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    The reference of an expression must be relativized to bot... — Carmelics
    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    The reference of an expression must be relativized to both a context of utterance and a circumstance of evaluation, not just a context of utterance alone.

    Philosophy of Language
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    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Sentences containing temporal operators like 'In 100 years' shift the circumstance of evaluation without shifting the context of utterance.
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    • 2.When a speaker utters 'In 100 years, I will be dead', 'I' refers to the speaker at the time of utterance, even though the speaker will not exist to utter the sentence in 100 years.
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    • 3.If reference were relativized only to context of utterance, there would be no way to account for the divergence between the time of utterance and the time relevant to truth evaluation.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Kaplan's 'dthat' operator and his own formal system demonstrate that context alone can fix reference for all directly referential terms without invoking a separate circumstance parameter.
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    • 2.Temporal operators like 'In 100 years' shift what is said about a circumstance, not the referential mechanism itself, which remains anchored entirely to the context of utterance.
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    • 3.Conflating the semantic role of circumstances in determining truth-conditions with the role of context in determining reference commits a category error that the two-dimensional framework itself was designed to prevent.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Contextualist accounts in the tradition of Travis and Recanati hold that pragmatic enrichment at the level of context is sufficiently powerful to handle temporal displacement without positing a separate circumstance of evaluation.
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    • 2.If the truth-conditional content of a sentence is always fully determined relative to a rich, occasion-specific context, then introducing circumstances as a second index is a theoretical posit that violates Occam's razor.
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    Related

    Conflating the semantic role of circumstances in determining truth-conditions wi...Contextualist accounts in the tradition of Travis and Recanati hold that pragmat...If reference were relativized only to context of utterance, there would be no wa...If the truth-conditional content of a sentence is always fully determined relati...
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    Kaplan's 'dthat' operator and his own formal system demonstrate that context alo...Sentences containing temporal operators like 'In 100 years' shift the circumstan...Temporal operators like 'In 100 years' shift what is said about a circumstance, ...When a speaker utters 'In 100 years, I will be dead', 'I' refers to the speaker ...

    Similar

    If reference were relativized only to context of utterance, there woul...80%An expression that rigidly designates its referent from a fixed contex...78%The content of the phrase determines different references with respect...78%If an expression were genuinely context-sensitive, disquotational repo...76%

    Source

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    What examples like (12) are often taken to show is that the reference of an expression must be relativized, not just to a context of utterance, but also to a circumstance of evaluation—roughly, the possible state of the world relevant to the determination of the truth or falsity of the sentence. In the case of many simple sentences, context and circumstance coincide; details aside, they both just are the state of the world at the time of the utterance, with a designated speaker and place. But se
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit