Abstract
It has recently been proposed that the framework of semantic relativism be put to use to describe mental content, as deployed in some of the fundamental operations of the mind. This programme has inspired in particular a novel strategy of accounting for the essential egocentricity of first-personal or de se thoughts in relativist terms, with the advantage of dispensing with a notion of self-representation. This paper is a critical discussion of this strategy. While it is based on a plausible appeal to cognitive economy, the relativist theory does not fully account for the epistemic profile that distinguishes de se thinking, as some of its proponents hope to do. A deeper worry concerns the reliance of the theory on a primitive notion of “centre” that hasn’t yet received enough critical attention, and is ambiguous between a thin and a rich reading. I argue that while the rich reading is required if the relativist analysis of the de se is to achieve its most ambitious aims, it also deprives the theory of much of its explanatory power.
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Notes
I will use throughout the word “thought” in the broad, Cartesian sense, to cover any type of mental state, perceptual, affective or conative as well as doxastic.
As the expression “first-personal thought” has the disadvantage of suggesting the involvement of a mental device of self-reference equivalent to the first-person pronoun ‘I’, I will prefer here the more neutral expression “de se thought”. The notion of a “de se” modality of thought has been popularized by Lewis (1979) but has been in use for much longer, with first occurrences in mediaeval philosophy. Here, I use the term in a non-committing fashion, to pick out a mode of thinking that is inseparable from the thinker’s subjective perspective, and not as shorthand for the Lewisian way of explaining the phenomenon.
I will use the word “epistemic” in the broader way, to include what pertains, not just to knowledge but to other states relating to knowledge as to their norm—like believing, conceiving, understanding, feeling certain, being aware that \(p\), etc. “Epistemic” will also be used in connection with the degree of informational richness of a subject’s representations (how extensively or finely they depict the world), as this contributes to determining how much knowledge the subject possesses if those representations are true, and how much it will take to justify them. “Epistemic” is thus treated here as a rough synonym of “cognitive”. The phenomena of self-location and IEM to be discussed below will be understood as epistemic in this broad sense.
I may of course be wrong in believing that the heater is on my left. But I can’t so easily be wrong in believing that I have an experience as of the heater being on my left.
Frege (1918).
Thus Anscombe (1975) gives a deflationary explanation of immunity to error through misidentification, based on semantic considerations: it is not, she claims, the function of a de se thought to represent the subject; so it cannot, a fortiori, misrepresent that subject. The relativist account of IEM is in the same spirit.
An important caveat concerning this filiation. Wittgenstein and Anscombe hold a non-referential view of both first-personal thoughts and first-personal attitude reports; they explicitly claim that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer. (See Wittgenstein 1953/2009, § 404 and § 410; Anscombe 1975, p. 148.) By contrast, the contemporary authors discussed here put forward a non-referential treatment of the content of (a certain subclass of) de se attitudes, but typically remain neutral as to the relationship between this mental content and the content communicated by utterances containing a first-person pronoun. Stojanovic (2012) and Torre (2010) are rare examples of relativist analyses of de se assertions. But for the most part, on the linguistic side, relativist semantics has been confined to the treatment of expressions containing more diffuse marks of a subject’s point of view (e.g. predicates of personal taste, PRO constructions, epistemic modals).
Millikan (2004) also contains related ideas.
Textual evidence includes Lewis’s way of introducing his theory of de se attitudes: what a creature who entertains such attitudes has, that a creature who doesn’t possess them cannot have, is a certain piece of knowledge (concerning their own situation within the world); and that is accounted for by the semantics. (Cf. the example of the two gods, presented in Sect. 2.2.1 below.) Egan and Ninan typically follow Lewis in this respect. Recanati, on his part, makes clear that his relativist semantics for the de se is dictated by considerations of psychological plausibility, and contributes to explaining epistemic phenomena such as immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). Here is a characteristic statement: “According to the [strong moderate relativist] account, [IEM] follows from the fact that (only) implicit de se thoughts are identification-free, since they do not involve the concept of self [\(\ldots \)]”. (2007\(a\), p. 177; my emphasis.) Similar statements are to be found in Recanati (2010, pp. 484–5,) Recanati (2012, p. 378), and elsewhere.
Let me make clear that the criticisms I will raise against the relativist theory by no means imply an endorsement of competing self-reference views. I do not, in particular, think that a token-reflexive approach fares better in explaining de se epistemology. I expect in fact that no semantic theory can do so on its own. However, the project of offering a positive account of de se epistemology, whether in non-purely representational terms or not, would go far beyond the scope of this paper. My (limited) aim here is only to show the specific ways in which relativism about the de se fails in its declared explanatory ambition (cf. the previous note), assessing that ambition on its own terms. These shortcomings are sufficiently distinctive (and different from the limitations of self-reference views) to deserve attention on their own.
Nothing essential hinges on this terminology, appropriate to a structural model of propositions; the relevant contrast can equally be drawn within a possible-world model of propositions, using the notion of “possible centred worlds” (Lewis 1979).
