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MANDY SIMONSDISJUNCTION AND ALTERNATIVENESSINTRODUCTIONThere is a requirement which a disjunction must satisfy in order to consti-tute a felicitous contribution to an ordinary conversation: its disjuncts mustbe interpretable as relevant alternatives. When such an interpretation is notavailable, the disjunction is highly anomalous. The disjuncts of sentence(1), for example, appear unrelated to one another, and the disjunction isconcomitantly odd. The effect is similar when the disjuncts are related butdo not constitute distinct alternatives, perhaps by virtue of one disjunctentailing another, as in (2).(1) Either there is dirt in the fuel line or it is raining in Tel-Aviv.(2) Either there is dirt in the fuel line or there is something in thefuel line.There is thus a requirement that the disjuncts of a clausal disjunctionuttered in a conversation constitute relevant and distinct alternatives. Let’scall the first part of this requirement the relatedness condition and thesecond the distinctness condition. The goal of this paper is to uncover thesource of these conditions.The approach I take is Gricean. I assume that these two pragmatic con-ditions can be derived from general principles of conversation, interactingwith the truth conditions of or – which I take to be those of inclusive dis-junction. This is a rather uncontroversial position. However, to uphold theposition, we need an explicit account of just how the pragmatic constraintscan be derived, including the precise nature of the conversational principleswhich produce them. This paper will give such an account.The two pragmatic conditions identified above will be treated separ-ately. The relatedness condition turns out to be the more interesting of thetwo, and most of the paper will be concerned with it. I will show that thereLinguistics and Philosophy 24: 597–619, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.598 MANDY SIMONSare two plausible accounts that can be given, which I will call the evidence-based account (Section 1) and the information-based account (Section 2).The evidence-based account develops suggestions made by Grice himself,and shows the relatedness condition resulting from an interaction betweenthe Maxims of Quantity and Quality. According to the information-basedaccount, on the other hand, the relatedness condition is a consequence ofthe interaction between the Maxims of Quantity and Relation. I will turn tothe distinctness condition in Section 3. The concluding section will discussthe relation between the evidence-based and information-based accounts,and will tie up some remaining loose ends.1. THE EVIDENCE-BASED ACCOUNT OF RELATEDNESSUnder normal circumstances, the utterance of a disjunction must be sup-ported by evidence of a particular kind: evidence that the disjunction as awhole is true, which is not adequate evidence for the truth of any disjunct.The first part of this requirement follows from the Maxim of Quality: “Donot say that for which you lack adequate evidence”. The second part isa consequence of the first Maxim of Quantity, which obliges a speakerto give as much information as is required for the current conversationalpurposes. A speaker should thus not assert, say, AorB, if she has evidencethat A is true, for an assertion that A would be more informative. (We canassume that in most situations in which AorBis relevant, A would berelevant too. We will turn to an exception below.) In this section, I showthat the relatedness requirement can be derived from the requirement forthis special type of evidence.In “Further Notes on Logic and Conversation”, Grice (1989, p. 44)suggests that to have this special kind of evidence, a speaker must be inpossession of a “reasonable ...argumentwith A∨ B as conclusion whichdoes not contain one of the disjuncts as a step (does not proceed via A orvia B)”. Thus, for example, the argument in (3) could underlie a felicitousutterance of (4):(3) (i) Jane’s telephone has been busy for an hour.(ii) The only person she talks to for a long time on the phoneis her mother, but occasionally she spends time surfing theweb.(4) Either Jane is talking to her mother or she’s surfing the web.DISJUNCTION AND ALTERNATIVENESS 599We can think of such arguments as arguments to possibilistic con-clusions. Given the premises in (3), a person could reasonably concludeboth:(5) It’s possible that Jane is talking to her mother.(6) It’s possible that Jane is surfing the web.Both (5) and (6) are reasonable inferences from (i) and (ii), in somethinglike the sense of Stalnaker (1975).1Moreover, nothing which entails either(5) or (6) is a reasonable inference from these premises. The two propos-itions disjoined in (4) are thus related in the same way to a single set ofpropositions: if the propositions in this set are accepted, both disjuncts of(4) are reasonably considered possible. In contrast, the proposition thatfleas are pesky is not related to this set of propositions in the same way,and this explains the oddity of (7):(7) Either Jane is talking to her mother or she is surfing the web orfleas are pesky.Any argument to the conclusion in (7) based on just the premises in (3)must include (4) as a step. And as (4) is stronger than (7), to utter (7)in these circumstances would be a violation of the Maxim of Quantity.Moreover, there seems to be no reasonable argument to the conclusion in(7) which would not include a step involving a statement stronger than (7).Hence, there seems to be no argument of the appropriate kind which couldunderwrite an utterance of this disjunction.We thus have the following picture: in ordinary circumstances, the co-operative utterance of a disjunction requires the speaker to have evidenceof a particular kind for her utterance. If a hearer judges that a particular dis-junction could not possibly be supported by that kind of evidence, she willjudge utterances of the disjunction infelicitous. This will almost certainlybe the case when the disjuncts are unrelated to one another. The relatednesscondition thus reduces to the requirement that there be some argument ofthe relevant kind relating the disjuncts. This, then, is the evidence-basedaccount of the relatedness condition.1Stalnaker defines a pragmatic notion of reasonable inference, which is a relationbetween speech acts, rather than propositions, and is defined as follows: an inference froma sequence of assertions or suppositions (the premises) to an assertion or


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MIT 24 954 - DISJUNCTION AND ALTERNATIVENESS

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