I dunno much about philosophy, he said, but isn't the question 'are indexicals interesting' and 'does deep structure exist' pretty similar? That is, the questions about indexicals (say, whether my statement "I believe in Gd" and another person's statement "I believe in Gd" share any words in comment, or whether all four words are indexical) question the existence of a deep structure, while the assumption that a deep structure exists (and can be more or less approximated) will make most of the questions about indexicals moot at best.
WWW(ittgenstein)D?
Thanks,
-V.

Hmm. I don’t care whether deep structures exist; I’m just using them as a convenient abstraction, and I don’t think that it’s necessary to posit “real” deep structures for the abstraction to be a valid one. One could turn the question around and ask: “Is it possible (Or: To what extent is it possible) to construct a language-independent representation of the utterances that the indexicals people are interested in, such that the utterances retain their meaning but lose the features that cause people to get interested in the idea of indexicals?”

If the answer is yes, that would seem to imply that philosophers who find the question of what indexicals mean a vexing one, in their quest for a “general theory of meaning,” are probably barking up the wrong tree — at best constructing only a general theory of the meaning of certain languages, at worst engaging in a lot of unnecessary reification.

(I tend to lean toward the “unnecessary reification” side of things myself, obviously. The idea that words have to have referents, or that the meaning of a given word exists, for example, seems to me to be a sort of weird Neo-Platonism that doesn’t have a lot to do with actual human communication, and leads to apparent nonsense like Putnam’s private language argument against brains in vats.)

The way you pose the question implies either that there is wholly transcultural philosophy, or that indexicals are a trivial part of language as opposed to a deep part of culture.

In other words, when you say "why do we say I?", if the "we" turns out to be "all speakers of languages containing 'I' " (can you think of any languages that don't have 'I', either explicitly or implicitly?), does that mean the question is not interesting and fundamental?

It just means that it's a question about language/culture. What would be an example of a philosophical question divorced from language/culture?

Would the question be interesting and fundamental even if "we" turned out to be "all speakers"? I think there are underlying questions about the concept of the self (or about differing concepts of the self) that are interesting, but the mere existence of pronouns seems like something that would be easy enough to explain on functional grounds; and I'm sure that comparative linguists have done plenty of work on questions like why English uses a lot of prounouns while Japanese tends to leave them out. The question of how the word "that" can mean different things at different times just doesn't really bend my mind, when it's approached in terms of people speaking (or writing) and understanding natural languages, and not in terms of meaning as a thing intrinsic to words or sentences.

Which may just mean that I haven't thought about it hard enough or haven't had the question sufficiently illuminated. :)

P.S. I'm not saying that the question of how people communicate isn't interesting, only that it doesn't seem to me to be a philosophical question, for a narrowly defined sense of "philosophical".

Interesting question. Am I right in thinking that you're basically saying that a pronoun is just a synonym for its referent, so in the deep structure it's the pronoun referents that show up rather than the pronouns? So when I say "I" it's effectively a different word (in the deep structure, anyway) than when you say "I"?

Sort of like homomorphs. For example, the kind of "pool" that you can bet in doesn't come from the same root as the kind that you can swim in, so in a sense those are two different words that just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same; sounds like you're saying that "I" said by two different speakers is effectively two different words that happen to be spelled and pronounced the same. (And have some other related features.) Yes?

Yes to the first part, I think (though it's been twelve years or so since I took syntax and semantics, and I also suspect that modern theories are a little more complicated than that).

For the second part, I can see the comparison, but my instinct would be to say that no, they're the same word -- that just because they have different referents, doesn't mean they have different identities, or even different meanings. The phrase "the speaker of this sentence" clearly has different referents in different contexts, but I think you have to define meaning in a fairly weird (or anyway specialized) way to say that therefore it has different meanings. To say that because in one context "I" means "David" and in another context "I" means "Jed" those two "I"s are as different as "David" and "Jed", seems to me to miss the point.

(I should note that in discussions of this kind the impression I get is that things are said to either mean the same thing, or mean different things, with no gray area in between.)