I’ve been thinking a little bit recently about the familiar debate between minimalists and contextualists over the semantics/pragmatics distinction. In particular I’ve been thinking about the thesis that is sometimes called underdeterminacy (U). Robyn Carston defends the following in her book Thoughts and Utterances:
(U) Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said.
For Carston linguistic meaning is the thing assigned to an expression relative to a context as its semantic value. What is said is the proposition that competent speakers take to be expressed by an utterance. Carston is a contextualist, and she is defending contextualist theses in her book. But is (U) a distinctly contextualist claim?
(U) is not a distinctly contextualist claim. Semantic minimalists are also committed to (U). This is sometimes obscured by the different way in which e.g. Emma Borg or Herman Cappelen & Ernie Lepore use terms like ‘linguistic meaning’ and ‘what is said’. But if we translate their terms into Carston’s then the views defended in both Minimal Semantics and Insensitive Semantics are committed to the claim that the content hearers take to be communicated by an utterance is not exhausted by the thing assigned as its semantic value. It’s also not clear that the minimalist has to have a very different view about the sorts of things are going on between the assignment of semantic value and the content expressed than the contextualist does.
Maybe that was obvious to anybody who was paying attention. In any case I think it shows that there is something universal about underdeterminacy that in practice most views are trying to deal with. (I don’t say all views because it looks like the indexicalist position defended by Jason Stanley and others is somewhat different.)
I think the real issue of dispute is whether (what you and Carston call) linguistic meaning—i.e., minimal content—has an interesting explanatory role to play in cognition.
Cartson, the oher Relevance Theorists, and Neale argue that there’s no interesting work for that type of content to do. The important point is that the contextualists deny that there is some stage in interpretation at which semantic content has been fully worked out, and that is then used to figure out what the speaker said. Neale is always saying stuff like the following: why should we care if the “minimal content” of your utterance is P (say: that every beer in the universe is in the bucket) if (a) you didn’t say that P, (b) you didn’t make as if to say that P, (c) you didn’t implicate that P, and (d) no thought I had to have in order to work out what you did say, make as if to say, or implicate had the content that P? In that case, P has nothing to do with anything we are actually interested in explaining.
For this reason, I think, the minimalists go to some lengths to try to convince us that semantic content plays an important cognitive role somewhere. Thus Cappelen and Lepore have a section called “The Cognitive Role of Minimal Semantic Content” (pp. 184–186), and Borg has her modularity argument to the effect that minimal content must be the pure output of the semantic module and input of pragmatics (chapter 2 in Minimal Semantics).
You’re probably right about underdetermination though. If you spell it out that way, it looks pretty verbal. But that’s not to say there isn’t genuine disagreement lurking nearby.
I agree with all that. There’s also a substantive dispute about whether semantic content (in the minimal sense) is propositional or not. So there’s plenty of disagreement about various questions.
By the way, I don’t think that we have a merely verbal dispute here. That does happen, and the varying uses of e.g. ‘what is said’ don’t help. It seems to me that (U) is a substantive thesis about which a surprising range of theorists agree. Despite that I think it’s a thesis often associated with contextualists. I’ve certainly done that in my own thinking and writing. Of course I may be the only one!
“There’s also a substantive dispute about whether semantic content (in the minimal sense) is propositional or not.” Kent Bach aside, are there other minimalists who’s making a case for non propositional semantic content?
I don’t think so. The people who I think of as minimalists, e.g. Cappelen & Lepore and Borg, insist that minimal content is propositional. Non-minimalists might hold that there is such a thing as semantic content that could be non-propositional. Robyn Carston’s templates might be like that.
Thanks.
As for the point you’re making in the post, I think that (U) is just another way to articulate the Semantics–Pragmatics dichotomy (SPD), and I find it hard to believe that a minimalist stance which repudiates SPD can prove tenable. Therefore I think your’e right in asserting that SM-ists will endorse the essence of (U), although, perhaps in different terms.