ABSTRACT
This position can be supported by the following consideration. If one is interested in whether a linguistic practice can have a range of properties, one way to provide evidence is through a thought-experiment in which a practice is stipulated to have one of them, and then to gradually acquire the other. In the scenario I have in mind there is a community of speakers who utter sentences of the type ‘It is raining’, where there is no covert location, and thereby communicate thoughts that are about no location. Over time they come to use these utterances to communicate thoughts about locations, typically the location of utterance, in just the way that defenders of UC claim is true of English speakers, and which is true by stipulation of English0 speakers. In this scenario, component (ii) was stipulated to obtain, and then it was supposed that the psychologies of the speakers changed in such a way that component (i) came to obtain. There is no reason to think that adding component (i) can plausibly be thought of as a dividing line between a practice that can coherently be supposed and one that cannot be, because all that is being supposed is that speakers take certain thoughts to be expressed by their utterances. Such facts about communication presumably supervene on those speakers’ beliefs and intentions. The beliefs and intentions they would have to have in this case are ones that they might perfectly well have; after all they are the same beliefs and intentions as English speakers have.
