INDEXICALITY

Adriano Palma

Submitted to the faculty of the Graduate School

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

in the Department of Philosophy

Indiana University

December 1989

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ii

INDEXICALITY

ADRIANO PALMA

c©Adriano Palma 1989

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written

permission of the author.

Acknowledgments

The author should like to thank all members of the thesis committee for the extent of their help.

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Abstract

The problem of indexicality is presented and then the problems brought about by it with

several semantical approaches are examined. In particular theories which claim to have a quick

eliminative solution for indexicality are discussed and criticized. Frege’s remarks on the logic of

sense and reference are discussed to indicate the limits of his original approach when indexical

terms are seen as not eliminable in any simple and straightforward way, in particular when the

importance of indexicality is understood in its essential role in the formation of attitudes toward

action and belief.

In the last chapter a tentative reformed and amended approach is proposed, trying to

keep insofar as possible intact the insights of the Fregean semantics, but with relevant changes

to accommodate the phenomenon of indexicality.

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Doctoral Committee:

Hector-Neri Castaneda, Ph.D., Chairman

Romane Clark, Ph.D.

Jon Michael Dunn, Ph.D.

Linda Wessels, Ph.D.

August 29th, 1989

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

(p.2)

CHAPTER 2: Reductions

(p.9)

CHAPTER 3: Frege’s notion of sense

(p. 41)

CHAPTER 4: Direct Reference

(p. 54)

CHAPTER 5: I (and some speculations)

(p. 100)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

I have been intrigued by indexical expressions for a long time. I still am, for I think I have

not found a finally satisfactory view that takes into account all the data (linguistic, psychological,

logical, etc.) and collates them in a simple and elegant pattern.

That being my final goal, here I offer prolegomena to it: what I take to be the relevant

data, and what I think one should not have as a theory.

Some of the critical parts of this paper are inherently unfair. To criticize Frege or Russell

from my present standpoint is using against them many of the data, theories, approaches, others

have built, after them, sitting on their shoulders. Perhaps in philosophy to be criticized is to be

alive, so this is my way of paying respect to them.

What I will eventually present (in chapter 5) as my positive view is somewhat speculative.

It has its foothold in works by others from which I have largely borrowed data, terminology,

and concepts. In that respect I have to mention Hector-Neri Castaneda’s work, which had me

interested in the topic of indexical reference to begin with.

First a delimitation of the world ’indexical’. I take indexical words to be expressions such

as ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘here’, ‘that’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘yesterda y’, ‘today’, and so forth

(caveat: the expressions to function indexically have to b e used in their “standard” pronominal,

adverbial, adjectival role, and the list itself is not exhaustive, in part because of disagreement

on the extent of indexicality in language). The common denominator of indexical expressions is

that they have no stable referent, even though always referential1.

The referent is determined contextually in each occasion of use. An ‘occasion of use’ is

in general an utterance. An utterance is a physical event in which a speaker uses a sentence.

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Two notes.

1. the context in which an utterance takes place includes a speaker as an essential feature (thus

one token sentence containing indexicals uttered by two speakers will bring about two occasions

of use, even ceteris paribus).

2. an utterance will do for me double duty. Either assuming sincerity or not, I will take it to be

the expression of a thought, which may occur independently of an utterance. Given candid talk,

I will take the text of an utterance to be the text of a thought and when the speech act is not

candid, the intention to deceive will at least determine one text of –deceitful– thought.

Even though in the final analysis I will reject one alleged reason for the distinction, I will

be using two terms to indicate a difference in use: pure and demonstrative indexical (in short,

demonstrative). The distinction, I owe to David Kaplan, is the following. While both pure and

demonstrative indexical expression have their referent fixed only in a context of use, the kind

of factors to be taken into account is different. For pure indexicals (paradigmatically ‘I’, ‘now’,

‘here’) the use of them is enough to establish that there is a reference made to a real entity.

This might be taken to be the semantical principle underlying Descartes’ argument that

just by thinking ‘I’, he would be able to conclude that there was a referent for his tokening the

expression, even without relying on logical principles of inference2.

On the other hand, according to David Kaplan at any rate, demonstrative indexicals or

demonstratives (paradigmatically ‘that’, ‘this’, ‘he’) achieve their reference by way of a context

which includes a demonstration. This might or might not be “physically executed” by a pointing,

or an ostension. The basic case is an utterance such as ‘That is a great work of art’, said by

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someone who is pointing to, say, a sculpture in front of an audience. The fixation of the referent

of the token of ‘that’ is possible for the hearers through the speaker’s pointing. This pointing is

very loose a notion (in a sense anaphoric reference can be seen as a way of pointing back, and

it is not very obvious what constitutes a pointing when an indexical reference to abstracta takes

place), but in first approximation it is a notion helpful in indicating a certain difference among

indexicals. No matter what one thinks of demonstratives a difference is perceivable. Though I

disagree with it, I have to notice that one position I found shared by many authors (Hector-Neri

Castaneda, Roderick Chisholm, and David Kaplan, for instance) is the one which singles out as

one feature of difference between the two kinds of indexicals referential failures. As noted pure

indexicals can not have non-referential uses, but demonstratives can according to the position

I am describing. I will spell out more clearly the reasons of my disagreement with such a view

in Chapter 5. The notion of pointing is to be taken loosely here, because I am not sure we can

make sense of a physical pointing to abstract objects directly, without a mediatory role of figures

and the like.

I will argue that we can refer to entities in thought that is independently from any

utterance, although utterances as remarked before are thoughts’ witnesses. The thought, insofar

as it is expressed by a sentence, has some level of syntactic structure, at least as much as we can

describe linguistically. I assume, then, a certain correlation between thought and speech.

As Castaneda never tires to argue, a language has to be used by a speaker first, in order

to be understood by anybody else. Accordingly I will make use of his distinction. There is a

(speaker’s) thinking reference which constitutes “the zeroing in on an entity E of one’s thinking

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of E”, and communicational speaker’s reference: “The issue here is the techniques for succeeding

and the limits of success in making others think, i.e., refer thinkingly in the first-person to, what

one thinkingly refers to in the first person”.3

I believe certain non-indexical expressions have a reference which is just fixed relative

to the language in which they occur. Whether they have by themselves denotations might be

doubted. I think it clear though, that indexical expressions get a denotation in use only, either

in thinking use or in communicational use. I shall indicate some of the reasons why I think that

in the passage from thinking reference to communicational speaker’s reference mechanisms akin

to Grice’s rule for meaning are at work4. The aim of the distinction lies in that we do convey

information in communication, but I think there is also a dimension of strict privacy of first-

person thoughts, those thoughts can be certainly alluded to, attributed to a thinker by others in

some vicarious ways, but I do not think they are shared in Frege’s sense.

One term I will make use of is ‘field of awareness’. It stands in need of at least preliminary

explanation.

I take it that I am aware of my surroundings, and, sometimes of myself, and I tend to

attribute the same conditions to others. Now by field of awareness I’ll mean all of which I can

be aware of at any given time. The construal here has to be taken internally, ‘being aware of x’

does not entail under an “internal” reading the existence of x. Different moments in time then

will have different fields of awareness. At one time though I might have present in my field of

awareness items which were presented in prior ones: memorized entities, so to speak, can be in

a field of awareness (bringing about the problem of re-identification; i.e. of how one can make

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a judgment of sameness between the item in field of awareness at time 0+1 and the item in the

field of awareness at time 0).

I assume that there are no boundaries to what our awareness can encompass: in our

fields there are at different times (and probably for different people) gods and humans, triangles,

concreta and abstracta, and so forth. At the basic level the items of our field of awareness

are perceptual, but awareness does not have to stop there. On what the precise structure and

contents of a field of awareness is, I will remain neutral5. I shall eventually note how our field of

awareness is shaped by unconscious processes of categorization and reification, which will play a

role in my view of demonstrative reference. I think the idea of field of awareness is a time-sliced

equivalent to Ray Jackendoff’s projected world6.

One final word of introduction: I do not have a mathematical theory, or a perfectly

formalized semantics. I would like to have it, if I only were able to construct one. In particular in

Chapter 5, I will indicate what I take to be the shape of the terrain a formal semantics ought to

formalize. In particular I think it an open question if we have good formal ways to characterize

the perspectival aspect of language mathematically: I certainly do not have any such. I do not

believe, though, that’s enough to refrain from trying to formalize it.

Enough of introduction: it is better to see the machinery at work than talking about it.

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NOTES\1/ Or, at least, always meant to be referential: as I note below some theories countenancereferential failures for some of these expressions.\2 “When someone says ‘I am thinking, therefore I am or I exist’, he does not deduce existencefrom thought by means of a syllogism, he would have to have had the previous knowledge of themajor premiss ‘Everything which thinks is, or exists’; yet in fact he learns it from experiencing inhis own case that it is impossible that he should think without existing”, wrote Rene’ Descartes inhis Second set of Replies to Objections. The objection in question was formulated by Mersenne.See The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Cambridge, 1984, vol. I I: p. 100.\3/ See CASTANEDA {7}: p. 277.\4/ See in particular “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions”, now in Studies in the Way of Words,Cambridge, Mass., 1989, pp. 86-109.\5/ Castaneda has a specific theory of hierarchy of consciousness (see, in particular, his {5} and{9}). This has to do, I believe, with certain views of his on the need for a “rich biography” whichrequires some higher-level consciousness of the self. At the present time I do not have any suchdeveloped connections, so I thought it correct to leave the question open. But see Chapter 5, forsome notes on self-consciousness.\6/ See JACKENDOFF {1} and {2}.I wrote ‘time-sliced’ because I wish to remain as noncommittal as possible w.r.t. issues of re-identification of recurring particu lars even though items of memory, I believe, can be in a fieldof awareness.

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CHAPTER 2

Reductions

Das Wort � ich � bedeutet nicht dasselbe wie � L.W. � selbst wennich L.W. bin, noch bedeutet es dasselbe wie der Ausdruck � die Person, diejetzt spricht �. Das bedeutet jedoch nicht, daß� L.W. � und � ich � zweiverschiedene Dinge bedeuten. Es bedeutet nichts weiter, als daß diese Woerterverschiedene Instrumente in unserer Sprache sind.

Ludwig Wittgenstein∗

Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption.Willard V.O. Quine∗∗

A setting of the problem

There is no visible practical problem of indexicality: every mature speaker is able to use

these expressions, these expressions are understood by audiences, the communicational traffic

seems to flow without any greater problems than in other areas of language.

The issues do not seem to be all that straightforward in philosophy of language. Index-

icals bring about a problem when certain assumptions, otherwise rather reasonable, are made.

The central assumption is that linguistic entities, such as sentences, are expressive of proposi-

tions. Propositions are hold by many to be abstract objects, to be bearers of truth-values, and

to be squarely out of the space-time network.

Taking a couple of extreme examples: the propositions expressed by:

2+2 = 4

and

II + II = V

are (given the medium of numerals) referring to numbers, and respectively true and false of

numbers. I have explicitly used two different kinds of numerals to indicate that in the classical

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notion of propositions they can be expressible by a variety of means. Obviously, modulo English,

one can express those two propositions by producing the noises (which are recognizable as) ‘two-

plus-two-equal-four’ and ‘two-plus-two-equal-five’.

Note: classically propositions are objects of cognitive capacities, they can be asserted,

denied, entertained in thought, believed, disbelieved, some will add also hoped for, queried about

and so forth. Frege tried to capture this facet by distinguishing and assertoric content from the

force of a sentence1.

Indexicality comes into the picture and a few features of the classical view of proposi-

tions do not look too convincing. For one thing there seems to be no prior ground to exclude

that sentences like ‘I am thinking now’ or ‘That chapter I wrote three days ago was not too

coherent’ are expressive of propositions. They do carry a definite cognitive significance for the

thinker/utterer, they are understandable by those who know English, and there seems to be a

content which gets exchanged communicationally. But they do not seem to be in the realm of

abstract tenseless entities (the propositions of the classical view, so to speak). Almost palpably

two distinct utterances or occurrences in thought of

‘I am hungry now’

might have diverging truth values, and so it seems that tenselessly the two occurrences of the

same sentence are expressing two different propositions after all.

On the other hand, as Frege noted in his Der Gedanke, there seems to be an irreducible

cognitive role of the first person pronoun: each user understands by it something private and not

quite shareable in the way in which the meaning and the denotatum of “II” is shareable.

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These intuitive problems have prompted two main responses: one is to show that in-

dexical expressions, although pragmatically convenient, are not really needed, with the sense of

“need” to be further explained; the other one is to build a formal apparatus that provides ways

to “tag” each indexical occurrence in such a way that it “hooks up” directly with its denotatum,

and then provide a separate theory w.r.t. to the cognitive significance of the sentence and of the

proposition expressed by it. To these two approaches I turn next.

My general view consists of three main tenets:

1. we do use indexical reference

2. indexical reference is irreducible to different forms of reference

3. the irreducibility of indexical reference points to a mode in which experience impinges upon

language, and insofar as language mirrors thoughts, upon thought as well.

Against this view a host of positions claims instead that indexicals are somehow reducible

to other expressions. With diverse aims and motivations theorists have been trying to show that

indexicality, while contingently present in natural language, need not be a permanent fixture in

our conceptual schemes: given enough patience, we could do without it. There is a plain sense

in which certain indexical expressions are replaceable by a non-indexical one.

My uttering a token of

I am reading

is easily understood by a hearer who knows my name as an act of stating to the effect that AP

(or ‘the speaker of the speech act in question’ if he takes me to be such an agent) is reading. Very

similar stories can be told for other indexicals as well. Indeed, generally a speaker’s indicators

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have to be replaced by other denoting expression in hearers’ reports: by names and description

in the de re mode or by quasi-indicators if the report wants to preserve the original indexical

character of the reported utterance.

The utterance at 6 a.m. of

I am awake

is easily understood by someone who hears it, knows English and assumes that I am producing it,

and knows or believes that it is 6 a.m. and that I am (the s ame as) AP to convey the information

that AP is awake at 6 a.m.

There are still some difficulties in providing this sort of quick translation with tokenings

of pure demonstratives. The difficulty I perceive is that the referents targeted by tokens of

demonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’ sometimes so speedily disappear that seldom if ever, anybody

conceived of having them baptized into an everlasting (or longlasting) lexicon. On the surface of

utterances often the tokenings of ‘this’ and ‘that’ have no sortal predicative specifying appendix,

as in ‘this dolphin’, and it is left to context and intentions of the speaker to make the reference

definite.

No doubt, indexicals express ephemeral references and to capture the content of a state-

ment containing them they have to be replaced by referentially stabler expressions. The next

question is: Is this replaceability a symptom of or a “proof” of their reducibility? To this question

I turn next.

One finds in the literature many a different “way” of reduction. One categorization I

propose is to divide the field between absolute and relative reductions.

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Absolute reductions attempt to eliminate indexicals tout court, to show them to be

dispensable, once one realizes they are in use only as abbreviations of longer, more cumbersome,

expressions which can be redrafted into service, were need to arise, as in the case of the fictional

physicist who has to speak pretending to be a god. Relative reductions, by contrast, try to show

that indexicals can be analyzed away only via a translation into other expressions, indexical

themselves, but taken to be more basic or fundamental in some sense.

The moral of the tale lies in what one’s primitive terms are: an indication of which kind

of philosophical semantics one wishes to construct.

I am inclined to categorize Millikan, Boer and Lycan, at least under one reading, and

Frege (again, in one of his phases, as I explain later) as absolute reductionists; G.E.M. Anscombe,

Chisholm, Russell and Reichenbach as relative reductionists.

The thrust of all “duplication arguments” (introduced qua arguments about indexicality

by Castaneda, and revived later by Perry, and afterwards used by numerous authors) relies on a

general characteristic of thought: its being never closed under any form of closure. A duplication

argument, in its most general form, tries to establish the irreducibility of the meaning of one

expression to another’s by calling attention to a possible disparity in the truth-evaluation of the

utterance/thought where the allegedly dispensable expression occurs. Here the assumption is that

the minimal unit of significance from the standpoint of assigning truth values is a declarative

sentence (this is not in general the case: anaphora and all sorts of contextual factors often make

much larger segments of discourse minimal units of significance). What those arguments show

is the following: in absolutely general terms the thought X is not equival ent to the thought

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Xt where Xt is a “translation” of X with replacements of referring terms with other coreferring

terms.

That I take to be the lesson of all the controversies on the morning star, Venus, the

evening star, Cicero and Tully, Londres and London, and so forth. Any given attempt at reduction

ought to be tested again this datum of thought: I see this character of thought as a consequence

of the finitude of minds’ activities.

To use my simple little example again:

I am awake now

is perfectly thinkable by me, whether I otherwise know or not what time it is now, or what my

(given) name is.

For I might be unaware of all information regarding my name, the time at which I am

thinking and so on and so forth, be that because I forgot it, because I just do not know it,

because I am radically mistaken, because I am in the wrong time zone, and so forth by way

of multiplication of possible situations in which there are indeed coreferring terms available to

express at some level of public communication my thought and I have not used them.

I take this character of thought to be a fact about human psychology. This openness is

what makes it impossible to have general replacements of indexical expressions. The de re char-

acter of many of the alleged replacements lacks the proper finegrained multiplicity of thoughts.

The de re modifier is to be taken in its literal meaning: it refers to that which is “about things”.

We have the tendency to think, in philosophical circles no less than in common sense, that the

component of a thought which is referential which the labeling functions, is part and parcel of

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what is meant.

My view, on the other hand, can be put in simple words thus: the way of reference is

part of what is meant in thought and speech, possibly and not necessarily together with the

expression’s referent.

So much for introductory remarks. Let’s test my view with some alleged translations, to

see how it fares by comparison.

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Russell’s “egocentric particulars” and Reichenbach’s “token-reflexive words”

Hans Reichenbach and Bertrand Russell had very similar approaches to the elimination

of indexicals in their purified language systems2.

Reichenbach rather cavalierly sets up his translation-cum-elimination of indexicals by

using quotation devices for the sentences in which they occur.

In his own words, Luther in 1521 at the Reichstag at Worms utters ‘Here I stand’.

Labeling the utterance in single quotes as ’U’, the ‘I’ tokened by Luther can be given the form

‘the x that spoke U’ and the ‘here’ tokened by Luther can be translated as ‘the place z where U

was spoken’. U can then be expressed formally (allowing ourselves to use the function ‘x speaks

y at z’, with SP for ‘speak’ and ST for ‘stand’ and a definite description operator ’dd’ for the

“iota operator” of Russell):

ST[(ddx)there is a z)SP(x,U,z),(ddz)(there is an x)SP(x, U,z)

Then, Reichenbach remarks, ‘here’ and ‘I’ used in a quotation of Luther’s utterance do not have

the original token-reflexive meaning3.

Aware of the limitations of his proposal, Reichenbach introduces a single symbolic equiv-

alent of the natural language type-word ‘this’, token-reflexive exactly in the same way ‘this’ is

in English, despite his insistence on the importance of the switch from types to tokens. And

his ‘this’ type has exactly the same function of ‘this’ in English, namely to make possible direct

reference to an item in the field of awareness of a speaker/thinker, the type ‘this’ has then a

constant character and a different meaning (referent) for each one of its tokenings4. Reichenbach

in this respect is very close to Russell’s view of keeping a single primitive indexical and ‘define’

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the meaning of all the others in its terms.

Russell, less mesmerized by the need of constructing symbolic calculi, shows more aware-

ness of the issues at stake in the “elimination” of indexical reference.

Very boldly he states:

All egocentric words can be defined in terms of ‘this’. Thus: ‘I’ means‘The biography to which this belongs’; ‘here’ means ‘The place of this’; ‘now’means ‘The time of this’; and so on. We may therefore confine our inquiry to‘this’. It does not seem equally feasible to take some other egocentric word asfundamental, and define ‘this’ in terms of it.

. . . Before embarking upon more difficult questions, let us observe thatno egocentric particulars occur in the language of physics. Physics views space-time impartially, as God might be supposed to view it; there is not, as in percep-tion, a region which is specially warm and and intimate and bright, surroundedin all directions by gradually growing darkness. A physicist will not say ‘I sawa table’, but like Neurath or Julius Caesar, ‘Otto saw a table’. . . 5

Russell aims at an elimination of indexicality through showing that references made to

items in the speakers’ experience, such as the ones expressed by indexical terms, are dispensable,

not really needed for a sort of view of the universe from the standpoint of an impersonal observer:

“If our theory of ‘this’ is correct, it is a word which is not needed for a complete description of

the world”.6

The reason for such a claim is quite simply that Russell holds a twofold view of egocentric

particulars-words’ meaning. The use of a sentence beginning with a phrase like ‘this is’ is the end

product, so to speak, of a causal chain that begins with an external stimulus impinging on the

perceptual apparatus of the speaker/thinker: “A verbal reaction to a stimulus may be immediate

or delayed. When it is immediate, the afferent current runs into the brain and continues along

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an efferent nerve until it affects the appropriate muscles and produces a sentence beginning ‘this

is’. When it is delayed, the afferent impulse goes into some kind of reservoir, and only produces

an efferent impulse in response to some other stimulus”.7 The second tenet of the view is that all

other forms of indexical reference are to be shown reducible to the “causal” one which constitutes

the path to the reference of ‘this’.

Now, claims that ‘I’ is replaceable by ‘The biography to which this belongs’ are refuted

by the experiencing in thinking of no such equivalences. Quite visibly, at a purely empirical level,

children of very young age do use the first person pronoun without ever being aware of any as

complex as ‘biography’. If in their thinking the meaning of ‘I’ were to be the one alleged by

Russell, we would be in the rather counterintuitive situation of having to attribute them such a

highly sophisticated conceptual network. Again I have to remind the reader that my focus is on

the level of thinking, the first person pronoun in the utterance can be understood by Russell or by

anybody else in a number of ways, among them as ‘the biography to which the event/utterance

belongs’. On a more philosophical level, we can apply duplication arguments rather smoothly to

the Russell-Reichenbach views. It is conceivable that an amnesiac has no idea whatsoever of his

own biography8. And yet the amnesiac can say and truly believe:

I am tired now

then of the amnesiac we can say, calling him ‘A’, ‘A believes ‘I am tired now”, if we allow on our

side the capacity to attribute to others indexical thoughts we can state that ‘A believes he-himself

to be tired’.

Since Castaneda’s seminal “Indicators and Quasi-indicators” we have the means to dis-

19

ambiguate as done above the more idiomatic report ‘A believes he is tired’. The ‘he’ token here

can be read in radically different ways: it can be a demonstrative pronoun, with its reference

depending on the context of the utterance and, I urge, on the speaker’s intention, or it can be

used to pinpoint in the report that A made a reference to himself-as-himself. It ought to be clear

then that when a reported ‘he’ is used as a quasi-indicator (made explicit in a semi-regimented

language by the he-himself phrase) we do not have the means to replace it by any other way of

referring to A, assuming we want to preserve the content of the original first person utterance9.

For the amnesiac’s beliefs are not correctly depicted by translating them to the effect that

‘The biography to which this belongs is tired’: A, the amnesiac, by definition has no biography

of which he is aware. As I noted in the introductory remarks we have again a disparity between

de re attribution (the way in which we can understand others’ utterances) and semantics of

thinking and uttering from the standpoint of the speaker/utterer. In most cases, probably in

a very large majority of cases of communication, default values will play the roles of referents

for singular expressions. Russell’s proposal works well for all cases of default: in most cases the

speaker is able, if necessary with some prodding, to cognize and recognize the ‘I’ in the utterance

as somehow equivalent to the biography within which the utterance itself appears as an event10.

Thus I conclude that, even if we grant Russell his understanding of the referential path for

tokens of ‘this’, his reduction of other forms of indexicality to it does not satisfy the requirements

of a semantics for thinking, even though it may be taken as one view of what default assignments

of referents are in many cases.

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G.E.M. Anscombe’s vanishing ‘I’.

Anscombe in her essay comes to the conclusion that first person referential acts are

dispensable:

‘I’ is neither a name nor another expression whose logical role is to make areference, at all −−11

Her view develops an intuition to the effect that a token of ‘I’ is not a name for an

object. It could not be a name for a body because the “loss” of a body, in putative cases of

sensory deprivation, or the loss of memory does not bring about the loss of an Ego, as long as

there are I-thoughts still thinkable under those conditions:

. . . ‘I’ is not a name: these I-thoughts are examples of reflective consciousness ofstates, actions, motions, etc., not of an object I mean by ‘I’, but of this body.These I-thoughts . . . are unmediated conceptions (knowledge or belief, true orfalse) of states, motions, etc., of this object here, about which I can find out (ifI do not know it) that it is E.A. About which I did learn that it is a humanbeing.12

Now, first of all I suspect that behind positions like hers there is overly simplified notion

of naming: it is not clear why a name has to be the name of a physical object, and why not

the name of a state. It might well be the case that within a larger philosophical outlook one

wishes to be materialist and claim that in final analysis what ‘there is’ is just a composition of

molecules, quarks, energy or what have you. It is not at all clear to me at any rate, why names

(here I mean names of natural languages) can not be naming entities other than objects, be those

states, motions, etc., and their indefinite combinations. But even setting aside my suspicions for

the nonce, Anscombe is forced to recognize that her zero-referential value of tokened ‘I’ will not

21

quite do:

There is a real question: with what object is my consciousness of action, posture,and movement, and are my intentions connected in such a fashion that thatobject must be standing up if I have the thought that I am standing up and mythought is true? And there is an answer to that: it is this object here.13

Anscombe holds first person ascriptions to be publicly verifiable by oneself and by anyone

else to be about a person, which person? “this one”, surprisingly she answers14.

