The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays
Abstract
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 criticisms that have been made by writers such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included are 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’.
... como propio (para mí), con lo cual se podría afirmar que se trata de una auto-adscripción que, o bien es siempre verdadera, o bien no es ni verdadera ni falsa ya que no hay condiciones para establecerlo(cf. Schoemaker, 2003;Evans, 1982;Perry, 1993;Longuenesse, 2017).En último término, una actividad de este tipo no admite instanciación en función de la cual dicha actividad se describiría como idéntica 11 . Este es el supuesto mínimo para establecer una relación de identidad estricta. ...
Hay ciertas nociones dentro de la filosofía de Kant que desempeñan un papel clave, tales como “autoconciencia” (Selbstbewusstsein) y “autonomía” (Autonomie). Nuestro objetivo es ofrecer algunas indicaciones sobre cómo comprender estas nociones, en especial en cuanto a cómo ha de entenderse su prefijo ‘auto-’ (Auto-, Selbst-). A pesar de que en algún sentido pueda comprenderse que hay una relación reflexiva en estos actos, aquello no es el punto fundamental, sino el hecho de que tales actos son realizados por el sujeto mismo, es decir, que son actos propios. Con la adición del prefijo ‘auto-’ no se está refiriendo a algo distinto de lo que designa la expresión sin el prefijo, sino al modo o al cómo del acto designado por esta última.
... On the contrary, this replacement could always leave the question unanswered whether the happy individual in question is me. The answer is immediate in the utterance I am happy, but can be impossible to resolve without 1P, a case in point being amnesia, where a person has forgotten his name and identity (Perry, 1993). While this feature has long been discussed in philosophy and semantics under the notion of essential indexicality, the notion of indexicality is broader than the exact term we need here: the relevant difference is empirically related to the presence or absence of Person, which, like Tense, technically encodes a specifically grammatical form of deixis (Hinzen & Martin, 2021). ...
We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We conclude that language is unlikely to be merely a medium in which independently constituted thoughts are expressed.
... If the file model is apt, these mechanisms account for aspects of behavior at the personal level, including sustaining coordination. But 27 These include, i.a., Strawson (1974), Perry (2000, Bach (1987), Crimmins (1992), Jeshion (2010), Lawlor (2001), Margolis (1998), Forbes (1989), Fodor (2008), Fodor & Pylyshyn (2015), Recanati (1993;. Recent philosophical work on mental files includes: Clarke (2018; 28 Some files may be descriptive (Goodman, 2016). ...
Modes of presentation (MOPs) are often said to have to be transparent, usually in the sense that thinkers can know solely via introspection whether or not they are deploying the same one. While there has been much discussion of threats to transparency stemming from externalism, another threat to transparency has garnered less attention. This novel threat arises if MOPs are robust, as I argue they should be according to internalist views of MOPs which identify them with representational vehicles, such as mental files. I explain how identifying MOPs with vehicles/files threatens transparency, provide empirical illustrations, and critically examine some attempts to dispel the threat. Rather than abandoning transparency, I outline a way of reconciling it with a robust view of mental files which takes seriously the idea that they are targets for investigation in cognitive science. Transparency does not require introspective access, and rather than as an incontrovertible principle for individuating MOPs, we can view it more modestly, as an open empirical hypothesis.
... (Cf. Castañeda (1966) and Perry (1993)). ...
This essay is concerned with Bernard Williams’ contention in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that, in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge. I attempt to defend this contention from the charge of incoherence. I do this by taking seriously the idea that ethical knowledge is knowledge from an ethical point of view. There nevertheless remains an issue about whether the contention is consistent with ideas elsewhere in Williams’ own work, in particular with what he says about knowledge in Descartes. In an earlier essay I argued that it is not. In a subsequent essay I indicated that I had changed my mind and gave a more sympathetic account of Williams’ contention. In this essay I set out the issues and say some more about my change of mind.
Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to meet the demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning.
For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential scholars in linguistics today, this Handbook presents an extensive picture of the study of language as it used 'in context' across a number of key linguistic subfields and frameworks. Organised into five thematic parts, the volume covers a range of theoretical perspectives, with each chapter surveying the latest work from areas as diverse as syntax, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, conversational analysis, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication. Comprehensive, yet wide-ranging, the Handbook presents a full description of how the theory of context has revolutionised linguistics, and how its renewed study is crucial in an ever-changing world.
