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Demonstratives: An Essay on the Semantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and other Indexicals

In Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes From Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-563 (1989)

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  1. Complex demonstratives, QI uses, and direct reference.Jeffrey C. King - 2008 - Philosophical Review 117 (1):99-117.
    result from combining the determiners `this' or `that' with syntactically simple or complex common noun phrases such as `woman' or `woman who is taking her skis off'. Thus, `this woman', and `that woman who is taking her skis off' are complex demonstratives. There are also plural complex demonstratives such as `these skis' and `those snowboarders smoking by the gondola'. My book Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account argues against what I call the direct reference account of complex demonstratives (henceforth DRCD) and (...)
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  • (1 other version)Craziness and metasemantics.John Hawthorne - 2007 - Philosophical Review 116 (3):427-440.
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  • Millian descriptivism.Ben Caplan - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 133 (2):181-198.
    In this paper, I argue against Millian Descriptivism: that is, the view that, although sentences that contain names express singular propositions, when they use those sentences speakers communicate descriptive propositions. More precisely, I argue that Millian Descriptivism fares no better (or worse) than Fregean Descriptivism: that is, the view that sentences express descriptive propositions. This is bad news for Millian Descriptivists who think that Fregean Descriptivism is dead.
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  • Indexicals and perspectivals.Anne Bezuidenhout - 2005 - Facta Philosophica 7 (1):3-18.
    (1) Jenny is coming to visit me tonight. (2) I’m going to visit Jenny tonight. In these examples, it is where I am (my home, let us suppose) that is the center of the coming and going. This may suggest that the perspective point is always the perspective of the speaker, and that comings are always towards the speaker and that goings are away from the location of the speaker. But this isn’t necessarily so. For example, suppose that a colleague (...)
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  • Belief in discourse representation theory.Nicholas Asher - 1986 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 15 (2):127 - 189.
    I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the (...)
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  • Holism, relevance, and thought content.Henry Jackman - 1999 - Proceedings of the Ohio Philosophical Association 1999:140-151.
    NB: This paper has been largely displaced by my: “Externalism, Metasemantic Contextualism and Self-Knowledge”, in Goldberg, (ed.) Externalism, Self-Knowledge and Skepticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 228-247. // -/- While straightforwardly ambiguous words like “bank” and obviously indexical words like “I” are unproblematically treated as referring to different things in different contexts, such variations are displayed by terms that seem neither ambiguous nor indexical. This paper will argue that traditional accounts of word meaning (in which a single fixed (...)
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  • Epistemic Two-Dimensional Semantics.David J. Chalmers - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 118 (1-2):153-226.
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  • (1 other version)Belief states and narrow content.Curtis Brown - 1993 - Mind and Language 8 (3):343-67.
    The first thesis is that beliefs play a role in explaining behavior. This is reasonably uncontroversial, though it has been controverted. Why did I raise my arm? Because I wanted to emphasize a point, and believed that I could do so by raising my arm. The belief that I could emphasize a point by raising my arm is central to the most natural explanation of my action.
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  • Shoemaker on phenomenal content.Brad Thompson - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 135 (3):307--334.
    In a series of papers and lectures, Sydney Shoemaker has developed a sophisticated Russellian theory of phenomenal content. It has as its central motivation two considerations. One is the possibility of spectrum - inversion without illusion. The other is the transparency of experience.
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  • Diagonal decision theory.Melissa Fusco - forthcoming - Economics and Philosophy:1-12.
    Stalnaker’s ‘Assertion’ (1978 [1999]) offers a classic account of diagonalization as an approach to the meaning of a declarative sentence in context. Here I explore the relationship between diagonalization and some puzzles in Mahtani’s book The Objects of Credence. Diagonalization can influence how we think about both credence and desirability, so it influences both components of a standard expected utility equation. In that vein, I touch on two of Mahtani’s case-studies, chance and the finite version of the Two Envelope Paradox.
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  • Naming and Non-necessity.Nathan Salmon - 2020 - In Andrea Bianchi (ed.), Language and reality from a naturalistic perspective: Themes from Michael Devitt. Cham: Springer. pp. 237-248.
    Kripke’s examples of allegedly contingent a priori sentences include ‘Stick S is exactly one meter long’, where the reference of ‘meter’ is fixed by the description ‘the length of stick S’. In response to skepticism concerning apriority Kripke replaced the meter sentence with a more sophisticated variant, arguing that the modified example is more immune to such skepticism. The case for apriority is examined. A distinction is drawn between apriority and a broader notion, “qua-priority,” of a truth whose epistemic justification (...)
