Essential Indexicals and Quasi‐Indicators

In this paper I shall focus on Castañeda’s notion of quasi-indicators and I shall defend the following theses: • Essential indexicals (‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’) are intrinsically perspectival mechanisms of reference and, as such, they are not reducible to any other mechanism of reference. • Quasi-indicators (e.g. expressions like ‘she (herself )’ exist in natural language and cannot be explained away as merely reflexive pronouns. • Quasi-indicators are the only mechanism that allows the attribution of an indexical reference. As such they must appear in oratio obliqua constructions. • When linked to a referring NP, quasi-indicators, like anaphors, inherit their reference from the antecedent to which they are linked (and thus coindexed with). When linked to a quantified expression, quasi-indicators work like (quasiindexical) bound variables. • Quasi-indicators must be understood along the lines of logophoric pronouns (from ‘logos’ meaning discourse and ‘phoros’ meaning bearing or transporting). As such, they are best explained using such notions as perspective and point of view. 1 THE IRREDUCIBILITY THESIS Uses of the first-person pronoun seem to have a special, privileged and primitive function. When you use it you refer to yourself while when I use it I refer to myself. The same story can be told about (paradigmatic) uses of ‘now’ and ‘here’. Their use is intrinsically tied to the time/location the agent uses them. They are tied, one could say, to the agent of the utterance’s egocentric setting or coordinates. In what follows I shall concentrate on the first-person pronoun. What I shall say about ‘I’, though, can easily be generalized to the paradigmatic uses of ‘now’ and ‘here’. 1 I said paradigmatic uses insofar as, to adopt Kaplan’s (1977, 1989) pure indexical vs. demonstrative distinction, ‘here’ and ‘now’ can also be used as demonstratives. If, when pointing to a map, one says: ‘I’ll go on vacation here’, ‘here’ does not pick out the place of the utterance but the place pointed to. The same applies to ‘now’. When watching a video, if one says, ‘Now we visit the Mausoleum’ ‘now’ is used to pick out the time when the video was recorded and not the time of the utterance. I discussed these ‘deviant’ uses in Corazza (2004a). Journal of Semantics, Vol. 21, No. 4, c © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved 342 Essential Indexicals and Quasi-Indicators An individual, Jane, may believe that someone is making a mess without realizing that she herself is making a mess and thus without adjusting her behaviour and acting accordingly. One can look into a mirror and say ‘His zip is open’ without realizing that his own zip is open and thus without bothering to close it. Only when one comes to entertain the thought expressed by ‘My zip is open’ one is likely to feel embarrassed and close it. Examples such as these lead people (Castañeda, Chisholm, Lewis, Perry, to name only few) to claim that the firstperson pronoun is irreducible to other mechanisms of reference. It is, to adopt Perry’s happy expression, an essential indexical (see Perry 1979). The way I understand Castañeda’s and Perry’s central thesis is as follows: the first-person pronoun has a cognitive impact, for it triggers self-centred behaviour. A similar story can be told about the indexicals ‘now’ and ‘here’; they trigger self-centred behaviours as well. This phenomenon has been popularized under the label the Irreducibility Thesis and can be summarized as follows: IT(oratio recta) The first-person pronoun cannot be explained away or replaced by a co-referring term without destroying the cognitive impact its use conveys. The question that springs to mind is: How do we attribute, from a third-person perspective, a use of the first-person pronoun? (Castañeda 1966, 1967, 1968) created an artificial pronoun, ‘she*/he*/it*’, to represent in an attitude ascription the use (maybe only implicitly) of the first-person pronoun. ‘Sue says that she* is rich’ represents Sue as saying ‘I am rich’. These artificial pronouns are called ‘quasi-indicators’ and, Castañeda claims, are the only mechanism enabling the attribution of indexical reference from the third-person perspective. They are, therefore, the only tools which allow us to capture the cognitive impact conveyed by the essential indexicals—‘she*’ captures the cognitive impact conveyed by ‘I’, ‘then*’ the cognitive impact conveyed by ‘now’ and ‘there*’ the one conveyed by ‘here’. It is an accident of English that a single pronoun ‘she/he/it’ can be used to perform very different speech acts. Following this suggestion we can say that the 2 ‘So replacing the indexical “I” with another term designating the same person really does, as claimed, destroy the force of explanation’ (Perry 1979: 29). 3 ‘It is a mere accident of grammar that the same physical objects are used in different logical roles. The underlying rationale is this: Indicators are a primary means of referring to particulars, but the references made with them are personal and ephemeral; quasi-indicators are the derivative means of making an indexical reference both interpersonal and enduring, yet preserving it intact’ (Castañeda 1967: 207).