Language in Context: Selected Essays

by Jason F. Stanley

Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context , Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as "She is a mathematician", where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun "she". But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our
interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals.

Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defense of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.

Genres: Philosophy, Language

276 pages, Paperback

First published July 5, 2007

About the author

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of five books, including How Propaganda Works, winner of the Prose Award in Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers, and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, about which Citizens author Claudia Rankine says: “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.” Stanley serves on the board of the Prison Policy Initiative and writes frequently about propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, democracy, and authoritarianism for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Guardian.

Reviews

[Spoust1]

This is a book only for specialists already acquainted with very high-level debates in philosophical semantics. Unfortunately, while Jason Stanley’s prose is clear, the stakes of what is being argued will be completely obscure to the general reader. I am not entirely ignorant of this subject, and I struggled.

What unites the essays in this book is an emphasis on the way the context in which language is used contributes to language’s logical form. At first, it seemed to me that Stanley was giving context too little due and putting down pragmatics. Then, I came to realize that, from Stanley’s perspective, the assumption that what is context-dependent belongs to pragmatics itself downplays context, since this assumption doesn’t allow that context can affect the very meaning of what is uttered. Persuaded by Wittgenstein and others, I have long privileged pragmatics over semantics and syntax; but these essays made me rethink whether emphasizing the contextualized uses of language by communities requires such a privilege. I continue to have serious questions about whether language is as rule-governed as Stanley believes, however. Even given Stanley’s persuasive arguments about how seemingly unstructured sentences in fact are structured — and therefore rule-governed — it remains an important fact, hardly remarked upon by Stanley, that most language use occurs without any consciousness of following rules.

There were many times when the essays in this book struck me as “academic” in the bad sense. First: I often felt that the book was more about various “isms” than about language itself, the scholarship having lost sight of its object and become lost in itself. I have read many scholarly books on language that do not give me this impression. Second: There are many places in the book where the author proposes to put one or another issue to the side. I appreciate the need for inquiry to abstract from some matters in order to focus on others, but this happened enough that I came to feel that there was some avoidance here.