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Source: Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Location: Croatia
Author(s): JEFFREY C. KING
Title: Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context
Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context
Issue: 38/2013
Citation JEFFREY C. KING. "Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context". Croatian Journal of
style: Philosophy 38:161-168.

https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=144388
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Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Vol. XIII, No. 38, 2013

Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions

and Context
JEFFREY C. KING
Rutgers University

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually

sensitive expressions. In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘to-
day’, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sensi-
tive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextually
sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms
(‘local’; ‘enemy’), possessives (‘Annie’s book’) and quantifiers (via quanti-
fier domains). With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions
discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as
to the mechanism whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their
values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions.
In a recent paper, I proposed a candidate for being this mechanism and
defended the claim that it is such. Because, as I suggested, these issues
have been most extensively discussed in the case of demonstratives, I
focused on these expressions by way of contrasting the mechanism I pro-
posed with others in the literature. In the present work, I simply state
what I claim is the mechanism by means of which demonstratives secure
semantic values in contexts without defending the claim that it is so. I
then consider some claims made by Kent Bach, and arguments for those
claims, which would undermine the account I propose of how demon-
stratives secure semantic values in context.

Key words: speaker intentions, context, pragmatics, demonstra-

tives, demonstrations.

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually

sensitive expressions. In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’,
‘today, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sen-
sitive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextual-
ly sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms
(‘local’; ‘enemy’), possessives (‘Annie’s book’) and quantifiers (via quan-
tifier domains). With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions
discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as

161
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162 J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context

to the mechanism whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their

values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions.
In a recent paper, I proposed a candidate for being this mechanism
and defended the claim that it is such (King 2012). Because, as I sug-
gested, these issues have been most extensively discussed in the case
of demonstratives, I focused on these expressions by way of contrasting
the mechanism I proposed with others in the literature. In the present
work, I intend to simply state what I claim is the mechanism by means
of which demonstratives secure semantic values in contexts without
defending the claim that it is so.1 I shall then consider some claims
made by Kent Bach, and arguments for those claims, which would un-
dermine the account I propose of how demonstratives secure semantic
values in context.
First, my proposal. I claim that the semantic value of a use of a de-
monstrative in a context is that object o that meets the following two
conditions: 1) the speaker intends o to be the value; and 2) a competent,
attentive, reasonable hearer with knowledge of the common ground of
the conversation at time the speaker uses the demonstrative would take
o to be the object that the speaker intends to be the value.2 We can ab-
breviate this by saying that an object o is the value of an occurrence of
a demonstrative in context just in case the speaker intends o to be the
value and the speaker successfully reveals her intention.3 I call this ac-
count of how demonstratives acquire values the coordination account.
I think of the fact that a speaker intends an object to be the value of
an occurrence of a demonstrative and the fact that a competent, atten-
tive, reasonable hearer who knows the common ground of the conversa-
tion would take the speaker to intend that a certain object be its value
to be objective features of a context of utterance. Call the former the
speaker fact and the latter the hearer fact. A context is appropriate for a
sentence containing demonstratives if each occurrence of a demonstra-
tive in it is associated with a speaker fact and a hearer fact and these
facts “involve” the same object (i.e. the intended object in the speaker
fact is the object that would be taken to be intended in the hearer fact).
For a given occurrence of a demonstrative in an appropriate context,
call this latter object the coordinated object. Then I view the meaning of
a demonstrative as a function that maps an appropriate context to the
coordinated object. I take the latter to be the semantic value of the oc-
currence of the demonstrative in the context. 4 Finally, I take the lexical
1
For a defense of the claim that the mechanism I propose is the correct one and
a comparison of my account with alternatives, see King (2012).
2
In King (2012) I consider complicating the account in certain ways.
3
Note that a speaker can successfully reveal her intention even though her
hearer failed to figure out what she intended. The hearer could be inattentive,
incompetent, etc.
4
Or at any rate, this is so for demonstratives that refer. I don’t take simple or
complex demonstratives to be referring expressions, so the story is a bit different for
them. See King (2001).

