Stojanovic on Grice on quasi-demonstratives

Well, not really.

Thanks to R. B. Jones for reporting. I have just checked the link to her PhD under Recanati. She does not quote Grice explicitly in the reference list to:

http://contextes.free.fr/ref.pdf

but we know that's what she means.

Grice was obsessed with the hidden indexical, and I'm pleased to learn Stokanovic got a second PhD under Perry, whom I know well. Perry I think studied (or at least 'learned') from Grice back in Berkeley. I was always amused that Grice's "Personal Identity" (Mind 1941) was repr. by Perry in "Personal identity", one of the few books worth having coming from the University of California Press as I think it's called -- ALL of the books from that press are worth having -- allow me to disimplicate.

Grice called

things like 'in this room'

a quasi-demonstrative

in his "Presupposition and conversational implicature" (in WoW)

"The book on the table is open"

Since there are zillion books on zillion tables, we need to specify. But this we leave to the level of the implicatum (or implicatura -- 'implicatum' fails to specify if the thing is via logical or pragmatic 'implication' and perhaps that is just as well, but linguists use 'implicata' to mean 'implicature' only, it seems.

----- (Not that Stokanovic is a linguist -- she is one of us: a philosopher).

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Anyway, I always thought that by calling these things 'quasi-demonstratives', Grice is giving a nod to Kaplan. Only that having met Kaplan and seeing that he rarely gives a nod to Grice I wonder if that was fair?

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Anyway,

There are perhaps like 30 references to Grice on the hidden or 'quasi-demonstrative', and I'm often surprised at how rarely that reference to the 'quasi-demonstrative' -- a precursor of a tenet of the contextualism that is said to have been invente by J. Stanley -- is given. Or something.