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Essay
By Invitation
Interpreting ⟦Hope

What do we actually mean when we describe hoping for ε? Or having hoped that ε would happen? What is it to have hope?

hope belongs to a class of predicates (the “intensional transitives”), which—along with know, fear, think, believe, want, doubt, imagine, fantasize, wish, love, trust, expect...—are taken to encode a particular kind of relation that an attitude holder stands in vis-à-vis a situation that’s being described.

During the May 9 event, several audience members mused about what distinguishes hopes from fantasies, expectations, imaginings... these English expressions of course, all stand in some sort of relation to one another; they all carve up a particular domain of conceptual space—viz. the way we think about and orient ourselves towards potential future developments, as well as towards imagined counterfactuals: opportunities on the horizon and situations foregone.

Here’s an informal sketch then of the ingredients of a hope-ascription:

x – the hoper: someone to “hold” HOPE

t – some time at which they hold it

p – some situation they hope for, where:

  1. x doesn’t know whether or not p obtains — that is, the truth or falsity of p is (still) contingent at t (as far as x is concerned). Unlike fantasies, imaginings and other wants and desires, hoping for something seems to presuppose that that thing is neither impossible nor assured.

  2. x wants p to obtain — p-worlds are somehow preferred to not-p-worlds (unlike expectations)

…or an attempt at a more formal representation for those playing at home:

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image of a linguistics lexical entry

What all of this amounts to then, is that—in a single word—we express a nuanced relationship between an individual “hoper” and a state-of-affairs that is contingent—one that is unknown (and perhaps unknowable)—but is preferable. From this we get expressions like hopeless, beyond hope. We also have despair and desperate (cf. French dés-espoir and Latin dē-spērātus ‘asunder+hope’). We can talk about false hope—that "horrible state"[1] where, even though the hoper believes that their future is “open” with respect to a given hoped-for situation, this belief is unfortunately mistaken.

What's more, grammars seem to be sensitive to the dual-meaning components that characterize hope. One way in which this is realized is in the domain of “mood selection”—in some Romance languages hope selects for an indicative complement, patterning with belief-type attitudes (know, think, believe...), while in others it selects for the subjunctive along with other preference-type attitudes (want, doubt, regret, require...).[2]

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image of a linguistics lexical entry

The variable mood selection behavior of hope-predicates cross-linguistically might be understood as underscoring the dual importance of the hoper’s belief in the possibility of the situation they hope for on the one hand and their subjective preference for it on the other.

Linguists are often loathe to extrapolate deterministic facts about cultures and populations on the basis of grammatical phenomena, although the fact that this class of predicates—simultaneously encoding belief and desire—exists in language after language in the first place, it is surely evidence of a particular role that hope holds as an organizing principle in human societies & relationships.’[3]

In Yolŋu Matha—the Aboriginal Australian languages that I primarily work with—gatjpuy’yun, the word for ‘hope’ derives from a word meaning ‘path’. The motivation for this metaphorical extension is clear—to hope is to be able to identify a better world and to believe that there exists a navigable way to end up there.


Notes

[1] h/t Angelika Kratzer (1981, p. 66) on "the notional category of modality."

[2] In the sense of an actual dream report. Compare subjunctive selection in the “I have a dream” sense: sueño que mi hija sea presidente un día ‘I dream that my daughter be.SBJV president one day.’

[3] The “emotive doxastics’ according to Anand & Hacquard (2013)

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Colloquy

Hope: The Future of an Idea

In a troubled age, hope may seem an elusive feeling. Alongside its history as a virtue, a political concept, and a psychological state, it enjoys a vivid presence as a necessary but poorly understood experience in everyday life. To reframe it in the context of this Colloquy, we might ask: how has hope been defined and critiqued? Where does it lie latent or unacknowledged? And how does the work of the humanities depend on hope, and perhaps arouse it? 

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This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century. 

It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach. 

The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives. 

Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.

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