boer & lycan - who, me

Philosophical Review

Who, Me?Author(s): Steven E. Boer and William G. LycanReviewed work(s):Source: The Philosophical Review, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Jul., 1980), pp. 427-466Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184397 .Accessed: 18/02/2012 14:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to The Philosophical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=duke

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=philreview

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2184397?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

The Philosophical Review, LXXXIX, No. 3 (July 1980)

WHO, ME?

Steven E. Boer and William G. Lycan

S ome fifteen years ago, Hector-Neri Castafieda argued vig- orously and at length that sentences which attribute first-

person propositional attitudes are semantically unique.1 This view is currently enjoying widespread revival. A growing number of theorists now maintain that the ascription of first-person attitudes or attitudes "de se" cannot be reduced to the ascription of attitudes de re or de dicto.

The main argument for this Irreducibility Thesis is disarmingly simple and straightforward. Consider the following pairs:

(1) a. John believes that he himself is in danger.

b. John believes that T is in danger. ('T' is to be replaced by any singular term which denotes John but which contains no reflexive element such as 'he himself.)

(2) a. I believe that I am underpaid. b. I believe that N is underpaid. ('N' is to be replaced

by any singular term which denotes John but which contains no occurrence of any form of 'I'.)

(3) a. John knows who he himself is. b. John knows who T is. ('T' is again to be replaced by

any singular term which denotes John but contains no reflexive element.)

In each pair, the first sentence reports an attitude de se and the second purports to express the same proposition by ascribing an attitude de re or de dicto. Castafieda and his followers argue that this purported sameness of content is impossible.

Consider (la-b).' If some instance of (lb) is understood as

' See especially [9]-[12]. Castafieda credits the original (but independent) investigation of first-person attitudes to Geach [18].

427

STEVEN E. BOER AND WILLIAM G. LYCAN

reporting a belief de dicto, clearly it would be inadequate as a paraphrase of (la): no matter how we specify the content of John's belief in third-person terms (as the belief that T is in danger), it will always be possible for (lb) and (la) to have opposing truth-values. For John may fail to be aware that he himself is T. And we cannot rectify matters simply by making this latter awareness part of the dictum, as in

(4) John believes that he himself is T and that T is in danger

lest the whole problem posed by the occurrence of 'he himself' in (1 a) break out all over again and trigger an infinite regress.

Yet an instance of (Ib) would be equally inadequate if taken as reporting a belief de re. Granted, (la) is paraphrased by

(5) John believes himself to be in danger.

And (lb), on a de re understanding, can be paraphrased by

(6) T is such that John believes him to be in danger.

But (6), which appears to be entailed by (5) if what replaces 'T' is a referential designator of John, does not entail (5) in turn, or so Castafieda claims. For it still seems possible for John to believe T to be in danger (to believe of T that T is in danger) without believing himself to be in danger, because (again) John may be unaware that he himself is T.2 Suppose John is looking at what he thinks is a window but what is in fact a large wall- mirror. He is watching a man in it; unbeknownst to him, the man is himself. He sees a drooling homicidal maniac with a hatchet creeping up behind the man "outside." Naturally he believes that man to be in danger and cries, 'Look out behind you!', but John takes no steps to defend himself, for he does not believe himself to be in danger. The truth of (6) explains his outcry; the falsity of (5) explains his regrettable subsequent inaction.

2 It is arguable that (5) is not equivalent to 'John believes of himself that he is in danger' on the ground that the latter, unlike the former, has an ordinary de re reading as well as a de se reading. Nothing in our present discussion hinges on this possibility.

428

WHO, ME?

Parallel reasoning can be based upon (2a) and (3a). And the Irreducibility Thesis is usually broadened further (again mutatis mutandis) to apply to spatial and temporal token-reflexives as well. Thus, the first members of the following pairs are held to be irreducible respectively to the second members (regardless of whether the latter are understood de re or de dicto):

(7) a. John believes that the meeting starts now. b. John believes that the meeting starts at t. ('t' is to

be replaced by any designator of the present moment which does not contain 'now' or any of its indexical dependents such as 'just' or 'ago'.)

(8) a. Drifting ashore on an uncharted island, John believed he would find food there.

b. Drifting ashore on an uncharted island, John believed he would find food at p. ('p' is to be replaced by any nonindexical designator of the island containing no reflexive elements such as 'he himself'.)

