In this paper, I analyze the semantics of the first person pronoun “I” from the perspective of the user/producer distinction. In the first part of the paper, I describe the Simple View and propose three interpretations of its thesis. In the second part, I analyze the notions of use and production of a linguistic token. In the next part, I show that all of the interpretations of SV are sensitive to counterexamples. In the end, I discuss possible answers of the (...) proponents of SV and argue against them. The first aim of this paper is to show that SV is wrong, and the second is to convince the reader that the user/producer distinction is of high importance in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for two theses. The first is that, among different existing accounts of proper name semantics, indexicalism—a stance that treats proper names as indexical expressions—is best suited to explaining various phenomena exhibited by the use of proper names in fictional discourse. I will discuss these phenomena and compare the solutions offered by traditional descriptivist and causal-historical theories of proper name reference with those proposed by indexicalists. Subsequently, I will offer a novel account of indexicalism about proper (...) names, which uses the apparatus of so-called hybrid expressions (Ciecierski, 2020; Künne, 1992; Predelli, 2006) as an alternative to traditional Kaplanian semantics for demonstratives. I offer an argument explaining why, among the variety of indexical views, one should favour such a hybrid theory over other available ones (e.g., Pelczar, Rainsbury, 1998; Rami, 2014) based on the analysis of “distributed utterances” (McCullagh, 2020) and statements that employ more than one fictional context. (shrink)