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The Practitional Approach to Imperatives

1 Introduction

It is a philosophical commonplace that there are two distinct forms of reasoning. One—

theoretical reasoning—has to do with what is the case, whereas the other—practical reason-

ing—has to do with how to act. This fundamental two-way distinction between kinds of reason-

ing is reflected in two of the three universally attested sentence types. Declaratives, at base,

seem to be for saying what (one believes) is the case, and imperatives, at base, seem to be for

telling people what to do.1 The distinction here is semantic: “Close the door!”, for example,

clearly does not mean the same thing as “You closed the door.” A central task on the philosophy

of language is to explain this basic semantic difference between declaratives and imperatives.2

Guided by their previous work on the meaning of declaratives, theorists who have taken

up this explanatory project have tended to do so in one of two ways. The first, which takes its

inspiration from Frege, starts by dividing meaning into the separable elements of reference,

1 The third universally attested sentence type is the interrogative, and it can concern either the theoretical or the practical. On the theoretical side, it can be used to ask what is the case or for an explanation of what is the case; on the practical side, it can be used to ask what is to be done or why something is to be done. We think this is best explained by analyzing the interrogative in terms of the declarative and imper-ative, which seem to be explanatorily more basic, but we will not pursue the matter here. 2 Imperatival meaning is addressed in discussions of illocutionary acts performed by using different sen-tence types, especially in the tradition begun by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969); see also Recanati (1981/1987). This literature, however, tends to focus on the use of imperatives to perform specific speech acts such as to command, request, advise, etc., rather than the semantics of the imperatival form that al-lows for such use. (We discuss this difference below.) The semantic question is addressed more directly but less systematically in discussions of the force/content distinction in Frege (1918-19/1984); see espe-cially Dummett (1973) and McGinn (1977). Somewhat more systematicity with respect to imperatival meaning specifically is developed by Pendlebury (1986), Hanks (2007, 2015), and Parsons (2012). Sever-al formal semanticists and logicians have been interested in the issue of modeling the semantic contribu-tion of imperatival mood, though only with varying degrees of interest in attached philosophical ques-tions. See especially Stenius (1967), Han (1998), Portner (2004, 2007, 2009), Mastop (2005), Barker (2012), Fox (2012), Charlow (2014), and Starr (unpublished). See also Hare (1949, 1967) and Vranas (2008, 2010, 2011) for related work on the logic of imperatives. We discuss some of this work below.

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sense, and force.3 All sentences, declarative and imperative alike, are said to have propositions

as their senses, constrained in some way by the referents of their terms and how these terms are

put together. What distinguishes imperatives from declaratives, then, is their respective forces.

Declaratives put forward their propositional contents in the Ur-way, i.e., as true. By contrast

and in modification, imperatives put forward their propositional contents as to be made true.

Because it marks the distinction between declaratives and imperatives in terms of the force with

which they put forward their propositional contents, call this approach the force approach.

The second approach starts instead with the idea that truth conditions are the core of

meaning. Any other semantic distinctions we might want to make are to be traced to distinctions

that can be made with the resources of truth conditions. Although it may be possible for this

approach to subsume the force approach (perhaps, e.g., by grounding make-true force in truth

conditions), its more common strategy is to identify a special prescriptive element in the truth-

conditional content attributed to imperatives, thereby distinguishing them from declaratives. For

example, the imperative “Close the door!” has been said to have the truth condition that the

speaker commands the hearer to close the door; alternatively, it has been argued that that its

truth condition is that the hearer should close the door. Views of this sort, we will say, take the

truth-conditional approach to imperatives.

The goal of this paper is to suggest a different starting place and thereby motivate a new

approach for explaining the semantic difference between declaratives and imperatives. In doing

so, we aim to be sensitive to some of the most basic concerns of the traditions in semantics that

underwrite each of the two approaches just mentioned; indeed, we take one of the attractions of

this paper to be the extent to which it maintains envoys in each camp. We aim, however, to up-

end the order of explanation common to both, which, as indicated above, moves from a free-

standing view of the declarative case to the imperative case by modification. Reflecting our be-

3 To be clear, we are not making any claims about Frege’s own view. For a discussion of Frege’s views and how they may have changed over his career, see Huntley (1980); see Hanks (2007) for a contrasting view.

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lief (which we will not defend here) that theoretical and practical reasoning are equally funda-

mental, neither reducible to the other and both crucial to understanding each other, we want to

suggest a framework for thinking about the meaning of imperatival sentences that treats declara-

tives and imperatives as equally fundamental.

Motivating this new approach will principally involve two lines of discussion. The first

concerns whether the explanantia of imperatival meaning must be, as Portner puts it, “impera-

tive-specific tools” (forthcoming, sec. 2.3.2). Along with a growing number of theorists, we be-

lieve that such imperative-specific tools are required. We part with these allies, however, by

insisting that the development of these semantic tools requires paying close attention to the dis-

tinctive subject-predicate sentential structure of imperatives. We will argue that this structure

has not been adequately examined and that, as a result, even the best contemporary accounts of

imperatival meaning require further development. To work up to this claim, we will open by

critiquing the force approach and the truth-conditional approach. We are not the first to chal-

lenge these approaches. To those familiar with other challenges, our critiques may seem super-

fluous.4 On the other hand, committed proponents of either of the two approaches may be less

than completely persuaded by our arguments. The goal of these arguments, however, is not to

improve upon previous challenges nor to convince committed proponents to change their minds.

Rather, our aim is to articulate desiderata for any semantic account of imperatives by highlight-

ing some serious difficulties that the force and truth-conditional approaches face.

The second line of discussion concerns our alternative approach. We will argue that im-

peratival content is sui generis and equally basic to declarative content, much as one might (and

we do) think that practical reasoning is sui generis and equally basic to theoretical reason-

ing. To try to triangulate on an explanation of something we believe to be sui generis, we will

first explain how this content can be understood by analogy to more the familiar propositional

4 Indeed, some contemporary philosophers and linguists dismiss the force approach out of hand and ex-pend most of their critical energy attacking the two versions of the truth-conditional approach (see, e.g., Zanuttini, Pak, and Portner (2012: 1260-62) and Charlow (2014: 631-37)).

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content of declaratives. This is where we want to suggest new resources for the “tool-kit” of

semantics. We will propose that, along with the familiar notion of propositions, we should rec-

ognize a relatively unfamiliar notion of practitions. At the most simple logical level, we think of

these as structured abstract contents typically comprising an agent-term and an action-term

much as propositions are commonly conceived as descriptive contents typically comprising a

subject-term and a property-term. However, whereas propositions connect their subject and

property terms to form something truth-apt, practitions connect their agent and action terms to

form something semantically evaluable in other ways, such as with respect to satisfaction or

legitimacy.5 Of course, there is no uncontroversial conception of propositions in this arena, so

just as we cannot address every imaginable force or truth-conditional view, we cannot address

every imaginable view of the nature of propositions. This does not prevent us from raising im-

portant questions about how practitions compare and fit together with more familiar elements of

the tool-kit commonly used to theorize about the meaning of sentences expressing propositions,

such as sets of possibilia, contentful attitudes, structured representations, Boolean operations,

entailment, models of dynamic discourse functions, etc. The standard semantic tool-kit is al-

ready multifarious and complex, so we have no chance here of fully answering questions about

how practitions fit with other tools. We nevertheless think we can show how fertile this relative-

ly unexplored ground is by roughing in some initial trenches and planting a preparatory few

seeds.

2 The Force Approach

As we noted in the introduction, views that take the force approach to explaining the meaning of

imperatives separate the propositional content that imperatives supposedly share with correla- 5 Here we draw on Vranas (2011), who argues that there are two distinct candidates for understanding the validity of imperatival inference. He calls these obedience preservation and bindingness preservation and argues that confusion arises from not distinguishing between these and understanding their different roles in understanding the content of imperatives. We discuss this idea in sec. 5, where we make some brief and provisional comments on the logic of imperatives.

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tive declaratives from the force with which this content is put forward. As a first step towards

understanding this approach, consider the following pair of sentences:

(1) Close the door!

(2) The door is closed.

If we compare these sentences based on the words they commonly share, we may suppose that

each sentence concerns the same object (the door) and the same property (being closed). If that

is right, then drawing on a common and widespread view, we may go on to characterize this

sameness by saying that these sentences contain the same proposition but differ in the way each

relates the proposition to truth: whereas (2) presents the proposition as true, (1) puts it forward

as to be made true.

The analysis we have just made limits itself to surface features of the sentences. This,

however, seems intuitively wrong, for whereas (2) concerns only the door and the property of

being closed, (1) also involves someone—specifically, the addressee—performing the act of

closing the door. Once our attention is drawn to this fact, we have reason to think that, if (1) has

a propositional corollary, it is not the proposition expressed by (2). Such a corollary needs to

specify an agent closing the door if it is to run parallel to (1). Taking a cue from Searle, we

might take the following to be properly parallel pair6:

(1) Close the door!

(3) You will close the door.

If this is the correct analysis, then the shared propositional core concerns the addressee closing

the door in the future, but whereas (3) asserts that the proposition is true, (1) puts it forward as

to be made true. The proponent of the force approach might put this by saying that (3) and (1)

have a common propositional content, but whereas (3) has is-true force, (1) has make-true force. 6 Although (3) is inspired by Searle, Searle himself would use ‘H’ to designate the hearer of the sentence where we have instead used ‘you’ (see Searle (1969: 57-71)). We thank an anonymous referee for point-ing out Searle’s relevance to the present discussion.

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By distinguishing declarative meaning from imperative meaning in this way, the force approach

aims to capture a deep difference between two of the universally attested sentential moods.

Since the speech-act analyses by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), however, one must

be careful when one speaks of a sentence’s “force.” As they both point out, one and the same

sentence form can be used to perform all manner of speech acts; with imperatives in particular,

one can state commands, give advice, make requests, issue warnings, etc.7 Each of these may be

conceived of as involving its own sort of illocutionary force. The “force” of the force approach

to imperatival meaning is of a different order, for it is supposed to be a feature shared by all im-

peratives, which is why it figures in explanations of the meaning of the imperatival sentential

form rather than in explanations of the various uses to which this form can be put. Indeed, one

might expect this shared “force” to play a role in explaining what unifies the diverse speech acts

one can perform by uttering an imperative sentence. Moreover, if illocutionary force belongs

exclusively to the pragmatics of language use, which are (according to orthodoxy) separable

from the semantics, then this shared “force” of the force approach is not illocutionary force at

all, since on this approach it plays an essential role in generating the meaning of imperatives as

such.8 For these and perhaps other reasons, linguists call the “force” of the force views senten-

tial force, which is to be distinguished from (pragmatic) illocutionary force.9 Once we have

7 For a detailed list of things one can do with imperatives, see Starr (unpublished, section 5.1). For a care-ful presentation of the notion of illocutionary force and how it must differ from grammatical mood (or what below we call sentential force), see Green (2009). 8 This point is made by Sosa (1967). 9 See, e.g., Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (1990), Portner (2004), and Lohnstein (2007). We thank Paul Portner for helping us clarify this. Conceived as an element of the meaning of imperative sentences, “sen-tential force” may just be a different name for sentential mood. These ideas are not, of course, unconnect-ed to illocutionary force. Sentential force/mood might be seen as the conventional linguistic encoding of something like the canonical range of illocutionary act potentials carried by a small set of grammatically distinguishable sentence types. Although almost any sentence can in principle be used to perform almost any kind of illocutionary act, imperatives seem to exist for commanding, requesting, advising, inviting, etc. Theories of sentential force/mood attempt to explain what it is about the meaning of imperatives that makes them such.

