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Some expressions of English, like the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’, are referentially promiscuous: distinct free occurrences of them in the same sentence can differ in content relative to the same context. One lesson of referentially promiscuous expressions is that basic logical properties like validity and logical truth obtain or fail to obtain only relative to a context. This approach to logic can be developed in just as rigorous a manner as David Kaplan’s classic logic of demonstratives. The result is a (...) logic that applies to arguments in English containing multiple occurrences of referentially promiscuous expressions. (shrink) | |
In order to capture our intuitions about the logical consistency of sentences and the logical validity of arguments, a semantics for a natural language has to allow for the fact that different occurrences of a single bare demonstrative, such as “this”, may refer to different objects. But it is not obvious how to formulate a semantic theory in order to achieve this result. This paper first criticizes several proposals: that we should formulate our semantics as a semantics for tokens, not (...) expressions, Kaplan’s idea that syntax associates a demonstration with each occurrence of a demonstrative, Braun’s idea that a context may specify shifts in context across the evaluation of the expressions in a sentence; and Predelli’s idea that we should countenance different classes of contexts. Finally, a solution is proposed that allows that a natural language persists across the addition of basic lexical items but defines logical properties in terms of language stages. A surprising result is that we do not need to think of demonstratives as taking different referents in different situations. (shrink) | |
Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink) | |
This essay proposes a novel semantic account of demonstratives, aimed at clarifying the sense in which demonstratives are semantically dependent on demonstrations. Its first two sections summarize the main views currently on the market. Section 3 argues that they are all vitiated by the same shortcomings, and yield incorrect results of ‘truth in virtue of character’ and entailment. Section 4 proposes a different account of the relationships between demonstratives and demonstrations, grounded on the idea of truth-conditionally irrelevant aspects of the (...) meaning of certain expressions. The resulting view of demonstratives is consonant with the so-called ‘bare boned’ account of their truth-conditional role, but is also in the position to recognize that the dependence of a demonstrative on a demonstration is, in some sense of the term, meaning-governed. The final section of this essay discusses the distinction between ‘vacuous’ and ‘incomplete’ uses of demonstratives, and cases involving multiple occurrences of these expressions. (shrink) | |
In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue (...) that they can be generalized to a novel criterion for distinguishing between indexicals and demonstratives. The central theoretical claim is that the semantic values of indexicals are objects which play certain utterance-related roles, which are fixed independently of the words being used in the utterance. For instance, the speaker plays the speaker role whether or not she uses the word “I”, and the addressee plays that role whether or not the speaker uses the word “you”. Demonstratives, on the other hand, pick out objects that play no such role, and are instead helped by the speaker’s word-specific intentions. (shrink) | |
This essay proposes a systematic semantic account of Davidson’s demonstrative theory of pure quotation (Davidson Theory and decision, 11: 27–40, 1979) within a classic Kaplan-style framework for indexical languages (Kaplan 1977). I argue that Davidson’s informal hints must be developed in terms of the idea of ‘character-external’ aspects of meaning, that is, in terms of truth-conditionally idle restrictions on the class of contexts in which quotation marks may appropriately be used. When thus developed, Davidson’s theory may correctly take into account (...) the intuitively special status of disquotational sentences, such as “Boston’ refers to Boston’, and “‘Boston” refers to ‘Boston”, and is thus immune from the important objections recently raised in Cappelen and Lepore 2007. (shrink) | |
Does the English demonstrative pronoun 'that' (including complex demonstratives of the form 'that F') have sense and reference? Unlike many other philosophers of language, Frege answers with a resounding 'No'. He held that the bearer of sense and reference is a so-called 'hybrid proper name' (Künne) that contains the demonstrative pronoun and specific circumstances of utterance such as glances and acts of pointing. In this paper I provide arguments for the thesis that demonstratives are hybrid proper names. After outlining why (...) Frege held the hybrid proper name view, I will defend it against recent criticism, and argue that it is superior to views that take demonstrative pronouns to be the bearer of semantic properties. (shrink) | |
Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 1, Page 136-151, February 2021. No categories | |
