Uncontroversially, the meaning of first and second person pronouns and “imposters”, i.e. expressions like yours truly, should be indexical, but how exactly this indexicality is achieved has been a matter of some debate. While not settling the debate, this paper aims to show that there is no single way to become a person indexical. Natural language allows for at least three different representations leading to person indexicality. Evidence for this comes from sentences involving imposters and pronouns coreferent with or bound (...) by them. Particularly telling are cases of variation between third and non-third person pronouns in sentences with imposters, first discussed by Collins and Postal. Constraints on this variation support the view that it is not adequate from either an empirical or an explanatory perspective to treat all person indexicals uniformly. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.

The subject of this book is the first person in thought and language. The main question concerns what we mean when we say 'J'. Related to it are questions about what kinds of self-consciousness and self-knowledge are needed in order for us to have the capacity to talk about ourselves. The emphasis is on theories of meaning and reference for 'J', but a fair amount of space is devoted to 'I' -thoughts and the role of the concept of the self (...) in cognition. The purpose is to give a picture of how we think and talk about ourselves in a wide range of circumstances. The topic has been discussed in numerous articles during the last decades, but rarely in the form of a monograph. I felt the need for a book of this kind while working on my dissertation. The manuscript is the result of many years of reflection on the self and indexicals. Some of the theories that I advance have developed as a result of my teaching an undergraduate course in the philosophy of language the last couple of years. (shrink)

Health professionals are especially exposed to stress, with consequences on professionals’ health and wellbeing. However, palliative care professionals’ wellbeing has been the subject of very little research. The aim of this work is to study the Personal Wellbeing Index in a sample of Spanish palliative care professionals, as well as to study their levels of wellbeing and the relationships of wellbeing with variables such as gender, age, marital status, profession, and professional quality of life. A cross-sectional survey of Spanish (...) palliative care professionals was conducted. The Spanish version of the PWI and the Short version of the Professional Quality of Life Scale were used. Here, 296 palliative care professionals attending patients at the end of life participated in the study. They showed medium to high levels of wellbeing. The PWI showed an adequate internal structure [χ2 = 116.130 ]; Comparative Fit Index = 0.970; standardized root mean square residual = 0.041; root mean square error of approximation = 0.140 ] and excellent estimates of reliability [α = 0.879 and Composite Reliability Index = 0.923]. Wellbeing was higher for married compared to single and showed no relation with age, gender, and profession. Additionally, a structural equation model was estimated, in which a positive relation was found between wellbeing and compassion satisfaction and a negative one with burnout. The PWI is adequate to measure personal wellbeing in Spanish palliative care professionals. (shrink)

The paper aims to weaken a widespread argument against indexical contextualism regarding matters of personal taste. According to indexical contextualism, an utterance of “T is tasty” (where T is an object of taste) expresses the proposition that T is tasty for J (where J is a judge). This argument suggests that indexical contextualism cannot do justice to our disagreement intuitions regarding typical disputes about personal taste because it has to treat conversations in which one speaker utters “T is (...) tasty” and another responds with “T is not tasty” (referred to as ‘judge-non-specific conversations’ in this paper) as being on a par with conversations in which one speaker utters “T is tasty to me” and another responds with “T is not tasty to me” (referred to as ‘judge-specific conversations’). The argument has it that judge-specific conversations, unlike judge-non-specific conversations, do not contain disagreement between speakers. To defend indexical contextualism, some philosophers have proposed accounts (here referred to as ‘dual-proposition theories’) according to which utterances of “T is tasty” are used to communicate both the above kinds of semantically expressed proposition and some other kinds of proposition (like superiority propositions or metalinguistic propositions) that could be used to explain disagreements about taste. The paper defends two claims: First, it is argued that judge-specific conversations, or at least some of them, do contain disagreement between speakers, contrary to what the anti-indexical-contextualist argument supposes. Second, it is argued that dual-proposition indexical-contextualist theories fail to explain judge-specific conversations that are intuitively interpreted as containing disagreement. (shrink)