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labeled this distinction, we might sensibly demand that force theorist explain the relations be-

tween sentential force, illocutionary force, and propositional content. 10

Once this demand is in focus, however, the force theorist faces a prior and potentially

thorny problem. Part of the appeal of the force approach, we think, is its simplicity: it takes a

well-studied theoretical notion—that of a proposition—and accounts for imperatival meaning

by modifying that entity with a simple operator—a sentential force. It is not clear, however,

how this approach should characterize logically complex sentences that embed an imperative

with a declarative under a sentential operator. These complex sentences are not uncommon.

This should be obvious in the case of conditionals:

(4) If it starts to rain, bring in the laundry!

is an unremarkable thing to say. Conjunction and disjunction also allow for mixed embedding—

consider the following:

(5) Get some matches, and I’ll start collecting tinder.

(6) Bring some peanut brittle, or I’ll get some.

Any full account of the meaning of imperatives will need to explain these and related cases.

This is not an easy task.11

These cases are challenging for any view, but they seem particularly problematic to the

force approach. To see why, consider how the approach can analyze (6). Suppose we treat (6) as

having a single, complex proposition as its content (or “sense”), whose meaning is determined

by the disjunction of its atoms. If force is strictly an operation on propositional sentential con-

10 Recanati (1981/1987) argues that utterances of imperatives differ from utterances of declaratives in having directive force as part of their meaning, which he cashes out in terms of having a representational content combined with a to-be-made-true direction of fit, whose fit is supposed to come about through some action of the hearer caused by the utterance. This comes closer to the notion of semantic force, but note that it is a view about the content of utterances rather than the content of sentences. 11 In section 5.2 we say more about the logic of imperatives. See fn. 46 for a list of some prominent at-tempts to address the challenges posed by this logic. For more on the challenges themselves, see Starr (unpublished: §3.1) and Charlow (2014).

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tents, then the force theorist will need to assign exactly one force to (6). It would clearly be

wrong to characterize the whole logically complex sentence as having is-true force, but it also

seems wrong to characterize it as having make-true force. The mood of the second disjunct is

declarative, and, were it uttered on its own, there would be no temptation to characterize it as an

imperative.12 To proceed this way, then, the force theorist will have to introduce new mixed-

mood forces. We know of no serious attempt to develop such an account, and we think this is

for good reason. It seems that a mixed-mood force would mix its moods according to the logic

of the sentence it operates on, which, it would seem, indicates that sentential force is in the end

a feature of complex sentences’ atoms. If this is right, then what we might call the traditional

force view, which treats force non-atomically, seems to be a non-starter.

This might lead one to develop what we could call a progressive force view, maintain-

ing that force is atomic and thus not extra-propositional in the case of complex sentences. To

say this is to say that an imperative’s force is not separable from its content but rather is part of

that content. We think that something along these lines is the correct thing to say; indeed, this is

at the heart of the practitional view we present below. To make this move, however, is to give

up on much of the explanatory strategy that motivates the force approach in the first place.

Again, the appeal of this approach is to start with propositional content, whose semantic opera-

tion within logically complex contexts is familiar and well studied, and then to describe impera-

tival meaning in terms of an operation on this kind of content. To treat the putative “force” ele-

ment of imperatival meaning as internal to the content of a given imperative is to abandon this

approach, for to go this route is to forgo being able to draw seamlessly on the logical structures

into which propositions fit. To characterize complex sentences, for example, one will have to

start from scratch; one will not be able treat conditionals, conjunctions, and disjunctions as (or

determining) truth-functions, so one will need a radically new semantics for “if-then”, “and”,

12 Sentences of the form ‘ϕ!-or-p’ often seem to mean ‘ϕ! If you do not comply, p’, which might suggest that imperatives never really embed under ‘or’. However, as Starr (unpublished) notes, that interpretation is not always plausible, as (6) in a normal context reveals.

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and “or”. Again, we think careful attention to imperatives does, in fact, require reconsideration

of these fundamental issues, and we hope to make a bit of progress on these matters in section 5.

Our point here is that to do this is to give up on the force approach’s familiar tack.

There is another problem for the force approach that, we think, reveals constraints on an

acceptable theory of the meaning of imperatives. The problem concerns the way in which

imperatives seem, as a function of their meaning and not just how they are typically used, to

direct agents to act. One of the most well-developed attempts to capture this within the force

approach is by appeal to so-called stit (“see-to-it-that”)-operators, for these views explicitly seek

to explain the apparent agent-directing feature of imperatival meaning.13 The appeal to a stit-

operator is a popular strategy in deontic logic and the logic of agency for ensuring that some

reference to agency is incorporated into the propositional content of an event description or the

prejacent of agentive deontic modals. To see how appealing to stit-operators might work, imagine that Anne says (1) to Sarah.

Because Anne has directed (1) specifically at Sarah, we could use ‘Sarah’ as the subject of the

stit-proposition:

that Sarah sees to it that Sarah closes the door

Then, a stit-analysis of the meaning of (1) in this context might be represented as follows:

FORCE [make-it-true]

+ CONTENT [Sarah sees to it that Sarah closes the door].

Perhaps not all imperatives must specify a particular agent as the subject: if in response to a

medical crisis one yells, “Get a doctor!” the subject of the stit-proposition is probably best char-

13 See Kanger (1957/1971: 42), Belnap and Perloff (1993), Belnap, Perloff, and Xu (2001), and Horty (2001: ch. 3). Compare inter alia Sosa, who treats imperatives as an operation “Let it be the case” on a proposition, which he formalizes as D:α, where “the propositional variable α can be replaced only by nominal clauses describing possible states of affairs which are exhausted by someone’s making some-thing true” (1967: 57-58). He cites Hare’s (1952: ch. 2) distinction between neustic and phrastic elements of meaning as inspiration for the view.

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acterized as “someone.” In our example, however, let us assume it is clear that Sarah is the one

who is to see to it that the door is closed. Now, if Anne means what she says, then not only is

Sarah to see to it that the door is closed, but Sarah herself must be the one who closes the door.

If Sarah pays Julia to close the door, Anne might reasonably complain that Sarah has not satis-

fied the imperative. Had Anne said to Sarah merely, “See to it that the door is closed!”, there

would be no grounds for such a complaint, for one can see to it that a goal is realized without

being the one who realizes the goal. To be sure, Anne can utter (1) to Sarah without caring who

closes the door, so Anne may be indifferent if in response to (1) Sarah pays Julia to close it. If

Anne is indifferent, however, she would speak more accurately by telling Sarah to see to it that

the door is closed. This reveals, we think, that to say (1) is to say something stronger than, “See

to it that the door is closed!”: it is to direct Sarah to be the one who closes the door.

The stit-account just sketched attempts to accommodate this point by linking the gram-

matical subject of “sees to it that” to the grammatical subject of the embedded verb phrase (e.g.,

“close the door”).14 Even when such a link is stipulated, however, there can be an important dif-

ference between a person’s seeing to it that she does something, on the one hand, and her simply

doing it, on the other. To appreciate the difference, consider Baier’s (1971) complaint against

analyzing intentions in terms of a bring-it-about-that relation. Her immediate target is

Chisholm’s (1971) claim that intentions can always be conceived as intentions to bring it about

that p, which construes the objects of intentions as states-of-affairs, which, in turn, can be ar-

ticulated by propositions. Baier argues that one’s intending to ϕ is not always, and indeed is not

typically, the same as intending to bring it about that one ϕs: she compares her intention to

speak sharply to the boy who has been stealing her raspberries to the intention to bring it about

that she speaks sharply to the boy. The goal of the former intention is to confront the boy,

whereas the goal of the latter is a sort of self-manipulation. We think this is an important dis-

tinction and will discuss its application to imperatives at several points below.

14 On the importance of this linkage to stit-accounts, see Belnap and Perloff (1993: 28-29).

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Return now to the stit-account we have been sketching. It characterizes (1), when di-

rected at Sarah, as telling Sarah to see to it that she (Sarah) closes the door. It would seem that

Sarah can see to it that she closes the door by bringing it about that she closes the door; that is, it

seems that she can see to it that she closes the door by manipulating herself into being a door-

closer. If Baier’s point is correct, such self-manipulation is different from Sarah simply and

straightaway closing the door. If this is correct, however, it shows the stit-account under consid-

eration to be insufficiently fine-grained. The application of Baier’s point to imperatives implies

that (1) is satisfied only if Sarah straightaway closes the door, but the stit-account developed so

far counts (1) as satisfied either by a straightaway closing or by an act of self-manipulation.15

One might respond to this worry by complaining that it is the result of the specific way

we have constructed the account. To get around the worry, one might recommend analyzing

imperatives of the form “S, make it the case that ϕ” as corresponding with “S, stit-ϕ” and distin-

guishing these from “S, let it be the case that S ϕs”, which could then be used to analyze (1).

The latter is satisfied only if Sarah closes the door straightaway, not if she self-manipulates.

This suggests that a way around Baier’s point is to analyze “ϕ!” with “Let it be the case that S

ϕs!”16

Although this analysis gets around the problem of failing to discriminate imperatives

that demand straightforward action from those that allow for self-manipulation, it does so by

introducing an analysans that generates its own problems. We can put the matter in the form of

a dilemma. Either letting something be the case is an action, or it is not. If it is not, then “let it

be the case that S ϕs” is a poor analysis of “ϕ!” On this analysis, the meaning of “Close the

door!” does not prescribe the addressee to do anything, for on this analysis, letting is not an ac-

tion. Suppose, then, that to let something be the case is an action. Going this route, however,

15 To take a phrase from Velleman, our critique here is that this stit-account “. . . fail[s] to cast the agent in his proper role” (2009: 123). 16 We thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.

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opens the analysis back up to the problem that Baier’s point poses. On this analysis, “letting it

be the case that Sarah closes the door” will be satisfied just in case Sarah lets it be the case that

she closes the door. Notice the structural similarity here to the stit- account: both make explicit

that the addressee who is directed to make the fact true/let the fact be true/see to it that the fact

is true is also the referent of the content’s grammatical subject. In doing so, these analyses must

specify the relevant individual twice, both as part of the fact to be made true and as the one to

make the fact true. Because of this dual-specification, the relevant fact can always be made true

by self-manipulation. If this is a general feature of any plausible force account—and we suspect

it is, since as soon as one splits force and content one would seem to need to locate the address-

ee in both of them—it provides another reason for considering an alternative approach to ex-

plaining imperatival meaning.

