Philosophy of Communication Research Paper

1. The Logical Structure Of Communication

The issue about the logical structure of communication can be explained in the following way. The verb ‘to love’ stands for a two-place relation, a relation that holds between two things just in case the first loves the second (temporal considerations are ignored for simplicity of exposition). This is indicated by the fact that if we take a sentence like

(a) Al loves Betty

and replace its singular referring expressions with variables, we obtain (what logicians call) the open sentence

(b) x loves y.

This indicates that the verb ‘to love’ stands for a two-place relation, a relation that holds between two things just in case the first loves the second. Similarly, we can say that giving is a three-place relation that holds among three things just in case the first gives the second to the third, because from a sentence such as

(c) Al gave that book to Betty

we obtain the three-place open sentence

(d) x gave y to z.

The issue concerning communication is whether we can likewise start with a sentence such as

(e) Sally communicated that it was snowing to

 Abe

and obtain the open sentence

(f) x communicated y to z.

If we can, then a further issue is about the sort of things that can occupy the y position. That is, what sort of things are the things we communicate, if communicating is represented by (f)? There is a philosophical issue about the logical structure of communication because there is disagreement about how to answer both questions.

The prima facie case for taking communication to be a three-place relation is simple: it is the obvious way to account for the fact that (e) entails

(g) There is something that Sally communicated to

 Abe—to wit, that it was snowing.

A possible reason to resist this first thought emerges when we ask what manner of thing is this thing, that it was snowing, which would be the entity Sally communicated to Abe if communication is a relation expressed by (f). For it is apt to appear that things communicated are what philosophers nowadays call propositions—mind- and language-independent entities that have truth conditions but are not in space and have no physical properties whatever. The trouble is that many think there are good reasons not to believe that such things exist (e.g., Quine 1970).

It must, however, quickly be said that the immediate source of concern here is not with communication per se but with that-clauses in sentences such as (e) and ‘Sally believes that it is snowing’—that is, with expressions of the form ‘that S,’ where ‘S’ holds the place of a sentence in the indicative mood. More generally, the concern is with what (for historical reasons we need not go into) philosophers call the problem of intentionality. Do that-clauses refer, or purport to refer, to entities that are believed and communicated, or do they have some other semantic function? While this is a problem that can be stated without specific reference to communication, a complete account of communication presupposes its resolution. Until we understand the semantics of that-clauses, we will not know what communication is. But there is no universally accepted solution to the problem of intentionality, and for every position in logical space there are philosophers who occupy it. For about one-third of the twentieth century, the American philosopher Willard von Orman Quine had so effectively stigmatized propositions that most philosophers were too frightened to believe in them; but philosophy has recovered from Quine’s influence, and most philosophers today feel that the case for pro-positions is stronger than any against them. At the same time, there is disagreement among proposition lists about the kind of propositions we believe and communicate. Here one finds two dominant views. The Russellian view (after the British philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell) holds that propositions are made up of the objects and properties our beliefs are about, while the Fregean view (after the German philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege) holds that propositions are made up of (what are nowadays called) concepts, or modes of presentation, of the objects and properties our beliefs are about. But even among Fregeans there is disagreement about the nature of concepts, and it is not clear whether the difference between the Russellian and Fregean views is in practice anything more than alternative styles of bookkeeping, since Russellians agree that concepts are crucial to the individuation of thoughts and acts of communication. In what follows I shall assume, which I believe to be correct (Schiffer in press), that communication is a relation holding among a communicator, a communicated proposition, and a person to whom that proposition is communicated, without prejudice as to whether those propositions are Russellian or Fregean.

2. The Explication Of Communication

How can the communication relation be explicated, or analyzed? One question that falls under this rubric concerns what we can know a priori about the concept of the communication relation. The strongest view here holds that a priori conceptual analysis can arrive at a correct, informative, and noncircular completion of the schema

(h) Necessarily, for any agent x, proposition p, and

 agent y, x communicates p to y if, and only

 if, … .

Those influenced by the late British philosopher J. L. Austin, such as the American philosopher John Searle, hold that a completion is possible that appeals to rules that are constitutive of the practice of communicating, in the way that the rules that define chess are constitutive of that practice, but none of these theorists has, to my knowledge, made any serious attempt actually to complete the schema, and in any case there are persuasive reasons to think that the appeal to ‘constitutive rules’ is mistaken (Austin 1975, Searle 1969, Schiffer 1972).

The only serious attempt to provide a complete a priori analysis of communication has been by the late British philosopher H. P. Grice and by others who sought to improve on his attempts (Schiffer 1972, Bennett 1976, Grice 1989). Three things are distinctive of the Gricean program. First, it attempts to define communicating p wholly in terms of the communicator’s audience-directed intentions, included in which is her intention to get her audience to believe p. Second, the means by which the audience is intended to arrive at his belief is by taking the communicator’s perceptible act (e.g., her uttering certain sounds) as evidence that she performed that act intending to get her audience to believe p, and then to take her having that intention as evidence that she herself believes, or believes she knows, p, and then taking her believing (she knows) p as good evidence that p is true. So, when Abe came to know that it was snowing as a result of Sally’s telling him that it was snowing, his knowing is due to his having adequate evidence—viz., the fact that Sally believed (she knew) that it was snowing—for the fact that it was snowing. Third, linguistic meaning—the meanings of natural language expressions —was then to be defined in terms of the now reduced notion of communication (or, more accurately, in terms of a reduced notion of speaker meaning that includes telling as a species of speaker meaning). In the end, one would have a reduction of the semantic to the psychological, which, we shall later notice, would set the stage for a reduction of psychological facts to physical or topic-neutral facts—facts, such as the fact that one event was caused by another, which do not entail but are consistent with there being no nontopic- neutral facts other than physical facts. (Functional facts are topic-neutral facts that pertain to the causal or counterfactual relations relating internal states to one another and to sensory input and behavioral output.)

Conceptual analysis of the kind practiced by Griceans is now generally regarded as so twentieth century. In addition to this general skepticism about definition-seeking conceptual analysis, there are specific problems with the best efforts in the Gricean tradition. It has proved very difficult to state nonsemantic conditions that are jointly sufficient for communicating that such-and-such; the complexity of the analyses inevitably proffered in the attempt to get sufficient conditions makes one doubt that ordinary speakers have the supersubtle intentions those accounts ascribe to them; and, related to these problems, it seems that if we subtract from a speaker’s intentions her intention to be telling her audience that such-and-such, we are not left with enough non-semantic propositional attitudes (i.e., thought states that have propositional content) in terms of which one could define communication (Schiffer 1987, pp. 242–9). Armchair reflection on the concept of communication can yield important necessary truths about communication, but it is doubtful if it can yield a definition, let alone a definition in wholly non-semantic terms.

Much more influential than attempts to define communication have been attempts to show that communication facts, like all other intentional facts, stand in a relation to physical facts which renders the intentional facts naturalistically respectable. But there is no universally accepted view about what is required to render the intentional a respectable part of the natural order. Some philosophers insist that intentional properties and relations be identical with physical properties and relations. Such an identity need not be discovered by a priori conceptual analysis; it could have as its model the a posteriori identification of, e.g., heat with molecular motion. Yet this insistence seems chimerical when the intentional relations are relations to propositions. For the idea of a physical relation to propositions is evidently incomprehensible (what on earth could be a physical relation to the proposition that 1 1 2?). More promising is the idea that propositional-attitude relations like believing are functional causal relations. If there are such identifications, it is doubtful that they can be dis-covered by a priori conceptual analysis, and the reasons for supposing that there are a posteriori, scientifically discoverable identifications of pro-positional-attitude relations with particular functional causal relations are considerably less than compelling, typically based either on implausible views about what is required by the ‘unity of science,’ the way in which the various special sciences are related to one another and depend on fundamental physics, or on a naive conception of what is required for propositional-attitude properties to play the causal explanatory roles that they evidently do play.

A weaker position, but one accepted by many, is that while intentional relations cannot be identified with physical or topic-neutral relations, nevertheless all intentional facts supervene on non-intentional facts in that there could not be two possible worlds that were identical as regards to their non-intentional facts but not as regards their intentional facts. This position faces the challenge of having to offer some sort of explanation of the supervenience relation that anchors the intentional in the non-intentional, rather than taking that supervenience simply as a brute, inexplicable fact (Schiffer in press).

Finally, there are those who are content to hold a neo-Cartesian dualism wherein the intentional does not supervene on the nonintentional but does play the causal-explanatory role it appears to play (Bealer in press). The trouble with this view, however, is that it is very difficult to see how the intentional could plausibly play its causal role without the sort of reliance on underlying physical facts which the dualism precludes. Those who hold the neo-Cartesian dualism will doubt-less appeal to causal relations between intentional states and their underlying physical states, but the difficulty just alluded to is precisely that of making sense of there being psychophysical causal laws or mechanisms capable of sustaining the alleged causal relations.

