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Missoula, MT 59812USA

Reference and Reflexivity, by John Perry. Stanford: CSLI Publications,. Pp xiii + . H/b $., P/b $..

Indexical expressions, that is, personal pronouns (my, you, she, his,we, ), demonstrative pronouns (this, that), compound demonstratives(this table, that woman near the window, ), adverbs (today, yesterday,now, here, ), adjectives (actual and present), possessive adjectives (mypen, their house, ) have been at the centre of some recent studies in philo-sophy of language. Indexicals also captured the interest of those workingwithin the boundaries of cognitive science, for they play a crucial role whendealing with such puzzling notions as the nature of the self, the nature of per-ception, the nature of time, cognitive dynamics, and so on. The notion ofindexicality is also at the core of Perrys new book. No doubt anyone interestedin singular reference and related topics, from the philosopher to the linguistand the cognitive scientist will benet from reading this book. Perrys contri-bution cannot be ignored and will set the agenda for some time to come.

In this book, Perry brings together and develops some of the ideas he hasunveiled and published in the last few years. He thus explains and expands onthe reflexivereferential account of singular reference. Among Perrys maincontribution in this book we nd a careful and well-argued distinctionbetween indexicality and reexivity; that is, Perry distinguishes between whatis said using an utterance with an indexical and the identifying conditions atwork when reference gets xed. The identifying conditions are what a compe-tent speaker grasps and masters when s/he uses/hears a referential expression.To be the referent of an indexical expression and thus the object of discourse agiven object/individual must satisfy the identifying conditions associated withthe utterance of the indexical. When, for instance, one hears someone saying,I am a philosopher without knowing who actually spoke, one comes tounderstand that the speaker of the utterance is a philosopher. The referentmust be the speaker; this is the condition the referent must satisfy. If the utter-ance is produced by John, then John says that he is a philosopher and expressesa proposition having himself as a constituent. John does not say that thespeaker of the utterance is a philosopher. If, addressing John, one says, You area philosopher, one expresses the very same proposition: that John is a philoso-pher. The condition John must satisfy to be the referent of you is that he is theaddressee. This identifying condition diers from the one John satises whenhe says I.

Proper names are not indexicals. Nevertheless, the same distinction holds.Utterances of proper names rest on the reexivereferential distinction as well.When one uses a proper name, such as John Perry, one exploits a given con-vention; that is, one exploits the fact that there is a conventional link between

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John Perry and its bearer, John Perry. This link began when John was named/baptized. What one says, however, is not something about this link, but some-thing about Perry himself. If one utters John Perry is a philosopher, oneexpresses the proposition that John Perry is a philosopher, the very same prop-osition John Perry would express in saying I am a philosopher. But theyexpress this proposition in a very dierent way: one exploits the conventionwhich bridges the gap between John Perry and John Perry, while John Perryexploits the identifying condition linked with the rst person pronoun. Thisdierence is what ultimately accounts for the dierence in cognitive signi-cance between the two utterances.

Since on such an account a singular term (either an indexical, a demonstra-tive or a proper name) places some constraints on the way the relevant indi-viduals come to be the objects referred to, Perrys theory brings together themerits of the so-called direct reference view (the view initiated by Kripke,Donnellan, Kaplan, Marcus, and Perry himself) and the merits of the Fregeantradition. Thus, unlike Freges theory, a singular term contributes to the prop-osition the referent itself and not a sense or mode of presentation. Yet a singu-lar term does not merely play this referential role. It also plays a reexive role,that is, it expresses the identifying condition the referent must full. The re-exive conditions are relative to the utterance itself; they allow Perry to dealwith traditional puzzles such as the problems of cognitive signicance andempty terms. These problems were at the core of the earlier works in philoso-phy of language; they were, for instance, at the centre of Freges and Russellswritings. The direct reference picture has often been criticized in so far as itfaces diculties in handling them, for if one focuses on the notion of singularpropositions, how can one explain why an utterance of Clark Kent is Super-man is informative while an utterance of Clark Kent is Clark Kent is trivial?How do we explain negative existentials like Superman does not exist, whichseem to be either false or meaningless (that is, false if Superman exists andmeaningless if Superman does not existthe puzzle arises because we seem tointroduce some kind of entity and then we go on to say that this entity doesnot exist); what is the dierence between an utterance of I am Clark Kent, saidby Clark Kent and an utterance of Clark Kent is Superman, said by someonein answer to Who is Clark Kent? Singular propositions, though, do notexhaust the content of an utterance. An utterance does not merely expresses asingular proposition. This is Perrys main moral.

