Abstract
Stojnić et al. (Philos Perspect 27(1):502–525, 2013; Linguist Philos 40(5):519–547, 2017) argue that the reference of demonstratives is fixed without any contribution from the extra-linguistic context. On their ‘prominence/coherence’ theory, the reference of a demonstrative expression depends only on its context-independent linguistic meaning. Here, we argue that Stojnić et al.’s striking claims can be maintained in only the thinnest technical sense. Instead of eliminating appeals to the extra-linguistic context, we show how the prominence/coherence theory merely suppresses them. Then we ask why one might be tempted to try and offer such a view. Since we are rather sympathetic to the motivations we find, we close by sketching a more plausible alternative.
Highlights
If you point at the V-notch couloir on the North Palisade and utter (1), most people will take you to have said something false.1 If you point at the U-notch couloir instead, while uttering the same sentence, people will take you to have said something true:(1) That is the U-notch couloir.This work is entirely collaborative and names are listed in reverse alphabetical order.E
At the end of the day, what we expect from a theory of demonstratives is an answer to the question of why two different truth conditions should be associated with a demonstrative sentence when it is uttered on two occasions by someone pointing at two different objects
We take Stojnicet al.’s semantics and metasemantics for sentences like (1), sentences containing a demonstrative and accompanied by a pointing gesture, to turn the question ‘What determines the reference of a demonstrative?’ into the question ‘What determines the target of the accompanying gesture?’ We have argued that all of the natural answers somewhere appeal to extralinguistic context
Summary
If you point at the V-notch couloir on the North Palisade and utter (1), most people will take you to have said something false. If you point at the U-notch couloir instead, while uttering the same sentence, people will take you to have said something true:. We will argue that instead of eliminating appeals to extra-linguistic context, the prominence/coherence theory relocates them This relocation, in our view, fails to resolve any of the thorny questions that arise regarding the way in which the extra-linguistic context helps to determine the intuitive truth conditions of a particular use of a demonstrative sentence. Associate with the existential quantifier, for example, takes an arbitrary input context and returns a variation on which the order of the objects is preserved, but on which they are all shifted down one place in the sequence to allow the introduction of a new object in the first position This means that demonstrative expressions that occur after an indefinite will refer to it anaphorically, assuming nothing else intervenes. When the demonstrative element is interpreted, it picks out the U-notch, which satisfies the condition of being the U-notch
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