Abstract
This paper investigates the truth conditions of sentences containing indefinite noun phrases, focusing on occurrences in attitude reports, and, in particular, a puzzle case due to Walter Edelberg. It is argued that indefinites semantically contribute the (thought-)object they denote, in a manner analogous to attributive definite descriptions. While there is an existential reading of attitude reports containing indefinites, it is argued that the existential quantifier is contributed by the de re interpretation of the indefinite (as the de re reading adds existential quantification to the interpretation of definites on Kaplan’s analysis).
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Notes
The truth condition of an utterance, as I intend it here, is the condition that must hold at the possible world where the utterance was made in order for it to be true. I am not giving an account of the proposition expressed by the utterance, nor of what the speaker says in making it. In particular, I do not necessarily mean by “truth condition” that condition satisfied in the set of worlds at which what the speaker said or expressed in making the utterance would have been true (sometimes called the “modal profile” of the utterance).
I won’t discuss sentences where the value of the indefinite covaries with a quantifier:
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(i)
Every sheriff has hanged an innocent man.
I also set aside sentences in which the indefinite occurs in the scope of negation or a modal, in the complement of an intensional transitive (such as the verb owe), or as a generic; all the situations in which, as Karttunen (1976) puts it, the indefinite does not establish a discourse referent. I will, however, be looking closely at indefinites occurring in the scope of attitude verbs with clausal complements.
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(i)
Restricted to monadic arguments, this would be, in the case of ‘some man’, the characteristic function of the set of all sets that overlap with the set of all men.
In fact, Strawson’s original claim was not about the truth condition of the utterance, but rather about what the utterance is used to assert (its “illocutionary point”). These notions need not coincide. For instance, if we have just witnessed a hanging, I could use (4) to assert that the condemned man, Jones, was innocent. (That is to say, the adjective in the noun phrase contributes the property that is asserted to hold of the topic—the recipient of the hanging. This example comes from Hobbs (1990).)
I’ve changed the names in Edelberg’s paper for mnemonic purposes.
This is a sufficient condition for intentional identity. The account can be extended to cases where the agents in question don’t know each other (and so aren’t in a position to so agree). For instance, they might be connected to each other by a chain consisting of pairs of agents who do so agree. For a more thoroughgoing account, see Cumming (2013). For alternative conditions on intentional identity, see Zimmermann (1998) and van Rooy (2001).
For instance, in a variant of the case, Onesky is not aware that Smith has succumbed to his injuries. Hence, though he would agree that his beliefs concern the same individual as Twosky’s beliefs about ‘whoever murdered Smith’, his own conception of this individual is as ‘the one who disembowelled Smith with a marlinspike’. Edelberg uses this case to show that a “pronoun of laziness” account, on which the pronoun ‘he’ goes proxy for the (narrow scope) definite description ‘the murderer of Smith’, is too strong to capture the target reading of (5). For in the variant case, Onesky doesn’t believe that the murderer of Smith murdered Jones, since he doesn’t yet believe Smith’s injuries were fatal, yet (5) still sounds true. Edelberg uses a different case to show that the pronoun of laziness proposal is also too weak (1986, pp. 8–9).
In model-theoretic brass tacks, Edelberg’s frames contain an additional primitive domain of thought-objects, a non-empty set \({\mathsf{D}}_{\theta}\). \({\mathsf{D}}_{\theta}\) is disjoint from the domain of individuals, and is not to be identified with individual concepts (i.e. functions from possible worlds to individuals) or anything analogous to descriptive modes of presentation. A model in which the contents of two cognitive states contain a common element from \({\mathsf{D}}_{\theta}\) is to be interpreted in the way set out in the main text (i.e. it means that the agents in question treat those states as concerning the same individual).
The relation of determination can be incorporated into the model as a (partial) function \(\textsc{ref}\) from \({\mathsf{D}}_{\theta}\) to the domain of individuals \({\mathsf{D}}_e.\)
In his 1992 paper, Edelberg no longer treats thought-objects as shareable among agents. I don’t follow him in this; I prefer to distinguish shareable thought-objects from private mental “files” (Recanati 2013). It is worth remarking that Edelberg’s motivation here is not solid. He assumes that an agent cannot coherently believe a proposition of the form α = β, where α and β are distinct thought-objects, as he takes it that beliefs of this form contribute in a constitutive manner to the individuation of thought-objects (which leads fairly directly to the conclusion that this individuation is relative to the individual psyche). There is a tradition, going back at least to Strawson 1974, that supposes an agent must merge their mental files upon being apprised of the identity of their referents. On the contrary, I consider mental files and thought-objects “cheap,” and the impulse to merge them false economy (see Recanati 2013, pp. 44–47).