I find it difficult to see the appeal of her approach. After all, there are strong reasons to

have in a semantics the referent of a singular term such as ‘I’ neutral among all possible targets

of reference. One reason is that we should try semantically to capture as much as possible of

the thinking of actual speakers and so I believe one should be careful before introducing rather

philosophically “loaded” notions as semantic referents, because referring terms may be used

quite correctly by people who have no use (and no acquaintance with) such sophisticated ideas.

Anscombe’s notion of ‘person’ is a philosophically loaded construction: it does not coincide with

the body physically associated to it, nor it coincides with a ghostly soul, spirit, or what have

you.

There are criticisms to be noticed.

First, the embedding in indirect discourse of first person utterances becomes nearly nonsensical.

For suppose one wishes to report:

I am standing

uttered by E.A., naturally one would have to say:

22

E.A. says she is standing

The token of ‘she’ in the report is a quasi-indicator in Castaneda’s terminology or in Anscombe’s

terminology is an indirect reflexive pronoun. What is its referent? E.A., at the level of publicly

identifiable targets of reference (assuming in a sort of meta-language we can treat names as

purely de re devices directly and uniquely getting hold of their referents). But notice that if the

embedding is faithful in its reporting a certain semantical structure has to be preserved. The

correct report in a slightly regimented idiom is

E.A. says [thinks, believes, . . . ] she-herself is standing

The extended regimented form makes it explicit we are reporting a first person utterance made

by E.A.

Now, if in fact the ‘I’ of E.A.’s original utterance or thought is a vanishing pointer

to ‘this object here’, the reporting agent ought to be able to report that as the object whose

thought/utterance is indeed reported. But this is often impossible or not even grammatical. And

for good reasons.

First person utterances do not occur in a vacuum waiting to be filled by an observant

questioning audience (even if the audience is only oneself): they come with a specific reference

to the subject doing the thinking and the uttering. The specific mode of reference is marked

linguistically by the use of the pronoun. That linguistic structure is preserved and embodied in

our grammatical convention to have systematic shifts of expressions in indirect speech. What

is revealed by the grammatical convention is the need to keep at least the capacity to make a

distinction between a reference to oneself, no matter how, and the reference to oneself qua ‘I’.

23

Were one to answer the same ‘whose standing are you talking about’ question for someone who

does not know the surname of Ms. Anscombe, we would have to switch most naturally to a

reply containing the distal demonstrative pronoun, saying ‘the standing of that person there’.

The systematic syntactical links between reporting utterances and reported contents, the general

phenomenon of opacity of indirect discourse, underpin and make explicit what is seldom explicit

in first person utterances: their occurring within the range of a covert indexical operator15.

The second criticism is more general in scope. Were one to accept Anscombe’s elucida-

tions about the role of prima facie referential acts performed in first person utterances, it would

still not follow that the tokens of ‘I’ are not referential at all, as she wishes to claim.

On her account the thought, or the utterance grammatically attributed by the use of a

token of ‘I’, or by the inflections of the verb in languages other than English, is attributed to ’this

body’ or to ’this person here’, since she has misgivings in identifying bodies with persons. The

token of ‘this’ in the explanatory clause is therefore referential on her own reckoning, because it

is the specific clue to the establishment and fixation of a referent a speaker, if thus queried, can

supply to the audience. The problem is just reproduced at a further distance: ‘this’ is indexical

again and does not have a referent fixed only by its grammatical meaning. It is only a tokened

‘this’ which is referential, and it “gets at” a referent precisely in virtue of being used by a speaker

in a context of which the speaker is part and parcel. The determination of the referent might very

well be shared by others, by ostension, as it were, but it is a reference made by the agent of the

thought/utterance. ‘this’ being indexical in complete isolation is not any more referential than

‘not’ (though for different reasons). Thus the reference made by a tokened ‘this’ is ultimately

24

depending upon being used by an agent. And that agency is ultimately what is captured by the

‘I’ without making any reference to bodies, people, etc. My rough sketch of a rule would state

in first approximation that within the semantics of the hearers:

a tokened ‘this’ refers to an item in the field of awareness of the thinker/speakerin whose utterance/thought it occurs

If this admittedly coarse rule of reference is anywhere close to correct, Anscombe could

not claim that the agent is vanishing from the semantical features of pronouns: the agent,

precisely what is captured by ‘I’, is always just beneath the grammatical surface of speech and

thought, and whenever we aim at perspicuity the primary task is to bring out from its covert

status the role of the agent in language. And that is nowhere more superficial than in first person

thoughts.

Often, Wittgenstein remarked, the real depth is just right on the surface of language.

25

Chisholm’s self-attributive view

Roderick Chisholm in an intricate treatise devoted to the explanation of first person

sentences makes the claim that all indexical reference is basically understandable in terms of one

simple mechanism of self-attribution of properties16.

After having assumed the primacy of intentionality, he states:

I shall propose that the primary form of all reference is that referenceto ourselves that we normally express when we use the first person pronoun.In the case of believing, this reference may be called ‘direct attribution’. Ourreference to all other things is by way of such reference to ourselves. I shallargue that, although we express ourselves in first person sentences, the referenceto ourselves that we thus express does not involve the acceptance of first personpropositions –for, I shall contend, there is no good reason to assume that thereare such propositions. The primary form of believing is not a matter of acceptingpropositions; it is a matter of attributing are to oneself.17

Chisholm states plainly his standpoints to be platonistic with respect to abstract entities

such as propositions and properties: he sees them as timeless entities with which thinkers are

somehow in contact. Thinking is primarily a matter of that ‘contact’, referring intentionally is a

form of thinking. Chisholm is reductionist in a much stronger fashion than other philosophers:

his tests for adequacy for theories countenance as a ground the sheer number of entities involved

in the ontology suggested by the theory. He writes:

The ontology that I shall develop here is Platonistic, since it presupposesthat there are eternal, or abstract, objects. It presupposes, in other words, thatin the strict and philosophical sense of the expression ‘there are’, there areproperties, relations and states of affairs. In this respect, I believe, the presenttheory is not unlike that presupposed by most other contemporary theories ofreference. But the present theory is ‘purified’ in that it refuses to countenancecertain nonPlatonic entities which are prominent in almost all other theorie

26

s. These non-Platonic entities may be suggested by the following expressions:indexical propositions (the propositions said to be expressed by such sentencesas ‘I am sitting’ and ‘That man is standing’); times, considered as particularthings which may be designated by dates and other temporal expressions; andpossible worlds, considered as particular things and many of them such thatthey contain the individuals of the actual world.

The present book is intended to show, in part, that such non-Platonicentities are superfluous.18

The relative reduction he proposes hinges on the primacy of direct self-attribution of

properties. Chisholm introduces two key definitions to implement his program: one defines

within his conceptual scheme the locution ‘I am F’ (where F is a property taken in intension)

and ‘This thing is F’ (with the same proviso). Here are the two definitions:

[DEF.1] The locution ‘I am F’ has as its primary use in English that of expressingthe following property of its utterer: directly attributing the property of beingF to itself.[DEF.2] ‘This thing is F’ is used in English to express the following property ofits utterer: believing himself to be such that the thing he is calling attention tois F.19

The direction of the reduction then ought to go from the second definition to the first:

primacy is given to self-attribution of properties, given the mechanism of self-attribution we can

“define out” other indexicals by showing them to be shortwinded expressions for special cases of

self-attribution20.

Chisholm’s definitions stand and fall together with the assumptions which constitute

their background, sharing this trait with the vast majority of philosophical views. He presupposes

two things about the faculties of believers: “First, a believer can take himself as his intentional

27

object; that is to say, he can direct his thoughts upon himself. And, secondly, in so doing, grasps

or conceives a certain property which he attributes to himself”.21

Let’s put aside, for the nonce at least, any misgiving about platonistically conceived

properties, the problem remains to see whether the two definitions are adequate in capturing

the evidence we have about first person utterances. Intuitively I think Chisholm’s requirements

are too strong: they impose the necessity of having the capacity of reflecting upon one’s self and

thereby re-flexing the intentional arrow. This is a capacity some people have, but even them

not necessarily are exercising it all the time22. But the case is even harder, I think, for those

speakers/thinkers who have no form of self-consciousness, cases Castaneda calls “Externus”-types

of consciousness, instances of which we might all experience when absorbed enough we are fully

attending outer phenomena. Very young children are known to be unable to formulate coherent

first person utterances couched in the idiom of the first person pronoun (up to a certain age).

However one wishes to interpret this fact, children of extremely young age are perfectly able to

use demonstrative utterances (and, I surmise, demonstrative thinking anchored to perceptual

appearances).

Federico, the child, facing the choice between two different pieces of hardware, likes the

monkey wrench, and says pointing to it:

This is good

if Chisholm is correct, by [DEF.2] Federico is believing himself to be such that the thing he is

calling attention to is good. Unpacking the phrase, Federico is self-attributing the property of

being such that the thing he is calling attention to is good. And this seems to a bit too much:

28

Federico does not believe anything of himself, by assumption he does not have the foggiest idea

of what a self is, his or somebody else’s. But I think it would be completely arbitrary to declare

Federico not “really” referring to the monkey wrench he likes.

The first partial conclusion is therefore that Chisholm’s [DEF.2] fails to capture in its

entirety the phenomenon of demonstrative reference: there is a residual which one has to rule

“out of court”, as it were, by brute force.

The case is much less clear cut with regards to the first person utterances. Here the use

of the sentence seems to be what is the focus of the analysis, and insofar as one limits oneself to

the communicational aspect of reference [DEF.1] is correct.

What remains an open issue is whether the structure of mind is such that any first person

thought necessarily needs the prop the consciousness of oneself as a self produces. There seems

to be cases in which we think ‘forgetful’ of our own existence23. I believe the issue deserves a

richer treatment than what can be given here and I’ll go back to it when dealing directly with

the structure of (self)consciousness.

29

‘Knowing Who’ and the “lazy” indexical

In her recent “Myth of the Essential Indexical”,24 Ruth Millikan after having reviewed

some of the “common wisdom” on the essential character of indexical reference puts forward four

intriguing and bold ideas:

. . . it is not indexical thoughts that serve to engage an agent with the world.First . . . it is not true for the general case that the relation an indexical bearsto its referent yields a relation that would be relevant to action. Second, it isnot true for the general case that those relations of self to world that one musttake into account in order to act are relations of the sorts that indexicals bear totheir referents. Third, it is no part of the job of an indexical token to signify therelation either of itself to its referent or of its interpreter to its referent: innersigns that do signify relations between agent and world as needed for action arenot indexical. Finally, if an agent employs a mental term to represent herself,this cannot in principle be a mental indexical: there can be no thought that hasthe character of ‘I’.25

Millikan’s main contention is that even if one could establish the relevance of indexical-

ity to behaviour, the connection between reference and action has to be independent from the

character of the indexical expressions:

the interpreter of an indexical must already know, must know independentlywhat item it is that bears the indexical’s adapting relation to the indexical token,hence must already know independently that it bears the relation to the token(hence to the interpreter). A token of ‘I’ does not tell me who the originator ofthe token is.26

Now, the first remark is that even accepting at first brush that interpersonal behaviour

depends on having independent ways of knowing “who” (or “what”) the indexically referred

object is, it is not very obvious how her approach would deal with the problem of reference from

30

the perspective of speaker’s meaning. While it may be the case that there are situations in which

our being prompted to action relies upon non-indexical mechanisms, it is not at all the case that

when we refer to someone as ‘you’ we need independent ways of knowing who ‘you’ is.

Quite the contrary: one of the key features of indexicals is exactly to permit reference

to items about which nothing whatsoever is known at all.

Millikan’s examples draw from John Perry’s problem with a postcard, containing a sen-

tence such as ‘I am having a great time now’ and a blurry unreadable signature. Her response

is to claim that to be moved to action one has to know in advance who is the author of the

postcard in order to be able to interpret the token of ‘I’ (or of ‘now’ for that matter). I think

this is literally false: I may be moved to action, typically in the case of commands, using only

indexically expressed information. If someone tells me ‘lift that’ and I have no other notion of

that (thing) other than being referred to by my commanding interlocutor, I am moved to action

quite naturally by my will to obey, my understanding of what the imperative verb is saying and

by my perceptual awareness of which thing that is. To be sure, mistakes and misunderstandings

abound (think of a natural command ’lift that’ issued to a blind bodybuilder for a quick example

of mismatch of perceptual fields), but they are not solved by resorting to some non-indexical

referential phrase (it might not be available for one thing), but by some appropriate indexical

reference (sight in the fixation of referent for a token of ‘that’ might have to be replace by ‘this’

and a proper tactile clues). Then I conclude that Millikan’s view has some difficulty handling

speaker’s meaning for indexicals: the reference made by the speaker to (the person “named” as)

‘you’ does not require an independent way of referring to you, much less entails its existence.

31

Millikan has to take into account what looks like a most fundamental indexical expression

whose role is most visibly one in which speaker’s meaning is psychologically predominant: ‘I’.

I think Millikan expresses her position in a rather ambiguous and oblique way. She claims she

does react in a special and different way to the knowledge that she herself, RM, is positioned so

in the world, a condition quite unlike how she would react to anyone (else) positioned thus in the

world, and so forth (this apparently holds for any first person case). She holds we have “inner

names” (within the lexicon of our language of thought, as it were):

. . . But what does that have to do with indexicality? My inner name “RM”obviously is not like other names in my mental vocabulary. It is a name whichhooks up with my knowhows, with my abilities and dispositions to act, in arather special way. Conceivably I might even have other mental names for RMas well that do not hook up with these knowhows because I do not recognizethem, do not identify them as having the same content as “RM”. . . My inner“RM” is indeed special. It names a person whom I know, under that name,how to manipulate directly; I know how to effect her behaviour. But In order tomanipulate this person, why would I need to think indexical thoughts? Whathas knowhow to do with indexicals?27

One crucial answer to her last question can be provided along the following lines. Since

very little is known about the overall features of a language of thought, let’s assume that each

person has an inner name, whatever its shape will turn out to be. The connection between the

inner name and indexicality is indeed very visible in the situation she has in mind. To be able

to act intentionally, to use knowhows and ski lls, one is bound to execute a form of indexical

reference. For, suppose I am issued an order, say,

Adriano, please, finish the dissertation!

32

In order to be able to carry that out or not to carry that out I have to make a judgment of the

form ‘Adriano is (the same as) ++++’, where ’++++’ is a standin for my inner name. But if

’++++’ functions similarly to the way ‘Adriano’ does, I would be involved in an odd regress. At

each stage a judgment would be made, but I would never be prompted to act unless I understand

that ’++++ is myself’. Hence it seems to me that either one’s inner name functions indexically,

or it could not be of use in the case of action, when the activation of practical skills and knowhows

is at issue.

As I understand it, Millikan’s position is either holding that each one of us has a deviant inner

name for himself which constitutes the referent of each tokening of ‘I’ or else her claim is highly

implausible no matter how she uses the notion of language of thought. First of all: who is

doing the identifying? I might have several inner names, she claims, as much as I could have

several “outer” names (Adriano, Palma, many others in my personal experience anyway). When

I am moved to action, can I refer to myself by just using ‘I’ and the thought there is just ’I

am (the same as) Adriano and this fellow is telling Adriano to X, means I (should) X’? The ‘I’

has a transcendental character, it underlies, if I am correct, all my representations, internal and

external as well. Secondly: if I have an inner name, in the normal sense of ‘name’, its referent is

constantly changing (even if one wants to claim that the only reference is to knowhows). Then

that “name” has at least one key feature in common with indexicals: its referent is determined

not just by my (mental) lexicon, but also by its context of use.

My answer to Millikan’s rhetorical question is the following.

i. Indexicality has a lot to do with action because in any given occasion I have to identify the

33

purported reference of others with me, if need be via my inner name;

ii. Whenever I express an indexical reference I have no need to have an independent way of

referring to the item I am “hooking up” with my indexical expression, and if I do more often

than not that second way of reference will be indexical as well (e.g. referring to a male in my

field of awareness as ‘he’ does not preclude at all that the only “other” way of referring to him

is to “call him” that person over there).

On the more technical side, I see in Millikan’s position the danger of eschewing Kaplan’s

distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives. Pure indexicals, paradigmatically ‘I’, do

not have reference failures: in every context they are denoting the thinker/speaker. In thought ‘I’

denotes a thinker who’s able to think in first person (excluding fancier cases, in first approximation

those are the cases in which self-consciousness is present). Demonstratives’ referential capabilities

depend both on a speaker/thinker and on a field of awareness around her, whether or not they

will be able to express a the correct, intended reference for the audience is a separate issue in

my view. But even pure indexicals such as the first person pronoun “shift” their referent: the

denotatum of a token of ‘I’ is not an intertemporally stable “object” or capacity. The denotata

of our tokened ‘I’ change over time and what “hold them together”, so to speak, are complex

mechanisms having to do with memory and recognition, with the ability to predicate of them

certain semi-stable relevant attributes, a core of properties, to wax metaphysical, which we hold

dear enough to see them as correctly attributed to our ephemeral ‘I’ repeatedly. Millikan seems

to forget, aside from theories, that her view is apparently unable to handle in any clear way

failures of reference for demonstratives: a token of ‘that’ intentionally referring to a non-existent

34

object slips by her analysis. Nothing can be known about it, or so it seems, there are no internal

names that will guide action in cases like the “drowning man” of Castaneda 28 since there is by

assumption nothi ng to be named. The logic of “confusion” has to be rather more complex to

handle our uses of demonstratives.

Related points on what it is to ‘know who’ are made by Steven Boer and William Lycan29.

They couched their remarks on the irreducibility of indexicals, in particular on first person

cases within a theory of propositional attitudes which relies heavily on paratactic construals of

opacity.30 Their reduction is absolute with respect to certain uses of ‘I’. Their key analysis can

be put in this way:

[u] John believes that I am in danger

is an utterance named [u], and that is true if and only if John believes-true some N is in danger

for ‘N’ denoting one way or another the utterer of [u]. In the case of [u] the way of denoting N

would be her own self-denoting by way of the token of ‘I’ in [u]. This analysis follows a traditional

way, by now, of reading ascriptions of belief as de re ascription (in a semi-regimented language

[u] can be read off as ‘John believes of-N-(whichever the way N is named in the utterance) that

N is in danger’. But the authors are willing to recognize that their paratactic reading gets into

more difficulties dealing with:

[u.I] I believe I am in danger

for [u.I] Boer and Lycan provide two different readings31. Their key claim here is that first

person ascriptions are ambiguous between a de re understanding (on the assumption that the

35

pure indexical token of ‘I’ is used in an utterance and it does not allow at all referential failures,

this seems to be correct) and a “quasi-indicator” style of reporting which would be symmetric

to the phenomena noted by Castaneda with uses of ‘he-himself’. They point out that this is not

very apparent because it is couched more deeply than usual in the pragmatics of discourse32.

The point of this analysis seems to me to be a failed attempt to an absolute reduction:

‘I’ is not, at least not always, readable in the de re mode. There are some different grounds to

be skeptical about the prospects of parataxis, but even leaving those aside for the nonce, what

the authors claim has to be a “surd in nature”,33 I think should rather be seen as part of nature,

a nature which includes first person perspectives.34

36

NOTES\*/ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Das Blaue Buch, Werkausgabe, Ban d 5, S. 107\**/ W.V.O. Quine, The Roots of Reference, La Salle, Ill. , 1973, p. 68\1/ Other notions of contents of thought make a sharp division between objects of practicalthinking and objects of contemplative thinking. See, e.g., CASTANEDA {5}. The dividends interms of explanations seem very large compared to the breadth of the unity of ontology in theorylike the one in Thinking and Doing . I am going to be only marginally involved with the specificsof practical thinking.\2/ See section 50 of REICHENBACH and ch. 7 of An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (RUS-SELL {1}: pp. 102-109)\3/ for a general discussion of the connection between quotation devices and indexicality see“Quotation” by Jonathan Bennett, in Nous, XXII, 3, 1988, pp. 399-418.\4/ See REICHENBACH, p. 287\5/ ‘Egocentric particulars’ is Russell’s own term for indexical expressions. As it has been notedby many, the connection between Neurath, Caesar and the physicist is not fully transparent:in point of fact physics discourse is full of indexical expressions, as much as any other piece ofhuman discourse, not to mention that specific theories in the physical sciences are built aroundthe very notion of an active observer, much unlike the remote god-like entity that Russell thinkscan look at the universe from a non-perspectival point of view.\6/ RUSSELL {1}: p. 107\6/ RUSSELL {1}: pp. 105-106It is interesting to note that Russell kept struggling with indexicality, tying it to his more generalepistemological views and the distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge bydescription.In Ch. IV of Human Knowledge (see RUSSELL {2}), he uses an example about Mrs. B aboutwhom I say “Mrs. B is rich”– According to Russell, I intend to say something about Mrs. Bherself, but I say something about ‘Mrs B’. In the example Mrs. B has a daughter, Mrs. A: “IfI say ‘Mrs. B is rich’, I intend something about Mrs. B herself but what I actually assert isthat Mrs. A has a rich mother” (see RUSSELL {2}: 88). Russell concludes the passage with theidea that only self-knowledge is direct knowledge by acquaintance: “. . . in fact everybody exceptmyself is to me in the position of Mrs. B; so are the sun and the moon, my house and garden,my dog and my cat, Stalin and the King” (ibidem)\8/ This is the case emphasized by Castaneda in his example of the war hero, who forgetful ofhis being the war hero, learns a lot in his hospital bed about the biography of the person who is,indeed, himself without ever coming to believe that he-himself is the war hero. Thus his stockof beliefs is very large about someone who is himself, but his beliefs are not in first person mode

37

at all (see CASTANEDA {13}).\9/ See CASTANEDA {2}. Patently I am accepting his arguments sharing the assumption thattruth values should be stable when coreferring terms are intersubstitutable and some level ofcompositionality between semantical units, both insights we owe to Frege in the first place. Thepaper cited presents an array of cases in which truth values are not stable when quasi-indicatorsare the correct way of reporting indexical utterances. The discussions about the so-called Frege’spuzzle are endemic in the whole of Anglo-Saxon philosophy: there is no agreement though onthe diagnosis Frege himself proposed. A very different view of the matter (bearing on propernames as well as on reference in general) is discussed and presented by Nathan Salmon in hisFrege’s Puzzle.\10/ I say somehow because Russell’s proposal strikes me as unnecessarily extreme: to imputeto thinkers that kind of translation seem to require from them already some sort of higher levelmental life. To have a biography is not given to everyone at every moment they utter a firstperson sentence. As I see it, to claim that first person self-attributions are attributions to a biog-raphy (to a narrative construction of events, or to some sort of abstract time-slice metaphysicalcompound) is already a move in philosophy and I do not think there is any reason to hold thatthinkers in general ought to have in mind some one specific theory of personal identity to be ableto use correctly ‘I’ (viz. children or brain-damaged people, or quite simply people who do nothave any philosophical position, naive or sophisticated).\11/ ANSCOMBE: p.60\12/ ibidem, p. 62\13/ ibidem\14/ ibidem, p. 63\15/ The idea here is to accept Kant’s idea that the transcendental ‘I think’ precedes everythought. Pushed a step further ‘I think’ is an indexical operator whose scope is any utterance,no matter how primitive or otherwise uninformed the utterer is about anything else. If the ‘Ithink’ operator is tacitly prefixing any utterance then any theory which wants to reduce ‘I’ tosomething else, is bound to fail, if for no other reason than that any piece of knowledge or beliefwill carry indexicality on its sleeves. Both Castaneda (see, in particular the collection {10}) and,after him, Clark (see CLARK {2}) have made the point w.r.t. covert indexicals.\16/ See his The First Person, (CHISHOLM).\17/ CHISHOLM: p. 1\18/ CHISHOLM: 4-5. It has to be noted that Chisholm’s definition of ‘property’ has no set-theoretical (or extensional) underpinning. He defines ‘property’ thus:

x is a property = Df x is possibly such that there is something that exemplifies it

38

where exemplification and de re possibility are taken as undefined primitive terms of the theoryitself. I take it that for Chisholm any Platonic entity, if it exists (i.e. bar inconsistencies, asin paradoxical Russellian predicates), then it exists necessarily. Then it is not contingent onanything else (time, the existence of speakers etc.). In other ontologies such as the explicit one inCastaneda or the implicit one in Kaplan there exist some abstract entities which are contingenton time and the existence of thinkers/speakers, e.g. the proposition expressed by an utteranceof the sentence ‘I am alive’ is contingent upon my existence, and given that I utter it or thinkit, then it is necessarily true. But in no sense there is a metaphysical necessity of my existence.\19/ CHISHOLM, pp. 42-43 and 46\20/ It has to be noted Chisholm in some respect is an absolute reductionist (my terminology):dealing with temporal indexicals such as ‘now’, ‘then’ and their ilk the direction of his reductiongoes toward the replacement of them by non-indexical pieces of his ontology, such as states ofaffairs and the notion of ‘obtaining’. –see in particular CHISHOLM: pp. 49-52 and the appendixon “The ontology of states of affairs”.\21/ CHISHOLM: p. 28\22/ See CASTANEDA {9}, where the point is brought to bear on several examples of unreflec-tive consciousness, expressible in sentences of a mental language of sorts. I believe that articledoes not make clear enough that Chisholm’s point is very limited, but it is so in an explicit wayso that the reduction is much less extensive than one would expect from the initial claims.\23/ In Castaneda’s article cited in footnote #22, several examples of this kind are discussedwithin a conceptual scheme in which it is taken as a datum that consciousness is never a singlephenomenon but a hierarchical build-up whose bottom is purely sensitive/perceptual.\24/ unpublished ms.\25/ ibidem (all the quotes explicitly attributed to Millikan are from the cited manuscript, givenas a lecture in 1989).\26/ ibidem, p. 8 (the adapting relation is in Millikan’s terminology what is character in Ka-plan’s).\27/ ibidem, pp. 11-12\28/ See his {8} (in particular pp. 122-124) in which a speaker is confronted with different situa-tions (a drowning man, what appears to be a drowning man, a purely hallucinatory experience),all of which have in common the indexical reference made via ‘that’.\29/ See their Knowing Who, Cambridge, Mass. 1986.\30/ See in particular “On Saying That” in DAVIDSON. In general the program seems to mevery difficult to carry out: I tried to explain some of the reasons in “Parataxis”, Lingua e Stile,1, 1989. On that subject see also CASTANEDA {9}.\31/ Knowing Who: pp. 147-148. In passing it ought to be noted that one of their claims is

39

rather exaggerated: they claim a sentence like

John believes that I myself am in danger

is ungrammatical, awkward as it is, it is not ungrammatical (often the “ –self” expressions areused for additional emphasis without carrying over any particular sense of reflexivity.\32/ ibidem. They point out that the split between the two readings can be made more visibleat the surface of sentences when the reporting sentence and the reported content differ in tense.\33/ This is Boer and Lycan’s term for what they perceive is the danger of allowing irreducibleindexicals in a semantics. They have made the claim first in “Who, me?”, Philosophical Review,89 (1980), pp. 427-466. They have themselves changed their position in Knowing Who. It isnot clear whether they see the ambiguity they now recognize in their own theory as admission of“surds” in nature between reference and irreducibly first person referential acts. They pointedout that their shift in position was brought about by the response Castaneda gave to their firstarticle. See specifically the appendix of CASTANEDA {9} and the fourth chapter of {10}.\34/ Epistemically, for reasons that have come to be known under the label “problem of otherminds” one might take the view that only one’s own first person perspective is part of nature. Ido not think this is the case, at least insofar as the use of indexicals and quasi-indicators pointsto the attribution we make in thinking of first person perspectives to others.

