Abstract:

Unlike the sentence 'All dogs hate cats', the sentence 'I hate cats' cannot be used to convey the same piece of information by everyone who uses it. What words like 'I', 'you', 'here', 'now' and 'today', called indexicals , are used to pick out on a given occasion depends, in some sense, on the context in which they are used.

According to standard theories of indexicality, the lexical meaning of an indexical can be thought of as a rule that fixes the referent of the indexical as a function of some contextual parameter. On a typical version of such theories, if Paul utters the sentence 'I am happy today' on Monday, then the fact that Paul is the speaker and the fact that the utterance occurs on Monday respectively determine the referents of 'I' and 'today' in that context. And so Paul's utterance thereby conveys the information that Paul is happy on Monday.

In this dissertation, I argue that the standard approach to explaining indexicality is deeply mistaken. In Chapter 1, I argue that the mistake lies in treating the fixed meanings of indexicals as reference-fixing rules. Instead, I argue, the fixed meanings of indexicals play a cognitive role, signaling to the hearer how the speaker intends to use the indexical. In Chapter 2, I construct a positive cognitive-semantic theory of how this works, and I argue that there's a body of data traditionally ignored that can best be accounted for on this approach. In Chapter 3, I present a challenge to the traditional approach that can only be met, I argue, by relinquishing the explanatory significance thought to motivate that approach. I conclude that the approach I take is superior. In Chapter 4, I reply to an objection against my theory centering on the notion of indexical validity, a notion that I argue we can do without. I conclude the chapter by showing how my theory can give a straightforward account of seemingly true utterances of sentences like 'I'm not here now'--as we might find on an answering machine--which have caused problems for the standard approach to indexicality.