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Who Are We?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard Vallée
Richard Vallée*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Paraiba João Pessoa, Paraiba, CEP 58-039-970 Brazil
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Extract

Personal and demonstrative pronouns ('I,’ ‘you,’ ‘s/he,’ ‘we,’ the plural 'you,’ ‘they,’ ‘this’ and ‘these’) are notorious for challenging any theory of natural language. Singular pronouns have received much attention from linguists and philosophers alike during the last three decades. Plural pronouns, on the other hand, have been neglected, especially by philosophers. I want to fill this gap and suggest accounts of ‘we,’ the plural ‘you,’ and ‘they.'

Intuitively, singular and plural personal pronouns are ‘counterparts.' Any account of personal pronouns should make sense of this intuition. However, the latter is not very sophisticated and, as we move along, it will be reexamined and relativized. As we shall see, plural pronouns are much more than mere counterparts of the familiar singular ones. It is well known that third person singular pronouns have puzzling behaviors, acting as co-referential terms, bound variables, or unbound anaphora. But co-reference, binding, and unbound anaphora are not confined to the usual examples and extend, in a way, to plural pronouns. My discussion of the latter is partly motivated by this particular behavior.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1996 , pp. 211 - 230
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1996

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References

1 I wrote this paper while I was a visiting scholar at CSLI (Stanford University) supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I want to express my gratitude to both institutions. I would like to thank Jane Aronson, Renée Bilodeau, Eros Corazza, Adele Mercier, Michael O'Rourke, and John Perry for helpful comments.

2 See, for instance, Castañeda, H.-N. ‘He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness,’ Ratio 8 (1966) 130-57Google Scholar; Perry, J. ‘Frege on Demonstratives,’ Philosophical Review 86 (1977) 474-97CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical,’ Noûs 13 (1979) 3-21; Kaplan, D. ‘Demonstratives,’ in Almog, J. Perry, J. and Wettstein, H. eds., Themes from Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1989) 481–563Google Scholar.

3 See Kaplan; for recent discussions of demonstratives, see Reimer, M. ‘Do Demonstratives Have Semantic Relevance?’ Analysis 51 (1991) 177-83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bach, K. ‘Intentions and Demonstratives,’ Analysis 52 (1992) 140-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I will not take sides in the debate concerning the question whether intentions or demonstrations are relevant to fix the referent of demonstratives.

4 See Neale, S. Descriptions (Cambridge: The MIT Press 1990)Google Scholar.

5 See Evans, G. ‘Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (I),’ The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 7 (1977) 467–536CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Neale.

6 See Evans, ‘Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses’; Heim, I. The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun Phrases (New York and London: Garland 1988)Google Scholar; and Neale.

7 See Hoeksema, J. ‘Plurality and Conjunction,’ in Meulen, A. Ter ed., Studies in Model-Theoretic Semantics. Groningen Amsterdam Studies in Semantics 1 (Dordrecht: Foris 1981) 63–83Google Scholar; Link, G. ‘The Logical Analysis of Plurals and Mass Terms: A Lattice-Theoretical Approach,’ in Bauerle, Schwarze and Stechow, von eds., Meaning, Use, and the Interpretation of Language (Berlin: De Gruyter 1983)Google Scholar; Feldman, F. ‘Groups, 1,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (1989) 559–605Google Scholar; Lasersohn, P. A Semantics for Groups and Events (New York and London: Garland 1990)Google Scholar.

8 The fact that in sentences in which they are subjects the predicate is plural, as in ‘We are philosophers,’ is good evidence.

9 See Massey, G. ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry, and All the King's Men,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 13 (1976) 89–107Google Scholar; Hoeksema; Link; and Lasersohn.

10 Can a plural pronoun refer to a group of objects as an individual? This is an interesting question I will not discuss here.

11 I will not address problems raised by plural identity sentences like ‘We are The Beatles.’

12 That is, the ‘correct’ referring intention or intentions.

13 Notice, however, that it does not have the universal force ‘it’ has in a typical donkey sentence.

14 I disregard some aspects of ‘we,’ such as the use of ‘we’ to refer to himself by a King, or the use of ‘we’ by a nurse to refer to a patient ('We are going to have surgery today’).

15 See Nunberg, G. ‘Indexicality and Deixis,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (1993) 1–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar for a different view on ‘we’ concerning this feature.

16 Partee, B. ‘Binding Implicit Variables in Quanified Contexts,’ in Papers From the Twenty-Fifth Meeting. Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession on Language and Context (Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society 1989)Google Scholar

17 Nunberg, in ‘Indexicality and Deixis,’ discusses at length this character and provides interesting details.

18 A feature Nunberg emphasizes in ‘Indexicality and Deixis.'

19 I owe the first suggestion to a referee, and the second one to David Martens.

20 Did the speaker express a proposition containing himself and the property of enjoying the party? I am inclined to say yes. But this proposition is not enough to make it the case that he expressed something true.

21 See note 13.

22 See Gillon, B. ‘The Readings of Plural Noun Phrases in English,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 10 (1987) 199–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Plural Noun Phrases and Their Readings: A Reply to Lasersohn,’ Linguistics and Philosophy 13 (1990) 477-85.

23 See Link, Hoeksema, Gillon, and Feldman on these issues.

24 Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon 1982)Google Scholar