What the Wolf Should Have Said

Two people in the class (Yuval and Kristen — thanks!!) have alerted me to an issue with one of the examples I used in class. Recall this:

In the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”, the little goats are home alone when the wolf knocks on the door and says “Open the door, my dear little goats! I am your mother.”

My point was that here the little goats are not being asked to trust that the proposition “the wolf is our mother” is true but that the proposition “the person at the door is our mother” is true. I showed that this is the diagonal proposition expressed by “I am your mother” in the context of this story.

What Yuval and Kristen both told me is that there is something odd about the wolf saying “I am your mother”. Somehow this sentence suggests that it is not already common ground that the little goats have a mother. Compare Darth Vader telling Luke “I am your father”. What the wolf should have said (to not give the game away) is: “This is your mother”. But then, my story would have been a little more involved since we don’t have an analysis in place for demonstratives like this.

I took the fairy tale example from notes by Irene Heim on indexicality, which we have been using for our formal pragmatics lectures for a while. Now, the original tale is of course in German, since it is from the Brothers Grimm’s collection of fairy tales. I just checked the original and what the wolf says there is even stranger:

Macht auf, ihr lieben Kinder, eure Mutter ist da und hat jedem von euch etwas mitgebracht!

which means “Open up, dear little children, your mother is here and has brought something for each of you!”.

Anyway, I could have made my point with a cleaner example:

[Door bell rings]
A: Yes?
B: I’m from the gas company

Again, the proposition that A is supposed to believe is not that B is from the gas company, but that the person who rang the bell is from the gas company.

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