De Se Thought

De Se Thought
De Se Thought
Manuel García-Carpintero
Subject: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind Online Publication Date: Nov 2015
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935314.013.61
Abstract and Keywords
Inspired by Castañeda’s work, Perry and Lewis argued that first-personal thoughts (those
we would naturally express by using the first person) have special features that call for a
distinctive account and suggested rival explanations. In this chapter, the author first re
vises Perry’s and Lewis’s considerations and rival accounts from the perspective of recent
debates on semantic content and reference. In part influenced by Castañeda’s and Perry’s
and Lewis’s work, but also on independent bases, linguists have argued that the phenom
enon has traces in the semantics of natural languages. The second section revises this as
pect of the discussion, together with some recent skeptical considerations. Section three
examines one of the epistemological issues that many think should be illuminated by an
adequate account of first-personal thoughts, the distinction that Wittgenstein made be
tween uses of “I” “as object” and “as subject” and a related phenomenon that Shoemaker
introduced,immunity to error through misidentification(IEM).
Keywords: thought, first-person, Castañeda, Perry, Lewis, immunity to error through misidentification, IEM, one
self, self-ascription, reflexive
Inspired by Castañeda (1966, 1968), Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979) showed that, among
singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself “as oneself” (de se thoughts, as
Lewis called them) raise special issues, and they advanced rival accounts. Perry (1979,
33) introduces his case with a celebrated example: “I once followed a trail of sugar on a
supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back
the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a
mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to
catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch.” Before his
epiphany, Perry has a belief about himself (under the individuating concept or mode of
presentation the shopper with the torn sack) to the effect that he was making a mess.
This, however, is insufficient for him to have the reflexive, self-conscious belief that he
would express in accepting “I am making a mess,” the one that leads him to rearrange
the torn sack in the cart.
Theorists of singular thought divide into two camps (cf. García-Carpintero 2014). The di
vide concerns whether such thoughts might constitutively feature descriptive content.
Millian theorists (cf., e.g., Soames 2002) appeal to extensions of Russell’s nondescriptive
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De Se Thought
acquaintance relation to account for singular thought; true aboutness is, on the Millian
view, constituted by some relation (perception, memory, testimony) nondescriptively link
ing subject and object of reference. Fregean theorists (cf., e.g., Hawthorne and Manley
2012) are typically latitudinarians or liberals who reject this, allowing for descriptively
constituted singular thoughts.
Now, on the Fregean view, Perry might already have a singular belief before his epiphany,
but not on Millian accounts. However, as Perry (1979, 42) points out, it will not help to
adopt the latter view: “Suppose there were mirrors at either end of the counter so that as
I pushed my cart down the aisle in pursuit I saw myself in the mirror. I take what I see to
be the reflection of the messy shopper going up the aisle on the other side, not realizing
that what I am really seeing is a reflection of a reflection of myself.” Given that he is per
ceiving himself in the mirror, the Millian view now allows for Perry to have a de re belief
about himself to the effect that he is making a mess; but this still falls short of the reflec
tive, self-conscious belief manifested by acceptance of “I am making a mess” and the
cleaning-up behavior. Lewis (1979) has a celebrated example involving two gods, one on
the tallest mountain throwing down manna and another on the coldest mountain throw
ing down thunderbolts, who, though omniscient about non-self-locating information, do
not know where they are in their world. Castañeda (1966) has another famous example
featuring an amnesiac war hero who reads a detailed biography without realizing that he
is its subject. Cases like this suggest that rich descriptive concepts are not only insuffi
cient, but also unnecessary; the amnesiac is able to think thoughts about himself in a fully
self-conscious reflexive way by using and understanding “I” and related expressions for
first-personal reference while knowing precious little about himself.
These examples raise the problem of de se thoughts—in a nutshell, how to characterize

them so as to give an accurate account of such data, thereby tracing their relations to sin
gular thoughts in general. Here, I will present the main contributions and highlight re
cent developments.
1. De Se Thoughts: Two Conflicting Accounts

Propositional attitudes and speech acts are individuated by representational contents that
are taken to be propositions with absolute truth-values: given a full specification of a pos
sible way for the world to be, propositions thus understood acquire a definite truth value
with respect to it. Alternatively, propositions can be simply identified as classes of possi
ble worlds, those with respect to which they are true. Thus, in believing that snow is
white, one represents worlds in which snow is white and places the actual world among
them. Lewis and Perry take de se thoughts to question this picture.
Lewis proposes that we abandon the traditional theory of contents, taking them to be
properties instead of propositions (Sosa [1981] and Chisholm [1981] advance essentially
the same view; Feit [2008] provides a book-length defense). Contents would be entities
that are true or false, given a full characterization of a way for the world to be, only rela
tive in addition to a subject and a time. Alternatively, the contents of propositional atti
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tudes are, or at least select, not just classes or worlds, but rather classes of centered
worlds: worlds together with a designated subject and a time. In coming to believe what
he would express by accepting “I am making a mess,” Perry locates himself among all
subjects making a mess at a given time and in a given world.
On the traditional conception of contents, the actual world is not part of them. In believ
ing a proposition, one ascribes it to the actual world in which the believing occurs1; it is
the attitude of believing or the act of judging that, as it were, as part of its “illocutionary”
nature, fixes the world in which the belief occurs as the one relevant for the evaluation of
the truth of the belief. A mere imagining with the same content would not similarly bring
the actual world to bear because imaginings are not evaluated as true or otherwise rela
tive to whether the actual world where the imagining occurs is correctly represented by
their contents.
Similarly and by analogy, on Lewis’s view, it is the attitude of believing itself, as opposed
to its content, which brings to bear the subject and time relevant for the evaluation of its
truth or falsity. Subjects who come to believe what they would express in English by ut
tering “I am making a mess” believe the same contents in the way that subjects who be
lieve in different worlds that snow is white believe the same contents. This provides a
nice solution to the initial problem of de se thought. If no conception of the subject (in
cluding those allowing for de re thought on Millian strictures) is sufficient for de se
thought, and none appears to be needed, this is because the subject is not represented as
part of the content but is brought to bear for purposes of evaluation by the act of judging
itself, not by its content. These perspectival contents that Lewis’s account posits have
made a strong comeback to the philosophical scene in recent years, in the so-called rela
tivist accounts advanced by writers such as Kölbel (2004), Egan (2007, 2010), and Mac
Farlane (2005) for different areas of discourse: judgments of taste, epistemic modals, and
future-tense claims on the assumption of indeterminism, among others.
To complete the presentation of the Lewisian proposal, it will be helpful to see how it es
capes an objection by Perry (1979, 44):
I believed that certain proposition, that I am making a mess was true—true for me.
So belief that this proposition was true for me then does not differentiate me from
some other shopper, who believes that I am making a mess was true for John Per
ry. So this belief cannot be what explains my stopping and searching my cart for
the torn sack. Once we have adopted these new-fangled propositions, which are
only true at times for persons, we have to admit also that we believe them as true
for persons at times, and not absolutely. And then our problem returns.
Here, Perry wrongly appears to be taking the content of the belief on the Lewisian pro
posal to be that the relevant property (making a mess) is true for oneself. He thus surrep
titiously introduces the subject back into the content of the proposition—so that a differ
ent shopper, with very different rational behavioral dispositions and responding to very
different evidence, may well believe the same. This is a misunderstanding. Lewis’s pro
posal is that the content of Perry’s epiphanic belief is the property of making a mess,
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which, in judging it, he self-ascribes (at the time of the believing) the way ordinary propo
sitions are supposed to be ascribed to the actual world when they are believed. The other
shopper does not believe (i.e., self-ascribe) this property; she instead believes a tradition
al de re proposition: that the property making a mess applies to Perry.2 In a recent criti
cism, Stanley (2011, 89) appears to be making the same mistake in requiring the
Lewisian theory to explain what it is to self-ascribe a property in a way that distinguishes
truly de se self-ascription from self-ascription “under the grip of amnesia, thereby failing
to ascribe it to myself.” But on Lewis’s view, the distinction lies in that the latter is not
self-ascription, in the relevant sense; it is just the self-ascription of a de re proposition
about oneself. The subject figures in the content in the latter case but not in the former;
in assimilating the two cases, Stanley’s request manifests the same misunderstanding as
Perry.
On Perry’s own alternative view, we should distinguish the content or object of the belief
from the belief-state through which it is accessed. The content is just a traditional propo
sition, de dicto or de re—say, that Perry is making a mess. The state is a specific condition
of the subject, by being in which the content is believed. Contents help to account for the
role that propositional attitudes constitutively have in appraising the rationality of the
subject, the adequacy of his beliefs to his evidence and of his actions to his beliefs and de
sires, the value of his desires, and the like. But only, on Perry’s view, in a coarse-grained
way: for a full account of rational action, we need not just the content, but also the specif
ic state through which the content is accessed. The just mentioned cases involving de se
thoughts show that traditional contents are not enough to appraise rationality and cogni
tive significance; ways of accessing them should also be taken into consideration. On
Perry’s view, this is just a particular case of what obtains in Frege’s puzzles in general:
exactly the same lesson should be obtained concerning the differing cognitive signifi
cance of “Superman flies” and “Clark Kent flies,” or “Hesperus is visible in the afternoon”
and “Phosphorus is visible in the afternoon.”
Belief-states themselves must hence have some kind of meaning or significance if they are
to have a role in appraising the rationality of actions or inferences. In his original ac
count, Perry (1979) appeals to Kaplan’s (1989) distinction between character and content
to characterize the significance of states. Utterances of “he is making a mess” and “I am
making a mess” might have, in their contexts, the same singular content, but they have
different characters. Similarly, Perry’s belief-state when he looks at what is in fact his
own reflection in the mirror, and later when he catches up, are different states with the
same content; given the differences in rational action to be expected from one and the
other, states themselves must have a role in the explanation of action and the cognitive
significance of the belief in virtue of their character-like meaning.
Now, Stalnaker (1981, 145–148) objected to accounts such as Lewis’s and the original one
by Perry just presented on the grounds that they cannot capture an “informational con
tent” that is an essential feature of utterances including essential indexicals, and he ad
vanced an alternative account appealing to the “diagonal propositions” that he (1978)
had introduced earlier. We might find it easier to think in terms of structured propositions
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as opposed to possible-world ones, so I will not present the Perry-Stalnaker debate in

terms of diagonal propositions; I will present it instead in terms of what I take to be the
finer grained token-reflexive structured propositions determining them as their intensions
or “modal profiles.”3
Let us imagine a variation on Perry’s supermarket story in which, contemplating the situ
ation and realizing what is going on, a kind shopper warns Perry, which leads to Perry’s
epiphany. He thereby comes to accept “I am making a mess” after being told “you are
making a mess.” On Perry’s original view, the contents of the beliefs thereby expressed
are the ordinary, coarse-grained de re propositions that are conveniently identical for the
two utterances. However, as we know, this singular content does not account for what
Perry comes to know after the epiphany: he already believed it beforehand. Nevertheless,
it seems that whatever explains Perry’s distinctive behavior after the epiphany was, in
this variation of the story, communicated to him by the other shopper’s utterance.
How could Perry’s or Lewis’s proposals account for this? The character-like contents cor
responding to the shopper’s utterance, “you are making a mess,” are very different from
those corresponding to the ones by means of which Perry would express his acquired
knowledge, “I am making a mess.” The properties that the shopper and Perry rationally
self-attribute differ (respectively, being addressing someone who is making a mess; being
making a mess), and the corresponding perspectival contents are similarly different. Al
ternatively put, it would be absurd for Perry to ascribe to himself the property that the
Samaritan shopper expresses—to wit, that of addressing someone who is making a mess.
For Lewis and Perry to deal with this consistently with their accounts, they should elabo
rate them so as to explain how it is that, in virtue of the shopper expressing a certain con
tent, Perry comes to learn a different one.
On the simplest account of successful communication, the episode should be explained by

Perry’s learning the very same content that the Samaritan shopper expressed. This is
what Stalnaker’s account in terms of diagonal propositions (token-reflexive contents in a
structured-content framework) purports to offer. We can think of the meaning of indexi
cals like “I” or “you” as token-reflexive rules, which, given a particular token, fix its refer
ent relative to some contextual property: being the speaker who produced it or its (most
salient) addressee. This provides a descriptive conception of the referent; in the case of
the Samaritan utterance of “you are making a mess,” we have a token-reflexive concep
tion associated with the particular case of “you,” the addressee of that token.4 Both the
Samaritan shopper and Perry can share this way of representing Perry. So we have here
an ordinary content determining a traditional proposition that is communicated from one
to the other: the one we could explicitly articulate with “the addressee of that token of
‘you’ is making a mess.” Perry (1993) accepts that these token-reflexive contents provide
a better representation of the significance of belief-states than the one he had earlier sug
gested in terms of Kaplanian characters. But as he (2006) explains, this refined version of
his account can be taken in two different ways, only in one of which is it at least prima fa
cie successful as a way of accounting for de se thoughts. Let us examine this carefully.
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On the first interpretation, the proposal is to think of what in Perry’s earlier account was
the character-like significance of belief-states as the proper contents of de se attitudes.
The proposal would thus be to take token-reflexive contents as the contents of de se
attitudes, capable by themselves of accounting for the data on traditional views on psy
chological explanation. I think this is the way Stalnaker took his proposal, given his insis
tence on making do just with traditional, possible-worlds propositions. However, taken in
this way, for reasons Perry (2006, 209–212) convincingly provides, the proposal does not
work. The reason is that it is possible to reproduce the original problem, now with token-
reflexive contents. The very same token-reflexive propositions can be accessed in differ
ent ways, and, in some of them, they could not possibly have the rational role that de se
thoughts do. Thus, for instance, Perry can hear the Samaritan shopper’s utterance of “you
are making a mess” without realizing, for whatever reason, that it is addressed to him
(perhaps the Samaritan is speaking behind him) but accepting on its basis that its ad
dressee is making a mess at the time. The Samaritan’s utterance would have the token-re
flexive content we have been considering, but accepting it could not have the epiphanic
role that accepting the Samaritan shopper’s utterance had for Perry in our variant of the
story.
On the second interpretation—the one that Perry subscribes to—the proposal is just a re
fined way of understanding the significance of belief-states, but an adequate account of
de se contents (of the nature of attitudes and speech acts in general) still requires the dis
tinction between belief-contents and belief-states (ways of accessing the content). The
modification of Perry’s original proposal lies only in that now the significance of belief-
states is taken to be specifiable in the traditional propositional way that token-reflexive
contents afford.5
This evades the previous objection but raises other issues. For one thing, Stalnaker’s crit
icism of Lewis’s and Perry’s original proposals was not that they cannot account for the
transmission of information in cases like the one we were considering—correctly so, be
cause they could indeed do so in several ways. The objection rather was that the view
that it is the diagonal or token-reflexive content that is communicated affords a simpler
explanation: the Samaritan shopper’s utterance conveys that content, which Perry ac
cepts. Once we realize the need to preserve the state/content distinction, however, this al
leged benefit is lost because the directly communicated content (be it the singular propo
sition that Perry is making a mess or the singular proposition about the token of “you”) is
not the explanatorily relevant one, while the belief-states truly accounting for the
shopper’s utterance and Perry’s acceptance of it are crucially different. In the Samaritan
shopper’s state, Perry is presented as the addressee of the token of “you” produced by
him; in Perry’s, as he himself as the person being addressed by the currently attended to
ken of “you.” No Stalnakerian argument for preferring the token-reflexive proposal (prop
erly understood) based on the simple model of communication is to be found here.
Stalnaker (1981), who was espousing the first interpretation, was aware of Perry’s objec
tion. He deals with it by appealing to the holism that he attributes to belief-states. Thus,
even though in accepting the Samaritan shopper’s utterance of “you are making a mess”
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in both versions of the story (with and without realizing he is the addressee) Perry may
well accept the same proposition, his full belief-state in each case can hardly be the same.
The account in terms of diagonal propositions is then taken to characterize full belief-
states. More recently, Stalnaker backs up, and he (2008, 55–59) provides an account in
the spirit of the second interpretation, thus replicating Perry’s distinction between con
tent and state in a formally elegant way.6
A fully convincing presentation of Perry’s proposal requires an account of the nature of

states and contents and their interrelation. Perry (2012) argues that states are mental
particulars that may be classified by their “official contents” (the coarse-grained singular
propositions in our examples) and also by a plurality of other finer grained propositional
contents useful for different explanatory purposes.7 However, crucial questions remain
unanswered: how is it that states have cognitive significances that differ from (“official”)
contents but nonetheless can be captured by means of contents without incurring the
problems of the first interpretation?8 I (forthcoming-a) have made a proposal influenced
by Stalnaker’s (1978) distinction between presupposition and assertion, which in a nut
shell goes as follows. Both in the linguistic and in the mental cases, we model states as
linguistic items, “interpreted logical forms.” The difference between “it is not you who is
making a mess” and “you are not making a mess” lies not in the assertoric content of
these utterances but in that the former, unlike the latter, carries the presupposition that
someone is making a mess. Presuppositions are normative conditions (which may in fact
fail) on “previous” (mutual, in the language case; antecedent, in the case of thoughts)
knowledge. Now, referential expressions carry specific knowing wh- presuppositions. The
difference between “you” in the shopper’s utterance and “I” in the one expressing Perry’s
acceptance lies in such presuppositions, which would be manifest in the structure of the
interpreted logical forms by means of which we would model their respective belief-
states.9
Properly elaborated, the state/content distinction should help us deflate objections to to
ken-reflexive proposals like one developed by O’Brien (2007, 70) and Recanati (2007, ch.
25). Both consider the case of a schizophrenic patient who believes that some mental
states he is conscious of are not really his but are the thoughts of some other person that
have somehow been implanted in him. In Recanati’s example, the patient is conscious of
the judgment that one would express by accepting “I am good and omnipotent”; he there
by comes to accept that the owner/judger of this state is good and omnipotent, but he
does not accept that he is the owner of that thought—it is rather “the other” who has im
planted it. Recanati (2007, 183–184) contends that:
… this is a counterexample, because the subject is in a certain state (he conscious

ly entertains a certain thought), the content of the state reflexively refers to the
subject of the state (whom the deluded subject takes to be different from what it
actually is), yet the subject does not entertain a de se thought, to the effect that he
himself is good and omnipotent. What this shows is that being in a state with a re
flexive content is not sufficient to ground a self-ascription.
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Recanati is right that being in a state with a reflexive content is insufficient for first-per
sonal thought; this is just the point Perry makes about the inadequacy of Stalanker’s sug
gestion on the first interpretation. We should distinguish between two different mental
states. There is, in the first place, the judgment about oneself—to the effect that one is
good and omnipotent—made by being in a state whose significance is captured by the to
ken-reflexive interpreted form the owner (judger) of this very state is good and omnipo
tent. There also is the impression about oneself—to the effect that one is judging oneself
to be good and omnipotent—had by being in a state whose significance is rather captured
by the token-reflexive form the owner of this very state appears to be judging herself to
be good and omnipotent. Normally, when one is in the latter belief-state, one is thereby
also in the former, but this is not so in the case of the schizophrenic patient. Recanati is
right that to be in a state with a reflexive content is not sufficient to ground a self-ascrip
tion; as I said, this was already shown by Perry’s objection to the first interpretation.10
What is needed in addition is that the reflexive content provides the significance of the at
titude-state one is in, the way through which some content is accessed, and not its con
tent. This fails to be so in the case of the token-reflexive content that Recanati considers
for the schizophrenic patient who fails to make the relevant judgment. (As we saw, a more
complex token-reflexive content does capture the significance of the impression-state of
the patient: the owner of this thought is under the impression of judging that he himself is
good and omnipotent.) I, of course, acknowledge again that the state–content distinction
requires further elaboration for this to be a fully satisfactory account.
In connection with the issue of circularity, I should make a further acknowledgment to

curb explanatory ambitions that an account along the lines of the one just suggested
might be wrongly presumed to hold. The account should be understood as a “two-tiered”
one, in the sense of O’Brien (2007, 65). Deploying representations whose significance is
captured by the self-reference token-reflexive rule is a necessary but insufficient part of
what thinking (and talking) about oneself, as such, is. The full account involves in addi
tion an awareness of or introspective access to one’s own states, a self-knowledge that is
not itself explained by the reliance on the self-reference rule.11 This assumption will be
considered unwarranted by some philosophers, and thus the account will be deemed in
adequate depending on what is to be explained.12
Ninan (2010) and Torre (2010) have independently developed a Lewisian response to the
communication problem posed by Stalnaker, on which what is communicated are cen
tered worlds contents. These are not taken to be properties that subjects self-attribute
(this would not do for the reasons already mentioned) but rather properties that ordered
groups of discussants collectively ascribe to themselves, given in a certain order. This ac
count, however, requires conversational participants to keep track somehow of whom
among them a given assertion ascribes a property to because we are not contemplating
merely attributions of properties that all conversationists may have (like their collective
spatial or temporal location), but also properties that only some of them have. Because of
this, I do not take these accounts to preserve the crucial appealing feature of Lewis’s the
ory highlighted by defenders such as Recanati (2007); namely, that the subject is not rep
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resented as part of the content. For speakers to coherently communicate on these ac
counts, the contents they have to ascribe to assertions (and other speech acts in a conver
sation) must be along the lines of those that Perry assumes in the objection to Lewis that
we rejected earlier: namely, that a given participant self-ascribes a given property.
Let us take stock. In this section, I presented the problem posed by the intuitive data sug
gesting that the thoughts we would characteristically express by means of first-personal
sentences have a distinctive cognitive role—a role that can be shared by thoughts ex
pressed with similar sentences by other agents (hence with different traditional singular
contents) and that can differ from that of thoughts we would express with other expres
sions equally referring to ourselves (hence with the same traditional singular contents). I
have also presented Lewis’s and Perry’s contrasting accounts. According to Lewis, first-
personal thoughts have distinctive contents: properties or centered worlds that the sub
ject self-ascribes in having the attitudes whose contents they are. According to Perry, they
have fully propositional token-reflexive contents, albeit these should not be taken as pro
viding the contents of the relevant attitudes, but rather as characterizing the cognitive
significance of the attitudes themselves in an alternative way. Traditionally, contents are
understood to be abstract—more so than the particular vehicles to which they are as
cribed, be they mental attitudes or linguistic utterances. Lewis’s and Perry’s proposals
share the view that to account for first-personal thoughts we need to essentially involve
the content-vehicles themselves, the states or attitudes: on Lewis’s view, this is encapsu
lated in the idea that de se contents are self-ascribed; on Perry’s, in the idea that de se
contents characterize states. So perhaps this should be part of any working account of
the de se. The proposals differ in that, to perform the job, Lewis posits perspectival con
tents, properties, or centered worlds, whereas Perry aims to do with fully propositional
token-reflexive ones.
2. Linguistic Data
Castañeda coined a technical device—quasi-indicators such as “he*”—dedicated to signal
de se ascriptions in attitude attributions. He (1968, 441) characterizes quasi-indicators as
follows (to stick to our examples, I slightly modify the passage so that it concerns “he*” in
the ascription “Perry has learned that he* is making a mess,” which I assume is made to
report Perry’s epiphanic utterance of “I am making a mess”):
(i) [I]t does not express an indexical reference made by the speaker; (ii) it appears
in oratio obliqua; (iii) it has an antecedent, namely [“Perry”], to which it refers
back; (iv) its antecedent is outside the oratio obliqua containing “he*”; (v) “he*” is
used to attribute, so to speak, implicit indexical references to [Perry]; that is, if
[Perry] were to assert what, according to [the ascription], he knows, he would use
the indicator “I” where we, uttering i[t], have used “he*.”
Castañeda considered the possibility that “he himself” might play that role in English, but
this has been questioned (more on this later). Interestingly, at the same time, some lin
guists were independently exploring the presence in natural language of so-called lo
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gophoric expressions with more or less the same features that Castañeda ascribed to his
theoretically posited quasi-indicators; see Corazza (2004), Anand (2006), Schlenker
(2011), Huang (2007), and references therein. Chierchia (1989) and Higginbotham (2003)
have showed that PRO (the implicit subject of infinitive clauses that linguists posit follow
ing Chomsky) also appears to behave in English like a quasi-indicator. Thus (to borrow an
example common in the literature), imagine that John, a candidate in an election, enter
tains a thought that he would express by uttering “I will win the election.” In that case,
we could correctly report him by both (1) and (2):
(1) John expects that he will win the election.

(2) John expects PRO to win the election.
However, imagine now that John is so drunk that he has forgotten that he is a candidate
in the election. He watches someone on TV and thinks that that person is a terrific candi
date who should definitely be elected. Unbeknownst to John, the candidate he is watching
on TV is John himself. In that situation, it intuitively seems that only the purely de re
report (1) would be correct; (2) feels like an incorrect description of the situation, a false
report.
Some researchers have offered examples intended to dispute the data—similar cases
were used to question Castañeda’s suggestion that “he himself” behaves like a quasi-indi
cator. For instance, Hinzen and Martín (unpublished manuscript) argue that (2) can after
all be correctly asserted in the envisaged circumstance, albeit ironically. As they put it, if
John expects the guy on TV to win the election, and the guy is John, then it so happens
(ironically) that John expects John (i.e., himself) to win. Cappelen and Dever (2013, 163–
164) offer analogous examples:
Clark Kent has lost track of the fact that he is Superman. In fact, he has been
tracking Superman’s past activities, finding him a suspicious character. Superman
comes to be on trial for sabotaging a power plant. Clark Kent is put on the stand
(in front of a prosecutor, judge, and audience, all of whom are aware of his identi
ty with Superman) and asked about what he’s discovered in his Superman-track
ing. After Kent gives out one particular piece of information, very damning in con
text, the prosecutor declares, “Mr. Kent, don’t you realize that you’ve just admit
ted sabotaging the power plant?”
These examples are, however, manifestly pragmatic (i.e., pragmatic in the sense that
Gricean particularized implicatures are pragmatic, not in the more controversial sense in
volving generalized implicatures such as scalar implicatures or so-called free pragmatic
enrichment); hence, they do not contradict the previous semantic suggestions. Even if we
accept the ironical correctness of the report in Hinzen and Martín’s proposal, it is
nonetheless an ironically conveyed content not only not in opposition to the de se report
that has been advanced as its literal semantic content, but also presupposing it as part of
the mechanism through which the ironical effect is achieved. Similarly, the prosecutor in
Cappelen and Dever’s example is aiming to create a pragmatic effect; he is trying to lead
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De Se Thought
Kent to realize that he is, after all, declaring against himself through the prima facie
falsity, taken literally, of the assertion that his rhetorical question conveys.13
Chierchia (1989) invoked the presence in natural languages of devices like PRO to indi
cate de se ascriptions in an argument for the Lewisian view presented in the previous sec
tion. However, the existence of such grammatical devices does not establish this. On the
alternative picture suggested by Perry, de se ascriptions are just like any other attitude
ascription that, in addition to indicating what the attitudes are about, provides some in
formation about how such a subject matter is represented. It is perfectly compatible with
this that languages have lexicalized or otherwise given grammatical realization to devices
aimed to convey this. Stanley (2011, 76–81) provides convincing replies to other related
grammatical arguments for the Lewisian view.
3. De Se Thoughts and Immunity to Error

Through Misidentification
Wittgenstein (1958, 66–67) pointed out a distinction between two uses of “I”—one “as ob
ject” and another “as subject”—which Shoemaker (1968) elucidated in terms of a notion
of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). This is an epistemological phenome
non that it is natural to find related to the special character of the de se thoughts ex
pressed with uses of the first person. One should then expect that accounts of de se
thoughts explain or otherwise illuminate IEM (Peacocke 2014, 109–10). On that assump
tion, Recanati (2007, 2009, 2012) argues for a Lewisian account of some “basic” or “im
plicit” de se thoughts, contending that this provides a good explanation of IEM. However,
several writers (Stanley 2011, 91–93; Morgan 2012; García-Carpintero 2013) have op
posed Recanati’s claim. We will conclude by examining the connection between de se
thoughts and these epistemological issues.
Shoemaker (1968, 557) specifies the sort of mistake that IEM excludes as follows: “to say
that a statement ‘a is φ’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term
‘a’ means that the following is possible: the speaker knows some particular thing to be φ,
but makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is φ‘ because, and only because, he mistakenly
thinks that the thing he knows to be φ is what a refers to.” Consider the moment in
Perry’s story when he sees what in fact is his image in a mirror with a torn sack. Let us
imagine now another variation on the story, one in which this is in fact the ground for
Perry’s epiphany because this time he recognizes himself in the mirror; suppose then that
he judges on this basis what he would express by “I am making a mess.” Made on such
epistemic grounds, the claim is exposed to the error that Shoemaker identifies. Perry
might have been wrong in identifying himself with the person whose back is reflected in
the mirror; he would then be right that someone is pushing a cart with a torn sack and is
thus making a mess but wrong to think that it is he who is making a mess.
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Pryor (1999) offers a definition of an IEM alternative to Shoemaker’s linguistic character

