Robert C. Stalnaker

Common ground is a problematic concept. It is a necessary part of any pragmatic theory because it names the context that speakers take for granted in carrying out a communicative act, or in other words the background against which a signal shows up as a particular pattern of sounds or shapes, words, and social effects. But it is too often either ignored or treated as a stative body of information, a definition which makes it impossible to understand how common ground is used and instantiated in actual conversations. This essay remedies this problem by presenting a novel account of common ground which subsumes most extant theories by approaching the topic separately on each of three levels of explanation. I begin by presenting a dynamical definition of common ground based on elements of Stalnaker’s theory of speaker presupposition, on which common ground is the information presented by a speaker as not-at-issue in the process of carrying out some speech act. I then justify and enrich this approach with a psycholinguistic account of the uses of common ground in conversation based on Clark’s work on joint action, and show that common ground underlies both egocentric and cooperative communication. I then justify and enrich the psycholinguistic account by showing how it is instantiated on a biological level as intra- and interpersonal synergies in a conversation. Finally, I use an analysis of referring to illustrate the relations between these three levels of description, which between presupposition and joint action and between joint action and synergies I take to be one of coherence, clarification, and specifying the object of explanation. In the other direction - from synergies to joint action and joint action to presupposition - the relation is one of grounding and providing naturalistic credentials via mechanistic details. The originality and generality of this explanatory strategy suggest tremendous opportunities for pragmatic research from a dynamical perspective.

Abstract: What a speaker says and thereby means, and how her words are best interpreted, can be influenced in complex ways by the conventional meanings of those words, the intentions with which she speaks, and by the conversation in which she is participating. In this chapter we first lay out certain of the principal mechanisms involved in this process, and then invoke them to help account for some communicative phenomena. In aid of the former task, we will explore the relations among illocutionary force, speaker meaning, and semantic content; develop a taxonomy of conversational projects; elucidate some conversational norms and the concept of common ground; and consider the context-sensitivity of certain expressions. These tools will then be used to illuminate four pragmatic phenomena: quantity implicature, presupposition accommodation, domains of discourse, and illocutionary silencing.

In Our knowledge of the internal world, Robert Stalnaker presents a sophisticated new defense of a radically externalist and contextualist approach to mental content. These comments focus on Stalnaker’s claim that fine-grained representational states like concepts play no role in explaining subjects’ access to the sameness or difference of their own thought contents. Stalnaker’s interpretive principles, I argue, commit him to positing something like representational structure at the cognitive level. And once he does so, there are strong reasons to posit conceptual structure at the semantic level as well. Recognizing conceptual structure, moreover, is compatible with Stalnaker’s broader externalist agenda.

The uploaded document contains my PhD dissertation. The abstract is given below.

ABSTRACT

The two main features of this thesis are (i) an account of contextualized (context indexed) counterfactuals, and (ii) a non-vacuist account of counterpossibles. Experience tells us that the truth of the counterfactual is contingent on what is meant by the antecedent, which in turn rests on what context is assumed to underlie its reading (intended meaning). On most conditional analyses, only the world of evaluation and the antecedent determine which worlds are relevant to determining the truth of a conditional, and consequently what its truth value is. But that results in the underlying context being fixed, when evaluating distinct counterfactuals with the same antecedent on any single occasion, even when the context underlying the evaluation of each counterfactual may vary. Alternative approaches go some of the way toward resolving this inadequacy by appealing to a difference in the consequents associated with counterfactuals with the same antecedent. That is, in addition to the world of evaluation and the antecedent, the consequent contributes to the counterfactual’s evaluation. But these alternative approaches nevertheless give a single, determinate truth value to any single conditional (same antecedent and consequent), despite the possibility that this value may vary with context. My reply to these shortcomings (chapter 4) takes the form of an analysis of a language that makes appropriate explicit access to the intended context available. That is, I give an account of a contextualized counterfactual of the form ‘In context C: If it were the case that … , then it would be the case that …’. Although my proposal is largely based on Lewis’ (1973, 1981) analyses of counterfactuals (the logic VW and its ordering semantics), it does not require that any particular logic of counterfactuals should serve as its basis – rather, it is a general prescription for contextualizing a conditional language. The advantage of working with ordering semantics stems from existing results (which I apply and develop) concerning the properties of ordering frames that facilitate fashioning and implementing a notion of contextual information preservation.

