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The impurity of “pure” indexicals

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Abstract

Within the class of indexicals, a distinction is often made between “pure” or “automatic” indexicals on one hand, and demonstratives or “discretionary” indexicals on the other. The idea is supposed to be that certain indexicals refer automatically and invariably to a particular feature of the utterance context: ‘I’ refers to the speaker, ‘now’ to the time of utterance, ‘here’ to the place of utterance, etc. Against this view, I present cases where reference shifts from the speaker, time, or place of utterance to some other object, time, or place. I consider and reject the claim that these counterexamples to the automatic indexical theory all involve non-literal uses of indexicals and argue that they cannot be explained away on the grounds that they involve conversational implicature or pretense.

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Acknowledgement

I am deeply grateful to Zoltán Gendler Szabó for many hours of discussion throughout the development of this paper, and to Delia Graff and Michael Fara for comments at several crucial points. I also benefitted from comments on an earlier draft by participants in the fall 2004 Department Workshop at The Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Mount Holyoke College, 50 College St., South Hadley, MA, 01075, USA

    Allyson Mount

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  1. Allyson Mount
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Correspondence to Allyson Mount.

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Mount, A. The impurity of “pure” indexicals. Philos Stud 138, 193–209 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9031-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-006-9031-6

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