RT list: Relevance theory and the speaker's intentions

Dear All,

I paste my paper Relevance theory and the speaker's intentions in this
email. I would like to submit this paper. Comments welcome.

Alessandro

Relevance Theory and the speaker’s intentions

by Alessandro Capone

1. Introduction
In this paper I set myself the (not too easy) task of reflecting on the
relationship between the notions usually invoked in Relevance Theory and
the notion of the speaker’s meaning. I hope to dismiss some negative
attitude cast by Saul (2005) on Sperber & Wilson’s Relevance Theory on the
grounds that their theory does not take into account the speaker’s
intentions.

2. The speaker’s intention and pragmatic theory
There is no doubt that a pragmatic theory, one that accounts for
inferences (of a non-logical type) in conversation is ideally a theory of
speaker’s intentions. Suppose, for a minute, that a pragmatic theory is,
instead, just a theory of interpretations, where by interpretation is
solely meant a process in which a hearer comes up with an interpretation
of an utterance, but fails to take into account the speaker’s intentions,
then it is licit to ask “What is an interpretation an interpretation of?”
and there is no obvious answer to this question. In fact, if utterance
interpretation is a process to be distinguished from the interpretation of
the speaker’s intentions, then we arrive at the obviously faulty view that
a theory of interpretation is a theory of a hearer’s intentions (a theory
in which a hearer attributes intentions to an utterance without taking
into account the speaker’s intentions). I do not know who would propose
and why she would want to propose such a theory.
        Presumably the point of pragmatics is to start with the premise that an
utterance U was uttered at a time t by a speaker S with a certain
intention I/S/U and then, on the basis of evidence provided by the
context of utterance, of the assumptions mutually manifest in it and of
the semantic information built into a sentence which is part of U, arrive
via some interpretative procedure at an interpretation of the unique
intention which lies behind U (the intention which caused the speaker to
utter/proffer U).

Of course, an intention is a mental event, and is something about which a
speaker can talk about, something which one can describe partially or
completely. One can say things such as “Part of my intention in uttering U
was to….” or “My intention in uttering U was to….”. An intention
associated with an utterance is a mental event that caused U and which
aims at being recognized. In this respect, it differs from intentions
which are causally operative in non-linguistic actions. I threw a stone at
Peter but I did not intend to be recognized as an actor (coward as I was),
in other words I did not construct my action in such a way that it could
be construed as evidence of my intention (although it was possible to let
the action speak of the actor and its intention). In uttering U, instead,
I usually intend my utterance (in context) to be a step in the
reconstruction of my intentions (the speaker’s intentions). The utterance
has to be construed as evidence of my intentions. A stronger relationship
need not hold. Due to ironies and metaphors, an utterance is often (if not
always) deprived of the meaning which it would be associated with if just
the literal meaning of the sentence used in it mattered. But literal
meaning is just one step in the reconstruction of the speaker’s
intentions.

We presuppose that a speaker’s intention is unique. Well, of course this
does not mean that a speaker’s intention is simple. It could very well be
a complex of intentions. What is meant when we say that a speaker’s
intention is unique is that the only plausible interpretation process is
the one that aims at the reconstruction of just one intention (or complex
of intentions). And that is the intention which generated the utterance
and which the speaker could have access to by reflecting on what he meant
when he uttered U. It was the intention which the speaker had in mind at
the time when he proffered U. Suppose that the speaker forgets what his
intention was and that on various occasions s/he is asked to report on
that communicative intention and that on every occasion s/he says
something different. Well, I would not hesitate then to say that any
attribution of the speaker’s intention which does not coincide with the
original intention the speaker had when s/he uttered U is false. The task
which an interpretation theory faces is not to reconstruct some plausible
enough intention and attribute it to the speaker for some saying, but to
reconstruct the unique intention associated with an utterance and which
had a causal effect on the utterance. Now, this task is hard enough (and
it is even possible that in carrying out this task we never really come
close enough to the real speaker’s intention), but this is no
justification for not attempting to aim at the real speaker’s intention.
Of course, an interpretation process is one that we must realistically
embark on (and we may be aware that our interpretation theory may be wrong
occasionally); thus we may be aware of the fact that plausible intentions,
sometimes, is what we can realistically reconstruct (even because, if we
try to check with a speaker we may end up with no foolproof evidence that
there is a correspondence between what we reconstructed and her real
intention, either due to the speaker’s insincerity or to amnesia). But
plausible intentions are enough for our interpretation process to be
working well, provided that the aim is to get to the real intentions.