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  • Defining Definiteness.Aleksander Domoslawski - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    Epistemicism associates vagueness with ignorance produced by semantic plasticity: the shiftiness of intensions in our language resulting from small changes in usage. The recent literature (Caie 2012; Magidor 2018; Yli-Vakkuri 2016) points to a missing piece in the epistemicist theory of vagueness, namely a clear account of the semantics of the definiteness operator Δ. The fundamentals of the epistemicist theory are well understood. However, the technical work of defining the definiteness operator has proven difficult. There are several desiderata that we (...)
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  • Meaning Representationalism: Between Representationalism and Qualia Realism.da Sá Pereira Roberto Horácio - 2016 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 93.
    The purpose of this article is to offer a new view of the key relation between the content and the conscious character of visual experience. The author aims to support the following claims. First, the author rejects the qualia realist claim that conscious character is an intrinsic, nonrepresentational property of visual experience, for example, a pattern of activation of neurons. However, the author also rejects the rival widespread representationalist claim that the conscious character of visual experience is identical to, or (...)
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  • Semantic conventions and referential intentions.Jakub Rudnicki - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-16.
    According to intentionalism, the semantic reference of the uses of demonstratives is fixed, at least partly, by the speaker’s referential intention. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of the existence of a semantic convention of this sort. My argument is placed in the Lewisian framework of signaling games and consists of several steps that correspond to four anti-intentionalist arguments, already present in the literature, that have proven inconclusive when employed separately and without being set in the mentioned framework.
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  • A puzzle about moral responsibility.Fabio Lampert & John William Waldrop - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (8):2291-2307.
    We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid.
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  • .Luca Incurvati & Julian J. Schlöder - 2023 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
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  • Samethinking.Romain Bourdoncle - 2022 - Dissertation, École Normale Supérieure
    This thesis investigates the nature of the relation between mental representations in successful verbal communication, thought attribution, agreement, and disagreement — a relation which I call “samethinking”. The nature of samethinking raises several foundational questions about the nature of (non-natural) meaning, and the cognitive underpinnings of the emergence of culture. It bears on long-lasting puzzles in the philosophy of mind and language (such as Frege’s puzzle and Kripke’s puzzle about belief). Samethinking does not amount to sharing a reference (with “sharing" (...)
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  • Twardowski i przygodna przyszłość. Prawdopodobieństwo kontra Cienka Czerwona Linia.Jakub Węgrecki - 2021 - Filozofia Nauki 29 (4):83-101.
    One of the most widely discussed philosophical issues is the problem of future contingents. Basically, the challenge is to create an adequate semantic theory of future-tensed sentences. Twardowski (1900) suggests that future contingent statements should be analyzed using the concept of probability. The aim of this paper is to show that (1) such an analysis is not appropriate and (2) that Twardowski’s main theses imply the Thin Red Line Theory. I discuss three potential arguments against my proposal and sketch the (...)
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  • Scorekeeping in a chess game.Bryan Pickel & Brian Rabern - 2022 - Semantics and Pragmatics 15 (12).
    There is an important analogy between languages and games. Just as a scoresheet records features of the evolution of a game to determine the effect of a move in that game, a conversational score records features of the evolution of a conversation to determine the effect of the linguistic moves that speakers make. Chess is particularly interesting for the study of conversational dynamics because it has language-like notations, and so serves as a simplified study in how the effect of an (...)
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  • Minimal contents, lying, and conventions of language.Massimiliano Vignolo - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-25.
    One recurrent objection against minimalism is that minimal contents have no theoretical role. It has recently been argued that minimal contents serve to draw the distinction between lying and misleading. In Sect. 1 and Sect. 2 I summarise the main argument in support of that claim and contend that it is inconclusive. In Sect. 3 I discuss some cases of lying and some of misleading that raise difficulties for minimalism. In Sect. 4 I make a diagnosis of the failure of (...)
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  • General-term rigidity is meaning constancy.Fredrik Haraldsen - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):41-49.
    It is often thought that some general terms or kind terms, in particular natural kind terms, are rigid designators, and that a properly extended notion of singular-term rigidity can help explain the behaviour of such general terms. In this article, I argue that the only legitimate notion of general-term rigidity is a trivial one and identify some crucial asymmetries between a posteriori necessary truths involving names and a posteriori necessary truths involving general terms. If we pay attention to these asymmetries, (...)
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  • Singular thoughts, singular attitude reports, and acquaintance.Jeonggyu Lee - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (2):126-142.
