Binding into Character

Abstract

Abstract Since Kaplan's “Demonstratives,” it has become common to distinguish between the character and content of an expression, where the content of an expression is what it contributes to “what is said” by sentences containing that expression, and the character gives a rule for determining, in a context, the content of an expression. A tacit assumption of theories of character has been that character is autonomous from content - that semantic evaluation starts with character, adds context, and then derives content. One consequence of this autonomy thesis is that the rules for character can contain no variables bound by content-level operators elsewhere in the sentence. Tacit appeal to this consequence features essentially both in Jason Stanley's recent argument, in “Context and Logical Form,” that all contextual ambiguity must be linked to “elements in the actual syntactic structure of the sentence uttered”, and in my arguments against character-based theories of complex demonstratives in my “Complex Demonstratives.“

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