Context-Dependence, Perspective and Relativity / Mouton Series in Pragmatics Bd.6 (PDF)

On words and thoughts about oneself (p. 253-254)


James Higginbotham


Abstract: In (Higginbotham 2003) the peculiar nature of first-personal or de se contents (including thoughts, memories, and utterances) was attributed to their reflexive character, where a content for an agent x is reflexive to the extent that it presents x as the bearer s(e) of the state or action e of thinking or saying it, and it registers in logical form the roles r(e') that x would play in events e' classified by its predicates. Here I extend the discussion so as to take into account critical remarks in Recanati (2007) and Morgan (2009), and to explain how I see the account going within a modal conception of the nature of (structured) propositions. On the linguistic side, I am specifically critical of the view that human languages with first-personal or other indexicals that are sensitive to embedding involve “context shift” in the sense of Schlenker (2003) or Anand (2006), rather than being special cases of anaphora. Departing also from Lewis (1979), whose internalist views did not permit a robust sense of de re thought, I argue for an account that rules out context shift; pins the de se on reflexivity of content; and restores de re content along standard proof-theoretic lines, as in Hintikka (1962). Finally, using examples from English and Norwegian, I observe (with Castañeda [1987], I believe) that the distinction between truly de se and merely de re thoughts about oneself extends to certain extensional as well as intensional simple sentences, where the question of context shift evidently cannot arise, but where the distinction between reflexive and non-reflexive thoughts can be made out in logical form.

1. Introduction


Indexical singular terms are understood as they are used by their speakers to refer to things; moreover, their behavior, their contribution to what is said, is not in general dependent upon

François Recanati and Isidora Stojanovic, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France; Neftalí Villanueva, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France, and University of Granada, Spain.