There is a traditional picture of belief, according to which someone's having a belief is that person's standing in a certain relation to an abstract object, a proposition. My dissertation examines the metaphysical demands that two problems for this picture of belief make on these abstract objects. The first problem comes to us from Frege's "On Sense and Reference," and the second concerns a ce...

We show that a very general form of Lucid (and RLucid) tail-recursive function can be transformed into an indexical equivalent. We show also that the standard indexical translations of the wvr and upon functions can be considered to be particular cases of the general situation. We give full proofs of the results, taking advantage of the clean semantics of Lucid.

There is a longstanding tradition in phonetics to conceive of speech as containing both “indexical” and “linguistic” components (Abercrombie, 1967). The linguistic properties of speech support the identification of linguistic (phonemic, lexical, etc.) contrasts, while the indexical properties of speech “reveal personal characteristics of the speaker”, such as their dialect or group membership, ...

Within the wider framework of investigating deixis in Hong Kong English, this paper considers the way that speakers handle deictic reference and indexical ground in general description and particular practice talk. The analysis takes as a starting point Hanks’s formulation that “a single deictic word stands for minimally two objects: the referent is the thing, individual event, spatial or tempo...

Indexical beliefs pose a special problem for standard theories of bayesian updating. Sometimes we are uncertain about our location in time and space. How are we to update our beliefs in situations like these? In a stepwise fashion, I develop a constraint on the dynamics of indexical belief. As an application, the suggested constraint is brought to bear on the Sleeping Beauty problem.