Those who are persuaded of the Irreducibility Thesis use it as a springboard for a variety of additional claims on various topics. Castafieda himself takes the Thesis to be symptomatic of a fundamental division between the indexical references made by a speaker (via "indicators") and those which the speaker attributes to others (via "quasi-indicators" like 'he himself'), which division in turn is held to betoken the essentially perspectival character of the propositional attitudes themselves. John Perry (in [30]; cf. [29]) takes the Thesis to show a need for distinguishing between the "objects" of the attitudes and the "states" of their possessors. David Lewis (in [24]) and Roderick Chisholm (in [13]) independently employ it to motivate the startling claim that all attitudes are at bottom attitudes de se. Stephen Schiffer relies on the Thesis (in [34]) to bolster his claim that only attitudes de se and attitudes directed upon the present moment are genuinely de re at all. Jerry Fodor uses the Thesis (in [17]) to argue for the existence of a semantically unique element, which he calls 'self, as a vocabulary element of the

429


language of thought. Romane Clark (in [14]) has turned the Thesis against some other views of Castafieda's own. Andrew Oldenquist has used it (in [27]) to blunt some impressive traditional arguments against Ethical Egoism. Lynne Rudder Baker (in [3]) has wielded it against the otherwise plausible idea that computers sometimes perform actions (e.g., when playing chess) (cf. also [4]).

We are not persuaded. We believe the Irreducibility Thesis should be repudiated. In what follows, we shall set out our case for rejecting the Thesis and for maintaining that a version of the traditional de re/de dicto distinction is adequate in itself to accommodate Castafieda's data.

I

Our argument rests on two assumptions, each of which is widely accepted though not entirely uncontroversial. We have not the space to defend either of them here; each has been argued at length elsewhere, both by us and by many others. We shall ask the reader to accept them for the sake of argument. If our reasoning is successful, we shall at least have proved an interesting conditional conclusion.

Our first assumption (A) is that there are genuinely de re attitudes toward ordinary objects. Belief, for example, is sometimes a genuine relation between a person (the believer) and another person or thing. To take the most hackneyed example we can think of, Ralph not only believes that there are spies and (because he is a competent logician) that whoever is the tallest spy is a spy, but also believes of the tallest spy (a hulking Secret Service agent named 'Hooper') that he is a spy; Ralph knows Hooper intimately and many times has seen him steal classified documents and pass them on to a nefarious-looking cafe patron. (Alternative formulations: The tallest spy, Hooper, is such that Ralph believes him to be a spy; the tallest spy is believed by Ralph to be a spy.) Ralph is related to the tallest spy, in a way in which he is not related to (say) the shortest spy, merely in virtue of believing that there is a shortest spy. Exactly what relation this is, is in dispute: it may be epistemic, causal, per-

430

WHO, ME?

ceptual, or whatever. It, and it alone, allows existential general- ization of the sort called "quantifying in."

Assumption A is not meant to imply that attitudes de re are irreducible to attitudes de dicto; we and many other theorists3 have argued elsewhere that they are so reducible. On most accounts, a belief de re is a belief in a dictum whose subject term has a special status. Thus, Ralph believes that the shortest spy is a spy merely in virtue of believing that some spy is shorter than any other, but Ralph believes that the tallest spy is a spy also in virtue of his accepting some dictum of the form rN is a spy', where N is a singular term of a preferred sort-it is "purely referential" (Quine [32]), "referential" as opposed to "attributive" (Donnellan [16]), "rigid" (Kripke [21]), or whatever;4 it "represents" Hooper to Ralph (Kaplan [20]); its use on at least some occasions is "grounded in" its referent, Hooper himself (Devitt [15]). The term of the dictum Ralph accepts bears a real relation-presumably a causal or, other natural relation-to Hooper, and it is this fact which mediates the real relation that Ralph himself bears to Hooper. No such relation obtains in the case of the shortest spy.

Our second assumption (B) is that English sentences have logical forms, at least in the sense that they can be associated in a principled way with formulas of a perspicuous logical theory, which formulas codify their truth-conditions relative to an assignment of values to their indexical terms and other free variables. A theory that assigns logical forms to sentences of English in this way is called a "semantics for" English. As against this, it is the job of a "pragmatics" to determine the assignment of values to indexical terms relative to occasions of their use. Thus, a pragmatics for English would tell us that when a speaker utters 'he' and points simultaneously to a (male) person who is

3 Most notably David Kaplan in [20]. Assumption A is strongly suggested by the view Kripke expresses in [21], though Kripke himself repudiates it in [22]. See also [7] and [15]. Castafieda himself has indicated to us in correspondence that he sees no substance to A in any of its popular forms, however; and so he may agree with our conditional conclusion. We are grateful to Professor Castafieda for helpful discussion and for his generous comments on our earlier essay [7].

