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The Semantics of Complex Demonstratives: a Defense of Character Theories

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The Semantics of Complex Demonstratives: a Defense of Character Theories The semantics of complex demonstratives: a defense of character theories Doctoral dissertation Ph.D. program in Logic and Philosophy of Science Joan Gimeno Simó Advisor: Jordi Valor Abad València, September 2020 2 Acknowledgements This dissertation deals with a very specific kind of expressions, complex demonstratives, but it does so from a wide range of perspectives, both philosophical and linguistic. This means that it has benefited from the expertise of many different people. In the first place, I would like to acknowledge the assistance from my advisor, Jordi Valor, whose guidance and careful comments have been essential to both the writing of this dissertation and my own personal development as a researcher. The very same thing could be said about Stefano Predelli and Derek Ball, who agreed to have me as a visiting student under their supervision during the two research stays I enjoyed while I was writing some papers that eventually became part of this dissertation. Their expertise in semantics and related fields helped me master many of the notions and topics that are central to this work, from demonstratives and compositionality to the semantics-pragmatics interface. Albeit less directly, the current shape of this dissertation is also due to many conversations with countless people, including the members of the Valencia Philosophy Lab, my fellow Ph.D. students, several members and visitors of the Philosophy Departments in Nottingham and St Andrews, and many interesting philosophers and linguists I had the occasion to meet at the conferences I attended. My gratitude goes to all of them. The passages where I discuss the lying-misleading distinction, for example, have greatly benefited from the exchanges with Tobies Grimaltos, Sergi Rosell and the attendants to the Lying and Deception reading group that we had during one whole semester in Valencia. Similarly, my understanding of the framework employed in this dissertation is largely due to the discussions held at the Semantics in Generative Grammar reading group in Valencia, with participants like Jordi or Marc Artiga, as well as at other groups such as the Language and Mind Seminar in St Andrews or the Edinburgh Philosophy of Language Group, with whose attendants and organizers I had the occasion to discuss important linguistic and philosophical notions. It is also worth mentioning Félix Bou’s expertise in logic, which helped me grasp some of the basics of the field – not too imperfectly, I hope. Topics like indexicality and de se attitudes are also central to some parts of this work, and I owe much of them to extensive discussions with Víctor Verdejo. My office mates, fellow students and occasional co-authors 3 Marta and Saúl made the whole process more enjoyable. It was also pleasant to attend many of the conferences where some parts of this work were presented: the 5th Philosophy of Mind and Language Network in St Andrews, the 11th Semantics and Philosophy in Europe Colloquium in Warsaw, the 9th SEFA Conference in Valencia and the 21st Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics on top of the mountains in Szklarska Poręba. The comments from the referees and audiences of these events were, in most cases, extremely helpful. I am also very grateful to the members of the examining committee for agreeing to review my work – a task that is always tedious and often goes unrecognized. This dissertation was financially supported by the Conselleria d’Educació of the Valencian Government and the European Social Fund through the grant ACIF/2016/421. Extraoficially, however, my parents also provided financial support during the first year. A ells, i a tota la meua família, els agraïsc tot el recolzament rebut. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge the help from Laura, whose mastery of Romance linguistics and her suggestions to rephrase many passages made this work more empirically accurate and far easier to read. She suffered the writing process much more than I did. Muchas gracias a ti también. 4 Contents 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 7 1.1 What are complex demonstratives? ......................................................................... 7 1.2 Some methodological remarks ............................................................................... 12 2 The two approaches ....................................................................................................... 17 2.1 The classical account: direct reference theories..................................................... 17 2.1.1 Kaplan and the “dthat” operator ..................................................................... 21 2.1.2 Character theories ........................................................................................... 33 2.1.3 Multiple proposition theories.......................................................................... 39 2.2 Quantificational theories ........................................................................................ 44 2.2.1 King’s theory .................................................................................................. 50 2.2.1.1 Syntactic counterevidence to direct reference ............................................ 50 2.2.1.2 Semantic counterevidence to direct reference: QI, NS, Bach-Peters, NDNS, bound variable readings, anaphora ............................................................................ 60 2.2.1.3 King’s three alternatives ............................................................................. 66 2.2.2 Lepore & Ludwig’s approach ......................................................................... 88 2.3 Donnellan’s way: are complex demonstratives ambiguous expressions? ........... 112 3 Complex demonstratives as singular terms ................................................................. 121 3.1 Some problems common to most theories of complex demonstratives ............... 123 3.1.1 Truth in virtue of character ........................................................................... 124 3.1.2 Redundancy .................................................................................................. 134 3.2 A new lexical entry .............................................................................................. 140 3.3 Responses to the semantic counterevidence ........................................................ 154 3.3.1 Monsters ....................................................................................................... 156 5 3.3.1.1 A straightforward response? ..................................................................... 158 3.3.1.2 Natural language expressivity and quantification over times and worlds 163 3.3.1.3 Two solutions to the problem of intensional mismatch ............................ 180 3.3.2 Excursus: Singular terms, rigid designation and direct reference ................ 202 3.3.2.1 Monsters, compositionality and what is said ............................................ 203 3.3.2.2 Millianism and direct reference ................................................................ 214 3.3.3 Bound variable uses ...................................................................................... 219 3.3.4 E-type anaphora ............................................................................................ 224 3.3.5 Two possible ways to account for NDNS .................................................... 238 3.3.5.1 Pragmatics and Frege cases ...................................................................... 240 3.3.5.2 Fregeanism regained: von Stechow’s theory of verbal quantifiers ........... 246 3.3.5.3 Crosslinguistic evidence for 3.3.5.2 .......................................................... 255 3.4 Why treating them as singular terms works better .............................................. 261 3.4.1 Singular terms, anaphora and ellipsis ........................................................... 262 3.4.2 Did character theories get things wrong? ..................................................... 264 3.4.2.1 Opacity: attitude reports and modal operators .......................................... 265 3.4.2.2 Anaphora and the Overt Antecedent Constraint ....................................... 268 4 Conclusions ................................................................................................................. 273 5 Resum (summary) ....................................................................................................... 279 6 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 297 6 1 Introduction 1.1 What are complex demonstratives? Complex demonstratives have been among the concerns of philosophers and linguists since the first theories of reference were developed. Expressions like “this cat”, “that table”, “these elephants” or “those people” are the result of combining a bare demonstrative such as “this” or “that” with a nominal, thus yielding a syntactically more complex expression. In spite of this complexity, they share many semantic features with their bare counterparts, i.e., with singular terms like “this” and “that”. This similarity has led many philosophers to assimilate the former as a special case of the latter: bare demonstratives have been regarded as paradigmatic cases of singular referring terms since the work of Bertrand Russell (1911, 1918, 1948), and complex demonstratives, to a great extent,
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