Abstract
The problematic status of apparently true instances of 'I am not here now' has been noted since the beginning of the contemporary debate on the semantics of indexical expressions, marked by David Kaplan's 'Demonstratives' (Kaplan 1977). According to Kaplan's account of the meaning of T, 'here', and 'now', the sentence 'I am here now' is analytically true. Yet, as Kaplan recognizes in a footnote, the negation of this sentence may apparently be employed so as to convey a true content in cases in which 'there is a significant lag between our production of speech and its audition', for instance in cases of 'messages recorded for later broadcast' (Kaplan 1977, 491, footnote 12). The debate about the puzzle to which Kaplan alludes took off in the late eighties and early nineties, with a handful of essays devoted to the analysis of recorded messages and written notes (Colterjohn and Macintosh 1987; Sidelle 1991; Smith 1989; Vision 1985). But it is only in the last decade or so that the case of 'I am not here now' has come to occupy a central role in the discussion of indexicality, partly due to a renewed interest in matters of contextual dependence (Akerman, forthcoming; Atkin 2006; Corazza 2006; Corazza et al. 2002; Dodd and Sweeney, forthcoming; Egan 2009; Gorvett 2005; Krasner 2006; Mount 2008; Perry 2003; Predelli 1998a, 1998b, 2002, 2005, 2008; Recanati 2001, 2007; Romdenh-Romluc 2002, 2008; Stevens 2009; Voltolini 2006). This essay aims at unveiling the genuinely semantic commitments of these views, and at defending an objection to Kaplan's account of the meaning of T, 'here', and 'now' grounded on the denial of what I call the 'propriety thesis'. After some preliminary remarks on Kaplan's semantics in section one, in section two I discuss a variety of proposals about the communicative effects of written notes and recorded messages, and I argue that they are successful as solutions to the puzzle of true instances of 'I am not here now' only insofar as they are committed to impropriety.
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