'These notions do not coincide completely, but the differences between them need not trouble us here.

431


present, that token of 'he' denotes the person being pointed at. It would also tell us that any indexical token of 'you' denotes the person being addressed, and that any token of 'I' denotes its utterer.

Armed with assumptions A and B, we may turn back to the question of attitudes de se. Bluntly, what we contend is that attitudes de se are simply attitudes de their owners. (la) imputes to John the belief that John (that very person, regardless of his being referred to as "John" and of any other accidental properties he has) is in danger. (2a) imputes to its utterer the belief that the utterer (again, that very person, regardless of our here calling him or her 'the utterer' and of his or her uttering anything) is underpaid. (3a) is equivalent to the claim that John knows who John is, just as Ralph may know who John is in the de re sense. Thus, to use a slightly more formal idiom, (la), (2a), and (3a) are respectively equivalent to (1c), (2c), and (3c):

(1c) John believes of John that he is in danger.

(2c) I believe of N that N is underpaid. ('N' may be replaced by any de re third-person reference to the speaker.)

(3c) John knows of John who he is.

Each of these sentences expresses the standard "real" or "genuine" de re relation between its subject and the thing or person that is the topic of the attitude in question; if anything is semantically noteworthy about them, it is that in these cases the subject and the topic happen to be one and the same person.

Our denial that attitudes (and references) de se are a surd or kink in semantics is not a denial that there is something special about the sorts of reflexives that Castafieda has singled out and abbreviated by starred pronouns. Certainly there is something distinctive about them. Our contention is that they are Prag- matically distinctive, not semantically sui generic in Castafieda's way. A correct pragmatics for English would contain a rule to the effect that reflexive pronouns refer back to the subjects of

432

WHO, ME?

the dicta in which they occur.5 This rule or valuation function legislates that 'he himself' in (la) refers to John, and that 'he himself in (3a) refers to John also. (No special reflexive rule is needed to cover (2a), since 'I' everywhere refers to the speaker in any case.) Of course, there are also uses of ordinary (not explicitly reflexive) pronouns that can have reflexive function; for example, (9) is pragmatically ambiguous as regards the topic of John's belief:

(9) John believes that he has the heartbreak of psoriasis.

'He' in (9) could refer de se to John, de re to some second party, or even anaphorically to the topic of a belief de dicto (as when (9) immediately follows 'John is thinking about your typical slum dweller'), depending on context. Attitudes de se are "special" in that they contain pronouns whose denotata are computed via a highly distinctive valuation function; it does not follow that there is anything the least bit odd about them semantically. In particular, contra Castafieda, Perry, Lewis, and the rest, we need not admit that the content of an attitude de se is inexpressible by any nonperspectival, third-person sentence. The content of John's belief in (la) is the proposition that John is in danger (we might think of this proposition, a la Russell, as being the pair consisting of John- himself and the property of being in danger). The content of the speaker's belief in (2a) is the proposition that the speaker (that very person) is underpaid. The content of John's knowledge in (3a) is the proposition that John is such-and-such a person, where this last phrase expresses what in the circumstances we would call "who John is." Thus, if one holds that the objects of propositional attitudes are propositions in the traditional sense of that term or something like it, one can hold that the objects of attitudes de se are ordinary propositions in just the same sense.

Similar remarks apply to the spatial and temporal indexicals occurring in (7a) and (8a). 'Now' is simply a purely referential or rigid designator whose referent is a moment in time, and

'Actually the rule would have to be a bit more complicated than this. See Castafieda's discussion in section 3 of [12].

433


there is a pragmatic rule to the effect that a token of 'now' always refers to the moment of its utterance.6 'There' in (8a) is a reflexive pronoun which refers rigidly back to the location mentioned just before. Here, too, there is nothing special about the semantic content of the propositions expressed; all that is distinctive are the pragmatic rules that compute the indexical terms' denotata.

So far we have only stated this unpopular view, not defended it. But even to state it makes a substantial contribution to the issue, since many people have become convinced that Castaiieda et al. are right about the Irreducibility Thesis simply on the basis of looking at examples such as (la)-(3a), thinking that there is no alternative interpretation. There is an alternative: ours.

