Complex demonstratives - San Sebastian

1.

Are complex demonstratives, expressions of the form ‘that F’, ‘this F’ etc., referential or quantificational? On the one hand they seem to be closely allied to simple demonstratives, standardly taken to be paradigmatically referential, while on the other they display the kind of syntactic complexity typical of quantified noun phrases. This puzzle has received much attention in the semantic and philosophical literature of late and yet, as I hope to show in the first part of this paper, we still lack a complete and adequate solution. Many of the accounts on offer, however, incorporate profound insights. In the second part of the paper I intend to build on those insights, and, by approaching the truth-conditional properties of complex demonstratives indirectly via their role in communication, I aim to provide the outline of an account that is both complete and adequate.

2.

Complex demonstratives appear to display what have been taken to be the two key features of referentiality: they track individuals across possible worlds and their emptiness leads to propositional failure. Consider the following sentence:

(1)        That cat has four legs

 A speaker who utters (1) while intending her use of ‘that cat’ to refer to Tiddles (and ensuring, by physical demonstration or otherwise, that her reference succeeds) will thereby have expressed a proposition the truth-value of which will depend on Tiddles in any circumstance of evaluation. Equally, a speaker who utters (1) without there being anything to which she intends to refer by her use of ‘that cat’ will thereby have failed to express any full proposition.

            Given evidence such as this, many have taken complex demonstratives to be referential, their contribution to truth-conditional content exhausted by their referent. There are a wide range of different accounts of this type currently on the market, with the (main) point of divergence the role played by the nominal element (the ‘cat’ in ‘that cat’). For some referentialists (e.g. Larson and Segal 1995), the nominal plays a merely pragmatic role in guiding the hearer toward a referent; for others (e.g. Kaplan 1978, 1989a, 1989b; Braun 1994 and Borg 2000) it contributes to Kaplanian character: the semantic content of a complex demonstrative ‘that F’ is just its referent, but that referent must be an actual F.

King (1999, 2001) has, however, raised a serious challenge for any referentialist account of complex demonstratives: there are apparent uses of complex demonstratives which are non-referential. He asks us to consider Scott, who, while giving a lecture on hominid history, utters:

(2)        That hominid who discovered how to start fires was a genius.

Scott’s intention is not to refer to any particular individual, given that he has no idea which individual his complex demonstrative picks out, but to talk about whichever hominid discovered how to start fires. His use of ‘that hominid’ also seems, inasmuch as there are any clear intuitions on the matter, not to display the key features of referentiality discussed above: the truth of Scott’s utterance would appear to depend in any particular circumstance of evaluation on the hominid who discovered how to start fires in that circumstance; and a failure of Scott’s use of ‘that hominid who discovered how to start fires’ to denote no more robs his utterance of propositional content than would the failure of ‘the hominid who discovered how to start fires’ to denote in the same context[1].

            If, as seems to be the case, these uses are truly non-referential, all accounts, such as those discussed above, on which complex demonstratives are straightforwardly referential would seem to be out of the running. Various referentialists have recognised such uses, however, without thereby feeling compelled to abandon their accounts. The view of Lepore and Ludwig is typical:

Sometimes, of course, “that” is pressed into service as a variant of “the”, and one could imagine someone uttering (21) [‘Every man loves that woman who is his mother’] with that in mind. We are not concerned with such uses of “that”, but rather with demonstrative uses.

Lepore and Ludwig (2000, p.219 fn.28)

How are we to take this exclusion? One possibility is that Lepore and Ludwig (and others who follow their line) are not in the business of analysing complex demonstratives as linguistic expressions, but are instead interested in the propositions expressed by particular uses of complex demonstratives. If this is the correct understanding of the passage above, then Lepore and Ludwig are simply addressing a different question from the one I am addressing in this paper. There is however another possible reading: Lepore and Ludwig may be making the tacit assumption that complex demonstratives are systematically ambiguous; that ‘that hominid’ in (5) is simply not the same kind of expression as ‘that cat’ in (1). If this were the case, their account (or any of the accounts examined above) might offer a complete analysis of  referential complex demonstratives, and would, of course, not be expected to carry over to non-referential complex demonstratives.

            If this is the correct interpretation of Lepore and Ludwig’s position (and it is clearly the position adopted by others, such as Dever (2001)), then the burden of proof must be on them to show that there truly is an ambiguity: with our lesson learned from Grice’s modified Occam’s razor, we should be ready to reject an account which posits an ambiguity for one which posits none, if such an account is available. As yet, this burden of proof has not been discharged[2].

3.

It seems that we must look for an account on which complex demonstratives are not ambiguous and yet on which they can give rise to truly non-referential truth conditions. King (2001) offers an account of just this sort. For him, complex demonstratives are profoundly context-sensitive quantifier expressions; context supplies not just an extra property over and above the property expressed by the nominal, but also determines whether, when assessed against any given circumstance of evaluation, the truth value of a complex demonstrative utterance will depend on the satisfier of these properties in that circumstance or in the context of utterance; whether, in other words, the complex demonstrative denotes rigidly or non-rigidly[3].

