🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct10.183025.43740@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>In article <1992Oct09.173634.150896@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>> 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?

I have given examples where I believe exactly this is happening, and Ken has
rejected them out of hand.  I'm not in the business of doing research into
"speaker behavior", so there is really nothing else I can offer.


>> 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.

But there *are* two simultaneous interpretations in my example.  Your boss
really *does* intend that every employee will be there; but he also intends
to hold the meeting, even if not everybody makes it.  Your counter-example
loses this aspect by presenting a clearly counter-factual surface claim.

>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.

Uncertainty about the intended meaning is quite independent of the
possibility of multiple meanings.  A reasonable answer to "Do you mean
exactly three men?" would be "Three would be best, but one or two more would
be acceptable.".  This I would interpret as resolving the uncertainty into
explicit multiple meanings.