Language

Upon whom is the burden of proof when interpreting a given phrase: those who would interpret it literally, or those who would interpret it non-literally (e.g., metaphorically, etc.)? I have heard people say that our default interpretation should always be literal, and that we should only deviate from this understanding if we poitively have reason to believe that it was not intended literally. Does this presuppose that things are more often meant literally than non-literally? Or is it based on the thought that non-literal uses of phrases (e.g. metaphoric ones) are always developments of their literal uses, and that the literal sense is therefore somehow ‘primary’ in an interpretational as well as a chronological sense? Presumably the answer as to which should be the default position will also depend on the context of the phrase – for example, is it found in a poem, or in a pamphlet of technical instructions (in the former non-literal uses may be more prevalent than literal ones; and you’d be surprised how many metaphors are used even in technical, scientific and philosophical prose). What then, of ‘context-less’ writings – e.g., if we found an ancient manuscript, in a language we understood, but knowing hardly anything of the culture that produced it – we may not know if it is poetry or prose, or on their predilections for non-literal language use. In such a case, would we simply have to say that we have no way or prioritising literal and non-literal interpretations over one another, or is there an absolute priority of one? (This question arose for me in being told that the burden of proof lay on me for interpreting Biblical anthropomorphism in a manner that is not committed to the materiality of God, and that the default position is to take the anthropomorphisms as intended literally, therfore committing the author(s) of the Bible to the view that God is a material being much like a human being). - Sorry for such a long question - your thoughts would be much appreciated!

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Your question relates to a central issue in philosophy of language concerning the bearers of linguistic meaning: are they objects you can describe formally, like sentences, or much more context-bound entities, like utterances? According to one school of thought, advocated by philosophers like Frege, Carnap, early Wittgenstein and Davidson, meaning should attach to formal linguistic objects, so there is a literal meaning to be recovered for sentences independently of what someone intends to mean or succeeds in conveying when they utter that sentence (for instance, the formalist will claim that 'It is raining' means simply that it is raining even if, on some occasion of utterance, the speaker of the sentence conveys an alternative proposition, like she doesn't want to go outside). On the other hand, many philosophers, like later Wittgenstein, Austin and Searle, have argued that meaning attaches at the primary level to speech acts, so that we really need to know about a context of utterance prior to determining what is meant. Theorists in the second camp are much more sympathetic to the role of context in producing linguistic meaning and are likely to think that interpretation is something which occurs 'on the hoof', as it were. Thus it is likely that people adopting a speech act based approach to meaning would not expect a default interpretation to be the 'literal' or context-free one, rather they would expect that in most contexts what matters is getting at what the speaker is intending to convey by their utterance, while it seems more likely that people adopting a formal approach will maintain the primacy of the literal, context-free interpretation.

However things are made a bit more complicated by recent versions of this debate. Contemporary versions of the formal approach, commonly known as 'minimal semantics', tend to agree with speech act theories that literal sentence meaning is not the default interpretation in most contexts. Instead they allow that what we normally aim to recover in communicative exchanges is what the speaker intended to convey and they recognise that this may often differ greatly from the literal meaning of the sentence uttered. Yet they still maintain that there is a basically context-free level of content attaching at the sentence level and that, when interpreters lack relevant information about the context of utterance, they fall back to this minimal literal content. So, a minimalist would not claim that the default interpretation is the literal one, but they might well say that, where you lack access to the context in which a sentence was produced, all you can recover is the literal meaning so you have to settle for that.

Finally, at least some contemporary versions of the speech act approach (which go under the general heading of 'contextualism') are pretty sceptical about the idea of sentence level literal meaning (at least where this is supposed to be anything like a complete proposition or something which can be evaluated for truth or falsity). So for them when you talk about 'literal meaning', where this refers to the primary proposition a speaker is committed to by their utterance, they will take this item itself to be affected by context. So, for at least some contextualists, the default interpretation might well be the literal one, but the literal one itself is something which can only be recovered only through sensitivity to features of the context of utterance. For such contextualists there might simply be no proposition to be recovered from a 'context-less' writings. So, to answer your question, I think most theorists in the contemporary arena would say that the default interpretation in most contexts of utterance is a 'pragmatic' one, that is getting at the proposition the speaker intended to convey not the one attaching simply to the words she uttered. The debate would then concern whether there is any context-free proposition to be found beneath, or alongside, this pragmatic one and, if so, how it relates to the context-based one (does it provide the inferential base for the context-based one, as some think the philosopher Paul Grice claimed, or is it further removed from communicated propositions, as minimalists claim).

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