L’agence d’expertise indépendante INDEX, constituée d’architectes, d’artistes et de chercheurs, enquête sur les violences d’État en France et depuis la France. Dans cet entretien, iels expliquent comment iels réinvestissent politiquement la notion d’expertise dans les enquêtes policières, racontent leurs liens avec le collectif Forensic Architecture, explicitent ce qu’iels entendent par « vérité » dans les enquêtes en sources ouvertes et ce qu’iels mettent en place pour permettre une plus grande dissémination des outils de l’OSINT.

I set out and defend a view on indicative conditionals that I call “indexical relativism ”. The core of the view is that which proposition is expressed by an utterance of a conditional is a function of the speaker’s context and the assessor’s context. This implies a kind of relativism, namely that a single utterance may be correctly assessed as true by one assessor and false by another.

This book investigates the subjective and objective representations of the world, developing analogies between secondary qualities and indexical thoughts and arguing that subjective representations are ineliminable. Throughout, McGinn brings together historical and contemporary discussions to illuminate old problems in a novel way.

Indexical beliefs pose a special problem for standard theories of Bayesian updating. Sometimes we are uncertain about our location in time and space. How are we to update our beliefs in situations like these? In a stepwise fashion, I develop a constraint on the dynamics of indexical belief. As an application, the suggested constraint is brought to bear on the Sleeping Beauty problem.

Truth conditional semantics is the project of ‘determining a way of assigning truth conditions to sentences based on A) the extension of their constituents and B) their syntactic mode of combination’. This research program has been subject to objections that take the form of underdetermination arguments, an influential instance of which is presented by Travis: … consider the words ‘The leaf is green,’ speaking of a given leaf, and its condition at a given time, used so as to mean what (...) they do mean in English. How many distinct things might be said in words with all that true of them? Many.… Suppose a Japanese maple leaf, turned brown, was painted green for a decoration. In sorting leaves by colour, one might truly call this one green. In describing leaves to help identify their species, it might, for all the paint, be false to call it that. (shrink)

One can have no prior credence whatsoever (not even zero) in a temporally indexical claim. This fact saves the principle of conditionalization from potential counterexample and undermines the Elga and Arntzenius/Dorr arguments for the thirder position and Lewis' argument for the halfer position on the Sleeping Beauty Problem, thereby supporting the double-halfer position. -/- .

David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose have proposed that sentences of the form S knows P are indexical, and therefore differ in truth value from one context to another.1 On their indexical contextualism, the truth value of S knows P is determined by whether S meets the epistemic standards of the speakers context. I will not be concerned with relational forms of contextualism, according to which the truth value of S knows P is determined by the standards (...) of the subject Ss context, regardless of the standards applying to the speaker making the knowledge claim. Relational contextualism is a form of normative relativism. Indexical contextualism is a semantic theory. When the subject is the speaker, as when S is the first person pronoun I, the two forms of contextualism coincide. But otherwise, they diverge. I critically examine the principal arguments for indexicalism, detail linguistic evidence against it, and suggest a pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

This paper argues for a moderate form of essentialism about indexical thought. According to this moderate essentialism, there is a significant category of intentional action that necessarily involves indexical thought. This category of action is navigation, that is, intentionally moving from one location to another by using public information about the world such as a map or a set of directions. It is shown that anti-essentialists face a challenge in accounting for this kind of action without accepting the (...) involvement of indexical thought or something equivalent. The conclusion that navigation necessarily requires indexical thought is neutral on the strong essentialist claim that there is a special class of indexical propositional attitudes that mandate rejecting standard theories of propositional attitudes. The conclusion is also neutral on the strong essentialist claim that any kind of intentional action necessarily requires indexical thought. (shrink)

