The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person

by Herman Cappelen, Josh Dever

When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. The Inessential Indexical is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. Cappelen and Dever oppose one of the most entrenched and dominant trends in contemporary philosophy: that perspective (and the perspective of the first person in particular) is philosophically deep and that a proper understanding of it is important not just in the philosophies of language and mind, but throughout philosophy. They argue that there are no such things as essential indexicality, irreducibly de se attitudes, or self-locating attitudes. Their goal is not to show that we need to rethink these phenomena, to explain them in different ways. Their goal is to show that the entire topic is an illusion--there's nothing there.

The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is Francois Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

Genres: Philosophy

210 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Being firmly rooted in the Kantian and Husserlian traditions as I am, I cannot agree with what the authors characterize as their ambitious aim in this work, which is to show that indexicality and perspectivality are "philosophically shallow." While people such as McGinn, McDowell, and others have made much of indexicality, seeing it as proof of an irreducibly first-person level of content, the authors present a deflationary view of indexicals, showing that they are just more instances of the opacity of Frege-style cases, where there's a failure of substitution of co-referring terms. Since my intuitions pull me in the opposite direction, and since philosophers are always slaves to their intuitions anyway, I will have to concoct arguments that support my intuitions and that provide reasons to re-inflate indexicals and perspectival contents.

That will take time.........

Regardless of the success or failure of the authors' more ambitious aim, I do think that they succeed in their more modest aim, which is to show that the tradition inspired by Perry's "The Essential Indexical" doesn't even have -arguments- to show for its hyper-inflated interpretation of indexicality. That is, it would be good if there were arguments, and they were bad ones with lots of holes in them. Then we might be able to start somewhere. Instead, there are - as the authors show - at times no arguments to be found. Instead, what we find are nothing more than just cases that could just as well be instances of the already familiar Frege's puzzle. Moreover, they show that much greater care is needed to provide some kind of taxonomy of indexicals, and to show how (and whether) they relate. This needs to be done before we can arrive at sweeping conclusions about the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of indexicality.

If you're already skeptical about the far-flung claims being made on behalf of first-personal contents, you should read this book. If you are already a committed believer in the existence and far-reaching philosophical significance of such contents (as I am) you should -really- read this book. It provides a good kick in the arse of an at times complacent tradition of just referring to Perry in a footnote, as if his seminal paper had clearly and unambiguously established groundbreaking claims about an indissoluble connection between, say, agency and indexicality. The authors remind us that these claims still need to be carefully argued for, one link at a time (and they helpfully show what some of the links to be established are). The acid that this book pours on us all can seem like a curse; but it is actually a blessing in disguise - a catalyst that stimulates us to clarify and sharpen our arguments. And, of course, to concoct arguments where we don't really have any.

Oops.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of the arguments in the book are: 1) indexicality is grotesquely useful, natural, and widespread, but, if you regiment your language in vastly, and ridiculously unpractical ways, it is not absolutely necessary in the sense that you can breathe without it, and 2) what is supposedly essentially indexical about stuff can often be reduced to Frege puzzles and Kripkean problems about names.

Other than that, two reflections:

An argument against mental indexicality, to the effect that I don’t need to have indexical thoughts to act out my intentions in the world (viz. to think about that phone to call X’s number, following a relation between X and his number which I can lay out in a relatively context-insensitive sentence, such as: ‘xxx-xxx-xxx is X’s number’). The objection states that the very fact that it is thinking proper that is involved at this stage has not been demonstrated. At least Cappelen & Dever, good minimalists that they are, hold that there can be no pragmatic theory of thought, because where action starts, thought stops. The context-sensitivity problem is a pragmatic problem, not a semantic problem, and so it doesn’t affect thought. I think this objection would hold if all thought were conscious. But it isn’t.

Also,

When I have de re, but not de se (i.e. referentially opaque) beliefs about myself, I still relate to myself in a way that is different from the way I relate to other people. This destroys Cappelen & Dever’s objection to Perry’s framework according to which when I have de re, but not de se beliefs about myself, I have Larry-beliefs that are structurally the same as my Annie- or my Helen-beliefs. Why? Because it is not possible for me to see myself in a third-person way; referentially opaque de re beliefs about oneself come to be had only when someone’s use of a first-person method of acquaintance misfires: I see myself in the mirror and identify someone else. But I can’t be right, since the only person I can see in front of me in a mirror that is in front of me is myself. To see myself in a mirror is not a third-person way to see myself, so whatever third-person (de re) belief I come to have about myself in this way is illegitimate. So it is never the case that I (actually) have the same kind of relation to myself as I have with other people, at least not in directly perceptual cases (photos etc. not included). Maybe this is a kind of disjunctivism about the de se?