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How Can “I” Refer to Me? Banishing Monsters at the Source

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The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 103))

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Abstract

Kaplan’s influential (1989) makes a connection between the mode of reference of indexical expressions and the impossibility of certain sentential operators, which he calls monsters. The impossibility of monsters has recently come under attack from several quarters, both theoretical and empirical. In this paper I consider monsters from a different perspective. I motivate the prohibition on monsters independently of intensional notions, and understand it not as an empirical hypothesis, but as an adequacy criterion on formal systems intended to capture the philosophical notion of direct reference. I show that Kaplan’s formalism doesn’t live up to this criterion, and sketch in preliminary fashion a formalism that does.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Rabern and Ball (2019). Linking the prohibition on monsters to content compositionality is common, see Westerståhl (2012), Stalnaker (2014), McCullagh (2017), Briciu (2018).

  2. 2.

    See also Schlenker (2011), Anand and Nevins (2004). But see Stalnaker (2014, 210) for an objection.

  3. 3.

    This work stems from my unpublished doctoral dissertation, Kashtan (unpublished), and departs from it somewhat. I would like to thank the following for their role in helping the work reported in this paper to come to existence, whether through support, helpful criticism or otherwise: Moysh Bar-Lev Eli Dresner, Rea Golan, Michael Goldboim, Balthasar Grabmayr, Aviv Keren, Ran Lanzet, Carl Posy, Danny November, Gil Sagi; an audience at the Language, Logic and Cognition Center seminar at HUJI (esp. Edit Doron), an audience at the Context, Cognition and Communication 2018 conference in Warsaw; and especially Paweł Grabarczyk and Tadeusz Ciecierski for organizing the CCC conference and getting this volume together.

  4. 4.

    Kaplan’s “pure indexicals”.

  5. 5.

    Roughly in Burgess and Sherman’s (2014, 2) sense, of metasemantics as “the business of providing metaphysical explanation of semantic facts”.

  6. 6.

    See Roberts (1994) for a discussion of the tension between Kaplan’s two metaphysical pictures.

  7. 7.

    Kaplan (1989, 493fn17) remarks on that.

  8. 8.

    See also Montague (1970).

  9. 9.

    Carnap takes up this division from Charles Morris.

  10. 10.

    This is the source of Morris’s term “semiotics”, but used in a different meaning, See Atkin (2005) for Peirce’s view of indexicals.

  11. 11.

    I’ll be abstracting from various issues such as non-conversational uses of language (see Cohen and Michaelson (2013) for an overview) or the token vs. utterance vs. sentence-in-context debate (see García-Carpintero (1998) for an example).

  12. 12.

    See Russell (1905).

  13. 13.

    Russell says it “denotes”. I won’t be fussy about terminology.

  14. 14.

    I leave “collection” vague.

  15. 15.

    Pace Russell, see footnote 10.

  16. 16.

    Compare this with, e.g., Rabern (2013), who ties the prohibition on monsters to content-compositionality. See also Rabern and Ball (2019), who explain it in terms of structured propositions. On my account, direct reference and the prohibition on monsters are understood independently of any prior conception or claim about content and intensionality.

  17. 17.

    See Israel and Perry (1996).

  18. 18.

    See Schlenker (2011) for an overview with later references.

  19. 19.

    See von Stechow (2003), Stalnaker (2014, 211) for arguments to the contrary.

  20. 20.

    I prefer “foundational” because “pure” has unwanted axiological connotations.

  21. 21.

    Pace, e.g., Gupta (2012, 54).

  22. 22.

    See Stalnaker (2014) for a similar distinction. Stanley and Szabo (2000, 220ff) make a distinction with the same titles, but different content. One sometimes distinguishes between descriptive and theoretical linguistics. Both sides of this distinction fall on the descriptive side of Carnap’s distinction, and correspond, respectively, to Carnap’s (1942, 11) special vs. general semiotics.

  23. 23.

    (1942, 13). See also (1955).

  24. 24.

    Let me note that Schlenker (2002, 29) is not blind to this option, but doesn’t find it attractive. If you’re skeptical about the possible intrinsic interest of expressive devices that can’t be found in natural language, recall Kaplan’s (1978) own dthat.

  25. 25.

    I will usually omit quote-marks.

  26. 26.

    The term “the president” is meant in its “attributive use”, see Donnellan (1966).

  27. 27.

