Keeping track of objects in conversation
| Abstract | Understanding a conversation sometimes requires us to keep track of what has been said about the objects under discussion. This fact presents a problem for a familiar account of content, the Russellian theory as advanced by Scott Soames and Nathan Salmon. Here I sketch an account of keeping track of objects in conversation, on which it involves presupposing unexpressed identity statements about the objects under discussion. The account is an application of a Stalnaker-style possible worlds account of assertion content, that treats these unexpressed identities as part of an evolving set of presuppositions. Finally, I propose a two-dimensionalist extension of the basic Stalnakerian account to deal with the sort of case in which utterances are best understood as conveying the diagonal proposition of a two-dimensional propositional concept. These are discourses in which some of all parties to the conversation are confused about exactly which object is being discussed, even though they do keep track of what has been said about it. | |||||||||
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