Abstract
In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue that they can be generalized to a novel criterion for distinguishing between indexicals and demonstratives. The central theoretical claim is that the semantic values of indexicals are objects which play certain utterance-related roles, which are fixed independently of the words being used in the utterance. For instance, the speaker plays the speaker role whether or not she uses the word “I”, and the addressee plays that role whether or not the speaker uses the word “you”. Demonstratives, on the other hand, pick out objects that play no such role, and are instead helped by the speaker’s word-specific intentions.
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Notes
In this paper, I will be talking quite extensively about Kaplan’s work on indexicals. Since the two central papers were published in the same book, but written at least 12 years apart, I have found it useful to refer to them in a more descriptive manner than the usual citation conventions. I will use “[Demons]” for Kaplan (1989b) and “[Aft]” for Kaplan (1989a).
I should note that talk of intentions here is, to some extent, a place-holder for some mental state, whose characterization is left to psychology. A comparison might help. Kripke (1980, p. 96), when talking about reference transmission, claims that the borrower must intend to use the name they have just heard with the same reference as does the lender. Devitt (2015, p. 117) finds Kripke’s account to be overly intellectualized, and would prefer to substitute some other intentional, possibly unconscious, act. The claims I am making are mainly about the structure of such a mental state, whatever it turns out to be, so if you share Devitt’s preferences, read my claims about intentions in a way similar to how you would read Kripke’s.
This is Kaplan’s view, and it is contested in the literature, for instance in discussions of the Answering Machine problem. I will come back to this in Sect. 7.
I follow King (2014) in using “semantic value” instead of “referent” in order to remain neutral about the question whether demonstratives are devices of reference or of quantification. The intuitive idea is that the semantic value of a demonstrative in a context is the object that it picks out, whether by referring to it, or by some other semantic means.
See Starr (2010) for an extended discussion of this issue within a Kaplanian framework.
There is little talk about “you” in [Demons], though a tantalizing remark on p. 552 seems to indicate that Kaplan might have contemplated counting it as an indexical: “Aspects of the contexts other than [agent, place, time, and world] would be used if new demonstratives (e.g., pointings, You, etc.) were added to the language.” His usage of “demonstrative” in the original paper is not very tightly regimented, as it is sometimes used synonymously with “indexical”. What is more important is that something like the addressee could be considered part of the context. Then again, it is hard to figure out why pointings would count as on a par with “you”, as expressions of the language, so we should not put too much pressure on this passage. In the later (Kaplan 2012, p. 137), Kaplan does talk about the characters of “I” and “you” in similar ways, so he seems to count both as indexicals. But his focus in those passages is on cognitive significance, rather than on the distinction between indexicals and demonstratives. Kaplan’s claim is that when A says to B “You are F”, and B says “I am not F”, there is a contradiction not just at the level of content, but also at the level of cognitive significance. This kind of claim can, probably, also be made about the cognitive significance of an appropriate utterance of “He is F”, so the distinction between indexicals and demonstratives is not directly relevant there.
Throughout this criterion, I mean to be talking about sentence forms, not sentence tokens. Brandom (2008, p. 58) has a similar proposal for indexicals, though his formulation appeals to tokenings, and thus is more restrictive. I should also note that talk of roles is not new: see Perry (2006), Korta and Perry (2011), and Sherman (2015) for an opposing view.
It is important to note that this picture depends on thinking of speech acts, e.g. of thinking of the speaker as speaking (or writing, or using sign language, or typing Morse code, etc.). In [Demons], §XIII, Kaplan argued that for the purposes of logic we need a more abstract notion, of a sentence relative to a context, allowing contexts in which the person who counts as the speaker is not in any way communicating. The reason was that it seems wrong to say that “I am in a coma” is false relative to all contexts, even if there can never be a true utterance of that sentence. The latter claim can be disputed: if the person left a message, can it not count as an utterance, even when the person is no longer capable of uttering anything? But there is an even harder problem that would need to be addressed: if we need to abstract away from real world utterances, how far do we have to go? This is indeed a big issue, and I will not address it in this paper. If the view I present in this paper is correct, we cannot stray away too far from the utterance-related roles of speaker and addressee.
