Reflexivity, Indexicality and Names

Abstract

Introduction Consider: (1) "I am a computer scientist." (said by David Israel) (2) "David is a computer scientist." (said by someone who is referring to David Israel with "David") It has been persuasively argued by David Kaplan and others that the proposition expressed by statements like (1) is a singular proposition, true in just those worlds in which a certain person, David Israel, is a computer scientist. Call this proposition P . The truth of this proposition does not require that the utterance (1) occur, or even that Israel has ever said anything at all. Marcus, Donnellan, Kripke and others have persuasively argued for a view of proper names that, put in Kaplan's terms and applied to this example, implies that the proposition expressed by (2) is also simply P . 1 The thesis that expressions of a certain category (names, indexicals, demonstratives, pronouns, descriptions, etc.) are referential 2 holds

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 36 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.