The Inessential Indexical: On the Philosophical Insignificance of Perspective and the First Person

Abstract

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. This book is an exploration and defence of the view that perspectivality is a philosophically shallow aspect of the world. This book opposes 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. It argues that there are no such things as essential indexicality, irreducibly de se attitudes, or self-locating attitudes. The goal is not to show that we need to rethink these phenomena, to explain them in different ways. The goal is to show that the entire topic is an illusion — there’s nothing there.