=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1845/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=Occasion-sensitive Semantics
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1845/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-1845
|authors=Tamara Dobler
}}
==Occasion-sensitive Semantics==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1845/paper3.pdf
CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
Occasion-sensitive semantics
Tamara Dobler
University of Amsterdam,
Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation
t.dobler@uva.nl
Abstract. In this paper we provide a formal model for occasion-sensitive
semantics motivated by so called ‘Travis cases’ (Travis 1978, 2000, 2008,
2009). We suggest that understanding of an utterance of ϕ (knowing its
truth conditions) can be modelled as a twofold partitioning of worlds
in logical space, where the initial partition is induced by the context-
invariant meaning of the sentence uttered and the latter on the basis
of context-dependent goals. Our model uses only a single parameter to
capture occasion-sensitivity of sentences: practical goals.1
1 Introducing occasion-sensitivity
Context-sensitivity is a phenomenon that affects natural language expressions.
Frege already pointed out that some sentences express thoughts only when
certain features of context are known, such as the time of an utterance or
the speaker. The case in point are sentences containing context-sensitive terms
such as indexicals or demonstratives (see Frege 1956: 296). For Frege, as for
many others, context-sensitivity seemed a fairly isolated phenomenon, affecting
only a small class of expressions. More recently, however, radical contextualists
(e.g. Travis 2008, Recanati 2004, Carston 2002) have suggested that context-
sensitivity is pervasive, that it affects all open class expressions (i.e. not just
pure indexicals), and that it does so in a way that classical truth-conditional
semantic theories may find difficult to track.
1
This paper will be enclosed in LNAI volume Modelling and Using Context (10th
International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT2017, Paris, France,
June 20-23. Proceedings) and should be quoted from there.
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
1.1 Motivation: Travis cases
Radical contextualism is motivated by examples such as following:2
The leaves are green3
State of affairs: Pia’s Japanese maple is full of russet leaves. Pia paints them
green.
Zoe needs some green leaves for her decoration:
Zoe: Do you have green leaves?
Pia: These leaves are green.
Pia’s botanist friend seeks green leaves for a study of green-leaf chemistry:
Botanist: Do you have green leaves?
Pia: # These leaves are green.4
Sid has a desk5
State of affairs: Sid, an impoverished student, uses a door over two stacks of milk
crates as a desk to write on.
Concerned if Sid has a desk to write on:
Pia: Does Sid have a desk?
Max: Sid has a desk.
On the look out for high end furniture:
Pia: Does Sid have a desk?
Max: # Sid has a desk
The shoes are under the bed6
State of affairs: Pia is looking for her shoes. Sid sees them, heels protruding
from beneath the bed.
Retrieving shoes:
2
In the literature these are known as Travis cases (sometimes referred to as context-
shifting arguments, see Cappelen and Lepore (2008). For critical discussion see
Hansen (2011), Hansen and Chemla (2013), Predelli (2005), Vicente (2012), Vicente
(2015), Kennedy and McNally (2010), Rothschild and Segal (2009), MacFarlane
(2009)
3
Travis (2008): 111
4
We use the sign # to indicate that the response is in some sense inadequate or
infelicitous, and that what is said is intuitively false.
5
Travis (2000)
6
Travis 2009: 119-120
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
Pia: Are the shoes under the bed?
Sid: The shoes are under the bed.
Making sure the shoes are well hidden. Sid’s response is meant to reassure Pia
that the shoes are well hidden.
Pia: Are the shoes under the bed?
Sid: # The shoes are under the bed.