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J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context 163

meanings of demonstratives to require that a use of a demonstrative

be supplemented by a speaker’s intention that is recognizable by an
ideal hearer. Though demonstratives share this feature of their lexical
meanings, different demonstratives have other, different features of
their lexical meanings (e.g. ‘he’ has as part of its lexical meaning that
its value in a context must be male, but ‘it’ does not).
The central insight behind the coordination account is that in or-
der to successfully secure o as a semantic value for a demonstrative in
context, a speaker must intend that o be the value and make his inten-
tion accessible to a reasonable attentive, competent hearer who has
been following the conversation. Speakers tacitly know this in virtue
of grasping the lexical meanings of demonstratives. Finally, as I said
at the outset, I take the coordination account to be an account of how a
wide variety of contextually sensitive expressions beyond demonstra-
tives secure semantic values in context.
In a series of papers, Kent Bach has defended some views that con-
flict with the coordination account as I understand it. Bach has argued
that intentions, or at least certain sorts of intentions, cannot contribute
to determining what is said. But the way I understand the coordina-
tion account, in using a sentence with demonstratives appropriately,
a speaker’s intentions do contribute to determining what is said by
contributing to determining the semantic value of the demonstrative
relative to a context. Bach has also argued that intentions, or at least
certain sorts of intentions, cannot be part of context, understood in the
“narrow”, “semantic” sense (Bach 2001: 29). Context in this sense in-
cludes only a small number of “objective” features, including a speaker,
an addressee, a time and a location (Bach 2001: 29, Bach 2003: 25–26,
Bach 1999: section entitled ‘Formulations’, Bach 2007: 8 note 10). The
coordination account as I understand it claims that speaker intentions
can be part of the context that determines semantic values and what
is said. Hence defending the coordination account requires addressing
Bach’s arguments here.
Bach holds that what is said by a sentence in a context—its seman-
tic content in that context—is determined by the semantic values in
the context of the lexical items in the sentence (overt and covert) and
their mode of syntactic combination (Bach 2001: 15–19, Bach 2003: 4,
Bach 2007: 3, 10). Here he follows Grice in having a very syntactically
constrained notion of what is said. He differs from Grice in thinking
that you can say something without meaning it (Bach 2001: 18, Bach
2003: 4). So if I utter ‘Kent is a fine friend.’ ironically after he betrays
me, I say Kent is a fine friend but I mean the negation of this. On
Bach’s view, saying one thing and meaning another, as occurs here, is
nonliterality (Bach 2001: 17).
Further, for Bach what is said need not be a proposition (Bach 2001:
18, 21, Bach 2007: 9). If I utter ‘Cindy is ready.’, what I say is not a prop-
osition and not truth evaluable. However, what I mean is: e.g. I may
mean that Cindy is ready for dinner (Bach 2001: 20, Bach 2003: 12).

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164 J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context

Bach holds that what a speaker means in speaking is given by her

communicative intention. A speaker’s communicative intention is her
intention that the hearer recognize that she means a specific proposi-
tion in saying what she says by means of recognizing this very inten-
tion and that the hearer is intended to recognize it (Bach 2001: 28,
Bach 2003: 7, Bach 2007: 3). The content of this intention is what the
speaker is trying to communicate (Bach 2001: 31). For Bach, to under-
stand an utterance is to recognize the speaker’s communicative inten-
tion (Bach 2007: 3). A speaker’s communicative intention is fulfilled by
being recognized (Bach 2003: 5, Bach 2007: 3).
When a speaker uses demonstratives, Bach thinks that her com-
municative intention includes as parts referential intentions associated
with the occurrences of demonstratives (Bach 2001: 33). These inten-
tions are in some sense intentions to refer to things and get associated
with occurrences of demonstratives (Bach 2003: 26). But since Bach
doesn’t think communicative intentions, or their parts, can determine
what is said—the semantic value of a sentence in a context—the ob-
jects of these referential intentions cannot be constituents of what is
said nor semantic values of demonstratives.
With only this much of Bach’s view on the table, we can already
state an argument of his that would undermine the coordination ac-
count’s claim that speaker intentions play a role in determining what
is said. Because saying something doesn’t require meaning it, one can
say something and have virtually any communicative intention or even
none at all. This means that in different contexts one can use a given
sentence S to say the same thing and have wildly different communica-
tive intentions in the different contexts, or even none at all in some of
them.5 But then communicative intentions cannot play a role in consti-
tutively determining what is said (Bach 2001: 18, Bach 2003: 13, 24).
From this Bach infers that the speaker’s referential intentions, which
are parts of his communicative intention, can play no role in determin-
ing what is said (Bach 2001: 32–33).6
Let’s grant Bach’s argument here that a speaker’s communicative
intention can play no role in constitutively determining what is said.
In fact, Bach’s argument seems to me sound (though I might take issue
with Bach’s views about the role of communicative intentions in un-
derstanding utterances, etc.). For the sake of argument, I’ll also grant
Bach’s view that communicative intentions have referential intentions
as parts, though I am somewhat skeptical of this claim. Finally, let’s
identify Bach’s referential intentions involved with uses of demonstra-
5
Of course if you actually want to successfully communicate something, it would
be crazy to say certain things while having certain communicative intentions (or
none at all), as Bach is well aware.
6
Bach does allow that a speaker’s semantic or linguistic intentions can play a
role in determining what is said. These are intentions concerning the resolution of
vagueness and ‘the fixing of any indexical reference.’ (Bach 2001: 28, Bach 2007: 8
note 11).

