## 1. The Phenomenon



Our subject is traditionally introduced by means of example. We follow
tradition:



> 
> 
> I 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 down 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.
> 
> 
> 
> I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making
> a mess. And I was right. But I didn't believe that I was making
> a mess. That seems to be something I came to believe. And when I came
> to believe that, I stopped following the trail around the counter, and
> rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to
> explain my change in behavior....
> 
> 
> 
> At first characterizing the change seems easy. My beliefs changed,
> didn't they, in that I came to have a new one, namely, *that
> I am making a mess?* But things are not so simple. (Perry 1979:
> 3)
> 
> 
> 



This case displays a structure common to many canonical examples of
self-locating belief, which we can use to point toward our subject. As
a first pass: the example describes an agent who is in, or comes to be
in, a particular doxastic state, where that doxastic state is
difficult or impossible to characterize without using indexicals.
(That is, without using expressions that vary in their denotations in
different contexts of use, such as "I", "now",
"here", etc.) Hence the title of Perry's paper,
"The Problem of the Essential Indexical" (1979).



The doxastic change that Perry underwent when he realized what was
happening, the one that explains his change of behavior, can be aptly
described (by him, at least), as *coming to believe that I am
making a mess*. It is not aptly described as *coming to believe
that the shopper with the torn sugar sack is making a mess*. Perry
already believed that. Nor (Perry argues) is it aptly described as
*coming to believe that the *F* is making a mess*, for
any non-indexical *F*. For one thing, for any such *F*
(the unique bearded man in a blue shirt at Safeway, the author of
"Frege on Demonstratives", etc.), we can construct a
version of the case in which Perry already believed that the
*F* was making a mess, but still persisted in trying to chase
the *F* around the supermarket to tell him that he was making a
mess. For another thing, it could easily be that everyone else in the
supermarket believed that the *F* was making a mess, and none
of them displayed the embarrassed cart-rearranging behavior that Perry
displayed after he realized what was happening. So none of those
beliefs looks like it explains Perry's change in behavior. (At
least, not by marking off a doxastic state that tends to give
rise--against a typical background of desires and other
beliefs--to that sort of behavior.)



Nor is Perry's doxastic change aptly described as *coming to
believe that John Perry is making a mess*. For one thing, we can
build a version of the case in which Perry already believed that too,
but, not realizing that he was John Perry, still tried to chase John
Perry around the supermarket to tell him he was making a mess. For
another, everybody else in the supermarket could have believed that
John Perry was making a mess, without any of them engaging in that
distinctive sort of embarrassed cart-rearranging. So that belief also
doesn't look like it explains Perry's change in behavior.
(At least, not by marking off a doxastic state that tends to give
rise--against a typical background of desires and other
beliefs--to that sort of behavior.)



So descriptions of doxastic states that don't make use of
indexical terms--states of believing, e.g., *that John Perry
is making a mess*, or *that the unique bearded philosopher in
Safeway is making a mess*--don't seem to capture the
doxastic change that occurs when Perry realizes what's been
happening. The sorts of descriptions that do capture that change all
seem ineliminably indexical--Perry can describe the change as
coming to believe *that I was making a mess*, and we can
describe it as, for example, Perry's coming to believe *that
he himself was making a mess*.



Perry's example (among others we'll soon see) has
convinced many philosophers that there is a distinctive category of
doxastic states that resist characterization in non-indexical terms.
Once one is convinced of this, some questions naturally arise:
What's the best way to think of these doxastic states? And what
marks them off as different from states that *are* happily
characterized in non-indexical terms?



Before we move on to more detailed discussion, another classic example
from Perry that helps motivate calling these distinctive doxastic
states *self-locating beliefs*:



> 
> 
> An amnesiac, Rudolf Lingens, is lost in the Stanford library. He reads
> a number of things in the library, including a biography of himself,
> and a detailed account of the library in which he is lost. He believes
> any Fregean thought you think might help him. He still will not know
> who he is and where he is, no matter how much knowledge he piles up,
> until that moment when he is ready to say,
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *This* place is aisle five, floor six, of Main Library,
> Stanford.
> 
> 
> 
> *I* am Rudolf Lingens. (Perry 1977: 21-22)
> 
> 
> 
> 



Here it's easy to see why the terminology of
*self-location* is appealing--Lingens' problem
doesn't seem to be ignorance about what the world is like.
It's ignorance about his own location within the world. (Another
metaphor one finds in the literature: his problem isn't that he
doesn't know how to draw the map of the world; it's that
he doesn't know where to place the "you are here"
arrow on that map.) In many respects, this is a helpful and clarifying
way to think about the purported special category of belief that
resists characterization in non-indexical terms: it's belief
about one's particular location within the world.



Yet this way of thinking is misleading in at least one respect: the
relevant category of belief is not restricted to beliefs about
one's geographical or temporal location. If the talk of
"self-location" is not to be misleading, we have to
understand "self-location" quite broadly--in the
messy shopper case, Perry's problem may be a failure to properly
self-locate, but it's not a failure to properly
*spatiotemporally* self-locate. When Perry realizes
what's going on, he locates himself among the (widely
spatiotemporally dispersed) messy shoppers of the world. Perry's
new belief state is one of self-location in the sense that it locates
him in a space of possible individuals, or in a quality space the
components of which aren't restricted to things having to do
with spatiotemporal position.



David Lewis calls the same phenomenon "belief *de
se*"--about the self. This avoids misunderstanding the
phenomenon as having primarily to do with spatiotemporal location, at
the expense of introducing some novel and potentially disconcerting
technical terminology, and perhaps obscuring the respects in which
talk about self-location is genuinely helpful for getting a grip on
the phenomenon.


## 2. Arguments and Examples



This section describes some paradigmatic examples motivating a
distinctive category of self-locating belief, and disentangles the
argumentative threads those examples support. The self-locating belief
literature is heavily driven by a cluster of evocative examples. The
distinctive category of self-locating belief, and the various
proposals for how to theorize about it, are often motivated by the
felicitous treatment they offer of these examples. But it's not
always clear exactly what argumentative work the examples are doing,
and which examples are driving which arguments. This section charts
the argumentative landscape by working through a dialectic
that's a bit artificial, but we think useful for seeing how the
pieces fit together.


### 2.1 A dialectic-structuring device



In 1979, David Lewis and John Perry each offered arguments for a
distinctive category of self-locating belief (Lewis 1979; Perry 1979).
To understand the argumentative landscape, it's useful to think
of both Lewis and Perry as first arguing that a particular theory of
belief is inadequate, and then offering different remedies for its
inadequacies. We'll call that initial theory of belief the
"Simple Picture", then characterize rival theories in
terms of how they supplement the Simple Picture to remedy the problems
Lewis and Perry identified.



On the Simple Picture, belief is a binary relation between subjects
and possible-worlds propositions (or something like them--more on
this in a moment), and the interesting and theoretically important
doxastic states of believers are states of *believing
*P** for possible-worlds propositions *P*. (So, in
particular, all the states required to fully account for what's
happening with people doxastically, to explain people's doxastic
similarities and differences, and to give explanations of
people's behavior in terms of their doxastic states, will be
states of *believing *P** for propositions *P*,
with propositions understood as sets of possible worlds.)



That's a pretty good characterization of the view that Lewis
wanted to demonstrate was inadequate, but we need to generalize a bit
to bring Lewis and Perry under the same umbrella. Although
possible-worlds propositions were Lewis's specific concern, the
Simple Picture needn't work with possible worlds propositions in
particular--it can operate with any type of proposition in a
broader category we'll call *traditional* propositions.
Traditional propositions determine a possible-worlds truth condition.
So they take truth-values relative to worlds. And importantly for our
purposes, they don't take truth-values relative to anything more
fine-grained than worlds. So we'll never get two worldmates
standing in the belief relation to the same traditional proposition,
one thereby believing truly and the other thereby believing falsely.
On the Simple Picture, objects of belief represent ways for the world
to be--they impose representational demands on the world, and are
answerable to the world for their truth or falsity. Possible worlds
propositions are, obviously, like this. So too are standard Russellian
structured propositions, constructed out of objects and properties.
(The Russellian proposition constructed in the usual way from
Aristotle and *wisdom* is true in all and only the worlds in
which Aristotle is wise.)



We can summarize the Simple Picture as follows:



> 
> 
> The Simple Picture:
> 
> 
> 1. Belief is a binary relation between believers and objects of
> belief.
> 2. The objects of belief are traditional propositions.
> 
> 
> 



In 1979, John Perry and David Lewis produced examples purporting to
show that this simple way of theorizing about belief was inadequate,
because the family of doxastic states at its disposal--states of
believing that *P* for traditional propositions
P--couldn't explain some bits of behavior that it's
important to be able to explain in doxastic terms, couldn't
capture certain sorts of ignorance and doxastic change, and/or
couldn't properly categorize believers so as to capture
important doxastic similarities and differences between them.



Thinking about the dialectical situation this way helps frame the
relevant arguments and examples in terms of problems they raise for
the Simple Picture. We can then differentiate the various theories of
self-locating belief by how they supplement the Simple Picture to
remedy those problems.



To guard against historical misunderstanding, we note that not
everybody endorsed the Simple Picture in the beginning of 1979, and
there were already examples and arguments in the literature making
trouble for the Simple Picture, on similar sorts of grounds, before
Perry's and Lewis's 1979 papers (see for example
Castaneda 1966, 1967; Frege 1956; Wittgenstein 1953; Anscombe
1975). But thinking in terms of problems for, and modifications of,
the Simple Picture is helpful for understanding the argumentative
landscape.


### 2.2 Arguments from ignorance



We return to Perry's example of the messy shopper.



Perry explains his change in behavior by saying "I came to
believe that I was making a mess". As Perry frames the problem,
no substitution for "I" in the reported belief
("that I was making a mess") will preserve the explanatory
power of the belief attribution. Descriptive substitutions won't
work, nor will "I came to believe John Perry was making a
mess". What's reported isn't a belief in any of the
familiar, tractable, Simple-Picture-friendly categories: it's
not a descriptive belief about the *F*, and it's not a
*de re* belief about a particular individual. So we need
something additional to capture the doxastic state Perry reports
himself as coming to be in when he says "I came to believe that
I was making a mess".



