Lian Zhou

Clapp (2023) develops an account for explaining the meaning of later utterances of mythical names called the Conversely Conditional Co-reference proposal (hereinafter cococo-reference proposal for short). According to Clapp, this proposal consists of three components: a complex intention, an intermediary disjunctive content, and a final content. In this essay, I examine the cococo-reference proposal to reveal a flaw in it. I argue that the cococo-reference proposal actually has a fourth component, namely a principle called “the consistency between intention and belief”. This principle is embedded implicitly in Clapp’s argument. Once the consistency principle is uncovered, I combine it with the complex intention and also the intermediary disjunctive content, to reveal that the cococo-reference proposal cannot coherently explain the meaning of a later utterance of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist”. This is because the explanation offered by this proposal results in a conflict between belief and intention: we will be required to hold intentions that our beliefs prevent us from holdings, and we will be ascribed beliefs that are in conflict with our intentions. Therefore, the explanation of later utterances of sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist” is the Achilles’ heel of Clapp’s cococo-reference proposal.

This paper proposes a new condition for the correct use of the second-person singular pronoun “you.” The current consensus among philosophers is that a mutual awareness between a speaker and her audience is the condition for the felicitous use of “you.” However, existing proposals based on this consensus are unsatisfactory. They either confuse a condition for the correct use of “you” with a condition for a successful conversation, or are not well defended. The proposal presented by this paper is called the unification condition, which brings together two constituents: what a speaker intends to talk about and whom a speaker talks to. This condition is more accurate compared with other proposals, and it can respond to challenges to which other proposals fail to respond.

“Essential Indexical Thesis” is a label for a collection of theses claiming there are essential connections between explanations of actions and the first-person perspective (or de se mental state). Recently there are two notable defences for essential indexical theses: Babb’s defence of the thesis that all intentional actions are essentially indexical, and Francescotti’s defence of the thesis that necessarily all intention-to actions have de se origin. Through a critical examination of these defences, I discover that although Francescotti has defended a de dicto claim that “necessarily, an intention-to action results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, his defence remains compatible with the de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, because his defence fails to eliminate another de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily is an intention-to action.” Since Francescotti’s defence is compatible with the first de re claim, the essential indexical thesis he defends is vulnerable to the risk brought up by this de re claim: if the first de re claim is true, then no (first-order) action is necessarily/essentially indexical in Francescotti's sense. To fix this problem, I demonstrate that some (first-order) actions, for example, looking-for and pursuit, necessarily are intention-to actions. Then I propose my defence for a new essential indexical thesis called the further restricted essential indexical thesis.