However, Castafieda and others have argued for the Irreduci- bility Thesis, and so we must show what is wrong with their arguments. To that we now turn.

II

The main argument is that no nonperspectival, third-person sentence of the form FS Vs that T is 4' is synonymous with, or conveys just the same content as, a corresponding sentence of the form FS Vs that he* is 4'. For any singular term T other than 'he*', the equivalence allegedly fails because of the truth of rS may not know that he* is T1.

Suppose that T is a definite description used attributively. Let us compare (la) with the following instance of (lb):

(id) John believes that the only person in the forest who is now about to be pounced on by a rabid leopard is in danger,

where the definite description semantically denotes John but John is unaware of this. We may agree with Castafieda that (id) is not synonymous with (la). The definite description in

6A defense of this suggestion, which prefigures our present attack on the Irreducibility Thesis, appears in [25].

434

WHO, ME?

(id) has narrow scope, and hence attributive or predicative force rather than referential force; it functions semantically, we believe, just as Russell's Theory of Descriptions says it does. Intuitively, the content of the belief ascribed to John by (id) is a general proposition, not a singular predication.

It is tempting to think the same of a proper name. Consider

(le) John believes that John is in danger.

The second occurrence of 'John' in (le) might be attributive- that is, it might abbreviate a description or in some other way go proxy for a quantity of descriptive material (cf. [5] and [6]). In this case, too, Castafieda is right to complain that John may not know that he himself is John. For on any attributive reading of 'John', to "be John" is to have whatever properties are expressed by the matrix of the description that 'John' is abbreviating in the context in question, typically properties of John that are important to speaker and hearer for the purposes at hand. John may not know that he himself has those properties, and hence may not know that he himself "is John," and hence may believe that whoever does have those properties is in danger without believing that he himself is in danger. Here, as in the case of the attributive definite description, the belief ascribed to John by (le) is belief in a general proposition, not in a singular predication; and, as in the case of the attributive description, the belief is straightforwardly de dicto. So the nonequivalence of (id) and (le) with (la) fails to count against our reduction of attitudes de se to attitudes de re.

So far we have dealt only with the easy cases. The force of Castafieda's position lies in the fact that ostensibly de re third- person attitude ascriptions do not seem to paraphrase de se ascriptions either. Let us now suppose explicitly and relentlessly that the second occurrence of 'John' in (le) is to be read not attributively, but referentially; that is, let us suppose that it is functioning solely to refer to the person in question, and not to attribute any contingent property to him, so that we cannot explain away the difference between (le) and (la) in the way that we explained away the difference between (id) and (la). Then (le) ascribes an attitude de re. Again, we might think of (le) as

435


relating John to the pair (John, the property of being in danger>. As we have said, our claim is that this relation is just the same as that recorded in (la), and that (la) is semantically equivalent to (le) on its referential reading. Yet there is still a strong temptation to think that this is not so-that the content of John's belief as described by (le) differs from that described by (la). Whence this temptation?

All Castafieda has to say on this point is again that John may not know that he himself is John. This remark we found to be obviously true when interpreted attributively and directed against the attributive reading of (le). But now we are supposing that 'John' in (le) is to be understood purely referentially. On this understanding, what could be meant by (10)?

(10) John may not know that he himself is John.

By hypothesis, it does not mean anything of the form rJohn may not know that he himself is the k', where rthe kd is an attributive description. It does not mean "John may not know that he himself is called 'John'" or "John may not know that he himself is whatever person Castafieda is uniquely thinking of' or "John may not know that he himself is the war hero he has been reading about." (10) can mean only that John may not know that he himself is (strictly) identical with . . . (that very person, whatever he is called or whatever other accidental properties he may have). Now, we contend, it is not at all obvious that John might not know this fact; or, if this is obvious, it no longer counts against our reduction of the de se to the de re. But this will take a fair amount of explaining.

A "quasi-indicator" of Castafieda's type is not attributive in our sense (loosely borrowed from Donnellan [16]).7 If it were, then the content of the belief ascribed to John by (10) would be some singular predication whose subject is the second occurrence of 'John' in (10); and this seems false, for precisely the reasons Castafieda himself has argued that (le) cannot be

'Lawrence Powers has pointed out to us that this claim is at odds with one of Castafieda's own characterizations of his position (cf. claim (v) on p. 441 of [12]). We believe the issue is terminological and shall not take it up here.

