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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The phrase 'one hundred years ago' shifts the context of utterance for expressions within its scope

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Kaplan's formal semantics distinguishes context of utterance (fixed at time of speech) from circumstance of evaluation (shiftable by operators).
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    • 2.Temporal operators like 'one hundred years ago' shift the circumstance of evaluation, not the context, leaving indexical content anchored to the actual utterance time.
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    • 3.Therefore, 'the second-largest city' is a definite description evaluated at a past time, not an expression whose context has shifted.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.On a Russellian analysis, 'the second-largest city in the United States' is a quantificational description, not a directly referential term sensitive to context of utterance.
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    • 2.Quantificational descriptions take wide or narrow scope relative to temporal operators without requiring any shift in the context of utterance itself.
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    • 3.The observed temporal relativity of the description's satisfaction conditions is fully explained by scope interaction, making context-shift an unnecessary and theoretically costly posit.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.In the sentence 'One hundred years ago, the second-largest city in the United States was Chicago', the description 'the second-largest city in the United States' refers to the city it would have referred to if uttered one hundred years ago
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    • 2.This reference shift is triggered by the temporal operator 'one hundred years ago'
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