Demonstratives are one type of indexical. Like other indexicals, demonstratives can be used to refer to different objects on different occasions. Some examples of demonstratives are that, this, you, he, she, there, then, this dog and that yellow house.

Indexicals and Demonstratives

Philosophers of language commonly distinguish between the meaning of a linguistic expression and its referent. For example, the definite descriptions the president of the United States in 2003 and the husband of Laura Bush in 2003 refer to the same individual (namely, George W. Bush), but differ in meaning. Indexicals (also known as context-sensitive expressions) lead many philosophers to distinguish between two different sorts of meaning. Consider the paradigm indexical I and suppose that Al and Bob both utter the sentence I live in Chicago. Their utterances of I have the same meaning, in one sense of meaning. Let us call the type of meaning that their utterances...