Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Peet, Andrew

doi:10.1080/00048402.2016.1194444

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…What's more, the IBFR view is vulnerable to objections closely related to those that plague the NFL condition on knowledge. Peet (2017) points out that the IBFR, while working nicely to exclude some lucky cases, still admits others, since "we can always construct a case in which the audience recognizes all of the speaker's intended ib-features, and follows the intended inferential path as far as it goes, but then deviates wildly in such a way that they could easily have failed to recover the correct referent were it not for some coincidence" (Peet 2017, 381). The audience's inferential path may display the elements of any posited set of ib-features, but so long as that set specifies an inferential path that is less than maximally demanding-that is, so long as it stops short of specifying an exact and exhaustive set of inferential steps that the audience is to pass through-it will not be enough to insulate them against a kind of luck that undermines utterance-understanding.…”

Section: Communication and Luckmentioning

confidence: 99%

Luck and the value of communication

HYSKA

2023

Synthese

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Those in the Gricean tradition take it that successful human communication features an audience who not only arrives at the intended content of the signal, but also recognizes the speaker's intention that they do so. Some in this tradition have also argued that there are yet further conditions on communicative success, which rule out the possibility of communicating by luck. Supposing that both intention-recognition and some sort of anti-luck condition are correctly included in an analysis of human communication, this article asks what the value of events satisfying these conditions is. I present a puzzle concerning the value of intention-recognition which is analogous to the Meno Problem in epistemology, but ultimately argue that this puzzle is solveable: the signaling-relevant value of intention recognition can be vindicated. However, I argue that the version of this puzzle that concerns the further proposed luck-proofing conditions on communication can not be answered. I argue therefore that communication, as analyzed by many, is no more valuable qua signal than a proper subset of its conditions. Human communication is then not a uniquely valuable signaling event.

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Section: Communication and Luckmentioning

confidence: 99%

Luck and the value of communication

HYSKA

2023

Synthese

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“…For instance, Buchanan (2014) applies a broadly Gricean framework to account for Loar cases without having to embrace Loar's descriptivist semantics for singular terms. Buchanan's attempt then generated responses by Peet (2017) and Unnsteinsson (2018), who also propose solutions that cannot be reduced to SW. Let us examine each of these views in turn.…”

Section: Other Approaches To Loar's Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference

Onofri

2019

Manuscrito

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In 'The Semantics of Singular Terms' (1976) Brian Loar proposed a famous case where a hearer seems to misunderstand an utterance even though he has correctly identified its referent. Loar's case has been used to defend a model of communication where speaker and hearer must think of the referent in similar ways in order for communication to succeed. This 'Similar Ways of Thinking' (SW) theory is extremely popular, both in the literature on Loar cases and in other philosophical discussions. My goal is to offer a novel argument against this influential model of communication and propose an alternative picture. First, I show how a certain version of SW fails to solve Loar's puzzle. Then I point at a more general problem with SW, arguing that no version of this model can account for Loar-style cases without making the conditions for communication too strict. I then propose an alternative account of Loar cases, analyzing them as cases of luck where the hearer does not know that she has identified the referent correctly. I conclude by contrasting my view with other existing accounts of Loar cases.

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“…It is a well‐known fact that thinkers usually have different perspectives on the subject matters they think about. Likewise, it is often vague which inferential route to the referent is intended by particular referential speech acts (Peet, 2017). Requiring that the hearer thinks of the referent in exactly the same way as the speaker, or that the hearer magically discovers the exact inferential route hidden behind the speaker’s utterance, might quickly lead one to a criterion which is rarely, if ever, satisfied in the real world.…”

Section: Final Remarksmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Successful Communication, Intentions and False Beliefs

Valente

2019

Theoria

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I discuss a criterion for successful communication between a speaker and a hearer put forward by Buchanan according to which there is communicative success only if the hearer entertains, as a result of interpreting the speaker’s utterance, a thought that has the same truth conditions as the thought asserted by the speaker and, furthermore, does so in virtue of recognizing the speaker’s communicative intentions. I argue, against Buchanan, that the data on which it is based are compatible with a view involving Fregean modes of presentation. In the second part of the article I critically discuss Unnsteinsson’s claim that communicative success depends on the absence of contextually salient false distinctness beliefs about the subject matter of the conversation. I argue that this thesis leads to clearly counterintuitive consequences and that no fundamental role must be given to the presence or absence of false distinctness beliefs in one’s account of successful communication. The upshot is that we should stick with Buchanan’s criterion. I conclude by employing Strawson and Recanati’s concepts of linking and merging to show how the criterion I favour is compatible with the fact that, when subjects hold no relevant false distinctness beliefs, communicative success does not seem to be disrupted by the hearer seemingly failing to recognize the speaker’s intentions.

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Referential Intentions and Communicative Luck

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

Luck and the value of communication

Luck and the value of communication

Loar’s Puzzle, Similarity, and Knowledge of Reference

On Successful Communication, Intentions and False Beliefs

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