Notions of fitting seem to be attractive in explaining language understanding. This paper tries to interpret "fitting" in terms of holistic (cheng, 誠) intentionality rather than the dualistic one. I propose to interpret “cheng” as a notion of integration: The cheng of an entity is the power to realize the embedded objective of it in the context where it interacts with all others; "Mind" refers to the ability of not a single kind of entity but to that of all entities (...) of complex degrees in processing informations and to any agent that integrates. I would like to discuss some cases where this notion of fitting is working. First, building of a primitive language could have been done by fittings of primitive expressions which came out of people's basic needs and desires, their forms of life. Second, we do not identify an object on the basis of a criterion of similarity, but by asking questions like whether it would be more fitting to identify two objects in the present context than not to.Third, what is involved in our recognition of a fact is a context. A context does not dictate one single description but does allow any number of descriptions, some of which are more or less fitting and others of which are more or less unfitting. It may take time for the community of language involved to come to a more fitting description. For the sake of convenience, this description may come to have a grammar for the community where it can be classified as true and others as false. (shrink) | |
In a very recent paper (2010), Dominic McIver Lopes has claimed that pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. If as I think Lopes is right, this has important consequences for the debate on the semantics/pragmatics divide. For one can exploit Lopes' claim in order to provide one more argument in favour of the well-known contextualist thesis that wide context has not only both a pre- and a post-semantic role, but also a semantic role – to put it in (...) Perry's (1997) terms. (shrink) | |
Frege held that the bare demonstrative ‘that’ is incomplete, and that it is the word together with a gesture that serves as the designating expression, and likewise that it is the word ‘yesterday’ together with the time of utterance that designates the relevant day. David Kaplan’s original theory of indexicals holds that Frege’s supplementation thesis is correct about demonstratives but incorrect about ‘yesterday’. Kaplan’s account of demonstratives deviates from Frege’s in treating supplemented demonstratives as directly referential, hence rigid. It is (...) argued here that the gesture or other demonstration that accompanies an utterance of ‘that’ is not part of the designating expression but instead part of the utterance context. (shrink) No categories | |
The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics (...) of indexical languages, the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and the aims and scope of propositional semantics. (shrink) No categories | |
In this essay, I propose an analysis of Quine’s example ’Giorgione was so-called because of his size’, grounded on the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the first sections, I discuss the advantages and drawbacks of the demonstrative and logophoric treatments of ‘so called’, I highlight certain parallelisms with Davidson’s paratactic view of quotation, and I introduce independent considerations in favor of the idea of an obstinate demonstrative. In the second half of my essay, I apply this notion to Quine’s (...) example, and I discuss its consequences with respect to the principle of substitutivity of coreferential singular terms. (shrink) | |
This paper is grounded on an exegetically creative reading of Kaplan's late approach to dthat-terms. I do have a few exegetic pretensions. In particular, I simply assume what I take to be the central tenets of Kaplan's theory of demonstratives between 1977 and 1989, and I develop them according to ideas suggested by certain passages in Afterthoughts. But my developments are also unashamedly creative. I recognize that I may overemphasize a few carefully chosen snippets and that, in doing so, I (...) may end up ignoring other important junctures. But I happily trade textual faithfulness for theoretical insight: if on the right track, my results hopefully cast a new light not only on Kaplan's take on ‘dthat’ but also on the fundamental ideas in his philosophical and semantic framework. (shrink) No categories | |
In the old days of descriptivism, fictional reference and non-fictional reference with proper names were treated on a par. Descriptivism was not an intuitive theory, but it meritoriously provided a unitary semantic account of names, whether referentially full or empty. Then the revolution of the new theory of reference occurred. This new theory is definitely more intuitive than descriptivism, yet it comes with a drawback: the referentially full use and the referentially empty use, notably the fictional use, of names are (...) semantically no longer on the same footing. How the use of names from fiction is referentially empty has even been seen as a symptom of its not being a use at all. In this paper, I ask the following question: can one keep the merits of the new theory of reference and still provide a unitary account of both fictional and non-fictional reference with names? My answer is positive, provided that one conceives proper names as a special kind of indexicals. (shrink) | |
