Moving parts

a new indexical treatment of context-shifting predication

Daniel Giberman

pp. 95-124

in: Synthese 193 (1), 2016.

Abstract

A context-shifting example involves a putatively non-ambiguous, non-elliptical, non-indexical declarative sentence, some distinct utterances of which differ in truth value despite sameness of place, time, surrounding objects, and other physical factors. Charles Travis has spawned a large literature by arguing that such examples undermine compositional truth-conditional semantics. After explaining how prior responses to Travis’s examples fail in the metaphysical details, the present essay develops a new approach that treats a wide range of subject terms as disguised indexicals sensitive to mereological structure.

Cited authors

Travis Charles