LINGUIST List 13.628

Thu Mar 7 2002

Review: Philosophy of Lang: King (2001)

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  • Edward Garrett, review of Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account

    Message 1: review of Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account

     Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 12:56:05 -0500
    From: Edward Garrett <eg3pvirginia.edu>
    Subject: review of Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account


    King, Jeffrey C. (2001) Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account. MIT Press, xiii+207pp, paperback ISBN 0-262-61169-4, $18.00, Contemporary Philosophical Monographs 2, A Bradford book. Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-1125.html Previous review at http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2794.html

    Edward J. Garrett, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

    Ever since the ground-breaking work of David Kaplan, the standard view of demonstratives in philosophy of language has been that they are devices of direct reference. A demonstrative such as 'that' directly grasps an object and places it into a proposition, without any mediating sense. Like a name, and unlike a definite description, it is thought to go straight to the object itself.

    This orthodoxy is challenged in Jeffrey C. King's interesting new monograph, Complex Demonstratives. King claims that complex demonstratives, i.e. phrases of the form 'that N', are in fact context-sensitive quantifiers rather than referential expressions.

    In Chapter 1, King presents a range of empirical data from English which is difficult or impossible for direct reference theorists to account for. In some cases, demonstratives seem to be used when the speaker does not have a particular referent in mind. In other cases, demonstratives behave like quantifiers, taking non-rigid and narrow scope readings.

    King starts with so-called 'no demonstration no speaker reference' (NDNS) uses:

    (1) That student who scored one hundred on the exam is a genius. (p. 3) (2) That hominid who discovered how to start fires was a genius. (p. 9)

    These are NDNS uses because the speaker has no individual in mind when she says them, nor is she talking about anyone in the physical utterance context. Rather, says King, such statements reflect the speaker's 'completely general' belief that exactly one person satisfies the conditions imposed by the noun phrase.

    King's claims about NDNS are slippery. The examples he discusses are all stilted. They sound better with 'whoever' or 'the N' in subject position. Furthermore, the purported generality of belief does not hit home: for a truly general belief, we expect to hear 'whoever'. Here as elsewhere, the monograph would benefit from a discussion of 'real' data, such as extracts from actual conversations, corpuses, and situated language use.

    Other uses show 'that' as more of a quantifier, taking narrow scope under another quantifier (3), or participating in a Bach-Peters dependency with another demonstrative in the same clause, as in (4):

    (3) Every father dreads that moment when his oldest child leaves home. (p. 10) (4) That friend of yours who studied for it passed that math exam she was dreading. (p. 13)

    These are intriguing data, which admittedly challenge the view under which demonstratives are necessarily rigid. However, I would like to see the direct reference theorists respond. Certain features of the examples should give us reason to pause and reflect - for example the genericity in (3).

    In Chapter 2, which constitutes the bulk of the book, King develops various competing quantificational accounts of complex demonstratives. All these accounts share certain features in common. First, they see 'that' as a multi-place predicate heavily dependent on context. Specifically, they take 'that' to be a predicate all but two of whose arguments are saturated by the context of use. The contextual arguments have to do with the speaker's intentions, and what's left after these arguments are saturated is an ordinary (two-place) determiner.

    Second, the quantificational accounts agree that there are two kinds of intentions speakers can have in using 'that'. In having a perceptual intention, the speaker intends to speak about a particular object which she presently perceives or once perceived. Perceptual intentional uses of demonstratives are the fully rigid uses of demonstratives that we are all familiar with. In having a descriptive intention, on the other hand, the speaker does not intend to talk about a particular specific object, but rather, she intends to talk about the unique object that satisfies the relevant descriptive property. For example, consider:

    (5) That person swimming across Lake Tahoe must now be cold. (p. 34)

    uttered where the speaker believes on general grounds that there is a unique person swimming across Lake Tahoe at the present moment.

    In a descriptive intentional use of 'that', the speaker's descriptive intentions are usually redundant with the overt condition found within the complex demonstrative itself (i.e. the N, e.g. 'person swimming across Lake Tahoe'), although this is apparently not necessary.