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CHAPTER 3

Frege’s notion of sense

If every thought requires an owner and belongs to the contents of hisconsciousness, then the thought has this owner alone; and there is no sciencecommon to many on which many could work, but perhaps I have my science, atotality of thoughts whose owner I am, and another person has his.

Gottlob Frege∗

Gottlob Frege, in Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung1 introduced a distinction between the ref-

erent of a linguistic expression (an object, if any) and a mode of presentation (“ein Art des

Gegebenseins”, literally a manner of being given) of such an object. His program was basically

to build such a distinction into the semantics for that expression.

The distinction was needed to explain the import in terms of information of true, non

analytic or synthetic statements (of the form ‘John Le Carre is Mister David Cornwell’).

If two identity statements, such as ‘a=a’ and ‘a=b’ are true, he argued, they should have

the same information conveyed to those who understand both. That they do not is puzzling:

as a matter of fact the first one provides nothing that the logically minded ones do not know

already (for, no matter what ‘a’ stands for ‘a=a’ is provably true from a purely general principle

of identity of absolutely every thing with itself). The second statement is seemingly informative

in that it expresses some fact that has to be established by means that are not necessarily only

logical (in the Cornwell case the means is of course the empirical knowledge of the circumstance

that the author, John Le Carre, uses a nom de plume when he writes). Frege wrote thus:

Now if we were to regard equality as a relation between that which the names‘a’ and ‘b’ designate, it would seem that a=b could not differ from a=a (i.e.provided a=b is true). A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing withitself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but to no other thing.What we apparently want to state by a=b is that the signs or the names ‘a’

42

and ‘b’ designate the same thing, so that those signs themselves would be underdiscussion; a relation between them would be asserted. But this relation wouldhold between names only in so far as they named or designated something. Itwould be mediated by the connection of each of the two signs with the samedesignated thing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use anyarbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something. In that case thesentence a=b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but only to its mode ofdesignation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means. But in manycases this is just what we want to do. If the sign ‘a’ is distinguished from thesign ‘b’ only as an object (here, by means of its shape), not as a sign (i.e. notby manner in which it designates something, the cognitive value of a=a becomesessentially equal to that of a=b, provided a=b is true. A difference can ariseonly if the difference between the signs corresponds to a difference in the modeof presentation of the thing designated.2

This was the starting point of the theory of senses. Frege did not explain fully what a

sense is, rather he went about the business of determining which kind of thing the sense of any

expression is. Later he included complete declarative sentences, as referential expressions, and

dealt with their senses.

In an intuitive fashion a Fregean Sinn is what we come to be aware of when we can make

sense of an expression, what we understand by way of it3. It is helpful to disentangle three (at

least) different strands in the notion of ‘sense’.4

First, taken in one way, a sense for an expression is a psychological notion. Frege would

say it is such only when it is “grasped” by speakers, a sense per se, he maintained, is a non-mental,

non-physical entity, but an abstract one, belonging to a so called “third realm of entities”, albeit

a realm accessible to speakers because of a common heritage5. This “common heritage” may be

viewed, at least initially, as a collection of properties or conceptualized aspects which a speaker

43

can use, in thinking, to identify the expression’s referent.

Second, a sense is a purely semantical notion: thus a Sinn plays the role of a linguistic

mechanism by means of which the expression’s referent is determined (this is what comes closer

to the linguistic meaning of the expression).

Third, a sense has also in some other respect an information value, an epistemic status

of sort s.

Clearly for Frege, declarative sentences have thoughts as their senses, and only one of

the two objects ‘True’ and ‘False’ or else nothing as reference – a sentence, for instance, lacks a

referent, it has no truth value, when it is used within a fiction. Predicates have concepts as their

senses. It is not immediately clear in which way one is to take the ‘sense’ of terms expressing

singular reference: most likely a conflation of the three senses of ‘sense’ indicated above, although

it is very clear that, for Frege, it is the (or a?) sense of singular terms occurring in sentences,

that is a constituent of a thought, never their reference6.

It is this part of Frege’s semantics that has come under attack in recent years. Several

philosophers, and not always for the same reasons, have come to take the view that, at least

in certain cases, thoughts have the rather unFregean characteristic of having an individual as a

component part. In the now prevalent terminology these authors are direct reference theorists,

and the thoughts with individuals as constituents are singular propositions. From now on, I refer

to this approach as K-D-R, in honor of David Kaplan, who wrote thus:

I believe that the issue of Haecceitism reappears. . . as the question whether anindividual itself – as opposed to an individual-under-a-concept – can be an im-mediate constituent of a proposition. Let us adopt the terminology singularproposition for those (purported) propositions which contain individuals as im-

44

mediate constituents. . . ‘I am mortal’ and ‘This is blue’ are thought by some toexpress singular propositions.7

Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of Frege’s philosophy of language than this

notion of singular proposition. The main problem seems to me to be that such a proposition is

not fit as an object of thought. But this needs to be substantiated. One of the reasons singular

propositions have been resurrected is to deal with indexicality. Frege himself recognized that the

very presence of indexical, token-reflexive, expressions in natural language posed problems for

his theory of senses.

In Der Gedanke8, Frege proposed to treat the sense of a sentence as a thought. Primarily

for him the G edanke expressed by an assertoric sentence is that to which the question of truth

value applies:

Without offering this as a definition, I mean by ‘a thought’ something for whichthe question of truth can arise at all.9

In the simplest case of direct discourse the sense of a sentence is not affected by the

replacement of terms by other coreferential terms:

It makes no difference to the thought whether I use the word ‘horse’ or ‘steed’or ‘nag’ or ‘prad’. The assertoric force does not cover the ways in which thesewords differ.10

That is also because the referential feature of the sentence is not affected by such changes:

although they have an effect on the style of the expression they do not bring about any difference

in truth value.

45

The theory of senses required the same group of phonemes constituting a sentence to

refer to a truth value, when occurring in direct discourse, and to refer to the thought expressed

when the same sentence is used in an embedded clause in indirect discourse. Quite palpably from

the fact that it is true that ‘Adriano says that Paris is a nice place in which to live’ it does not

follow that ‘Adriano says that the capital of France is a nice place in which to live’ is true as well.

Paris is the French capital, granted, but Adriano might not know it, or he just does not think

so when asked about it. Let us term this phenomenon the divergence between factual harmony

and cognitive dissonance.

For Frege this dissonance in truth value is again puzzling, and principles similar to

the ones involved in his original Sinn/Bedeutung distinction are evoked to have a difference

recognized. Whereas in direct discourse the exchange of coreferential terms, be they names or

descriptions or what have you, does not affect the thought encoded by the sentence, in indirect

discourse that exchange cannot in general take place without altering the whole about which the

question of truth can arise. Frege’s idea was to allow for a multiply-tiered approach to senses.

Expressions in direct discourse have their normal sense and reference, expressions embedded

within oratio obliqua clauses take on an indirect reference11.

The first tier of indirect reference comes to be equivalent to the normal senses of expres-

sions (where ‘normal’ is understood as ‘occurring in oratio recta’). In a somewhat less cumbersome

idiom the idea is: what we come to understand, when we understand the utterance of a sentence,

is its sense (the Gedanke expressed). In other words we come to cognize what the sentence says:

a propositional content. Michael Dummett puts the matter in terms of the preservation of the

46

information conveyed:

If I say ‘Jones said that Scott wrote Waverley’, I do not purport to be giving hisactual words; he may have said, ‘Sir Walter Scott authored Waverley’ or ‘Scotthat Waverley geschrieben’, and my statement will still be true.12

This much seems to be phenomenologically apparent just from the usage of oratio obliqua

constructions.

The import of linguistic phenomena for Frege’s theory requires some more contortions

– basically because the intuitive, pretheoretical notion of content is for him already divided in

sense and reference –:

The replacement of a sentence in indirect speech by another with the same truthvalue will evidently not in general preserve the truth value of the whole sentence;so a sentence occurring in such a clause cannot have its ordinary reference. If weask what replacements are possible without change of truth value, we discoverwhat its reference in such context is. We can alter the sentence in the oratioobliqua clause, without changing the truth value of the whole, just so long as wedo not change (what is ordinarily) the sense of the constituent sentence, so longas it continues to express the same thought.13

The intuitive idea behind the appeal to indirect reference is a difference, at bottom,

between use and mention: in oratio recta an expression is used, on the other hand what is taken

to be its content is mentioned in oratio obliqua14.

Frege also held some form of the principle of compositionality15. The atomic building

blocks of a language as an expressive symbolism are utterances of sentences, the semantic features

of a sentence depend in diverse ways upon its constituents’ semantics. A sentence is the minimal

unit of assertion: the tokening of a thought. In cases of oratio obliqua referential expressions carry

47

as their reference not the primary, direct referents (objects), but the indirect ones: their Sinn. If

each non-syncategorematic term is supposed to have an indirect reference in oratio obliqua, it is

not difficult to understand why indexicals are doubly puzzling for Frege, for it is not obvious at

all what is the “mode of presentation” of tokens of pure indexicals. Furthermore, however one

wishes to spell out the primary sense of a pure indexical, such as ‘I’, it is not clear at all that

the supposed switch to indirect reference in condition of obliqueness takes place. Suffice it to

say that, as it has been often noted, pure indexicals no matter how deeply embedded in indirect

discourse express a speaker reference. They take in this way “primary scope”.

In cases of direct speech we seem to be bound to have a unique correct reference of a

pure indexical, such as ‘I’. This is often observed by noting that there is no referential failure

for tokens of pure indexicals when used qua indexicals, they have a “Cartesian” character, as

it were. In a speech act expressed by a sentence like ‘I am a pumpkin’, no matter which other

characteristics the sentence might have, in terms of the thought tokened or of the truth value it

has – or denotes according to Fregean orthodoxy – the first person pronoun has as its referent,

as its Bedeutung, the speaker. It is not obvious, at first blush at least, what its Fregean Sinn

is, but more about that later. Now, according to Frege’s theory of thoughts, the sense of the

entire sentence is a thought, and the latter should become the referent of the homophonic group

of expression when embedded in indirect speech. In the exchange all the referential terms would

acquire their new Bedeutung, which were the S inn attached to them in direct speech.

Hence in

Raffaella says that I am a pumpkin

48

the occurrence of ‘I’ should have as denotation not me (that is the utterer of the ‘I am a pumpkin’

sentence) but the (or a?) sense possessed by the token of ‘I’ in direct speech. This is false, unless

pure indexicals escape the alleged necessity of switching to indirect reference when used in indirect

discourse.

Frege tried first to “reduce” some indexical sentences to show that the thought expressed

by the sentence is in fact such only in a context of use: for that reason he wants to claim that

in most cases the tense of the verbal phrase conveys a time-indication, and one “must know

when the sentence was uttered in order to grasp the thought correctly. Therefore the time of the

utterance is part of the expression of the thought”.16

He realized then that even this building into the expressed thought features of the context

would not quite do: the occurrence of ‘I’ in a sentence brings about further problems. His

discussion of the first person pronoun is confusedly mixed with many remarks on proper names

(some of them, by themselves, rather insightful nevertheless). The key part of Frege’s view, as I

understand it, is an admission that the general thesis that an expression has a sense is not quite

correct.

Doktor Lauben is wounded and says ‘I was wounded’, thus tokening a thought. The

referent of this occurrence of ‘I’ is doubtlessly Lauben. What is the manner of presentation of

Lauben to himself? Frege says:

. . . everyone is presented to himself in a particular and primitive way, in whichhe is presented to no-one else.17

But, if the latter claim is correct, then Lauben’s first person thought is not capable of

49

being grasped by any one other than Lauben himself, for no one literally can grasp the privately

given manner of self-(re)presentation of the speaker. And the latter is the self-destructive reduc-

tion of the claim, since it is fairly clear that the vast majority of speakers (very young children

excluded, it seems) can understand and use in innumerable different cases sentences with an

indexically executed first person reference. Hence for sentences containing indexicals to be ob-

ject of communication, tokens of indexicals have to possess somehow more than just the purely

private sense which is the way of getting at the referents of the indexically referential expression,

as used by the utterer to refer.

50

NOTES\*/ FREGE {1}: 362\1/ published in 1892, now in FREGE {1}: 157-177. Sinn is usually translated in English as‘Sense’ and I’ll keep the tradition. ‘Bedeutung’ though has often been translated as ‘meaning’and the latter choice is, to me, not quite felicitous. I will translate ‘Bedeutung’ with ‘reference’when it is to be understood as a feature of an expression (namely its referential capability) andwith ‘referent’ (with an apology to Latin grammar, but ‘referee’ in English has a wholly differentconnotation) when the object referred to by an expression is at issue.\2/ FREGE {1}: 157-158\3/ “. . . ‘sense’ is first introduced as correlative of ‘understan d’: the sense of an expression iswhat we know when we understand it. . . [and] the notion remains schematic until we have atheory of sense – an account of what for each class of expressions has to be known in order toknow its sense”, see DUMMETT {1}: 293\4/ See SALMON: 12\5/ FREGE {1}: 160\6/ the point was emphasized much more explicitly in the Frege-Russell correspondence, seeFREGE {2}: 130-170, e.g. in a letter dated 13.11.1904 Frege wrote: “The sense of the word‘moon’ is a component part of the thought that the moon is smaller than the earth. The moonitself (i.e. the referent of the word ‘moon’) is not part of the sense of the word ‘moon’; for then itwould also be a component part of that thought. We can nevertheless say: ‘The moon is identicalwith the heavenly body closest to the earth’. What is identical, however, is not a componentpart but the referent of the expressions ‘the moon’ and ‘the heavenly body closest to the earth”’[modified translation]. That Frege was unconvinced by Russell’s points is apparent from hisletters to Philip E. B. Jourdain, in which he reiterates his thesis about thoughts containing notmountains (this time, for a change, it is a volcano) but the sense of the phrase (be it a nounor a description) denoting the mountains: “Now that part of the thought which corresponds tothe name ‘Etna’ cannot be Mount Etna itself; it cannot be the referent of this name. For eachindividual piece of frozen, solidified lava which is part of Mount Etna would then also be part ofthe thought that Etna is higher than Vesuvius. But it seems to me absurd that pieces of lava,even pieces of which I had no knowledge, should be parts of my thought.” See FREGE {2}:80 (the letter to Jourdain was written about ten years after the quoted exchange with BertrandRussell).\7/ See KAPLAN {1}. Singular propositions are often called Russellian propositions becauseBertrand Russell arguing against Frege proposed a similar notion as the content of certain asser-tions: “I believe that in spite of all its snowfields Mont Blanc itself is a component part of whatis actually asserted in the proposition ‘Mont Blanc is more than 4000 metres high’. We do not

51

assert the thought, for this is a private psychological matter: we assert the object of thought, andthis is, to my mind a certain complex (an objective proposition, one might say) in which MontBlanc itself is a component part. If we do not admit this, then we get the conclusion that weknow nothing at all about Mont Blanc.” See Bertrand Russell’s letter of 12.12.1904, in FREGE{2}: 169.\8/ The first of his Logical Investigations (1918-1926), see the translation in FREGE {1}: 351-406\9/ FREGE {1}: 353\10/ ibidem\11/ For an exegesis and a discussion of Frege’s views and their superficial incoherence see chap-ter 9 of DUMMETT {1} and chapter 6 of DUMMETT {2}.\12/ DUMMETT {1}: 265. A fascinating, albeit in my opinion ultimately unsuccessful, differenttreatment of opaque contexts, is given in “On Saying That” in DAVIDSON.\13/ DUMMETT {1}: 266\14/ “The object about which I am saying something – what I mean, what I understand by thesign – is always the referent of the sign; but in saying something about it I express a thought,and the sense of the sign is part of this thought. Thus what I am talking about when I use a signis not the sense of the sign. But it can happen that I want to talk about the sense; e.g. abouta certain thought. This happens in indirect speech. In the period ‘Aristotle believed that thevelocity of a falling body was proportional to the time of its fall’ what we have in the subordinateclause is indirect speech. What would be the sense of this clause if it was the main clause isnow its referent. I can say: here the subordinate clause is the proper name of a thought . . . thesubordinate clause does not here express a thought but designates a thought . . . in indirect speechevery word has not its ordinary (direct) reference, but its indirect reference, which coincides withwhat is otherwise its sense” FREGE {2}: 149-153 [modified translation]. That what counts as‘talking about a thought’ or ‘mention it’ is very flexible is part of the problem. The preserva-tion of thought-contents when expressed in oratio obliqua may require that the embedded clausebe not reported in literal quotation style. Typically in reporting indexical sentences in indirectspeech the very preservation of contents forces one to abandon quotational style.\15/ “A Fregean theory of reference will observe the principle of compositionality: the referenceof a complex expression is a function of the reference of its parts”, wrote Gareth Evans, seeEVANS {2}: 293.\16/ FREGE {1}: 358. He went on to claim that this is generally the case for indicators like‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, and ‘today’: “In all such cases the mere wording, as it can be preservedin writing, is not the complete expression of the thought; the knowledge of certain conditionsaccompanying the utterance, which are used as means of expressing the thought, is needed for

52

us to grasp the thought correctly” (ibidem). The exceptions are the sentences Quine termedeternal, namely either purely logical or mathematical sentences or, if they in fact exist, sentenceslike ‘Otto sees the table in Cambridge, Mass. at 12 noon on the first of January 1937 A.D.’; seeQuine, section 40: “An eternal sentence may be expected to be free of indicator words, but thereis no bar to its containing names, however parsed, or other ostensively learned terms. Termspresent may well have been learned with the help of indicator words.” (QUINE: 194).\17/ FREGE {1}: 359. It is interesting to note that, in his unpublished Logic (probably dated1897), Frege toyed with ideas coming very close to the intuitions behind the more recent K-D-Rtheories. For instance he wrote: “A sentence like ‘I am cold’ may seem a counterexample to ourthesis that a thought is independent of the person thinking it, in so far as it can be true for oneperson and false for another, and thus not true in itself. The reason for this is that the sentenceexpresses a different thought in the mouth of one person from what it expresses in the mouthof another. In this case the mere words do not contain the entire sense: we have inaddition to take into account who utters it. There are many cases like this in which the spokenword has to be word has to be supplemented by the speaker’s gesture and expression, and theaccompanying circumstances. The word ‘I’ simply designates a different person in the mouth ofdifferent people. It is not necessary that the person who feels cold should himself give utteranceto the thought that he feels cold. Another person can do this by using a name to designate theone who feels cold.” (see FREGE {3}: 134-135, [emphasis mine]. Apparently (and, perhaps, thatthis the reason why Logic is in the Nachlaßamong unpublished works) the line taken here is atodds with Frege’s criterion that a difference in possible or actual attitude by speakers/thinkersw.r.t. the sense of a sentence (thought) forces the recognition of a difference between expressedthoughts, in the plural. It is easy to supply very natural situations in which one can entertain,and take to be true, ‘I am cold’ without having any such attitude w.r.t. the thought that onebearing his name, or even he-himself-under-that-name, is cold. Like examples are common coinamong the authors who have stressed the non reducible character of indexicals.

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CHAPTER 4

Direct Reference

An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things,it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things aswere necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on.

Jonathan Swift∗

The inadequacy of Frege’s original treatment of indexical sentences has prompted a

discussion which has come to coincide with wider philosophical concerns1.

John Perry, focussing on the communicational function of language, starts out by con-

sidering indexical sentences.

In order to be understandable those sentences have to express propositions, publicly

graspable thoughts.

For sentences in subject-predicate form the situation is the following:

I am making a mess

has as one constituent of its sense (the thought express ed) the sense of the unsaturated (incom-

plete) concept-word ’. . . is making a mess’. To achieve the completion of a thought in Fregean

terms we ought to be able to supply a sense-completer. The sense-completer which comes to mind

as the most natural is the sense of the ‘I’ occurring in the sentence. The move is problematic

in Fregean terms because, Perry argues, tokens of ‘I’ (and of other indexicals) do not yield any

sense to bring about the “saturation of the incomplete thought”, but just what they refer to: the

utterer of the speech act, hardly a sense at all.

Taking Sinn to be the linguistic mechanism that secures reference in communication

(Salmon’s second possibility2), Perry states that when we grasp the meaning of the tokening of

55

an indexical

. . . what we seem to know is a rule taking us from an occasion of utterance toa certain object. ‘Today’ takes us to the very day of the utterance, ‘I’ to thespeaker. . . 3

This meaning-as-machinery-for-securing-referents is what Perry called a role: a role is a

function from characteristics of an event to an object (e.g. from the time at which a speech act

takes place to an instant). This is the reason K-D-R was dubbed by its proponents a theory of

direct reference: there is no intermediate “entity” between referent and referential expression (at

least in the case of expressions which function as indexicals do, perhaps proper names.

Perry by allowing individuals-in-propositions wishes to avoid an infinity of private per-

spectives creeping into what he calls our common world4. This is accomplished in turn by

claiming that what is expressed by the speaker and what is understood by the hearer(s) of an

utterance containing (tokens of) indexicals is a proposition construed thus:

S utters ‘I am cold now’[and expresses that which]H understands,namely S [the role of ‘I’ takes the utterance containing its tokening to the uttereras referent of ‘I’] is cold [the sense of the unsaturated concept-word ‘. . . is cold’]at the time of the utterance [the role of ‘now’ takes the time of the utterancecontaining its tokening as the referent of ‘now’]

Following Kaplan5, I shall call the propositions which allow individuals as constituent-

parts $entences. Using a semi-formal language $entences are structured truth-valued sentences6.

To go from an uttered indexical sentence to the $entence expressed one has to “compute” the

value of a function (or, as the case might be, of several functions). Indexicals’ functions (Perry’s

56

roles) take the hearers and the speakers from event to objects, that is from aspects of the context

of a speech act to individuals (speakers, events, locations in space, locations in time, locations

within the anaphoric environment created by a stretch of discourse, and so forth). I said ‘take the

speakers and hearers’ because it is a common trait of K-D-R theories to focus on words’ meaning

and not on speaker meaning7.

The K-D-R theory then presents the view that linguistic expressions have a twofold

meaning-structure: a character and a content, or alternatively a role and a content. Basically a

content is a referent, and a character is a conventional prescription (relative to a language) to

determine the content (in this respect, under one interpretation of Frege’s theory of Sinn, direct

reference approaches might be seen less as competitors than notational variants8). Indexical-free

expressions have a fixed character (and a possibly varying content, i.e. they can change content

in different circumstances of use), indexical expressions have a fixed content9.

In spite of all its formal elegance, important though it is if one is concerned with model-

theoretic semantics, the theory of direct reference seems to be in a predicament symmetrical to

the one Frege faced with respect to the phenomenon of factual harmony and cognitive dissonance.