In this essay, I explain how certain suggestions put forth by Frege. Wittgenstein, and Schlick regarding the interpretation of indexical expressions may be incorporated within a systematic semantic account. I argue that the 'hybrid' approach they propose is preferable to more conventional systems, in particular when it comes to the interpretation of cases of cross-contextual ellipsis. I also explain how the hybrid view entails certain important and independently motivated distinctions among contextually dependent expressions, for instance between 'here' and 'local'. | |
Summary of Anna Pilatova’s doctoral thesis A User’s Guide to Proper Names, Their Semantics And Pragmatics The origins of this work go all the way back to my reading of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity in 1993. It had left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction that lingered long enough to inspire my MA thesis (on Internalism and Externalism in the Theories of Reference), and finally inspired the current work. Over time, I became acquainted with other influential accounts of reference of (...) proper names, but my unease with essentialism and wariness of direct designation remained. In the User’s Guide to Proper Names, I seized the opportunity to analyse what I thought was problematic with the mainstream theories of reference of proper names. I tried to tease apart a number of related doctrines about the behaviour of proper names, and thus arrive at a better understanding of how the various parts of the theories of reference I chose to analyse are related. This helped me to develop my own proposal regarding both the semantics and the pragmatics of proper names. The Guide is organised around a particular approach to the tasks of a semantic theory. According to this view, proposed by Stalnaker, a semantic theory dealing with proper names should account for the descriptive semantics of names, their foundational semantics, and the semantics of modal statements in which they figure. Descriptive semantics focuses on the contribution a proper name makes to the truth-value of sentences in which it occurs. Based on such an analysis, a proper name is assigned a semantic value, which is supposed to provide us with an interpretation of that name. A crucial part of this task is to see just what kind of thing the semantic value of a proper name is. In interpreting sentences containing proper names, one can, and often does, use the notion of possible worlds. This is especially true if the sentences in question are modal. There are various approaches to modality, which carry with them different sets of presuppositions. An analysis of the systematic features and presuppositions of various possible-world frameworks is a part of the task of the semantics of modal statements. Another task of semantics of modal statements is to investigate whence the constraints on possible worlds used in analysing these statements should derive, that is, whether, and to what degree, they should derive from the descriptive or the foundational part of the semantic enterprise. Both of these parts of a semantic theory have the potential to make predictions about the foundational semantics of proper names, which deals with the speaker’s behaviour and communication. Foundational semantics aims at answering the following question: What makes it the case that the language spoken by a particular individual or community has the very descriptive semantics it has? In this investigation, one looks at the speaker, her intentions and communicative goals, and tries to look at the strategies she uses to get her (linguistic) point across. To show the usefulness of organising the User’s Guide to Proper Names around these distinctions, and to provide their proper characterisation, is the task of the first part of the introductory first chapter, Outlining the Field and Introducing Some of the Players. In the second part of the same chapter, Setting the Scene, I give a preliminary outline of some of the notions needed to describe the theories of reference that are later investigated, that is mainly the theories proposed by Kripke, Kaplan, Lewis, and Stalnaker. The second chapter, Descriptive Semantics, focuses on the descriptive semantics proposed by Kripke and Kaplan for proper names. In the first part of the chapter, I introduce several arguments in favour of rigid designation. A closer look reveals that none of the three arguments in question -- the modal, the epistemological, and the semantic one -- is actually an argument for rigid designation. They all just argue against some forms of descriptivism. Moreover, in the case of the modal and the epistemological argument, it is relatively easy to find forms of descriptivism that are immune to the lines of reasoning proposed in these arguments. The semantic argument seems to be the strongest of the three. An analysis of a direct argument for rigid designation highlights the connection between rigid designation and certain preconceptions about the identity of individuals. A further investigation of the notion of identity of individuals across possible worlds emerges at this point as an important issue to tackle. It also becomes clear that rigid designation alone cannot fully determine the Kripkean picture of names as non-descriptive entities