Confessions of a schmentencite: towards an explicit semantics

Natural language semantics is heir to two formalisms. There is the extensional machinery of explicit variables traditionally used to model reference to individuals, and the intensional machinery of implicit index parameters traditionally used to model reference to worlds and times. I propose instead a simple and unified extensional formalism–explicit semantics–on which all sentences include explicit individual, world and time variables. No implicit index parameters are needed.