A Puzzle about Meaning and Communication

According to a view implicit in much of twentieth-century philosophy of language, linguistic communication conforms to the following model: a speaker has a thought—say, a belief that Fichte was a philosopher—which she would like to convey to her audience. This thought has a certain proposition as its content, a proposition which we might specify using the ‘that’-clause ‘that Fichte was a philosopher’. If the speaker knows that her audience is a competent speaker of a shared language such as English, she can choose some form of words which makes manifest to her audience the proposition she intends to communicate. Perhaps she utters ‘Uncle Johann was a philosopher’, or ‘He [pointing to a painting of Fichte] was a philosopher’. The speaker’s audience recognizes her communicative intentions, and communication is successful, only if her audience thereby entertains a thought whose content is the proposition the speaker meant by her utterance. Let’s call this the standard view. Stated at this level of generality one might be tempted to think that some version of the standard view is obviously true—perhaps hardly worth stating. I believe that this temptation ought to be resisted: communication rarely, if ever, works in the way characterized by the standard view. In this paper, my primary aim is to make some headway towards establishing this rather sweeping claim by discussing some cases in which the standard view apparently fails, focusing on the phenomena of quantifier domain restriction and non-sentential assertion, illustrated by (1) and (2), respectively: