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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Personal Identity and Memory' and 'The Inessential Indexical'

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2 ideas

19. Language / F. Communication / 5. Pragmatics / a. Contextual meaning
The basic Kaplan view is that there is truth-conditional content, and contextual character [Cappelen/Dever]
     Full Idea: In what we label 'Basic Kaplanianism', each of the sentences 'Smith is happy' and 'I am happy', as uttered by Smith, has two levels of meaning. The 'content' is a truth-conditional representation. The 'character' is a function from contexts to contents.
     From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 01.6)
     A reaction: They give this as a minimal and plausible account of the situation, without reading huge significance into the indexical. I'm inclined to see the situation in terms of the underlying proposition containing both ingredients.
It is proposed that a huge range of linguistic items are context-sensitive [Cappelen/Dever]
     Full Idea: An enormous amount has been written about whether 'all', 'know', 'might', 'delicious', 'good', 'if, then', 'and', 'red', 'just', 'justified', 'probable', 'local', 'ready', and 'left-right' are context-sensitive.
     From: Cappelen,H/Dever,Josh (The Inessential Indexical [2013], 02.3)
     A reaction: The clearest way to approach these things is ask what the (informal) domain of quantification is for that particular context. The domain can shift in the course of a sentence.