Patently the content of two tokenings of phrases like ‘I am cold’ and ’You are cold’ when

expressed by two communicating speakers, makes their own production, in a way redundant.

Both productions are reiterating the expression of the same content, namely that S is cold,

where S is the content both the token of ‘I’ as used by S and the token of ‘you’ as used by

her interlocutor. It is equally clear, though, that if a semantics has something to do with how

humans think, then sameness of content does not entail identity of psychological attitudes about

57

that very same content, even when the attitudes are held by a single rationally consistent subject

at one moment in time. All the examples showing that indexical expressions are not reducible

to fully indexical-free ones point exactly to this fact. That is

If I see, reflected in a window, the image of a man whose pants appear to be onfire, my behavior is sensitive to whether I think ‘His pants are on fire’ or ‘Mypants are on fire’, though the object of thought may be the same.10.

K-D-R theories, at least in Kaplan’s and Perry’s original versions, if they want to be

true to their aims, are somehow forced to reintroduce a distinction between referential aspects of

language and manners of presentation, which though embodied in language itself, play a major

role in thinking.

The tension is detectable between views of semantics as an enterprise descriptive of a

prior domain of objects referred to by speakers and a semantics as an analysis of language as a

means of thinking and communication of thinkable contents11.

To be sure, Kaplan is aware of the implausibility of the idea that $entences are objects

of proper thought, given, just to mention one reason, the human condition of being bound by

one specific perspective. His answer to the challenge presented by the divergence between factual

harmony and cognitive dissonance is to let characters play the role of thinkable components, and

have contents being the constituents of propositions. Characters – Perry’s roles – now function as

manners of presentation, and those are the avenues to the individuation of psychological states,

to the accounting of the causal role of thoughts in the explanation of actions. The psychological

states of the thinker are “sensitive to how the content corresponding to the time is presented, as

58

‘yesterday’, or as ‘this March 26th’.” .12

To take stock of the findings: the theory of direct reference postulates that tokens of

indexicals yield contents to the propositions expressed by the uttered sentences in which they are

used. Contents are referents, objects referred to by the speaker. The cognitive status enjoyed

by the indexical at the level of semantics involved with the apprehension of meaning from the

perspective of the thinker-speaker is not identical with the content itself. That role is played

by the character of the expression used. A character, in turn, is a rule of language, relative to

particular definite languages. Those rules are rules that specify which function one has to compute

to “get at” the content referred by the expression. Whereas in the case of pure indexicals the

utterance and the appropriate rule will suffice, in the case of demonstratives the rule will specify

that one has to take into account an associated demonstration, some kind of ostension, for the

determination of the demonstratum, the individual referred by means of the tokening of the

demonstrative expression.

My own interest lies on the side of the semantics of language as a vehicle of thought.

From this perspective I think one can ask two (clusters of) questions:

a) Are the points made by K-D-R theories sufficient to support the claim that

indexicals refer regardless of speakers’ intentions?

What exactly is it one thinks when engaged in indexical thoughts?

Are Kaplan’s characters or Perry’s roles objects of thought? – neutral terminology

here, no reference here to Fregean timelessly hypostatized Gedanke –

Are objects on the other side of the spectrum the right kind of thinkable contents

59

in terms of doxastic reference (i.e. in terms of what the speaker purports to refer,

relative of course to the complex web of her beliefs at the time of the mental episode)?

b) Are singular propositions the right kind of entity to be bearers of truth values?

My answers are negative to both a) and b).

As to a), simply put: the requirement that a semantical explanation of indexicality

should eschew the very notion of speaker intention seems to me just a prejudice13. As far as

I can tell, there is no specific reason supporting the claim, except perhaps the suggestion that

introducing intentional notions would spoil the project of giving a neatly mathematized formal

semantics. As to b), the answer is again negative: a singular proposition lacks the peculiar

“fact-like” complexity needed to be a bearer of truth and falsity14.

The idea that the cognitive status of an indexical tokening has to be seen as a function

clashes with an intuition to the effect that, in thinking, one deals with ‘contents’, not necessarily

Kaplanian contents. It is not clear to me that in uttering a sentence like ‘I am writing now’ I

have in mind as referent of my used ‘I’ a rule that gives myself as the object referred to by the

term in subject position, nor it is clear that I have in mind the object represented as the value

the function takes in the given context of utterance: which object? my body at the time of the

utterance? We seem to run up against the same kind of problem Frege had with mountains!

The problem seems to me to be summarizable in this way: in thinking the referential

content of an expression like ‘I’, used literally as a first person pronoun, is not an object (the

privileged object commonly perceived by most a s me, i.e. my body). For if it were my body,

then entire stretches of discourse, such as Descartes’ Meditations would be literally nonsensical.

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But it cannot be the rule by itself: the rule is not a content of my thinking, at best it is a way

of depicting a content.

The most natural answer, to me, is that I have in mind a specific ephemeral content:

myself-as-the-agent/thinker-at-that time. But notice that this content is, at best, a very thin

time-slice of the Kaplanian content of an ‘I’. And it looks suspiciously like an individual-under-

a-concept, as opposed to the “immediate” individual constituent part of a singular proposition.

Along Kaplanian lines, one could thicken ontologically the very thin ephemeral slices.

One way to do it is to introduce indexically referred essences.

An essence is the fixed referent of a tokened indexical expression. Here by essence I

mean individual essence. I think the remark is needed to point out that in the case I’ll examine

now the essence of an object in the sense of its essence in terms of natural or artificial kind

will not work. What one might want to fix as an indexically referred object across possible

worlds is something identical with the referent in the actual circumstances of the speech act

executing the reference. I view such an individual essence as a set of identifying traits that

are unique to the individual possessing such an essence. Experientially those traits will suffice

to identify an entity and differentiate it from anything else. In the ontological mode of speech

one could say that an individual essence is a set of properties unique to that one individual (it

remains open whether the set itself is to be thought of as the individual or one wants to have

a substratum-holder of the prope rties included in the set). What seems to me problematic, as

I try to show below, is that there are some serious difficulties when one wishes to specify what

those identifying traits/properties are. Some specifications appears to be counterintuitive, but

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that is not necessarily a terminal trouble for an essentialist view of this kind. It just seems to

me an essentialism of this form poses a theory of reference, qua theory of thought contents, too

removed from the phenomenology of thinking as we experience it. The essentialist move would

eliminate in a full sweep all the Fregean puzzles about mountains, snowfields, and solidified lava.

By pointing to Kaplan and uttering

(E) That is a philosopher driving a Mercedes

Doctor Hammer refers, following the essentialist proposal, with his ‘that’ not to Kaplan and his

kidneys, but to Kaplan’s essence. This essence of Kaplan gives us the right kind of referential

fix, and the right cognitive fix, when we want to have identity of referents in, e.g., evaluating

counterfactual statements. Hammer, presumably, would want to keep a stable referent for his

tokenings of ‘that’, when, pointing to Kaplan, he utters

(E+C) That is a philosopher driving a Mercedes, and if there were better publictransportation between Pacific Palisades and Westwood, that (man) would notdrive at all but use subways and buses

If one wants to have an identical referent across “possible worlds”, in order to make both

tokens of ‘that’ in (E+C) to be about one entity, Kaplan’s essence will do.

For the author of “Opacity” is driving a Mercedes in this world. So (E) is true in virtue of

its demonstrative-cum-associated demonstration successfully “harpooning” David Kaplan. The

counterfactual statement hints at a world different from the actual in which public Los Angeles

public transportation is not in the sorry state it is in actuality. In that world Kaplan would be

differentiable from the fullfledged (actual) Kaplan, for Kaplan-on-a-bus is different from Kaplan-

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driving-his-car. Therefore the two demonstrative tokenings do not target the same individual

after all, if one wants to have (E+C) true.

The essentialist gambit in the context described allows one to have one single trans-world

individual as demonstratum. The latter is achieved by having ‘that’ in (E) refer to Kaplan’s

essence and having the demonstrative tokenings in (E+C) doing the same work.

To keep the same referent of ‘that’ in (E) and (C) one then would have to deny that the

demonstrative in (E) hooks onto Kaplan, the experienced Kaplan sitting at the wheel of the car.

Instead one should say that we are getting at his essence by pointing at him. One has to add

that in the case of (E+C) In the (E+C) case one has to add that, at least in Kaplan’s case, the

property of driving that car is not part of his essence. Are properties of this kind constituent

parts of essences? here one’s intuitions, or mine at any rate, falter rapidly: do we individuate

some one’s haecceitas by the car he drives? conceivably yes and no. Some decisions have to be

made by those who have stronger essentialist intuitions. But once those decisions are made one

could claim that Frege’s problems with lava, or with Kaplan’s cars and pencils, fade away: the

constituent part of the singular proposition, the referent is an essence, however one will have it

spelled out.

If I am correct an essence in this sense is not the commonsensical everyday object Kaplan

wants as contents and constituent parts of singular propositions. It is a referential content whose

manner of presentation can be roughly expressed as follows:

an essence is a constructed individual that we want to be stable across an enor-mous variety of frames of reference and it can be identified within one or moresuch frames demonstratively or descriptively

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If this characterization of essence can be a Kaplanian content, it seems to me a far cry

from the plain individual, ostensibly picked out by ‘that’ in (E). It is again, in a different way, an

individual-under-a-concept. What is particular of its manner of presentation is that the fixation

of a referent can be achieved by ascribing a certain stability to the highly unstable target of a

demonstrative referential intention. It is along those lines that some have resurrected the talk

about “haecceitas”: it looks very much like the picking out of an eternally stable essential “core”

of the experientially given target of a demonstrative.

The above excursus in the strange land of essentialism is for me a symptom of an ambi-

guity in Kaplan’s theory. The latter (at least in Demonstratives) is moving between the wholly

pedestrian, pretheoretical, notion of object as it is used in natural language to talk about regular

middle-sized physical objects, and a much more sophisticated theoretical “object” which serves

as a bearer of terms used for singular reference within the semantical theory.

To be sure, there are linguistic conventions regulating the use of indexicals and demon-

stratives. These conventions seem to me, in passing, more complicated than Kaplan allows. They

certainly play a role in communication: in prompting one’s audience to identify the speaker’s

referential targets. Rules roughly analogous to

by ‘I’ one should understand the agent doing the tokeni ng

are properly placed at the crossroad between syntax and semantics15.

But if one wishes a theory to be of some generality, it can not be restricted to such

grammatical rules.

Thinking, I assume, is a shared trait among communicators, hence insofar as communi-

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cation is an exchange of linguistically expressible thoughts, to communicate one must be able to

bring about in one’s audience thoughts related by some degree of similarity with the thoughts

one has . This is, admittedly, a very rough sketch, but at a pretheoretical level it is close enough

to what I think is the case.

The issue can be broken down, then, in two interrelated sub-headings:

(i) which is the thinking process one engages in when using an indexical?(ii) which is the thinking process that, with all necessary approximations, oneexpects from competent speakers-hearers engaged in the interpretation of one’sutterances?

As to (i), the most immediate case is demonstrative thinking. By ‘demonstrative think-

ing’ I mean here the tokening of thoughts that can suitably be expressed linguistically by means of

demonstrative pronouns, in primis ‘this’ for the proximal and ‘that’ for the distal. ‘this’ and ‘that’

can be used in thinking without any attached demonstration: it is the thinker’s intentional object,

informally what-the-thinker-has in mind, which suffices (at least for the thinker) for the identifi-

cation of a referential target for a demonstrative token. I keep stressing token because as many

occurrences of ‘this’ and ‘th at’ can be employed as one pleases, without using them as corefer-

ential terms within the same stretch of discourse at all. This latter feature should be taken more

seriously into account by all who link very closely their referential mechanisms with the proper

names’ ones.

To refer demonstratively is to refer to ephemeral, intrinsically unstable particulars which

are part of a subjective experience: whether each one or all of one’s ‘thats’ can be properly

identified with a more stable, enduringly intersubjective – thus objective – particular is a different

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question. That question does not call for doubts at all (it could not) the fact that I (I suppose

we) think demonstratively.

The idea here is that demonstrative thinking is the component of our thought processes

that more closely than others takes place within our own experiential field16. This idea helps

explaining why demonstrative thinking is present even at the most inchoate stage of intellectual

development. The best examples I am able to cite in support of the claim are the wonderfully

“primitive” thoughts extracted by Aleksandr R. Luria from S., the mnemonist17. S. is capable,

because of his extreme misfortune, to have the most vivid memories of his mental life as an

infant. All those thoughts of his are populated by demonstrative instances not easily replaceable

by any clear non demonstrative linguistic expression at all:

Light is something I remember very clearly. During the day it looked like “this”,afterwards, like “that” – twilight. Then came the yellow light of the lamp – itlooked like “this”.18

Now, it seems clear to me that situations of this kind can hardly be accounted for by

claiming that what S. the mnemonist had in mind was a rule giving the content of his ‘this’ and

‘that’ by way of an accessory demonstration and the whole apparatus called into play by direct

reference views.

It has to be admitted, on the other hand, that a stretch of discourse, like the one carried

out by S., may be impenetrable for its audience. Again it is to be pointed out that language is a

learned social skill, and that only as a social fact communication takes place. Did S., then, refer

to nothing with his ‘this’ and ‘that’? This answer would be forced only upon he who maintains

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that the one and only function of language is to be the medium of communicational exchange.

A semantics in my view ought to be able to bridge the gap between thinking, expressed

or not, and communication. If such a gap is in fact not bridgeable, theory should have it as

narrow as possible. What is peculiar of demonstratives is that the gap is wider than with other

expressions. The latter peculiarity is one of the reasons why, more often than not, one’s audience

has to rely upon all sorts of contextual clues to (try to) identify one’s demonstrative references.

Those clues can be behavioral (e.g. demonstrations by way of gestures) but some of them need

not be.

Question a) can be answered along the following lines. In thought the use of a demon-

strative depends on the ability of the thinker to focus on something. Here ‘focus’ is, in a way,

a piece of jargon: no visual metaphor is intended. To focus on something in thinking is to give

to it, whatever it is, a sharper distinction against the enormous background of the ephemeral

field of experience the thinker has at any given time. A field of experience is always present,

sometimes consciously and sometimes subliminally (hence one can have, I take it, unconscious

experiences – whether those can be verbalized or expressed is another question, and the role of

language in bringing those back to awareness is a vexed problem indeed!19.

A field of experience need not be perceptual. One can have experiences with nothing to

do with perception at all. Hence I do count hallucinations, reference to fictional entities, delusions

and the like, together with any kind of perceptual “entry” within the possible experiential field

of a subject.

The peculiarity of demonstrative thinking is that the focussing can be exercised on any

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of the elements of the experiential field, and even on the field as a whole. Examples of the latter

could be taken to be aired by some statement such as ‘That is thoroughly disgusting’, where

the thinker-speaker has in mind nothing less that her global experience of the universe, perhaps

including the thinker – an experiential field can transcend itself, as it were. The referent of the

demonstrative that would be used by the thinker to express a mental episode she is, or was,

engaged in is then that very item zeroed in on thinking. Notice that, at this level of reference,

no question of vagueness can arise: from the standpoint of the thinker to what ‘this’ or ‘that’

refers is perfectly differentiable from anything else in the experiential field compresent with the

demonstrative thought.

A sustained attack against the idea of intentional reference has been recently mounted

by Howard Wettstein20.

All of his criticisms depend upon one crucial assumption: that reference is a social

phenomenon. Hence the determination of singular terms’ referents depends exclusively on what

an auditor can make out of a stretch of discourse. I disagree. The reasons are in part explicit

in my assumption that language is a vehicle of thought from a first person perspective. And

even besides my general assumption, I think there are rather simple cases of discourse where we

are almost perforce going to resort to an appeal to the intentions of the speaker. Suppose, and

it is not a farfetched case, that one makes a telephone call to Howard. Howard is not home to

answer, but a voice coming from his phone answers: ‘I am not here now to take your call, but if

you want to be called back please leave your name and telephone number after the tone’. Now,

I take it, this is an utterance as good as any. I think it quite unnatural to take the ‘I’ to be

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referring to the machine, to the tape or whatever. Note, in passing, how difficult it would be,

then, to understand the ‘here’ and ‘now’. The natural way seems to me to take ‘I’ as referring

to Howard, because that was the intention of the speaker when the Ur-utterance was recorded

on tape to be played back21.

Nevertheless, something has to be said about the other side of the coin of reference: the

communicational side. I take it that in thinking it is the intention of the thinker-speaker which

determines the denotations of demonstrative tokenings. How are those references conveyed to

auditors?

The first cue to the determination of the referent of a demonstrative for an auditor is

not a demonstration at all, for in a host of possible and actual situations there is simply none.

The cue is given by a shared knowledge of the character of demonstratives: if I am correct, that

character lies in the grammatical meaning of the pronoun. Hence we are attending to (listening

to or reading, or whatever) the tokening of a reference to an item in the experiential field of

the tokener. Which one? To answer this question I think the best way for an auditor is to

rely on the predicative content of the utterance as a whole, and on the specific meaning of the

demonstrative used. The performance required for the understanding of a demonstrative varies

with the pronoun used. Using ‘he’ the speaker is asking the auditor to refer in first approximation

to ‘a certain male’ (an indefinite description), but to achieve singular reference (if that is indeed

achievable) the auditor has to rely on the predicative content of the utterance and contextual

and extracontextual cues (the salience of a definite male within that stretch of discourse, the

presence of that certain male, if physical ostension took place, and so forth). Important remark:

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the degree of definiteness of a demonstrative reference for an auditor decreases as it moves from

‘he’, which just in virtue of its grammatical meaning in English indicates an item believed by the

speaker to be a human male, to ‘this’ and ‘that’. Both are highly indefinite: both can and do refer

to virtually anything, including purely subjective entries (e.g. in the case of S. the mnemonist),

but a higher definition can be restored by attaching to them a sortal term, as in ‘that man’ which

can conceivably in many situations be communicationally equivalent to the demonstrative use of

‘he’. Notice: this does not show that the meaning of the demonstrative is some sort of formula,

computing which we obtain some expression that is ready to replace the demonstrative in the

sentence salva veritate.

Let us test my approach with one example. David says:

(1) That is a great theory

At the level of David’s referential intention, his ‘that’ refers to the picture, in the sense of the

view of the functioning of proper names preferred by Saul Kripke. We might also suppose that

David is uttering (1) while pointing to a copy of Naming and Necessity. What does an auditor

understand? According to my view he can have David’s token of ‘that’ referring to the theory.

The auditor’s understanding would have to make use of the following cues: David is referring

to some item of his experiential field. Such an item is the kind of thing that should fall in the

categories of ‘theories’ and of ‘great’ (the way I see them, those are properties in the specific

sense of forms of categorization of the world). Such an item would have to be in the right kind of

relationship between a book and a theory (a relation that might be fairly complex: it is almost

a prototype of “Platonic” case of exemplification of an abstract entity). I think it is likely that

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a linguistically competent auditor with all those contextual and extracontextual hints can, at

an illocutionary level, identify the item targeted by the reference David expresses in (1). The

predicative content of the utterance is essential because the pointing as such would never be

sufficient: I am not even clear whether one can point at a theory by ostension. As it was noted

earlier the understanding by the auditor does not produce a substitutable expression:

(1.S) An item in David’s experiential field is a great theory

does not have the same truth conditions (1) has. And

(2) That is a great theory written in Princeton

while it may have the same truth conditions of

(3) There is an item in David’s experiential field which is a theory written in Princeton

does not have the same cognitive significance. So, in terms of meaning, one would have to conclude

that applying Frege’s test (2) and (3) are not synonymous. Similar kind of referential constraints

can be given for other demonstratives22. Note that on a literal application of a K-D-R approach

(1) would have to come out false, or at least very elliptical: ‘that’ picks out its demonstratum

(the book) and books are not (literally at least) great theories. I would like to stress that, if I

am correct, this kind of reference is doubly direct: the speaker refers directly to the target of his

referential expression (that segment of the field he intends to single out for reference) and the

auditor can have the same referential target, when the clues given are sufficient. At no point does

either one have to rely on descriptive, conceptual analysis (dissolution) of the singular indexical

term into purely non indexical morphemes.

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Both the speaker and the auditor have no need to resort to Fregean senses to determine

reference. The referential fix can take place at one side at the level of intentions and on the other

side at the level of executing instructions to perform a similar kind of mental act, as it were.

The thinkable referents for both speaker and audience are contents, and if the mechanisms

for referring have to be interpreted as mathematical functions (I am not convinced that this is

what is going on in speakers’ minds at all, but this is not very important) the referents should

be taken to be the values of the functions, given the arguments provided by the environment of

the speech act to be interpreted.23

It is important to see that in my sense there is never a guarantee that the referents of

the speakers and the auditors are the same, self-identical massive chunk of reality “out there”. In

the simplest case what we have are two references to items in two distinct fields of experience. It

is a matter of the stability of intersubjective agreement to arrive at a stronger sense of “talking

about the same thing”. In most cases our references are pretty much public in the sense of being

easily subject to an intersubjective check, and those are the cases in which we can get more

simply at the referents with the relevant degree of “sameness” with no indexical reference at all.

But this is not the guaranteed outcome of an episode of, perhaps purported, communication.

I now turn to my second question about singular propositions. The idea of singular

propositions as contents expressed by some sentences, I believe, is informed by two powerful

(and pretty good) intuitions. One is the anti-nominalistic view that sentences are carriers of

information, that they have a meaning which is not just a faint echo of the noises made and of

the ink marks: it is an idea going back at least to Greek philosophy. The second motivational

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component is a concern for the stability of communication, and here what plays an important

part is the realistic view that when we express the same propositions, by whatever means, we

are talking about the same fact. I stress the realism implicit in this kind of view because even

to state a semantics with singular propositions one has assumed from scratch a neat division

of the universe into individuals, properties, relations and the like. Propositions are bearers of

truth value and it seems intuitively sound to have them as the right kind of entities between

brute facts and sentences. Tradition has it then that propositions and not utterances are the

objects of psychological attitudes (like believing, guessing, knowing, doubting, etc.). There are

indeed good reasons to think that what is believed is not in general an utterance, but the content

expressed, some say the information carried by the utterance. Very visibly in the case of indexical

utterances the information carried varies depending upon the context of use. ‘I am cold’ uttered

by X and ‘I am cold’ uttered by Y carry quite different information, or so the story goes. By

disanalogy, it seems intuitively clear that ‘I am hungry’ said by X at one specific time carries the

same information that ‘Ho fame’ said by X would yield at the same time (of course relative to the

language in which the utterance is to be understood: if ‘Ho fame’ were an expression in English

(hence being lexically in both languages) meaning what ‘I am scared’ means in English, then the

two graphically and phonetically identical tokens would carry different information depending

upon the language in which each one of them is understood).

Singular propositions introduce a new twist in the traditional doctrine. In them individ-

uals enter as constituents “in toto”, so to speak, not by being represented by ways of thinking,

perceiving or conceiving them. This trait is controversial from the beginning because it is natural

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to think of propositions as eminently abstract entities, fit for proper apprehension in thought:

how else can one hold psychological attitudes toward propositions without being able to have

them “in mind”? The difficulty is sensed (and quickly disposed of) by John Perry, a proponent

of singular propositions:

Philosophers who are bothered by singular propositions often complain thatindividuals can’t be “inside the mind”. But of course the properties and relationsthat are constituents of “general propositions” are no more in the mind thanindividuals24

My complaints are partially different. A singular proposition is a complex. Some of its

components are individuals: if I am interpreting correctly K-D-R theorists, those individuals are

pieces of a physical universe, such as people, objects, events, instants and their ilk25.

I start tackling the issue with a very simple case. Suppose X utters:

I love you

directing his statement to Y. Have we generated a singular proposition? The generated singular

proposition could take one of two forms, in so far as I can tell:

(i) [the individual denoted by ‘I’, the property denoted by ‘love’: the denotatum of ‘you’]

or

(ii) [the denotatum of ‘I’, the relation ‘love’, the denotatum of ‘you’]

Given the context of the utterance the competent speaker and the competent auditor are

able to identify, by means of Perryan roles or Kaplanian characters, the two individuals denoted

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by the two personal pronouns . Suppose X is Bogart and Y is Bacall. The singular propositions

would then be

(iN) [Bogart, love-Bacall]

or

(iiN) [Bogart, love, Bacall]

Thus seen singular propositions then look like n-tuples of elements which are referents of terms.

Whenever the term is a singular term the propositional constituent is an individual, otherwise it

is a more or less complex property or relation.

Seen in the above way singular propositions seem to be the strongest guarantee that we

are able to communicate about individuals.

For suppose that John Huston is present and overhears Bogart saying ‘I love you’ to

Bacall. Huston would be correct then in reporting in oratio recta ‘Bogart loves Bacall’ and in

oratio obliqua ‘Bogart said that he [pointing, intending to refer to Bogart] loves her [pointing,

intending to refer to Bacall] (this is, to my mind, the sound part of the idea that proper names

and indexicals alike are just referring devices, without any descriptive meaning attached to them:

the descriptive meaning, whatever it is, drops out of the picture for want of relevance).

Often singular propositions have been termed de re, as being about things and not

de dicto or about words. Note that in Fregean terms denoting relations and properties have

unsaturated sense, so the propositional components in (i) and (ii) expressed in the utterance by

‘love’ are incomplete senses, as Perry puts it. The saturation, the completion of the proposition

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is effected by the individuals which fall within the extensions of the incomplete senses.

