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Perspectives on de se immunity

Synthese volume 198, pages 10089–10107 (2021)Cite this article

Abstract

Concept-individuating reference rules offer a well-known route for the explanation of immunity to error through misidentification in judgments involving first person or de se thought. However, the ‘outright’ version of this account—one that sanctions a one-to-one correspondence between the reference-fixing rule and immunity—cannot do justice to the unassailable ground-relativity of the target phenomenon. In this paper, I outline a version of the reference-rule account that circumvents this problem. I state a reference rule for the de se concept that makes space for different non-reference-fixing ways of thinking or perspectives, yielding different grounds for judgment. The proposal and its ramifications, I argue, shed light on the variety of ways in which this kind of immunity has been proved to be present—and indeed absent—in de se thought.

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Notes

  1. This is not to deny the import of IEM beyond the first person. Other central manifestations arguably include judgments involving demonstratives and indexicals (e.g. Evans, 1982, Chap. 6; Campbell, 1999; Peacocke, 2008, Chap. 3; Wright, 2012), descriptive names (e.g. Campbell, 1999, 2012; García-Carpintero, 2018), and mathematical judgments (e.g. Coliva, 2017; Palmira, 2019).

  2. IEM is a property of judgments. I therefore consider thoughts (and also propositions or beliefs) to be candidate bearers of IEM only insofar as they are involved in or constitute the corresponding judgments. Having clarified that, I will often drop this circumlocution in what follows and speak interchangeably of (non-)IEM de se thoughts and judgments.

  3. Reference-rule accounts don’t exhaust the accounts that have been given of de se thought in the context of explanations of IEM, nor indeed the accounts of IEM tout court. Among the former are also those that explain IEM in terms of implicit or unarticulated contents (Prosser, 2005, 2012; Recanati, 2007, 2012). Among the latter, the family of views that take IEM to be explained, not in terms of content, but in terms of the justificatory structure of judgments (Coliva, 2003, 2006; Morgan, 2012; Wright, 2012) or in terms of its modal profile (McGlynn, 2016). For reasons of space, I sidestep a detailed discussion of these and related views in this article (see Morgan & Salje, 2020, pp. 154–159 for an overview).

  4. The claim should more properly be credited to Shoemaker’s (1968) interpretation of Wittgenstein’s passages, as forcefully argued by Wiseman (2019).

  5. See Coliva (2006), Smith (2006) or Prosser (2012) for works subscribing to (versions of) the general claim and Wright (2012), McGlynn (2016), García-Carpintero (2018) and Palmira (2019) for replies.

  6. This is a special case of the basic entailment from wh-immunity to de re immunity (Pryor, 1999, p. 285).

  7. This is arguably not true in the general (non-de se) case: for one might perhaps justifiably judge “x is F” (partly) on the basis of G (e.g. one’s visual or smelling experience), where x is distinct from a, and the judgment “a is F” based on G still be de re immune on account of the fact that a, but not necessarily x, is among the objects that are epistemically relevant for the judger. By contrast, it is prima facie hard to see how any object other than oneself potentially satisfying F wouldn’t be epistemically relevant for someone judging “I am F”. See fn. 5 for related works on this issue.

  8. The last direction of entailment may also be seen as a consequence of the fact that, in the case of the de se, any evidence undermining the justification for a de re immune judgment “I am F” will necessarily consist of an additive defeater (i.e. a defeater that not only undermines one’s de re immunity-yielding justification for “I am F” but also offers positive evidence for the negation of “I am F” (i.e. evidence for the judgment that someone but not ourselves could in fact be F) and hence never consists of a merely undercutting defeater (undermining only justification for the singular proposition without adding to one’s case for its negation) of the sort required for wh-misidentification properly so-called (cf. Pryor, 1999). See also Wright (2012, pp. 259–260) for a different explanation based on his ‘Simple Account’.

