Kaplan’s Formal Framework

Kaplan (1989a) introduced a formal semantic theory for modeling context-sensitivity that aimed to provide an answer to the question of, for example, “what is said when a speaker points at someone and says, “He is suspicious” ” (p. 489). Due to the pronoun, the latter sentence can be used to express different propositions on different occasions. When used to talk about Stephen Harper, the individual picked out by ‘He’ is plausibly Stephen Harper, and when used to talk about Barack Obama, it is plausibly Barack Obama. Kaplan’s theory targets a range of expressions he calls indexicals, which can be used to pick out distinct individuals, times and locations depending on when, where, and by whom they are used.2 _{Nevertheless, even though different speakers can} say different things when uttering ‘He is suspicious’, the same sentence-type is being used in each case. And insofar as they share a common, unambiguous linguistic form, distinct utterances of expressions containing indexicals would seem to share certain semantic properties.

Kaplan analyzes indexicals in terms of a fundamental distinction between two levels of meaning. The semantic aspect of an indexical that is common to all its uses is captured at the level of character, which is “set by linguistic conventions and, in turn,

determines the content of the expression in every context” (p. 504). More specifically, the character of an indexical “provides a rule which determines the referent in terms of certain aspects of the context” (p. 490). In contrast, the level of content varies with

context and corresponds to the distinct individuals, times and locations picked out by distinct occurrences of indexicals. The upshot of the distinction was to isolate the invariant features of indexicals in their characters, defining them as rules that yield distinct, determinate contents by appeal to certain variable aspects of context.

Kaplan further distinguished between two kinds of indexicals. Pure indexicals

have their contents fixed simply in terms of features of the context, such as the time, location, etc. For example, ‘now’ picks out the time of the context as its content, and

2 _{Kaplan (1989a) writes,}

The group of words for which I propose a semantical theory includes the pronouns ‘I’, ‘my’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘she’, ‘it’, the demonstrative pronouns ‘that’, ‘this’, the adverbs ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’, the adjectives ‘actual’, ‘present’, and others (p.

489)

The proper range of context-sensitive, or indexical, expressions is the subject of much debate. See Cappelen and Lepore (2005) and the references therein for a recent discussion.

other examples include ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘today’. According to Kaplan, “[t]he linguistic rules which governtheir [i.e.,pure indexicals’] use fully determine the referent for each

context” (1989a, p. 491; original emphasis). Formally, we “represent characters by functions from possible contexts to contents” (p. 505). Possible contexts, the arguments of character functions, are represented by an ordered n-tuple of parameters including

agent, time, place/location, and possible world such that the agent is located at the

time at the place/location in the possible world (p. 509; 543-44). Each parameter represents one of the “aspects of context” in terms of which character functions are defined. For example, the character of ‘I’ takes a possible contextc as argument and

yields the value corresponding to the agent parameter of c, which is the content of

‘I’ relative to c. Somewhat less formally, ‘I’ refers to “the agent of the context” and

similarly for the other pure indexicals (p. 505).3

The contents oftrue demonstratives, on the other hand, do not seem to vary strictly

in virtue of the typical features of context. Examples include ‘we’, ‘she’, ‘that’, ‘these’, etc. To illustrate, consider the following sentences (and contextual information).

(1) That is Hannah’s bag (At a busy baggage carousel)

(2) She is a yoga teacher (Amidst several females)

(3) Jeff is playing guitar in a band now (Discussing Jeff at 9:45pm, September 7, 2010)4

(4) John thinks he is the smartest person in the room (John is not the only male in the room)

In (1), ‘that’ could be used to refer to any of the bags on (or around) the carousel, and in (2), ‘she’ could be used to refer to any of the females in the vicinity. A felicitous use of (3) allows that Jeff not be playing guitar in a band at 9:45pm, September 7, 2010. And in (4), ‘he’ can be used to refer to John or another male.5 _{In each case, the} content of the expression does not seem to be fixed simply by appeal to the context

3 _{Throughout this essay I use ‘content’ and ‘referent’ interchangeably, ignoring the distinction between}

intension (content) and extension (referent) in Kaplan’s framework. Insofar as Kaplan regards them as directly referential, the distinction is negilible in the case of indexicals.

4 _{Stokke does not appear to distinguish between pure indexicals and true demonstratives and}

includes (inter alia) ‘here’ and ‘now’ amongst the class ofintention-sensitiveexpressions, whereas King restricts his account to Kaplan’s true demonstratives, viz., “expressions that need to be supplemented in some way in order that they secure values in contexts” unlikepure indexicals, “whose conventional meanings by themselves suffice to secure values in all contexts” (2014, p. 219).

5 _{I ignore the bound reading, which may be attested by the sloppy readings of continuations of, e.g.,}

‘John thinks he is the smartest person in the room and Tim does too.’ See chapter 2 (s. 2.4.2) and Heim and Kratzer (1998) ch. 9 for discussion.

3.2 Character-based Semantics | 77

of use (such as, e.g., the (fe)male of the context) since multiple candidate contents are equally compatible with the semantic properties of the expression. 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).

Kaplan initially claimed that a demonstrative has its content fixed, relative to a context, by an accompanying demonstration – “typically, though not invariably, a (visual) presentation of a local object discriminated by a pointing” (1989a, p. 490) – before suggesting that it is actually fixed by the speaker’s intention, and that an accompanying demonstration, if one occurs, simply externalizes the intention (1989b, p. 582).6 _{However, Kaplan never explained how his suggestion was to be formally} implemented in his theory and, as a result, the question of how a character-based semantics should be developed to accommodate demonstratives remains the subject of debate. In what follows, I focus on the proposals of King (2014) and Stokke (2010), who develop Kaplan’s later suggestion that speaker intentions fix the contents of demonstratives and defend including them in the context.