Analyses of counterfactuals, such as Lewis’ (1973), that cash out the truth of counterfactuals in terms of the corresponding material conditional’s truth at possible worlds result in all counterpossibles being evaluated as vacuously true. This is because antecedents of counterpossibles are not true at any possible world, by definition. Such vacuist analyses have already been identified and challenged by a number of authors. I join this critical front, and drawing on existing proposals, I develop an impossible world semantics for a non-vacuist account of counterpossibles (chapter 5), by modifying the same system and semantics that serve the basis of the contextualized account offered in chapter 4, i.e. Lewis’ (1986) ordering semantics for the logic VW. I critically evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of key conditions on the ordering of worlds on the extended domain and show that there is a sense in which all of Lewis’ analysis of mere counterfactuals can be preserved, whilst offering an analysis of counterpossibles that meets our intuitions.

The first part of chapter 1 consists of an outline of the usefulness of impossible worlds across philosophical analyses and logic. That outline in conjunction with a critical evaluation of Lewis’ logical arguments in favour of vacuism in chapter 2, and his marvellous mountain argument against impossible worlds in chapter 3, serves to motivate and justify the impossible world semantics for counterpossibles proposed in chapter 5. The second part of chapter 1 discusses the limitations that various conditional logics face when tasked to give an adequate treatment of the influence of context. That introductory discussion in conjunction with an overview of conditional logics and their various semantics in chapter 2 – which includes an in-depth exposition of Stalnaker-Lewis similarity semantics for counterfactuals – serves as the motivation and conceptual basis for the contextualized account of counterfactuals proposed in chapter 4.

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(Perhaps it is worth emphasizing that the most original work is contained in chapter 4, where I give an account of a contextualized (context relativized) counterfactual of the form ‘In context C: If it were the case that … , then it would be the case that …’, based on Lewis’ (1974, 1981) analysis of the counterfactual. Drawing on earlier work by Lewis (1973, 1981) I first give an ordering semantics for counterfactuals, based on the idea of comparative similarity, interpreted as ‘similarity in relevant respects’ or as ‘relevant similarity’, and modelled by total preorderings of possible worlds. Subsequently, building on that analysis I develop model-theoretic methods for a semantic consequence relation of contextualized counterfactuals (contextualized validity), which is given as the culminating item of the chapter.)

Accommodation is a process whereby the context of an utterance is adjusted or repaired in order to maintain the default assumption that the utterance constitutes an appropriate conversational move of a certain type. It involves, then, a kind of redressive action on the part of the audience and, depending on what the appropriateness of a speech act requires, results in providing missing contextual elements such as referents for anaphoric expressions, presuppositions, suppositions, deontic facts, pragmatically enriched contents, and so on. It remains to be determined, however, what is the source of the contextual requirements whose recognition motivates and guides the accommodating context-change. The aim of this paper is to address this question – which expresses the so-called triggering or constitution problem – and suggest that it can be adequately answered by a speech-act based model, the central idea of which is that the requirements in question are structural components of patterns, scripts or procedures for the performance of speech acts.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110628937-009

Presuppositions—information speakers mutually take for granted in conversation—play important explanatory roles in pragmatics and semantics. This chapter argues that not all presuppositions in a conversation are equally available, or accessible, to speakers at a given stage in a conversation. Contrary to common assumption, some pieces of information may be presupposed yet not be available to speakers for conversational actions. Standard conceptions of the conversation’s common ground—the set of presuppositions—cannot account for such differences in availability. This chapter presents an account of the common ground that makes room for a notion of availability of presuppositions relative to a conversational task. The notion is implemented in a conception of a Fragmented Common Ground that draws on three independently motivated ideas: the notion of context as common ground, mental fragmentation, and questions as guiding and structuring discourse.

According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on this view, are publicly shared bodies of information that evolve over the course of a conversation and that play a range of semantic and pragmatic roles. I argue that this view is mistaken: performing a communicative act requires aiming to change the mind of one's addressee, but not necessarily the context. Although changing the context may sometimes be among a speaker's aims, this should be seen as an extra-communicative aim, rather than one that is necessary for the performance of a communicative act. Along the way, I also argue that contexts needn't play a role in linking anaphora to their antecedents. On the view that I defend, theories that take publicly shared contexts to play an essential role in the nature of communicative acts or anaphoric dependence conflate an artifact introduced by idealized models of conversation with a feature of the phenomenon being modeled.

