Herman Cappelen

The inessential indexical : on the philosophical insignificance of perspective and the first person

1. Introductory Overview: The Role of Indexicality, Perspective and the De Se in Philosophy 2. Preliminaries: Language-Mind, Super Indexicals, and Opacity 3. Indexicality, the De Se, and Agency 4. Indexicality, Opacity, and Fregeanism 5. Lewis on the De Se, Self-Ascription, and Centered Worlds 6. Functionalism to the Rescue? 7. Indexicality and Immunity to Error 8. A Brief Note on Perceptual Content and the De Se 9. The De Se and the Semantics of PRO Constructions 10. The View From Everywhere

Indexicality, binding, anaphora and a priori truth

Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose meaning remains stable while their reference shifts from utterance to utterance. Paradigmatic cases in English are ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. Recently, a number of authors have argued that various constructions in our language harbour hidden indexicals. We say ‘hidden’ because these indexicals are unpronounced, even though they are alleged to be real linguistic components. Constructions taken by some authors to be associated, or to ‘cohabit’, with hidden indexicals include: definite descriptions and quantifiers more generally (hidden indexical refers to a domain – Davies (1981), Westerstahl (1985), Higginbotham (1988), Stanley and Williamson (1995)), propositional attitude verbs (hidden indexical refers to a mode of presentation – Richard (1990)), comparative adjectives (hidden indexical refers to comparison classes – Partee (1989), Kamp (1975), Ludlow (1989)). An interesting recent addition is the view that all nouns are associated with a hidden indexical referring to a domain restriction (Stanley and Szabo (2000), Stanley (2002)).1 We are sceptical of such posits, first, because evidence typically proffered to support their existence is better accounted for, we believe, in other ways;2 and secondly, because each alleged case familiar to us is flawed, or so we will argue. We begin by concentrating on a recent, influential argument for hidden indexicals – the so-called Argument from Binding. We present a reductio of it. We then present two requirements any indexical – hidden or otherwise – should satisfy, illustrating how various alleged ANALYSIS 62.4 OCTOBER 2002

A Tall Tale: In Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism

In Insensitive Semantics (2004), we argue for two theses – Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. In this paper, we outline our defense against two objections often raised against Semantic Minimalism. To get to that defense, we first need some stage setting. To that end, we begin with five stage setting sections. These lead to the first objection, viz., that it might follow from our view that comparative adjectives are context insensitive. We defend our view against that objection (not, as you might expect, by denying that implication, but by endorsing it). Having done so, we address a second objection, viz., that Semantic Minimalism makes it difficult to see what role semantic content plays in communicative exchanges. We respond and end with a reversal, i.e., we argue that even though the second objection fails against us, it works against those who raise the objection. In particular, we show that Recanati ends up with a notion of communicated content that fails various tests for psychological reality. Stage Stetting 1: Semantic Minimalism Three features of Semantic Minimalism are important in the context of this paper (all elaborated on in Insensitive Semantics): a) The most salient feature of Semantic Minimalism is that it recognizes few context sensitive expressions, and hence, acknowledges a very limited effect of the context of utterance on the semantic content of an utterance. The only context sensitive expressions are the completely obvious ones (‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘that’, etc., (essentially those Kaplan lists in ‘Demonstratives’, (1989, p. 489). These are not only obvious, they also pass certain tests for context sensitivity we spell out below. b) It follows that all semantic context sensitivity is grammatically (i.e., syntactically or morphemically) triggered. c) Beyond fixing the semantic value of these obviously context sensitive expressions, the context of utterance has no effect on the proposition

Reply to Richard and Reimer

We begin our discussion of Richard by comparing his and our aims. Richard argues for and begins to develop an account of a connection between the semantic content of (an utterance of) a sentence and correct indirect reports of it. He submits that by doing so he refutes us, but that’s just not so. We never challenged the existence of every such connection. Surely there is some connection (probably many). Our paper attempts to show that one alleged connection does not obtain. We articulated two central goals, one specific (1), and one more general (2).

Empathy and transformative experience without the first person point of view (a reply to L. A. Paul)1

Abstract In her very interesting ‘First-personal modes of presentation and the problem of empathy’ (2017, 315–336), L. A. Paul argues that the phenomenon of empathy gives us reason to care about the first person point of view: that as theorists we can only understand, and as humans only evince, empathy by appealing to that point of view. We are skeptics about the importance of the first person point of view, although not about empathy. The goal of this paper is to see if we can account for empathy without the ideology of the first person. We conclude that we can.

Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism Applied to ‘Knows’

This chapter is an introduction to how the combination of two views – semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism (‘SM+SAP’, for short) – can be used explain some aspects of our practice of making knowledge attributions. SM+SAP wasn’t developed to account for issues in epistemology in particular. It was proposed as a solution to a very general linguistic phenomenon – a phenomenon that also happens to be exhibited by sentences containing ‘knows’. The chapter is structured as follows:

Semantic Theory and Indirect Speech

An overlooked assumption in much of the semantics literature is that there is a close connection between semantic content (whatever a semantic theory attempts to elucidate) and indirect speech. The assumption is that an adequate semantic theory T for a language L should assign p as the semantic content of an utterance u, by A, of a sentence S in L iff ┌A said that p┐ is true.1 We shall dub this assumption MA. In effect, since Galileo in uttering (I) makes (2) true, by MA, any adequate semantics for Italian must interpret (I) to mean that the earth moves.