Cappelen and Dever challenge the widely accepted idea that some key aspect of intentional action is essentially indexical. They argue that the classical arguments for this coming from Perry are in fact arguments for a different phenomenon: the opacity of explanatory contexts. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that what Perry says about the ineliminability of indexical terms from explanations of intentional action fails to amount to an argument for this indexicality being essential. But this should not (...) lead us to be sceptics. In this paper, I present a different argument for the essential indexicality of intentional actions. The key premise of this argument is that intentions themselves are essentially indexical. I provide evidence for this premise and defend it against potential criticism. I also show how the essential indexicality of intentions can be used to vindicate Perry's original claims about the essential indexicality of certain beliefs and desires. (shrink)

In this paper I shall focus on Castaneda's notion of quasi-indicators and I shall defend the following theses: (i) Essential indexicals (‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’) are intrinsically perspectival mechanisms of reference and, as such, they are not reducible to any other mechanism reference...

In their recent book The Inessential Indexical Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever take issue with what has become close to philosophical orthodoxy – the view, most often associated with John Perry and David Lewis, that psychological explanations are essentially indexical. Cappelen and Dever claim that claims of essential indexicality are typically driven by intuitions rather than supported by arguments. They issue a challenge to supporters of essential indexicality: Produce an argument to back up the intuitions. This (...) paper answers their challenge. (shrink)

Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.

The ways of thinking of things associated with a few indexical expressions—e.g. ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘that’—have a special role in the causation of action. They have a role not had by, for example, the guise associated with the ‘Superman’, or the guise associated with any other proper name. So, at least, an orthodox view about action—often associated with the phrase ‘essential indexical’—has it. Recently, this view has come under scrutiny. An increasing number of philosophers think it is a (...) myth. In this paper, I do two things. First, I argue that the orthodox view really is an insight, not a myth. Second, I offer an explanation of why it is that the insight holds. (shrink)

A collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored, this book deals with various problems related to "self-locating beliefs": the sorts of beliefs one expresses with indexicals and demonstratives, like "I" and "this." Postscripts have been added to a number of the essays discussing criticisms by authors such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included with such well-known essays as "Frege on Demonstratives," "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," "From Worlds to Situations," and "The (...) Prince and the Phone Booth" are a number of important essays that have been less accessible and that discuss important aspects of Perry's views, referred to as "Critical Referentialism," on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

In this book, renowned philosopher John Perry addresses critiques of his work on the essential indexical.

Certain anaphoric forms are widely supposed to give rise to ‘de se’ interpretations. Castanteda (1966a/b, 1967) argues that intensive reflexive anaphors such as ‘he himself’ and ‘she herself’ act as devices for the indirect report of essentially ‘first person’ contents when they occur with singular antecedents. In this paper, I argue that first and third person pronouns that occur as anaphors on c-commanding quantified antecedents (so-called ‘bound variable pronouns’) also give rise to de se interpretations. I draw out a problem (...) that this observation raises for a well-accepted account according to which bound pronouns occur as featureless variables. I argue that the best way to account for de se interpretations of bound first and third person pronouns is to abandon the view that pronouns lack features when bound. I offer a new account of bound pronominal anaphora which assigns the features of pronouns a crucial role in deriving bound readings. (shrink)

There are two ways of interpreting the argument for the existence of essential indexicals; one of them is too strong, the other one is compatible with reductionist positions.

Like proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions, pronouns have referential uses. These can be 'essentially indexical' in the sense that they cannot be replaced by non-pronominal forms of reference. Here we show that the grammar of pronouns in such occurrences is systematically different from that of other referential expressions, in a way that illuminates the differences in reference in question. We specifically illustrate, in the domain of Romance clitics and pronouns, a hierarchy of referentiality, as related to the topology (...) of the grammatical phase. Our explanation is based on extending the 'Topological Mapping Hypotheses' of Longobardi and Sheehan & Hinzen. The extended topology covers the full range of interpretations, from purely predicative to quantificational, to referential and deictic. Along this scale, grammatical complexity increases, and none of these forms of reference is lexical. This provides evidence for the foundational conclusion that the source of essential indexicality is grammatical rather than lexical, semantic or pragmatic. (shrink)

One can have no prior credence whatsoever (not even zero) in a temporally indexical claim. This fact saves the principle of conditionalization from potential counterexample and undermines the Elga and Arntzenius/Dorr arguments for the thirder position and Lewis' argument for the halfer position on the Sleeping Beauty Problem, thereby supporting the double-halfer position. -/- .