The necessary a posteriori poses a problem for possible worlds semantics. Truths such as Hesperus is Phosphorus are necessary and a posteriori. Necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, but a posteriori truths are informative and thus rule out some possible worlds in virtue of being false in them. Stalnaker uses his two-dimensional framework of pragmatics to represent the informativeness of necessary a posteriori truths. He represents the informativeness with possible worlds with alternative semantic facts, which are ruled out by utterances of such truths because they express falsehoods in those worlds. Soames points out that speakers make referential presuppositions about the names that they use, so those worlds are excluded from the context set before the utterances are made. Instead of metaphysical possibilities with alternative semantic facts, Soames proposes using metaphysical impossibilities as epistemic possibilities, and attributes this view to Kripke. However, as a main exegetical contention of the present work, Kripke has his own conception of epistemic possibilities in terms of epistemic counterparts. With the notion of epistemic counterparts, I propose the epistemic counterpart function that generates epistemic possibilities, and the description function that eliminates a proper subset of them. I then develop a notion of epistemic content along that line, and present a challenge to the project of representing epistemic states with possible worlds. I propose the epistemic function that takes, for any evidence, prior epistemic states to posterior epistemic states, in response to the challenge. I will then apply the notion of epistemic content to pragmatic contexts, and point out its complementary role to Stalnaker’s theory of pragmatics.

Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metase-mantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: an utterance has the primary intension it has because it yields the secondary intensions it yields relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. In these possible worlds, the semantic facts can be different: the metasemantic interpretation is metasemantic in the sense that the secondary intensions are determined relative to possible worlds considered as actual given the meanings the expressions have there. Stalnaker holds a causal picture of the reference of names, according to which names have no meaning over and above their unique referent, and therefore maintains that the semantic interpretation is not an option. He thus endorses the metasemantic interpretation , while insisting that this interpretation does not, contrary to what he originally thought, yield any account of a priori truth and knowledge. My double aim in this paper is to show (i) that the metasemantic interpretation, as sketched by Stalnaker, is not compatible with one natural understanding of the causal picture of reference, on which names are rigid because they have their original bearers essentially, and (ii) that a third kind of interpretation of the framework is available,

W wystąpieniu zostanie poddany analizie współczesny model esencjalizmu metafizycznego zwany esencjalizmem modalnym (EM). W ramach EM zwykło się istotę definiować następująco: F jest istotą x’a, jeżeli (i) F jest własnością i (ii) x posiada F we wszystkich światach możliwych w których x istnieje. Teza polemiczna względem przedstawionej definicji będzie opierała się na negacji jej pierwszego członu (i), wedle którego istota rzeczy musi posiadać charakter własności. Argumentacja rozpocznie się od uwagi terminologicznej dotyczącej tego, jak rozumieć pojęcie własności oraz czy możliwe jest zastąpienie w definicji EM pojęcia własności pojęciem alternatywnym. W celu zbadania tych możliwości, analizie zostanie poddana zasada identyczności przedmiotów nieodróżnialnych (tzw. zasada Leibniza – ZL), będąca podstawowym narzędziem generowania prawd esencjalnych w teorii EM. W związku z tym, negacja ZL (za którą będzie się argumentować) okaże się być warunkiem możliwości zbudowania alternatywnej definicji istoty rzeczy. Jeżeli bowiem ZL nie jest prawdziwa, to możliwe jest by dwa byty posiadające te same własności, były różnymi od siebie przedmiotami. Przyjęcie takiej możliwości oznacza akceptację niejakościowych różnic między przedmiotami, które zapewniają ich nieidentyczności przy równoczesnej tożsamości jakościowej (tj. pod względem własności). Te niejakościowe różnice zdefiniowane zostaną jako ta-otość (thisness), w przeciwieństwie do różnic jakościowych, określonych mianem takowości (suchness). Ostatni etap wystąpienia będzie prezentacją dwóch sposobów rozumienia zależności między obiema charakterystykami przedmiotów. Możliwości są następujące: (a) ta-otość superweniuje logicznie na takowości oraz (b) ta-otość nie superweniuje logicznie na takowości. Przedstawione zostaną argumenty na rzecz prawdziwości wariantu (b).

