Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Knowing How to Keep Track of Particulars

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2023-2024

Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Knowing How to Keep Track of Particulars

Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Intervenant(s)

Taku Uchiyama, Georg-August-University, Göttingen

We often do the same thing by doing different things, while we also do different things by doing the same thing. The former is the case when we think of a particular object (place, time, people, etc.) while we move on from one context to another. For example, to think of a particular day d as time passes, we need to think of d differently, i.e., as tomorrow, today, and yesterday. Despite those differences at a local level, the thought remains the same because it depends on the same ability to keep track of d over time (Evans 1981). How can such a cognitive capacity be best understood? On the functionalist's view, it can be understood as a disposition to interact with things in ways appropriate for changing contexts. However, such an externalist's approach fails to capture the content of thoughts at issue, which is supposed to be essentially indexical. In contrast, the internalist's view does respect the content. Still, it fails to account for its indexical nature because such an account either leads to an infinite regress or amounts to be circular. This paper aims to provide a hybrid view. The view is basically internalistic because it reflects the content of indexical thoughts. At the same time, it appeals to the functional and dispositional notion of ability. The resulting view adequately characterizes the ability that underlies the indexical content of thoughts.

For that aim, I first examine the externalist's approach to the ability and determine its limitations. Drawing on Perry (1986), I argue that the approach can only justify ascribing perspectival contents to the subject, not indexical ones. Second, I turn to the internalist's approach and illustrate its problem as a dilemma that intellectualists also face when they specify knowledge-how as propositional knowledge. The dilemma has the same source: the paradox of self-reference: the problem of accommodating a viewpoint into the picture observed from the very viewpoint. To overcome this problem, one needs some special representational means that represents itself without objectifying itself. So, I finally appeal to the notion of a hybrid proper name developed by Künne (1992) and Kripke (2008). According to them, indexicals constitute proper names together with contextual constituents that serve as self- referring designations. Given this idea, the ability to keep track of things amounts to the ability to apply them as a (part of) hybrid proper name. As such, it provides perspectival thoughts with indexical contents without causing the dilemma, hence the ability that can account for the indexical content of thoughts.