No word in English is shorter than the word I.' And yet no word is more important in philosophy. When Descartes said I think therefore I am' he produced something that was both about himself and a universal formula. The word I' is called an indexical' because its meaning always depends on who says it. Other examples of indexicals are you,' here,' this' and now.' John Perry discusses how these kinds of words work, and why they express important philosophical (...) thoughts. He shows that indexicals pose a challenge to traditional assumptions about language and thought. Over the years a number of these papers, now included in this book, have sparked lively debates and have been influential in philosophy, linguistics and other areas of cognitive science. With seven new papers, including the previously unpublished What Are Indexicals?,' the present volume expands on an earlier version of this book published in the early nineties. Also included are the well-known papers Frege on Demonstratives,' Cognitive Significance and New Theories of Reference,' Evading the Slingshot,' The Prince and the Phone booth', Fodor on Psychological Explanations', and related papers on situation semantics, direct reference, and the structure of belief. This book also includes afterwords written by the author that discuss responses to his work by Gareth Evans, Robert Stalnaker, Barbara Partee, Howard Wettstein and others. (shrink)

The prevailing notion that the problem of essential indexicals must be solved through the theory of meaning of attitude ascriptions is incorrect. Well-known attempts to solve the problem along those lines, e.g., the proposals of Lewis and Perry , have rested on the overly optimistic assumption that there is no limit in principle to the access one may have to the contents of someone else’s thoughts, including their knowledge. That assumption is challenged in this essay. The hazards associated with (...) limited accessibility can be and indeed must be alleviated by an epistemological theory in such a way that allows for a new nonsemantic approach to the problem. The following is an outline of the arguments in favor of this approach. In the first part, the problem of essential indexicals and the familiar corollary thesis that such indexicals are not reducible to nonindexicals is briefly reviewed. In the second part, indexical irreducibility is shown to hold for a range of explanations of theoretical rationality in addition to the basic explanations of action in which the irreducibility is typically illustrated. (shrink)

This paper takes indexicality as a case-study for critical examination of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics as currently conceived in mainstream philosophy of language. Both a ‘pre-indexical’ and ‘post-indexical’ analytic formal semantics are examined and found wanting, and instead an argument is mounted for a ‘properly pragmatist pragmatics’, according to which we do not work out what signs mean in some abstract overall sense and then work out to what use they are being put; rather, we must (...) understand to what use signs are being put in order to work out what they mean. (shrink)

Some authors claim that ‘I’ and ‘now’ are essential indexicals, in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of other indexicals or nonindexical expressions. This article argues that three indexicals of direction—one for each spatial dimension (e.g., ‘up’, ‘front’, and ‘left’)—must also be regarded essential, insofar as they are used as pure indexicals and not as demonstratives.

It has been widely acknowledged that indexical thought poses a problem for traditional theories of mental content. However, recent work in philosophy has defied this received view and challenged its defenders not to rely on intuitions but rather to clearly articulate what the problem is supposed to be. For example, in “The Inessential Indexical”, Cappelen and Dever claim that there are no philosophically interesting or important roles played by essential indexical representations. This paper assesses the role (...) of essential indexicality in understanding the content of perception and argues that, if the perceptual experiences of different subjects can have the same phenomenology, and thus share a representational content (phenomenal content)—assumptions shared by a well-established research project, including a wide variety of theories—, then phenomenal content exhibit a particular kind of essential indexicality (perspectival). I also discuss how the argument is immune to Cappelen and Dever’s objections to the idea that the content of perceptual experiences is essentially indexical. (shrink)

Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall argue that the problem of the essential indexical at best shows that belief should be tied somehow to what is (...) subsequently acted upon, and must make room for other relations than those properly predicated. But it does not show that belief cannot be modeled as a binary relation between an agent and some suitable object, nor that this object cannot be a proposition. (shrink)

Some time ago, John Perry argued that the content of an indexical belief, that is, a belief expressible with a sentence containing an indexical or demonstrative, cannot be a proposition. I consider several of his arguments for this view, and show that they can be extended to show that belief expressible with other non-indexical expressions such as natural kind terms and proper names presents the very same problem for the traditional picture. I then suggest that if (...) class='Hi'>indexical belief has any special status, this is not because it has a special kind of content, but rather because action is impossible if agents do not have indexical belief. (shrink)

This critical review of John Perry’s recent compilation of his work (Perry (1993) is mainly devoted to surveying the path leading towards a certain rapprochement between philosophers with Fregean inclinations and philosophers attracted by the picture of thought and meaning brought out by Direct Reference theorists like Donnellan, Kaplan, Kripke, Putnam, and, of course, Perry himself, by taking advantage of the suggestions in the postscripts to very well-known and deservedly influential articles.

