Perspectives on de se immunity

Synthese 198 (10):10089-10107 (2021)
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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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References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Elements of symbolic logic.Hans Reichenbach - 1947 - London: Dover Publications.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans & John Mcdowell - 1986 - Philosophy 61 (238):534-538.

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