Psychological Explanations in Gricean Pragmatics: An Argument from Cultural Common Ground

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Psychological Explanations in Gricean Pragmatics
An Argument from Cultural Common Ground

• Kasia Jaszczolt
• University of Cambridge

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Psychologism and post-Gricean pragmatics

• Fregean logic gt truth-conditional semantics gt
  truth-conditional pragmatics
• Does Freges ban on psychological explanations
  in logic extend to pragmatic theory?

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• Gottlob Frege
• Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884 90)
• there must be a sharp separation of the
  psychological from the logical, the subjective
  from the objective
• Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1893 202)
• being true is quite different from being held as
  true
• corrupting intrusion of psychology on logic

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• The description of the origin of an idea
  should not be taken for a definition, nor should
  the account of the mental and physical conditions
  for becoming aware of a proposition be taken for
  a proof (). A proposition just as little
  ceases to be true when I am no longer thinking of
  it as the Sun is extinguished when I close my
  eyes. Frege (1884 88)

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Freges review of Husserls Philosophy of
Arithmetic I

• If a geographer was given an oceanographic
  treatise to read which gave a psychological
  explanation of the origin of the oceans, he would
  undoubtedly get the impression that the author
  had missed the mark and shot past the thing
  itself in a most peculiar way. () Reading
  Husserls work has enabled me to gauge the
  extent of the devastation caused by the irruption
  of psychology into logic Frege (1894 209)

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• Q1 Should psychological explanations be present
  in definitions of what is said, truth-conditional
  content, explicature, etc?
• Q2 Should the psychology of utterance processing
  be considered in the discussions of the boundary
  between semantics and pragmatics?

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Areas in which (moderate) psychologism is
necessary

• 1 The selection of the perspective to be
  adopted that of the speaker, the addressee, or a
  Model Speaker Model Addressee interaction
• 2 The unit on which pragmatic inference or
  default enrichment operate
• 3 The definition and delimitation of automatic
  (default) interpretations vis-à-vis conscious
  pragmatic inference
• 4 The definition of the unit of analysis
  (Primary Meaning)

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• Radical Minimalism (Bach, e.g. 2006 Atlas, e.g.
  forthcoming) -P

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1 Whose perspective?

• The theory of utterance meaning (meaningnn) is
  to account for the meanings the speakers normally
  convey and at the same time the meanings the
  addressees normally recover in the process of
  rational conversational interaction.

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• Model Speaker Model Addressee perspective
• Saul 2002, Co-existence Thesis both the speaker
  and the addressee can be wrong about what is
  said.
• Psychologism in 1 ?

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• Just as Frege, in Der Gedanke (1918-19), writes
  that the task of logic is not investigating
  minds and contents of consciousness owned by
  individual men, the task is the investigation
  of the mind of the mind, not of minds (p. 342),
  so a theory of meaningnn is the investigation of
  the utterance meaning the meaning, not meanings
  for speakers or addressees.

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2 The unit on which pragmatic
inference/default enrichment operate

• ? hypotheses about meaning are entertained
  incrementally as the words come in, as it
  were. Levinson (2000 5).
• processing as explanandum (psychologism?)

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• I-heuristic
• What is expressed simply is stereotypically
  exemplified
• (1) bread knife gt knife used for cutting bread
• kitchen knife gt knife used for preparing
  food, e.g. chopping
• steel knife gt knife made of steel

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• (2) a secretary gt a female one
• a road gt hard-surfaced one
• I dont like garlic. gt I dislike garlic.
• ? Cancellation problem
• (3) Some (gt not all), in fact all, of the
  boys came.

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• Johns book is good.
• ? gt the one he read, wrote, borrowed
• Levinson (2000 37)
• vs. Chomskys book is about grammar.
• We need a theory that construes pragmatic
  inference and defaults as operating on a unit
  that is adequate for the case at hand, ranging
  from a morpheme to the entire discourse.

