Failing to Make It Explicit: Superficial and Irreducible Perspectivality
Failing to Make It Explicit: Superficial and Irreducible Perspectivality

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore what the different answers that might be given to the question about the role of perspective in language – indexical contextualism, nonindexical contextualism, and assessor relativism – amount to, using Perry’s work about thought without designation and thought without representation as our point of departure. In particular, I argue that Perry’s discussion of the possibility of making explicit the parameter on which the truth value of a certain sentence depends provides us with a useful criterion to distinguish between indexical and nonindexical contextualism. Then, I show that some of MacFarlane’s insights can be seen as a continuation of Perry’s discussion. The most salient outcome of the comparison between Perry’s and MacFarlane’s frameworks will be the distinction between the superficial perspectivality that can be found in sentences like “It is raining” and the irreducible perspectivality that we find in sentences like “Licorice is tasty.” The apparently paradoxical conclusion will be that language is truly perspectival precisely when it does not encode a perspective.

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