Deferred Utterances and Proper Contexts

1 Proper contexts Frege (1918-1919) famously makes a caveat concerning his doctrine of sense and reference: there are some special expressions like 'here', 'today' and 'that', that cannot by themselves express senses (and, therefore, cannot have references). Something else is necessary, namely, the extra-linguistic context in which the particular tokens of words of this kind occur. Therefore, in order to grasp the sense (and, therefore, the reference) expressed by an utterance containing some of these expressions in a particular context we need to know some facts about the latter (e.g., the place where a particular token of 'here' occurs, the day when a particular token of 'today' occurs, the demonstration that accompanies a particular token of 'that', etc.). These expressions are what we nowadays call indexicals, and although several philosophers now reject Frege's thesis that they have a (Fregean) sense in a context, almost everyone retains the spirit of Frege's remark that the semantic value of indexicals (i.e., their reference or extension) depends on the context of occurrence. Moreover, almost everyone takes the semantic value of an indexical to be some element present in the context of occurrence (the day of occurrence, in the case of 'today', the utterer, in the case of 'I', the location, in the case of 'here', etc.). Different indexicals take different elements of the context of utterance (the agent, the location, the time, the ad-dressee, etc.) as semantic value. And the semantic behavior of each indexical is governed by a rule or function that assigns a particular semantic value to each context of utterance. Following Kaplan, most philosophers call this function the character of the indexical, and the