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• Atlas (2006) against armchair psychologising
  and in favour of empirical psychology of
  sentence-processing.
• But psychologising must appear before
  empirical studies in order to identify the unit
  for experimental testing.
• (cf. Recanati 2004 on automatic modulation)
• Psychologism in 2 ?

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3 Automatic default interpretations vs.
conscious pragmatic inference

• Conscious or automatic?
• Leonardos painting was stolen from
  Czartoryskis Museum in Kraków.
• Larrys book is a thrilling account of
  negation.
• bread/kitchen/steel knife

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• A So, is this your first film?
• B No, its my twenty second.
• A Any favourites among the twenty two?
• B Working with Leonardo.
• A da Vinci?
• B DiCaprio.
• A Of course. And is he your favourite Italian
  director?
• (Richard Curtiss, Notting Hill, 1999)

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• We advertised for a new nanny.
• gt a female nanny
• Situational context (used for conscious
  inference) or common ground (exploited in
  automatic, unreflective inference)?
• level of specificity at which the default
  meaning ends

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• Arguments from psychology are needed in order
  to postulate a hypothesis on the demarcation
  between automatic and conscious interpretations
  as food for experimentation.
• Psychologism in 3 ?

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4 Unit of analysis

• Primary Meaning what is intended by MS and
  recovered by MA as the main message
• Q3 Should primary meaning obey the syntactic
  constraint? (cf. what is said, explicature)
• Psychologism in 4 ?

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• Primary Meaning is the most salient meaning that
  can be assumed to be intended by the Model
  Speaker and recovered by the Model Addressee. It
  need not obey the syntactic constraint (cf.
  Sysoeva and Jaszczolt 2007)
• (modelled as merger representations in Default
  Semantics, loosely modelled on DRSs of DRT, Kamp
  and Reyle 1993 Kamp and van Eijck 1997 Kamp,
  van Genabith and Reyle forthcoming)

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• I havent eaten.
• I havent eaten lunch yet.
• I am hungry.

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devastation caused by the irruption of
psychology into pragmatics (G. Frege)

• The definitions of proposition, utterance
  meaning, default enrichment/modulation, pragmatic
  inference require a decision on the perspective
  S, A, MS/MA
• This is a decision within the domain of the
  psychology of processing. It is not a decision as
  to whether to admit psychologism into pragmatic
  theory. S, A, MS/MA perspectives are all
  contaminated, albeit to different degrees (vs.
  Saul 2002, Co-Existence Thesis).

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• G. Frege, Logic (1897/1969 250)
• Logic is concerned with the laws of truth,
  not with the laws of holding something to be
  true, not with the question of how people think,
  but with the question of how they must think if
  they are not to miss the truth.

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• Respected by truth-conditional semantics and
  post-Gricean pragmatics
• being true is placeless and timeless
  (Frege 1893 203)
• Thoughts (Gedanken) (Frege 1918-19) are MS/MA
  meanings they are not mental entities.
• ? Neo-Fregean Thought when no syntactic
  constraint on Primary Meaning as in Default
  Semantics or late-Wittgensteinian Meaning
  Eliminativism (Recanati 2005).

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Conclusion

• While Gricean theory of meaningnn respects
  Freges rejection of psychological explanations
  from logic, it must resort to psychology in
  choosing and defining the object of study of
  pragmatics.

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Further questions

• Q4 Does semantic minimalism (Cappelen and
  Lepore 2005, Borg 2004) respect Freges ban on
  psychologism?
• A4 No, if it resorts to Propositionalism (Bach
  2004, 2005, 2006). See Jaszczolt 2007.

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• Q5 Should we ban propositions in order to ban
  psychologism, or to retain propositions and
  admit some modest dose of psychologism?
• A5 I argued for the latter because a
  proposition- free semantics that is properly
  formally constrained and compositional is for me
  inconceivable. Exorcising propositions means
  exorcising truth conditions, or placing them on
  the wrong side of the semantics/ pragmatics
  boundary.

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