Oops, there’s a small mistake in one of the arguments against the contextualist account of colour below. But it’s an instructive mistake, so it’s not an utter disaster.

At one stage I used the following form of argument

Premise: There exists a phrase P such that I can say “Tunn and Larry said that P”
Conclusion: There exists a proposition p such that Tunn and Larry both expressed that proposition.

Well that’s not right in general, and in fact the exception is relevant here, so I retract that argument. Here’s an exception – or at least what looks like an exception to me:

Tunn: That looks orange.
Larry: That looks orange.
Me: Tunn and Larry said that looks orange.

I think that’s OK, and I think that it just says that each of Tunn and Larry said that the desk looks orange to them. In general it’s possible I think for a variable in the P phrase to be filled in by the speaker in each case, even when that makes for a different proposition in each case. Since that’s much of what the contextualist needs in this case, my argument doesn’t go very far.

This leads to an interesting possibility in that there are things one can say using elison that cannot be explicitly said (at least without seriously changing the grammar of the sentence). Consider

(1) Tunn said that looks orange, and so did Larry.

I think that can be used to mean Tunn said that it looks orange to her, and Larry said it looks orange to him. But you can’t say that by making the relativisation explicit, as in:

(2) Tunn said that looks orange to her, and so did Larry.

That has to mean that Larry said it looks orange to Tunn. If we have two speakers of the same gender, there’s still an ambiguit, but in cases like (2) I think it’s unambiguous and means something different to (1).

Anyway, the argument about “Tunn and Larry said that… ” below seems to me to fail. I still think the contextualist claim is a pretty implausible claim about the syntax/semantics of colour sentences, but the argument I gave for that doesn’t work.