Abstract
The author's response to Eduarda Calado´s contribution to the special issue on The Indexical Point of View.
Keywords:
Indexicals
Frege held that the thought expressed by (an utterance of) a well-formed sentence is objective, interpersonally shareable, and serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. This being the case, an indirect speech report is held to be correct just in case the thought referred to in the report is the thought expressed by the embedded sentence uttered on its own. The view is that if Jill says, and believes it on Tuesday that
(1) Today is beautiful,
Jack’s reporting her on Wednesday by
(2) Jill said that yesterday was beautiful
is correct just in case the thought referred to in (2) is the thought expressed by (1). In chapter 8 of my book I have tried to meet this demand by relying on the view that an utterance of ‘today’ yesterday and an utterance of ‘yesterday’ today may have the very same sense, which makes it the case that if Jill’s utterance of (1) expresses the same thought as Jack’s utterance of
(3) Yesterday was beautiful,
then (2) is a correct report of (1).
Enter Calado claiming ‘my proposal ... will be to go in the opposite direction of Bozickovic’s conclusion, though, and try to answer the following questions: what would a theory of [Indirect Speech Reports] look like if we abandoned the concern with sameness of cognitive significance between original utterance and embedded sentence? Could such a theory account for correctness of speech report?’
As Calado points out, speech reports are not just in the business of updating the belief they transfer from one context to another. They are also in the business of capturing what the reporters take the original speaker to be communicating and of allowing their audiences to understand just that. They also depend on goals that are ultimately determined by the reporter’s reconstruction of the reportee’s cognitive states and the audience’s informational statuses and expectations.
In reply, I admit that as far as the cases that I discuss are concerned, I was driven by the desire to meet Frege’s demand on speech reporting because of its evident virtues mentioned above. But Calado is right about some other cases, some in my own ball park. Look no further than the Rip Van Winkle case. When Rip went to sleep, he had the belief that he would express by ‘Today is beautiful’. When he wakes up 20 years later, believing he slept for only one day, he attempts to express his earlier belief by uttering ‘Yesterday was beautiful’. In relation to this, Ludlow (2019Ludlow, P. 2019. Interperspectival Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press., 73) has argued that people in-the-know about Rip’s long sleep, speaker S and hearer H, shall want to report Rip’s earlier belief in a very different way from Rip, something like ‘Rip was thinking that day - 20 years ago - to be beautiful’, which is a correct speech report. Assuming that, unlike Rip, the reporters do not remember the day Rip went to sleep, hence do not think about it in the same way as Rip, the thought expressed by Rip’s ‘Yesterday was beautiful’ will not be the same as the thought that features in the report. And, in line with Calado’s foregoing remarks, the report at least so much as captures what the reporters take Rip to be communicating and reconstruct his cognitive state.
References
- Ludlow, P. 2019. Interperspectival Content Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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1
CDD: 401.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
02 Sept 2022 -
Date of issue
Jul-Sep 2022
History
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Received
03 May 2022 -
Accepted
14 May 2022
