Are Russellian Indexicals Eliminable?

Abstract

It is widely thought that, in his later work An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Bertrand Russell argued that our natural languages could in principle do away with indexicals. This brief piece, by contrast, aims to show that, instead of suggesting the potential eliminability of such expressions, Russell outlined a semantic account of indexicals according to which such expressions fundamentally depend on the perspectival way in which they refer to worldly items. If correct, this proposal would not only show that, in Russell’s later work, the meaning of expressions like indexicals is not exhaustively determined by the items they refer to: it would also show that Russell did not mean to eliminate indexicals from our natural languages at all.

Keywords

• indexicals
• bertrand russell
• acquaintance
• causal chains
• names