Are non-indexical action rationalizations necessarily incomplete because of a missing indexical component? Bermúdez argues that they are. Two things make the argument unpersuasive. First, it assumes that all action rationalizations involve attitudes that are about the agent. Second, it assumes that the attitudes expressible using ‘I’ are themselves indexical. Each is an assumption that believers in complete but non-indexical action rationalizations can and do reject. Surprisingly though, a more effective argument can be obtained by switching focus (...) from indexical attitudes about agents to indexical attitudes about times. The debate about the de se and the de nunc has much less in common than is standardly assumed. It is the de nunc not the de se which provides the knock-down case for essential indexicality. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in Frege’s latest writings. These views form the (...) backdrop on which we can put forward the claim of treating all indexicals as complex demonstratives. In the central part of the paper, I criticize each of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. Besides, I propose a new definition of the concept of “demonstration” as a nonlinguistic feature of all indexicals in their referential uses, to contrast de Gaynesford’s rejection of the idea that demonstrations are an essential feature of indexicals. Eventually, I strengthen my claim by distinguishing indexicals from proper names and definite descriptions on the ground that only perceptual indexicals necessarily require an accompanying demonstration. However, the main point of the paper is a negative one, that is the rejection of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. More work is needed to reach a positive conclusion on this topic. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever have recently defended the view that indexicals are not essential: They do not signify anything philosophically deep and we do not need indexicals for any important philosophical work. This paper contests their view from the point of view of an account of intentional agency. It argues that we need indexicals essentially when accounting for what it is do something intentionally and, as a consequence, intentional action, and defends a view of intentional action as a possible conclusion (...) of practical reasoning where the indexical is essential for the content of such a conclusion. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 211-233, December 2015.

The aim of this paper is to argue that our non-first-personal ways of thinking of ourselves – those we would naturally express in language without using first person pronouns – are just as important to our agency as our indexical ways of thinking of ourselves. They are just important in different ways. Specifically, I argue that a thinker who is systematically excluded from these non-first-personal modes of self-directed thought would be excluded from participation in some of the domains of (...) agency we value most as part of a full human life: the domains of agency associated with our social identities. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.

I utilize recent work in analytic epistemology on the notion of essentially indexical knowledge, as well as Marion’s notion of saturated phenomenality, to ground the psychological model of the Trinity. I argue that classical theism implies that God is essentially omniscient. This omniscience entails complete self-knowledge on God’s part. There are, however, truths about God’s consciousness that are reducible neither to concepts nor to 1st person experience. These are the truths about how God’s presence is perceived from a 2nd (...) person perspective. In order for God to know such truths about himself, he would have to experience himself as both an ‘I’ and a ‘You.’ Thus, God must exist as a being with multiple subjective centers of consciousness. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the references of indexical expressions are fixed partly by their relations to contextual parameters such as the author, time, and place of the utterance. Because of this, indexicals are sometimes described as token-reflexive or utterance-reflexive in their semantics. But when we inquire into how indexicals help us to identify items within experience, we find that while utterance-reflexivity is essential to an interpretation of indexical tokens, it is not a factor in a speaker's (...) identificatory use of indexicals. Tokens cannot be interpreted unless they are first produced, and obviously the speaker who produces them does not depend upon utterance parameters in order to identify their referents in the way that hearers do. Consequently, the standard reflexive accounts of indexicals are of little use in explaining the speaker's identificatory use of indexicals, and must be either replaced or complemented by a further theory of the role of indexicals in thought. This paper provides an account of indexical identification that is attentive to a speaker's as well as a hearer's identification and reveals how indexicals are inextricably perspectival. (shrink)

