Why do we need indexicals? Keeping apart linguistic indexicals and indexical thoughts (if there are such beasts)

Ernesto Perini-Santos (Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

Tues 17 Jun, 5.00pm
Room 243, second floor, Senate House, WC1

Ernesto Perini-Santos (Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

Why do we need indexicals? Keeping apart linguistic indexicals and indexical thoughts (if there are such beasts)

Abstract: Kaplan has two sorts of arguments for the need of a special semantics for indexicals: one concerning the truth-conditions of sentences with indexicals and another one deriving from Perry.  According to Perry, “we use sentences with indexicals or relativized propositions to individuate belief states, for the purposes of classifying believers in ways useful for explanation and prediction.” [Perry 2000: 39]  Even if we grant this point, we can still ask why we need ‘I’.  It is not clear that the first person has any use for the agent to explain and predict her own actions.  It seems more natural to read Perry’s quote as concerning the third person point of view. But, in this case, we have no use for the first person pronoun. A solution to this problem has been suggested by Corazza, using Castaneda’s quasi-indicators. Quasi-indicators are linguistic devices that indicate, from the third person point of view, the perspective an agent has on a situation. In Corazza’s reading, they are logophoric pronouns whose antecedent are first person pronouns, in the discourse or in the thought of the attributee. There are however two correlated reasons to refuse this solution. On the one hand, when we try to capture the perspective someone else has on situation, we are not tracking her reflective thoughts. The sense of agency - what is presumably aimed at in Perry’s sugar trail case - is not characterized by a reflective stance a subject has on herself as she acts, and therefore does not seem to be correctly characterized by a mental tokening of a sentence with the first person pronoun. On the other hand, patterns in the person marking system, as they appear in Cysouw 2009, are explained by their role in communication. In many languages, there is no distinct first person pronoun, and that does not mean that their speakers lack the sense of agency. Speakers need linguistic tools to disambiguate sentences, but that does not require a first person pronoun - nor, indeed, any personal pronoun. Cysouw treats “independent pronouns and inflectional person marking as two different, though a priori equivalent, ways of person marking.” [Cysouw 2003: 15] A similar argument can be extended to demonstratives: against the idea that demonstrative thoughts are explained by the mental tokening of a demonstrative sentence, as suggested, e.g., by Levine 2010, I will propose that tracking objects on a scene does not require having a ‘that’-sentence on mind, and demonstratives across languages are patterned after their role in the coordination of attention with others. Personal pronouns are not devices for self-thoughts, any more than demonstratives in language correspond to demonstrative thoughts. Thoughts about oneself and about the perceptual environment do not always require language, and the meaning of personal pronouns and of demonstratives is explained by their role in communication.
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Summer 2014 Series: http://philosophy.sas.ac.uk/LEMSummer2014

Convenor: Dr Corine Besson (Sussex)