Demonstrating and Necessity

Philosophical Review 111 (4):497-537 (2002)
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Abstract

My title is meant to suggest a continuation of the sort of philosophical investigation into the nature of language and modality undertaken in Rudolf Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. My topic belongs in a class with meaning and naming. It is demonstratives—that is, expressions like ‘that darn cat’ or the pronoun ‘he’ used deictically. A few philosophers deserve particular credit for advancing our understanding of demonstratives and other indexical words. Though Naming and Necessity is concerned with proper names, not demonstratives, it opened wide a window that had remained mostly shut in Meaning and Necessity but that, thanks largely to Kripke, shall forevermore remain unbarred. Understanding of demonstrative semantics grew by a quantum leap in David Kaplan’s remarkable work, especially in his masterpiece “Demonstratives” together with its companion “Afterthoughts.” In contrast to the direct-reference propensities of these two contemporary figures, Gottlob Frege, with his uncompromisingly thoroughgoing intensionalism, shed important light on the workings of demonstratives in “Der Gedanke”—more specifically, in a few brief but insightful remarks from a single paragraph concerning tense and temporal indexicality.

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Nathan Salmón
University of California, Santa Barbara

Citations of this work

No context, no content, no problem.Ethan Nowak - 2020 - Mind and Language 36 (2):189-220.
The I in logic.Gillian Russell - forthcoming - Theoria.
Discourse and method.Ethan Nowak & Eliot Michaelson - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (2):119-138.

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References found in this work

Has semantics rested on a mistake?Howard Wettstein - 1986 - Journal of Philosophy 83 (4):185-209.
Sinning against Frege.Tyler Burge - 1979 - Philosophical Review 88 (3):398-432.
Structured characters and complex demonstratives.David Braun - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 74 (2):193--219.

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