Literal Meaning and Logical Theory

Literal Meaning and Logical Theory Jerrold J. Katz The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 4. (Apr., 1981), pp. 203-233. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-362X%28198104%2978%3A4%3C203%3ALMALT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H The Journal of Philosophy is currently published by Journal of Philosophy, Inc..

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/jphil.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

http://www.jstor.org Fri May 18 08:53:50 2007

LITERAL MEANING; A N D LOGIC:AL THEORY

203

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY"

I

N "Literal ~ e a n i n g , "John ' Searle claims to refute theview that sentences of a natural language have a meaning independent of the social contexts in which their utterances occur. T h e present paper is a reply on behalf of this view. In the first section, I show that the issue is not a parochial dispute within a narrow area of the philosophy of language, of interest only to specialists in the area, but is at the heart of a wide range of important philosophical problems, those on which the recent linguistic turn in philosophy has properly taken a grammatical perspective. In the second section, I reply to Searle's criticisms of the view. I

Philosophers who take the position that contextually independent sentence meaning exists have a reason for thinking that literal sentence meaning does not depend on contextual factors, namely that such meaning can be accounted for purely grammatically as a compositional function of the meanings of component words and syntactic structure. This reason has at times been challenged by philosophers and linguists, but these challenges turn out on close examination to bear only on dispensible aspects of the way compositionality has been formulated and so to be easily met. Searle's criticisms, however, d o not constitute another of these indirect challenges; they attack the idea of context-free meaning directly. But Searle's attack is itself strangely context-free. One could hardly guess from Searle's discussion that the issue has broad philosophical

'

* T h e author wants to thank Ned Block for helpful discussions of a n earlier draft. Erkrnntnts, X I I I , 2 (July 1978): 207-224; reprinted in Searle's Expresston and Meaning (New York: Cambridge, 1979),pp. 117-136. Parenthetical page references to Searle will be to this article, unless otherwise noted, with the Erkenntnis numbering. ' F o r example, Donald Davidson in making the crucial step in motivating his program, the step from a 'means that' form of analysis to a ' s is T if and only if p' form, claims that the step is warranted as the only way he knows to deal with the difficulty that "we cannot account for even as much as the truth conditions of [belief sentences and others containing intensional contexts] o n the basis of what we know of the meanings of words in them." See his "Truth a n d Meaning," in J. F. Rosenberg and C . Travis, eds., Readings i n the P h i l o s o p h y of Language (Englelvood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p p . 433-435. Davidson says this without argument, presumably relying o n Benson Mates, "Synonymity," in L. Linsky, ed., Senlnntics and the Philosopliy of Lnnguage (ITrbana: ITni\.. of Illinois Pless, l9.52), p p . 111-138. Noarn <:homsL\ also uses a {zrriant of Al:rtes's a~.gurnentto rnoti\.atc his Extcnded Standard Theor!; sec hir "Deep Struc-ture. Surface Struc ture, and Scn1:rntic Interpretation" in S t u d r r . ~o n Senzar11rc.srn ( ; e ? ~ e r n t ~Gr ~mer n n ~ n r( T h r Hague: hlouton, l972), p p . 87 8. T h e standard intrnrionalist rejoinder in Alonzo C:hurch. "Intensional Isomorphism and Identity of Belief," Philosophical Studies, \., 5 (October 1954): 65-73, though o n the right track, ir not sufficient. Sre m ) discursions in Semnritic. Theory (New York: Harper & Rolv. 1972). pp. 263-280, hereafter S T , and in "C:homaky o n Meaning," Lnngunge, 1.1.1, 1 (hlarch 1980): 29-32.

'

204

THE JOI.Rh'AL OF PHILOSOPHY

significance. He neither explains its significance nor identifies the particular form of the pro-literal-meaning view that he is singling out for criticism (207). Readers are left in the dark about the philosophical background that gives the issue its philosophical significance. It is not clear why Searle or anyone else, apart from natural curiosity, ought to be bothered about the prospect of sentences having a purely compositional meaning. T o learn why Searle is bothered by this prospect, we need look n o further than the description he gives of the view he sets out to refute: "the view . . . that the literal meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has in the 'zero context' or the 'null context' " (207).~ T he technical terms here are unique to the theory that I developed in Proposithis book argues tional Structure and Illocutionary ~ o r c e Now, .~ that what the tradition from Austin to Searle claims to be a theory of speech acts is, in fact, n o theory at all, but merely a loose assortment of observations about various aspects of language, on the one hand, and of its use, on the other. It argues that "speech act theory" lacks the coherence and congruity to be a proper theory and that it should be replaced by at least two distinct theories, one dealing with the grammatically determined literal meaning of sentence types (including both constatives and performatives) and the other dealing with the extragrammatical information on which speakers use their knowledge of the meaning of sentence types to perform illocutionary acts. These theories, individually, have the coherence and congruity that speech act theory lacks: the former concerns the grammatical structure of a language, and the latter concerns the language user's application of grammatical and contextual knowledge in actual speech. T o pin the point down, consider the rules Searle gives for syntactic indicators of illocutionary force. One such rule says that the verb 'promise' involves the notion of the speaker's undertaking an obligation and also reference to a future act (relative to the speech point) in which the speaker is the agent.4 Now, there is a range of grammatical facts that show that these semantic conditions are inherent aspects of the grammar of 'promise', e.g., the contrast between 'promise' and 'advise', on the one hand, and the contrast between 'promise' and 'thank', on the other. Another such rule of Searle's, completely on a par with the former rule in his treatment, says that it should not be 'Searle introduces the pro-literal-meaning view under the misleading description "received opinion." Considering the popularity o f contextualism nolvadays, such a description is like describing Berkeley as a typical American city. New Y o r k : Crowell, Harper& R o w , 197'7;Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1980).Hereafter, PSIF. 4Speech Acts ( N e w Y o r k : Cambridge, 1969), pp. 57-61.

1.I'I'ER.II.

ILIt.ANINC; AND 120C,IC..%L 'I'I1EORY

205

obvious that the speaker will d o the act that fulfills the promise in the normal course of events. Another rule, again on a par, says that the promisee wants the speaker to fulfill the promise. These conditions can be shown not to bea part of thegrammar of 'promise', but merely aspects of contexts that speakers normally take into consideration i n their use of language. Note that such conditions, in contrast to the obligation and future-act conditions, need not be satisfied in straightforward literal uses of 'promise'. Typically, pledges and oaths (which are promises) are given when it is obvious that the speaker will do the act(s)-e.g., honest Abe's oath-and a promise can be made when the last thing in the world that the promisee wants is to see it fulfillede.g., a student promises to finish a three-hundred-page paper by the end of the semester, so that the professor can read it over the vacation (PSIF 34-36, 150-152). If these considerations are right, Searle's speech act theory can be divided u p in this way and its rules parceled out, on the one hand, to a theory of the grammatical structure of the languageand, on theother, to a theory of how speakers use sentences in different contexts. Given such a challenge to the speech act tradition and to Searle's own theory in particular, it is clear why Searle would be bothered about the prospect of sentences having a purely compositional meaning. Such a prospect underlies the dismemberment of Searle's treatment of meaning and speech acts. \Vhy should other philosophers bother about the issue? There is the trivial answer that a large number of philosophers accept something like Searle's treatment of meaning and speech acts. But there are deeper reasons for interest in the issue, reasons which apply more generally. Underlying speech act theory is the assumption that meaning is use, that the explanation of the meaning of a word is fundamentally like a n explanation of how we make the proper moves i n games or social practices. T h i s assumption has been adopted, i n one form or another, by a large and influential number of philosophers in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, including Wittgenstein, Ryle, Strawson, and Dummett, and it has been exploited by them in areas as diverse as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of mathematics. T o take one recent illustration, Michael Dummett uses the equation of meaning with use to ground his constructivist philosophy of mat he ma tic^.^ T h e use theory provides the general semantic under'''I\'~ttgensrein's Philosophy of IIathematics," P111lotophzcnl R e i ' ~ r i u ,I . X I I I I , 3 (July 19.59):324-348; reprinted in Trlitl~ond O f l ~ eErlzgmos r (Ckmbridgc, IIass.: H a r ~ a r d 19781. ,

pinnings Dummett requires to argue, i n particular, that the meaning of a mathematical theorem is . . . the conditions under xvhich Ice regard ourse1x.e~as justified in asserting [the theorem], that is, the circumstances in which xve are in possession of a proof (325).

