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Chapter 1 presents indexicalism as idea that the world is ultimately best described in terms of indexical expressions like 'here', 'you', 'now', 'outside', 'same' or 'other'. Substantive descriptions are appropriate to think things through only to the extent that they have an implicit indexicality. Indexical expressions are context-dependent and therefore thoroughly situated. Indexicalism is a paradoxico-metaphysics in the terms defined by Cogburn; it can also be seen as a critique of metaphysics if metaphysics aims at a general, substantive view of how things are and they are such that no substantive description is adequate. Indexicalism draws from elements of Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism – especially the notion of locus standi in the theory of measurement – of Levinas’ account of the asymmetric Other and of Perry and Kaplan’s work on demonstratives and implicit indexicality. An indexicalist image of things has no space for total, third-person views of everything. The postulated absolute is deictic.

Chapter 2 provides an elaboration of the metahysics of the others that follows from indexicalism. The analysis the others as an indexical entail a recommendation of the injunction formulated by Anna Tsing: tell the world with the best of one’s capacities and leave space in the ground for alternative narratives. The injunction, in its turn, is connected to Amerindian perspectivism and its insistence in the deictic character of any narrative. The metaphysics of the others is contrasted to Meillassoux’s speculative materialism and a method of bound speculation is then outlined. The chapter engages with Deleuze’s analysis of Michel Tournier’s Robinson Crusoe to discuss how the others relate to the Great Outdoors. In order to step from the Levinasian Other to the Great Outdoors, two approaches are examined: the one around Silvia Benso’s attempt to expand Levinas’ approach to faces to all things and the one provided by Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘supplement’.

This chapter investigates possible semantic implementations of epistemic contextualism (EC). To begin with, the chapter introduces Kaplan’s distinction between character and content and uses this distinction to illustrate the need for a more detailed semantic account of the context-sensitivity of ‘knowledge’-attributions. Views discussed are fancy contextualism and classical contextualism, which is analysed further into indexicalism and radical contextualism. Indexicalism is then shown to be the version of EC discussed most widely in the literature. Different versions of indexicalism are distinguished—namely, strict indexicalism and so-called hidden variables accounts (scalar indexicalism, quantificational indexicalism, and contrastivism). Section 2.5 concludes the chapter by providing a diagram representing the most important semantic implementations of EC and their interrelations.