Back through the Looking Glass: On the Relationship between Intentions and Indexicals

Back through the Looking Glass: On the Relationship between Intentions and IndexicalsAuthor(s): Jonathan GorvettSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 124, No. 3 (Jun., 2005), pp. 295-312Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321611 .

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Philosophical Studies (2005) 124: 295-312 C Springer 2005

JONATHAN GORVETT

BACK THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTENTIONS AND INDEXICALS

ABSTRACT. Donnellan and Predelli have both responded to accusations that in virtue of involving intentions in their accounts of reference they are committed to 'Humpty Dumpty' theories of reference. I examine their responses and argue that they do not succeed in escaping this accusation. Corazza et al. (2002) propose an alternative to Predelli's account involving linguistic conventions instead of intentions. I argue that Predelli's responses to Corazza et al. are unsatisfactory and that the intentional theorist is obliged either to accept the Humpty Dumpty conclusion or to adopt the conventional picture, thus relegating intentions to a less significant role in their reference theory.

1. INTRODUCTION

Stefano Predelli (1998, 1998a) has proposed a theory of indexicality that makes significant appeals to speaker intentions. Corazza et al. (2002) have objected that this position commits Predelli to a 'Humpty Dumpty' theory of reference. This objection is analogous to that made by MacKay (1968) in response to Donnellan's (1966) account of the role played by intentions in the reference of definite descriptions. Donnellan (1968) and Predelli (2002) have both responded directly to these objections. I argue that their responses do not do the work expected of them. I highlight some problems with Donnellan's response that point the way towards analogous problems for Predelli. Corazza et al. propose an alternative account for indexicals, in response to Predelli, that accords primacy to linguistic conventions, rather than to speaker intentions. I argue that the intentional theorist is forced either to accept the Humpty Dumpty conclusion or to adopt the conventional theory to account for the problem cases. Predelli's objections to Corazza et al.'s conventional theory are shown to fail to shore up the intentional position. This results in rejecting the tenet that speaker intentions play a significant role in determining the reference of indexicals.



296 JONATHAN GORVETT

2. THE CONVENTIONAL AND INTENTIONAL PICTURES

The basic motivation behind Corazza et al.'s conventional picture of indexicals is the requirement to deal with non-standard uses of indexical terms. One such example of a non-standard use is that of a post-it note pinned by workers on a colleague's door that reads

(1) I am not here today.'

These examples pose a problem for Kaplan's traditional account of indexicals. This theory identifies the referent of a use of "I" in every context with the producer of the token.2 As such, Kaplan's picture is unable to account for the fact that "I" in (1) seems to refer to the occupant of the office, not the writers of the note. The problem is identified as lying in how one goes about identifying the agent of the context. In the basic structure of Kaplan's account it is the agent of the context that is always the referent. The agent is one of the logical parameters provided by the context in order to evaluate the function that represents the character of the indexical. Kaplan always identifies the agent as being the producer of the token. This strategy fails in examples like (1). Two alternatives have been proposed. Predelli (1998, 1998a) argues that in order to account for examples like (1), we need to introduce the producer's intentions. The thought is that the producer's intentions determine who fills the role of agent in the context. In most standard uses of "I", this will be the producer herself, as predicted by Kaplan's strategy. However, it enables us to account for examples like (1) where Kaplan fails to explain how the referent of "I" and the producer appear to come apart.

The intentional strategy encounters significant problems that we shall look at in the next section. In contrast, Corazza et al. propose a conventional picture that also deals with both the standard and non-standard examples. Instead of introducing the intentions of the producer, they propose that we look to the social conventions of language use to determine the agent of the context. These social conventions will obviously account for the standard uses of indexicals in the normal way - the convention governing standard uses of indexicals is that which gives Kaplan's original proposal an intuitive appeal. In most cases, the agent is identical with the producer. Kaplan's proposal captures and formalizes this convention. With the non-standard uses of indexicals, the convention in



ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INTENTIONS AND INDEXICALS 297

question depends on the context. In the case of examples like (1), the conventions that have developed surrounding the uses of post-it notes determine, roughly, that the agent of such a context will be the occupant of the office on whose door the note is posted.3

3. THE HUMPTY DUMPTY PROBLEM

Corazza et al.'s main criticism of Predelli's intentional picture is that it leads to the unacceptable consequence of a Humpty Dumpty position. This accusation comes by analogy from the following statement of Humpty Dumpty's that MacKay (1968) argues implies a theory of meaning:

When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more, nor less. (Dodgson, C.L., 1936, p. 213)

MacKay argues that such a theory of meaning, that one can mean just what one chooses, is mirrored in reference theory when one introduces intentions: a speaker's uses of referring expressions must refer to just what she chooses. Corazza et al. argue that this is the position that Predelli is committed to. While it may seem compelling to say that intentions are what enable one to refer to another location with an utterance of "here" in a sentence like

(2) I will be here next week

whilst poring over an atlas, it seems less acceptable to say that one could use "here" to refer to Sydney in a situation like an utterance of

(3) I was on holiday here last year

made whilst standing at a bus stop in Luton whilst looking at a large puddle. The point made by both MacKay and Corazza et al. is that the intentionalist owes some account of how intentions might enable the first situation to occur, as surely it does, but not allow us the second. Without such an account the intentionalist is committed to unpleasant and ludicrous conclusions about what one can and cannot refer to. There would appear to be nothing to prevent one from using an utterance of "I" to refer to one's uncle, boss or the Pope, if it is one's intentions that determine the agent of the context.




4. THE INTENTIONALIST REPLY

MacKay's presentation of the Humpty Dumpty objection is directed at Donnellan's account of definite descriptions. However, the debate is largely couched in terms of singular terms in general. As such, the arguments they use are applicable to the discussion here of indexicals. I examine Donnellan's response here as it enables us to understand Predelli's response to the same objection as posed by Corazza et al. Donnellan's argument in response to this criticism concerns the very nature of intention. The Humpty Dumpty objection presupposes, according to Donnellan, that the scope of intentions is limitless.

MacKay finds nothing odd about the possibility that a person should simply intend to refer to a book by the words "the rock". What goes wrong, he seems to think, is that the intention cannot be fulfilled. (Donnellan, 1968, p. 211)

If it were the case that one could intend to do anything whatsoever, then the conclusion that Humpty Dumpty can go around meaning whatsoever he chooses with his words would be problematic, as asserted by the objectors. However, Donnellan argues that this is not the correct analysis of intentions. Just as in the legal world one cannot knowingly intend to do the impossible, murder a corpse, for instance, so Donnellan contends intentions are limited with regard to linguistic usage. The key issue according to Donnellan is that intentions are linked to expectations. What one can intend to do is restricted in some way by what one can legitimately expect to be the outcome. Crucially, however, Donnellan refrains from explaining exactly what constrains what counts as a legitimate expectation although he does emphasise that what counts as a legitimate expectation will vary according to the context. If one's ability to intend to refer is limited in this way then the occasions on which one is able to refer with a singular term will be correspondingly restricted. This seems to count heavily against the conclusion that Donnellan and Predelli are committed to a Humpty Dumpty style theory of reference.4

Donnellan claims that rather than the intention to refer being a simple desire, it is a complex mental state that involves expectations about the audience, and, in the case of the definite description, the content of the description. If we apply this to the case of demon-




stratives and indexicals, we might expect these expectations to be determined in some way by the character of the indexical as well as the audience. For example, with regard to an utterance of "I", one's intentions would be bound up with expectations regarding the fact that the referent of "I" is the producer of the token, for instance. The consequences of this response are thus as follows; contra MacKay and Corazza et al. one cannot simply intend to refer to whatever one chooses. A speaker's referential intentions are restricted by her expectations about the referring act, including her expectations regarding the audience's ability to "get" the reference. This means that the objection that an intentional theory of reference leads inexorably to the absurd conclusion that one can refer to whatever one chooses with any singular term does not have any force.