Have we not set the task of pragmatics too high? On the one hand
insincerity may prevent us from being apprised of the speaker’s real
intentions, on the other hand a speaker may forget what intentions he had
in proffering a given sentence. So why should intentions matter? Well, at
least ideally there should be a convergence between what a speaker
intended to communicate when he uttered U and what a hearer took him to
communicate when he interpreted U. Unless there is such an agreement,
there is no reason to think that utterances should play a role in a theory
of action. As Cappelen & Lepore (2006) make clear, a theory of action
should be a testing bed for whatever intuitions we have about
communication. If there is no agreement between a speaker’s intention and
the hearer’s construal of it, then intentions could have no causal role in
action, since the hearer’s action would proceed and flow independently of
the speaker’s intentions. In order to make intentions and actions
convergent, we need a theory of interpretation based on the speaker’s
intentions in which a hearer strives to reconstruct those intentions.

2. Levinson (2000) and the speaker’s intentions
The recognition of the important role played by the notion of the
speaker’s intentions in pragmatics is usually attributed to Paul Grice. In
fact, Sperber & Wilson (2005) write:

The approaches to pragmatics we will consider here all accept as
foundational two ideas defended by Grice (…). The first is that sentence
meaning is a vehicle for conveying a SPEAKER’S MEANING, and that a
speaker’s meaning is an overtly expressed intention which is fulfilled by
being recognised (p. 2).

That there should be some agreement between the hearer’s interpretations
and the speaker’s meanings is implicit in the pragmatic views expressed in
Levinson (2000), where he provides an interpretative theory based on the
interaction of speaker’s principles and hearer’s corollaries. Consider the
Q-, I- and M- Principle (in an abridged version from Levinson 2000, 76;
114; 136).

Q-Principle
Speaker’s maxim:
Do not provide a statement that is informationally weaker than your
knowledge of the world allows, unless providing an informationally
stronger statement contravenes the I-principle.

Recipient’s corollary:
Take it that the speaker made the strongest statement consistent with what
he knows.

I-Principle
Speaker’s maxim:
Say as little as necessary; that is, produce the minimal linguistic
information sufficient to achieve your communicational ends (bearing Q in
mind).

Recipient’s corollary:
Amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance by finding
the most specific interpretation, up to what you judge to be the speaker’s
m-intended point, unless the speaker has broken the maxim of Minimization
by using a marked or more prolix expression.

The M-Principle
Speaker’s maxim:
Indicate an abnormal, non-stereotypical situation by using marked
expressions that contrast with those you would use to describe the
corresponding normal, stereotypical situation.

Recipient’s corollary:
What is said in an abnormal way indicates an abnormal situation, or marked
messages indicate marked situations.

Levinson finds it appropriate to insert a reference to the speaker’s
intentions in his Recipient’s corollaries, assuming that the point of
interpretation is to reconstruct the speaker’s intentions and that the
Speaker’s maxims and the recipients’ corollaries converge in the task of
having the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s interpretations meet.
What would the point of interpretation beif it were divorced from the
speakers’ intentions? And what would the point of having the speaker’s
intentions be if interpretations proceeded along a separate path? The
logical solution is to have an interpretation theory in which the
speaker’s intentions guide the interpretation procedure by providing
directional clues and the hearer’s interpretations respond to those
directional clues by enacting a standard procedure. The intentions and the
interpretations line up because both the speaker and the hearer know that
the directional clues provided by the speaker lead to a standard
interpretation procedure. The directional clues provided by a speaker and
utilized by a hearer include information about some sentence used by the
speaker, the context of utterance and some principles guiding language
use/interpretation.