    In ways that merit more discussion than I can offer here, this result obviously tells against conciliatory interpretative approaches to the controversy between Evans and Shoemaker on the IEM status of memory-based judgments (e.g. Coliva, 2006) and also undergirds, I believe, independently developed alternatives to such approaches (e.g. McGlynn, 2016; Morgan, 2019).

  9. The converse, however, is probably not true. Some de se judgments of the form “I am F” seem necessarily not IEM, namely, those for which there are no available grounds directly accessible by the subject regarding the property F, and must therefore rely on an identification. Examples include the judgments expressible with “I will die” or “I was unhappy on my first birthday” (cf. Evans, 1982, pp. 208–212).

  10. Morgan confines attention to Higginbotham’s reflexive account. I here target any reference-rule account proposing a one-to-one correspondence between (instantiations of) the reference-fixing rule and (instantiations of) IEM.

  11. Cf. Morgan (2012, pp. 108–109), where he states a similar objection against Higginbotham’s account in terms of a trilemma (the horn missing here is the self-refuting one in which instantiations of the rule would guarantee that the judgments are not IEM).

  12. Recanati cashes out this suggestion in terms of his distinction between explicit and implicit notions of de se thought (Recanati, 2007, Chap. 24; Recanati, 2012; see Morgan, 2012, pp. 115–122; García-Carpintero, 2018, pp. 3312–3315 for discussion). The considerations in the main text are meant to apply to any articulation of this idea. The notion of derivative de se must not be confused with the notion of ‘derivative IEM’, also invoked in Recanati’s work to refer to the property of certain IEM judgments of inheriting their status from other IEM judgments (Recanati, 2012, pp. 182–184).

  13. This line of objection is developed in Morgan (2012, pp. 110–111).

  14. E.g. the assumption “that one’s body is the body from which one normally perceives, receives bodily information, and executes one’s basic actions” (García-Carpintero, 2018, p. 3329).

  15. For instance, Folescu (2019) presents compelling evidence to the effect that no syntactical or lexical structure is necessarily linked to both de se and IEM reports in English and Romanian. If we take token-reflexive reference rules to involve these structures—such as the understood subject PRO in English or Subjunctive I in Romanian—this evidence would also seem to confirm the need to investigate the perspectives (or ‘psychological states’ in Folescu’s terminology) informing these rules to give rise to IEM. I am here indebted to an anonymous referee for this journal.

  16. My previous analysis is based on Peacocke’s ‘thinker rule’ (Peacocke, 2014) but I will here stick to SRP for the sake of simplicity and generality.

  17. The real guarantee is clearly reminiscent of Anscombe’s ‘guaranteed (self-)reference’ (Anscombe, 1975) and (the impossibility of) what Coliva calls ‘split between speaker’s and semantic reference’ (cf. Coliva, 2003, pp. 424–427) and Pryor calls ‘badly aimed reference’ (cf. Pryor, 1999, pp. 276–278). These related notions merit more discussion than I can tender here.

  18. See McGlynn (2016, pp. 49–53) and García-Carpintero (2018, pp. 3316–3320), for accounts germane to the one sketched in the main text. On the notion of the epistemic possibility in connection with IEM see also Palmira (2019, pp. 158–159). Coliva offers a different account (cf. Coliva, 2006, 2012).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. I am especially indebted to Manuel García-Carpintero, Michele Palmira, Carlota Serrahima, and Stephan Torre for very stimulating discussions at reading group meetings during my research stay in Barcelona (LOGOS Research Group). They spurred me to think more deeply about IEM in the first place. I also thank Daniel Morgan for his inspiring work on this topic. This research has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Government of Spain) and the European Union [Grant PID2019-106420GA-100/AEI/10.13039/501100011033].

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    Víctor M. Verdejo

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Verdejo, V.M. Perspectives on de se immunity. Synthese 198, 10089–10107 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03122-7

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Keywords

  • Immunity to error through misidentification
  • First person
  • Reference rule
  • Perspective
  • Real guarantee