Questions: Indexicals and Context-Sensitive Expressions

Question 1

Kaplan distinguishes 'character' from 'content' for indexicals. What is the character of the word 'now'?

Model answer: The character of 'now' is the context-invariant rule: 'the time of the context of utterance.' This rule is the same regardless of when 'now' is used. The content, by contrast, is the particular time the utterance occurs — which varies with each use. When I say 'It is raining now' at 3pm on Tuesday, the content contributed by 'now' is 3pm Tuesday; when you say it at 9am on Wednesday, the content is 9am Wednesday. The character is the constant function; the content is the output of that function applied to the specific context.

This two-level analysis is Kaplan's key contribution. It explains how the same word can be fully understood by all competent speakers (they all know the character) while contributing different semantic content to different propositions on different occasions. Character is a property of the linguistic expression type; content is a property of the expression-in-a-particular-context (the token).

Question 2

'I am here now' is true in every context of utterance because its meaning is trivially self-confirming.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

Yes — Kaplan calls such sentences 'logically true' in his technical sense: their character guarantees they will be true at every context of utterance, regardless of what world the context is in. The 'I' always refers to the speaker, 'here' to the speaker's location, and 'now' to the time of utterance — so the proposition expressed (a specific individual is at a specific place at a specific time) will always be true when uttered. However, this is not the same as analytic truth in the traditional sense, since the proposition expressed changes from context to context.