Abstract
Castañeda, Perry, and Lewis argued in the 1960s and 1970s that thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts – require special treatment and advanced different accounts. In this chapter, I discuss Ernest Sosa’s approach to these matters. I first present his approach to singular or de re thought in general in the first section. In the second, I introduce the data that need to be explained, Perry’s and Lewis’s proposals and Sosa’s own account, in relation to Perry’s, Lewis’s, and his own views on de re thought. In the third section, I present the account I prefer – a “token-reflexive” version of Perry’s original account that Perry himself came to adopt in reaction to Stalnaker’s criticisms. In the final section, I take up Recanati’s recent arguments, from a viewpoint on de se thought very similar to Sosa’s, to the effect that such an account is in a good position to explain the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I argue there that that is not the case, and I conclude by suggesting that the token-reflexive account fits better both with the data and with Sosa’s Fregean take on de re thought in general.
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research project FFI2010-16049, and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009-6; through the award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, 2008, funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya; and by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 238128. Thanks to Jose Díez, Ernest Sosa, Stephan Torre, and John Turri for very helpful discussion and comments and to Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
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Notes
- 1.
I myself sympathize with the Fregean line in part as a result of earlier exchanges with Sosa, although the view that I defend makes room for the direct-reference notion of contents individuated by the referents of singular terms and does not purport to reduce de re thoughts to de dicto thoughts: thoughts irreducibly come in singular and general varieties. Cf. García-Carpintero (2000, 2006a, 2008a, 2010) for different aspects of the view.
- 2.
As Hawthorne and Manley emphasize, however, Harmony cannot simply be dismissed; any adequate treatment of these matters should include an account of the relation between de re ascription and singular thought.
- 3.
I do not mean to suggest that in his case there was any confusion about the difference, which Sosa (1970) clearly makes.
- 4.
Kripke does not speak of contents or propositions; wisely he speaks rather of “statements.” Here is a relevant quotation (1980, 56): “What then, is the epistemological status of the statement ‘Stick S is one metre long at t 0 ’, for someone who has fixed the metric system by reference to stick S? It would seem that he knows it a priori. For if he used stick S to fix the reference of the term ‘one metre’, then as a result of this kind of ‘definition’ (which is not an abbreviative or synonymous definition), he knows automatically, without further investigation, that S is one metre long. On the other hand, even if S is used as a standard of a metre, the metaphysical status of the statement ‘Stick S is one metre long’ will be that of a contingent statement, provided that ‘one metre’ is regarded as a rigid designator: under appropriate stresses and strains, heatings or coolings, S would have had a length other than one metre even at t0. (Such statements as ‘The water boils at 100 degrees centigrade, at sea level’ can have a similar status.) So in this sense, there are contingent a priori truths.”
- 5.
If, while listening to an utterance in a language that I do not know, I am told by a reliable person who knows the language and whom I trust that the utterance is true, I may come thereby to know that the sentence expresses a truth, without knowing the truth that it expresses.
- 6.
Evans’s famous example was “Julius,” introduced to refer to whoever invented the zip.
- 7.
For present purposes, I am interpreting Evans’s account as proposing just one form of upholding N, thus classifying it together with the more purely causalist proposals of Donnellan, Soames, and others. Unlike the latter, Evans’s account of genuine singular thought requires a substantive identifying conception of the relevant res.
- 8.
I think this is confused because nonconceptual thoughts, in the only clear-headed way I (2006b) know of tracing the distinction, are simply prelinguistic thoughts, and these can be as “descriptive” as linguistic thoughts.
- 9.
- 10.
This point can be combined with the simple direct argument for L provided by Sosa (1995a, §2). Following Martí (2008), Recanati (2010, 163) would argue that referential uses are devices of genuine reference because the descriptive material does not play any role in determining the referent. Invoking Sosa’s (1995a) account of such cases based on ED below, I would deny that the descriptive material is irrelevant: it at least points to the descriptive conception (the one on which the former epistemically depend) which does fix the referent.
- 11.
Recanati (2010) used to defend acquaintance constraints on singular thought, but in his more recent work, he holds a weaker position on which only a preparedness for acquaintance actually satisfied in the future is required.
- 12.
Jonathan Schaffer questions this orthodoxy in “Necessitarian Propositions,” ms. downloaded from http://www.jonathanschaffer.org/.
- 13.
Lewis is working with a coarse-grained notion of proposition; the example can be taken to show, alternatively, that we need a finer-grained one, cf. Stanley (2011, 81–2). This would also be the diagnosis of someone upholding the token-reflexive account proposed below.