            King’s account has much to recommend it, not least that it makes the right predictions on rigidity and on the propositional failure that results from a failure to denote in apparently referential cases. Where the account falls short, however, is in the predictions it makes regarding scopal interactions. If, as King claims, complex demonstratives are quantificational, then they should enter into scopal relations with other quantifiers, belief operators, negation and so on. On non-referential uses this seems to be the case, but consider an utterance of :

(3)        Mary believes that that policeman is my brother

on which ‘that policeman’ is used to refer to Bob. On King’s account, there should be two readings of this sentence: on one it will be true iff there is one and only one object which is both Bob and a policeman in the context of utterance and Mary believes that that thing is my brother; on the other, it will be true iff Mary believes that there is one and only one object which is both a policeman and Bob in the context of utterance and that object is my brother (the italicisation is intended to indicate the content of Mary’s belief on each reading). The problem is with this second reading: if there really were such a reading, we should judge that (on one interpretation) an utterance of (6) would be false in the circumstance that Bob is indeed a policeman, Mary does indeed believe that he is the speaker’s brother, but she has the mistaken belief that he is a fireman. Intuitively, however, (6) is true in that circumstance.

            King recognises that this type of evidence might weigh against his account and thus runs a defence against it: he tries to show that there are referential cases where distinct scopal readings do arise and, where they don’t, that there are good pragmatic reasons why they shouldn’t. Neither of these arguments is entirely convincing however: on the one hand King’s examples of scope interaction on referential uses seem universally to be examples of something else, and on the other those readings which he claims are pragmatically suppressed seem in reality absent[4].

4.

Where does this leave us? It seems that (a) those uses on which the referentialist focuses are truly referential; (b) those uses on which the quantificationalist focuses are truly quantificational; (c) we should not treat complex demonstratives as ambiguous until we are offered better reason to do so. In the remainder of this paper I want to outline an account that satisfies these desiderata.

On most of the currently-available accounts, complex demonstratives are analysed along at least two dimensions of meaning: Kaplan distinguishes between (descriptive) character and (referential) content, King between the (descriptive) property expressed by the nominal and another contextually-determined (and often rigid) property which saturates an indexical element in the lexical meaning of complex demonstratives. The underlying insight behind all such two-tiered analyses seems to be that understanding a complex demonstrative involves both the linguistically-given nominal and some extra element; when we understand ‘that F’, we understand firstly that what is being talked about is an F, and secondly that it is a particular F being talked about. I propose, then, that we start from the following working hypothesis: ‘that F’ is a tool that speakers use to talk about particular Fs. The tool works by indicating two things: (i) that the hearer is intending to talk about an F; and (ii) that being an F, in the context of utterance, is not the only way in which the speaker is thinking of her intended F.

As vague as this formulation is, it would already seem to face a potential difficulty: consider example (2) again, taken from King (2001). Here Scott seems to be using a complex demonstrative felicitously although there is only one way in which he is thinking of his intended referent: as that hominid who discovered how to start fires. King is prepared to accept that the second property may be redundant; that in this case, for instance, the contextually-determined property is just the same property as is expressed by the nominal. But can this be right? Consider:

(4)        That oldest man in the world must be over 100

Something odd seems to be going on here: whereas Scott, knowing on purely general grounds that there is one and only one hominid who discovered how to start fires, can felicitously refer to him as ‘that hominid who discovered how to start fires’, it seems that A, who knows on purely general grounds that there is one and only one oldest man in the world, cannot felicitously refer to him as ‘that oldest man in the world’. Notice two things however: firstly, if we replace the expression ‘that oldest man in the world’ with ‘that person who is the oldest man in the world’ the infelicity disappears; and secondly, that if A and B have, for instance, recently been discussing a newspaper article on the oldest man in the world, A can utter (4) to B with significantly less infelicity than is the case without such a context. What might these data suggest? They seem to suggest two things: firstly that the speaker must have a way of thinking of her intended referent other than as a satisfier of the nominal in order to use a complex demonstrative felicitously, and secondly that this way of thinking may be linguistically represented. Thus a use of ‘that person who is the oldest man in the world’ may be felicitous because there are two available ways of thinking of the intended referent, as a person and as the oldest man in the world, whereas a use of ‘that oldest man in the world’ will (in the default context) be infelicitous, since there is only one available way of thinking of the intended referent (note that the property of being the oldest man in the world is not equivalent to a conjunction of more basic properties). ‘That oldest man in the world’ will, however, lose some of its infelicity when used in a context in which the intended referent has been the subject of previous conversation, since there are two ways of thinking of the referent available in such a context: as the oldest man in the world and as the subject of a previous conversation. A degree of infelicity remains, however, and on the proposal sketched above it is easy to see why: the role of the nominal, on this proposal, is to guide the hearer to a category of individuals, from which point the extra property guides him to a particular member of that category. In the imagined context, however, the nominal expresses a property which, if instantiated at all, must be uniquely instantiated, thus leaving the extra property, the property of being the subject of a previous conversation, with no work to do.