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J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context 165

tives with speakers’ intentions that, according to the coordination ac-

count, play a role in determining the semantic values of demonstratives
in contexts. In effect, Bach is arguing here that since what is said by
uttering a given sentence S may be constant across a bunch of contexts,
while the communicative intention backing the use of the sentence can
vary indefinitely, the communicative intention cannot play a role in
determining what is said. And that seems exactly right. But can you
infer from this that the referential intentions that are parts of the com-
municative intention play no role in determining what is said. No.
The coordination account claims that these referential intentions
play a role in determining what is said and that the values of demon-
stratives in contexts are constituents of what is said.7 So take a sen-
tence containing a demonstrative, say ‘He is smart.’ and imagine it
being used in different contexts to say the same thing according to the
coordination account’s notion of saying the same thing. Say that what is
being said in each context is that Kent is smart. Then it follows on the
coordination account that the speaker’s referential intentions remain
constant across these contexts, even if her larger communicative inten-
tions are allowed to vary indefinitely. She must in each context intend
Kent to be the value of ‘He’. That means that in cases of this sort, we
can’t have what is said as understood by the coordination account stay-
ing constant across contexts while referential intentions vary wildly.
But then the considerations Bach raises here that show that commu-
nicative intentions do not contribute to what is said cannot be used to
show that referential intentions do not contribute to what is said nor
that the values of demonstratives in contexts are not semantic values.
Next, Bach gives an argument, which he calls the role of context
argument, for the claim that context cannot play a part in determining
what a speaker says, except for fixing semantic values of pure indexi-
cals.8 For obvious reasons, we’ll focus here on what a speaker says in
uttering a sentence containing demonstratives. As we have seen, for
Bach there is a narrow, semantic notion of context that includes the
speaker, the hearer, the time and location. Pure indexicals have se-
mantic values relative to these narrow, semantic contexts according
to Bach. However, for Bach demonstratives do not, since their mean-
ings aren’t rules that can be applied to these narrow contexts to yield
semantic values. Bach also has a notion of the wide or broad context,
comprising something like the mutually salient information at a given
point in a conversation (Bach 2003: 25–26, Bach 1999 the section en-
titled ‘Formulations’.). However, Bach holds that context in this sense
doesn’t play a role in constitutively determining the semantic value of
7
The values of demonstratives in contexts are (sometimes) objects, and even
though I don’t think simple and complex demonstratives refer to these values/objects,
there is a sense in which they are constituents of what is said on my view.
8
Bach also argues that context can’t play a role in determining what a speaker
means. But since this claim does not conflict with the coordination account, I won’t
be discussing it.

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166 J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context