ization, one free from concerns that the latter might raise.14 Pryor’s characterization also
highlights the relativity to ways of reaching the relevant judgment that, as this example
already makes clear, any proper characterization should capture: a judgment can be IEM
if made on a given epistemic basis in normal circumstances and not if made on different
grounds. Pryor defines first de re misidentification, which occurs when the following
three conditions obtain—here they are illustrated relative to the example just imagined:
(i) There is some singular proposition about x, to the effect that it is F that a subject
believes or attempts to express. (Perry believes a singular proposition about himself,
to the effect that he is making a mess.)
(ii) The subject’s justification for believing this singular proposition rests on his justi
fication for believing, of some y, and of x, that y is F and that y is identical to x. (In the
imagined counterfactual circumstances, Perry’s justification derives from his justifi
cation for believing of the person whose back he sees that he is making a mess and
for identifying himself with that person.)
(iii) However, unbeknownst to the subject, y ≠ x.
Pryor (1999, 279) then stipulates that a judgment justified by grounds G is IEM just in
case it is impossible for the judgment to be a case of de re misidentification when made
on grounds G. Now, in the original version of the story, the epiphany comes when Perry
sees that he is pushing a cart with a torn sack. Consider now his physical self-ascription,
“I am pushing a cart with a torn sack,” or his psychological self-ascription, “I see that I
am pushing a cart with a torn sack,” both based on his visual experience of the scene
around him. Neither of these claims appears to be open to the sort of error that Shoemak
er and Pryor describe, nor is the thought he expresses by “I am making a mess” when
based on the same grounds.
Our examples show that, if there is a connection between de se thoughts and IEM, it must
be indirect; the thought that Perry expresses by accepting “I am making a mess” is de se
not just in the original IEM case, but also in the previously imagined alternative non-IEM
condition. The subtler connection might be this: “I” thoughts that are IEM are fundamen
tally de se; those that are not are only de se derivatively in that, in making them by using
the first-person concept, the speaker identifies himself as the object of other, fundamen
tally de se thoughts. Recanati’s defense of the Lewisian account of de se thought thus
concerns only the fundamentally de se. He (Recanati 2007, 177) distinguishes explicit
from implicit de se thoughts. The former are attitudes to traditional propositions, the lat
ter to perspectival contents. This explains the IEM of thoughts such as “my legs are
crossed” based on proprioception (2007, 147):
The content is a relativized proposition, true at a person, and the internal mode
determines the person relative to which that relativized content is evaluated: my
self. In Perry’s terms, the self is an unarticulated constituent of the judgment. The
content of the judgment, therefore, is not the proposition that my legs are crossed,
strictly speaking. What is articulated is only the person-relative proposition that
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one’s legs are crossed. Since I am not explicitly “identified” as the person whose
legs are crossed, I cannot be misidentified. The judgment, Evans (1982, 180–1)
says, is “identification-free.”
Now, Recanati’s appeal to Evans here is at the very least misleading. Various writers, in
cluding John Campbell, Christopher Peacocke, and Crispin Wright, have developed an ac
count of IEM suggested by Evans’s notion of identification-freedom that Wright (2012,
253) calls “the Simple Account” (SA). As I will show now, SA provides an account of IEM
that is not only compatible with the Lewisian account of the de se, but also with one along
the lines of the Perry-Stalnaker proposal.15 On SA, non-IEM thoughts are thoughts the
structure of whose epistemic justification depends on an identity claim; thus, for instance,
Perry’s judgment “I am making a mess” in the previously imagined version of the story,
which was not IEM, depends on Perry’s identity judgment, I am that person reflected in
the mirror. This is why he himself might coherently consider that, although the existential
“part” of his claim—that someone is making a mess—is correct, he is mistaken in the
identification, and it is not in fact he himself but someone else who is making a mess. SA
characterizes IEM thoughts negatively as those that are not thus dependent on an identi
ty claim.
The account that SA affords appeals to the absence of an identity claim in the justifica
tional structure of IEM thoughts; Recanati’s explanation appeals instead to the absence of
a conception of the self in their content. SA leads us to distinguish between two senses
for a thought to have an identification component. In the first sense (“identificationP”),
the epistemic grounds for the thought include an identity-premise. In the second sense
(“identificationC”), the thought includes a concept that identifies what it is about. Given
SA, having an identificationC component is compatible with a thought being IEM because
being IEM is lacking an identificationP component, and thoughts having identificationC
components may well be identificationP-free—they might even be epistemically basic. In
contrast, Recanati’s account explains IEM by the absence of an identificationC element.
SA thus opens up the possibility of thoughts including identificationC components, which

