Indexicalism and Dynamicity about De Se and Self-Locating Beliefs

Abstract

De Se and Self-locating beliefs (“Egocentric beliefs”, for short), those canonically expressed by ‘I’ and ‘now’, are widely taken to have special properties that inevitably raise serious philosophical challenges. More specifically, the received view subscribes to a thesis that I call Indexicalism, which roughly means that egocentric beliefs can be accounted for in just the same way as indexical language, namely, by deploying a two-level Kaplanian framework where representations are assigned both a (context-sensitive) character and a referent. Indexicalism is a powerful methodological too. It allows the reapplication of a successful linguistic framework to the mental realm (promising to make the latter just as easily tractable as the former). Not only that, Indexicalism can also be motivated by means of direct argumentation, such as by Perry’s argument(s) about action (“the bear attack case” and “the tardy professor”), one of the most celebrated – and virtually uncontested –  arguments in analytic philosophy.

However, Indexicalism is not without problems. For one thing, it is committed to the existence of mental indexicality (i.e. not only egocentric concepts are canonically expressed by indexical terms, they are themselves indexical), a thesis that some have judged mysterious or unwarranted (e.g. Millikan, Papineau, Sainsbury & Tye; more recently, Clarke 2023). Relatedly, Indexicalism is also committed to characterising egocentric concepts as Relative or Private. A relative concept refers to an object because their tokens stand in certain relations to them (e.g. they are tokened by them, their tokening is simultaneous to them). To be relative in this sense plausibly amounts to nothing more than being indexical, in the most standard sense of that word. A private concept, on the other hand, is one of limited accessibility, either because it is entertainable only by its owner or only at specific times. The choice point between Relativity and Privacy is a well-known feature of the received view and has been argued to explain exactly in which sense egocentric beliefs are exceptional: they cannot be easily (or ever) shared or retained.

In my talk, I want to get clear on what the motivations for Indexicalism are, to challenge these motivations, and to sketch an alternative picture where egocentric beliefs neither have to be relative or private. The Dynamic view – inspired by ideas from Frege, Evans, Campbell, and Bermúdez – takes egocentric concepts to pick out their referents by means of intersubjective and diachronic relations between thinkers and objects. Paradigm examples of such relations are: being perceptually/temporally tracked by a thinker and being jointly attended to by thinkers. If it makes sense to individuate egocentric concepts by reference to our cognitive capacities for tracking a single thing across time and for jointly attending to a single thing, then these concepts are not indexical in the same sense that (Kaplanian) indexical terms are. This view thus draws a sharp contrast between egocentricity in thought and indexicality in language. I take Perry-inspired arguments about action to be the most serious challenge for the Dynamic view. If thinking of a time as soon and as then motivate distinct actions even though these concepts are deployed within a single episode of temporal tracking, then one must favour Indexicalism over Dynamicity. Likewise, if thinking of somebody as oneself and as one’s addressee motivate distinct actions even in cases where the addresser and the addressee are jointly attending to each other and successfully communicating, then, again, Indexicalism must be favoured and Dynamicity rejected.

I intend to challenge this family of arguments by pointing out that action-individuation is as much a serious issue for a theory of thought and intentionality as concept-individuation. Failure to acknowledge that has led to a biased interpretation of Perry’s cases where the subject(s) is/are presupposed to be performing distinct actions. If this interpretation were compulsory, these cases would indeed establish Indexicalism. But I don’t think they are, for the actions that rational agents perform are usually (or always) complex, and thus can be individuated dynamically by means of their common goals (Bermúdez is, to my knowledge, the only one to sketch that argument in connection to Perry’s bear attack case; 2017, pp. 48). If these points are correct, then Perry’s arguments neither favour Indexicalism nor Dynamicity. I conclude by showing that the dominant Indexicalist view is not the only game in town and, furthermore, that its Dynamic alternative promises to do everything that its rival does while rejecting the mystifying thesis that Egocentric concepts are exceptional.