3. Communication And The Explication Of Linguistic Meaning

What is it for marks or sounds to have meaning in a given population? Obviously, it has something to do with how the members of that population use, or are apt to use, those marks or sounds. If what we are concerned with is meaning in a public language like English or French, then it is reasonable to think that the use of those marks or sounds in communication looms large in the answer. On this much all agree, and David Lewis (1983) has provided an elegant frame-work for posing the further questions about the explication of linguistic meaning and the role of communication in it. Think of a language as an abstract object that may or may not be used by anyone; more specifically, think of it as a mapping of sequences of marks or sounds onto those things that are sentence meanings—propositions, perhaps, or, more likely, abstract entities that determine a specific kind of speech act and propositional content. Then the problem is to say what relation must obtain between a population of persons and a language so conceived in order for that language to be a language of that population. It is likely that this question enjoys no neat answer in terms of a single set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but it is probably not unreason-able to suppose that sufficient conditions can be stated that in fact explain what it is by virtue of which particular languages are used by particular populations. Such sufficient conditions will include communicative speech acts, but, what other kinds of speech acts? Can a unified account of speaker meaning be provided which subsumes all relevant speech acts? If so, are the Griceans right in claiming that those speech acts can be explicated in wholly psychological terms, thereby yielding a reduction of all public-language semantic facts to psychological facts? How exactly will the relevant kinds of speech acts enter into the account of what makes a language a language of a given population? Will some notion of convention be needed here? If so, what sorts of conventions, and how is the relevant notion of convention itself to be explicated? There is little agreement on how these questions should be answered, and, anyway, philosophers have lately lost interest in the questions. Of much more contemporary interest is the explication of meaning in systems of mental representation, and it is not plausible that that explication needs recourse to communication (Field 1978, Schiffer 1987).

4. Knowledge By Testimony

Knowledge by testimony is the knowledge gained via communication; it is knowing something because it was told to you. The liveliest issue at present about communication concerns the nature of this knowledge. It is a lively issue because a certain view that was more or less taken for granted has been challenged. In order to understand what is at issue, we need to see what the assumed view was, what objections have been brought against it, and what new view, or views, of knowledge by testimony has been proposed in its place.

If one knows p, then p is true and whatever justifies one in believing p is what elevates one’s true belief to knowledge. Accordingly, disputes about the nature of knowledge by testimony are disputes about the kind of knowledge-providing justification for one’s believing p when one knows p by virtue of having been told p. The long-standing view that has been challenged is that this justification is just the ordinary sort of empirical justification one has whenever one knows something because one has adequate empirical evidence for it. There is no established view about the exact nature of such knowledge, but part of the traditional view is the idea that there is a single set of topic-neutral epistemic principles that determine when one is justified in the truth of any given proposition to be evidence for the truth of any other given proposition. Examples of knowledge gained in this way would be one’s knowing that Smith murdered Jones on the basis of such-and-such DNA and fingerprint evidence; one’s knowing that one’s cat had been on the kitchen table on the basis of seeing cat hairs on the table; one’s knowing that a smoker had recently been in the room on the basis of seeing a smoldering cigarette in the ashtray; and so on. In the case of communication, the idea, applied to an example, is that when Abe comes to know that it is snowing because Sally told him that, his knowledge-providing justification is his taking Sally’s utterance of ‘It’s snowing’ to be adequate empirical evidence that it was snowing, and that his so taking it is based not on any special faculty or principles of testimony but on ordinary empirical knowledge together with general inductive and deductive procedures. The Gricean conception of communication, as ordinarily conceived, presupposes this evidential view of knowledge by testimony. On this view, the key ingredient in Abe’s coming to know that it is snowing is that he takes Sally’s utterance to be evidence that she believes she knows that it is snowing, and his taking her having that belief to be evidence that it is snowing. None of this is to say that Abe is consciously thinking thoughts, or making inferences, about what Sally thinks, any more than you are consciously thinking the thoughts, or making the inferences, involved in your inductive justification when you see the smoldering cigarette and instantaneously conclude that someone has recently been smoking in the room. On this conception, knowledge by testimony reduces to knowledge gained by other means—by perception, memory, demonstrative, and non-demonstrative inference—and no more requires special epistemological mechanisms or principles of its own than does, say, knowledge gained by police detection.

