About Oneself

This volume addresses foundational issues concerning the nature of first-personal, or de se, thought and how such thoughts are communicated. One of the questions addressed is whether there is anything distinctive about first-person thought or whether it can be subsumed under broader phenomena. Many have held that first-person thought motivates a revision of traditional accounts of content or motivates positing special ways of accessing such contents. Gottlob Frege famously held that first-person thoughts involve a subject being 'presented to himself in a particular and primitive way, in which he is presented to no-one else.' However, as Frege also noted, this raises many puzzling questions when we consider how we are able to communicate such thoughts. Is there indeed something special about first-person thought such that it requires a primitive mode of presentation that cannot be grasped by others? If there really is something special about first-person thought, what happens when I communicate this thought to you? Do you come to believe the very thing that I believe? Or is my first-person belief only entertained by me? If it is only entertained by me, how does it relate to what you come to believe? It is these questions that the volume addresses and seeks to answer.

Manuel García-Carpintero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona, Spain. He has been a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh, 2001), and he has been appointed Visiting Professor at the University of Lisbon (2013-2016). His main interests are in philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and related epistemological and metaphysical issues.; Stephan Torre is a Lecturer at University of Aberdeen. Previously he was a post-doctoral researcher with LOGOS at the University of Barcelona and a Junior Research Fellow at Oriel College, Oxford. He received his PhD from University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research interests are in philosophy of time, self-locating content, persistence, and modality.

- List of Contributors - 1: Stephan Torre: De Se Thought and Communication: An Introduction - Part I: Foundational Issues in De Se Thought - 2: Aidan McGlynn: Immunity to Error Through Misidentification and the Epistemology of De Se Thought - 3: Kathrin Glüer-Pagin: Constancy in Variation: An Argument for Centering the Contents of Experience? - 4: Dilip Ninan: What is the Problem of De Se Attitudes? - 5: Robert Stalnaker: Modeling a Perspective on the World - Part II: De Se Thought and Communication - 6: François Recanati: Indexical Thought: The Communication Problem - 7: Manuel García-Carpintero: Token-Reflexive Presuppositions and the De Se - 8: Isidora Stojanovic: Speaking about Oneself - 9: Emar Maier: Why My I Is Your You: On the Communication of De Se Attitudes - 10: Clas Weber: Being at the Center: Self-location in Thought and Language - 11: Peter Pagin: De Se Communication: Centered or Uncentered? - 12: Dirk Kindermann: Varieties of Centering and De Se Communication - Index