Singular Content and Deferred Uses of Indexicals*

Deferred uses of indexicals challenge views on singular content in at least two ways. On the one hand, they could be regarded as conveying propositions about objects which are not entirely discriminated by the hearer (or speaker as well), violating possible epistemic constraints on semantic content. On the other, they can also receive attributive interpretations, making it dubious that their truth-conditional contribution could be determined by pragmatics-free semantic processes, as recently suggested by Emma Borg (2004). This paper gives a critical review of some existing semantic approaches to the issues and it argues in support of a truth-conditional pragmatic approach, while also suggesting a modification of existing TCP accounts that seems necessary in order to accommodate the empirical facts across different uses of indexical expressions