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The argument from convention revisited

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Abstract

The argument from convention contends that the regular use of definite descriptions as referential devices strongly implies that a referential semantic convention underlies such usage. On the presumption that definite descriptions also participate in a quantificational semantic convention, the argument from convention has served as an argument for the thesis that the English definite article is ambiguous. Here, I revisit this relatively new argument. First, I address two recurring criticisms of the argument from convention: (1) its alleged tendency to overgenerate and (2) its apparent evidential inadequacy. These criticisms are found wanting. Second, following Zacharska (Univ Coll Lond Work Pap Linguist 22:56–63, 2010), I argue that while the argument from convention does alter the landscape of logical possibilities insofar as it provides good grounds for treating Donnellan’s (Philos Rev 75:281–304, 1966) referential–attributive distinction as having truth-conditional consequences, the argument from convention nonetheless fails to demonstrate that ‘the’ requires two lexical entries.

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Notes

  1. With the obvious proviso that ‘F’ and ‘G’ do not themselves contain any referential terms.

  2. Strawson (1950) couched his theory in terms of statements, not propositions. Later, however, Strawson (1971/2004) would recast his view in proposition-talk. I follow that recasting here.

  3. This, at least, was the view that Strawson (1964, 1971/2004) eventually settled upon.

  4. Donnellan, for his part, framed the referential–attributive distinction in terms of whether there’s some individual the speaker ‘has in mind’ when she uses a definite description. Following Devitt (1974), I will instead couch the referential–attributive distinction in causal–perceptual terms.

  5. The term ‘get across’ is neutral between minimal propositions, explicatures, and implicatures.

  6. Indeed, Strawson’s view, Donnellan noted, could not account for the referential success speakers had in misdescription cases.

  7. The notation is Neale’s (1990).

  8. The locus classic is Neale (1990). But see Grice (1969), Kripke (1979), Bach (1981, 1987), Davies (1981), Evans (1982), Salmon (1982), and Soames (1986) as well.

  9. Davies’s case centered around five philosophers and their respective criminal records. While I have changed the details of the case, the basic moral remains.

  10. MOR requires that theorists ‘don’t multiply senses beyond necessity’. See Grice (1989) for further details.

  11. The label’s Neale’s (2004). Buchanan and Ostertag (2005), Pupa (2008), Amaral (2008, 2010), and Abbott (2010) also endorse AFC. While Neale (2004) remains skeptical that AFC provides definitive support for AT, he nonetheless accepts that AFC has truth-conditional import. And while Elbourne holds that AFC does not ‘[land] a knock-out blow on the traditional Russellian account’ (2013: p. 109), he does acknowledge that AFC casts traditional Russellianism in a less compelling light.

  12. Reimer (1998) also formulates and advocates AFC. But, she does not put AFC in the service of AT but rather argues in favor of the pragmatic ambiguity thesis that Recanati (1989, 1993) and Bezuidenhout (1997) endorse (for details, see Sect. 6 and fn. 62). I will put her particular brand of AFC to the side in Sects. 3–5. The two major criticisms of AFC are directed at the use of AFC to vindicate AT. They are directed at Devitt’s version of AFC. Dialectical coherence, then, obligates the initial sidelining of Reimer’s AFC. Now, I think that Reimer’s AFC has not been the subject of direct criticism in virtue of the fact that it seeks to substantiate the pragmatic ambiguity thesis, a thesis that most theorists, following Neale (1990: pp. 110–112), take to be a non-starter. For instance, both Devitt (2007: fn. 9) and Bach (2007: fn. 4) approvingly cite Neale’s argument against Recanati’s pragmatic ambiguity thesis. Taking Zacharska’s (2010) lead, I argue in Sect. 6 that the real problem for AFC is its indeterminacy with respect to AT and the pragmatic ambiguity thesis. In fn. 62, I argue that Neale fails to demonstrate that Recanati’s proposal is “highly artificial” (Neale 1990: p. 112).

