Indexicals and Perception

Abstract

The usage of indexicals in our communicative activities displays a special connection between thought and sensory knowledge. Indexical terms are “sensitive to context” in a special way, and show ambiguity and incompleteness in abstraction from context. The literature on this topic traditionally makes a distinction between pure indexicals, the semantic ambiguity of which is resolved by appeal to context alone, and demonstratives, the ambiguity of which persists notwithstanding the recourse to context, as they need further disambiguation by means of demonstrations, speaker’s directing intentions, etc. After a discussion of some approaches to the problem of indexical reference, I propose an alternative, salience-based model centered on the notion of the perceptual-pragmatic salience of an object in a context. The main idea of the salience-based model is the following: an indexical term denotes an object, or portion of the perceptual context, which is salient at the moment of utterance. Salience itself is understood in terms of the selective attention operative in perception. The salience-based account allows one to solve the problems of ambiguity and incompleteness, yet overcoming the distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives. This proposal for indexical perception-based reference clearly matches the paradigm of the “embodied cognition”.