A while ago, I found myself on a plane sitting close to a distinguished and well-dressed man in his fifties. He bought an Italian newspaper and showed me the picture on the front-page of the newly formed Monti cabinet, following Berlusconiâs resignations in 2011. âIsnât it curious â he asked me with a sarcastic tone â that they picked exactly this day to form the new cabinet?â. As I clearly did not get his allusion, he continued: âand isnât it curious that they nominated exactly thirteen new ministers?â. For some reason, my puzzled face aroused his talkativeness. How could I ignore how to decipher the messages they want to send through masonic numerology? For the remaining three hours of our flight, the man decided to charitably remedy my evident ignorance by talking uninterruptedly about any imaginable sort of conspiracy theory: âThey want to leave us in a state of ignorance to control us betterâ, he said. âThey are mostly aliens called reptilians and they occupy the positions of power all around the worldâ. âThey know how to cure cancer but they wouldnât let us knowâ. âThey can control the weather through the chemtrails produced by airplanesâ. âThey make babies have vaccinate because they know it causes autismâ. I was extremely fascinated, I must confess. Not only by the inexhaustible fantasy of this guy and of his sources, but also â from a linguistâs perspective â from the very words he was using to make his points.
Conspiracy theories have always been extremely popular[1], and they are especially widespread in the internet era. Scientific explanations and rigorous fact checking can be boring, time-consuming and ultimately disappointing and/or unexciting. If you surf the internet around the sea of conspiracy websites and forums, you will easily notice that most of the conspirationist discourse follows schematic stylistic strategies and is characterized by a similar sensationalist and allusive rhetoric. But one thing that fascinated me about the talk of my bizarre travel companion, and that I later noticed in most conspiracy texts on the internet, is the widespread âemptyâ usage of the third-person plural pronoun âtheyâ. Popular blogs names are: âTruth they are hidingâ and âStuff they donât want you to knowâ. In the 1997 movie âConspiracy Theoryâ, the conspiracy-theory obsessed character Jerry Fletcher (Mel Gibson) complains: âIâm only paranoid because they want me dead.â
If you are â predictably â now wondering who they are, I suggest that you look at this instructive flowchart. Here, I will only be interested in the word âtheyâ itself. Semantically, one can distinguish three uses of third-person pronouns in English: In example (1), âtheyâ acts as a variable bound by the quantifier âfew linguistsâ. In (2), âtheyâ is anaphoric to âJohn and Maryâ appearing in the preceding sentence. Finally, in (3), âtheyâ is said to have a deictic or indexical use, i.e. it directly picks the group of people from the extra-linguistic context which is made salient by the speaker:
Few linguists believe that they will become rich.
John and Mary are two linguists. They are homeless.
(pointing to a group of indigent people) They are my linguist friends!
The interesting use of âtheyâ in the conspiracy talk is of this third, indexical sort, i.e. cases in which there is no linguistic antecedent fixing the referent of the pronoun.
Indexicals are the paradigm of context-sensitive expressions: my utterance of the sentence âI am Italianâ is different from your utterance of the very same sentence. In a sense, the two utterances share the same meaning, but they obviously have different contents and, probably, different truth-values. Such a straightforward intuition is at the core of David Kaplanâs theory of indexicals (Kaplan 1989), the mainstream theory of indexicals in semantics and philosophy of language. Incidentally, indexicals are also one big battlefield in semantics and pragmatics, with theorists questioning the very existence of a natural semantic class of indexical expressions or arguing about exactly which expressions fall into this category. The more conservative faction (e.g. Cappelen and Lepore 2005) struggles to show that we should restrict ourselves to Kaplanâs very limited list of indexicals (including what he called pure indexicals, like âIâ, and âtrue demonstrativesâ, like âthatâ). Others, more liberal, are very willing to expand this list to the point of encompassing context-sensitive predicates like âredâ (Rothschild and Segal 2009) or vague words like âheapâ (Soames 2002). Still others think that indexicals are a bit like the stars: there are many more that we can see with the naked eye! According to these authors, a myriad of hidden indexical-like variables are attached to most words and are ultimately responsible for all effects of extra-linguistic context on semantic content (Stanley 2000 and Stanley and Szabò 2000).
