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The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports pp 259–286Cite as

Consequences of the Pragmatics of ‘De Se’

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Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 8))

Abstract

In this Chapter, in several places I discuss the idea that the essential indexical can be reduced to the notion of ‘I’, with reference to various authors. I then move on to the discussion of Immunity to Error through misidentification to show what the consequences of the pragmatics of ‘de se’ are for this issue. I consider an objection that ‘I’ need not be first-personal and I reply to it armed with contextualism. The discussion is mainly philosophical, but it has linguistic consequences, as my main idea is that IEM is to be explained at least in part linguistically.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Jaszczolt (2005) Merger Representations represent a level in which semantic and pragmatic information can be combined to produce truth-conditional output (see Jaszczolt 2005 for a more specific and articulated view).

  2. 2.

    It would be best to use the example ‘I remember being born in Corsica’.

  3. 3.

    This consideration is of great importance. It appears to follow independently from Igor Douven’s (2010) paper on the pragmatics of belief.

  4. 4.

    Proprioception need not entail thinking that p, while thinking that p can be based on proprioception.

  5. 5.

    However, there may be chains of ‘de se’ subjects involving anaphoric connections between various occurrences of ‘I’ (see the following chapter on impure ‘de se’ thoughts).

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  1. University of Messina, Barcellona PG ME, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

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Capone, A. (2016). Consequences of the Pragmatics of ‘De Se’. In: The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports . Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_11

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