There are two central argumentative threads at work here:


1. An argument from *ignorance*: In the early parts of the
story, Perry manifests a sort of ignorance, which drives his behavior.
But it's not (Perry argues) ignorance of any ordinary
descriptive or *de re* proposition. It's a kind of
ignorance that could survive coming to have all the relevant
descriptive beliefs, and all the relevant *de re* beliefs.
Perry's ignorance is a distinctively first-personal,
self-locating kind of ignorance. That is: The doxastic state that
Perry's missing--the one whose absence constitutes his
ignorance--isn't of the kind that appears in the Simple
Picture. It's not a state of *believing *P** for
any traditional proposition *P*. So in order to characterize
Perry's ignorance, we need more resources than the Simple
Picture gives us.
2. An argument from *difference*: When Perry has his
*a-ha* moment, he undergoes an important doxastic
change--one that disposes him to very different sorts of
behavior. So there's an important doxastic difference between
pre-*a-ha* and post-*a-ha* Perry. But it's not
(Perry argues) a difference in which states of ordinary descriptive or
*de re* belief Perry was in at the two times. It's a
difference in belief states of a distinctively first-personal,
self-locating kind. That is: the change that Perry undergoes
isn't one that we can characterize in the Simple Picture.
There's no (relevant) difference in which traditional
propositions Perry believed before and after his *a-ha* moment.
So in order to characterize the doxastic difference between pre- and
post-*a-ha* Perry, we need more resources than the Simple
Picture gives us.



We'll pick up these threads in turn, and look at other prominent
examples pushing similar lines of argument. In this section, we take
up arguments from ignorance. Arguments from difference will be
discussed in
 section 2.3.



Arguments from ignorance get a lot of attention in debates about
self-locating belief. They have the same general form as the knowledge
argument against materialism in the philosophy of mind (Jackson 1982,
1986): we build a case in which a subject is stipulated to have all of
the *K*-type knowledge there is to have, elicit the intuition
that they still display a particular sort of ignorance, and conclude
that not all knowledge is of type *K*. It's easy to see
the messy shopper case contributing to this sort of argument: We build
a version of the messy shopper case in which Perry, before his
epiphany, is already in all the relevant states of *de re*
belief, and all the relevant states of descriptive belief, but still
has something to learn. We conclude that there are some states of
belief of a distinctively self-locating ("essentially
indexical") kind, that aren't states of *de re* or
descriptive belief. Perry already believes all of the relevant
traditional propositions, so there must be states of belief that
aren't states of *believing *P** for some
traditional proposition *P*.



While the messy shopper example contains both of the argumentative
threads we identified above, another famous example offers a
relatively pure argument from ignorance. This is Lewis' (1979)
example of the two gods. (Note that in what follows, Lewis uses
"propositional attitude" to mean an attitude toward a
possible-worlds proposition, and "proposition" so that it
applies only to possible-worlds propositions.)



> 
> 
> Lewis's two gods
> 
> 
> 
> Consider the case of the two gods. They inhabit a certain possible
> world, and they know exactly which world it is. Therefore they know
> every proposition that is true at their world. Insofar as knowledge is
> a propositional attitude, they are omniscient. Still I can imagine
> them to suffer ignorance: neither one knows which of the two he is.
> They are not exactly alike. One lives on top of the tallest mountain
> and throws down manna; the other lives on top of the coldest mountain
> and throws down thunderbolts. Neither one knows whether he lives on
> the tallest mountain or on the coldest mountain; nor whether he throws
> manna or thunderbolts. Surely their predicament is possible. (The
> trouble might perhaps be that they have an equally perfect view of
> every part of their world, and hence cannot identify the perspectives
> from which they view it.) But if it is possible to lack knowledge and
> not lack any propositional knowledge, then the lacked knowledge must
> not be propositional. If the gods came to know which was which, they
> would know more than they do. But they wouldn't know more
> propositions. There are no more to know. (Lewis 1979:
> 520-521)
> 
> 
> 



The load-bearing phenomenon here is a kind of ignorance that survives
knowledge of all true traditional propositions. By stipulation, the
gods know all the true traditional propositions, and thus are in the
state of *believing *P** for all traditional
propositions *P*. Yet each is still ignorant of something. Thus
there must be some kind of knowledge whose doxastic component is not
being in a state of believing a traditional proposition.



Here is the general form of the argument, expressed abstractly enough
that Lewis and Perry could both endorse it:


1. An adequate account of belief will include, for each of the two
gods, a state that they are not in, such that their failure to be in
it is a kind of ignorance.
2. There aren't any states of *believing *P**,
for traditional propositions *P*, that the two gods
aren't in, such that their not being in them is a kind of
ignorance. (They believe all the ones that are true in their world,
and not believing the false ones isn't a kind of
ignorance.)
3. So, the Simple Picture of belief isn't adequate. To
characterize the gods' ignorance, we'll need to refer to
some doxastic states that aren't just states of *believing
*P** for traditional propositions *P*.



Lewis and Perry offer different diagnoses of what's gone wrong
with the Simple Picture, and recommend different remedies. But they
agree on the Simple Picture's inability to account for these
sorts of cases.



There are a number of other arguments from ignorance in the
literature--for example, the case of Rudolph Lingens in the
Stanford library (Perry 1977), which we discussed briefly in
 section 1,
 and the case of the lost hiker in the Desolation Wilderness (Perry
1979). They are worth noting because they are in some respects less
odd and science-fictional than the case of the two gods, but we will
not take them up in detail because their load-bearing structural
features are the same.


### 2.3 Arguments from difference



Another major thread of argument for a theoretically distinctive
category of self-locating belief maintains that there are important
doxastic similarities and differences between agents that are
difficult to characterize without that distinctive category.
Introducing such a category provides the resources to characterize
those similarities and differences in a theoretically helpful way. We
will focus on difference-based arguments in this subsection, then take
up similarities in the next.



In the messy shopper example, there's an important doxastic
difference between Perry before his *a-ha* moment and Perry
after his *a-ha* moment. But that difference isn't (Perry
argues) a difference in which descriptive or *de re*
propositions Perry believes. So we need some extra theoretical
resources, beyond states of *believing *P** for
traditional propositions *P*, to characterize the doxastic
change Perry undergoes in his *a-ha* moment.



It's no accident that the messy shopper example has both an
ignorance thread and a difference thread. Typically, where
there's an argument from ignorance, there's an argument
from difference--the pre- and post-discovery stages in a case of
*resolved* ignorance will be importantly doxastically
different. And even when the ignorance isn't resolved, there
will be in the background a relevant doxastic difference between the
subject in the case as described and the subject as they would be if
the ignorance *were* resolved.



Yet where there's an argument from difference, there need not be
an argument from ignorance. We can illustrate this with another famous
example from Perry of two hikers, one of whom is attacked by a bear
(Perry 1977: 23). Let's call the hikers John and David, and
let's suppose that it's John who is attacked while David
looks on.



John and David both believe *that John is being attacked by a
bear*. But they display, Perry notes, very different behavior:
John curls up into a ball; David runs for help. It's very
plausible to attribute this difference in behavior to a doxastic
difference between them. (A difference that makes it appropriate, for
example, to say that John, but not David, believes that *he
himself* is being attacked by a bear.) But the doxastic difference
isn't a difference in traditional propositions
believed--certainly it isn't a difference in
possible-worlds propositions believed, or in descriptive or *de
re* structured propositions believed. John and David are on
exactly the same page about the relevant aspects of the
world--it's a world in which John is being attacked by a
bear, and David isn't. They are on exactly the same page about
which relevant descriptive and *de re* structured propositions
are true--it's true that the prominent advocate of
self-locating belief from Stanford is being attacked by a bear, while
the prominent advocate of self-locating belief from Princeton is not,
that John is being attacked and David is not, etc.



Here then is the general form of a difference argument centered around
some case, which we'll call 'CASE':


1. There is an important doxastic difference between *A* and
*B* in CASE.
2. In CASE, *A* and *B* are alike with respect to all
of the potentially relevant states of *believing *P**
for traditional propositions *P*.
3. So, there are some important doxastic states that are not states
of *believing *P** for traditional propositions
*P*, such that differences in those kinds of states can explain
the doxastic difference between *A* and *B* in
CASE.



While ignorance arguments often need to become quite odd and
science-fictional, difference arguments don't. Here is why: The
most obvious strategy for responding to both sorts of arguments is to
identify some piece of Simple Picture-friendly information that would
resolve the ignorance, or mark the doxastic difference. In ignorance
cases, this strategy can initially look very promising. If Lingens
thinks of himself as the unique bearded man in a plaid shirt reading a
biography of Rudolph Lingens, then learning the Simple
Picture-friendly information that the bearded man in a plaid shirt
reading a biography of Rudolph Lingens is in the Stanford library will
resolve his ignorance. So to keep Simple Picture-friendly information
from resolving Lingens' ignorance, we need to make sure Lingens
doesn't think that he's the unique bearded man in a plaid
shirt reading a biography of Rudolph Lingens. He needs to think
that--or at least, leave open the possibility
that--there's another bearded man in a plaid shirt reading
a biography of Lingens somewhere. More generally, there needs to be
*no* unique Simple Picture-friendly description of himself
available to Lingens, because any such description would allow some
Simple Picture-friendly information to resolve his ignorance.
Similarly for *de re* belief--the subjects of ignorance
cases mustn't be in a position to uniquely identify themselves
*de re*.



That's why ignorance argument cases wind up involving things
like mirror-image universes with qualitatively indistinguishable
"sides", pairs of amnesiacs undergoing identical courses
of subjective experience, pairs of gods with unusual perspectives on
the world, and so on.



Those are peculiar, highly science-fictional cases. In more ordinary
cases, believers have access to a description that they take to apply
uniquely to themselves, even if it's quite complex and difficult
to state concisely. To preserve the case, and make sure that
*no* Simple Picture-friendly information can help, the case
needs to get very weird. And it's natural to worry about whether
intuitions about such cases are good bases for theory choice.



