Abstract
The day to day experiences of answering machine messages, written notes, postcard messages, etc. and our intuitions regarding these seem to contradict the traditional assumptions in the semantics of indexicals. The primary analytical scope of the article is to undertake an analysis of Allyson Mount’s convergence of perspectives-based account of indexical reference and see whether it is able to successfully meet the challenges faced by Stefano Predelli’s intended context of interpretation approach towards the semantics of indexicals, thereby providing a viable solution to the Answering Machine Paradox.
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Notes
Sidelle (1991) formulates the AMP.
Neale and Schiffer (2020) also favour an intention-based analysis of indexicals and demonstratives in terms of the speaker’s audience-directed intentions as opposed to a strict Kaplanian position.
Perry’s (1990) insight on this is very much consistent with Kaplan’s system. Perry suggests that,
“When we understand a word like ‘today’, what we seem to know is a rule taking us from an occasion of utterance to a certain object. ‘Today’ takes us to the very day of utterance, ‘yesterday’ to the day before the day of utterance, ‘I’ to the speaker and so forth. I shall call this the role of the demonstrative. I take a context to be a set of features of an actual utterance, certainly including time, place and speaker, but probably also more. Just what a context must include is a different question, to be answered only after detailed study of demonstratives. The object a demonstrative takes us to in a given context, I shall call its value in that context or on that occasion of use. Clearly, we must grant ‘today’ a role, the same on both occasions of use. And we must, as clearly, give it different values on two occasions.” (Perry, 1990, 55) (Original emphasis).
This point is also recognized by R. H. Thomason (1975). He writes, “In virtue of its form, [‘I am here’] must be true on any occasion on which [it is] asserted, and yet the propositions they express on each occasion [is] contingent.” (Thomason, 1975, 222). This means it is not necessarily true (for, I need not have been here now). So, it can be logically true, though not necessarily true.
In fact, Kaplan is himself seems to be aware of the problem of shifted reference, though he does not incorporate the idea into his system of the semantics of indexicals in ‘Demonstratives’. He says, “Among the pure indexicals are ‘I’, ‘now’ and ‘here’ (in one sense), ‘tomorrow’, and others. The linguistic rules which govern their use fully determine the referent for each context.” (Kaplan, 1989a, 491). Kaplan, at the same time, suggests,
“If the message: “I am not here now” is recorded on a telephone answering device, it is to be assumed that the time referred to by ‘now’ is the time of playback rather than the time of recording. Donnellan has suggested that if there were typically a significant lag between our production of speech and its audition (for example, if sound travelled very very slowly), our language might contain two forms of ‘now’: one for the time of production, another for the time of audition. The indexicals ‘here’ and ‘now’ also suffer from vagueness regarding the size of the spatial and temporal neighborhoods to which they refer.” (Kaplan, 1989a, 491, fn. 12).
Although Kaplan’s standard system is able to account for all the ordinary cases of indexicals where the context of production coincides with the context of audition (proper context), it does not provide an adequate answer to the cases of shifted reference where the two contexts do not coincide.
Unless one is actually at the place ‘X’ when one makes that utterance.
Vision (1985) raises cases pertaining to even more advanced answering machines with the feature of setting a pre-recorded message at a set time, even without a speaker having to utter the sentence.
Akerman (2015, 2017) provides a pragmatic approach to the cases of reference shifting of indexicals and argues that understanding utterances is not just a matter of one’s linguistic competence to grasp its literal or semantic interpretation but also involves the role of the audience’s pragmatic ability. However, Mount (2008a, 2015) rules out such pragmatic explanations and favours a semantic approach based on a convergence of perspectives among the interlocutors. Interestingly, very recently Bowker (2022) in his pragmatic analysis of indexical expressions suggests that such appeals to ‘perspectives’ or ‘perspective shifts’ in the semantic approaches to indexicals may not clearly have the laid-out conditions when one can appeal to them. He rather offers a nihilistic conception of the character of indexicals over a pluralist (See Gómez-Torrente 2019) or epistemicist (See Williamson1994) view. This poses a more general problem to the use of cases and counter-examples in the debate of indexicals. In order to avoid digression, we will not go into the details of these views here.
The other related discussions remain beyond the analytical scope of the current paper.
Cohen (2013) consistent with Sidelle’s position puts forth the context-of-tokening view. According to this view, the indexicals are to be interpreted in the context where the utterance takes place.
Briciu (2018) via his remote utterance (action at a distance) view argues in favour of the approach given by Sidelle and develops it further by suggesting some minor revisions in the Kaplanian framework. O’Madagain (2014, 2021) also argues in line with Sidelle and goes on to develop his token-contextual view of indexicals and demonstratives.
This example is discussed by Predelli (1998a) in support of his intended context of interpretation approach.
See Mizuta (2017) for a detailed experimental analysis of the use of indexical ‘now’ in written messages and different contexts of delayed reading of notes.
Vicente and Zeman (2020) offer a novel approach towards the indexical ‘now’ borrowing from Reichenbach’s (1947) treatment of all temporal adverbials. Their view departs in some aspects from the Kaplanian tradition and can account for the use of ‘now’ in historical narrations, answering machine cases as well as in ordinary cases. Unlike Predelli’s intended context view, they argue for an ‘indirect role’ of intention in determining the configurations of the reference frame. However, they argue that the character of ‘now’ is linguistically determined (as Reference Time) and accept the original context of utterance as the only relevant context.
This problem can be traced back to Lewis Carroll (1871).
As discussed in an earlier section, in Kaplan’s sense a context is ‘proper’ when in a context, the agent (the speaker/the utterer, as per Kaplan’s system) is present at the place of the utterance (containing indexicals) at the time when the utterance occurs.
According to Ciecierski and Rudnicki (2023) the use of the term ‘I’ refers to the object or speaker responsible for the speech act containing ‘I’. Unlike Dodd and Sweeney (2010) who attempt to account for all uses of ‘I’ (an agent with some communicative intentions or a mere mechanism of communication), Ciecierski and Rudnicki (2023) differentiate between the indexical uses and the demonstrative cases of ‘I’.
Consistent with Mount’s convergence of perspectives view of indexicals (a mutually accepted salient perspective), Calado and Carvalho (2021) also argue in favour of the notion of salience and the role of the joint attention of the speaker and the hearer in successful reference of demonstratives.
Not the location of the speaker (owner) at the time of the call.
Not the time when the message is recorded by the owner.
In the Gricean sense, the cooperative principle must be followed by the interlocutors engaging in an ongoing conversation for it to succeed. Grice (1975) puts forth the Cooperative Principle which governs any conversational exchange in language. According to this principle, one should make one’s conversational contribution as required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose of that conversation. Grice also provides some maxims and sub-maxims to ensure cooperation between interlocutors.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Dr. Nilanjan Bhowmick for his numerous discussions with me on the notion of indexicals and the problem of shifted-reference. I thank Prof. Ranjan K. Panda for his suggestions and feedback on my work. I am also thankful to all the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions which have helped me to make this paper much better.
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Jha, A. Intention, Convergence and Indexical Reference. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 40, 183–206 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-023-00305-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-023-00305-0