3 Truth-Conditional Views

We have just raised two objections against force-based accounts of imperatives, each of which,

we think, teaches us something important about imperatival prescriptivity. By ‘prescriptivity’,

we mean to pick out that feature of imperatives in virtue of which they seem to be semantically

suited for telling people what to do. It is because of the prescriptivity of the imperatival type

that to use an imperative with its “literal meaning” (to borrow an idiom from Searle) is to direct

its addressee to do something.17 As we see it, the prescriptivity of imperatives is a feature, in the

first instance, not of their uses, but rather of their literal meanings. Although non-imperatives

can be used prescriptively, imperatives seem to be essentially prescriptive. The first lesson from

the previous section is that we need to explain prescriptivity in such a way that holds out the

promise of accounting for logically complex mixed-mood sentences. Specifically, an account 17 See Searle (1978) for a discussion of these meanings. We hope this claim is intuitively compelling to native English speakers, for most English imperatives involve a phonologically null ‘you’. It might seem that the presence of “third person imperatives” in other languages pose a threat to our claim here—we think they do not. We discuss this later in this section.

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should make it possible to explain how one but not the other of the atomic sentences can be pre-

scriptive. Second, an account should respect Baier’s point, viz., that there is a difference be-

tween self-manipulation and normal action. Although some imperatives do allow self-

manipulation as a way to satisfy them (e.g., “See to it that p!”), we should prefer views whose

account of imperatival meaning discriminates this difference to those that do not.

One way to respond to the first lesson is to maintain that, contrary to initial appearanc-

es, imperatives express propositions that determine truth conditions. As we noted in the intro-

duction, such accounts exist, and they come primarily in two sorts; for reasons that will become

obvious, we will call the first sort performative accounts and the second sort deontic modal ac-

counts.18 Both of these can be understood as locating prescriptivity in the distinctive proposition

claimed to be expressed by imperatives. The performative version of the view starts by noting

that in the standard case a person uses an imperative to direct its addressee to do something.

This view can be articulated in terms of truth: in the standard case, it is true that the use of an

imperative directs the addressee to do what the imperative states. Drawing on this fact, Lewis

suggests that imperatives “…ought to be treated as paraphrases of the corresponding performa-

tives, having the same base structure, meaning, intension, and truth-value at an index or on an

occasion” (1970: 57).19 As an example, he considers

(7) Be late!

and suggests that it corresponds to

18 Zanuttini, Pak, and Portner (2012) call the former speech act views and the latter modal views. Charlow (2014) labels the class of views cognitivist and distinguishes between explicit performative views and modal views. 19 This is not the only possible performative view, but it is both plausible and elegantly simple, so we will focus on it. Davidson (1979) also floats a performative view, according to which imperative sentences have dual truth conditions, the first making prospective anaphoric reference to the second and setting its mood. For example, he would treat (1) as having truth conditions along the following lines: “My next sentence is imperatival in force. You will close the door.” See also Price (1988: ch. 3) and Jackson and Pettit (1998) for views similar to Lewis’s. Bohnert (1945) offers still another truth-conditional analysis: he argues that imperatives have disjunctive truth conditions of the form “Either you will φ or X will hap-pen.”

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(7') I command you to be late.

His view is that (7) has the same truth conditions as (7').

One might object here that commanding is too specific to capture the meaning of im-

peratives, since (7) clearly could be used to perform other prescriptive speech-acts such as rec-

ommending, suggesting, etc. However, we think it is open to Lewis to argue that there is some

genus of which all of speech-acts an imperative can be conventionally used to make are species.

If we call it prescribing, then a more nuanced version of the performative view would hold that

(7) has the truth conditions given in

(7'') I prescribe you to be late.

Then, Lewis might argue that not only does this view allow for straightforward embedding of

imperatives under sentential connectives, but it also captures the way imperatives seem, as a

matter of their meaning, to prescribe something of an agent by writing prescriptivity into their

putative truth-conditional content.

The natural skeptical response to treating (7') or (7'') as a specification of the meaning

of (7) is that whereas (7') and (7'') appear to have truth-apt contents, it seems odd to say that an

imperative sentence such as (7) could be true or false.20 We will elaborate this worry during our

analysis of the deontic modal truth-conditional account. To set the stage for that analysis, we

first want to present two other concerns we have about the performative account. Consider the

generic terms of affirmation and dissent, “Yes” and “No”—focus specifically on the latter. On

Lewis’s view, it seems that using “No” to reject what is said by an imperative amounts to deny-

ing that the prescription has been made. Not only is this clearly false, but it is also an inaccurate

20 We should note here that some (e.g., Austin) suggest that utterances of explicit performative sentences such as (7') or (7'') are not truth-apt (see Bach and Harnish (1979: ch. 10)). Even if this is correct, it will not save the performative analysis of the content of sentence (7). Even if specific utterances of (7') or (7'') are not truth apt, that does not change the fact that those sentences (as distinguished from their utterances) are the sorts of sentences that can embed under “is true.” Moreover, if utterances of (7') and (7'') are not truth-apt, their similarity to the way (7) is typically used would seem to support rather than undermine our contention that imperatives do not have truth-conditions. We thank an anonymous referee for drawing our attention to this.

15

analysis; to say “No” in response to an imperative is typically to refuse to comply with it, not to

deny that it has been issued. This does not seem like a mere quirk of language, so we think Lew-

isian views are going to fail to characterize properly what it is to affirm or to repudiate an im-

perative.21

This is not the only problem that Lewisian views face when subjected to what we might

call a “dialogical analysis”. Consider the range of questions one can ask by saying “Why?” in

response to an imperative. The addressee of (7) might ask “Why?” to query the motives of the

person who has issued the imperative, but the addressee might also, given Lewis’s view, sensi-

bly use “Why?” to ask in virtue of what (7) is true. This is, at very least, bizarre; it is difficult to

think of natural contexts in which an addressee might say “Why?” in response to the issuing of

an imperative in order to ask in virtue of what it is true that the imperative has been issued.

Lewis might respond by saying that although “Why?” can ask this particular question, as a prac-

tical matter, we rarely have a cause to ask it. The mere fact that his account presents this as a

question one might intelligibly ask, however, would seem to tell against the view.

For similar reasons, the account seems to be committed to the intelligibility of the fol-

lowing dialogue:

A: Be late!

B: Why?

A: Because I want to hear myself prescribe something.

The reason this dialogue is weird is that, when B asks A “Why?”, A would normally need to

explain why B should comply with the imperative A has issued; A’s response seems deaf to B’s

query.22

21 Mastop (2005: 13ff) makes a similar point. 22 There are other related problems. As Parsons (2012) argues, the performative view has undesirable consequences about the entailment and inconsistency relations imperatives stand in. For example, it would seem to treat (3) as entailing that someone commanded someone to close the door, which it does

16

This last point is useful not only as a further argument against the performative view but

also for revealing a motivation behind the deontic modal approach.23 This approach begins by

noticing the tight connection between saying “φ!” and “You should φ.” We can explicate this

connection by noting that “Why?”, when asked of either, will often produce the same answer.

Deontic modal versions of the truth-conditional view exploit this connection to explain the

meaning of imperatives in terms of their corresponding should-sentences. To see how such an

account might go, imagine that Jonah is working on a bicycle, and Marty tells him:

(8) Grease the chain!

Insofar as we restrict consideration to Marty’s preferences with respect to Jonah, then the fol-

lowing would seem to be true:

(9) Jonah should grease the chain.

For this reason Kaufmann (2012: ch. 3) has argued that imperatives such as (8) have truth con-

ditions like those of (9).

As is well known in the literature on the semantics of modals, there are many readings

of a should-sentence such as (9), depending on whether the conversational context in which it

occurs explicitly or implicitly encourages the interpretation in terms of moral norms, prudential

maxims, someone’s preferences, or probabilistic standards.24 Hence, the flavor of the ‘should’ is

partially determined by the context of use. For this reason, on Kaufmann’s version of the deon-

tic modal view, (8) has the same truth conditions as (glossing over a few details):

(9') In light of the relevant rules, preferences, or ends, Jonah should grease the

chain.

not, and it would treat (4) as consistent with the sentence “Don’t be late!”, which it seems not to be. Compare Charlow (2014: 631-634) for further discussion. 23 Examples of this approach include Han (1998), Schwager (2006), Aloni (2007), Kaufmann & Schwager (2009), and Kaufmann (2012). We focus on the last of these because it is the most developed. 24 See Kratzer (1977, 1981). For helpful overview of the vast literature that has grown out of Kratzer’s seminal work on the subject, see Portner (2009: 29-45, 47-84) and Hacquard (2011).

17

where the relevant rules, preferences, or ends are determined by the context in which the imper-

ative is used. For example, if Marty’s use of an imperative comes in the context of employee

regulation (imagine that he and Jonah are mechanics at a bicycle shop), it might be interpreted

in light of business rules, whereas if it comes in the context of Marty’s desire for Jonah to get

his hands dirty, it might be interpreted in light of Marty’s desires.

This helps to narrow the sense of ‘should’ that featuring in the deontic modal analysis

of imperatives, but note that not all should-claims that are relativized to rules, preferences, or

ends direct agents to act. For example, in a context where we are outside observers on Larry,

who is severely down on his luck, we might say

(10) Larry should to win the lottery.25

We are clearly not telling Larry what to do; indeed, if we were asked to tell him what to do, we

might say that he should save his money rather than wasting it on lottery tickets. We can even

use a sentence similar to (10) with no agent in mind whatsoever, e.g.,

(11) The lottery should be won by whoever needs the money most.

Because of this, should-sentences such as (10) and (11) have been called “evaluative” in the

sense that they merely evaluate the desirability of some state of affairs rather than tell someone

what to do. The states of affairs evaluated may involve an agent per accidens, but this is not

necessary. It seems, then, that capturing the prescriptivity of imperatives will require more than

giving them truth conditions employing a ‘should’ relativized to rules, preferences, or ends. It

will require conceiving of this ‘should’ as an agentive rather than evaluative deontic modal.26

25 The example derives from Schroeder (2011), drawing on Harman (1973) and Geach (1982), who uses something very similar to argue that ‘ought’ is ambiguous between agentive (his term is ‘deliberative’) and evaluative senses. See also Finlay and Snedegar (2014) for a response to Schroeder, which shows how much of the data he attempts to handle semantically can be handled in terms of Gricean pragmatics. 26 That is, a ‘should’ used to advise/recommend/direct an agent in doing something rather than merely to evaluate a state of affairs as good in some respect. There are a variety of names for what we call “agen-tive” ‘should’s (“deliberative”, “directive”, “performative”, “ought-to-do”) and for what we call “evalua-tive” ‘should’s (“political”, “propositional”, “critical”, “ought-to-be”).

18

Having isolated the relevant sense of ‘should’, let us return to our dialogical analysis.

We noted earlier that asking “Why?” either of an imperative or its corresponding should-

sentence will often evoke one and the same answer. We are now in a position to see why this is

so when it is so. Because it is the agentive ‘should’ that features in the corresponding deontic

modal, to ask “Why?” of this modal claim is to ask what good there could be in or what reasons

there could be for performing the relevant action. When one says “You should φ” and the

‘should’ in question is agentive, there is a presumption that there is some good in and/or are rea-

sons for the agent’s φ-ing. To ask “Why?” in response to this deontic modal assertion is to ask

about the goodness/reasons the speaker takes there to be in the addressee’s φ-ing. “Why?” can

ask about this same goodness or reasons when it is asked in response to an imperative; indeed,

an addressee asks the same question “Why?” if she responds to an imperative with “Why should

I?” The deontic modal view offers an attractive explanation of this; in doing so, it is superior to

the performative view.27

This, we think, helps us learn still more about the distinctive prescriptivity of impera-

tives. An imperative is semantically suited to direct an agent to do something, which may in-

clude exercising her agency to be some way.28 In general, the addressee can probe the reasons

for doing the relevant thing by asking, “Why?” We have just seen that this same question can be

asked of the deontic modal declarative that corresponds with the imperative. In either case, the

agent who asks “Why?” does so to probe the basis of what she is directed to do; in either case,

she is thus probing a direction. Whatever an imperatival sentence directs, therefore, can be di-

rected by a declarative should-sentence; the deontic modal account of imperatives exploits this

fact to explain the distinctive meaning of imperatives.

