Kaplan and the Formal and Intentional Aspects of Context

The blossoming of possible world semantics in the 1960s and 70s set the stage for many developments in research on indexical reference and other aspects of context-sensitivity; I will focus in this chapter on the work of David Kaplan, particularly his influential monograph Demonstratives, because his work is well known, and covers the central issues. I will examine the development of his theory of direct reference as a response to difficulties in adapting model-theoretic semantics to accommodate specific features of natural language—de re readings of indirect discourse, semantic peculiarities of proper names, and especially, the centrality of context-sensitive expressions within the class of directly referential uses of language. Kaplan's work provides a fine-grained conceptual vocabulary for analyzing important contextual influences on meaning, and also recapitulates, in a series of widely discussed contemporary examples, the varied roles that context will be required to play in a comprehensive theory of meaning for natural language. It also displays a step by step progression of thought from extensional models of context, such as those found in Bar-Hillel and Montague, to a view which recognizes inescapable intentional aspects of contextual structure and function. Thus Kaplan's evolving views on indexical reference suggest—if only in broad outlines—much of what a theory of context must contain; in so doing, they set the stage for the theory to be developed in the final chapter.