Posted by zeugma on August 31, 2005, at 7:33:22
In reply to Re: mystery of the missing indexical.. » zeugma, posted by alexandra_k on August 30, 2005, at 17:46:54
Characters are neither rigid nor flaccid; they are constant or inconstant.
Okay...
No, sorry... How do they get to be inconstant?
(Does that happen when the context of utterance changes???)>>Most characters are constant. For example, 'the car' refers to the (contextually salient) automobile I don't drive any more (thankfully), at least it does in my dialect of English. Questions of contextual salience are presumably pragmatic, because obviously many definite descriptions have an uncertain reference strictly speaking, but are nonetheless used widely with few problems.
Context, insofar as it affects character, is the ordered set of elements (time, place, speaker, world) that determines the content of the utterance. So I say 'I woke up two hours ago.' The function that is the character of 'I' includes as part of its determining elements 'speaker', and that speaker (and hence contentual element) is 'zeugma.' The time is 8 am Wednesday, and so 'two hours ago' designates the contentual element '6 am.'
But if you had uttered the identical string of words, I would have to know that the character of 'I', while identical to the character that 'I' means when I use it, yields the content 'alexandra_k', and likewise with the other elements of the utterance. So the equation character=standard meaning is basically right.I shouldn't have said, then, that characters are 'constant' or 'inconstant.' If these words didn't have a constant meaning, we would be speaking different dialects, and getting confused in the process. I think what I 'meant' was that for most non-indexical terms, they yield the same SORT of content as definite descriptions, and hence the pathway from character to content, and then to extension, can be collapsed into a single process that can be designated as 'intension.' So empty singular terms like 'the present King of France' can be regarded as having an intension though yielding an extension that is the empty set. In fact that was what intensions were mostly useful for, apart from problems that arise where one object can be designated by more than one singular term (e.g. 'the Morning Star' and 'the Evening Star').
and yeah, indexical terms are fixed relative to their contents (I am the only one to use 'I' to designate [Z], though others may share my name and many of my attributes) in virtue of their contextual elements- I am naturally going to figure in every ordered quadruple that represents the context of each of my utterances, and one must use this context to arrive at me. So the character as function (meaning) is constant (i.e. ordered quadruple) but the elements of the set are context-dependent, and without a grasp of the context, the right output can't be gotten. That is what differentiates the indexicals from the everyday terms like 'car' and 'computer'- the time, place and speaker aren't important as long as the language is shared between interlocutors. So those factors can generally be ignored when dealing with such terms.
Apologies for highly prolix reply.
I'm glad you like intensional externalism. :-)
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:541758
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20050807/msgs/549125.html