However, Predelli's response to Corazza et al.'s criticism that he is committed to a Humpty Dumpty picture takes a different tack to Donnellan's. Predelli states that Corazza et al. make two assumptions in their argument:

(i) [O]ne can intend her utterance to be interpreted with respect to contexts containing any agent (time, location ...) whatsoever, and that (ii) if one can so intend then, given my intention-based picture, she can use indexicals to refer to 'pretty much anything'. (Predelli, 2002, p. 314)

While Donnellan denies the first of these premises, it is with the second of these assumptions that Predelli really takes issue. For the sake of argument, he grants his critics the first assumption but then gets to grips with the second one. Where Donnellan's response turns on the thought that to intend to refer one must have the right sort of expectations, Predelli wants to draw a distinction between a term referring to a referent and a term being used to refer. In order to make the distinction between a term referring to a referent on the one hand, and a term being used to refer, on the other, one must have a thorough idea of what it is to use an expression. Predelli is defending a theory that explicitly involves the intentions of the speaker in the referential process. It seems then, in the context of Predelli's discussion, fair to attribute to him the belief that to use a term in a certain way one must have an intention to use a term in that way. However, this is not the issue over which the distinction is drawn. In Predelli's picture, the role of the intention is that it is




used to determine the context with respect to which the indexical should be interpreted. For the purposes of the discussion, Predelli permits, contra Donnellan, that a speaker can intend her use of an indexical to be evaluated with respect to any context whatsoever. The crucial distinction comes in after this point, however. In the kinds of counterintuitive circumstances invoked in objection to his strategy, Predelli claims that while the indexical does refer, it cannot be used to refer - it has no communicative use. So while the indexical can refer in these situations, our speaker does not succeed in communicating. The question is, why not? Well, when the analogous question of what limits our referential intentions was asked of Donnellan, the response was that it was the speaker's expectations that do the restricting. Predelli however does not make any appeal to expectations. For him the difference between a term referring and being able to be used to refer is determined purely by what the audience does and does not grasp in practical terms when attempting communication.

It is important to note that Donnellan and Predelli's conceptions of reference seem to be somewhat different. For Predelli reference is simply a relationship between a word and an object, but one that does not require or entail successful communication. That a word refers to an object does not mean that it can necessarily be used to communicate a thought about that object. Donnellan, however, seems only to be interested in reference as part of a theory of communication. I am firmly on Donnellan's side over this discrepancy as I share his intuition that reference should be more closely tied to communication. A notion of reference that can be divorced from communication is not of interest to Donnellan. In this light, then, we should understand Donnellan's use of "refer" to be equivalent to Predelli's "use to refer" as this seems to be what Donnellan actually means when he talks about reference.

5. BACK THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

I am not convinced that the Humpty Dumpty accusation has been dealt with satisfactorily. I shall briefly discuss Donnellan's response before looking at Predelli's reply to Corazza et al. The discussion of Donnellan provides the background to understand my criticism




of Predelli, which I see as being analogous to the response to Donnellan. Donnellan claims that the objectors fail to appreciate the subtlety of the concept of intention in use. It seems correct to accept this first stage of Donnellan's response. It is reasonable to allow that having an intention to refer should be restricted in some way. Indeed, this seems to be the only way in which the intentional theorist might have any hope of escaping the objection. However, this strategy only shifts the onus of explanation onto the next concept. Instead of focussing on the notion of intention, one now moves to analyse the idea of expectation that Donnellan introduces as the restrictor of intention. We have to see what it is that limits these expectations, such that a speaker cannot expect to refer to a book with "the rock" or to fly when she flaps her arms, an analogy introduced by Donnellan.