1.2 What Travis cases are taken to show
Travis cases are taken as evidence for a number of claims. First, they demon-
strate what we deem to be an uncontroversial fact that the interpretation and
evaluation of utterances are somehow sensitive to contextual factors. However,
the reason why Travis cases are particularly interesting is because the relevant
sentences contain no pure indexicals (such as I, you, here, today) or other stan-
dard context-sensitive expressions (e.g. gradable adjectives, predicates of per-
sonal taste, modals, quantifier phrases), and yet their interpretation and evalu-
ation varies across contexts of utterance. Second, in each example, the sentence
type used in both contexts is the same, and it is assumed that its conventional
meaning remains invariant. One important consequence of the fact that the se-
mantics of sentence types is invariant is that it would be impossible to avoid
the denial of the law of non-contradiction, since the same sentence appears to
be evaluated as true and false of the same state of the world, if, that is, the
sentences used in these examples are taken at their face value (namely, as not
being context-dependent in some sense). Third, the fact that the interpretation
of utterances varies in this way is typically taken as evidence for the variability
of intuitive truth-conditions or truth-conditional content of utterances.7
A number of analyses of Travis cases have been proposed, many whose pri-
mary concern is to preserve a compositional account of truth-conditions.8 With
the exception of semantic minimalists who reject that the intuitions about truth-
value of utterances are good evidence for truth-conditions of sentences, almost all
other solutions assume that at least some of the constituents in these sentences
have context-dependent interpretations. Thus the appeal to context-dependence
seems by far the most common way to avoid the attribution of contradictory
7
See Recanati (2004) and Travis (2006) for a defense of this thesis; see Cappelen and
Lepore (2008), Borg (2004) and Fodor (2003) for criticism
8
The phenomenon exhibited in Travis cases has thus far been analysed as a form of
lexical ambiguity or polysemy (Fodor 2003; Vicente 2015; Carston 2010), structural
ambiguity (Kennedy and McNally 2010), conversational implicature (Cappelen and
Lepore 2008; Fodor 2003), circumstance of evaluation dependence (MacFarlane
2009; Predelli 2005), pragmatic modulation (Pagin 2005, Recanati 2012, Carston
2010) and (hidden) indexicality (Szabó 2001; Rothschild and Segal 2009
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
beliefs to speakers or the denial of the law of non-contradiction, whilst also
preserving truth-conditional compositional semantics.
1.3 Non-indexical contextualism
In this paper we aim to take a different approach because we believe that
occasion-sensitivity is different from indexicality, and also that it is not a threat
to compositional semantics. Thus, although we will propose what is, broadly
speaking, a contextualist treatment of occasion-sensitivity, unlike Rothschild and
Segal (2009) for instance, we won’t treat individual lexical items (e.g. green) as
(non-standard) full-blown indexical predicates. We fully agree with Kennedy
and McNally (2010) that an indexical account which specifies no rule for deter-
mining the contextual value of an indexical (e.g. the speaker in context for I )
places no constraint on its possible interpretations, and potentially creates the
overgeneration problem (see Stanley 2005). Furthermore, unlike Szabó (2001),
we will refrain from postulating hidden variables in the logical form of colour
adjectives, mainly for the reasons already pointed out in Rothschild and Segal
(2009) and Kennedy and McNally (2010), namely, because such an analysis lacks
the required generality.
The approach defended in this paper is formally and conceptually closest
(albeit not identical) to the position known as non-indexical contextualism de-
veloped in MacFarlane (2007, 2009). We agree with MacFarlane that context-
sensitivity is a broader phenomenon than indexicality and it shouldn’t be con-
flated with the latter. We also think that occasion-sensitivity is a good example
of non-indexical context-sensitivity, where (i) semantic content of a predicate
is invariant, (ii) the world of evaluation is invariant, and yet (iii) the extension
of the predicate (and the truth-value of an utterance) varies. This is possible,
MacFarlane argues, because the circumstance of evaluation includes more pa-
rameters than just a possible world (where these parameters are initiated by the
context of use rather than the context of assessment).
With regards to Travis cases, MacFarlane’s suggestion is that predicates such
as green or weighs 80 kilos invariantly express a property of being green or
weighing 80 kilos yet such a property has an intension which is a function from
the circumstance of evaluation – consisting of a pair of parameters (counts-as
parameter and world parameter) rather than one – to extension. A non-standard,
all encompassing count-as parameter “settles what things have to be like to have
various properties: e.g. the property of weighing 160 pounds, or of being tall”
(MacFarlane 2009: ) such that the extension of a predicate varies when the value
of the counts-as parameter varies, even when the world of evaluation remains
the same.
We believe that this picture, generally speaking, adequately captures the phe-
nomenon illustrated in Travis cases. However, we also contend that because
of its generality it potentially suffers from similar problems as
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
Rothschild and Segal (2009), in particular to do with lack of constraint and over-
generation. Our aim, therefore, is to further develop this approach, and revise
it where necessary, in order to explain which features of occasions of use guide
our judgements as to when something would count as having a certain prop-
erty, and how these features constrain possible interpretations and evaluations
of sentences.