The ways of thinking of things associated with a few indexical expressions—e.g. ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘that’—have a special role in the causation of action. They have a role not had by, for example, the guise associated with the ‘Superman’, or the guise associated with any other proper name. So, at least, an orthodox view about action—often associated with the phrase ‘essential indexical’—has it. Recently, this view has come under scrutiny. An increasing number of philosophers think it is a myth. (...) In this paper, I do two things. First, I argue that the orthodox view really is an insight, not a myth. Second, I offer an explanation of why it is that the insight holds. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe sets out in a recent paper1 to refute McTaggart's proof of the unreality of time, by exposing an ‘indexical fallacy’ in his disproof of the existence of tensed (i. e., A-series) facts.2 Lowe then develops an original account of what makes time the dimension of change, based on his own account of tensed facts. But in our opinion he fails on both counts: (1) he fails to refute McTaggart's perfectly sound disproof of tensed facts, which shows (...) that time can be real only if (Lowe and McTaggart not withstanding) it needs no tensed facts, and (2) he fails to explain the temporal character of change, since his account of it has an exact spatial analogue. In what follows we argue these two points in turn. (shrink)

In a famous paper in Noûs in 1979, John Perry points out that action depends on indexical beliefs. In addition to “third-person” information about her environment, an agent need “first-person” information about where, when and who she is. This conclusion is widely interpreted as a reason for thinking that tensed claims cannot be translated without loss into untensed language; but not as a reason for realism about tensed facts. In another famous paper in the same volume of Noûs, Nancy (...) Cartwright argues that action requires that agents represent their world in causal terms, rather than merely probabilistic terms: for, Cartwright argues, there’s a distinction between effective and ineffective strategies, that otherwise goes missing. This is widely taken as a reason for thinking that causal claims cannot be translated without loss into merely probabilistic claims; and also – in contrast to Perry’s case – widely regarded as a reason for realism about causation. In this paper I ask whether the latter conclusion is compulsory, or whether, as in Perry’s case, the need for causal beliefs might merely reflect some “situated” aspect of a decision-maker’s perspective. (shrink)

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.

Contextualism concerning vagueness (hereafter ‘CV’) is a popular response to the puzzle of vagueness.[1] The goal in this paper is to uncover in what ways vagueness may be a particular species of context-sensitivity. The most promising form of CV turns out to be a version of socalled ‘Non-Indexical Contextualism’.[2] In §2, we sketch a generic form of CV (hereafter ‘GCV’). In §3, we distinguish between Truth CV and Content CV. A non-indexical form of CV is a form of (...) Truth CV, while an indexical form of CV is a form of Content CV. In §4, we argue that the theory of vagueness given in Fara (2000) is crucially incomplete but is best seen as a non-indexical form of CV. In §5, we set forth four kinds of error-theory to which CV might be committed. It turns out that Non-Indexical CV is committed to a weaker, and more plausible, error-theory than Indexical CV. In §6, we address a challenge posed by Keefe (2007) to the effect that CV entails that any speech report of what has been said by a particular vague utterance, where the context of utterance and the reporting context are relevantly different, will almost always be inaccurate. While this challenge is prima facie effective against Indexical CV it proves to be less effective against Non-Indexical CV. In §7, we look at two tests for context-sensitivity and assess whether they can be employed against CV. These tests, if cogent, reveal that the only workable form of CV is Non-Indexical CV. (shrink)

According to Hector-Neri Castañeda, indexical reference is our most basic means of identifying the objects and events we experience and think about. Its tokens reveal our own part in the process by denoting what are "referred to as items present in experience" (Castañeda 1981, 285-6). If you hear me say, "Take that box over there and set it next to this box here," you learn something about my orientation towards the referents in a way that is not conveyed by, (...) "Take the red box and set it next to the blue box." My indexical tokens express what they do not only because they issue from a unique spatio-temporal perspective that I happen to occupy, but also because they reflect my encounter with referents that are differently situated in that perspective. From your perspective, my here might be your there, my you your she, and within my own, a this differs from a that and one this diverges from another. Encounter and orientation within a perspective are the essential ingredients in indexical identification without which particular 'this's, 'that's, 'then's, 'here's, and 'beyond's would be denuded of individuating powess.1 There are several consequences of this description. First, indexical reference is ephemeral because perspective is constantly changing, rendering the indexical status of an entity relative to a given perspective temporary: 1 A this quickly turns into a that, and soon enough it is lost to experience and is not even a remote that; a you goes away and is replaced by another . . . Nothing is really an enduring you -- except God perhaps for the abiding mystic. (Castañeda 1989a, 69) Second, indexical reference is irreducible since non-indexical mechanisms of reference fail to express the subject's involvement or encounter with the referents that indexicals convey. Nor can the various indexicals be reduced to each other.2 Third, because each perspective is unique, indexical reference is essentially subjective.. (shrink)