T h i s verificationism comes directly out of a feature common to a wide range of use theories, namely, the notion that assertion is governed by a rule requiring that the speaker have sufficient evidence or reasbns to make the a ~ s e r t i o n\Vithout .~ the general semantic basis provided by the use theory, Dummett's constructivism would be in the unfortunate position of having to treat the meaning of mathematical sentences a n d the meaning of grammatically indistinguishable everyday sentences in a gratuitously dissimilar manner.' No wonder, then, that Dummett claims that nothing short of a use theory would satisfy the philosophical demands on a theory of meaning.8 It is one thing to have philosophical applications fall out of a theory of meaning independently justified on appropriate linguistic grounds, another to begin with desired philosophical applications a n d reason backwards to the necessary character of a theory of meaning. T h e danger i n the latter course, which I think Dummett takes, is that the theory chosen because it fits the philosophical desiderata may fail to be a n adequate theory, o n linguistic grounds. One ought to begin without philosophical desiderata and ask what a scientific theory of meaning must do i n order to say what meaning is, and then having arrived a t a n answer, go on to see whether the linguistically successful theory will serve any of our philosophical purposes. I have argued ( S T , 1-10f) that when one takes this approach, the

o or

example, Srarle says that the preparatory r ~ i l efor assertion is that the speaker has exidrncr (reasons, crc.) for the truth of the assertion (Sppprh art,^, 64); a n d H. P . (;rice ["I.ogic a n d Conversation," in P . Cole a n d J . L. hlorgan, rds., S.i.,7tau orzd Semnntzcs 3 (New Yolk: Academic PI-r,s, 197.5), 11. 461 introduces the "supermaxim" under the categol-y q ~ ~ n l z"Tr) t ~ : to rnake your cont~-ibutiono n e that i, true," a n d , mol-r specificall), "Do not sa) what you belie\e to he fal,r" and "Do not sa) that for ~ v h i c hyou lack adequate evidence." 7 ~ a u Benacerraf, l "Mathematical T r u t h , " this j o r ~ s . ~L ~ .XX . ,, 19 (Nov. 8, 1973): 661-677. "\\'hat Is a Theory of Meaning?", i n ,Wind and L a n g u a g e (New York: Oxfol-d, 1975), p p . 100/l. Dummett WI-ites,"Any theor) of meaning which was not, o r did not irnmediatel) lield, a throryof understanding, would not s;tti,f\ the pul-pose for which, philosophically, we require a theory of meaning. For I ha\,e argued that a theory of meaning is requil-rd to make the workitlg, of 1;111guagro p e n to \ielv. T o knolv a 1;111guage is to he ahlr to rmplo! a language." See also his sequel, "\\'hat Is ;I Theory of Mezining (111," in C;. Evans a n d J. AlcDo1cc.11, cds., T r u t h and " d e o n ~ r ~(New g York: Oxford, 19761, p p . 67-137.

LITERAL XIEANING A N D LOGICAL. THEORY

207

criterion for a n adequate theory of meaning is that it answer the specific questions that the general question "What is meaning?" breaks down into, such as "What is sameness of meaning (synonymy)?", "What is multiplicity of meaning (ambiguity)?", "What is the difference between meaningfulness and meaninglessness (semantic deviance)?", "What is redundancy of meaning?", and "What is truth by virtue of meaning (analyticity)?" T h e linguistic criteria for a theory of meaning, then, are simply that it explain the component notions in the pretheoretical notion of sentence meaning in a way that is confirmed comprehensively by predictions about the synonymy, ambiguity, meaningfulness, meaninglessness, redundancy, analyticity, and other semantic properties and relations of sentences, and that it be the simplest such theory forming part of the over-all grammar of the language.9 O n Dummett's approach, asking that a theory of meaning first meet certain philosophical desiderata-specifically, yield a theory of understanding in his sense-has the effect of pushing the boundaries of semantics beyond language into matters of everyday manners and morals, psychology and sociology, and so on. O n the approach outlined above, however, one obtains far tighter boundaries for the domain of meaning. Instead of a theory of meaning having to account for understanding, it becomes a theory of the meanings understood. All aspects of manners, morals, psychology, etc. required to explain understanding and use now fall outside the domain of semantics. T h e principal consequence of this in the present connection is that constructivism is deprived of a defensible semantic basis. T h e criteria for a theory of meaning on our approach exclude from the factors relevant to the meaning of a sentence any condition that a speaker have sufficient evidence or reason to assert anything, just as a related distinction between matters of language and matters of linguistic be-

' Dummett tries toestablish his "full-blooded" theoryof meaning by refuting"modest theories." These modest theories claim that the proper task of theory construction in semantics is only to explain the grammatical association of conceptsand propositions (sentence meanings) with expressions and sentences (as their senses in the language). But Dummett's reasons for rejecting modest theories rest on the curious assumption that Davidson's theory of interpretation is an acceptable exemplar for modest theories generally. (See, for example, "What Isa Theory of Meaning?", pp. 101/2.) Davidson's theory is, it can be shown, not even a theory of meaning at all. [See my "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Intensionalism," in K. Cunderson, ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1'11 (Minneapolis: L1niv.of Minnesota Press, 197i), pp. 63-76.] The central point is that Davidson'smove from theanalysisparadigm 's meansm' to theanalysis paradigm 's is T if and only if p' takes his theory of interpretation completely outside the range of theories of meaning. Therefore, no argument like Dummett's showing that Davidson's theory is inadequate can establish that modest theories generally are inadequate.

208

THE J O L ' R N J ~ L O F PIIII~OSOI'HY

havior excluded Searle's nonobviousness condition o n promising. Since such conditions would be considered a matter of the use o f language, or better yet, a general feature of cooperative behavior, the meaning of mathematical sentences would come out to have nothing directly to do with "the conditions under which we regard ourselves as justified in asserting [them], that is, the circumstances in which we are in possession of a proof." It is even plausible to suppose that an explication of the pretheoretic notion of sentence meaning will provide truth conditions for mathematical sentences which are most reasonably construed in accord with a realist position. At the very least, the existence of contextually independent sentence meaning undermines the most serious contemporary attempt to show that mathematics is created rather than discovered. I ~%,ish to give one further reason for philosophical interest in the issue of contextually independent sentence meaning. I have two motives in this. One is that this reason exhibits the connection between this issue and questions that are extremely important for both logical theory and metaphilosophy. T h e other is that this further reason makes clear that a conception of compositional sentence meaning, and in particular the conception sketched above, is not to be thought of as necessarily Fregean and, as a consequence, open to objections that have been brought, rightly in many cases, against Fregean semantics. In many ways, Frege got intensionalist semantics off on the wrong foot. One example of this was his doctrine that natural languages contain imperfections, conditions intrinsic to them which are injurious to scientific thought, and his program of constructinga logically perfect language with which to replace natural languages for the purpose of doing science.'' T h e influence of this doctrine and program is hard to exaggerate. Not only subsequent logic and philosophy of logic but subsequent philosophy of language, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy have been strongly influenced by them. T h e first philosopher to try to check this "tendency to sublime the logic of our language" was Ludwig ~ i t t g e n s t e i n . "He argued that, rather than natural languages being too imperfect, artificial languages designed as logical perfections of natural language were too primitive. Typical of \Vittgenstein's criticisms is the passage in the Philosophical Investigations that begins by asking how many kinds of sentence there are, enumerates a variety of things one can do using l o See my discussion in "The Theol-y of Semantic Repl-esentation," Erkenntnis, X I I I , 2 (July 1978): 63-79; and also in Language and Other Abstract Oblects (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), pp. 162-166. ' I Ph~losoph~ca Inuestzgatzons l (Oxtord: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 538, p. 1 8 .

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

language, and ends with It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language (523, p. lZC).

John Austin's constative/performative distinction puts the criticism in another way.'* T h e crux of the problem, in Austinian terms, is that these logicians, in trying to "rationally reconstruct" natural languages o n the model of artificial languages like Frege's Begriffsschrift or Principia Mathernatica, focus exclusively o n constative structure, ignoring performative structure. T h e logical relations, such as implication, characterized in such artificial languages can hold only between sentences that can bear truth values, but performative sentences, by their nature, cannot. Austin writes: . . . to say "I promise to . . ." -to issue, as we say, this performative utterance-just is the act of makinga promise; not, as we see, at all a mysterious act. And it may seem at once quite obvious that a n utterance of this kind can't be true or false (23).

