The deferred interpretation of indexicals and proper names
Abstract
One of the central tenets of direct
reference theory, that indexicals are semantically marked so as to give rise to
singular propositions, has recently been challenged, by Geoffrey Nunberg among
others, on the grounds that indexicals can, in fact, be shown to lead to the
same range of interpretations as descriptions. In this paper I want to take a
look at so-called deferred interpretations
of indexicals and proper names from a cognitive perspective grounded in
Relevance Theory, with the aim of exploring
what rôles semantic decoding and pragmatic inference play in the retrieval of
these interpretations.
1
Introduction
What
do indexicals, expressions such as I,
you, here
and now, contribute to the
propositions expressed by utterances in which they appear? What, for instance,
does the expression I bring to a
proposition? I imagine many of us, without having to give the question too much
thought, would probably say something like:
I just serves to pick out a particular person, it picks out the person who’s
speaking. So if I say I hope I’m not
boring you yet, my use of I just
picks out George Powell, in order that I can say something about him/me. And
faced with most of the data this intuition seems pretty robust, so robust, in
fact, that it provides the bedrock for accounts of the semantics of indexicals
within the direct reference tradition. But is it really as robust as all that?
Are there uses of indexicals which don’t fit into this nice clear picture?
Over the last few years there has been a growing number of voices claiming just
this: that there are, in fact, a range of uses, involving so-called deferred
reference, in which indexicals do not introduce particular individuals into the
propositions expressed by the utterances in which they appear. Consider the
following examples, taken from Nunberg (1993):
(1)
Condemned
prisoner: I am traditionally
allowed to order whatever I like for my last meal.
(2)
Chess
teacher giving an introductory lesson to a student who has just played 4. N 5
P …: According to all the
textbooks, you often get in trouble with that move.
(3)
Medical
pathologist pointing to a spot on his own chest:
When a person is shot here we can usually conclude that it was not suicide.
In
each of these examples it seems that, on at least one reading, an indexical is
being used to introduce something other than an individual. Have a look at (1),
for example. The claim is that it has two readings: a (nonsensical) reading on
which I does indeed introduce an
individual, and a preferred reading on which I
introduces a definite description something like the
condemned prisoner, used attributively in the sense of Donnellan (1966). In
much the same way, you in (2) is
taken to introduce a description something like the
player who plays 4. N 5
P…, again attributively
used. In (3) it’s not entirely clear how we’d want to paraphrase the
contribution here makes to the
proposition expressed, but all we need be clear about is that it doesn’t serve
to introduce the particular spot on his own chest which the pathologist is
pointing at, as our original intuition might suggest it should.
So
where do these observations leave us? Should we abandon our original intuition
entirely in the face of irreconcilable evidence? But if we do that how do we
explain the undoubted strength of the intuition, or the fact that it can account
for the majority of the data? It would surely be ill advised to ditch out of
hand a theory which can do so much good work for us. Perhaps, then, we should
just stick to our guns and assume that uses like those in (1), (2) and (3) are
somehow deviant? It seems to me that this smacks of sticking one’s head in the
sand; if our theory of indexicals is to be worth its salt it better have some
kind of account for uses which, although perhaps rare, are certainly
intelligible and attested. As I imagine the foregoing may have suggested, I hope
to steer a middle course between these two approaches: I don’t want to turn my
back entirely on direct reference, but direct reference cannot hide from the
data if it is to provide a satisfactory account of indexicals as they are used
in natural language.
So
far, then, I’ve introduced the notion of the deferred use of indexicals; how
about the deferred use of proper names? I hope that, as we go on, it will become
clear why the availability
or unavailability of deferred readings for proper names is of central
significance. As a rough first approximation, the issue looks like this: if
indexicals are alone among referring expressions in their capacity to give rise
to deferred readings, then that seems like pretty good evidence that that
capacity has something to do with the semantics of indexicals i.e. with their
linguistically encoded meaning; if, on the other hand, proper names can give
rise to deferred readings just as indexicals can, then we might well be looking
towards pragmatics for an overall account of deferred use.
Before
getting on to the meat of this paper, let me say a couple of words about how I
propose to proceed. In the first half of the paper, I want to look at the
competing camps in rather more detail, starting with direct reference-flavoured
accounts and then turning to the challenges that those accounts have had to
face. Then I want, essentially, to turn the question around: rather than
approaching the issues raised by deferred reference from a philosophical
perspective grounded in truth-conditional semantics, I want to see whether any
interesting results fall out from adopting a cognition-based approach. My aim is
to see whether looking at things from a new perspective might allow us to ask
different (and perhaps more interesting) questions and so reach different (and
perhaps more interesting) answers.
2
Indexicals, proper names and direct reference
At
the heart of the theory of direct reference is the notion that there is a
lexically encoded distinction between, on the one hand, definite descriptions
and, on the other hand, directly referential terms such as indexicals and proper
names. There are various ways of looking at this distinction but whichever way
you look at it, it comes down to something like this: what descriptions
contribute to a proposition is some version of a Fregean sense; what directly
referential expressions contribute to a proposition just is their referent.
Kaplan (1977) is careful to distinguish this from the claim that directly
referential expressions lack descriptive content; it’s just that what
descriptive content they do have plays a fundamentally different role in the
interpretation process. Instead of forming part of the proposition expressed, it
simply serves to indicate a referent and then falls away. To put this another
way, utterances containing descriptions give rise to general truth conditions,
utterances containing directly referential expressions give rise to singular
truth conditions.
To
capture this insight, Kaplan (1977) introduces a distinction between two
different types of meaning: character and content. I don’t propose to go into
this no doubt familiar distinction in any great depth, but as a rough rule of
thumb an expression’s character can be equated with its linguistic meaning and
its content with what it contributes to the proposition expressed. In Kaplan’s
terms, then, the distinguishing feature of directly referential expressions is
that their content just is their referent. So what I
or John, for instance, contribute to
a proposition just is whoever they’re being used to refer to. The content of a
description, by contrast, is some kind of conceptual complex, some kind of
Fregean sense. And the character of directly referential expressions? For
Kaplan, the feature that distinguishes indexicals from other expressions is that
their character and content differ. Let’s take I
again: we’ve just seen that the content of I
will be an individual; what is its character? Well it’s going to be something
like the speaker of this utterance.
So the meaning of I on this analysis
just serves to pick out the speaker of the particular utterance and then falls
out of the picture.
