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Philosophy; Kaplan, Kripkenstein

 

The utterance alone does the pointing. The second is that the referent of the pure indexical depends on the context. For example, the referent of the sentence "I am here" depends on who is uttering the sentence. .
             Principle 2 (P2) at first glance seems to be in conflict with P1. However, Kaplan gives two notions as to why P1 and P2 are not in conflict but actually parallel. The first notion is context of use (contexts) and the second is circumstance of evaluation (circumstance). These two notions must be kept in mind if we are to avoid conflict between P1 and P2. However, before I detail these notions we must first understand what is meant by "directly referential" as stated in P2.
             Kaplan uses the term "directly referential" for an expression whose referent, once determined, is taken as fixed for all possible circumstances. This does not necessarily mean that the expression will pick out the same object in all possible worlds, such as Kripke's "rigid designator". As Kaplan states, it is an expression whose semantical rules provide directly that the referent in all possible circumstances is fixed to be the actual referent.
             Moving back to P2 I mentioned that there are two notions, context and circumstance. Context in terms of an expression is used to pick out a complex state when attached to a word meaning to give a context. For example:.
             "Tomorrow" refers to the day after today. To secure a referent for the word tomorrow we must know what day the word was uttered. That is, the context of "tomorrow" is a function of the context of "today". If the context of today is Monday then tomorrow refers to the day after Monday, which of course is Tuesday.
             The second notion of P2 is that of circumstance. Circumstance is used to pick out a state of affairs, that is, the expression being made true or false. It should be noted that in order to pick out the truth or falsity of an expression we must first know the context of which the expression was made.


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