Of course advocates for a special category of self-locating-belief
will say that this response misses the point. The *de re*
proposition about Lingens, or the descriptive proposition about the
unique bearded, plaid-shirt-wearing biography reader, can only help
resolve Lingens' ignorance if we assume Lingens'
self-locating belief *that he himself is Lingens*, or *that
he himself is the unique *F**. And there is something to
this. But now the dialectical ground has shifted. Rather than offering
an example about which we have clear--and clearly Simple
Picture-unfriendly--intuitions, the advocate for a special
category of self-locating belief simply insists on their theory. The
force of the argument is diminished.



For advocates of self-locating belief, difference arguments have the
advantage of working with cases that aren't so strange and
science-fictional. Cases in which two subjects have all the same
Simple Picture-friendly beliefs, yet respond very differently to their
environments, needn't be especially peculiar--their only
peculiarity is in the unlikely degree of shared belief. And cases in
which subjects have all the same *relevant* Simple
Picture-friendly beliefs, so that differences in subjects'
Simple Picture-friendly beliefs don't explain the differences in
how they respond to their environments, are not peculiar at all. They
are actual, and common. (Other examples from the literature include
Perry's case of the lost hiker [1979: 4] and Kaplan's
burning pants case [1989: 537], which also features prominently in
Chierchia 1989: 2-3.)



It's worth pausing on Perry's case of a professor waiting
for a faculty meeting to start, as this case extends the issue about
self-location to *temporal* self-location:



> 
> 
> a professor, who desires to attend the department meeting on time, and
> believes correctly that it begins at noon, sits motionless in his
> office at that time. Suddenly he begins to move. What explains his
> action? A change in belief. He believed all along that the department
> meeting starts at noon; he came to believe, as he would have put it,
> that it starts now. (Perry 1979: 4)
> 
> 
> 



This is a temporal difference case: there's an important
doxastic difference between the professor when he's sitting
motionless in his office, thinking to himself "the meeting
begins at noon", and the professor when he starts to move,
thinking to himself, "the meeting begins now". But the
difference isn't in traditional propositions believed--the
professor believes, both before and after he begins to move, that the
meeting begins at noon, at the time when the clock strikes twelve
times, etc. Characterizing the difference requires resources beyond
those of the Simple Picture.


### 2.4 Arguments from sameness



There is also a tradition--a bit less frequent in the
literature--of cases involving cognitive *similarity* that
are purportedly best captured by a distinctive category of
self-locating belief. (Though see Perry 2019's discussion of
what he calls "Type A" cases.) A prominent example:



> 
> 
> Hume and Heimson
> 
> 
> 
> Let us imagine David Hume, alone in his study, on a particular
> afternoon in 1775, thinking to himself, "I wrote the
> *Treatise*". Can anyone else apprehend the thought he
> apprehended by thinking this? First note that what he thinks is true.
> So no one could apprehend the same thought, unless they apprehended a
> true thought. Now suppose Heimson is a bit crazy and thinks himself to
> be David Hume. Alone in his study, he says to himself, "I wrote
> the *Treatise*". However much his inner life may, at that
> moment, resemble Hume's on that afternoon in 1775, the fact
> remains: Hume was right, Heimson is wrong. Heimson cannot think the
> very thought to himself that Hume thought to himself, by using the
> very same sentence. (Perry 1977: 17)
> 
> 
> 



Let us step back from some of the particular commitments in
Perry's presentation of the case to extract an argument that
both Perry and Lewis could endorse: There's something
theoretically and explanatorily important that Hume and Heimson have
in common. But it's not a state of *believing *P**
for any traditional proposition *P*. (If it was, either both
would be correct in their belief or neither would.) To capture this
doxastic similarity, we need resources beyond those provided by the
Simple Picture. We need states of distinctively self-locating
belief.



The Hume/Heimson case is a bit odd, since Heimson's belief is a
bit odd. But more mundane examples are ubiquitous. One occurs a bit
later in Perry 1977: there is something doxastically in common to all
of the (well-informed) residents of Kennebunkport--they're
all in a doxastic state that leads them to sincerely assert "I
am in Kennebunkport", and to engage in Kennebunkport-appropriate
behavior. Similarly, there's something doxastically in common to
everyone disposed to sincerely assert, "that's Gilmore
Lake before me" (Perry 1979) or "my pants are on
fire" (Kaplan 1989).



These doxastic similarities are not a matter of all the group
members' being in a common state of the type, *believing
*P** for some traditional proposition *P*.
(There's no traditional proposition that all and only those
disposed to sincerely assert, e.g., "my pants are on fire"
believe, believing which generates--given otherwise typical
beliefs and desires--corresponding behavioral dispositions.)



Notice also that these problems are not just problems about belief.
It's awkward for the Simple Picture of belief that Hume and
Heimson seem to have a common belief, but Hume's belief is
correct while Heimson's is incorrect. Whatever's in common
to Hume and Heimson, it's not standing in the belief relation to
a common traditional proposition. Since Hume and Heimson are
worldmates, any traditional proposition that one of them would be
correct to believe, the other would be as well. It's similarly
awkward for a Simple Picture about desire that Hume and Heimson could
equally well both *want* to be Hume (or to have written the
*Treatise*), and if they did, Hume's desire would be
satisfied and Heimson's would not. This means, because Hume and
Heimson are worldmates, that their conative similarity can't be
a matter of both standing in the desire relation to a common
traditional proposition. And once we've seen this trick,
it's easy to generate parallel examples for other propositional
attitudes, and it's easy to generate examples in which the
attitudes in question aren't as odd as Heimson's.



Moreover, once we've seen the trick of generating non-doxastic
similarity cases, it's straightforward to generate non-doxastic
difference cases as well. *A* wants to lead and *B*
wants to follow. That's a difference in preference, that gives
rise to systematic differences in behavior. But it's not a
difference in traditional propositions desired. Very clearly,
it's not a difference in the possible worlds *A* and
*B* favor--both favor the worlds in which *A* leads
and *B* follows. And it's not clear how the extra
structure of traditional propositions that aren't sets of worlds
(e.g., Russellian propositions) could help draw the distinction.
(Lewis discusses a similar case in "Dispositional Theories of
Value", 1989: 119.)



This points to another advantage of sameness and difference
arguments--over ignorance arguments--as the primary
argumentative basis for recognizing self-locating belief: sameness and
difference arguments are easily generalized to other propositional
attitudes, while ignorance arguments are belief-specific.


## 3. Theoretical Responses



It's useful to think of Lewis and Perry as both rejecting the
Simple Picture and as responding to its inadequacies by introducing
different sorts of complications.



Perry rejects the Simple Picture's reliance on a simple, binary
belief relation. According to Perry, we need theoretical resources
that keep track, not just of which propositions subjects believe, but
of the mechanisms by which they come to believe them.



Lewis rejects the Simple Picture's reliance on traditional
propositions as the objects of belief. According to Lewis, we need
objects of belief that carve up a space of possibilities whose points
aren't worlds, but positions within worlds--that is, worlds
together with a position specified within them.



We'll discuss Lewis' proposal first, then Perry's in
 section 3.2.


### 3.1 Centered worlds



On Lewis's view, what's distinctive about self-locating
beliefs is their *content*. Instead of taking the objects of
belief to be possible worlds propositions, we take them to be
properties. Equivalently, we can take them to be sets of centered
worlds. A centered world is a set-theoretic object that models a
position or a location within a world; it's easiest to think of
a centered world as a \(\langle \textrm{world}, \textrm{time},
\textrm{individual}\rangle\) triple. (Absent clever science-fictional
examples, specifying a world and then a time and an individual within
that world suffices to specify the intended sort of position or
location. See Liao (2012) for troublemaking clever science-fictional
examples, and for discussion.) Treating objects of belief as sets of
centered worlds is equivalent to treating them as properties because
for each property \(F\), there's a set of centered worlds that
includes a given \(\langle w,t,i\rangle\) triple iff \(i\) has \(F\)
at \(t\) in \(w\), and for each set of centered worlds, there's
a property that's shared by all and only those individuals in
those worlds at those times. (Note that this requires a plenitudinous
ontology of properties, to which Lewis is already independently
committed. Those who subscribe to enough Lewisian metaphysics can
also, equivalently, treat the objects of belief as sets of worldbound
time-slices.) We will call a set of centered worlds a
*centered-worlds proposition* or a *centered
proposition*, and a belief with a centered-worlds proposition as
its content a *centered belief*.



Lewis (1979) argues that properties/centered-worlds propositions can
do all of the attitude-characterizing work of traditional
possible-worlds propositions, and more besides. For each
possible-worlds proposition *P*, there's a corresponding
property (centered-worlds proposition)--the property of
inhabiting a *P*-world, a.k.a. the set of triples \(\langle
w,t,i\rangle\) such that \(w\) is a *P*-world. But there are
also more properties and centered-worlds propositions--ones that
sometimes distinguish between worldmates, such that one individual in
a world has the property and another doesn't, or such that an
individual in a world has the property at some times but not others.
Let's call the first kind of property or centered proposition
*boring* and the second kind *interesting*. Where a
possible-worlds proposition would do as an object of belief, the
corresponding boring property or centered proposition will do as well
(see Nolan 2006 for dissent, and Turner 2010 and Feit 2010 for
defense). So every doxastic state that we could represent using belief
relations to possible-worlds propositions--every one that
appeared in the Simple Picture--we can also represent using
belief relations to boring properties or boring centered propositions.
But having properties or centered propositions as objects of belief
gives us additional resources we can use to represent doxastic states
that resisted characterization using the Simple Picture.



For example: What's missing in ignorance cases is an interesting
centered belief--it's a state of *believing
*P** for an interesting centered proposition *P*. In
the messy shopper example, Perry's realization puts him in the
belief relation to the property *being the messy shopper* (or
to the corresponding centered-worlds proposition). In the case of the
two gods, the gods are belief-related to all the right boring
world-occupancy properties, but they're not belief-related to
all the right interesting properties. The manna-throwing god on the
tallest mountain, for example, isn't belief-related to *being
on the tallest mountain* or *throwing manna*.



