According to the paratactic theory of indirect discourse, a report in the form 'A said that p' is best regarded as an utterance of two type sentences, 'A said that' and 'p', in which the word 'that' is a demonstrative pronoun somehow relating to the subsequent (non-assertive) utterance of 'p'. Different versions of the theory, however, differ markedly over the nature of this relation, and over the character of the item which the putative demonstrative designates. In the paper which brought the theory to widespread attention, Davidson (1969) construed the demonstrative as denoting the speech event which is the subsequent utterance of 'p'. Accordingly, he construed the initial claim 'A said that' as expressing a relationship between a person A and an event u a relation that obtains iff u and some utterance of A's 'make samesayers' of the reporter and A. Against this, Ian McFetridge (1976) raised what has come to be called the 'counting problem'. Our actual practice of making indirect reports, he claimed, is littered with examples which show that the designata of the grammatical objects of the verb 'to say' (the things said, as we might call them) cannot be particular utterances. And he went on to develop a variant paratactic theory in which the demonstrative is taken to be a device of 'deferred ostension' denoting, not the ensuing utterance itself, but the proposition which that utterance expresses, or binds.1 On this view, 'to say' expresses a relation between speakers and the things expressed by utterances, and not between speakers and utterances themselves. The most recent contribution to this intrafamilial wrangle has come in these pages from Richard Holton (1996), who disputes the whole cogency of McFetridge's attack on Davidson. This note is devoted to explaining why his counter is unconvincing. McFetridge undertook to produce cases in which the designata of the demonstrative (the things said) cannot be taken to be speech events; and in so doing, he concentrated upon examples in which there is an explicit claim to the effect that the thing said on one occasion of utterance (the proposition thereby expressed) is (or is not) identical with the thing said on another. As Holton rightly observes, such examples do not tax Davidson's strategy of reconstruing predicates a strategy already visible in his