Abstract
De jure coreference in a discourse is typically understood as explicit coreference that speakers are required to recognize in order to count as having correctly understood the discourse. For example, in an utterance of the sentence ‘Tom went to the market because he needed soy milk’, the two underlined terms are typically coreferential in a way that appreciating their coreference is required to fully understand the utterance. Often, de jure coreference is understood as an equivalence relation, so in particular it is thought of as a transitive relation. However, Pinillos (Philos Stud 154(2):301–324, 2011) provides examples that apparently challenge the transitivity of de jure coreference (in intra-personal cases). In this paper, I argue for two claims. First, while it is (at best) inconclusive whether the relevant terms in Pinillos’s examples satisfy his third condition, it is much clearer that they fail to satisfy his first two conditions. Given that Pinillos’s conditions capture important characteristics of de jure coreference, his examples do not successfully show the non-transitivity of de jure coreference. Second, I present an alternative account of his examples, one that shows which representation the anaphoric pronoun in an example of the sort that he presents is de jure coreferential with.
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Notes
Here, occurrences count as being of the same name if they are occurrences of coreferential names with the same spellings and pronunciations. However, having coreferential name occurrences with the same spellings and pronunciations is neither necessary nor sufficient for de jure coreference. It is not sufficient, since occurrences of a name with the same spellings and pronunciations in a discourse can be merely de facto coreferential, as illustrated by Kripke’s (1979) ‘Paderewski’ case. It is not necessary, since names with different spellings and pronunciations can be de jure coreferential, as illustrated by a name and a nickname, e.g. ‘Robert’ and ‘Bob’—this is what Taschek (1998: 328, fn. 7) calls merely stylistic variants. For a similar example, see Fine 2007: 46–47.
Thus, I will use the notion of de jure coreference in a way that does not entail coreference.
There are at least two sorts of accounts that explain the phenomenon of de jure coreference: (1) accounts that explain it in terms of non-reducible semantic relations and (2) accounts that explain it in terms of some intrinsic or local semantic features of expressions. The former are forms of semantic relationism (e.g. Fine 2007; Pinillos 2011; Taschek 1995, 1998); the latter are what Pinillos calls third-object accounts (see ft. 7). For a helpful overview of relationism, see Gray 2017.
As Goodsell (2014: 293, ft. 3) points out, Fiengo and May (2006: 37) and Taylor (2003: 2) suggest that the sort of relation that I have been calling de jure coreference is transitive. Fine (2007: 55–56) holds that, in intra-personal cases, coordination is transitive. However, Fine (2007, Ch. 4) holds that coordination is not transitive in inter-personal cases.
Pinillos (2011, §5) illustrates some accounts that might be considered as endorsing a third-object strategy, e.g. Fiengo and May (2006) using syntactic identity and the so-called dynamic semantic theories (e.g. Karttunen 1976; Kamp 1981; Heim 1983) using identity of discourse referents or file cards. For a more detailed discussion, see Pinillos (2011: 309–312). Also, Recanati’s (2012, 2016) account of de jure coreference using mental files, which are non-descriptive modes of presentation, would fall in the category of third-object accounts.
These conditions are naturally interpreted as being individually necessary and jointly sufficient for de jure coreference. But, as we will see later, for Pinillos, especially condition (3) might be viewed as a sufficient condition.
Following Saul (1997: 102, fn. 1), a simple sentence is a sentence that doesn’t contain any non-extensional operators such as a propositional attitude verb or a modal operator.
Pinillos provides another type of example, which involves an attitude verb:
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(a)
Smith1,2 is wearing a costume, and (as a result) Sally thinks that he2 is someone other than Smith1.
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(b)
He1,2 was in drag, and (as a result) Sally thought that Smith1 wasn’t Smith2. (Pinillos 2011: 315)
For Pinillos, ‘he’ and the second occurrence of ‘Smith’ in (a) cannot be de jure coreferential, since they do not satisfy the a prioricity condition. For these terms to satisfy this condition, speakers would need to know a priori that (a) entails ‘∃x(Smith is wearing a costume, and (as a result) Sally thinks that x is someone other than x)’. Pinillos argues that, since this ascribes to Sally an inconsistent belief, the two terms in the ‘that’-clause in (a) do not satisfy the a prioricity condition; thus, they do not de jure corefer. A similar thing can be said of (b). This type of example involving an attitude verb concerns how de jure coreference works in the ‘that’-clause of an attitude report. And this is a distinct topic.
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(a)
Or, as Goodsell (2014: 307) suggests, the fact that two terms satisfy conditions (1) and (2) can be explained by the fact that they satisfy condition (3).
Also, Pinillos seems to assume that a partially descriptive name such as ‘Professor Smith’ is a directly referential term. However, on Soames’s (2002, Ch. 5) account, its semantic content would be given by a definite description including an identity claim, e.g. ‘[the x: Professor x & x = y]’ with respect to an assignment of Smith to ‘y’.
It is unclear whether, on No Reference, a confused term must be a genuinely empty term. Perhaps, on a (broader) understanding of No Reference, the term may indeterminately refer to more than one thing, so it doesn’t have a determinate referent. I assume this broader interpretation in Sect. 4.2.