In a recent book (Lying and insincerity, Oxford University Press, 2018), Andreas Stokke argues that one lies iff one says something one believes to be false, thereby proposing that it becomes common ground. This paper shows that Stokke's proposal is unable to draw the right distinctions about insincere performative utterances. The objection also has repercussions on theories of assertion, because it poses a novel challenge to any attempt to define assertion as a proposal to update the common ground.

This major research project looks at the resolution of the Liar paradox, this proposition is not true / this proposition is false, through contextual linguistics-based approaches used by Michael Glanzberg in his 2001 and 2004 papers on the subject. This approach has challenged the semantics-pragmatics boundary by showing that even the totality of all possible truth conditions, from which all truth-conditional content is created, is also context dependent in that an analysis of the Liar triggers the coming into being of new truth conditions and propositions that did not exist previously. It also raises the possibility of a hierarchy of contexts where propositions can be formed and expressed at one level of the hierarchy that cannot be so formed or expressed at lower levels. A novel way to approach the paradox is also presented based on Stalnaker’s conversational context sets.
This paper has four chapters. The first looks at the history and significance of the Liar as well as the major approaches to its resolution. The second deals with context from the perspectives of Lewis, Stalnaker and Kaplan as these theories are used by Glanzberg in the linguistic aspects of his work on the Liar. The third chapter deals with Glanzberg’s contextual treatment of the Liar, where his 2001 paper makes use of possible worlds and Stalnaker’s concept of context, while his 2004 paper switches to Kaplan’s notion of context, and possible worlds are replaced by salience structures. The fourth chapter deals with a novel way to approach the Liar by combining Stalnaker’s context sets with the accessibility relation between possible worlds. An appendix presents detailed versions of the theorems sketched by Glanzberg in his 2001 paper.

Keywords: Liar paradox, context, contextual approaches, context sets, possible worlds, the semantics-pragmatics boundary.

This is a much improved draft of an essay in which I borrow some of Robert Stalnaker's ideas in Mere Possibilities to improve some features of the neo-Davidsonian account of propositions and properties I gave in Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics: From the True to the Good.  It would be good to have some feed-back from those interested in metaphysics and philosophy of language.

بگذارید با چند نکته بدیهی درباره حکم شروع کنم. نخست احکام دارای محتوا هستند؛ عمل حکم کردن، منطقاً بیان یک گزاره است،
یعنی بیان چیزی که نشان میدهد جهان اکنون به گونهای خاص است. دوم، احکام در بسترهایی شکل میگیرند، یعنی موقعیتی
متشکل از یک گوینده با باورها و مقاصد خاص خودش، و افرادی نیز با باورها و مقاصد خودشان که طرف حکم هستند. سوم، محتوای
حکم بعضا بسته به بستریست که در آن شکل گرفته است، یعنی برای مثال شخص گوینده، یا آن زمانی که عمل حکم کردن در
آن انجام میشود. چهارم، عمل حکم کردن بر بستر خود اثر دارد – و اصلا بناست که اثر داشته باشد – و به طور مشخص، قرار است
که بر گرایشات افراد حاضر در موقعیت اظهار حکم اثر داشته باشد. نحوه اثرگذاری حکم بر بستر، بسته به محتوای آن است.
هدف من در این مقاله، طرح برخی مفاهیم نظری جهت بسط این نکات بدیهی و نشان دادن این است که اولا این بدیهیات چگونه
میتوانند جهت توضیح برخی پدیدههای زبانی به کار روند، ثانیاً چگونه میتوان محتوا و بستر را در یک نظریه گفتاری بازنمایی کرد،
ثالثا چگونه میتوان ارتباط این دو را نشان داد و رابعا اینکه بدیهیگوییهای بالا، چه ربطی به ارتباط این دو دارند. البته قرار نیست
هیچ تحلیلی از حکم ارائه کنم، اما مدعیات فروتنانهتری را در خصوص نحوه عمل احکام بر بستر شکلگیریشان و نیز الزاماتی که این
بسترها برای حکم به همراه میآورند، خواهم داشت. در قسمت نتیجهگیری هم به طرح اجمالی مسائلی میپردازیم که به گمان من،
این مدعیات فروتنانه میتوانند در حل آنها راهگشا باشند.

