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1383The 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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29Return of the zombies?In Hill Christopher & Gozzano Simone (eds.), New Perspectives on Type Identity: The Mental and the Physical, Cambridge University Press. pp. 251. 2012.
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213Indexicals, Contexts and Unarticulated ConstituentsIn Atocha Aliseda-Llera, Rob J. Van Glabbeek & Dag Westerståhl (eds.), Proceedings of the 1995 CSLI-Armsterdam Logic, Language and Computation Conference, Csli Publications. 1998.Philosophers and logicians use the term “indexical” for words such as “I”, “you” and “tomorrow”. Demonstratives such as “this” and “that” and demonstratives phrases such as “this man” and “that computer” are usually reckoned as a subcategory of indexicals. (Following [Kaplan, 1989a].) The “context-dependence” of indexicals is often taken as a defining feature: what an indexical designates shifts from context to context. But there are many kinds of shiftiness, with corresponding conceptions of co…Read more
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72Fodor and psychological explanationIn Barry M. Loewer (ed.), Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell. 1991.[In Meaning in Mind, edited by Barry Loewer and Georges Rey. Oxford: Basil Black- well, 1991, 165.
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203Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising SituationsMidwest Studies in Philosophy 6 (1): 387-404. 1981.
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1318The 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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411Situations and AttitudesMIT Press. 1983.This volume tackles the slippery subject of 'meaning'.
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119Myself and "I"In Marcelo Stamm (ed.), Philosophie in Synthetischer Absicht, . pp. 83--103. 1998.In this essay I distinguish three kinds of self-knowledge. I call these three kinds agent-relative knowledge, self-attached knowledge and knowledge of the person one happens to be. These aspects of self-knowledge dier in how the knower or agent is represented. Most of what I say will be applicable to beliefs as well as knowledge, and to other kinds of attitudes and thoughts, such as desire, as well.1 Agent-relative knowledge is knowledge from the perspective of a particular agent. To have this s…Read more
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113Executions, Motivations, and AccomplishmentsPhilosophical Review 102 (4). 1993.Brutus wanted to kill Caesar. He believed that Caesar was an ordinary mortal, and that, given this, stabbing him (by which we mean plunging a knife into his heart) was a way of killing him. He thought that he could stab Caesar, for he remembered that he had a knife and saw that Caesar was standing next to him on his left, in the Forum. So Brutus was motivated to stab the man to his left. He did so, thereby killing Caesar.
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8Circumstantial attitudes and benevolent cognitionIn Jeremy Butterfield (ed.), Language, mind and logic, Cambridge University Press. 1986.From: _Language, Mind and Logic_, edited by Jeremy Butter?eld. 123.
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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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152Where monsters dwellIn Jerry Seligman & Dag Westerståhl (eds.), Logic, Language and Computation, Csli Publications, Stanford. pp. 1--303. 1996.Kaplan says that monsters violate Principle 2 of his theory. Principle 2 is that indexicals, pure and demonstrative alike, are directly referential. In providing this explanation of there being no monsters, Kaplan feels his theory has an advantage over double-indexing theories like Kamp’s or Segerberg’s (or Stalnaker’s), which either embrace monsters or avoid them only by ad hoc stipulation, in the sharp conceptual distinction it draws between circumstances of evaluation and contexts of utteranc…Read more
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89Rip Van winkle and other charactersEuropean Review of Philosophy 2 13-39. 1996.In this essay I first review Kaplan’s theory of linguistic character, and then explain and motivate a concept of doxastic character. I then develop some concepts for dealing with the topic of belief retention and then, finally, discuss Rip Van Winkle. I come down on Kaplan’s side with respect to the Frege-inspired strategy, narrowly construed. But I advocate something like the Frege-inspired strategy, if it is construed more broadly. On my view it is remarkably easy to retain a belief, and I thi…Read more
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16In this paper, I shall defend Russell's view that Mont Blanc, with all of its snow elds, is a component part" or constituent of what is actually asserted when one utters Mont Blanc is more than 4000 meters high," and of what one believes, when one believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 meters high. I also claim, however, that a proposition that does not have Mont Blanc as a constituent plays an important role in the assertion and the belief that Mont Blanc is more than 4000 meters high. Taken somewhat…Read more
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942Frege 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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92Can’t We All Just be Compatibilists?: A Critical Study of John Martin Fischer’s My WayThe Journal of Ethics 12 (2): 157-166. 2008.My aim in this study is not to praise Fischer's fine theory of moral responsibility, but to (try to) bury the “semi” in “semicompatibilism”. I think Fischer gives the Consequence Argument (CA) too much credit, and gives himself too little credit. In his book, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer gave the CA as good a statement as it will ever get, and put his finger on what is wrong with it. Then he declared stalemate rather than victory. In my view, Fischer’s view amounts to sophisticated comp…Read more
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143Moore'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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211The 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
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933Personal Identity (edited book)University of California Press. 1975.Contents PART I: INTRODUCTION 1 John Perry: The Problem of Personal Identity, 3 PART II: VERSIONS OF THE MEMORY THEORY 2 John Locke: Of Identity and ...
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91Indexicals and DemonstrativesIn Bob Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, 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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575Evading the SlingshotIn and J. Larrazabal J. Ezquerro A. Clark (ed.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Categories, Consciousness, and Reasoning, Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1996.The topic of this essay is “the slingshot,” a short argument that purports to show that sentences1 designate (stand for, refer to) truth values. Versions of this argument have been used by Frege 2, Church 3, Quine4 and Davidson5; thus it is historically important, even if it immediately strikes one as fishy. The argument turns on two principles, which I call substitution and redistribution. In “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations,”6 Jon Barwise and I rejected both principles, as part…Read more
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53”Self-beliefs” are beliefs of the sort one ordinarily has about oneself, and expresses with the first person. These contrast with the beliefs one has in ”Casta˜neda cases,” in which one has a belief about oneself without knowing it. This paper advances an account of the nature of self-belief. According to this account, self-belief is a special case of interacting with things via notions that serve as repositories for information about objects with certain important relations to the knower, and a…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Mind |