    It is widely accepted among philosophers that there is a tension between acquaintance constraints on singular thought and the plausible assumption that the truths of singular attitude reports ensure the subject's having singular thoughts. From this, anti-acquaintance theorists contend that acquaintance constraints must be rejected. As a response, many acquaintance theorists maintain that there is good reason to doubt a strong connection between singular attitude reports and singular thoughts. In this paper, however, I defend the acquaintance theory by arguing that (...)
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  • Spinoza and the Inevitable Perfection of Being.Sanja Särman - 2019 - Dissertation, The University of Hong Kong
    Metaphysics and ethics are two distinct fields in academic philosophy. The object of metaphysics is what is, while the object of ethics is what ought to be. Necessitarianism is a modal doctrine that appears to obliterate this neat distinction. For it is commonly assumed that ought (at least under normal circumstances) implies can. But if necessitarianism is true then I can only do what I actually do. Hence what I ought to do becomes limited to what I in fact do. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Extended Modal Realism — A New Solution to Problems Related to Non-existence.Andrew Thomas - 2021 - Dissertation, Durham University
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  • Quantitative Character and the Composite Account of Phenomenal Content.Kim Soland - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    I advance an account of quantitative character, a species of phenomenal character that presents as an intensity (cf. a quality) and includes experience dimensions such as loudness, pain intensity, and visual pop-out. I employ psychological and neuroscientific evidence to demonstrate that quantitative characters are best explained by attentional processing, and hence that they do not represent external qualities. Nonetheless, the proposed account of quantitative character is conceived as a compliment to the reductive intentionalist strategy toward qualitative states; I argue that (...)
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  • Against intentionalism: an experimental study on demonstrative reference.Wojciech Rostworowski, Katarzyna Kuś & Bartosz Maćkiewicz - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (5):1027-1061.
    In this paper, we present two experimental studies on reference of complex demonstratives. The results of our experiments challenge the dominant view in philosophy of language, according to which demonstrative reference is determined by the speaker's intentions. The first experiment shows that in a context where there are two candidates for the referent—one determined by the speaker’s intention, the other by some “external” factors—people prefer to identify the referent of a demonstrative with the latter object. The external factors for which (...)
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  • (1 other version)Fictional reports.Paal Fjeldvig Antonsen - 2019 - Synthese 198 (6):5675-5688.
    This paper outlines a bicontextual account of fictional reports. A fictional report is a report on something that happens in a fiction, and a bicontextual account is an account that relativizes truth to two contexts. The proposal is motivated by two considerations. First, it explains the intuitive truth conditions of fictional reports without postulating hidden fiction operators. Second, it handles the problem of indexicals in fictional reports better than the standard accounts.
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  • The Contingent A Priori, Linguistic Stipulation, and Singular Thought.Jeonggyu Lee - 2021 - Theoria 87 (5):1020-1037.
    The primary aim of this paper is to provide the exact diagnosis of the contingent a priori debate so far by untangling complicated issues surrounding it, such as singular thought, linguistic stipulation, and epistemic justification. I will first maintain that most philosophers' arguments for or against the contingent a priori are ultimately based on one of two conflicting intuitions about linguistic stipulation: sceptics of the contingent a priori have appealed to the intuition that extra-linguistic knowledge cannot be acquired through the (...)
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  • On how to legitimately constrain a semantic theory.Joan Gimeno-Simó - 2021 - Semiotica 2021 (240):97-127.
    Semanticists often restrict their theories by imposing constraints on the parameters that can be employed for interpreting the expressions of a language. Such constraints are based on non-logical features of actual contexts of utterance, but they often have important effects on issues that do pertain to logic, like analyticity or entailment. For example, Kaplan’s restriction to so-called “proper contexts” was required in order to count “I am here now” as valid. In this paper I argue that constraints of this kind (...)
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  • Intentional and Phenomenal Properties: How not to be Inseparatists.Miklós Márton - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (1):127-147.
    In this paper I give an overview of the recent developments in the phenomenalism – intentionalism debate and try to show that the proposed solutions of neither sides are satisfying. The claims and arguments of the two parties are rather vague and attribute to intentional and phenomenal properties either a too weak or a too strong relationship: too weak in the sense that they establish only mere coexistence, or too strong in the sense that they attribute some a priori conceptual (...)
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  • What Is Theoretical Knowledge?Søren Harnow Klausen & Esben Nedenskov Petersen - 2021 - Theoria 87 (3):559-577.
    While it is common in social epistemology, philosophy of education and sociology to speak of theoretical knowledge, the concept of theoretical knowledge used in ordinary discourse has not been properly examined, and its relations to other types of knowledge remain unclear. This article argues that this ordinary language notion of theoretical knowledge has a distinct meaning different from the meanings of terms for other knowledge types, for example, knowledge‐that, and meta‐cognitive knowledge, and provides an analysis that characterizes theoretical knowledge as (...)
