Red sky at night, enjoy the sunset

Here is Someone Braun saying something:

Some Russellians attempt to do so by saying that speakers may fail to distinguish correctly between the semantic content of an utterance and its pragmatic "implications".  Let's consider an analogous example.  Many semanticists maintain that utterances of (12) and (13) express the same, or logically equivalent, propositions.

(12) Mary turned the ignition key and the car's engine started.

(13) The car's engine started and Mary turned the ignition key.

Yet many ordinary speakers of English would judge that utterances of (12) and (13) can differ in truth value.  To explain away these common intuitions, many semanticists say that utterances of sentences of the form P and Q typically pragmatically convey ("suggest", "implicate", or "insinuate") the proposition that P and then Q.  Thus utterances of (12) and (13) usually pragmatically convey different propositions.  A hearer may (reasonably) believe that one of those conveyed propositions is true and that the other is false.  So a hearer who fails to distinguish correctly between what the utterances semantically express, and what the speaker is "getting across," may mistakenly judge that the two utterances themselves differ in truth value.

Here's what I don't get: (12) and (13) are being offered out of any particular context.  In the context of no context!  Braun isn't asserting them, nor is he presenting a situation in which they're being asserted by hypothetical persons, none of that.  He's just displaying the sentences.  So why is it, given that there's no particular context, and nothing that any particular utterer (since they're not presented as utterances) might mean to do with them, that we still get the supposedly "pragmatic" reading of "and" as "and then" or "and so"?  Isn't this kind of a problem?  And if we're just used to giving sentences like (12) and (13) their supposedly pragmatically-derived readings, then how do we account for our not giving "and" that kind of reading to sentences like "John ordered steak and Susan ordered salmon"?  The answer can't (can it?) be something about the sort of sentences involved, because if that sort could be specified noncircularly, one could deny that it's pragmatic at all, and just say that in that sort of sentence "and" has this sort of meaning.  (Though many would probably find that distasteful anyway.)

Comments

[Jacob Haller]

Is the context THE WORLD AT LARGE, maybe? I mean maybe it's true that 'Grenog snaffled the crimshaw and the maneparch fruntled' would have an implication of sequence if we lived on Mars and knew what those things were.

BUT maybe I am confusing CONTEXT and MEANING.

[teofilo]

I believe the usual explanation is that this is an example of what Grice called convential (as opposed to conversational) implicature; the idea is that there's nothing in the logical form of the sentence that entails the reading we get intuitively, so it must be an implicature that is context-dependent, but happens to apply in every context. Like most of pragmatics this sounds kind of mumbo-jumbo-y to me, but that's the explanation.

[Matt F]

how do we account for our not giving "and" that kind of reading to sentences like "John ordered steak and Susan ordered salmon"?

Perhaps because these are two self-contained actions, whereas in the car example, one is inherently a cause and the other an effect, even without a broader context (i.e., one can turn a key without any requisite pre-conditions, but some force must come into play before an engine starts). Since the order of the actions is relevant to the result, so too is the order of the descriptions of the actions relevant to the truth value of the statement.

But, there's nothing in the sentence that says the key and engine are of the same car, so maybe not. Regardless, I still think there's probably something fundamentally different between those two sets of actions.

[ben wolfson]

Having now read "Logic and Conversation", I hanker for/demand a fuller discussion than is contained therein of conventional implicature.

[teofilo]

Basically, it's on the border between semantics and pragmatics (and somewhat controversial). The idea is that some linguistic operators have meanings that don't affect the truth values of the sentences containing them but rather serve to implicate something without explicitly saying it ("therefore" and "but" are the usual examples). Thus, they are not semantic (because they don't affect truth values) but neither are they pragmatic (because they are not context dependent).