De re Necessity and de se Intention: Defending a Further Restricted Essential Indexical Thesis

Abstract

“Essential Indexical Thesis” is a label for a collection of theses claiming there are essential connections between explanations of actions and the first-person perspective (or de se mental state). Recently there are two notable defences for essential indexical theses: Babb’s defence of the thesis that all intentional actions are essentially indexical, and Francescotti’s defence of the thesis that necessarily all intention-to actions have de se origin. Through a critical examination of these defences, I discover that although Francescotti has defended a de dicto claim that “necessarily, an intention-to action results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, his defence remains compatible with the de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily results from an intention that necessarily has de se content”, because his defence fails to eliminate another de re claim that “no (first-order) action necessarily is an intention-to action.” Since Francescotti’s defence is compatible with the first de re claim, the essential indexical thesis he defends is vulnerable to the risk brought up by this de re claim: if the first de re claim is true, then no (first-order) action is necessarily/essentially indexical in Francescotti's sense. To fix this problem, I demonstrate that some (first-order) actions, for example, looking-for and pursuit, necessarily are intention-to actions. Then I propose my defence for a new essential indexical thesis called the further restricted essential indexical thesis.