Abstract
Our paper works on a proposal recently put forward by Hunter, Asher and Lascarides (2018) on the use of events in discourse context. We basically accept their view and their proposal of using events as explanation in discourse context. However we think that a stricter connection with demonstrations and causal reasoning in everyday conversation is a necessary step in a coherent view of discourse context. We will not deal with any particular formalism, but only with the general problem of taking into account some elements that may simplify or explain what is taken for granted in some steps of our inferences. A central concept used in these setting is the concept of “explanation” as a way to give coherence to the discourse context. This kind of explanation is also based, besides elements of a general encyclopedic knowledge, on default assumptions derived by the ontology present in the lexicon as Asher (2011) has abundantly shown. However, the steps to recover such coherence would gain clarity with a better specification of causal explanation and with a more precise account of the relation between demonstrative and demonstrations in discourse context. On these two aspects we give some suggestions.
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Notes
- 1.
The most recent attempt has been given by Perry (2019).
- 2.
Discourse context may be linked to cognitive context as discussed by Stalnaker within the framework of possible worlds semantics, but may use different formalisms. We may also consider discourse context as an organized sequel of utterances. In this way we may theoretically connect the notion of discourse context to the notion of context of utterance in the strict sense (parameters of speaker, time, location and possible worlds) and in the wide sense (including cognitive aspects). The framework actually used by HAL is Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Lascarides and Asher 2008) where they apply what they call “glue logic”, which is a kind of commonsense reasoning using rhetorical relations. Rhetorical relations are what connect different stages in a discourse, and different stages may also be identified with different utterance contexts. The dynamic of discourse takes care of anaphoric relations among elements of the discourse and is often represented with updates that restrict the set of worlds. Meaning in dynamic semantic is therefore typically given as “context change potential”, but this new aspect of meaning does not abolish the idea of what is said as truth conditional content, which is the typical approach of the classical presentation of the context of utterance. Discourse context is a linguistic context where elements of the lexicon contain information plugged in the ontology of language (as widely analysed by Asher 2011).
- 3.
We cannot summarize HAL’s paper, but it is relevant to consider that explanation is a semantic relation such that “if the content p of a discourse move m stands in an Explanation relation to the content q of a discourse move n such that p provides the explanans, then the raison d’être of m is to provide an explanation of q.” This gives a less prominent role to intention: an Explanation can be inferred on the basis of features of p and q and from there an interpreter “can defeasibly infer that the speaker had the intention of using p to explain q” (p. 18).
- 4.
Stojnic et al. (2013) seem to treat “situated utterance” as something special, but every utterance is connected to a situation, unless we think of utterances concerning logical or mathematical formula (but even there we need to refer, at least, of the kind of theory we are using: in elementary arithmetics we may use natural numbers or integers or rational or real numbers and everytime we change the rules of the game). There are many representations of situations. Gauker (2012) suggests distinguishing “context” as a formal representation of a domain and “situation” as the actual state of affair pertaining to an utterance. McCarthy used the term “context” to define a situation as a triple containing a domain, axioms (describing the relation of the elements of the domain) and rules of inferences. Kaplan intended context of utterance in narrow sense as a set of parameters: speaker, time, location and possible world. Context of utterance in a wide sense includes other relevant information (often including presuppositions) necessary to disambiguate the reference of demonstratives and other non-automatic indexicals. Barwise-Perry with others followed Austin’s idea, used by Stojnic et al. (2013) for speaking of “situated utterance”. Let us say that the “context of utterance” is in principle always situated, and may be defined with an increasing and indeterminate degree of precision. Interpretation of what is said in a context should amount to defining the truth conditional content of sentences in context or utterances (and we may have different levels of truth conditions, from reflexive truth conditions to subject matter or referential truth conditions – Korta and Perry (2011), Da Ponte et al. (2019)).
- 5.
We use “state of affairs” or “singular event” or “event” interchangeably, for the sake of simplicity.
- 6.
This is only a hint to be developed; we refer here to an interesting suggestion by Guarino et al. (2019), on the requirement of causal connectness for understanding the meaning of a sentence.
- 7.
See for instance the references in Benzi (2016).
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Benzi, M., Penco, C. (2019). Nonlinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Contexts. In: Bella, G., Bouquet, P. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11939. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34974-5_1
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