Egan (2009) pointed out a further complication: in a commercial, the announcer may say “this is the soda you’ve been waiting for”, where she uses the second person pronoun singular, but does not intend to address only one person. Rather, the intention is to address each viewer or listener in turn. Even in this complicated case, we can still ask “who is the addressee?”, even though the best short answer would be “it’s complicated”.
One could claim that “whale” is a demonstrative-type word, perhaps for Burgean anti-individualist reasons (though I am not claiming that this is the view proposed in Burge (1979)). In that case, put aside that example. At least one of these three ought to be demonstrative-free by anyone’s lights.
This is the majority view; see, for instance, King (2014), for a similar claim that this is the default starting point. Some have even argued that speakers’ intentions are sufficient: Bach (2005), Montminy (2010), and Åkerman (2015a). As always, there is a minority. Wettstein (1984, pp. 72–73) argues that the line stretching from the speaker’s finger determines the referent of demonstratives accompanied by a pointing. Quine (1968, p. 194) is often cited as a precursor, but Quine was not talking about demonstratives in that passage; Ryle (1949, p. 188) is a better, though still imperfect, fit. These difficulties have led to a mini-tradition of intentionally ignoring the issue, and just continuing to talk, like Kaplan, in terms of demonstrations as whatever it is that demonstratives need to get a referent. See Salmon (2002) and Caplan (2003).
There are many kinds of intentions that deserve to be called “word-specific”. Here is one that is semantically irrelevant because it is guided by Gricean considerations of manner: I may choose to use “bunny” rather than “rabbit” when talking to a child, guided by the intention to use the right register. In this paper I focus on semantically relevant intentions.
There are more options than can be discussed in this paper. A referee for this journal suggests a natural proposal: we could make different two-way divisions, depending on our interest. If one thinks that the need for intentions marks the border between semantics and pragmatics, or that, even within semantics, there is a crucial border there, one might say that for semantics the A versus B \(+\) C grouping is the correct one, while at the same time accept that for their role in conversations, the better grouping is A \(+\) B versus C. My claims are about semantics, so I disagree with this proposal on the crucial question whether the role of intentions in the semantic story of the second person pronoun puts it on the side of demonstratives. This disagreement has two parts. First, I claim that the intention to address someone is of a different kind than the intention to pick out an object with a demonstrative. This I take to be fairly obvious. Second, I claim that the intention to address is part of a typical speech-act, and thus part of the setup of any typical context. A full discussion of these issues, and of the border between semantics and pragmatics, would not fit in a single paper. So I would be content if the reader were to agree that the second person is an interesting case, and that there are reasons to consider it an indexical, reasons that are not obviously semantically irrelevant.
In a sample of 402 languages, Siewierska lists one language that lacks number distinctions altogether, 7 for just the first person, 1 for the second person, and 3 for the first and third persons only (English is among these three, because “you” is used for both singular and plural). She states that the case of the third person being the only one that lacks number distinctions is “widely attested”. The vagueness is due to the vagueness of the category of “number”: how to count the dual case, how to consider clitics, how to account for the inclusive/exclusive distinction, etc.
Out of the 133 languages in Siewierska’s sample that have gender markings in independent forms, 97% have it marked in the third person, 18% in the second, and 3% in the first.
Here the evidence is more geographic than in terms of cardinality: the former happens in several languages in each of Australia, North America, and the Tibeto-Burman area. The latter only happens in three languages in the Tibeto-Burman area (pp. 63–65).
This marking is not so strict as to prevent the third person from referring to the speaker of the context. Someone wanting to meet John Perry, without knowing him, may ask Perry “Is John Perry here?”, and Perry, uncooperatively, may well reply “He is”, though he knows that he himself is John Perry. See Perry (2001), Stojanovic (2007) for discussion.
