The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person By Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever [Book Review]

Due largely to the influence of Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979), many philosophers now believe that certain attitudes are ‘essentially indexical’, and that this fact is philosophically significant. Going against the conventional wisdom, Cappelen and Dever (2013) (henceforth ‘C&D’) have two goals. The modest goal is to show that Perry, Lewis and their followers have failed to establish any clear ‘essential indexicality’ thesis. The ambitious goal is to show that indexicality is ‘shallow’, in that it does not play any interesting explanatory role in philosophy. They admit that the ambitious goal is too ambitious to be fully achieved in a single work, but they hope to have made a significant step toward its eventual achievement.