Abstract
It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979, Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan (1989), has it that if Alma says “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handling de se assertion, i.e., contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing.
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Notes
There is some unclarity in Kaplan's writings as to the status of his notion of what is said, since he seems to move back and forth between a stronger view, on which his notion of content (qua something that, when evaluated at a circumstance, gives a truth value) is meant to account for our pre-theoretical, intuitive notion of what is said, and a weaker view, on which 'what is said' is merely another “technical” term for the notion of (semantic) content. Note that even if we take him to have held the weaker view, it may still be said that the force of Kaplan's arguments often draws on our intuitive notion of what is said.
Note that this motivation relies not only on, as it were, our direct intuitions about what is said, but also on our intuitions on same-saying, and on our practices of reporting what is said. On the relationship between the notion of what is said and the relationship of same-saying, see Everett (2000) discussion. Here and in what follows, I shall assume that there is a tight connection between what is said and what gets reported in reports of what is said. I take that to be a relatively uncontroversial assumption, even though it is, in principle, possible that the notion of what is said might have little or nothing to do with reports of what is said (as has been held, for instance, by Bach (2001)).
Although Kaplan was arguably the first to systematically distinguish between lexically encoded meaning and what is said, both insights go back at least to Frege, who wrote: “The sentence ‘I am cold’ expresses a different thought in the mouth of one person from what it expresses in the mouth of another. […] It is not necessary that the person who feels cold should himself give utterance to the thought that he feels cold. Another person can do this by using a name to designate the one who feels cold” (1899: 236).
As a matter of fact, the report in (6) is four-ways ambiguous because of the contribution of the present tense: it can report Alma as having said that Chris was hungry at the time when she said it, or that he is hungry at the time of (5), or that she was hungry at the time when she said it, or that she is hungry at the time of (5). For the sake of simplicity, I will leave aside all the issues raised by the contribution of tense.
Note that I am not claiming that the ambiguity in (6) must be the same phenomenon as the ambiguity that we find VP-ellipsis. What is more, there is no consensus whether the strict/sloppy ambiguity in the latter case is to be handled within syntax alone or, rather, (syntax combined with) semantics and pragmatics. For discussion, see e.g., Lappin (1996).
Note that it is sometimes possible to have sloppy same-saying reports even with the 2nd or 3rd person, without making it explicit that the person talked to or about was someone else. Here is a tentative example. Suppose that Bruce and Chris had a blind date each on Saturday evening. On Sunday, when Alma asks him how the date went, Bruce tells her, “She was obnoxious.” Later, Chris, talking about his own date, tells Alma, “She was obnoxious.” Alma may then truly reply “Bruce said that, too.” The report is acceptable because the context makes it sufficiently clear that Bruce must have been talking of his own date. My point is not that sloppy same-saying reports with the 2nd or 3rd person are impossible, but rather, that in ordinary contexts, they are simply unavailable.
Some will be tempted to see the challenge in (24) and Bruce's retraction in (25) as evidence that the report in (24) had been false all along. If so, this would make my point even more straightforward, since, as we will shortly see, reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion cannot be challenged by “she didn't quite say that” and remain literally true, unlike reports such as (24).
There need not be a sharp distinction between loose and literal uses – it is enough for my argument that there be uses that are more literal than others. Also, let me stress once again that a report in which 'what is said' is used loosely need not be ipso facto false. All that matters is that, if challenged, the reporter feels the need of qualifying or retracting his or her report.
Let me acknowledge that the range of patterns that one would need to look at in order to provide a thorough account of same-saying reports goes far beyond the sorts of case that I have considered here. For instance, suppose that Alma says “The logic class is terribly boring” and that Bruce tells Prof. Blanchet “Your class is terribly boring. That's what Alma said, too.” One should be able to challenge Bruce by pointing out that Alma never said to Prof. Blanchet that her class was boring, or even that Prof. Blanchet's class is boring. While such cases involving definite descriptions seem to fall on the 'literal' side of what is said, they also exhibit certain features of looseness. Although it would be interesting and worthwhile to compare same-saying report patterns in the de se cases and the cases involving definite descriptions, that would be a separate issue with only indirect bearings on the more basic distinction that I have been focusing on in this paper. Let me also emphasize that the phenomenon of de se assertion is wider than the use of the 1st person pronoun. Thus it has been held e.g., by Egan (2007) that when we use epistemic modals, we assert contents whose truth values depend on centered worlds (i.e., not only on what the world is like, but on what it is like from an individual's perspective).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. This paper is part of a larger project, which I have presented, at various stages, on a number of occasions. I am particularly grateful to my commentators on three such occasions: Maite Ezcurdia (Workshop on Cognitive Perspectives on Mind and Language at UNAM, Mexico City, August 2009), Jennifer Carr and Ryan Doody (MIT-Jean Nicod Workshop on Self-Locating Belief, MIT, Cambridge MA, September 2009), and Ernie Lepore and Una Stojnic (SPAWN-2011, Syracuse NY, August 2011). Last but not least, the research leading to these results was partly funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), from the projects “Perspectival Thoughts and Facts” (PETAF), grant agreement number 238 128 and “Context, Content and Compositionality”, grant agreement number 229 441–CCC, as well as from the project “Semantic Content and Context-Dependence”, MICINN, Spanish Government, grant number CSD2009-0056.
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Stojanovic, I. The Problem of De Se Assertion. Erkenn 76, 49–58 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9350-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9350-7