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Communicating Egocentric Beliefs: Two-Content Accounts

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Abstract

It has long been known that the popular account of egocentric thoughts developed by David Lewis is in conflict with a natural account of communication, according to which successful communication requires the transmission of a thought content from speaker to hearer. In this paper, I discuss a number of proposed attempts to reconcile these two accounts of egocentric thought and communication. Each of them postulates two kinds of mental content, where one is egocentric, and the other is transmitted from speaker to hearer in communication. I argue that Ninan’s account, which involves multi-centered contents, and Kölbel’s and Moss’s accounts, which postulate centered and uncentered proxy contents, respectively, are unsatisfactory. Therefore, I propose a two-dimensionalist account, according to which egocentric thoughts are represented by primary intensions, while the thoughts shared by speaker and hearer in cases of successful communication are represented by secondary intensions. Finally, I argue that aside from being able to reconcile Lewis’s account of egocentric thoughts with the natural account of communication, two-dimensionalism also provides the means for modeling agreement and disagreement.

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Notes

  1. An account of this kind is developed, e.g., in Stalnaker (2014).

  2. An account of this kind is developed, e.g., in Weber (2013).

  3. Alessandro Capone (2010, 2013) uses the observation that egocentric beliefs have a special cognitive role to argue that de se readings of ambiguous attitude ascriptions such as ‘John believes that he is clever’ are pragmatically more salient than any non-de se readings.

  4. Possibly the best-known of these cases, involving two omniscient gods, was also introduced by Lewis (1979).

  5. The de se account is endorsed by a great number of philosophers, but it has recently come under some criticism (cf. Devitt 2013; Cappelen and Dever 2013; Magidor 2015). For a response to these criticisms, cf. Ninan (2016).

  6. Stalnaker (1984, 79–81, 2002) discusses the notion of acceptance.

  7. For the sake of simplicity, in what follows I will only discuss cases that involve transmission of beliefs.

  8. This problem for the centered worlds account was first noted by Stalnaker (1981).

  9. Kindermann (2016) reports that he also suggested multiply-centered belief contents in an unpublished manuscript.

  10. Ninan (2012, 2013) also introduces multi-centered contents for modeling de re thoughts and what he calls ‘counterfactual attitudes’, such as imaginative states. However, these are different kinds of contents that are not relativized to conversational sequences.

  11. The discussion below suggests, however, that even the participants in a conversation need not share a perspective in the relevant sense.

  12. This objection was raised by Kölbel in personal communication.

  13. Pagin (2016, 289) interprets the example such that Kaplan explicitly tells the hearer that he stipulates that he is Dr. D. This assumption does solve the problem at hand and is consistent with the relevant passage in Moss (2012). However, as Pagin himself notes, it presupposes the communicability of egocentric beliefs and is therefore unsuitable for an account of communication of this kind. I will therefore assume in what follows that the stipulation in question is not communicated.

  14. Cf. Lewis (1979, 523f.) for similar considerations.

  15. The account of egocentric thought developed by Stalnaker (2008, 2014, 2016) also invokes singular thoughts, for the same reasons.

  16. Chalmers (2011a) offers general arguments for the claim that singular propositions cannot be the objects of credence.

  17. Epistemic two-dimensionalism is spelled out in detail in Chalmers (2004).

  18. For an alternative interpretation on which epistemic possibilities do not correspond to metaphysically possible worlds, cf. Chalmers (2011c).

  19. Chalmers (2011b, 619f.) endorses both SSC and SSA, only using different terminology. He also suggests that communication and agreement involve specific relations between the primary intensions entertained by the relevant subjects, but without further specifying these relations.

  20. I argue for this claim in more detail in Kipper (ms.).

  21. In my view, only secondary intensions are always shared in successful communication—cf. also below.

  22. Cf. also Kipper (ms.).

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Acknowledgements

I have presented a version of this paper at the University of Cologne. I would like to thank the audience for helpful comments. I am especially grateful for comments and discussions to Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath, Zeynep Soysal, and to two anonymous referees for this journal.

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Funding was provided by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

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  1. Philosophical Department, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz 1, 50923, Koeln, Germany

    Jens Kipper

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Kipper, J. Communicating Egocentric Beliefs: Two-Content Accounts. Erkenn 83, 947–967 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9921-3

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