Symbolic Systems Forum - David Hills, Philosophy Department

David Hills, Philosophy Department, "Thinking Out Loud: The

Problem of Oracular Utterance"

ABSTRACT:

Sometimes we lash words together and float them out into the world in a manifestly experimental spirit. We issue these words in the hope that the best interpretation of them will have us embracing claims we're prepared to embrace, performing speech acts we're willing and even eager to perform, etc. But we don't profess to know in advance precisely which claims we'll be embracing and precisely which speech acts we'll be performing by issuing these words. In such cases, the best interpretation of our utterance isn't settled in the classical Gricean manner by how we inferably intend it to be interpreted in the first place. Yet interpretation remains remarkably sensitive

to the classical Gricean conversational virtues: optimal informativeness, relevance, perspicuity, and so on. Other things equal, we should interpret so as to maximize the informativeness, relevance, perspicuity, etc. of the conversational contribution the utterance would make, were it to be interpreted in the manner in question.

I wonder how this works. I wonder what kind of revision or extension of the classical Gricean framework is needed to account for what I call oracular utterances. I sketch an account of these matters based on two basic ideas:

(a) Human beings are remarkably good at playing games of make-believe together on a pick-up basis.

(b) When we speak in an oracular manner, we initiate a game of make-believe in which we pretend to be or be speaking for someone much more fully in command of our words and their powers than we ourselves actually are at the time.