    Whether times should be included in propositions or not is a question I won’t discuss.

  28. 28.

    See Heim and von Fintel (2011) to get an idea.

  29. 29.

    See, e.g., Roberts (2015) for a brief overview and a sample account.

  30. 30.

    Stalnaker (1999) contains the classic treatment of presupposition in terms of a contextual-intensional semantic system. See Potts (2007) and Schlenker (2007) for treatments of expressives.

  31. 31.

    I plug the context into the index slot, as usual.

  32. 32.

    This is an epistemic criterion like, say, the Tarski-Vaught test, and not an adequacy condition like Convention T.

  33. 33.

    Such quadruples are called proper contexts. Kaplan (1989, 509) introduces them in order to capture the fact that sentences such as

    1. (a)

      I am here now,

    are true whenever uttered. For some reason he calls such sentences “logically true”. But in his logic, they only become true in virtue of a special clause tailored for this purpose (p. 544, clause 10), and not in virtue of the structure of his model theory, as we would expect logical truths to be. In any case, the ad-hoc clause is not sufficient, since there are sentences true whenever uttered which are not true in every proper context, e.g.:

    1. (b)

      I am uttering a sentence.

    Of course, we can further restrict the proper contexts by adding further ad-hoc clauses to handle each new “logically true” sentence. But this is not always forthcoming, for consider:

    1. (c)

      I am uttering an English sentence.

    This sentence will not be true in contexts in which, say, a French sentence is uttered, but will be true whenever uttered. This isn’t just a matter of including a language parameter in contexts. Here’s a sentence true whenever uttered, but true only in contexts in which it is uttered:

    1. (d)

      I am uttering the result of prepending to its own quotation the string “I am uttering the result of prepending to its own quotation the string”.

    The notion of proper context is not so easy to characterize.

  34. 34.

    By the object-blindness of extensional semantics, see §2.1.

  35. 35.

    P.505: “Just as it was convenient to represent contents by functions from possible circumstances to extensions (Carnap’s intentions [sic]), so it is convenient to represent characters by functions from possible contexts to contents.”

  36. 36.

    I’m referring to the fact that every expression of the form f(x) can be systematically replaced by a predication P(x, y), with suitably placed existential quantifier binding y.

  37. 37.

    From the Latin fungi – perform, execute, discharge. See https://www.etymonline.com/

  38. 38.

    See Kaufmann (2012, 2) for such a paradigm. The present simple tense sounds less natural in the plain indicative and interrogative, but we can ignore that.

  39. 39.

    See, e.g., Aikhenvald (2010, 3), Portner (2016), Roberts (2015).

  40. 40.

    (36) doesn’t have a truth-value either, but its semantics, arguably, involves the truth conditions of (36) in a straightforward way.

  41. 41.

    See, e.g., Isac (2015, 42ff) for an argument for the modal account.

  42. 42.

    There are some complications that I will gloss over for the sake of brevity. For example, the context doesn’t “come into existence” in the same way that the cake of the example does. The context is the collection of circumstances of an utterance, and as such, it doesn’t literally depend on the agent for its existence. But it does turn from a mere static self-standing “index of evaluation”, to a dynamic “context of use” in virtue of the speaker’s linguistic agency. I expand on this in Kashtan (unpublished).

  43. 43.

    I subscripted the @ since it is not a genuine variable. The resulting denotation function then has the signature of iden(e), and not of cden(e,c), a fact I marked in the spelling.

  44. 44.

    And not with speaker(c 1), since “c 1” is not an available term, either in M @ nor in L @. See Kashtan (unpublished).

  45. 45.

    See the item labeled “Definability” in §2.2.

  46. 46.

    This is the truth predicate’s best known use. See Picollo and Schindler (2019) for a recent discussion.

  47. 47.

    More about this in Kashtan (unpublished). Compare this account of schemata with that of Field (2006).

  48. 48.

    See Priest (1984), Putnam (1990, 13f) for discussions of this problem.

  49. 49.

    This is the topic of Kashtan (unpublished).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    David Kashtan

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

    Tadeusz Ciecierski

  2. Institute of Philosophy, University Of Lodz, Lodz, Poland, IT University of Copenhagen, København, Denmark

    Paweł Grabarczyk

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Kashtan, D. (2020). How Can “I” Refer to Me? Banishing Monsters at the Source. In: Ciecierski, T., Grabarczyk, P. (eds) The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 103. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34485-6_10

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