27 The analysis here draws on the discussion of “Why?” in Anscombe (1963). We have sought to remain neutral on whether the goodness and the reasons that the question probes can be state-given. 28 At the outset, we suggested that imperatives typically conjoin agent terms with action terms. The hedge “typically” was meant to allow for the case of imperatives prescribing someone’s being in some way (E.g., ‘Be there by 10!’). Here we use “do something” loosely to include being in some way; below we speak somewhat more precisely about imperatives mobilizing a “concept around which an agent can or-ganize her will.”

19

This fact also provides a reason for thinking that imperatives have, as a Fregean might

put it, fully saturated contents. A content is fully saturated if, at the highest node of its logical

form, it involves both a concept and an object brought under the concept. Standardly, the object

in question will saturate the concept by taking the form of a grammatical subject. In English, the

grammatical subject of an imperative is typically phonologically null but appears to be semanti-

cally second-personal: if, e.g., I want to command you to run, I can simply say, “Run!”, and the

fact that it is you who are to run is implicit. If it is not clear who an imperative is directed at, we

can use a vocative, e.g., “Amar, run!”, which makes it clear that Amar is the relevant you who is

to run.

Now if you respond by asking me, “Why?”, you are asking me for reasons why you

should run; again, you would be probing the same reasons had you asked “Why?” in response to

my saying, “You should run.” This deontic modal sentence clearly has saturated content, as

does the explication of “Why?”, i.e., “Why should I run?” The grammatical subject of each of

these refers to the same person. The fact that “Why?” asks the same question of the correspond-

ing imperative is thus best explained, it would seem, by taking the imperative to have fully satu-

rated content, its grammatical subject likewise referring to the same person as the explicated

version of “Why?”

One might worry at this point that we are leaning too heavily on the surface grammar of

English to make general points about imperatives, for there are languages that involve what we

might call third person imperatives.29 Indeed, even English seems to allow for them.30 Examples

of third person imperatives include the following:

(12) Rain!

(13) Maître d’, someone seat the guests!

29 We thank Paul Portner for raising this point and for pointing us to all of the examples and citations dis-cussed in this paragraph. 30 Potsdam (1998) suggests as much; example (13) below is from him.

20

(14) Layke tini baje aav˜e.

(14) is a Bhojpuri sentence that translates roughly as ‘The children come at 3 o'clock!’; it might

be said to a teacher with the goal of directing him to ensure that the children arrive at 3.31 These

are interesting cases, but we think that in spite of what their grammar might suggest, the logical

form of each is best understood as a fully saturated content articulating the addressee with a

concept that the addressee is to realize through action. (12), we think, cannot be understood ex-

cept as addressed to some imagined agent—e.g., the gods, the fates, the personified sky, etc.—

for how else could it be imagined to be responsive? (13) and (14) both direct their addressee to

do something: (13) directs the maître d’ to see to it that someone seats the guest, and (14) directs

the addressee to see to it that the children come at 3. If the maître d’ does nothing relevant but

the guests get seated, he has not satisfied the imperative; the same is true if the addressee of (14)

does nothing relevant but the children arrive at 3. In both cases—and, we suspect, in any similar

case—the addressee is called on to see to it that someone else does something. The surface

grammar might disguise the logical structure of these imperatives, but in all of them, it would

appear, the subject is the addressee, and it saturates a concept of seeing to it that someone else

do something.32

Returning to the main line of argument: we also commend the deontic modal view for

satisfying the two desiderata presented at the beginning of the section.33 Because it accounts for

a given imperative’s prescriptivity in terms of its propositional content and thus at the atomic-

sentential level, it is at least prima facie capable of explaining logically complex mixed-mood

sentences. The view also respects Baier’s point. It does not analyze, e.g., “Run!” as calling for

the agent to see to it that she runs; rather, it connects the agent directly with the act of running,

31 Zanuttini, Pak, & Portner (2012) present example (14) and show that such imperatives are robustly at-tested in languages other than English. 32 This means that some imperatives are illuminated by a stit- type analysis. It would be surprising if this were not the case since, as we have already pointed out, “See to it that p!” is obviously imperatival. Our contention above, however, is that this is not an accurate analysis of basic imperatives. 33 One might argue that the performative view also satisfies these desiderata, but it does not reveal the connection between them that we discuss later in this paragraph, so we shall presently set it aside.

21

asserting that the act is something the agent, according to the imperative, should do. Moreover,

the deontic modal view also reveals that these two desiderata are interconnected in a way that

may not have been initially obvious. Both are satisfied by the deontic modal account because

the account explains an imperative sentence’s meaning in terms of how its addressee is to exer-

cise her agency. In the basic case, this prescriptivity is presented as a way of linking an agent,

the grammatical subject, with an action, which is part of the predicate. Because prescriptivity is

thus presented as part of an imperative’s propositional content, the account holds out the possi-

bility of explaining mixed-embedding within the confines of the semantics and logic of proposi-

tional operators; because it immediately links the grammatical subject to the act to be per-

formed, it respects Baier’s point. All of this, we think, counts in the favor of the deontic modal

version of the truth-conditional view of the meaning of imperatives.

Unfortunately, the difficulties of treating imperatives truth-conditionally are, we think,

simply insurmountable. Kaufmann seeks to explain away the appearance that imperatives are

not truth-apt by pointing out that some deontic modal sentences have a performative rather than

descriptive use. For example, in response to the question “May I leave now?”, someone with

authority might say

(15) Yes, you may leave now.

This is best interpreted not as a description of what is permissible given the relevant rules but

rather as the granting of permission. Although (15) embeds under “It is true/false that…,” it

would be weird for someone else to say, “No, that’s false,” unless of course they were speaking

from a higher authority and were canceling the granted permission. It thus seems that sentences

that are grammatically and semantically embeddable in propositional contexts can have nonde-

scriptive performative roles, which, Kaufmann claims, explains the non-truth-conditional ap-

pearance of imperatives.

This explanatory strategy, however, is limited. To see why, note that many modal sen-

22

tences that have performative uses can be embedded under S believes/doubts that or in the con-

text of It might/must/will/could be the case that. Nonsense seems to result, however, when one

embeds imperatives in these contexts: consider, e.g., “Marty doubts that grease the chain.” A

plausible explanation for this nonsensicality is that imperatives, considered as sentences, do not

embed in propositional attitude contexts.34 This is not only a problem for the deontic modal

view; it is a problem for any view, including the performative view, that assigns truth conditions

to imperatives.35

4 The Practitional Approach

Although the deontic modal view faces serious problems, we think that reflecting on its praise-

worthy features can guide the way towards a better approach. As we have just seen, the deontic

modal view captures the way in which an imperative prescribes its addressees to exercise her

agency. As we also noted above, an exercise of agency is something to which the reason-

34 Pendlebury (1986: 363) argues that ‘knows’ and ‘told’ embed both propositional contents as well as something like imperatival content (contrast, e.g., “Rick knows that Sam will play again” with “Sam knows to play again” and “Rick told Sam that he would play again” with “Rick told Sam (to) play again.”). Like us, he thinks propositions should not be assigned as the meanings of imperatives, and ac-cordingly he argues that it shows that ‘told’ and ‘knows’ are not purely propositional verbs. (We say more about ‘told’ in the next footnote.) Our argument against truth-conditional views her depends on an as-sumption which Pendlebury’s argument does not challenge, viz., that ‘believes’, ‘doubts’, and ‘might’ are purely propositional. 35 There has been a flurry of work in recent years on imperatival embedding; see, e.g., Portner (2007), Crnic and Trinh (2008), Zanuttini, Pak, & Portner (2012), Kaufmann and Poschmann (2013), and Kauf-mann (2014). (Thanks to Paul Portner for pointing out this work to us.) Kaufmann (2014) lists examples from Old, Middle, and Contemporary German as well as Korean, Japanese, Slovenian, and English. The English examples, discussed in detail in Crnic and Trinh (2008), are illustrative of how imperatives tend to embed: consider, e.g., “My girlfriend said don’t call her.” This is meant to show that imperatives em-bed under verbs that report speech acts (e.g., ‘said’, ‘told’, ‘ordered’), which are typically assumed to embed something with full sentential structure, transparent to regular grammatical transformations. We do not, however, take this as evidence that imperatives express propositions. Instead, we take the fact that imperatives do not embed under propositional attitude verbs and in epistemic modal constructions as a reason to think imperatival contents are not propositional, which combines with the data regarding ‘said’, ‘told’, and ‘ordered’ to provide a reason to reject the assumption that these speech-act reporting verbs always embed something propositional.

23

probing question “Why?” can apply; this fact guided our dialogical analysis of the view. That

analysis revealed that asking “Why?” either of an imperative or its corresponding should-

sentence often evokes one and the same answer. This, we think, provides a clue for a new ap-

proach to the meaning of imperatives. To discover this clue, let us ask the following: are there

other related statements to which asking “Why?” can evoke one and the same answer?

Return to Marty, Jonah, and the bicycle. Imagine Marty saying either of the following

to Jonah:

(8) Grease the chain!

(16) You should grease the chain.

To either of these, Jonah might ask, “Why?”; in either case, Marty might respond

(17) To make the bike run smoothly.

Suppose Jonah accepts Marty’s explanation of the benefits of chain greasing and forms an in-

tention to grease the chain. Jonah is then in a position to utter either of following sentences

truthfully:

(18) I want to grease the chain.

(19) I intend to grease the chain.

Should he utter either of these, and should someone respond by asking, “Why?”, he can repeat

what Marty said earlier, viz., (17). Now imagine that Jonah starts greasing the chain; imagine

further that someone approaches him, curious about his activity. The following exchange en-

sues:

A: What are you doing?

J: (20) I am greasing the chain.

A: Why?

24

J: (17) To make the bike run more smoothly.

This shows that (17) can be given as one and the same answer to the Why-question asked about

(8), (16), (18), (19), and (20).36

The clue to take from this vignette, we think, is to be found by reflecting further on (18)

and (19). In these sentences, the act of greasing the chain is not specified propositionally. Con-

sider (18). Not only does its predicate lack a that-clause, but it does not seem like it can be

changed into a sentence with a that-clause complement without thereby altering the sentence’s

meaning. Consider the plausible candidates:

(21) I want that I greased the chain.

If (21) is a something an ordinary English speaker might say (it might not be), it expresses one

of two things. It may express a wish to have greased the chain, which in another language might

be captured by the subjunctive mood and which we might paraphrase by, “Would that I greased

the chain!” This is not what (18) expresses. Alternatively, it may express a desire to have

greased the chain, but this neither is what (18) expresses. This may not be obvious in the case of

a mundane and potentially tedious task such as chain greasing, but compare the following:

(22) I want to exercise.

