Intentionalism about demonstratives is the view that the referent of a demonstrative is determined solely by the speaker's intentions. Intentionalists can disagree about the nature of these intentions, but are united in rejecting the relevance of other factors, such as the speaker's gestures, her gaze, and any facts about the addressee or the audience. In this paper, I formulate a particular version of this view, and I defend it against six objections, old and new.

Two main methods for analysing de re readings of definite descriptions in intensional contexts coexist: that of evaluating the description in the actual world, whether by means of scope, actuality operators, or non-local world binding, and that of substituting another description, usually one expressing a salient or ‘vivid’ acquaintance relation to an attitude holder, prior to evaluation. Recent work on so-called descriptive indexicals suggests that contrary to common assumptions, both methods are needed, for different ends. This paper aims to show (...) that there is indeed a division of labour between the two methods of analysis and to identify criteria for choosing among alternative ways to model the second, substitutional method. (shrink)

The discrepancy between the theoretical problems experts raise on polysemy, and the ease with which it is everyday understood by speakers, has been defined as the polysemy paradox. The same could be said for other forms of meaning ambiguity in the non-literal side, as for instance metaphor. A sort of metaphor paradox is raised by the fact that metaphor usually goes unnoticed for most people, even though experts claim that it constitutes a theoretical challenge for understanding human thought. In both (...) polysemy and metaphor cases, people’s intuitions clash with experts’ intuitions. Moreover, experts seem to disagree on the very identification criterion of the linguistic phenomena. Deference to experts is anyway important in semantic applications, such as translation, where subtle distinctions in word meaning prove to be not only useful but also essential. However, the apparently wide gap between people’s and experts’ intuitions could be reduced once the paradoxes of meaning ambiguity are explained as a result of semantic underdetermination. (shrink)