What's different in difference cases is interesting centered
beliefs--it's a difference in states of *believing
*P** for interesting centered propositions *P*. In
the case of John and David and the bear, John and David are both
belief-related to *inhabiting a world in which John is being
attacked by a bear while David looks on*, but only John is
belief-related to *being attacked by a bear*, while only David
is belief-related to *being an unattacked witness to a bear
attack*. This case highlights how "self-locating"
belief isn't just about geographical self-location. On
Lewis's framework self-locating beliefs relate individuals to
properties of the form, *being such-and-such*, as opposed to
properties of the form, *inhabiting a world in which so-and-so
person is such-and-such*. For example, *having written the
Treatise*, rather than *inhabiting a world in which Hume wrote
the Treatise*. (Annoying complication: we need to qualify and
restrict to values of *such-and-such* where it's a
condition that's not necessarily satisfied by all individuals in
a world at all times if it's satisfied by any individual in that
world at any time.)



What's the same in sameness cases is interesting centered
beliefs--it's a similarity in states of *believing
*P** for interesting centered propositions *P*. In
the burning pants case, all of the people who sincerely exclaim
"my pants are on fire!" (and are disposed towards the
associated non-verbal behaviors) are belief-related to *having
burning pants*. Hume and Heimson are both belief-related to
*being Hume*, and to *having written the Treatise*.



This will generalize to the non-doxastic attitudes as well--if we
take the objects of propositional attitudes generally to be properties
or centered-worlds propositions, we can handle the cases of
similarities and differences in desire (etc.) that resisted
characterization in terms of attitudes toward possible-worlds
propositions in the same way as we handle the recalcitrant
similarities and differences in belief.


### 3.2 Belief states



Perry recommends that instead of complicating our picture of the
objects of belief, we complicate our picture of the belief relation.
On Perry's view, a proper doxastic theory focuses not just on
the propositions to which we stand in the belief relation, but also on
the mechanisms by which we come to be belief-related to those
propositions.



Perry's solution emphasizes that once we're externalists
about belief content, determination of what we believe is a two-part
affair: Which propositions we're belief-related to depends
partially on what we're like intrinsically, and partially on how
we're situated in our environment.



Some of our states--in particular, states of our internal
mechanisms of mental representation--determine not what we
believe, but instead a function from environments to things believed.
Perry calls these *belief-states*. Belief-states are
individuated by something like Kaplanian characters (Kaplan
1989)--functions from environments (contexts) to propositions a
believer would be belief-related to if they were in that state in that
environment.



While this is deliberately *not* built into the theory,
it's natural (and sometimes heuristically helpful) to think of
belief-states in terms of tokenings of language-of-thought sentences
with context-sensitive elements. (More generally, it's natural
to think of them as particular patterns of deployment of one's
internal representational apparatus.)



According to Perry, what's distinctive about distinctively
self-locating beliefs is a particular sort of belief-state--a
belief-state that belief-relates agents to different propositions in
different contexts. Instead of focusing our theoretical attention
exclusively on which propositions subjects believe, we focus also on
which belief-states they're in. And it's at the level of
belief-states that we find the tools for accommodating cases that make
trouble for the Simple Picture.



To explain how Perry's view addresses difficulties for the
Simple Picture, we need a way of talking about belief-states. Perry
uses English sentences to talk about belief-states, by indexing
belief-states to English sentences with the same
character--English sentences displaying the same pattern of
dependence of content on context as the belief-states. So the
belief-state corresponding to "I am the messy shopper" is
the belief-state such that, for any subject *x* who is in that
state, *x* is thereby belief-related to the proposition
*that *x* is the messy shopper*.



On this view, what's missing in ignorance cases isn't a
belief, but a belief-state. When Perry realizes what's happening
in the supermarket, he doesn't (at least, he needn't) come
to believe any new propositions, but he does come to be in a new
belief-state. He comes to be in the "I am the messy
shopper" state, and thereby believes the proposition *that
Perry is the messy shopper*. (He may have already had a belief
with that content, but if so it will have been in virtue of being in a
different belief-state.) It's a change in belief-state, not just
a change (if any) in propositions believed, that's responsible
for Perry's changed behavior.



Another example to illustrate the idea: Gennaro looks in a mirror,
thinking he's looking through a window, and sees flames creeping
up the pants leg of the person he sees in the glass. At first he says,
"that guy's pants are on fire", and is in the
"that guy's pants are on fire" belief-state. He
thereby comes to believe the traditional proposition *that
Gennaro's pants are on fire.* Then he realizes what's
happening, and comes to be in the "my pants are on fire"
belief-state. There's no change in which propositions he
believes--he's still belief-related to the traditional
proposition *that Gennaro's pants are on fire*. But
because he's now belief-related to that proposition by way of
the "my pants are on fire" belief-state, his behavior
changes.



The difference in difference cases isn't a difference in
propositions believed, but in belief-states. John and David are both
belief-related to the proposition *that David is witnessing
John's being attacked by a bear*. But the belief-states that
support their being belief-related to that proposition are different.
David is in (for example) the "I am witnessing that guy's
being attacked by a bear" belief-state, while John is in the
"that guy is witnessing my being attacked by a bear"
belief-state. This difference in belief-states generates the
differences in their behavior.



What's the same in sameness cases is a belief-state, not a
proposition believed. When Gennaro and Hector both exclaim, "my
pants are on fire", and engage in similar associated behavior,
it's because they are both in the "my pants are on
fire" belief-state. Being in that belief-state gets them
belief-related to different propositions. It relates Gennaro to the
proposition *that Gennaro's pants are on fire*, while it
relates Hector to the proposition *that Hector's pants are on
fire*. So the similarity is to be found at the level of
belief-states, not at the level of propositions believed.


### 3.3 Other options



There are other theoretical options in the literature. See for example
those offered in Recanati (2007), Higginbotham (1995, 2010), Chisholm
(1981), and Stalnaker (2008). But the Lewis/Perry contrast, where
Lewis responds by complicating the objects of belief, and Perry
responds by complicating the relations between believers and objects
of belief, provides a useful classificatory scheme. Like Lewis,
Recanati and Chisholm propose a more complicated account of content
than that of the Simple Picture, though their proposed alternatives
differ. Higginbotham's token reflexive account is, we think,
usefully grouped with Perry's view as accounting for
self-locating phenomena with the mechanisms by which believers are
related to the objects of belief; though again, the theoretically
load-bearing features of the relations are different.
Stalnaker's (2008) account also likely belongs with
Perry's. Rather than going into detail about other accounts of
self-locating belief, we refer the interested reader to the works
cited above.


## 4. Another Motivation: Immunity to Error Through Misidentification



Lewis and Perry overlap extensively on their motivations for their
views: Both are focused on cases of ignorance, doxastic difference,
and doxastic similarity that aren't happily captured in terms of
states of *believing *P** for traditional propositions
*P*. But not all theorists of self-locating belief are
motivated in the same way.



Another source of motivation, common in other threads of the
self-location literature, but not prominent in the Lewis/Perry
dialectic, is the phenomenon of immunity to error through
misidentification.



There are a number of influential discussions of this
phenomenon--for some prominent and helpful examples, see
Wittgenstein (1953), Shoemaker (1968), Anscombe (1975), Evans (1982),
Pryor (1999), Recanati (2007), Coliva (2009), Garcia-Carpintero
(2018), and the papers in Prosser and Recanati (2012). For more
thorough discussion than we will offer here, see the supplement
 the scope of immunity to error through misidentification
 to the entry on
 Self-Consciousness.
 For a not-so-thorough introduction of the phenomenon, and how it can
serve to motivate an account of self-locating belief, see below.



Here is a framing of the phenomenon that follows Wittgenstein's
(1953): There are two importantly different kinds of uses of
"I"--uses of "I" as subject and uses of
"I" as object. There's a certain distinctive sort of
error that's possible in the second case but not in the first.
Consider uses of "I" as object, as when I find myself, for
one reason or another, in a tangle of bodies, mistakenly take another
person's arm that I see to be mine, and judge, based on the
arm's visual appearance, "I have a broken arm".
(Perhaps I am participating in a game of Twister gone horribly wrong.)
In this case, my judgment is wrong, and in particular it's wrong
because, though I've correctly perceived that the arm I'm
looking at is broken, I've misidentified whose arm it is. In
uses of "I" as subject, such as when I feel a pain and
judge, "I am in pain", my judgment can't be wrong in
the same way. Maybe I can be wrong about whether that sensation is a
pain, but I can't be wrong about whose sensation it is.
Judgments employing "I" as subject are characterized as
immune to a particular type of error: they are immune to errors
through misidentification.



Subsequent literature has made much more precise the notion of error
through misidentification, and has offered various hypotheses about
exactly which beliefs (if any) are immune to such error. One recurring
thread, though, is that if there's immunity to error through
misidentification, it's intimately bound up with thoughts about
oneself. If there are beliefs immune to error through
misidentification, then a particular class of thoughts about ourselves
are among them.



Francois Recanati (2007 and elsewhere) offers one prominent
account, building on Evans (1982) and Lewis (1979). Recanati
distinguishes between judgments whose contents do and do not contain
an "identification component". Here's one way to
capture the thought: When Francois has a *de re thought*
about Francois --where the content of the judgment is,
e.g., *that Francois has a broken
arm*--that's a thought with an identification
component; the person represented as having a broken arm is explicitly
represented, in the content of the judgment, as Francois. When
Francois has a distinctively self-locating thought, the content
of the judgment is something "identification
free"--something corresponding to, for example, the
property *being in pain*. In the latter case, there's no
danger of error due to misidentification, because there's no
identification-element in the judgment that can be the locus of
misidentification. (See Recanati 1993 and 2007 for Recanati's
full story.)



So the idea that some judgments are immune to misidentification-based
error provides another potential motivation for the introduction of a
distinctive category of self-directed belief: thinking about oneself
as oneself.