Philosophers who reject the traditional conception of knowledge by testimony do so for two reasons: first, they have reasons for thinking that it cannot account for all that we know by testimony, and second, they have at hand an alternative conception of knowledge by testimony. As regards the direct objections to the traditional conception, Coady (1992) argues that if we took away all of an agent’s knowledge based on testimony that itself did not depend on other knowledge by testimony, there would not then be the wherewithal to provide adequate empirical justifications for beliefs based on testimony. Tyler Burge has objected that while in gaining knowledge by testimony we rely on a presumption of reliability, we ‘need not engage in reasoning about the person’s qualifications to be rational in accepting what he or she says, in the absence of grounds for doubt’ (Burge 1993, p. 469). This is evidently the sort of consideration also at work behind Robert Audi’s claim that knowledge by testimony is

‘typically not inferential. Certainly when trusted friends speak to us on matters we have no reason to think are beyond their competence, we normally ‘‘just believe’’ what they tell us.’ (Audi 1998, p. 132)

Those who reject the traditional view hold that knowledge by testimony, in the typical case, is immediate and non-inferential. Sometimes this is developed via an analogy with the way in which perceptual knowledge is thought to be immediate and non-inferential (Coady 1992). According to Burge (1993), we have an a priori entitlement to belief what we are told immediately without argument or evidence, unless there are stronger reasons not to do so. The direct objections are not persuasive. Coady presupposes that if knowledge by testimony were inferential (in the sense in which taking one thing to be evidence for another is inferential), then the inferences involved would rely on general beliefs about the reliability of testimony. This is unwarranted. On the most plausible inferential account, the crucial thing on which interlocutors rely is their commonsense knowledge of what would explain a given person’s having a certain belief. Abe, for example, comes to believe that it is snowing because he comes to believe that Sally believes she knows that it is snowing, and, using his general knowledge about the sorts of ways one is likely to acquire such a belief, Abe believes that it is very unlikely that Sally would have her belief if it were not snowing. The status of the relied-upon folk psycho-logical theory may be taken to be on all fours with the status of the commonsense physical theory we rely on in forming our beliefs about the movements of physical objects.

As for the Burge–Audi objection, if believing what someone says off the bat, or not needing to engage in reasoning about a person’s qualifications, were a reason for taking knowledge by testimony to be nonevidential, we could easily be shown not to have most of the evidential knowledge that we have. What ‘reasoning’ is one actively and consciously engaged in when one immediately concludes from the sight of a wet sidewalk that it recently rained, or when one immediately believes that one’s Vermeer has been stolen upon seeing that one’s alarm system has been disabled and that one’s back door is wide open? Whether knowledge is based on inference from evidence is not about the actual movement of thought, the considerations one actually ponders; it is about the structure of beliefs that sustain one’s conclusion. What justifies our beliefs about the rain and the Vermeer, and what justifies our taking those examples to be examples of evidential knowledge, is that they involve inferences to the correct explanation. One takes the wet streets to be evidence that it rained because one believes that the streets are wet because it rained; one takes recent rain to be the correct explanation of why the streets are wet. Likewise, when one sees the disabled alarm system and open door, one immediately and unhesitatingly makes an inference to the explanation whose ingredients include the intentional disabling of the alarm by a thief whose motivation was to get the only thing of value in the house and who successfully made his escape, Vermeer in hand, via the back door.

Likewise, when Abe unhesitatingly accepts Sally’s statement that it is snowing, he instantaneously makes an inference to an explanation of her utterance which entails that she believed she knew it was snowing and that part of the explanation of this is that it was snowing. Proponents of the non-evidential view will concede that Abe would not believe that it was snowing if he also thought either that Sally did not believe that or that her belief was not partly explained by the fact that it was snowing, but they will then claim that it is not necessary that Abe actually believe that Sally had her belief or that she had it because it was snowing. This is a mistake; Abe need not consciously ponder any thoughts, but he must have the beliefs in question, just as you must actually have the belief that the streets are wet because it rained when you see the streets and instantaneously form the belief that it rained, even though, so to say, that belief need never have consciously crossed your mind. Nor does it matter that Abe should form his belief while knowing next to nothing about Sally. For suppose you now learn, in whatever way you care to imagine, that I believe I know that my middle name is ‘Richard.’ Even if you only know me as the author of this research paper, you would almost certainly yourself believe that my middle name is ‘Richard.’ Why so? Because, as you know, it is extremely unlikely that a philosophy professor who is coherent and sane enough to write this research paper would be mistaken about his middle name. On the other hand, your knowing that I believe that the law of excluded middle is not determinately true or that so-and-so will win the next US presidential election probably would not significantly affect your beliefs about those propositions.