Abstract Claudio Pizzi:
In Logical Forms Chateaubriand introduces a disambiguation technique that might turn out to be highly useful for analyzing important classes of sentences. In particular, he claims that this technique is relevant for analyzing counterfactual suppositions. In this paper I critically examine this claim and conclude that the ambiguity of counterfactuals is contextual rather than structural.

Abstract response:
After some preliminary remarks in §1, I argue in §2 that Claudio’s considerations about my treatment of Quine’s Bizet-Verdi counterfactuals do not constitute a difficulty for the structural analysis of such counterfactuals. I discuss some of his other examples and argue that counterfactuals are ambiguous both structurally and contextually. I conclude with an examination of the principle of transitivity for counterfactuals.

Many theories of the de dicto / de re ambiguity for quantifiers and descriptions follow the tradition started by Kaplan and Lewis in that they make use of notions that are epistemic in nature, such as the notion of acquaintance. This may create the impression that the question about de re in attitude report semantics should always be resolved by looking at the reported attitude; if the latter qualifies as de re according to some epistemological criteria, then also the affitude report may be true de re. The present paper aims to provide an argument to the contrary. The argument proceeds in several steps. First, we point out the existence of a wide range of de re readings (mostly already known from the literature), some of which do not target referential or quantificational expressions at all. Second, we show that the existing analyses either give wrong predictions for such cases, or are incomplete, or at least inelegant. Third, we offer a new analysis (which, as it turns out, has predecessors not united by any single tradition) whose main ingredient is the observation that the right predictions result from modifying the Context Set of the conversation in certain intuitive ways before the attitude report is added to the Common Ground. This is the semantic contribution of the paper. The philosophical upshot is that the reasons for an attitude report being de re at least in some cases have little to do with the grounds on which the corresponding mental state — the attitude itself — qualifies as de re. We also speculate as to how the proposed analysis, which divorces de re'ness from epistemic rapport, may be extended onto more traditional cases.

Some version of the construct of common ground is required in any pragmatic theory that relies on both (i) a distinction between what is said and what is meant and (ii) a representational model of meaning as internal and computational. On any such view, “common ground” is whatever premises are required to infer the mutually available but not explicitly articulated meaning of an utterance (Lee, 2001; Stalnaker, 2002).

By contrast, embodied and empirical approaches to common ground study coordination in gaze - on objects of shared attention - as well as coordination of body sway, prosody, and gesture (Shockley, Richardson, & Dale, 2009). This gives a concrete picture of what is perceptually and physically common in a meaning-rich interaction, but tells us little or nothing about conceptual and cultural common ground.

This paper takes some preliminary steps towards resolving this debate by dissolving the notion of common ground into the clearer notion of overlapping aspects of ecological embedding on multiple timescales, ranging from millisecond timescales for gaze and posture coordination up to multigenerational (i.e., cultural) timescales, for lexicogrammatical patterns and conceptual divisions (Thibault, 2011; Uryu, Steffensen, & Kramsch, 2014). This is a non-representational approach to utterance meaning that replaces the distinction between what is said and what is meant with that between which words were said and what effect those words have on the attentional activity of the interlocutors (c.f. Bach, 2001; Robertson, 2002).

With this in mind, the participatory negotiation of what is usually treated as common ground can instead be treated as coordinated action in a domain of attentional structures - not concepts per se, but non-local patterns or objects of experience to which we are able to direct our attention in virtue of our collaborative construction of a (partially) shared domain of attentional actions.

A context-directed theory of communicative acts is one that thinks of a communicative act as a proposal to change the context in some way. I focus on three influential examples: Robert Stalnaker's theory of assertion, Craige Roberts' theory of questions, and Paul Portner's theory of directives. These theories distinguish different categories of communicative acts by distinguishing the components of context that they aim to change. I argue that the components of context they posit turn out not to be distinct after all, and that these theories therefore collapse the taxonomic distinctions that they set out to draw. Although it might be possible to avoid this problem by devising a more adequate theory of the nature of context, I argue that it should be taken as a reductio of context-directed theories.