Indexicals and utterance production

Abstract

We highlight various non-standard mechanisms of communication to both motivate our response to what is known as the 'answering machine paradoxes' and to shed light on recent variants of these cases. We claim that the most intuitive solution to these paradoxes requires one to distinguish between the agent (of a context), the tokening of a sentence and the agent's chosen mechanism of communicating this tokening.Keywords Answering machine paradox Á Indexicals Á Context of utterance Á Kaplan Á Predelli Á Pure and impure indexicals Steven Hawking is having a bad day. He has just lost another nurse; the fourth this month. The problem is that the voice synthesizer he uses to communicate has been malfunctioning, 'saying' things that Hawking has not instructed it to say. The first three times it was inconvenient and embarrassing when he 'said' ''I hate you!'' to his worthy nurses, but what he 'said' to this latest nurse was liable to land him with a harassment suit. ''The machine is putting words in my mouth,'' he tells the engineer. ''I am not saying these things!'' Intuitively, Hawking is not saying anything; and the machine (having no communicative intentions) is not saying anything. In fact, nothing is said; no proposition is expressed. We use this case and cases like it to both motivate our response to what is known as the 'answering machine paradoxes' and to shed light on recent variants of these cases. We claim that the most intuitive solution to these paradoxes requires one to distinguish between the agent (of a context), the tokening of a sentence and the agent's chosen mechanism of communicating this tokening.

Indexicals in Virtual Environments

“…The first two cases concern the status of pure indexicality of "now" and "here", the third of "I". As Dodd & Sweeney (2009) I also think that Corazza et al (2002) fail to criticize the purity status of the indexical "I". Finally, I have presented examples that criticize the logical truth status of "I am here now" in virtual environments.…”

“…The first two are metasemantic or pre-semantic (Perry, 1997;Dodd & Sweeney, 2009) claims. They involve finding the suitable condition from where you can start doing semantics, e.g.…”

“…In a recent paper (Dodd & Sweeney, 2009) this position is criticized 5 with the support of three elements (stages) of utterance production. In STAGE 1 the agent of the context kicks the mechanism of production into action (time, location = t 1 , l 1 ).…”

“…"Now" is not a worry in the virtual environments cases I present since the examples involve real time situations. The lag, the delay between a keyboard inscription (or a microphone utterance) and its tokening is regarded as a [unfortunate] constituent part, as a side effect of the mechanism of production, pace (Dodd & Sweeney, 2009).…”

Indexicality and The Answering Machine Paradox

“…Dodd and Sweeney () develop a theory that, like that of Michaelson (), posits that technological advances allow the reference of ‘here’ and ‘now’ to shift between the place/time of production and the place/time of tokening in certain sorts of contexts. However, since they also claim that it is the speaker's prerogative to decide whether or not reference should shift in these contexts, their view is not a pure channel type‐dependence view like Michaelson's.…”