Many studies of primate vocalization have been undertaken to improve our understanding of the evolution of language. Perhaps, for this reason, investigators have focused on calls that were thought to carry symbolic information about the environment. Here I suggest that even if these calls were in fact symbolic, there were independent reasons to question this approach in the first place. I begin by asking what kind of communication system would satisfy a species’ biological needs. For example, where animals benefit from (...) living in large groups, I ask how members would need to communicate to keep their groups from fragmenting. In this context, I discuss the role of social grooming and “close calls,” including lip-smacking and grunting. Parallels exist in human societies, where information is exchanged about all kinds of things, often less about the nominal topic than the communicants themselves. This sort of indexical information is vital to group living, which presupposes the ability to tolerate, relate to, and interact constructively with other individuals. Making indexical communication the focus of comparative research encourages consideration of somatic and behavioral cues that facilitate relationships and social benefits, including cooperation and collaboration. There is ample room here for a different and potentially more fruitful approach to communication in humans and other primates, one that focuses on personal appraisals, based on cues originating with individuals, rather than signals excited by environmental events. (shrink)

This is a study of an under-developed topic in philosophy of language, namely first-person plural pronouns (‘we’, ‘us’, etc.) Richard Vallée has made very important progress by identifying crucial desiderata and putting forward an ingenious proposal about ‘we’ which addresses them. We contend that, despite this impressive progress, he makes some missteps, both omissions and errors; furthermore, his proposal appears implausible as a personal-level psychological story. We thus sketch an alternative approach to the semantics of the first-person plural indexical (...) which, though it builds on Vallée’s important work, departs substantially from it. (shrink)

This paper advances the thesis that sensory concepts have as a semantic component the first-person indexical. It is argued that the private nature of our access to our own sensations forces, in our talking about them, an indexical reference to the inner states of the speaker in lieu of publicly accessible properties by which reference is usually fixed. Indexicals, such as ‘here’, can be understood despite ignorance of their referent. Such is the case with sensory terms. Furthermore, the thesis (...) that sensory terms are indexical has considerable explanatory power. I give two examples: firstly, I argue that clashes of intuition over Block's ‘inverted spectrum’ thought experiment can be explained by appeal to semantic properties of indexicals. Secondly, I argue that multiple realisability intuitions can be shown to be consistent with the view that sensations are type-identical with brain states. (shrink)

For decision making in government, it is necessary to have well-structured sources of information. In several countries, it is difficult to access government data as the information are dispersed, disconnected, and poorly structured. For this reason, this work presents a framework to gather, unify, and enrich missing person data from distributed web sources. The framework allows inserting new tasks specific to the user’s domain to improve data quality. In this study, Brazilian missing person data from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governmental (...) websites were collected and semantically enriched. To enhance the understanding of the gathered missing people cases, we create interpretive models using machine learning techniques to extract knowledge and to encourage the use of standards for publishing the data that are frequently ignored by organizations, hindering analysis and decision-making on data. After the collection and semantic enrichment process, there was an increase of approximately 11% in the data present in the base. Also, the mining process evidenced the disappearance and reappearance of a person in Brazil according to several factors such as age, state initiatives, skin tone, hair colors, etc. (shrink)

Indexicals are inevitably autobiographical, even when we are not talking about ourselves. For example, if you hear me say, "That portrait right there is beautiful," you can surmise not only that I ascribe beauty to an object of my immediate awareness but also something about my spatial relation to it. Again, if I praise you directly within earshot of others by using the words, "You did that very well!," my concern need not be to cause them to think the (...) exact thought I have; they might not be in a position to address you as you and I might not care what they think of your performance. My purpose is to get them to ascribe to me an attitude that I express with a second-person indexical, to convince them that I am an encouraging and supportive person inasmuch as I addressed someone with words of praise. Indexicals are autobiographical not only because they issue from a speaker--all utterances do--but because they reveal something about the speaker's orientation toward and encounter with objects in a way that non-indexical language fails to do. For this reason, care must be taken in reporting indexically-expressed thoughts. Suppose the Chair of my Department informs me, (1)I am upset about the Dean's report. I cannot relate what he said by reiterating his words within indirect discourse, viz., (2)The Chair said that I am upset about the Dean's report. Because 'I' expresses speaker's reference, my assertion of (2) would cause a hearer to misconstrue who is said to be upset.i Alternatively, the sentence, (3)The Chair said that the Chair is upset about the Dean's report. (shrink)