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  • Indexicality, meaning, use.Tadeusz Ciecierski - 2021 - Semiotica 2021 (238):73-89.
    The article presents two concepts of indexicality. The first, more standard and narrow, identifies indexicality with systematic (meaning controlled) context-sensitivity. The second, broader (derived from the work of Jerzy Pelc), conceives indexicality in terms of the potential variability of the general semiotic characteristics expressions (with respect to the context of use). The text introduces the concept of a pragmatic matrix that serves for a schematic representation of contextual variation. I also recapitulate briefly the views of Jerzy Pelc on the meaning (...)
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  • Beliefs, make-beliefs, and making believe that beliefs are not make-beliefs.Alberto Voltolini - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):5061-5078.
    In this paper I want to hold, first, that one may suitably reconstruct the relevant kind of mental representational states that fiction typically involves, make-beliefs, as contextually unreal beliefs that, outside fiction, are either matched or non-matched by contextually real beliefs. Yet moreover, I want to claim that the kind of make-believe that may yield the mark of fictionality is not Kendall Walton’s invitation or prescription to imagine. Indeed, in order to appeal in terms of make-believe to a specific form (...)
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  • Against the Quotational Theory of Meaning Ascriptions.Andrea Raimondi - 2020 - Studia Semiotyczne 34 (2):81-103.
    According to the quotational theory of meaning ascriptions, sentences like “‘Bruder means brother” are abbreviated synonymy claims, such as “‘Bruder means the same as ‘brother’”. After discussing a problem with Harman’s version of the quotational theory, I present an amended version defended by Field. Then, I address Field’s responses to two arguments against the theory that revolve around translation and the understanding of foreign expressions. Afterwards, I formulate two original arguments against both Harman’s and Field’s versions of the theory. One (...)
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  • Millianism and Translation.Andrea Raimondi - 2020 - Topoi 39 (5):1193-1197.
    According to Millianism about proper names, what a proper name semantically contributes to the sentence in which it figures is simply its referent; therefore, co-referring proper names are intercheangable salva veritate and salva significatione. In their 2019 paper published in Topoi, Felappi and Santambrogio formulate a thought-provoking argument against Millianism. Their argument aims at establishing that our normal practice of translation shows that Millianism cannot be correct. I argue that Millians can successfully reply. I will address in turn two versions (...)
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  • What would it mean for natural language to be the language of thought?Gabe Dupre - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (4):773-812.
    Traditional arguments against the identification of the language of thought with natural language assume a picture of natural language which is largely inconsistent with that suggested by contemporary linguistic theory. This has led certain philosophers and linguists to suggest that this identification is not as implausible as it once seemed. In this paper, I discuss the prospects for such an identification in light of these developments in linguistic theory. I raise a new challenge against the identification thesis: the existence of (...)
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  • Fostering Liars.Paul M. Pietroski - 2020 - Topoi 40 (1):5-25.
    Davidson conjectured that suitably formulated Tarski-style theories of truth can “do duty” as theories of meaning for the spoken languages that humans naturally acquire. But this conjecture faces a pair of old objections that are, in my view, fatal when combined. Foster noted that given any theory of the sort Davidson envisioned, for a language L, there will be many equally true theories whose theorems pair endlessly many sentences of L with very different specifications of whether or not those sentences (...)
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  • On the Singularity of Descriptive Files.Mayank Bora - 2019 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 36 (1):71-95.
    Jeshion (New essays on singular thought, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010b) believes that singular thought is implemented by the tokening of mental files (MFC). She also believes that an individual’s being significant to the agent is necessary and sufficient for the agent’s having singular thought about the individual (Cognitivism). Goodman (Rev Philos Psychol 7(2):437–461, 2016a, Philos Q 66:236–260, 2016b) argues that mental files created under a description lead to descriptive not singular thought. She uses this to criticize Cognitivism’s sufficiency claim (...)
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  • (1 other version)How I Really Say What You Think.José Manuel Viejo - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):251-277.
    The apparently obviously true doctrine of opacity has been thought to be inconsistent with two others, to which many philosophers of language are also attracted: the referentialist account of the semantics of proper names and indexicals, on the one hand, and the principle of semantic innocence, on the other. I discuss here one of the most popular strategies for resolving the apparent inconsistency, namely Mark Richard’s theory of belief ascriptions, and raise three problems for it. Finally, I propose an alternative (...)