Now, some want propositions, among other things to be bearers of truth and falsity, and

we want them to be the proper subject matter of logical relations. Singular propositions lack

the proper articulation to be carriers of information, informally what is said by an utterance. If

one were to be given as information (i), (ii), (iN), or (iiN) she would be hard pressed to evaluate

them. If, that is, an auditor was presented with Bogart juxtaposed with the incomplete sense

of ’love-Bacall’, I have my doubts that such an auditor could literally make any sense out of it,

much less understand what the presentation is supposed to accomplish.

The singular proposition looks very much like an unstructured bare fact: it is not [Bogart,

the unsaturated sense of ‘love’, Bacall] which can be true or false.

For if a non ordered n-tuple of elements that gives us the proposition were the bearer of

truth and falsity, then we would be assigning perforce the same truth-value (in the same context)

to ‘Bacall loves Bogart’. Hence it is natural to think of singular propositions as more structured

entities (formally representable as, say, ordered pairs, triples, and so forth). Taking the road

toward the very structured object of thought [that Bogart loves Bacall] pushes the theory back

to the notion of de dicto propositional contents, which are just plain abstract description of actual

or possible facts, thence true or false (given a domain of evaluation). A tension is detectable: the

closer the semantical reconstruction of the proposition’s structure is to the grammatical form of

the sentence expressing the proposition, the further we move away from the intuitions behind

the “singular proposition” strategy, intuitions which amount to the need for having an object,

plain and simple as propositional component.

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The obvious response to a critique like the one just presented is to build more structure

“from within” the singular propositions26 making them look more and more like the sentences

expressing them.

It has been claimed that the “extra-structure” proposal fails exactly where it is thought

to help, namely in the semantics for ascriptions of belief27. It seems to me that the argument,

though very interesting, suffers from an ambiguity, perhaps a fatal one. I reproduce, almost

verbatim, Scott Soames’ examples and then proceed to point out the source of the ambiguity.

Karl sees me in a supermarket and knows me as an Italian graduate student, and Karl

sees me in the university teaching. Then Karl can utter on two different occasions:

(I) He is an Italian graduate student

and

(U) He is a teacher at the university

Later on, he remarks:

(I+U) He is an Italian graduate student and he is a teacher at the university

Now, following Kaplan, the two tokens of ‘he’ are demonstratives, each one of them associated

with a different demonstration (since the occasions are different, the two utterances are taking

place in two different contexts). Same character, different context of evaluation, same content:

myself. Both of the following ascriptions seem to be correct:

(1) Karl said that he [pointing to me in the supermarket] is an Italian graduate

student, and he [pointing to me while I am teaching] is a teacher at the university

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(2) Karl said that I am a teacher at the University and an Italian graduate student

[uttered by me]

Paraphrasing Soames, (1) has the form

(F1) K says (believes, asserts, thinks, etc.) . . . t. . . t’

On the other hand (2) has the form

(F2) there is an x [K says x is a teacher and x is a graduate student]

This is because, by the lights of K-D-R ‘I’ is always referential, so it seems one is always allowed

to understand a first person utterance as an existential claim. (2) is true and so if the theory of

direct reference does not allow to move from (1) to (2) it seems to miss a truth. If it does allow

the move in question it seems to be committed to the truth of

(3) K says that t* is a teacher and t* is a graduate student

for any directly referential term t* denoting me, such as the indexical ‘he’ in the context, and

so allowing back into the picture the Frege-inspired puzzles of the form ‘that is the evening star

and that is the morning star’. This is because the theory is committed to the claim that

(F3) K says (believes, etc.) . . . t. . . t

can be true if (F1) is false, only in the case in which (F2) is also false. Soames’ “counterexample”

points out that even within direct reference theory one can construct cases in which more than the

bare content comes to be a propositional component. In this case the propositional component is

myself, but if referred to by way of ‘I’ or by way of ‘he’ the very same content generates disparities

in truth values of sentences which intuitively ought not to appear.

The argument is ingenious, but it suffers from an ambiguity which makes one of the

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premisses rather doubtful. While attribution (2) seems indeed to be correct if uttered by myself

(it is a case of belief-ascriptions de re), attribution (1) is ambiguous. It is not obvious what the

tokens of ‘he’ do there. If they are straight demonstratives (Kaplan-style), as Soames seems to

imply in his comments, then sentence (2) does not appear to be well-formed. On the one hand

demonstratives have, as many have remarked often, the “largest scope”, they express a speaker

reference. If the “pointing” indicated in the bracketed portions of (2) is done by its utterer, then

the ascription is not correct, after all. The tokens would be different tokens and (2) would not

be a faithful report of what Karl said. If on the other hand the tokens of ‘he’ and the associated

demonstrations are indeed Karl’s, then the sentence is a strange mix of direct speech and indirect

speech (it would make perfect sense to utter: “Karl said: ‘he [pointing, if you wish] is an Italian

graduate student, and he [second pointing] is a teacher at the university”). Another source of

possible ambiguity lies in the possibility of wholly different reading of (1). The tokens of ‘he’ there

could be taken as Castaneda’s quasi-indicators, in which case though (2) would rather obviously

false, in that case Karl would be doing the pointing to he-himself and that does not seem to be

what was intended at all. Suffering from this ambiguity I am unconvinced that Soames’ point

has exactly the force he attributes to it.

Coming to points where my disagreements with K-D-R theorists are more radical, I want

to point out why I am ill at ease with the strong realistic assumptions of K-D-R. The whole formal

apparatus relies heavily on a fixed domain of interpretation. By fixed domain of interpretation I

mean the so called world out there which is supposed to come ready-made for our apprehension

with a crisp division between individuals, predicates, relations, and so forth. I have to admit this

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form of realism is a deep seated inclination of many, and of many philosophers. I just do not

find any reason to rule out radically different forms of categorization of whichever experiential

entries one wants to categorize.

This antirealist position is a prejudiced opinion on my part. There are reasons though,

why I want to hold it. I am reluctant to see those reasons as arguments in any formal way

because I do not think that arguments will settle disagreements of this kind: at best reasons will

serve as paths to see the line of thought involved in my philosophical position.

I have an adversion to claiming that reference, and even more perspicuously demonstra-

tive reference, is a relational phenomenon between minds and the world as it is, whichever the

ultimately correct understanding for such locution will turn out to be. K-D-R theorists take

the referents of demonstratives to be massive chunks of reality, individuals as they call them. It

seems to me to be a fact that we can demonstratively refer to a variety of entities having very

little to do, if anything, with the cozy familiar world of trees, glasses, and umbrellas.

We can and do refer to dreams, hallucinations, and their internal characters, fictional

figures, and. . . all sorts of entities that do not qualify for the high standard of “reality”. I do not

think it correct to claim in all those situations that we are actually referring to “things-in-the-

head” in the sense of cerebral events. With Ray Jackendoff I believe

One is speaking of brain-events no more when discussing one’s dreams than when

discussing one’s perceptions28

To keep the phenomenon of indexicality as unitary as possible and to keep its understand-

ing as unified as possible, one has to postulate and eventually countenance in one’s ontological

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commitments – if one wishes to have them – internal contents, mental objects of reference, which

may in the last analysis be identified with “real” world counterparts, when there exist indeed

public, intersubjective counterparts of those internal contents. But the latter are the primary

referents of referential attitudes. Language as a medium of communication certainly provides

for an immense background of intersubjective objectivity in the referential relation, for, by and

large, it is language itself that shapes our very capacity to think in terms of singular reference,

and we learn language in communicational exchange. But indexicality is, if one wishes to put the

matter in terms of development, more primitive and more simple: it points directly to contents

as they are experienced by the subject who is doing the “pointing”.29 Demonstrative thinking

constitutes ephemeral targets of reference, ephemeral because we do not have an infinite number

of non indexical naming devices. We do have in natural language a limited stock of singular terms

and, to put the matter jokingly, most of those internal targets do not deserve to be baptismally

named: they flee out of sight and out of existence too quickly.

Internally experienced contents are the proper targets of demonstratives and those need

not be shown to be “in the mind” or “out of it”: they are the ways in which minds organize and

categorize whatever signals impinge on them30.

The same holds true of propositional contents. While K-D-R theorists’ notion of proposi-

tion will work, plus or minus some itches, whenever there exists the external, objective individual

to be the denotatum of demonstrative tokenings and the physical constituent of the proposition,

the same notion will break down the fundamental unity of thinking in any non veridical case,

in which the targeted individual does not exist except from within the experiential field of the

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tokener.

For take the simple circumstance motivating a course of action prompted by a thought like:

(D) That’s a drowning man31

It makes no difference in this case whether the pointing (the referring) occurs ostensively as a

movement of arms or not: (D) is what I think (perhaps falsely, depending on whether the man

is there or not, and whether the man is drowning or not). (D) together with other premisses can

lead me to try to swim to save the man. In the veridical case the man is out there gasping to

make my thought a thought-of Kaplanian content (a singular proposition). In the non veridical

hallucinatory case there seems to be no content whichsoever. And yet in both cases, all else being

equal, it would lead to the same course of action on my part.

If my interpretation is correct, it is the internally given propositional content that I am

evaluating in my practical inference. But this could not be under K-D-R constraints. The point

is that my deduction is not taking as a premise anything like the character of ‘that’, or the

manner of presentation of my (possibly only purported, be that as it may) referential target. If

I want to save anything I want to save that man, the unfortunate possible counterpart of my

experienced content of ‘that’, or the luckier non-existent (by everybody else’s standards of reality

if I am indeed hallucinating, or even just mistaking the motion of the dolphin for a drowning

man) and nonetheless quite real man in my experience.

The realization of how crucial the causal role of demonstrative and indexical thoughts

is, helps us to see more clearly the need for internal propositional contents. Whereas in all

cases of veridical experience we can, I think correctly, interpret in Kaplan’s way a demonstrative

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proposition, we can not easily do it in the non veridical one.

In terms of truth conditions, (D) is true if and only if there is something which is that one man

who is the referent of my tokening of ‘that’ in (D), (by means of its grammatical meaning and

my pointing, be that physical or purely intentional) and that man is drowning at the time (D) is

vocally expressed or mentally entertained. Therefore, in the non veridical case, I take it, (D) has

to be false. And yet, for me, to be able to use it as a premiss in my little exercise in practical

reasoning it has to be taken to be true. Were I not to take it to be true I would never be moved

to action. I am disregarding the possibility that I might actually be a sadist and be amused by

the spectacle of the man who dies before me: it is immaterial – even to experience the pleasure

of the man’s painful dying I still have to take (D) to be true.

I am aware of a prima facie destructive objection to the idea of internally construed

propositions as thought contents: it breaks down truth values in a myriad of subjectively acces-

sible evaluations, thereby losing the world for the theory which countenances them.

I am not sure there is such a danger, and I am unpersuaded that it is a danger. I am

also persuaded, however, that at this juncture our ability to communicate plays the key role in

establishing the very idea of a common, intersubjectively available world.

¿From the indexical viewpoint, as I understand it, the experiential environment is sub-

jectively apprehended, my ‘this’ and ‘that’ and even more so for my ‘I’ have as referents internal

construals32. Those internal construals are not necessarily private. By ‘private’ here I mean even

in principle not open to others. Effable thoughts are transparent. The so called ontological rela-

tivity, which is only a term of art for the ability of humans to carve up the experienced world in

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many different ways, thereby having different constructions for, say, ’individuals’ in their frame

of reference, does not block any one of those ontologies from being linguistically expressible. And

the very possibility of radically divergent ontological assignments to the symbols representing “in-

dividuals” in a formal semantics indicates that there are no univocal, absolutely objective values

for functions mapping singular terms like demonstratives into objects. We can both make and

attribute demonstrative/indexical references. Here at work is in part an assumption about the

existence of minds other than one’s own, and a stronger assumption to the effect that there are

no radically diverse conceptual schemes33. Armed with these two assumptions we can interpret

within the range of our own internal construals the propositional contents others express.

If indexical reference is subjective, ephemeral and experiential, (I agree with Castaneda

in that it is), the purely linguistic fact that it is attributable to others is evidence that our system

of communication is at least able to accommodate the dreaded myriad of private perspectives34.

Whether or not prima facie perspectivalism has to be a final point of rest in metaphysics

is the question I will deal with in the fifth chapter.35

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A more radical break with tradition: Guise Theory.

In a long series of works Hector-Neri Castaneda has argued for a radical break with the

semantic tradition. Guise theory, his view, is a grand theory in formal ontology, meant to shed

light on a number of different issues in comprehensive terms. I’ll try to summarize his view first,

and then suggest some ground of possible disagreement.

Castaneda’s views could be described as a doubly tiered structure, one tier is more strictly

linguistic, or phenomenologically linguistic, the second tier develops a philosophical treatment of

indexicality which is, in turn, embedded in a theory of much larger scope, a general ontology, as

it were.

The key ingredient of the phenomenological linguistic tier is the view that indexical terms

express references made by speakers to items present in their experience. As I mentioned earlier

a development in analysis initiated by Castaneda is the finding that along indexical references

natural languages, at least many of them, make room for quasi-indexical references. Quasi-

indexical references are made by speakers who attribute to others the (capacity of) making

indexical references, whether the original reference was made indexically or not.

Castaneda states the main linguistic properties of indicators thus:

Let S be a sentence containing and indicator i (not in quotation marks). Let S be

used on some occasion o by a thinker-speaker H to formulate a thought content, e.g.,

a statement, a question, a conjecture, a request, a petition, that H thinks out loud

by proffering S. Then on occasion o indicator i:

(i) expresses a thinking reference by H

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(ii) to an entity determined by o;

(iii) expresses a reference by H that does not depend on H referring to the referent

with another expression;

(iv) expresses no attribution of reference or mechanism of reference to anyone -even

if i appears in a clause of indirect speech in S36.

Principle (iv) indicates the important fact that the embedding of indexicals within oratio

obliqua does not affect their status of expressing a reference made by the speaker, while (iii) reck-

ons with the absolute character of indexical references as they are made by the speaker, namely

that they do not depend upon alternative non-indexical ways of referring. Thus Castaneda’s

position seems to be diametrically opposed to Millikan’s.

Castaneda holds that all indexical expressions follow laws (in the descripti ve sense)

of experiential reference, and differently from Kaplan he does not make a distinction between

pure and demonstrative indexicals, since for him the character of each indexical plays a role in

determining reference.

There remains a distinction between the levels of certainty attained: whereas ‘I’ for

instance whenever used has a doubly successful reference (double because it has an internal, or

thinking, guaranteed referent and an external, metaphysically certain, referent) ‘that’ has a singly

succesful reference, there being no certainty of a correspondence between the internal, thinking

referent and an external “harpooned” target which might not exist at all. the character of each

indexical plays a role in determining reference.

Setting them apart from other terms indicators undergo a “semantical shift” when con-

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tained within the scope of so-called opaque-context forming operators (psychological, modal

prefixes for instance, such as “. . . believe that” or “possibly. . . ”). The shift is needed to have the

indexical reference “jump out” as it were of the scope of opacity.

The cluster of distinctions which operates at the level of phenomenological linguistics

between oratio recta and oratio obliqua constructions will take a radically different aspect in the

ontological aspect of Castaneda’s view, but more about that later.

Two important notes.

a) One claim originally made was to the effect that two sentences, one indexically expressed (such

as ‘I am blue’) and the other quasi-indexically attributed to (such as ‘AP thinks he is blue’),

denote one and the selfsame propositional content. More recently Castaneda claims two such

sentences express two propositions, intimately related one to another, nonetheless not related by

strict identity.

b) Indexical reference is reference to items present in the experience of its maker, qua present in

experience and as long as present in experience, those references have no temporal “stability”,

they are ephemeral references:

Every indexical reference is both personal and ephemeral. . . indicators are ex-pressions used to make immediate and strict references to items presented inone’s experiences in so far as they are present to such experiences. Even thoughHector-Neri Castaneda has lived for fifty-six years now, his first-person referencesare always personal -his and nobody else’s- they are always also ephemeral. Theself to which each of his first-person references refer is the synchronic present selfwho owns the experience that prompts the first-person reference in question. Ingeneral, one attributes to oneself adventures in the past only because one identi-fies oneself (i.e. the current experiencing self) with a previously existing person.Similarly, one’s this’s, that’s, now’s, here’s and there’s are all ephemeral andpersonal.37

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As he expresses it, the claim that singular thinking references are made towards individ-

uals cries out for an explanation of what such an individual is supposed to be ontologically.

That is the task Castaneda assigns to Guise Theory, which has at least two different

strands. One is the elucidation of what has to be taken as individual to be a fit target of thinking

reference. And the seco nd one is an elucidation of the family of relationships which connects, in

the successful cases, our thinking with the structure of the world. The answer to the first problem

is the introduction of a new kind of individual, while the answer to the second is the introduction

of a family of relations of sameness, one of which is the traditional unrestricted identity.

As a theory of thinking reference, Guise Theory posits a new kind of referents. Whereas

in more “realistic” approaches referents of terms which are singularly referring (indexicals, de-

scriptions, possibly proper names) are what Castaneda calls macro-objects, the thinking referents

in his view are Guises. Guises are structured particulars: the core of a Guise is a set-theoretical

entity, whose members are properties. A sui generis operator particularizes the set of properties,

yielding an individual. Informally the basic idea, I believe, is best understood thinking of a Guise

as a facet of an object in perception. A facet has the following characteristics:

a) it is a kind of particularb) it is fully characterized by a set of propertiesc) it is not closed under implication, i.e. a facet is characterized by certainproperties without being characterized by properties implied by themd) (perceptual) facets are finite, in the sense of being fully characterized by afinite set of properties.38

The theory of Guises formalizes with a set of principles the kinds of operators which

particularize set of properties. One advantage has to be noted at the outset: Guises are directly

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thinkable, there are no further cognitive intermediaries. Hence there is no categorial difference

in the theory between referring to an object of thought and referring to (what I would call) a

perceptual object in my field of awareness. The differentiation would come about by way of the

different properties in the core of the guise thought of. In the case of demonstrative thinking the

core of the guise referred to has to contain irreducibly demonstrative properties (expressible by

locution such as “being there” or “being that (thing) which makes noise”).

Indeed a specific view of perception is one of the motivating grounds for Guise Theory.

The view of perception expounded by Castaneda is best understood, as he himself said, as a

generalized and sophisticated from of phenomenalism, without the classical “sense-data”. Per-

ceptual awareness is a awareness of a private perceptual field: “To perceive is not . . . to perceive

this or that, but to perceive a perceptual field in which there is, often, this or that”.39 The

dwellers of the perceptual spaces (the “origin point” of which is a thinking mind with perceptual

capabilities) are those facets (of ordinary objects), and they can be related in perceptual judg-

ments such as “the tallest evergreen tree on my left is the pine tree with a good smell”. Now,

the perceptual judgments can be veridical. And in that case Guise theory interprets the copula

in the example not as a statement of identity, but a statement expressing a consubstantiation.

As one can gather etymologically, the consubstantion operator brings together the being of two

facets. It is important to notice that there is no a priori guarantee of the consubstantiation

expressed by a statement such as the one in the example of the tree above. The person making

the statement might be hallucinating, or be wrong. Here comes to fruition the remark on the

non-differentiability of veridical from non-veridical perception40. Within a mind’s perceptual

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space those facets (guises) are the primary referents of demonstrative expressions, they point as

well to a purported reference to a physical object, very often at least, but the purpose might

be defeated. What seems to be missing are the macroobjects of ordinary perceptual awareness.

Those are ontologically described as systems of Guises, with one specific particularizer, an oper-

ator expressing consubstantiation.41 Linguistically one may take the consubstantiation operator

as expressive within the theory of relationships of sameness which ordinarily are thought of as

cases of “contingent identity”, as in my example above “John Le Carre’ is David Cornwell”.

Such a sentence states a true proposition which is not in Guise Theory a proposition of identity,

a weaker notion of sameness is needed to account of Frege-style puzzles.

The key similarity of Guise theory with Frege’s semantics lies in the similarity between an

individual guise and a Fregean sense for a singular referring term. There are two key differences

though. One lies in the direct character of an act of reference: the Fregean sense of a term is (also)

an intermediate entity, it is also a way for the speaker to get at the referent of the expression.

On the contrary in Guise theory the (guise-theoretical) referents are directly, in propria persona,

present before the mind. Secondly, whereas Frege held we have to make a distinction within the

theory of reference between the referents of the same terms when appearing in direct speech vs.

their occurrence in indirect speech, Castaneda’s view is that there is no instance of direct speech,

and thence there are no first-order Fregean Bedeutungen:

With Kant’s assistance, the destruction of Fregean referents is immediately es-tablished. Kant observed, and posited as his major principle about the unityof consciousness, that all representations can be subordinated to I think. Fromthis we can extract the following important syntactico-semantical datum: Allthought-expressing utterances are implicitly or explicitly embedded in an indi-

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rect speech construction of the form “I think that”. . . Hence every speaker’s use of singular terms, even if ostensibly in direct speech,must by Frege’s own lights, have as referents what he calls their primary senses42.

The object Frege took to be the referent of an expression is then not part of the stock of

semantics, but part of the stock of doxastics. Fregean referents are, for Castaneda, transcendent

objects of belief and/or quantification, but not proper subject matter of a referential attitude

from a speaker.

The key distinction is between a semantics for doxastics reference and a semantics for

thinking reference.

So, one distinguishing trait of Guise theory is that there is no direct speech, in the

traditional grammarians’ sense. It is here one can appreciate more clearly the distinction between

a phenomenological linguistic level of analysis and an ontological one. As pointed out before,

the linguistic analysis make use of the distinction between direct and indirect discourse. At the

(perhaps deeper) ontological stage of analysis such a distinction turns out to be in a sense illusory.

While I believe the suggestions of Castaneda’s linguistic analysis ought to be incorporated in any

view of indexicality, as it surfaces in language, the ontological side of his analysis is much more

contentious, in particular for the thorough destruction of Fregean referents (which seem, at least

at first blush, much closer than Guises to what, commonsensically , many take to be objects

of reference). The latter trait I see as an advantage in purely philosophical terms, but as a

problem in terms of expressibility of the theory. It seems to follow that any expressed thought,

or sentence, is within the scope of the Kantian prefix, and so the only “genuine” case of direct

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speech is a case of non speech (the adjective genuine is Castaneda’s own characterization of the

transcendental prefix ‘I think here now’), since every time the ‘I’ of the prefix is expressed is just

embedded inside another clause in indirect discourse. If one accepts Castaneda’s point on the ‘I

think’ and wants to hold a Fregean view of the semantics shift between sense/reference between

direct and indirect discourse, the almost paradoxical result would be that there can not be any

instance of direct speech.

It seems to me that given the sweeping power of ‘I think here now’ prefixing all of

our representations, there is no reason to think philosophical statement to be excluded, from

which it should follow that transcendental prefixes are absolutely ineffable. I do think there is an

advantage in the generality of Guise theory, and that generality consist in having a unified theory

of reference for all kinds of syncategorematic terms. This is not the only advantage, but is the

one but it is the one I am concerned with now. What I would like to explore in the next chapter is

the possibility of a mixed theory in which the “reach” of a transcendental prefix affects indexical

terms, but not all terms. One of the reasons that pushes me in such a direction is a more deeply

embedded reluctance in taking properties as fundamental ontological components. Guise theory

is a theory firmly steeped in a Platonistic framework. What is appealing of Guise theory is that

it has room to accommodate my intuition43 that we have private contents of thought, encased

linguistically

Castaneda held, in the past, that a quasi-indexical proposition depicting an indexical

one expresses exactly one and the same propositional content. After his exchange with Robert

M. Adams he came to give a much fuller sense of privacy to indexical propositions: indeed the

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quasi-indexical ones only give a picture of their indexical “cousins”. The relation, intimate as it

may be, is not a relation of identity. In fact in indexical propositions and the quasi-indexical ones

depicting them the indexical contents would be fully shareable by different thinkers. Since the

latter is not the case, a stronger sense of privacy is appropriate for indexical contents, as contents

they are not shareable at all, although the structures of the propositions containing them is .44

Summarizing, Guise Theory is a theory of direct reference which does not countenance

any psychological entity mediating between the thinker and referents. The Fregean denotata are

reinterpreted as systems of Guises, those denotata aren’t thinkable referents but are doxastic

referents45. Doxastic referents are not directly thinkable, but are reachable in thinking and belief

through references to guises and/or through forms of general reference (e.g. quantificational).

While I have been learning from Castaneda’s analysis and I adopted in much agreement

many of his syntactic and semantic insights, I think it is not useless to explore an alternative

theory, leaving the ontology of objects as it stands, roughly in common sense, but trying to

provide a different framework for indexical expressions. I will go back as well to the effect of the

Kantian ‘I think’ on the ‘I’ in it, and in any first-person utterance in the fifth chapter.

There are two lines of difference I wish to develop, increasingly important I believe.

For one thing I am not convinced that the fuller “Kantian” prefix (‘I think here-now’)

is the best way to characterize our linguistic and thinking practices. In one section of the next

chapter I develop an argument which seems to me to indicate we do not have a ground for the

extension from ‘I think’ to ‘I think here-now’ which is evenly solid for both the temporal and the

spatial indexical. But this might be a minor problem.