Personal indexicals are often taken to refer to the agent of an expression’s context, but deviant uses (e.g. ‘I’m parked out back’) complicate matters. I argue that personal indexicals refer to the extended self of the agent, where the extended self is a mereological chimera incorporating whatever determines our behavioral capacities. To ascertain the persistence conditions of personal identity, I propose a method for selecting a level of description and a set of functional properties at (...) that level that remain constant over a lifetime. I argue for functional constancy, and against continuity, as the central determinant of diachronic identity. (shrink)

In recent analytic literature on the Trinity we have seen a variety of "social" models of the Trinity. By contrast there are few "non-­‐social" models. One prominent "non-­‐social" view is Brian Leftow's "Latin Trinity." I argue that the name of Leftow's model is not sufficiently descriptive in light of diverse models within Latin speaking theology. Next, I develop a new "non-­‐social" model that is inspired by Richard of St. Victor's description of a person in conjunction with my appropriating insights about (...) indexicals from David Kaplan and John Perry. I point out that the copula in tokens of statements like, "I am the Father," is an ambiguous term and when used by a certain divine person a different proposition is affirmed. Central to this model is the claim that the copula bears the "is of identity" and the "is of numerical sameness without identity." Further, I show that Leftow's model employs two concepts of "person," a Lockean one and a Boethian one, and mine employs Richard of St. Victor's. I describe Leftow's model as a "hard non-­‐social" model and mine as a "soft non-­‐social" model that is nearer to some social models. I conclude that Leftow's model is not the lone candidate among "non-­‐social" models and that the variety of "non-­‐social" models has yet to be exhausted. (shrink)

Self-awareness is commonly expressed by means of indexical expressions, primarily, first- person pronouns like.

It has been persuasively argued by David Kaplan and others that the proposition expressed by statements like (1) is a singular proposition, true in just those worlds in which a certain person, David Israel, is a computer scientist. Call this proposition P . The truth of this proposition does not require that the utterance (1) occur, or even that Israel has ever said anything at all. Marcus, Donnellan, Kripke and others have persuasively argued for a view of proper names that, (...) put in Kaplan’s terms and applied to this example, implies that the proposition expressed by (2) is also simply P .1 The thesis that expressions of a certain category (names, indexicals, demonstratives, pronouns, descriptions, etc.) are referential 2holds that these expressions contribute the object to which they refer, rather than a mode of presentation of that object, to the propositions expressed by statements containing them. The thesis that indexicals and names are referential creates the challenge of explaining the difference in cognitive significance between statements like (1) and (2), that express the same proposition[Wettstein, 1986]. The problem has two parts, which.. (shrink)

: Frege’s remarks about the first-person pronoun in Der Gedanke have elicited numerous commentaries, but his insight has not been fully appreciated or developed. Commentators have overlooked Frege’s reasons for claiming that there are two distinct first-person senses, and failed to realize that his remarks easily generalize to all indexicals. I present a perspectival theory of indexicals inspired by Frege’s claim that all indexical types have a dual meaning which, in turn, leads to a duality of senses expressed (...) by indexical tokens. Keywords : Indexicals; First Person; Perspective; Senses La doppia natura degli indessicali: una posizione fregeana Riassunto : Le osservazioni di Frege sul pronome di prima persona contenute in Der Gedanke hanno sollevato numerosi commenti, ma le sue intuizioni non sono state pienamente comprese o sviluppate. I commentatori di Frege hanno trascurato le ragioni per le quali egli sosteneva che ci sono due distinti sensi della prima persona e non hanno colto come queste sue osservazioni possono essere facilmente estese a tutti gli indessicali. Intendo presentare qui una posizione prospettivista sugli indessicali, ispirata dall’affermazione di Frege per cui tutti i tipi di indessicali hanno un doppio significato che, a sua volta, porta a una doppia natura dei sensi espressi dalle occorrenze indessicali. Parole chiave : Indessicali; Prima persona; Prospettiva; Sensi. (shrink)