are nonetheless IEM with respect to them. Hence, supporters of a Perry-Stalnaker ac
count of the de se can happily appeal to SA to explain IEM.16 And it seems to be the case
that there are such thoughts. Wright (2012, 254) offers as examples “you are standing
very close” and “he is a long way off,” both based on observation; Peacocke’s (2008) “this
keyboard is black” is again based on observation. Hence, without further elaboration,
Recanati’s account of IEM will not do. He (Recanati 2009, 259; 2012, 190–196) accepts
this, even for some first-personal IEM thoughts. A thought expressed by “my legs are
crossed” based on proprioceptive evidence is IEM on his original account because the
content is just the property of having crossed legs, which the subject self-ascribes. The
thought expressed by “it is my legs, not my neighbor’s, that are crossed” cannot plausibly
be thought not to include the concept of the thinker’s leg, though; but it is still IEM.
In response, Recanati argues (2012.) that “subject-explicit” thoughts are only IEM be
cause they are derived through a process he calls “reflection” from a “subject-implicit”
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property ascription and hence have the same grounds as the latter. They are therefore
identificationC-free and hence also identificationP-free: “a judgment is immune to error
through misidentification if it is implicitly de se, that is, if the subject is not represented
in the content of the judgment but his or her involvement is secured by the mode of the
grounding experience; yet an explicit de se thought may also be IEM if it has the same
grounds as an implicit de se thought.” But how could this work for demonstrative
thoughts? Recanati (2012, 199–200) justifies the extension of the proposal to that case,
but Wright (2012, 273–278) raises serious concerns.
We have seen that Evans’s notion of identification freedom in fact does not support the
explanation of IEM offered by the Lewisian view of de se thoughts, contrary to Recanati’s
initial suggestion: the Perry-Stalnaker line that assumes a full-proposition view of de se
thoughts can also rely on SA to explain IEM. However, supporters of the Perry-Stalnaker
line would be well advised to look for an alternative, more positive account of IEM than
the one afforded by SA. There are three reasons for this.
In the first place, Recanati can argue that the Lewisian view, which is also compatible
with SA, in fact offers the best explanation for there being no identity premise involved in
the justificational structure of IEM thoughts.17 Now, I do not think this response is ulti
mately satisfactory, but the reason why it is not manifests the need to go beyond SA to
properly explain IEM. The Lewisian view is indeed compatible with SA, but Recanati pur
ports to offer a more specific explanation than the one afforded by it in terms of a feature
that entails the absence of an identity premise without being required by that absence. If
this more specific proposal cannot account for some cases (e.g., IEM thoughts that do in
volve an identificationC component), perhaps another explanation, equally compatible
with SA but alternative to the Lewisian one, might be the truly operative one in all cases,
thus accounting for them in a unified way. I think this is in fact the case, but to defend it
we should obviously go beyond SA, indicating specifically how accounts allowing for iden
tificationC without identificationP explain IEM.
The second reason has to do with the fact that, as Pryor (1999, 281–286) argues, IEM is
not the truly general epistemological phenomenon in need of explanation; it is rather
what he calls “wh-misidentification immunity.” I peel a few oranges, separate the seg
ments, put them on a dish, and go to buy the sugar and port I need to make a dessert;
when I come back, all the segments have vanished. I judge that someone ate the oranges,
without assuming that there is just one culprit; several family members are around, and,
for all I know, a few of them might have each eaten some segments. Then I see Mary
alone in the main room and judge that Mary ate the oranges. Here, no identification (no
identity premise) is involved in my reasoning; I just infer that Mary is one witness to an
existential generalization that I hold, open to the possibility that there are more. The
judgment is IEM in terms of SA; but my singular thought is vulnerable to a mistake very
much in the vicinity of the one Shoemaker had in mind: the properly singular, identifying
“part” of my singular judgment can be wrong without the existential “part” being wrong.
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Pryor explains this talk of parts of contents in terms of defeaters: the identification can be
defeated (I may come to have evidence that Mary did not interfere with the oranges)
while the existential claim stays untouched. Now, it is clear that the examples of IEM we
have seen are also immune to this new kind of mistake. Wh-immunity on grounds G en
tails IEM relative to G as defined earlier because when it obtains the justification that G
offers to believe something is F must suffice of their own to justify the belief it is a who is
F. The converse does not obtain under SA because cases like these exhibit IEM in that the
judgment does not rely on any identity premise while not being cases of wh-immunity.
Now, it seems that the interesting epistemic phenomenon is the more encompassing one:
what we would like to understand better is why, in some cases, the justification for the ex
istential “part” of a claim comes indissolubly together with a justification for the corre
sponding ascription to a witness. But SA cannot explain this because, as we have seen,
the absence of an identification premise is compatible with wh-vulnerability.
The third reason for going beyond SA will take a little longer to present. It comes from
the fact that the IEM of the cases we have offered so far is merely de facto, obtaining on
ly assuming that circumstances are normal, assuming the need to explain why they are
nonetheless cases of IEM. Let us first note that SA relies on the notion of doxastic
justification and hence on the grounding relation. Propositional justification is justification
for a proposition whether or not one believes it; doxastic justification is justification that
supports a belief a subject has, hence in terms of a structure of mental states that explain
the holding of the belief by the subject in an epistemically valuable way.18 For a judgment
A to be epistemically grounded on B does not require that the subject consciously experi
ence his coming to judge A as a result of an inference in part from B. In our earlier exam
ple, Perry might well lack awareness of inferentially relying on his identification with the
person whose back he sees in the mirror, but his judgment in fact relies on it—as shown
in that he should be prepared to admit to the dependence on appropriate prompting. Be
yond this, there are important discrepancies between contemporary epistemologists that
have immediate resonance for our present issue.
Consider Moore’s (in-)famous awkward inference, (i) here are two hands, (ii) if there are
hands, there is an external world, hence (iii) there is an external world. Given its validity,
someone who judges (i) is thus rationally committed to (iii); but there are different ways
of understanding such commitments and thereby explaining the oddness of the inference.
Pryor (2004) distinguishes two epistemological attitudes we may have with respect to
them, a liberal and a conservative one. On the conservative attitude, having prima facie
justification to believe (i) requires antecedent justification to believe (iii); the liberal de
nies this, even though he agrees that evidence against (iii) would defeat our justification
to believe (i). We should further distinguish two versions of the conservative attitude; on
the most straightforward conservative-conservative version, justification for (i) would re
quire a priori or empirical evidence for (iii); on a liberal-conservative one along lines ex
plored by Wright (2004), it is enough if (iii) is a presupposition that one is entitled to
make by default.
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These views can be applied to the identity claims that might be discerned in the justifica
tory structure of our singular thoughts. The conservative-conservative attitude is the
proper one concerning Perry’s identification with the person whose back he sees in the
mirror. The reason is that, as we indicated earlier, Perry’s judgment that he is making a
mess in such a case is grounded on the premise that he is the person whose back he sees
in the mirror, and, intuitively, the former would not be justified if the latter were not. Con
sider, however, the judgments mentioned earlier as examples of IEM: Perry’s physical
self-ascription that he is pushing a cart with a torn sack, made on the basis of visual per
ception, or his psychological self-ascription that he sees that he is pushing a cart with a
torn sack. Shoemaker would consider them as cases of de facto IEM; they are in fact IEM,
but they could be vulnerable to error through misidentification under abnormal condi
tions. Imagine, for instance, that the science fiction technologies that the film Avatar
imagines are available, allowing us to temporarily break off our own visual impressions
and receive instead those coming from another body.19 Under those circumstances, the
judgments might be wrong because Perry mistakenly identifies himself with the body that
is the source of the relevant visual impressions.
We can interpret de facto IEM in terms of the distinction between the liberal-conservative
and the conservative-conservative views. In normal circumstances, the liberal-conserva
tive attitude is in order: the subject reasonably and in fact correctly takes for granted the
identity premise so that the judgment does not depend on it. Abnormal conditions over
ride this, demanding the conservative-conservative stance—say, because a circumstance
in which the otherwise merely presupposed identification fails becomes a relevant alter
native. As a result, in such contexts, the judgment must be taken as epistemically based
on the identity premise. On this view, the commitment to identifications that ordinary self-
ascriptions based on visual perception in fact carry is understood along the lines of the
liberal-conservative proposal, as opposed to the conservative-conservative view that sug
gests itself as more appropriate for the mirror example. These identities are, in normal
contexts, presuppositions to which we are entitled by default, without the need to have
ordinary a priori or empirical evidence for them.20
The example of thought-insertions discussed in the first section shows that some mental
self-ascriptions (I am judging that I am good and omnipotent) are liable to the same treat
ment. I might worry that an assertion of “I am good and omnipotent” that feels like hav
ing been made by me has in fact been forced upon me by an evil scientist in control of my
brain. In a similar vein, one might have analogous worries about what feels like an inner
judgment with the same content. To the extent that the worries are appropriate, the con
servative-conservative attitude is adequate, and the judgment, if it is made, can be cor
rectly said to be based on the identification of myself with the producer of the judgment;
otherwise, the liberal-conservative attitude prevails and the judgment is
identificationP-free.
This is not the place to evaluate whether this suggestion is correct; it has only been
brought out in order to motivate the third reason for going beyond SA. For how could an
account that relied merely on SA justify the contention that the earlier examples are in
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fact cases of IEM, even if only de facto? Consider Cappelen and Dever’s (2013, 130–133)
skepticism about IEM. As mentioned earlier, they argue that de se thoughts are philo
sophically unimportant and uninteresting. To sustain this, they want to establish that no
such significance can result from their affording an explanation of IEM simply because
there is nothing here to explain: there is no IEM. They adduce in support the scenarios
just contemplated to show that previous examples are only de facto IEM; they appear to
take them to show that there is no de iure (as we may call it) or absolute IEM, and hence
no genuine IEM.
Now, the examples do not in fact support anything of this sort. In the thought-insertion
case, for instance, one is still conscious of being under the impression of making the judg
ments or utterances, and I cannot see how an analogous worry extends to the IEM of that
state against what Cappeen and Dever contend.21 Similar points can be made about the
other cases.22 Let us put this aside, though, for I think it is important to establish that or
dinary cases are also IEM, even though only de facto.23 It should be clear by now that by
relying on SA we would be deprived of the resources to do this in any sufficiently illumi
nating way in response to skeptical challenges such as this one. For we would then be
limited to asserting without further explanation that the judgment does not depend on an
identity premise in the normal case, although it does in the abnormal one.
In contrast with this, someone elaborating on SA along Recanati’s lines by appealing to

the Lewisian account of the de se has more resources. On this view, in a normal case, the
subject is not part of the content, whereas in abnormal ones he is. The proponent of this
view can now explore whether this theoretical distinction allows further justification for a
claim of de facto IEM in the former case. Similarly, the proponent of the Perry-Stalnaker
line can also appeal to what she takes the Self concept or mode of presentation to be; see,
for example, the account that Peacocke (2014, ch. 5) offers, assuming a full-proposition
account of de se thoughts.24 I myself prefer the second option, and I have offered an ac
count of this kind assuming the presuppositional view outlined in the first section (García-
Carpintero forthcoming-b). But, whatever the choice, we have here a third clear reason
for going beyond SA.
IEM is not the only epistemological issue the clarification of which an account of de se
thoughts might contribute. A clear additional one is an account of the very nature of the
Self concept—which even defenders of the Lewisian view need at least for explicit de se
thoughts. Such an account is also involved in debates over whether claims such as the
agent of this very judgment exists or related cogito thoughts are a priori or have a related
modal status. But the earlier discussion should suffice to illustrate the philosophical sig
nificance of the distinctions that Castañeda, Chisholm, Lewis, Perry, and Sosa articulated
several decades ago.
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Acknowledgments
Financial support for my work was provided by the DGI, Spanish Government, research
project FFI2013-47948-P and Consolider-Ingenio project CSD2009–00056; through the
2008 award ICREA Academia for excellence in research, funded by the Generalitat de
Catalunya; and by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–
2013 under grant agreement no. 238128. Thanks to Annalisa Coliva, Jose Díez, Alisa Man
drigin, Ernest Sosa, and Stephan Torre for very helpful discussion and comments, and to
Michael Maudsley for the grammatical revision.
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lem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 50–52.
Perry, John (2002). “The Self, Self-Knowledge and Self-Notions,” in his Identity, Personal
Identity, and the Self. Indianapolis: Hackett, 189–213.
Perry, John (2006). “Stalnaker and Indexical Belief,” in J. Thomson and A. Byrne (eds.),
Content and Modality: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker. Oxford: Claren
don Press, 204–221.
Perry, John (2012). Reference and Reflexivity, 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Pryor, James (1999). “Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.” Philosophical Topics

