Abstract

From human relations to philosophy, many problems arise because of the indefiniteness or indeterminacy of terms. In order to solve such problems, we need to determine the whatness or quiddity of the meaning of any term, sentence or statement. Questioning such quiddity requires the determination of how the terms of the language acquire their meaning in the first place. Most of the terms the meanings of which we need to determine the meanings are used to inform us about the objects in the external world. It is not possible to complete the semantics of natural languages without doing semantics of context sensitive terms like indexicals. In our work we present David Kaplan’s theory of context sensitive terms. In cases of such terms any inquiry into the determination of the meanings of terms as well involve an answer to the question how we decide the reference of the terms. For this purpose, many philosophers like Frege and Russell in order to eliminate ambiguity in language and make language into a more objective endeavor to do semantics of names and descriptions. But they did not work on the semantics of indexical terms which encompass a large portion of language. It is not possible to complete the semantics of natural languages without doing semantics of context sensitive terms like indexicals. In our article we present and critically discuss David Kaplan’s theory of indexical terms.