Pursuing a different line, Anscombe (1975) suggests that the meanings
of an individual's "I"-thoughts essentially tie them
to that individual's actions, movements, and intentions. Yet
it's not entirely clear how this picture would mesh with the
other accounts and phenomena discussed in this section;
Anscombe's framing of the issues is different from the one
above, and she is explicit that she's not talking about
traditional IEM phenomena such as "I have a headache".


## 5. Self-Location in Language



So far we've discussed issues almost entirely within the
philosophy of mind. This is no accident--the central motivating
phenomena for an account of self-locating belief are phenomena in the
philosophy of mind, and the theoretical proposals for accommodating
those phenomena are proposals in the philosophy of mind (or at least,
are most centrally proposals in the philosophy of mind). Debates about
whether to postulate a distinctive category of self-locating belief,
and about the best theory of that distinctive category, are debates
about the theoretical resources needed to properly characterize
subjects' doxastic states. The arguments we've considered
all maintain that there are mental phenomena--ignorance,
cognitive similarity or difference, immunity to error--that
require special theoretical treatment featuring a particular category
of mental states, the distinctively self-locating beliefs.



Though its first home is in the philosophy of mind, self-locating
belief has also received much attention in linguistics and the
philosophy of language. This is unsurprising, because interesting
phenomena in the philosophy of mind about *belief* are likely
to cast shadows into linguistics and the philosophy of language about
belief *reports*, and the semantics thereof. (Similarly for our
accounts of other sorts of attitudes, and our accounts of the
linguistic devices we use to report them.) There is an extensive
literature here, too large and much of it too technical for us to
summarize. For some points of entry, see Anand and Nevins (2004),
Anand (2007), Castaneda (1966, 1967), Chierchia (1989), Maier
(2009), and Feit (2008).



More specifically, the parts of philosophy of language concerned with
communication--in particular, with the individual or collective
mental states and attitudes that give rise to, and are produced by or
updated in response to, various speech acts--must be sensitive to
what we say about the objects and the structure of those attitudes
when we're doing philosophy of mind. If our philosophy of mind
includes a distinctive category of self-locating belief, that's
liable to raise downstream questions in the philosophy of language,
about (for example) how self-locating beliefs are (or are not)
implicated in the production of various speech acts, how interlocutors
update their self-locating beliefs (or don't) in response to
various speech acts, and about the place of self-locating beliefs in
speakers' communicative intentions or in the conversational
common ground.



The first thing to note here is that there pretty clearly *are*
some self-locating communicative phenomena. (Or at least, it's
pretty clear that if there are self-locating beliefs, then there are
some self-locating communicative phenomena.)



If you grant the existence of self-locating beliefs, then it's
clear that people can systematically and predictably give voice to
their self-locating beliefs by using the right sentences of natural
language. For example, when Muhammad Ali says "I am the
greatest", he's giving voice to a particular self-locating
belief--what Lewis will characterize as a self-attribution of
*being the greatest*, and what Perry will characterize as being
in the "I am the greatest" belief-state. Similarly when I
call the friend I'm supposed to be meeting at the bar and say,
"I'll be there in 15 minutes".



It's also pretty clear that people can systematically and
predictably produce self-locating beliefs in their interlocutors by
using the right sentences of natural language. For example, consider
standard uses of "it's your turn". This utterance
produces in one's interlocutor the state Lewis would
characterize as self-attributing *having the next turn*, and
which Perry would characterize as being in the "it's my
turn" belief-state. Similarly for "you are Rudolph
Lingens", "that's Gilmore Lake", or
"you're muted".



The central philosophical issue about self-locating communication is
that, while there pretty clearly *is* some self-locating
communication, a model of communication that seems obvious and natural
when we're dealing with non-self-locating belief doesn't
straightforwardly generalize to the self-locating case. We'll
start by looking at some examples of self-locating communication, then
present the model of communication that's so appealing when
we're not working with self-locating belief. Then we'll
discuss why that model doesn't generalize, and finally lay out a
selection of responses presently on offer in the literature.


### 5.1 The package-delivery model of communication



Most of the literature around self-locating communication presupposes
a Lewisian account on which what's distinctive about
self-locating beliefs is their distinctively self-locating content. In
what follows, we'll try to remain neutral between Lewisian,
content-based accounts and Perry-style
vehicle/mechanism/mode-of-presentation based accounts. To do this,
we'll need to introduce a bit of stipulatively defined technical
vocabulary.



We will talk, for example, about John's self-locating
*doxastic state* when he's disposed to sincerely say,
"I am the messy shopper"--this is the state that
marks him off as doxastically similar to others who are also disposed
to say "I am the messy shopper" (and to search their own
grocery carts for sources of mess), and as doxastically different from
his pre-cottoning-on self. We'll use "doxastic
state" in a way that's deliberately neutral between
standing in the belief relation to a distinctively self-locating
content, as Lewis would have it, or instead being in a particular
Perry-style belief-state, such that different subjects, when in that
belief-state, are thereby belief-related to different traditional
propositions. We want to use "doxastic state" to talk
about the cognitive states that Lewis and Perry both target with their
theories, without taking a stand on who's offering the right
theoretical account of those states.



We'll follow Perry in using English sentences to identify
particular such doxastic states. So, for example, the "my pants
are on fire" doxastic state is the cognitive state underwriting
dispositions to sincerely assert "my pants are on fire",
to seek out fire extinguishers and turn them on one's lower
parts, etc., which according to Perry is a matter of being in a
belief-state whose character mirrors that of the English sentence, and
according to Lewis is a matter of standing in the belief relation to
the property one needs to instantiate in order to speak truly with the
sentence, given the sentence's actual character (or standing in
the belief relation to the corresponding centered-worlds
proposition).



We can also extend the distinction between *boring* and
*interesting* centered contents from
 section 3.1
 to doxastic states--this will be useful in what follows. A
*boring* doxastic state is one that might as well be a state of
believing a traditional proposition. For Lewis, it'll be a state
of believing a boring centered proposition or its corresponding
world-occupancy property. For Perry, it'll be a matter of being
in a belief-state with constant character--one that always
relates its bearers to the same traditional proposition. We identify
these doxastic states using context-insensitive English sentences (for
example, the "John is in Palo Alto" belief-state).
Interesting (or interestingly self-locating) doxastic states are ones
that aren't boring. We identify these states using
context-sensitive English sentences, such as "I am in Palo
Alto". For Lewis, these states belief-relate an agent to an
interesting centered proposition, or its corresponding interesting
property. For Perry, these are belief-states that don't always
relate their bearers to the same traditional proposition.



So much for terminological stipulations. On to a model of
communication that looks attractive when applied to non-self-locating
belief, but which doesn't straightforwardly generalize.



From a very high altitude, linguistic communication (or at least, the
large part of it that's concerned with the transmission of
information) does this: I'm in some doxastic state, and I want
to get you into some appropriately matching doxastic state. Somehow or
other, I use a linguistic signal to get you to adopt a doxastic state
that matches mine.



When we're not dealing with self-location, it's extremely
natural to model communication by reading the "appropriate
match" in this story as identity. On this model, assertion works
as follows: I'm in some doxastic state that, for one reason or
another, I'd like you to be in as well. So I encode my doxastic
state linguistically somehow, and send the linguistic signal over to
you. Then (if all goes well) you respond to the signal I sent by
getting yourself into the same doxastic state that I encoded. This is
a tractable, simple picture of communication, according to which
linguistic communication (or at least this part of it) is a matter of
transmitting doxastic states from speaker to hearer. Moss (2012) calls
this the "package delivery" model, Egan (2007) calls it
the "belief transfer" model, and Weber (2013) calls it the
"FedEx" model. (Or rather, this is a generalization of the
model described by Egan, Moss, and Weber, theoretically zoomed out to
be neutral between Lewis and Perry. Egan, Moss, and Weber all
presuppose a Lewisian picture in their papers.) The model is nicely
visualized by the following cartoon from Weber (2013: 208):



![A 3 box cartoon with each box containing two humans facing each other. The first box has the left figure think 'P', the second has the left figure say 'P', the third has the right figure think 'P'.](weber2013.png)
(c) 2013 Springer Nature, reproduced with permission.




Weber also helpfully breaks up the model into two principles: the
mind-to-speech principle, according to which what's
linguistically expressed is the same as what's in the (sincere)
speaker's mind, and the speech-to-mind principle, according to
which what winds up in the (credulous) addressee's mind is the
same as what's linguistically expressed. We are, in what
follows, going to focus exclusively on the relation between
*doxastic states* of sincere speakers and credulous addressees.
We will suppress, as much as possible, discussion of the precise
relations between speaker/addressee doxastic states and the linguistic
communication mechanisms that serve to coordinate them.



So, in particular, we will suppress questions about the relation
between the compositional semantic values of natural language
sentences in context and the doxastic states of sincere speakers and
credulous addressees. We'll do this not because we find the
issues unimportant or uninteresting--quite the contrary! Rather,
we want to avoid swimming into deep waters about exactly what the
relevant communication-supporting relations are, what they have to do
with semantics, etc., and also to keep the discussion at a level of
abstraction compatible with as many particular theories of the
phenomena as possible. (See Stanley 1997, 2002; Yalcin 2007; Ninan
2010a, 2012a; and Rabern 2012, 2017 for some exploration of those deep
waters, and see for example Egan, Hawthorne, & Weatherson 2005;
Egan 2007, 2010, 2012; Stalnaker 2008, 2011; Feit 2008; Torre 2010;
Ninan 2010b, Stojanovic 2012; Moss 2012; Kindermann 2012, 2016, 2019;
Weber 2013, 2015; Kolbel 2013; and Recanati 2016 for less cagey
and more committal discussions of these issues around self-locating
communication.)


### 5.2 Failures of the package-delivery model



Let's consider where and why the package-delivery model breaks
down for self-locating communication. First we'll examine cases
in which there is clearly some self-locating communication happening,
but the self-locating communication isn't of the type
contemplated by the package-delivery model. Then we'll identify
the general phenomenon behind the package-delivery model's
failure to happily account for these cases.