Our proposal departs from MacFarlane’s on several points (although the
first two may be only terminological departures): first, we take it that properties
that feed into the counts-as function can also be zero-place properties such as
the property of these leaves being green or Sid’s having a desk ; second, we don’t
consider a zero-place property to be the same as the proposition expressed by
an utterance on occasion (i.e. intuitive truth-conditions); we consider the propo-
sition expressed by an utterance on occasion (i.e. the Austinian proposition)9 to
be an output of, rather than an input to, the counts-as function. Third, whereas
MacFarlane leaves it open which feature of a context drives modifications of
properties and why such modifications would ever take place, we suggest that a
specific contextual feature mandates shifts in when things count as having certain
properties.10 By considering pragmatic processes as not linguistically mandated
(rightly so), existing non-indexicalist approaches fail to put enough emphasis on
why, in the course of communication, we nevertheless do systematically mod-
ify standing semantic contents of our expressions. We suggest that Travis cases
point towards one specific contextual factor as playing part in fixing when things
would count as having a certain property: relevance (of the information) for the
goals that speakers pursue within particular practical projects. Even though ob-
jective predicates have their context-invariant semantic contents, these contents
are uninformative unless they are restricted so that they become valuable for
achieving contextually salient goals.
2 The role of standing meaning
We will assume that each declarative11 sentence ϕ has a context-invariant, com-
positional meaning in virtue of syntactic and lexical structure and linguistic
9
See Recanati (2007)
10
Reference is usually made to the speaker’s intentions or the topic of conversation,
without going into details of how or why these are able to determine correctness of
selecting a certain function and not other. According to MacFarlane, “the counts-
as parameter will be determined in complex ways by other features of the context,
including the topic of conversation and the speaker’s intentions” (MacFarlane 2007:
246).
11
The model we are about to propose can be extended to interrogatives and impera-
tives, although this is beyond the scope of this paper.
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
conventions. On our view, standing meaning has a substantial role to play in the
process of utterance interpretation. However, in the light of pervasive context-
sensitivity of natural language, we believe it is crucial to capture the idea that the
meaning of ϕ only constrains the intended interpretation, or the proposition(s)
expressed, without fully determining it, i.e. the meaning of ϕ underspecifies the
proposition that some utterance of ϕ expresses.
To capture this notion of semantic constraint on what is said, we suggest that
the conventional meaning of an (atomic) declarative sentence can be viewed as
the set of worlds which are compatible with its meaning, that is, those worlds
where the sentence is true on some of its uses but false on others. For any atomic
(NP+VP) sentence (used to state a piece of information) there will be: (i) some
possible worlds or situations which are incompatible with what it means, and
which can thus be eliminated purely with respect to its conventional meaning,
and (ii) others which are compatible with the meaning of the sentence but in
which an utterance of the sentence is not always true.
In standard truth-conditional frameworks, a world is considered to be com-
patible (incompatible) with the meaning of ϕ only when ϕ is true (or false) at
that world. Accordingly, the set of worlds in Wϕ would thus correspond to the
proposition expressed by ϕ, modelled as the set of worlds in which ϕ is true.
However, as evidenced in Travis cases, this common identification of meaning
with truth conditions is problematic insofar as the truth valuation of an utter-
ance of ϕ may shift even when the world of evaluation and conventional meaning
remain unchanged. So we believe it is crucial to resist the common assumption
that conventional meaning is sufficient to determine when a sentence uttered
in context would be true. Hence, on our view, the meaning function does not
partition the worlds into those at which ϕ is true and those at which ϕ is false.
Rather ϕ is considered to be truth-evaluable and worlds are considered to be
truth-makers only after taking into account a further factor: an occasion on
which ϕ is used.
Take The shoes are under the bed Travis case. The sentence The shoes
are under the bed may be true if the shoes are well hidden under the bed, or if
their heels are poking out. This sentence could also be true if the shoes are three
floors down aligned with the bed. Or if they are buried in cement under the bed
etcetera. However, an utterance of the sentence on an occasion won’t necessarily
be true at all these worlds: this is the lesson we learned from Travis cases. Even
though all these very different conditions of the world are compatible with what
the sentence means not all of them will make an utterance of the sentence on
some occasion true since an occasion places some further constraints on success
(i.e. truth) of the utterance.
Let us call this set generated by the meaning function the compatibility set
of ϕ, or Wϕ . If a world is semantically incompatible with the meaning of ϕ,
then there will be no possible understanding on which ϕ is true at that world
(where an understanding of ϕ is a refinement of Wϕ ). If a world is semantically
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
compatible with ϕ then there will be some understanding on which an utterance
of ϕ is true at that world, but also some understandings on which it is false at
that world.
