See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/31149214

Review: Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication

Article  in  Mind · July 2005

DOI: 10.1093/mind/fzi722 · Source: OAI

CITATIONS READS

0 107

1 author:

Anne Bezuidenhout
University of South Carolina
29 PUBLICATIONS   462 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Anne Bezuidenhout on 03 June 2015.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication, by Robyn Carston. Oxford:
Blackwell, 2002. Pp.418. H/b £60.00, $69.95, P/b £19.99, $34.95.

Carston’s new book is one of the most important books in philosophy of language to have been published in
the last decade. It contains a richly detailed account of many of the issues that have been central to recent
debates in the philosophy of language. It addresses questions as to the architecture of the language faculty,
the relation between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning, the role of context in determining
truth-conditional content, the existence or otherwise of hidden indexicals, the nature of irony, metaphor and
other non-literal speech, and much more. At the same time it lays the foundations for a coherent account of
all these things. The theoretical framework that Carston works within is the theory of relevance first
advocated by Sperber & Wilson (Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
Carston is one of the “inner circle” of relevance theorists, who has developed aspects of this framework and
extended it in interesting and fruitful ways.

Carston’s book has an introduction and five very substantial chapters. The introduction describes
the overarching framework within which Carston will be working. Carston is interested in articulating a
general theory of pragmatics, which she assumes is the study of how people produce and understand
utterances. She assumes that a pragmatic theory is a cognitive theory, whose details will be worked out
through research in the various cognitive sciences. She also assumes that the cognitive principles and
mental representations that are appealed to by cognitive pragmatics are ones at a sub-personal level of
explanation. That is, they are not ones of which language users need be consciously aware.

Chapter 1 is titled ‘Pragmatics and linguistic underdeterminacy’. The main aim of this chapter is to
defend the claim that encoded meaning underdetermines truth-conditional content. The chapter begins with
a thorough survey of linguistic phenomena whose explanation seems to require the recognition of such
underdeterminacy. Carston also argues against a strong effability/ expressibility principle, according to
which all thoughts can in principle be fully linguistically encoded. On the other hand, she accepts a weaker
form of effability, according to which all thoughts are in principle communicable by the utterance of some
sentence of some natural language. Communicability of a thought doesn’t require full linguistic encoding of
that thought.

A substantial section of Chapter 1 is devoted to a discussion of the prospects for a Davidson-style

truth-conditional semantics for natural languages. Several difficulties are raised for such a semantic theory,
even one modified to deal with indexicals. E.g., it cannot deal with cases in which there is pragmatic
intrusion into truth-conditional content. Carston suggests that truth-conditional semantics applies at the
level of thought, where fully propositional representations are recovered, rather than at the level of
language, which at best encodes propositional schemas. Carston also argues that pragmatic intrusion does
not threaten compositionality either at the level of encoded meaning or of thought (propositional content).
The only compositionality principle threatened is the inter-level one that claims that propositional content is
a function of encoded sentence meaning plus syntactic structure. But giving up this inter-level principle
doesn’t threaten our ability to account for learnability of language, or the systematicity and productivity of
our linguistic abilities.

Chapter 2 is titled ‘The explicit/implicit distinction’. There has been a lively dispute over the past
decade as to how to draw the line between semantics and pragmatics and how best to account for the
phenomenon of linguistic underdeterminacy. Carston has been one of the central contributors to this debate,
and in this chapter she summarizes the main claims of these alternative positions and the reasons for
favoring her relevance theoretical alternative. By challenging aspects of the views of Grice, Levinson, Bach
and Stanley, and by adopting aspects of the views of Sperber & Wilson, Travis, and Recanati, Carston
carves out her own unique position. She argues that aspects of meaning that can be retrieved by a process of
decoding fall on the side of semantics, whereas those that require inference for their retrieval fall on the side
of pragmatics. Given this conception, both what is said and what is implicated fall on the side of pragmatics.
What is said by an utterance, the explicature of the utterance, is a pragmatic development of the encoded
meaning of the sentence uttered.

Carston defends her view that explicatures are pragmatic developments of encoded sentence
meaning by spelling out the RT notions of explicature and higher-order explicature, contrasting these with
the notion of implicature, and offering various tests by which to tell when something is part of what is said
as opposed to being conversationally implicated. The tests include her Functional Independence Principle,
which states that pragmatically determined aspects of content that do not play an independent role in
processing must be part of the explicature. The initial definition of explicature is refined in the course of the
chapter, and a plausible account of the processing of utterances is spelled out, according to which
explicatures and implicatures are derived in parallel, via a process of mutual adjustment, and such that the
overall interpretation of the speaker’s utterance is optimally relevant (i.e., has adequate contextual effects
for no gratuitous processing effort).

Chapter 3 is titled ‘The pragmatics of ‘and’-conjunction’. Grice pointed out that conjunctions of the
following sort convey different things:

(1) She left him and he took to the bottle.

(2) He took to the bottle and she left him.

