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Jesus loves you!

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Abstract

According to orthodox semantics, a given sentence as used at a given situation expresses at most one content. In the last decade, this view has been challenged with several objections. Many of them have been addressed in the literature. But one has gone almost unheeded. It stems from sentences that are used to address several people individually, like ‘Jesus loves you!’ as uttered by a priest at a sermon. Cappelen (Philos Perspect 22(1):23–46, 2008), Egan (Synthese 166(2):251–279, 2009), López de Sa (Erkenntnis 79(1):241–253, 2014), and MacFarlane (Assessment sensitivity: relative truth and its applications. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, ch. 4) claim that, to account for such cases, one has to adopt a pluralist semantics, according to which the sentences in question express more than one content. In this paper, I shall counter this objection. Exploiting different so far underappreciated features of singular and plural ‘you,’ I argue, orthodox semantics can very well account for the cases in question.

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Notes

  1. See, most prominently, Lewis (1980) and Kaplan (1989). I use the expression ‘sentences at situations’ rather than the more usual ‘sentences at contexts of use’ to indicate that—unlike López de Sa’s (2014)—my discussion is not going to turn on the question of what Lewis might or might not understand by ‘contexts of use.’

  2. Egan’s (2009, 259ff.) presentation of what I call ‘the pluralist objection’ is much more explicit and detailed than Cappelen’s (2008, 30), López de Sa’s (2014, 247f.), and MacFarlane’s (2014, 74). In what follows, I shall therefore mostly deal with Egan.

  3. See Egan (2009, 264ff.).

  4. Egan (2009, 265).

  5. See Egan (2009, 261ff.).

  6. See Egan (2009, 261ff.).

  7. Given the rough outline of a pluralistic semantics in the introduction, it should be clear that it can rather easily account for the impression that the priest addresses all the people attending the sermon individually: as used in the sermon, sentence (1) contains singular ‘you’ and expresses a number of propositions each of which is about and hence directed to a different sermon participant. Since the rest of the paper is devoted to the question whether orthodox semantics can account for this impression as well, I shall not comment on the explanatory power of a pluralistic semantics any further. For a critical discussion of a pluralistic semantics for ‘Jesus loves you,’ see Davis (2013, 12).

  8. See Egan (2009, 264ff.), and also Predelli (1998, 114) and MacFarlane (2014, 74).

  9. See, for instance, Moltmann (2006). Though Moltmann mainly talks about generic one, she takes what she says about generic one to transfer to generic you. See Moltmann (2006, 259).

  10. This sentence is due to Rullmann (2004, 162). For similar data, see Kratzer (2009, 188) and Déchaine and Wiltschko (2015).

  11. See Rullmann (2004), Kratzer (2009), and Déchaine and Wiltschko (2015).

  12. Note that I am not saying here that singular ‘you’ of (1) works exactly like it does in (9) or (10) (assuming the bound readings). I am only saying that there is precedent for the claim that singular ‘you’ can function as a bound variable. To be fair, I should say that Egan is aware of the fact that ‘you’ can function as a bound variable. He does not consider an approach along the above lines, though, since he seems to assume (i) that the only way for ‘you’ to be a bound variable is for it to be bound by a generic quantifier and (ii) that ‘you’ of (1) is not bound by a generic quantifier. See Egan (2009, 263, fn.13). I most certainly agree with (ii), but I am not convinced by (i).

  13. For a similar worry, see Davis (2013, 10).

  14. For a similar example, see (Egan 2009, 259) and (López de Sa 2014, 247).

  15. The felicitous counterparts would be

    1. (15′)

      Für jede und jeden von euch gilt, dass Jesus sie bzw. ihn liebt.

    2. (16′)

      Jede und jeder von euch ist derart, dass Jesus sie bzw. ihn liebt.

    For similar data, see Kratzer (2009).

  16. For the claim that it is not a necessary feature of covert material that one can straightforwardly uncover it, see, for instance, also Schaffer (2011, 196).

  17. See Davis (2013, 11ff.).

  18. See Davis (2013, 13).

  19. In a way, this approach can be seen as a detailed elaboration of a thought both Egan and Davis express but do not work out themselves: that ‘the semantic content of an utterance isn’t all that’s conveyed to the audience.’ See Egan (2009, 254) and also Davis (2013, 9).

  20. For the tests, see, for instance, von Fintel (2004) and Yablo (2006).

  21. For this claim, see, most prominently, Strawson (1950).

  22. See Strawson (1954) and, more prominently, von Fintel (2004), Yablo (2006, 2009).

  23. For the following, see Yablo (2006).

  24. See, most prominently, Grice (1989, ch. 2).

  25. For critical discussion of calculability as a key feature of implicatures, see Davis (1998). For critical discussion of cancelability as a key feature of implicatures, see Weiner (2006) and Åkerman (2015).

  26. Egan (pc). See similarly Davis (2013, 11).

  27. See Davis (2013, 11).

  28. See Davis (2013, 13).

  29. See Davis (2013, 13).

  30. See, for instance, Chapman (1996, 396 f.).

  31. See Yablo (2006).

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Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this material were presented at the HU-KCL workshop in London, the workshop Topics in Analytical Metaphysics and Philosophy of Language in Mainz, the GAP.9 in Osnabrück and the SPB in Berlin. I am grateful to all these audiences for helpful feedback. Special thanks to Max Barkhausen, Alexander Dinges, Andy Egan, David Löwenstein, Eliot Michaelson and Richard Woodward, as well as two anonymous referees of this journal. My research on this paper was conducted within the context of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group Ontology After Quine (WO-1896/1-1). Many thanks to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for supporting this project.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Julia Zakkou

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Zakkou, J. Jesus loves you!. Philos Stud 174, 237–255 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0679-2

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