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Notes
Kaplan’s intensions are officially functions from time-world pairs to semantic values, see Kaplan (1977 sections VI and XVIII).
For instance, Vision criticizes Kaplan for assuming that ‘the time of a statement must be its time of utterance’ (Vision 1985, p. 199), and Sidelle insist that ‘when one records an answering machine message … one is not, at that time, (typically) making an utterance, or at least making an assertion’ (Sidelle 1991, p. 535). Sidelle develops this point in terms of a theory of ‘deferred utterances’; for criticisms see Romdenh-Romluc (2008).
According to Vision, the time of assertion is the intended time of reception (Vision 1985, p. 199), and for Sidelle ‘the referents of “here” and “now” are given by the intended, or maybe expected, location and time of the utterance’ (Sidelle 1991, p. 537). For a criticism of intentionalism, see Corazza et al. (2002), Gorvett (2005), and Voltolini (2006).
A further position which for reasons of space I do not discuss in the main text appeals to the idea of pretence, and to the related notion of the ‘pretended’ setting of utterance (see Recanati 2007; Voltolini 2006; Mount 2008; for criticisms, see Krasner 2006). My arguments may however straightforwardly applied to this proposal: ‘pretended contexts’ provide a solution to the semantic problems raised by ‘I am not here now’ only as long as they are improper.
For a precursor of the ambiguity thesis, see the summary of Donnellan’s view in Kaplan (1977, p. 491), footnote 12. Smith (1989) is the most explicit and radical commitment to the ambiguity thesis: ‘the character/role/meaning of an indexical changes from use to (relevantly different) use’ (Smith 1989, p. 167). For further criticisms of the ambiguity thesis, and in particular of Smith’s appeal to ‘metacharacters’, see Corazza (2006), Corazza et al. (2002), and Krasner (2006).
The distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives originates in Kaplan (1977). On the automatic/non-automatic divide, see also Recanati (2002), Perry (2003), and Corazza (2006). A precursor of the idea that at least ‘here’ occasionally functions demonstratively can be found in Kaplan (1977) and Colterjohn and MacIntosh (1987).
For a defence of the bare-bones theory, see Caplan (2003). My discussion of the alternatives to the bare-bones theory focuses on a simplified version (ignoring the possibility of multiple occurrences of demonstratives) of the view in Salmon (2002). My discussion of the conjunction of non-automaticity and Salmon’s view is also applicable, with opportune modifications, to the otherwise importantly different account put forth in Braun (1996).
This may be as good a place as any to mention a tangential, but independently interesting issue, noted in Smith (1989) and more recently in Atkin (2006), having to do with the alleged possibility that ‘now’ and ‘here’ refer respectively to non-temporal and non-spatial items (as in ‘here the proof becomes difficult’). I am unsure the evidence at hand is conclusive (we do also say, after all, ‘in this place the proof becomes difficult’, thereby signalling a tendency to conceive spatially of non-spatial items). More importantly, even disregarding this point, it remains utterly obscure why Atkin insists that no satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon would be consistent with intentionalist views such as the one I defended in Predelli (1996) and (2002) (his mention of a ‘demonstrative account’ seems to stem from the confusion between the representational hypotheses discussed in section two, and the semantic issues under discussion in this section).
Strictly speaking, Corazza’s view deals only with ‘here’ and ‘now’, and argues that these expressions are ambiguous between a Kaplanesque reading and an anaphoric reading—I ignore these details as irrelevant for my purpose here.
Note that this multiplicity cannot be dismissed as semantically irrelevant: if ‘now’ where anaphoric on a tacit syntactic item, a sentence of the form ‘now P’ would have different truth-conditions if interpreted with respect to an antecedent a1 than if interpreted with respect to a2, even in cases in which a1 and a2 actually identify the same individual.
For reasons of space I do not discuss the (in principle available but to my knowledge never explicitly defended) option that the case of ‘I am not here now’ is to be explained in terms of Gricean implicatures. For convincing arguments against approaches in this vein, see Krasner (2006) and Mount (2008).
The research leading to these results was supported by MICINN, Spanish Government, I+D+i programme, grant FFI2009-13436 and also CONSOLIDER INGENIO Programme, grant CSD2009-0056, as well as the European FP7 programme, grant no.238128.
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Predelli, S. I Am Still Not Here Now. Erkenn 74, 289–303 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9224-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-010-9224-4