IV—Contextual Dependence and Definite Descriptions

Abstract

As is well-known, the reference of singular terms in natural languages often depends on the context of utterance. A token of'I', for example, refers to the person who utters that token, a token of 'now' refers to a period of time which includes the moment when this token is uttered, and so on. In the fifties, some philosophers thought that reference was always a pragmatic, contextual matter; and this view is again current among contemporary linguists and philosophers working on the pragmatics of natural languages. Does this mean that all referring expressions are 'indexical', like 'now' or 'I'? Obviously they are not. A definite description like 'the president of the United States of America in 1986' is surely not indexical in the ordinary sense. But then, how are we to understand the claim that reference is always contextdependent? Can we make that claim consistent with due recognition of the fact that not all singular terms are indexical? This is the question I will try to answer in this paper. I hasten to add that I will not be concerned with trivial forms of contextdependence, such as the dependence of reference on the language being spoken. There might exist a language, say Lambdese, where the words 'the president of the USA in 1986' mean the same as the English description 'the inventor of the zip'; supposing Julius to be the inventor of the zip, the description 'the president of the USA in 1986', uttered in a context where Lambdese and not English is spoken, would refer to Julius and not to Ronald Reagan. This form of contextdependence is trivial and will be set aside in this paper; I will always consider the language spoken as fixed. Contextdependence will be deemed non-trivial and worthy of consideration only to the extent that a given expression, with a fixed meaning, makes in different contexts different contributions to