Context and Indices

Abstract

In the last chapter worlds and times were introduced as indices along with individuals. But ‘individuals’ are understood in an extended sense to be anything at all. On p.218 I suggested that τ(0) might be used as a speaker index;. and worlds, times and speakers certainly provide a central element in accordance with which the truth or falsity of a sentence may be determined. But it was recognized long ago that sentences depend on context in many ways. Thus, deictic pronouns or demonstratives might be interpreted using an indicated-objects index, vagueness by a standards-of-precision index and so on. The earliest ways of dealing with this used to add extra contextual indices as needed. Such a process is discussed in Lewis 1972. However, it proved very easy to ridicule (see p.110f of Cresswell 1973) and rather more elaborate accounts of context were developed. In the course of this work a striking fact began to emerge, and that was that for many cases of context dependence you would find that the role of context was to fill an argument place that could sometimes be equally filled by a linguistic item or by a bound variable. Examples of this may be found on pp.1l9–128 of Cresswell 1985b..