TITLE:
Indexicals in Virtual Environments
AUTHORS:
Bernardo Alonso
KEYWORDS:
Indexicals; Kaplan; Virtual Environments; Context; Utterance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.4 No.2,
May
6,
2014
ABSTRACT:
In this paper I
explored three well-known cases that seem to cast doubt on the notion that a
speaker is always at the place of the utterance when the utterance occurs. I
gave a few examples produced in Second Life environment, which cannot be
handled correctly by evaluating the expression at issue with respect to the
traditional view, i.e., the kaplanian framework—where the agent and
the utterer will always be identical, and the referent of “I” will always be
the utterer. The same happens to “here” and “now”; in each case the character
of the indexical is a function from a contextual parameter to the referent of
the expression. An example of logical truth peculiar to indexicals is the
sentence “I am here now”, since, according to that view, no utterance can take
place in a context whose agent is not in its location in its time. Finally I
concluded by claiming that particular kinds of utterances produced in virtual
environments (VE) break with the logical truth status of “I am here now”.