Abstract
My aim in this paper is to lay out a number of theses which are very widely held in contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics, and to argue that, given some extra theses for which I’ll argue, they are inconsistent. Some of this will involve going through some very well-trodden territory—my hope is that presenting this familiar ground in the way that I do will help to make plain the problem that I aim to identify.
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Notes
Frege (1914/1980, 79).
I should also note that there is controversy about how to understand all of the key terms here—‘compositional,’ ‘productive,’ and ‘systematic.’ But nothing in what follows will hang on any of the fine points about which there is controversy.
The reason is that, when it comes to context-sensitive expressions, ‘meaning’ is ambiguous between ‘standing meaning’ and ‘meaning relative to a context.’ More on this below.
What sort of true claim? The answer is that it depends a bit on one’s view of semantics. A Davidsonian will think that it is a T-sentence, a possible worlds theorist might think that it should be the possible worlds truth condition of a sentence, and a structured propositions theorist might think that it should be a pairing of sentences and structured propositions. The somewhat awkward wording of the adequacy condition is meant to be neutral on this point.
Of course, the scope of our semantic competence includes, because of our cognitive limitations, only some of the infinitely many constructions about which a compositional semantics entails theorems. I ignore this for simplicity in what follows.
One could get around this problem by letting ‘I’ mean not ‘the speaker of the context,’ but rather ‘the speaker of this context.’ This would lead to other counterintuitive assignments of truth conditions to sentences—but more importantly for our purposes, since ‘this’ is itself an indexical which presumably has different contents with respect to different contents, it would not provide a way of avoiding the claim that ‘I’ has different contexts relative to different contexts.
This an ‘intention-sensitive semantics’ in the sense of Stokke (2010).
See Gauker (2008) for a theory which makes use of facts about salience, but is quite different from the salience-based theories discussed above. I am inclined to think that Gauker’s theory is either open to some of the counterexamples just discussed, or fails to be internalizable in the way that the ‘salience raising’ theory does, but I do not argue that here.
Indeed, many of the problems to be discussed below would arise if we focused on the case of comparative adjectives, for example, rather than demonstratives.
One might worry that a theory of the character of demonstratives which was based wholly on the internal mental states of the speaker of the context would fail to recognize the importance of demonstrations in understanding these expressions—why would demonstrations so often be required if the character of the expression had nothing to do with those demonstrations? But to this question the intention theorist has a reasonably straightforward answer: in standard cases, the user of an indexical expression intends her audience to grasp the content of that indexical in the context. Hence she will intend her audience to be aware of whatever contextual features are relevant to the character of that indexical. If an intention theory is correct, then one such contextual feature is the speaker’s own referential intention. So the speaker will intend, in the standard case, that her audience be aware of her intentions, and so will have a reason to make those intentions evident. Pointing gestures and the like are often the most straightforward way to do just that.
As above, we can treat de re intentions to refer to some particular object o as the intention to refer to the unique thing which is identical to o.
It is again worth noting that there is nothing very special here about demonstratives; in the case of any context-sensitive expression whose character is at least in part explained in terms of speaker intentions, we will get cases of conflicting intentions. One might even think that examples like those discussed in Romdenh-Romluc (2002) suggest that similar problems can arise for ‘I.’
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.
See King (2013, 10–11) for an interesting argument that ‘says’ and ‘agrees’ ascriptions support the verdict of reference failure. While this is suggestive, I think that those tests yield different results in other cases of conflicting intentions, like the case of the carnival discussed below.
Reimer (1991) presents this case not as one where one intention trumps another, but as one where the demonstration trumps speaker intentions. But in Reimer (1992), Sect. 3, she is clear that the case of the keys is a case of conflicting intentions. (In her terms, it is a conflict between primary and secondary intentions.) For a discussion of the positive theory of Reimer (1992), see Sect. 5.2.2 below.
King (2013) (notes 15 and 28) doubts whether in this scenario the speaker really intends to refer to the winning ball, noting, plausibly, that it’s not clear that people buying lottery tickets can intend to buy the winning ticket. But it is not hard to modify the case to avoid this objection: we can just imagine that the person playing the game has received a false but plausible anonymous tip about which ball has the cash in it. In these conditions the subject can surely rationally believe that he will refer to the winning ball, intend to refer to the winning ball, and this intention can be part of various of the subjects plans in the sense required by King’s view of intentions. For more on King’s take on these cases, see Sect. 5.3.3 below.
The second and third problems for salience theories seem to me to be problems for the audience uptake condition endorsed in Stokke (2010).
In the end, I think that (F) is probably inadequate as well as non-internalizable, for reasons discussed in Speaks (forthcoming).
See, among others, Bratman (1987).
He doesn’t endorse the view, however; he offers it as the best view for someone who thinks that the demonstrative in Carnap/Agnew refers to the picture of Agnew, rather than being an instance of reference failure—while leaving it open which is the correct view of that, and other similar, cases.
Another move would be to say that the controlling intention in the case of the professor is not a purely descriptive intention, but rather a descriptively enriched de re intention to refer to S, the sleeping student, and that in the cases of such controlling intentions, the reference of the demonstrative is fixed by the singular element rather than the extra descriptive material. But the problem again is why, if we say this in the case of the professor, we should not say this in the case of Carnap and Agnew—which would give us the incorrect result that the demonstrative in that case refers to the picture of Carnap.
One might object here that, while the professor may have had this extra intention, he may not have. I can intend to refer to the F without intending to refer to something which appears to be F. Otherwise, I would have to intend not just to refer to the thing which appears to be a sleeping student, but also to the thing which appears to appear to be a sleeping student. But it is no doubt true that in the natural way of understanding the case of the sleeping student, the professor does have an appears-intention of some sort.
Here I am taking ‘context’ in a sufficiently broad way—as, e.g., a centered world—to ensure that there will be such a function.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks for helpful discussion to two anonymous referees, audiences at the University of Missouri and University of Notre Dame, and for helpful discussion of previous versions of this material to Kent Bach, Jeff King, Alasdair Macintyre, and Scott Soames.
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Speaks, J. A puzzle about demonstratives and semantic competence. Philos Stud 174, 709–734 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0704-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0704-5