- 14.
Or just relative to a subject, if subjects are time-slices of what we ordinarily take to be so. I will ignore henceforth this more economical possibility, which is actually Lewis’s preferred way of presenting the view, given his four-dimensional leanings.
- 15.
Following common practice, I’ll indulge in modal-realist talk because it makes exposition easier at some points, but I take this to carry no metaphysical commitments.
- 16.
Sosa (1981, 323, fn. 5) provides essentially the same reply to Perry. Of course, on Lewis’s view, in believing that de re proposition, the other shopper also self-ascribes a different property: the property of being one such that the de re proposition is true. This is the vacuous sense of self-ascribing properties in which one also self-ascribes the traditional propositions one believes, as we said two paragraphs back we do on Lewis’s proposal.
- 17.
As Stephan Torre reminded me, Lewis (1986, 54–5) considers to speak of egocentric propositions instead of properties, concluding as follows: “If you insist that propositions, rightly so called, must be true or false relative to worlds and nothing else, then you had better say that the objects of at least some thought turn out not to be propositions. Whereas if you insist that propositions, rightly so called, are the things that serve as objects of all thought, then you had better admit that some propositions are egocentric.”
- 18.
- 19.
The reader might find further elaboration in my (2006a).
- 20.
I disregard here the differences between “it is you who is making a mess” and “you are making a mess,” which in my view are presuppositional.
- 21.
Ninan (2010) and Torre (2010) develop a Lewisian response to Stalnaker, on which centered worlds contents are after all what is communicated: not properties that subjects self-attribute, which will not do for the reasons mentioned in the main text, but rather properties that ordered groups of discussants collectively ascribe to themselves, taken in the relevant order. Their accounts, however, essentially require conversational participants to keep track somehow of whom among them a given assertion ascribes a property, for we are not speaking of attributing properties that all conversationists may have (like their collective spatial or temporal location) but properties that only some of them have. Because of this, I do not take these accounts to preserve the crucial appealing feature of Lewis’ theory highlighted before, namely, that the subject is not represented as part of the content. For speakers to coherently communicate on these accounts, the contents they have to ascribe to assertions (and other speech acts in the conversation) must be along the lines of those that Perry assumes in the objection to Lewis that we discussed in Sect. 2: namely, that a given participant self-ascribes a given property.
- 22.
- 23.
Stalnaker’s criticism of Lewis’s, Sosa’s, and Perry’s original proposal was not that they cannot account for the transmission of information in cases like the one we are considering but (as I presented it) that they have to do so in a more complex way than the one afforded by the view that it is the diagonal/token-reflexive content that is communicated. Once we understand the need to preserve the state/content distinction, this benefit is lost, for it will be essential to acknowledge that the belief state accounting for the samaritan shopper’s utterance and for Perry’s acceptance are crucially different. We will have to find arguments to prefer the token-reflexive proposal (properly understood) elsewhere. The final section suggests one.
- 24.
I said that I understand Stalnaker as adopting the first interpretation. How does he deal with Perry’s objection, then? In his earlier work, he takes refuge in the holism he attributes to belief states. Thus, even though in accepting the samaritan shopper’s utterance of “you are making a mess” in both versions of the story (with and without realizing he is the addressee) Perry may well accept the same proposition, his full belief state in each case can hardly be the same, and the account in terms of diagonal propositions is intended to characterize full belief states. But this appeal to holism is not sufficient to deal with Lewis’s two gods example, because, with respect to traditional propositional knowledge, they are both supposed to be omniscient. Stalnaker (1981, 144–5) appeals to haecceitism (different worlds qualitatively indiscernible) to deal with the case and appears to reject as incoherent an objection by Lewis that this does not solve the problem – to assume the coherence of the objection is just to beg the question against his proposal, he suggests. More recently, Stalnaker (2008, 55–9) appears to back up and to accept the coherence of Lewis’ objection, and he provides in reply a new account that replicates Perry’s distinction between content and state in a formally elegant way.
- 25.
Peacocke (1983, ch. 5; 2008, ch. 3), Higginbotham (2003), and Howell (2006) provide alternative versions of this proposal. Cf. Howell’s (2006, 51–2) discussion of “objection two” (a version of the problem posed by taking the proposal on the first interpretation). As I indicated, for the sake of expediency, I am not distinguishing accounts of de se utterances from accounts of de se thoughts, even though, as Ernest Sosa pointed out to me, the latter pose a serious worry to the token-reflexive account; as he put it (pc): “Even if we presuppose a language of thought, so that there is some vehicle of that thought, it is not clear to me that we can identify the token of the singular term involved … we have no way to distinguish that token in anything like the way we can visually or aurally distinguish the overt linguistic token.” The account I subscribe to assumes mental particulars, including individual concepts and particular acts of deploying them, and contends that the subject of a first-personal thought is identified token-reflexively as the person deploying the self-concept instance constituting it.
