This is a Paper about Demonstratives
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This is a Paper about Demonstratives Cathal O’Madagain1,2 Received: 4 July 2019 / Revised: 11 March 2020 / Accepted: 9 June 2020 / © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Demonstratives (words like ‘this’ and ‘that’) and indexicals (words like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’) seem intuitively to form a semantic family. Together they form the basic set of directly referring ‘context sensitive’ terms whose reference changes as the environment or identity of the speaker changes. Something that we might expect of a semantics for indexicals is therefore that it would be closely related to a semantics of demonstratives, although recent approaches have generally treated them separately. A promising new theory of indexicals is the ‘token-contextual’ account, which accounts for a wide range of uses of indexicals without encountering the problems faced by competing models. So far this theory has not been considered for demonstratives, however, but only for the indexicals ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. In this paper I show that the token-contextual account can be elegantly extended to cover demonstratives. Doing so restores unity to our understanding of a natural semantic family, and allows us to identify a single rule governing the most basic context-sensitive terms. Keywords Demonstratives · Indexicals · Contextualism · Tokens · Kaplan
1 Kaplan on Demonstratives In Kaplan’s agenda-setting paper ‘Demonstratives’ (1977), a set of terms was identified whose reference appears to change from one context to the next. Included in this set were words like ‘this’ and ‘that’, which I will henceforth call simply ‘demonstratives’, and words like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, which I will call ‘indexicals’. These terms are generally considered to form the set of prototypically ‘context sensitive’ expressions in natural language (Cappellen and Lepore 2005: 1): depending on who uses them, where they are, what time it is, or what they are pointing at, the terms refer Cathal O’Madagain
[email protected] 1
School of Collective Intelligence, Universit´e Mohammad VI Polytechnique, Ben Gu´erir, Morocco
2
Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, 29 Rue d’Ulm, Paris, 75005, France
Philosophia
to different things. Suppose Descartes produces the following sentence in Holland in 1641, pointing at a piece of wax: 1) I am here now, and this is a piece of wax In 1), ‘I’ refers to Descartes, ‘here’ refers to Holland, ‘now’ refers to 1641 and ‘this’ refers to the piece of wax he points at. But if I produce the same sentence in Paris in 2020, pointing at a wax pig, the terms will refer to different things: me, Paris, 2020, and the wax pig I’m pointing at. Such is not the case, for example, for proper names or natural kind terms. If Descartes says “wax melted in Holland in 1641” in 1641 in Holland, he says just what I would say if I produce the same sentence 400 years later in Paris. Demonstratives and indexicals are also paradigmatic instances of ‘directly referring’ expressions. A term that refers directly is a term that picks out its object de re, without any intervening description.
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