  13. See Devitt (2004).

  14. See Reimer (1998).

  15. See Neale (2004).

  16. See Klein (1980).

  17. See Lewis (1969) and Schiffer (1972).

  18. Devitt holds that his view of semantic conventions is less intellectualized and thus fuzzier than Lewis or Schiffer’s. The view is less intellectualized since it’s couched in terms of dispositions as opposed to mutual knowledge. The conception is fuzzier insofar as it leaves opaque the precise mechanisms that ground the community’s shared dispositions. Nothing here hinges upon these features. For further discussion, see Devitt (2013b). Reimer (1995) subscribes to the traditional Lewis-Schiffer view that invokes mutual knowledge. Bach (1995), a Russellian and AFC critic, does too.

  19. Two points are in order. First, Lewis claims that conventions are, at bottom, arbitrary. Now, one might hold that the referential use of definite descriptions is not arbitrary. After all, the definite article must have the right semantic properties in order to lend itself to such usage. This, I think, is a misreading of Lewis’s notion of arbitrary. For Lewis (1969: pp. 69–70), a convention is arbitrary in the sense that an alternate convention could have arisen in place of the actual convention. On this gloss, referential definite descriptions are arbitrary. For example, English speakers could have encoded the referential properties of the definite article in a different lexical item and thereby used a different lexical item to refer via those properties. Second, one might claim that a speaker that uses a definite description referentially need not conform to (ii). The speaker, one might allege, could hold an agnostic view regarding the communicative dispositions of her audience. I’m skeptical. An agnostic speaker, I think, would be a terribly uncooperative speaker. If a speaker wishes to refer to a particular individual and also wishes to be understood by her audience, then she will employ a lexical item that she takes her audience to be disposed to use for similar purposes. Relatedly, a cooperative hearer that wishes to properly interpret a speaker’s referential speech act must take the speaker to be employing a lexical item that the hearer herself would be disposed to use for such purposes were she the speaker. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer at Synthese for raising these issues.

  20. The example’s Grice’s (1989: p. 43). Since there is no entailment relation between ‘try’ and ‘succeed’, neither <‘try’, ‘succeed’> nor <‘succeed’, ‘try’> form Horn scales [see Horn (1972)]. Thus, the movement from ‘try’ to ‘not succeed’ is not a case of scalar implicature. For a discussion of scalar implicatures and overgeneration, see Sect. 4.1.

  21. Here, I follow Kripke, a prominent Gricean:

    I find it plausible that a diachronic account of the evolution of language is likely to suggest that what was originally a mere speaker’s reference may, if it becomes habitual in a community, evolve into a semantic reference. (1979: p. 249).

    As Grice (1989: p. 43) himself notes, what’s implicated may later become conventionalized. Elsewhere, Grice expresses the point this way:

    ...It may not be impossible for what starts life, so to speak, as a conversational implicature to become conventionalized. (39: my emphasis).

    It’s hard to imagine what else besides regular usage or authoritative stipulation would be able to mold a pragmatic effect into a semantic convention. For some evidence of the tight connection between regular usage and convention, see Sect. 4.2.

  22. Strictly speaking, AFC only substantiates the existence of ‘\(\hbox {the}_{\mathrm{R}}\)’, not ‘\(\hbox {the}_{\mathrm{Q}}\)’. So, AFC doesn’t fully ground AT. In place of an argument for the existence of ‘\(\hbox {the}_{\mathrm{Q}}\)’, AFC proponents simply grant that the definite article has at least a quantificational semantics (Reimer 1998: p. 92; Devitt 2004: p. 280; Amaral 2008: p. 288). That is, AFC proponents exhibit an ‘attributive bias’. Since AFC critics also tend to exhibit the same bias, I will proceed on the assumption that AFC is an argument for AT. This, in the end, is a harmless assumption. After all, AT proponents could easily extend AFC to cover ‘\(\hbox {the}_{\mathrm{Q}}\)’ just so long they demonstrate what seems independently uncontentious, namely that attributive usage is a regular phenomenon.

  23. The overgeneration argument against AFC originates with Bach (2004), a Russellian. See Bach (2007) as well. An earlier version, used for different purposes, appeared in Bach (1995). Bontly (2005), Schoubye (2012), who defends Heim’s (1988) theory of definite descriptions, and Zacharska (2010), who defends Recanati’s (1989) theory of definite descriptions, have all put forward overgeneration arguments against AFC.

