(to appear in Mind, 2002)
Truthfulness
and Relevance
deirdre
wilson and dan sperber
Abstract
This
paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a
maxim, norm or convention of truthfulness which applies at the level of what is
literally meant, or what is said. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must
explain the frequent occurrence and acceptability of loose and figurative uses
of language. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and
provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal
communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but by
expectations of relevance, raised by literal, loose and figurative uses alike.
Sample analyses are provided, and some consequences of this alternative account
are explored. In particular, we argue that the notions of ‘literal meaning’
and ‘what is said’ play no useful theoretical role in the study of language
use, and that the nature of explicit communication will have to be rethought.
Here are a couple of apparent platitudes. As speakers, we expect what we say to be accepted as true. As hearers, we expect what is said to us to be true. If it were not for these expectations, if they were not often enough satisfied, there would be little point in communicating at all. David Lewis (who has proposed a convention of truthfulness) and Paul Grice (who has argued for maxims of truthfulness), among others, have explored some of the consequences of these apparent platitudes. We want to take a different line and argue that they are strictly speaking false. Of course hearers expect to be informed and not misled by what is communicated; but what is communicated is not the same as what is said. We will argue that language use is not governed by any convention or maxim of truthfulness in what is said. Whatever genuine facts such a convention or maxim was supposed to explain are better explained by assuming that communication is governed by a principle of relevance.
According
to David Lewis (1975), there is a regularity (and a moral obligation) of
truthfulness in linguistic behaviour. This is not a convention in Lewis's sense,
since there is no alternative regularity which would be preferable as long as
everyone conformed to it. However, for any language £ of a population P,
Lewis argues that there is a convention of truthfulness
and trust in £ (an alternative being a convention of truthfulness and trust
in some other language £'):
My proposal is that the convention whereby a population P uses a language £ is a convention of truthfulness and trust in £. To be truthful in £ is to act in a certain way: to try never to utter any sentences of £ that are not true in £. Thus it is to avoid uttering any sentence of £ unless one believes it to be true in £. To be trusting in £ is to form beliefs in a certain way: to impute truthfulness in £ to others, and thus to tend to respond to another's utterance of any sentence of £ by coming to believe that the uttered sentence is true in £. (Lewis 1975, p. 167)
Lewis considers the objection that truthfulness might not be the only factor which needs to be taken into account, and replies as follows:
Objection:
Communication cannot be explained by conventions of truthfulness alone. If I
utter a sentence s
of our language £, you—expecting me to be truthful in £—will conclude that
I take s
to be true in £. If you think I am well informed, you will also conclude that
probably s
is true in £. But you will draw other conclusions as well, based on your
legitimate assumption that it is for some good reason that I chose to utter s
rather than remain silent, and rather than utter any of the other sentences of
£ that I also take to be true in £. I can communicate all sorts of
misinformation by exploiting your beliefs about my conversational purposes,
without ever being untruthful in £. Communication depends on principles of
helpfulness and relevance as well as truthfulness.
Reply:
All this does not conflict with anything I have said. We do conform to
conversational regularities of helpfulness and relevance. But these regularities
are not independent conventions of language; they result from our convention of
truthfulness and trust in £ together with certain general facts—not dependent
on any convention—about our conversational purposes and our beliefs about one
another. Since they are by-products of a convention of truthfulness and trust,
it is unnecessary to mention them separately in specifying the conditions under
which a language is used by a population. (Lewis 1975, p. 185)
However,
Lewis does not explain how regularities of relevance might be by-products of a
convention of truthfulness. One of our aims will be to show that, on the
contrary, expectations of truthfulness—to the extent that they exist—are a
by-product of expectations of relevance.
Paul
Grice (1967), in his William James Lectures, sketched a theory of utterance
interpretation based on a Co-operative Principle and maxims of truthfulness,
informativeness, relevance and clarity (Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner).
The Quality maxims went as follows:
(1)
Grice's maxims of Quality
Supermaxim:
Try
to make your contribution one that is true.
(i)
Do not say what you believe to be false. [maxim
of truthfulness]
(ii)
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
The
supermaxim of Quality is concerned with the speaker's overall contribution (what
is communicated, either explicitly or implicitly), while the first and second
maxims of Quality relate only to what is said (the proposition explicitly
expressed or asserted). Grice saw the first maxim of Quality, which we will call
the maxim of truthfulness, as the most important of all the maxims. He says in
the William James Lectures:
It is obvious that the observance of some of these maxims is a matter of less urgency than is the observance of others; a man who has expressed himself with undue prolixity would, in general, be open to milder comment than would a man who has said something he believes to be false. Indeed, it might be felt that the importance of at least the first maxim of Quality is such that it should not be included in a scheme of the kind I am constructing; other maxims come into operation only on the assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied. While this may be correct, so far as the generation of implicatures is concerned, it seems to play a role not totally different from the other maxims, and it will be convenient, for the present at least, to treat it as a member of the list of maxims. (Grice 1967, p. 27)
In
his ‘Retrospective Epilogue’, written 20 years later, this view is
apparently maintained:
The
maxim of Quality, enjoining the provision of contributions which are genuine
rather than spurious (truthful rather than mendacious), does not seem to be just
one among a number of recipes for producing contributions; it seems rather to
spell out the difference between something's being and (strictly speaking)
failing to be, any kind of contribution at all. False information is not an
inferior kind of information; it just is not information. (Grice 1989a, p. 371)
Notice,
though, an interesting shift. While he talks of ‘the maxim of Quality,’
Grice's concern here is with the speaker's contribution as a whole; indeed,
there is room for doubt about whether he had the first maxim of Quality or the
supermaxim in mind. We believe that this is not a minor detail. One of our aims
is to show that the function Grice attributes to the Quality maxims—ensuring
the quality of the speaker's overall contribution—can be more effectively
achieved in a framework with no maxim of truthfulness at all.
