What characterizes indexical thinking is the fact that the modes of presentation through which one thinks of objects are context-bound and perspectival. Such modes of presentation, I claim, are mental files presupposing that we stand in certain relations to the reference : the role of the file is to store information one can gain in virtue of standing in that relation to the object. This raises the communication problem, first raised by Frege : if indexical thoughts are context-bound and relation-based, (...) how is it possible to communicate them to those who are not in the same context and do not stand in the right relations to the object? Following Frege, I argue that the solution comes from an important distinction between linguistic and psychological modes of presentation. Psychological modes of presentation are mental files. They are perspectival and context-bound. But linguistic modes of presentation are fixed by the conventions of the language and they are shared by the language users. They are public and serve to coordinate mental files in communication by constraining them to contain the piece of information they encode. In this way communication takes place even though the indexical thoughts entertained by the speaker are, in some sense, private and cannot be shared by the audience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Tensism is the view that tense is not merely a property of language and the mind, but of the world itself. Perspectivalism extends this idea to all perspectival properties be they person or locational. One challenge that perspectivalism faces is the problem of expressing the contents of the beliefs and utterances of persons that are in other perspectival positions. One proposed solution to this problem is to allow for semantic theories that "realign" the expression of contents so that the (...) contents expressed by persons in other perspectival positions can be re-expressed from one's own perspectival position. In this paper I argue that a similar semantic realignment strategy could be deployed in helping perspectivalists generally come to grips with a puzzle raised by the Special Theory of Relativity. In short, the strategy is to realign the expression of contents in another inertial frame so that they are expressed from within your inertial frame. As we will see, the strategy is not puzzle free. (shrink)

One of the most gripping intuitions that people have about time is that it, in some sense “flows.” This sense of flow has been articulated in a number of ways, ranging from us moving into the future or the future rushing towards us, and there has been no shortage of metaphors and descriptions to characterize this sense of passage. Despite the many forms of the metaphor and its widespread occurrence, it has been argued that there is a deep conceptual problem (...) in any assumption that time “passes” or “flows.” The idea expressed by the metaphor is supposed to be incoherent. But is the idea expressed by this metaphor really incoherent? In this essay I will argue that, on one understanding of the metaphor, it is not. I’ll argue that the metaphor can be unpacked as representing three features of temporal experience, and while these features together appear to lead to paradox, I will argue that correctly handled they do not. (shrink)