  24. Bach distinguishes between standard indirections and standard non-literality. According to Bach, the former are cases such as ‘I order you to leave the room’ where a speaker uses an expression to convey two things: (a) the expression’s literal semantic content (or performative force) and (b) something more than the expression’s literal semantic content (or performative force). For Bach, the latter are cases like (7) where speakers use an expression to convey something other than the expression’s literal content. Bach (2004) argues that the referential use of definite descriptions falls into this camp.

  25. For an overview of the interaction between standardization and sentential embedding, see Bach (1995).

  26. The label is Neale’s (1990). Neale (1990) and Bach (1987), the two main targets of AFC, fall into the Russellian–Gricean camp. Neale (2004) does claim that AFC extends to GCI accounts of referential usage (see Sect. 6). In this way, Neale (2004) maintains that his previous analysis of referential usage needs replacing. For details, see Pupa (2008).

  27. The term appears in Davidson (1978). See Saddock (1978), Levinson (1984), Devitt (1997, 2004), Reimer (1998), and Pupa (2008) for overgeneration arguments that employ dead metaphors.

  28. Oxford English Dictionary Online (Accessed February 19, 2016).

  29. Oxford English Dictionary Online (Accessed February 19, 2016) credits a 1971 New Scientist article with the first publication of such a use.

  30. For example, popular news agencies regularly use ‘hardwiring’-talk in framing issues surrounding brain differences between various populations. A case in point: NPR correspondent Singh (2015) recently wondered ‘Why some teen brains may be hardwired to make risky choices’.

  31. For an alternative take on the meaning of ‘hardwired’, see Sect. 6.

  32. For a critical overview of some competing theories of metaphor, including the Gricean theory, see Camp and Reimer (2006).

  33. The term’s Devitt’s (2004).

  34. See Reimer (1998) and Devitt (2004).

  35. As Devitt (2004: p. 285) notes, the metaphor remains dead even in cases where a speaker knows the historical evolution of the lexical item and therefore can provide a pragmatic derivation of the previously metaphorical meaning from the original literal meaning.

  36. See Devitt (2007) and Bach (2007).

  37. See Wilson (1991) and Devitt (2007).

  38. See Wilson (1991) and Devitt (2007).

  39. Here, ‘®’ denotes a formula that, when conjoined to \(\mathbf{F}x\), produces a formula that \(\alpha \) uniquely satisfies.

  40. See Neale (2004).

  41. The label is Neale’s (2004). See Kripke (1973/2013), Lepore and Ludwig (2000), and Neale (2004, 2005) for Russellian proposals of this nature. Elbourne (2005) employs Gödelian completions in the service of a univocal referential semantics; Wilson (1978) does so while defending a univocal predicational semantics.

  42. As an anonymous reviewer for Synthese notes, the Jean Valjean case is rather odd. Given his state of confusion, it is unclear whether Jean Valjean does successfully refer to Javert. So, Russellians might simply reject this particular case out of hand. Still, Gödelian completions provide Russellians with a fail-safe: if Jean Valjean successfully refers to Javert, he does so through the employment of a Gödelian completion.

  43. Lepore and Ludwig (2000) maintain that many referential uses of definite descriptions may be subject to such a strategy.

  44. See Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995) and Recanati (1993).

  45. See Zacharska (2010: p. 61) as well.

  46. See Neale (2004, 2005). While enrichment Gödelianism is a form of Russellianism as it provides a univocal Russellian analysis of the definite article, it is not a form of Gricean Russellianism as it frames referential usage not as a kind of conversational implicature but rather as a kind of free enrichment. Now, Devitt (2007) argues that enrichment Gödelianism is Russellian in name only, that the enrichment Gödelian redundantly builds into incomplete definite descriptions the causal–perceptual link that helps to determine the reference of a referentially-used definite description. For further discussion of enrichment Gödelianism, see Sect. 6.

  47. For further discussion of processing, see Sect. 5.1.

  48. See Larson and Segal (1995), Neale (2004), and Amaral (2008).

  49. The term’s Neale’s (2004).

  50. Interestingly, the overgeneration charge against enrichment Gödelianism is of a piece with Neale’s (1990: p. 112) overgeneration charge against Recanati’s (1989) pragmatic ambiguity account of Donnellan’s distinction. For details, see fn. 62.