There
is a range of apparent counterexamples to the claim that speakers try to tell
the truth. These include lies, jokes, fictions, metaphors and ironies. Lewis and
Grice are well aware of these cases, and discuss them in some detail. Grice
(1967, p. 30), for instance, notes that his maxims may be violated, and lists
several categories of violation, each with its characteristic effects. Lies are
examples of covert violation, where the hearer is meant to assume that the maxim
of truthfulness is still in force and that the speaker believes what she has
said. Jokes and fictions might be seen as cases in which the maxim of
truthfulness is overtly suspended (the
speaker overtly opts out of it); the
hearer is meant to notice that it is no longer operative, and is not expected to
assume that the speaker believes what she has said. Metaphor, irony and other
tropes represent a third category: they are overt violations (floutings)
of the maxim of truthfulness, in which the hearer is meant to assume that the
maxim of truthfulness is no longer operative, but that the supermaxim of Quality
remains in force, so that some true proposition is still conveyed.
We
will grant that a reasonable—if not optimal—treatment of lies, jokes and
fictions might be developed along these lines. Tropes, and more generally loose
uses of language (e.g. approximations, sense extensions), present a much more
pressing challenge. After all, many, if not most, of our serious declarative
utterances are not strictly and literally true, either because they are
figurative, or simply because we express ourselves loosely.
An
utterance can be said to have a literal meaning which is capable of being either
true or false when the result of combining its linguistic sense with its
reference is a proposition. We ourselves do not claim that all utterances have a
literal meaning, and we will be arguing that even when a literal meaning is
available, it is not automatically the preferred interpretation of an utterance.
In fact, literalness plays no role in our account of language comprehension, and
nor does the notion of what is said.
By contrast, to those who argue that there is an expectation of truthfulness in
what is said, literal meanings matter. For Grice, what is said (as distinct from
what is implicated) is the literal meaning of an utterance. For Lewis, what is
said is specifiable on the basis of the utterance’s literal meaning. Without
such an appeal to literal meaning in the determination of what is said, the
claim that there is a maxim or convention of truthfulness in what is said would
be, if not vacuous, at least utterly vague.
Lewis (1975) considers the case of tropes:
Objection:
Suppose the members of a population are untruthful in their language £ more
often than not, not because they lie, but because they go in heavily for irony,
metaphor, hyperbole, and such. It is hard to deny that the language £ is used
by such a population.
Reply:
I claim that these people are truthful in their language £, though they are not
literally truthful in £. To be
literally truthful in £ is to be truthful in another language related to £, a
language we can call literal-£. The relation between £ and literal-£ is as
follows: a good way to describe £ is to start by specifying literal-£ and then
to describe £ as obtained by certain systematic departures from literal-£.
This two-stage specification of £ by way of literal-£ may turn out to be much
simpler than any direct specification of £. (Lewis 1975, p. 183)
Lewis's
reply rests on a widely-shared view which dates back to classical rhetoric. On
this view,
(2)
(a) Figurative and literal utterances differ not in the kind of meanings they
have (thus, if literal meanings are truth-conditional, so are figurative
meanings), but in the way these meanings are generated.
(b)
The meanings of figurative utterances are generated by systematic departures
from their literal meanings.
For
example, consider (3) and (4), where (3) is a metaphor and (4) is intended as
hyperbole[1]:
(3) The leaves danced in the breeze.
(4)
You’re a genius.
Lewis
might want to say that in literal-English, sentences (3) and (4) have just their
literal meanings. In actual English, the language in which a convention of
truthfulness and trust holds among English speakers, (3) and (4) are ambiguous.
They have their literal meanings plus other, figurative meanings: thus, (3) has
the metaphorical meaning in (5), and (4) the hyperbolical meaning in (6):
(5)
The leaves moved in the breeze as if they were dancing.
(6)
You’re very clever.
However,
it is not as if any language £ (in the sense required by Lewis, where the
sentences of £ can be assigned truth-conditional meanings) had ever actually
been specified on the basis of a corresponding ‘literal-£’. So what is the
justification for accepting something like (2a) and (2b)? How are figurative
meanings derived from literal meanings, and under what conditions do the
derivations take place? Lewis does not explain, and there are no generally
accepted answers to these questions. We have argued (Sperber and Wilson 1986a,b;
1990; 1998a) that figurative interpretations are radically context-dependent,
and that the context is not fixed independently of the utterance but constructed
as an integral part of the comprehension process. If so, then the very idea of
generating the sentences of a language £ on the basis of a corresponding
‘literal-£’ is misguided.
Grice
is often seen as providing an explanation of how figurative interpretations are
conveyed. Consider a situation where the speaker of (3) or (4) manifestly could
not have intended to commit herself to the truth of the propositions literally
expressed: it is common knowledge that she knows that leaves never dance, or
that she does not regard the hearer as a genius. She is therefore overtly
violating the maxim of truthfulness: in Grice's terms, she is flouting
it. Flouting a maxim indicates a speaker's intention: the speaker intends the
hearer to retrieve an implicature which brings the full interpretation of the
utterance (i.e. what is said plus what is implicated) as close as possible to
satisfying the Co-operative Principle and maxims. In the case of tropes, the
required implicature is related to what is said in one of several possible ways,
each characteristic of a different trope. With metaphor, the implicature is a
simile based on what is said; with irony, it is the opposite of what is said;
with hyperbole, it is a weaker proposition, and with understatement, a stronger
one. Thus, Grice might analyse (3) as implicating (5) above, and (4) as
implicating (6).
