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John Perry
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Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 18 facts
claimJohn Perry distinguishes between the irreducibility of the first-personal way of thinking about oneself and the facts or states of affairs that make such thoughts true, noting that the latter are not irreducible.
claimMichael O'Rourke and Cory Washington edited the 2007 collection 'Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry'.
claimJohn Perry discussed thinking about the self in his 2012 chapter 'Thinking About the Self'.
claimJohn Perry discussed the concept of thought without representation in his 1986 article 'Thought Without Representation'.
claimJohn Perry explored the relationship between reference and reflexivity in his 2001 book 'Reference and Reflexivity'.
quoteI once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.
claimJohn Perry argues that Fregean senses are descriptive, and no description is equivalent to an essential indexical, meaning no Fregean proposition can be the object of belief when one believes first-personally.
claimJohn Perry published a collection of essays titled 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays' in 1993.
referenceCappelen and Dever (2013) argue against the philosophical claims surrounding the 'essential indexical', specifically challenging the arguments for it made by Perry and Lewis.
perspectiveCappelen and Dever argue that cases like Perry's shopper, often cited to show a special connection between self-consciousness and action, actually demonstrate that action explanation contexts are opaque and do not allow for substitution salva veritate.
accountJohn Perry describes an experience in a supermarket where he followed a trail of sugar, attempting to find the shopper with the torn sack to inform them of the mess, only to realize eventually that he was the shopper making the mess.
claimJohn Perry analyzed Gottlob Frege's views on demonstratives in his 1977 article 'Frege on Demonstratives'.
claimJohn Perry argues that terms such as “I” are “essentially indexical” and pose a problem for the traditional Fregean view of belief, which treats belief as a two-place relation between a subject and a proposition.
claimJohn Perry (2001) proposes an account of 'I' that attributes to an utterance both singular content and 'reflexive content' (e.g., 'the speaker of this token is F').
claimJohn Perry (2012) proposes that certain sources of information are 'necessarily self-informative' or 'self-tracking', meaning a subject can only come to know of the instantiation of her own states through that specific form of experience.
claimJohn Perry argues that first-personal content is 'self-locating' and therefore enables action, whereas non-first-personal content does not necessarily trigger the same action without additional self-identification.
claimJohn Perry's (1979) case of the 'messy shopper' highlights the connection between rational behavior and first-person thought in the context of the essential indexical.
claimJohn Perry identified the 'problem of the essential indexical' in his 1979 article 'The Problem of the Essential Indexical'.
Self-Consciousness - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Jul 24, 2024 1 fact
claimJohn Perry's theory of the essential indexical posits that genuine self-consciousness is linked to the ability to think and utter first-person thoughts.