T h e problem that has been inherited from Wittgenstein's and Austin's criticism of the Fregean tradition in logical theory is whether this tradition with all its obvious advantages has to be abandoned as a n a p proach to the logical structure of natural language because its too limited conception of logical form cannot shed light o n the logic of promising, asking, requesting, advising, and the other performative aspects of natural language. There have been two responses to this problem, one from those influenced by Frege and Russell and the other from those influenced by Wittgenstein a n d Austin. T h e former, as might be expected, holds on to the constative conception of logical form, either maintaining Frege's theory without fundamental revision or adopting a n extensionalist theory like that of Quine or Davidson, a n d tries to solve the problem by squeezing promise-sentences, question-sentences, request-sentences, and other performatives into some constative mold within its traditional conception of logical form. Sometimes these philosophers claim that performative sentences are really constatives in grammar and use; sometimes they claim that such sentences are constative in grammar but performative in use. Also, as might be expected, the response of those influenced by Wittgenstein and Austin-what might be called the solution of "ordinary language philosl 2 "Performative-Constatiw" in C. E. Caton, ed., Philosophy and Ordinary Language (LTrbana: ITniv.of Illinois Press, 1963).

ophy"-abandons formal explication as a n approach to meaning in natural language. Instead of explaining meaning in terms of constative logical forms within formalized artificial languages, it explains it by exhibiting the details of how expressions are used i n speech a n d codifying, informally, the rules for such linguistic practice. My view is that neither of these responses is wholly satisfactory. T h e ordinary language solution sacrifices formalization, theory, a n d the wealth of logical insights of the Fregean tradition. In addition, it abandons the notion that meaning is part of sentence grammar a n d embraces a questionable use theory of meaning, thus leaving unexplained the semantic connections between constatives a n d performatives i n the grammatical structure of natural languages. I would think, in connection with the first point, that even the most convinced ordinary language philosopher would agree that formal explication, if feasible, is to be preferred as a way of representing logically relevant features of natural languages, since, other things equal, it is better to be more rather than less explicit. O n the second point, there are well-known, long-standing objections to the identification of meaning with use which still g o unanswered. For example, the use theory is forced to predict that obscene words a n d their non-obscene medical synonyms-which have very different uses-are different i n meaning. Also, it is forced to predict that sentences that are too long or too syntactically complex ever to be used-being a trillion words long or having a thousand center-embeddings13-are not meaningful even though they are built u p from meaningful components by operations that preserve meaningfulness. Again, since almost every word has ironicas well as literal uses, the use theory is forced to predict that all ordinary words like 'beautiful', 'happy', 'clever', etc. are ambiguous between their customary sense a n d the sense of their antonyms. Such difficulties are not temporary embarrassments that can be expected to disappear once the notion of use is better understood, but deep-seated troubles reflecting the conflation of language and its use. 14 Note further how semantic connections in the grammar of constatives a n d performatives g o unexplained. T h e knowledge of the l 3 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory o f Syntax (Cambridge, Mass.: ~ I I TPress, 1965), p p . 10-15. Hereafter, ATS. ''The hope that they \vill eventually disappear has been expressed by William P. Alston i n "Meaning and Use," Philosophical Quarterly, X I I I , 51 (April 1963): 107-124. Alston seems to believe that Austin's account of illocutionary acts provides the clarification required to avoid these difficulties. But, as Janet Fodor points out, such clarification cannot yield a general theory that solves the difficulties; see her Senzantzcs (New York: T . Y. Cro\vell, Harper h Ro\v, 1977), p p . 25-27. PSIF carries this line of argument to its logical conclusion.

LITERAL. RIEANINC7 A N D L O G I C A L THEORY

21 1

grammar of 'promise' on the basis of which English speakers extrapolate the meaning or truth conditions of constative sentences like "I promised to go" or "Jill promises to stay" is the same knowledge o n the basis of which they extrapolate the meaning or fulfillment conditions of performative sentences like "I (hereby) promise to go." Constative and performatives are thus inextricably connected at the level of word meanings. Hence, in their zeal to account for performative structures, ordinary language philosophers have chosen a form of description which, in principle, cannot explain the fact that there is a common source of information, such as the following: (a) speaker undertakes a n obligation at some time (the speech point) (b) speaker makes reference at that time to an act that is future with respect to it (c) the future act is a n act of the speaker's for both constative sentences like "I promised to go" and performative sentences like "I promise to go" (see PSIF, 25-36). T h e Fregean tradition's solution sacrifices the insights of LVittgenstein and Austin about the kinds of sentences in natural language and, in consequence, makes false claims about natural language. F\'ittgenstein and Austin were simply right about natural languages. It is false to claim that sentences like "I hereby apologize for not phoning you," "I wish you a happy birthday," "I congratulate you on your elegant solution," etc. are true or false on their standard, literal uses. T h e falsehood of such claims is reflected in the fact that sentences like "Bernard's apology for not phoning is true" are quite absurd-unless, of course, they are taken, as they are not intended to be taken, to mean ". . . rings true" (false apologies are not false in the truth-value sense, but are simply insincere apologies, like false promises). Furthermore, the attempt on the part of some philosophers to preserve a uniform constative treatment of all sentences and still do justice to performativeness by consigning performativeness to pragmatics suffers from the same implausibility as the attempt to squeeze performatives into constative logical forms. In a typical attempt of this kind, Kent ~ a c h "argues that, although performative sentences are grammatically assertions, they can be used performatively o n the

l 5 "Performatives Are Statements, Too," Phzlosophical Studirs, X X I . I I I , 4 (October 1975): 229-236. I have chosen this case because it is the case best workedoutalong these lines; see also Bach and R. M. Harnish, Linguistzc Communication and Sprec h Acts (Cambridge, Mass.: M I I Press, 1980) for the full development. See PSIF, 175-177, for f l ~ r t h e cr riticisms.

basis of pragmatic reasoning concerning the speaker's communicative intentions. According to Bach (234), . . . the audience leasons, and is intendrd to lrason, as follows: ( 1 ) H r [the speaker] is sa) ing, 'I older you to leave'. (2) H e is stating that he is ordering me to leave. ( 3 ) If his statement is tlur, then he must be ordering me to leave. (1) If heis orderingmr to leavr, itrnust be his utterance that constitutes the order ( ~ v h a else t could it be?). ( 3 ) P r e s u m a b l ~ he , is speaking the truth. (6) Thcreforr, in saying, 'I order you to leavr', he is o r d r l i n g me to Iravr.

But how can (2)be used as a n assumption of the argument? T h e question at issue is whether it is true to claim that what a speaker is doing in ordering (apologizing,congratulating, etc.) is makinga statement. One can hardly show, contrary to the strong Austinian intuition cited above, that performatives are constatives, too, using an argument with a premise that is implausible on the basis of these very intuitions [e.g., "Virginia's request for you to go is true (false)"]. (For further arguments, see PSIF, 75-77 and 170-177.) My aim has been to show that neither of the two widely accepted solutions is optimal a n d to indicate where there is room for improvement. In a nutshell, a better solution would avoid the vices of both the Fregean and the ordinary language solutions xvhile incorporating their virtues. Unlike the former, it would not ignore the logical features of performatives, but would try to find a way of exploiting Wittgenstein's and Austin's insights to get at the grammatical basis of speech acts in the use of natural languages. LTnlikethe latter, it would not abandon formalization and theory or adopt a questionable use theory of meaning, but would try to find a way of extending the formal explication of how laws of logic apply to sentences in natural language which succeeds in accounting for the logical features of performative sentences. T h e last of my reasons for claiming that the issue of the existence of context-free sentence meaning has general philosophical interest is, then, that its existence makes possible a better solution. Starting with the notion of sentence meaning, independent of context and compositionally determined, we can build a rich enough conception of the semantics of natural language to allow us to place the blame for the logical fallacies Frege cites in his doctrine of the imperfection of natural languages where the blame rightly belongs, namely, on the imperfection of language users. Thus, for example, we do not blame the English language for fallacious inferences like that from "Sam likes

LITERAL MEANING A N D LOGICAL THEORY

213

old wine and women" to "Sam likes old women," any more than we blame a wrong turn on the fork in the road. We can reject Frege's doctrine and program of constructing a logically perfect language, and in their place we can put Wittgenstein's doctrine that natural languages need no subliming and our own program of constructing a scientific theory of compositional sentence meaning. Therefore, a kind of conceptual notation may be developed as the representation system for meaning in such a theory. But the notation would be employed not to reform or perfect a natural language, only to state the compositional meaning of sentences just as it is in the language. Now, since the meaning of performative sentences has special features and since such a notation has to state them just as they are in the language, an adequate notation has to represent both the semantic connections between performative and constative sentences, e.g., those discussed above in connection with (a)-(c), and the logical features of performative sentences, such as the analyticity of (6):

(6) If I promise to help others, then I undertake an obligation to help them. and the validity of the argument (7): (7) I promise to help others.

.

I undertake an obligation to help them.