Note that this treatment of tropes does not differ radically from Lewis’s, or from the classical rhetorical account. Grice's approach, like Lewis's, is based on assumption (2a) and, more importantly, on assumption (2b) (that the meanings of figurative utterances are generated by systematic departures from their literal meanings). The only difference is that Lewis sees these departures as systematic enough to be analysed in code-like terms: the figurative meaning of a sentence is a genuine linguistic meaning specified in the grammar of £ by a derivation which takes the literal meaning of the sentence as input. The sentences of £ (unlike those of literal-£) are systematically ambiguous between literal and figurative senses. For Grice, by contrast, sentences have only literal meanings. Figurative meanings are not sentence meanings but utterance meanings, derived in a conversational context. However, the derivations proposed in Grice’s pragmatic approach to tropes are the same as those hinted at by Lewis in his linguistic approach, and neither differs seriously from the classical rhetorical account.
Grice's
treatment of tropes leaves several questions unanswered, and we will argue that
it is inconsistent with the rationale of his own enterprise. In particular,
there is room for doubt about what he meant by the maxim of truthfulness, and
the role it was intended to play in his framework. This doubt is created by two
possible interpretations of his notion of saying.
On the first interpretation, saying is
merely expressing a proposition, without any necessary commitment to its truth.
Understood in this way, the maxim of truthfulness means ‘Do not express
propositions you believe to be false.’ The function of this maxim, and more
generally of the Quality maxims, would be to account for the fact—to the
extent that it is a fact—that a speaker actually commits herself to the truth
of what she says. Tropes would then be explained by the claim that flouting the
maxim triggers the recovery of an implicature in the standard Gricean way.
However, there is a problem. In general, the recovery of implicatures is meant
to restore the assumption that the maxims have been observed, or that their
violation was justified in the circumstances (as when a speaker is justified by
her ignorance in providing less information than required) (Grice 1989a, p.
370). In the case of tropes, the maxim of truthfulness is irretrievably violated,
and the implicature provides no circumstantial justification whatsoever.
On
the second, and stronger, interpretation, saying is not merely expressing a
proposition but asserting it: that is, committing oneself to its truth.
Understood in this way, the maxim of truthfulness means ‘Do not assert
propositions you believe to be false.’ On this interpretation, saying already
involves speaker commitment, and the function of the maxim of truthfulness, and
more generally of the Quality maxims, would be to ensure that speakers do not
make spurious commitments. This seems to fit with Grice's above remark that the
function of the Quality maxim is to guarantee that contributions are genuine
rather than spurious. However, understood in this way, it is hard to see why a
maxim of truthfulness is needed at all. It seems to follow from the very notion
of an assertion as a commitment to truth (perhaps together with a proper
understanding of commitment) that your assertions should be truthful. In fact,
the only pragmatic function of the maxim of truthfulness, on this interpretation,
is to be violated in metaphor and irony, thus triggering the search for an
implicature. Without it, Grice would have no account of figurative utterances at
all.
Which
notion of saying did Grice have in mind in proposing the maxim of truthfulness?
There is evidence of some hesitation. On the one hand, he treats the tropes as
‘Examples in which the first maxim of Quality is flouted’ (Grice 1967, p.
34). On the other, he comments that in irony the speaker ‘has said or
has made as if to say’ [our italics]
something she does not believe, and that in metaphor what is communicated must
be obviously related to what the speaker ‘has
made as if to say’ (ibid. p. 34). If the speaker of metaphor or irony
merely ‘makes as if to say’ something, then the stronger notion of saying
must be in force; on the other hand, if the speaker of a trope merely ‘makes
as if’ to say something, then surely the maxim of truthfulness is not violated.
But if the maxim of truthfulness is not violated, how does Grice's analysis of
metaphor and irony go through at all?
Elsewhere
in his philosophy of language, where the notion of saying plays a central role,
it was the stronger rather than the weaker notion that interested Grice. He says,
for example, ‘I want to say that (1) “U
(utterer) said that p” entails (2)
“U did something x by which U
meant that p”.’ (Grice 1967, p.
87). For Grice, what is meant is
roughly co-extensive with what is intentionally
communicated: that is, with the information put forward as true. On this
interpretation, saying involves speaker commitment: that is, it means asserting.
Among his commentators, Stephen Neale (1992) treats these broader considerations
as decisive: ‘If U utters the
sentence “Bill is an honest man” ironically, on Grice's account U
will not have said that Bill is an honest man: U will have made as if to say that Bill is an honest man.’ (Neale
1992, section 2).
How
can we reconcile these two claims: that metaphor and irony are deliberate
violations of the maxim of truthfulness, and hence must say
something, and that in metaphor and irony the speaker merely makes
as if to say something? A possible answer would be to distinguish two phases
in the utterance interpretation process. In the first, the utterance of a
declarative sentence would provide prima facie evidence for the assumption that
an assertion is being made. In the second, this assumption would be evaluated
and accepted or rejected. In the case of metaphor and irony, this second phase
would involve an argument of the following sort: if it is common ground that the
utterer U doesn't believe p,
then U cannot assert p; it is
common ground that U doesn't believe p;
hence, U hasn't asserted p. In
this way, we get a consistent interpretation of the notion of saying, and we can
see why Grice hesitates between ‘saying’ and ‘making as if to say.’
However,
if this interpretation is correct, then a trope involves no real violation of
the maxim of truthfulness at any stage: since the speaker was not saying p,
she was not saying what she believed to be false. A flouting, so understood, is
a mere appearance of violation. So why should it be necessary to retrieve an
implicature in order to preserve the assumption that the maxims have been
respected? The Gricean way to go (although Grice himself did not take this
route) would be to argue that it is not the maxim of truthfulness but some other
maxim that is being violated. Quite plausibly, the maxim of Relation (‘Be
relevant’) is being violated, for how can you be relevant when you speak and
say nothing? Surely the first maxim of Quantity (‘Make your contribution as
informative as is required’) is being violated, for if nothing is said, no
information is provided. The implicature should thus be seen as a way of
providing a full interpretation of the utterance in which these maxims are
respected.
