Cappelen Herman - Context and Communication

This book is about the various ways in which what we say (and assert, ask, and think) depends on the context of speech and thought. The period since 1970 has produced a vast literature on this topic, both by philosophers and linguists. It is arguably the area of philosophy (and linguistics) where most progress has been made over the last forty years. The goal of this book is to provide students with an introduction to some of the central data, questions, concepts, and theories of context sensitivity.

The some part of the previous sentence is important. This book is not meant to be exhaustive. The amount of work done by philosophers and linguists on this topic is immense. To cover it all, we would have had to write an extremely long and unwieldy book. So we dont aspire to comprehensiveness. Instead, we have picked some topics, views, and arguments that we think are important, interesting, and instructive. Our hope is that a reader who has understood and engaged with this selection of material will be in a good position to start engaging with much of the work we dont cover in this book.

The book is written to be accessible to someone with no prior knowledge of the material or, indeed, any prior knowledge of philosophy. It can be used as part of a philosophy of language course or as part of a general introduction to philosophy.

We initially set out to write a single book that could serve as an introduction to philosophy of language. We gave up. We now think that goal is too ambitious for any one book. There is simply too much interesting work done within this field over the last 100 years to cover it all (or even most of it) in a single book. A book that tried to do that would inevitably be so superficial that it would fail to convey to the readers how rich, complex, and important these topics are. To do justice to the field we have set out to write a series of introductions to philosophy of language, each one covering an important topic, each one of which would be a way into the field as a whole. These books aim to provide systematic introductions to important questions, data, theories, and arguments. Those looking for a history of the discipline should look elsewhere.

Here is an overview of the various chapters, and a guide to how to read the book.

The first part concerns how to reconcile two facts about language and language use. On the one hand, most of the words we use appear to be sensitive to the context of speech. What we say to each other is shaped by the contexts we are in in when we speak, in ways that are complex and difficult to understand. On the other hand, language is a device for transmitting and storing information. If the information we get and transmit is sensitive to context in ways that are massively complicated and hard to understand, it is difficult to see how information can be shared between different contexts. The more we focus on the context sensitivity of what we say, the more it looks like what we say ends up being tied to the context of speech and it becomes hard to see how that information is moved between contexts. The first chapter in Part I outlines the evidence of context sensitivity. The second chapter outlines the arguments and evidence for stability between contexts. The third chapter considers some of the proposals for how to reconcile variability and stability: how to ensure shared information across contexts despite massive context sensitivity.

In the first part of this book, we focus primarily on a puzzle about communication. We begin with some observations about the meanings and truth values of sentences, but from there move on to discuss what people say with and understand by uses of those sentences. In the second part of the book, we turn to looking in more detail at what a theory of meaning for a language could be. Our main goal here is to set out and compare two major approaches to a theory of meaning for context-sensitive language, one originating in the work of David Kaplan and the other in David Lewis work. The shift to thinking more about the functioning of language and less about the use of that language by speakers means that we will need to think in more detail about the internal functioning of the language: how the meanings of whole sentences are determined by the meanings of the words that make them up.

Throughout this book, the notion of a context plays a central role. In the final part of the book we turn directly to the question of what a context is and how it does its work. We start by distinguishing two questions: (i) What is it to be in a context? (ii) How does context determine the meaning of words? We then consider two views of contexts to see how they can respond to these questions. We next turn to a more detailed discussion of what ingredients a context must provide to account for gradable adjectives like rich, the second-person pronoun you, and other expressions. In the final chapter, we consider how speech itself can create contexts, how contextual accommodation and negotiation works, and how asymmetric power relations affect contextual negotiations. We conclude the book by presenting a radical line of thought: because to negotiate over what the word legal means is to negotiate over what is or should be legal, contextual negotiation is not just negotiation over the meaning of words, but also about what the world is or should be like.