Some Alternative Accounts of Interperspectival Content

Abstract

This chapter looks at a number of attempts to exorcise perspectival content from the semantics (and thus, presumably, from our metaphysics). First, perhaps, we can make do with token indexical (token reflexive) content, give the account of human action and emotion that we needed, and avoid the use of perspectival contents. The chapter also considers other approaches to perspectival contents including David Lewis’s account of the de se, Kaplan’s theory of indexicals, and use-based accounts. It is argued that all such accounts sweep the perspectival content under the rug and fail to eliminate it.