Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk I want to talk about what - if anything - makes indexical attitudes special. Indexical attitudes are those we paradigmatically express by means of context-sensitive expressions such as 'I', 'you', 'today', 'now', 'here' etc. Unlike most of the recent literature on this topic, I will shift the focus away from discussions pertaining to indexical attitudes and action. Even though I'm sympathetic to the argument that one of the things that make indexical attitudes special is their special connection to action, I think they're also special in a possibly independent way. My main claim is that indexical attitudes are such that retaining or retrieving them requires the exercise of cognitive capacities that are not needed in order to retrieve/retain other standard attitudes. This means one can be downgraded from indexical omniscience to indexical ignorance even if one has not changed one's mind nor forgotten anything (e.g. Rip van Winkle). I intend to defend this broadly Evans-inspired view in relation to recent papers by James Shaw, Víctor Verdejo, and the infamous imbroglio of essential indexicality.