(23) I want to have exercised.

Whereas (23) expresses the desire that a certain fact be true of the speaker—viz., that she has

completed an act of exercising—(22) expresses the desire to perform an act of exercising. These

are not the same.

Returning to possible analyses of (18):

(24) I want that I will have greased the chain.

The predicate phrase here appears to refer to the right kind of thing—a future action—but it ex-

36 The analysis here and below takes its inspiration from Anscombe (1963) and Thompson (2008).

25

presses a desire for it to be true that the speaker has greased the chain, which, as the discussion

of Baier’s point above has shown, is not the same thing as desiring to grease the chain.

(25) I want that I grease the chain.

The simple present-tense of the verb here would seem to indicate a habit, not a single action; to

say this is to express the desire to be a habitual chain-greaser, which is not what (18) expresses.

The response here might be to alter (25) by adding a definite temporal marker:

(25') I want that I grease the chain now.

(25'') I want that I grease the chain tomorrow.

These appear to mean the same as the following, in which the embedded verb phrase is in the

present progressive:

(26) I want that I am greasing the chain.

(26') I want that I am greasing the chain tomorrow.

These sentences express the desire to engage in an act of chain greasing, but they express no

desire to achieve the goal of having fully greased the chain. Along with expressing the desire to

perform an act of chain greasing, (18) also expresses the desire to complete the act successfully,

so it and differs in meaning from (25'), (25''), (26), and (26').

We promised that this analysis would provide a clue to an alternative approach to un-

derstanding imperatival meaning: here it is. The arguments of Section 2 problematize locating

the prescriptivity of imperatives “outside” their content in an external force operation on a sepa-

rable propositional content. It seems, then, that that this prescriptivity must be “inside” that con-

tent, but when we considered views—viz., truth-conditional views—that construe prescriptivity

this way, we found them to be problematic too. Now we have just learned that action-

specifications can feature as predicate complements to “I want…” in infinitival form, and when

they do, they have no propositional analogues. Maybe, then, truth-conditional views are right to

26

locate prescriptivity internal to fully saturated content but wrong to present that content as prop-

ositional. Maybe there is another sort of fully saturated content, one that is essentially prescrip-

tive but non-propositional.

We believe that the best account of imperatival meaning must be given in terms of just

such a content, which we will call practitional content. The term ‘practition’ is Castañeda’s

(1975) term of art for marking content that is like propositional content in consisting in (or be-

ing determined by) the saturation of predicates with subjects but unlike propositional content in

involving a sui generis mode of saturation. Spelling this out offers the prospect, we think, of

locating the prescriptivity of imperatives in the distinctively practitional form that their content

takes. By adopting Castañeda’s terminology, we risk peddling in obscurities and giving the im-

pression we endorse everything he has to say about them.37 So, in the remainder of this section

we will present what we find attractive in Castañeda’s notion by explaining how a fully saturat-

ed content can be put together in a non-propositional way.38

Let us start by reconsidering the traditional way of thinking of the form of a proposi-

tion. In the basic case, a declarative sentence such as

(2) The door is closed

can be thought of as predicating the property of being closed of the door. This remains true in

cases where the subject of a sentence refers to an agent and the predicate of the sentence refers

37 He is, after all, widely thought to be a needlessly obscure philosopher, and partly for this very idea. The Philosophical Lexicon cheekily defines cast a ñeda as follows: “To invert the basic principles of theory construction by seeking to explain a small and unproblematic set of data by means of a huge and opaque set of concepts, principles, and distinctions. ‘After casting a ñeda over a few ordinary moral arguments he spent several years blathering about practitions, noemata, “Legitimacy” as a semantic value, etc.’” 38 We are not, we want to stress, offering any interpretation or defense of Castañeda’s views about the contents of various attitudes, such as intentions or other-regarding preferences. To be sure, his work the-matized very interesting issues about the relationship between the content of imperatives and the content of “practical” attitudes, but we think it is not obvious that one has to give the same story about both. We endeavor here to remain as neutral as possible about psychological contents, focusing instead on language where the data is perhaps a bit more concrete and public. Note that, in a similar vein, a philosopher of language who wants to appeal to propositions as contents of declaratives need not first offer an account of belief contents.

27

to an action. For instance, we might think of

(27) Sarah is closing the door

as predicating the property of closing the door of Sarah.39 In both of these cases, the form of

predication is propositional: the content of each of these sentences determines a truth condition,

and each will be true just in case the grammatical subject has the relevant property. Following

Castañeda, we want to suggest that it is also possible to attach the concept of closing the door to

Sarah, not as something that is true of her, but rather as something she is to exercise her will in

doing. This is how we think the concept attaches to Sarah in (1) when directed at her. Both (27)

and (1) are linguistic expressions of ways of connecting the idea of Sarah with the idea of clos-

ing the door, but the type of connection differs. The latter way, we suggest, is practitional.

We should say a bit more about what we mean when we speak of a concept being satu-

rated in a practitional as opposed to propositional way. Imagine Sarah says one of the following:

(28) I intend to open the door.

(29) I will open the door.

(30) I am opening the door.

These are statements she can make to express how she will exercise or is exercising her will.

Are these not, then, also practitional instead of propositional? We think not. The key difference

between these sentences and (1) can be seen if we return once again to our dialogical analysis.

To each of these, it is sensible to reply, “False!” (28) might be false because Sarah is lying, (29)

might be false because the door is immovable, and (30) might be false because she is hallucinat-

39 Is closing the door really a property? Some, following Thompson (2008), Rödl (2010), and Ford (2011), might think that is not. The predicate has imperfect aspect, which means that it could be in the process of becoming true of someone but not yet (and perhaps never) actually be true of someone. By contrast, one might think that properties are on/off; vagueness aside, either x is F or x is not F. For exam-ple, if at t1 John is going home, but at t2 he is hit by a bus before arriving home, did he at t1 have the prop-erty of going home? We think the answer to this question depends on how one decides to use the term ‘property’ in one’s ontology. Nothing in this paper hangs on this decision, as you can substitute a predi-cate with perfect aspect in examples such as (27) to make the same point.

28

ing. This shows that all of these sentences can be given truth conditions. By contrast, it makes

no sense to say “False!” in response to (1). Even if these are all expressions of agency, only (1)

involves non-truth-conditional saturation, so it is only sentences of its type that we will call

practitional.40

If all of this is correct, (27) and (1) show that there exist pairs of practitions and propo-

sitions that both have the same objects and concepts as constituents but different forms of satu-

ration. This distinction seems to come into semantics at the level of verbal aspect. There are at

least three propositions one can form out of the ingredients Sarah and to close the door, depend-

ing on how one declines the verb for tense and aspect:

that Sarah is closing the door

that Sarah closed the door

that Sarah will close the door

Our claim is that none of these is the same as the practition one gets from combining these in-

gredients. Taking our clue from the chain-greasing vignette, we might represent this combina-

tion with the infinitival form of the verb41:

Sarah (to) go home 40 As such, our analysis classifies sentence-types in a way that is at odds with the surface grammar of some languages. Korean is one such language. Consider the following trio of sentences: (i) Cemsim-ul sa-la (‘Buy lunch!’); (ii) Cemsim-ul sa-ma (‘I will buy lunch’); (iii) Cemsim-ul sa-ca (‘Let’s buy lunch’). This trio exhibits three different clause types: the first is imper-atival, the second is promissive, and the third is exhortative. All three express the organization of an agent’s will around the act of buying lunch, but (i) does so second-personally, (ii) does so first-person-exclusively, and (iii) does so first-person-inclusively. Because of this similarity of meaning and because each differs from the others by only one word, Zanuttini, Pak, and Portner (2012) claim that all three be-long to a common class, which they call the jussive. We have no complaint about this as a grammatical taxonomy. Semantically, however, this fails to distinguish between sentences whose meanings can be determined truth-conditionally—e.g., (ii)—from those that cannot—e.g., (i). Indeed, we think it is a virtue of our account that it allows us to probe the meaning of (iii). If (iii) entails that the goal of collective lunch-buying has been established, then it is liable to truth assessment and is thus a proposition. If it does not entail that this goal is established—because, perhaps, the addressee must first consent to pursuing it—then the statement is not liable to truth assessment and thus is practitional. 41 The connection between imperatives and infinitives is also important to Huntley (1984). Huntley’s view differs from ours, for he insists that imperatives and infinitives share a common semantic value, which is truth-conditional. We thank Paul Portner for drawing our attention to this.

29

Castañeda marks the difference here in terms of distinct modes of “copulation.” He uses the

term here to denote the combining of a grammatical subject with a predicate to form a whole

sentence. He thinks that there are two sorts of copulation:

…the primary difference between *John goes (is going, will go, has gone)

home* and *John, go home* seems to be a difference in the way in which the

property or action of going home is predicated of John…it seems to be a differ-

ence in the way the action of going is thought to be tied to John, i.e. it is a dif-

ference belonging to the copulation of subject and predicate. (1975: 92).

It would be a mistake to suggest that this means there is a distinct copula term in every

expression of a practition: neither (1) nor “Sarah closed the door” contain such a term.42 The

idea of “practitional copulation,” we take it, is that in our abstract representation of the semantic

content of atomic sentences, we should recognize two different kinds of structures, each involv-

ing a distinctive way of linking subjects and predicates. Propositions determine truth conditions,

which are relevant for reasoning about what is the case, and practitions determine some other

kind of conditions, which are relevant for reasoning about what to do. (More on the latter condi-

tions in the next section.) To further clarify the practitional approach, let us compare it to force

and truth-conditional approaches, focusing in particular on their strengths and shortcomings. As

we noted, the strength of the force approach is its apparent simplicity. The practitional account

will seem to some (certainly to the traditional force theorist) to fail on this score, for its distinc-

tive feature is its defining abstract entity. The simplicity of the force approach, however, is part

of its undoing, for that simplicity makes it difficult for it to account for mixed-mood complex

sentences without abandoning the attractive simplicity. The practitional view seems better

equipped for this task. Although the view treats declaratives and imperatives as having semantic

contents of different types—propositions or practitions—they are similar in their being fully

42 Note, however, that just as ‘is’ is the copula term in “Sarah is in her office,” ‘be’ is the copula term in “Sarah, be in your office!” The practitional copula exists, but not all practitional copulation requires its use.

30

saturated contents. Of course, appealing to practitions does not on its own explain how impera-

tives embed under sentential connectives, but it sets up a useful framework for developing an

explanation. Practitional and propositional copulations of subject and predicate are both internal

to the relevant piece of content, so either can conceivably feed into functions characterizing sen-

tential connectives such as conjunction, disjunction, and the conditional. As a result, the practi-

tional view avoids the perplexing task of saying what the force of a whole mixed declara-

tive/imperative sentence is.

