Indispensible Indexicals

(Maybe this is just more on Moore's Paradox ...)

Traditional approaches to formalising natural language have tended to treat indexicals as a kind of short-hand: as though they can always be substituted with non-contextual names or descriptions without changing the sense of the embedding expression.

I'm not sure whether this presumption has ever been thoroughly examined.  What would a language without indexicals look like?  If we always referred to ourselves by name, or by description, for instances ...

There would be an important epistemological difficulty, arising from the point I have made in earlier posts about Kripke's rule following argument:  While 'Mary is talking to John' is a corrigible intentional description of their behaviour, 'I am talking to you' is not.


Only the first and second person have this character - 'They are having a conversation' is subject to behavioural justification in a way in which 'We are having a conversation', or 'I am talking to you' are not.  We can probably alwasy replace 'they' with a context free name or description, but not so 'I' or 'you'.

If this is correct, then not only are the first and second person indexicals not dispensable, but their role is epistemologically fundamental.