11 10
01 00
(a)
Fig. 1. Semantically compatible worlds, Wϕ
For simplicity’s sake, let us assume there are only two possible ways of being
green: painted green and naturally green. Figure 1 represents the set of all
alternatives, where (11) is the world where the salient leaves are both painted
and naturally green, (10) is the world where they are painted green but not
naturally green, (01) is the world where they are only naturally green, and (00)
is the world where they are neither painted nor naturally green. Since in our
simplified model painted and naturally green exhaust the ways of being green, in
the (00) world the leaves are not green. The set of worlds which are semantically
compatible with the sentence The leaves are green is thus Wgreen : {11, 10, 01},
whilst the set of semantically incompatible worlds is W green : {00}.
Travis cases show that not all the worlds in Wgreen will make an utterance of
The leaves are green on some occasion true: for instance, in the botanist context,
the world (10) is ruled out as a truth-maker because it matters in this context
that the leaves are naturally green (see Figure 2). By contrast in the decorator
context, it does not matter if the leaves are painted or natural, so the only world
ruled out is {00}.
Hence it depends on which understanding of green is relevant, which worlds
will make an utterance of ϕ true. The resolution of the issue which understanding
of ϕ is relevant for truth evaluation is here independent from its meaning. To fix
which understanding of a predicate is correct we need to ask which information
(about the world) would be relevant to an agent on some occasion. In the next
section we suggest that the worlds in Wϕ are kept or eliminated on the basis
of how conducive they are to the goal that the agent aims to achieve on an
occasion.12
12
In our diagram the world (01) is thus not fit for the botanist’s goal.
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
11 10
01 00
Fig. 2. Understanding of green in the botanist context
3 Occasions and goals
So far we used the term occasion and occasion-sensitivity without properly defin-
ing them, or showing what the relation between an occasion and a world is
supposed to be. In this section we will try to give a more detailed account of
these notions by identifying a feature that we consider necessary for determining
which proposition is expressed by an utterance of a sentence on occasion. We
shall suggest that a key feature of some occasion of using ϕ that gives rise to
the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity is a practical goal which is salient of that
occasion and which agents strive to achieve. Recognising which goal is salient is
necessary to determine which proposition someone expressed by an utterance of
ϕ.
3.1 Communication goals understood narrowly and broadly
What does a practical goal have to do with determining when a sentence is true?
In this section we try to motivate the connection between goal directed actions
and correct understanding of utterances.
To get the idea that practical goals constrain interpretation off the ground,
we take the following remark made by Robert Stalnaker (who cites Grice) as our
guiding principle:
“[W]e should see speech as action to be explained, like any other kind
of action, in terms of the beliefs and purposes of the agent” (Stalnaker
1999: 2).
To Stalnaker’s principle we add the following observation about the success-
conditions of actions: namely, that an action (including a speech action)
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
is successful when it successfully achieves its goal. But what constitutes the goal
of a speech act?
Ever since Frege (1956) it is common to distinguish two elements in a speech
act: its content (truth-evaluable thought)and its force. The idea of (illocution-
ary) force is normally understood as capturing what a speech act aims at; an
assertion characteristically aims at truth or saying something true, a question
characteristically aims to raise an issue to be resolved by a (truthful) answer,
and an order aims to issue an order to be successfully fulfilled. Saying something
true, raising an issue, issuing an order etc. are thus goals that characterise dif-
ferent speech acts. Are these goals then sufficient to determine (together with
the sentence meaning) when a particular speech act is successful?
Our answer to this question is negative because we believe that goals (and
hence successes) that agents aim to achieve in the course of communication
are typically much broader (and much more practical) than the characteristic
goals of assertions, questions, or commands. That is, by virtue of performing an
assertive speech act, an agent does aim to say something true and, if true, add the
proposition to the common ground (see Stalnaker 1999). Nonetheless, as a rule,
this is not the only thing that agents do whilst communicating: an issue raised
and proposition asserted are always turned towards fulfilments of other practical
goals such as hiding shoes from kleptomaniac friends, doing green leaf chemistry,
decorating, putting kids to sleep, building houses and bridges, and so forth.13
So, besides narrowly defined goals that characterise (conventional) illocutionary
forces, there are various practical goals we aim to achieve on particular occasions.
Our suggestion is that practical goals are another necessary factor in determining
when a speech act (of assertion) is successful, and, in particular, when its content
is true.
