From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: The Cosmological Bad Dream
Date: 10 Oct 92 18:30:25 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1992Oct09.173634.150896@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:

[...]

>>It sounds as if you are talking about *vagueness* and indeed natural
>>language is vague, in the sense that we cannot normally *precisely*
>>define the truth conditions of an utterance.  However for language
>>theorists the degree of precision required by an assertion is
>>determined by the context* of the assertion.  Your claim of assertions
>>simultaneously having multiple precision values seems mystifying.  Do
>>you have any evidence from speaker behavior to back it up?
> 
> If I give a description of a person believed to have committed a crime, the
> police will attempt to use the exact description to enable identification of
> him in the future.  They will also, not assuming my powers of observation to
> be perfect, use a much more approximate interpretation to study the question
> of what the activities of the person were.  Assuming I also understand the
> limits of my powers of observation, I will give the police the description
> in detail, expecting it to be understood at both levels.

I doubt that this is empirically supported.  I once gave the police a
description and intended to give an accurate one.  Perhaps you know
more about forensic pragmatics than I do..
> 
> Another example: if your boss tells you that there will be a meeting
> tomorrow with every employee in the company present, you will believe
> strongly that there will be a meeting; much less strongly that *every*
> employee will be there.  This is understood by both you and your boss.

Yes.  Or if I say, "Everybody's coming to the party tonight" my hearer
knows I do not mean all the people in the world.  The context and the
belief-worlds of speaker and hearer determine an interpretation.  Not
many interpretations, rather *an interpretation* -- as far as I know
there is no evidence whatever for simultaneous multiple
interpretations of utterances, or simultaneous distinct preciseness
values for assertions.  I can't even imagine what it would be like.
Interpretations of utterances are like those box drawings you stare
at, as they seem to flip from one spatial orientation to the other and
back again: you *can't* see the box *both* ways at the same time.
It's possible for an utterance to be semantically ambiguous or to even
be ambiguous as to the precision value intended, but there surely can
be only one interpretation (outside of poetry) for the hearer.  This
is empirically supported: we ask "What did he mean when he said S?"
and we certainly expect an intelligible response.  Notice that when a
hearer is uncertain as to interpretation, he will pursue it: "What did
you mean?"  "Do you mean exactly three men?" etc.  If your notion of
simultaneous precision values were correct, I do not see how you would
account for this behavior.
> 
>>If you claim that assertions might be ambiguous in intended precision,
>>so that a hearer might be uncertain, and might be intended by the
>>speaker to be uncertain, just what degree of precision is intended, I
>>think that certainly happens; it is a rhetorical device and it is
>>regarded, quite simply, as a trick!
> 
> Assertions vary in the degree of certainty which the speaker has in the
> assertion as well as in the precision of interpretation.  

We don't disagree here.

It is not unusual
> for an assertion to occupy more than one point on this spectrum.

Do you have any evidence for this?  Does it seem a wholly novel idea
that we might want to have support from speaker behavior for what we
assert about language?
-- 
-Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> {Sometimes you have to look reality straight
 OPINIONS ARE MY OWN            {in the eye, and deny it. - G. Keillor