Semantic Intentions and the Ascription of Meaning and Truth-Conditions to Utterances: What Interlocution Cases Teach Us

Sanford C. Goldberg

I take it as a truism that, for any given utterance U, the meaning which it is correct to ascribe to U is partly a function of the speaker’s semantic intentions. In this paper I aim to clarify this connection by focusing on a very limited subgroup of utterances: those in which one speaker S is attempting to make herself a samesayer with some other co-lingual T, yet where (a representation of) T’s source statement includes some expression-type(s) which render(s) problematic the assumption that S knows what T said. In these cases, the relation between the meaning of S’s utterance and S’s semantic intention to samesay is particularly vivid. My main ambition is to use these examples to illustrate the following thesis: the manner in which speaker intentions factor into the determination of the truth conditions and meaning of the speaker’s own utterances can be illuminated by determining the manner in which the semantic contribution of each of the contributing expressions in one’s utterance is determined. I take it that this thesis in itself is not controversial; more controversial will be the manner in which I illustrate it in particular interlocution cases. The broader significance of my particular illustrations will lie in the manner in which they force us to distinguish between at least two distinct senses in which a speaker can be said to ‘know the truth conditions’ and/or ‘know the meaning’ of her own utterances.