The impersonal ‘you’ and other indexicals

In this essay I propose a semantic analysis of impersonal uses of ‘you’, and related uses of other indexical expressions. The framework I employ is Kaplan’s classic analysis of indexical languages, enriched with independently motivated hypotheses about the identification of the semantically relevant context, and about the employment of generic expressions. Consider an utterance of (1) you get in trouble with that move said by a chess instructor to a student. More often than not, such an utterance is to be understood impersonally, in the sense that, roughly, chess players typically get in trouble. After all, (1) may well occur within a true fragment such as (1*) according to all textbooks, you get in trouble with that move even though textbooks obviously do not contain warnings directed to the particular student the instructor is addressing (see Nunberg 1993, 21). Similar, straightforward instances of the impersonal use of ‘you’ are provided by cases such as ‘you just can’t tell’ or ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’, which convey general information, rather than a content pertaining to the addressee’s inabilities. Although the impersonal behavior of ‘you’ has not received a great deal of attention, its analysis plays a non-peripheral role with respect to certain fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy of language. One