There’s
some debate about the character of proper names: for Kaplan proper names have
identical character and content. For others, such as Recanati (1993), proper
names have differing character and content; they are, in other words, a form of
indexical. We need not, however, be too concerned here with the character of
directly referential expressions; it is, rather, their content, what they
contribute to propositions, that lies at the heart of the debate over deferred
reference.
In
a series of papers (e.g. Nunberg (1990) and Nunberg (1993)), Geoffrey Nunberg
has raised objections to the approach outlined above which one of its leading
proponents has called ‘the most serious which the theory of direct reference
has ever faced’ (Recanati (1993, p301)). The main thrust of Nunberg’s
argument is simple: at the heart of direct reference is the claim that there is
a semantically encoded distinction between directly referential expressions and
descriptions which leads to a difference in truth conditions; if, therefore, it
can be shown that indexicals are capable of giving rise to the same range of
interpretations as descriptions, then the theory of direct reference will be
seriously weakened, at least so far as indexicals are concerned. And, for
Nunberg, examples such as (1), (2) and (3) show just this.
But
what lessons does he draw from these data? Let’s just remind ourselves of the
two main planks of the direct reference account of indexicals: the meaning
(character) of indexicals does not enter into the proposition expressed, in
other words the meaning of indexicals is indicative; and what indexicals
contribute to propositions (their content) just is an individual. Where do these
claims stand in the face of Nunberg’s examples? Well the first claim remains
unaffected: Nunberg sees no reason to dispute the notion that the linguistic
meaning of indexicals is indicative. There is, after all, abundant evidence to
illustrate this point. To take just one example, Kaplan (1977) points out that,
if the speaker of this utterance were
the content as well as the character of I,
then (4) would express a necessary truth:
(4)
If no one were to utter this token, I would not exist.
Kaplan
(1977, p520)
‘Beliefs
such as [(4)]’, says Kaplan, ‘could make one a compulsive talker’.
The
second claim of direct reference, on the other hand (the claim, that is, that
indexicals are semantically marked so as to give rise to singular propositions),
seems seriously threatened by Nunberg’s examples, if we accept that the
propositions expressed by those examples are general[1].
The insight that underlies this is that there is no necessary link between the
two claims of direct reference: just because the meaning of an expression is
indicative, that doesn’t necessarily mean that what that expression
contributes to a proposition just is an individual. It might contribute a
property other than that encoded by its linguistic meaning. And it’s this
insight that leads Nunberg to propose an alternative account of the semantics of
indexicals, an account grounded in the notion of deferred reference.
The
question Nunberg sets out to answer is, essentially, this: if indexicals can
contribute properties other than those encoded by their linguistic meaning,
through what mechanism do these properties get into propositions? And, in rough
terms, the answer he gives is that they get in because indexicals have the
semantics they do. Nunberg starts by looking at the meaning of we:
he observes that, although it may be so interpreted[2],
we is not standardly used as the
plural form of I. It is, rather, used
to mean something like the group of
people instantiated by the speaker or speakers of the utterance (Nunberg
(1993, p7)). Now as Nunberg points out, this amounts to the claim that the
interpretation of we involves a
two-stage (i.e. deferred) process: first the hearer has to find out who the
speaker of the utterance is and secondly he must decide which group instantiated
by the speaker is being picked out by this use of we.
With this in mind, Nunberg divides the meaning of we
into three separate components: a deictic component, which picks out a
particular element of the context of utterance (an index,
in Nunberg’s terms): in the case of we,
the deictic component will pick out the speaker; a classificatory component,
which serves to lay constraints on the eventual interpretation: for we,
the classificatory component will contain the features plural and animate, on
Nunberg’s analysis; and a relational component which determines what relation
must hold between the index and the interpretation: for we
this will be something like the index
must instantiate the interpretation. The key point is that, for Nunberg, the
semantics of we is such that all
three components must be resolved in the interpretation process: a hearer must
go from the expression to its speaker and then from the speaker to a plural,
animate interpretation instantiated by the speaker. Now that’s not to say that
there is no rôle for pragmatics in this process: clearly working out which
plural, animate group is being referred to on a given use of we
involves pragmatic inferencing. That pragmatic inferencing is, in fact,
mandatory given what, for Nunberg, we
semantically encodes.
The
interpretation of we, then,
standardly involves deferred reference. But it’s not at all clear that direct
reference theorists would have much trouble with the outline of this account of we:
so long as the ultimate interpretation is singular rather than general, then all’s
well. They would, and in the case of Recanati do, however, have a problem with
Nunberg’s next move. Nunberg’s claim is that the interpretation of
indexicals standardly involves a process of deferred reference; in other words,
indexicals in general work like we.
Let’s have a look at I to see how
this might work. Nunberg’s proposal looks something like this: I
has a deictic component identical to that of we,
i.e. the deictic component of I picks
out the speaker as index; it has a classificatory component which requires that
the interpretation should be ‘an individual or an individual property, which
moreover can only apply to an animate’ (Nunberg (1993, p20)); and it has a
relational component which, again, determines that the index should instantiate
the interpretation. With this in mind let’s have another look at (1), repeated
here as (5):
(5)
Condemned
prisoner: I am traditionally
allowed to order whatever I like for my last meal.
On
Nunberg’s analysis, the deictic component of I
will, in this case as in every case, pick out the speaker as index. The
hearer will then look for an animate individual, or ‘individual property’,
instantiated by the speaker. Clearly, so long as the interpretation of I
is an individual, the predictions of Nunberg’s account will coincide with
those of the direct reference account; after all, there’s only one individual
which is identical to any speaker, and that is the speaker herself. But in this
case it is an individual property, that of being the condemned prisoner, which
enters into the interpretation. As we’ve already observed, whether it will be
an individual or an individual property which enters into the interpretation,
and, if the latter, which individual property, will be down to pragmatic
inference[3],
but that pragmatic inference is mandatory given Nunberg’s semantics for
indexicals.
To
summarise, for Nunberg the direct reference account of indexicals must be wrong,
given the evidence that indexicals can give rise to the same range of
interpretations as descriptions. He thus proposes a semantics for indexicals
which accounts for the transfer from individual to property evident in some of
his examples as the upshot of a mandatory step of the interpretation process.
For Nunberg, an indexical leads to its interpretation by pointing out an object,
the index, which relates to that interpretation. Looking at it from the other
end, deferred reference depends on the availability of an index: ‘in the
absence of deixis, deferred interpretation is not possible’ (Nunberg (1993,
p35)).
