Abstract
The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune to error through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity to error through misidentification. The lessons are: First, the so-called Simple Account (see Wright 2012) of which-object immunity to error through misidentification to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds do not feature any identification component fails. Secondly, wh-immunity can be explained by a Reference-Fixing Account to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds are constituted by the facts whereby the reference of the concept of the object which the judgement concerns is fixed. Thirdly, a suitable revision of the Simple Account explains the de re immunity of those arithmetic judgements which are not wh-immune. These three lessons point towards the general conclusion that there is no unifying explanation of de re and wh-immunity.
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Notes
Henceforth my focus will be on singular judgements about the natural numbers, that I will call – for ease of expression – ‘arithmetic judgements’.
Coliva's discussion of the “Hesperus/Phosphorus” case (2017: 243) makes it clear that the necessity of (G6) is not sufficient for de re IEM. However, I take it to be important to emphasise that the modal force of immunity has nothing to do with metaphysical modality in the sense that the necessary truth of (G6) is not even necessary to establish the de re immunity of (1).
I believe that the interpretation of the modal force of immunity I have argued for here is assumed by various authors in the literature. For instance, García-Carpintero (2015: 14) qualifies the impossibility of error by using the expression “counteractually, i.e., considering alternative worlds as actual”. Cappelen and Dever (2013: 130) write: “[I am in pain] is epistemically privileged, by virtue of a certain kind of error being impossible, in the sense of a priori ruled out”.
Pryor does not officially add the independence condition in the definition, but he refers to it at various points (see pp. 282–3).
In his 1996 Whitehead lectures, Wright characterised IEM as follows: “A claim made on a certain kind of ground involves immunity to error through misidentification just when its defeat is not consistent with retention of grounds for existential generalization” (Wright 1998: 19). This passage encapsulates Pryor’s definition of wh-misidentification.
Importantly, Coliva (2006: 413) maintains that the concept ‘the animal (in my garden) which is actually responsible for this odour I can smell’ that features in (ii) is a singular but not de re in the sense of not requiring any identifying knowledge of the objects.
Thus, both de re and wh-immunity involve a kind of epistemic impossibility that I have characterised above in terms of how things might be for all we know a priori.
I will use “[]” to refer to concepts.
To forestall misunderstandings: Evans and Shoemaker deployed (SIQT) long before Pryor advanced the de re/wh-IEM distinction, so they have never defended that (SIQT) is a test for wh-IEM in print. However, the fact that (SIQT) is a test for wh-IEM might be taken as evidence that they were after wh-IEM, but I am not here concerned with the Evans-Shoemaker dispute.
Wright (2012) qualifies this definition by adding that no identification component must feature in the judgement’s background presuppositions. However, I will ignore this qualification since my objection to the Simple Account is independent of whether the singular judgement upon which the target inferential judgement depends can be either in the grounds or in the background presuppositions.
To give an example, suppose that S judges ‘He’s is chasing me’ on the basis of a hallucinatory experience. S deploys the demonstrative concept [he] whereby S purports to refer to a male individual in particular without succeeding in doing so.
Again, the Simple Account* may - and perhaps should - be reformulated so as to include the judgement’s background presuppositions. I ignore this for the sake of simplicity.
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Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO) under grant agreement #FFI2016–80588-R, the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675415, the Juan de la Cierva and Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral fellowship programmes (under grant agreements FCJI-2014-20227 and 2016BP00142), and a visiting fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust-funded project “What’s So Special about First-Person Thought?”. I wish to thank an audience at the 2017 ESPP conference in Hatfield for discussion of various parts of this material. Special thanks are due to Daniel Morgan and two anonymous referees for this journal, whose terrific comments have greatly improved the arguments of this paper. Finally, I am grateful to the members of the 2016 De Se and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification LOGOS Reading Group for stimulating and enjoyable discussions of the topics of this paper.
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Palmira, M. Arithmetic Judgements, First-Person Judgements and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 155–172 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0395-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0395-2