Episode 27: Emma Borg discusses semantic minimalism
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What is semantic minimalism and why does the literal‑meaning vs. implied‑meaning distinction matter?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Jamie Edwards. With us today is Emma Borg, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading, and she is here to talk with us about semantic minimalism. Emma Borg, welcome.
Thank you.
Hi. Semantic minimalism is a position in the philosophy of language that takes a very distinct interest in the difference between literal meaning and implied meaning. So maybe you could just sort of explain what that difference is.
Yeah, of course. I think it's probably easiest to see by looking at an example. So if we think about what might be meant by a sentence, take a sentence, this is an example from a famous philosopher in the area, Paul Grice. Have an example of a sentence like, Jones has nice handwriting. Now you might think to yourself that you know exactly what that sentence means, but Grice points out that it could be used to convey very different things in different kinds of contexts. So imagine that the context in which that sentence is being produced is the following one. I've been asked for a reference for a philosophy job for one of my students, by the name of Jones, and I'm writing my letter in response. And in my letter of reference, the only thing that I write for this philosophy student is, Jones has nice handwriting.
Now, as Grice points out, what I'm going to convey by the sentence produced in that given context is probably something along the lines of, I don't think Jones has very much philosophical talent, or I don't think Jones is well equipped for this job. And the way that I convey that is because what appears to be the literal meaning of the sentence is not entirely appropriate to the given context in which it's being produced. So we might think of literal meaning as the kind of content that a sentence carries with it, perhaps just in virtue of the words that the sentence contains or the lexical elements the sentence contains and the way that they're put together. On that account, the literal meaning of a sentence like, Jones has nice handwriting, is just going to be the claim that the given individual picked out by the name Jones has a given property, namely the property of having nice handwriting.
But in the context we're interested in, what I'm going to convey by producing that utterance is something along the lines of the alternative proposition, Jones is lacking in philosophical talent, or Jones is not to be recommended for this job. And the minimalist then takes this distinction that Grice really drove home, the distinction between the literal meaning of a sentence on one hand and the things that can be implied by the production of that sentence in a particular context. The minimalist takes that distinction very much to heart and says that if we're looking for an account of the meaning of our language, the semantic value of expressions, we should just be focusing on that first part of the divide.
What a semantic theory should give us then is an account of the literal meaning of words and sentences, the claims that we're committed to just via the words and the way they're put together, as against the kinds of pragmatic content which are conveyed as part of speaker meaning. So it's a minimal kind of job description for semantics.
So semantics is the area of philosophy of language and or linguistics that studies the meaning that a sentence has solely in virtue of which words are in it and the order in which they're put together and stuff like that. The sort of the thing that you automatically mean just in virtue of the fact that you said these particular words and not some other words. But as everybody knows, the meaning of a sentence isn't exhaustively determined by which words appear in it and in which order. The meaning of the things we say is also determined in part by conversational context. And the example you just gave, where what I literally say is that Jones has very good handwriting, but what I imply is that that's sort of his only good characteristic, and he's deficient in other respects.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is semantic minimalism and why does the literal‑meaning vs. implied‑meaning distinction matter?
0:02–4:26
2
How does Grice’s ‘Jones has nice handwriting’ example illustrate the gap between literal content and speaker implication?
4:26–8:53
3
Why do minimalists argue that semantic theory should only capture literal meaning and not pragmatic enrichment?
8:53–13:02
4
Which expressions (e.g., indexicals like ‘I’, ‘today’) are claimed to be the only ones that let context affect literal meaning?
13:02–17:27
5
How do incompleteness and inappropriateness cases (e.g., ‘there’s nothing to eat’) challenge the minimalist restriction on context?
17:27–20:21
6
What does Charles Travis’s painted‑leaf example reveal about the role of context in determining truth conditions?
20:21–24:08
7
Why do minimalists worry that letting context decide literal meaning leads to an unmanageable flood of propositions?
24:08–28:31
8
What are the main take‑aways for listeners about balancing literal semantic content with pragmatic inference?
28:31–32:05
Speakers
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