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Indexicals and utterance production

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Abstract

We highlight various non-standard mechanisms of communication to both motivate our response to what is known as the ‘answering machine paradoxes’ and to shed light on recent variants of these cases. We claim that the most intuitive solution to these paradoxes requires one to distinguish between the agent (of a context), the tokening of a sentence and the agent’s chosen mechanism of communicating this tokening.

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Notes

  1. We will be ignoring the “demonstrative uses” of ‘here’ and ‘now’ in this paper. Corazza (2004) cogently argues that the cases used by Smith (1989) to motivate the thesis that indexicals like ‘here’ and ‘now’ are ambiguous are in fact cases where the words are being used anaphorically. We shall be ignoring anaphoric uses of ‘here’ and ‘now’ in this paper too.

  2. Predelli (2008) says that what is special about ‘I am here now’ is just that it’s “self-verifying”, which means this. Take the set of all contexts C such that agent of the context is at the location and time of the context, this sentence can only be uttered truly at C. He then points out rightly that ‘I am uttering something now’ is also self-verifying, and concludes that ‘I am here now’ is not special in a way that ‘I am uttering something now’ is not (62–64). He fails to see how ‘I am here now’ is different because he pairs utterances of sentences with contexts, not simply sentences with contexts.

  3. As Bach (1998) puts it, “Ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic expressions. A word phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning… However, it is not always clear when we have only one word. The verb ‘desert’ and the noun ‘dessert’, which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they are homonyms). So do the noun ‘bear’ and the verb ‘bear’, even though they not only sound the same but are spelled the same.”

  4. Since we think this, we think some of Kaplan’s “improper contexts” should be allowed back into semantics. However, we don’t think they all should. In particular, we don’t see any reason to let contexts in where the agent of the context is not at the world of the context. We also don’t see a need to let in context in which the time of the context is prior to the time of the agent of the context’s birth.

  5. Throughout this paper we use the term mechanism in a slightly technical sense. A mechanism need not be a piece of machinery like Hawking’s computer or an answering machine; it may be another person (a potential agent) but, as we will argue later, we should not let this detract us from the fact that they are simply part of the mechanism, working on behalf of the agent.

  6. The distinctions we make in our account of utterance production benefit from Perry’s distinction between utterances, as intentional acts of communication, and tokens, as the effects (physical events or objects) that are the effect of such acts. As Perry notes, tokens can often be re-used with no semantic hangover from one use to the next. (See Perry 2001, pp. 38–39; 2003, pp. 376–377).

  7. It seems to us that Smith is assuming a framework where semantics takes utterance-context pairs as inputs. He talks of the character of indexical taking one from a “use” to a referent (Smith 1989, p. 167).

  8. We’re assuming it doesn’t refer to the Stage 1 time in this case.

  9. Sidelle (1991) shares Predelli’s intuition here, and amends his theory accordingly (see p. 537, cited by Predelli 1998a, p. 111).

  10. Could it be that a convention has developed down through the years whereby ‘here’ in an answering machine message refers to the address at which the phone is located? Here’s how it might have happened. Back in the old days before mobiles and such, phone numbers were simply associated with an address. When you called the number, and heard ‘I’m not here now’, the point was that no one was at the address listed for that phone number. Thus ‘here’ as used in answering machine messages has come to have this reference by convention. Perry (2003, p. 384) makes a similar point, stating that ‘here’ refers to ‘the place where the phone is or is expected to be, not the place where the answering machine is.’

  11. Note that in this case the sentry could have said ‘I’m not here now, but back in my camp. But I surrender…’ Thus we have another counterexample to Kaplan’s claim that ‘I’m here now’ is a logical truth.

  12. Several of the variants on the post-it note case we will discuss are similar to cases discussed by Corazza et al. 2002, although our analysis of these cases will be diametrically opposed to theirs.

  13. As occurs in Paul’s letter to Romans where, in the midst of transcribing Paul’s message, the scribe introduces himself and delivers his own message, mid-text (see Romans 16:22).

  14. We analyse a variant of the king-sentry case similarly. If the king sends the sentry to say ‘I surrender’ but the sentry in his role as spokesperson says instead ‘I will eat your liver tonight with fava beans’, the ‘I’ refers to neither the king nor the sentry, for the sentry as a mere means of production is trying to get the king to say something he doesn’t say. Nothing is actually said because there is no real agent of the context to say something.

  15. Thus we disagree with Corazza et al. (2002) that this case shows that ‘I’ doesn’t refer to the agent of the context. They wrongly are assuming that the agent is the one who originally wrote the note.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Andreas Stokke. We wouldn’t have been able to write this paper without discussions with him of the issues of this paper. We are grateful to audiences in Barcelona, Krakow, and St. Andrews for feedback. We benefited greatly from feedback from Ambròs Domingo, Manuel Garcia-Carpintero, Patrick Greenough, Dan López de Sa, Crispin Wright, Elia Zardini, and an anonymous referee from Philosophical Studies.

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Correspondence to Paula Sweeney.

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Dodd, D., Sweeney, P. Indexicals and utterance production. Philos Stud 150, 331–348 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-009-9416-4

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