Accordingly, we are here, too, required to reject accounts of logical form in the tradition descended from Frege and Russell, which restricts logical form to structures determined exclusively by the limited vocabulary of logical particles and thereby precludes structures determined by the vocabulary of performative verbs and other grammatical devices for expressing performativeness.'6 In place of this account, we must put an account that takes all meaningful words in a natural language to contribute to the logical form of its sentences. One such account is that for which I have argued over the years in my attempt to defend theanalytic/syntheticdistinction. If my arguments in that connection are sound, ordinary nouns and adjectives like 'bachelor' and 'unmarried' belong to the logical vocabulary of the language. In the present connection, acceptance of ordinary nouns and adjectives as logical vocabulary constitutes the thin edge of the wedge. Acceptance of these as logical vocabulary involves the accept16 I have arguedextensively elsewhere for the elimination of the standarddistinction between logical and extralogical vocabulary. See, for example, "Where Things Now Stand with the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction," Synthese, xxvrr~,3 (November 1974): 283-319.

ance of analytic sentences like "If John is a bachelor, then John is unmarried," and it is then a short step to analyticities based o n verbs a n d other grammatical structures, such as "If John convinced Jane that she should bet, then Jane came to believe that she should bet," and finally, to analyticities like (6)which turn on performative verbs. Such a solution is set out in Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force. It consists of two innovations. One is a stock of new logical forms to supplement standard quantification theory. These enable theories of natural languages to represent the logical form of sentences as a function of the meanings of performative verbs, other illocutionary-force-indicating devices, as well as ordinary nouns, adjectives, and the logical particles. Thus, they enable us both to draw the distinction between constative and performative sentences and to describe their underlying semantic connections at the lexical level. T h e other innovation is a more abstract conception of logical \,slidity. Such a revision in the methatheory of logic is required in order to account for valid arguments like ( 7 ) ,in which the propositions do not bear truth values. Since the conclusion in an argument like (7) follows from the premise deductively, but since the standard modeltheoretic account of 'follows from' in terms of preservation of truth is too narrow to cover these cases, we require a more abstract notion of validity, which does not presuppose that the components of valid arguments are statements, i.e., are true or false. Our new conception of validity is general enough to be applicable to arguments involving performative sentences as well as arguments consisting solely of constatives (PSIF, 222-242). This solution is preferable because it does not force performatives into a n uncongenial constative mold or ignore their logical features; moreover, it does not sacrifice theory, formalization, or faithfulness to the facts of natural language. But the innovations on which the solution rests depends on the existence of context-free sentence meaning. Hence, the possibility of a better solution to the problem raised by M'ittgenstein's and Austin's criticisms also depends on the existence of context-free sentence meaning. I1

M'ittgenstein's and Austin's assumptions about the study of language set the character of subsequent thinking about speech acts within the ordinary language tradition. T h e principal assumption was that explaining the meaning of a n expression is explaining its use, giving general rules for its use. Accordingly, the study of performative aspects of natural language in this tradition is a study of acts, linguistic behavior. In contrast, my solution to the problem that M'ittgenstein and Austin raised makes a sharp competence/performance distinc-

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

215

tion, which purifies the study of language of all performance elements by abstracting away from features of language use and behavior. T h e study of natural language concerns . . . an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speechcommunity, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest and error . . . in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance (ATS, 3).

T h u s , the account of performative aspects of natural language o n this approach is a n account of semantic competence, the ideal speaker-hearer's perfect knowledge of the compositional meaning of sentence types in the language." An account of speech acts is a n account of semantic performance, the way a language user employs semantic competence and information about a speech context to determine the meaning of sentence tokens in the context. Given such an account of performativeness, PSIF (13-36) puts forth the following pragmatic theory of how semantic competence is related to semantic performance. T h e main idea is that semantic performance is concerned exclusively with the assignment of sentence tokens, or utterances generally, to grammatically specified semantic types. Semantic types, which are the compositional meanings of sentences in the language, provide the utterance meanings of sentence tokens assigned to them (with respect to the context). Utterance meanings are not another kind of meaning, but simply compositional meanings of sentences under another kind of correlation. O n this theory, the role of the grammar is to supply a complete stock of meanings, each of which is grammatically correlated with a sentence in the language. T h e role of contextual information and pragmatic principles is to provide a means to determine which meanings from this stock are assigned to which particular sentence tokens. For example, a n ironic use of "He's a wonderful doctor" o n the part of a patient suing for malpractice will be assigned not the meaning that the grammatical structure of English correlates it with, but the meaning of the antonymous sentence "He's an awful doctor." Of course, context does not always direct the speaker and listeners to the meaning of some sentence different from the one the speaker used: the compositional meaning of "The null set is a member of every set" "Since writing PSIF. I have changed my t,ielc of what the grammar of a language, and hence the semanticcomponent, isa theory of. I n o longer think it isa theory of the ideal speaker-hearer's knowledge of the language, but of the language itself. See my Language and Other Abstract Objects. I have maintained the original framework because, from the point of view of the present controversy, this change is a n unnecessary complication.

216

THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

would be assigned to a use of the sentence on the part of a mathematics teacher in an ordinary classroom situation. Here, in contrast to cases where contextual information makes a substantive contribution to the speaker's message, information about the context plays no role in determining the content of an utterance meaning. It is such contexts, in which contextual information makes no contribution and the utterance meaning of a sentence is identical with the compositional meaning of the sentence, which, for obvious reasons, were called "zero contexts" or "null contexts." Pragmatic principles, on this theory, say how contextual information from non-null contexts is utilized for choosing the proper meaning, from the stock of grammatically determined meanings, to be the utterance meaning of a sentence token. The theory thus specifies the general form of pragmatic principles, but does not prejudge the empirical question of what these principles are. It says only that the system of such principles is an input-output device for computing the utterance meaning of uses of sentences as a function of the grammar's sentence-meaning correlation and relevant contextual information about the context of use." The significant feature of this theory for the present discussion is that, since pragmatic principles and contextual information have no role beyond choosing antecedently specified compositional meanings to serve as utterance meanings, questions about the conceptual and logical structure of sentences are a matter of semantics rather than pragmatics. Given our broadened conception of semantics, this means that the nature of the constative sentence/performative sentence distinction, what makes arguments like (7) involvingperformatives sentences valid (in the same sense as arguments involving constative sentences),and similar questions are to be handled in a theory of compositional sentence meaning which is logically prior to theories of how sentence meanings become utterance meanings. It is clear, then, that this approach was, from the outset, on a collision course with the Austinian approach to performative structure. Each approach assumes that the proper account of performativeness does nicely without what the other approach takes to be the essential explanatory factor. The Austinian approach addresses itself to semantic performance and ignores compositional sentence meaning "This theory is compatible with a wide range of views about the true pragmatic principles. In particular, it is easy to see how, for example, principles like thoseof H. P. Grice and other perlocutionary theorists can be adapted as principles for determining utterance meaning in the above sense. See Grice, "Logicand Conversation," in P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., S y n t a x a n d Semantics 3 (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 41-58. Note, however, that the adaptation is not without difficulties; see Katz and D. T. Langendoen, "Pragmatics and Presupposition," Language, LII (1976): 1-17.

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

217

independent of contextual information (and in Searle's recent form of the approach rejects it as a matter of principle). It seeks rules reflecting the contextual conditions under which language users perform speech acts of various kinds. In contrast, my approach idealizes away from just such aspects of performance, treating them as factors that complicate the statement of the laws of compositional meaning in the grammar. T h e identification of compositional meaning with utterance meaning in the zero or null contextlgmakes this idealization explicit: it precludes rules reflecting contextual conditions from any role in the explanation of performativeness in the language. T h e performativeness of the sentence "I hereby request that you close the window" and the constativeness of the sentence "The window is wide open" or "You want us to freeze" are explained at the semantic level of the grammar of English, whereas the explanation of how uses of the two constative sentences can sometimes have the meaning of the performative sentence as their utterance meaning is left to a pragmatic account of how information about contexts enables language users to assign the compositional meaning of the performative sentence to some utterances of the constative sentences. Grammatical explanation is restricted to the formal representation of the compositional meaning of explicit performative and constative sentences. Hardly a sharper opposition to the Austinian approach could be found, but the clash between these approaches did not occur right away. Semanticists working in the Chomskian framework were initially occupied with other issues, and those who first turned their attention to the problem of performativeness came under the influence of the Austinian approach, some to such an extent that they abandoned the Chomskian framework of generative grammar in favor of a

I9There have been some unnecessary confusions about this notion which can be cleared u p here. T h e notion, adapted from the anonymous-letter situation that Jerry Fodor and I introduced in our "The Structure of a Semantic Theory ," Language, XXXIX (1963): 170-210, is also formulatedasan idealization. It was definedas a context whose features provideno relevant information forchoosingacompositional meaningas the utterancemeaningdifferent from thecompositional meaningof the sentence used. T h e notion of a null context generalizes the anonymous-letter situation in the form of an idealizedcontext containingno basis fora departure from sentence-meaning, in which semantic competence fully determines utterance meaning. Thus, Harnish's criticism in "Meaning and Speech Acts," Lingua, I L (1979): 349-350, is based on a confusion. Harnish says that my conditions for performativeness "cannot be satisfied in the null context because in such acontext there is nothing but the sentence itself" (350). This is an unwarranted construal of my term 'null'. 'Null' was used to mean not void, but merely lacking in information on which to base a departure from sentence-meaning. Harnish's criticism is like saying that the conditions for Salviati's test of Galilee's hypothesis about free-falling bodies cannot be satisfied because in a n idealized experiment there is n o surface for a ball to roll down.

