In the 1960s and 1970s Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among de re or singular thoughts, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” – de se thoughts – raise special issues. Perry and Lewis offered contrasting accounts: while Lewis aims to account for de se thoughts by taking the subject away from de se contents, which are thus properties instead of complete traditional propositions, Perry offers an account compatible with traditional views. This issue has recently become a hot topic of debate, on different counts. First, there is a debate whether natural languages include expressions specifically devoted to the ascription of de se thoughts. Second, some recent proposals to relativize truth appeal to de se contents, understood along the lines that Lewis' suggested. Third, there have been proposals to characterize in such terms the content of conscious perceptual experiences and related matters, such as the primary/secondary quality distinction. This project aims at clarifying the nature of first-personal thoughts, investigating in particular whether the Lewisian view is required to account for the indicated phenomena, or a Perrian view could properly account for them. The project aims to investigate also whether an account of de se thoughts should be able to explain epistemological aspects of subjectivity such as the phenomenon of Immunity to Error through Misidentification, and, if so, how the Lewisian and Perrian accounts fare in that respect. Similarly, the project aims to investigate whether an account of de se thoughts presupposes an account of self-knowledge – the apparently privileged knowledge we have of our own states – and, if so, once again to compare how the Lewisian and Perrian accounts fare in that respect. Finally, we want to explore the relevance of accounts of de se thoughts for issues concerning the metaphysics of persons.
| 2018
De Se Thoughts and Immunity to Error through Misidentification
Synthese 195, 3311-3333, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-015-0817-y.
