Kaplan (1989a) introduces a formal framework for modeling the semantics of languages containing indexical expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘today’, ‘here’, ‘she’, ‘them’ etc. Depending on when, where, and by whom, such expressions are used, they can pick out distinct individuals, times and locations. ‘I am the best candidate for president’, for example, expresses different propositions in different mouths: when Bernie Sanders utters, ‘I am the best candidate for president’, the content of ‘I’ is Bernie Sanders, and when uttered
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by Donald Trump, it is Donald Trump. Radically different propositions are expressed in each case. Nevertheless, even though distinct speakers can say different things when uttering ‘I am the best candidate for president’, the same sentence-type is used in each case. And insofar as they share a common linguistic form without ambiguity, distinct utterances of such expressions would seem to share certain semantic properties.
Kaplan’s framework captures and encodes this distinction between the two levels of meaning associated with indexical expressions. The shared semantic aspect of an indexical expression, common to all its uses, is captured at the level ofcharacter, which
“applies only to words and phrases as types” and captures the repeatable, invariant semantic properties of such expressions (1989a, p. 524). In contrast, the level of
content varies with context and corresponds to the distinct individuals, times and
locations picked out by distinct occurrences of such expressions.2 The upshot of the character-content distinction was to isolate the invariant features of context-sensitive expressions in their character, defining them as rules that appeal to certain aspects of context to yield distinct, determinate contents, and thereby account for the variable contents of distinct utterances of such expressions.
Kaplan also drew a distinction between two kinds of indexical expressions. Pure indexicals (e.g., ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘today’) have their content fixed simply in terms of
“brute facts of the context, like location and time” (1989b, p. 588). “The linguistic rules which governtheir [i.e.,pure indexicals’] use fully determine the referent for each
context” (1989a, p. 491). For example, ‘now’ picks out the time of the context as its content. The contents of true demonstratives (e.g., ‘we’, ‘she’, ‘those’, ‘there’), on the
other hand, do not vary strictly in virtue of the “brute facts of the context.” According to Kaplan, “[t]he linguistic rules which govern the use of the true demonstratives [. . . ] are not sufficient to determine their referent in all contexts of use. Something else [. . . ] must be provided” (1989a, p. 490). For example, ‘then’ can potentially pick out any time (save that of the context), but which particular time is not settled by “brute facts of the context” and instead must be fixed by “something else”.
For the sake of simplicity, I will focus discussion in what follows on the case ofpure indexicals (hereafter simply indexicals), setting aside true demonstratives. Although
the discussion here is relevant to true demonstratives, they raise further complications
of their own that would take us too far afield to adequately address.3 Besides, the
2 Although Kaplan makes a distinction in his framework between intension (content) and extension
(referent), I will I use ‘content’ and ‘referent’ interchangeably in what follows. On the assumption that indexicals are rigid designators, the distinction effectively collapses in the cases under discussion.
3 The complications include the status of the “something else” required in order to determine a
issues with how to understand the relation between the two notions of context that I am interested here in can be raised in the case of indexicals, and so we need not worry about the complications raised by true demonstratives. The basic feature of an
indexical that is important is that it is associated with a character that determines its referent relative to acontext of use, regardless of the user’s attendant beliefs, intentions
or actions.
Despite his suggestions that the context of use represents the “brute facts of the context” in which language is used, Kaplan’s notion of context is rather more abstract. He notes, for example,
it is important to distinguish an utterance from a sentence-in-context.
The former notion is from the theory of speech acts, the latter from semantics. Utterances take time and utterances of distinct sentences cannot be simultaneous (i.e., in the same context). But to develop a logic of demonstratives it seems most natural to be able to evaluate several premises and a conclusion all in the same context (1989b, p. 546; original emphasis). As Kaplan’s remarks suggest, his notion of context is idealized and invoked primarily in the service of exploring the logical relations of sentences containing indexical expressions.4 That is, the context of use is a formal representational tool that allows contents to be assigned to indexical expressions independent of considerations of language use and utterance events. In fact, an occurrence of an indexical (orsentence- in-context in the case of a sentence containing an indexical) is Kaplan’s technical term
for “the mere combination of the expression with the context,” and in this sense, “an occurrence requires no utterance” (1989b, p. 584). Thus, Kaplan’s theory assigns a content to sentences whose utterance could never be felicitous, but which it seems could nevertheless express truths, such as ‘I am not speaking’, which is true provided the value of the agent parameter of the context of use is not speaking at the circumstance
of evaluation.5
Kaplan encourages us to construe “context in this more abstract, formal way, as providing the parameters needed to generate content” (1989b, p. 591). Accordingly, it is
in thecontext of use. See Chapter 3 for discussion. See also Braun (1996), Stokke (2010), and King (2014).