218

THE JOL'RN.ALOF PHILOSOPHY

radically contextualist view of natural languages.20PSIF was the first attempt to study the meaning of explicit performative sentences and to present a theory of the formalization of such meaning within the framework of generative grammar. This theory was set out as an attack on Searle's speech act theory both because that was the most sophisticated version of Austinian speech act theory available at the time and because it embodies in the clearest form this tradition's endemic conflation of matters of language with matters of language use. In "Literal Meaning," Searle sees correctly that the thrust of this attack is directed at the use theory of meaning underlying the Austinian approach to the explanation of performativeness. Searle defends the use theory by launching an attack against the theory on which the alternative, grammatical account of performativeness rests. His attack consists of a set of alleged counterexamples to its view that sentences of a language have a literal compositional meaning that is absolutely free of contextual dependency. Searle explains that his . . . strategy i n constructing the argument will be to consider sentences which appear to be favorable cases for the view that literal meaning is context free a n d then to show that in each case the application of the notion of the literal meaning of the sentence is always relative to a set of contextual assumptions (210).

Such an argument would be important for philosophers who rely on the use theory of meaning in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and other areas, because it would support their applications of this theory by refuting the only alternative conception of meaning that can handle performativeness in language without equating meaning with use.21 Searle's examples are all variants of his initial example of a cat and a mat floating freely in outer space. T h e point of this example is that, in outer space-"perhaps outside the Milky Way galaxy altogether" (211)-there is no intrinsic up-and-down orientation. Thus, Searle claims that "the notion of the literal meaning of the sentence 'The cat is on the mat' does not have a clear application, unless we make some further assumptions," that is, provide contextual supplementation that orients cat, mat, and space (21 1). Searle means this claim to assert that the very question of whether thecat is on the mat does not have an answer, that the sentence "does not yet determine a clear set of truth conditions" (212). Most philosophers would find Searle's claim extremely implausible on the grounds that, contrary to Searle's opinion -

''See, for example, D. Gordon and G. Lakoff, "Conversational Postulates," in Cole and Morgan, op. czt., pp. 83-106. "See, for example, the discussion of Dummett i n section I above.

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

219

of the matter, "The cat is on the mat" is simply false in the case at hand; the cat is not on the mat if there is n o up-and-down orientation. Searle, though he doesn't consider this response, would, I suspect, reject it because he takes falsehood to depend on orientation. I take it that he thinks that truth consists in the cat's position being over the mat, so that the bottom of a rightside-up cat touches the top of the mat, and falsehood consists in the cat's position being under the mat so that the bottom of the mat touches the bottom of an upside-down cat (or in some other similar setup). Since I have some sympathy for this conception of falsehood, I have no inclination to press the aforementioned criticism. Rather, I wish to challenge the supposition that these examples undermine the thesis that sentences have a compositional meaning independent of context. As Searle puts it: These examples are designed to cast doubt on the following thesis: Every unambiguous sentence, such as "The cat is on the mat" has a literal meaning which determines for every context whether or not an utterance of that sentence in that context is literally true or false (2i4). The danger in failing to tie criticism down to a real position is the risk that the criticism will refute a straw man and leave the real position unscathed. This is exactly what happens in the case of Searle's criticisms. His examples cast doubt on a straw man, but miss entirely the position on which "the literal meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has in the 'zero context' or the 'null context' " (207). Somehow this position becomes changed so that it is vulnerable to the c o ~ n t e r e x a m ~ l eTsh.e~change ~ is to tack on to the principal claim of the position the further claim that the compositional meaning of a sentence must determine "for every context whether or not an utterance of that sentence in that context is literally trueor false." Since the real position denies this further claim, Searle's arguments are of the form -(P clr (2) hence -P. One of the main ideas underlying my position is that compositional meanings do not, in all instances, determine whether or not the use of a sentence is literally true or false (PSIF, 88-96, and ST, 127-150). Contrary to Russell's meaning-as-reference conception, on which a meaningful, well-formed constative sentence is ipso facto true or false, on my conception, meaning is sharply distinguished from reference, and meaningfulness depends exclusively on intrasentential sense relations (i.e.,selectional restrictions). I have argued '*I think that, by not stickingclosely to the real position, Searle fails toseecertain of its features and in their place reads in claims that it is natural to make on his own use theory. We will see further examples of this interpolation below.

220

THE JOI'RNAL. OF PHIL.OSOPHY

in one place23that this sharp distinction between sense and reference is what enables my account of proper names to escape the criticisms Kripke uses so successfully against Searle, and in another,24that this conception of meaningfulness, coupled with Frege's account of the conditions under which a sentence bears a truth value, provides the best treatment of statementhood. T h e meaningfulness of a constative sentence is, on my view, its ha\,ing at least one sense,25whereas its statementhood is its having a sense whose referring terms succeed in referring. This guarantees that meaningful senses have truth conditions, but allows them to be unsatisfied without the sentence being ipso facto false: it will have no truth value in the case in which the objects it is about do not exist. Therefore, Searle has n o right to saddle all positions that claim the existence of context-free compositional meaning (and in particular the position that makes use of a zero or null context) with the further claim that compositional meaning "determines for every context whether or not a n utterance of that sentence in that context is literally true or false." T h e sentence "The cat is o n the mat" has a literal compositional meaning. Unlike "Itches drink theorems," its selectional relations are in order. Its meaning is, roughly, that some (contextually specified) cat is vertically positioned over some (contextually specified) mat and that the aforementioned cat is also positioned so that its bottom is in contact with the top of the mat. T h u s , a use of "The cat is o n the mat" is true if and only if such is the case with respect to cat and mat. In Searle's examples, uses of the sentence are neither true nor false because, given the absence of u p and down in outer space, neither the sentence-world relation required for truth nor the sentence-world relation required for falsehood obtains. But there is nothing wrong with this, providing one is not committed to thinking of meanings as fully determining use-in particular, the statementhood, of sentences .26 As a use theorist, Searle is committed to this way of thinking; his mistake here is to read it into the positions he is criticizing. When he considers the possibility of his opponent's distinguishing the "de2 3 "The Neoclassical Theor) of Reference," in P. '4. French, T. E. Llehling, Jr., and H. K. Wettstein, eds. Contemporary Perspectiues In the Philosophy of Language (Mj4nneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1979), p p . 105.6. ST, 127-150, and also "A Solution to the Projection Problem for Presupposition," in Choon-Kyu O h and D. A. Dinnean, eds., S y n t n . ~and Semantzcs 11 (Nem. York: Academic Press, 1979), p p . 91-126. 25 T h e selection restrictions allow at least one composition of senses ( S T . 89-1 16). 26 See "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," p p . 111-1 18, for a discussion of why intensionalists should not g o along with Frege's \iew that meaning determines reference.

L I T E R A L ME.ANIh'G .AND LOC.ICAL T H E O R Y

22 1

scriptive meaning" of a sentence from a condition for its application, he says

. . . we could treat this condition as a further stage direction for the application of the sentence, but still the stage direction would be part of the literal meaning, at least in the sense that they would be made completely explicit in the semantic analysis of the sentence (212). It is just this assimilation of such "stage directions" to meaning which the position Searle is criticizing wishes to reject as a confusion of language with language use. O n this diagnosis of his mistake, Searle conflates competence with performance, takes the conflation to represent linguistic fact, and then concludes that the facts cast doubt o n the existence of an absolutely context-free notion of sentence meaning. This mistake underlies all Searle's arguments. Searle asks whether the order that he gives in using (8): (8) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup a n d mustard, but easy on the relish. is obeyed if the hamburger is brought encased in a solid lucite cube or turns out to be a mile wide. Searle answers that . . . it has not been fulfilledor obeyed because that is not what Imeant in my literal utterance of the sentence (though again it is easy to imagine variations in our background assumptions where we would say that the order had been obeyed) (211).

