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once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. was the shopper was trying to catch. believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a And was right. But didn't believe that was making a That seems to be something came to believe. And when came to believe that, stopped following the trail around the counter, and rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to explain my change in behavior. My aim in this paper is to make a key point about the characterization of this change, and of beliefs in general. At first characterizing the change seems easy. My beliefs changed, didn't they, in that came to have a new one, namely, that am making a mess? But things are not so simple. The reason they are not is the importance of the word in my expression of what came to believe. When we replace it with other designations of me, we no longer have an explanation of my behavior and so, it seems, no longer an attribution of the same belief. It seems to be an essential indexical. But without such a replacement, all we have to identify the belief is the sentence I am making a mess. But that sentence by itself doesn't seem to identify the crucial belief, for if someone else had said it, they would have expressed a different belief, a false one. argue that the essential indexical poses a problem for various otherwise plausible accounts of belief. first argue that it is a problem for the view that belief is a relation between subjects and propositions conceived as bearers of truth and