We also noted before that the force analyses fail to distinguish self-manipulation from

straightforward action, so they face difficulty accommodating Baier’s point. The deontic modal

truth-conditional view fares better here; so too does the practitional view. The subject of a prac-

tition (in our example, Sarah) is tied in the predicate (‘(to) close the door’) to a concept for that

agent to organize her will around in acting. So, in this way, if imperatives express practitions,

then they not only set goals, but they also address agents as the sorts of beings that can rational-

ly act so as to achieve those goals. To commit to a practition where the agent is oneself is typi-

cally to commit to act straightaway, not to commit merely to see to it that a proposition is made

true. Prescriptivity is internal to the logical form of the practition, and so an account of impera-

tives based on it does not run afoul of Baier’s point. The deontic modal account, we argued, is

to be applauded for its ability to accommodate Baier’s point, so it is similar in this regard to an

account that takes the practitional approach. No truth-conditional view is ultimately acceptable,

however, for imperatives simply do not have truth conditions. A practitional view does not face

this problem. In contrast to the proposition that Sarah is closing the door, the practition Sarah

(to) close the door is not the sort of content that can be true or false. This is apparent in the lin-

guistic expression of these two different kinds of contents.

By contrasting the practitional approach to the other approaches vis-à-vis their short-

comings, we have just given a negative characterization of the sort of view we wish to endorse.

More needs to be said to give a positive characterization of the view—we turn now to this.

31

5 Further Developments: What are Practitions?

One might complain at this point that although we have made a number of remarks about practi-

tions, we have yet to say what, exactly, a practition is. We have defined it structurally, explain-

ing it as a connection of agent to a concept around which she is to organize her will that differs

from the way in which subjects and predicates are connected in propositions. We have also

characterized concepts around which agents can organize their wills infinitivally, noting that

when such an expression is the complement of “I want…”, both the desire to perform the action

and the desire to complete the action successfully are thereby expressed. This is what an agent is

called on to exercise her will in doing when an imperative is issued to her. “Close the door!”,

for example, calls upon its addressee to perform the act of closing the door and to do so with the

goal of succeeding. Beyond these points, however, it still seems fair to ask: what are practi-

tions?

There two ways, we think, to hear this question. First, one might hear it as asking for a

substantive metaphysics of practitions: what in the world are they made of, what kinds of pow-

ers do they have, and where do they fit amongst other things we regard as part of the “furniture

of reality”? Second, one might hear it in a more deflationary spirit. Granting that practitions are

(like many theorists think propositions are) theoretical posits in a particular kind of explanatory

modeling project which thus do not pose any deep metaphysical issues, one might still wonder

about, inter alia, the possibility of modeling them set-theoretically, their compositional and logi-

cal structure, and their role in understanding conversational kinematics. Let us consider each of

these issues in turn.

We can imagine several tacks one might take in pursuing a metaphysics of practitions.

In this arena, Fregean and Russellian views are often distinguished by whether one sees proposi-

32

tions as “thoughts,” i.e., abstract thinkables existing in some the realm of language- and mind-

independent concepts, or as “possible states of affairs,” i.e., entities composable via free recom-

bination of the (often concrete) individuals, properties, and relations that make up facts of the

world. A third (and more recent) metaphysical view conceives of propositions as cognitive

event types (Soames 2010, 2012, 2014). We suspect that at least some of these metaphysical

views of propositions can be reformulated for practitions.

A Fregean metaphysics of practitions, for example, would recognize a fundamentally

different kind of abstract thinkable—practical “thoughts”—involving a fundamentally different

way of subsuming objects under concepts. A Russellian view of practitions is harder for us to

imagine, since practitions are not supposed to be the sorts of things that could be true, but per-

haps one could be constructed by developing a different mode of metaphysical-cum-logical re-

combination of the various objects, properties, and relations, especially if temporally extended

events are added to the basic building blocks. If one is willing to recognize different species of

the cognitive event-type of predication, we think one could also develop a metaphysics of prac-

titions as cognitive event types, whereby actions are predicated of an individual, not as some-

thing true of him but rather as something for him to exercise his will in doing.43

Our official stance, however, is more deflationary. Whether or not it makes sense to talk

about propositions and practitions as real entities whose natures could be studied metaphysical-

ly, we think it makes sense to use semantic models that posit, at least at some level of analysis,

propositions and practitions as the abstract contents of, respectively, declarative and imperative

43 Indeed, this is Hanks view of imperatives, which he claims to have a sui generis kind of content he calls “imperative propositions,” claiming “that there are assertive propositions, interrogative propositions and imperative propositions” (2007: 151). We demur at this nonstandard use of the term “proposition” to in-clude contents that are not truth-apt, but otherwise this can be seen as a metaphysics of practitions as cog-nitive event types. Importantly, on his view, so-called imperative propositions do not stand in the sort of word-to-world representation relation that declarative sentences and their propositional contents are commonly understood to stand. To the contrary, according to Hanks, “[t]he distinctive feature of this im-perative proposition is that its tokens have world-to-word...direction of fit” (2007: 152). More recently (2015: ch. 9), he suggests that the difference between the three basic kinds of contents he recognize boils down to different ways of combining properties and objects. Where declarative propositions combine in such a way to determine a truth condition, imperatives combine in such a way to determine a satisfaction condition.

33

sentences. Even if the resulting models involve important idealizations rendering them imper-

fect representations of reality (as all models do), their theoretical posits can be useful for under-

standing the structure of meaningfulness and related facts about the learnability and productivity

of language. The past fifty years of semantic theorizing about declarative meanings has shown

this to be the case, not by trying to limn the nature of propositions but by explaining the follow-

ing: (i) how to model the propositional contents of particular sentences such that it functionally

captures intuitive semantic similarities and differences (ii) how to understand the logical rela-

tions between propositions of varying logical complexity, and (iii) how a semantics based on

propositions might interact with a conversational kinematics based on the notion of updating the

context.

If we want our claim that practitions need to be added to the semanticist’s tool-kit to be

compelling but do not want to give a metaphysics of imperatives, we will do well to give expla-

nations similar to (i)-(iii) for practitions. We are not in a position here to develop such explana-

tions fully, but we will conclude by addressing them with some programmatic remarks.

5.1 Modeling Practitional Content

We have said that imperatives saturate a predicate around which an agent might organize her

will with a term referring to the agent (usually the addressee) who is to organize her will in this

way. As we put it before, “Jonah, (you) grease the chain!” expresses the practition Jonah (to)

grease the chain, which can be thought of as content saturating the action concept (to) grease

the chain with Jonah.

An initially tempting way to make that idea more specific would be to develop a model

of the practitional predicate that mimics the way the content of one-place predicates is often

modeled in formal semantics, viz., as a partition on possible entities. For this to help to make

sense of practitions, however, we would need to modify how we think of this partition to avoid

obscuring two important features of practitions that make them suitable for organizing agents’

34

wills. We can appeal to these features in turn to put two desiderata on the model. First, practi-

tions are not truth-apt, so they do not determine truth conditions. This means that the partition

on possible entities cannot be conceived as delimiting the set of individuals of which, relative to

worlds, some predicate is true. Some other conception of the partition is needed; let the articula-

tion of this partition define the partition desideratum. Second, unstructured sets of possible enti-

ties are not fine-grained enough to distinguish between necessarily coextensive though obvious-

ly nonsynonymous action predicates. “Draw a Euclidean quadrilateral with more than two right

angles!” and “Draw a rectangle!” provide two different concepts around which someone might

organize her will. The former is an imperative that requires quite a bit of mathematical acumen

to follow, whereas many three-year olds can follow the latter. To be sure, the first practition will

not be satisfied unless the second is satisfied (and vice versa), but the rationality of someone’s

strategy for doing so might vary depending on which of these provide the concept around which

she is organizing her will. If possible, we want our model to have the sort of structure necessary

to mark the difference here: call this the structural desideratum.

As a first step towards meeting the partition desideratum, we might enrich a standard

truth-conditional model to include types of semantic values over and above the standard e (enti-

ty), t (truth value), and various functions relating these two things. We would need something

like e, t, and l (legitimacy value), plus the increased range of complex functions that can relate

these things.44 This would let us treat the set of possible individuals who are, e.g., to grease the

chain at some time t differently from the set of possible individuals who, e.g. are greasing the

chain at some time t: the former contains the possible individuals of whom the prescriptive 44 As we noted above (fn. 5), Vranas (2008, 2011) proposes to develop a logic of imperatives with two kinds of semantic values for imperatives–what he calls “obedience” and “binding”. The latter is similar to what we are here calling legitimacy. This raises the question of whether we should work instead with a semantic model for natural language imperatives that has pairs of values for imperatives. Maybe it does but this complex issue goes beyond the brief comments we are in a position to offer here about semantics and logic of imperatives. See Charlow (2014: 627-629) for further discussion and worries about satisfac-tion-values as semantic values for imperatives. We take the idea of legitimacy values from Castañeda (1975) who, like Vranas and Charlow, thinks that preservation of something like legitimacy across imper-atival arguments is an important and understudied logical property of those arguments. This view arises in response to perceived problems with attempts—Hare (1949, 1952: ch. 1-2), Geach (1958), and Kenny (1966)—to develop a logic of satisfaction conditions that mimics the standard logic of truth conditions.

35

predicate (to) grease the chain at t is legitimate, whereas the latter contains the possible indi-

viduals of whom the descriptive predicate is greasing the chain at t is true. To be sure, this way

of enriching a formal semantic model would require quite a bit of rebuilding from the ground

up. It is worth noting, however, that unless one takes the truth-conditional approach to the

meaning of imperatives, such rebuilding is going to be necessary anyway to handle mixed-mood

sentences. Although

(5') You should get some matches, and I’ll start collecting tinder.

(6') You should bring some peanut brittle, or I’ll get some.

are plausibly said to be true just in case both/one of their parts are/is true, it is not obvious what

semantic function ‘and’ and ‘or’ perform in mixed-mood sentences, such as

(5) Get some matches, and I’ll start collecting tinder.

(6) Bring some peanut brittle, or I’ll get some.

Above, we noted that the development of a compositional semantics for mixed-mood sentences

is not an easy task; we set it aside to focus instead on what we view as a prior conceptual issue,

viz., the prescriptivity of unembedded imperatives. Fortunately, however, Charlow (2014) has

recently developed what we take to be a promising semantics for imperatives designed to ex-

plain the compositional semantic contribution they make to complex mixed-mood sentences. It

is thus worth our saying a few words about his proposal and how it might be integrated with the

practitional account of the meaning of imperatives.

Charlow proposes to generalize a typical possible-worlds semantic model. In this kind

of model, we conceive of correctness of declaratives relative to possible worlds as truth at the

world, such that the content of a declarative can be modeled as a partition of possible worlds.

Charlow’s idea is to treat that as a special case where the other special case is the correctness of

imperatives relative to plans, which he conceives of in terms of some action’s being required by

the plan. More precisely, if we think of a plan abstractly simply as a set of action descriptors,

36

Charlow suggests that we might characterize requiring by thinking of sets of action descriptors

as inducing a partial ordering of sets of possible worlds (roughly from “worst,” where fewest of

the actions are performed, to “best,” where most of the actions are performed). Then, a plan can

be said to require an action, α’s φ-ing, only if it is true that α φs in all of the best worlds relative

to that plan. Sentential connectives coordinating contents of either type can be treated as func-

tions from semantic values of the appropriate type (truth relative to worlds for declaratives and

what he calls being required relative to plans for imperatives) to an abstraction of from those

semantic values.