This thesis consists of four essays and an introduction dedicated to two main topics: indexicality and presupposition. The first essay is concerned with an alleged problem for the standard treatment of indexicals on which their linguistic meanings are functions from context to content. Since most indexicals have their content settled, on an occasion of use, by the speaker’s intentions, some authors have argued that this standard picture is inadequate. By demonstrating that intentions can be seen as a parameter (...) of the kind of context that characters operate on, these arguments are rejected. In addition, it is argued that a more recent, variable-based framework is naturally interpreted as an intention-sensitive semantics. The second essay is devoted to the phenomenon of descriptive uses of indexicals on which such an expression seems to contribute, not its standard reference as determined by its character, but a property to the interpretation. An argument that singular readings of the cases in question are incoherent is shown to be incorrect, and an approach to descriptive readings is developed on which they arise from e-type uses akin to other well known cases. Further, descriptive readings of the relevant kind are seen to arise only in the presence of adverbs of quantification, and all sentences in which such an adverb takes scope over an indexical are claimed to be ambiguous between a referential and an e-type reading. The third essay discusses a version of the variable analysis of pronouns on which their descriptive meanings are relegated to the so-called phi-features – person, gender and number. In turn, the phi-features are here seen as triggering semantic presuppositions that place constraints on the definedness of pronouns, and ultimately of sentences in which they appear. It is argued that the descriptive information contributed by the phi-features diverges radically from presuppositional information of both semantic and pragmatic varieties on several dimensions of comparison, and instead the main role of the phi-features is seen to be that of guiding hearers’ attempts to ascertain the speaker’s intentions. The fourth essay addresses an issue concerning the treatment of presuppositions in dynamic semantics. Representing a semantic treatment of pragmatic presuppositions, the dynamic framework is shown to incorrectly regard conversational infelicity as sufficient for semantic undefinedness, given the standard way of defining truth in terms of context change. Further, it is shown that a proposal for a solution fail to make correct predictions for epistemic modals. A novel framework is developed on which context change potentials act on contexts that have more structure than the contexts usually countenanced by dynamic semantics, and it is shown that this framework derives truth from context change while making correct predictions for both presuppositions and modals. (shrink)

This book argues that there is a common cognitive mechanism underlying all indexical thoughts, in spite of their seeming diversity. Indexical thoughts are mental representations, such as beliefs and desires. They represent items from a thinker's point of view or her cognitive perspective. We typically express them by means of sentences containing linguistic expressions such as 'this ' or 'that ', adverbs like 'here', 'now', and 'today', and the personal pronoun 'I'. While generally agreeing that representing the world from (...) a thinker's cognitive perspective is a key feature of indexical thoughts, philosophers disagree as to whether a thinker's cognitive perspective can be captured and rationalized by semantic content and, if so, what kind of content this is. This book surveys competing views and then advances its own positive account. Ultimately, it argues that a thinker's cognitive perspective - or her indexical point of view - is to be explained in terms of the content that is believed and asserted as the only kind of content that there is which thereby serves as the bearer of cognitive significance. The Indexical Point of View will be of interest to philosophers of mind and language, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

When you use the word “I” it designates you; when I use the same word, it designates me. If you use “you” talking to me, it designates me; when I use it talking to you, it designates you. “I” and “you” are indexicals. The designation of an indexical shifts from speaker to speaker, time to time, place to place. Different utterances of the same indexical designate different things, because what is designated depends not only on the meaning associated with (...) the expression, but also on facts about the utterance. An utterance of “I” designates the person who utters it; an utterance of “you” designates the person to whom it is addressed, an utterance of “here” designates the place at which the utterance is made, and so forth. Because indexicals shift their designation in this way, sentences containing indexicals can be used to say different things on different occasions. Suppose you say to me, “You are wrong and I am right about reference,” and I reply with the same sentence. We have used the same sentence, with the same meaning, but said quite different and incompatible things. (shrink)

