The essential indexical research program
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The essential indexical research program Daniel Morgan1 Received: 24 July 2019 / Accepted: 19 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The ways of thinking of things associated with a few indexical expressions—e.g. ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘that’—have a special role in the causation of action. They have a role not had by, for example, the guise associated with the ‘Superman’, or the guise associated with any other proper name. So, at least, an orthodox view about action—often associated with the phrase ‘essential indexical’—has it. Recently, this view has come under scrutiny. An increasing number of philosophers think it is a myth. In this paper, I do two things. First, I argue that the orthodox view really is an insight, not a myth. Second, I offer an explanation of why it is that the insight holds. Keywords Propositional attitude · De se · Intentional action · Agency · Indexicality · Self-consciousness · Intention
1 Introduction An orthodoxy about intentional action (hereafter, action) holds that there is a special connection between intentional action on the one hand, and, on the other, a small subset of attitudes—the attitudes that involve guises from a fairly short list.1 A guise associated with the first-person pronoun, the guise one deploys when one thinks ‘I am being pursued by bear’ is a strong candidate for being on the list. So too is a guise associated with ‘now’, the guise one deploys when one thinks ‘The meeting starts now’. So too is a guise associated with ‘that’, the guise one deploys when one thinks ‘That is the sweater for me’. There are other strong candidates besides (e.g. a guise associated with ‘here’). But clearly not every guise can be on the list. If that were so, there wouldn’t a special connection between action and attitudes involving just the guises on the list. 1 Particularly influential statements include: Castaneda (1968), Perry (1977), Perry (1979), Lewis (1979), Evans (1982), Peacocke (2008), Kaplan (1989) and Perry (1979).
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Daniel Morgan [email protected] University of York, Sally Baldwin Buildings Block A, Wentworth Way, Heslington, York YO10 5DB, UK
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Synthese
Ultimately, a defender of this orthodoxy will want to do several different things. They will want to give a full account of what relation to action distinguishes listmembers from non-list-members (and whether there are important distinctions to be drawn among list-members2 ). They will want to say which guises belong on the list and whether all the guises on the list have something interesting in common beyond being on the list—e.g. is there any sense of the word ‘indexical’ on which all and only indexical guises are on the list? Finally, they will want to say, of each list member, what explains the fact that it is on the list. These questions arise because of the form of the claim that orthodoxy is. For any claim of the form ‘A few X’s stand in a special relation to A’, there are analogous questions: what is the special relation; which few X’s; do those few X’s have anything else in common; and why do these gu
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