Searle takes this to be an argument against supporters of context-free literal meaning because he thinks they are required to say that the order has been fulfilled by delivery of the encased or enormous burger, and, further, that they have to say that a customer would have to use a sentence like (9): (9) Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and mustard, but easy on the relish and don't encase it in lucite or bring one that is a mile wide. (though fantastically more elaborate) in order to express "exactly and literally" what was intended. But the supporter of absolutely contextfree meaning does not have to say either of these things. Searle is right in saying that in giving his order for a hamburger he said "exactly and literally" what he meant and that it is unnecessary for him to use a sentence like (9) containing extensive qualifications. But Searle can draw n o conclusion about the notion of context-free literal meaning from this. Saying exactly and literally what he meant

222

THE TOI'RNAL. OF PHIL.OSOPHY

does not require him to specify that the hamburger not be encased in lucite, etc. but only to use 'hamburger' nonfiguratively (more o n this below) and in accord with the obvious expectations of all concerned. T h e supporter of absolutely context-free sentence meaning does not deny that background assumptions reflecting such expectations and other contextual information shape the meaning of sentence uses i n actual speech; such shaping is an essential part of the notion of a non-null context. T h e supporter denies only that such background assumptions are relevant to the meaning of sentences i n the language. Only if Searle is conflating what the language user's utterance of a sentence means in speech with the quite distinct matter of what the sentence used means in the language could he think that such examples cast doubt o n the notion of a n absolutely context-free sentence meaning. Searle's phraseology in the above quote, viz., "what I meant in my literal utterance of the sentence" (italics mine) is a dead give-away. Searle's mistake is particularly clear in his claim that . . . it is hard to see how the sentence [(8)]could have quite the sameobedience conditions if these institutions [restaurants, money, etc.] did not exist (215).

If the connection between existence and truth conditions, obedience conditions, etc., were as tight as Searle supposes, the entire corpus of modern science fiction, fairy tales, utopian literature, and comic books would become linguistically problematic. Sentences like "Let's try and create a classless, purely egalitarian society!" would be paradoxical, and sentences like "I'd like to have T o m Swift's or anyone's televisionphone" would change their meaning (fulfillment conditions) with technological progress. In a more recent paper, Searle reformulates this line of argument on the basis of new example^.^' Searle claims that "it is hard to see how we can hold both . . . that the literal meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has in the 'null context' " and "that the meaning of a sentence determines the truth conditions of that sentence" (BM, 223). His reason is that in (10) and (11): (10) Bill cut the grass (11) Sally cut the cake . . . one and the same semantic content, expressed by the word 'cut', occurs in each sentence; and yet it seems to makea different contribution to the truth conditions of the sentence in each case (223). 27 "The Backgrounds of Meaning," in Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds., Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics (Boston: Reidel, 1980),pp. 221-232. Hereafter, BM.

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

223

Why does Searle think the semantic content of 'cut' makes different contributions to the truth conditions of (lo) and (1l ) ?Because, as he puts it, T h e sort of thing that constitutes cutting thegrass is quitedifferent from, e.g., the sort of thing that constitutes cutting a cake. One way to see this is to imagine what constitutes obeying the order to cut something. If someone tells me to cut the grass and I rush o u t and stab it with a knife, or if I am ordered to cut the cake and I run over it with a lawn mower, in each case I will have failed to obey the order. That is not what the speaker meant by his literal and serious utterance of the sentence (223, italics mine).

Again, the same dead give-away phraseology. True enough, the speaker's intentions rule out running over the cake with a lawn mower, just as Searle's intentions in ordering the hamburger rule out encasement in lucite, but what counts as obeying particular orders cannot be supposed to reflect directly the meaning of the sentences that the speakers used to issue the orders-unless, of course, one assumes to begin with that meaning is use. T h e fact is that I can cut a cake with a lawn mower if I feed it into the blades cleverly enough. T h e person who gave the order may be displeased with the unorthodox way I cut the cake, but cannot say I didn't cut it (there may be no way to tell your cake-knife-cut pieces from my lawn mower-cut pieces except for the bits of grass). Stabbing is not cutting (i.e., "Her hat pin as a small blade so that she can stab and then cut an assailant"), but one can cut grass with, say, a cake knife-again, an unorthodox way, but still a way. Thus, Searle is simply wrong that the semantic content of 'cut' makes a different contribution in (10)and (11): specification of the way the cutting is done is not part of the meaning or truth conditions of (10) and ( I 1)-any more than specifying knife and fork, chopsticks, fingers, etc, is part of the meaning or truth conditions of "I ate some vegetables." T h e semantic contribution of 'cut' to (10) and (11) is the same, namely, the concept of dividing something (the pieces of grass in the one case and the cake in the other) with a sharp-edged i n ~ t r u m e n t . ~ ~ 28 Searle considers three possible replies: 'cut' is ambiguous; like a variable function i n mathematics; and vague (BM, 224/5). My view of the semantic contribution of 'cut' is different from all three. I agree with Searle that 'cut' occurs unambiguously in the sentences (10) a n d (1 1). I d o not think that 'cut' is like a variable function i n the sense "the word 'cut' has different interpretations i n 1-5 . . . determined by the different arguments-grass, hair, cake, skin and cloth" (BM, 224). I think it has, throughout, the one sense mentioned i n the text, but that, as with compositionality in general, w h o a n d what performs the action expressed i n the verband what it is performed o n derive from the meanings of subjects and objects. [ T h u s the fact that in (10) theaction is performed o n the individual grass plants, but the success is specified in terms of effect o n the area

224

THE. JOL'KNALOF PHILOSOPHY

Searle claims that the supporters of absolutely context-free meaning are, as he puts it, "likely to resort to certain standard moves" to "rescue" this notion from his criticisms (222). T h e "move" is a n appeal to the competence/performance distinction, but, according to Searle, it won't work. In an attempt to "obviate these moves before they can even get started" (222), Searle says that he has all along been . . . discussing the understanding of the literal meaning of a sentence by a speaker as part of the speaker's semantic competence. T h e thesis I have been advancing is that for a large class of sentences the speaker, as part of his linguistic competence, knows how to apply the literal meaning of a sentence only against the background of other assumptions (222).

Searle is correct in thinking that supporters of absolutely contextfree meaning will appeal to the idealization of competence. It is only to be expected that the confusions in one's arguments will be pointed out by supporters of the notion at which the arguments are directed. But Searle is wrong in thinking that his notion of "semantic competence" obviates the move. Searle's notion embodies the same confusion as the arguments against which we have made the move. There is an equivocation in Searle's use of 'semantic competence' between a n ordinary sense, in which competence involves knowledge of how to use sentences ("how to apply the literal meaning of a sentence") and a technical sense, from generative linguistics, in which competence involves n o extragrammatical knowledge (performance aspects of use have been abstracted out to avoid complicating the laws of compositional meaning). Searle's attempt to obviate the "rescue operation" trades o n this equivocation. It is true that the ordinary sense of 'se-

for which they collectively constitute ground cover is a consequence of the meaning of theobject "grass."] Finally, I seenoreason tosay that 'cut'isvague, but Iagree with the third reply's emphasis o n the divergence of what a speaker means in a certain context from what the sentencemeans i n the language. Searle's objections to this reply seem to me without force. T h e first simply ignores the fact that all theories of compositionality employ selectional restrictions to weed out anomalous combinations of senses. A sentence like "Max cut the sun" (BM, 225) is semantically anomalous because the selectional restriction o n the object of 'cut' requires that there bea solid object for the operation to be performedon. (Note that,accordingly, there is noreason tosay that "Samcut the coffee" is anomalous, since the object can refer toa cubeof frozen coffee; it is hard to see why Searle thinks there isany problem about "Bill cut the mountain.") Thesecond objection rests o n the language/language use confusion. So what if "cut the cake" literally applies to the use of a lawnmower to produce cake slices? Such applications are only "crazy misunderstandings" if someone takes them to be the proper way to interpret the speaker in context, which in o u r view is another matter. T h e third objection is irrelevant. T h e view being criticized does not claim that, i n actual performance, the speaker always follows a strict ordering from sentence meaning to speaker's utterance meaning. N o doubt the speaker sometimes short-cuts the process. But even if we did make this claim, Searle gives n o reason to show that it is implausible.

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGIC.4L THEORY

225

mantic competence' is incapable of supporting such a "rescue operation,'' and it is also true that Searle has been working with this notion all along. But the move in question is an appeal to the technical sense. This notion, as we have shown, is quite capable of confounding Searle's arguments, and it is not a notion that he can claim to have been working with all along.29 Searle's "performancization" of semantic competence, like Dummett's, results from reasoning backwards from his philosophical desiderata to a conception of what meaning must be. Searle says: There are certain jobs that we want the notion of meaning t o d o for us; it connects in all sorts of systematic ways with our theory of language and with our pretheoretical beliefs about language. Meaning is tied to our notions of truth conditions, entailment, inconsistency, understanding, and a host of other semantic and mental notions (220).

