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PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS 243
5. Demonstrative Reference
Going into the rich philosophical analysis of indexicals goes far beyond the boundaries of this
paper. Let us state, however, the things that are necessary for the point I want to make. First
as Braun (2010) explains, indexicals are those linguistic expressions whose reference shifts
from context to context: some examples are ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’,‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘that’.
Famously Kaplan argues that indexicals have two sorts of meaning. Following the classic
terminology, we will distinguish the static linguistic meaning or single character of the
concepts and the varying content which is relative to the contextual factors such as time,
location, and intentions of the speaker. Furthermore, Kaplan (1989) distinguishes between
two different sorts of indexical, pure indexicals and true demonstratives. 14
The demonstratives include words like ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘his’, ‘her’, and ‘that’, while the pure
indexicals include words like ‘I’, ‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘actual’, ‘present’. The difference between
the two types of indexicals is how their references and contents are fixed. The reference and
content of a pure indexical in a context is fixed independently of the speaker intentions.
Vaguely speaking the reference and context of a pure indexical is automatic (see Braun,
2010).
This sort of indexicals is not going to be thematized any further in this paper. We are rather
concerned with demonstratives, where the reference and content is not independent from the
intention or demonstration that accompanies the speaker’s utterance in a certain context. For
example, the reference and content of ‘that’ in a context is partly determined by the pointing
gestures of the speaker or by the speaker’s intention to refer to a particular object(Braun,
2010).
One relevant peculiarity of indexicals is that sentences that contain them are not
disquotational. This is important since that will reaffirm the expected result that Mary could
not entertain sentences with demonstrative PC. To illustrate what it means to say that
demonstratives are non-disquotational consider the following two sentences:
(P)
(P’)
The cat is on the mat.
That is a cat.
Where the difference is that P’ but not P includes a demonstrative. Now assume that we hear
Mary uttering P. In this case we are normally 15 entitled to infer:
(2) Mary beliefs ’the cat is on the mat’.
However, if Mary would utter P’, we would not be entitled to infer:
(3) Mary beliefs ‘that is a cat’.
The validity of the inference from Mary says that ’P’ to (2) is a valid inference because the
content of the terms are independent from any demonstration and we assumed Mary is not
trying to fool us when she utters a proposition. However, this is not the case of (3), because as
we explained the content of ’that’ varies depending on the context and the speakers intention.
The converse is also the case, given that Mary is in the right epistemic relation, we can deduce
P from (2). However it would be wrong to infer P’ from (3). This actually holds for any
sentence, if the sentence includes demonstratives reference, disquotation is not always
allowed.
To offer a more formalized version of the invalidity of disquotation involving demonstrative,
lets us quickly go over a possible formal analyses. 16 Let φ be a proposition where no indexicals
14
In this paper referred to as demonstratives
15
Granted that her utterances reflect what she holds to be the case.