The
problem with this analysis of tropes (and with the alternative analysis on which
floutings of the maxim of truthfulness are genuine violations) is that it leads
to an interpretation of figurative utterances which irretrievably violates the
Manner maxims. In classical rhetoric, a metaphor such as (3) or a hyperbole such
as (4) is merely an indirect and decorative way of communicating the
propositions in (5) or (6). This ornamental value might be seen as explaining
the use of tropes, insofar as classical rhetoricians were interested in
explanation at all. Quite sensibly, Grice does not appeal to ornamental value.
His supermaxim of Manner is not ‘Be fancy’ but ‘Be perspicuous.’ He
assumes, this time in accordance with classical rhetoric, that figurative
meanings, like literal meanings, are fully propositional, and always
paraphrasable by means of a literal utterance. Which raises the following
question: isn't a direct and literal expression of what you mean always
more perspicuous (and in particular
less obscure and less ambiguous, cf. the first and second Manner maxims) than an
indirect figurative expression? (Remember: you cannot appeal to the subtle extra
effects of tropes, since they are not considered, let alone explained, within
the Gricean framework.)
It
would be presumptuous to attribute Grice's apparent hesitation between two
senses of saying to a lack of
conceptual rigour on his part. We see it rather as arising from the difficulty
of deploying a notion of saying which is both close enough to common usage to justify the
choice of this word, and yet precise enough to make a contribution to a theory
of language use. We will argue in §7 that there is no such notion. We ourselves
do not use ‘saying’ as a theoretical term, except in rendering the views of
others.
Tropes
are the most striking examples of serious utterances where the speaker is
manifestly not telling the strict and literal truth. Even more common are loose
uses of language (e.g. rough approximations, sense extensions), where an
expression is applied to items that fall outside its linguistically-determined
denotation, strictly understood. Consider the examples in (7)–(10):
(7) The
lecture starts at
(8)
(9)
Sue: I must run to the bank before
it closes.
(10)
Jane: I have a terrible cold. I need a
Kleenex.
If
the italicised expressions in (7)–(10) are understood in the most restrictive
way (and ignoring issues of ambiguity or polysemy for a moment), these
utterances are not strictly and literally true: lectures rarely start at exactly
the appointed time, Holland is not a plane surface, Sue must hurry to the bank
but not necessarily run there, and other brands of disposable tissue would do
just as well for Jane. Such loose uses of language are very common. Some are
tied to a particular situation, produced once and then forgotten. Others may be
regular and frequent enough to give rise to an extra sense, which may stabilise
in an individual or a population: lexical broadening (along with lexical
narrowing and metaphorical transfer) has been seen as one of the main pragmatic
factors driving semantic change (Lyons 1977, Chs.13.4, 14.5). What concerns us
here is not so much the outcome of these historical macro-processes as the
nature of the pragmatic micro-processes that underlie them, and we will largely
abstract away from the question of whether, or when, a word such as ‘flat’,
or ‘run’, or ‘Kleenex’ may be said to have acquired an extra stable
sense (see Sperber and Wilson 1998a for some discussion).
How should loose uses such as those in (7)–(10) be analysed? Are they lapses, the result of sloppy speech or thought, accepted by hearers whose expectations have been reduced to realistic levels by repeated encounters with normal human failings? Is it reasonable to assume that there really is a convention or maxim of truthfulness, although speakers quite commonly fall short of strictly obeying it? As hearers, would we always—and as speakers, should we always—prefer the strictly true statements in (11)–(14) to the loose uses in (7)–(10)?
(11)
The lecture starts at or shortly after five.
(12)
(13)
I must go to the bank as fast as if I were running.
(14)
I need a Kleenex or other disposable tissue.
Clearly not. In most circumstances, the
hearer would not be misled by strictly untrue approximations such as (7)–(10),
and their strictly true counterparts in (11)–(14) would not provide him with
any more valuable information. Indeed, since these strictly true counterparts
are typically longer, the shorter approximations may be preferable.
Loose
uses of language present few problems for speakers and hearers, who are rarely
even aware of their occurrence; but they do raise a serious issue for any
philosophy of language based on a maxim or convention of truthfulness. We have
suggested above that appeals to ambiguity (or polysemy) merely defer the problem,
since such ambiguities ultimately derive from repeated instances of loose use
(for further discussion, see §6 below). In this section, we will consider other
solutions proposed in the literature, paying particular attention to Lewis’s
treatment of pragmatic vagueness. We will argue that no single solution, nor any
combination of proposed solutions, is adequate to handle the full variety of
loose uses of language, which go well beyond the types of pragmatic vagueness
dealt with on Lewis’s account.
In
Grice’s framework, loose uses such as (7)–(10) apparently violate either the
maxim of truthfulness or the second maxim of Quality (‘Have adequate evidence
for what you say’). However, they do not really fit into any of the categories
of violation listed in §1 above. They are not covert violations, designed to
deceive the hearer into believing the proposition strictly and literally
expressed. They are not like jokes or fictions, which suspend the maxims
entirely. One might try to analyse them as floutings: overt violations (real or
apparent), designed to trigger the search for a related implicature (here a
hedged version of what was literally said or quasi-said); but the problem is
that loose uses are not generally perceived as violating the Quality maxims at
all. In classical rhetoric, they were not treated as tropes involving the
substitution of a figurative for a literal meaning. They do not have the
striking quality that Grice associated with floutings, which he saw as resulting
in figurative or quasi-figurative interpretations. Loose talk involves no overt
violation, real or apparent; or at least it does not involve a degree of
overtness in real or apparent violation which might trigger the search for an
implicature. While we are all capable of realising on reflection that utterances
such as (7)–(10) are not strictly and literally true, these departures from
truthfulness pass unattended and undetected in the normal flow of discourse.
Grice's framework thus leaves them unexplained.
