides its apparent context-sensitivity, internally determined by the semantic content of its components eliminates any role speakers and audience have when determining meaning. Given the risk of psychologism, on the other hand, skepticism towards personalist/intentionalist and relativist positions is defended with a solution in favor of contextual, conventional non-linguistic elements that provide the appropriate truth conditions for each utterance of the sentence in question. My solution embraces the existence of “unarticulated constituents” based on an externalist but pluralist explanation supported by Stalnakerian pragmatic presuppositions, which preserve the speaker’s epistemic relevance in language, while explaining the externalist and conventional nature of language and meaning behind Quine’s “observation sentences.” The final conclusion is that speakers mean things with the words they employ, and not words by themselves, because speakers display the values and means of the concrete speech community to which they belong/endorse.
References
Mill, J.S., 1843. A System of Logic. University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, HI, 2002.
Quine, W.O., 1977. Facts of the matter. In: Shahan, R.W., and Merrill, K.R. (Eds.), American Philosophy. From Edwards to Quine. University of Oklahoma Press, Norma, OK, pp. 176-196.