Papers by Daniel Harris
Philosophical Studies
According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be unde... more According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on this view, are publicly shared bodies of information that evolve over the course of a conversation and that play a range of semantic and pragmatic roles. I argue that this view is mistaken: performing a communicative act requires aiming to change the mind of one's addressee, but not necessarily the context. Although changing the context may sometimes be among a speaker's aims, this should be seen as an extra-communicative aim, rather than one that is necessary for the performance of a communicative act. Along the way, I also argue that contexts needn't play a role in linking anaphora to their antecedents. On the view that I defend, theories that take publicly shared contexts to play an essential role in the nature of communicative acts or anaphoric dependence conflate an artifact introduced by idealized models of conversation with a feature of the phenomenon being modeled.
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Mind and Language
I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and i... more I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. Its role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems.
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British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2017
Did Wittgenstein influence Austin's philosophy of language, and, if so, when and how? There are c... more Did Wittgenstein influence Austin's philosophy of language, and, if so, when and how? There are currently two schools of thought, both of which are problematic. First, many assume without evidence argument that Austin's work was heavily influenced by Wittgenstein. Second, many of Austin's colleagues and students claim that Austin's work developed independently of Wittgenstein. We draw on textual evidence to argue that Austin's work on language was influenced, at all stages of its development, by engagement with Wittgenstein's ideas.
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Philosophers of language inspired by Grice have long sought to show how facts about reference boi... more Philosophers of language inspired by Grice have long sought to show how facts about reference boil down to facts about speakers' communicative intentions. I focus on a recent attempt by Stephen Neale (2016), who argues that referring with an expression requires having a special kind of communicative intention—one that involves representing an occurrence of the expression as standing in some particular relation to its referent. Neale raises a problem for this account: because some referring expressions are unpro-nounced, most language users don't realize they exist, and so seemingly don't have intentions about them. Neale suggests that we might solve this problem by supposing that speakers have nonconscious or " tacit " intentions. I argue that this solution can't work by arguing that our representations of unpro-nounced bits of language all occur within a modular component of the mind, and so we can't have intentions about them. From this line of thought, I draw several conclusions. (i) the semantic value of a referring expression is not its referent, but rather a piece of partial and defeasible evidence about what a speaker refers to when using it literally. (ii) There is no interesting sense in which speakers refer with expressions; referring expressions are used to give evidence about the sort of singular proposition one intends to communicate. (iii) The semantics–pragmatics interface is coincident with the interface between the language module and central cognition.
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A context-directed theory of communicative acts is one that thinks of a communicative act as a pr... more A context-directed theory of communicative acts is one that thinks of a communicative act as a proposal to change the context in some way. I focus on three influential examples: Robert Stalnaker's theory of assertion, Craige Roberts' theory of questions, and Paul Portner's theory of directives. These theories distinguish different categories of communicative acts by distinguishing the components of context that they aim to change. I argue that the components of context they posit turn out not to be distinct after all, and that these theories therefore collapse the taxonomic distinctions that they set out to draw. Although it might be possible to avoid this problem by devising a more adequate theory of the nature of context, I argue that it should be taken as a reductio of context-directed theories.
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A critical overview of the contemporary literature on speech-act theory. This is the introductory... more A critical overview of the contemporary literature on speech-act theory. This is the introductory chapter of the forthcoming OUP volume, New Work on Speech Acts, edited by Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris, and Matt Moss.
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In their recent book, Imagination and Convention, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone defend a radical... more In their recent book, Imagination and Convention, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone defend a radical version of conventionalism, according to which conventions determine all of the properties of a communicative act that a hearer must interpret the act as having in order for communication to succeed. Purported examples of unconventional communicative acts either are revealed to be governed by hitherto-unnoticed conventions, or aren't communicative acts at all, but merely invitations to open-ended imaginative reflection. In this paper, I argue that Lepore & Stone's defense of conventionalism fails, on several grounds. On one hand, they fail to account for the many ways in which intention recognition is involved in communication. On the other hand, their argument that unconventional utterances are used to provoke imaginative reflection rather than to communicate suffers from serious flaws. One problem with the argument is that it overgenerates, entailing that most literal and direct linguistic communication is impossible. But the argument is also incompatible with Lepore & Stone's own view that communication often involves becoming competent with new conventions on the fly, since the task of acquiring a new convention is roughly the same as the task of interpreting an unconventional communicative act. I conclude that although Lepore & Stone’s treatments of particular semantic and pragmatic phenomena are fascinating and possibly correct, their broader defense of conventionalism in the philosophy of language is not one about which we should be optimistic.
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Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence ... more Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth-condition, or by an enti- ty with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non-truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic mean- ing, we’re now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its vari- ous roles in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises a historical question: why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand ar- tificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural-lan- guage semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explanatory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adop- tion of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-condi- tional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology.
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Book Reviews by Daniel Harris
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I review Lepore and Stone's recent monograph, Imagination and Convention. Although many of their ... more I review Lepore and Stone's recent monograph, Imagination and Convention. Although many of their accounts of specific linguistic phenomena may be on the right track, I argue that these accounts don't support their large-scale philosophical conclusions, such as the claim that there is no conversational implicature, or the claim that all genuine communication works by essentially conventional means.
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Papers by Daniel Harris
Book Reviews by Daniel Harris