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David Kaplan's intellectual influence on 20th-century analytic philosophy has been transformative. He introduced lasting innovations in the philosophy of language and philosophical logic. Just as important, however, is Kaplan's way of doing philosophy; generous but incisive, his profoundly interactive style mentored countless generations of students, many of whom contribute to this book. This book collects new, previously unpublished articles on Kaplan, analyzing a broad spectrum of topics ranging from cutting-edge linguistics and the philosophy of mathematics, to metaphysics, the foundations of pragmatics, and the theory of communication. With its historical introduction and personal tributes, this book also reveals much of Kaplan's life and times, highlighting the key players of analytic philosophy of the last century, and underscoring Kaplan's substantial impact on contemporary philosophy.

This article reviews the literature on a particular kind of operator present in natural languages, i.e., \"'monster operator\". This operator can shift the context of evaluation of indexicals in its scope. Its existence was initially denied by Kaplan (1989), but later authors such as Schlenker (2003) and Anand (2006) argue that such operators do exist in natural languages. However, throughout the literature, we see different definitions of that operator. In this paper, after we introduce the concept of monster operator and defend its existence based on data from Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), we argue in favor of a definition that is wider, similar to that first one proposed by Kaplan (1989). Data from the BrP will be crucial to defending our position. KEYWORDS: Semantics. Indexicals. Monsters operators. Context shifting. O presente artigo reve a literatura relacionada a um tipo particular de operador, supostamente presente em linguas naturais, chamado de \"operador-monstro\". Esse operador tem a caracteristica de poder mudar o contexto de avaliacao de itens indexicais sob seu escopo. Sua existencia ioi inicialmiente negada por Kaplan (1989), em seu famoso texto sobre a semantica dos itens indexicais, e, posteriormente, autores como Schlenker (2003) e Anand (2006) argumentaram que tais operadores de iato existem em linguas naturais, com base tanto em dados de linguas indo-europeias quanto de outras iamilias linguisticas. Contudo, analisando com cuidado a literatura, e possivel notar, nos varios autores que se debrucaram sobre o tema, diferentes definicoes desse operador. Neste artigo, apos apresentar o conceito de operador-monstro conforme postulado por Kaplan (1989) e defender sua existencia com base em dados do portugues brasileiro (PB), argumentadlos a favor de uma definicao para esse operador que seja amipla, nas linhas daquela primeiramente proposta por Kaplan (1989). Os dados do PB serao cruciaspara defender nossa posicao. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Semantica. Indexicais. Operadores-monstros. Mudanca de contexto.

Containing sixteen essays by such distinguished contributors as Robert M. Adams, Nathan Salmon, and Scott Soames, this book discusses and expands upon the work of David Kaplan and provides essential new perspectives on the philosophy of language. It includes Kaplan's hitherto unpublished paper, \"Demonstratives.\".

The distinction between a merely ‘rigidifying’ dthat and a directly-referential take on dthat-terms is well known, and is explicitly highlighted by Kaplan in Afterthoughts, his 1989 commentary on Demonstratives. What is not equally widely recognized is that Afterthoughts also oscillates between three different directly referential proposals. This essay discusses the semantic and philosophical implications of these different directly-referential interpretations of ‘dthat’, paying particular attention to (a) the relationships between syntactic and propositional structure, (b) the structure and makeup of contexts in the semantics of indexical languages, (c) the significance of context shifting devices and of so-called operators on character, and (d) the aims and scope of propositional semantics.

Certain passages in Kaplan's 'Demonstratives' are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator 'always' would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan's intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such an argument might go, focusing on the case of time and temporal operators as an illustration. What we regard as the most plausible reconstruction of the argument establishes a conclusion similar enough to that attributed to Kaplan. However, the argument overgenerates, leading to absurd consequences. We conclude that we must distinguish assertoric contents from compositional semantic values, and argue that once they are distinguished, the argument fails to establish any substantial conclusions. We also briefly discuss a related argument commonly attributed to Lewis, and a recent variant due to Weber.

In \"Demonstratives\", David Kaplan introduced a simple and remarkably robust semantics for indexicals. Unfortunately, Kaplan's semantics is open to a number of apparent counterexamples, many of which involve recording devices. The classic case is the sentence \"I am not here now\" as recorded and played back on an answering machine. In this essay, I argue that the best way to accommodate these data is to conceive of recording technologies as introducing special, non-basic sorts of contexts, accompanied by non-basic conventions governing the use of indexicals in those contexts. The idea is that recording devices allow us to use indexicals in new and innovative ways to coordinate on objects. And, given sufficient regularity in the use of indexicals on such devices, linguistic conventions will, over time, come to reflect this innovation. I consider several alternatives to this 'character-shifting' theory, but none is able to account for the data as well as the present proposal. Many face additional theoretical difficulties as well. I conclude by explaining how the character-shifting theory not only retains many of the virtues of Kaplan's original semantics, but also coheres with a plausible view on the nature of semantic theorizing more generally.

Bromberger comments on David Kaplan's paper, \"Words,\" and John Hawthorne and Ernest Lepore's criticism about the paper. Kaplan proposes a model according to which utterances and inscriptions are stages of words, which are the continuants made up of interpersonal stages along with some more mysterious intrapersonal stages. Each word in Kaplan's \"model\" is a growing tree-like structure made up of actual utterances and inscriptions, each of which is related to a predecessor in the structure, a predecessor that the speaker or writer intends to copy, though not necessarily exactly. Such predecessors may themselves be actual utterances or inscriptions, but they may also be icons in memory. Furthermore, each word, in Kaplan's \"model,\" is rooted in an initial stage, its first production in time. That stage does not stand as intended copy to any predecessor. Its role is to individuate the word containing its successive repetitions. Hawthorne and Lepore construe Kaplan as also viewing these structures as mereological joints of their stages.

Cohen defends a solution that collapses onto David Kaplan's classic semantics for non-answering-machine cases, departs from (and is superior to) Kaplan's view for answering-machine instances of extends smoothly to the variations of the answering-machine cases that have arisen in the literature. Specifically, he will defend a semantics according to which indexicals are interpreted relative to the contexts in which they are tokened. He compares this view to competitors and urges that it succeeds where they fail. Moreover, he suggests that getting clear about the puzzle and the resources required for its solution holds important methodological lessons.

The aim of this paper is to examine the kind of evidence that might be adduced in support of relativist semantics of a kind that have recently been proposed for predicates of personal taste, for epistemic modals, for knowledge attributions and for other cases. I shall concentrate on the case of taste predicates, but what I have to say is easily transposed to the other cases just mentioned. I shall begin by considering in general the question of what kind of evidence can be offered in favour of some semantic theory or framework of semantic theorizing. In other words, I shall begin with the difficult question of the empirical significance of semantic theorizing. In Sect. 2,1 outline a relativist semantic theory, and in Sect. 3,1 review four types of evidence that might be offered in favour of a relativistic framework. I show that the evidence is not conclusive because a sophisticated form of contextualism (or indexical relativism) can stand up to the evidence. However, the evidence can be taken to support the view that either relativism or the sophisticated form of contextualism is correct.