Themes from Kaplan

by Joseph Almog, John Perry and Howard Wettstein

The book contains one of David Kaplan’s most influential papers, called ‘Demonstratives’, the centre of which is his logic of demonstratives. This is a system of logic which, though a descendant of Frege’s original system, has an unusual feature. It employs terms we use in everyday life that vary their referents from speaker to speaker and use to use. Words like, ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘today’ and so on.