26, 271–304.
Pryor, James (2004). “What Is Wrong with Moore’s Argument?” Philosophical Issues 14,
349–378.
Recanati, François (2007). Perspectival Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Recanati, François (2009). “De re and De se.” Dialectica 63, 249–269.
Recanati, François (2012). “Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: What It Is and

Where It Comes From,” in S. Prosser and F. Recanati (eds.), Immunity to Error Through
Misidentification: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 180–201.
Recanati, François (2013). “Mental Files: Replies to My Critics.” Disputatio (Portugal)

36(2013), 207–242.
Schaffer, Jonathan (2012). “Necessitarian Propositions.” Synthese 189, 119–162.
Schlenker, Philippe (2011). “Indexicality and De Se Reports,” in K. Heusinger, C. Maien

born, and P. Portner (eds.), Semantics. An International Handbook of Natural Language
Meaning. Berlin: Morton de Gruyter, 1561–1604.
Shoemaker, Sidney (1968). “Self-Knowledge and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy

65, 555–567.
Soames, Scott (2002). Beyond Rigidity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sosa, Ernest (1981). “Propositions and Indexical Attitudes,” in H. Parret (ed.), On Believ
ing. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 316–332.
Stalnaker, Robert (1978). “Assertion,” in P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and Semantics vol. 9. New
York: Academic Press, 315–332.
Stalnaker, Robert (1981). “Indexical Belief.” Synthese 49, 129–151. Also in R. Stalnaker
(ed.), Context and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1999), 130–149, to which I
refer.
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Stalnaker, Robert (2008). Our Knowledge of the Internal World. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Stanley, Jason (2011). Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Torre, Stephan (2010). “Centered Assertions”, Philosophical Studies 150, 97–114.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958). The Blue and Brown Books, Rush Rhees (ed). New York:
Harper and Row.
Wright, Crispin (2004). “Warrant for Nothing (and Foundations for Free)?” Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 78, 167–212.
Wright, Crispin (2012). “Reflections on François Recanati’s ‘Immunity to Error Through

Misidentification: What It Is and Where It Comes from,’” in S. Prosser and F. Recanati
(eds.), Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 247–280.
Notes:
(1) For a dissenting view, see Schaffer (2012).
(2) Sosa (1981, 323, fn. 5) provides essentially the same reply to Perry. On Lewis’s view,
on which de re thought is a species of de se thought, in believing that de re proposition,
the other shopper also self-ascribes a different property: the property of being one such
that the de re proposition is true. This is a vacuous sense of self-ascribing properties in
that it does not discriminate among different subjects who believe the same traditional
propositions.
(3) The reader will find further elaboration in my (2006a).
(4) I have discussed the role of these contents in detail elsewhere (1998, 2000, 2006).
(5) Peacocke (1983, ch. 5; 2008 ch. 3), Higginbotham (2003) and Howell (2006) present
related views. Cf. Howell’s (2006, 51–52) discussion of “objection two” (a version of the
problem posed by taking the proposal on the first interpretation).
(6) Holism does not suffice to deal with Lewis’s two gods example because they are sup
posed to be equally omniscient relative to traditional propositional knowledge. Stalnaker
(1981, 144–145) appeals to haecceitism (positing qualitatively indiscernible different
worlds) to deal with the case, rejecting as incoherent an objection made by Lewis that
this does not solve the problem—to assume the coherence of the objection, he suggested,
is just to beg the question against his proposal. In the more recent work (2008, 56–58), he
accepts the coherence of Lewis’s objection, and this provides one of the motivations for
the new account.
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(7) Cf., for instance, Perry’s (2012, 146–150) deployment of the distinction rehearsed ear
lier between the first and second interpretation of the role of token-reflexive contents in
the account of de se phenomena to general Fregean “Hesperus”/“Phosphorus” cases in
volving de re beliefs.
(8) In recent work, Peacocke (2014, chs. 2 and 4) correctly emphasizes the importance of
linking the concept associated with “I” in reasons-sensitive thoughts such as beliefs and
intentions, to the role of more primitive “I”-representations in perceptual or bodily experi
ences. He also, like Perry, characterizes the cognitive significance of such representations
by means of a (token-reflexive) reference rule, which he is at pains to distinguish from
content-constituents of the relevant attitudes. Alas, also like Perry, he says precious little
of a positive nature about the role that the reference rule is supposed to play in charac
terizing the personal-level, conscious first-personal awareness that the subjects of those
states are supposed to have.
(9) On the view outlined, the problems posed by de se thoughts highlighted by the exam
ples by Castañeda, Perry, and Lewis are just particular cases of the ones created by typi
cal Fregean cases; cf. also Moss (2012, 226–231). On this point, on which the skepticism
about the de se recently expressed by Cappelen and Dever (2013) is predicated, I am in
agreement with them; so are Castañeda, Chisholm, Lewis, Perry, etc. This is compatible
with their playing distinctive roles in personal-level folk-psychological explanations.
Whether these are “philosophically interesting or important roles” (Cappelen and Dever
2013, 13) is a matter of how those values are appraised.
(10) Higginbotham (2010, 262–263) discusses these cases in connection with the relation
between de se thought and immunity to error through misidentification, which is dis
cussed in the third section. He sounds as if he is providing an alternative defense of the
token-reflexive account he also supports, but I fail to see how the defense goes. In my
view, the case of the schizophrenic shows that mental actions such as the judgment that I
am good and omnipotent, as much as physical actions such as making a mess, are only
“circumstantially” IEM (see later discussion). In abnormal circumstances, the ordinary
grounds one has to self-ascribe them survive as grounds for the existential generalization,
someone is making a mess, someone is judging that he himself is good an omnipotent,
while still leaving it open whether it is oneself who is doing them. For this to be possible,
some other state has to be genuinely de se and immune to misidentification error (the im
pression of the being executing those actions, in the suggestion in the main text).
(11) I understand this to be the point that Castañeda (1983, 324) raises against Perry.
(12) In part to deal with this problem, O’Brien (2007, chs. 5 and 6) and Peacocke (2008,
ch. 3) rely essentially on an “agent awareness” of one’s own actions, particularly one’s
own mental actions such as judging and intending, to account for the first “tier”—aware
ness of one’s mental states. I do not understand their replies (O’Brien 2007, 89–93; Pea
cocke 2008, 89–92) to the obvious objection that we seem to be doing as much fully self-
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conscious self-reference in our judgments as in our perceptual experiences or uncon