436

WHO, ME?

synonymous with any de dicto belief-ascription. Presumably, if this last point is correct, the quasi-indicator functions to refer diaphanously to a person (John); we assume that this conditional, at least, is uncontroversial. And if the quasi-indicator refers to a person, it refers to that person without attributing any (accidental) property to the person (otherwise it would be attributive). Therefore it seems to be a purely referential designator, even if it is not a referential designator of the ordinary, nonperspectival sort; at least it picks out one and the same person in every possible world. And if so, then, since 'John' in (10) also picks out the same person in every possible world, the identity-statement that is the complement of (10) is an identity-statement whose terms are rigid designators of one and the same person and which is therefore a necessary truth, contrary to the impression created by impassioned repetition of (10) when the referentialness of 'John' in (10) is unemphasized.

How could John be ignorant of a necessary identity of which he himself is a term? There are two positions one might take here:

(P) He could not. Appearances to the contrary, John knows any necessary identity provided that he knows that at least one of its terms exists. If we are tempted to say that John fails to know such an identity, this can only be because we are tacitly softening one of the relevant designators and thinking of the identity as really being contingent after all, via the Theory of Descriptions or some variation on it. Otherwise we would be taxing John with the inexplicable stupidity of failing to notice that ... (that very person) is identical with . . . (that very person)-that he is he!

(Q) John could be ignorant of a necessary identity, because necessity does not guarantee aprioricity, as Kripke has pointed out (in [21]). Just as we can be ignorant of the (always necessary) truths of mathematics, we can be ignorant of other necessary truths, even very simple ones!

437


We incline toward (P) rather than (Q). This is because of the appeal of a principle concerning reference that we think is true, important, and very easily forgotten despite its importance. Here is the principle:

C. When a purely referential designator occurs transparently, even if within the scope of an operator that is capable of creating opacity, the designator is in the mouth of the utterer of the whole sentence, and in no way in the mouth of any subject to whom the utterer may be ascribing a propositional attitude.

Thus, on its transparent (and true) reading, (11) carries not the least suggestion that Oedipus would own up to harboring the desire in question, were it expressed to him in those words:

(11) Oedipus wanted to marry his mother.8

The designator 'his mother' is in our mouths; we are using it to pick out the person whom we know to be the object of Oedipus' relational, de re attitude. Now likewise, let us suppose that 'John' in (12) is transparently referential:

(12) Ralph believes that John is a spy.

(=John is such that Ralph believes him to be a spy.) (12) is, then, a de re belief-statement concerning John, and carries no implication whatever that Ralph knows John to be called 'John', that Ralph thinks of John as "John," or anything at all like that. 'John' is our (the utterer's) word; we are using it to refer to the person who is the other term of the relational predication we are making of Ralph.

Applying principle C to someone's alleged ignorance of a necessary identity, we can support (P) at the expense of (Q). The occurrences of 'John' in the complement of (13), let us suppose, are purely referential designators:

8 Thus, in a sense, Oedipus does not know what he himself desires (or believes, or wonders, ... ). Lynne Rudder Baker deplores this fact, and a number of theories that exploit it, in [2].

438

WHO, ME?

(13) Ralph believes that John is John.

Here again, by principle C, 'John' is used by us to refer to the person in question; it is not necessarily ever used or acknowledged by Ralph. Presuming that Ralph is aware that John (that very person) exists, he believes of him that he is self-identical under some name or description or other (in order for the belief to be de re, the name or description must sometimes have functioned referentially for Ralph), and that de re belief of Ralph's suffices to make (13) true. A similar point can be made concerning

(14) Ralph believes that Cicero is Tully.

It is probable that in any serious utterance of (14) either 'Cicero' or 'Tully' or both would be functioning flaccidly, since the belief ascribed to Ralph would normally be an interesting belief and not a trivial necessary identity; but suppose, contrary to likelihood, that the names in (14)'s complement are understood referentially. Then what Ralph believes is that ... (that very person) is . . . (that very person), regardless of the two ways in which we have chosen to designate that person, and the apparent interestingness or informativeness of the complement is an illusion. The reason that it is hard to hear (14) in this way is that (a) it is a contemptibly weak assertion, crediting Ralph with belief only in a boring, trivially necessary truth, and (b) on this referential reading, the shift of designator from 'Cicero' to 'Tully' would be pointless, distracting, and conversationally inept (cf. [19]).

