EROS CORAZZA, WILLIAM FISH and JONATHAN GORVETT

Whilst it may seem strange to ask to whom “I” refers, we show that there are occasions when it is not always obvious. In demonstrating this we challenge Kaplan’s assumption that the utterer, agent and referent of “I” are always the same person. We begin by presenting what we regard to be the received view about indexical reference popularized by David Kaplan in his influential 1972 “Demonstratives” before going on, in section 2, to discuss Sidelle’s answering machine paradox which may be thought to threaten this view, and his deferred utterance method of resolving this puzzle. In section 3 we introduce a novel version of the answering machine paradox which suggests that, in certain cases, Kaplan’s identification of utterer, agent and referent of “I” breaks down. In the fourth section we go on to consider a recent revision of Kaplan’s picture by Predelli which appeals to the intentions of the utterer, before arguing that this picture is committed to unacceptable consequences and, therefore, should be avoided if possible. Finally, in section 5, we present a new revision of Kaplan’s account which retains much of the spirit of his original proposal whilst offering a intuitively acceptable way to explain all of the apparently problematic data. In doing so, we also show how this picture is able to explain the scenario which motivated Predelli’s account without appealing to speaker intentions. 1. THE CLASSICAL VIEW First, some background. Pure indexicals, “I”, “here”, “now”, “today”, etc. have linguistic meanings, which are, roughly, conventions telling us how to use them. Its dictionary entry, for example, informs us that “I” stands for the speaker or writer. What the dictionary gives us aims to capture the linguistic rule governing its use. Hence a competent speaker knows, roughly, that “I” is the first person pronoun which stands for the utterer (or writer). Kaplan (1977), following Reichenbach (1947), in his logic of demonstratives argues that we should countenance a distinction between the Philosophical Studies 107: 1–21, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 2 EROS CORAZZA ET AL. content of an indexical (its referent) and its character. The latter aims to capture the linguistic meaning of indexical expressions. On this account, the character of “I” is represented by a function that takes as argument the agent, and gives as value the referent. Kaplan argues that the logic of indexical terms forces the distinction between the utterer, the contextual parameters (agent, time, place and possible world) and the referents (contents). Kaplan argues that, as utterances are features of the world and hence occur in time, it is not possible to provide a semantic evaluation of utterances.1 To overcome this, we need instead to assess the abstract notion of a sentence-in-a-context, and to do this we need to endorse the notion of a context.2 The agent is, therefore, an essentially logical notion, a contextual parameter filling the argument of the character (qua function), and giving us the referent of the indexical, and, as such, is logically distinct from the notion of an utterer. However, Kaplan simply seems to assume that the utterer and the agent will always be identical and hence that the referent of “I” will always be the utterer. This account of indexical reference, therefore, appears to assume two identity statements; that the agent is the referent (from the character of “I”), and that the utterer is the agent.3 This account, therefore, can be represented in the following way: Determination of agent Determination of referent f = (The character of “I”) The utterer is the agent f: agent → referent While the utterer and referent are parts of the material world, the agent is a logical parameter, playing the role of taking us from the language to the world. When these two components are combined, we can see how Kaplan preserves the intuition that “I” refers to the speaker or writer. The agent-utterer identity ensures that, for every token of “I”, the contextual parameter of the agent is identified with the utterer, the individual who uses the token. The character of “I” then completes the task by returning the utterer (= the agent) as the referent of the token. The character of the other indexicals, “here” and “now”, can also be represented in the same way. In each case, the character of the