HU-phillanguage

(The following is adapted from Laura Schroeter’s article “Two-Dimensional Semantics”) "We can think of  contexts  as what David Chalmers calls ‘centered worlds.’ A centered world is a world, an agent within that world, and a time when the agent exists or utters something within that world <w, a, t>" (The following matrices are adapted from Robert Stalnaker) Trump’s use of ‘I’ in his inaugural address: w1 w2 w3 ⟨ w1,DT,t0 ⟩ DT DT DT The leftmost column represents  context The top row represents the world that takes us to an assessment of the utterance Left is  context  of utterance Top row is  circumstance of evaluation So, evaluating Trump’s use of ‘I’ in w1 requires that we keep the referent of ‘I’ fixed when we plug in w2 and w3.  So, ‘I’ is very much like a rigid designator. In other words, possible worlds get appealed to twice—once at the level of character—and once again at the lev...

Let's see if we can make sense of the differences between Kaplan and Lewis.  Here is one way to see what Lewis is up to: Kaplan-to-Lewis Translation Method S is true relative to context C iff the character of S determines in C some content CON and CON is true relative to C It is important to see that what the above says is that Kaplan’s two levels of meaning are reducible to one level of meaning (remember my remark that Lewis is the arch-reductionist). The left side (the stuff before the ‘iff’) is equivalent to the right side (the stuff after the ‘iff’). So, if the above is correct, Kaplan’s two levels of meaning can be reduced to one level of meaning. It is not as though character and content are gone. They are just combined in one stage. The context C gets all of the stuff relevant to the character stage AND all of the stuff relevant to the content stage. So, C gets bloated in order to handle everything that is relevant for determining a truth-value of S. We just...