I'm Here Now, But I Won't Be Here When You Get This Message

Answering machine messages allegedly refute Kaplan's ‘classical account’ of the semantics of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’. The classical account doesn’t allow that a token of ‘I am not here now’ can be true; but these words in an answering machine message can communicate something true. In this paper I argue that the true content communicated by an answering machine message is extra-semantic content conveyed via the mechanism of ‘externally-oriented make-believe’. An answering machine message is associated with a game of make-believe whose rules prescribe making believe that the agent who recorded the message is speaking there (at the end of the line) and then; and it thereby conveys that the circumstance that would make the message fictionally true obtains.