Perhaps
we should reconsider the apparent platitudes we started with. Maybe we should
have said that as speakers, we expect what we say to be accepted as approximately
true, and as hearers, we expect what is said to us to be approximately true. But this is far too vague to do the required
work of explaining how speakers and hearers manage to communicate successfully.
Approximations differ both in kind and in degree, and their acceptability varies
with content and context. There is no single scale on which the degrees of
approximation in disparate statements such as (7)–(10) can be usefully
compared. The same statement can be an acceptable approximation in one situation
and not in another. Thus, suppose the speaker of (7) expects the lecture to
start sometime between
A
convention of truthfulness and trust in a language (if there were one) might
play a valuable role in explaining how linguistic expressions acquire their
conventional meanings, and how speakers and hearers use these meanings to
communicate successfully. If all that speakers and hearers are entitled to are
vague expectations of approximate truth, it is hard to see how the resulting
convention of approximate truthfulness could be robust enough to establish
common meanings. As we have shown, the same approximation may be differently
intended and understood in different circumstances. Unless it is supplemented by
some account of how speakers and hearers may converge on these more specific
understandings—an account which might then be doing most of the explanatory
work—a convention of approximate truthfulness and trust is inadequate to
explain how the co-ordination necessary for successful communication is achieved.
Still, this is the direction that David Lewis proposes to explore. He writes:
When
is a sentence true enough? […] this itself is a vague matter. More important
for our present purposes, it is something that depends on context. What is true
enough on one occasion is not true enough on another. The standards of precision
in force are different from one conversation to another, and may change in the
course of a single conversation.
We agree with Lewis (and Unger 1975, Ch.2)
that ‘hexagonal’ and ‘flat’ are semantically absolute terms, and that
their vagueness should be seen as pragmatic rather than semantic (so in our
terms they are genuine cases of loose use). However, Lewis’s analysis of
pragmatically vague terms such as ‘flat’ is very similar to his analysis of
semantically vague terms such as ‘cool’.[2]
For Lewis, a semantically vague term has a range of possible sharp delineations,
marking different cut-off points between, say, ‘cool’ and ‘warm’.
‘This is cool’ may be true at some but not all delineations, and depending
on our purposes, we may be willing or unwilling to assert it: hence its
vagueness (1970, pp. 228–29). On Lewis’s account, semantically absolute but
pragmatically vague terms are handled on similar lines, except that semantic
delineations are replaced by contextually-determined standards of precision (so
if ‘flat’ were semantically rather than pragmatically vague, the analysis
would not be very different). On this approach, ‘
Semantic vagueness clearly exists
(‘bluish’ and ‘flattish’ are good examples); its analysis raises
problems of its own, about which we have nothing to say here (see Williamson
1994; Keefe and Smith 1996). What we do want to argue against is the idea that
loose use can be successfully treated as a pragmatic analogue of semantic
vagueness. As we have suggested above (and will argue in more detail below),
there are many varieties of loose use, not all of which can be satisfactorily
handled by appeal to contextually-determined standards of precision. For the
cases that cannot be handled on Lewis’s lines, an alternative analysis must be
found. We will propose such an analysis, and argue that it generalises
straightforwardly to all varieties of loose use (and indeed to all utterances,
literal, loose, or figurative), making the appeal to standards of precision as a
component of conversational competence unnecessary.
In fact, there are problems even in some cases
where the appeal to contextually-determined standards of precision looks
initially plausible. Consider a situation where (7) (‘The
lecture starts at
(15) The lecture starts at
(16) The lecture starts at
This
is clearly ad hoc. It would be better to find an alternative account of these
asymmetries—but such an account might make the appeal to
contextually-determined standards of precision redundant.
A
more serious problem for Lewis is that in some cases of loose use, the appeal to
contextually-determined standards of precision does not seem to work at all.
Lewis’s account works best when there is a continuum (or ordered series) of
cases between the strict truth and the broadest possible approximation.
‘Flat’ is a good example, since departures from strict flatness may vary in
degree. ‘
Again,
for someone with no particular theoretical axe to grind, it is easy enough to
see intuitively what is going on. Suppose
you have a lecture one afternoon, but don’t know exactly when it is due to
start. Someone tells you, ‘The lecture starts at
Suppose
that Peter and Mary, who are both rather unfit, are discussing where to go on
their next cycling holiday. Mary suggests
Suppose
that Sue, chatting with friends in the street, looks at her watch and says, ‘I
must run to the bank before it closes.’ Her friends will take her to mean that
she must break off their chat and hurry to the bank. For them, that much
information is worth deriving. Whether she will actually get to the bank by
running, walking fast or a mixture of both is of no interest to them, and they
will simply not attend to this aspect of the literal meaning of her utterance.
Suppose
that Jane and Jack are in the cinema waiting for the film to start. By saying,
‘I have a terrible cold. I need a Kleenex,’ Jane provides a premise from
which Jack can infer that she wants to borrow a tissue to use in dealing with
her cold. Her utterance also provides a premise from which he could derive the
possibly false conclusion that she does not want a tissue of any other brand
than Kleenex; but he is unlikely to draw such a conclusion, since his
expectations of relevance in this context are satisfied by the weaker
interpretation on which she wants a tissue (and in a context where his
expectations of relevance would encourage an interpretation on which Jane was
specifically requesting a Kleenex—e.g. if she was angrily throwing away
tissues of another brand—the utterance would not be understood as a case of
loose talk).
As
these examples show, hearers have no objection to strictly false approximations
as long as the conclusions they bother to derive from them are true. In fact,
they might prefer the shorter approximations to their longer-winded but strictly
true counterparts for reasons of economy of effort. There
is some evidence that speakers take account of the perceived preferences of
their audience in deciding how strictly or loosely to speak. In a series of
experiments on truthfulness and relevance in telling the time, Van der Henst,
Carles and Sperber (forthcoming) showed that when people in public places are
asked the time by a stranger, they tend to respond with a time that is either
accurate to the minute or rounded to the nearest multiple of five, depending on
how useful in the circumstances they think a more accurate answer would be. This
includes people with digital watches, from which a time that is accurate to the
minute is most easily read off. These people have to make an extra effort to
produce a rounded answer which, to the best of their knowledge, is not strictly
true, but is easier for their audience to process.