If we look quickly at some other concepts of intention in other fields, we might be able to see where the problem has gone for the intentionalist. For instance, consider the legal concept of intention: in British law one cannot knowingly intend to murder a corpse. What restricts this intention? Well, it is a notion of possibility - it is not possible to murder a corpse, therefore one cannot knowingly intend to do it. It is a little subtler than that, however. This seems so far to be a question of logical possibility. It is contained in the concepts of "murder" and "corpse" that the two are incompatible - a murder victim ought to be alive prior to her murder, a corpse is not alive and therefore not a candidate to be the subject of a murder. However, whether or not one can intend to murder a corpse is dependent not on the status of the corpse but of one's own mental state. While one cannot "intend to murder a corpse" de dicto, one can have the de re intention to murder a body that turns out to be dead unbeknownst to the perpetrator. There is an epistemic notion of possibility here. What limits one's intentions is a question not of what is the case but of what one believes to be the case. What about the birdman, flapping his arms? Here Donnellan says that "it does not seem to me that a normal adult in normal circumstances can flap his arms and in doing so really have that intention [of flying]" (ibid., p. 212). Presumably the restricting factor here is that it is not biologically or physically possible for the intention to be satis- fied, so the man cannot have the necessary expectation. Importantly,




however, Donnellan says that a child who has seen birds flying and genuinely might be described as having the intention, "would have expectations not shared with us." Once again, then, the thing that prevents the agent having the intention is some notion of possibility, and again an epistemic notion. Just as the murderer can have the intention to murder a corpse if his beliefs are in the right state (i.e. he does not believe the corpse to be a corpse), so the child can intend to fly, because she does not believe that it is physically impossible. If we look back to the linguistic behaviour examples, it seems that the intentionalist owes us some account of where the restriction of the expectations comes from, now that the focus is shifted from the intention to the expectation.5

Our interest here is in the fact that one is judged to be incapable of knowingly intending the impossible. This mirrors Donnellan and Predelli's strategies. In the case of attempting to murder a corpse whether one can attempt to commit the act of murder is limited by one's mental state- by one's intention. The intention itself is restricted by logical possibility. In the case of reference, one's intention is likewise restricted by a notion of possibility. It is not a notion of logical possibility, however. The counter examples we are seeking to explain have already demonstrated that the conceptual restrictions placed by the intuitive accounts of the meaning of "I", for instance, do not suffice to limit our intentions. None of these, however, seems to be the right sort of possibility to restrict intentions to refer. It is not logically impossible to refer to someone else with "I". It is not against the laws of physics either. We need some further notion of possibility - that of linguistic possibility. The question then arises, however, of from where we get such a notion.

Predelli shares with Donnellan the strategy of relieving the bare intention of the responsibility the MacKay-style criticism places on it. Rather than appealing to the notion of expectation Predelli invokes the distinction between referring and using an expression to refer. Where Donnellan owes us an account of what limits a speaker's referential expectations, Predelli needs to establish what it is that enables a speaker to use an expression to refer. The intention alone, for Predelli, allows the term to refer (obviously I do not accept this, but for the sake of argument will allow him the step), but the speaker needs more in order to use the expression to




communicate. The question arises of exactly what it is that prevents us from communicating on those occasions when communication is unsuccessful.

Predelli's distinction between a term referring and being able to use a term to refer in a context was introduced above. The basis of this distinction is simply the practicalities of communication. Just as one cannot use a spoken word to communicate a referent in a noisy night club, so one is unable to use an indexical to communicate a referent without the right context of evaluation. This turns on what an audience grasps. Where for Donnellan it was the speaker's expectations that determined when one's intentions would be successful and legitimate, for Predelli what a speaker can use an indexical to refer to will be constrained by what the audience grasps. Making this step, however, only passes the buck one step down the line. We are in an analogous situation to that we found ourselves in with Donnellan. With Donnellan we had to ask what constrained the speaker's expectations such that they legitimated some intentions but not others. The question facing Predelli now is that of what it is that determines and restricts what an audience grasps in a situation. This restriction is necessary - if we simply say that the audience always grasps the reference, we end committed to the Humpty Dumpty conclusion that one can use a term to refer to whatever one chooses.

