302 The subjectivity of utterance

with de re ("about the thing"), which are widely employed nowadays in modal logic and logical semantics in the sense indi­cated here. We shall return to the question of intensionality, in relation to reference, in a later section. Here it is sufficient to note that such generally accepted de re / de dicto ambiguities of the kind illustrated here give us particularly cogent reasons for extending the theory of reference beyond the bounds of what I have loosely and inadequately called ordinary contexts. Indeed, it is arguable, as we shall see later, that there is much more inten­sionality involved in so-called ordinary contexts than is gener­ally supposed. Throughout this section, however, I have been adopting a fairly conventional view of reference.

The third main class of referring expressions, in addition to names and noun-headed noun-phrases, is that of pronouns. Much of what has been said here about reference applies also to them. Since they are intrinsically connected with deixis and indexicality, I will deal with them in the next section.

10.2 INDEXICALITY AND DEIXIS

The third class of referring expressions mentioned, though not discussed, in the previous section is that of pronouns. Tradition­ally, pronouns are thought of as noun-substitutes (as the term 'pronoun' suggests). But most subclasses of pronouns (other than relative pronouns: 'who', 'which' and, in certain instances, 'that' in English) also have a quite different function, which arguably is more basic than that of standing for an antecedent noun or noun-phrase. This is their indexical or deictic func­tion. (We have already met the terms 'indexicality' and 'deixis' in Chapter 9; and the term 'index' was used in a related sense, in the discussion of model-theoretic semantics, in Chapter 7. Indexicality and deixis will be dealt with from a much broader point of view in this section.) The only two subclasses of pro­nouns that will be mentioned here, however, are personal pro­nouns, on the one hand (' I ', 'you', 'we', etc.) and demonstrative pronouns, on the other ('this', 'that'). But 'indexicality' and 'deixis' are commonly employed nowadays to cover a far wider range of phenomena, including demonstrative

10.2 Indexicality and deixis 303

adverbs ('here', 'there'), the grammatical category of tense, and such lexical differences as are exemplified in English by the verbs 'come' versus 'go' or 'bring' versus 'take'.

The terms 'indexicality' and 'deixis', as we shall see, can both be explained, from an etymological point of view, on the basis of the notion of gestural reference. But they have entered linguis­tics and related disciplines at different times and by different routes. 'Indexicality' (or rather 'index' from which 'indexicality' derives) was introduced into logic and the philosophy of language via semiotics by the American philosopher C. S. Peirce (mentioned, in another connexion, in Chapter 2); it is only recently that it has come to be employed by linguists. 'Deixis' (and more especially the adjective 'deictic') has a much longer pedigree - going back, as it does, to the work of the ancient Greek grammarians; but it was made familiar to linguists and others, in the sense that it now bears, by the German psychol­ogist K. Biihler (1879-1963). So far, there is no generally accepted and theoretically well-motivated distinction drawn between the two terms. But it would be in the spirit of the use that is currently made of them in philosophy, linguistics and psychology to think of indexicality as a particular kind of deixis: namely, as deixis in so far as it is relevant to the determi­nation of the propositional meaning of utterances. I will tacitly adopt this view. However, I would emphasize that I am doing no more than codifying a historically explicable difference of usage. It so happens that the philosophical tradition in which 'indexicality' has been defined is one that takes a characteristi­cally narrow view of meaning.

As I said earlier, the terms 'deixis' and 'index' both originate in the notion of gestural reference: that is, in the identification of the referent by means of some bodily gesture on the part of the speaker. ('Deixis' means "pointing" or "showing" in Greek; 'index' is the Latin word for the pointing-finger. Pointing with the hand or finger is a method of identification by bodily gesture, which may have a natural, biological, origin and is institution­alized with this function in many cultures.) Any referring expression which has the same logical properties as the bodily gesture in question is, by virtue of that fact, deictic. Personal