Loose Talk

The paper aims at a new interpretation of Donnellan’s strong claim on the possibility of stating something true with a definite description that appears to be literally false (a misdescription). In the first section I introduce the debate on Kripke’s criticism, according to which with a misdescription, contrary to what Donnellan claims, we say something false and implicate something true. In the second section I present two attempts (Recanati’s and Almog’s) to justify Donnellan’s strong claim, in the form of a strong inertness thesis. In section 3 I reconsider Donnellan’s argument against a Humpty Dumpty interpretation of his theory, re-evaluating the idea that a referential description needs to fulfil the expectations required by the context. In section 4 I use the previous point to interpret Donnellan’s work as an anticipation of a theory of loose talk, embedding his ideas in the current debate on the semantics/pragmatics interface. Following the idea of loose talk thus defined, in section 5 I present a weak inertness thesis as an alternative to Recanati’s and Almog’s treatment of misdescriptions, and try to defend and extend it. In section 6 I propose two alternative ways to represent this solution. In section 7 I claim that this weakness inertness thesis is coherent with a theory of communication considered as a ‘view from below’, that is a view of cognitive limitations and provisional acceptance of what is said, in contrast with a ‘view from above’ that concerns what is assumed to be the truth of the matter, independently of human accessibility conditions.