Resentment and Indignation: Communicative but Not Demands

One of the most widely made claims about resentment and indignation is the “communication claim”: that resentment and indignation have a communicative nature. Many who endorse this claim take it one step further and unpack the communicative nature of resentment and indignation in terms of a specific form of address: demands. Resentment and indignation are often described as addressing, expressing, making, or issuing a demand. In this paper, I argue that while it is apt to characterize resentment and indignation as communicative entities, it is a mistake to characterize them as demands. I sketch an alternative account of blame’s communicative nature, what I call the “mere address” view.