Meaning, Context, and How Language can Surprise Us

Abstract

In uttering a sentence, we are often taken to assert more than its literal meaning; though we sometimes assert less. For example, when someone utters ‘I haven’t had breakfast’ it is seldom, if ever, taken to express the improbable claim that the speaker has never eaten breakfast. Robyn Carston and others take this phenomenon to show that what is said or asserted by a speaker on an occasion is usually a contextually enriched version of the semantic content of the uttered sentence. I shall argue that we can resist this conclusion if we recognise that what we think we are asserting, and take others to be asserting, involves selective attention to one of the ways the uttered sentence could be true while neglecting others. Most of the time people converge in their selective attention and so communication is not impaired, though in the case of sentences involving predicates of taste, people’s selective attention to different aspect of a sentence’s truth conditions can lead to seemingly intractable disputes. I will propose a treatment of such cases on which speakers can mean the same thing by a sentence, assert no more than its semantic content, and yet hold conflicting opinions as to its truth-value and both be right.