Overview

When we represent the world in language, in thought, or in perception, we often represent it from a perspective. We say and think that the meeting is happening now, that it is hot here, that I am in danger and not you; that the tree looks larger from my perspective than from yours. The Inessential Indexical is an exploration and defense of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. Cappelen and Dever oppose one of the most entrenched and dominant trends in contemporary philosophy: that perspective (and the perspective of the first person in particular) is philosophically deep and that a proper understanding of it is important not just in the philosophies of language and mind, but throughout philosophy. They argue that there are no such things as essential indexicality, irreducibly de se attitudes, or self-locating attitudes. Their goal is not to show that we need to rethink these phenomena, to explain them in different ways. Their goal is to show that the entire topic is an illusion--there's nothing there. The Context and Content series is a forum for outstanding original research at the intersection of philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The general editor is François Recanati (Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris).

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9780198748168

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Reviews

`This crisp, lean, and tightly argued study deserves the attention of anyone interested in the topics of indexicality, perspective, and the first person . . . My prediction is that this fine book will significantly advance the debate about the place of perspective and indexicality in human thought and action.' Tomis Kapitan, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews `This is a brave and fascinating book in terms of how it takes on a longstanding and largely unchallenged tradition. The book succeeds in its stated aim to show that arguments put forward in favour of essential indexicality are often shallow and border on the rhetorical, and that the notion of perspectiveprobably has little philosophical mileage.' Wolfram Hinzen, Mind

This crisp, lean, and tightly argued study deserves the attention of anyone interested in the topics of indexicality, perspective, and the first person ... My prediction is that this fine book will significantly advance the debate about the place of perspective and indexicality in human thought and action. Tomis Kapitan, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Author Information

Herman Cappelen is a professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews, where he works at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre. He works in philosophy of language, philosophical methodology and related areas of epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of many papers and four books: Insensitive Semantics (with Ernest Lepore; Blackwell, 2004), Language Turned on Itself (with Ernest Lepore; OUP, 2007), Relativism and Monadic Truth (with John Hawthorne; OUP, 2009), and Philosophy without Intuitions (OUP, 2012). ; Joshua Dever is Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He completed his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, and his primary research interests include philosophy of language and philosophical logic.

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