3. Relevance theory (abridged)
Sperber & Wilson (2005) accept some foundational ideas by Paul Grice:

a) an utterance is just a piece of evidence about the speaker’s meaning;
b) comprehension is achieved by inferring this meaning from evidence
provided not only by the utterance but by context (Sperber & Wilson 2005).

However, Sperber & Wilson depart substantially from Grice’s account. For
Grice and neo-Griceans the expectations that guide the comprehension
process derive from principles and maxims, rules of behaviour which
speakers are expected to obey, but may on occasion violate. For relevance
theorists acts of communication raise precise and predictable expectations
of relevance, which are enough to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s
meaning. Speakers cannot produce utterances that do not convey a
presumption of their own relevance (Sperber & Wilson 2005).
        Before addressing the issue of speaker’s intentions in great detail, I
would like to expose some general claims Relevance Theorists make:

Cognitive Principle of Relevance:
Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance.
Communicative principle of Relevance:
Every act of overt communication conveys a presumption of its optimal
relevance.

Presumption of optimal relevance
(a) The utterance is worth enough to be worth processing;
(b) It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicators’
abilities and preferences.

Relevance-guided comprehension heuristic
(a) Follow a path of least effort in constructing an interpretation of the
utterance (and in particular in resolving ambiguities and referential
indeterminacies, in going beyond linguistic meaning, in supplying
contextual assumptions, computing implicatures, etc.).
(b) Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

With these notions in mind, let us return to the notion of the speaker’s
intention.

4. Relevance theory and the speaker’s intentions
Notice that the speaker’s intention figures in Sperber & Wilson’s theory,
as it is a notion which it has in common with the Gricean and neo-Gricean
theories. In my opinion, it is not an extrapolation to say that Sperber &
Wilson accept that the aim of a pragmatic theory is to recognize the
important role of the speaker’s intentions given that they explicitly say
that the expectation of relevance guides interpretation towards the
speaker’s intentions. Notice that they implicitly allow for the divergence
between interpretation and the speaker’s intentions, but I think they
also implicitly grant that ideally an interpretation process guided by
considerations of optimal relevance ends up with the speaker’s intention
figuring in the interpretation.

Saul (2005) criticises Sperber & Wilson because while they think that
their theory is an alternative to Grice’s theory, in fact they fail to
recognize that Grice’s is a theory of speaker’s meaning whereas theirs is
a theory of utterance interpretation. It is interesting that Saul (2005)
does not attack Sperber & Wilson (1986), but Sperber & Wilson (1981),
because it is in the latter that Sperber & Wilson’s attacks on Grice are
concentrated.
        Saul (2005) claims that the role of speaker’s intentions played an
important role in Grice’s theory of meaning and Grice’s work does not
have as its goal that of accurately describing and explaining the
interpretation process. The audience will, of course, attempt to discover
the speaker’s intentions but the audience does not have access to those
intentions. Saul claims that a theory based around actual speaker’s
intentions is unlikely to yield a psychologically accurate descriptions
of audience interpretation processes.
So, if my interpretation of Saul is fine, she takes Relevance theory and
Grice’s project as two separate enterprises. In Grice there is no heavy
emphasis on interpretation processes which are psychologically accurate,
but there is an emphasis on the notion of speaker’s meaning. In Relevance
Theory there is great emphasis on psychologically accurate interpretation
processes but no emphasis on the actual speaker’s intentions. Saul seems
to assume that the actual speaker’s intentions cannot figure in a
relevance theory account of language use because if they did, then it
would be impossible for relevance theory to come up with wrong
interpretations. It appears that for Saul a psychologically accurate
theory of communication is one in which interpretations can go wrong. If
actual speaker’s intentions figured in the theory, then there is no way
interpretative processes could go wrong. Of course Saul is right in saying
that the audience does not have direct access to the speaker’s intentions,
but she concedes that the hearer will attempt to discover the speaker’s
intentions. So one cannot accept that a psychologically accurate theory of
audience interpretation processes does not involve the speaker’s actual
intentions. After all, the speaker’s linguistic behaviour was generated
(caused) by those intentions and a hearer sets herself the task of
uncovering those intentions by scrutinizing the linguistic behaviour which
is a manifestation of those intentions, as well as contextual clues which
the speaker utilizes to guide the hearer towards the actual intentions. It
should at least be conceded that it is clear to the hearer that she
strives to reconstruct the speaker’s real intentions, because all efforts
to reconstruct intentions that do not belong to the speaker would be vane
and solipsistic. Why should the hearer engage in this futile task? What
are the rewards of engaging in such a task? If the hearer’s aim to is to
access to information about the world via the speaker’s intentions, then
every effort is made to avoid misinterpretation, as that would just lead
to a mistaken view of the world. If it is relevance that guides
interpretation, then maximal contextual effects are obtained if the hearer
obtains her view of the world through the speaker’s intentions (the
speaker being considered as an important informant).

