Pragmatic Halos

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.It is a truism that people speak 'loosely'-that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly, all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness.* 1. PRAGMATIC SLACK. People speak with varying degrees of precision, and often speak quite loosely. Suppose, for example, I tell John that Mary arrived at three o'clock. In certain relatively unusual circumstances, the exact second of her arrival might be important, but most of the time this level of precision is not required. So if John finds out later that Mary didn't arrive at three but at fifteen seconds after three, it would be unreasonable of him to complain 'You said she came at three!' But whether or not John is acting unreasonably in this situation, I think we have to concede that he is, strictly speaking, RIGHT: when I told him that Mary arrived at three, I said something that was literally false, not true. As people often do, I was just speaking a little loosely. My defense is not that I was telling the truth, but that what I said was 'close enough' to the truth for practical purposes.Taking this position sets up an interesting semantic puzzle. If sentence 1 is true-literally true, not just close enough to the truth for practical purposes-only if Mary arrived precisely at 3:00, then it seems to be truth-conditionally equivalent to 2.(1) Mary arrived at three o'clock.(2) Mary arrived at exactly three o'clock. But of course these sentences don't mean the same thing. How can we express the difference between them?The difference seems to be just that 2 does not permit one to speak as loosely as 1. Put differently, 1 allows greater 'slack' than 2 in determining just how close to the truth is close enough for practical purposes. Now, one might have supposed that the degree of slack or looseness with which one may speak would be purely a matter of the pragmatic situation of utterance. But since 1 and 2 seem to differ precisely in how much slack they allow, and since this difference is tied directly to the presence or absence of the word exactly, it appears that we must build some means of dealing with slack into the lexical entries for particular words-and perhaps even...

Presupposition and Implicature in Compositional Semantics

“…Specifically, this point is shown below for the analysis of Lasersohn (1999), which is the only monist analysis we are aware of that provides an account of some approximators. On our dualist account, however, the difference between fifty and Beef Stroganoff follows from that between scalar and epistemic vagueness.…”

“…Another recent strand of research on vagueness in linguistics deals with the semantics and pragmatics of imprecision and approximation (see , Lasersohn 1999. On a naive view, imprecision might be seen as the essence of vagueness.…”

“…The monistic account of Lasersohn (1999), which addresses some approximators, makes different predictions for (27): 13 Lasersohn (1999) represents vagueness uniformly as a halo of values close enough to the truth to be considered true, but not really true. For example, the halo of 30 in a given context could be the set of all points representing real numbers between 29.5 and 30.5.…”

“…Adherents to the uniform view do not all agree on what the general mechanism of vagueness is, but they agree that there is just one mechanism. For instance, the following treatments of vagueness advocate a uniform view: Lakoff (1973), who analyses all forms of vagueness using fuzzy logic, , who uses supervaluations, Lasersohn's (1999) "Pragmatic Halos," and to some extent also the epistemic view of vagueness of . The dualistic view assumes that there are at least two mechanisms that can give rise to vagueness.…”

Varieties of intensification

“…A second type of context-sensitivity is exhibited by non-gradable predicates like forbidden, for which intensification by -issimo results in precisification effects, as shown in (2). In order to account for this, B&B make recourse to pragmatic halos proposed by Lasersohn (1999). The idea is that for a one-place predicate P like forbidden that is subject to pragmatic imprecision, its denotation in context c may be a superset of its strictest interpretation I (P ) and include some additional individuals.…”