Although we suspect that an imperative’s satisfaction being required relative to some-

one’s plan is only one way for its practitional content to be legitimate, we are inclined to adopt

the basic structure of Charlow’s approach to the compositional semantics for embedding imper-

atives. By conceiving of imperatives as correct (in the sense of legitimate) relative to some-

thing—plans, norms, ordered preference sets, etc.—like declaratives are correct (in the sense of

true) relative to worlds, we can then model the contents of both types of sentences as partitions

on those things relative to which the sentences are correct. Sentential connectives, such as ‘and’

and ‘or’, can then be treated as correctness-functions on something similar (though adjustments

to the logic will be needed) to the way standard declarative semantics treats these connectives as

truth functions.

Charlow’s recent work thus can serve as a guide for modeling practitions as they embed

under logical connectives; so too can still more recent work by Hellie. Motivated in part by a

desire to represent the temporal structure of action and the way this affects the forms of rational

support there are for intentions and commands in an account of the content of imperatives, Hel-

lie (forthcoming: 2, 26-40) proposes to incorporate procedures into his semantic model, which

he treats as the nonpropositional contents of imperatives. As he conceives them, procedures are

not eternal such that we might represent them with an ordered set of worlds (e.g., with all of the

37

worlds where the relevant person closes the door at the top of the ordering) but rather “a struc-

tured, nonpropositional representation of a plan of action” (forthcoming: 2).

We see this general idea as a further step in the right direction to modeling the structure

of practitions. However, the structure Hellie achieves strikes us as too anemic. Formally, he

adds more temporal structure by incorporating a temporal interval to the modeling of the action

predicates that can form imperatives. An action predicate, he suggests, might be said to deter-

mine “extended centered worlds” or world-interval-individual triples. For example, he treats

running around the block as determining the set of world-interval-individual triples where, rela-

tive to a world, the relevant individual commences running around the block at the beginning of

the interval and concludes at the end of the interval (forthcoming: 30). An imperative such as

“Sarah, close the door!” is then modeled as world-interval pairs, viz., the set of world-interval

pairs where it is legitimate to prescribe shutting the door of Sarah.

One important shortcoming with this, however, is that it does not have enough structure

to distinguish between necessarily coextensive practical predicates. This is the well-known bug-

bear of possible worlds semantics, and as long as we model practitions in terms of sets of possi-

bilia, the problem is likely to remain unsolved. For this reason, we would ultimately strive for a

semantic model that represents practitions (and propositions) not merely as sets of entities but

rather as something like sententially structured. It is a difficult outstanding issue in the philoso-

phy of language whether the successes of a Montogovian compositional semantics built on se-

mantic composition conceived as function application can be integrated with the idea that sen-

tential contents are subject-predicate structured.45 Without claiming any particular license to

optimism on this front, we should nonetheless note that we have developed the idea of practi-

tions in section 4 in terms of their subject-predicate structure, which, as ever, we see as sui gen-

eris and so not reducible to the subject-predicate structure of declarative sentences. Rather than

use a semantic model of sets of worlds or sets of world-interval pairs, then, perhaps we should

45 For an attempt to integrate them, see Pickel (unpublished).

38

model practitions as sets of ordered pairs <α, ϕ> of agents and goals agents can pursue. Each of

these pairs can be thought to determine a set of world-interval pairs, viz., the worlds where it is

legitimate to tell α to ϕ in the interval, where telling α to ϕ is different from telling α to Ψ, even

when all worlds where α ϕs she also Ψs. This would allow us treat legitimacy of a practition as

hyperintensional in a way that the truth of a proposition is typically not treated. Something like

this increased intensional structure seems like it is going to be necessary to meet the structural

desideratum. Here is a place where we think adding practitions to the semantic tool-kit would

help.

Our aim in developing these sketchy remarks is not to propose a formal model for im-

peratives but to say a bit more about what we are thinking they are like, not in the spirit of limn-

ing a structure of reality but in the spirit of identifying criteria of adequacy on a the posits of a

particular theoretical model.

5.2 The Logic of Practitions

It is undeniable that imperatives stand in logical relations like entailment and inconsistency. For

example, “Sally, go home!” stands to “Sally, go somewhere!” very much like “Sally went

home” stands to “Sally went somewhere.” Similarly, “Grease the chain!” stands to “Don’t

grease the chain!” very much like “Jonah will grease the chain” stands to “Jonah won’t grease

the chain.” Moreover, imperatives seem to be combinable via Boolean connectives into logical-

ly complex imperatives that have declarative analogues. Given the two imperatives “Close the

door!” and “Open the window!”, we can generate the more complex “Close the door and open

the window!”; as with its analogous declaratives, the latter, complex sentence seems to entail

each of its conjuncts. Both of the sentential atoms in this example are imperatival, but as we

have noted throughout, imperatives can also combine with declaratives in mixed-mood sentenc-

es. This is perhaps most common with the conditional, which behaves somewhat like the de-

clarative conditional. If I tell you “If it rains, bring in the laundry” and it starts to rain, then by

39

something like modus ponens, you are, as per my imperative, to bring in the laundry. These and

related facts need to be explained by a logic of imperatives.

Inspired by the conjunctive and conditional examples just given, one might hope to

produce this logic by simply extending the familiar logic of propositions. As Ross (1944) points

out, however, no such simple extension is possible, for disjunction-introduction is not valid for

imperatives. Consider the following pairs:

(31) The letter has been mailed.

(31') The letter has been mailed, or the letter has been burned.

(32) Mail the letter!

(32') Mail the letter, or burn the letter!

(31') follows from (31), but (32') does not follow from (32). This may be the most well-

discussed failure of propositional logic to extend to imperatives,46 but it is not the only one: as

Vranas (2011) points out, although material conditional propositions are true when their ante-

cedent is false, it is puzzling what to say about parallel imperatival cases. For example: does

avoiding meeting her count as a way of satisfying the imperative “If you meet her, warn her!”?

We think Vranas is right to argue that, if we are to develop a logic of imperatives, we

must recognize that an imperative can have a semantic value besides satisfaction. He calls this

“bindingness” and distinguishes two kinds of imperatival validity: “A pure imperatival argu-

ment is (1) obedience-valid exactly if, necessarily, its conclusion is obeyed if the conjunction of

its premisses is obeyed, and is bindingness-valid exactly if, necessarily, its conclusion is binding

if the conjunction of its premisses is binding” (2011: 478). Vranas’s notion of binding is similar

to what we have been calling the legitimacy of imperatives.47 Understanding practitions as sen-

46 See, e.g., Williams (1963), Mastop (2005), Portner (2010), Vranas (2008, 2010, 2011), Barker (2012), Fox (2012), Charlow (2014), Hellie (forthcoming), and Starr (unpublished). 47 As such, it is not surprising that Vranas also treats imperatives as having nonpropositional contents, with semantic values that are not truth-values: “…propositions are what declarative sentences (and de-clarative utterances) typically express, and similarly prescriptions are what imperative sentences (and imperative utterances) typically express. If propositions are (as I take them to be) abstract entities, exist-ing regardless of whether they are ever expressed, then so are prescriptions” (2008: 532).

40

tentially structured abstracta that determine a partition on world-interval pairs conceived as de-

limiting the conditions when it is legitimate to tell someone to do something provides a nice

framework, we think, to make sense of the idea that the logic of imperatives is as much a logic

of legitimacy (or “bindingness”) conditions as satisfaction conditions.48

The fact that practitions copulate an agent concept with an infinitivally-specified con-

cept around which she can organize her will can go a long way, we think, towards explaining

why imperatives do not allow either for disjunction-introduction or for conditional satisfaction

by antecedent falsification. Disjunction-introduction is valid for propositional logic because that

logic tracks truth, and whenever a proposition is true, so too is any disjunctive proposition that

contains it as one of the two basic disjuncts. Practitional logic does not track truth, because

practitions are the contents of imperative, and these are not truth-apt. Whatever exactly this log-

ic tracks, it must respect the telic nature of imperatives. We have captured this by specifying

their predicates infinitivally and suggesting that joining an agent term and a prescriptive (non-

finite) predicate forms a different abstract content than joining an agent term and a descriptive

(finite) predicate (i.e., <α, to ϕ> is distinct from <α, ϕed>). Every world where α ϕed is a world

where α ϕed or πed, but not every world where it is legitimate to tell α to ϕ is a world where it is

legitimate to tell α to ϕ or to π. This prevents disjunction-introduction from being valid for im-

48 Vranas (2008) pursues a more conservative development of this idea than we are inclined to pursue. We follow him in thinking that imperatives have nonpropositional contents, but he models these contents as pairs of propositions, which he in turns models in the standard way in terms of sets of worlds. He writes “to each prescription correspond two incompatible propositions: its satisfaction proposition, equiv-alent to the claim that the prescription is satisfied, and its violation proposition, equivalent to the claim that the prescription is violated… If propositions are ‘identified’ with sets (e.g., sets of possible worlds or sets of histories in a branching time model), then instead of talking about the satisfaction, violation, and avoidance propositions of a prescription one can talk about its satisfaction, violation, and avoidance sets; moreover, negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions of propositions amount then respectively to comple-ments (e.g., with respect to the set of all relevant possible worlds), intersections, and unions of sets. I adopt this identification from now on” (2008: 533-535). As he shows, that modeling decision can be used predict intuitive entailment relations between imperatives and to diagnosis cases where intuitions diverge. With sets of worlds at its base, however, we would expect this semantics to face one of the core difficul-ties of all possible worlds semantics, viz., necessarily coextensive but nonsynonymous terms. It is of course fine to bracket the challenge of hyperintensionality to make progress elsewhere (which we take to be the force of Vranas’s “adopting” the “identification”), but we suspect something like sentential struc-ture rather than the minimal structure of pairs of sets of worlds is ultimately going to be necessary to ad-dress that challenge.

41

peratives, for the reasons supporting the goal specified by an atomic imperative do not support

the goal specified by a disjunctive imperative that includes the atomic imperative as one of the

disjuncts. Similarly, the conditional imperatives prescribe a goal just in case the antecedent con-

ditions obtain. That goal is not pursued by acting so as to falsify the antecedent conditions, so

making “You see her” false in response to “If you see her, warn her!” does not satisfy the im-

perative.49

It is not clear to us the best way to formalize these ideas, but we think an approach that

takes seriously the sui generis structure of practitions and understands logical relations between

them at least in part in terms of legitimacy conditions will offer tools usefully enriching the

standard semantic tool kit.

5.3 Practitions in the Update of Context

According to Stalnaker’s (1970, 1978) well-known account of conversational kinematics, con-

versations take place on the backdrop of a contextually determined “Common Ground,” which

is a set of propositions mutually assumed to be accepted by all participants to the conversation.

If the Common Ground is modeled as the set of worlds where these propositions hold, then, in

the normal case, assertions can be understood as attempts to update this set by intersecting it

with the set of worlds where the propositional content of the assertion holds.

Portner (2004, 2007) has proposed to extend the relevant notion of context to capture

the difference in meaning between declaratives and imperatives without relying on a notion of

sentential force or suggesting that imperatives have truth conditions.50 The core idea is to think

of the canonical conversational role of a sentence as in part determined by its sentential mood,

49 For more on the role of instrumentality in telic logic, see Thompson (2008). He draws his inspiration from Anscombe (1963), who presents this logic as the form of practical reasoning. 50 This follows related work by Ginzburg (1995a, 1995b) and Roberts (1996), who extend the framework to explain the discourse function of interrogatives by adding a Question Set containing representations of the open questions in an ongoing conversation. We shall set this aside here.

