Professor Kemmerling raised a question about the claim that
(s)(t)('I am hungry' is true(s,t) iff s is hungry at t)
is interpretive on the grounds that an instance may be something such as
'I am hungry' is true(ludwig,t) iff Ludwig is hungry at t
and 'I am hungry' as used by Ludwig at t does not mean the same as 'Ludwig is hungry at t'.
Why say they differ in meaning? If two sentences are alike in meaning, they should be intersubstitutable in all (appropriate) contexts salva veritate. But that isn't true (it may seem) for this pair. To see this consider a different case. Contrast (1) and (2).
(1) I believe that I am about to be eaten by a great white shark (as uttered by me at t)
(2) I believe that Ludwig is about to be eaten by a great white shark (as uttered by me at t)
Are the complement sentences synonymous? If so, then surely if (2) is true than (1) is true. But suppose I come to believe (2) true because someone yells 'Ludwig is about to be eaten by a great white shark' but uses the German pronunciation of my family name. I don't recognize it as my name, but I do believe, whoever this Ludwig is, that he is about to be eaten by a great white shark. Good thing, I think, that I am not he!
There are lots of proposals about how to handle this. I like my own, which is in a paper (now or shortly to be in the left hand column) titled "Singular Thought and the Cartesian Theory of Mind." I maintain that the resistance to the substitution is due to pragmatic factors, but this requires some set up to explain exactly how it works. So I maintain that the truth conditions are indeed interpretive.
Suppose you convinced me otherwise. Then we'd need to change the way we give the truth conditions, and how would depend on exactly what more one thought was added to the proposition expressed by the first person pronoun besides the referent of the indexical.
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