There are exceptions. Imagine someone saying “Impressive!” in front of a Rothko painting. No overt demonstrative has been used, but the painting does play a demonstratum-like role. There are several options here. One is to postulate an unpronounced demonstrative; another is to say that no assertion has been made, but something got communicated—perhaps an implicature of sorts; yet another is to say that reference can be accomplished without any expression doing the referring. I owe the example to Stojanovic (2007, p. 14).
Lyons (1977, p. 673) argues that deixis is more basic than anaphora because deixis is one of the most important ways in which we introduce objects into the universe of discourse, so that we can later refer to them anaphorically. This argument seems convincing to me, but I suspect that different notions of basicness might be in play here.
See King (2001) for arguments that all uses of demonstratives should be subsumed under one theory, and for such a theory.
Siewierska (2004, p. 105).
Bhat (2004, p. 134).
In fact, Bittner (2012) discusses two languages—Kalaallisut and Slavé. Even more broadly, the paper aims to promote a dynamic view of indexicality, as opposed to both the classic Kaplan (1989b) and the DRT of Kamp (1985) and Zeevat (2000). Space considerations preclude a more detailed discussion of this view. Fortunately, the main points of this paper can be made in her framework with little adaptation needed.
The last two paragraphs are closely based on Bittner (2012).
Bittner (2012, pp. 11–12).
See Diessel (1999, p. 83) for the relevant data, and for many more examples. The Ponapean example is not unusual, and it also points to the importance of the speaker and addressee roles, other than qua referents of pronouns.
Perry (2001, pp. 58–62) calls them “discretionary indexicals”, and contrasts them with “automatic indexicals”, like “I” and “today”.
I put aside many other issues about these words. For example, Mount (2008) notes that some uses are constrained by the time and place of the utterance (e.g. when the speaker intends to pick out the country she is in, whichever that may be), but some are not (e.g. when, during a history lesson, the teacher says “and now, Napoleon makes a big mistake”). I agree with Åkerman (2015b) that this phenomenon is pragmatic, not semantic. If this is incorrect, I would have to categorize some uses of indexicals as of a demonstrative nature, in which case I would separate the treatments of the different kinds of uses.
Exceptions exist, of course. A parent may say “we’re getting sleepy”, and thus be truly talking about two children, though the parent is not sleepy at all. I take this to be a non-literal use of “we”, for reasons similar to the ones about historical uses of “now”.
See Siewierska (2004, §3.2) and the many references therein.
Words within square brackets have been changed to match the terminology of this paper. In his paper, Kaplan was not always consistent in his use of “demonstrative” and “indexical”, so I don’t feel too bad about making these changes here.
Korta and Perry (2011, p. 62). The authors use “role” as a technical notion here: “[roles] are a way of talking about and organizing information about important relations things have to one another” (Korta and Perry 2011, p. 28). The relevant part of the theory is thinking of contexts of utterance as “role-fillers” (Korta and Perry 2011, p. 61): the context, for instance, specifies who plays the speaker role. They also talk about “utterance-relative roles”, which seem to include only the speaker, the time, and the location of the utterance (p. 148), but the discussion is not very detailed, so it is hard to see why only these contextual features are included, and not others. In their terminology, my view rests on a particular conception of utterance-relative roles.
Here, I am following the discussion in Korta and Perry (2011, p. 62), though they think of this as an addendum to the second criterion, which we will get to in a moment.
There are many other ways to do this. For instance, Lewis (1981, p. 85–86) distinguishes between features of contexts which are given directly (speaker, time, and place) and those that are given “less directly”, which include the previous course of the conversation.
[Aft], p. 587.
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Thanks to the audiences at the APA—Pacific, 2012; the Society for Exact Philosophy, 2014; the Midsouth Philosophy Conference, 2015. Also, thanks are owed to numerous anonymous referees, Sam Cumming, Marina Folescu, Geoff Georgi, Michael Glanzberg, Matt McGrath, Eliot Michaelson, Stefano Predelli, Scott Soames, Jeff Speaks, Dawn Starr, Isidora Stojanovic, and especially David Kaplan.
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Radulescu, A. The difference between indexicals and demonstratives. Synthese 195, 3173–3196 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1367-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1367-2