Reference and indexicality are two central topics in the Philosophy of Language that are closely tied together. In the first part of this book, a description theory of reference is developed and contrasted with the prevailing direct reference view with the goal of laying out their advantages and disadvantages. The author defends his version of indirect reference against well-known objections raised by Kripke in Naming and Necessity and his successors, and also addresses linguistic aspects like compositionality. In the second part, (...) a detailed survey on indexical expressions is given based on a variety of typological data. Topics addressed are, among others: Kaplan's logic of demonstratives, conversational versus utterance context, context-shifting indexicals, the deictic center, token-reflexivity, vagueness of spatial and temporal indexicals, reference rules, and the epistemic and cognitive role of indexicals. From a descriptivist perspective on reference, various examples of simple and complex indexicals are analyzed in first-order predicate logic with reified contexts. A critical discussion of essential indexicality, de se readings of attitudes and accompanying puzzles rounds up the investigation. (shrink)

Recording devices are generally taken to present problems for the standard Kaplanian semantics for indexicals. In this paper, I argue that the remote utterance view offers the best way for the Kaplanian semantics to handle the recalcitrant data that comes from the use of recording devices. Following Sidelle I argue that recording devices allow agents to perform utterances at a distance. Using the essential, but widely ignored, distinction between tokens and utterances, I develop the view beyond the initial sketch (...) given by Sidelle, and I answer the main objections raised against the view. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 gives a succinct presentation of Kaplanian semantics and of the problem raised by the use recording devices, Section 2 presents the remote utterance view and Section 3 answers the objections put forward against the view and further develops it. I conclude that the remote utterance view can handle the data that comes from the use of recording devices with only modest modifications of the Kaplanian semantics. (shrink)

Umberto Eco’s essential contribution to semiotics consisted in finding a theoretical equilibrium between deconstructive tendencies, aiming at presenting cultural habits as pure conventional but naturalized products, and motivational trends, claiming the natural fundament of constructed cultural habits. Fully comprehending and turning into analytical frame the concept of sign in Charles S. Peirce was instrumental to reach such equilibrium. In no other aspect of Umberto Eco’s semiotics it manifests itself with more evidence than in the characterization of indexes. The article (...) seeks to propose a general theorization of their semiotic nature, starting from Umberto Eco’s interpretation of Peirce. (shrink)

My aim in this essay is to look back on and critically examine Tomis Kapitan’s (1949–2016) views of indexical language and indexical thought. Despite the novelty and insightfulness of Kapitan’s writings on these topics, his work has largely gone ignored. I believe this to be a tragic oversight, especially given the renewed interest in whether any of our thoughts might be essentially indexical. To be sure, there may be a reason for this oversight. In particular, Kapitan’s views (...) are complex and his writing often dense. So my hope is to do justice to his work on indexicality not only by making it more accessible but also by examining it in such a way as to demonstrate its strength and plausibility. (shrink)

I develop here a novel version of the Fregean view of belief ascriptions (i.e., sentences of the form ‘S believes that p’) and I explain how my view accounts for various problem cases that many philosophers have supposed are incompatible with Fregeanism. The so-called problem cases involve (a) what Perry calls essential indexicals and (b) de re ascriptions in which it is acceptable to substitute coreferential but non-synonymous terms in belief contexts. I also respond to two traditional worries about (...) what the sense of a proper name could be, and I explain how my view provides intuitively pleasing solutions to Kripke’s ‘London’–‘Londres’ puzzle and his Paderewski puzzle. Finally, in addition to defending my view, I also argue very briefly against Russellian alternatives to Fregeanism. (shrink)

Many of our thoughts are about particular individuals (persons, things, places, etc.). For example, one can spot a certain Ferrari and think that it is red. What enables this thought to latch onto that particular object? It cannot be how the Ferrari looks, for this could not distinguish one Ferrari from another just like it. In general, how a thought represents something cannot determine which thing it represents. What a singular thought latches onto seems to depend also on features of (...) the context in which the thought occurs. This suggests that its content is essentially indexical, contextually variable much as the content of an utterance like 'I am hungry' depends on who utters it and when (see DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS). The indexical model of singular thought is not limited to thoughts about individuals one perceives, like the Ferrari driving by, but applies also to thoughts about individuals one remembers or has been informed of, like an old bicycle or Christopher Columbus. In each case, a certain contextual relation, based on perception, memory, or communication, connects thought to object. (shrink)