‘The Best Architect Designed This Church’: Definite Descriptions in Default Semantics

Abstract

Jaszczolt examines the default semantic analysis of ‘the best architect designed this church’, uttered when standing in front of El Temple de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona. At first sight, Jaszczolt's conclusion that the cognitive default reading of the sentence is ‘Antoni Gaudí designed El Temple de la Sagrada Família, and the speaker believes him to be the best architect’ looks right; but is it in fact an appropriate semantic analysis, even given Jaszczolt's pragmatics-rich approach? Our knowledge of what the particular speaker is likely to know is our only guide here. We will make different assumptions for the speaker who is a four-year-old child, George W. Bush, or a native of Barcelona (and so on). The same goes for the addressee: an adult addressing a four-year-old child will very likely follow up by identifying the architect. We only know whether speaker and hearer correctly identify the architect from the co-text, and this requires considerably more inferencing from contextual and encyclopaedic data than Jaszczolt allows. This paper criticizes some of the assumptions of Default Semantics and suggests some emendations to the theory, including additional machinery showing a mapping from the words uttered to the intended meaning in the case of ‘the best architect designed this church’.

Keywords:

• Common Ground
• Context
• Definite Descriptions
• Default Semantics
• Non-monotonic Inference
• Pragmatic Inference
• Reference (Direct and Indirect)

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Kasia Jaszczolt for comments on an earlier version of this paper. No one but myself is in any way to blame for its residual inadequacies.

Notes

¹One can be more confident of identifying the consciousness of reasoning for non-expert players of games like chess and bridge, and for someone faced with a puzzle or a task such as learning a language or how to drive.

²See also Jacob (2003) and Siewert (2006) on the varied views that exist of ‘intentionality’. The meaning is distantly related to the normal everyday use of intention but derives directly from Latin intendere ‘to stretch out or forth, to strain, direct, spread out, increase, turn one's attention, purpose, endeavour, maintain, assert’ via the medieval scholastics for whom it commonly meant ‘to understand, interpret’ and for whom intentio meant what philosophers and logicians nowadays call a concept or an intension.

³Sense is decontextualized meaning, abstracted from innumerable occurrences of the listeme or combination of listemes in texts; at the lexical level it is what is found in dictionaries, which leave the dictionary user to decide which of the senses given is relevant to a particular context in which the listeme is used.

⁴These are respectively an Akan family name, a Chinese family name (also Romanized to Chan and Tan), a Jewish family name, a French name for a female, an Italian name for a male, an Akan name for a boy born on Saturday, a Russian or Ukrainian name for a female (), a Chinese name for a female (měi ‘beautiful’ [most common], méi ‘plum blossom’, méi ‘rose’, mèi ‘charming’, also mèi ‘sister’), a Vietnamese family name (Nguyn), a Greek family name (), a Georgian family name (), a Japanese name for a female () and a Polish name for a male.

⁵Despite the fact that Jaszczolt does refer to the metarepresentational hypotheses advanced in Bloom (2002), Happé and Loth (2002), Papafragou (2002) and Sperber (2000), they don't have much bearing on and certainly don't outweigh my objections.

⁶The syntactic constraint is ‘the requirement that the primary object of study of the theory of meaning, and at the same time the primary object of a truth-conditional analysis, is directly related to the logical form of the sentence and does not depart from it in a way that changes it beyond recognition. Evidence from utterance processing points, however, in a different direction’ (Jaszczolt 2009: 127).

⁷The subscripts _{CD, WS}, _CPIpm, etc. that are found in MRs are for the benefit of theoretical presentation. It would be most unlikely that ordinary language users are aware of them, consciously or unconsciously.

⁸She died 23 March 2011. I would not expect most people to whom I attribute this cognitive default to be able to supply more than a subset of such biographical details when correctly identifying the name bearer.

¹⁰This seems to justify a defeasible consequence relation [A]>[B] of SDRT in [A] if something is a bull, [B] it's bovine since [A] ∣∼[B] (cf. Asher & Lascarides 2003: 48, 169f).

⁹I'm grateful to Kasia Jaszczolt for reminding me of this. In the rest of the paper I will retain CD for the relevant category in DS as described by Jaszczolt and spell out cognitive default for other cases which I regard as cognitive defaults.

¹¹But not when introducing the referent into the foreground of attention as in Yesterday I came across this church with a gold-plated roof. It was just such an amazing sight.

¹²I'm assuming neither is blind. Blindness would complicate matters, but not invalidate the general argument.

¹³Bach (2004) rightly points out that standardization facilitates a certain use whereas conventionalization makes a certain sort of use widely accepted. It is probable that conventionalization often derives from earlier standardization.

¹⁴A more credible example of such a thing is The world's best playwright wrote ‘Troilus and Cressida’. If this were the only play of Shakespeare's to have survived, he is unlikely to have been regarded as the world's best playwright. However, the proposition that The world's best playwright wrote ‘King Lear’ might be justified on the basis of Lear alone.

¹⁵It is notable that proper names are often incomplete, as we saw when discussing the name Elizabeth Taylor. Under normal circumstances they refer successfully because the context of use makes completeness unnecessary.

¹⁶Bach's and Devitt's ‘quantificational meaning’.

¹⁷Updated with the terminology of Jaszczolt (2009).