Communicating by Doing Something Else

Roughly put, occasion-sensitivity is the thesis that the meaning of a sentence is not a Kaplanian character: a function from canonical features of a context to truth conditions. Many have doubted occasion-sensitivity because they doubt that linguistic communication would be possible if the meaning of a sentence was not a Kaplanian character. The aim in this chapter is to describe what would be sufficient to rebut this criticism. It proceeds by identifying assumptions that David Lewis (in his book Convention) has to make in order to reach the conclusion that linguistic conventions are required for linguistic communication. The chapter then describes circumstances in which these assumptions would be false despite the absence of Kaplanian characters. To show that Kaplanian characters are not necessary for linguistic communication, it would be sufficient to show (without postulating Kaplanian characters) that these assumptions are false in our own case.