When Muhammad Ali says "I am the greatest", he's
definitely giving voice to his self-locating doxastic state (which
Lewis would characterize as self-attributing *being the
greatest*), but that doxastic state is not, and is not intended to
be, transferred to his interlocutors. Ali wants his interlocutors to
get in to the "Muhammad Ali is the greatest" doxastic
state, not the "I am the greatest" doxastic state. And
it's the former, not the latter, that addressees who take Ali at
his word will in fact get themselves into.



Similarly, when Bob seeks to resolve Lingens' uncertainty by
saying to him, "you are Rudolph Lingens", his
communicative aim is to get Lingens into the "I am Rudolph
Lingens" doxastic state. But Bob, being no fool, is not himself
in the self-locating doxastic state that he's aiming to produce
in his interlocutor.



In each of these cases, the communication that takes place is
difficult to straightforwardly characterize on a belief
transfer/package-delivery model. The doxastic state that the
cooperative, credulous addressee gets into is not the same as the
self-locating state that motivates the sincere speaker's
utterance, and which the speaker demonstrates or gives voice to by way
of the utterance.



This shouldn't come as a surprise, and it doesn't result
from a quirk or shortcoming of one particular human language, or of
actual human languages as compared to other possible types of
language. There is an in-principle problem with package-delivery
communication of interestingly self-locating doxastic states.
Precisely because they're interestingly self-locating, such
doxastic states aren't the sort of thing that can uniformly be
transmitted from speaker to addressee without leading addressees into
error. This is easiest to see in an extreme case: It's great for
David Hume to be in the "I am David Hume" doxastic state.
It's not so great for anybody else to be in that state, and
it's not great for Hume to put his interlocutors in that state
by communicating it package-delivery style.



A somewhat less extreme example: Suppose I'm in the "my
pants are on fire" doxastic state. I want to communicate my
plight to you so that you'll give me a bucket of water, or a
fire extinguisher. I don't want to get you into the "my
pants are on fire" state--that won't enlist your help
in my pants-extinguishing project, and it will give you inaccurate
beliefs, since your pants (we may suppose) are *not* on fire.
So communicating my self-locating belief via belief transfer will not
achieve my communicative goals.



I want to get you into some *other* doxastic state. Getting you
into the "the pants of the guy addressing me are on fire"
state would likely do the trick, as would getting you into the
"Andy's pants are on fire" state. The communicative
effect of saying "my pants are on fire" is not what would
be predicted by a view on which that sentence's conventional
communicative role is to ensure that both speaker and addressee are in
the "my pants are on fire" doxastic state.



The situation is similar for very many indexical sentences--their
production is clearly motivated (in standard cases) by a particular
self-locating doxastic state, but their communicative role is
emphatically *not* to bring it about that that doxastic state
is shared by both speaker and addressee. The communicative role of
(uses of) typical indexical sentences is not to deliver a
self-locating doxastic package from speaker to addressee.


### 5.3 Alternative models of communication



The literature offers many responses to the failure of self-locating
doxastic states to play nicely with a package-delivery model of
communication. We won't attempt to survey them in detail here.
Instead, we'll present a taxonomy of response-types. The
responses fall into three main categories: *recentering*,
*decentering*, and *restriction*. (There is a fourth
option--*multicentering*--which we will discuss only
briefly, because its distinctive claims and contributions are in its
account of the linguistic mediation between speakers' and
addressees' attitudes. As far as what it says about
speakers' and addressees' attitudes themselves, it's
a version of a recentering account. More about this below.)



This literature typically frames its questions and proposals in a
Lewisian framework. But it's worth emphasizing that the issue of
communicating self-locating beliefs doesn't arise only for the
Lewisian. So we will continue to characterize candidate responses in
Lewis/Perry neutral terms. For points of entry into the literature,
see Heim 2004
 (Other Internet Resources);
 Egan 2007; Feit 2008; Moss 2012; Kindermann 2016; Stojanovic 2012;
Kolbel 2013; the papers in Garcia-Carpintero and Torre
2016; Torre 2010; and Ninan 2010b.



The first move we'll discuss is *recentering* (the first
use of that term we can locate is in Weber 2013). The idea is that
successful communication doesn't require transmission of a
single doxastic state from speaker to addressee. The doxastic state
that motivates sincere assertion needn't be the same as the
doxastic state adopted as a result of credulous uptake. What's
expressed is what the speaker believes, but what the hearer comes to
believe as a result of accepting the assertion is something else. In
credulous, trusting uptake, the addressee doesn't (more
carefully--needn't) come to adopt the doxastic state
expressed by the speaker's sincere assertion, but instead
*recenters*, adopting a doxastic state that stands in a
particular relation to the doxastic state of the speaker, reflecting
the addressee's beliefs about how they and the speaker are
related to one another.



So, for example, when Andy says to Mike, "my pants are on
fire", Andy believes (for example) the interesting *de
se* proposition corresponding to the property, *having burning
pants*. Mike, when he accepts Andy's assertion,
doesn't come to believe what Andy believes. Mike instead comes
to believe a "re-centered" relative of what Andy
believes--the interesting *de se* proposition
corresponding to the property of (for example), *being addressed by
someone with burning pants*. Andy says what he says because he is
in the "my pants are on fire" doxastic state, and wants to
make it the case that Mike is in an appropriately matching state. The
appropriately matching state that Mike, as a credulous addressee,
comes to be in is not the very same state Andy is in, but something
else--for example, the "the guy who just addressed
me's pants are on fire" doxastic state.



How exactly does linguistic communication produce these properly
aligned doxastic states? Multiple proposals are available; we'll
pause for a moment to discuss multicentering accounts. In
*multicentering* models, self-locating communication is
characterized by means of *multicentered* contents--sets
of n-tuples, each of which contains a world, a time, and a
*series* of individuals. We can characterize the content of
Andy's communication to Mike with a set of triples \(\langle
w,t,\langle i\_1,i\_2\rangle \rangle\) such that, in \(w\) at \(t\),
\(i\_1\) is addressing \(i\_2\), and \(i\_1\)'s pants are on fire.
If Andy had instead said, "you are better at basketball than
me", we could model the content with the set of \(\langle
w,t,\langle i\_1,i\_2\rangle \rangle\)s such that, at \(t\) in \(w\),
\(i\_2\) is better at basketball than \(i\_1\). The intuitive idea is
that we characterize communicated content (and conversational common
ground) using sets of set-theoretic objects whose role is to
represent, not a single individual, but an entire conversational
group. They do this by containing, for each participant in the
conversation, an element representing that particular conversational
participant. These objects characterize the state of the whole
conversation, and the effects that utterances have on the state of the
conversation. They don't directly characterize the cognitive
attitudes of particular parties to the conversation--a set of
multicentered worlds is not a good candidate to be an object of belief
for an individual (though see Ninan 2012b for a different application
of the multicentering apparatus to represent *de re*
attitudes). Instead there is a translation from the single set of
multicentered worlds characterizing the state of the conversation to
the various different sets of singly-centered worlds characterizing
the doxastic states of particular parties to the conversation. (When
the conversation is properly characterized by a set of \(\langle
w,t,\langle i\_1,i\_2\rangle \rangle\)s such that, in \(w\) at \(t\),
\(i\_2\) is better at basketball than \(i\_1\), and we're using
the first individual position to represent Andy and the second to
represent Mike, that will mean that Andy self-attributes *being the
worse basketball player in a two-person conversation*, and Mike
self-attributes *being the better basketball player in a two-person
conversation*.)



What's important for our purposes here is that multicentering
accounts describe, in an elegant and compact way, the interlocking
pattern of distinct but systematically related doxastic states of the
particular parties to the conversation. Each party to the conversation
has their own private doxastic states, which are properly
characterized in terms of singly-centered propositions. And in cases
of successful communication, the sincere speaker and credulous
addressee wind up, not in the same doxastic state, but in doxastic
states systematically related to each other, in ways that the
multicentering account is designed to represent. So for our present,
limited purposes--where we are concerned just with the relations
between the doxastic states of speakers and addressees in successful
communication, and are averting our eyes from the details of
linguistic mechanisms that underwrite that communication and take us
from the one to the other, and also from tools that characterize the
overall state of a conversation rather than just the doxastic states
of participants--a multicentering account becomes a way of
implementing a *recentering* account. (There is a lot more to
say about this. See for example Stalnaker 2008, 2014; Torre 2010;
Ninan 2010b, 2012a, 2013; and Kindermann 2012, 2016.)



On *decentering* models, we retain the package-delivery model
of communication, but disallow interestingly self-locating doxastic
states as deliverable objects. The doxastic states linguistically
communicated are all *boring* doxastic states. This allows us
to retain the package-delivery model of communication.



Yet the decenterer acknowledges that there are systematic relations
between interestingly self-locating doxastic states and boring
doxastic states, for both speakers and hearers. The decenterer uses
these connections to explain self-locating communicative effects. On
one way of implementing a decentering model, when Andy says to Mike,
"my pants are on fire", Andy expresses the
"Andy's pants are on fire" doxastic state. (Other
implementations will differ with respect to just which boring doxastic
state is expressed.) And that's the doxastic state that Mike
winds up in as well. But being in the boring "Andy's pants
are on fire" doxastic state is differently connected to
interesting doxastic states for Andy than for Mike. For Andy, given
his total package of self-locating beliefs, being in the
"Andy's pants are on fire" state goes hand in hand
with being in the "my pants are on fire" state. For Mike,
given his total package of self-locating beliefs, being in the
"Andy's pants are on fire" state goes hand in hand
not with the "my pants are on fire" state, but with the
"the guy I'm talking to's pants are on fire"
state.



