Abstract
The dominant conception of speaker-meaning is that of a relation between speakers and the propositions they mean. Acts of vague speaker-meaning are the acts of speaker-meaning speakers perform in producing vague utterances, and since virtually every utterance is vague, virtually every act of speaker-meaning is an act of vague speaker-meaning. So the dominant conception of speaker-meaning is confronted with the question: What can be said about the proposition a speaker means in producing a vague utterance? The answer won’t be found in the publications of those who have advanced accounts of speaker-meaning, for it’s a striking feature of those publications—indeed, of virtually every presentation of a foundational semantic theory—that they completely ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. Perhaps the authors of these accounts would say that their ignoring vagueness is a useful idealization akin to Galileo’s ignoring friction in his idealized model of bodies in motion. They might say that, but, as we’ll see, they would be wrong—and wrong in ways that show that propositional attitudes aren’t relations to propositions (or to anything else), and that current ways of doing natural-language semantics can’t accommodate vague expressions.
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Notes
- 1.
For my purposes it doesn’t matter to which kind of proposition—Fregean, Russellian, functions from possible worlds into truth-values, whatever—the propositions we mean are taken to belong, but for simplicity of exposition I will often write as though they are taken to be Russellian propositions, i.e. structured entities whose basic components are the objects and properties our speech acts are about.
- 2.
My use of ‘vague’, ‘determinate’, ‘indeterminate’, and ‘borderline’ throughout this essay is pre-theoretic in that nothing I say will rely on any particular philosophical theory of vagueness but will instead remain neutral on that score. So, for example, as far as this essay is concerned it’s not assumed that ‘It’s indeterminate whether Harold is bald’ entails ‘It’s neither true nor false that Harold is bald’. I will, however, assume that: (i) ‘x is borderline F’ entails ‘It’s indeterminate whether x is F’. (ii) ‘It’s indeterminate whether x is F’ doesn’t entail ‘x is borderline F’. For example, if, as many suppose, it’s indeterminate whether the continuum hypothesis is true, that wouldn’t entail that it was borderline true or even vague. In this essay, however, the only indeterminacy that will be at issue is vagueness-induced indeterminacy, so far all that presently matters ‘It’s indeterminate whether x is F’ is equivalent to ‘x is borderline F’. (iii) If it’s indeterminate whether x is F, then it’s impossible for anyone to know whether x is F. If, for example, it’s indeterminate whether Harold is bald, then nothing can count as one’s discovering that Harold is in fact bald or that he is in fact not bald. If one did come to know that Harold was bald, then one would thereby come to know that it’s not indeterminate whether Harold is bald. (iv) One might wonder what the difference is supposed to be between x’s being F and x’s being determinately F. What, for example, is the difference between its being true that it’s raining and its being determinately true that it’s raining? If they are two distinct facts, in what can the difference between them consist? Are we to imagine its raining harder if we suppose that it’s determinately true, as opposed to being merely true, that it’s raining? Of course not. It’s not that one might know that Sadie is lethargic and and then wonder whether she’s also determinately lethargic. To understand my vagueness-related use of the jargon expressions ‘determinate’ and ‘indeterminate’ it’s enough to know that, while ‘x is determinately F’ entails ‘x is F’, ‘x is F’ doesn’t entail ‘x is determinately F’. For ‘x is not determinately F’ must be consistent with ‘It’s indeterminate whether x is F’, and we don’t want that to entail ‘x is not F’. So we can’t deny that it’s indeterminate whether x is F by claiming that x is F or that x is determinately F or that x is determinately not F. The usefulness of ‘x is determinately F/not F’ resides in its incompatibility with ‘It’s indeterminate whether x is F’.
- 3.
One yoctosecond = one trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
- 4.
Williamson (1997: 921).
- 5.
As an expository convenience, instead of saying e.g. Tom expressed φ with the token of ‘boy’ he uttered I’ll say Tom expressed φ with ‘boy’, where that will be shorthand for the longer way of speaking. Likewise Tom referred to α with ‘here’, for example, will be shorthand for Tom referred to α with the token of ‘here’ he uttered.
- 6.
If α* could be secured as the referent of the token of ‘here’ Tom uttered without his having any intention that was de re with respect to α*, then perhaps Tom could have intended to refer to α* under the description the area to which the token of ‘here’ I uttered refers. Yes, but (1) it’s impossible to see what factors could determine that reference if they didn’t require Tom to have any intention that was de re with respect to α* and (2) it’s as difficult to see what feature just one of uncountably many indiscriminable metaphysically-precise areas could make it alone the referent of the token of ‘here’ as it is to see what feature could make it alone the one to which Tom referred with that token of ‘here’.
- 7.
- 8.
Lewis (1999a: 170).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
This ignores the use of ‘here’ manifested when the FBI agent points to a certain spot on a map and says to the guy who’s about to enter the witness protection program ‘Here is where you’ll live for the foreseeable future’.
- 12.
Chomsky (1980: 82).
- 13.
Parts of this article are duplicated in Schiffer (2017).
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Schiffer, S. (2019). Vague Speaker-Meaning. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_1
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