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  1. Frege on demonstratives.John Perry - 1977 - Philosophical Review 86 (4):474-497.
    Demonstratives seem to have posed a severe difficulty for Frege’s philosophy of language, to which his doctrine of incommunicable senses was a reaction. In “The Thought,” Frege briefly discusses sentences containing such demonstratives as “today,” “here,” and “yesterday,” and then turns to certain questions that he says are raised by the occurrence of “I” in sentences (T, 24-26). He is led to say that, when one thinks about oneself, one grasps thoughts that others cannot grasp, that cannot be communicated. However, (...)
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  2. The Prince and the Phone Booth: Reporting Puzzling Beliefs.Mark Crimmins & John Perry - 1989 - Journal of Philosophy 86 (12):685.
    Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...)
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  3. Evading the Slingshot.John Perry - 1996 - In J. Ezquerro A. Clark (ed.), Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Categories, Consciousness, and Reasoning. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    The topic of this essay is “the slingshot,” a short argument that purports to show that sentences1 designate (stand for, refer to) truth values. Versions of this argument have been used by Frege 2, Church 3, Quine4 and Davidson5; thus it is historically important, even if it immediately strikes one as fishy. The argument turns on two principles, which I call substitution and redistribution. In “Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations,”6 Jon Barwise and I rejected both principles, as part of our (...)
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  4. On Knowing Who I Am.John Perry - 2023 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 36 (1):25-32.
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  5. Are There Essential Indexicals?John Perry - 2022 - Belgrade Philosophical Annual 35 (2):7-12.
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  6. Identity and Self-Knowledge.John Perry - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (5).
    Self, person, and identity are among the concepts most central to the way humans think about themselves and others. It is often natural in biology to use such concepts; it seems sensible to say, for example, that the job of the immune system is to attack the non-self, but sometimes it attacks the self. But does it make sense to borrow these concepts? Don’t they only pertain to persons, beings with sophisticated minds, and perhaps even souls? I argue that if (...)
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