An approach to indexical beliefs is presented and defended in the paper. The account is inspired by David Kaplan’s representationalist analysis of de re belief reports. I argue that imposing additional constraints on the Kaplanian notion of representation results in an elegant theory of indexical beliefs. The theory is committed to representations of limited accessibility but is not committed to relativized proposition, special de se contents or propositions of limited accessibility.

In this paper a close look is taken at van Fraassen's use of the concept of truth. It is shown that the rather deflationist understanding of the term in his more recent publications differs considerably from the one referred to in his earlier writings, where the truth of a scientific theory is construed as its correspondence to the world. As will be argued, his more recent remarks call for a reevaluation of the difference between scientific realism and constructive empiricism and (...) force him - for the sake of consistency - to give up his realist commitments regarding the world and the observable. (shrink)

In his presidential address on “Symbols, Signs, and Signals,” given before the Association for Symbolic Logic, December 28, 1938, Professor C. J. Ducasse made and important distinction between what he there called the indicative and the quiddative symbol. He remarked in passing that he thought it possible to show that: 1) “The same entity may function both as indicative and as quiddative symbol: or one part of a complex symbol may be quiddative and another indicative”; and 2) “the difference between (...) the two roles is irreducible: the indicative is not a species of the quiddative nor vice versa.” An indicative symbol is defined as “one of which the distinctive property is to orient our attention to some place in an order system …”; and a quiddative symbol as “one of which the distinctive property is to make us conceive a certain kind of thing—a certain ‘what'—no matter where in any order system it may or may not be existing.”. (shrink)

As Donnellan (1966) and many others have pointed out, a sentence like (1) has two readings: 1. The person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry. On the attributive reading, the description the person who's parked in front of the restaurant is interpreted as a quantifier: it says that the unique person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry, with no implication that the speaker has a particular person in mind — maybe (...) she simply inferred his haste from his choice of a parking spot. On the referential reading, the description picks out a particular person — say Jones, who's waiting for his car at the valet parking station with visible impatience. The question is, is (1) semantically ambiguous? Not if you accept the Russellian view, which holds that the description in (1) is always interpreted as a quantifier, with the referential interpretation arising via a conversational implicature that arises from the hearer's assumption that the speaker is trying to say something relevant and has a particular person in mind. In that case the utterance doesn't literally say anything about Jones, though the speaker may succeed in identifying him by uttering it. (shrink)

Certain anaphoric forms are widely supposed to give rise to ‘de se’ interpretations. Castanteda (1966a/b, 1967) argues that intensive reflexive anaphors such as ‘he himself’ and ‘she herself’ act as devices for the indirect report of essentially ‘first person’ contents when they occur with singular antecedents. In this paper, I argue that first and third person pronouns that occur as anaphors on c-commanding quantified antecedents (so-called ‘bound variable pronouns’) also give rise to de se interpretations. I draw out a problem (...) that this observation raises for a well-accepted account according to which bound pronouns occur as featureless variables. I argue that the best way to account for de se interpretations of bound first and third person pronouns is to abandon the view that pronouns lack features when bound. I offer a new account of bound pronominal anaphora which assigns the features of pronouns a crucial role in deriving bound readings. (shrink)