Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Truth in the Realm of Thoughts
- 3 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Reconciling Deflationary Semantics with Correspondence Intuitions
- 4 Indexical Representation and Deflationary Semantics
- 5 Why Meaning Matters
- 6 Into the Wild Blue Yonder: Nondesignating Concepts, Vagueness, Semantic Paradox, and Logical Paradox
- Notes
- Index
4 - Indexical Representation and Deflationary Semantics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Truth in the Realm of Thoughts
- 3 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Reconciling Deflationary Semantics with Correspondence Intuitions
- 4 Indexical Representation and Deflationary Semantics
- 5 Why Meaning Matters
- 6 Into the Wild Blue Yonder: Nondesignating Concepts, Vagueness, Semantic Paradox, and Logical Paradox
- Notes
- Index
Summary
In the present chapter, I will argue that it is possible to extend deflationary semantic theories in such a way as to explain our use of truth-conditional semantic concepts in connection with indexical concepts and indexical thoughts.
Indexical concepts include I, you, he, she, it, here, there, now, then, yesterday, two years ago, this rabbit, and the table on your left. They also include all tensed verbal concepts. Indexical thoughts include I love you, she is having a bad hair day, and I used to play tennis with that man. Roughly speaking, a concept counts as indexical if its reference or denotation depends, at least in part, on features of the context in which the concept is entertained. And a thought counts as indexical if it is necessary to take features of the context into account in determining whether the thought counts as true. On the other hand, a concept or a thought counts as eternal if its truth-conditional semantic properties are independent of contextual features.
Indexical representations pose a variety of challenging problems for deflationary theories. As I see it, however, it holds quite generally that deflationary theories possess the resources to cope with these problems. That is to say, as I see it, where D is any reasonably powerful deflationary theory, it is possible to extend D to a theory that explains the basic features of our semantic thought and talk about indexical representations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thought and WorldAn Austere Portrayal of Truth, Reference, and Semantic Correspondence, pp. 58 - 88Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002