            Let me briefly summarise the kind of picture that the evidence above seems to point towards: complex demonstratives are communicative tools of a particular kind, they are tools for talking about individuals; given their meaning, they indicate that the individual in question is being thought of in at least two ways, firstly as a member of a particular class and then via some other route or routes that distinguish(es) them from all other members of that class. But how should we cash out the notion of thinking of an individual which we have used in this formulation? I take it as uncontroversial from a cognitive perspective that having a concept of an individual is a necessary prerequisite for entertaining thoughts about that individual. However, it has been a philosophical commonplace since Russell that there are two fundamentally different ways of thinking of individuals: in Russell’s terms, one may think of an individual either as an object of acquaintance or via description. This distinction, and the discussion it has given rise to, are familiar and I don’t intend to go into them in detail here. The lesson I wish to draw, however, is simple: there are ways of thinking of individuals which are truth conditionally singular, in the sense that all they contribute to the truth-conditions of propositional representations is their referents, while there are other ways of thinking of individuals that are general, in that they give rise to general, i.e. quantificational, truth conditions. I shall call the former de re individual concepts[5] and the latter descriptive individual concepts.

My proposal looks like this: the information carried by a complex demonstrative ‘that F’ (where ‘F’ is taken only to supply one property to the interpretation) comprises three aspects:

i)                    The component of the speaker’s mental representation which corresponds to the complex demonstrative in her linguistic representation is an individual concept, be it de re or descriptive;

ii)                   That individual concept is a concept of an F;

iii)                 That individual concept is a concept of an O, where O is a further property or conjunction of properties over and above the property of being an F.

The key to this proposal is that complex demonstratives are neutral as between de re and descriptive individual concepts: they are simply tools for expressing individual concepts. On this proposal complex demonstratives may be construed as functions from contexts to individual concepts. ‘That F is G’ will be true just in case G*_{IC(F*, O)} is true, where G*_{IC(F*, O)} is a mental representation formed by combining the property expressed by G with an individual concept of the appropriate type of an F and an O (F* being the property expressed by F). This gives us one step towards a truth condition for complex demonstrative utterances, but what of the step from mental representation to world? When, in other words, will G*_{IC(F*, O)} be true? This will of course depend on which kind of individual concept IC(F*, O) is: if it is a de re individual concept, G*_{IC(F*, O)} will be true just in case G* is a property of its referent; if it is a descriptive individual concept, then it will, no doubt, have something like a standard descriptive truth condition, i.e. it will be true iff [the x: F*x & Ox] (G*x).

5.

I would like, in the last part of this paper, to raise one potential objection to my account and to explain why I do not think that it poses any genuine threat. The potential objection is that, having argued that we need a univocal story on complex demonstratives, what I have actually provided is an ambiguity account. On my analysis, one and the same complex demonstrative utterance can, in different contexts, have either genuinely singular of genuinely quantificational truth conditions; what, so the argument might go, could be more ambiguous than that?

            There is certainly something right in this objection: I am proposing an account on which complex demonstratives can give rise to very different kinds of truth conditions, so, if all that is being claimed is that, on my account, complex demonstratives are truth-conditionally ambiguous, then I’m going to have to put up my hands to that. My claim, however, is that, on my story, complex demonstratives are not ambiguous in any way that we should worry about. Let me briefly rehearse the familiar methodological claims about ambiguity to demonstrate why. According to Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor, ‘senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity’ (Grice 1967: 47). Given two competing theories about the interpretation of a linguistic expression, one of which posits an ambiguity and the other of which posits none, we should be ready to accept the latter theory. How might a theory without an ambiguity do the same work as one with an ambiguity? By handing everything beyond the univocal semantics over to pragmatics. The essence of Modified Occam’s Razor, then, is that an expression should be viewed as ambiguous iff one cannot account for it via a univocal semantics plus pragmatics. But this is just what my account of complex demonstratives does: it takes a single semantics, a lexically encoded meaning which constrains the mapping from linguistic to conceptual representation for all complex demonstratives, and leaves the rest, i.e. which is the O-property, whether the intended individual concept is de re or descriptive etc., to pragmatics. In any theoretically significant sense, therefore, the account I have proposed is not an ambiguity account.

References:

Borg, E. 2000. Complex Demonstratives. Philosophical Studies 97, 225-44.

Braun, D. 1994. Structured Characters and Complex Demonstratives. Philosophical Studies 74, 193-219.

Dever, J. 2001. Complex Demonstratives. Linguistics and Philosophy 24, 271-330.

Kaplan, D. 1978. Dthat. In P. Cole (ed.) Syntax and Semantics. New York: Academic Press.

Kaplan, D. 1989a. Demonstratives. In J. Almog et al. (eds.) Themes from Kaplan, 481-563. Oxford: OUP.

Kaplan, D. 1989b. Afterthoughts. In J. Almog et al. (eds.) Themes from Kaplan, 564-614. Oxford: OUP.

King, J. 1999. Are Complex ‘That’ Phrases Devices of Direct Reference? Nous 33, 155-182.

King, J. 2001. Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational Account. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Larson, R and G. Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Lepore, E and K. Ludwig. 2000. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Complex Demonstratives. Mind 109, 199-240.

Powell, G. 2001. Complex Demonstratives. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13, 43-71.