Once again, the names are chosen for mnemonic ease. The thought-objects themselves should not be understood as descriptive.
Edelberg also assumes that Onesky believes *Smith’s murderer* murdered Smith, and *Jones’ murderer* murdered Jones (in other words, he pins both crimes on both thought-objects, a rational consequence of his hunch that the two thought-objects correspond to the same individual). If we take Twosky’s belief that someone murdered Smith (the intentional object of which is *Smith’s murderer*), it seems correct to say that Onesky agrees with Twosky that that person murdered Smith (and mutatis mutandis for *Jones’ murderer*).
Perhaps surprisingly, we cannot support this line of reasoning with a double attribution on the model of (5):
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(i)
Twosky thinks someone murdered Smith, and Onesky thinks he murdered Smith too.
This only seems true if the detectives have both pinned the crime on some suspect in particular. It is a decidedly odd way to put the point that they agree Smith was murdered. More on this anon.
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(i)
Since (10) nonetheless captures the relationship of intentional identity between the ascribed beliefs, we can infer that the claim made by (9) is stronger than a bare claim of intentional identity.
Consult Donnellan (1966, pp. 296–302), for a better picture of the subtle relation he envisions between the referential use and truth conditions.
In fact, he treats the indefinite as an existential restricted by the unit set containing the thought-object the speaker has in mind. This analysis is subject to the same empirical refutation as (20).
I assume a framework on which expression type and linguistic context contribute constraints on the possible semantic contributions of a phrase (not necessarily a full character in the sense of Kaplan 1989). For an example of (and empirical justification for) such a framework, see Stone and Webber 1998.
The attributive account is different to the “pronoun of laziness” analysis, on which the pronoun is replaced by a narrow-scope definite description:
(i)
a.
Twosky thinks someone murdered Smith, and Onesky thinks the murderer of Smith murdered Jones.
b.
Onesky thinks someone murdered Jones, and Twosky thinks the murderer of Jones murdered Smith.
Edelberg (1986) shows that the conditions above are neither necessary nor sufficient for the truth of the corresponding target sentences. His arguments don’t apply to the attributive account, according to which the descriptive material merely constrains the choice of thought-object, and does not appear in the scope of the attitude verb.
If you’re still having trouble, work backwards from the following version in which the desired interpretation is made explicit:
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(i)
There is someone that Onesky (now) thinks murdered Jones (namely, Smith’s murderer); Twosky thinks he murdered Smith.
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(i)
Compare the sentence ‘Onesky suspects someone of murdering Jones’. “Having a suspect” is my way of putting Jayez and Tovena’s (2002; 2006) condition of independent identifiability. In discussing the example ‘Mary met a certain diplomat’, those authors proclaim “a strong intuition that the diplomat is not just ‘the diplomat that Mary met’, even if this description is uniquely identifying. The diplomat in question is presented as known under another guise” (Jayez and Tovena 2006, p. 242).
Farkas makes the analogous observation for phrases like ‘a certain criminal’ (2002, p. 74).
I won’t venture an account of this data, but it supports the treatment, given later, on which the indefinite determiner introduces thought-objects, while the nominal predicate constrains the individuals the thought-objects are mapped to (see Sect. 6 for further discussion). The constraint provided by the nominal is automatically relativized to the actual world when it doesn’t occur in the scope of any intensional operator (Farkas 2000, p. 102).
See Hawthorne and Manley (2012, p. 95) for a similar intuition.
The distinction between referential and descriptive files is related to Donnellan’s (1966) distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions. On its attributive use, ‘Smith’s murderer’ expresses the speaker’s descriptive file for whoever killed Smith, while the referential use expresses a referential file (in Donnellan’s original case, the file referred to his character Jones).
For versions of the story on which one of the detectives doesn’t know that Smith has succumbed to his wounds, he would instead possess a file for, e.g., whoever disembowelled Smith.
Rubric conditions should be distinguished from Lewis’s acquaintance relations and Kamp’s internal anchors (Lewis 1979a, pp. 539–543; Kamp 1990, pp. 49–64). The latter two notions arise from special constraints applying to de re belief. Acquaintance relations were born from the attempt to distinguish those cases in which an agent is in a special relation of causal rapport with the object of their belief (such as the shortest spy), while a internal anchor represents ‘how the subject … takes herself to be causally linked to the represented referent’ (Bende-Farkas and Kamp 2001, p. 23). As this gloss suggests, the contents of internal anchors could be false of their referents, and hence they behave like non-rubric conditions.
