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Can supervaluationism successfully handle indirect speech reports? This chapter considers and rejects Schiffer's claim that they cannot. One alleged problem with indirect speech reports is that the truth of ‘Carla said that Bob is tall’ implausibly requires that Carla said all of a huge number of precise things (i.e. that Bob was over n feet tall, for values of n corresponding to precisifications of ‘tall’). This chapter shows why the supervaluationist is not committed to this. It argues that vague singular terms are no particular problem for supervaluationism within indirect speech reports, but there remain some issues surrounding certain vague demonstratives. The supervaluationist has good responses available, however, and any remaining questions face all theories of vagueness and are more appropriately addressed within a theory of demonstratives rather than a theory of vagueness.

Austinian semantics resolves some problems that beset other semantic accounts of knowledge claims. Special attention is given to problems that arise for more standard forms of semantic contextualism, concerning indirect reports, metalinguistic claims about others’ knowledge claims, and retrospective reports about one’s own claims. Because the Austinian semantic theory invokes an invariant semantic contribution for ‘knows’, we have an invariant proposition (the ‘Russellian proposition’) which is evaluated for truth or falsity with respect to the situation the utterance is about. The Russellian proposition serves as the stable semantic value in indirect reports of what others say. The Austinian fares better in capturing the fact that the skeptic is disagreeing with ordinary speakers, since according to Austinian semantics, when the skeptic denies we have knowledge, the term ‘knows’ means the same in his mouth as it does in ours.

In certain circumstances, it is possible to report the utterance of an indefinite noun phrase using a definite referring expression, such as a name or pronoun. The referent of the definite must match the individual the original speaker had “in mind” when uttering the indefinite, and the speaker must not have been in a position to use a definite instead (the individual in question must not have been familiar, and so identifiable, to the hearer at the time of the original utterance). To account for this data, the chapter claims that indefinites refer (though truth-conditionally they function like restricted existential quantifiers), but also that coreference is not always sufficient for substitution in an indirect report. (Perhaps surprisingly, the second, less controversial, claim will explain the cases motivating the condition of hearer non-identifiability.) In sum, the data tells us about the semantics of indefinites and the tolerances of indirect reporting.

Initially, the semantics of quantifiers seems to suggest a context-insensitive account of their interpretation unlike, say, indexical or demonstrative noun phrases. However, most philosophers think that incomplete quantifiers and the need for domain restriction shows that all quantifiers are, in fact, context sensitive. This chapter carefully establishes a set of intuitions prevalent in the literature in favour of a context-sensitive analysis of the semantics of quantifiers. These intuitions are shown to be misguided through a Kripke test, a technique which establishes the consistency of a set of assumed counter-examples and a given phenomenon by showing that in a language in which this phenomenon is stipulated, these counter-examples persist. This task is achieved by using the connection (or rather lack thereof) between reports of what is said/asserted/claimed and semantic content to show that the context-sensitive intuitions are the result of the non-interpretive, non-semantic effects of true indirect reports.

This chapter starts with a puzzle about how a semantic theory can both incorporate the high level of context sensitivity of ‘what is said’ (O1) and the ability speakers have to express the same claim/assertion/proposition across a wide range of contexts (O2). The problem is that these two observations seem to be at odds with one another, and any semantic theory that postulates O1 must do so in a way that respects O2. Various proposed solutions are considered including the denials of O2, shared content, and absolute truth. These solutions are all shown to be unacceptable. A positive solution—Pluralistic Minimalism—is proposed. This option requires us to reject the idea that the variability of ‘what is said’ is relevant to semantics and the view that indirect reports report on semantic contents.

This chapter presents one strategy for responding to Strawson’s challenge that appeals to the idea that sameness of extension does not track samesaying. If a sentence p contains a context-sensitive term like ‘smart’, then if I say p in one context, and you say p in a different context, and relative to these two contexts ‘smart’ has a (slightly) different extension, it can still be true to say that both you and I said the same thing. If you accept this, then you should also accept that extension doesn’t track sameness of topic. This means that—contra the Strawsonian challenge—it can be true both that the extension is changed, and the topic has remained the same. The chapter shows how this line can be used against various versions of the Strawsonian challenge, compares the author’s view with some alternatives, and considers whether there are any limits to revision.