But
why, given that there’s so much pragmatics going on in the step between index
and interpretation, does Nunberg want to develop a semantic machinery to account
for this step, rather than just leaving the whole thing to pragmatics? He has
two answers to this question: firstly, if these interpretations were just the
product of some pragmatic tinkering with a literal meaning, you’d expect the
same effect to crop up in the same contexts with other referring expressions,
such as proper names. But there are at least some contexts in which a deferred
reading is available for indexicals but unavailable for proper names. Compare
(6) and (7) with (8) and (9):
(6)
Spoken
by Justice O’Connor, a member of the US Supreme Court:
We might have been liberals.
(7)
Spoken
by Bill Clinton: The
Founders invested me with sole responsibility for appointing Supreme Court
justices.
(8)
O’Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas etc. might have been liberals.
(9)
The Founders invested Bill Clinton with sole responsibility for appointing
Supreme Court justices.
For
Nunberg (6) and (7) have general readings on which the indexicals introduce
attributive descriptions; we in (6)
would be equivalent to something like the
Supreme Court justices, and me in
(7) to the President of the US. (8)
and (9), by contrast, appear to have only de re readings.
The
second reason Nunberg gives for rejecting a pragmatic account is that, if these
general readings are pragmatically derived, then there must be some coherent
literal interpretation for them to be derived from; but, in at least some of the
examples, there is no coherent literal interpretation. Consider another of
Nunberg’s examples:
(10)
Tomorrow is always the biggest party night of the year.
Always
must quantify over instances, therefore, Nunberg argues, this utterance has no
coherent interpretation on which tomorrow
is taken to refer to a particular day, as direct reference would have it do.
Rather, the only coherent interpretation has tomorrow
standing in for some description such as the
Saturday before classes begin. Given the lack of a coherent literal
interpretation this general reading cannot, for Nunberg, be pragmatically
derived. If we want to argue for a pragmatic account of any of Nunberg’s
general interpretations, we will need to overcome these two obstacles.
4
Some problems with Nunberg’s account
Before
I come on to that, however, I want to highlight a couple of problems which might
make us think twice before accepting Nunberg’s account wholesale. The first
problem with Nunberg’s account is that it involves a great deal of redundancy.
As we have seen, Nunberg analyses the meaning of we
as: deictic component picking out the speaker; classificatory component
constraining the interpretation to plural and animate; and relational component
requiring that the index instantiate the interpretation. But how would we want
to flesh out the semantics of other indexicals, they
for instance? Let’s look at one of Nunberg’s examples of deferred reference
involving they:
(11)
Spoken
by a teacher pointing at a little girl:
They haven’t signed the permission form yet.
The
idea is that they in this utterance
is interpreted as something like her
parents. Assuming that this interpretation is available, how does it
proceed? Firstly, what is the deictic component of they
which leads us to the index, in this case to the little girl? The answer Nunberg
gives is, essentially, that there is no encoded deictic component, or, at least,
no deictic component which alone identifies an index: they
relies for deixis on an associated demonstration. And what of the relational
component? As Nunberg himself points out, there seems to be no particular
relation that need hold between the index and the interpretation in cases such
as this.
Now
Nunberg is entirely aware of these differences; they in fact form the basis of
his distinction between two classes of indexicals: participant
terms and non-participant terms.
Participant terms are those nominal indexicals which, in Nunberg’s terms, have
as their index a participant in the exchange; that is I
and we, which both have the speaker
as index, and you, which has the
addressee as index. Non-participant terms are, essentially, all other nominal
indexicals: he, she,
they, this, that etc. For Nunberg
the interpretation of participant terms involves the cashing out of all three
semantic components, whereas non-participant terms ‘have no explicit
relational component’ (Nunberg (1993, p9)). In addition, ‘with
demonstratively used pronouns, the deictic component is provided entirely by
demonstration’ (Nunberg (1993, p23)), so for the majority of non-participant
terms there is neither a semantically encoded deictic component nor a
semantically encoded relational component. It seems, then, that much of the
semantic machinery Nunberg has developed is actually redundant in many of the
examples he seeks to account for.
The
second problem with Nunberg’s account is pointed out by Recanati (1993).
Recanati argues that, in his distinction between index and interpretation,
Nunberg has conflated two separate distinctions: that between index and
referent, a distinction which Recanati grants is crucial to the interpretation
of we, and the distinction between
trigger and target in the terminology of Fauconnier (e.g. Fauconnier (1994)).
Have a look at the following example:
(12) We are in red brick.
Now
the interpretation of (12) will, Recanati claims, look like:
(13)
The house we live in is in red brick.
But,
Recanati asks, what is the process which underlies this interpretation? The
answer seems to be something like: from we
to the speaker, from the speaker to the group of people living in the house and
from the group of people living in the house to the house itself. In Fauconnier’s
terms, the trigger is the group of people living in the house and the target is
the house itself. As Recanati points out, the distinction between index and
referent must be separate from that between trigger and target ‘for the
obvious reason that the index is neither the trigger nor the target’ (Recanati
(1993, p312)). It seems to me that this objection is crucial. However Recanati
has allowed Nunberg an easy escape: example (12) is of a type which Nunberg
expressly excludes from his analysis of deferred reference[4].
We can, however, see the same phenomenon at work in some of the examples cited
by Nunberg himself:
There
was an even clearer example of this type [the type of example (6)] in a recent
cartoon by William Hamilton, which showed a group of conservative middle aged
businessmen sitting around a boardroom table as one of them says: “in a couple
of years we’ll probably all be women.”
Nunberg
(1993, p14 fn20)
As
Grimberg (1996) points out, the index in this example cannot be intending to
include himself in the interpretation, since the interpretation is an all-female
group. Grimberg takes this as evidence that there is no relational component
encoded by we; as I shall argue later
I believe this conclusion to be hasty. It does, however, illustrate just the
situation Recanati claims for (12): the index here is, as always, the speaker,
the trigger is the group of businessmen around the boardroom table and the
target will be something like the board
members attributively used. What this shows, I shall be arguing, is that
there are two entirely separate processes of deferral at work in Nunberg’s
examples, one semantically motivated and one entirely pragmatic.
Finally,
before launching into the second half of this paper, I’d like to mention
another issue raised by Nunberg’s account. As I’ve stressed, one of Nunberg’s
key claims is that ‘in the absence of deixis, deferred interpretation is not
possible’: the process of deferral relies, for Nunberg, on the identification
of an index, and that can only be achieved through deixis, either in the form of
an encoded deictic component or a demonstration. In the light of this, consider
these two examples, both from Nunberg (1993):
(14)
Spoken
while pointing at a painting:
Now he knew how to paint goats.
