Filologiya
məsələləri, №4, 2017
104
know in common. In contrast, the proposition that the speaker expresses will
be the content of the thought that the speaker intends the hearer to recognize
on the basis of the speaker's choice of words and shared understanding of
semantic rules. If the speaker neglects the rules or is mistaken about what
they require, then it may happen that the proposition that the speaker
expresses is not the proposition that the speaker's sentence expresses.
[1,34]A source of confusion about this distinction is that the features of the
setting that determine which proposition a sentence expresses may
sometimes be features of the speaker's state of mind. For example, it might
be thought that what determines the domain of discourse relative to which
we should interpret the quantifiers in a sentence is just the class of things that
the speaker has in mind in speaking the sentence.
The concept of thought content is integral to the expressive theory of
linguistic communication inasmuch as it is the content of the speaker's
thought that the speaker intends the hearer to grasp on the basis of the
speaker's choice of words. Apart from the conception of content as
something shareable between speaker and hearer, the expressive theory of
communication would amount to little more than the thesis that something
happens in the speaker, which causes the speaker to speak, and as a result of
the speaker's speaking something happens in the hearer. The expressive
theory is distinguished from this completely vacuous theory primarily by the
idea that in successful communication there must be a certain relation
between what happens in the mind of the speaker andwhat happens in the
mind of the hearer, and that relation is a relation of common content
(although the hearer's attitude toward that common content may be different
from the speaker's attitude toward it).
Issues that divide expressivists fall into two main categories: First,
there are issues concerning the place of thought in the theory of semantics.
Second there are issues concerning the nature of the underlying thoughts and
their contents. One basic issue concerns the prospects for intention-based
semantics. Again, the expressivist will allow that it is by virtue of a common
knowledge of the semantic properties of words that the speaker can expect
the hearer to grasp the content of his or her underlying thought. In his paper,
"Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-meaning and Word-meaning" (first published
in 1968; reprinted in Grice 1989 and Davis 1991) Grice had proposed to
explain the semantic properties of words in terms of speaker's intentions.
Roughly, the timeless meaning of a sentence was to be the sort of thing that
speakers "have it in their repertoire" to mean by it. So not only are we to
understand the speaker's meaning on a particular occasion as the content of a
thought that motivates the act of speech, but in addition the semantic
properties of words that speakers exploit in this way on particular occasions
Filologiya məsələləri, №4, 2017
105
are to be explained in terms of what speakers of the language
generally mean
by such forms of words. The project of intention-based semantics was
pursued as well by Bennett and early Schiffer .However, it is quite possible
to be an expressivist in my sense without believing in intention-based
semantics. For instance, Lewis thinks of a language, including the semantic
properties of the language, as a conventional choice among the members of a
community. In Davidson's later writings (such as 1986, although not perhaps
in his earlier writings (such as 1975), Davidson seems to qualify as an
expressivist, but one who thinks of semantic properties not as a matter of
speaker's intention but as a matter of radical interpretation. The program of
intention-based semantics has been criticized by an apostate Schiffer . A
particular stumbling block was how to explain the possibility of generating
meaningful, but novel sentences on the basis of meaningful subsentential
components. It seems to me that there is no one working in the philosophy of
language today who believes in intention-based semantics. Even among
expressivists who reject intention-based semantics an issue can arise about
the place of thought content in semantics. As I have explained, a sentence
will not generally express a proposition apart from the setting in which it is
uttered. A question among and between expressivists is whether or to what
extent the pertinent features of the setting include features of the speaker's
state of mind. For example, if on a given occasion the demonstrative "that"
refers to a cat, then one might say that what makes it the case that "that"
refers to that is that that is what the speaker had in mind; or, alternatively,
one might maintain that there are certain semantic rules that determine the
reference of a demonstrative in light of the setting irrespective of what the
speaker has in mind, so that if the speaker does not have in mind the object
determined by these rules, then what the speaker expresses will not be what
the speaker's sentence expresses in the setting. (See Wettstein , Reimer , and
Bach's replies to Reimer, My own is relevant here, but it is aimed at criticism
of expressivism rather than taking sides on an issue within expressivism.)
But there may be some doubt about whether language is conventional
in any stronger sense. For instance, Lewis holds that language may be
conceived as a solution to a coordination problem (which is a problem in
which the best choice for each of several parties depends on the choice that
the other parties make), and someone might doubt that. It might even be
doubted that there is any sense in which languages must be shared. For
instance, this has been doubted by Davidson .
A second issue in this class concerns the kind of content that might be
communicated. The contemporary concept of mental content has its roots in
the late 19th/early 20th century writings of Gottlob Frege .A great deal of
recent writing has revealed that Frege's various conceptions of content do not