PH38D Deixis

Deixis

Besides Lycan 11, see Martinich 24 and 25, and H&W 4 and 23.

  1. Lycan introduces the particular topic of deixis by reference to the wider contrasts of semantics and pragmatics, distinguishing the latter into 'semantic pragmatics' and 'pragmatic pragmatics'. As Lycan says, the fundamental notion in any kind of pragmatics is the role of the context of utterance in contributing to the meaning of what is said. It is easy enough to invoke context; the difficulty is spell out how this contribution is actually managed, since competent speakers don't have particular problems with sentences that rely to some extent upon their context of use.
  2. The particular contextual issue that Lycan focuses on is deixis or the use of indexical or demonstrative or token-reflexive items. He had raised this originally (p. 142) as a problem for Davidson. "'P' is true iff p" might be appropriate for some sentences, but "'I am sick now' is true iff I am sick now" is pretty hopeless. It makes the sentence in anyone's mouth dependent on my state of health. Davidson responds by relativising truth to a speaker and a time: "'I am sick now" is true as potentially spoken by p at t iff p is sick at t". But that won't capture the range of different contextual factors that are relevant for different deictics.
  3. Lycan's own approach is to stress the endless variety of factors in the context that can, on occasion, become relevant. Some are pretty obvious; others more exotic.
    • speaker: we have seen that with 'I'.
    • location: 'here', 'there'.
    • time: the use of tenses.
    • pointing gestures: 'This one is more expensive than that'.
    • assumed vantage points: Lycan contrasts 'X went to Z' with 'X came to Z' and claims the second sentences can only be properly used by a speaker whose assumed vantage point is Z itself. There is also a temporal vantage point here, the time of the arrival of X at Z rather than the time of utterance. This is getting pretty complex, but it was described by Reichenbach in one of the earliest studies of the logic of temporal expressions.
    • time zone.
    • hemisphere: it's summer in the antipodes, and we might talk about what is happening in Australia by saying 'since it's summer....'
    Lycan reports that some theorists have tried to capture this variety by specifying various parameters. One example uses 8 elements: a possible world, a time, a place, a speaker, an audience, a sequence of indicated objects, and two other unexplained items. But Lycan's point is that we cannot hope to limit the number of features that may become relevant. So he offers instead a general function (he writes it as Greek alpha; I shall use 'D') that takes an expression and computes what the context contributes to its meaning. So if "I" always denotes the speaker, D("I",C) - what D assigns to 'I' in the context C - is the speaker of C. D("tomorrow",C) might yield the day immediately following the uttering in C.
  4. But probably not, since these suggestions are in general too simple. Lycan gives some examples of the complexities we actually find with "I" and "now". One nice example is what you often hear on the phone "I'm not here now. Please leave a message after the beep." My feeling is that we can leave the linguists to get the details of D right.
  5. One moral for general consumption, however, is yet another recognition of the complexities of what people can reasonably intend by talking about 'meaning'. Lycan invokes Kaplan's contrast of the 'character' and 'content' of sentences. If Caesar actually said "Et tu, Brute" as Brutus stabbed him, we know whom the 'tu' referred to, as also the unexpressed reproach. But if we consider the myriad other uses of this sentence we don't usually know who was speaking, or to whom. So in one sense, there is a lot missing from our understanding; but in another, there isn't — once we know the language, we know all we need to know about the meaning of the sentence, even when it is being used simply as an example (and so has no referent for 'tu' and no real speaker). Character, for Kaplan, is the meaning in this broad sense we all have; content is what you get when you actually plug in D and get the actual speaker, hearer, etc. See Perry in H&W 23 for reasons to think we need to make yet more distinctions here.
  6. One topic Lycan does not mention concerns the uses of pronouns as either pointing out individuals (deictics) or referring via anaphora (picking up on an earlier bit of language: 'That woman.... she...'). (Perry mentions the issue in H&W 23, p. 594, but only to leave it aside.) If you want to get a flavour for cutting-edge discussion here, you can see Recanati's 'Deixis and Anaphora' (rtf file).

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