Kaplan distinguishes between the character, the stable linguistic meaning of words and more complex constructions, and the content they express at each context. The character of indexicals is a rule that guides the search for the relevant referent(s) in the context. Kaplan formulates such a rule-based analysis in functional terms: thus, the character of âIâ is a function which, at any context, takes as its value something like âthe speakerâ or âthe agentâ of the context and returns as its content the relevant person[2]. Not all such rules are so straightforward, though. For example, the character of âhereâ is said to be a function that picks the location of the context, but the extent of such a location can be extremely indeterminate (in different contexts, âI was born hereâ can mean that I was born at this exact spot/in this country/in this world). Not all indexicals are so strictly constrained by linguist conventions: perhaps âIâ always picks up the speaker of the context without requiring other information[3]. By contrast, the linguistic meaning of a pronoun like âsheâ (in the indexical use) only specifies a few grammatical features (gender, number and animacy), leaving the identification of the relevant referent to the speakerâs intentions (i.e. to whomever the speaker has in mind with her use of the pronoun).
Our original âtheyâ is even more unconstrained: it does determine the number of the referent but leaves other features completely unspecified and dependent upon the speakerâs referential intention. Be that as it may, the standard picture has it that indexicals are tools of direct reference: intentions and pragmatic reasoning may be more or less crucial for fixing the referent of an indexical, nonetheless the content of an indexical, in the standard picture, is the object to which it refers in the context. What about our conspirationist âtheyâ, then? How should we make sense of the directly referential nature of indexicals vis Ă vis the referential indeterminacy and, possibly, emptiness of the conspiracy âtheyâ? Well, I can think of three possible solutions. First, we could deny that the use of the pronoun here is really indexical: perhaps the seemingly indexical âtheyâ is here actually a disguised (and very general!) description, as when Obama utters (4)
The Founders invested me with sole responsibility for appointing Supreme Court justices. (Nunberg 1993)
Here the indexical âmeâ is used descriptively to mean âThe president of the United Statesâ rather than the individual Barack Obama.
Secondly, we may say that the conspiracy theoristsâ speech is completely meaningless, in the sense that a sentence of the form âThey donât want us to know such and suchâ does not express anything at all or at most expresses just a vague content, because the use of the indexical is accompanied by only an imprecise referential intention (Numberg 1993).
Or perhaps the conpirationist âtheyâ is truly indexical and does actually refer⌠to the indexicals themselves! After all, semanticists know that indexicals are such an ugly beast to cope with: nobody would be surprised to find that they are nothing but conspiring indexicals.
 [1] Such a continuous success of conspiracy theories in the European history is fascinatedly described and exploited in two novels by Umberto Eco, The Foucault Pendulum (1988) and The Prague Cemetery (2010).
[2] Actually, Kaplanâs content is itself a function (from a circumstance of evaluation to an extension). I will gloss over this point (and over many others!) for the sake of simplicity.
[3] But see Predelli 2005 for apparent counterexamples to this generalisation.
Kaplan, David (1989). âDemonstrativesâ. In Almog, J., Perry, J. and Wettstein, H. (1989). Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 481â563.
Lepore, Ernest & Cappelen, Herman (2005). Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell Pub.
Nunberg, Geoffrey (1993). âIndexicality and deixisâ. Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (1):1â43.
Predelli, Stefano (2005). Contexts. Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rothschild, Daniel & Segal, Gabriel (2009). âIndexical Predicatesâ. Mind and Language 24 (4):467â93.
Soames, Scott (2002). âPrecis of Understanding Truth and repliesâ. Philosophy and Phenomological Research 65 (1):429â452.
Stanley, Jason (2000). âContext and logical formâ. Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (4):391â434.
Stanley, Jason & SzabĂł, ZoltĂĄn G. (2000). âOn Quantifier Domain Restrictionâ. Mind and Language 15 (2&3):219â61.
Conspiring indexicals was originally published on CamLangSci
