Does Context Change?
Manfred Kupffer · 2014
Semantics deals both with utterances and expressions. In order to capture the variability of content, David Kaplan has proposed to explicate meaning by the technical notion of character. First every utterance uniquely determines a context. This chapter reserves the term for a semantics with the following traits: meanings are assigned to expressions; contexts are determined by utterances; meanings are characters, functions from contexts into contents; and the content of a complex expression in a context c is a function of the contents of its constituent expressions in the same context c . It argues the cases of occurrence dependence (OD), and compares two alternatives to classical Kaplanian semantics. The first is token-reflexive semantics, and the second is occurrence-interpretation. These two frameworks incorporate the prototypical ways to react to the shortcomings of Kaplanian semantics. Keywords: Kaplanian semantics; occurrence dependence (OD); occurrence-interpretation; token-reflexive semantics