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What I do not think is a minor problem is that despite the complete destruction of

Fregean “primary referents” executed by Castaneda there is one fact which I keep finding com-

pelling: we do use direct speech, and I find convincing the Fregean arguments on the need of

keeping a sense/reference distinction between direct and indirect discourse. One can always dis-

count the surface of linguistic practice when a stronger theoretical pressure imposes the move,

for reasons of economy or of explanatory power. I think it is possible, or minimally it is worth to

try, to save as much we can of the Fregean framework, while accommodating the phenomena of

indexicality without undergoing a complete ontological overhaul. This is the motivating intuition

behind the sketch of a theory I present next.

Eventually theories have to be incorporated in larger bodies of thought, and I have to

admit I do not have a complete alternative to Guise Theory catering to exactly the same (or

possibly even more) corpus of data. That, by itself, does not seem a good reason not to develop

alternatives.

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NOTES\*/ Jonathan Swift, “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnirabi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan” inGulliver’s Travels.\1/ Large part of the recent literature on indexicality has to do with attacks and counterattacksaimed at Frege’s remarks. Singular propositions as “a way out from Frege” however came aboutfrom related although different corners (worries about the proper interpretations for systemsof modal logical calculi and, in part, from concerns for the so called metaphysics of individualessence, often dubbed haecceitas – literally this-ness or this-ity – after Duns Scotus). See, interalia, CASTANEDA {8}, EVANS {1} and {2}, GALE, KAPLAN {2} and {4}, and th e, by nowclassic papers by John Perry, (PERRY {1} and {2}. For a different view of the connectionsbetween indexicality and “possible worlds” semantics, see “Indexical Belief” by Robert C. Stal-naker, in SAARINEN.\2/ See footnote \1/ and the reference in footnote \5/.\3/ PERRY {1}: 479\4/ In an explicit reference to Guise Theory he wrote: “. . . a theory of propositions of limitedaccessibility seems acceptable, even attractive, to some philosophers. Its acceptability or attrac-tiveness will depend on other parts of one’s metaphysics; if one finds plausible reasons elsewherefor believing in a universe that has, in addition to our common world, myriads of private per-spectives, the idea of propositions of limited accessibility will fit right in. I have no knockdownargument against such propositions, or the metaphysical schemes that find room for them. ButI believe only in a common actual world” (see PERRY {2}, p.16.\5/ KAPLAN {5}: 245\6/ See KAPLAN {5}, where the method of $entences is brought to bear on a host of issuesstemming from intensional contexts. In turn this method is a development coming from Ka-plan’s notion of proposition, for him one should not think of “propositions as set of possibleworlds, but rather as structured entities looking something like the sentences which expressthem” (KAPLAN {2}: 17, not too similar though, see his caveat in footnote #41 of KAPLAN{5}: 281). Valuated sentences ($entences “are virtually the singular propositions they express.They give us structure. They give us individuals. They bear truth (with respect to a language)”see KAPLAN {5}: 245).\7/ “My semantical theory is a theory of word meaning, not speaker’s meaning. It is based onlinguistic rules known, implicitly or explicitly, by all competent users of the language” writes forinstance Kaplan, see KAPLAN {2}: 101, note #4.\8/ This was Gareth Evans’ position, see EVANS {2}: 314.\9/ KAPLAN {2}: 21-26. Eternal sentences, in the Quinean sense, are good examples of expres-sions with a fixed character. While their truth value may be different in diverse circumstances of

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evaluation, their content (as Kaplan puts it what is said) does not change at all no matter whichutterance comes to express them (and no matter who is the speaker, which is the “possible”world in which the utterance takes place, and so forth).\10/ KAPLAN {2}: 64. That the conclusion might be that semantics is not about psychologicalattitudes is suggested by Howard Wettstein. He takes the position that semantics for a languagehas to zero in to language as it is used in public: a semanticist should be looking at linguisticpractices as an alien visitor would, namely as instances of noise/inscription production with somedegree of regularity. Whether or not his claims about the messiness and intrinsic vagueness ofour use of proper names are correct, I have my doubts that his remarks apply naturally to our useof indexicals. Part of the problem is that a truly alien visitor, doing anthropological semantics,would have nearly unsurmountable difficulties (if his, the alien’s, experiential field is markedlydifferent from humans’) in understanding demonstrative sentences: it is not obvious to me that,for instance, he could have any grasp of tokens of ‘That is a table’ or, even worse, of ‘This isa mistake’. See WETTSTEIN {2} and {3}; and for a response from the perspective of K-D-Rtheorists who want to hold on to the cognitive significance of language see PERRY {4}.\11/ This is a tension Kaplan is well aware of: “Frege’s incredulity surely stems from the pointthat for an ‘object of thought’ to be an object of thought, all of its parts have to be thinkable.According to Frege, material objects are not, in this sense, thinkable. They are presented to usonly indirectly, being represented by some concept. It is these representations that are to be partsof an object of thought. There is an asymmetry in intelligibility here: one which I have observedin myself and others. From Russell’s point of view, Frege’s theory looks like a subtheory of hisown in which the singular propositions are excluded, . . . From Frege’s point of view, Russell’sway of ‘extending’ his (Frege’s) idea is utterly baffling because it seems to miss the point (as wellas the method) of the whole enterprise.” see KAPLAN {5}: 280, footnote #34.\12/ KAPLAN {2}: 63-64\13/ Interestingly enough, John Perry in a recent paper says that what is said is a “rather com-plex notion that needs to be explained in terms of intentions to communicate”, see PERRY {4}:17, footnote #10.\14/ A similar objection is pressed in GALE, even though I think he did not take into consider-ation the possibility of a Kaplanian “more structure” move, namely that a singular propositionmay be conceived as a structured entity – as opposed to a simple sequence – somehow mimickingthe grammatical structure of the sentence expressing it. I pursue this counterobjection in whatfollows in the main text.\15/ Rules regulating communication have, I think, to be more complicated than the simpleone just given because there is always an interplay between the context of an utterance, andthe “correct” way of understanding it. It is mistaken to limit one’s scope of interpretation to

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isolated utterances: the context, linguistic and otherwise, can radically change what is said bythe utterance. Typically this is the case in every non literal use of terms, even pronouns like ‘I’.There are obvious cases in which ‘I’ does not refer to the utterer in any straightforward fashion.For instance in: “Suppose I am Mozart . . . and we are in Prague . . . and . . . I am stuck withdebts . . . ”. It seems to me clear that the token of ‘I’ in the above stretch of discourse has tobe understood not so much as myself, tokening it, but as myself under the description ‘Mozart’commanding the entire piece, whichever the correct reading of myself-qua-Mozart will turn out tobe. On the difficulties of fixing, once and for all, referential constraints for pronouns see BACH,chapter 9. On uses of ‘I’ non denoting the speaker see also CASTANEDA {1} and his “Reply toPerry” in TOMBERLIN.\16/ That this is the trait of indexicality philosophically most relevant has been emphasized byCastaneda in all his work on the topic.\17/ See LURIA, in particular chapter 4, aptly titled “His world”. nl \18/ LURIA: 77 (record ofAugust 1934).\19/ The topic is huge. At least according to some linguistic traces are all we are left with in thecase of unconscious experience. The point is that the resurfacing of what has been submergedcan be accomplished only by a (psycho)analytical interpretation which is operating only on theexpressed thoughts of the subject during the process of interpretation itself.\20/ WETTSTEIN {1}\21/ Answering machines, and any form of delayed discourse, bring about strange problems fortheories of reference. An alternative approach could be to treat the ‘I’ as a standard pure in-dexical, in Kaplan’s sense, and then treat ‘here’ and ‘now’ as covert demonstratives, pointingto the place and the interval within which the tape is producing the right kind of noises. Stillthe ‘I’ would be difficult to interpret as ‘the agent of the context’ (which context? the time therecording was made? each time the tape plays itself aloud? in the first case we would get Howardas referent, in the second case . . . the tape – are tapes agents?). It seems to me more naturalto understand such a message by referring back to the intention of Howard’s (admittedly, thisis guesswork on the side of the caller: Howard might be dead, we might have got the wrongnumber, and . . . ). That K-D-R theories are not successful in excluding categorically speakers’intention is also pointed out in BACH.\22/ Thus in ‘He is a great swimmer’, the referential constraint on the token of ‘he’ would beof the form ‘a certain male’. David does not say that a certain male is a great swimmer. Butthe constraint helps the auditor in delimiting the zone of David’s experiential field most salientw.r.t. that utterance. As Kent Bach noted, this kind of rules for referring are relative to lan-guages: there are languages in which gender has nothing to do with the sex of the bearer of thegrammatically gendered expression. In German the sun is a grammatical female and the moon a

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grammatical male, in Italian the opposite is the case. It should also be noted that the referentialconstraints for ‘this’ and ‘that’ are limit cases, since they just indicate that the referent is withinthe experiential field of the speaker construed as broadly as possible. The ‘as broadly as possible’modifier is the source of the very many misunderstandings that are generated by demonstratives.\23/ This is not a crucial point, I believe. Whatever the actual psychological events are they canbe represented within the theory by mathematical functions – see e.g. functions in economicswhich serve well the purpose of the theory at hand, but hardly, if ever, are in the mind of theconsumer deciding what to buy.On the differences between functions, their values within formal theories and thinking realities avaluable discussion is the appendix to CASTANEDA { 8}.\24/ PERRY {4}: 4. He continues to note that “Minds evolved in a very Strawsonian world,where the ability to reidentify individuals, and to use information picked up in one encounterto guide action in a later encounter is crucial. That we can describe minds by reference to theindividuals they have acquired information about, and that our concepts of belief and the otherattitudes embody such a way of describing minds, should not be expecially perplexing.”.\25/ There are some difficulties here already: do we have actually ways to individuate things likeinstants that do not depend on our perspective? I grant the point that instants are individuals,and that we can refer to them by using, for example, ‘now’. I do not think we do in fact referto instants using ‘now’: I am more inclined to view those referents as vague intervals. I willexpound my own on the proper referent of ‘now’ elsewhere.\26/ This seems to be Kaplan’s present position, if I understand correctly. See the passage citedin note #6.\27/ The refurbished version of the singular proposition approach has been dubbed ‘extra-structure’ by Scott Soames. I am here basically following his criticism. I am not convincedby his move of declaring the matter altogether a subject for pragmatics because we disagree – Ibelieve – on the range of semantical phenomena.\28/ JACKENDOFF {2}: 128. If I understand correctly Situations and Attitudes, Barwise andPerry in keeping a semantical distinction between the veridical case (paradigmatically ’see that’)and the non-veridical (paradigmatically ‘believe that’) are inclined to treat hallucinations as hav-ing as contents brain states and cerebral events. I am disinclined to take such a position becauseI am more interested in keeping as unified as possible the understanding of the phenomenon ofreference to experienced contents.\29/ I am not here talking about the ostensive demonstration of objects at all, rather the pointingis the directedness of intentionality.\30/ Jackendoff puts the same point in terms of mental representation: “People have things totalk about only in virtue of having mentally represented them” JACKENDOFF, ibidem.

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\31/ The example is from CASTANEDA {8}. The importance of demonstrative reference forguiding action has been pointed out by many authors. It was Castaneda though that brought itinto focus as a motivational factor which does not depend upon external targets of reference fordemonstrative tokens.\32/ I deal specifically with the first person pronoun, qua indexical expression, in another section.\33/ I owe the idea of course to Donald Davidson. See his “On the Very Idea of a ConceptualScheme”, in DAVIDSON.\34/ The spotlight on the importance of the attribution of indexical reference to others has beenfirst switched on in CASTANEDA {2}.\35/ While already working on this piece I came to realize that within the K-D-R proponentsthere exists a tendency to allow internal contents, which may or may not come to be (identifiedwith) identical massive chunks of reality. John Perry, in his most recent article, couches the pointwithin communication: “Suppose two children are looking out from different windows [of a car]neither of them is paying any attention to that fact. The discussion goes something like this:“ ‘That’s Wendy’s. Let’s stop here’ says one child, looking in one direction. ‘No, it’s not, youidiot. Can’t you see that it is McDonald’s. Who wants to eat there?’, says the other lookingin the other direction. The first child use of ‘that’ and the second child use of ‘it’ are not co-referential -there is not some thing they both refer to. The use of ‘that’ refers to one restaurant,the use of ‘it’ to another. But to understand the internal structure of the discourse, and theemotions to which it gives rise, one must see that the various referring expressions are supposedto be about the same thing. The utterances are not really or shall I say “externally” about thesame thing. But they are “internally” about the same thing. That is, the utterances bear therelationship that is appropriate in discourse, for utterances that are really about the same thing”(see PERRY {4}: 13). This is a refreshing example because for once the internal content is one,and the external contents are more than one (the reverse of many Frege-style puzzles): I wouldgo a step further in recognizing that the two children have certain internal propositional contents.And I would also read the example as evidence that what is exchanged in communication is notjust information (in the sense of Situations and Attitudes) but also internal contents.\36/ See his “The Semiotic Profile of Indexical (Experiential) Reference”, in SAARINEN, p. 281.\37/ ibidem, pp. 311-312.\38/ See CASTANEDA {6}: 311 –but see also CASTANEDA {4}.\39/ ibidem, p. 287 and pp.288-289 for an argument about the impossibility for a visual spaceto be (identical to) a physical space. Note: the key premise of the argument is empirical, namelylight moves at a finite speed, hence whatever is in the visual field of an observer at one timeneedn’t correspond to anything in the physical space at the same time. As an empirical point Iam not quite sure this is in general the case for all perceptual modalities: is there an olfactory

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space? and what distinction can one make between it and its physical “counterparts”?\40/ See in particular the seventh section of CASTANEDA {8}.\41/ See “Reply to Perry”, in TOMBERLIN, p. 318.\42/ ibidem, p. 322.\43/ And Frege’s for that matter.\44/ See in particular the letters contained in the ADAMS-CASTANEDA Correspondence (inTOMBERLIN) where the change has been made explicit and clarified.\45/ See in particular Castaneda’s “Reply to Perry” in TOMBERLIN.

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CHAPTER 5

I (and some speculations)

Consciousness in its deepest home seems to oscillate slowly, will-lessly, and re-versibly between stillness and sensation. And it seems that only the status ofsensation allows the initial phenomenon of the said transition. This initial phe-nomenon is a move of time. By a move of time a present sensation gives way toanother present sensation in such a way that consciousness retains the formerone as a past sensation, and moreover, through this distinction between presentand past, recedes from both and from stillness, and becomes mind.

As mind it takes function of a subject experiencing the present as wellas the past sensation as object. And by reiteration of this two-ity phenomenon,the object can extend to a world of sensations of a motley plurality.

L.E.J. Brouwer∗

OPACITY

Opacity is the best word I find to name the condition I am engulfed in trying to speak

of myself and of my self. Reasons are there for it to be the clearest area: who is more entitled

than I am to say something of myself?

Introspection reveals only a bottomless crevasse. The very standards of evidence are in

dispute: many are willing to claim that introspective claims are baseless, nearly by definition for

there is nothing to introspect in the first place.

The bet of my semantics of thinking is twofold: since language has to be thinkingly

spoken before it can be understood, language is at least one of the external channels of thought;

and whatever can be said of reality has to be said by examining our thinking reality, with the

participle left ambiguous between its two natural readings.

Our indexical thinking has two key features: it can focus on anything demonstratively

and it is reflexive in a way unique to first person thoughts. From now on I use “thoughts” as

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short for acts of thought, states of mind, entities individuated by their contents (sometimes called

“texts”), “utteranc e” is reserved to public events and sentences will be used as expressions of

contents of both. This is not meant to suggest that thoughts are of their essence, so to speak,

linguistic in character: I am making the assumption only for simplicity, in fact I think it is very

clear there are thinkable contents which are not linguistic at all1.

I will deal primarily with two problems which are related in my view

i) ‘I’ when actually used in speech and thought marks a reference made by the user

to the user as self (there isn’t any replacement of the first person pronoun which

preserves all its valences). What are the structures of this unbreakable referential

link?

ii) Demonstrative reference points to a key part of our consciousness: what are its

link with our self-consciousness, somehow encased in first person thoughts?

¿From David Kaplan2, I borrow the distinction pure indexicals and demonstrative in-

dexicals. Both categories of expression refer within the semantics of understanding language

when utterances are anchored to a context of use. I use semantics of understanding to mark the

difference between the hearer’s semantical valuations of utterances and the thinking/speaking

semantics for the intentional attitudes which are characteristic of reference from the viewpoint

of the speaker who is making the reference.

In Kaplan’s terminology, pure indexicals do not have at all failures of reference: ‘now’,

‘here’, ‘I’ are always referring (in a context of use3).

On the contrary demonstratives may or may not have referents: one example of failure

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was that of his own pointing to a wall where a picture of Carnap use to hang, but not any longer,

and he is giving his shoulders to the wall while uttering “That was the greatest philosopher of

the century”. To use a simpler example, the use of “he is good looking” in the context in which

the utterer points unmistakably to a flower is for Kaplan (and for many others) a failure with

regards to the reference of the indexical token in the sentence. I will argue that even though

this might be a impossible speech act to understand for an audience (from the point of view of

what I have termed valuations of sentences made by hearers) it does not constitute in this view

a failure of thinking reference for the speaker.

The key prediction of this view of demonstrative reference is that every natural language

has some device of demonstrative reference with a wide range of variations in lexicon. To use a

simple example at my disposal, the couple of demonstrative pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’ in English

has to be translated with three distinct expressions in Italian. However the basic mechanism of

reference remains the same.

Demonstrative indexical reference is a symptom of the intrusion of experience in lan-

guage: it is an experiencing agent who is the user of this kind of reference. It is also an agent

which has a particular kind of experience. It can not be the experience of the world sub specie

aeternitatis, since demonstrative reference isolates particulars, whose boundaries are very much

conventional4, and those particulars come and go from one’s field of awareness. Experience it is

nonetheless, no matter how much straying away from our common “world”.

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”. . . what can be expressed, if the intrinsic content of experience is beyond alldescriptions? What remains over, if all experienced qualities, colours, sounds,feelings, in short all determinations of the content of the stream of conscious-ness, are ruled out for communication as absolutely subjective and indescrib-able? We might think at first that nothing whatever remains over, since weare assuredly unable to free our experiences and thoughts entirely from all con-tent. Or are the relations between contents of consciousness something that isremoved from the subjective sphere and can be therefore be communicated?”

Moritz Schlick∗∗

A reformulated Fregean theory

If I am correct, there are acts of thoughts, states of mind which are subjective and

private. Strictly speaking, then, those are not objects of communication, if communication has

to involve the ability to prompt one’s audience to share refer ences to zero in on one and the

same thought expressed by a sentence uttered or written. This is one consequence of Frege’s

entertaining the possible existence of private sense of expressions5. Frege, I believe, failed to

realize how far a theory of thoughts would have to go to countenance private senses.

The kernel of my proposal is to postulate as an explanatory tool the presence of an ‘I

think’ preceding every representation6 and test what this will bring about w.r.t. indexicality

within a broadly Fregean semantics7. This is a theoretical posit, a way of linking indexical

thoughts and the perspectives from they which they are “executed”.

If indexical terms have, at least, one dimension of privacy, the sentences containing them

are bound to a speaker. Indexical referents may not be egocentric, as Russell thought, but rather

logocentric. Not egocentric because their use does not presuppose, though allows, the presence

of an Ego to consciousness: we can use ‘this’ fully lost in thought without any awareness of a self

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of any kind, like Castaneda’s Externus.

Logocentric indexical terms have to be because their very existence does presuppose an

agent-speaker-thinker: the centre of an ongoing logos.

I propose to consider the possibility that the primary referents for indexical terms in

thought and in direct discourse are senses, “Sinne” along more or less Fregean lines.

The senses of indexicals are subjective: they are constructed entities bound by the

perspective of the agent/speaker/thinker (although in making quasi-indexical references we have

the means to “capture” at least their fundamental structure ). In and by themselves they are

private targets of reference.

Schematically: when the text of a thought (expressible in direct discourse) is f ree from

indexical terms the Fregean scheme of sense and reference stays in place. In this case we are

resorting to the Fregean common heritage of concepts and Sinne. Those are objective at least

enough to yield intersubjectivity of communicational content. To buttress the distinction between

general terms and perspectival, indexical ones, one may also observe that while in learning the

meaning of indexical terms one learns an abstract mechanism which, when put to use, can denote

on particular occasions, learning the meaning of general terms one learns also their reference, in

the vast majority of cases. It is an open question whether issues of “inscrutability of referent”

are resolved by innate mental structures or by what seems to be a fact of psychological reality;

namely that in learning language humans as a species are subject to an extremely vast, common

array of environmental features which prompts, given their common biological make-up, their

reactions in ways which are vastly similar. The Fregean “common heritage” of concepts and

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meanings would, then, be common by way of a shared physical environment.

The terms I want to be affected directly by the agent/speaker/thinker’s perspective are

indexicals, pure and demonstrative alike.

There are two main reasons for this choice.

I have been stressing all along the subjective character of indexical reference. And that seems

to be a ground for indexicals being bound to a particular speaker, losing as it were the semantic

“innocence” which they appear to have. But there is also another reason, to me more compelling.

If there is a unique ephemeral character of indexical references, and if their referents are, as I

believe, internal to the fields of awareness of thinkers and speakers, then these particulars are

not ever publicly appearing. Their role is to provide a focus to speakers’ references, and to bring

about certain reactions on an audience. In the limit case of soliloquy, or of thought exclusively

entertained by a thinker, one may take the audience to be the thinking subject itself. The role

of indexical thoughts is causal in communication: indexical references, though private, serve the

purpose of indicating to an audience what should be focussed on.

Indexical references, in spite of the privacy I’m underlining, are expressible publicly: the

tokening of indexical terms signals a speech act which I see as mixed in character, part assertion,

part command.

The process of understanding indexical utterances is arduous: a piece of empirical evi-

dence supporting that is the unclarity that indexical utterances suffer: those are the utterances

that are most sensitive to the hospitality of their context to be comprehensible at all, e.g. how

hard it has to be to communicate a sentence containing a demonstrative based on a visual pre-

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sentation within the field of awareness of the speaker to someone else who’s blind.

If one takes what I have called the narrower view, changes have to be made in what gets

transmitted in communication, but not to the point of having to replace the ordinary notion of

objects wholesale.

An underlying motivation not to take the broader view is for me an attempt to see how far

one can go keeping one’s ontological commitments as conservative as possible in accommodating

the phenomena indicated by the occurrence of indexical references in thought and the ir use in

communication.

When the text of a thought contains indexicals the very capacity of thinking it requires

the employment of the perspective from which the indexical is tokened. The switch I am proposing

will take as referent of the indexical its sense. Now I am using ‘sense’ as a combination of two

elements: the object internal to the field of awareness of the thinker/speaker and its manner

of presentation. That ‘sense’ is an object qua present in the field of awareness. Its manner of

presentation might be taken as a descriptive component which the speaker might be able, if

so queried, to supply. This descriptive component might be very poor and again might have

irreducible indexical elements itself. A table might indicate a rough division of indexicals in

terms of their senses. Indexical senses have polarities, they are expressive of the isolation of

certain particulars, hence their meanings come into their sense by way of determining differences

in presentation: what can be now a ‘this’ is soon to be a ‘that’, not necessarily in that order,

whereas what is called now ‘now’ is forever afterwards to be called ‘then’.

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that in opposition to ‘this’, “entificator” par excellence, the less obvious of the items present

in the speaker/thinker’s field of awareness, its mode of presentation is highly nonspecific,

possibly perceptual or anaphorical with respect to a stretch of discourse; very often its

reference is determinable only contextually, causally inducing the right kind of response

this similar to ‘that’ in being highly nonspecific but its grammatical meaning points to the

most obvious item in the field of awareness, obvious in terms of relative spatial proximity,

or of temporal, sequential order

now the adverbial marker (implicitly present in any unmarked sentence) of a fuzzy interval,

whose upper and lower limits are eternity or timelessness and instants at which thoughts

take place. mostly to be placed in opposition to ‘then’, because of the sequential character

of thought (see more below for some remarks on the absolute certainty of the existence of

a referent for ‘now’)

here the marker of a spatial portion in general, at a more metaphorical level a portion of

discourse as well (as in ‘Now; we are talking!’) ; to be placed in a sort of duality with ‘now’

in expressing the boundedness of the agent of the speech-thought-act

I the most basic and most primitive of all indexical senses (not to be confused with the one

indexical term to which all others can be “reduced”). Expressive of agenthood, key opposi-

tion with all others indexical terms: at each occasion of use it has a strictly unique referent,

always present by the very force of the agent performing an indexical speech-act in first per-

son, thinking a first person thought and so forth. Explicitly conceived, essential ingredient

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of the expression of selfconsciousness (on which some more below)-. In polar opposition to

all other indexical terms which are expressible by personal pronouns. The use of ‘you’ con-

stitutes the possibly highly metaphorical attribution of an Ego to a conversant (as in ‘Now,

you let me down!, uttered by my to the computer which is misbehaving). When I term ‘I’

the most basic indexical, the claim has not to be understood as saying that ‘I’ is genetically

prior to other indexicals, or even somehow grounding them. “Externus”-type episodes of

consciousness may and do take place without an‘I’. ‘I’ is basic just in the pedantic sense it

is the base on which you can attribute self-consciousness to others, hearing them using it.

