Pragmatic Puzzles of Referentialism

D. Kaplan on Indexicals and Demonstratives

The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives has probably been David Kaplan's monograph “Demonstratives” (1989), versions of which were circulated in the seventies [7]. Kaplan's basic concepts are context, character, and content. Character is what is provided by sentences with indexicals, like "I am sitting," or "You are sitting," a function from contextual features to contents.

For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of:

Ø an agent,

Ø location,

Ø time,

Ø world.

Intuitively, these are:

ü the speaker of an utterance;

ü the location of the utterance;

ü the time of the utterance;

ü the possible world in which it occurs.

The beliefs of the speaker as to who he is, where he is, and when it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant to determining content, although not of course to explaining why the speaker says what he does. (The possible world is the contextual feature Kaplan uses to deal with "actually"). A proper context is one in which the agent is at the location at the time in the world, which is of course the characteristic relation among the speaker, time, location and world of an utterance.

Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory of utterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formal theory he supplies, as a theory of occurrences, or sentences-in-context, which are abstract objects consisting of pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances, Kaplan argues, are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation. Utterances take time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist that all of the premises of an argument share the same context, but this stipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of "I am not speaking" would be false, we might have to conclude that "I am speaking" is a logical truth, an unwelcome result.

Kaplan does not call what he is doing "pragmatics" but the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives.

Kaplan's theory was part of a movement in the philosophy of language that developed the sixties and seventies, which we will call ‘referentialism.’ For our purposes, the salient aspects of referentialism are:

v in some forms, heavy reliance was made of the concept of ‘what is said,’ — often equated with ‘the proposition expressed’ — by a particular utterance of a suitably declarative sentence;

v referentialists argued persuasively that ‘what is said’ or ‘the proposition expressed’ depends on reference of names, indexicals and demonstratives, rather than any descriptive ‘backing’ or identifying conditions speakers or hearers might associate with them.

More controversially, Keith Donnellan argued that in the case of ‘referential’ uses of definite descriptions, the reference of the description, rather than the descriptive condition, is a constituent of the proposition expressed [2].

The question naturally raises, then, how does the referentialist conception of what is said fit with Grice's theory of conversation, which, as we have seen, pertains to the reasons the speaker has for saying what he does.

It can be argued that Kaplan's concept of content fits in with Grice's theory of conversation. For the purposes of formal semantics and logic, the context (in Kaplan's sense) can be taken as given. Kaplan treats both the sentence and the context as abstract objects, and all of the rules of interpretation are suitably deductive. Pragmatics begins when we apply Kaplan's theory to utterances. Semantics and near-side pragmatics resolve reference, and so what proposition is expressed, that is, what is said, by an utterance involving the use of a sentence in a context. Then Grice's theory of conversation, and the Austin-Searle theory of speech acts, takes over to tell us what else the speaker has implicated by saying what he did, and what else he has accomplished in or by saying what he did.

This picture is not without problems, however. Consider the statements "Hespherus is visible in the eastern sky" and "Phosphorus is visible in the eastern sky." On referentialist principles, the two statements express the same proposition, the one that is true in all worlds in which Venus (the planet that ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ are two names for) is visible in the eastern sky. But they seem to convey different information. And, most dramatically, "Hesperus is Hesperus" seems trivial, while "Hesperus is Phosphorus" or "Phosphorus is Venus" seem to convey valuable information. And yet, on referentialist principles, all three identity statements express the same proposition.

Paradigmatically, according to Grice's theory, the input to the hearer's reasoning about implicatures is what is said. Referentialism would seem to imply that different ways of saying the same thing should be conversationally equivalent. But this does not seem correct. If Elwood says, "I can't reach the salt," this has the implicature that he would appreciate someone passing it to him. But what if he says, "Elwood can't reach the salt?” The implicatures are not so clear. Elwood seems to have flouted the maxim of quantity, in both its submaxims, giving us information we don't need (the name of the person who can't reach the salt), and denying us information we do need, namely that the speaker is the person whose relation to the saltshaker is at issue. Grice's maxims of manner allow the theory of conversation to deal with information that depends on how something is said, rather than only what is said; it seems these maxims may have to be exploited beyond what Grice envisaged to explain how co-referential names and indexicals can give rise to non-equivalent implicatures, if we adopt the referentialist account of what is said.

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