The Deferred Ostension Theory of Quotation

Consider a familiar example of deferred ostention: pointing to a parked car just dented by a runaway driver, one says ‘he is going to have a bad day’, succeeding in referring thereby to the car’s owner. In deferred ostention, a demonstration picks out from the context an object or event; this is not the referent of the indexical to which the demonstration is associated, but an auxiliary with which to fix the referent, in virtue of some manifest relation between them (ownership, in the example). That the demonstrated item is not the referent of the indexical is usually clear in that it does not fit the indexical descriptive meaning: the car in the example is obviously not a male, as required by the use of ‘he’ for it to be the indexical’s referent. Nunberg (1993) argues that this is a more general phenomenon than we may think; the interpretation of ‘we’, for instance, according to him follows the mechanism of deferred ostention. Nunberg uses the term ‘index’ for the demonstrated auxiliary in deferred ostention. According to Nunberg, in uttering ‘we’ the speaker demonstrates himself as an index of this kind (no explicit act of demonstration being required, as when one says ‘that dog’ in the presence of a sufficiently salient dog), and the referent is obtained on the basis of some contextually signaled relation between the speaker and the group intended as referent. The deferring character of the demonstrated index is made clear in that the speaker does not fit the descriptive meaning of the plural indexical ‘we’. In a previous publication (Garcı́a-Carpintero 1994) I argued for (a version of) Davidson’s (1979) demonstrative theory of quotation (DT henceforth) that fits Nunberg’s generalization of deferred ostention; I also argued there against the Fregean identity theory (IT henceforth) as articulated and defended by Washington (1992). Consider a written utterance of the sentence (1)