- 26.
The proposal is further developed in the papers mentioned in footnote 1. Both Ernest Sosa and Stephan Torre raised a serious objection to this proposal that I had not seen in print. As Torre put it (pc): “a token-reflexive account cannot provide for the true ascriptions of non-occurrent beliefs, desires, etc. Moritz is sitting at the desk next to me now and I take him to believe now that he, himself, is in Barcelona, that he is not a rabbit, that he is German, etc. I think these are true belief ascriptions of him but I don’t see how they can be accommodated by a token reflexive account since presumably he does not currently possess any mental tokenings corresponding to these beliefs.” Sosa made the same objection, concerning beliefs such as it has been more than one month since my most recent swim in the Ocean. Whether this is taken to be part of a general account of belief or just of those with de se or de nunc content, the proponent of the token-reflexive account might respond that the relevant beliefs should be understood as dispositions to make related occurrent judgments. I think this is particularly plausible in the case of present-tense beliefs, as in Sosa’s example, because they are plausibly taken as claims about the relation between the present time and a previous one, and for their semantics, we need some particular event (even if a merely possible one) to fix what counts as the present. In that respect, cases that appear to be atemporal claims made with a “tenseless” use of the present, such as “I am not a rabbit,” look more problematic.
- 27.
Higginbotham (2010, 262–3) discusses these cases, in relation to the relation between de se thought and immunity to error through misidentification, to be discussed in Sect 4. He sounds as if he was providing an alternative defense of the token-reflexive account he also supports, but I fail to see how the defense goes. From the perspective I defend, the case of the schizophrenic shows that mental actions such as the judgment that I am good and omnipotent, as much as physical actions such as making a mess, are only “circumstantially” IEM (see below); under abnormal circumstances, the ordinary grounds one has to self-ascribe them survive as grounds for the existential generalization, someone is making a mess or someone is judging that he himself is good and omnipotent, while still wondering whether it is he himself who is doing them. For this to be possible, some other state has to be genuinely de se and IEM (the impression of being executing those actions, as in my account in the main text).
- 28.
I understand this to be the point Castañeda (1983, 324) is raising against Perry.
- 29.
In part to deal with this problem, O’Brien (2007, ch. 5 & 6) and Peacocke (2008, ch. 3) rely essentially on an “agent awareness” of one’s own actions, particularly one’s own mental actions such as judging and intending, to account for the first “tier,” awareness of one’s mental states. I do not understand their replies (O’Brien 2007, 89–93; Peacocke 2008, 89–92) to the obvious objection that we seem to be doing as much fully self-conscious self-reference with respect to our judgments than to our perceptual experiences or uncontrolled daydreamings.
- 30.
Shoemaker suggests that IEM captures some of Wittgenstein’s points about uses of “I” “as subject” vs. uses of “I” “as object” in the Blue Book.
- 31.
Pryor (1999) offers an alternative propositional characterization, free from concerns that this linguistic characterization – useful as a starting point – might raise, such as this: “If this is the explanation, then I don’t see how any statement at all could avoid being subject to error through misidentification. It would seem to be always possible that the term ‘a’ could have meant something other than what it means and that the speaker could then have mistakenly thought that the thing he knows to be F is what ‘a’ refers to” (Sosa, pc.).
- 32.
Stanley (2011, 91–3) makes related objections to Recanati.
- 33.
- 34.
In the way imagined by Dennett (1978).
- 35.
- 36.
- 37.
Campbell (1997, 69–70) argues that claims such as “that chair is yellow” are not IEM because the “binding” of sortal and color properties may get things wrong: perhaps the chair is transparent, and it is the wall behind that is yellow. In my view, such “binding” consists in the presence of further unnoticed identity claims in the justificational structure of demonstrative claims: say, that chair is the source of this yellow experience – open to liberal, liberal-conservative, or conservative-conservative treatment.
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García-Carpintero, M. (2013). Self-Conception: Sosa on De Se Thought. In: Turri, J. (eds) Virtuous Thoughts: The Philosophy of Ernest Sosa. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5934-3_5
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