In the philosophy of language, there are many ongoing controversies that stem from relying too heavily on an utterance-based framework. The traditional approach of rigidly partitioning the utterance’s meaning into what is grammatically determined from what is not may not fully capture the complexity of human language in real-world communicative contexts. To address this issue, we suggest shifting focus toward a broader analysis level encompassing conversations and discourses. From this broader perspective, it is possible to obtain a more integrated view of how linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects dynamically interact and thus reconsider semantics/pragmatics dichotomy as complementary dimensions. Meaning is not confined to linguistic structures alone but emerges from the dynamic interplay of words, sociocultural knowledge, discursive situations, and psychological dispositions of speakers. Substantiating this perspective calls for embracing an interdisciplinary approach that synthesizes research from various domains, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. This paper focuses on a particularly compelling case study: aphasia. Speeches produced by individuals with aphasia represent complex scenarios where the balance between linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects is notably compromised, often to the former’s detriment. Aphasics’ productions represent a vivid example of how the interpretation of speeches can be far from involving fixed and static operations. Instead, it entails continuously reallocating cognitive resources toward the most readily available and accessible sources for the speakers. This case study ultimately demonstrates that the influence of semantic and pragmatic processes in shaping and conveying meanings displays remarkable adaptability, continuously adjusting to the ever changing demands placed upon speakers.
This chapter explores various issues about agrammatism, aiming to identify a unifying factor that elucidates the underlying problems of aphasia. Due to impairments in functional categories and grammatical morphemes, individuals with aphasia adopt an “economy principle,” whereby they omit grammatical words and employ a reduced form of emergency language. This observation intertwines with contextualist theses in the philosophy of language. Notions such as “explicature”, “impliciture”, or “intuitive what is said” are undoubtedly valuable for illuminating how the features of the situational context can enrich and enhance poor language. The idea is that language disorders in aphasia create particular communicative needs which prompt listeners to integrate, complete, or modulate what is seriously compromised.KeywordsAgrammatismSub-sentential speechExplicatureFree enrichmentEllipsis
The current understanding of cognitive development rests on the premise that infants can individuate objects early on. However, the so-called object-first account faces severe difficulties explaining extant empirical findings in object individuation tasks while alternative, more parsimonious explanations are available. In this paper, we assume that children start as feature-thinkers without being able to individuate objects and show how this ability can be learned by thinkers who do not already implicitly possess the notion of an object. Based on Tugendhat's ideas on the relation between singular terms and object reference, we argue that spatial indexicals comprise the fundamental means of object individuation and describe how feature thinkers might acquire the complex substitutional system of spatial indexicals. In closing, two accounts of object cognition that do not rely on symbolic capacities, namely Pylyshyn's FINST indexes and Burge's perceptual objectivity, are critically discussed.
In linguistic communication, the speaker’s utterance simultaneously generates several levels of meaning related to Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated. Yet, there is a lively debate about the two notions. This study gives a general overview of three schools: Semantic Minimalism, Radical Contextualism, and Moderate Contextualism. After surveying the current controversies in these theories, it introduces a new direction: Moderate Semantic Minimalism. This eclectic approach isolates the propositional meaning as what is asserted, something intermediate between the literal level of what is said and the intentional level of what is implicated. It tends to take the minimal notion of what is said to be relatively context-independent and does not have to be a truth-evaluable proposition.
We take up issues raised in the commentaries about our proposal that social robots are depictions of social agents. Among these issues are the realism of social agents, experiencing robots, communicating with robots, anthropomorphism, and attributing traits to robots. We end with comments about the future of social robots.
In this paper, we focus on some misconceptions about Critical Pragmatics, what it is, what it assumes and what it proposes. Doubtless, some of these misconceptions are due to clumsy writing on our part; perhaps others are due to inattentive reading. And some may be due to an effort to shield us from the apparent implausibility of what we said—and in fact meant. It does not matter much. We focus on those misunderstandings that most matter to us, either because, by repetition, they have ended up being annoying, even if they are not, perhaps, that important; or because they are substantial enough to represent a distortion of the basic picture of Critical Pragmatics and its theoretical foundations, namely, Critical Referentialism—also known as the Reflexive-referential Theory—and, more generally, Perry’s fundamental views on meaning and content(s).
In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on how it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there is a tension between the views that: (i) the token of a name refers to the object conventionally (causally) linked with the tokened name and (ii) the token of a name refers to the object the speaker has in mind. I will end up suggesting that Korta and Perry’s (Critical pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) critical referentialism/pragmatics and their name-notion network conception help to clarify this tension (and possibly evade it).
Framing effects concern the having of different attitudes towards logically or necessarily equivalent contents. Framing is of crucial importance for cognitive science, behavioral economics, decision theory, and the social sciences at large. We model a typical kind of framing, grounded in (i) the structural distinction between beliefs activated in working memory and beliefs left inactive in long term memory, and (ii) the topic- or subject matter-sensitivity of belief: a feature of propositional attitudes which is attracting growing research attention. We introduce a class of models featuring (i) and (ii) to represent, and reason about, agents whose belief states can be subject to framing effects. We axiomatize a logic which we prove to be sound and complete with respect to the class.
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