Abstract
This paper is a sympathetic and critical discussion of the views about mental and linguistic content put forward by François Recanati in his book Perspectival Thought (2007a). I begin in the first section by outlining Recanati’s account and his arguments for it. In the second section, I articulate some questions and criticisms: I propose some complementary arguments, attempt to relate Recanati’s notion of a “lekton” to his earlier notion of “what is said”, and put forward some objections against Recanati’s account of epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste.
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- 1.
I am here ignoring tense and also the reading of “French philosopher” on which being French and a philosopher is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a French philosopher (just as being good and being a dancer is not necessary or sufficient for being a good dancer). On this reading, (1) is true concerning the distant past, but not true today (see Belleri and Palmira 2014).
- 2.
I suspect that Kaplan pursued this approach in large part because Prior’s pioneering work in tense logic was the standard approach at the time Kaplan was writing (Kaplan 1977/89). However, recently some philosophers have read into Kaplan (1977/1989, p. 502–3), an argument (the “operator argument”) which argues from the premiss that there are intensional temporal operators to the conclusion that there must also be time-unspecific intensions or tensed propositions. I suspect that Kaplan was not envisaging having to defend the premiss of this argument. See Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009, Weber 2012 and Zeman 2013.
- 3.
To be sure, Recanati recognises that it would be “perfectly coherent” (Recanati 2007: 217) to say that the swimmer is not herself included in the content of the perception or memory. In that case, we would have to say that when evaluating the perception, the content has to be evaluated with respect to the actual object of perception. And similarly for the memory. Again, the mode of the cognitive state determines the situation of evaluation.
- 4.
There are those who argue against Kaplan that there are “monsters”, i.e. expressions that shift indexicals. For example Schlenker 2003.
- 5.
For example in Recanati 2001, he argues that while one could define what is said in a minimal sense “as what is said in the full-fledged, pragmatic sense minus the unarticulated constituents resulting from free enrichment” (p. 88), what is said in this minimal sense “has no psychological reality” (p. 89).
- 6.
- 7.
Some of Recanati’s formulations suggest otherwise: he says, for example, that “‘It is beautiful’ means that it is beautiful ‘for us’, that is for the community to which the speaker and his audience belong”. I take it that by “means that” Recanati here has in mind the complete content expressed by utterances of the sentence, and not the linguistic meaning of the sentence. For otherwise his account would involve the claim that, after all, sentences containing predicates of personal taste are implicitly indexical, which goes against his view that lekta are fully articulated.
- 8.
By the way, it often seems that people assume that there is an argument, associated with myself, that proceeds from the premises that there are cases that intuitively seem to be cases of faultless genuine disagreement to the conclusion of some form of relativism. Recanati is among these people, see p. 90, but see also MacFarlane 2007. I have never put forward such an argument. The argument that I have discussed is an argument that starts from the premiss that there is disagreement in some sense. For example, it seems that in Recanati’s case, when I utter “the picture is beautiful”, and you utter “it is not”, I assert something that you cannot rationally accept without changing your mind (and vice versa). Similarly, if the assertions are sincere, I believe something that you could not rationally come to believe without changing your mind (see Kölbel 2002, 2003, 2007, 2008a, b). If this is so, then independently of how we define “disagreement”, we cannot make room for the apparent faultlessness involved by postulating implicit indexical elements in the sentences involved. I believe that Recanati would agree with this observation.
- 9.
The research leading to this article benefitted from MINECO, Spanish Government, I + D + i programme, grant FFI2012–37658 and also CONSOLIDER INGENIO Programme, grant CSD2009-0056, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
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Kölbel, M. (2017). About Concerns. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_12
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