Indexical Beliefs and Communication: Against Stalnaker on Self-Location

© 2014 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LLC. Beliefs are commonly analyzed as binary relations between subjects and propositions. Perry and Lewis have shown that the standard account has difficulties in handling self-locating beliefs. Robert Stalnaker has recently put forward a version of the standard account that is supposed to overcome this problem. Stalnaker's motivation for defending the propositional account of belief is that it comes with a simple and powerful propositional model of communication. In this paper I argue that Stalnaker's proposal fails. The only way of upholding the propositional account of belief is by abandoning the simple account of communication. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.