John Perry

John Perry
Stanford University | SU · Department of Philosophy

Phd

About

41
Publications
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2,113
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Introduction
Born 1943, Lincoln Nebraska. BA 1964, Doane College, Philosophy. Phd, 1968, Cornell University, Philosophy. UCLA 1968-1974; Stanford 1974-2008, then Emeritus; UC Riverside, 2009-2014, then Emeritus.

Publications

Publications (41)
Book
The Problems of the Essential Indexical is a collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored. These deal 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 criticis...
Article
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A frequent criticism of Richard Vallee’s “pluri-propositionalism” is that it multiplies propositions beyond necessity. I argue that this criticism, recently voiced by Robert Stanton and Arthur Sullivan, is based in misconceptions about propositions are and how they help us classify utterances and the mental states and events that lead to them, rely...
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In this paper, we defend two claims. First, we argue that a notion of contextuality that has been formalized in physics and psychology is applicable to linguistic contexts. Second, we propose that this formal apparatus is philosophically significant for the epistemology of language because it imposes homogeneous rational constraints on speakers. We...
Chapter
Full-text available
The Problems of the Essential Indexical is a collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored. These deal 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 criticis...
Book
The book argues that the criticisms of my articles "Frege on Demonstratives" and "The Problem of the Essential Indexical" by Hermann Cappelin and Josh Dever in their book THE INESSENTIAL INDEXICAL are very confused, often based on ignoring or misinterpreting what I said. I explain my views, and discuss a few related issues.
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Self, person, and identity are among the concepts most central to the way humans think about themselves and others. It is often natural in biology to use such concepts; it seems sensible to say, for example, that the job of the immune system is to attack the non-self, but sometimes it attacks the self. But does it make sense to borrow these concept...
Chapter
The term 'indexical' comes into the philosophy of language from Charles Sanders Peirce's use of the term 'index'. Paradigm indexicals include pronouns such as 'I' and 'you', as well as words like 'here', 'now', 'today', 'tomorrow', and 'yesterday' that occur as both nouns and adverbs. This chapter looks at how such paradigms work, then look at less...
Article
The name "Jacob Horn" comes from the book The Horn Papers (1945), published and apparently written by William Horn of Topeka, Kansas. He presented this book to the public as if it were the newly discovered diary of an eighteenth-century American, his great-great-great-grandfather. Scholars eventually concluded that it was a hoax, and it is assumed...
Chapter
This chapter presents the author's recollections from 1964 until 1968, as a graduate student in the Philosophy Department-that is, in the Sage School of Philosophy-at Cornell University, where Keith Donnellan was a professor. Donnellan is described as an extraordinarily nice person and an effective and encouraging teacher. He also became a good fri...
Book
Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a co...
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Are there such operators as ‘In some contexts, itistruethat’, which when prefixed to a sentence yields a truth if and only if in some context the contained sentence (not the content expressed by it) expresses a content that is true in the circumstances of
Chapter
This chapter explores the notion of some philosophers that the self is a mysterious thing. It has been associated with a number of concepts, such as the souls of Christian theology, the essential natures that are passed along in reincarnation, or as noumenal objects that exist beyond normal space and time, outside of the causal realm, and join, in...
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If language is action (Austin, 1961; Grice, 1967), referring to things is not something that words do, but something that people do by uttering words. According to this pragmatic view, then, a theory of reference should be grounded on an account of our acts of referring; that is, the part of communicative acts that consists in referring to individu...
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Kaplan finds demonstratives puzzling. He offers only one theory of indexicals; once the right distinctions are made, the facts about the semantics of indexicals are "obvious and incontrovertible." The case is otherwise with demonstratives. He says at the end of his discussion in "Afterthoughts": "There is something I'm not understanding here, and i...
Book
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A theory of reference and content of utterances.
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Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda’s study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker’s seminal paper ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical antici...
Book
Defends identity theory of minds and body; criticizes arguments for property dualism
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In "Demonstratives," David Kaplan develops an account of the meaning of indexi-cals and sentences that contain them based on the concepts of content, character and context. The content of a statement is a proposition; which proposition a statement ex-presses depends not only on the linguistic meaning or character of the sentence used, but also on t...
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We present an account of action whose main features are that actions are content properties that agents have in virtue of (i) the bodily movements they effect and (ii) the wider circumstances in which those movements are effected. The account includes definitions of one action being a way of doing another, and of performing one action by performing...
Book
Collection: Indexicals, contexts and unarticulated constituents Reality without reference Evading the slingshot Broadening the mind Myself and I Reflexivity, indexicality and names Rip Van Winkle and other characters Frege on demonstratives The problem of the essential indexical Belief and acceptance A problem about continued belief Castandeda on h...
Chapter
Philosophers approach the concept of a person from two directions. In ethics and political philosophy it often is taken as primitive, or at least familiar and not requiring elucidation, but persistent inquiry and difficult problems make a deeper look inevitable. In discussing abortion, for example, one can hardly invoke principles about rights and...
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In this paper, I will contrast two concepts of personal identity, the philo- sophical and the psychological. Then I'll develop my account of self- knowledge. In the course of this I'll explain the concept of memory that I think is crucial to developing our sense of ourselves as persisting beings, and contrast it with other ways we can remember thin...
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