You Are Reading This

As you were reading those four words, what you read
was clearly true if the first of those words meant you;

does "You" mean you?

A written "you" usually means whoever is reading it

(unless the "you" is occurring inside some quotation marks)

but this post is now going to continue like this:

You, Bob, are reading this.

Perhaps you are surprised that I know your name, but you are probably not called Bob. The thing is, even if you are called Bob, you would probably not think that the first of those five blue words meant you (if you were called Bob you would probably assume that I meant a different Bob, someone with whom I am acquainted). And whatever your name is, I might have chanced upon that name to add after the first word of "You are reading this." So, the question is:

Would adding your name have made you less likely to think that I meant you by "You"?

The natural assumption is that adding people's names after "you" would make it clearer that it was those people who were meant, because the meanings of simple words like "you" are learnt by hearing them spoken (not by reading them), and while the meaning of a spoken "you" is usually obvious (it is usually whoever the speaker is looking at), when it isn't obvious the addition of a name would usually make it obvious.

When does "you" mean you?

That question is basically a request, for a list of contexts in which "you" would mean you, but I intend it to be more of a talking point than a request.

Questions seem like requests, to me, because if you asked me "what is that?" I would hear you saying something like "please tell me what that is, if you know." A lot of philosophers regard questions as incomplete propositions, though (and because they like to define their terms in terms of artificial languages, I am not even sure what they mean by "proposition").

How does an answer complete a question?

Well, replacing "__" by "a cat" does turn "that is __" into an assertion that answers the question "what is that?" correctly when a cat is being indicated. But I think that "what is that?" could, no less logically, be regarded as a request for most of the contextually relevant assertions of the form "that is X" to be eliminated in light of some indicated information and the remainder presented very concisely. The very similar question "is that a cat?" does seem like a request for one of "yes" and "no"; or, in other words, for as many of the assertions of a certain kind (assertions like "yes, that is a cat," "no, that is not a cat," "no, that is a skunk," "no, that is a cat," and so on) as possible to be eliminated in light of a view of something like a cat and the remainder presented very concisely.

Is "is that a cat" a question and "that is a cat" a proposition?

If that is what you think, then you might find the question "that is a cat?" surprising. And philosophers have read a lot of books, and they do like their definitions written down, so it is easy to imagine them being surprised by the fact that our words get a lot of their actual meaning from how they are spoken. For myself, I just wonder whether music is the closest thing we have to the first human language.

When Sir Paul sang "you know I love you" to camera, the meaning of his "you" was a complicated thing created, for the most part, by those watching him, even though the meaning of a spoken "you" is usually whoever the speaker intends it to mean. When someone says "you" to camera, it normally means anyone watching (not unlike the written "you" without quotation marks). But of course, a song is like a poem, which is like a fiction (so you could expect quotation marks). And some of the viewers would already have heard Paul's song on the radio, or via vinyl, maybe with their eyes closed, as though dreaming. In short, we have, for generations, been watching TV as we learnt our languages. And because we naturally read the current meanings of our words into records of how people used to talk before the invention of the camera, it is bound to be a bit mysterious how the meanings of our words have changed since then. Still, we can always look at how they are changing.

When does "she" mean she?

When some people say "she thinks she's a girl," they might mean what I would mean by saying "he thinks he's a girl." My use of pronouns might make it harder for him to live as he has chosen to live, but saying "she" when I and many other people would say "he" goes against the grain of ordinary language and biological fact, so it might put a lot of people's backs up, and so even that new approach to such pronouns might end up making it harder for him to live as he wants to. Am I being intolerant or disrespectful? No: I can tolerate and even respect people that I disagree with. But should we not say what we mean, while we can? The loudest voices of God's creatures do tend to express intolerance, but God's voice is still and small.