Complex Demonstratives

Abstract

Over the last few years, the philosophical debate on the referring-denoting distinction has shifted its focus. Donnellan (1966) placed definite descriptions at the heart of the debate, and for three decades or so, they stayed there. Recently, however, definite descriptions have been usurped by what have variously been called demonstrative descriptions, complex ‘that’-phrases and complex demonstratives (I shall stick to this last throughout). Complex demonstratives, which at a first pass we can think of as any expression of the form ‘that/this F’, pose a particular problem for the truth-conditional semanticist toiling on the border between referring and denoting: on the one hand, it would seem that they’re semantically closely linked to simple demonstratives, standardly taken to be the prototypical referring expressions, but on the other they display the kind of syntactic complexity associated with definite descriptions and, more broadly, with the class of quantifiers. For the truth-conditionalist who either overtly or tacitly accepts the hypothesis that all NPs must either be referential or quantificational,¹ this is an alarming state of affairs, and much ink has been spilled in the effort to show that these apparently anomalous expressions do, after all, behave in familiar ways. There are problems, however, with all the stories currently on offer: some, while offering nuggets of truth, are empirically inadequate; others offer much of the truth as far as they go, but seek to delimit their field of inquiry in ways that, under scrutiny, reveal themselves as unprincipled; and yet others offer what seem to me to be profound insights into the workings of complex demonstratives, but are forced into Ptolemaic complexity in the effort to accommodate these insights within a truth-based framework.