No longer: Hundreds of thousands of consumers are now communicating with personal stylists (or data-driven human/artificial intelligence hybrids) via next-gen fashion platforms such as Trunk Club and Stitch Fix — two platforms with demonstrative value (Trunk Club was acquired more than a year ago for $450 million, and few experts would reject Stitch Fix's $300 million recent valuation).
Our conscious experience of the object to which the demonstrative refers provides us with a form of knowledge of the semantic value of the demonstrative, and thereby plays a role in justifying the use we make of the demonstrative in our reasoning.
According to Campbell, this pattern of use is justified by appeal to the semantic value of the demonstrative.
Burge, who is, as remarked above, a demonstrativist, represents the semantic value of a demonstrative (and so an argumental occurrence of a name) with a variable.
Furthermore, according to Campbell, the knowledge of the semantic value of the demonstrative that such conscious experience provides us with, justifies and causes the pattern of use we make of that demonstrative in our reasoning.
This confrontation with, this awareness of, the mind-independent object referred to is what provides one with the relevant form of knowledge of the semantic value of the demonstrative that allows experience to play its explanatory role.
Jeffrey King (2012) argues that the semantic value of a demonstrative in a context is the object such that (a) the speaker intends it to be the demonstrative's semantic value and (b) an attentive hearer would take it to be the speaker's intended semantic value.
What's required, argues Campbell, is a conception of experience as something less than conceptual representation of the object of experience, but which nonetheless has the resources to explain how experience of an object can provide one with a form of knowledge of the semantic value of a demonstrative that refers to it.
The aim of toy datasets is to provide simple but clear and demonstrative examples on the importance of the correct choice of the value of the DDP in forming the best predictor set.
Thus, for predicativists like Burge and Fara, the semantic value of a name in the subject place is equivalent to that of a complex demonstrative or an incomplete definite description.