Grice wanted to preserve a univocal, truth-functional definition for the connective ‘and’, and so he argued
that the different temporal orders conveyed by (1) and (2) are conversational implicatures. Grice’s account
faces various problems, and this has spurred others to offer rival explanations. Carston does an excellent job
surveying the problems Grice faces, laying out the various semantic and pragmatic alternatives that have
been proposed to deal with these problems, and describing the problems that these accounts face in their
turn.

One problem is that the elements of meaning that Grice thinks are conversationally implicated by
(1) and (2) appear to contribute to truth-conditional content when (1) and (2) are embedded in larger
constructions, as is shown by the fact that (3) could be true while (4) is false:

(3) If she left him and he took to the bottle, I feel sorry for him.

(4) If he took to the bottle and she left him, I feel sorry for him.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem correct to build these elements into the semantics of ‘and’, since the same
causal-temporal meanings that are conveyed by conjunctions are conveyed when ‘and’ is dropped and the
two conjuncts are simply juxtaposed. This suggests that these meanings are pragmatically derived. Note,
however, that the reverse relationship between interpretations of conjunctions and juxtapositions does not
hold. Compare:

(1) She left him and he took to the bottle.

(5) She left him. He took to the bottle.

Although (5) has the same causal-temporal reading that (1) does, it also has a reading according to which
the man’s taking to the bottle was the reason for the woman’s leaving, which is not available for (1).
Carston again shows that a semantic explanation would be problematic. Instead, she suggests that we are
explanation-seeking creatures. When a speaker introduces a new fact, P, we ask ourselves ‘Why P?’. Thus it
is natural to interpret the speaker’s next utterance as answering this implicit question, and hence to give a
fact-explanation interpretation for juxtaposed sentences. On the other hand, since question-answer pairs are
separately processed units and conjunctions must be processed as units, conjunctions cannot be interpreted
in this way.

Chapter 4 is titled ‘The pragmatics of negation’. It argues that the variety of different uses of ‘not’
can be accounted for by positing a univocal semantics for ‘not’, and explaining the variety by pragmatic
means. Distinctions have been drawn between (i) sentence and predicate negation, (ii) descriptive and
metalinguistic negation, and (iii) presupposition-preserving and -cancelling negation. The first contrast,
often referred to as the wide-scope / narrow-scope distinction, is illustrated by two possible readings of the
sentence ‘Everyone isn’t hungry’, namely:

(6) Not everyone is hungry.

(7) Everyone is non-hungry.

To illustrate the second contrast, suppose someone utters the sentence ‘We saw hippopotamuses’. One
could object to the utterance’s truth-conditional content, as in (8), or to a feature such as its phonetic form,
as in (9):

(8) We didn’t see hippopotamuses. We saw rhinos.

(9) We didn’t see hippopotaMUSES. We saw hippopotaMI.

The third contrast is illustrated by the following:

(10) The king of France isn’t wise. There is no king of France.

(11) The king of France isn’t wise. He is foolish.

If we assume that ‘The king of France is wise’ presupposes that there is a king of France, then the negation
in (10) cancels that presupposition, whereas the negation in (11) preserves it. It is generally assumed that
the first and third contrasts are connected, since wide scope negations are p-cancelling, whereas narrow
scope negations are p-preserving.

Firstly, Carston discusses various tests have been appealed to in order to rule out ambiguity or
polysemy accounts of the wide-/ narrow-scope distinction. One such test is the VP-anaphor test. Carston
argues that applications of this test have been inconclusive, but she agrees that an account that posits a
univocal semantics for ‘not’ is to be preferred to an ambiguity/polysemy account. She next discusses
various accounts that are Gricean in spirit. According to this type of account, ‘not’ encodes wide-scope
sentence negation, and narrow scope predicate negation is conversationally implied. For example, a
sentence such as ‘I am not happy’ will be pragmatically strengthened to ‘I’m unhappy’. Carston’s own
account is similar to this, except that she treats the pragmatically strengthened content is an explicature.

Carston then turns to a discussion of metalinguistic negation. She offers a truth-functional account,
according to which negation always operates on a proposition, although in the metalinguistic case the
negated proposition contains a metalinguistic element and is obtained by means of pragmatic enrichment.
E.g., in the case of (9), the negative proposition expressed is something like The group of which the speaker
is a part did not see things that the speaker would call ‘hippopotamuses’. Carston offers several arguments
in favor of her view over an ambiguity view according to which metalinguistic negation operates on
non-propositional elements of utterances whereas truth-functional negation operates on propositions.
Carston turns finally to a discussion of p-cancelling versus p-preserving cases of negation. She discusses a
view according to which negation is by default p-preserving and according to which the p-cancelling (10) is
descriptively a contradiction and so triggers a search for an alternative metalinguistic interpretation.
Carston shows this view is mistaken. Hence we must reject the claim that the only non-contradictory
reading of (10) is a metalinguistic one. However, such cases are sometimes understood metalinguistically.
Carston’s pragmatic account is able to explain why this is so, but also account for the more usual descriptive
readings of these cases.

