Abstract
I shall start with some generic considerations on the pragmatics of ‘de se’ thoughts and I will then move on to the distinction between pure and impure ‘de se’ thoughts, which clearly involve some pragmatic discriminatory ability. Since impure ‘de se’ thoughts need not be IEM, it must be clear that IEM is not a semantic characteristic of psychological predicates but is available only after intervention of some pragmatic considerations. Anyway, the issue of IEM is to be considered as only tangential to the issue of ‘de se’ and thus, I will only reserve a final section for the definitive demonstration that IEM applies to certain psychological predicates only in the background of contextual considerations. IEM, in other words, is only pragmatic in nature. Although this is an important conclusion, it is deduced merely as a consequence of the analysis of ‘de se’ thoughts. The D-tour we are making is considerable, but not improper and without consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Purity’ in connection with reference unmediated by some descriptive component is a term used by García-Carpintero (2013, 76). Reasonably enough, the term ‘impure’ has been coined by myself in opposition to such a term.
- 2.
I am largely following Higginbotham (2003) in the thought that there is a connection between ‘de se’ thoughts and IEM.
- 3.
As Recanati (2012) says, “to be immune to error through misidentification, a first-person judgment must be truly subjective. The subject must not be thought of as an object which one identifies as oneself; for, if it is, the judgment rests on an identity (‘b = myself’) and is subject to identification errors”.
- 4.
The source of information may come from inside the body (proprioceptive information, as ‘I feel a pain in my leg’ (see Recanati 2012) or from the flow of throught (inside the mind).
- 5.
García-Carpintero (2013, 80) says that “the amnesiac cases suggest also that descriptive individuators, whether or not they allow for for ‘de re’ thought on the strictures of N, are unnecessary, for amnesiacs are able to think about themselves in a fully self-conscious way by using and understanding ‘I’ and related expressions for first-personal reference while ignoring everything about themselves”. However, this looks like a simplification. When I discuss Kant’s transcendental self, I present data to the effect that the ‘I’ must keep a file of what he said before to monitor his own speech for contradiction. Thus a truly amnesiac subject which only retains the ‘I’ mode of presentation of himself cannot successfully embark on the enterprise of making a coherent discourse devoid of contradictions. It is necessary that the ‘I’ should always come accompanied by a file on what he has said before.
- 6.
García-Carpintero (2013) says that “believers in a substantive singular/general distinction will have to accept that some ‘de re’ ascriptions (those meeting Quine’s criterion) report what in fact are general thoughts and viceversa…”.
- 7.
‘Am I John Smith’ and ‘I am John Smith’ would have to share a neutral (or minimal) mode of presentation of ‘I’. But this neutral mode of presentation needs saturating information in the question ‘Am I John Smith?’, while in the answer the information in the predicate comes through antecedent knowledge that the speaker knows the identity of the subject.
- 8.
Where the apposition ‘John Perry’ may be an implicit constituent, something one does not have an occurrent thought of (to use words by Davis) but one could have an occurrent thought of, had one a chance to make this constituent explicit.
- 9.
Rosenthal (in a p.c.) writes the following:
You assert that the I in the the ‘I think’ that Kant thinks must be able to go with every thought is not a sequence of tokens of the mental analogue of ‘I’, but something that has the capacity to tie all one’s thoughts together.
I certainly agree that that’s something like what Kant had in mind. But there’s a question about whether any such thing is there to be had. Simply stipulating that there is a mental item that will do the relevant unifying job doesn’t show that there is any such mental item.
Note in that connection Kant’s methodology: Establishing what is necessary for what is actual even to be possible. Kant takes the relevant unity of the self through time and across thoughts to be actual. He therefore argues that a unifying ‘I’ is necessary for that unity even to be possible.
That’s fine – except that assuming that strong unity – we might in the context of my own article call it a thick unity – is question begging. I argue that there is an appearance of such strong unity, but that we have no reason to suppose that that strong unity is also real, in addition to being apparent.
My reply to Rosenthal is that from a philosophical point of view, I am certainly sympathetic to Kant’s considerations, which derive, on a priori grounds, the unity of different slices of the thinking subject. However, in a linguistic paper, like the present one, not as much as this is required. We can be sympathetic with Rosenthal that only a thin identification is required, as this may well occur through anaphoricity, that is to say coindexation. Coindexation need not involve stipulation, but is normally a pragmatic interpretative matter (the hearer associates the ‘I’ of a thought with the producer of that thought and then anaphorically links one ‘I’ to the next). Of course, the thinking subject need not interpret occurrences of ‘I’ (in his own thoughts) as anaphorically linked. They are are already linked by the fact that they are uttered by the same voice (if just thought is considered, we may just assume that the thinker remembers whether his thoughts are his own and coindexes the ‘I’s of his thoughts with his own thoughts, from which it follows that the different occurrences of ‘I’ of his thoughts refer to the same person).
- 10.
Rosenthal (in a p.c.) replies that the case of a person who cares (or actually manages) not to contradict herself is pretty rare. I agree with that. I agree that people can change their minds, over time. However, there are cases to conform to the one I have described, such as that of the rational law-maker who has to avoid and eliminate contradictions (Dascal 2003; Capone 2013). There are, furthermore, also contexts in which one is held to certain assumptions, as in the course of a logical demonstration.
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Capone, A. (2016). Impure ‘de se’ Thoughts and Pragmatics (and How This Is Relevant to Pragmatics and IEM). In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_24
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