On the Alleged Ambiguity of 'Now' and 'Here'

It is argued that, in order to account for examples where the indexicals ‘now’ and ‘here’ do not refer to the time and location of the utterance, we do not have to assume (pace Quentin Smith) that they have different characters (reference-fixing rules), governed by a single metarule or metacharacter. The traditional, the fixed character view is defended: ‘now’ and ‘here’ always refer to the time and location of the utterance. It is shown that when their referent does not correspond to the time and/or location of the utterance, ‘now’ and ‘here’ work in an anaphoric way, inheriting their reference from another noun phrase. The latter may be explicit or implicit in the discourse. It is also shown that ‘now’ and ‘here’ can inherit their reference from a presupposed or tacit reference. In that case, they are coreferential with what will be labeled a ‘tacit initiator’. This anaphoric interpretation has the merit of fitting within the Kaplanian distinction between pure indexicals (‘now’, ‘here’, ‘today’, etc.) and demonstratives (‘this’, ‘that’, ‘she’, etc.). According to a widely accepted theory popularized by Kaplan (1977) and Perry (1977), indexicals (‘I’, ‘today’, ‘this’, ‘now’, etc.) are directly referential expressions. As such, they contribute the referent itself to what is said (i.e., the proposition expressed). Thus, an utterance containing an indexical expresses a singular proposition. This theory has been labeled the direct reference theory. It holds that an indexical expression has a fixed linguistic meaning (character), which can be represented as a function from context of utterance to referent (content). The character or meaning is, roughly, a rule explaining how reference is fixed – it is what we find in a dictionary for an indexical. Under the entry ‘I’, for instance, one reads that it refers to the speaker or writer, while ‘today’ refers to the day it is uttered, etc. If we change the context, we are likely to change the content. ‘I’ said by you does not refer to the same individual as when it is uttered by me and ‘today’ uttered today does not refer to the same day as ‘today’ uttered yesterday. If today we desire to say what we said yesterday using ‘today’, we use ‘yesterday’. The character, however, remains constant across contexts. Let us call this the fixed character thesis. The fixed character thesis has been criticized. It has been argued (Quentin Smith; 1989) that it cannot account for all the relevant data. We use, for instance, present tense locutions to refer to past or future events. Synthese 138: 289–313, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.