Anticipating
the arguments of the next section, let us say that an utterance is relevant
when the hearer, given his cognitive dispositions and the context, is likely to
derive some genuine knowledge from it (we will shortly elaborate on this).
Someone interested in defending a maxim or convention of truthfulness might then
suggest that expectations of relevance do play a role in comprehension, but in a
strictly limited way. It might be claimed, for example, that while utterances in
general create expectations of truthfulness, approximations alone create
expectations of relevance, which have a role to play in the case of loose talk,
but only there. This account (apart from being unparsimonious) raises the
following problem. As noted above, while we are all capable of realising on
reflection that an utterance was an approximation rather than a strictly literal
truth, the fact that an approximation has been used is simply not noticed in the
normal flow of discourse, and is surely not recognisable in advance of the
comprehension process.
But
in that case, how could loose talk and literal talk be approached and processed
with different expectations?
Here is the answer. It is not just approximations but all utterances¾literal, loose or figurative¾that are approached with expectations of relevance rather than truthfulness. Sometimes, the only way of satisfying these expectations is to understand the utterance as literally true. But just as an utterance can be understood as an approximation without being recognised and categorised as such, so it can be literally understood without being recognised and categorised as such. We will argue that the same is true of tropes. Literal, loose, and figurative interpretations are arrived at in the same way, by constructing an interpretation which satisfies the hearer’s expectations of relevance (for earlier arguments along these lines, see Sperber and Wilson 1986a,b; 1990; 1998a).
No special machinery is needed to explain the interpretation of loose talk. In particular, contextually-determined standards of precision play no role in the interpretation process. They do not help with cases such as ‘run’, or ‘Kleenex’, which are neither semantically nor pragmatically vague; and to appeal to them in analysing cases such as ‘flat’ or ‘at five o’clock’, which might be seen as involving a pragmatic form of vagueness, would be superfluous at best.
Grice's maxim of truthfulness was part of what might be called an inferential model of human communication. This contrasts with a more classical code model, which treats utterances as signals encoding the messages that speakers intend to convey. On the classical view, comprehension is achieved by decoding signals to obtain the associated messages. On the inferential view, utterances are not signals but pieces of evidence about the speaker's meaning, and comprehension is achieved by inferring this meaning from the evidence provided. An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that the comprehension process will involve an element of decoding. But the linguistically-encoded sentence meaning need not be identical to the speaker's meaning¾and we would argue that it never is¾since it is likely to be ambiguous and incomplete in ways the speaker's meaning is not. On this approach, the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding is just one of the inputs to an inferential process which yields an interpretation of the speaker's meaning.
Grice,
Lewis and others who have contributed to the development of an inferential
approach to communication have tended to minimise the gap between sentence
meaning and speaker's meaning; they treat the inference from sentence meaning to
speaker’s meaning as merely a matter of assigning referents to referring
expressions, and perhaps of calculating implicatures. While the slack between
sentence meaning and speaker's explicit meaning cannot be entirely eliminated, a
framework with a maxim or convention of truthfulness has the effect of reducing
it to a minimum. But why should this be something to be a priori expected or
desired? Comprehension is a complex cognitive process. From a cognitive point of
view, how much of the work is done by inference and how much by decoding depends
on how efficient the inferential processes are. We have argued (Wilson and
Sperber 1981; 1993; forthcoming; Sperber and Wilson 1986a; 1998a) that
relevance-oriented inferential processes are efficient enough to allow for a
much greater slack between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning than is
generally assumed. Here, we summarise the theory briefly for purposes of the
present discussion.
We
characterise relevance as a property of inputs to cognitive processes which makes
them worth processing. (‘Relevance’ is used in a technical sense which is
not meant to capture any of the ordinary senses of the word.) These inputs may
be external stimuli (e.g. a smell, the sound of an utterance), or internal
representations which may undergo further processing (e.g. the recognition of a
smell, a memory, the linguistic decoding of an utterance). At each point in our
cognitive lives, there are many more potential inputs available than we can
actually process: for example, we perceive many more distal stimuli than we can
attend to, and have many more memories than we can reactivate at a single time.
Efficiency in cognition is largely a matter of allocating our processing
resources so as to maximise cognitive benefits. This involves processing inputs
that offer the best expected cost/benefit ratio at the time.
Here
we will consider only one type of cognitive benefit: improvements in knowledge
(theoretical or practical). This is plausibly the most important type of
cognitive benefit. There may be others: improvements in memory or imagination,
for example (although it might be argued that these are benefits only because
they contribute indirectly to improvements in knowledge; better memory and
imagination lead to better non-demonstrative inference, and therefore to better
knowledge). In any case, for our present purposes, there is another important
reason for identifying cognitive benefits with improvements in knowledge.
In
a situation where it is clear to both participants that the hearer's goal in
listening to the speaker's utterances is not the improvement of knowledge—say,
he just wants to be amused—there is no reason why the speaker should be
expected to tell the truth. Thus, one way of challenging the maxim or convention
of truthfulness would be to start by questioning whether humans are much
interested in truth (e.g. Stich 1990). Here, we want to present a more pointed
challenge to Grice’s and Lewis’s ideas, based on the nature of human
communication rather than the goals of cognition. We will therefore grant that
one of the goals of most human communication (though certainly not the only one)
is the transmission of genuine information and the improvement of the hearer's
knowledge. We will consider only cases where hearers are interested in truth.
Our claim is that even in these cases, hearers do not expect utterances to be
literally true.