(15)
We
are walking through the Taj Mahal:
Gee, he certainly spared no expense.
(14)
has, ex hypothesi, an associated
demonstration; (15), on the other hand, has neither an associated demonstration
nor an encoded deictic component (since he
is a non-participant term and so lacks deixis). As we already know, without
deixis there is no deferred reference; so, if Nunberg is right, there must be a
different kind of interpretation process at work in (14) and (15). Nunberg
concludes that (14) and (15) contain examples of different uses of he:
in (14) he is deictic,
in (15) it is contextual. In a good
discussion of Nunberg’s distinction between deictics and contextuals, Grimberg
(1996) points out that this result is highly counterintuitive: there seems
little intuitive basis for assuming that the Taj Mahal is playing a
fundamentally different role in the interpretation of (15) from that played by
the painting in the interpretation of (14). Grimberg also observes that the use
of he in (15) carries the hallmark of
deferred reference: it can give rise to an interpretation on which the indexical
appears to stand in for an attributively used definite description, just as it
can in (14). In (14) he can either be
interpreted as Chagall, say, or as the
man who painted that painting; in (15) it can be interpreted either as Shah
Jahan or as the man who built this
building. There seems little more evidence to support a distinction between
these two uses than that Nunberg’s account begins to look a bit shaky without
it. Nunberg himself, in fact, appears to realise that this is, to say the least,
a murky area: he concedes that ‘it is not always easy to tell when the context
provides an implicit demonstration (Nunberg (1993, p 34)).
5
Deferred reference - a cognitive approach
5.0
At
the start of this paper I suggested that by approaching questions of deferred
reference from a cognitive perspective, interesting results might fall out. The
cognitive perspective I intend to adopt is grounded in Relevance Theory,
providing, as it does, useful insights into the semantics-pragmatics
distinction, a distinction which will prove central to the following discussion.
It seems to me that, looking at deferred reference from a relevance theoretic
perspective, we’re likely to find the question we’re asking more or less
entirely reversed: rather than asking, as Nunberg does, why deferred readings are
available for indexicals, the key question from within a relevance theoretic
framework, as I hope to show, is likely to be why deferred readings aren’t
available for other referring expressions, such as proper names, where they are
available for indexicals. But before looking at that question we need to do a
bit of preliminary scene-setting.
5.1
Descriptive and de re concepts
What
kind of thing are we talking about when we talk about the interpretations of
indexicals or, for that matter, of any referring expressions? I hope I’m
saying nothing too controversial when I claim that, from a cognitive
perspective, there can be only one general answer to this question: we’re
talking about concepts. Concepts, after all, must, in one form or another, be
the building blocks of propositions on any representational account. It might
seem, however, that, in accepting this notion, I’ve prejudged the entire issue
against the direct reference camp; after all, it is, as we’ve seen, one of the
central claims of direct reference that what directly referential terms
contribute to propositions is nothing but their referent. I don’t believe that
I have: direct reference, as originally formulated by Kaplan, is a semantic
theory, not a cognitive one; Kaplan is not attempting to discover what goes on
in the mind, but rather what goes into the truth conditions.
The
direct reference account, however, is not incompatible with a cognitive
approach, as has been demonstrated, for instance, by Recanati (1993). Recanati
draws a distinction between descriptive
concepts and de re concepts.
Descriptive concepts are the sort of thing that go to make up Fregean senses; de
re concepts, by contrast, are, for Recanati, the cognitive corollary of directly
referential terms. Their defining characteristic is that their content is truth
conditionally irrelevant, leaving only their referent to appear in the truth
conditions. Recanati envisages de re concepts as being of two types: egocentric
and encyclopaedic. Egocentric
concepts are the sort of thing we standardly entertain when we understand
indexicals; they are temporary dossiers dominated by non-descriptive
(perceptual) information. Encyclopaedic concepts, by contrast, are stable,
long-term dossiers of predominantly descriptive information, the sort of thing
we entertain when we understand proper names[5].
In what follows I propose to adopt these two distinctions: that between
descriptive concepts and de re concepts, and that between encyclopaedic concepts
and egocentric concepts.
5.2
Indexicals and the conceptual-procedural distinction
Since
Blakemore (1987) proposed that the meaning encoded by non-truth conditional
expressions such as discourse connectives might be of a fundamentally different
kind from that encoded by other expressions, there has been a great deal of
research conducted within the relevance theoretic framework into the distinction
between conceptual meaning and procedural
meaning. Blakemore’s original insight was, roughly, this: that, since
utterance interpretation involves two radically different kinds of process,
first the retrieval of a logical form and then the manipulation of that logical
form through pragmatic inference, we might well expect to find two distinct
kinds of meaning corresponding to these processes. And this, for Blakemore, is
just what we do find. The kind of meaning encoded by descriptions, for instance,
is representational: it encodes concepts. The kind of meaning encoded by
discourse connectives is, by contrast, computational: it encodes procedures
which lay constraints on the retrieval of implicatures.
For
Blakemore, then, procedural meaning constrains the retrieval of implicitly
communicated meaning. Wilson and Sperber (1993) and others have extended
Blakemore’s original notion to the retrieval of explicitly communicated
information; specifically, Wilson and Sperber suggest that pronouns, while
contributing to truth conditions, might encode procedures. On the face of it, as
Wilson and Sperber admit, this is little more than a reformulation of Kaplan’s
distinction between character and content: for Kaplan the character of I
is something like the speaker of this
utterance; for Wilson and Sperber I
encodes ‘an instruction to identify its referent by first identifying the
speaker’ (Wilson and Sperber (1993, p20)). The conceptual-procedural
distinction does, however, have a cognitive grounding which the
character-content distinction lacks. For Kaplan, character and content are, at
least in one sense, the same kind of
meaning: they are both descriptive. The failure of the character of indexicals
to show up in truth conditions, then, must be accounted for by an extra (and ad
hoc) piece of encoding, something like the REF feature of Recanati (1993). By
contrast there is a fundamental difference between conceptual meaning and
procedural meaning corresponding to the cognitive difference between
representation and computation. The upshot of this is that procedural meaning is
not excluded from truth conditions by an ad hoc encoding, it is excluded because
it’s simply not the sort of thing that appears in truth conditions i.e. it’s
not representational[6].
