View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers Practical Language: Its Meaning and Use by Nathan A. Charlow A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Allan F. Gibbard, Chair Professor Richmond H. Thomason Assistant Professor Ezra Russell Keshet Assistant Professor Eric Peter Swanson Professor Paul H. Portner, Georgetown University © Nathan A. Charlow 2011 All Rights Reserved For P&N ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It was a great surprise to have to finish this dissertation so soon. It was also a huge task. I want to thank so many people for their help with it. I will, I’m sure, forget a few of you. I especially want to thank Allan Gibbard for taking this project on. I am sure he was a bit skeptical about why a philosopher of language would wish to be supervised by an ethicist. In reading this, I think he (and you) will see why it made such good sense. My brother Simon introduced me to hardcore formal semantics and kept me in touch with the field during the years when Michigan lacked a bona fide semanticist. He, more than anyone else, helped me to become a linguist in addition to a philosopher. Eric Swanson has been my mentor since I took the plunge into philosophical linguistics in his 2006 seminar. He has read and given comments on nearly everything I have written since then. I owe him a great deal. Rich Thomason taught me modal logic. It has served me better than any other tool I acquired during graduate school. Rich also pressed me early and often with questions about the conceptual foundations of what I was doing with imperatives and Expressivism. I hope I’ve been able to answer some of those questions in what follows. I learned an incredible amount from Thony Gillies and Peter Ludlow. Thony introduced me to Paul Portner’s work on imperatives, which is the foil for so much of what follows here, and he supervised my Candidacy Dossier, for which I eventually won the Charles L. Stevenson Prize. Peter taught me Heim and Kratzer, and was the first person I knew to try and give Allan’s Expressivism its linguistic due. Mark van Roojen and Al Casullo are pretty much wholly responsible for my going to graduate school. I’m glad to call them my friends. For sundry inspiration, advice, and discussion, I’m grateful to Chris Barker, Gordon Belot, Billy Dunaway, Kai von Fintel, Benj Hellie, Lina Jansson, Ezra Keshet, Sam Liao, Clayton Littlejohn, Sarah Moss, Dilip Ninan, David Plunkett, Paul Portner, Peter Railton, Craige Roberts, Anders Schoubye, Alex Silk, Will Starr, Andreas Stokke, Sergio Tenenbaum, Dustin Tucker, Jonathan Weisberg, and Jessica Wilson. My Michigan friends are the best. Lina Jansson is a great person, a great philosopher, and was an ideal flatmate for the past two years. Jason Konek turned down a record deal with Akon to be my roommate for my first two years in Michigan. Sam Liao and I have shared many good times, in bars, in restaurants, in New York, Bloomington, and New Haven. Dave Wiens helped me remember how awful I am at basketball. Alex Plakias has iii impeccable taste in Nineties Hip-Hop. Eduardo García-Ramírez’s friendship was especially important to me last year. There is no way that I would have found a job—even secured an interview—without Linda Shultes’ tireless help. Judith Beck has been unfailingly warm and helpful. Molly Mahony kept my spirits up during the job market. Thank you all. I will keep things informal for people, things, and cats non-academic. *zilla. VT. Jingjing. Zingerman’s, which still makes the best Americano in Ann Arbor. Rori Cat, my beloved three-fanged, barbarically yawping hillbilly =^-_-^= Lots of love to C. Qui nolet fieri desidiosus, amet. Finally, thanks Mom. Thanks Dad. I love you both. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ........................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................. iii LIST OF APPENDICES . viii ABSTRACT .......................................... ix CHAPTER I. Introduction ....................................1 1.1 Interest...................................1 1.2 Overview..................................2 1.3 Synopsis...................................4 1.3.1 Identifying a Conventional Use................4 1.3.2 Embeddings...........................6 1.3.3 Applications: Expressivism and Conditionals.......7 II. Dynamic Accounts and the Problematics of Conventional Force ...... 10 2.1 Masters, Slaves, and Permissibility Spheres.............. 11 2.2 A Less Idealized Model.......................... 13 2.3 Imperatives and Obligation-Imposition................. 