4 Similar remarks are found elsewhere: “Utterances take time, and are produced one at a time;
this will not do for the analysis of validity” (1989b, p. 584). The notion of context also plays an ineliminable role in the definition of truth in Kaplan’s system (1989a, p. 522).
5 Similarly, Moore’s paradox (‘P, but I don’t believeP’) is unproblematic within Kaplan’s formal
system, and is assigned the content that is true just in caseP is true and the agent of thecontext of usedoes not believeP (1989b, p. 585).
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important to be clear on the relation between thecontext of use and what (metaphysical
possibilities) it represents. The context of use, recall, is a quadruple of parameters,
<agent, time, location, world>, which correspond to aspects of contexts, themselves
defined in terms of possible worlds, though not all possible worlds contain contexts. Kaplan writes,
not every possible circumstance of evaluation is associated with an (appro- priate) possible context of use, in other words, not every possible-world is a possible actual-world. Though there may be circumstances in which no one exists, no possible context of use can occur in such circumstances (1989b, p. 597).
This constraint ensures that ‘Something exists’ is necessarily true in Kaplan’s formal language, the Logic of Demonstratives (LD).
Kaplan further restricts the set of possible worlds that contain contexts to include only those “proper” ones such that the agent is located at the location at the time in the possible world (1989a, p. 509). Predelli (2005) argues that “the decision to restrict the [semantic] system’s attention to proper indexes [i.e., contexts of use] turns out
to yield empirically inadequate results” on account of (inter alia) answering machine
cases (p. 62).6 According to Kaplan, though, this restriction is grounded in our a priori knowledge of the actual world, namely, “our knowledge that certain facts always
hold at a world containing a context” (1989b, p. 597; original emphasis). Indeed, such “proper” contexts are important for Kaplan’s logical results, since if these parameters could vary freely, ‘I am here now’ would not be true in all contexts of use, though, as
Predelli notes, it would always be “warrantedly utterable” (2005, p. 60).
Given the restriction to “proper” contexts, Kaplan’s notion of a context of use
can be thought of as representing a centered possible world, consisting of a possible
world and an agent in that world at a time in that world.7 Nevertheless, as we noted, the agent need not be speaking at the time in the possible world represented by the
context of use. In other words, the centered possible world need not be centered on an
utterance. As such, the context of use represents, in the first place, certain predictable
features of the class of possible worlds that include individuals, though not necessarily
6 E.g., ‘I’m not here right now’ recorded and played on an answering machine. Kaplan (1989a) notes
this kind of case, but does not address it in detail (p. 491, n. 12). Cf. Predelli (2005) ch. 2, s. 4 for discussion.
7 Although Kaplan construes the location as a “brute fact” of the context on a par with the agent
and time, the value of thelocation parameter can be derived from the location occupied by the agent at the time in thecentered possible world.
actual utterance events or situations of language use. This is significant in that, as Caplan (2003) notes, Kaplan’s
semantics tells us about sentences, not utterances, relative to contexts; by itself, semantics doesn’t tell us anything about utterances. If we want to use semantics to figure out something about utterances, then we’re going to have to find a way to take what semantics tells us about sentences relative to contexts and use that information to figure out something about utterances (p. 194, n.10).
In other words, Kaplan’s framework cannot be directly applied to linguistic utterances without some further assumptions about how the latter are represented by the former.8 Whatever its relation to everyday situations in which natural language use occurs, Kaplan’s metaphysical notion of context has a well defined role to play (as a tool to assign contents) within his formal semantic framework for modeling languages contain- ing indexical expressions, and as such is useful for investigating logical coonsequence and deriving logical truths in such langauges. Indeed, according to Kaplan, “the most important and certainly the most convincing part of my theory is just the logic of demonstratives itself” (1989a, p. 487).