We have had an account of how a speaker's intentions are limited with respect to what she can and cannot intend to refer to from Donnellan, and Predelli has provided an explanation of what limits what a speaker communicates. However, if those limita- tions are themselves limitless we are faced again with the prospect of Humpty Dumpty. Limitless expectations for Donnellan would simply provide us with limitless intentions. With Predelli, an audience unrestricted in what they grasp would similarly lead us back to a scenario in which the speaker's intentions have free reign. The intentional theorists are thus faced with a dilemma. Either they say that the limiting features are themselves unlimited, in which case they must accept the implausibilities of the Humpty Dumpty picture, or they must provide a further account of what constrains these 'limiters'.




Seizing the latter horn appears to be the only coherent option, as we have yet to find an alternative route for escaping Humpty Dumpty. Predelli appeals to what an audience grasps to constrain when a term can be used to refer. Our question now is, then, what constrains what an audience grasps? Here I follow Corazza et al. in countering the intentionalists with an alternative solution. Instead of focussing on intentions, I propose that it is to the social conventions of language that we are forced to turn. We are looking for some account of what it is that restricts an audience from grasping certain non-standard uses of indexicals while allowing them to grasp others. It seems that the most plausible option is to say that it is our linguistic conventions that determine what an audience does and does not grasp. We are looking for a notion of linguistic possibility. To me it seems clear that the laws and conventions of language use provide for such a notion of possibility, just as the laws of physics determine what is possible in that realm. The preferable analogy to that of a man flapping his arms is to the making of a move in chess. It is not logically or physically impossible for me to move a bishop from a white square to a black square, in much the same way as it is neither logically nor physically impossible for me to refer to Napoleon with an utterance of "I". However there is an important sense in which it is impossible to do both of these things. On the chessboard the possibility is determined by the laws of the game. I contend that in the field of reference, it is the laws and conventions of use that determine what is and is not possible. It is this notion of possibility that seems best suited to be that which restricts what one can or cannot intend to do. It is only where there is a convention to refer to an object with a word that one can intend so to do. However, this removes the power of the intention from the picture. If we look again at our first non-standard example, a post-it note written for a colleague reading

(4) I am not here today

we can see how this will work. On Corazza et al.'s original picture, it is said that in order to identify the referent of this use of "I" we look to the relevant convention. Here we see that such a context conven- tionally has the usual occupant of the office as agent. Adapting conventional theory for the Predelli-type theory given above, we get the following process. The writer has the intention to refer to the




normal occupant with his use of "I". However, it is not clear that he is able to use the term to refer in this way. So we look at what the audience grasps. It seems clear that the audience will interpret the note as referring to the time intended by the writer. What is it that ensures that the audience will succeed in that grasping? The conventions surrounding the use of post-it notes on office doors. This picture appears to work, but the question is now what work the intention and expectation are actually doing. In comparison with the original theory from Corazza et al., we appear to have two extra steps that contribute nothing but lead to the same result. It seems that one might as well jettison the intentions and the audience's grasping. This is not to deny that they exist, but it is to say that they play no role in identifying the agent of the context, and as such they have no semantic relevance.6

Predelli (1998a) considers the example of a man leaving a note for his wife that reads "As you can see I am not at home now. Please meet me in six hours in my office" (where "in six hours" is short for "in six hours from now"). The man expects his wife home at 5:00 PM and wants to be met at 1 1:00 PM. When the wife arrives at 5:00 PM "now" refers uncontroversially to 5:00 PM. If she returns at 7:00 pm, Predelli claims that "now" still refers to 5:00 PM, as that is the intended context of interpretation. However, this example is as prone to the criticism I propose as any other. For Predelli the producer could refer to any time whatsoever with "now". However, for this note to succeed, in Predelli's terminology he must be able to use it to refer to 5:00 PM. We must establish what makes this the case. Donnellan would talk about the man's expectations that his wife would interpret his note correctly. Again, the question is in virtue of what the man can have these expectations. For Predelli, the challenge is to explain why the wife grasps the referent. The answer that I propose to both of these questions is that both the man and his wife are mutually aware of the common practice of her returning home every day at 5:00 PM. This is sufficient to constitute a tacit convention between the two of them. It is in virtue of this that the man's use of "now" refers to 5:00 PM, rather than 7:00 PM, and the fact that he intended it to refer to that time is not significant here. Had he intended it to refer to 9:00 PM, it would not have done so - it would still refer to 5:00 PM in virtue of the convention.