It
seems to me, then, that there may well be good reasons to suppose that
indexicals encode something like procedures, although I’m not sure that a
great deal of what follows will hang on this. But, if indexicals do encode
procedures, which procedures might they encode? Let’s take Sperber and Wilson’s
suggestion for the procedure encoded by I
as a starting point: identify its
referent by first identifying the speaker. In other words, the semantics of I
takes the hearer as far as (an egocentric concept of) the speaker and then
leaves the rest to pragmatics. I imagine we’d want to say much the same about
the encoded meaning of you: something
like identify its referent by first
identifying the hearer. In other words, you
takes the hearer to his own concept of himself and then leaves him to work the
rest out pragmatically.
So
much for Nunberg’s two singular participant terms; how about the plural
participant terms? As we’ve seen, Nunberg (1993) launches his proposal off the
back of a discussion of the semantics of we.
The reason he gives for doing so is that the interpretation of we
uncontroversially involves deferred reference. And intuitively this seems right;
the interpretation of we does seem to
involve finding the speaker and then finding a group of which the speaker is a
member. In procedural terms, it looks like we
encodes a two-part procedure, the first part leading to the speaker and the
second leading to a group instantiated by the speaker[7].
But maybe this analysis of we is not
as uncontroversial as it seems. Grimberg (1996) has argued that, for all
indexicals, Nunberg’s relational component should be regarded not as
semantically encoded but, rather, as a metaphor for the operation of pragmatic
processes. In other words the semantics of indexicals would consist of a deictic
component leading to an index, a classificatory component constraining the
interpretation and no more. So, for Grimberg, the meaning of we
leads a hearer to the speaker and then determines that the interpretation should
be plural and animate. Grimberg takes as evidence for this the fact that we
can give rise to interpretations which are not instantiated by the speaker. Have
a look again at (12), repeated here as (16):
(16) We are in red brick.
Now,
as we’ve already seen, for Recanati, (16) shows that there must be a
difference between Nunberg’s distinction between index and interpretation and
Fauconnier’s between trigger and target: the group of people living in the
house, while neither index nor interpretation, is the trigger in Fauconnier’s
terms. Recanati’s view, then, is that we
may well encode something like Nunberg’s relational component, but that this
semantics cannot account for deferred uses of we,
which are the result of sub-propositional pragmatic processes. Grimberg,
however, says:
It
seems to me that the inferencing process from index to interpretation is
essentially the same as that from trigger to target, with the ‘trigger’ in
Recanati’s example representing no more than an intermediate stage in that
process.
Grimberg
(1996, p 80)
As
I understand it, then, Grimberg sees the process of interpretation that leads
from this utterance of we to the
interpretation the house we live in
as essentially seamless: the same processes take us all the way, guided by the
deictic and classificatory components and by general pragmatic principles. But
surely there is a problem here? What has happened to the classificatory
component? The ultimate interpretation in this example is a house, i.e. it is
neither plural nor animate, the two properties which are, on Grimberg’s
analysis, encoded by the classificatory component of we.
As we’ve already seen, however, Nunberg might well not account for this
example in terms of deferred reference. Perhaps, then, we might want to say
something like: the standard interpretation of we,
rather than those cases involving phenomena such as predicate transfer, involves
deferred reference guided by a deictic component and a classificatory component
but no relational component. Now there seem to me to be good reasons to suppose
that this is wrong. Grimberg conducts her discussion off the back of:
(17) In a couple of years we’ll probably all
be women.
in
which the interpretation of we does
indeed comply with her analysis; interpretation, that is, goes via the speaker
to a plural animate group but, apparently, to one not instantiated by the
speaker. But consider a parallel example. Imagine a discussion between a group
of print workers in Fleet Street some time around 1982:
(18)
In ten years time we’ll probably be one large computer sitting in an office
somewhere in Docklands.
Following
Grimberg’s argument, the speaker of (18) is, presumably, not intending to
include himself in the interpretation of we,
therefore the interpretation does not appear to be constrained by Nunberg’s
relational component. But, then, the interpretation doesn’t seem to be
constrained by Nunberg’s (or Grimberg’s) classificatory component either:
one large computer is, surely, neither plural nor animate. The only way that I
can see out of this, arguing that (17) and (18) involve different types of
interpretation process, seems to me to be a non-starter.
The
picture that seems to be emerging here is, as Recanati has argued, of two
distinct processes at work: on the one hand the interpretation of we
standardly involves deferred reference, and it is at the level of the output
of this process of deferral that the interpretation conforms with both
classificatory and relational components[8].
This type of deferral is semantic, by
which I mean that it is the result of a semantically mandatory phase of the
interpretation process. On the other hand, once this mandatory process has taken
place, there is then a separate pragmatic
deferral, constrained by general pragmatic principles, which leads from the
output of semantic deferral as trigger to the eventual interpretation as target.
On
this analysis, then, we encodes a
two-step procedure something like first
find the speaker(s) and then find a group instantiated by the speaker(s).
And it seems inevitable that much the same analysis must apply to plural you,
i.e. plural you must encode something
like first find the addressee(s) and then
find a group instantiated by the addressee(s)[9].
I don’t propose to provide any arguments for this analysis over and above
those I’ve already provided for we.
That
deals, then, albeit fleetingly, with Nunberg’s participant terms; how about
non-participant terms? Let’s start with he
and she. It seems to me that
there is no need to propose anything like a deictic component for he
and she; after all, even for Nunberg
these are not semantically encoded but supplied by an associated demonstration.
Nunberg also agrees that he and she
lack relational components, so what does that leave us with? In Nunberg’s
terms it leaves us with a classificatory component consisting of the features
male and singular in the case of he,
and female and singular in the case of she;
in procedural terms, it leaves he
encoding something like find a de re
concept with a male referent, and she
encoding find a de re concept with a
female referent. The rest can be left to pragmatics.
I’ll
come on to they in a moment, but
first I want to have a look at this, these,
that and those. It seems to me
that this and that
must, at least in some sense, encode a two-step procedure. Take this;
in intuitive terms this is used to
refer to an object relatively near to the speaker, so the hearer must find the
speaker before he can find the object referred to. In procedural terms, this
must encode something like find the
speaker and then find an object near the speaker. The same goes, mutatis
mutandis, for that. How about these
and those? There might, at first, be
a temptation to suggest that these
just encodes something like find a group
relatively near the speaker and those,
find a group relatively distant from the
speaker. But Nunberg produces good reasons why this can’t be right or,
rather, why this can’t be the whole picture. Consider the following example
from Nunberg (1993):
(19)
I
point in sequence at two sample plates in my china shop, the first sitting in
front of me, the second on a table across the room:
These are over at the warehouse, but those I have in stock here.