This is not an exhaustive list, and I am not sure there is in fact such a list, in part because the

phenomenon of indexicality is more widespread than for the extent of indexical terms, tenses

in verbs (for the languages which allow them) are indexical markers as well, but they aren’t

necessarily to be reduced to ‘now’ and ‘then’, whereas languages such as English which allow

the construction of complex indexical terms have a potentially infinite repertoire of secondary

indexical terms; e.g. ‘to-day’, ‘to-morrow’, ‘yester-year’.

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Now, this would hold for each speaker. Hence there remains the need of providing an

account of how this kind of reference can be transmitted in communication. I say transmitted

and not shared, because indexical references are not directly shareable in my view.

One initial element has to be noted: indexicals, on the surface of speech, are always

indicating references made by the speaker even in sentences construed as reports in indirect

discourse. I take this to be a bit of evidence favoring the view that indexical references are not

common in the same way others are.

I try to illustrate the view using an example involving a demonstrative pronoun.

Suppose a speaker says:

(L) That is a lime tree

(L) is bound by the ‘I think’ of a speaker, I claim, and the indexical term in it takes as primary

referents its sense. The referent of the token of ‘that’ is the presented object targeted by the

speaker within her field of awareness, and the referent of ‘lime tree’ can be taken as the descriptive

component of the sense ‘lime tree’ the speaker has in mind. What are the truth conditions of

(L)? One way to characterize them is in terms of “fit” between the descriptive component of the

sense of ‘that’ and the characteristic properties of the sense of ‘lime tree’, or at least “enough of

them”.

A descriptive component of ‘that’ in (L) can be seen as a series of properties, doxastically

attributed to it. If enough of them are also in the series of properties characterizing the stereotype

of ‘lime-tree’ (for instance ‘being a tree’, ‘being a tree with green fruits’ etc.), then we may talk

of a “fit” between the sense of ‘that’ and the sense of ‘lime-tree’. The “enough” caveat is here

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by and large because the salient features of ‘lime-tree’ are socially determined, so that what can

count as “fit” for a botanist is generally very different from what will count for the layman in

botany. I have indicated above that I propose to have senses of indexicals as their referents, but

I have not proposed to eliminate outright the terms’ Fregean Bedeutungen. Which role Fregean

Bedeutungen play? In thought they remain intentional objects, something we do not have as

propositional components. But they retain a role in communication as the external anchoring,

the background against which the directing intentions of the speaker can be fulfilled. I believe

that role is best understood shifting the focus to communication.

Before we discuss this I think a summary is not amiss.

In terms of referents, my view is that the referents of indexicals are senses, in a quasi-

Fregean acception. They are not objective in Frege’s terminology, they are subjective and “pri-

vate”. I put private in quote because although there is one dimension of privacy to them, they

are communicable. In communication, in the interplay between the semantics of thinking, on the

speaker’s side, and the semantics of understanding on the hearers’ side, Fregean Bedeutungen

play a central role. One of my criticisms of Frege’s original approach lies in that he collapsed

the two aspects of thought: the mental act with a content and the communication of such a con-

tent to others. In a slogan like fashion Frege thought that the only guarantee of intersubjective

communication is the existence of timeless, spaceless pseudo-Platonic entities he thought Sinne

were.

An indexical judgment when true or false constitutes in my view a form of “mixed”

predication. On the one hand the indexical referent (which might be in subject position as in

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(L)) is a private object, whereas in the predicate position is a Fregean concept-word or some such.

The proper fit of these two kinds of entities (which makes the judgment itself true or false, as the

case might be) requires a different theory of predication. One option is to be excluded, it seems

to me, the relationship between ‘that’ and ‘is-a-lime-tree’ in L is not a relation of identity, of full,

unrestricted identity obeying to Leibnitzian strictures. On the other hand the conception of such

a relationship along the lines of a standard extensional membership (L is true iff the referent of

‘that’, on the given occasion of use is a member of the set determined by the property ‘being a

lime-tree’) would bring about a clash of intuitions about what is predicable of what, since on the

one side is a “mental” object of sorts, and on the other is a purely public (ontologically speaking)

property.

As Professors Clark and Castaneda have made me realize, the construction of a theory

of predication in mixed form, allowing the compresence of a mental object and a “non-mental”

property in one and the same judgment is what I see as the most urgent task in pursuing the theory

of indexicality which seems to save their privacy and their functional role in communication.

As I have noticed above one such theory of predication is part and parcel of Guise

Theory, where though the relationship to be split is the relation of identity, weakening the full

Leibnitzian one to a potentially growing list of different relationship which picture different kinds

of judgments (of consubstantiation, of consociation and so forth). But the theoretical price of

Guise theory is to relegate Fregean referents to the realm of doxastics, a price I am not willin g

to pay, or, at least, a price which does seem to high for the bill presented by indexicality. The

recognition of the truth of (L) performed by the thinker or speaker of it is not a matter of logical

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deduction, independent from experience. It is a recognition prompted by a reference to an object

of experience. Indeed the very proposition the judgment expresses is a product of experience:

it is not a Platonic proposition, in Chisholm’s acception, but a contingent one, created by the

episode of thought generating it. The “facts of the matter” contribute to the truth-conditions

of an indexical judgment by providing (or failing to provide as the case might be) the grounding

of the senses of general, non-indexical, terms. The senses of general, non indexical, terms have

a double status: they are objective and subjective, in virtue of their intersubjectivity. In a way,

then, they are within and without minds, if one grants that their very acquisition is constrained

enough.

Which role are Fregean Bedeutungen playing? That role, I think, is best understood

shifting the focus to the scene of communication. ¿From the viewpoint of the speaker an indexical

sentence such as (L) expresses a quasi-Fregean thought. The thought lacks the kind of objectivity

attributed by Frege to Gedanke: it is bound, so to speak, to the spe aker’s field of awareness since

the component of the thought referred to by the indexical grammatically in subject position is a

private sense.

Now, if (L) is actually uttered, at the limit even in soliloquy, a further dimension has

to be added. Indexicals’ grammatical meanings are built-in directing intentions. One way to

understand these, the one I prefer, is to see them as pointers given to an audience8. Some of the

pointers might be demonstrations, though there does not have to be any. Some of the directing

intentions are hinted at by referential constraints: using ‘she’, in E nglish, the speaker tries to

direct the hearer to a female, using ‘he’ to a male, using ‘that’ to a salient item in the hearer’s

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field of awareness. ‘that’ and ‘this’, it might be noted, has one of the lowest level of directing

specificity: it points to an item which is somewhat more salient and/or closer in time or in space

than a ‘this’.

If I am correct, we are often unconsciously misrepresenting our references. At the simplest

level the speaker/thinker of (L) is understood, quite likely by himself as well by others, to refer

to a tree by means of ‘that’. That he is referring to an item within her field of awareness does not

have to be something of which she is conscious: the very construction of a field of awareness is

an unconscious process9. Note too that when the covert ‘I think’ is actually verbalized it carries

a connotation of agnosticism about the correspondence between what one is aware of and the

environment.

What, then, is communicated by (L)? Not the speaker’s thought, but rather an abstract

propositional structure, not a Kaplanian singular proposition at all10. In the case of (L) the

propositional structure expresses the inclusion of the referent of ‘that’ in the category ‘lime tree’.

A hearer of the utterance of (L) to go from this communicated structure to the formation of her

thought has to use her understanding of the clues given by the speaker, namely the interpretation

of the directing intentions and her knowledge, if any, of the sense attached to ‘lime tree’.

I’d like to note that a thought such as (L), mental entity as it is, is not an incorrigible

statement (if there are any). The Fregean Bedeutung of the token of ‘that’, what I think is only

an intentional object in thinking, has not vanished from the scene of communication. The hearer

might very well interpret the directing intentions of the speaker in such a way that she takes

‘that’ to be what she sees as a cardboard replica of a lime tree and reply with ‘no, that is a

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cardboard sculpture mimicking a lime tree’. And the speaker, revising her statement (L) can

come to recognize ‘oh, what I thought to be a lime tree is actually a mock-up of a lime tree’. We

might understand the revision implying:

(L.rev.) ‘that, which I thought was a lime tree, is a mock-up’

What are the relationships between the referent of the token of ‘that’ in (L) and the ‘that’ in

(L.rev.)? I do not think it is reasonable to say they are one and the same. There is one level

of analysis (the level I have called semantics of thinking, following Castaneda) in which the two

tokens refer to the same presented object within the field of awareness of the speaker of both

sentences. For otherwise it will not make too much sense even for her to see (L.rev.) as a revision

of (L). But the intended external Fregean referents are not two particulars identical to each

other. Identity is too strong a notion: if one accepts Leibniz’s interpretation of identity, identical

particulars share all properties they have. And at least one property is not shared, namely being

a mock-up. I take it ‘being a mock-up of a lime tree’ entails ‘being not a lime tree’.

One way to characterize the relationship between the two senses is to view the speaker

as indicating an intentional similarity between them.

Intentional in two ways:

i) The speaker asserts of them a similarity, strong enough to revise (L); and

both are intended to be about a Fregean Bedeutung, an object, in this case the lime tree. It

gives the necessary background of the directing intentions of the speaker and the potential target

of the mobilization of the referring intentions of the hearer. It is in the interaction between the

referring intentions of speaker and hearer that a complete judgment such as (L) can come to be

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revised. And this can happen also in the limit case of soliloquy, for there is no reason not to

suppose that I can see my thoughts as uttered by another. In this way, what Kaplan takes as a

failure of reference, I see as a split phenomenon. ¿From the standpoint of the speaker there is

no referential failure for demonstrative indexicals. What might “misfire” is the mobilization of

the referring attitudes of the hearer(s): they might be unable to interpret the speaker’s directing

intentions, due to the unavailability of any background to the identification within their field of

awareness of items displaying the right fit between an external targeting and an accordance with

their understanding of the speech-act performed by the speaker.

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Some more content-less structures

Quite differently from Frege11, the indexical propositions I am envisaging are actual

creations of the speaker/thinker. They are not at all timeless, mind-independent objects. Thus

their existence is contingent upon the existence of the speaker in the first place. Such a creation

though brings into existence a web of structures more complex than it would appear at first

blush.

Let’s suppose, then, (L) comes to be uttered by a speaker and is heard (and understood)

by an audience which may, although need not, consist of several different hearers.

Each one of the hearers can formulate two thoughts:

(A.L) That is a lime tree

and

(Ind.A.L) She says (that) that is a lime tree

According to Castaneda and me, both tokens of ‘that’ in (A.L) and (Ind.A.L) have subjective,

perspectival senses12. Their contribution to the contents of thought is not the same as the one

made by ‘that’ in (L). And it shouldn’t, because to target the lime tree each hearer has to use her

own sense of ‘that’ in this occasion: different thinkers, different speakers, different perspectives,

hence different presented objects. Spatially and temporally there is an asymmetry between the

perspective from which (L) has been thought of, and (Ind.A.L.) the perspective(s) of (A.L.) and

(Ind.A.L.) Note: in (Ind.A.L) the demonstrative token of ‘that’ takes the “largest scope”, i.e. it

is a token of the thinker of (Ind.A.L), not the ‘that’ of (L). Demonstratives keep, so to speak,

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their sense bound to the actual user.

But then what is it (Ind.A.L.) attributes to the utterer of (L)?

My proposal is to view that attribution in a twofold manner. On the one hand there

is an indexical proposition entertained by the hearer. This is subjective in the sense specified

by the hearer perspective. On the other hand this proposition comes with a potentially infinite

“cohort” of other propositions. The members of this cohort are propositions which may be the

content of other references made from different perspectives.

In case of successful communicational speaker reference, the success consists in eliciting

in one’s audience the entertaining of one proposition which is in the cohort of the proposition

one wishes to communicate.

Strictly speaking, then, the content of communication and the content of thought are

not (in the indexical case) identical. There is a specific feature of indexical reference which has

to do with the need of causing in the audience’s thought the proposition which has in its cohort

the perspectival proposition entertained by the speaker.

In the case of successful communication I have been using a tacit assumption, namely

that the audience can pick up through its own directing intentions the proper indexical or quasi-

indexical proposition expressed by (A.L) or (Ind.A.L) respectively.

As I have remarked before, one should not focus exclusively on successful communication.

Whether I am able in fact to prompt the entertaining the “right” proposition or not, it remains

that in thinking I am entertaining an object of thought. Let’s go back to (L). Suppose though

that there is no lime tree, due to hallucinations, my mistaking a bush for a lime tree or whatever

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other situation would make (L) non veridical. The veridicality of (L) consists in there being an x,

which is the Fregean denotatum of token of ‘that’ and which is identical to a lime tree. If (L) is

non veridical, and by hypothesis it is, I still want to hold the tokening of ‘that’ to be referential.

First of all, there is a datum which I would call, following Castaneda, homogeneity of

thought: from the perspective of the thinker there is no difference between (L) when thought in

the presence of the tree and in the presence of nothing. If it were not so, hallucinations (and

dreams) would not be understandable. There is a level of cognitive significance which is carried

by thought contents alone: we do have reactions of fear, of excitation, and so forth in dreams and

hallucinations as much as in experiences of purely external objects. And as Castaneda argues,

there is also a level of thinking in which we have to take contents of thought to be truth-valued,

at least13.

This homogeneous character of thought is widespread. We do refer to fictional entities,

whether knowing they are fictional or not. And the case of fictions is interesting because we

do often refer to fictional entities not from within the fiction in which they are embedded, but

from without. Typically this is the case when one wishes to express something like “Diotima is

a woman who is very seductive”.14

As noted before we can refer demonstratively to items in our field of awareness which are

not present and attended at at the time the reference is made. Our field of awareness does include

conscious memories and lots of artifacts of thought, artifacts like fictional characters which have

as background only other objects of thought.

There is a distinction to be kept in mind. Communicationally to prompt in one’s audience

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the production of what I have called a proposition in the right “cohort” is much more difficult.

One’s directing intentions are much harder to figure out. As I see it the case of demonstrative

communicational reference presents a continuum of cases: from the successful reference made

by the speaker in a perceptual judgment and so well understood by the audience t hat they

are able to form the perspectival proposition which converges exactly on the external target of

the speaker’s reference, to the case of moot or only purported communication, in which one’s

audience is left completely in the dark as of the directing intentions of the speaker. The latter is

probably very often the situation we encounter when an hallucination takes hold of the mind of

the speaker.

What looks like a failure of reference is then a pragmatic failure: the speaker is unable

to cause the right kind of directing intentions in her audience. This shows neither that a target

of reference does not exist, nor that it does. A pragmatic failure of this kind can be brought

about by the difficulty for the audience of interpreting an utterance. In such a case most likely

(Ind.A.L) would be meant by a member of the audience to be a quote, possibly expressed in

speech by adding a shrug.

I’ll call the indexical propositions with their whole cohort of indexical propositions others

can use to target the same referent, successfully or unsuccessfully, imperial propositions. They

bring about a different adjustment in Frege’s notion of thought . The centre of the empire, its

emperor – my indexical proposition – is available to me directly and to others vicariously through

their own targeting one of its attached members of the cohort.

Now, the indexical proposition is contingent upon the existence of its creating mind. But

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there is a sense in which it can be attributed independently even from the existence of a creating

mind.

Louis Antoine Leon de Saint-Just, before being executed, thought that he was immortal

(in one very idiosyncratic sense). Since he wrote thus, it is a reasonable presumption to think

that he entertained in thought:

I am immortal

and we can attribute to him that proposition, expressing the attribution through

Saint-Just thought he was immortal

The token of ‘he’ here is not a demonstrative pronoun but the quasi-indicator ‘he-himself15.

The problem here can be put thus: given what Saint-Just thought, we know beforehand

there is an imperial proposition we are capturing16. But there is no guarantee that this is the

case. For we might by same token attribute a first person proposition in this way:

The first woman born after the implosion of the universe will think she is pretty

And I take it to be clear that the alleged first person proposition ‘I am pretty’ might never

come to be. First person proposition are contingent upon the existence of a thinker who indeed

thinks them. And in this situation that thinker might simply never exist, a fortiori her indexical

propositions do not exist either.

Therefore the more serious revision for Frege’s scheme has to allow what he calls the

“third realm of thoughts” to be a realm of thinkable thoughts, some of them occurring at one time

or another, some of them never occurring. Note that this has nothing to do with the “grasping”

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of a thought: if there is (tenselessly) no indexical proposition, the quasi-indexical thoughts which

purport to report it are, at best, what Frege would term “fictional thinking”.17 The difference

between the purported targeting of an indexical proposition via a quasi-indexical sentence and

sentences like (Ind.A.L) lies in the lack of directing intentions. When a demonstrative sentence

is uttered the creation of the indexical proposition expressed by it is the creation of an imperial

proposition, in my terminology. When a quasi indexical proposition is used to attribute to others

an indexical reference no indication is given as to how others could make the attributed reference.

This principle underlies the difference between the direct character of indexical reference to an

item in a field of awareness which is perceptual (or present to the attention of the speaker) and

the reference made in indirect discourse such as the (Ind.A.L) to the content attributed. In the

quasi indexical case we are making a reference to a sense of a sentence. Disagreeing with Frege I

am pointing out how there might be thinkable sense associated with the content sentence while

there is no indexical proposition matching it.

Hence a further distinction has to be introduced in the Fregean frame. In his theory the

content sentence of a clause in indirect discourse does not refer to its ordinary denotatum, but

to its sense (a thought). The introduction of indexical propositions forces to distinguish between

three different situations: a report sentence whose content sentence is indexical free, a report

sentence whose content is indexical, and, a report sentence whose content is quasi indexical. For

the first case there is no need to modify the framework. For the case in which the content sentence

is indexical, the proposition or the sense it expresses is speaker’s sense of it. That it is so is shown

by the phenomenon of the “largest scope” of indexicals: no matter how deeply embedded they

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express a speaker thinking reference. In the third case the content sentence has a quasi indexical

character: this purports to attribute an indexical proposition to another thinker (who might be

the speaker herself18). In the quasi-indexical case the very attribution is making as assumption.

Namely it is assuming the subject to which the proposition is attributed to be indeed capable of

indexical thinking and referring, possibly of first person referring. This assumption can be highly

metaphorical as in the recent phenomenon of attributing to a computer faced with a mistaken

command “He believed that he was asked nonsense and replied with a stark ‘syntax error!”’. The

attribution may be null and void when the indexical proposition attributed is not thought by the

thinker to whom it has been attributed at all. In my idiom, we may be targeting a member of a

cohort without an emperor, as in the case of the first woman after the implosion of the universe.

The latter is the case I find more interesting: when one and only one subject is con-

sidered the phenomenon of attributed indexical propositions raises issues of continuity of self-

consciousness. Attributions are all self-attributions, with an added apparent dimension of cer-

tainty in targeting. And whether there is or not continuity of self-consciousness seems to me very

mysterious.

To that mystery, now I turn19.

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What is a self? How is a self possible? A self stands in a peculiarly intimaterelationship to itself, being aware or conscious of itself, of itself as itself –or, atleast, it has the capacity for this. How is such knowledge possible, is the capacityfor it part of the essence of selves, an essential feature of what is a self?

Robert Nozick∗∗∗

Awareness and self-awareness

Demonstratives, I have stressed, do not fail to refer because their referents are within

our fields of awareness. That we have a field of awareness, a motley plurality of experiences, I

take for granted.

That we have awareness of ourselves is not to be taken for granted. I begin with one

example.

Suppose we observe a child, maybe mumbling to herself, or thinking out loud for our purpose:

that is a toy, a pretty one, and that is a store, and there now they sell toys. . .

Our child is named Kathleen, and her mumbling goes on:

that is the toy Kathleen wants, and that is why Kathleen will go there, to that store,

with this bunch of coins. . .

So far all she thought can be captured by a description of her field of awareness. In it we find

stores, that one store where they sell that one toy she wants. We might even find Kathleen

herself. Within her linguistic awareness is not only the expression ‘Kathleen’ (if she responds,

however mechanically to it, it has got to be stored somewhat in her mental repertoire of terms),

but there might also be what we refer to by using it, Kathleen herself, of course, our familiar

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Kathleen20.

What we do not find is Kathleen referring to herself as herself21. Note that it is a fact

that we do have self-reference, but it is not very obvious what “survival value” it has, so to speak.

Kathleen is perfectly capable of surviving, in fact she engages in actions such as observing her

prized toy store, she is able to reason in rather sophisticated manners (she understands that toy

stores will exchange toys for coins). On the face of it, from what we can infer from her thoughts,

she lacks reflective awareness of herself.

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A genetic account: Theory I

Kathleen notices first that one area of her field of awareness is singled out as the easiest

to affect causally: her body. Her pains are in her field of awareness but she can do nothing about

them. Her hands are there as well and she can move them: in fact there is no phenomenological

distinction from her standpoint between the motion of her hands and the motions of mine. She

can move hers at will, no matter what she thinks she does not move mine. She feels her pains,

but she does not have any similar sensation with respect to anything else. But for all she knows

felt pains might have their seat in the universe at large she faces. Segments of that universe do

not respond to her commands though, by conscious will she has no telekinetic causal powers22.

Theory I consists in the following hypothesis: the mechanism which triggers the birth

of self-awareness is a psychological mechanism which recognizes certain boundaries within the

subject’s field of awareness. Those boundaries are determined by the reach of the subject’s causal

powers.

At this stage there is no referent of ‘I’: the first person pronoun is not used at all, even

though someone like Kathleen might be able to refer to herself in a third-person fashion as in

“that is the toy Kathleen wants”.

I believe this hypothesis to be somewhat confirmed by the observation of children. It

seems to an established fact that very young children do not express anything like self-awareness

for years, after they have acquired expressive capacities with language which indicate an ability

to refer even to themselves. The linguistic phenomenon I have most prominently in mind consists

in children learning their (given) name and use it to refer to themselves in third-person mode,

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as it were, before they start using the first person pronoun and the first person inflections of the

verbs in sentences.

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Theory I is not satisfactory: Theory II

Theory I suggests a close connection between certain physical powers and the referent

of ‘I’.

Can we move ahead and identify those powers with it?

A first move, intuitively plausible, is to answer positively and view the referent of a

tokened ‘I’ as the holder of those powers we experience. The holder is a body: that one body we

learn to single out as a body we can most intimately affect.

We have reached one provisional result: the referent of ‘I’ is a body cum its causal

powers. But this is not enough vis-a-vis the cache of the data we have available from our

thinking activities.

“Cartesian” sentences show a residual which is not captured by the reference to our

body. Thinking is a multilayered phenomenon: we can step back, as it were – no motion of

physical bodies is involved at all –, and look from another first person perspective at our own

body. Brouwer’s “motion of consciousness” is well represented by our capacity of externalize

and reify our empirical ‘I’. At any stage in which we come to refer to a particular in our field of

awareness as ‘I’, we are also able to refer to it demonstratively.

Let’s review the linguistic evidence.

Suppose I were to utter:

(D) That is a computer

The token of ‘that’ in (D) is a demonstrative used by me to refer to an item in my field of

awareness, and (D) predicates of it that it is a computer.

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If I am able to articulate in the first person mode, making thereby explicit the ‘I think’

prefix, I can think (or utter)

(D.I) I think (that) (D)

According to the first tentative theory of reference for ‘I’, (D.I) ought to be understood as stating

that a particular item in my field of awareness (that one with body with those specific cau sal

powers) thinks that (D). Here comes into play a phenomenon which I think underlies all our

thinking activities: the multiplicity of our empirical referents of ‘I’. Sentences such as (D.I) can

be embedded in indirect discourse ad infinitum: assuming I am able to articulate my first person

perspective I can think (and utter)

(D.I’) I think (that (D.I)

Theory I forces on us a regress. The regress is not vicious if we allow that there is one ‘I’ which

refers to itself as self. We make room, then, for self-awareness proper: the awareness of self as

self.

There is a tensions here between the being-in-the-world of each referent of the tokened ‘I’

and the capacity of the self to refer to each one of those demonstratively. At least one empirical

referent of ‘I’ has to be able to enter the world of the causal network: I have to mobilize it

when engaging in intentional action. And I can also objectify it, witness my ability to refer to it

demonstratively as in ‘that thinks that is a computer’. But the reiteration (explicitation) of the

‘I think’ prefix leaves us with a residual ‘I’ and its referent.

The self seems to be a vanishing point of view, unlocalizable in our field of awareness:

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“The I is not an object. I objectively confront every object. But not the I.” wrote Wittgenstein23,

and, I would add, I can refer to every object, including the ‘I’ insofar as it is seen as an object.

I think now I can make clearer my dissatisfaction with rules such as

(K-I) In any statement in which it occurs, I designates the speaker of the statement24

These rules describe the capacity of the audience of identify as referents of the heard token of

‘I’ the proper objects in their fields of awareness. They do not describe first person thinking

referential uses of ‘I’, insofar as they fail to capture the implicit (though explicitable) ‘I’ in the ‘I

think’ prefix underlying my thoughts and utterances. A residual non-objectual ‘I’ remains. But,

if I am correct, the residual non-objectual ‘I’ is never captured by K − I25.

And still, I believe there are deeper problems.

I am, from now on, assuming that there is a referent for the tokening of ‘I’. The rules for the

meaning of ‘I’ can not be stated by avoiding a form of circularity: indexical terms are not

reducible. There is a key difference between the reference mechanism of demonstratives and that

of pure indexical: whereas the former can be explained in terms of referent in the projected

world, the latter cannot, at least exhaustively.