Chapter 5 it titled ‘The pragmatics of on-line concept construction’. It provides more details about
pragmatic enrichment and loosening and the process of ad hoc concept construction that they involve. The
sort of enrichment Carston is concerned with here is the sort that results from pragmatically restricting an
encoded concept. For example, when in an appropriate context Anne says ‘I want to meet some bachelors’,
she conveys a proposition containing the ad hoc concept BACHELOR* that includes in its extension just
those unmarried adult males who are eligible for marriage and excludes old misogynist and young,
fast-living, matrimonially uncommitted ones. On the other hand, when in an appropriate context Anne says
‘This steak is raw’, she conveys a proposition containing the loosened concept RAW* that includes in its
extension the technically cooked piece of steak in front of Anne as well as all literally uncooked meat.
There are also cases in which both processes operate. Suppose that in an appropriate context someone says
of Bob, who is a married man, that he is a real bachelor. The proposition expressed contains the ad hoc
concept BACHELOR**, which is obtained by first narrowing the encoded concept to include just the
unmarried men who are fast-living and matrimonially uncommitted and then loosening this to include
technically married men who behave in similar ways.

Carston offers a symmetrical account of enrichment and loosening, seeing them as two opposite
outcomes of the same underlying process of pragmatic adjustment in which the ad hoc concepts created
become part of the explicature of the utterance being comprehended. This represents a departure from
Sperber & Wilson, who treat enriched contents as explicatures, but loosened contents as implicatures that
belong to one end of a continuum that has metaphorical contents at the other end. Some cases of metaphor
do seem akin to cases of loose use. Consider for instance ‘Caroline is our princess’, where what is
communicated is that Caroline is wayward and spoilt. Here the ad hoc concept PRINCESS* is created by first
narrowing to focus on properties such as waywardness, and then loosening by dropping the property of
being a female member of a royal house. However, Carston shows that for cross-category cases, such as
‘Mary is a bulldozer’, we must see the ad hoc concept BULLDOZER* as created by a third pragmatic process
of “metaphorical transfer”. In such cases the role of encoded meaning is to give access to a metaphorical
scheme. E.g., ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ might invoke the metaphorical scheme PEOPLE ARE MACHINES.
 As the chapter summaries should make clear, Carston’s book covers a lot of territory. Most of this
territory has been covered in more detail in her published work over the last decade or so. Thus this book is
primarily a survey that pulls together the strands of her recent work, rather than one that breaks new ground.
Some of her important work from the previous decade is not surveyed in this volume, such as her work on
scalar implicatures. But the other major debates to which she has contributed are all touched on in one way
or another. Thus, especially for those who have not followed her work closely, this volume is an excellent
introduction to her thought. Moreover, it is an excellent introduction to relevance theory (RT). Although RT
is a framework that has been widely adopted by linguists, it has not been as widely accepted by
philosophers, especially those in North America, who see no reason to give up their favored combination of
Gricean pragmatics and Davidsonian truth-conditional semantics. If they are willing to inform themselves
about RT, there can be no better guide on this journey than Carston. She is philosophically sophisticated,
and a very lucid writer.

The most successful chapters are the last three, namely the ones that discuss the semantics and
pragmatics of conjunction and negation, and the one that discusses metaphor and loose use. These chapters
are well-structured. They contain clear summaries of the various debates that Carston has been involved in.
The accounts that compete with Carston’s own account are treated fairly and her reasons for rejecting these
alternatives are always cogent. The second chapter is the richest in terms of details, but perhaps not as
crisply and cleanly organized as the others. There are many interesting explorations of somewhat tangential
issues. To give just one example, the discussion of higher-order explicatures leads to a very interesting
discussion of parenthetical expressions and of the possibility that utterances can simultaneously express
multiple propositions. This is the chapter in which Carston stakes out her own position in the on-going
debate as to whether what is said belongs on the side of pragmatics or semantics. One of the other major
contributors to this debate is Jason Stanley, who has argued that what appear to be pragmatically
determined aspects of what is said are in fact elements controlled by hidden indexicals. Stanley’s views are
discussed in a postscript, rather than being treated alongside the views of others in this debate, presumably
because the bulk of this chapter had been written prior to Carston’s being aware of Stanley’s arguments.

The introduction makes it clear that Carston is offering a cognitive theory of pragmatics that aims
to explain language production and comprehension. However, details about the mental architecture that her
account presupposes or the real-time processing of implicatures and explicatures are sparse. Carston would
probably argue that her views are meant to be neutral as to these details. And to be fair to her, no one
researcher can be expected to work out all these details. She has at least articulated some of the main
cognitive principles involved in pragmatic processing. Overall, Carston’s book is essential reading for
anyone interested in contemporary philosophy of language, and especially for those who see philosophy of
 language as an attempt to understand the nature of meaning and communicative competence in a way that is
continuous with research by linguists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others interested in studying
language from a cognitive perspective.

Department of Philosophy ANNE BEZUIDENHOUT

University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
USA

View publication stats