Volume 14 (2022): Edition 66 (December 2022)
Special Edition: Varieties of Context-Sensitivity in a Pluri-Propositionalist Reflexive Semantic Framework

This brief introduction to a special issue of Disputatio succinctly summarizes John Perry’s pluri-propositionalist reflexive framework and notes some potential applications to varieties of context-sensitivity.

The paper shows that contextuals, words such as those discussed by Richard Vallée in his paper, “On local bars and imported beer”, include not only adjectives and nouns but also verbs, prepositions and adverbs. It shows, moreover, contextuals form just one subclass of words whose complements are optional, that is, words analogous to polyadic predicates of predicate logic. Just as different words, when their complements are omitted, give rise to reflexive (to wash), reciprocal (to meet) and indefinite (to eat) construals, so contextuals give rise to an indexical construal. The paper sets out how such optional complements, or polyadic predicates, as it were, can be handled completely with the syntax and semantics of English, without recourse to special pragmatic principles, lexical ambiguity or phonetically null elements. Though not discussed here, the approach nonetheless applies, it seems, to other languages, such as Chinese.

In “Unarticulated Comparison Classes” 2018 [2009], Richard Vallée adopts John Perry’s (2012 [2001]) reflexive-referential theory of meaning and content as well as his concept of unarticulated constituents (Perry 1986) to deal with certain context-sensitive elements of the truth-conditions of statements containing relative gradable predicates. I am sympathetic both with the general framework and with the assumption that unarticulated constituents are involved in the truth-conditions of bare positives such as “Monica is tall.” I do not share, however, Vallée’s main conclusions on the examples he provides as pre-theoretical evidence. This leads me to disagree with some details of his proposal for the semantics and pragmatics of relative gradable adjectives.

A frequent criticism of Richard Vallee’s “pluri-propositionalism” is that it multiplies propositions beyond necessity. I argue that this criticism, recently voiced by Robert Stanton and Arthur Sullivan, is based in misconceptions about propositions are and how they help us classify utterances and the mental states and events that lead to them, relying for the most part on extended discussions of examples.

This is a study of an under-developed topic in philosophy of language, namely first-person plural pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’, etc.) Richard Vallée has made very important progress by identifying crucial desiderata and putting forward an ingenious proposal about ‘we’ which addresses them. We contend that, despite this impressive progress, he makes some missteps, both omissions and errors; furthermore, his proposal appears implausible as a personal-level psychological story. We thus sketch an alternative approach to the semantics of the first-person plural indexical which, though it builds on Vallée’s important work, departs substantially from it.

Both the semantics of fictional discourse and the semantics of indexicality are canonical topics in the philosophy of language, on which there exists well-known significant literature. However, the same cannot be said for the terrain where they overlap. That is, the distinctive issues raised by fictive uses of indexicals and demonstratives have not been extensively studied per se. The aim of the present essay is to shed some light on this terrain, and to advance our understanding of some of these issues. As it happens, accounting for indexicals in fiction requires the use of innovative new tools. In particular, the standard, familiar taxonomy of types / tokens / utterances is not sufficient to account for the complex cognitive significance and truth-conditions, unique to these kinds of case. For instance: it is widely recognized that, with indexicals generally, semantic properties attach to utterances, not to types or to tokens. But in fiction there are no utterances (in the relevant sense). An innovative notion is required, which I call an “indexed token”. This account of indexicals in fiction, based on the notion of an indexed token, is developed within a Perry (2012)-inspired pluri-propositionalist framework. As such, the present essay constitutes an original application of that framework, extending its already impressive reach.