As
Nunberg points out, in (19) the referent of these
is further from the speaker than the referent of those,
whereas the index of these is nearer
the speaker than the index of those.
What this comes down to is that the interpretation of these
and those standardly involves
deferral just as for we. In
procedural terms, these, for
instance, must encode something like find
an object near the speaker and then find a plural referent relating to it[10].
How
about they? Well, they
is a little problematic. The problem comes down to this: does they
encode a plural, genderless equivalent of he
or she (i.e. find
something plural), or does it encode something more like we
(i.e. find a he or she and then find a
group relating to it)? There is no way that I can see to decide this: since they
doesn’t encode anything like the proximality/distality of these
and those, both analyses lead to the
same results. Given this, I don’t propose to spend any more time worrying
about the problem.
Finally
I want to look at indexicals of time and place i.e. expressions like here,
now, tomorrow
etc. I don’t want to suggest anything particularly revolutionary; in fact,
standard accounts of these expressions seem to translate well into procedural
terms. On a straightforward analysis, here
would encode find the place of utterance
(or, more accurately, find an egocentric
concept of the place of utterance); now,
find an egocentric concept of the time of
utterance and tomorrow, find
a concept of the day after the day of utterance. This is all very rough and
ready but, as I stressed earlier, it does not seem to me that a great deal hangs
on the minutiae of this procedural account.
5.3
Deferred reference and relevance
I
have suggested, then, that there may be two separate processes of deferral at
work in Nunberg’s examples: what I have been calling semantic deferral and
pragmatic deferral. Now I want to persuade you that the availability of
pragmatically deferred readings is to be expected within a relevance theoretic
approach. Why should this be so? Relevance Theory embodies a particular
conception of the nature of communication: the task facing a hearer is not that
of decoding an encoded message, but rather that of inferring speaker intentions.
Under this conception of communication the role of linguistic meaning is
restricted to providing inputs to the inferential process which will ultimately
deliver hypotheses about speaker intentions; or, in other words, linguistic
meaning provides evidence for speaker intentions and no more. One upshot of this
insight is that so long as the linguistic meaning of an utterance provides
sufficient evidence for a hearer to infer the speaker’s intention, it should
have served its purpose; the linguistic meaning of an utterance can be as
minimal as you like so long as it places adequate constraints on the
interpretation process. Now what does this mean in practice? At the heart of
Relevance Theory is the notion that interpretation is constrained by a
presumption of optimal relevance; the hearer, that is, can assume that:
a)
The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough for it to be worth his effort
to process it; and
b)
The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the
communicator’s abilities and preferences
and
can conduct the process of interpretation on the strength of these assumptions.
If a speaker wants communication to be successful, she had better make sure that
the content of her informative intention coincides with the optimally relevant
interpretation of her utterance. If it does, communication should succeed, if it
doesn’t she runs the risk that communication will fail.
Now
how do these observations tie in with deferred reference? Well, so long as the
deferred interpretation of a referring expression is the optimally relevant one,
then it should be the accepted interpretation. It seems to me that this
condition involves two separate requirements: firstly, that the intermediate
stage in the interpretation, the trigger, should not, itself, be optimally
relevant; and secondly that there should not be any more relevant stimulus which
the speaker could have produced (compatible with her abilities and preferences).
So long as these conditions are met, however, pragmatic deferral is to be
expected under a relevance theoretic conception of communication.
5.4
Pragmatic deferral and indexicals
Let’s
briefly summarise what we’ve seen in the last three sections. Firstly we’ve
proposed a rough and ready semantics for indexicals on which indexicals encode
procedures which lead to de re concepts; and secondly we’ve argued that some
kind of pragmatic deferral is no more nor less than we’d expect within a
relevance theoretic framework. But what do we get when we put these two ideas
together? Well, if the procedures proposed above are anything like right, many
of the examples Nunberg seeks to account for with his tripartite semantics for
indexicals must, on our account, be the product of pragmatic deferral. And on
the face of it, this has a pretty plausible feel to it. To convince ourselves of
this, let’s return to a couple of Nunberg’s examples; let’s look at
examples (7) and (10), repeated here as (20) and (21):
(20)
Spoken
by Bill Clinton: The
Founders invested me with sole responsibility for appointing Supreme Court
justices.
(21)
Tomorrow
is always the biggest party night of the year.
On
the semantics for indexicals proposed above, me
in (20) will initially lead the hearer to a de re concept of the speaker, i.e.
to a de re concept of Bill Clinton. Why, then, is this individual concept not
accepted as the eventual interpretation? We’d like to be able to say that it’s
not accepted because it’s not optimally relevant. And why might that be? One
possibility is this: put in pretheoretical terms, there’s something bizarre
about the idea that the Founders of the United States, in the 18th century,
could have made a decision concerning someone not born until the 20th century.
Finding a context in which this interpretation will have sufficient contextual
effects will put the hearer to a great deal of processing effort; the
interpretation cannot, therefore, be optimally relevant. With this
interpretation pragmatically blocked, the hearer should, as always, try out the
next most accessible interpretation. He will, in this case, look within his de
re concept of the speaker where he will find the descriptive concept the
President of the United States. Finding that an interpretation on which me
is interpreted as equivalent to the
President of the US provides enough effects for not too much effort, he will
accept this interpretation as optimally relevant. The hearer can thus arrive at
the deferred interpretation through standard pragmatic inferencing.
Much
the same line of argument can be used to account for the interpretation of (21):
tomorrow leads to the hearer’s
concept of a particular day d;
that concept is pragmatically blocked as the eventual interpretation since always
must quantify over instances; the hearer thus hunts through information stored
with his concept of d
for another interpretation and comes up with something like the
Saturday before classes begin.
It
therefore seems that, on the face of it, we might be able to account for some of
Nunberg’s examples in terms of pragmatic deferral, i.e. in terms of the free
operation of pragmatic processes. But, as we already know, things are not that
straightforward: if we want to argue for a pragmatic account we’re going to
have to tackle Nunberg’s two objections. I imagine that it may already be
clear how I intend to deal with Nunberg’s second objection, that deferred
readings cannot be pragmatically derived because there is often no coherent
literal interpretation for them to be derived from. Recanati (1993) has mounted
what seems to me an entirely convincing defence against this objection. Nunberg
appears to be working on the assumption that any pragmatic account must be based
on the retrieval of implicatures; that is, the pragmatic inferencing involved
must operate once a global utterance interpretation has been achieved[11].
