Chris, (01)
Indexicals had been developed in quite a bit of depth
by the person who coined the term, C. S. Peirce. (02)
> Montague semantics consists of the model theoretic analysis
> of many linguistic phenomena (notably, indexicals) that had,
> before Montague, largely been consigned to the pragmatic
> scrapheap. (03)
By the way, Peirce approached the whole treatment of names
and indexicals in an integrated way. Instead of taking
names as "rigid designators", he took the notion of index
as primitive, and he treated names as special cases of
indexicals with an associated convention for resolving
the reference. (04)
He also unified the treatment of the indexical use of
'the' with the use of 'the' for definite descriptions.
The definite description is nothing more than a special
case in which the context just happens to be global. (05)
As I keep saying, Russell, Quine, Kripke, Montague, et al.,
could have jumped a century ahead, just by doing their
homework. Quine is more to blame than any of the others,
because Peirce's Nachlass was sitting in the Harvard library. (06)
For all those years, Quine kept teaching his yearly seminar
on Frege, and he never thought that it might be useful to
suggest that some student do a dissertation in comparing
Frege to Peirce -- all the resources were right there. (07)
And by the way, Peirce developed the model theory for
existential graphs about 30 years before Tarski -- that
was actually a trivial step for Peirce, because he had
done his homework by reading Ockham. (08)
John (09)
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