Drawing on Och's (1992) model of social meanings and
indexicality (of therapeutic functions), she discusses the social contexts; client self-disclosure of experiences and emotions; therapist strategies of emotional presence and support; and discursive norms of relationship- focused psychotherapy.
In Chapter 6, '
Indexicality and Context Shift', Recanati takes indexicals to be expressions 'whose semantic value systematically depends upon the context of utterance, and whose linguistic meaning somehow encodes this dependency' (181), usually via a 'token-reflexive rule' which determines the item in the context that is the value, e.g., 'I' is the speaker of this token of 'I'.
And if one happens to feel hunger pangs and is in the company of a friend, one might blurt out: 'Big Mac!' (a simple symbol or a term insofar as it inter-relates, by way of
indexicality, with the visual image).
Indeed, any representation is, like photography, "a symbolic practice where meaning is determined by beliefs and generated through the connotative strategies of subject selection, framing and vantage point" (Legrady, 88), so that the question of
indexicality as an indicator of some kind of real-world veracity is already deeply problematic even before digital images make their appearance.
One central aspect of this view is the universal context-sensitivity of language, reflected in the multiple types of "
indexicality" that are pervasive in all linguistic systems.
Both words and things are understood as 'representations,' that is, as semiotic entities that, through patterns of formal resemblance or iconicity and processes of contextual implication and entailment or
indexicality, not only mediate interpersonal and intergroup activities but also constitute the identity of persons and groups as agents.
Indexicality is a feature of predicates and predicate components (verbs, adjectives, adverbs and the like) as well as of referring expressions.
Photography has a unique ability to produce an image that "exists alone," as Arbus put it, thanks to its semiotic
indexicality. By definition, a film photograph is not personal, interpretational, gestural, expressive, though in the end it may be all these things.
In the Indian context, the fundamental feature of photography's
indexicality was subverted by adding jewellery to a woman's face, head, neck, and arms, or a turban, moustache, or spectacles to a man.
Chapter 1 relates the issue of tense and temporal cross-reference to
indexicality, and the extension of the notions of logic to indexical languages.
An Epistemological Approach to Essential
Indexicality, JEREMY MORRIS