If communication, in general, is embedded in other goal-directed, practical
activities, then we can also assume that what someone communicates on a par-
ticular occasion is directed at fulfilling some such goal. To take a Travis case
again as our example, if I know that my friend is a botanist and is searching for
green leaves for her experiment (assuming I am not totally ignorant about this
topic) then I also should know that her request for green leaves bears on that
particular goal and that so does my response. If I sincerely say to my friend,
“Search no more, the leaves on my tree are green”, then what I say is that the
world is indeed such that her project can be successfully carried out. In other
words, by asserting this, I suggested that the world is conducive to my friend’s
goal. If it turns out, however, that I have the leaves that are painted green but are
naturally red, then her reasonable expectations as to the state of the world won’t
be satisfied and her project won’t take off. That is, this state of the world is not
conducive to the salient goal and so what I said to my friend was false (although
it could have been true were her goal decorating rather than chemistry).
13
This idea of communication is based on Wittgenstein et al. (2009).
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
It is in this way that we take practical goals to be an important factor in
interpreting and evaluating what someone has said.
3.2 Goal-conduciveness of a world
Agents communicate to exchange or gain the information about the world which
helps them achieve their goals, which, it was argued, outstrip narrow goals that
define illocutionary forces of particular speech acts. We also suggested that the
state of the world can be such that it is more or less conducive to fulfilling some
practical goal, and so, when we provide some information to someone about the
state of the world, it goes without saying that this will have certain practical
consequences, i.e., some positive or negative effect on salient plans and goals.
For instance, the world where a room is such that the shadows of objects can be
seen in it is not conducive to the goal of opening a camera and developing a film
since such a project won’t be successfully achieved in this state of the world.
Consequently, if someone says that the room is dark, where this particular goal
is salient in the conversation, then he said something false. If, however, he says
this when the salient goal is to put a child to sleep, then he might well be saying
something true.
Our main suggestion is that the worlds which are compatible with the mean-
ing of a sentence (the members of Wϕ ) may include those with very different
potentials in terms of enabling a successful action (some very low, some high).
For a particular goal g and world w we can take it that w will be more or less
conducive to g (i.e. achieving g in w is more or less difficult). We will give a
formal definition of this notion below.
We propose that, among the worlds that are semantically compatible with
the sentence uttered (those belonging to the compatibility set), only those worlds
that are conducive to the salient goal on an occasion constitute the proposition
expressed by an utterance of the sentence on that occasion.
4 A model
In order to determine which proposition is expressed by an utterance of the
sentence on some occasion we propose to first evaluate all possible worlds in
terms of how goal-conducive they are, and to assign each a numerical value,
thus producing a ranking over worlds. The set of worlds with the highest rank
that is also semantically compatible with the sentence will correspond to the
proposition expressed by the utterance of that sentence on that occasion.
4.1 Language
Because we take simple NP+VP sentences as our atom of analysis, we will use
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
a language L for propositional logic, with its standard set of propositional letters
and connectives. We assume the set of atomic sentences A and define formulas
as follows:
ϕ := p, ϕ ∨ ϕ, ¬ϕ, ϕ ∧ ϕ, ϕ → ϕ
where p ∈ A, the set of atomic sentences.
4.2 Semantics
A model M for L is a tuple M = hW, G, V, C, i in which W is a non-empty set of
possible worlds, G is a non-empty set of goals, V is a valuation function which
assigns to a sentence a numerical value 1 for semantically compatible or 0 for
semantically incompatible, C is a goal-conduciveness function which maps a pair
of worlds and goals to a value in the interval [0, 1] (≈ the c-value of the world w
given the goal g).
Definition: conduciveness to goal
C : G × W → [0, 1]
where g ∈ G is a goal that agents are aiming to reach on occasion.
Definition: conduciveness ordering
∀w, w0 ∈ W, w0 g w iff C(w0 , g) ≤ C(w, g)
We can produce a ranking of all worlds in logical space with respect to how con-
ducive they are to some goal. For any pair of possible worlds {w, w0 } the world
with the lower conduciveness value will be ranked lower than the world with the
higher conduciveness value. If they have the same value they will also have the
same rank.
Definition: the top tier
w ∈ MAXg iff ∀w0 ∈ W, w0 g w
The set of worlds with the highest ranking, MAXg , will form the top tier of the
worlds wrt to their goal-conduciveness. For any world w with a given ranking
one can conceive of another world w0 that has the same ranking despite differing
in some way from w. So, in principle, there will also be more than one world
with the MAXg value.
We were able to order the worlds in terms of their conduciveness to a given
goal quite independently of language. This is because a successful action that
brings about some goal does not necessarily presuppose a use of language (i.e. a
performance of a speech act). However, since our primary interest is in the
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
interpretation and evaluation of sentences used in communication (i.e. speech
acts), our model should capture how pragmatic constraints on interpretation
we defined by means of contextual goals interact with semantic constraints we
defined by means of the initial partition induced by conventional meaning.