Well if readers are surprised by Saul’s claim that speaker’s intentions
should not be part of a theory of hearer’s interpretations, her position
is clarified by what she says later. She resorts to an example. A
politician says

(1) This is the time to support a party because it is unfashionable.

However, she is interpreted as having said (2)

(2) This is the time to support apartheid because it is unfashionable.

This is a case where the audience is wrong about what was said and it is
wrong because (2) conflicts with the speaker’s intentions. According to
Saul, Grice’s theory ensures that audiences can be wrong about what was
said. Now, we have a decisive conclusion.

If the audience is wrong about what is implicated, then what is implicated
is not a part of the audience’s interpretation and it need not play any
role at all in the interpretation process.

Since what is implicated includes the speaker’s intentions, it follows as
a logical implication that the speaker’s intention is not a part of the
audience’s interpretation and it need not play any role at all in the
interpretation process.

I think Saul focuses on the wrong type of example. She takes as important
a case in which there is a misperception of the acoustic signals. Of
course it is possible that while I speak a bus passes by and due to
additional noises in the air my signals are disturbed. Should we consider
these as cases where the speaker’s intentions have no role to play? Well,
surely the speaker intended to produce some acoustic signals but those
signals were disturbed. A conscientious hearer, aware of the preponderant
noises, would have to ask the speaker to reiterate the signal. Presumably
the intention to produce certain, but not other, acoustic signals has to
be taken into account. The fact that in some cases some mistakes occurred,
in fact, proves that speaker’s intentions are very important and should be
taken into account. The fact that they were not taken into account, in
fact, explains the interpretation error.
        Saul makes the point that there can be no interpretation error if the
speaker’s intention figures in the interpretation process. My point,
instead, is: how can we know that a mistake occurred if we do not take
into account the speaker’s intentions? And what is the point of
interpretation if its aim is not the speaker’s intentions?
Saul’s error is to assume that the speaker’s intentions should figure in
the interpretation process in the sense that the hearer must be fully
aware of them. Instead, the weaker claim must be made that the speaker’s
intention causes the interpretation process and guides it with the aid of
the linguistic input, the contextual assumptions, and cognitive factors
such as relevance.

Saul takes issue with another assumption voiced in Wilson & Sperber
(1981), namely that what is said is “what proposition the utterance is
taken to express” (1981, 156). Saul believes this assumption is wrong on
the basis of a story. She brings our attention to the utterance proffered
by Clinton when the Lewinsky sex scandal started to emerge:

(3) There is no sexual relationship.

Saul claims that at the beginning the utterance was taken to mean (both in
America and in Britain) that there had never been a sexual relationship
between Clinton and Ms Lewinsky. Subsequently people started to think of
how carefully Clinton used to speak and rejected this interpretation in
favour of the reading that at present there was no sexual relationship.
Now Saul wonders, if we accept Wilson & Sperber’s notion of what is said,
what should we say, that Clinton said two different things or that there
was a long interpretation process and that the audience’s interpretation
should really be taken to be the final one?

