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Indexicality: De Se Semantics and Pragmatics

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Indexicality: De Se Semantics and Pragmatics Indexicality: de se semantics and pragmatics Craige Roberts, The Ohio State University Draft of April, 2015 Abstract: I offer a new theory of indexicality in which indexicals are characterized as presuppositionally anchored to a doxastic center, of the general sort introduced by Lewis, Quine and Stalnaker to model de se attitudes. I argue that this theory is empirically superior to direct reference (and constant function) accounts of indexicality, and show how it accounts for a variety of puzzles for those accounts, including shifted indexicals, problems about de re belief, the behavior of indexicals in Free Indirect Style; bound indexicals, and so-called "fake indexicals", inter alia. This account draws essentially on the theory of Aloni (2001), accounting for de re belief attribution and counterpart relations under epistemic modality, and on Stalnaker (2008) for his modification of the account of Centers due to Lewis (1979). And it shares important features with Wechsler's (2010) recent theory of first and second person plural pronouns across languages. 1 0. Introduction We should start by giving an account of self-location, in thought, which will also give us a more general account of the complex iterated attitudes that define common ground (including the presumed common knowledge about who and where we are, and what time it is). When we have a notion of the common ground that can accommodate such information, the semantics for indexical pronouns will be a relatively straightforward matter. Stalnaker (in press) Ch.2 1 Many thanks are due to colleagues and students who’ve given me important feedback on earlier versions of this work. Thanks especially to Irene Heim for her comments at the OSU Workshop on Reference in March, 2012; the participants at the PhLiP (Philosophical Linguistics and Linguistical Philosophy) workshop in Tarrytown, NY in October, 2013; to audiences at the Rutgers University Workshop on Linguistics and Philosophy and at the University of Rochester Linguistics Department in the spring of 2014; to Maria Aloni, Pranav Anand, David Beaver, B. Chandrasekaran, Valentine Hacquard, Hans Kamp, Ian Proops, Josep Quer, Robert Stalnaker, Steve Wechsler, and Joost Zwarts for stimulating discussions about some of these ideas; and to members of the OSU project on perspective—Jefferson Barlew, Greg Kierstead, and Eric Snyder—for discussions over many months and their own stimulating exploration of related ideas. Special thanks to Zsófia Zvolenszky, whose detailed comments on a near- final draft resulted in significant improvements. I am especially grateful to the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, where I was a Fellow in 2012-13, and to The Ohio State University, which helped to support that fellowship; without that precious time, this work would never have gotten off the ground. The perspective project also received invaluable support in 2013-14 from a Targeted Investment in Excellence grant from OSU, a Research Enhancement Grant from the OSU Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, and a supplement to NSF Grant #0952571. This manuscript was completed while I was a Senior Fellow in 2014-15 at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, sponsored by Budapesti Közép-Európai Egyetem Alaptvány, and again, I am deeply grateful for their support. The theses promoted herein are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the CEU IAS or any of the other sponsoring organizations or individuals cited here. © 2014 Craige Roberts 1 The indexicals are a cross-linguistic class usually taken to include a number of pronouns and demonstratives, at least including English I, we, you, here, now; the demonstratives this and that, and demonstrative uses of he, she, her and his; a range of other nominal and adverbial elements including today, tomorrow, actual, and present; and their counterparts in other languages. Since 1977, the standard theory of the semantics of indexicals has been that of Kaplan (1977): an indexical is directly referential, with no Fregean sense. Its conventional content is a Character, a function taking as argument the concrete situation of utterance to yield the referent itself, the latter a concrete individual in that situation (speaker, addressee, time, etc.). In standard variants of this account in offshoots of Montague Grammar, an indexical’s Character plus contextually given argument yields a constant function from worlds to individuals, i.e. one with the same value in all possible worlds (or at least, in all worlds in which that individual exists). This constant value is the intuitive counterpart of the referent on the direct reference account. This essay argues for a theory of indexicality which is empirically superior to the direct reference approach (and its Montagovian counterpart), one which can both account for the apparent wide scope of indexicals which motivated Kaplan and for a variety of cross-linguistic features of indexical meaning which are problematic for that account. I will argue that none of the accounts of indexical expressions developed to this point capture an essential feature of this class: Their interpretations crucially depend on the doxastic point of view, and associated doxastic perspective, of a salient and relevant agent, typically that of the speaker or addressee, but not always so for all indexic a ls in all contexts. Such a claim may call to mind theories of self- reference and I like that of Perry (1979,1993,2001). But though our views converge on a crucial feature of linguis tic indexicality—that it presupposes something about the doxastic state of a distinguished individual—in the present theory the empirical motivation, the generalization to cases not involving the speaker, and the realization of this idea in a truth conditional semantics are very different from Perry’s. What do I mean by an agent’s doxastic point of view and perspective? Consider first the usual spatial notions, with space modeled as a three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate structure. A point of view in such a space can be characterized as a point in that space and a vector for which the point serves as origin (Barlew, in press)—that is, as a location (or origin) plus an orientation. Then the perspective available from that point of view is that portion of the Cartesian space which is perceptually accessible from the adopted point of view (origin+orientation). Spatial perspective is not entirely given by the point of view, but depends in part on the perceptual mechanisms available at the origin, the circumstances in the perceptual field, etc. If an agent’s visual field is omnidirectional, then even if in some sense he is oriented in one particular direction, he might have visual access in other directions as well; to calculate his perspective, we need information about his perceptual apparatus, etc. So the accessibility relation itself may be complex to specify; but we can abstract over such complications here. This notion can be generalized metaphorically to talk about different kinds of space and accessibility relations over those. A perspective reflects the information available from a given point of view about the space in question, as a function of an appropriate kind of accessibility relation over that space. 2 I will use the term doxastic of operators and states that depend on the beliefs of some agent(s). Since epistemic operators and states depend on beliefs, they are doxastic as well. A doxastic point of view is the origin for an accessibility relation over the space of possibilities, that space modeled, say, as the set of possible worlds. The origin of this relation is an agent-in-a-world-at- a-time, and the orientation is the doxastic attitude of that origin, offering a kind of vector through that space (in this case, a modal accessibility relation). This yields a doxastic perspective: the set of worlds compatible with that agent’s beliefs at that time in that world. Call the origin in a doxastic state the center. But we know from Lewis (1979b) (as discussed in §2 below) that the doxastic state of an agent- in-a-world-at-a-time is not just a simple set of worlds. Doxastic propositional attitudes are not relations to propositions simpliciter, but must also reflect the agent’s self-location in the worlds in question. Intuitively, the relata in a doxastic attitude are worlds labelled with a sort of you- are-here arrow: “and this is me, there, at that time”; technically, both the world in which the beliefs obtains and those reflecting what is believed are centered worlds, each a pair of a world and an individual (at a time) in that world. The individ ua l-at-a-time is the center of a centered world. The agent whose doxastic perspective is reported is the center of the centered world in which the beliefs hold, and that centered world is the adopted point of view. Since some of the agent’s beliefs are de se, i.e. about herself qua self, the center self-locates in each of her belief- worlds. So the doxastic perspective corresponding to a doxastic point of view is a set of centered worlds, the agent’s belief state, the worlds being those in which all her beliefs are true and the center of each world in that state serving to characterize what the doxastic agent self-ascribes in that world. The interpretation of an indexical conventionally depends on the doxastic point of view assumed by the speaker at the time of utterance. This dependence is what I call (doxastic) anchoring; unlike the Kaplanian story, this dependence on the context of utterance does not imply coreference with any element in that context. This may at first seem an unlikely way to characterize the class of indexicals.
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