42

where this then determines the discourse object an unembedded use of the sentence attempts to

“update”. Whereas Stalnaker suggests that declaratives are canonically used to make assertions

in an attempt to update the Common Ground, Portner suggests that the canonical use of an im-

perative is to prescribe something, which he conceives as an attempt to update the To-Do List of

the prescription’s addressee. To be more precise, whereas the Common Ground of an ongoing

conversation is shared among the conversational participants, To-Do Lists belong to individual

conversational participants. For this reason, Portner posits a To-Do List Function as the dis-

course object on a par with the Common Ground; this takes as inputs individual conversation

participants and returns each of their To-Do Lists.

In terms of an abstract model of conversational kinematics, the key question is how to

model To-Do Lists, which in turn affects how to think of imperatival updates of context. Portner

suggests modeling To-Do Lists as a set of properties: “the To-Do List of an agent α is a set of

properties, and the participants in the conversation mutually assume that α will try to bring it

about that he or she has each of these properties” (2007: 352). In the modal spirit, the idea is to

treat To-Do Lists as sets of sets of individuals but to conceive of these sets not as lists of proper-

ties that could be true of possible individuals but rather lists of properties that individuals could

be expected to make true of themselves. This coheres with his treatment of the semantic value

of an imperative as a property.

He includes obvious properties corresponding directly to actions, such as being such

that one goes to the store, but he also includes properties where the actions one needs to take in

order to acquire the property are considerably less determinate. He writes, “A To-Do List may

also have properties like [λwλx. x is happy in w] or even [λwλx. there is world peace in w]…

Because of properties like these, the name ‘To-Do List’ is a bit inaccurate; it would be more

accurate to call it the ‘To-Make-True-of-Me List’” (2007: 352, fn 2). However, there is a sense

in which, Portner is very restrictive about the type of properties that can go on To-Do Lists:

“We hypothesize that an imperative denotes a property which can only be true of the addressee”

43

(2004: 5).51 In this way, we might think of the properties as essentially agent-connected. This is

a key part of the way in which Portner’s account makes sense of imperatival prescriptivity.

Portner conceives of canonical uses of imperatives as attempts to add the agent-connected prop-

erty expressed by the imperative sentence to the addressee’s To-Do List. For example, suppose

we are discussing the cold room and I say to Brian “Close the door!” Portner would view this as

an attempt to add a property to Brian’s To-Do List, thereby updating the mutually assumed To-

Do List Function in our ongoing conversation. If successful, the property added is that of having

closed the (relevant) door, which is conceived of as a property that no one besides Brian in the

conversation (or otherwise) can instantiate.52

Predictably, we think that Baier’s point poses a challenge here.53 Her point, recall, is

that there is an important difference between some agent S directly performing some act ϕ (e.g.,

51 Formally he captures this by representing the property as a function whose domain is restricted to the addressee in the context in which an imperative is used. He gives the following example:

[[Leave!]]w*,c = [λwλx : x = addressee(c) . x leaves in w].

He writes, “The condition that the argument x is the addressee is given as a domain restriction, so that this function returns neither true nor false when applied to individuals other than the addressee” (2004: 5). 52 Mastop (2005) offers a different conversational-update account. He replaces the idea of a To-Do List with that of a “Schedule,” which in turn is populated by action-representations that are explicitly distin-guished from (mere) properties. His goal is to avoid analyzing imperatives either explicitly or tacitly in terms of declaratives. We agree with the order of explanation he pursues and find this to be a congenial account of the conversational kinematics of standard use of imperatives. Because of sentences such as “Be happy!” and “Achieve world peace!”, however, we prefer to see To-Do Lists as lists of practitions (which can include “concepts around which an agent is to organize her will”) even if these are not, strictly speaking, “action representations.” 53 There are other challenges to Portner’s account of the potential of imperatives to update context that we won’t stress here but also think a semantics based on structured practitions rather than sets of possibilia might help to alleviate. For example, quantified imperatives, such as “Someone, get a doctor!” obviously don’t place [λwλx : x = addressee(c) . x gets a doctor in w] on each individual addressee’s To-Do Lists, but it’s also strained to think that they place something like [λwλx : x = addressee(c) . x sees to it that some member of the group gets a doctor in w] on each individual addressee’s To-Do List. Moreover, as we have already seen, every world where someone draws a rectangle is a world where she draws a Eu-clidean quadrilateral with more than two right angles, but conversational participants will not necessarily mutually assume that someone trying to acquire the property of having drawn a rectangle will be trying to acquire the property of having drawn a Euclidean quadrilateral with more than two right angles. Finally, it is not clear how Portner’s view can adequately explain the update potential of mixed-mood complex sen-tences of the sort discussed in Section 2. These appear to coordinate sentential contents and yet subsume whatever it is that distinguishes imperatives from declaratives. Charlow (2014: 652-654) argues that Port-ner’s view cannot account for these cases and that this counts decisively against the view. Although we are sympathetic with Charlow’s complaints, and see them ultimately as reasons to find the distinctive

44

speaking sharply to the boy stealing her raspberries) and S’s acting so as to bring about the truth

of the proposition that S ϕ’s (e.g., her bringing it about that she speaks sharply to the boy steal-

ing her raspberries). Both involve the agent performing the act ϕ, but in the latter case ϕ is a

consequence of self-manipulation, not an immediate act of agency. According to Portner, what

an imperative directs its addressee to do is to make a property true of oneself. However exactly

one thinks of this property, one might reasonably worry that this is little different from saying

that an imperative directs its addressee to bring about the truth of a proposition which involves

her having a property. The point comes out clearly when thinking about examples such as

speaking sharply to the boy, but it is also true of all other imperatives, including simple impera-

tives such as “Close the door!” If Baier’s point presents a legitimate worry about force accounts

of imperatives, it would seem to do the same for Portner’s account of the context update poten-

tial.54

Nevertheless, we think Portner’s idea of explaining the canonical discourse function of

imperatives by enriching Stalnaker’s account of conversational kinematics with To-Do Lists is

promising. Moreover, we think it is pretty clear that one could avoid Baier’s challenge in this

theoretical context by altering the way in which To-Do Lists are conceived. Portner presents a

To-Do List as an individualized menu of properties each conversational participant is mutually

element of imperatival meaning in their contents rather than in their context-update potentials, we will not press the matter here. 54 In a paper far too rich to do justice to here, Starr (unpublished) develops a conversational update ac-count of the meaning of imperatives that is more radically “dynamic” than Portner’s version. Starr’s se-mantics assigns context update functions to imperatives as their semantic values rather than truth condi-tions, propositions under force operations, or properties. This provides a novel treatment of imperatives imbedded under sentential connectives, which is impressive in the range of data it can predict and ex-plain. Engaging seriously with Starr’s work requires a reexamination of some of the basic assumptions of how one does semantics; this goes well beyond our present project. The only thing we will say about Starr’s view is that we suspect his account is—like Portner’s—subject to a version of Baier’s worry. This is because the semantics uses the notion of a “proposition radical” to define the preference ordering up-date functions (see §4.2). Indeed, this turns out to be key for making his account of disjunction unified across imperatives and declaratives. As such, we are concerned that the view might elide the distinction between updating a preference ordering with a preference that a proposition be true and a preference to act. That being said, Starr signals that his use of a propositional radical abstracts, for the sake of simplici-ty, away from the fact that a proposition radical has more basic parts corresponding to a determiner phrase and a verb phrase. Perhaps when that abstraction is lifted this distinction can be captured in a way that is sensitive to Baier’s point.

45

assumed to be committed to making true of herself. The alternative we have in mind is a com-

mon list of practitions around which the agents relevant to a particular conversation are mutual-

ly assumed to be committed to organizing their wills. Since organizing one’s will around speak

sharply to the boy is different from organizing one’s will around bring it about that I speak

sharply to the boy, this will respect Baier’s point. Moreover, since organizing one’s will around

draw a rectangle is distinguishable from organizing one’s will around draw a Euclidean quad-

rilateral with more than two right angles, this also allows us to distinguish the conversational

update potential of necessarily coextensive imperatives.

Perhaps a metaphor will help to elucidate the suggestion. As Portner conceives them,

To-Do Lists belong to individual agents. We might imagine a given list as something an agent

wears around her neck, visible to all conversational participants but belonging only to the agent

herself. If, instead, we think of To-Do Lists as common discourse objects populated by practi-

tions, they might be imagined as a bulletin board that all conversational participants can see,

read, and attempt to update.55 In terms of this metaphor, a typical use of “John, go home!” could

be understood as an attempt to put a practitional copulation of John + (to) go home, i.e., the

practition expressed by this sentence in context, on the shared To-Do List of the ongoing con-

versation. This is the list of things it is legitimate to expect John to do. Because that is different

from the practitional copulation of John + (to) bring it about that you have the property of hav-

ing gone home, it respects Baier’s point.

Part of Portner’s reason for thinking of To-Do Lists as populated by properties is to

handle imperatives such as “Be happy!” or “Achieve world peace!”, which do not seem to pre-

scribe a specific action. Fortunately, a To-Do List populated with practitions can make sense of

these too. As long as the concept expressed by the predicate term can be thought of as a concept

around which someone might organize her will in acting, then it can be the concept copulated of

55 The bulletin board metaphor can also be found in the literature on collective intentionality—see Tuomela (2005). We suspect that our account of imperatives can be usefully applied to discussions of collective intentionality, but we will not pursue the matter here.

46

an agent in a practition. The way that Portner conceives of To-Do Lists is designed to accom-

modate these sorts of imperatives along with ones that more clearly prescribe specific actions;

here again, we find the communal versions of these lists useful in elaborating our understanding

of practitions and the conversational role of imperatives that express them.

In the end, we think it would be wrong to locate the distinctive prescriptivity of impera-

tives in their canonical discourse function rather than their practitional contents. Nevertheless,

we think it would be promising to think of imperatives as having a canonical discourse function

of attempted updates to To-Do Lists, as long as these are not conceived as lists of properties

belonging to specific discourse participants but rather communal lists of practitions.

6 Conclusion

At the outset, we claimed that an account of the meaning of imperatives should be able to ex-

plain the semantic features that distinguish imperatives from declaratives, which we suggested

are partially analogous to the conceptual features that distinguish practical and theoretical rea-

soning. We highlighted what we take to be the most crucial difference, viz., the way an impera-

tive directs an agent to organize her will around realizing a concept. Accordingly, we expressed

our desire for an account that captures this while treating imperatives as involving full sentence-

level saturated content in their logical form. The account that is needed to capture these points,

we have claimed, will reject the assumption that the only kind of full sentence-level saturated

content is a proposition. By reviving this Castañedian thought and situating it in a new theoreti-

cal context, we hope to have laid important groundwork for a new and better theory of the

meaning of imperatives. The last section indicates some of the most pressing tasks for construct-

ing that theory; we hope to have shown there how some contemporary work on imperatives can

be drawn on to develop the practitional approach and how that work might be further enhanced

by adding practitions to the semanticist’s tool kit.

47

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