anything. Context in this sense is used by hearers to figure out speak-

ers’ communicative intentions, including referential intentions associ-
ated with occurrences of demonstratives (recall that Bach thinks that
such referential intentions are parts of speakers’ communicative inten-
tions). So the reason context can’t determine what is said beyond fixing
the semantic values of pure indexicals is that narrow context can only
do the latter. And broad context never plays any role in constitutively
fixing semantic values of anything, but plays only an epistemic role in
being used by hearers to figure out what speakers mean. So neither
broad nor narrow context can constitutively determine any element of
what is said that goes beyond the semantic values of pure indexicals.
This means, of course, that the values of demonstratives in context are
not semantic values and not constituents of what is said for Bach, con-
trary to what the coordination account claims (Bach 2001: 32).
Let’s call whatever context plays a role in constitutively deter-
mining semantic values the semantically relevant context. For Bach,
this will be the “narrow” context consisting only of speaker, hearer,
time and location. The response to Bach’s argument here is that the
coordination account claims that the semantically relevant context is
“bigger”—contains more features—than Bach claims it does. First, the
coordination account claims that a speaker’s referential intentions are
part of the semantically relevant context. Second, the fact that a com-
petent, attentive, reasonable hearer who knows the common ground
of the conversation would take the speaker to intend that a certain
thing be the value of a given occurrence of a demonstrative must be a
feature of the semantically relevant context as well on the coordination
account. This latter fact will be highly complex but will include ele-
ments of what Bach calls broad context. This highlights the fact that
the advocate of the coordination account differs from Bach in thinking
that elements of what he calls broad context play a constitutive role in
determining what is said.
Bach also argues that a speaker’s communicative intention cannot
be part of the context. However, it seems to me that if the argument
works, it would work for any speaker intentions, including those that
the coordination account claims are part of context and play a role in
securing values for demonstratives in context. Here is the crucial part
of the argument:
However, if context is to play the explanatory role claimed of it, it must be
the same for the speaker as it is for his audience and obviously the role of
speaker intention is not the same for both. (Bach 2001: 30)
The explanatory role of context that Bach mentions here is its role in
explaining why the utterance of a sentence in a context has the con-
tent it has. So it is the semantically relevant context that is in ques-
tion here. Bach claims that the elements of the semantically relevant
context must “be the same” for speaker and hearers. Bach is not fully
explicit about what he means by “be the same”, but I think he must

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J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context 167

mean that speaker and hearers have to be epistemically related to the

features of the semantically relevant context in the same way. Obvi-
ously, the speaker bears a very different epistemic relation to his inten-
tions than the hearer does. So Bach concludes that speaker intentions
cannot be part of the semantically relevant context.
The problem with this argument is that there is no reason to believe
that speakers and hearers must bear the same epistemic relation to the
elements of the semantically relevant context. Indeed, Bach himself
must deny this. For Bach, the semantically relevant context—narrow
context—includes the speaker, the hearer, the time and the place.
Clearly, the speaker bears a different epistemic relation to himself
than the hearer bears to him. The same, of course, is true of the hearer.
Further, the speaker and hearer may bear different epistemic relations
to the time and place of the context. Think of my being in a room that
you have never been in and I call out to you ‘It’s dark in here.’ Clearly
my epistemic relation to the location of the context of utterance is dif-
ferent from yours. So Bach’s argument here fails because the premise
that speaker and hearer must bear the same epistemic relations to fea-
tures of the semantically relevant context is false.
Finally, Bach in various places argues that what I am calling de-
monstratives don’t “refer as a function of context” (Bach 2003: 25 (sec-
tion 10), Bach 2004: 29–30). However, these arguments simply assume
that the references of demonstratives are not constitutively determined
by elements of what he calls broad context and that semantically rel-
evant contexts do not include speakers’ intentions.9 The first claim begs
the question against the coordination account. And we have considered
Bach’s arguments for the second claim. So there is no point in looking
at these arguments of Bach’s.
Having surveyed various of Bach’s arguments that would under-
mine the coordination account, I conclude that the coordination ac-
count has effective responses to them.10

References
Bach, K. 1999. “The Semantics Pragmatics Distinction: What it is and Why
it Matters,” in Ken Turner (ed.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
From Different Points of View, New York: Elsevier, 65–84.
Bach, K. 2001. “You Don’t Say”. Synthese 128: 15–44.
Bach, K. 2003. “Context ex Machina”, in Semantics vs. Pragmatics, Zoltan
Szabo ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9
As we’ve seen, for Bach the semantically relevant context (his narrow context)
includes only the speaker, hearer, time and place of the conversation.
10
Thanks to Eliot Michaelson, whose ideas caused me to stumble upon the
coordination account; to Annie King for helpful comments and suggestions; to the
audiences at the Mental Phenomena conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia in September,
2011, and the Kline Workshop on Semantics, Pragmatics and Epistemology at the
University of Missouri in October 2011 for helpful discussion.

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168 J.C. King, Kent Bach on Speaker Intentions and Context

Bach, K. 2004, “On Referring and Not Referring”, available on Bach’s web-
site http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/
Bach, Kt. 2007. “Regressions in Pragmatics (and Semantics),” in Noel Bur-
ton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 24–44.
Also available on Bach’s website: http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/. I
use the pagination of the latter.
King, J. C. 2001. Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account.
Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.
King, J. C. 2012. “Speaker Intentions in Context”, forthcoming in Nous.

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