Demonstratives and saliency

Kaplan argues for the view that demonstratives are direct reference devices on the grounds of their behavior in modal and temporal contexts. Some alternative approaches to the semantics of demonstratives have been proposed (King (2001), Roberts (2002), Elbourne (2008)) in order to cover some uses of demonstratives that Kaplan's theory cannot account for. However, King, Roberts, and Elbourne do not give a sufficient explanation of the behavior of demonstratives in modal and temporal contexts. The diagnosis of this failure is that a crucial condition is missed: demonstratives refer to the most salient object satisfying their descriptive content in a context. This condition is the essential feature which differentiates demonstratives from definite descriptions. Once this feature is taken into account, an explanation of the behavior of demonstratives follows straightforwardly.