Abstract

The aim of this paper is that to argue that Moore's paradox demonstrates the essential indexical, challenging Cappelen and Dever’s perspective (Cappelen and Dever 2013) that denies the philosophical significance of the first-person by rejecting that there is an essential indexical. They believe that the well-known cases of the essential indexical, such as Perry’s messy shopper, do not reveal essential indexicality, since each of these cases has a Frege counterpart that is essentially the same, with the only difference being substitution failures involving third-person expressions instead of indexical expressions. However, this paper points out that Moore's paradox arises only when an agent refers to oneself using an indexical expression, asserting something like “P, but I do not believe P.” Therefore, contrary to Cappelen and Dever’s perspective, there is no corresponding Frege counterpart to Moore's paradox.