Why Semantic Unspecificity Is Not Indexicality

The problem with these sentences is that their linguistic meaning fails to determine a truth-condition for their utterances. For instance, the linguistic meaning of (1) is just that it is raining at the time of utterance (where the temporal information is supposed to be encoded in the present tense), but there is no word which stands for a locational aspect. The semantics of the sentence thus seems to fall short of specifying in which conditions an utterance of (1) is true. As to (2), it just says that the leaves are green, where this is unspecific between the leaves being green, for instance, on the outer surface or as their natural shade (perhaps covered by a red dye). Finally, (3) simply states that Sally reads an Italian book, but in what sense the book is Italian remains unspecified. Is it written in Italian? Has it been printed in Italy? And so on. Theorists regard sentences (1)-(3) as having a meaning which is “too poor” to specify a content for their utterances. Following Sainsbury (2002), I use the term semantic unspecificity to refer to this kind of phenomenon, which falls under the headABSTRACT ____________________________________________