But why would we necessarily want to assume this? There is, after all, abundant
evidence to suggest that pragmatic inferencing is not restricted to the
retrieval of implicatures but plays a crucial role in retrieving the proposition
expressed[12].
As soon as we assume that the inferencing involved in pragmatic deferral takes
place locally rather than globally, as Recanati explicitly does, there’s no
need for any global interpretation to be retrieved before deferral takes place:
it is, in fact, precisely because no ‘literal’ global interpretation is
available, for Recanati, that deferral does take place.
What
of Nunberg’s first objection, then? If I’m right, and examples such as (20)
and (21) really do involve pragmatic deferral, why can we not get the same
readings in the same contexts with proper names, if that is the case? It seems
to me that there may well be no one standard answer to this question, but a
whole range of factors which together may prevent deferred readings of proper
names from achieving optimal relevance in particular contexts. There are,
however, a couple of general patterns which I’d like to draw out, in order to
show that we don’t necessarily need to resort to a semantic account of the
type adopted by Nunberg.
First,
however, we need to establish in which contexts deferred readings really are
available for indexicals but blocked for proper names. I want to start by
weeding out one group of Nunberg’s examples which seem to me to involve no
deferral in any useful sense. Consider (22), (14) (repeated here as (23)), and
(24):
(22)
Spoken
while pointing at a girl child to identify her father:
He is in real estate.
(23)
Spoken
while pointing at a painting:
Now he knew how to paint goats.
(24)
Spoken
while pointing at a book to identify its author:
She was my chemistry teacher.
On
Nunberg’s analysis, the interpretation of each of these examples involves
finding an index, as indicated by the demonstration, and then finding an
interpretation suitably associated with that index. As we’ve already seen,
this forces Nunberg to the conclusion that (22)-(24) involve a different type of
interpretation process from (15), repeated here as (25):
(25)
We
are walking through the Taj Mahal:
Gee, he certainly spared no expense.
Now
on the face of it that seems a pretty counterintuitive result; as I suggested
earlier, the Taj Mahal in (25) seems to be playing much the same role in
interpretation as, for instance, the painting in (23). Moreover, we could,
without any problem, rework (23) so that the painting in question was the only
one in the room and (23) was uttered without any associated demonstration[13].
Evidence such as this has led Kaplan (1989) and Bach (1992) to conclude that the
role of demonstrations is no more than context shuffling in order to reveal
speaker intentions: a speaker, intending to refer to something which is not
already maximally contextually salient, performs a demonstration; since
demonstrations are intentional acts, the hearer will ask himself what the
demonstration is for, and will come up with the answer that it is to make
something in the context more salient. Interpretation will then proceed
according to this new hierarchy of contextual salience. Now if Kaplan and Bach
are right, there is no need for the speaker to point at the actual referent;
after all, in (22)-(24) this wouldn’t be possible. All the speaker need do is
point at something which makes the intended interpretation optimally relevant in
the revised context. On this analysis, the interpretation processes involved in
(22)-(24) are no different from that involved in (25): each involves assigning
reference to an indexical according to context.
Ah,
says Grimberg (1996), but there must be some deferral, because there is an
obvious way in which these examples can give rise to general interpretations,
the very hallmark of deferral. Consider, for instance, if the speaker of (23)
has no idea who the goat-painter is, or the speaker of (25), who built the Taj
Mahal. The interpretation in each case must, in that case, be equivalent to a
definite description attributively used. Now it seems to me that the distinction
drawn earlier between individual and general concepts can help us to overcome
this objection: in each case the hearer simply retrieves an individual concept,
as required by the semantics of the indexical. So the hearer of (23) will simply
retrieve, or open, an individual concept containing the information is
the painter of that painting, and
insert that concept into his interpretation; in much the same way the hearer of
(25) will retrieve or open a concept containing the information
is the person who built the Taj Mahal. The key point is that, in each case,
the hearer is accessing a concept which he believes to correspond to a unique
individual in the world, albeit an individual with whom he may have no direct
epistemic contact.
Finally,
before addressing Nunberg’s second objection to pragmatic accounts, there are
a couple of pitfalls we would do well to be wary of. Recanati (1993) argues that
many of the general interpretations that Nunberg cites for indexicals are simply
illusory. Let’s just have a look at one of the examples he tackles, taken from
Nunberg (1990):
(26)
In the movie The Year of Living
Dangerously, Mel Gibson plays a reporter in Sukarno’s Indonesia who is
looking for a shipment of arms destined for the local communists; who will kill
him if they find out he is on to them. He is interviewing a warehouse manager,
who tells him, ‘I have seen no such shipment. And you should be careful; I
might have been a communist’.
Recanati
(1993, p 301)
Nunberg
points out that there are two possible readings of I
might have been a communist in (26): on one reading the warehouse manager is
saying, of himself, that he might have been a communist (given a different
upbringing, say); on the other, the preferred reading in the context, he is
saying something like The person you are
talking to might have been a communist. For Nunberg the first reading is
singular, since I contributes an
individual, and the second is general, since I
contributes a concept (or property in
Nunberg’s terms). Recanati starts by asking the following question: what
thought is it that a hearer must think in order to have understood an utterance
of (26) on the second reading? And the answer he comes up with is that the
hearer must think something like That man
might have been a communist, with that
man corresponding to an egocentric concept of the warehouse manager. But
surely that leads us straight back to our first interpretation, i.e. to the
interpretation on which the speaker is saying of himself that he might have been
a communist? No, says Recanati, and this becomes clear as soon as we understand
the distinction between metaphysically possible worlds and epistemically
possible worlds. For Recanati, the speaker of (26) is not saying that there is a
metaphysically possible world at which he is a communist; rather, he is saying
that there is an epistemically possible world at which this is the case. To put
this another way, in order to understand (26), a hearer must entertain a thought
which looks something like:
(27)
For all I know, that man might have been a communist.
The
proposition the hearer entertains in understanding (26), then, does, just as
Nunberg claims, contain a concept, but, crucially, it is a de re concept and
thus contributes nothing to truth conditions beyond its referent. Translating
this argument into the terms we’ve been developing in this paper, the
interpretation of (26) just involves retrieving an individual concept of the
speaker, as determined by the semantics of I
and goes no further. For Recanati, many of Nunberg’s examples are just such
sheep in wolves’ clothing.