See for instance Lichtenberg (1971), ii, 412, §76.
See also Recanati (2007a, p. 176).
Perry (1998, p. 4).
See for instance Proust (2007).
Exactly how far this implicitness can go is what is in dispute between self-referential and “selfless” (no-reference) approaches to the de se.
Lewis (1979, pp. 520–522).
The treatment of the objects of de se beliefs as properties attributed to individuals reflects Lewis’s particular ontology, which excludes trans-world individuals. Leaving aside this controversial metaphysical background, the gist of Lewis’s proposal can be recaptured within a standard modal logic framework by saying that, in a de se belief, a centred-world proposition is attributed to an agent. (As the distinction has no direct incidence on what follows, however, I will continue talking in terms of self-attributed properties, as contemporary followers of Lewis often do.) Thanks to Robert van Rooij for having pointed this out to me.
I thank Stephan Torre for questions that helped me become aware of this difficulty.
Lewis (1979, p 522.) My emphasis.
Conversely, not all thoughts that are IEM are, narrowly speaking, de se thoughts. It has often been noted, for instance, that demonstrative thoughts formed in the normal (experiential) way also exhibit IEM (Shoemaker 1968; Evans 1982; Wright 2012). This may also be true of temporal and spatial thoughts (McGinn 1983). As all these subtypes of indexical thinking deploy an egocentric framework of representation, however, there is still a clear sense in which IEM attaches primarily to the de se.
This can be seen as a radicalized re-interpretation of Evans’s intuition that de se thoughts are “identification-free” (Evans 1982). Why “radicalized” is the topic of another paper (Guillot n.d.).
This equivalence rests on the assumption of what Recanati (2007a) calls the “distribution principle”; namely, the idea that if a parameter is part of the index, then it cannot be also represented in the content that is evaluated at this index. Ninan (2010) challenges this principle; but for reasons of space I will take it for granted here.
One could use the thought-experiment in Dennett (1978), with minor alterations. One important constraint is that the “host” must remain conscious throughout the experiment, so as to forestall any doubts as to whether two subjects are continuously present.
p. 557.
Ibid., p. 566.
Recanati does acknowledge the distinction between de facto and strong IEM, but doesn’t explain the latter, which he seems to take as a primitive, sui generis property of consciousness. (See Recanati 2007a, b, pp. 149–154; and his 2010, pp. 289–292.) He thus treats the two forms of immunity, not as two degrees of the same phenomenon, but as distinct in nature.
This objection was inspired by a point made by Dokic in conversation.
See Wright (2012) for further objections.
Lewis (1979, p. 531).
For a similar distinction, see Biro 1991, 2006 and Nagel (1986, p. 325). Vendler (1988, pp. 175–6), defends an opposing view, according to which any point of view in the psychological sense is, in fine, reducible to a purely topographical point of view, constrained by various structural requirements.
Recanati (2007b, pp. 145–6). My emphasis.
Of course, this classical (Cartesian, Lockean) notion of subjecthood as based on a mental relation to oneself is not the only one available. Some contemporary theories of the self have moved the emphasis from epistemic achievement to embodiment (Merleau-Ponty), agency (Anscombe, O’Brien), or commitment (Sartre, Moran). However, it is not obvious that those theories constitute alternatives as far as the point at issue here is concerned. They all make it a necessary condition (although not a sufficient one) for subjecthood that the creature bear a special, mental relation to itself, e.g. bodily awareness or agent-awareness. This is asking for much more than a spatio-temporal location; which is my main point. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for inviting me to clarify this.
I leave it open here whether or not this mental relation to oneself needs to be conceptually articulated in the subject’s representations.
Locke (1690/1979) II, XXVII, “Of Identity and Diversity”.
Lewis himself compensates for the thinness of his notion of centre by another rich primitive in his theory, namely the notion of a sui generis attitude of implicit self-attribution, which replaces belief as the basic attitude, and through which the subject of a de se thought relates to the centred content she represents. This notion, which seems to play a crucial part in the modelling of de se thought, presumably presupposes full-blown subjectivity. But if subjectivity is already packed in the primitives of the theory, it is not something that the latter can explain.
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Acknowledgments
Work on this article has been supported by funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under ERC grant agreement \(n^{\circ }\) 229441–CCC, during a research fellowship at CNRS. I would like to thank audiences at various conferences and seminars, as well as Michael Murez, Jérôme Dokic, Stephan Torre, and especially François Recanati, for discussions that have helped me shape the ideas presented in this article. I am very grateful to Manuel García-Carpintero, Robert van Rooij, Crispin Wright, and two anonymous reviewers, for insightful and detailed comments on the article at various earlier stages. Special thanks are due to Conor McHugh for his reading, both acute and supportive, of several successive drafts. Any remaining shortcomings and errors are my own.
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Guillot, M. The limits of selflessness: semantic relativism and the epistemology of de se thoughts. Synthese 190, 1793–1816 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0262-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0262-8