"You are here"

 Maps with big red dots saying "You are there" make no sense. They can only say “You are here”. Why?

You are here! Niseko Station, Hokkaido
David McKelvey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 2010)

According to Casati (forthcoming), it is because of the way the map is drawn, you can only understand the map (and read the sign that says “you are here”) if you are close enough, and if you are that close the truth of the claim that “you are here” is warranted. That is how you KNOW that that part of the map represents your current location. But, Casati adds, situation is not the only way to achieve epistemic segregation.

Consider a map on a huge billboard on top of a distant building or, even farther away, drawn on the surface of the moon in such a way that it can be seen from many different places with a huge red dot saying “you are here” such that it can be seen both from places corresponding to the red dot in the map (which is actually pretty far from where the map is actually located) and places that are not. People wrongly located can use the map to extract wrong information about their location. People properly located can use the map to extract true but unjustified (i.e. Gettierized) information about their location. But finally, people can also use the map to extract true and unjustified information about their location IF someone else happens (so that they know that, for example, the billboard is directed towards them or at least toward people located in the same place as them; for example, if it says “George Carlson is located here on May 31st, 2021, 13:27”). Therefore, Casati concludes, in cases like this, the red dot is epistemically segregated not by the location of the dot (which is not identical to its referent, after all. The billboard is pretty far from the people) but by a more complex set of facts.

"You are here" by Jaime Walker (CC BY 2.0 2010)

However, I am not convinced. It seems clear to me that, in general, placing the map where it is an drawing it the way it is IS telling you that you are there!, i.e., that this is an indexical assertion, and that to explain the epistemic segregation of red dots in maps is just a case of the more general phenomenon on how  indexical claims are usually epistemically segregated, i.e. by correctly situating their utterance (here, broadly speaking so as to cover written utterances, signs, maps, etc.). It is hard to mistake where “here” refers to (which is another way of saying that uses of the indexical “here” are epistemically segregated), because “here” utterances are usually situated at the same place that is the referent of the indexical. Because that is how the indexical word “here” works (and notice that red dots work like this (and thus ARE indexicals), even if they do not include indexical words like “here”.

How does this, more conservative account would deal with an example like Casati’s sign on the moon? Well, because the relevant (spatio-temporal) location of an indexical in general NEED NOT be the (spatio-temporal) location where the signal is created, we can still say that the red dot is located where the interpreter is (otherwise, she would not be able to see it). The literature is full of examples where the proper interpretation of the indexical requires that the location in the context of utterance be understood as a different location that where the signal was created (phone calls are the usual example). Just as a recorded wake up call that tells you that it is time to wake up must be understood as the time you hear the recording, so the “here” and the red dot of the map on the moon must be understood as located where they are seen. So in my conservative approach, adding, for example, “George Carlson is located here on May 31st, 2021, 13:27” is not supplanting the role of proper location in epistemically segregating the red dot, but is helping us (and specially George Carlson) determine the proper location of the utterance which is still part of what is doing the epistemic segregation. But this is something that we must always accomplish, i.e., we must always find out where the utterance is located, even if we accomplish this very easily most of the times (usually, speakers are co-located with hearers and maps are not drawn on the surface of the moon). The main advantage of this account is that it is simpler, more conservative, for it generalizes an account that we need anyway – i.e., we still need to explain why it is quite difficult to misidentify where “here” is – to cover this new case.