The chessboard analogy enables us to see exactly where Predelli's distinction between referring and using a term to refer leads us away from the crucial question about reference. Predelli may be correct (on his understanding of "reference") to say that one can refer to an object with an inappropriate expression but that one cannot use that expression to refer. This seems to me to be invoking the wrong notion of possibility, that of logical or metaphysical possibility, perhaps. It is true in the same sense that I can move my bishop from a black square to a white one, but I cannot use that movement in a game of chess.7 This simply is not a notion of possibility in which we should have any interest. A notion of reference that does not enable one to communicate does not seem to me to be a coherent or useful notion of reference at all. Just as with the legal possibility determined by legal conventions, so the linguistic notion of possibility I propose is a conventional one. In this sense it is comparable with the possibilities of the law court and the chessboard, all being determined by a set of conventions.

6. RESPONSES TO THE CONVENTIONAL THEORY

If the conventional account is to be seen as saving Predelli's intentional picture from Humpty Dumptyism, it must stand up to the criticisms of it that Predelli proposes in his 2002 paper. Predelli offers two specific criticisms of the conventional theory offered by Corazza et al. I do not find either of them to be particularly persuasive. The first is that the conventional theory seems to require that we admit an implausibly large number of conventions to our ontology:

Are we really to believe that there are particular conventions regulating the use of indexicals in postcards, answering machines, recorder messages, written diaries, post-it notes attached to one's office door, day-dreaming, re-enactments, etc.? ... the conventional apparatus supposed to regulate our use of indexicals would have to expand to unlikely proportions (Predelli, 2002, p. 313)

I am happy to bite the bullet in respect to this criticism. I do not share Predelli's intuition that there must be something wrong with a proliferation of conventions. Conventions are established regularly amongst language users, ranging from the 'incorrect'




uses of descriptions or names used descriptively amongst micro- communities of language users ("How's Her Majesty this morning?" used to enquire derogatively after the health of the boss) to those adopted on a more universal front such as those regarding the uses of answering machines. Predelli offers no substantive argument to explain the problem with this account, beyond the suggestion that it seems to be unlikely.

The second objection is, by Predelli's own admission, the more substantive of the two. Predelli argues that even if we accept the proliferation of conventions it is not obvious that the conventional theory offers a coherent alternative theory to his own:

... what conventions allegedly regulate the adhesive notes attached to my office door? I may write 'I am on leave today' to inform prospective visitors that I am away on the day when they read the message, but I may also attach a note saying 'Today the Dean is getting on my nerves' merely to record my annoyance on the day of writing. On the account of Corazza et al. 2002, adhesive notes would then turn out to instantiate an ambiguous practice, regulated by distinct conventions. If that is the case, to which convention did I allegedly appeal when I wrote 'I am on leave today?' Aren't my intentions in writing that message what is determinant in this respect? (Predelli, 2002, p. 314)

While this criticism may seem to have some prima facie validity, on closer analysis it appears that Predelli is begging the question against the conventional theorist. Why is the example he provides considered to be evidence for "an ambiguous practice, regulated by distinct conventions"? I suggest that it is because, according to Predelli's reading of the example, "today" on the first note should be seen as referring to the day of reading while "today" on the second note refers to the day of writing. However, for Predelli this reference determination is taken to be in accordance with the author's intentions. If one does not presuppose Predelli's account of intentional uses of indexicals, however, it is not clear that Predelli's understanding of the two notes is the correct one. I simply disagree with him here. Anyone reading the two notes on the door would interpret them both as saying something about the day on which they read the note; unfortunately the second note would be saying something false, just as, if the writer forgot to remove the first note after his return, it would communicate something false to its readers about that particular day. Admitting that one of the notes in this example says something false does not seem to be a weakness of




