He also points to cases where our use of names or demonstratives referring to human beings must be understood as referring to their souls, and concludes that this shows that human beings are their souls.
Davidson's idea is that 'that' in (16) functions as a demonstrative that refers to the utterance of the sentence that follows.
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.
'This water', on a demonstrative occasion, refers, but, "my contention is that this water, unlike this or that drop, is not a particular object" (1972, p. 4).
For example, according to McGrew (1995, 1999), for any object of acquaintance or direct awareness, it is possible to form a belief in which a demonstrative concept refers directly to it.
Priscian's reference to intellectual demonstration was found useful, and the thought that a demonstrative could refer either to something absent or to something spiritual was supplemented by a further kind of intellectual demonstration in which the thing actually pointed to is not numerically identical to the thing signified and to which the predicate applies.
The problem was dealt with by the provision of extra premises which ensured that the very same things referred to by a true premise are the things referred to by the demonstrative phrases in the conclusion.
The truth of these propositions demand the truth of all or some relevant singular propositions of the type just mentioned; the demonstrative pronoun is then taken to refer the possible beings even though they do not exist.
A grasp of a sortal concept F involves both grasp of the truth-conditions of such statements of identification involving "F" and also grasp of the truth-conditions of what Dummett calls "crude predications" involving "F", statements of the form "this is F", in which the demonstrative again does not serve to refer to any object.
Indeed, it is quite intuitive that one might truly report another's beliefs using a demonstrative to refer to something that agent is not in a position to refer to demonstratively in any way whatsoever.