T h e equivocation noted in the last paragraph now pops u p in a new place. Meaning, of course, is "tied to," "connects with," understanding and other mental notions. But this is an extremely loose way of speaking. Its looseness allows Searle to conflate two quite different ways in which meaning might be related to understanding and other mental phenomena, one reflecting the ordinary sense of semantic competence and the other reflecting the technical sense. T h e relation in the former is that a wide range of performance variables involved in understanding are part of meaning, the relation in the latter is that meaning is one of the variables determining performance. T h e conflation makes it seem as if only a use theory can account for the obvious relations between meaning and psychological phenomena. But accounting for such relations does not require that meaning be taken as a potpourri of use factors. These relations can be accounted for, on our notion of compositional sentence meaning, simply by taking semantic competence (in the technical sense) to be one of the inputs to the psychological performance me~hanism.~' As far as the relation of meaning to other semantic notions like truth conditions, analyticity, semantic entailment, synopymy, ambiguity, antonymy, and so on are concerned, there is hardly a need to go beyond a purely grammatical notion of meaning. As we said above, the theory of compositional sentence meaning is set u p precisely to account for such semantic properties and relations in terms of their 29 Searle's equivocation o n 'semantic competence' is nothing new. See PSIF, p. 28/9, for a discussion of a n earlier instance. 30 For further discussion concerning the role of this input i n the operation of the mechanism in the case of reference, see "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference," pp. 110-122.

226

THE' JOITKN.\L OF PHII.OSOPH\

definitions a n d of a conception of the representation of meaning structures in sentence^.^' T h e relation of meaning to the broader notions of logical theory like implication and inconsistency is based on the thesis we have defended elsewhere that the propositions between which laws of logic hold and the senses of sentences in natural language are one and the same. T r u t h conditions, analyticity, semantic entailment, synonymy, ambiguity, etc. are notions into which the notion of meaning breaks down, whereas logical implication, logical inconsistency, understanding, etc. break down into notions that include, inter alia, the notion of meaning. Searle claims that A second skeptical conclusion that I explicit]) renounce is that the thesis of the relativity of literal meaningdestro) s . . . the distinction between the literal sentence meaning and the speaker's utterance meaning, where the utterance meaning may diverge in various ways from literal sentence meaning (221).

T h e orthographic act of renunciation is one thing, but it is quite another for use theorists like Searle to be able to make this distinction given the uncompromising stand they take on the relativization of literal sentence meaning to context. Searle will have to try to draw the distinction on the basis of relevant extragrammatical, contextual information. T h e question is how he is to draw the distinction between the information to which literal meaning is relative and the information that reflects the departures from literal sentence meaning responsible for speaker's utterance meaning. T h e only suggestion along these lines that appears in Searle's "Literal Meaning" is that the former information consists of background assumptions that it would be somehow absurd to miss (e.g., such as that hamburgers are expected to be of normal size and served so they can be eaten). But this suggestion is of little use. Background assumptions that contribute to determining the speaker's utterance meaning are often just as absurd to miss. It is surely as absurd to miss the background assumption ' I I do not wish t o g i ~ the e iml~rcssionthat Searle is unalv;ireof this tighter notion of meaning or that he has not prc.1 iouslv criticized it o r that these c~iticismswere left unanswered. T h e reader is referred to his "C:homskv's Re~,olutionin 1.inguistits." T l ~ r New York Kez~iewof Books, 1972; reprinted In C;. IIarman, ed., 0 1 1 .Yoam Clzonz.tky (New York: Anchor Books, l974), p p . 27-30. O n e needs o n ] ) to be informrd that Searle's circumlocution "the semantic theor) of Chomsk\'s grammar" and similar d the Years. F o r m \ rrphrases refer to the theor) of mraning that I have d e ~ e l o l ~ eover plies to Searle's criticisms in this article, s e e m \ "1:ogic and 1,;inguage: .An E-iarnin;~tion of Recent C:riticisms of Intensionalism," p p . 107-120 and PSIF. 25-28. Thrse rrjoinders remain unanswered.

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

that produces the ironic utterance meaning of "fine" in (12): (12) That's a fine way to treat your devotedparents, letting them go without food and shelter and laughing at their plight. as it is to miss the background assumption that makes an ordinary use of (8) a request for an ordinary hamburger. Thus, how absurd it would be to miss a background assumption bears n o relation to the difference between literal sentence meaning and speaker's utterance meaning. T h e suggestion collapses, and we are left with no idea of how to draw the distinction o n a full relativization of literal sentence meaning to context. But even if there were some way, the antecedent question is whether it would be correct to distinguish literal sentence meaning and speaker's utterance meaning o n the basis of aspects of the speech context. Such a distinction plainly falsifies the logic of these notions. There are clear cases where contextual information is unavailable, but where, nonetheless, the sentence has a perfectly straightforward (compositional) literal meaning, e.g., phrase-book translations like "Voici mon passeport" for "Here is my passport" or "on m'a volk" for "I have been robbed." It is surely a mistake to treat the literal sentence meaning in such cases as containing unobservably miniscule, but still definite, amounts of background or contextual information. It is instructive to see what Searle does when faced with such clear cases. T h e example he considers is (13): (13) Three added to four equals seven He writes: Even here, howelrer, i t appears that certain assumptions about the nature of mathematical operations such as addition must be made in order to appl) the literal meaning of the sentence (219). Let us ignore the fact that Searle's phraseology is unfortunate is conceding that sentences like (13) might have a context-free meaning whose application requires "certain assumptions." Elsewhere he makes it clear that he wants to say

. . . that even these sentences only determine a set of truth conditions against a background of human practices and various background assumptions, and these practices and assumptions are so pervasive that we seldom notice them (BM, 229). Searle's argument for this claim is borrowed from Wittgenstein's discussion of sentences like (13) (see 219 and BM, 229). But, o n this use of Wittgenstein's discussion, it is a transparent case of simply changing

228

THE. J O L T K N A L OF PHILOSOPHY

the meaning of 'add'. Hence, Searle himself suggests the proper reply in saying . . . one might reply. . . that these assumptions are in a sense part of the meaning of the sentence (219).

Calling them "background assumptions" is, of course, illegitimate from the viewpoint of supporters of context-free compositional sentence meaning, since the concept of addition is a matter not of the background context but of grammatical structure. In "Literal Meaning," Searle makes no rebuttal. He supposes that conceding cases like (13) is not damaging to his position because his earlier cat-in-outer-space examples show that "the notion of absolutely context free literal meaning does not have general application to sentences" (220).T h i s supposition, as we have seen, is an error, because the standard language/language use distinction renders all these examples harmless. Thus, rather than claim that mathematical examples are exceptions (or perhaps contain miniscule, undetectable amounts of contextual assumptions in their interpretation), there is nothing to prevent us from taking the general view that all sentences have a compositionally fixed literal meaning and all utterances a contextually fixed literal or figurative meaning (usually different from the meaning of the sentence the speaker used). In "The Background of Meaning," Searle attempts a rebuttal (BM, 229-230). He says that . . . there is nothing in the content of the representations that, so to speak, forces us to accept only one set of moves to the exclusion of all others. The representations are not self-guaranteeing (BM, 230).

If 'forces' has reference to the applications that language users make of sentences, what Searle says is true. A language user is under n o compulsion to use words in conformity to their grammatical meaning. O n this construal of 'forces', Humpty Dumpty is right: we, not the words, are master. But, although what Searle says is true, his remark, on this construal, is irrelevant to the issue. As we have already noted, the supporter of compositional meaning does not claim that meaning determines use in this strong sense. O n the other hand, if 'forces' has reference to the grammatical structure of sentences, Searle is making the relevant claim that there is no compositional meaning in sentences to provide a semantic standard specifying the grammatical point from which language users may depart. But now Searle is wrong. Alice is right: 'glory' does not mean "a nice knock-down argument." Moreover, Searle's remark begs the question of whether sentences like (13) have a compositional meaning in which the con-

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

229

cept of arithmetical addition appears, because it merely reiterates his answer.32 There are, furthermore, reasons for thinking that a full relativization of meaning to context eliminates even the notion of the literal meaning of a use of a sentence. T h e literal meaning of a use of a word is a matter of its utterance meaning on that use coinciding with its meaning in the language. T h e literalness of the use of 'hamburger' in (14): (14) Tal would make hamburger of Karpov on the part of English missionaries whose references to T a l and Karpov are, respectively, to the local cannibal chief and to a Russian missionary is a matter of the utterance meaning of 'hamburger' coinciding with the meaning of 'hamburger' in English, whereas the nonliteralness of a use of (14) on the part of chess players is a matter of their utterance meaning of 'hamburger' failing to coincide with the meaning of 'hamburger' in English. Since, as argued above, a full relativization sacrifices an independent notion of literal sentence meaning, the notion of the literal use of a sentence is sacrificed, too. Searle assures us that his criticisms of the notion of a context-free literal sentence meaning do not have these consequences (22011). But it is hard to see how the necessary distinction between literal sentence meaning and utterance meaning can be preserved in a complete relativization. Searle thinks that the distinction can be explained in terms of the notions "context of utterance" and "background assumptions" (221), but these notions, on Searle's use of them, represent a distinction without a difference. Throughout Searle's paper, the notions "context of utterance" and "background assumptions" function pretty much interchangeably in reference to the same sort of extragrammatical influences on utterance meaning. Moreover, it is no quirk of Searle's presentation that they function interchangeably: 'context of utterance' and 'background assumptions' are nothing more than different labels referring to the same contextual information from different perspectives. In the former case, the reference is from the perspective of the source of the information in the world, 32 Searle'sdiscussion (BM,230/l)of "Snow is white"adds nothing to thecontroversy. His new example is merely a variant on Hilary Putnam's original set of examples in "Is Semantics Possible?" Metaphilosophy, I , 3 (July 1970): 212-218. Searle seems completely unaware of the problems that have been raised about such examples in the response to Putnam, for example, "The Neoclassical Theory of Reference" and earlier studies such as "Logic and Language: An Examination of Recent Criticisms of Intensionalism" and my ".A Proper Theory of Names," Ph~losophicalStudies,x x x ~1, (January 1977): 1-80.

