Indexicals: A Problem for Chalmers' Two-Dimensional Semantics
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Abstract
As Chalmers himself notes, his two-dimensional semantics leads to the problem of how scenarios, i.e. epistemically possible worlds, can best represent the information who I am, where I am, and what time it is now. For Chalmers, the natural solution to this problem of indexicality is to identify scenarios with centered worlds: ordered tuples of (possible) worlds, individuals, times, and places. According to such a solution, two arbitrary tokens of ‘now’ and ‘here’ (respectively) have the same primary (or epistemic) intension, picking out the time/place marked at the center of any given scenario. Against this, I will object that there are a posteriori true, i.e. epistemically contingent, utterances of both ‘Now = now’ and ‘Here = here’. Since identifying scenarios with centered worlds seems to be the natural solution to the problem of indexicality, this will undermine Chalmers’ two-dimensional semantics.
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References
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