Date: Sun, 01 Jan 1995 20:25:15 +0000
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject: Re: veridicality
In-reply-to: (Your message of Sat, 31 Dec 94 11:32:19 PST.)
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To: Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Reply-to: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
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pc:
>         While I generally share the feeling that, when a linguist says
> "pragmatics," he means the as yet undeveloped part of his theory which
> will solve all the problems that the developed parts of his theory cannot
> cope with,

Shouldn't judge a theory by its worst practice.

> What a theory means by "pragmatics,"  how it differs from syntactics
> and semantics (and morphology and phonology for that matter) differs
> from theory to theory (as do the meanings of the other terms here as
> well) and are all pretty remote from the original Peirce and Morris
> notions.  Before I would want to attack And too much for his
> discussion, then, I would want to know more about the whole theory in
> which he is working and how he draws the line.  The little I have seen
> suggests Gricean antecedents for pragmatics but little about which of
> the several routes from there are followed (but it does not look like
> the formal - e.g Karttunen -- line).

I do indeed take a broadly Gricean view. The general position I want
to take is that a theory of language use requires (a) a grammar,
a set of stipulated rules, and (b) 'pragmatics' - general, not
specific to language, cognitive processes (including reasoning, access
to encyclopedic knowledge).

>         But the questions about veridicality do not really depend upon
> sorting out theory parts.  The questions about whether it can be or will
> succeed in being an active feature in Lojban are empirical questions and
> will presumably be answered eventually by examining what happens in
> Lojban.

This all depends on whether a sumti the grammar specifies as +veridical
carries with it a pledge by the speaker to the addressee that they are
speaking literally. Everyone but me seems to be assuming this is so,
but if this is indeed so I would like it to be acknowledged that "lo"
is not only a descriptor but also carries with it a promissory,
commissive illocutionary force.

>        First, veridicality, if it is meaningful at all, is a distinctive
> feature in some modern version of the old Prague sense (and so will not
> fit into every linguistic theory even to begin with).  Thus, it is a rule
> governed part of the description of some linguistic category and within
> that category there are items that take a positive value and others that
> take a negative value (and perhaps some that are neutral).

This we all agree on.

> Thus, to say that a _language_ is +veridical makes no sense.

What was meant by that was: Given that, say, English grammar
doesn't encode +/-veridical, are English sumti +veridical?

> Good Griceans that we are, we take the fact that someone has broken
> a rule (loosely "Don't babble") to indicate that some meaningful
> message is being hinted at.

This is what I think. But if "lo" carries with it a promise of
literality, we will additionally conclude that this promise has
been broken, and derive additional inferences from that conclusion.
That I don't think will happen, and if I turn out to be right, it
shows that "lo" doesn't carry with it a promise of literality.

>         So, perhaps we should not take the babble as this claim but as a
> more precise and relevant claim, that descriptive sumti (or what
> corresponds to them in a natural way) in all languages are veridical,
> i.e., that the referent of the sumti is required to have the property
> mentioned in the description.  The explicature of a sentence involving
> such a descriptive sumti will contain a segment involving the predication
> in the description in such a way that it affects the truth of the sentence
> as a whole and also affects what the description refers to.

I am inclined to think this too.

> This claim, whatever may be its status for natural languages, is directly
> challenged by Lojban.

I don't think Lojban challenges the claim. Lojban simply has an additional
device of non-veridicality.

> For _le_broda_cu_brode_ is said to have as explicature simple
> brode(B), where B is the direct reference to the thing that _le_broda_
> refers to; _broda_ nowhere appears in this explicature in any role.

I think the explicature is actually "brode(B) & I describe B as a broda".
Or "it is the case that brode(B) & it may or may not be the case that
broda(B)". Essentially, I reckon broda(B) should be in there somewhere,
but having no effect on the truth of the sentence as a whole.

> Of course, somewhere in the theory we must have a device for hooking
> _le_broda_ up with B as its reference.  But there is no gurantee in
> Lojban that _broda_ plays any role there either.  It may, of course,
> and it is often useful (for the hearer, at least) if it does, but
> the connection may be totally casual -- an earlier scrap of dialog
> where the speaker says "_le_broda_ there" waving toward B, who is
> not at all brodaish.

I agree.

>         Clearly, the same sort of thing happens in NLs as happened with
> _le_broda_ in this tale.  Why,then, do would we insist that the
> descriptive sumti in English, say, are always veridical?  The short answer
> seems to be that "the" is taken as univocal (or not very equivocal anyhow)
> in English.

I don't think that's the reason. We insist that descriptive English sumti
are +veridical because from "the dog" we derive the explicature Dog(D),
even if we may later conclude that the speaker is not in fact asserting
Dog(D).

>        More pressing, in some sense, is And's claim that
> _lo_broda_cu_brode_ is going to be used to make statements understood
> (eventually) as true when there is no broda which is also brode, but
> rather (as we might say of the theoretical record) when _lo_broda_ is
> used to refer to something totally unbrodaish.  And, again, the case
> of English "the" can be taken to prove the point.  But, in Lojban, we
> can refuse to write in -- or allow other to make use of unwritten --
> the rules that allow reinterpretation of false sentences with _lo_
> descriptors.

Except that I hold that reinterpretation of literally false utterances
is not done by language-specific rules, so that we as language-designers
are impotent to refuse in the way you suggest.

> So, we come finally to another empirical question -- can we make this
> refusal to allow reinterpretation stick.  My guess is that we can.

Only, I have argued, if non-literal "lo" is socially stigmatized.

---
And