Language, Action and Thought

Is the second person an irreducible feature of our linguistic interactions? Using Perry’s terminology, is the second person an essential indexical? Heck has argued for a negative answer. Although we cannot simply extend Perry’s argument to the second person, we cannot replace second person sentences by third person sentences in joint actions. More precisely, second person sentences classify mental states that are essential to joint actions, but this is also a move that is needed for the first person anyway: the utterance of a first person sentence is not essential to Perry’s argument. I will argue that there is a kind of “thinking for speaking” that goes well beyond the use of second person sentences and explain the mutual effort to build a common ground in a conversation. Conversations require for each speaker to have in mind what her interlocutor is thinking, or, better, to respond to her interlocutor’s reactions, as the conversation unfolds. This kind of “thinking for speaking” explains the plan a speaker deploys, and it may be represented in a pluripropositionalist framework.