Philosophers who reject the evidential view may do so because they are mistaken about what is required to know something on the basis of an inference to the correct explanation. Two points seem relevant in this connection. First, in forming one belief a person may be relying on another belief even though the second is merely tacit, never brought to conscious thought. When you see the wet streets and actively believe that it rained during the night, you probably at no time entertained or actively believed that the streets are wet because it rained last night; yet you believe that all the same and would not believe that it rained last night if you did not. Likewise, Abe, in coming to believe that it snowed, probably does not actively believe that Sally would not believe that it snowed if it had not snowed, but he does have that belief and would not believe that it snowed if he did not. Second, a seven-year-old child may know that it rained on the basis of her perception of wet streets, and this because he she knows that the streets are wet because it rained. But how does our seven-year-old know that? It is unlikely that he she spent any time actually considering alternative explanations of the streets’ wetness. The fact is, I submit, knowledge-providing justification is easy to come by in cases like this; we are relaxed in our ascriptions of knowledge in such cases, at least when nothing more is at stake. We count the child as knowing because we think he is right and because we do not think there is an alternative explanation of what made the streets wet that is a plausible competitor. Come to think of it, what is true of the child is true of most adults, or else we have very little evidential knowledge. We count someone as knowing, on the basis of his perception of wet streets, that it rained even though if asked to rule out alternative explanations of the streets’ being wet he would not be able to articulate much of anything.

All that is required for knowledge by testimony to be evidential is that when we are justified in believing p because we were told p, then, roughly speaking, we are also justified in believing that the speaker would not have told us p unless she believed she knew p and that she would not have that belief if p were not the case. Moreover, as already indicated, to be justified in thinking that someone would not have told us p if she had not believed (she knew) p need not require any special antecedent knowledge of the speaker’s honesty or reliability. I am giving a talk on an unfamiliar campus and ask an unknown professorial-looking man where Blah-Blah Hall is. He points to a visible building; I head off in what I am confident is the right direction. But how did I know he was not lying, crazy, mistaken, etc.? By inference to the correct explanation; the assumption that he is expressing his belief, etc., is entailed by my tacit explanation of why he pointed and spoke as he did.

One who holds that Abe has non-evidential knowledge by testimony that it is snowing might concede that Abe has a justified true belief that Sally believes it is snowing in part because it is snowing, but yet insist that his justification is not good enough to yield knowledge. This is not very plausible. Abe knows that if it is snowing, then Sally believes it is snowing in part because it is snowing. So in order for him not to know the consequent of the conditional he knows, it would have to be possible—since it is agreed that Abe knows it is snowing—for one to know [p and if p, q] and not know q. And while there are indeed those who are willing to hold that this is possible (Dretske 1970, Nozick 1981), it remains extremely counterintuitive and is widely rejected.

I now know that the cup before me is red. I also know that its being red is the correct explanation of why I am having the visual experience I am now having. Yet my knowing that the cup is red may in this case be over-determined, both direct and based on the evidence of my visual experience. In this case it is not unreasonable to suppose that, in addition to my evidential knowledge that the cup is red, I also have immediate and nonevidential knowledge that the cup is red. For it is not unreasonable to suppose that, given the way we are built as information processors, my having my visual experience would cause me to believe that the cup was red even if I did not have the conceptual wherewithal to form a belief about my sensory experience or its causes. This is evidently the moral to be drawn from the perceptual knowledge of certain animals and very young children. But knowledge by testimony seems disanalogous in an important respect. While very young children seem to believe what they are told even though they are conceptually unable to form beliefs about the beliefs of speakers or about the etiology of those beliefs, it is also the case that it is very difficult to see how there could be communication in public language by creatures who did not have a fairly rich commonsense propositional-attitude theory that allowed them reliably to ascribe beliefs to others and to form reliable hypotheses about the etiology of those beliefs. What we can conclude is that when an adult gains knowledge by testimony, it is because she knows that the speaker believes (she knows) the communicated proposition and that she has that belief in part because the communicated proposition is true. Whether anything like knowledge by testimony could occur in mature creatures who did not tacitly form such beliefs about the beliefs of speakers is perhaps to some extent an open question. If it is possible, then perhaps we should allow that knowledge by testimony is over-determined; but whether or not it is over-determined, the knowledge by testimony actually gained by mature persons is arguably evidential.

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