Definition: valuation function
V : A × W → {0, 1}
where A is the set of atomic sentences, and values 1 and 0 designate semantically
compatible and semantically incompatible, respectively (NOT: true and false).
Definition: valuation of formulas
M, w |=g ϕ iff w ∈ MAXg ∧ V (ϕ, w) = 1
M, w |=g ¬ϕ iff M, w 2g ϕ
M, w |=g (ϕ ∧ Ψ ) iff M, w |=g ϕ and M, w |=g Ψ
The proposition expressed by an utterance of an atomic sentence p is defined
in model M as the intersection of Wϕ , the set of worlds that are semantically
compatible with the sentence, and the set of worlds that have the MAXg value.
5 Examples
We can now analyse Travis cases using our present semantics in the form of the
following conditional T-sentence:
(T) The utterance u of the sentence ϕ is true at world w relative to goal g iff
w is conducive to g and w is semantically compatible with ϕ.
The leaves are green: In this example we have a shift of goals between the two
occasions: on one occasion the salient goal is to decorate a table centrepiece, in
which case the natural property of the leaves is not relevant; on another occasion
the salient goal is to examine the green leaf chemistry, in which case the natural
property is relevant. The stipulated world of evaluation is such that the leaves are
only painted green (but are naturally red). This world is semantically compatible
with the uttered sentence on both occasions, but is only conducive to the former
goal and not to the latter. Therefore, the utterance is true at w only wrt to the
goal of decorating and is false wrt the goal of doing chemistry.
(O1) ugreen is true at w wrt gdecorate
(O2) ugreen is false at w wrt gchemistry
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
The shoes are under the bed: Again we have a shift of goals on the two
occasions. On one occasion the goal is to retrieve the shoes and the extent to
which they are visible is not relevant to a successful achievement of this goal.
On another occasion the goal is to make sure the shoes are well hidden, so not
visible at all. The world of evaluation is such that the heels of the shoes are
visible from under the bed. Saying that the shoes are under the bed is conducive
only to the former goal, whilst saying this on the second occasion would prevent
the achievement of the latter goal. Therefore, the information conveyed by the
sentence is true with respect to the former goal and false wrt to the latter.
(O1) ushoes is true at w wrt gretreive
(O2) ushoes is false at w wrt ghide
Sid has a desk: In this scenario, each occasion of utterance is paired with a
different goal such that on one occasion the goal is to have something to sit and
write on, and on another the goal is to find a piece of expensive office furniture.
The world of evaluation is such that Sid has a door over two stacks of milk crates.
Saying that Sid has a desk in the first case facilitates the fulfilment of the goal,
whilst in the latter case it probably doesn’t. Hence, the information conveyed
by the utterance is true on the former occasion and false on the latter.
(O1) udesk is true at w wrt gwrite
(O2) udesk is false at w wrt gof f ice
6 Conclusion
This completes our model for occasion-sensitive semantics. It is important to
bear in mind that we do not claim that all meaning is occasion-sensitive in-
sofar as we assumed that the conventional meaning of a sentence creates an
initial partition which is not sensitive to any particular occasion. The outcome
of the meaning partition corresponds to what is in the literature known as min-
imal proposition.14 Unlike proponents of the notion of minimal proposition, we
take intuitions behind Travis cases as evidence for the variability of intuitive
truth-conditions across occasions. Although we decided to sidestep the termi-
nological side of this debate by stipulating that occasion-sensitive utterances of
ϕ are successful (an not merely true), the substantial point of Travis cases and
occasion-sensitivity nonetheless remains: ‘minimal proposition’ is not only some-
thing with no ‘psychological reality’ (Recanati 2004) but moreover it plays no
significant role in decision making, planning and action. And if we are interested
14
See Cappelen and Lepore 2008, Borg 2004, Recanati 2004, Pagin and Pelletier 2007,
Travis 2006
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CEUR Proceedings of the Workshop on Contexts in Philosophy - Paris, June, 20, 2017
to capture what propositions our utterances express in the course of communica-
tion, rather than in their structural semantic properties, then the analysis which
stops at the initial meaning partition is incomplete, to say the least. We have
shown that only once we take into account particular goals (and also agents’ ex-
pectations) we are able to specify the subset of semantically appropriate worlds
which corresponds to the proposition expressed on occasion.
33
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