Inspección y propuesta de modificación de las normas de desarrollo de la

King (2014) claims “speaker intentions can be part of the context that determines

semantic values and what is said” (p. 231; original emphasis). On King’s Coordination Account,

the value of a use of a demonstrative in a context is that object o that meets the following two conditions: 1) the speaker intends o to be the value; and 2) a competent, attentive, reasonable hearer would take o to be the object that the speaker intends to be the value (p. 225).

According to the Coordination Account, “a speaker’s referential intentions are part

of the semantically relevant context” (p. 233) and “an object o is the value of an

6 _{Kaplan notes the possibility of opportune demonstrations as exceptions, e.g., if a sheep walked}

into the room and captured everyone’s attention, no demonstration would be required to fix the referent of the pronoun in ‘Where did she come from?’ Some theorists have defended the role of demonstrations in fixing the contents of demonstratives (McGinn (1981), Reimer (1991)), while others maintain they’re fixed by certain causal relations (Devitt (1981)) or by a variety of features of the situation in which they are used (Wettstein (1984), Gauker (2008)). See Bach (1992) and Åkerman (2009) for discussion. Still others have argued against a uniform account of demonstrative reference fixing (Reimer (1992), and Siegel (2002)). It is also not uncommon for theorists to ignore the question altogether, using ‘demonstration’ as a placeholder for whatever it is that fixes the content of demonstratives (Braun (1996), Caplan (2003)).

occurrence of a demonstrative in context just in case the speaker intends o to be the value and the speaker successfully reveals her intention” (p. 225). In light of the second condition, “a speaker can successfully reveal her intention even though her hearer failed to figure out what she intended. The hearer could be inattentive, incompetent, etc.” (p. 225, n. 20). Thus, King includes not only speaker intentions in the context, but also what amounts to a constraint on the admissible intentions, characterized in terms of an idealized hearer who knows the “common ground of the conversation in Stalnaker’s sense” (p. 226).

King’s justification for the Coordination Account is, in part, “that it gets the

intuitively correct results in a variety of cases” (e.g., Kaplan’s notorious Carnap/Agnew case)7 _{(p. 229). Alternative accounts appealing either to accompanying demonstrations} or simply unconstrained speaker intentions falter precisely in “cases in which a speaker has the relevant intention but mounts either a poor demonstration or no demonstration at all” (p. 223). “Intuitively,” King claims, “the speaker failed to discharge her responsibility to be understandable”, suggesting the alternative accounts “err in not requiring the speaker to do enough to secure a value for her demonstrative” (p. 225). The other part of the justification, then, and a theoretical virtue, according to King, is that the semantic values of uses of demonstratives in context are defined (via the second condition) in terms of what is “required for successful communication with a

demonstrative” (p. 229; original emphasis).

Stokke (2010) similarly defends “construing speaker intentions as parameters of the kind of contexts that provide arguments for characters” (p. 384). On Stokke’s

Intention-Sensitive Semantics (ISS), “[t]he only intentions we allow into narrow context

are successful intentions. An intention is successful only if the audience is in a position to recognize it. What the audience is and is not able to recognize is constrained by wide

7 _{Kaplan (1978) writes:}

Suppose that without turning and looking I point to the place on my wall which has long been occupied by a picture of Rudolf Carnap and I say.

(27) Dthat [I point as above] is a picture of one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

But unbeknownst to me, someone has replaced my picture of Carnap with one of Spiro Agnew. I think it would simply be wrong to argue an “ambiguity” in the demonstration, so great that It can be bent to my intended demonstratum. I have said of a plcture of Splro Agnew that it pIctures one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. And my speech and demonstration suggest no other natural interpretation to the linguistically competent public observer (p. 239)

3.2 Character-based Semantics | 79

context” (p. 402).8 Like the coordination account, then, ISS adds a speaker intention parameter to context as well as a constraint on its admissible values characterized in terms of the audience’s ability to recognize the speaker’s intention.

For his part, Stokke is concerned to address what he sees as a dilemma for the character-based theorist:

Either she must take referential intentions as themselves parameters of contexts providing arguments for characters, or she must concede that these expressions do not have their referents determined as a function of context (p. 384).

In light of Kaplan’s distinction between pure indexicals andtrue demonstratives, which

might be read as a clear articulation of the second horn, it would seem that Stokke’s dilemma is rather contrived. As noted above, however, Stokke does not adopt Kaplan’s

indexical/demonstrative distinction. In any event, Stokke pursues the first horn of the

dilemma in defense of a “semantic approach to context-sensitivity”, and argues that it is superior to Predelli’s (2005) account of context-sensitivity according to which speaker intentions are relevant to content, but are not included in the context.

The main difference between the two accounts appears to be that King’s Coor- dination Account is constrained by an idealized, “competent, attentive, reasonable

hearer who knows the common ground”, while Stokke’s ISS is constrained by the ability of the actual audience to recognize the speaker’s intention on the basis of the wide context. However, ISS merely requires a hearer to be “in a position to recognize” the speaker’s intention, and thus the difference is likely superficial. Both proposals take speaker intentions (constrained to be recognizable to the hearer/audience) to be the “something else” relevant to demonstratives, and claim they fit properly in the theory

as an additional contextual parameter.9