Now I think I can anticipate the readers’ reaction. Surely Wilson &
Sperber who try to capture what is said in their famous notion of
explicature are not interested in capturing conversational implicatures in
their notion of what is said. The effect the utterance of (3) had on its
audience looks like a conversational implicature (after all are not cases
of conversational implicature those in which a speaker avoids commitment
by suggesting something which may very well be cancelled in the same
context?), in which case Wilson & Sperber have no trouble, since they can
maintain that at all stages of the interpretation process Clinton said the
same thing. I suppose it would be more reasonable to claim that part of
what is said is that there is no sexual relationship between Clinton and
Ms Lewinsky – this hardly seems to be cancellable or to change from one
stage to another of the interpretation process. In fact, it might be
argued that explicatures are the stable entities of an interpretation
process consisting of various stages and of mutable interpretations.

There is, of course, something odd in the statement that what is said is
what proposition the utterance is taken to express, if one considers the
interpretation process as a capricious one in which hearers are free to
arrive at whatever interpretations come before their minds. However,
Wilson & Sperber, I am sure, take utterance interpretation to be a highly
regimented process in which the objective linguistic elements, the
objective elements of the context and the necessity to obtain optimal
relevance all contribute to making interpretations in line with the
speakers’ intentions. Ideally the principle of relevance guides
interpretations towards the speaker’s intentions – thus it is not mistaken
to say that ideally what is said is what proposition the utterance is
taken to express. Presumably this assertion, problematic though it is,
presupposes that the right view of communication is one in which routinely
the principle of relevance guides the interpretation process towards the
speaker’s intentions and ensures that interpretations be in line with the
speaker’s intentions. To insist on linguistic mistakes,
misinterpretations, etc. is to focus on exceptional phenomena, whereas
Wilson & Sperber’s theory rightly focuses on the central cases.
        As I said before, there are problems if we take what is said to include
conversational effects, conversational halos of all kinds, but not if we
confine ourselves to the central examples of explicatures, in which
objective features of the content, via the guidance of the principle of
relevance, enter into what is said and ensure that a speaker’s commitment
to it is not feeble or retractable.
        In Capone (2006) and elsewhere I argued that explicatures are not
cancellable correlating with stronger intentions that conversational
implicatures. This view – with appropriate refinements – promises to
defend Wilson & Sperber’s theory from the kind of problems raised by
Saul.

5. Conclusion
It’s hard to see whether the views voiced in this paper will resist the
attack of time. Nevertheless, I think they are the obvious conclusion of
thinking constructively of Relevance Theory. It is clear that if Relevance
Theory has to deserve the name of a theory of communication it must take
into account the notion of speaker’s meaning – consolidating its link with
the philosophy of Paul Grice.

References

Capone, Alessandro (2006). On Grice’s circle (further considerations on
the semantics/pragmatics debate, “Journal of Pragmatics” 38, 645-669.

Cappelen, Herman & Lepore, Ernie (2005). Insensitive semantics. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Carston, Robyn (2002). Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit
communication. Oxford: Blackwell.

Carruthers, Peter (2002). The cognitive functions of language. Behavioural
and Brain Sciences.

Levinson, Stephen (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized
conversational implicature. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

Millikan, Ruth G. (1998). Language conventions made simple. The Journal of
Philosophy.

Saul, Jennifer (2005). What is said and psychological reality: Grice’s
project and relevance theorists’ criticism. Linguistics & Philosophy 25:
347-372.

Sperber & Wilson (1986). Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sperber, Dan & Wilson, Deirdre (2005). Pragmatics. In Jackson, F. & Smith,
M., eds. The Oxford handbook of contemporary analytic philosophy. Oxford,
OUP, 468-501.

Sperber, dan & Wilson, Deirdre (2002). Pragmatics, modularity and
mind-reading. Mind & Language 17, 3-23.

Wilson, Deirdre & Sperber, Dan (1981). On Grice’s theory of conversation.
In Werth, P.,ed., Conversation and discourse. London: Croom Helm.

Wilson, Deirdre, Sperber, Dan, 2002. Truthfulness and relevance. Mind
111, 583-632.

Wilson, Deirdre (2005). New directions for research on pragmatics and
modularity. Lingua 105, 1129-1146.
Received on Tue Aug 14 16:05:43 2007