the conventional theory by any stretch of the imagination. If you approach this example with no preconceptions about the impor- tance of the speaker's intentions and the proposition intended to be communicated, it is not clear that this example demonstrates that the conventional theory slips up here. The fact that one may have an intention to appeal to a particular convention no more guarantees that you will succeed in exploiting that convention than one's intention to refer to a given object will guarantee that you will succeed in referring to that object. As such I do not think that either of Predelli's criticisms of conventional theories hit their targets successfully.

As a final remark on Predelli's criticisms, it should be made clear that Corazza et al.'s conventional theory that I endorse here does not commit the conventional theorist to the view held by Smith (1989) and Colterjohn and Macintosh (1987) that indexicals are associated with a variety of characters. The conventional theory questions how the contextual parameters that affect the character are determined. For Predelli it is the speaker's intentions that determine the context of interpretation while for Corazza et al.'s it is conventions that play this role. However, there is still only one character for "I", which is, as for Kaplan and Predelli, that "I" refers to the agent of the context (for Predelli the context of interpretation). The dispute is over how the agent is determined. For Kaplan it is determined by identity with the speaker, for Predelli by the intentions of the speaker and for Corazza et al. by the conventions of the setting.

7. CONCLUSIONS

Looking again at Humpty Dumpty, Donnellan says that the only way in which Humpty could have the correct sort of intention is if he had prepared Alice in advance by stating that he would mean "a nice knockdown argument" by "glory". According to Predelli's arguments concerning indexical reference Humpty would succeed in using the term to refer in such a situation as Alice, the audience, would grasp the referent of the term. However, the question I have posed here is to demand an explanation of what it is that makes it the case that the audience grasps the referent. With Humpty, it is the establishment of a new linguistic convention for the micro- community consisting of himself and his audience. This convention




is that 'glory' should be interpreted as meaning 'a nice knockdown argument'. Where Donnellan owes an account of what restricts the speaker's expectations concerning his audience, for Predelli there remains the challenge of explaining why the audience grasps the reference. Corazza et al. have provided such an account in the form of the social conventions of language use. If one accepts this conventional explanation, though, the intention ceases to have any genuine significance. In their presentation, Corazza et al. distinguished two kinds of intentions. It was claimed that a speaker could have an intention to use a certain expression and an intention to refer to a certain object through their use of that expression. However, the intention to refer to a particular object has no part in the communicative process. Under Predelli's understanding of 'reference', the intention to refer plays no part in determining whether or not one is able to use a term to refer. This is still the case if the intentionalist adopts the conventional account of expectation restriction. As what an audience grasps is controlled by the conventions, and it is what the audience grasps that is significant in determining whether or not a term can be used successfully to refer, the intention is, to all intents and purposes, redundant. Predelli may reject this path, but in that case he owes an account of what does this restriction job. The arguments he gives to count against the conventional reply do not seem to fire if one looks at them from outside the framework of the intentional theory. Any attempt to say that what the audience grasps is unrestricted would lead straight back down the road to Humpty Dumpty.8

In conclusion, then, we have seen two more sophisticated versions of the intentional picture that attempt to save the intentional theory of reference. I have demonstrated that these pictures succeed only in shifting the focus of the attack. While this is sufficient to deal with MacKay's original line of objection, it does not satisfactorily solve the problem, as the same criticism arises concerning the freedom or restriction of the expectation for Donnellan and of the limits of what an audience grasps for Predelli. I have offered a solution in the form of the conventional picture. This solution, however, renders the intentional picture impotent, as the intention loses any significance. While this may not be acceptable to the intentionalist, at the very least they owe us an account of what it is that prevents




the same criticism as MacKay brought to bear on the intention being shifted to the next stage down the line.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Stephen Barker, Michael Clark, Bill Fish, Stefano Predelli and Komarine Romdenh-Romluc for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. In particular, I would like to thank Eros Corazza and the anonymous referee for Philo- sophical Studies for their advice and substantial suggestions for improvement to the arguments and structure in this paper. All mistakes are mine. I am grateful for the financial support provided by the AHRB.