So while what travels (what's expressed, what's
communicated) is the boring state, being in that boring state goes
along with being in a particular interestingly self-locating state for
the speaker, and with a different interestingly self-locating state
for the addressee. Moss (2012), working in a Lewisian framework, puts
it this way: a *de se* belief is, always, for any particular
believer, going to be "equivalent given certainties" to
some *de dicto* belief of theirs. (In the present framework,
*de se* beliefs play the role of interestingly self-locating
doxastic states, and *de dicto* beliefs the role of boring
doxastic states.) What travels in communication is the *de
dicto* belief, which is liable to be equivalent given certainties
to one *de se* belief for speaker, and another for addressee.
Note that this requires that there's always, for every believer
and every *de se* belief, a *de dicto* proxy belief
available that's equivalent to that *de se* belief for
that speaker, given what the speaker is certain of. All decenterers
must take on something like this substantive commitment to get their
program off the ground (see Stalnaker 2008 and Moss 2012 for details).
Stalnaker (2008) concedes that this approach requires countenancing
haecceties (see entry on
 haecceitism),
 which not everyone will be comfortable with. (See also Weber 2015;
Pagin 2016; and Torre 2018 for criticism of the commitment to the
availability of non-self-locating proxies.)



The general decentering strategy is to take self-locating attitudes
out of the story about communication, and put them in the story about
relations between what's communicated and the
interlocutors' private belief-states. Everybody allows, and
needs to allow, that speakers and hearers have their own proprietary
doxastic states. And everybody allows, and needs to allow, that which
doxastic commitments a speaker displays in asserting what they
believe, and which other doxastic commitments a hearer incurs by
accepting what's asserted, are going to be highly
interpersonally variable. (If you and I are acquainted with different
members of this term's introduction to philosophy class, which
*de re* beliefs we're committed to when we both accept
*that every member of the class passed the exam* is going to be
different.) The decenterer solves the problem of self-locating
beliefs' making trouble for the package-delivery model by making
self-locating beliefs ineligible for (direct) communication, then
explaining self-locating communicative effects via uncentered
communication's knock-on effects for interlocutors'
private self-locating beliefs.



We'll call the third response-type *restriction*.
Restriction approaches preserve the package-delivery model, but
don't uniformly disallow interestingly self-locating doxastic
states as objects of communication. Restrictionists take the fact that
assertions of "my pants are on fire" don't lead to
credulous addressees getting into the "my pants are on
fire" doxastic state to be a reason to think that the English
sentence doesn't conventionally communicate the self-locating
doxastic state. But they don't go on to impose a blanket ban on
self-locating doxastic states as objects of communication, and they
allow that other sentences might conventionally encode other
self-locating doxastic states as objects of package-delivery-model
communication. So while the "I am Mike Titelbaum" and
"I am the greatest" doxastic states are more-or-less
uniformly disastrous as objects of package-delivery communication,
package-delivery communication of the "we are in
Amsterdam", "it's getting hot in here", and
"that's Gilmore Lake" states, for example, would
quite frequently be unproblematic, and even quite useful.



Restriction models aim to rule out, not self-locating doxastic states
generally, but only the troublemaking ones, as objects of
communication. They retain the package-delivery model, but say that
some of a speakers' doxastic states are bad candidates for
linguistic communication.



Restrictionists take on two central commitments: First, we
shouldn't expect to find natural language devices for
communicating self-locating doxastic states that are systematically
troublemaking (such as the "I am David Hume" state).
Second, we should expect to see a distinctive sort of conversational
defectiveness in assertions of self-locating contents that are locally
troublemaking (Egan 2007, 2010).



For example: Doxastic states such as the "I am the
speaker" state or the "I am fifty years old" state
are extremely likely to be troublemaking if asserted on a
package-delivery model, because it's extremely likely that not
all the participants in a conversation will believe truly by being in
them. The fact that the speaker has the property one must have in
order to believe truly by being in those doxastic states is not
strongly correlated with the speaker's addressees having it, and
so it's very likely that if these states were communicated by
package delivery, a package would get delivered that the recipient
ought not to accept.



However, doxastic states such as the "we are in
Amsterdam", "it's getting hot in here", or
"that's Gilmore Lake" states are less likely to be
troublemaking. That's because participants in a conversation are
frequently (though not so frequently as at earlier points in human
technological history) geographically very close to each other,
experiencing similar environmental conditions, and attending to the
same geographical features.



So package-delivery transmissions of the "I am the
speaker", "I am fifty years old", etc. doxastic
states should be problematic, and we shouldn't expect to see
them very often, we shouldn't expect to see natural language
constructions that are in the business of expressing them, and we
should expect them to be marked as defective on any occasions where
they do take place. Package-delivery transmissions of the "we
are in Amsterdam" and "it's getting hot in
here" doxastic states, on the other hand, shouldn't be (or
shouldn't systematically be) problematic. And so we should (says
the restrictionist) be open to the possibility of natural language
constructions conventionally expressing them, and we should expect any
such constructions to display a distinctive sort of defectiveness in
the (not-super-frequent) situations when the speaker and their
audience are different in the relevant respect. (Other kinds of
self-locating doxastic states that have been suggested as objects of
package-delivery communication by recenterers include the "that
tastes good to me" state and the "I don't have
evidence that rules out rain" state. See Egan 2007 and
2010--though he doesn't quite describe things in these
terms.)



Concluding this section on self-location in language: Self-locating
beliefs introduce complications in accounts of belief reporting.
(Similarly for other attitudes and reports thereof.) Also, some
self-locating communicative phenomena need to be accounted for in our
philosophy of language. Those won't be accounted for
straightforwardly by a package-delivery/belief-transfer model.
We'll need some extra resources to do that, and it's
controversial which resources are best suited for the job. Above,
we've introduced the issue and some of the main proposals for
resolving it. Readers interested in exploring these topics further
might start with the papers contained in Garcia-Carpintero and
Torre (2016), as well as the others papers cited above.


## 6. Self-Location in Decision Theory and Formal Epistemology



Among the many things that happen in his 1979 paper, Lewis makes the
following comment in passing:



> 
> 
> It is interesting to ask what happens to decision theory if we take
> all attitudes as *de se*. Answer: very little. We replace the
> space of worlds by the space of centered worlds, or by the space of
> all inhabitants of worlds. All else is just as before. Whatever the
> points of the space of possibilities may be, we have probability
> distributions over the space and assignments of utility values to the
> points. For any rational agent at any time there is a pair of a
> probability distribution and a utility assignment. The probabilities
> change under the impact of his perception; the probabilities and
> utilities jointly govern his action. (1979: 534)
> 
> 
> 



Yet incorporating self-locating attitudes into decision theory takes a
little more work than the "very little" Lewis supposed (as
Lewis himself acknowledged in a footnote to his 1996 (n. 6, pp.
309-10)). The trouble comes when we ask how self-locating
doxastic states change over time. Formal decision theories have
updating rules to manage these transitions. We will focus on how
self-locating states interact with Bayesian updating rules (see entry
on
 Bayesian epistemology);
 similar problems arise on other updating formalisms of which we are
aware.



Start with a Lewisian approach to self-locating states. Decision
theory works with numerical degrees of belief--or
"credences"--rather than full beliefs. Following
Lewis, we may distribute credences over a space of centered worlds (or
properties) rather than uncentered possible worlds. On this approach,
when John learns that he is the messy shopper, his credence in the
centered proposition associated with "I am the messy
shopper" increases dramatically. The Bayesian updating rule
called "Conditionalization" handles this transition
easily. For instance, we can model John as conditionalizing on that
centered proposition, sending it from a middling or low degree of
confidence in his mind to certainty.



The trouble comes when we go in the other direction.
Conditionalization famously sends propositions to certainty then keeps
them there ever-after. Suppose that around 11:30 am, Perry's
professor is certain of the proposition associated with "It is
not now noon". On Lewis's approach, the professor loses
confidence in that proposition as time passes. But Conditionalization
cannot model drops from certainty to lower degrees of confidence.
(Similarly, Conditionalization cannot model increases from no credence
to a positive value, so when the time comes to recognize that
it's noon and go to his meeting, the professor won't be
able to do that either.)



Conditionalization was designed to model an idealized process in which
agents accumulate information to hone in on non-self-locating
hypotheses whose truth-values remain constant (e.g., *the atomic
number of lead is 82*). The model founders when propositions
change their truth-values as the accumulation occurs.
Conditionalization wasn't designed to hit moving targets.
Neither, for that matter, was Jeffrey's (1965)
"probability kinematics"; Namjoong Kim (2009) shows that
Jeffrey's update rule fails just as badly as Conditionalization
when applied to credences in Lewisian centered propositions. (Of
course, decision theory involves not only credence but also utility
assignments, and the latter may be self-locating just as easily as the
former. Decision theories usually assume that utility distributions
remain constant, and so typically have not bothered to offer utility
updating schemes. But if we introduce utilities in self-locating
propositions--I'd get higher utility from addressing that
problem *tomorrow* than *today*--then such updating
schemes may become needed!)



Perhaps the culprit is taking self-locating attitudes to be directed
at such moving targets; perhaps self-locating credences are not
attitudes adopted towards Lewisian propositions. Since around
2008--spurred in large part by Elga's (2000) introduction
of the "Sleeping Beauty Problem" to the philosophical
literature--a number of self-locating update schemes have been
proposed. Most work with formal models built on Lewisian contents,
though some authors have employed other structures: Chalmers (2011)
primary intensions; Braun (2016) Russellian propositions with guises;
Stalnaker (2008) more complex centered-worlds constructions.
Nevertheless, as of this writing a general consensus has emerged that
no matter what theoretical account one gives of doxastic states, the
Bayesian updating rules of Conditionalization and Jeffrey
Conditionalization will have to be amended or supplemented in some
way.



To understand the rival amendments proposed, return to our
 section 5
 discussion of communication, and imagine that the individuals
coordinating doxastic states are an earlier and later edition of the
same agent. In linguistic communication we usually think of a
speaker's utterance as directly producing a single doxastic
state in the addressee, then indirectly producing knock-on addressee
states which follow from that one. Communication from an earlier to a
later self doesn't have this bottleneck structure; the present
me directly inherited a whole slew of doxastic states from myself a
moment ago. Still, in formal updating it's useful to start by
aligning just one of the later agent's states with a state of
the earlier agent, then to work out the rest of the later
agent's states from that one.



