Abstract
In this paper I sketch an alternative to Stalnaker’s view of referential uses of descriptions. Stalnaker has long promoted a pragmatic account of assertions, presuppositions, and informativeness. He is also a fervent advocate of propositionalism, the doctrine that the contents of assertions, presuppositions, and attitudes, (are or) determine sets of possible worlds. I argue that the combination of a pragmatic account and propositionalism creates several problems. (i) It does not predict the right truth-conditions for some assertions. (ii) It cannot duly separate facts of reference from presuppositions about facts of reference. (iii) It reproduces, at the level of what is presupposed, the cognitive significance problems that pragmatic presuppositions were meant to solve at the level of what is asserted. I argue that the solution to these problems involves giving up propositionalism. While Stalnaker analyses assertions and presuppositions in terms of singular propositions and possible worlds, I propose to analyse them in terms of properties and centred worlds. But unlike other centred world accounts inspired by Lewis, the view I advertise is not egocentric: the circumstance of evaluation of an assertion need not be centred on the subject, it can be centred on an object. When the assertion involves a referential use of a description, the object at the centre is the one that the speaker “has in mind.” Unlike its egocentric counterparts, this view can maintain that referential communication is direct: speakers and hearers can grasp the same truth-conditions.
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Notes
- 1.
See [1, pp. 40–41]. I am adding world and time coordinates w 1 and t 1 in the context of utterance.
- 2.
The characterisation is neutral in that it does not settle whether it is the designator or its use that is rigid; it is silent about possibilities at which the corresponding statement would be neither true nor false; and it does not say whether the domain of possibilities at which this dated statement is either true or false is contextually restricted or not.
- 3.
This centred world view of asserted content is not entirely new. It is suggested by Recanati [6, 7] when he deals with examples like ‘Very handsome!’ (said concerning someone’s appearance) or ‘The carburettor is in good condition but there is a problem with the front wheels’ (said concerning a certain car), in which no word stands for the relevant referent. Stojanovic [8] argues that, even when there is a word standing for the referent in the corresponding sentence, the referent may be part of the circumstance of evaluation rather than part of the content. She defends a similar account of assertions involving referential uses of descriptions [8, Chapter 3]. However, neither Recanati nor Stojanovic uses this centred world account to deal with Frege’s puzzle and cognitive significance phenomena.
- 4.
One might want to argue that the three are only suitable counterparts of one another. But this is not what Stalnaker would want to say, given his own metaphysical preference for haecceitism over counterpart theories.
- 5.
Note that Stalnaker’s [2, 9] pragmatic version of the two-dimensionalist strategy to explain the informativeness of identity statements involving proper names and indexicals cannot be invoked here. First, it applies only to identity assertions, and we have only (negative) identity presuppositions here. Second, on that account, the diagonal proposition cannot become the proposition asserted unless there is a manifestly intentional violation of some Gricean maxim or conversational principle. But there is no such violation here.
- 6.
- 7.
For a recent overview of this “communication problem” for Lewis, see [11] and references therein.
References
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Acknowledgments
I am currently Chargé de Recherches by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique, Communauté française de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS), at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in the Centre of Research in Linguistics LaDisco. I am grateful to the F.R.S.-FNRS for its support. I thank my colleagues from ULB and from the Université de Liège, Philippe De Brabanter, Mikhail Kissine, Philippe Kreutz, Bruno Leclercq, Sébastien Richard, and Antonin Thuns, for helpful discussions on the ideas of this paper in a joint seminar in September 2016.
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Bochner, G. (2017). Assertion De Re . In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_1
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