Slippery meaning and accountability

Abstract

In his ‘Fishy business’, Mark Sainsbury (Analysis 74:3–5, 2014) presents a puzzle: in order to have a substantive disagreement, one has to first agree on the meaning of a proposition that is the object of this disagreement. Now, since before Linnaeus’ classification the criteria for counting as ‘fish’ were such that they allowed for the inclusion of whales, while the new classification (1758) excludes them, a substantive disagreement ought not to arise across these two. And yet, in a court case from 1818 he refers to, the judges did not dismiss the disagreement on semantic grounds. They proclaimed whales to count as fish, and, according to Sainsbury, we, the readers, are equally able to reach a verdict in that we would proclaim the jury to be wrong. The question I address in this paper is a metasemantic one, namely what should count as meaning of expressions for the purpose of theoretical inquiry. I point out that truth-conditional analysis of meaning increasingly makes use of pragmatically derived interpretations in radical versions of contextualism and that this pragmatization of meaning is supported by the increasingly common philosophical stance on reference according to which reference is to be pursued on the level of cognitive mechanisms rather than types of noun phrases. It is in this milieu that I analyse the cognitive construct of the primary meaning of an utterance that corresponds to the intended and recovered meaning in a model situation, derived here by employing the sources of information and processes identified in Default Semantics. I demonstrate through selected examples that any attempts to regiment meaning by using the explicit/implicit distinction, directly-referential/contextually-referential, or indexical/nonindexical distinction do not yield the primary meaning intended and recovered in linguistic interaction. As a result, the question of accountability arises: if the primary meaning can be implicit, context-driven and multidimensional, then is it this meaning that the speaker should be accountable for? If so, we need a normative theory that would predict such meanings. If not, then we would have to make the speaker accountable for some content that is not intended. I propose that a normative, radical contextualist account that places meaning on the level of a conceptual structure, while at the same time preserving the truth-conditional method of analysis, acts in favour of this accountability on the grounds of primary, intended meaning, irrespective of its explicit or implicit status. I tentatively conclude by pointing out one obvious corollary, namely that this pragmatization of meaning affects both sides of language in the courtroom but not to the same degree: the relevant law cannot have a communicative rather than textual content beyond certain limitations imposed on the generalizations over admissible contexts, while the primary content of the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s contributions, firmly situated in the co-constructed context, can easily cross the explicit/implicit boundary.