Intention, Demonstration, and Reference

I. While the precise role of intentions in theories of meaning and reference has long been controversial, the link between intention and demonstration has generally gone unquestioned. And this for understandable reasons. It is arguable that in most of our utterances the words we use, with their lexical meanings, impose constraints on what those utterances can mean (and perhaps even on what we can mean by them). It may even be urged that with referring expressions, such as definite descriptions and even names, similar, if perhaps somewhat weaker, constraints are provided by the history of the development of the expression's referring function. But at least with simple cases involving demonstration, it does seem that what we demonstrate really is up to us: it is whatever we intend to demonstrate. If this is so, then it seems that there are also some cases of reference which are wholly under our control, for the only plausible referent for a demonstrative in an utterance in which no other referring expression occurs is, surely, the thing demostrated. Yet this orthodoxy may be challenged no less than that surrounding more general intentionalist accounts of language.' I wish to do so in this paper by showing that what is demonstrated in an act of demonstration is logically independent of what the speaker intends to demonstrate. This can be shown by noting that there are cases where the demonstrandum and the demonstratum diverge, even if such cases are rare. Some interesting examples of David Kaplan's provide the clue, though he treats them only in passing and draws only tentative conclusions from them.' I want to look more closely at the kind of example

Computer Science · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology

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