230

THE JOL.KNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

whereas, in the latter, it is from the perspective of the representation of the information in the minds of the language users. Context of utterance encompasses beliefs and other background assumptions of the speaker and hearer, and background assumptions encompass contextual information. At the end of both papers, Searle offers what he takes to be a reason for thinking that things should be the way the use theory says they are. Searle answers the possible rejoinder that Meanings are, after all, a matter of convention, and if heretofore such conventions have rested on background assumptions why not put an end to this dependence by a new convention that there shall henceforth be no such dependence? (222) saying . . . there is no way to eliminate the dependence in the case of literal meaning which \vould not break the connection with other forms of intentionality and hence \vould eliminate the intentionality of literal meaning altogether (222). . . . since meaning is always a derived form of intentionality, contextual dependency is ineliminable (BM, 231). Here, h o w e ~ e r ,Searle is merely arguing from his own theory. Searle's theory of meaning is the perlocutionary theory that he adapts from H. P. Grice's account of nonnatural meaning.33In this theory, meaning is e x p l a ~ n e din terms of the effect that a speaker intends to produce in listeners by virtue of their recognition of the speaker's intention to produce the effect in uttering the sentence. Now, given this theory, it is q u i t e true that the meaning of a sentence is tied via intentions to such things as beliefs and perceptions, which, in turn, depend o n background assumptions (222/3). Given Searle's conception of meaning, there is, as he claims, n o way to eliminate contextual dependency. But, given the conception he has been criticizing in these papers, that is, the tighter notion of compositional meaning based o n the idealization of semantic competence (in the technical sense), dependence o n context is eliminated for sentence meaning. O n this tighter notion, what is "always a deriked form of intentionality" is not meaning, but the assignment of sentence meanings to uses of sentences i n n o n - n u l l contexts. Since the question at issue is the 33

"Meaning," Phzlosophzcnl Reulew,

LXI I ,

3 (July 1957): 37'7-388

LITERAL MEANING AND LOGICAL THEORY

23 1

choice between these different conceptions of meaning, Searle's claim that "meaning is always a derived form of intentionality" begs it.34 Searle was closer to the truth when, a number of years ago, he opposed intention and convention: Meaning is more than a matter of intention, it is also at least sometimes a matter of convention (Speech Acts, 45).

His target at that time was Grice's original formulation of the perlocutionary notion of meaning. Searle introduced a clever counterexample to show that Grice's claim that non-natural meaning is "always a derived form of intentionality" does not account for the meaning of sentences determined in their grammatical structure, Searle's example was that of an American soldier in the Second World War who addresses his Italian captors with an utterance of (15): (15) Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen bliihen? which is the one sentence heremembers from high school German, in order to make them think he is German. Searle's point against Grice is that (15) does not mean 'I am a German soldier' ("Ich bin ein deutscher Soldat" means that) but rather "KnoweSt thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?" Thus, Grice's claim about meaning makes the false prediction that the American soldier's utterance means "I am a German soldier," since this is what the Italians correctly recognized as his intention to have them recognize as his communication, but it is not the meaning of the soldier's utterance of the sentence ( 15). Since Searle now takes the same view as Grice, he is open to the same counterexample. He has to make the same false prediction, because his theory of meaning, like Grice's, makes meaning solely a matter of intentionality and leaves no place for an independent notion of meaning based on grammatical structure in sentences. Searle has to predict that the utterance means "I am a German soldier" when clearly this is not what it means, but just something that the Italians infer from the fact that a soldier is speaking in German. The simple truth about the example is that an American soldier gets his captors to believe he is German by an utterance that means "Knowest thou the 14

T h e dependence o n background assumptions is eliminated without dire consequences. Even though the direct connection Searle has i n mind is broken, the relation of competence to performance involves a n indirect connection between the absolute context-free literal meanings of sentences o n theone hand and, o n theother, the intentions and belief structures behind their use a n d , hence, the literal utterance meanings their use produces. O n this connection, the intentional and other psychological elements to which meanings are related in n o way undermine the independence of compositional meaning from context.

232

THE J O ~ R N A L O E PHILOSOPHY

land where the lemon trees bloom?", but the utterance can mean this only by virtue of its being a use of a sentence with this compositional meaning. It is hardly credible that the conventions that pair the German sentence (15)with the meaning "Knowest thou the land where the lemon trees bloom?" depend on background assumptions common to contexts such as the situation of the American soldier i n Searle's example, the high school German class that he attended, various circumstances where sentimental German poetry is read, etc. There are n o background assumptions common to such contexts that can explain the literal meaning of (15) and its utterances. Moreover, it seems quite straightforward that the literal meaning of (15) and its utterances is to be accounted for compositionally as a function of the meanings of the German words 'kennst', 'du', etc., their positions in the sentence, and its interrogative form. Hence, talk about intentions and background assumptions expressing information about context is idle, and, accordingly, it is to be excluded by Occam's razor from a scientific account of meaning in natural language. I11

I have dealt at length with Searle's arguments, first, because they are the only explicit defense in the literature of the central semantic assumptions of the Wittgensteinian/Austinian approach to performativeness which comes to grips with a more serious challenge to these assumptions than the artificial-language approach, and, second, because they are, from my experience, an accurate expression of what ordinary language philosophers and many outside this tradition take to be knock-down arguments against the notion of context-free sentence meaning. Wittgenstein thought that his critique of Frege's and Russell's theories of meaning and logical form had eliminated all competing theories, leaving only one or another form of the use theory. Supposing Wittgenstein to be correct, and further that the principal grounds on which such competition was eliminated is, as the quotes from the Philosophical Inuestigations above suggest, that other theories do not account for the full range and diversity of what natural languages have the potential to do, the obvious moral is that the exclusion of use from "conceptual notation" theories is precisely their mistake. Hence, from the perspective of Wittgenstein's trenchant critique of Frege and Russell, the use conception of meaning appears a great philosophical breakthrough. Philosophizing about natural language need n o longer be hamstrung by a primitive picture of language that reflects only a small part of what enables natural languages to func-

LITERAL MEANING A N D LOGICAL THEORY

233

tion as they do in issuing orders, making promises, asking questions, and so on. Wittgenstein's critique is, however, not as general as he thought or as is required to refute all "conceptual notation" theories. His view of such theories shares three assumptions with the Frege-Russell conception which restrict the scope of his critique to one class of "conceptual notation" theories. First, it is assumed that "conceptual notation" theories of logical structure are about constative logical structure and ignore performative logical structure. Second, it is assumed that "conceptual notation" theories are put forth as sublimi n g o~f highly imperfect natural languages. Third, it is assumed that, in such theories, the vocabulary determinants of the logical structure of sentences are only the so-called "logical particles." I have argued that these assumptions are false. If so, then both the target of Wittgenstein's critique and the philosophical consequences that he and other use theorists draw about meaning from this critique are mistaken. The general rationale Wittgenstein fashioned for the use theory collapses. Thus there emerges the possibility of a "conceptual notation" theory which is not limited by these assumptions. It is a theory of performative logical structure as well as constative logical structure; it is put forth not as perfecting or replacing a natural language, but as a scientific theory of the language; it treats all vocabulary in the language as determinants of the logical structure of its sentences. Now, from the very different perspective of such a "conceptual notation" theory, the use theory appears in a different light. Without the confidence that came from the belief that Wittgenstein's critique removes all competition for the use theory and against a "conceptual notation" theory that incorporates many of the insights of this critique, the use theory now appears as an unnecessary sacrifice of the advantages of formalization, theory, and the possibility of explaining the grammatical relations between constative and performative structures in natural language. Searle's two articles are an attempt to restore confidence in the use theory by showing that such an alternative cannot make use of the notion of compositional sentence meaning it requires. I have argued here that this attempt fails because it conflates questions of language with questions of language use. If these arguments are convincing, the use theory ought no longer appear to be a highly sophisticated and liberating approach but, instead, a highly confused as well as an unnecessarily limited approach. J E R R O L D J . KATZ

The Graduate Center, City University of New York