Indexicality

Seminar 5. Near-Side Classical Pragmatics

Issues Discussed:

1. Indexicality

2. D. Kaplan on indexicals and demonstratives

3. Pragmatic puzzles of referentialism

4. R. Stalnaker on context and content

5. Presupposition, common ground and context

6. Propositional concepts

In logic and in many of the investigations of logical empiricists in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, artificial languages were the focus of attention. First the predicate calculus, and then various extensions of it incorporating modal and temporal operators seemed the appropriate linguistic vehicles for clear-thinking philosophers. Issues about the use of natural languages were often thought to be beyond the scope of the proof-theoretic and model-theoretic tools developed by logicians. As Robert Stalnaker put it in 1970: “The problems of pragmatics have been treated informally by philosophers in the ordinary language tradition, and by some linguists, but logicians and philosophers of a formalistic frame of mind have generally ignored pragmatic problems” [9, p. 31].

The idea that techniques of formal semantics should be adapted to natural languages was forcefully defended by Donald Davidson, on general philosophical principles, and Richard Montague, who applied the techniques of possible worlds semantics to fragments of English in a body of work that was influential in both philosophy and linguistics.

These attempts make clear that, on the near side of what is said, semantics and pragmatics are quite enmeshed. The interpretation of indexicals and demonstratives seems squarely in the realm of pragmatics, since it is particular facts about particular utterances, such as the speaker, time, and location that determine the interpretation of ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘now’ and the like. But the relevance of these varying factors is determined by a non-varying rule of meaning, as Bar-Hillel had already observed [1].

In his essay "Pragmatics" (1968), Richard Montague generalized the concept of a possible world to deal with a number of phenomena, including indexicals [8]. An index combines a possible world with other factors relevant to the truth value of a sentence. To study tensed sentences, for example, one incorporates times into indices. A sentence like "Elwood went to the store," is true in a world, at a time. A sentence like "I went to the store," would be true in a world, at a time, for a speaker: roughly, if the speaker went to the store prior to the time in the world.

If we ignore time, we can think of the meaning of "I am sitting" as a function from pairs of speakers and worlds to truth-values. Suppose Moe is sitting in the actual world w and standing in alternative world w ′, while Curley is standing in w and sitting in w ′. "I am sitting" is true at <Moe, w > and <Curley, w ′>.

A somewhat different approach to indexicality, implemented in different ways by David Kaplan and Robert Stalnaker, has been much more influential, however. Here is how Stalnaker put the key idea: “The scheme I am proposing looks roughly like this: The syntactical and semantical rules for a language determine an interpreted sentence or clause: this, together with some features of the context of use of the sentence or clause determines a proposition; this in turn, together with a possible world, determines a truth-value. An interpreted sentence, then, corresponds to a function from contexts into propositions, and a proposition is a function from possible worlds into truth-values” [9, p. 36].

Both of these philosophers develop a ‘two-tiered’ approach to the content of utterances of sentences containing indexicals. "I am sitting" expresses the proposition that Moe is sitting in a context with Moe as speaker, a different proposition, that Curley is sitting, in a context with Curley as speaker. Thus we have two functions involved. The character (Kaplan) or propositional concept (Stalnaker) is a function from contexts to propositions. And, at least within possible worlds semantics, propositions are conceived as functions from worlds to truth-values.

This ‘two-tiered’ approach brings out what Moe's utterance of "I am sitting," has and doesn't have in common with Curley's utterance of "You are sitting," directed at Moe. They both have the same truth-value, of course, but more importantly both express the same proposition.

There are, however, important differences in the way Kaplan and Stalnaker implement this idea, which reflect the very different ways in which they think about context.

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