The
processing of an input in the context of existing assumptions may improve the
individual’s knowledge not only by adding a new piece of information, but by
revising his existing assumptions, or yielding conclusions not derivable from
the new piece of knowledge alone or from existing assumptions alone. We define
an input as relevant when and only when it has such positive cognitive effects.[4]
Relevance is also a matter of degree, and we want to characterise it not only as
a classificatory notion but also as a comparative one. There are inputs with at
least some low degree of relevance all around us, but we cannot attend to them
all. What makes an input worth attending to is not just that it is relevant, but
that it is more relevant than any alternative potential input to the same
processing resources at that time. Although relevance cannot be measured in
absolute terms, the relevance of various inputs can be compared.
For
our purpose, which is to characterise a property crucial to cognitive economy,
the relevance of inputs must be comparable not only in terms of benefits (i.e.
positive cognitive effects), but also in terms of costs (i.e. processing
effort). We therefore propose the following comparative notion of relevance:
(17)
Relevance of an input to an individual at
a time
(a)
Everything else being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved
in an individual by processing an input at a given time, the greater the
relevance of the input to that individual at that time.
(b)
Everything else being equal, the smaller the processing effort expended by the
individual in achieving those effects, the greater the relevance of the input to
that individual at that time.
Here is a brief and artificial illustration. Peter wakes up feeling unwell and goes to the doctor. On the basis of her examination, she might make any of the following true statements:
(18)
You are ill.
(19)
You have flu.
(20)
You have flu or 29 is the square root of 843.
The literal content of all three
utterances would be relevant to Peter. However, (19) would be more relevant than
either (18) or (20). It would be more relevant than (18) for reasons of
cognitive effect, since it yields all the consequences derivable from (18) and
more besides. This is an application of clause (a) of the characterisation of
relevance in (17). It would be more relevant than (20) for reasons of processing
effort: although (19) and (20) yield exactly the same consequences, these
consequences are easier to derive from (19) than from (20), which requires an
additional effort of parsing and inference (in order to realise that the second
disjunct is false and the first is therefore true). This is an application of
clause (b) of the characterisation of relevance in (17).
Given
this characterisation of relevance, it is, ceteris
paribus, in the individual’s interest to process the most relevant inputs
available. We claim that this is what people tend to do (with many failures, of
course). They tend to do it not because they realise that it is in their
interest (and they certainly do not realise it in those terms), but because they
are cognitively-endowed evolved organisms. In biological evolution, there has
been constant pressure on the human cognitive system to organise itself so as to
select inputs on the basis of their expected relevance (see Sperber and Wilson
2002). Hence:
(21)
The First, or Cognitive, Principle of
Relevance
The
human cognitive system tends towards processing the most relevant inputs
available.
The
tendency described in the Cognitive Principle of Relevance is strong enough, and
manifest enough, to make our mental processes at least partially predictable to
others. We are in general fairly good at predicting which of the external
stimuli currently affecting some other individual’s nervous system she is
likely to be attending to, and which of the indefinitely many conclusions that
she might draw from it she will in fact draw. What we do, essentially, is assume
that she will pay attention to the potentially most relevant stimulus, and
process it so as to maximise its relevance: that is, in a context of easily
accessible background assumptions, where the information it provides will carry
relatively rich cognitive effects.
This
mutual predictability is exploited in communication. As communicators, we
provide stimuli which are likely to strike our intended audience as relevant
enough to be worth processing, and to be interpreted in the intended way. A
communicator produces a stimulus¾say
an utterance¾which
attracts her audience's attention, and she does so in an overtly intentional
way. In other words, she makes it manifest that she wants her audience's
attention. Since it is also manifest that the audience will tend to pay
appropriate attention only to an utterance that seems relevant enough, it is
manifest that the communicator wants her audience to assume that the utterance
is indeed relevant enough. There is thus a minimal level of relevance that the
audience is encouraged to expect: the utterance should be relevant enough to be
worth the effort needed for comprehension.
Is
the audience entitled to expect more relevance than this? In certain conditions,
yes. The communicator wants to be understood. An utterance is most likely to be
understood when it simplifies the hearer's task by demanding as little effort
from him as possible, and encourages him to pay it due attention by offering him
as much effect as possible. The smaller the effort, and the greater the effect,
the greater the relevance. It is therefore manifestly in the communicator's
interest for the hearer to presume that the utterance is not just relevant
enough to be worth his attention, but more relevant than this. How much more?
Here, the communicator is manifestly limited by her own abilities (to provide
appropriate information, and to present it in the most efficient way). Nor can
she be expected to go against her own preferences (e.g. against the goal she
wants to achieve in communicating, or the rules of etiquette she wishes to
follow). Still, it may be compatible with the communicator’s abilities and
preferences to go beyond the minimally necessary level of relevance. We define a
notion of optimal relevance (of an
utterance, to an audience) which takes these ideas into account, and propose a
second principle of relevance based on it:
(22)
Optimal relevance of an utterance
An
utterance is optimally relevant to the hearer iff:
(a)
It is relevant enough to be worth the hearer's processing effort;
(b)
It is the most relevant one compatible with the speaker's abilities and
preferences.
(23)
The Second, or Communicative, Principle of
Relevance
Every
utterance conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
In
interpreting an utterance, the hearer invariably has to go beyond the
linguistically-encoded sentence meaning. There will be ambiguities and
referential indeterminacies to resolve, and other underdeterminate aspects of
explicit content that we will look at shortly. There may be implicatures to
identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to
interpret. All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions. The
Communicative Principle of Relevance and the definition of optimal relevance
suggest a practical procedure for constructing a hypothesis about the
speaker’s meaning. The hearer should consider interpretive hypotheses
(disambiguations, reference assignments, implicatures, etc.) in order of
accessibility—that is, follow a path of least effort—and stop when he
arrives at an interpretation which satisfies the expectations of relevance
raised by the utterance itself.[5]
What
makes it reasonable for the hearer to follow a path of least effort is that the
speaker is expected (within the limits of her abilities and preferences) to make
her utterance as easy as possible for the hearer to understand. Since relevance
varies inversely with effort, the very fact that an interpretive hypothesis is
easily accessible gives it an initial degree of plausibility (an epistemic
advantage specific to communicated information).