referring without a mediation of any sort of conceptual content. In the second part of Chapter 2, I introduce the basic notions of Kaplan’s approach to the descriptive semantics of proper names. It turns out that in order to derive the familiar Kripkean picture of proper names, one has to presuppose direct reference for names and at least some version of haecceitism for the individuals in question. While, as we show, Kaplan’s framework does not work well for proper names, it gives us conceptual tools that help us in our undertaking. In the third chapter, Modal Statements, Individuals, and Essences, I analyse three different approaches to building a possible-world framework, Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s. In each case, the same questions are asked: What is the motivation and intended field of application of this framework? What are the ontological commitments of the approach? What form of essentialism, if any, does it imply? How does it deal with the notion of an individual? In Lewis’s case, the main problem turns out to be the theory of counterparts, which is, as I show, an integral part of his approach. The concept of an individual implied by it does not seem to correspond to any intuitive reading of counterfactual statements involving individuals. The investigation of Kripke’s framework focuses on describing the weakest form of essentialism that has to be presupposed to make the proposal work. Once that is concluded, I analyse the essentialism Kripke actually proposes, and the motivation and presuppositions on which it rests. I conclude that its motivation cannot be said to come from an analysis of language and that it presupposes a particular form of scientific realism. The rest of the chapter is devoted to a reconstruction and analysis of Stalnaker’s possible world framework, which turns out to be rather more cautious about metaphysical presuppositions and more suited for an analysis of natural language. As in the two previous proposals, I try to reconstruct the notion of actual world that is presupposed here. In the fourth chapter, Foundational Semantics, I investigate the notion of proposition implied by Lewis’s, Kripke’s, and Stalnaker’s approach. I focus on propositions containing proper names, and analyse the way in which each of the conceptions mentioned above is vulnerable to the problem of logical omniscience. An analysis of Lewis’s framework reveals that the concept of proposition implied by it is so weak as to be rather uninteresting. An investigation of Kripke’s concept of proposition deals not only with the systematic issues, but also with the Pierre puzzle and various attempts at solving it. I present a number of different approaches to the problem and compare their merits. Stalnaker is very worried about the problem of logical omniscience, and yet it turns out that his conception is less vulnerable to the adverse consequences of the problem of logical omniscience than other frameworks we investigate. I point out that various pragmatic features of Stalnaker’s framework (the epistemic nature of his possible-world framework, the Gricean principles built into the notion of assertion) help to counterbalance and mitigate the scope of the problem of logical omniscience within it. In Chapter 5, User-friendly Descriptive Semantics, I present and motivate my own proposal for the descriptive semantics of proper names and the treatment of modal statements in which they figure. Basically, the aim is to preserve the notion of names as rigidly designating expressions while admitting as little metaphysics as possible. Working with epistemic possible worlds whose domain is in each case co-determined by a particular context enables me to develop a very intuitive plausible notion of individual, to which a name can be said to refer rigidly. The interpretation of modal statements is then driven not by essentialist constraints in the common sense of the term, but by context-derived limitations, which seems to be a more natural approach. In the sixth and last chapter, Names, Indexicality, and Ambiguity, I develop a view of foundational semantics inspired by the pragmatic observation that in common parlance one can say that a name, `John Smith’ for instance, can refer to numerous individuals. A lot of attention is given to the ontology of names, and the question `What is a name?’ delivers answers which are then used in a discussion about whether names should be seen as indexical or ambiguous. I adopt the ambiguity view, and propose a way of using a Stalnakerian possible-world framework to derive intuitively plausible results for some difficult cases. The weight of the discussion all through the guide rests in an examination of different kinds of presuppositions implied by various possible-world frameworks and the notion of the individual used in accounts of the behaviour of proper names. In my own account of these issues, I do without any metaphysical assumptions and aim at describing communication in terms accessible to its participants. (shrink)  | |
ABSTRACT In this review, I try to present and discuss the main elements of each chapter of the book as briefly and instructively as possible. The first group of chapters deals with various issues about language, and the second group focuses on thought. No categories |
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