Pinillos (personal communication) suggests that in cases where the identity claim is false, the pronoun fails to refer. So Pinillos might be viewed as endorsing No Reference. On this line of thought, a necessary condition for the third term to refer is that there exists a referent to which the two names both refer. Also, Pinillos (personal communication) seems to think that, even in the cases of confusion, there is a de jure coreferential link between the two names and the confused third term.
Recanati’s labels for these sentences are the ∀-coreference relation and the ∀∀-coreference relation, respectively. According to Recanati (2016: 27, ft. 8), both Pinillos (2011) and Goodsell (2014) endorse the view that the de jure coreference is characterized based on the ∀∀-coreference relation, but Contim (2016) holds the view that only the ∀-coreference relation is required for characterizing de jure coreference.
One might object as follows. In making such an inference, we assume the truth of a (false) identity that Amsterdam is Paris; so, the argument would be valid. But, as Contim (2016: 376) points out, its validity now relies on an identity claim. And this is a feature of merely de facto coreference.
Goodsell presents an example that is similar to Lawlor’s:
- Mary::
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[Pointing to Starbucks]
That looks a great place to stop.
- John::
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[Thinking Mary is pointing to a Pret-A-Manger, and pointing himself at the Pret-A-Manger]
Yes, it looks quiet. (Goodsell 2014: 296)
For Goodsell (2014: 296), John’s pronoun ‘it’ refers to the Pret-A-Manger, so Goodsell’s reading of this example is partly supportive of the reading under discussion in the main text.
As mentioned in fn. 16, Contim (2016: 380) is sympathetic to the view that de jure coreference is based on the ∀-coreference relation, which corresponds to what he calls referential equivalence:
Referential Equivalence: An occurrence u de jure corers with an occurrence u’ only if it is a semantic fact that: (∀x)(u refers to x ↔ u’ refers to x). (Contim 2016: 380)
On this condition, as on the ∀-coreference relation, for any two de jure coreferential terms, either they both refer or they both fail to refer.
It might be a radical idea that a linguistic term is anaphoric on a mental term, rather than another linguistic term. We can find a precedent of this idea in Fine’s Semantic Relationism. In the postscript, Fine writes about indexicals:
It is my view that the demonstrative uses of an indexical expression, such as “this” or “it,” should be taken to be anaphoric on an associated demonstration. In other words, it should be taken to be a semantic requirement on the use of the indexical that it be coreferential with the demonstration. When the demonstration is private (as with the act of attending to a particular object), this will yield coordination between a given individual's singular thoughts and his use of language. When the demonstration is public (as with the act of pointing to an object in common view), it will yield coordination between different individual uses of the indexical, since each use will be tied to the same demonstration. (Fine 2007: 124)
For Fine, in a demonstrative use of an indexical, when the demonstration associated with the indexical is private, the indexical is coordinated with a term in the speaker’s singular thought. So, on Fine’s view, the indexical can be coordinated with a mental term.
An alternative view, suggested by William Taschek, is that the original sentence ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus, and it is F’ (as uttered in situations where neither ‘Hesperus’ nor ‘Phosphors’ possesses dominant salience) has a more complex logical form, e.g. (10*):
(10*) ∃x∃y[((x = Hesperus & y = Phosphorus) & Hesperus = Phosphors) & ∃z((z = x & z = y) & Fz)].
On this view, the ‘it’ in the original sentence is anaphoric on the variable ‘z’. The presupposition in the suggestion in the main text entails this proposition (10*).
For related issues, see Pinillos (2011: 320). For him, de jure coreference is explained in terms of a primitive relation (termed p-linking), and occurrences of variables bound by the same binder are p-linked.
Roberts suggests a similar but slightly different reasoning process about the retrieval of the antecedent for the pronoun ‘he’ in (11). See Roberts 2015: 351.
According to Clapp (2017: §2), the biding theory of presupposition includes the following two claims:
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1.
Presuppositions triggered by definite NPs (including proper nouns) must be resolved either via binding or via accommodation.
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2.
Binding is preferred to accommodation. (Clapp 2017: 1846)
Clapp also writes,
[T]he process of presupposition accommodation can be invoked only if the initial attempt to bind is unsuccessful. To bind a presupposition is to link its discourse referent with an appropriate and accessible antecedent discourse referent. (Clapp 2017: 1848)
In the example at issue, since there is no unique individual being made salient in the discourse, which can serve as the antecedent of the pronoun, according to the above theory, presupposition accommodation will be the only option for an interpreter to choose.
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1.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ali Aenehzodaee, Aidan Gray, Ángel Pinillos, Francesco Pupa, and Stewart Shapiro for their very helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially grateful to Ben Caplan and William Taschek for detailed comments, discussions, and encouragement. Lastly, I would like to thank an anonymous referee for Philosophical Studies for insightful comments and suggestions that led to substantial revisions of an earlier version of this paper.
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Yoon, C. The transitivity of de jure coreference: a case against Pinillos. Philos Stud 178, 2257–2277 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01545-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01545-5