  51. See Schoubye (2012: pp. 525, 522, fn. 8).

  52. See Schoubye (2012: pp. 525–527).

  53. Schoubye argues that AFC proponents cannot avail themselves to truth-conditional divergences since ‘The\(_{R}\) F is G’ entails that there is one and only one F and every F is G, which, of course, makes ‘The\(_{R}\) F is G’ truth-conditionally equivalent to ‘The\(_{Q}\) F is G’. Strictly speaking, however, the truth-conditional equivalence holds only if AFC proponents posit a uniqueness condition for both attributive and referential definite descriptions. Devitt (2004) rejects the uniqueness condition for referential definite descriptions. In place of a uniqueness condition, Devitt adopts a familiarity analysis of referential definite descriptions:

    \(\llbracket \hbox {The}_{\mathrm{R}} \rrbracket \) = \(\lambda \mathbf{f}. \lambda c.\exists x [\mathbf{f}x \)& \(\mathbf{Familiar-In} (x, c)]. \iota x [\mathbf{f}x\) & \(\mathbf{Familiar-In}(x, c)]\)

    Thus, on Devitt’s view, ‘\(\hbox {the}_{\mathrm{R}}\) F is G’ does not entail that there is one and only one F. Rather, the sentence entails that there is at least one F. So, on Devitt’s view, referential usage and attributive usage should give rise to observable truth-conditional divergences. Devitt believes such a divergence most clearly arises in the case of referential and attributive uses of incomplete definite descriptions.

  54. Some may wish to turn to corpus-based studies as an additional indirect source of evidence. Unfortunately, such studies are currently unhelpful. First, the studies presume that definite descriptions are primarily devices of (discourse) reference and thereby exhibit a ‘referential’ bias. Fraurud (1990), for example, treats definite descriptions in her corpus as either the ‘first mention’, the ‘subsequent mention’, or the ‘isolated mention’ of a referent. In a similar vein, Poesio and Vieira (1998) direct their annotators to classify definite descriptions in their corpus using a familiarity-based taxonomy derived from Hawkins (1978) and Prince (1981). Second, the familiarity-based taxonomies researchers impose upon their corpuses cross-cut Donnellan’s referential–attributive distinction. Thus, while some researchers simply set the distinction aside, others reject the utility of such a distinction for natural language processing. Poesio and Vieira (1998: p. 191) fall into the former camp, Fraurud (1990: pp. 427–428) the latter. Third (and obviously), the studies tend to be unrepresentative, drawing upon the written usage of definite descriptions in various publications. However, since the researchers proceed as if reference-based accounts are the only game in town, the investigations might provide a hint of indirect empirical evidence for the claim that definites are frequently used referentially. After all, the annotators in Poesio and Vieira’s study do not have a hard time classifying definite descriptions in purely referential terms.

  55. See Neale (1990) and Ostertag (1998: fn. 29) for further details.

  56. For instance, see Frege (1892/1997), Strawson (1950, 1964, 1971/2004), Stalnaker (1972), Barwise and Perry (1983), Heim and Kratzer (1998), and Elbourne (2005, 2013).

  57. As Heim and Kratzer note:

    The basic intuition about phrases of the form ‘the NP’ is that they denote individuals, just like proper names. Had it not been for Bertrand Russell’s famous claim to the contrary, few people would think otherwise. Frege, for one, thought it obvious: ‘let us start, e.g., with the expression ‘the capital of the German Empire’. This obviously takes the place of a proper name, and has as its reference an object.’ (1998: p. 73: my emphasis).

  58. See Szabó (2000) for details.

  59. The ‘permissibility’ entry is sometimes accompanied by a note claiming that such usage is improper. Speakers, we are told, should use ‘may’ in place of ‘can’ in such cases (Oxford Pocket American Dictionary of Current English 2002: p. 106). I think we can safely ignore such prescriptive remarks.

  60. Despite the different outcomes, the underlying result remains the same. The non-literal usage of a phrase, when regularized, often affects the semantic content of the phrase.