The indexical thesis says that the indexical terms, “I”, “here” and “now” necessarily refer to the person, place and time of utterance, respectively, with the result that the sentence, “I am here now” cannot express a false proposition. Gerald Vision offers supposed counter-examples: he says, “I am here now”, while pointing to the wrong place on a map; or he says it in a note he puts in the kitchen for his wife so she’ll know he’s home even though he’s (...) gone upstairs for a nap, but then he leaves the house, forgetting to remove the note. The first sentence is false by virtue of “here” not necessarily referring to the place of utterance, the second sentence, by virtue of “now” not necessarily referring to the time of utterance. We argue that these sentences express falsehoods only because the terms are being used demonstratively, not indexically – the distinction pertains not to words simpliciter, but to uses of words. When used indexically, the terms refer in accord with the indexical thesis; but when used demonstratively, their referents depend on how devices of ostension are used with their utterance – pointings, and the like. Thus Vision’s first sentence really says, “I am there now”, referring to the place on the map the finger is pointing to. As for his second sentence, we distinguish the time of utterance or production of a sentence from the time of its uptake. Due to the pragmatics of interpretation, the sentence really says “I” – the person ‘uttering’ the note – “am here” – here where the note is, with the note serving as a kind of proxy ‘finger’ – “now” – where “now” refers to the time of uptake of the note, i.e., when it is read. “I” refers indexically, “here”, demonstratively, and “now”, indexically, but indexically to the time of uptake. Since the sentence is not purely indexical, its falsehood doesn’t threaten the indexical thesis. A similar treatment is given of teletyped messages about the typer’s location. (shrink)

Sentences of natural languages are often said to express propositions and to have meanings . This work is about the nature of such entities and their role in an account of the truth conditions of tensed attributions of belief containing demonstratives and indexicals. ;In Chapter I, I discuss the temporal properties of propositions. Two views concerning the temporal properties of propositions--temporalism and eternalism--are characterized; eternalism is defended as the correct view. I show that the temporalist cannot give adequate truth (...) conditions for tensed attributions of belief, and, in addition, that criticisms of eternalism made by David Kaplan are unfounded. I also show that, given the truth of eternalism, Kaplan's identification of sentence meaning with character must be rejected. ;Chapter II takes, as its point of departure, Kaplan's work on demonstratives. An account of the semantical properties of demonstratives and indexicals is presented, one based upon Kaplan's account, but modified in the light of the results of Chapter I. It is then argued, on the basis of this account, that the usual truth conditions accorded to attributions of belief are incorrect: I argue that an attribution of belief is not true simply if the person to whom belief is attributed believes the proposition expressed by the sentence used to attribute belief. ;In Chapter III, two recent attempts to deal with the problems raised in Chapter II are considered: The semantics for attributions of belief suggested by Robert Stalnaker and Bas C. van Fraassen. On Stalnaker's and van Fraassen's views, in attributing belief to a person u using a sentence S, we sometimes do not attribute to u a belief in the proposition expressed by S, but in some other proposition. Both accounts are shown to be unacceptable. ;Finally, in Chapter IV, a solution to the problems raised in Chapter II is proposed. I suggest that not only the proposition expressed by a sentence S, but the meaning of S, is involved in truth conditions for attributions of belief containing S. The work concludes with a formal development of this proposal. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in Frege’s latest writings. (...) These views form the backdrop on which we can put forward the claim of treating all indexicals as complex demonstratives. In the central part of the paper, I criticize each of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. Besides, I propose a new definition of the concept of “demonstration” as a nonlinguistic feature of all indexicals in their referential uses, to contrast de Gaynesford’s rejection of the idea that demonstrations are an essential feature of indexicals. Eventually, I strengthen my claim by distinguishing indexicals from proper names and definite descriptions on the ground that only perceptual indexicals necessarily require an accompanying demonstration. However, the main point of the paper is a negative one, that is the rejection of de Gaynesford’s arguments against the reduction of indexicals to complex demonstratives. More work is needed to reach a positive conclusion on this topic. (shrink)

Indexical reference is personal, ephemeral, confrontational, and executive. Hence it is not reducible to nonindexical reference to what is not confronted. Conversely, nonindexical reference is not reducible to indexical reference. (Castañeda 1989, p. 70).

It is commonly held that retraction data, if they exist, show that assessment relativism is preferable to non-indexical contextualism. I argue that this is not the case. Whether retraction data have the suggested probative force depends on substantive questions about the proper treatment of tense and location. One’s preferred account in these domains should determine whether one accepts assessment relativism or non-indexical contextualism.