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996Frege on demonstrativesPhilosophical Review 86 (4): 474-497. 1977.Demonstratives seem to have posed a severe difficulty for Frege’s philosophy of language, to which his doctrine of incommunicable senses was a reaction. In “The Thought,” Frege briefly discusses sentences containing such demonstratives as “today,” “here,” and “yesterday,” and then turns to certain questions that he says are raised by the occurrence of “I” in sentences (T, 24-26). He is led to say that, when one thinks about oneself, one grasps thoughts that others cannot grasp, that cannot be co…Read more
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14The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays, Expanded EditionCenter for the Study of Language and Inf. 2000.No word in English is shorter than the word I.' And yet no word is more important in philosophy. When Descartes said I think therefore I am' he produced something that was both about himself and a universal formula. The word I' is called an indexical' because its meaning always depends on who says it. Other examples of indexicals are you,' here,' this' and now.' John Perry discusses how these kinds of words work, and why they express important philosophical thoughts. He shows that indexicals pos…Read more
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37The Pretenses of Loyalty: Locke, Liberal Theory, and American Political TheologyOxford University Press. 2011.John Perry connects the 'Johannine liberalism' of Locke and Rawls to contemporary debates about the place of religion in public life, arguing that disputes such as the culture wars must be understood theologically as fundamental conflicts of loyalty.
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48Critical Pragmatics: An Inquiry Into Reference and CommunicationCambridge University Press. 2011.Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular…Read more
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47Reference and ReflexivityCenter for the Study of Language and Inf. 2001.Following his recently expanded _The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays,_ John Perry develops a reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Oddly, the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-re…Read more
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9Studies in language and informationCenter for the Study of Language and Information. 2019.A new collection of John Perry's work celebrating his contributions to the philosophy of language.
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60Situation Theory and its Applications Vol. (edited book)CSLI Publications. 1990.Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, ...
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91Indexicals and DemonstrativesIn Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 486--612. 1997.When you use the word “I” it designates you; when I use the same word, it designates me. If you use “you” talking to me, it designates me; when I use it talking to you, it designates you. “I” and “you” are indexicals. The designation of an indexical shifts from speaker to speaker, time to time, place to place. Different utterances of the same indexical designate different things, because what is designated depends not only on the meaning associated with the expression, but also on facts about th…Read more
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205Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising SituationsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1): 387-404. 1981.
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88Using IndexicalsIn Michael Devitt & Richard Hanley (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 314--334. 2006.In this essay I examine how we use indexicals. The key function of indexicals, I claim, is to help the audience --- that is the hearers or readers of the utterance with whom the speaker intends to be communicating---to find supplementary channels of information about the object to which the indexical refers. To keep the discussion manageable, I will oversimplify the epistemology of conversation. I ignore the fact that people sometimes lie and sometimes make mistakes. I talk freely about what one…Read more
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79PragmaticsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — although perhaps politically incorrect, are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, …Read more
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72Varieties of minimalist semantics (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2). 2006.Cappelen and Lepore view themselves as embattled defenders of the Free Republic of Semantics from the attacks of its enemies, mostly in the form of pragmatic incursions. They withdraw to a limited territory, and defend it with reason, humor, and other less noble weapons. The enemies are everywhere. This way of posing the debates is often humorous and helps make the book easy to read. It also often leads the authors to caricaturize and to trivialize many of the problems, arguments and positions h…Read more
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142Three demonstrations and a funeralMind and Language 21 (2). 2006.Gricean pragmatics seems to pose a dilemma. If semantics is limited to the conventional meanings of types of expressions, then the semantics of an utterance does not determine what is said. If all that figures in the determination of what is said counts as semantics, then pragmatic reasoning about the specific intentions of a speaker intrudes on semantics. The dilemma is false. Key points: Semantics need not determine what is said, and the description, with which the hearer begins, need not prov…Read more
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150Moore's paradoxAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (3). 2008.G. E. Moore famously noted that saying 'I went to the movies, but I don't believe it' is absurd, while saying 'I went to the movies, but he doesn't believe it' is not in the least absurd. The problem is to explain this fact without supposing that the semantic contribution of 'believes' changes across first-person and third-person uses, and without making the absurdity out to be merely pragmatic. We offer a new solution to the paradox. Our solution is that the truth conditions of any moorean utte…Read more
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226The pragmatic circleSynthese 165 (3). 2008.Classical Gricean pragmatics is usually conceived as dealing with far-side pragmatics, aimed at computing implicatures. It involves reasoning about why what was said, was said. Near-side pragmatics, on the other hand, is pragmatics in the service of determining, together with the semantical properties of the words used, what was said. But this raises the specter of ‘the pragmatic circle.’ If Gricean pragmatics seeks explanations for why someone said what they did, how can there be Gricean pragma…Read more
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154Truth Without Reference: The Use of Fictional NamesTopoi 39 (2): 389-399. 2020.Singular terms without referents are called empty or vacuous terms. But not all of them are equally empty. In particular, not all proper names that fail to name an existing object fail in the same way: although they are all empty, they are not all equally vacuous. “Vulcan,” “Jacob Horn,” “Odysseus,” and “Sherlock Holmes,” for instance, are all empty. They have no referents. But they are not entirely vacuous or useless. Sometimes they are used in statements that are true or false. We are basicall…Read more
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876The Prince and the Phone Booth: Reporting Puzzling BeliefsJournal of Philosophy 86 (12): 685. 1989.Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The belief puzzles (He…Read more
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419Situations and AttitudesMIT Press. 1983.This volume tackles the slippery subject of 'meaning'.
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1334The problem of the essential indexicalNoûs 13 (1): 3-21. 1979.Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.
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503Themes From Kaplan (edited book)Oxford University Press. 1989.This anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, "Themes from Kaplan," organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University.
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215The problem of the essential indexical: and other essaysOxford University Press. 1993.A collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored, this book deals with various problems related to "self-locating beliefs": the sorts of beliefs one expresses with indexicals and demonstratives, like "I" and "this." Postscripts have been added to a number of the essays discussing criticisms by authors such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included with such well-known essays as "Frege on Demonstratives," "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," "From Worlds to Situ…Read more