trolled imaginings.
(13) To echo the quote in a previous footnote, this does not establish that the de se is
philosophically important or interesting, but it does show that natural languages signal a
distinctive role for de se contents in ascriptions of propositional attitudes—even if they
merely indicate thereby their role as distinctive Fregean senses.
(14) Here is one, suggested to me by Ernest Sosa. On this explanation, any statement ap
pears to be vulnerable to error through misidentification. For it would seem to be always
possible that the term “a” could have meant something other than what it means and that
the speaker could then have mistakenly thought that the thing he knows to be F is what
“a” refers to.
(15) Slightly confusingly, it should be pointed out that Recanati’s Lewisian explanation for
basic de se thoughts is in fact Perry’s (cf. Perry [2002]), for instance. Perry agrees with
the Lewisian picture that we do not need full traditional propositions to characterize their
contents.
(16) This was only to be expected given Evans’s neo-Fregean conception of the contents of
thoughts exhibiting IEM and his total lack of sympathy for any form of truth-relativism.
Cf. Grush (2007) for an accurate exegesis of Evans’s notion of identification-freedom.
(17) This is in fact the line of response that Recanati (2013, 236–238) takes to the criti
cism so far presented.
(18) Chalmers (2012, 94–99) outlines an interesting analysis; Audi (1986) provides a more
detailed account that I like.
(19) Dennett (1978) presents such a scenario; cf. also Higginbotham’s (2010, 262)
“Davidson’s eyes” example from H. G. Wells.
(20) Cf. Coliva (2006, 2012) and Wright (2012, 267–272); cf. also Peacocke (1983, 139–
151) and Peacocke (2008, 92–103).
(21) They consider this possibility (2013, 131): “maybe what is IEM for Gareth is his belief
that his legs seem to be crossed” and go on to contend: “But now imagine that Gareth is
deviantly wired, so that he receives ‘introspective’ awareness from John’s seemings.”
Now, it is not just that intuition does not support at all Cappelen and Dever’s suggestion
that one could be introspectively “wired” to someone’s else seemings; to make sense of
the suggestion requires a view of introspection as a pure causal process that most con
temporary philosophers reject. The possibility would not exist, for instance, on Peacocke’s
(1999) account.
(22) On the basis of similar examples, Howell (2007) defends a much more nuanced skepti
cism about IEM than Cappelen and Dever’s, one that does not extend to impressions. He
is only skeptical that IEM affords a kind of non-Cartesian privilege that can be acknowl
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De Se Thought
edged without indulging Cartesian metaphysical consequences; his point is that (de facto)
IEM ultimately depends on the (de iure) IEM of less committal mental states such as im
pressions or seemings, which are precisely those possessing the potentially problematic
form of Cartesian privilege.
(23) This is so because I agree with Evans (1982, 242–243) and Peacocke (2014, ch. 4) that
ordinary cases have a foundational character in a properly explanatory architecture, but I
cannot go into this any further here.
(24) Even though Peacocke does not take SA to provide the full story about IEM, but
rather relies on his own account of the Self notion to offer a positive and helpful account,
he does wrongly rely on SA to characterize the IEM phenomenon to be explained. As we
have seen, this is something that the case of wh-immunity challenges. Peacocke (2014,
109) rejects modal characterizations of IEM like the one I have relied on, following Pryor
and Shoemaker. His reason is that modal definitions would force us to intuitively misclas
sify some cases as instances of IEM. “Suppose … that in normal circumstances mirrors
were always entirely flat, and that they only reflected faces very close to the mirror, so
that in those normal circumstances, for any person x, only x can see the face and head of
x in the mirror. In those circumstances, it would not be possible for someone, basing his
judgment on what he sees in the mirror, to be right that someone’s hair is tidy, but wrong
that his hair is tidy.” Why not? Even in such a world, one can conceive of being in a Duck
Soup situation, not facing a true mirror. García-Carpintero’s (2013) account of IEM also
explains why a modal (epistemic) characterization is right.
Manuel García-Carpintero
Manuel García-Carpintero, Departament de Lògica, Història i Filosofia de la Ciència,

Universitat de Barcelona
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De Se Thought

Abstract and Keywords

date: 16 January 2022

These examples raise the problem of de se thoughts—in a nutshell, how to characterize

1. De Se Thoughts: Two Conflicting Accounts

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

as opposed to possible-world ones, so I will not present the Perry-Stalnaker debate in

On the simplest account of successful communication, the episode should be explained by

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

A fully convincing presentation of Perry’s proposal requires an account of the nature of

… this is a counterexample, because the subject is in a certain state (he conscious­

date: 16 January 2022

In connection with the issue of circularity, I should make a further acknowledgment to

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

(1) John expects that he will win the election.

date: 16 January 2022

3. De Se Thoughts and Immunity to Error

date: 16 January 2022

Pryor (1999) offers a definition of an IEM alternative to Shoemaker’s linguistic character­

date: 16 January 2022

SA thus opens up the possibility of thoughts including identificationC components, which

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

date: 16 January 2022

In contrast with this, someone elaborating on SA along Recanati’s lines by appealing to

date: 16 January 2022

Castañeda, Hector (1966). “‘He’: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness.” Ratio 8,

Castañeda, Hector (1968). “On the Logic of Attributions of Self-Knowledge to Others.”

Chisholm, Roderick M. (1981). The First Person. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Corazza, Eros (2004). “Essential Indexicals and Quasi-Indicators.” Journal of Semantics

date: 16 January 2022

Evans, Gareth (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

García-Carpintero, Manuel (1998). “Indexicals as Token-Reflexives.” Mind 107(1998),

García-Carpintero, Manuel (2000). “A Presuppositional Account of Reference-Fixing.”

García-Carpintero, Manuel (2006). “Two-Dimensionalism: A Neo-Fregean Interpretation,”

García-Carpintero, Manuel (2014). “Introduction: The Problem of Empty Representa­

García-Carpintero, Manuel (forthcoming-a). “Token-reflexive Presuppositions and the De

García-Carpintero, Manuel (forthcoming-b). “De Se Thoughts and Immunity to Error

Grush, Rick (2007). “Evans on Identification-Freedom.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy

date: 16 January 2022

Howell, Robert (2006). “Self-Knowledge and Self-Reference.” Philosophy and Phenomeno­

Huang, Yan (2007). “De Se Attitude/Belief Ascription and Neo-Gricean Truth-Conditional

Kaplan, David (1989). “Demonstratives,” in J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein (eds.),

Kölbel, Max (2004). “Indexical Relativism vs Genuine Relativism.” International Journal of

Moss, Sarah (2012). “Updating as Communication.” Philosophy and Phenomenological

O’Brien, Lucy (2007). Self-Knowing Agents. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peacocke, Christopher (1999). Being Known. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peacocke, Christopher (2008). Truly Understood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

date: 16 January 2022

Pryor, James (1999). “Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.” Philosophical Topics

Recanati, François (2007). Perspectival Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Recanati, François (2009). “De re and De se.” Dialectica 63, 249–269.

Recanati, François (2012). “Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: What It Is and

Recanati, François (2013). “Mental Files: Replies to My Critics.” Disputatio (Portugal)

Schaffer, Jonathan (2012). “Necessitarian Propositions.” Synthese 189, 119–162.

Schlenker, Philippe (2011). “Indexicality and De Se Reports,” in K. Heusinger, C. Maien­

Shoemaker, Sidney (1968). “Self-Knowledge and Self-Awareness.” Journal of Philosophy

date: 16 January 2022

Stanley, Jason (2011). Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

… this is a counterexample, because the subject is in a certain state (he conscious

Pryor (1999) offers a definition of an IEM alternative to Shoemaker’s linguistic character

García-Carpintero, Manuel (2014). “Introduction: The Problem of Empty Representa

Howell, Robert (2006). “Self-Knowledge and Self-Reference.” Philosophy and Phenomeno

Schlenker, Philippe (2011). “Indexicality and De Se Reports,” in K. Heusinger, C. Maien

conscious self-reference in our judgments as in our perceptual experiences or uncon