Situated Representations and Ad Hoc Concepts 1

Situation theorists such as Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy, and (at one time) John Perry have advanced the hypothesis that linguistic and mental representations are ‘situated’ in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations. François Recanati has done an important task in reviving and in many respects deepening situation theory. In this chapter, I would like to explore some aspects of Recanati’s own account. I shall focus on situated mental representations, and stress the connection between them and ad hoc or temporary concepts. First, I introduce the notion of unarticulated constituent, due to John Perry. I suggest that the question of whether there really are such constituents should be distinguished into two issues, one concerning language and the other concerning thought (Section 10.1). Then I formulate a dilemma that any friend of cognitive unarticulated constituents must face: alleged unarticulated constituents seem to be either articulated or non-constituents after all (Section 10.2). The dilemma is strengthened by the fact that unarticulated constituents cannot be inferentially relevant (Section 10.3). In order to show, hopefully, that the dilemma can be escaped from, I give two illustrations of what I take to be genuine unarticulated constituents. In the first, thoughts like It’s raining and It’s over are implicitly related to spatiotemporal situations via practical capacities for keeping track of particular places or times (Section 10.4). In the second, more tentative illustration, the relevant situations are not given, but stipulated, as with In Constance, it’s raining (Section 10.5). In the last section, I argue that the notion of situation which emerges from the previous discussion is rather different from the one used by Recanati himself.