According to Kaplan, ‘I’, ‘now’, and ‘here’ are pure indexicals: their reference is achieved

without any need of demonstration (or of directing intentions). And certainly in the case of ‘I’

he is right: I am not pointing to anything (literally or metaphorically) when saying ‘I’. Each

token’s reference is as direct as it can be. It has been noted by many authors that each and

every (indexical) tokening of ‘I’ has a dimension of certainty against which any skeptical wave

has to break. Beginning with Descartes and arriving at Jerrold Katz and Ernst Tugendhat26,

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the remark has been made that ‘I’ indexically used does not and could not fail to refer to an

existent entity, impervious to the most radical forms of skepticism. There are two issues here.

One could be termed the uniqueness of ‘I’, namely is that the only term which self-p, as

it were, its existential commitment, or there are other terms which share this feature?

The second issue could be termed a question of substantiality: what is the (certainly)

existing “object” we refer to with ‘I’?

On the first issue Castaneda writes:

“. . . as Descartes himself had causally shown, the Kantian prefix is only a frag-ment of the relevant prefix, to wit: I think here now. This is to be sure at theheart of Descartes’ claim that thinking and extension are two distinct attributescharacteristic, respectively, of the mental and the material substances. A com-prehensive study of indexical reference suggests that the true transcendentalprefix is, therefore, the extended one: I think here now .27

Tugendhat, following him, elaborates along Strawsonian lines, that while a tokened ‘this’

might fail to refer to any spatio-temporal object “objectively” (i.e. not from the internal per-

spective of the tokener of it), there is no failing of having space and time as conditions of the

very possibility of identifying anything. While in ‘this beetle in my hand is red’ the ‘this beetle’

token might fail to refer to anything, there is no such phenomenon for ‘here’ and ‘now’: “It may

be false that a beetle is now here at the place at which I am pointing, but it is not possible that

the place is not there”.28.

As I have noted earlier, I believe some distinctions have to be kept here. There is indeed

an unshakable truth in the idea that ‘I’ does not fail to refer to a real entity ever. But ‘here’ and

‘now’, I wish to maintain, have a dimension of similar certainty coupled with a difference. Not

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only for the sake of philosophical chicanery one can consider examples fashioned (partially) after

Avicenna’s “suspended man”.

This is a man who has no contact whichsoever with anything, in fact he might be the one

and only existent. The only way I have to make the example vivid to my mind is to see that man

as a god before creation (or after destruction?). Notice that I am assuming there is absolutely

nothing but the man of the example, and following Avicenna the man is “suspended” in the sense

that he can not even touch, say, his feet. No motion is taking place at all, no perception in the

normal sense and so forth (there is nothing to perceive after all).

First question: if the “suspended subject” thinks can he refer to himself as himself in the indexical

fashion? my answer is positive. His thoughts would be highly Cartesian in a sense, but they

would never move beyond the ‘I think’ (plus the contents of these thoughts). And the tokenings

of ‘I’ would surely not fail to refer to the man as much as the ‘I’ used by all non-suspended

thinkers.

Second question: if this person were to think ‘Here now I am rather bored with this nothingness

surrounding me’, would ‘here’ and ‘now’ provide the same dimension of certainty? There is

no place “in” which the occurrence of the thought takes place, by hypothesis. And there is

no “objective identifying time frame” to use Tugendhat’s terminology, there are no external

coordinates of time, there being nothing to coordinate in the first place. My first intuitive

response to a case like this is that while ‘I’ keeps functioning in the normal way, ‘here’ and ‘now’

do not.

The mental life of our “god” is boring indeed, but it isn’t necessarily nonexistent. The

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strength of this example depends upon the conceivability of the situation. I, for one, finds it

conceivable and think that it also illustrates a further point of difference between indexical ex-

pressions. In the example in question ‘here’ fails to refer to any externally conceivable space, what

Strawson and Tugendhat call objective space. It may though still refer in a quasi-pathological

way to the whole in which the suspended man is hanging. There is no “whole” though, so ‘here’

would refer back to its tokener! It may be the way in which some might conceive of the ‘here’

of a god faced with an entire universe. That would be a different situation altogether, although

even the the ‘here’ still would fail to segregate a particular in the normal way.

The ‘now’ of the suspended man, I would maintain, fails to refer to any interval or

portion of time in terms of “objective time-frames”. It does refer though to internal “durations”.

As long as the “suspended man” is capable of retaining any form of memory and has the ability

to keep track of the difference between separate episodes of thought, his tokenings of ‘now’ (and

of ‘then’) would keep providing a dimension of metaphysical certainty in referring beyond that

one given by the ‘I’.

The point made by the argument indicates a difficulty in a fullfledged Frego-Kantian ex-

tension of the ‘I think’ prefix of Kant to Castaneda’s ‘I think here now’ as a trascendental phrase,

which unthought itself accompanies all thoughts and representations. Whereas Castaneda’s point

seems to me to hold in straightforward manner for ‘now’, it seems that, given the differences in-

dicated above, there isn’t a basis of equal force for ‘here’.

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A substantial ‘I’?

If ‘I’ has a referent, it has be somehow mentally encoded, if it is to be thinkable at all. ‘I’

has that particular meaning I have tried to illustrate and so we have the inescapable conclusion

that minds are somehow able to reach beyond the experiential world, if I am correct in identifying

a part of the meaning of ‘I’ with a non-worldly, transcendental condition of experience, and

transcendent referent, ‘I’ which is implicit in all our representations, and in all our utterances29.

The problem is that even accepted the existence of such a transcendental referent, if

referring to it I use any form of demonstrative reference, by doing so I am making it an object of

my awareness. The non reducibility of ‘I’ comes back twice reinforced. It comes back because at

each stage, if I wish to have some substantial claim on my tokenings of ‘I’ then I have to be able

at each point to make a judgment of identity between my occurrent token and the prior ones. I

can always refer to myself (in the past or in the future) as ‘that person who. . . ’ but if I want

an Ego-connection, I have also to add ‘. . . and that person is I’. Robert Nozick puts the problem

thus:

If I always knew something of myself via a term or a referring token, there wouldbe needed the additional (unexplained) fact of my knowing the term referred tome. . .Therefore it seems we must have an access to ourselves which is not via a termor referring expression, not via knowing that a term holds true (of something orother)30.

Trying to make the referent of my tokenings of ‘I’ an entity reiterates the need for

identification: even assuming I know that my ‘I’ tokenings hark back towards my noumenal ‘I’,

I still have to know that ‘I am (the same as) the noumenal I’. Nozick’s answer relies on what he

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calls self-synthesis: a Fichtian philosophical notion of the ‘I’ positing itself as an ‘I’.31

A self-synthesis is a creative process: ex nihilo an I comes to be referred to in this

peculiar first person irreducible way. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary:

it constitutes the raw material which we utilize when we uncover the covert indexical prefix of

our utterances. Nozick also claims that more often than not we are relying on past synthesis to

establish the reference of the unthought-of I. We can rely on past occurrences of self-synthesis

insofar as we can refer demonstratively to the selves established then. I think this happens, and

it constitutes the source of a sense we have of across times identity.

But logically the priority should be given to the occurring act of self-synthesis. It is by

way of this act of reference to the self as our self that we are put in the condition of being able

to make those judgments. Judgments on past occurrences of self-synthesis have to be in the end

statements of sameness. To have an enduring identity I have to be able to recognize past acts

of self-synthesis as mine, and so I have to perform an occurring synthesis logically prior to my

looking back in memory, to search for my former selves. Quite evidently this is not always a

simple process. Aside from the pathologies of the occurrent multiple selves, even in the normal

case we find much more difficult to recognize our selves as ourselves when the span of time

between the act of recognition and the memorized content. An act of recognition, of reliance

on past self-synthesis, presupposes an occurrent self-synthesis. Thence it is always an occurrent

self-synthesis which grounds our referring to our self.

Castaneda after having indicated that self-reference in origin an anchoring of a quasi-

indexical reference32, locates the nature of the synthesis of a self in a system of negative polarities:

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The internal I-structures are I-strands hinging on contrasts between what oneis qua oneself* and something one is not. Alternatively phrased, an I-strandis the polar negation of something intrinsically non-I . . . Thus an I-schema is acomplex of negativities.33

Those negativities are lines of contrast, between e.g. ‘I’ and ‘they’, ‘I’ and ‘this’, ‘I’ and

‘we’, each contrast being the block on which an awareness of oneself as ‘I’ is possible. Castaneda

takes the line that at bottom the ‘I’ is a purely primitive phenomenon, something of which

any thinker (who is an ‘I’) is aware: “There is just no criterion one can apply to determine

whether one is an I or not. One simply is an I. This primitive fact is primitively and immediately

apprehended by a thinker who is an I”. Both Nozick and Castaneda have a view in which there is

no substantial ‘I’; that is, there isn’t in their view any enduring entity to which one might refer

with different occurrences of ‘I’. For Nozick one solution to traditional perplexities on the nature

of the self (perplexities started by Hume) is to view it as a Fregean unsaturated property, but he

dismisses it as “too much froth and too little substance”.34

Castaneda on the other hand denies that there is any enduring substance named by

the tokens of ‘I’, even when used by one speaker diachronically. For him the sense of enduring

selfhood some experience is given in judgments, the subject matter of which are I-Guises.

I think there is a real insight in the denial of any one enduring entity captured by ‘I’.

There is a persistent nagging reckoning from the deepest recesses of “common sense” which

resists the full force of this denial. A conception of self-synthesis based on occurrent episodes of

synthesis helps explaining such a resistance. It is the very synthesis which generates an entity. It

seems to me that is an entity which stands in a polar macro-opposition, borrowing Castaneda’s

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terminology: the opposition ‘I’ vs. everything else. To let go such an opposition literally on the

spur of the moment is, perhaps, too difficult. It is a “small death” after all, and we seem to

have, most of the times, some sense that to exist is “better” than not to. Prior to some sense of

philosophical reflection which might make room for judgments of similarities between episodes

of self-synthesis, or some sense of “fully lived biography” in Castaneda’s sense, it might be too

hard to bear psychologically to die at each moment, too hard psychologically for each ‘I”s sense

of self-worth. That indeed seems to me the price of not identifying tout court the ‘I’ with one’s

own body or the ‘I’ with one’s person, the social construct most commonsensically associated

with the notion of self. But it seems also that looking at the way we talk about ourselves, ‘I’

captures something different each time is used, even by one and the same speaker.

William M. Richards in a recent article35 brings up a difficulty for a theory which allows

reflexive self-reference in Nozick’s fashion. The key criticism consists in a charge of circularity:

reflexive reference of this kind presupposes a unitary self, which is referred to. Nozick’s expla-

nation makes appeal to an individual which is a “sum-individual X+Y+Z”.36 We can take a

sum-individual to be something like Kathleen in my Theory I, where X, Y, and Z could be a

body, certain causal powers, and, say, the repertoire of words she remembers. There is no un-

derlying “I-unity”; that is there isn’t any self-awareness proper, with the sensation of certainty

of attribution which comes with it. Nozick writes:

“Suppose the sum-individual X+Y+Z produces the sum-token x+y+z whichreflexively refers to X+Y+Z. This is sufficient for the closest relation schemato be applied; the entity X+Y+Z thereby may delineate itself as the entityX+Y+Z, correctly applying the predicate to itself”.37

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Richards notes that to refer to oneself qua oneself is an eminently intentional act and to

be in accord with the intention an act would have to be somehow keyed to the content of the

intention itself. But then

“Either exactly one of X, Y, or Z of the sum-individual X+Y+Z was keyed tothe content of the intention [to refer], in which case the operative individual wasnot a genuine sum-individual; or X, Y, and Z each were cognizant of differentparts of the intention and they communicated among one another to produceto produce the unified intentional result. But ‘communication’ is an intentionalunifier par excellence. . .[or] at least one of X, Y, and Z would have to be cognizant of the subjectcomponent of the intention that guides the token production, and if intentionsare essentially first-person, this means that one of the X, Y, and Z must havebeen aware of himself in the first-person way”.38

While I agree that Richards in that there is an intentional element in self-reference, I

do not think that is enough to doom any self-reflexive approach. A Nozickian “sum-individual”

is, I believe, at some stage of development each one of “us”, developed selves of now. Our first

tokenings of ‘I’ might well be not self-reflexive. Our utterances though produce reactions from

others: our own unaware creation of imperial propositions with their cohorts of propositions

others can attribute to us bounces back on us.

Attribution of selfhood to myself, I think, is better placed finally in communication.

We learn to be a self, and at least part of learning depends on a mechanism of attributions of

selfhood to others, before than to ourselves. An occurrent self-synthesis is initially prompted by

our contemplation of the ways others react to our acts, linguistic or not, and by our capacity of

targeting the cohorts of imperial first person propositions created by others.

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It is this occurrent self-synthesis which I think is the real primitive of the theory. Not

because it is utterly clear intuitively nor because it is so obscure it defies any attempt of expla-

nation. It is primitive because it is a just a label for creative process we all perform, attributing

to others first-personhood, and then speaking in first person.

Perhaps, in the beginning was the word.

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NOTES\*/ “Consciousness, Philosophy, and Mathematics” (1948), now in L. E.J.Brouwer,Collected Works, vol.1, Amsterdam 1975, pp. 480-494.\1/ I have in mind in particular the thinking of music, perhaps of certain parts of mathematics.I am not assuming that music or mathematics have to be non representational systems. Theexplanations of this statement would take me too far away. It will have to wait for some otheroccasion.\2/ KAPLAN {2}\3/ A word of caution: each one of these expressions can (and does) have uses which are notpurely indexical. The trivial ones are exemplified by a sentence like “I is a letter in the Frenchalphabet”. The not so trivial are the ones in which they can be used demonstratively, e.g. in“Here you see Kaplan at his best” pointing to a passage of his “Demonstratives”, or in “NowWebern breaks away from seriality” pointing to a section of a score of his (notice the difficulty inaccepting this is the difficulty in having a perceptually clear way to pinpoint a moment in time,that is why I used a musical example in which the perception on the piece is so closely linked toour perception of time).\4/ On the ways in which unconscious mental processes to a large extent determine what ourfield of awareness looks like see JACKENDOFF {1} and {2}.\**/ Moritz Schlick, “Erleben, Erkennen, Metaphysik”, now in Philosophical Papers, Dordrecht,1979, vol. II, p. 100.A fascinating attempt to trace the consequences of a Leibnizian approach to thinking is “Monadol-ogy” by Montgomery Furth, Philosoph ical Review, Vol. LXXXVI, No.2, (1967), pp. 169-200.Furth notices that even aside from qualms about distinctions between indexical and non-indexicalreferences it is not easy even to distinguish between myself and my world, a tail to Lichtenberg’spoint that the only “logical” conclusion of Descartes’ First and Second Meditation is not so muchthat I am thinking, but rather that ‘Thinking is happening’.\5/ Speaking again of Doktor Lauben Frege writes: “when Dr. Lauben has the thought thathe was wounded, he will probably be basing it on this primitive way in which he is presentedto himself. And only Dr. Lauben himself can grasp thoughts specified in this way. But now hemay want to communicate with others. He cannot communicate a thought he alone can grasp.Therefore, if he now says ‘I was wounded’, he must use ‘I’ in a sense which can be grasped byothers, perhaps in the sense of ‘he who is speaking to you at this moment’; by doing this hemakes the conditions accompanying his utterance serve towards the expression of a thought” (inFREGE {1}: p. 359-360). Frege is way ahead of his time. His “secondary sense” of ‘I’ (the“public” sense) is basically the one encased in rules such as K-I (see Perry, in TOMBERLIN: p.18). What he did not develop is a correspondingly elaborated theory of thoughts: for him those

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remained paradigmatically entities very similar to classical propositions, hence tenselessly trueor false.\6/ “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwisesomething would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalentto saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me.”Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 108, B 131-132I am adopting the Kantian prefix with rather divergent aims from Castaneda. The prefix, intu-itively, is a marker of the agency which binds indexical sentences, giving them private senses.\7/ A very similar approach has been taken by Castaneda in his “The Self and its Guises”.\8/ The correct orientation of the audience’s directing intentions is in fact greatly facilitated bythe predicative content of a sentence like (L). The right neighborhood is delimited by the set ofobject in the audience’s field of awareness that conceivably can be a lime tree. And this oftenmakes it superfluous to pay attention to the physical motions, if any, accompanying the utteranceof (L). Together with the predicative content of the sentence in which an indexical token occurs,another help in semantics of understanding is provided to the audience by what Kent Bach called“referential constraint” for a pronoun. These kinds of constraints are relative to a language (inparticular where issues of grammatical gender and/or sex are involved). For a detailed treatmentof referential constraints, see BACH, in particular ch. 9 “Reference and Pronouns”. Before Bach,Castaneda pointed out the same phenomenon, without calling it a constraint: “Each indicatorhas a general sense, which may be construed as a range of possible denotations”, he also pointedout that the predicative part of a noun phrase containing and indexical might function as a guideto the establishment of a reference from the perspective of an audience, as in ‘this red chair’ –see in particular his “The Semiotic Profile of Indexical (Experiential) Reference” in SAARINEN,especially sections 8 and 9.Even though I have been insisting on an intentional component in reference which is more promi-nent in indexical cases than in non-indexical ones, I have found to my surprise that David Kaplannow takes directing intentions to be determinant of referents, while abandoning his prior notionof “demonstration”. I have indicated some of the problems with that notion in the fourth chaptermyself, for Kaplan’s own statement of his change of heart on the matter, see his “Afterthoughts”in Themes from Kaplan.\9/ See JACKENDOFF {2}.\10/ I owe the idea of communication of content-less structures to Moritz Schlick. See in partic-ular Ch. 17 of The Problems of Philosophy in their Interconnection.\11/ “When he grasps or think a thought he does not create it but only comes to stand in acertain relation to what already existed”, writes Frege (see FREGE {1}: p. 363, fn. 7). I believethat a distortion of the problem in part was brought about by an extreme concentration on the

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range of mathematical Gedanke Frege took as paradigmatically central. Mathematical thoughtsseem indeed to be the ones where the perspectival ingredient is minimal, if not non altogethernon existent.\12/ I am disregarding the peculiarity of English in which to indicate the beginning of an indirectdiscourse clause ‘that’ is used to conjoin the two clauses. It is the demonstrative use of ‘that’ Ihave in mind.\13/ See, in particular CASTANEDA {8}. But the connections between contemplative thoughtsand practical thinking are the centre of his whole work.The notion of PROPOSITION of CASTANEDA {15} is analogous to my notion of “imperial”proposition: the difference between our two approaches is slight enough to make them parallelin many respects, although I believe my proposal to be a possibly preferable, less ontologicallyburdened alternative .\14/ I have in mind Diotima in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. I take it as evident that Diotimain-Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften is not a fictional woman who is seductive, but a woman who isseductive .\15/ See CASTANEDA {2}.\16/ This can not be the first person indexical proposition Saint-Just had as his referent.

First person propositions are private, as much as indexical referents. For some of thereasons why there is no identity between indexical propositions and “matching” quasi-indexicalones, see the “Adams-Castaneda Correspondence” in TOMBERLIN: pp. 293-309.\17/ He introduces the term while explaining why in the non-veridical case of a demonstrativesentence such as (L), the lack of an external referent would make not true-and-not false. I haveindicated why I take that not to be correct.\18/ It might be the speaker in Castaneda’s examples such as ‘The Editor of Soul believes he isrich’.\19/ In margin to my approach, I should like to notice that one prediction follows from it. Sup-pose speaker 1 says: ‘I think that is a flower and now, from here it looks red’. If speaker 2 has toreport the utterance of 1, in a situation in which they have no common background, hence thedirecting intentions of 1 would not be much help, he should not be inclined to use a demonstra-tive to capture the token of ‘that’ in 1’s utterance, whereas he could capture all of the other 1’scontent by way of quasi-indicators. The reporting, I think, should be: ‘He said that he* thoughtwhat he saw was a flower and then from there it looked red’. ‘He*’ is the ‘he-himself as himself’quasi-indicator of Castaneda, and the tokens of ‘then’ and ‘there’ are quasi-indicators as well.My point is that speaker 2, say after a period of time, could not have access to the salient itemof 1’s field of awareness which, I surmise, was the reference of the demonstrative ‘that’ used by1. Quite visibly in 2’s utterance the first occurrence of ‘he’ is demonstrative.

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\***/ NOZICK: 71\20/ Were I to be picky on terminology, our familiar Kathleen ought to read #Kathleen# a la’Jackendoff. But I take it for evident that what we refer to by way of her name is the item in ourfield of awareness.Kathleen’s story is a somewhat re-elaborated story accounting of the empirical results (some ofthem of difficult interpretation, once one discounts a behavioristic model of stimulus-response)collected and examined in KAGAN. See, in particular ch.3: “Signs of self-awareness”.\21/ This is a case of what Castaneda calls a “Externus”- type of consciousness.See, in particular, CASTANEDA {12} and {13}.\22/ If we were equipped with telekinetic powers, this genetic account would look wildly implau-sible. I take it to be a fact that we have no ability to affect causally in direct fashion objectsother than our bodies.\23/ in Notebooks 1914-1916, notes of 7.8.1916 and 11.8.1 916\24/ K-I has been proposed by John Perry (and thus named after Kaplan ). The criticisms madehere is originally Castaneda’s. See PERRY {3} and Castaneda’s “Reply to Perry” in TOMBER-LIN.\25/ Castaneda (in “Metaphysical Internalism, Selves, and the Wholistic Indivisible Noumenon(A Frego-Kantian Reflection on Descartes’s Cogito)” (CASTANEDA {14}) writes in a similarvein: “In a sense, the true Thinking I is the unthought of I, that thinks (D), (D.I), (D.I’). . . “ –I have adapted the passage by changing the examples to my examples in the text.\26/ See Jerrold Katz, Cogitationes, Oxford 1986,and Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, Cambridge, Mass. 1986.Katz takes the line that the ‘I’ of the Cartesian Cogito is referring to an existing entity in virtueof analytical entailments built-in the conceptual structure of language. Tugendhat follows a moreKantian line of viewing ‘I’ (and ‘here’ and ‘now’) as conditions of any possible experience, andin this “external” sense not open to skeptical doubts, since the very doubting does in fact entailthat a) some one is doing the doubting, b) the doubting takes a certain interval of time, and c)the doubting takes place somewhere. Tugendhat in passing seems to be much closer than Katzto Castaneda’s extension of the ‘I think’ to ‘I think here now’. I try to pursue this issue a littlefurther in the main text.\27/ See his “Metaphysical Internalism, Selves, and the Wholistic Indivisible Noumenon (AFrego-Kantian Reflection on Descartes’ Cogito), (CASTANEDA {14}).\28/ See Tugendhat, op. cit., pp.62-66.\29/ From a different perspective John Perry approximates the view I am trying to spell out.In recent work he adds to his theory unarticulated constituents of propositions. What I amindicating is that, at least in the case of the utterer, the unarticulated constituent can be ar-

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ticulated, as my sequence of (D), (D.I). . . tries to show. What Perry denies is that one of theunarticulated constituent of proposition might have an irreducible perspectival aspect built intoit (the ‘I’ has such a character, I think). See Perry’s “Thought without Representation”, inProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, (1986), 60: 137-151; Mark Crimmins and John Perry,“The Prince and the Phone Booth”, Stanford, CSLI, 1988. For some critical responses see SimonBlackburn’s comments on the first paper in the same issue of the Proceedings and Jon Barwise’s“Situations, Facts, and True Propositions” in his The Situation in Logic, Stanford, CSLI 1989.\30/ NOZICK: 81\31/ ibidem, p. 89. A little taken aback by the very “idealistic” flavour of the idea, Nozicktries then to have only some acts of self-reference as creators ipso facto of a self. As I havestressed earlier, it is certainly true that not all consciousness is self-consciousness. The hierarchyof consciousness, in Castaneda’s terms, begins at the bottom with a perceptual consciousnesswhich, as in Kathleen’s case, does not need an ‘I’, much less a transcendental one. But I dobelieve that each act of self-reference creates a self: the one referred to by the covert indexicaloperator [I think here now] accompanying each one of our utterances. I’d like to stress that thisself-referentiality of some stratum of our consciousness might very well be causally dependent(though not identical with, if this argument is sound) on the matter and the structure of ournervous system. In that respect one of the key test to decide whether “machines can think” insome sense close to our sense of thinking, is to test their self-referential capacity.\32/ In “The reflexivity of Self-consciousness, Sameness/Identity, Data for artificial intelligence”,forthcoming. There he writes: “First-person reference is necessarily reflexive. This feature is sig-naled by our formula ‘ONE refers to ONEself as oneself’. The expression one in oneself doesco-refer with ’ONE’. This reflexivity forces first-person reference to harpoon an external reality”The externality of the reference is what gives the necessary existence of a target for each tokenof ‘I’. (Most of the citations in this section attributed to Castaneda are from this work.\33/ ibidem\34/ NOZICK: 114\35/ William M. Richards, “Self-Consciousness and Agency”, Synthese 61, (1984) 149-171.\36/ NOZICK: 665-666\37/ ibidem. The closest relation schema is Nozick’s preferred schema for an enduring identityacross times.\38/ William M. Richards, op. cit., pp. 157-158.

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Vita

Adriano Palma was born in 1956.

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