The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality are distinct and separate phenomena, even if they...

In Zwei Arten von Relativismus , Max Kölbel wants to make a substantial distinction between two types of truth-relativism. According to Kölbel, indexical relativism detects hidden indexicality in certain statements (e.g. moral judgments). This leads indexical relativists to claim that the proposition expressed by such a statement is relative to a further parameter in the context of use (e.g. a ...

Archive photographs are used widely in heritage education, but the photographic experience and our understanding of it, is poorer than it could be. This is primarily because the learning often fails to harness a photograph’s tangible indexical link with the past, but also because the instability of photographic meaning requires that we assign explicit labels for historic purposes, without alway...

KAPLAN’S PUZZLE, DYNAMIC SENSES, AND DIACHRONIC PROPOSITIONS ! by ! Jack Kingston !! The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2014 Under the Supervision of Professor Michael N. Liston ! The Fregean encounters a few interconnected problems in his account of indexical sentences, each posed in one way or another by Kaplan’s puzzle of cognitive dynamics. For one, there’s a problem defending the doctr...

In Japan’s southernmost prefecture, Okinawa, the Japanese government is constructing a new military base for United States Marine Corps despite ongoing local opposition and protest. Sea grass beds, which are potential feeding grounds of critically endangered Okinawa dugong, situated within construction area. Because its critical status close to regional extinction, dugong was declared Natural M...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to investigate how linguistic knowledge interacts with indexical knowledge in older children's perception under demanding listening conditions created by extensive talker variability. METHOD Twenty-five 9- to 12-year-old children, 12 from North Carolina (NC) and 13 from Wisconsin (WI), identified 12 vowels in isolated /hVd/ words produced by 120 talkers rep...

In this paper we test the hypothesis that monophthongal /aw/ is semiotically associated with local identity in Pittsburgh. We compare results of an experimental task that directly elicits participants’ sense of the indexical value of /aw/-monophthongization with the occurrence of this variant in the same people’s speech. People who hear monophthongal /aw/ as an index of localness are unlikely t...

Vocal-tract resonances (or formants) are acoustic signatures in the voice and are related to the shape and length of the vocal tract. Formants play an important role in human communication, helping us not only to distinguish several different speech sounds [1], but also to extract important information related to the physical characteristics of the speaker, so-called indexical cues. How did for...