Adherents of two-dimensionalist semantics have devised a powerful argument to show that the Kripke-Putnam semantics is in need of an overhaul. Kripke and Putnam take “Water is H2O” to be necessary as well a posteriori. But that cannot be true. For to claim that a proposition is necessary is to claim that it is true in all contexts, whilst to maintain that it is a posteriori or informative is to...

In a famous paper in Noûs in , John Perry points out that action depends on indexical beliefs. In addition to “third-person” information about her environment, an agent need “first-person” information about where, when and who she is. This conclusion is widely interpreted as a reason for thinking that tensed claims cannot be translated without loss into untensed language; but not as a reaso...

The goals of situated agents generally do not specify particular objects: they require only that some suitable object should be chosen and manipulated (e.g. any red block). Situated agents engaged in deictic reference grounding, however, may well track a chosen referent object with such fixity of purpose that an unchosen object may be regarded as an obstacle even though it satisfies the agent’s...

Infants preferentially discriminate native speechsound categories prior to acquiring a large receptive vocabulary, implying a major role for distributional learning strategies in phoneme learning. However, it is unknown how infants extract the vowel phonemes of their language from distributional information in the presence of between-speaker variability in vowel realizations. Before we can ask ...

The organization of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, I review the two major approaches to Japanese tenses in past studies, i.e. the “uniform/non-indexical” approach (e.g. Ogihara 1996) and the “non-uniform/indexical” approach (e.g. Oshima 2006a), drawing on data that involve tenses in matrix clauses and in complement clauses (of utterance/attitude predicates).1 In Section 3, I consider te...

Most direct reference theorists believe that ‘I’ is a pure indexical. This means that when ‘I’ is uttered, it contributes with the speaker to what is said. But, from some conceptions of metonymy as reference transfer, if ‘I’ is used metonymically, it has an improper meaning and the object referred to is not the speaker. We will show that all theories of metonymy as transfer are inadequate and s...

In this paper we explore the logic of now, yesterday, today and tomorrow by combining the semantic approach to indexicality pioneered by Hans Kamp [9] and refined by David Kaplan [10] with hybrid tense logic. We first introduce a special now nominal (our @now corresponds to Kamp’s original now operator N) and prove completeness results for both logical and contextual validity. We then add propo...

The main purpose of this paper is to characterize and compare two forms any relativist thesis can take: indexical relativism and genuine relativism. Indexical relativists claim that the implicit indexicality of certain sentences is the only source of relativity. Genuine relativists, by contrast, claim that there is relativity not just at the level of sentences, but also at propositional level. ...