The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person, by Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever.

Abstract

What is ‘indexicality’? At an empirical level, phenomena considered under this usually rather ill-defined label range from certain uses of pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘he’, or ‘this’; to temporal and spatial adverbs such as ‘now’ or ‘here’; and even to deictic (e.g. index-finger) pointing. As the authors of this book (henceforth IE) note, when we extend the term beyond the linguistic domain, as when using such terms as ‘attitudes de se ’ to depict certain putatively non-linguistic representational mental states, it is even less clear what exactly indexicality amounts to and what ‘ de se attitudes’ actually ‘have to do with the first-person pronoun’ (p. 23). In IE, indexicality is not really defined either, but philosophically captured under the unifying concept of the world being represented ‘from a perspective’ (p. 1). Below I will largely focus on how the book looks at pronouns as incorporating ‘perspective’ in this sense. Empirically, pronouns are special in two ways: (i) they encode distinctions of grammatical Person: using pronouns the exact same person can be referred to in three grammatically and lexically distinct ways, namely in the first Person (‘I’), the second (‘you’), or the third (or ‘non-’) Person (‘he’, ‘Bill’, ‘this man’); (ii) they are not only typically short (phonologically light-weight) and can (in some languages) even be silent, but they are devoid of descriptive lexical content. Hence they embody little more than the very form of reference they allow us to enact, and because of their lack of descriptive lexical content, figuring out their reference will depend on witnessing the context in which they are used: we need to know who speaks, to whom, about whom, when, and where. Pronouns exist (or nearly enough) universally in human populations: no grammar has been found that either lacks them completely or allows extending the Person distinctions that pronouns incorporate beyond three to four, five, six, or seventeen. They also interact with core dimensions of grammar (e.g. structural case). Overall, therefore, pronouns represent a fundamental aspect of human language design, and we might well expect that they would matter philosophically as well. Whether they really do is the question of this book.