The Inessential Indexical

((With Josh Dever) The received wisdom is that the semantic phenomenon of indexicality is connected to a cluster of philosophical issues about the explanation and rationalization of action, the nature of the self and of self-knowledge, the epistemology of perception, and the line between objective and subjective representations of the world. We criticize the received wisdom, arguing that a traditional, truth-conditional, non-theory of information provides all of the tools needed for a satisfactory philosophical account. Indexicality, on this view, is a phenomenon characterizing the relation of syntactic forms to semantic contents, but never a feature of contents proper.

Philosophy without Intuitions

Forthcoming book.

Here is the table of contents.

Here are the first two paragraphs of the book:

Contemporary analytic philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence. This claim is almost universally accepted in current meta-philosophical debates and it figures prominently in our self-understanding as analytic philosophers. No matter what area you happen to work in and what views you happen to hold in those areas, you are likely to think that philosophizing requires constructing cases and making intuitive judgments about those cases. A theory of a topic, S, isn’t adequate unless it correctly predicts intuitive responses to S-relevant case. This assumption also underlines the entire experimental philosophy movement: if philosophers don’t rely on intuitions, why would anyone do experiments to check on intuitions? Our alleged reliance on the intuitive makes many philosophers who don’t work on meta-philosophy concerned about their own discipline: they are unsure what intuitions are and whether they can carry the evidential weight we allegedly assign to them.
   The goal of this book is to argue that this concern is unwarranted since the claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively (or even a little bit) on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of ‘intuition’-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: It has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.