    I find the perceptual-descriptive distinction to be illuminating, but I wish aspects of it had been further explored. An understandable but regrettable omission is King's silence on past perceptual uses of 'that'. A more glaring omission is the absence of any discussion of discourse factors which might affect the descriptive intentional use. It seems to me, for example, that the speaker of (5) is not merely intending to talk about the person uniquely satisfying the condition of 'swimming across Lake Tahoe'. In addition, (5) seems to invoke 'that person of whom we spoke'; in other words, the demonstrative is being used anaphorically to pick out someone already mentioned in prior discourse. Sentences such as these may belong to the category of demonstratives qua anaphors rather than demonstratives qua demonstratives.

    In Chapter 3, King goes out on a limb and argues that 'that' is so much like other quantifiers that it can scopally interact with modals, negation and propositional attitudes. Going very much against the ideas of direct reference theory, he argues that demonstratives may take narrow scope in relation to these operators.

    Here I believe King is just wrong about the facts. Consider, for example, his cases of complex demonstratives taking scope under negation:

    (6) At any rate, that supermodel who told Alan he is handsome isn't in there. (p. 96) (7) That diamond isn't real. (p. 107)

    We sense that (6) is true even if no supermodel told Alan that he was handsome. Since the existence of the supermodel is not presupposed, argues King, 'that supermodel ...' must scope under negation.

    In fact, King's observation about (6) has nothing to do with the demonstrative. The same effect can be reproduced for any rigid nominal:

    (8) At any rate, God/his guardian angel/Tom [an imaginary friend]/Shrek [that monster] isn't in there.

    Are we to conclude from this that names, too, are quantifiers?

    Similarly, the fact that (7) seems true even if 'the diamond' is not a diamond is unrelated to the presence of negation. Consider the following non-negative variation on (7):

    (8) That diamond is a fake diamond.

    Since the same intuitions hold here, King is forced to either abandon his claim or to assert that 'fake diamond' is also grammatically (and not just conceptually) negative.

    In my opinion, Chapter 3 suffers from King's silence on discourse anaphoric approaches to demonstratives. This is somewhat surprising, given the important role played by discourse semantics in influential theories of definite determiners. For example, the notion of discourse 'familiarity' plays a crucial role in both Heim's file change semantics and Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory.

    Chapters 4 and 5 conclude by taking up assorted loose ends, including interesting differences between 'that' and 'the' (pp. 133-34), and the question of whether or not King's treatment should be extended to 'that' occurring on its own without a restricting noun. He does not decide matters one way or the other, but it looks quite likely that his account could be extended with similar success to simple demonstratives. Finally, he concludes the monograph with an appendix on his formal semantic apparatus.

    Overall, King's monograph is an interesting contribution to philosophy of language, whose key points are sure to be debated whenever the semantics of demonstratives is raised.

    At the same time, King's monograph suffers from various inadequacies which are likely to limit its usefulness to a broader audience. First off, in an area of philosophy ripe for naturalization, the text has little empirical bite. Many examples are awkward, and the only demonstrative to be discussed is 'that'. There is absolutely no mention of 'this', even though we know that 'that' has a contrastive role, and that its semantics cannot be disentangled from the semantics of 'this'.

    Similarly, since all the data in the monograph is from English, we find no discussion of the rich linguistic work, especially typological work, done on demonstratives in the world's languages. There was a day when such omissions were forgivable in linguistics, and no doubt they are still forgivable in philosophy, but as linguists we know that this day must end.

    In conclusion, although I enjoyed King's book, I still eagerly await the final naturalizing blow, the text on demonstratives in which philosophy and linguistics coalesce into one, the text which makes it impossible for the two disciplines to go on ignoring each other.

    ABOUT THE REVIEWER I am especially interested in topics at the intersection of philosophy, semantics, and pragmatics, and have done extensive field work on Tibetan. I recently received my doctorate from UCLA.