What
makes it reasonable for the hearer to stop at the first interpretation which
satisfies his expectations of relevance is that either this interpretation is
close enough to what the speaker meant, or she has failed to communicate her
meaning. A speaker who produced an utterance with two or more significantly
different interpretations, each yielding the expected level of cognitive effect,
would put the hearer to the gratuitous and unexpected extra effort of choosing
among them, and the resulting interpretation (if any) would not satisfy clause
(b) of the presumption of optimal relevance.[6]
Thus, when a hearer following the path of least effort finds an interpretation
which satisfies his expectations of relevance, in the absence of contrary
evidence, this is the best possible interpretive hypothesis. Since comprehension
is a non-demonstrative inference process, this hypothesis may well be false.
Typically, this happens when the speaker expresses herself in a way that is
inconsistent with the expectations she herself has raised, so that the normal
inferential routines of comprehension fail. Failures in communication are common
enough: what is remarkable and calls for explanation is that communication works
at all.
This
relevance-theoretic account not only describes a psychological process but also
explains what makes this process genuinely inferential: that is, likely to yield
true conclusions (in this case, intended interpretations) from true premises (in
this case, from the fact that the speaker has produced a given utterance,
together with contextual information). On the descriptive level, it has testable
implications, some of which have been tested and confirmed by a growing body of
research in experimental pragmatics.[7]
On the explanatory level, it claims that what makes this relevance-guided
process genuinely inferential is the fact that it typically yields a single
interpretation for a given quadruple of speaker, hearer, utterance and
situation. Given that such interpretations are predictable by the speaker, the
best utterance for a speaker to produce is the one that is likely to be
interpreted in the intended way, and the best interpretation for a hearer to
choose is the one arrived at by use of the relevance-guided procedure, which is
therefore likely to have been predicted and intended by the speaker.
Communication is a form of co-ordination, and runs into co-ordination problems
which are partly standard, and partly specific to communication.
Relevance-guided comprehension takes advantage of the communication-specific
aspects of these problems, and provides a solution which is, of course,
imperfect, but is nonetheless effective (for further discussion, see Sperber and
Wilson 2002).
An
utterance has two immediate effects: it indicates that the speaker has something
to communicate, and it determines an order of accessibility in which
interpretive hypotheses will occur to the hearer. Here is an illustration.
Lisa
drops by her neighbours, the Joneses, who have just sat down to supper:
(24)
Alan Jones: Do you want to join us for
supper?
Lisa:
No, thanks. I've eaten.
A
standard semantic analysis of the second part of Lisa’s utterance would assign
it the following truth condition:
(25)
At some point in a time span whose endpoint is the time of utterance, Lisa has
eaten something.
Clearly,
though, Lisa means something more specific than this. She means that she has
eaten that very evening, and not just anything, but a supper or something
equivalent: a few peanuts wouldn't do.[8]
Here
is our explanation of how Alan understands Lisa’s meaning. Her utterance
activates in his mind, via automatic linguistic decoding, a conceptual structure
which articulates in the grammatically specified way the concepts of Lisa, of
eating, and of a time span whose endpoint is the time of utterance.[9]
He does not have to reason, because it is all routine, but he might reason along
the following lines: she has caused me a certain amount of processing effort
(the effort required to attend to her utterance and decode it). Given the
Communicative Principle of Relevance, this effort was presumably not caused in
vain. So the conceptual structure activated by her utterance must be a good
starting point for inferring her meaning, which should be relevant to me.
Lisa’s
utterance, ‘I have eaten’, immediately follows her refusal of Alan’s
invitation to supper. It would be relevant to Alan (or so she may have thought)
to know the reasons for her refusal, which have implications for their
relationship: Did she object to the offer? Would she accept it another time? It
all depends on the reasons for her refusal. The use of the perfect ‘have
eaten’ indicates a time span ending at the time of utterance and starting at
some indefinite point in the past. Alan narrows the time span by assuming that
it started recently enough for the information that Lisa has eaten during that
period to yield adequate consequences: here, the relevant time span is that very
evening (for discussion, see Wilson and Sperber 1998). He does the same in
deciding what she ate. In the circumstances, the idea of eating is most easily
fleshed out as eating supper, and this, together with the narrowing of the time
span, yields the expected level of cognitive effect. Alan then assumes that Lisa
intended to express the proposition that she has eaten supper that evening, and
to present this as her reason for refusing his invitation. Although this
attribution of meaning is typically a conscious event, Alan is never aware of
the process by which he arrived at it, or of a literal meaning equivalent to
(25).
The
process by which Alan interprets Lisa’s meaning may be represented as in Table
1, with Alan’s interpretive hypotheses on the left, and his basis for arriving
at them on the right. We have presented the hypotheses in English, but for Alan
they would be in whatever is the medium of conceptual thought, and they need not
correspond very closely to our paraphrases.
|
(26a)
Lisa has said to Alan ‘I have eaten’. |
Decoding of Lisa's utterance. |
|
(26b)
Lisa's utterance is optimally relevant to Alan. |
Expectation raised by the recognition of Lisa's
utterance as a communicative act, and acceptance of the presumption of
relevance it automatically conveys. |
|
(26c)
Lisa's utterance will achieve relevance by explaining her immediately
preceding refusal of Alan's invitation to supper. |
Expectation raised by (b), together with the fact that
such an explanation would be most relevant to Alan at this point. |
|
(26d) The fact that one has already eaten supper on a given evening |