Abstract
Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, and that we would do better not to.
Original language | English |
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Journal | Mind & Language |
Early online date | 3 Feb 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 3 Feb 2020 |
Keywords
- assertoric content
- demonstratives
- pragmatics
- semantics
- variablism