For instance, Kim (2009) adopts a recentering approach, on which an
agent's Thursday credence *that it rained yesterday* is
coordinated with her Wednesday credence *that it rains today*.
Other credences of the later self (e.g., credence *that it rains on
Wednesday*) may be worked out from that one. (Further recentering
approaches are offered by Meacham 2010; Schulz 2010; and Schwarz
2012.) Halpern (2005) and Meacham (2008), on the other hand, adopt
decentering approaches on which the crucial updating step coordinates
credences in uncentered propositions (*that it rains on
Wednesday*). Stalnaker (2008) and Moss (2012) offer decentered
variants in which the crucial uncentered propositions are *de
re* (*it rains on* that *day*). Titelbaum (2013a)
develops a restriction model, focused on the transfer of
"epistemically context-insensitive" doxastic
states--states that both the earlier and later selves are certain
do not change truth-values between the two times. (The category of
"epistemically context-sensitive" may also include states
beyond the explicitly self-locating. For instance, an epistemologist
who's a contextualist about knowledge attributions may
anticipate that the truth-value of "Bob knows he has
hands" will change across contexts.) Titelbaum articulates
conditions under which epistemically context-insensitive states can be
trusted to convey all the relevant information from earlier to later
self, and discusses how to update when these conditions aren't
met.



For a survey of the strengths and blindspots of all these updating
approaches, see Titelbaum (2016). To get a sense how one might argue
for some of the approaches over others, see Briggs (2010) and Kierland
& Monton (2005). For applications of self-locating update to other
philosophical topics of interest (indifference principles, quantum
mechanics, the multiverse, etc.), see Titelbaum (2013b).


## 7. Objections



The positive accounts concerning self-locating belief we've
described above (Lewis' and Perry's, the accounts of
communication, the accounts of updating, etc.) each face their own
specific objections and challenges. Here, however, we take up
objections to the main argumentative thread pursued in this piece:
that cases of ignorance, similarity, and difference require us to
recognize a distinctive category of self-locating belief.



We have assessed this as a thesis in the philosophy of mind. Yet
it's easy for this thesis to become conflated with various
theses in the philosophy of language, and thus for arguments against
the need for special linguistic constructions to express self-locating
attitudes to be mistaken for arguments that such attitudes don't
exist to begin with. (Here it doesn't help that many of
Perry's key examples appear in the course of his argument for an
"essential indexical".)



Millikan (1990), for instance, argues that self-locating attitudes
(doxastic or otherwise) could exist without the presence of indexicals
in either communicative language or the language of thought (if there
be such). She imagines creatures, each of whom has a special name for
themselves--a name employed in all and only their self-locating
thoughts and expressions. For instance, John might employ the name
"JP" whenever he thinks or speaks a self-locating thought
about himself, and never otherwise; while David might use
"DL", etc. We can imagine that these creatures'
language entirely lacks expressions whose characters shift across
contexts (in the sense of Kaplan 1989).



If Millikan is right that such creatures could exist, then it seems
the cases of ignorance, similarity, and difference we've
identified could perhaps occur without necessitating any indexicals,
used either among the actors in the examples or among the theorists
describing the cases. Notice, however, that this is not an argument
against the existence of self-locating attitudes; it is simply an
argument that self-locating attitudes could exist without the
attendant presence of indexicals.



Similarly, a number of authors have argued that the cases that seem to
call for self-locating beliefs are "just Frege cases"
(Millikan 1990: 730; Devitt 2013; Magidor 2015; and especially
Cappelen & Dever 2013). Cappelen and Dever offer the following
parallel case to Perry's messy shopper:



> 
> 
> Pushing my cart down the aisle I was looking for CK to tell him he was
> making a mess. I kept passing by Superman, but couldn't find CK.
> Finally, I realized, Superman was CK. I believed at the outset that CK
> was making a mess. And I was right. But I didn't believe that
> Superman was making a mess. That seems to be something that I came to
> believe. And when I came to believe that, I stopped looking around and
> I told Superman to clean up after himself. My change in beliefs seems
> to explain my change in behavior. (Cappelen & Dever 2013: 33)
> 
> 
> 



The objection seems to be that the motivating cases for self-locating
belief don't do anything new; they don't highlight any
phenomena we shouldn't already have been aware of from decades
of study of Frege's puzzle. We know from that puzzle that our
theory of content needs to accommodate multiple ways of referring to
the same object, and that cases of ignorance, similarity, and
difference can arise from such multiplicity. While there are plenty of
debates about which theory of propositions handles this puzzle best,
your preferred mechanism for solving that puzzle should equally well
handle the motivating cases above--or so the objection goes.



This line might succeed as an objection against the claim that cases
of self-location require us to modify our theory of propositions (as,
for instance, Lewis suggests). Perhaps if we had a theory of
propositions that successfully handled Frege puzzles, it would apply
*mutatis mutandis* to these cases as well. (Though see Shaw
2019 for a denial of this concession.) But that is no argument against
the existence of a distinctive category of self-locating beliefs.



To see why, let's focus on one theory of propositions that
purports to address Frege cases (a similar point could be made on any
other such theory). Imagine that propositions are Russellian, but are
believed under guises. So I might believe *de re* of someone
that their pants are on fire, and also see on a Zoom call that
someone's pants are on fire. If the person about whom I have the
*de re* belief is also the unfortunate Zooming individual, then
I believe the same proposition under two guises--one *de
re* and one descriptive (with the relevant description being
something like *the guy on Zoom*).



Put in terms of guise theory, the cases of ignorance, similarity, and
difference seem to show that there exists a distinctive category of
attitudes whose propositional contents are not believed under *de
re* or descriptive guises. When Perry realizes that he is the one
making a mess, he does not come to believe the proposition that Perry
is making a mess under the guise *that John Perry is making a
mess*, nor does he come to believe that proposition under the
*de re* guise *that that guy is making a mess*. To
account for Perry's new doxastic state, we need to recognize a
distinctive type of belief that is not a state of believing a
proposition under a descriptive or *de re* guise. We can
concede that self-locating beliefs are still beliefs in propositions
under guises, understood as guise theory wants to understand them in
its proposed response to Frege puzzles. But that does not keep them
from being a distinctive category of beliefs.



Cappelen and Dever do, however, offer a distinct line of attack that
bears directly on the existence of self-locating doxastic states.
(Their attack builds upon suggestions in Magidor 2015.) Many of our
cases of ignorance, similarity, and difference cite as evidence for
the presence of significant self-locating beliefs an action performed
by an agent. That Perry has resolved his ignorance about the identity
of the messy shopper is indicated by his rearranging a sack; the
difference between my taking my own pants to be on fire and my
friend's taking my pants to be aflame is indicated by my
dropping to the ground and rolling around; etc. In each case, it is
eventually argued that these actions cannot be entirely explained by
descriptive or *de re* cognitive states, and thus that we need
to attribute self-locating beliefs to the agents in question in order
explain their actions. More generally, there is a consistent
suggestion across the self-location literature that self-locating
cognitive states play a central, and crucial, role in action
explanation.



Cappelen and Dever deny that self-locating doxastic states play any
role in action explanation, hoping to thwart some of the main
motivating cases for asserting that such doxastic states exist. They
begin by asking us to imagine a god whose doxastic states are all of
the type envisioned by the Simple Picture--binary relations
between the believer and objects of belief that are traditional
propositions. This god



> 
> 
> can bring about states of the world just by intending them or maybe
> just by thinking them. The god thinks, "The door is
> closed", and straightaway the door is closed. (2013: 37)
> 
> 
> 



It seems this god could perform all sorts of
actions--intentionally bring about all sorts of states of
affairs--without having any self-locating representations at
all.



Yet the actions of non-omnipotents are a bit more difficult to
explain. Why, when my friend and I both realize my pants are aflame,
do I but not he drop to the ground and roll? Cappelen and Dever deny
that this is because I possess some special self-representing
cognitive state that my friend lacks. They trace the difference in
action not to a difference in belief or desire, but instead to a
difference in ability. Both my friend and I believe that Mike's
pants are aflame, and both of us desire that Mike drop to the ground
and roll around. But Mike has the ability to make that happen, while
Andy lacks that ability (at least directly--Andy can do things
like shout at Mike in an effort to induce dropping and rolling); so
Mike does it and Andy doesn't. Cappelen and Dever suggest that
one can explain all the differences in action here without invoking
self-locating self-representations at any point.



One might be dubious that such an explanatory strategy can be
successfully executed all the way through--can we really tell the
*whole* story of an action without invoking self-locating
representation at any stage? Will this work across all examples of
human action, and all action descriptions we might be inclined to use?
(See Torre 2018 and Ninan 2016 for doubts on each front.)
There's also a tricky question here about argumentative burdens,
and what's required to discharge them. Suppose it's
granted that there *could* be agents--like Cappelen and
Dever's god--who performed intentional actions without
possessing any self-locating doxastic attitudes. One might still
maintain that real-life humans employ self-locating representations in
their practical deliberations, and perhaps that we are wired up so as
to be incapable of intentionally acting without invoking self-locating
attitudes. (*Indexicals* might not be essential for
*all* agents, but *self-locating attitudes* might be
essential for *us*.)



Is this an empirical question about human agential psychology? (And
are there interesting, related questions about animals and infants?)
Or could we argue for self-locating attitudes on the grounds that
including them in our theory of mind makes that theory simpler, more
unified, and more fruitful? When we look not just at immediate action
generation, but across the whole spectrum of an agent's
practical deliberation--her hopes, plans, goals, and
aspirations--there certainly seems to be a disproportionate focus
on how events affect one particular individual, and what that
individual is capable of. The various motivational stories we've
cited suggest that that individual's experiences and abilities
factor into her cognitive architecture in ways that others'
experiences and abilities don't (or don't nearly as
frequently), and in ways that explain her actions without explaining
the actions of others (or explaining them in the same way). Perhaps
theories of mind are possible that account for all these patterns of
similarity and difference without postulating self-locating beliefs.
But it may also be that theories of self-locating belief are the best
explanations of these phenomena currently on offer.