If one adopts Perrys theory which he sometimes also terms CriticalReferentialism one commits oneself to the view that a single utteranceexpresses, or at least conveys, several propositions, that is, that there are severallevels of content associated with a single utterance. Interestingly enough,Perrys view rst appeared as a reaction to a paper by Wettstein, in whichWettstein claimed that the new theory of reference cannot deal with Fregesinspired puzzles and that it is not the semanticists job to worry about thesepsychological problems (see Howard Wettstein, Has Semantics Rested on a

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Mistake?, The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. , No. , , pp. , and JohnPerry, Cognitive Signicance and New Theories of Reference, Nos, Vol. ,, pp. , reprinted in his The Problem of the Essential Indexical and OtherEssays, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, ). In his reply Perry distinguishedbetween the proposition created and the proposition expressed by an utter-ance:

The proposition expressed by my utterance [You are spilling coee] is that Ellsworthis spilling coee. The proposition created by it is that its speaker is addressing some-one who is spilling coee. Both can be regarded as singular propositions, one aboutEllsworth, one about my utterance. (p. )

In his more recent writings and in this new book, Perry characterizes the prop-osition created as the reflexive truth condition or pure truth condition of theutterance, while the proposition expressed is the incremental truth condition.Roughly, while the former has to do with linguistic meaning, the latter is whatis said/communicated by the utterance. These are also characterized as the offi-cial content. The reexive truth conditions of an utterance of

() Clark Kent can yare:

There is an individual x and a convention C such that(i) C is exploited by ()(ii) C permits one to designate x with Clark Kent(iii) x can y

while the incremental truth conditions are:That Clark Kent can y.

The reexive truth conditions of() I can y [said by Clark Kent]

are:There is an x such that

(i) x is the agent of ()(ii) x can y

and the incremental truth conditions are:That Clark Kent can y.

Since the incremental truth conditions of () and () do not dier and corre-spond to the proposition that Clark Kent can y, they are not suited to dealwith the dierence in cognitive signicance between () and (). The latter isdealt with by the reexive truth conditions. The same story can be told aboutidentity statements such as:

() Clark Kent is Supermanwhose reexive truth conditions are:

There is an individual x, an individual y and conventions C and C* such that(i) C and C* are exploited by ()(ii) C permits one to designate x with Clark Kent and C* permits one todesignate y with Superman(iii) x = y.

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Perry tells a similar story about empty terms and negative existentials. Thereexive truth conditions of

() Superman does not existsare:

There is no individual that is assigned to the convention being exploited by ause of Superman.

Perrys reexive truth conditions/incremental truth conditions distinctionseems to bring us back to Freges Begriffsschrift metalinguistic theory. Beforeintroducing the sense/reference distinction, Frege held that an identity state-ment like a = b could be analysed as: the sign a and the sign b designate thesame thing. Butsee G. Frege (), On Sense and Meaning, in P. Geachand M. Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege,Oxford: Blackwell, this cannot be the case, for:

In that case the sentence a = b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but onlyto its mode of designation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means.(p. )

