The main chapters of this thesis develop and defend a version of two-dimensional semantics that provides an account of Kripkean a posteriori necessity.

Donnellan and Predelli have both responded to accusations that in virtue of involving intentions in their accounts of reference they are committed to ‘Humpty Dumpty’ theories of reference. I examine their responses and argue that they do not succeed in escaping this accusation. Corazza et al. (2002) propose an alternative to Predelli’s account involving linguistic conventions instead of intentions. I argue that Predelli’s responses to Corazza et al. are unsatisfactory and that the intentional theorist is obliged either to accept the (...) Humpty Dumpty conclusion or to adopt the conventional picture, thus relegating intentions to a less significant role in their reference theory. (shrink)

In this paper I explored three well-known cases that seem to cast doubt on the notion that a speaker is always at the place of the utterance when the utterance occurs. I gave a few examples produced in Second Life environment, which cannot be handled correctly by evaluating the expression at issue with respect to the traditional view, i.e., the kaplanian framework—where the agent and the utterer will always be identical, and the referent of “I” will always be the utterer. (...) The same happens to “here” and “now”; in each case the character of the indexical is a function from a contextual parameter to the referent of the expression. An example of logical truth peculiar to indexicals is the sentence “I am here now”, since, according to that view, no utterance can take place in a context whose agent is not in its location in its time. Finally I concluded by claiming that particular kinds of utterances produced in virtual environments (VE) break with the logical truth status of “I am here now”. (shrink)

Ruffino-Marco_Deferred-utterances-and-proper-contexts.

The popular interpretation of token‐reflexivism states that at the level of logical form, indexicals and demonstratives are disguised descriptions that employ complex demonstratives or special quotation‐mark names involving particular tokens of the appropriate expression‐types. In this article I first demonstrate that this interpretation of token‐reflexivism is only one of many, and that it is better to think of token‐reflexivism as denoting a family of distinct theoretical frameworks. Second, I contrast two interpretations of the idea of the token‐reflexive paraphrase of an (...) indexical sentence. The utterance approach claims that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of entire utterances. The sub‐utterance approach maintains that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of the particular indexical words used in the utterance. Next, I pose a problem that shows that neither of the two approaches is correct. The problem shows that the only viable version of the token‐reflexive proposition must somehow take into account the referential intentions of the speaker of the context. Therefore I conclude the article by sketching the framework of restricted intentional token‐reflexivism. I argue that it is an attractive semantic theory of distributed utterances that, among other things, enables automatic and intentional indexicals to be distinguished. (shrink)