The
second potential pitfall which we should be aware of is illustrated by (1). In
his analysis of (1), Nunberg assumes an interpretation of traditionally
which requires that it should quantify over instances; and, given this
assumption, it follows naturally that I
cannot have a de re interpretation. But are we sure that Nunberg is right about traditionally?
Consider the following paraphrase of (1):
(28) By tradition, I’m allowed to order
whatever I like for my last meal
Now
I hope you agree that, in (28), there is no reason to assume that by
tradition quantifies over instances. Given this, how can we be sure that traditionally
in (1) is not interpreted as equivalent to by
tradition in (28)? And, if that’s right, there’s no reason to suppose
that I receives anything other than a
perfectly straightforward de re interpretation in (1). Moreover, Nunberg himself
seems to have doubts about the interpretation of traditionally
in this example. In a discussion of (1) he, apparently inadvertently, slips from
using traditionally to using usually,
the semantics of which seem much clearer (see Nunberg (1993, p 32)). It’s
interesting to note, however, that the claimed deferred reading of (1) becomes
markedly less accessible when we replace traditionally
with usually:
(29)
Condemned
prisoner: I am usually
allowed to order whatever I like for my last meal.
5.5
Pragmatic deferral and proper names
With
those caveats under our belt, we must now turn to Nunberg’s second objection
to pragmatic accounts: that deferred readings are unavailable for proper names
in the same contexts in which they are available for indexicals. The first
question we’re going to need to ask is whether Nunberg is right; whether it is
always the case that deferred interpretations are unavailable for proper names.
It would, after all, be quite surprising if deferred readings of proper names
were never available, given that, as we’ve seen, pragmatically deferred
readings are to be expected under a relevance theoretic conception of
communication. And there do, indeed, seem to be cases in which proper names can
give rise to deferred interpretations just as indexicals can. Imagine yourself
in Allied Command Headquarters, some time around May 1944; you overhear someone
saying:
(30)
I’ve looked through the meteorological charts and D-Day has been the hottest
day of the year every year for the last decade
How
are you going to interpret the expression D-Day
in this utterance? It seems to me you’ll probably interpret it as June
6th. The interpretation process, that is, will go via an individual concept
of June 6th 1944 to a general concept of June 6th.
There
do seem, however, to be certain contexts in which, as Nunberg argues, deferred
interpretations are available for indexicals but blocked for proper names, and
these examples provide Nunberg with the core of his argument against pragmatic
accounts of deferred reference. Consider the following examples, some of which
we’ve already seen:
(31)
Spoken
by Justice O’Connor, a member of the US Supreme Court:
We might have been liberals.
(32)
O’Connor, Rehnquist, Thomas etc. might have been liberals.
(33)
The Founders invested me with sole responsibility for appointing Supreme Court
justices.
(34)
The Founders invested Bill Clinton with sole responsibility for appointing
Supreme Court justices.
Now
Nunberg’s claim is that (31) and (33) have two readings each whereas (32) and
(34) have just one each. Whether or not he is right that deferred readings of
(32) and (34) are entirely unavailable, there does seem to be a marked disparity
in the availability of such readings between the examples using indexicals and
those using proper names. And, on the face of it, this looks like strong
evidence in favour of Nunberg’s account, or something like it; after all, the
examples are set up so that the different referring expressions appear in
precisely the same contexts.
Perhaps,
then, Nunberg is right and the procedures proposed above are far too simple;
perhaps we do need to build into the semantics of many more indexicals elements
of meaning leading to an index and other elements of meaning leading from index
to interpretation. But before we give so much away, could there be any other
reasons for the unavailability of deferred readings of proper names in these
contexts? It seems to me that there could.
Let’s
first consider (31) and (32). Now, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure whether
or not (32) does have only a de re reading as Nunberg claims; it seems to me
that in certain lights I can get an attributive reading. But if Nunberg is right
and there is no attributive reading, there may well be a good reason for it
without having to resort to a semantic deferral account. As we’ve already seen
above, the interpretation of we does
standardly involve a two-stage process: from expression to speaker and from
speaker to group instantiated by speaker. As part of the mandatory
interpretation process, therefore, the hearer must retrieve some kind of
property delimiting the group which, in Fauconnier’s terms, provides the
trigger for the pragmatic deferral in these cases. This property (in the case of
(31) the property of being Supreme Court justices) is, therefore, made highly
contextually salient and it is a small (and, in processing terms, uncostly) leap
from this property indicatively used
to the same property attributively used.
In (32), by contrast, interpretation does not involve the retrieval of any joint
property: the proper names in (32) present their referents individually, not
jointly. It must therefore be a more costly step, in processing terms, to
retrieve the intended property in (32) than in (31); (32), therefore, cannot be
the most relevant stimulus the speaker could have produced, given that (31) (or
the equivalent using they, you
etc) offers the same effects for less processing cost.
How
about (33) and (34) then? I want to suggest a possible account for these two
examples which I hope might well shed light on a wide range of the cases in
which there truly does appear to be a disparity between indexicals and proper
names. Indexicals and proper names differ in two significant (although
non-semantic) ways. Firstly the linguistic meaning of indexicals, the procedures
they encode, are, in obvious ways, bound to the context of utterance. This has
the by-product that the link between an indexical and its referent is typically
short-term: I can only refer to here as here
while I am actually here, I can only refer to you as you
while I am addressing you. This is simply a result of the fact that the kind of
properties encoded by the meaning of indexicals, properties such as being the
speaker or the addressee, are temporary. The link between a name and its
referent, by contrast, remains stable across contexts: I can refer to Tony Blair
by uttering Tony Blair regardless of
where or when I am speaking (so long as my addressee knows who Tony
Blair names or, rather, so long as he has an individual concept relating to
Tony Blair which contains the information
is called Tony Blair). Moreover, any number of other people can also refer
to Tony Blair by uttering Tony Blair.
The other difference between indexicals and proper names we’ve already seen:
understanding an indexical standardly involves retrieving an egocentric concept,
whereas understanding a proper name standardly involves retrieving an
encyclopaedic concept. And, as we know, egocentric concepts tend to be
repositories of short-term, perceptual information, whereas encyclopaedic
concepts generally store long-term, propositional information[14].
Now
how might these differences help us explain the data we’re trying to explain?
Consider (33) and (34) again: why can Bill
Clinton in (34) not lead to the same general reading as me
in (33)? Saul (1997) points out that failure of substitutivity of co-referential
names (or something that looks very much like it) is not limited to those
contexts usually thought of as referentially opaque. Consider the following
examples: