As Sabine Iatridou and I are putting the finishing touches on another collaboration, I am struck yet again by the puzzle raised by the ritual incantation: “The authors appear in alphabetical order.”
It is clear what the sentence is used to convey: that the order of the authors’ names is not meant to reflect the importance of their contributions but was solely determined by the alphabetical order (F before I, in our case). But how do we manage to convey that with this sentence?
Is it that “alphabetical order” here has as its semantic content “an order determined by the order of the alphabet” rather than “an order consistent with the order of the alphabet”?
If so, we have to concede that “alphabetical order” must be ambiguous, since it is not a contradiction to say that “the authors appear in alphabetical order, but only accidentally so”.
Alternatively, we might want to tell a Gricean story. What is said by the sentence is a near triviality: anyone looking at the list of authors and a knowledge of the alphabet will realize that the order is consistent with the order of the alphabet.#[1] So, the cooperative hearer will draw the inference that more is meant: namely, that the truth of the sentence is more than an accident.
The Gricean story would actually be a natural ingredient in an ambiguity story as well, since the near triviality of the sentence under one of its putative readings would serve as an incentive to resolve the ambiguity towards the more informative reading.
Lastly, one could imagine an analysis that says that the sentence does say that the order was non-accidentally determined by the alphabet but that the source of that reading is not a lexical ambiguity but lies in the presence of a covert “generic” operator. Something like this is often appealed to when dealing with the apparent ambiguity of a sentence like “Every coin in my pocket is silver”#[2], which can be taken to convey an accidental generalization (”it just so happens that currently every coin in my pocket is silver”) or can convey a lawlike generalization (”as a matter of policy, I allow only silver coins in my pocket”). Reinterpretation of a (near) triviality as conveying a lawlike generalization happens with surface tautologies like “Boys will be boys” (but this also involves reinterpreting the predicate as referring to stereoptypical properties of boys).
I am thinking about expanding this into a squib, but would like to hear whether readers share my befuddlement and what their guesses at the appropriate analysis are.
[1]: Actually, our case is not the best example of that, because people might erroneously have thought that “von Fintel” should appear after “Iatridou” in an alphabetic order.
[2]: The example is due to Nelson Goodman.
The case of ‘appear’ in your example reminds me of the discussion of the verb ‘pick out’ in Greg Carlson’s dissertation (which Greg has been presenting in his seminar here at UMass in the past weeks) [the following examples are from p. 167 (Garland edition)]:
There seem to be two versions of ‘pick out’, one extensional and one intensional with respect to its object position:
For ‘John picked out a hat’ to be true, there has to be some particular hat that John picked out.
But compare the following intensional usage of ‘pick out’ (assume that the coldest state is the least populous state):
(1) Procedure P picks out the coldest state.
(1′) Procedure P picks out the least populous state.
Clearly, these sentences aren’t equivalent, even though their objects are extensionally equivalent.
With ‘appear’, something similar seems to be going on, at least in your example. Crucially, the relevant sentence is written by the authors, and it is clear that the authors are the ones that decided on the order in which their names appeared (How would we understand the sentence if it was prefixed ‘Editors note: …’?). So, in a way, what you’re saying with the sentence ‘The authors’ names appear in alphabetical order’ is that you had a method of picking out the order
in the intensional sense of ‘pick out’. Had the spelling of your names, the conventions about where ‘von’-names fit in alphabetical listings, or the alphabet been different, the order might have been switched around.
We can make the same sort of argument as for (1) above:
(2) The authors’ names appear in alphabetical order.
(2′) The authors’ names appear in the order of length (counted in the numbers of letters, short before long).
Again, these sentences are clearly not equivalent, although the orders they determine are extensionally equivalent.
Once we understand the sentence in this way (and I’m not sure how we get to that meaning), the Gricean reasoning you sketch should be straightforward. One could consider one further alternative to (2):
(2”) The authors’ names appear in the order of importance of their contribution to the paper.
Since the authors tell us that they chose the rather formal method of picking an order, namely the one in (2), we can infer that the method described in (2”) isn’t one that played any role…
September 29th, 2005, at 8:45 pm #[I'm posting an emailed comment from Edward Garrett, KvF]
the preposition “in” could well play a role.
“determined by alphabetical order” imputes some kind of modality to the effect that it is in alphabetical order *by design*. if we say that the authors were “alphabetically ordered”, this seems to be the preferred reading. but my hazy impression is that “in” (plus perhaps the nominal nature of “order”) makes a difference:
the first case seems to me to suggest alphabeticization by design; the second, maybe so, maybe not. so i guess i vote for the by design feature coming from other aspects of the sentence, and the basic meaning of alphabetical order being the consistency meaning.
Edward Garrett
September 30th, 2005, at 10:28 am #In support of Florian’s analysis, we might add the following example to his:
Neither ordering of two names can be meaningfully characterized as “random” post hoc, so in (2”’) only the intensional reading is sensible.
September 30th, 2005, at 1:31 pm #Thony Gillies emails the following tidbit:
October 5th, 2005, at 12:27 pm #How much of this do you think is a matter of context and convention?
I ask because Hollywood has it’s own version of this habit that might be worth comparing. And because I can’t think of any profession more obsessed with contratually defined name ordering and distinction than Hollywood, it might shed light on expectation (if not any particular depth or merit).
October 27th, 2005, at 2:18 am #