15 2.4 Non-Command Uses........................... 18 2.4.1 The Data............................. 18 2.4.2 Interpretation and Explanation................ 20 2.4.3 A Problem: Instruction Imperatives............. 22 2.4.4 A Ninan-Inspired Reply?................... 23 2.4.5 Varieties of Permission..................... 26 2.5 Recap.................................... 30 III. Imperatives and Necessitation .......................... 32 3.1 Indirect Speech Acts: A Primer in Defeasibility............ 33 3.2 Conventions as Defaults......................... 37 3.2.1 Convention and Cancellation................. 38 3.2.2 The Mechanics of Interpretation............... 41 v 3.2.3 Data for Declaratives and Interrogatives........... 44 3.3 Imperatives Express Necessitation.................... 45 3.3.1 Conventional Use Data.................... 46 3.3.2 Necessitation Data....................... 48 3.4 Computing ISAs.............................. 50 3.4.1 ISAs in General......................... 50 3.4.2 Voiding.............................. 53 3.4.3 Binding............................. 55 3.4.4 Permission as an ISA...................... 57 3.4.5 Instruction as an ISA...................... 62 3.5 Recap.................................... 66 IV. A Dynamic Theory of Imperative Meaning .................. 67 4.1 A “Standard” Account.......................... 69 4.1.1 Motivations........................... 70 4.1.2 Modeling the Standard Notion of a Speech Act....... 76 4.2 Information, Issues, and Preferences.................. 81 4.2.1 Information States....................... 81 4.2.2 Integrating Issues........................ 82 4.2.3 Integrating Preferences..................... 85 4.2.4 A Compositional System................... 87 4.3 Direction as Necessitation (as Coming to Recognize a Requirement) 93 4.3.1 Imperative Presuppositions.................. 93 4.3.2 Coming to Recognize a Requirement............. 98 4.3.3 Instituting Requirements................... 99 4.3.4 Conservative Preference Update................ 101 4.3.5 Prima Facie and Inconsistent Directives........... 107 4.3.6 Instituting Recognition..................... 109 4.3.7 Requirement Recognition as Decision............ 113 4.3.8 Strong Permission as Recognized Permission........ 115 4.3.9 Practical Questions and Preferential Issues......... 117 4.3.10 Summing Up.......................... 119 4.4 Against the Standard Account...................... 121 4.4.1 Bad Arguments Against the Standard Account....... 121 4.4.2 The Challenge of Embedded Imperatives.......... 129 4.4.3 Regular Operations....................... 131 4.4.4 Conjunction: Contrived Examples.............. 133 4.4.5 Conjunction: Sequencing Designation............ 135 4.4.6 Disjunction, Permission Content, and the Ross Paradox.. 137 4.4.7 Quantifiers?........................... 151 4.5 Conditional Imperatives......................... 162 4.5.1 A Standard Account (Wide-Scoping)............. 163 4.5.2 Conditional Speech Acts (Narrow-Scoping)......... 166 4.5.3 Challenging the Dynamic Program: The Modal Analysis. 169 4.5.4 Against the Modal Analysis.................. 173 4.5.5 A New Account......................... 178 4.5.6 The Semantics of Conditional Requirements........ 187 vi 4.5.7 Conditional Imperatives as Fundamental.......... 193 4.5.8 Upshot.............................. 195 V. Concluding Remarks ............................... 197 5.1 Taking Stock................................ 197 5.2 Editorial Digression............................ 197 5.3 Meaning, Force, Semantics, and Logic.................. 199 APPENDICES ......................................... 201 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................... 271 vii LIST OF APPENDICES Appendix A. Meaning for Expressivists.............................. 202 B. Conditional Utility, Preference, Obligations, and Imperatives......... 234 viii ABSTRACT Practical Language: Its Meaning and Use by Nathan A. Charlow Chair: Allan F. Gibbard I demonstrate that a “speech act” theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act- theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !f is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !f’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it convention- ally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !f’s CDF is to express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent’s preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence’s linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of “static” properties of the sentence—e.g.,