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  • The philosophy of linguistics: Scientific underpinnings and methodological disputes.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12636.
    This article surveys the philosophical literature on theoretical linguistics. The focus of the paper is centred around the major debates in the philosophy of linguistics, past and present, with specific relation to how they connect to the philosophy of science. Specific issues such as scientific realism in linguistics, the scientific status of grammars, the methodological underpinnings of formal semantics, and the integration of linguistics into the larger cognitive sciences form the crux of the discussion.
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  • The Diversity of Fiction and Copredication: An Accommodation Problem.John Collins - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1197-1223.
    The paper presents an accommodation problem for extant semantic accounts of fiction. Some accounts of fiction are designed to accommodate one or another form of fictive statement exclusively, what I shall call in-fiction and out-fiction. Thus, typically, the accounts fail to do justice to their respective excluded form. A natural response, entertained by Kripke and in a different fashion by latter-day Meinongians, is to let the two different kinds of fiction have their respective accounts. It is very easy, however, to (...)
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  • Kant, Causal Judgment & Locating the Purloined Letter.Kenneth R. Westphal - 2017 - Con-Textos Kantianos 6:42-78.
    Kant’s account of cognitive judgment is sophisticated, sound and philosophically far more illuminating than is often appreciated. Key features of Kant’s account of cognitive judgment are widely dispersed amongst various sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, whilst common philosophical proclivities have confounded these interpretive difficulties. This paper characterises Kant’s account of causal-perceptual judgment concisely to highlight one central philosophical achievement: Kant’s finding that, to understand and investigate empirical knowledge we must distinguish between predication as a grammatical form of sentences, (...)
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  • Four Dthats.Stefano Predelli - 2019 - Synthese 198 (4):2959-2972.
    The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics (...)
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  • Intersubjective belief.Vivienne Brown - 2019 - Episteme 16 (2):139-156.
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  • Manifest validity and beyond: an inquiry into the nature of coordination and the identity of guises and propositional-attitude states.Paolo Bonardi - 2019 - Linguistics and Philosophy 42 (5):475-515.
    This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine : “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective (...)
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  • Neo-Kantian constructivism and metaethics.Kirk Surgener - 2012 - Dissertation, University of Birmingham
    Christine Korsgaard has attempted to defend a distinct approach to metaethics – Neo-Kantian Constructivism. Not only does she present a positive case for her own view, she also attacks existing metaethical positions and even the disctinctions that metaethics has traditionally relied on. This thesis is a sustained examination of this position. I consider whether Korsgaard can legitimately claim to be offering a metaethical position at all, providing her with some defence against the scepticism of some metaethicists. I also examine her (...)
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  • Objects and Modalities: A Study in the Semantics of Modal Logic.Tero Tulenheimo - 2017 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    This book develops a novel generalization of possible world semantics, called ‘world line semantics’, which recognizes worlds and links between world-bound objects (world lines) as mutually independent aspects of modal semantics. Addressing a wide range of questions vital for contemporary debates in logic and philosophy of language and offering new tools for theoretical linguistics and knowledge representation, the book proposes a radically new paradigm in modal semantics. This framework is motivated philosophically, viewing a structure of world lines as a precondition (...)
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  • Externalism and critical reasoning: a reconsideration.Seyed Mohammad Yarandi - 2019 - Synthese 198 (2):1201-1216.
    According to Burge, it is not possible to commit brute errors in the process of critical reasoning. This thesis lies at the heart of Burge’s influential theory of self-knowledge. By appealing to a version of the slow-switching argument, this paper contends that Burge’s view is not compatible with his commitment to externalism about mental content. In particular, it is argued that accepting externalism opens up the possibility of brute errors in the process of critical reasoning.
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  • Semantic Variance.Martín Abreu Zavaleta - 2018 - Dissertation, New York University
    This dissertation argues for Semantic Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition that more than one languge user takes to be that utterance's truth-conditional content. I argue that Semantic Variance is problematic for standard theories concerning the nature of communication, the epistemic significance of ordinary disputes, the semantics of speech reports, and the nature of linguistic competence. In response to the problems arising from the truth of Semantic Variance, I develop new accounts of (...)
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  • Back to the actual future.Jacek Wawer & Alex Malpass - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2193-2213.
    The purpose of the paper is to rethink the role of actuality in the branching model of possibilities. We investigate the idea that the model should be enriched with an additional factor—the so-called Thin Red Line—which is supposed to represent the single possible course of events that gets actualized in time. We believe that this idea was often misconceived which prompted some unfortunate reactions. On the one hand, it suggested problematic semantic models of future tense and and on the other, (...)
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