Discourse and method

Linguistics and Philosophy https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-019-09266-7 Discourse and method Ethan Nowak1 · Eliot Michaelson2 © The Author(s) 2019 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. Keywords Reference · Metasemantics · Demonstratives · Pronouns 1 Introduction 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. 1 Nathaniel Hansen reports the intuition: ‘What the **** is a V-notch couloir?’ We are confident that the arguments we offer here are consistent with this response. By way of information, a couloir is a steep and narrow channel on the side of a mountain, typically filled with ice and snow. The V-notch is a couloir on the North Palisade in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California that looks like the letter ‘v’. This work is entirely collaborative and names are listed in reverse alphabetical order. B Eliot Michaelson Ethan Nowak 1 Department of Philosophy, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK 2 Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK 123 E. Nowak, E. Michaelson Linguists and philosophers generally agree that the two utterances should be associated with different truth conditions, which result from differences in the extra-linguistic contexts in which the two utterances take place. Some think that the speaker’s gesture determines which object the demonstrative picks out. Some think her referential intentions are what does this work. Some approaches weigh these two things against one another, and others invoke further considerations still. In the Golden Age of philosophical work on demonstratives, debates between theorists advocating one or another of these positions were treated as semantic debates.2 It was generally assumed that an adequate compositional semantic theory would take a demonstrative sentence and a context and return a determinate truth condition. More recently, philosophers have been attracted to analyses on which, semantically speaking, demonstratives are represented simply as variables. On this way of thinking, the classic disputes turn out to be disputes about which principles should be used to link contexts to particular variable assignments.3 Stojnić et al. (2013, 2017) have recently attracted significant attention by rejecting the framework of the classic debates entirely. According to what they call the ‘prominence/coherence’ theory of demonstratives, the question of which feature of a context fixes the referent of a demonstrative is fundamentally confused. On their view, the context-independent linguistic meaning of ‘that’ fixes its reference without any contribution from speaker intentions, demonstrations, or other features of the speech situation in which the expression is used. Our primary aim here is to show that Stojnić et al.’s striking claim can be sustained only in the thinnest technical sense. We will argue that instead of eliminating appeals to extra-linguistic context, the prominence/coherence theory simply 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. Properly understood, Stojnić et al.’s proposal raises exactly the same issues—and is susceptible to exactly the same sorts of challenges—as every other extant theory of demonstratives of which we are aware. Having established this negative thesis, we turn our attention to a discussion of its significance. We structure that discussion around two connected questions. First, why might one be tempted to offer a picture along the lines of Stojnić et al.’s? And second, if we are right that the authors fail to deliver the theoretical goods promised, might there be some other way of obtaining them? To preview: we suspect that Stojnić et al. are eager to avoid invoking the extra-linguistic context because they worry that fractious debates about which variable assignment should count as ‘the one true assignment’ in a context lead nowhere.4 We share this concern; what once appeared to be a healthy ecosystem of competing views has, in certain regards, begun to look like a degenerative 2 Artifacts from this Golden Age include Kaplan (1977, 1978, 1989), Bertolet (1980), McGinn (1981), Schiffer (1981), Wettstein (1984), Reimer (1991, 1992), and Bach (1992). 3 For discussion, compare Rabern (2012a, b), Yalcin (2014), and Nowak (2016, forthcoming). 4 For a representative sample, see Neale (2004), Gauker (2008), Mount (2008), King (2013, 2014a, b), and Speaks (2016, 2017). 123 Discourse and method research program.5 To really move away from the old picture, however, we suspect that something more radical than Stojnić et al.’s suggestions might be required. One response, which we take to have at least some appeal, would be to give up the idea that demonstrative sentences in a context really have canonical truth conditions in the first place. 2 The prominence/coherence theory Here is the thesis that we want to dispute: The semantic value of a pronoun is never determined, even partly, by extralinguistic cues; it is fixed, invariably and unambiguously, by features of its context of use governed entirely by linguistic rules. (Stojnić et al. 2017, p. 519) Except for the part about extra-linguistic cues, this thesis sounds perfectly consonant with longstanding philosophical tradition. Most theorists endorse one or another variation on the following template, according to which the semantic value of a demonstrative is fixed invariably and unambiguously by some specific feature (or specific combination of features) of its context of use:6 (2) thatc,w = the object ostended/intended/etc. by the speaker of c For their part, Stojnić et al. claim that the semantic value of a demonstrative in a context is the object that is at the center of attention in the context. They do not think their positive proposal amounts to just another way of filling out th (...truncated)