This rubric condition connects the associated descriptive file to Twosky’s referential file for Smith by the relational condition ‘x murdered y’.
Descriptive files would appear to be of use in extending Heim’s semantic account of definiteness to non-anaphoric definite descriptions. According to Heim, the use of a definite noun phrase presupposes the existence of a file of the right sort in the hearer’s cognitive gallery. Since descriptive files are generated by belief update rather than prior utterance, they can be presupposed in the absence of an establishing antecedent.
Note too that co-denotation (i.e. intentional identity) doesn’t necessarily follow from two files sharing a rubric condition. This is the lesson of Edelberg’s argument against the pronoun of laziness approach. On the other hand, if the claim ‘there is just one x such that R x’ is in the common ground between some set of agents, then the descriptive files with rubric condition R among those agents will (normally) denote the same thought-object.
Generally speaking, a hyper-attributive indefinite contributes the thought-object denoted by the descriptive file belonging to the report’s subject whose rubric condition either matches, or is entailed by, the condition in the scope of the report verb. So, for instance, the indefinite below could denote *Jones’ murderer*:
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(i)
Onesky thinks someone wearing size nine shoes murdered Jones.
This account predicts that the hyper-attributive reading is unavailable for the following (since ‘x is a spy’ cannot function as a rubric condition for Onesky, who believes there is more than one spy):
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(ii)
Onesky thinks someone is a spy.
The only reading available for (ii) requires Onesky to have a “suspect,” but what would that mean in this case? A preliminary general analysis of the suspect reading would be an existential quantification over thought-objects, restricted to exclude those denoted by descriptive files whose rubric conditions entail the condition in the scope of the report verb (for a pragmatic route to such a restriction, consult Aloni 2001). Note that the suggested restriction would admit *Smith’s murderer* as a witness to (30), but not to the following sentence (false, to my ear):
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(iii)
There’s someone that Onesky thinks is a murderer.
Note too that the following is predicted to have a hyper-attributive reading (and hence is not necessarily equivalent to ‘There is someone Onesky thinks is the shortest spy’):
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(iv)
Onesky thinks some spy is shortest.
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(i)
In the present case, we assume the detectives do establish such files, so there is no difference in prediction. However, it is far from clear what to say in general, and I have already denied a version of this claim for other predicates. In particular, Onesky could believe that someone with size nine shoes murdered Jones without establishing a file with the rubric condition ‘x murdered Jones and wears size nine shoes’.
This datum raises a problem: why is the hyper-attributive reading unavailable for (42)? I’m not sure, but perhaps it is relevant that there is a simpler way to put the claim it makes: ‘Onesky and Twosky both think someone murdered Jones.’
The de dicto indefinite is more familiarly analysed as a narrow-scope existential quantifier, and hence non-specific (see Quine 1956; Kamp and Bende-Farkas and Kamp 2001, p. 23). My innovation is to treat the non-suspect reading as specific, in the sense that the indefinite denotes the thought-object denoted by a particular descriptive file. This is the key to solving Edelberg’s puzzle, since the upshot of his case is that we can’t analyse the de dicto indefinite as an unrestricted existential quantifier.
What might the rationale be for this? Suppose an indefinite co-denotes with the file the speaker is expressing (I take it to be a condition on the utterance of a non-dependent indefinite that the speaker has a corresponding mental file—see Cumming 2012). In this case, it is natural to see the speaker as expressing their descriptive file with the rubric condition ‘x murdered Jones’, which is intentionally linked to the detectives’ descriptive files with the same rubric condition, and hence denotes *Jones’ murderer*.
Proponents of the causal-historical account of reference are committed to the claim that one transmits a singular thought about *Julia Gillard* with the reference-passing utterance:
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(i)
A woman named Julia Gillard is prime minister of Australia.
It is reasonable to say the same thing about indefinites that do not contain a naming construction in their nominal complement (Kaplan 2012):
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(ii)
A female prime minister was elected in Australia.
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I’m cribbing two ideas here from Discourse Representation Theory. The first is the notion of an embedding, which is a mapping from the discourse referents in a Discourse Representation Structure to individuals in the domain of the model. The second is the notion of an external anchor, which restricts embeddings to those that map a particular discourse referent to a particular object (Kamp and Reyle 1993; Kamp 1990).
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Cumming, S. Indefinites and intentional identity. Philos Stud 168, 371–395 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0131-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0131-9