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Relativism about knowledge-attributions is the thesis that knowledge attributions express propositions the truth of which is relative to a judge. On this view, a knowledge attribution may express a proposition that is true for one judge, and false for another. This chapter explains and criticizes various versions of relativism about knowledge attributions.

The discovery of the twin categories of reference and singular thought is widely felt to be one of the landmark achievements of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. On the one hand there is the distinction between bona fide referential expressions of natural language and those that are about objects only in some looser sense. On the other hand there is a corresponding distinction between a thought that is loosely about an object, and one whose bond with an object is robust enough for it to count as genuinely ‘singular’ or ‘de re’. This chapter tries to shed light on these two ideas by focusing on semantic ideas connected with Russell’s category of logically proper names that have been widely brought to bear on their successors.

Knowing what an expression means is neither knowing that it means such and such nor knowing how to do things with the expression; it is being in, or being apt to be in, a certain kind of language-processing state. The account of knowledge of meaning is seen to suggest that, strictly speaking, there are no such things as expression meanings. Whether or not that is so, there are things to which an expression must be related if it is to have meaning, and with an eye to David Kaplan’s characters, these things are called characters*. This leads to a critical discussion of two-dimensional semantics.

This chapter focuses on the perplexities some philosophers have felt concerning the simple first person pronoun “I.” It considers the views of David Kaplan, Frege, and David Lewis. It argues that the first person use of “I” does not have a Fregean sense, at least if this means that it has a definition. But it might be a paradigmatic case of fixing a reference by means of a description: it is a rule of the common language that each of us fixes the reference of “I” by the description “the subject.” However, since each of us speaks a natural language, and not an imaginary “scientific language” spoken by no one, for each of us the referent can be different.

This chapter discusses the contributions of Saul Kripke and David Kaplan, which are leading elements of a body of work that changed the course of analytic philosophy. It first deals with the views of Kripke. The necessity featured in Naming and Necessity is the nonlinguistic notion needed for quantified modal logic and the modal de re. Kripke's articulation of this notion is linked to his discussion of rigid designation, and metaphysical essentialism. The remainder of the chapter deals with Kaplan, focusing on the tension between logic and semantics; the basic structure of the logic of demonstratives; direct reference and rigid designation; and English demonstratives vs. “dthat”-rigidified descriptions.

A critical discussion of David Lewis’s two-dimensional framework for doing semantics. Lewis’s framework has the same abstract structure as David Kaplan’s semantics for demonstratives, where the truth-value of a sentence is defined as a function of two parameters, one of which is a context. This chapter focuses on the notion of context that is common to the two frameworks, arguing that it is not suited to play the pragmatic role that we need a notion of context to play. The technical notion that both Kaplan and Lewis call ‘context’ plays several different roles in the explanation of speech that need to be distinguished, and this notion also needs to be distinguished from a pragmatic notion of context as the body of information that is available for the determination of what is said.

Chapter 1 presents indexicalism as idea that the world is ultimately best described in terms of indexical expressions like 'here', 'you', 'now', 'outside', 'same' or 'other'. Substantive descriptions are appropriate to think things through only to the extent that they have an implicit indexicality. Indexical expressions are context-dependent and therefore thoroughly situated. Indexicalism is a paradoxico-metaphysics in the terms defined by Cogburn; it can also be seen as a critique of metaphysics if metaphysics aims at a general, substantive view of how things are and they are such that no substantive description is adequate. Indexicalism draws from elements of Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism – especially the notion of locus standi in the theory of measurement – of Levinas’ account of the asymmetric Other and of Perry and Kaplan’s work on demonstratives and implicit indexicality. An indexicalist image of things has no space for total, third-person views of everything. The postulated absolute is deictic.

The Symmetry Constraint calls for the possibility of token-equivalence in sense between a token of “I” and, for example, a token of “you.” But understanding how to use the first person pronoun “I” is different from understanding how to use the second person pronoun “you.” So one corollary of the Symmetry Constraint is that we need to distinguish: (a) The token-sense of “I”: What a speaker/hearer understands when they utter or hear a token utterance involving “I”; and (b) The type-sense of “I”: What a speaker/hearer can properly be said to understand by the expression “I.” This chapter shows how this distinction cannot be mapped onto standard distinctions made in discussions of “I” and other indexicals. In particular, none of the proposed accounts does what a satisfactory account of token-sense must do, namely, respect both Frege’s criterion for sameness/difference of sense (particularly with respect to coreferential proper names) and the Symmetry Constraint.

Existing metasemantic projects presuppose that word- (or sentence-) types are part of the non-semantic base. This paper proposes a new strategy: an endogenous account of word types, that is, one where word types are fixed as part of the metasemantics. On this view, it is the conventions of truthfulness and trust that ground not only the meaning of the words (meaning by convention) but also what the word type is of each particular token utterance (words by convention). The same treatment extends to identifying the populations through which the conventions prevail. The paper considers whether this proposal leads to new underdetermination challenges for metasemantics, and makes a case that it does not.