  61. See Zacharska (2010).

  62. As previously mentioned, a general skepticism surrounds pragmatic polysemy accounts of the referential–attributive distinction. The skepticism, I think, traces back to Neale’s critique of Recanati’s (1989) pragmatic ambiguity thesis. Neale (1990) claimed to be “baffled” (110) by Recanati’s account, arguing that the pragmatic ambiguity thesis is “puzzling” (111) and “highly artificial” (112) as it holds speakers can use univocal phrases to express distinct kinds of propositions. With Recanati (1989: p. 233) and Bezuidenhout (1997: pp. 393–394), I think that this criticism begs the question against pragmatic ambiguity; it simply presumes that univocal phrases cannot contribute distinct types of content to what’s expressed. I also find Recanati’s proposal rather natural. To fix ideas, consider the following example. Recanati (1989: pp. 227–228) holds that sentences such as ‘You will go home’ are unmarked for or neutral with respect to illocutionary force. Following Recanati, we can imagine that the sentence contains a ‘gap’ where an element marking illocutionary force should reside. In a context, the ‘gap’ is ‘plugged’ with either an assertoric marker or imperative marker. The result: on some occasion of use, the sentence has assertoric force, on other occasions, the sentence has imperative force. Whatever the plausibility of this proposal, it is hardly puzzling.

    For his part, Recanati (1989) claims that we should treat ‘the’ as univocally denoting the \(_{<+unique, \pm REF>}\), where ‘REF’ denotes the property of being type referential. For Recanati, referential terms such as proper names are +REF and quantificational terms such as ‘every’ are –REF. Since the definite article is neutrally marked with respect to REF, it will be contextually toggled to a fixed value. If context toggles ±REF to +REF, ‘the’ operates as a device of reference. If, instead, context toggles ±REF to –REF, ‘the’ functions as a quantifier. The result: definite descriptions will participate in different types of propositions depending on how context fixes the value of ±REF. Again, whatever the plausibility of such an analysis, surely it is readily intelligible. (Neale (2004) is a bit more conciliatory on this point: “I took issue with [the pragmatic ambiguity thesis] in ch 3 of Descriptions (n. 36), and I am still inclined to think that, as stated, it is unacceptable; however, the desires that motivate it are highly instructive and I am inclined to think there is something valuable in it. Perhaps it just needs to be stated differently.” (2004: p. 69, fn. 1).)

    Now, Neale (1990) does claim that Recanati’s account is implausible insofar as it seemingly reduces genuine semantic ambiguity to mere pragmatic polysemy. Recanati’s account seems to allow one to hold that ‘bank’ contains a ‘gap’ that, in a context, may be ‘plugged’ with one of two markers: +financial or +geological. But surely if anything’s semantically ambiguous, ‘bank’ is! Or take a familiar example. Just as AFC proponents and the enrichment Gödelian provide analyses that lend themselves to treating the permissibility reading of ‘can’ as a semantic phenomenon, so too do pragmatic polysemy analyses. For example, Recanati’s framework suggests treating ‘can’ as neutral with respect to a permission marker (i.e. ‘can’ means can \(_{<+possible, \pm permission>})\). Context toggles the neutral marker to either +permission or –permission. I think these overgeneration charges are correct. But, I don’t think that these charges render Recanati’s account implausible. Again, overgeneration is an occupational hazard of all accounts of the referential–attributive distinction. On this point, see Sect. 4.

  63. For details, see Sect. 4.3.2.

  64. For her part, Zacharska argues that the pragmatic polysemy account of the definite article trumps AT.

  65. Since AFC provides prima facie evidence for the conventionality of referential usage, Devitt (2007) concludes that AFC also places an explanatory burden on those who reject the conventional nature of such usage. AFC opponents are obliged to explain why referential usage has not migrated from implication to convention. As we saw in Sect. 4.3.3, Bach, a main opponent of AFC, fails to meet this burden. I take this failure to be symptomatic of accounts that deny the conventionality of referential usage. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer at Synthese for bringing this issue to my attention.

  66. Devitt (2013b) himself takes Amaral’s discussion of the definite articles of Malagasy and Monchengladbach to have “driven the final nail into the coffin of the received Russellian view” (108).

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Acknowledgements

I benefitted greatly from suggestions by Michael Devitt, Amanda Favia, Gary Ostertag, Jennifer Pupa, and two anonymous referees at Synthese.

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    Francesco Pupa

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Pupa, F. The argument from convention revisited. Synthese 195, 2175–2204 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1330-2

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