An utterances reexive truth condition is a proposition about words. It is nota proposition about the subject matter. Frege is quite right. But Perry avoidsthe Fregean objection in so far as he defends a multiple proposition view. Asingle utterance does not merely express its reexive truth conditions. It alsoexpresses its incremental truth condition. It is the latter, the official content,which is the subject matter (what is said) of the utterance. Freges metalinguis-tic account faces diculties in so far as it does not distinguish between theincremental truth conditions and the pure or reexive truth conditions; ittakes the latter to be the subject matter of the utterance. That is, Freges meta-linguistic account faces diculties because Frege recognized only one level ofcontent, a unique proposition, and asks the latter to deliver all the relevantinformation, that is, both the information relative to the cognitive signicanceand the subject matter of the utterance. In a nutshell, Freges metalinguisticaccount cannot succeed because Frege commits the fallacy of misplaced infor-mation, that is, he asks a single entity to deliver all the information. Frege isright in arguing that an identity statement is not about words but about thingsand thus rejects his metalinguistic account. He is wrong, though, in claimingthat the metalinguistic account must be supplanted by the sense/reference dis-tinction and that the propositional constituents are the senses expressed bywords. Were Frege (and the neo-Fregeans for that matter) to accept the viewthat a single utterance expresses or conveys several propositions, then Fregeand his followers would be happy to accommodate the view that a sentenceexpresses a proposition about words and yet this proposition is not the subjectmatter, for the latter is a proposition having the referents themselves as constit-uents and not the words used to designate them.

One of Freges main worries was the substitution salva veritate of co-refer-ring terms in oratio obliqua constructions. In an ascription like Lois believesthat Superman can y we cannot substitute salva veritate Superman with

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Clark Kent, for Lois is not aware that Superman is Clark Kent. Does the re-exivereferential distinction capture Freges data? Moreover, Perry spent a longtime discussing indexicality but, curiously enough, he did not himself ventureto discuss how, from the third person viewpoint, we attribute indexical refer-ence to others. How do we attribute, for instance, an I-thought? In a series ofpapers, Castaeda claimed that to capture someones indexical thoughts weneed to use quasi-indicators, that is, expressions of the form s/he (her/himself ) H.-N. Castaeda, He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness, Ratio, Vol. , No. , , pp. ; Indicators and Quasi-Indicators, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. , No. , , pp. ;On the Logic of Attributions of Self-Knowledge to Others, The Journal ofPhilosophy, Vol. , No. , , pp. -. Thus a report like Mary believesthat she (herself) is rich attributes to Mary an I-thought, that is, the thoughtshe would express in saying I am rich. Can the reexivereferential distinctionbe accommodated to capture quasi-indicators? What would be the reexivetruth conditions of a report like Mary believes that she (herself) is rich? In sofar as it is the job of the reexive truth conditions to deal with the problem ofcognitive signicance, the reexive truth conditions of Mary believes that she(herself) is rich must dier from the reexive truth conditions of a report likeMary believes that Mary is rich, while the pure truth conditions may well bethe same for Mary and she (herself) are co-referential.

This book is admirable for its richness of data and the way it handles them.Yet it is succinct and goes straight to the core of the main problems. In avoid-ing too many technicalities, it is a fresh and enjoyable read, inviting andaccompanying the reader through some of the central issues in philosophy oflanguage. Perry is a master at motivating his theory with lots of good andentertaining examples, and the reader will nd it dicult not to succumb to itscharm and elegance.

Department of Philosophy eros corazzaThe University of NottinghamNottingham NG7 2RDUK

Nietzsches Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsches Prelude to Philo-sophys Future, edited by Richard Schacht. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, . Pp. xiv + . H/b ., $..

This volume presents nine new essays on Nietzsche, but beyond that they havelittle connection, substantively or stylistically, with one another. The contribu-tors are Ivan Soll, Rdiger Bittner, Alan D. Schrift, Alan White, Robert B.Pippin, Maudemarie Clark, Robert C. Solomon, James Conant, and the editor.Several papers deal with topics related to or inspired by Nietzsches moralphilosophy, including his putative virtue ethics (Solomon, and in some ways