NOTES

1 Discussed by Corazza et al. (2002). The locus classicus for the non-standard examples is Sidelle (1991). They are also discussed in Smith (1989) and Nunberg (1993). 2 The producer of the token is taken to be the utterer or writer of "I", depending on whether the word is spoken or written. Kaplan speaks of "the person who utters [the token of "I"]" (Kaplan, 1977, p. 520), but for the sake of clarity with these written examples, I will use "producer" throughout to refer to the person who writes or utters the token in question. 3 One could think that this account will struggle to explain the very first use of a post-it as in (1) to refer to the occupant, as there would not yet be a convention. However, I do not find this objection particularly forceful. When I write a note for my colleague's door, I am merely exploiting the existing convention regarding notes on office doors. The fact that I use "I" to refer to her is irrelevant. There are two conventions in use here. The first, the character of "I", merely looks for the agent of the context. The other convention, that concerning notes on office doors, is that the occupant of the office is the agent for the context of interpretation of notes on doors. I can use "I" to refer to the office occupant in such a note just as she could. The first time somebody used such a note to refer to themselves in this way (and thus created such a convention), they relied on the stretching of the existing convention that written tokens of "I" refer to the contextually salient candidate for being the agent: in this case, fairly obviously, the occupant of the office. 4 In fact, as a result of these musings, Donnellan is not convinced that this label is appropriate. Humpty Dumpty can have had no expectations that Alice would




"construe his words in a novel way". The expectations are thus linked to the audience, in the case of linguistic behaviour. The relevant expectation that a speaker must have is that his audience will "get" the reference, or meaning, in the case of Humpty Dumpty. To this extent, then, your ability to intend to mean something with your use of a term depends upon your expectation that your audience will understand you. Donnellan concludes from this that the Humpty Dumpty case does not actually work. Humpty Dumpty did not mean "a knock-down argument" when he said "glory" as he cannot genuinely have had the intention to mean that. 5 In attempting to clarify when a speaker is entitled to have the intention to refer, the intentional theorist may try to distinguish between a positive and negative assessment of speaker's expectations. The positive assessment would be that a speaker can intend to refer to object 0 with term t iff she has the belief that it is possible (expectation) for her to refer to 0 with t. The negative account would be that a speaker can intend to refer to 0 with t iff she does not believe that it is impossible for her to refer to 0 with t. It seems to me that Donnellan's talk of a speaker "having the right sort of expectations" implies that he would prefer the positive assessment. However, in the final analysis it makes little difference which method the intentional theorist chooses. As we have seen, the positive route requires further explanation of what gives the speaker the expectation. The negative route leads back to Humpty Dumpty, unless an alternative method of limiting the intentions can be found. 6 I am not denying that one needs to have certain intentions in order to refer successfully. One can only use a language if one speaks/writes with the intentions of communicating within that language. This is what distinguishes words and sentences from meaningless strings of noises that sound the same. The thought is that the intentions do not play the role of determining the reference of the terms, as Donnellan and especially Predelli claim they do. The fact is that the conventions appear to do the job on their own, so there is no need to invoke intentions at this level. 7 As Wittgenstein would say, if I were to do so, I would not be playing the same game. 8 It should be noted that the prime focus of Predelli's work in the philosophy of language is unaffected by these criticisms, a point that Predelli makes himself in his 2002 paper. The crux of Predelli's work remains the distinction between contexts. He is able to maintain this distinction notwithstanding these criticisms, but should modify his understanding of the context of interpretation such that it is determined by the conventions, rather than the speaker's intentions.

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Department of Philosophy The University of Nottingham Nottingham NG7 2RD UK



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Back through the Looking Glass: On the Relationship between Intentions and Indexicals