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How much of what a sentence means depends on the context in which it is uttered? This question is the central pressure behind the study of context and indexicality. Indexicals—words like "I," "here," "now," and "today"—shift their reference with each use, making them a natural test case for the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Over the past five decades, philosophers have developed a series of frameworks that progressively expand, refine, or resist the role of context in meaning. The arc of this debate moves from a baseline theory of direct reference to increasingly sophisticated accounts of how context shapes truth-conditional content, and finally to proposals that relativize truth itself to a perspective.
David Kaplan’s 1977 work "Demonstratives" established the modern framework for indexicals. He drew a sharp distinction between two dimensions of meaning: character (a rule that determines the referent given a context) and content (the proposition expressed, which is evaluated at a circumstance of evaluation). For example, the character of "I" is "the speaker of the context," while its content in a given utterance is the speaker herself. Kaplan argued that indexicals are directly referential: their content is simply the individual or object picked out, not a descriptive sense. This framework gave semantics a precise tool for handling context-dependence while keeping the proposition expressed stable once the context is fixed. Kaplanian Semantics became the baseline against which all later theories measure themselves.
Almost immediately, philosophers saw that Kaplan’s character/content distinction could be extended to handle phenomena beyond indexicals, such as the interaction of necessity and apriority. Two-Dimensional Semantics, developed by Robert Stalnaker and later refined by others, generalizes the two-dimensional structure: the first dimension (often called the diagonal) captures the epistemic or a priori information carried by an utterance, while the second dimension (the horizontal) captures the counterfactual truth conditions. This framework preserves Kaplan’s insight that context supplies a parameter for determining content, but it adds a second parameter—the world of the context—to model how sentences like "Water is H₂O" can be both necessary and a posteriori. Two-Dimensional Semantics thus extends Kaplan’s machinery to address problems in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics, showing that the same formal apparatus can illuminate the relationship between meaning, knowledge, and modality.
John Perry’s 1979 paper "The Problem of the Essential Indexical" introduced a challenge that pure truth-conditional semantics could not easily meet. Perry pointed out that indexicals are not just a technical curiosity; they play an indispensable role in explaining action and belief. A belief expressed as "I am making a mess" has a different cognitive significance from "The philosopher with the torn pants is making a mess," even if the reference is the same. Perry argued that no purely propositional content—no set of possible worlds or truth conditions—can capture this difference. The essential indexical thus forced semanticists to recognize that context affects not only reference but also the cognitive role of utterances. This framework did not replace Kaplanian Semantics but rather added a layer of psychological reality that the formal theory had abstracted away from. It set the stage for later debates about whether semantics should incorporate cognitive content or remain purely truth-conditional.
Dynamic Semantics, originating in the work of Irene Heim and Hans Kamp on discourse representation, redefined meaning itself as context-change potential. Instead of treating a sentence as expressing a static proposition, dynamic approaches see it as a function that updates the information state of the interlocutors. This shift was motivated by phenomena like anaphora and presupposition, where the interpretation of later expressions depends on the context built by earlier ones. Dynamic Semantics directly challenges the Kaplanian assumption that content is fixed once context is supplied. In a dynamic framework, the meaning of an indexical is not just its referent but its capacity to transform the conversational scoreboard. This framework coexists with Kaplanian Semantics by offering a different level of analysis: while Kaplan explains how reference is determined, dynamic semantics explains how reference contributes to the ongoing discourse. It also provides a natural home for the essential indexical insight, since the cognitive update of a belief can be modeled as a change in the information state.
By the late 1980s, philosophers began to argue that context-sensitivity is far more pervasive than indexicals alone. Contextualism, associated with Charles Travis, François Recanati, and later John MacFarlane, holds that almost every expression—including nouns, verbs, and quantifiers—can shift its truth-conditional contribution depending on the context of utterance. For example, "It is raining" may be true in one context and false in another even if the same location is intended, because the standard of what counts as "raining" varies. Contextualists argue that the semantic content of an utterance is always a function of pragmatic enrichment, not just the output of a character rule. This framework directly challenges Kaplanian Semantics by denying that a sentence has a determinate content prior to pragmatic processing. It also absorbs the essential indexical insight by making cognitive and communicative context central to content determination. Contextualism remains a leading position, especially in the philosophy of language and linguistics.
In response to contextualism, Semantic Minimalism, defended by Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, insists that sentences have minimal propositions that are stable across contexts. According to minimalists, the only context-sensitive expressions are those that are grammatically marked as such (like indexicals and demonstratives). All other apparent context-sensitivity is a matter of speech act content or implicature, not semantics. Minimalism preserves the Kaplanian idea that semantics can be done with a limited set of context parameters, and it rejects the contextualist claim that pragmatic processes infiltrate truth conditions. The debate between contextualism and minimalism is the central fault line of the subfield today. Minimalists argue that contextualism overgenerates context-sensitivity and undermines the possibility of shared content across contexts; contextualists reply that minimal propositions are too thin to capture what speakers actually assert and understand.
Relativism about Truth, developed by John MacFarlane and others, offers a third way between contextualism and minimalism. It proposes that the truth of an utterance can depend not only on the context of utterance but also on the context of assessment—the perspective from which the utterance is evaluated. For example, a sentence about taste ("Licorice is tasty") might be true relative to one assessor and false relative to another, even if the context of utterance is fixed. Relativism extends the Kaplanian framework by adding a third parameter (the assessment context) to the character and circumstance. This move preserves the idea that semantic content is context-sensitive (like contextualism) but avoids the contextualist claim that content shifts with every utterance context. Instead, it allows the same content to be evaluated differently from different perspectives. Relativism about Truth is a live option for predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and future contingents. It remains in active disagreement with both contextualism and minimalism, each of which denies that assessment-sensitivity is needed.
Today, all seven frameworks remain active, but they occupy different roles. Kaplanian Semantics is the default formal theory for indexicals and is widely used in linguistics. Two-Dimensional Semantics continues to be applied in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essential indexical is a standard datum that any theory of belief and action must accommodate. Dynamic Semantics is a major paradigm in formal semantics and pragmatics. The contextualism-minimalism debate defines the main battlefield: contextualists dominate in pragmatics-oriented philosophy, while minimalists hold ground in truth-conditional semantics. Relativism about Truth is a growing research program for domains where disagreement seems faultless. The leading frameworks agree that context matters for meaning, but they disagree sharply on how much and at what level. Contextualists and relativists argue that context penetrates truth conditions; minimalists and Kaplanians insist on a stable semantic core. The unresolved question is whether a unified theory can accommodate the full range of context-sensitivity without collapsing into either extreme. The study of context and indexicality thus remains a dynamic field where each new framework refines, challenges, or extends the insights of its predecessors.