DEIXIS IN DISCOURSE. REICHENBACH ON TEMPORAL REFERENCEa

Hans Kamp

1. Introduction

It is a great honor for me to be allowed to give this lecture, in the place where, more than thirty years ago, I made the transition (painful as it is in most cases, I guess) from a “mere” student to someone trying to be a genuine member of his field by contributing to it, to the best of his ability,things of his own making or finding. At that time Reichenbach, about whom I had heard a good deal as a student in the Netherlands before I came to UCLA, was already part of its Philosophy Department’s illustrious history, and I should confess that his work did, as that point, not have an immediately identi- fiable influence on the education which UCLA gave me—what influence there was was already part of a general heritage of philosophical insights and logical techniques. The visible importance Reichenbach has had, for me per- sonally and more generally for that part of the field which has absorbed an increasing proportion of my attention, came—as far as I was concerned— later. This occurred at a time when, in part because of Reichenbach’s work on temporal reference, I felt I had to abandon some of the scientific convictions I had formed during the three years of my stay at this university. My outlook on much that is central to the problems which have preoccupied me both before and after—the way in which language functions and its implications

a Editors’ note: This paper is the slightly revised version of the Reichenbach Lecture at UCLA, which Hans Kamp gave in 1999. The Reichenbach Lectures are dedicated to the life and work of Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), who worked at UCLA from 1938 to 1953. The original manuscript was never published, though it circulated as a copy since then. It consists of the lecture and an appendix that elaborates on critical questions after the talk. We have included the lecture and the main part of the appendix. We carefully edited the manuscript, corrected typos and updated the bibliographical references. We would like to thank Daniel Altshuler for proofreading and constructive comments. © K. von Heusinger & A. ter Meulen (eds.), Meaning and the Dynamics of Interpretation. Selected Papers of Hans Kamp, Brill, Leiden, 2013. 106 hans kamp for logic and for our understanding of the human mind—was thereby quite radically transformed. The opportunity I have been given to address this audience here today— on an occasion dedicated to the furtherance of the scientific and philo- sophical ideals Reichenbach pursued, but also, I presume, to reflect on the lasting impact of his own work—has made me think back, in an attempt to recapture the changes which then occurred, to the field as a whole but, as a side-effect, also to me personally. That made it necessary to try and recall, as vividly as was still possible after so many years, what it was people thought in the days before those changes, those when I was a student here, and—an even harder task—the times before I was a UCLA graduate student. And so the experience which culminates in my standing here before you became something like the closing of a long and fairly tortuous loop. Reichenbach should probably be characterized as first and foremost a philosopher of science. Even a cursory perusal of his bibliography reveals a clear predominance of works in the philosophy of physics and on related issues of scientific and logical methodology. (In fact it was in this context that I first became familiar with his work at the university of Amsterdam, and turned into a firm afficionado.) In comparison, his contribution to the philosophy of language may appear much less prominent—though admit- tedly the line between philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and sci- entific methodology is, in his case no less than that of many of his contem- poraries, not so easy to draw. Yet, in this domain too Reichenbach has been extraordinarily influential. And probably the largest part of that influence is due to one section—of no more than ten pages—in the chapter he devoted to the analysis of natural language in his book “Elements of Symbolic Logic”. This is the section on the tenses of the verb (Reichenbach 1947: pp. 289–298). Over the past 25 years it has given rise to an unending flow of publications, most of them within linguistics. And although much has happened in this domain since the first papers appeared that were inspired by it, it is still often quoted—and all of us who are working on temporal reference in natural lan- guage know that Reichenbach is the principal source from which our work received its ultimate inspiration. This is an unusual feat, and it deserves some reflection why this compar- atively short section should have had such an enormous impact. In brief the answer is something like this: (i) the section reveals what we can now rec- ognize as at least two distinct, extremely important insights; and (ii) these were insights that, as far as I can guess, went very much against the spirit of the times—or, more correctly perhaps, against the spirit of the logical tra- dition to which Reichenbach belonged and which he himself had helped so