The Word That Cannot Be Replaced

There is a peculiar moment, familiar to anyone who has ever read a name tag and realized, with a small shock, that the name tag was their own. The information has been there the entire time. The badge says Hello, my name is — and underneath, in tidy ink, is a string of letters one knows perfectly well. And yet something happens — a small lurch, a quiet correction — when the third-person description on the badge is replaced, in thought, by the word I. Whatever changes in that instant is the subject of this journal.

The philosopher John Perry called such words essential indexicals, and argued, in a now-famous essay, that they cannot be paraphrased away. The argument runs deceptively quickly. Perry imagines himself in a supermarket, pushing a cart, when he notices a trail of sugar on the floor. He concludes, reasonably, that some shopper is making a mess. He sets out to find the careless person. He follows the trail. The trail, of course, leads in a circle. Eventually he arrives at the realization that he is the shopper with the torn sack — and only then does his behavior change. He stops. He looks down. He rights the bag.

The puzzle is this: the belief he had before — that some shopper was making a mess — was true the entire time. The shopper was him. So in some sense he had always known the relevant fact. But that fact, expressed in the third person, did not move him to act. Only when the belief took the form I am the shopper making the mess did anything change. Something about the first-person formulation does work that no description, however accurate, manages to do.

The fact had been true the whole time. It was the shape of the thought that had changed.

One can attempt, of course, to argue this difference away. Perhaps, one might say, the shopper-belief and the I-belief are really the same belief, dressed in different costumes; perhaps the change is psychological rather than semantic. But Perry’s point, pressed gently, refuses to dissolve. The difference is not merely one of vividness or attention. It is a difference in what is believed. Two people watching a security camera might form the belief that some shopper has a torn bag of sugar, and that belief might be true of one of them. Yet only the one for whom the thought takes the further form that shopper is me will turn around to inspect the cart. The first-person frame is not a flourish on top of an otherwise complete proposition. It is part of the proposition.

I. The privilege of the index

Indexicals — I, here, now, this — are the words whose meanings depend on the situation of utterance. They are perspectival in the strict sense: the same sentence, spoken by different mouths or at different times, asserts different things. I am hungry is a sentence each of us could say truthfully, but each of us would, in saying it, be claiming something different.

For most of philosophy, this perspectival quality was treated as a kind of inconvenience — a feature of natural language to be paraphrased away in any properly precise account of the world. Logic textbooks once tried, with considerable ingenuity, to translate every I and now into a name and a date, as if to say: here is the eternal sentence underlying the temporal one. But the supermarket example, and many others like it, suggest that this translation comes at a cost. The eternal sentence is true, but it is somehow inert. It does not, by itself, explain why anyone moves.

What Perry’s argument exposes — and what gives this journal its name — is that there is something irreducible about the first-person standpoint. To know that JP is the shopper making the mess is to know a fact about the world. To know that I am that shopper is to know that fact as it concerns me. And this latter knowledge, this perspectival registration, is what mobilizes us. It is the hinge on which any agent turns.

II. Consciousness as a way of being indexed

It is tempting, in light of this, to identify consciousness itself with a kind of indexicality. To be conscious is to occupy a standpoint — to have a here and a now and an I, and to register the world as showing up from that point. The famous question of what it is like to be something is, in this light, a question about the inner availability of indexicals: a thing for which there is a here is a thing for which something is the case from where it stands.

This will not satisfy everyone, and perhaps it should not. There are versions of consciousness — drowsy, dispersed, impersonal — in which the first-person frame seems to thin. There are also philosophical traditions, particularly in Buddhist phenomenology, which describe states in which the indexical seems to drop out altogether, leaving only the field of experience without anyone in particular at its center. Whether such states are coherent, and what they would mean for the picture of consciousness as essentially indexed, is a question we hope this journal will press.

To be conscious is to be the place where a here happens.

What is striking, however, is how stubborn the indexical proves under examination. Even in the most refined accounts of selfless awareness, there remains a vantage — a perspective from which the absence of self is observed. The I may attenuate, but the indexical structure does not vanish. Something is still being registered from somewhere.

III. What this journal proposes

We have called this journal The Essential Indexical because we believe Perry’s phrase names something that bears extended attention. The first-person standpoint — its irreducibility, its strange centrality, its uneasy relation to the impersonal descriptions science is so good at producing — is, we think, the central puzzle around which a great many smaller puzzles cluster. Personal identity, the felt present, the difference between knowing and undergoing, the question of whether a sufficiently complex machine could ever genuinely say the word I rather than merely produce its sound — all of these are, in some way, indexical questions.

The essays gathered here, and those forthcoming, will not pretend to settle these matters. They will, instead, try to take them seriously: to read the philosophical literature carefully, to follow the puzzles where they lead, and to notice when an apparently dry technical point opens, as Perry’s did, onto something close to the heart of what it is to be someone at all.

The shopper, in the end, looks down at his cart. He has known, in some form, the relevant fact for a long time. But only when the fact arrives wearing the word I does he act on it. Whatever it is that the word I does in such a moment — whatever it carries that no description can carry — that is, we suspect, the thread worth following. A journal can do worse than to follow a single thread carefully. We propose to follow this one.