Likewise: since the singular terms in (10)'s complement are being interpreted referentially, principle C rules that they are being used by us to refer to the person in question (John), and not necessarily ever byJohn himself. In the kind of case Castafieda is talking about, in particular (e.g., one in which John has amnesia or for some other reason does not realize that he is the person everybody is calling 'John'), they are emphatically and noticeably not used or countenanced by John. (10)'s complement in this case is the utterer's way of expressing the fact allegedly unknown to John; and so John's own total unawareness of being called 'John' and of having any of the properties normally

439


associated with the name 'John' does not in the least count in favor of (10) itself. And if these grounds are removed, it is hard to find any further motivation for (10).

Ralph believes of John that he is a spy. According to (13), Ralph also believes of John that he is he. According to (14), Ralph further believes of Tully that he is he, as always without knowing that Tully is called 'Tully' or any related contingent fact. Ralph believes, and perhaps knows, these things, but not (so to speak) under our descriptions of them. Similarly, it seems to us, given that John knows that John (that very person, regardless of his being called 'John', etc.) exists, John presumably believes of John (of that very person, etc.) that he is identical with that very person; hence he believes that, as we would say in our present language, he himself (where 'he himself' refers referentially and so in our mouths to the person in question) is strictly identical with John (where 'John' refers referentially and hence in our mouths to that very same person). This is one reason why we want to accept (P) and deny (10).9 And if (10) is false, Castafieda's argument collapses.

The most likely response available to Castafieda is an objection in turn to our principle C. As we have deployed it, C entails that 'he himself in (10) and elsewhere is a term of our (the utterer's) language and not necessarily a term of John's. Of course this is true, since obviously John does not use the expression 'he himself' as a name of himself. But as Castafieda is at pains to insist, John does use another expression, 'I', to make references de se; and in general ascriptions of attitudes de se do somehow commit the speaker to the subject's willingness to assert the complement, only with 'I am' in place of 'he himself is' (or to assert a suitable translation of the complement, only with the local version of 'I am' in place of the local version of 'he himself is'-a complica-

9 Actually, there is an even more decisive reason for preferring (P) to (Q), one that does not rely on Principle C: John certainly does know that ... (that person) is . . . (that person) under one mode of designation, since presumably he knows that John = John, where both occurrences of 'John' are referential. Therefore he cannot at the same time fail to know it.

Our discussion of (10) would apply equally to David Lewis's elaborated case (in [24]) of the two gods who allegedly do not know that they themselves are identical with certain neutrally designated inhabitants of a world concerning which the gods are (prepositionally) omniscient.

440

WHO, ME?

tion which, for present purposes, may be ignored). So the quasi- indicator is not totally noncommittal as regards John's way(s) of expressing himself, in the way that (according to C) an ordinary referential designator is. Surely, then, contrary to what is suggested by C, 'he himself' in (la) and (10) refers to John, not just referentially, but in some further specially intimate way.

We shall take up this objection in some detail in Section IV below, but for now let us remind ourselves that our assumption B already provides the rudiments of an answer. Of course 'he himself' refers, not just referentially, but in a further special way. Our claim is that it refers in a pragmatically special way. There is a pragmatic constraint on the use of 'he himself ' to the effect that an occurrence of 'he himself' inside the scope of a verb of propositional attitude denotes the subject of that verb; there may be further pragmatic constraints on the use of indexical pronouns that will explain why (la) implies or suggests that John is willing to assert 'I am in danger'.

We conclude that our view is not refuted by Castafieda's argument alone (provided that A and B are also acceptable). Now, we may also add positive strength to our case by calling attention to a type of situation different from Castafieda's para- digm, in which intuition runs squarely against the Irreducibility Thesis. Here is an example: Perry Mason has just been ap- proached by a murder suspect, Larson E. Whipsnade. Whip- snade has told Mason all, asked Mason to defend him, and paid him a retainer. Mason has agreed. Just at this point, heavy official knocking is heard at the door, and the following conversation ensues.

Mason: Here are the police now. They will arrest you and ask a lot of questions.

Whipsnade: Oh, God!

Mason: Tell them that I am your lawyer. And refuse to answer any questions prior to the hearing.

(Police enter)

441


Lt. Tragg: Good morning, counsellor. (Turning.) You're under arrest, Whipsnade!

Whipsnade (to Tragg): Mr. Mason here is my lawyer. And I won't answer any questions until the hearing.

Mason has issued the order

(15) Tell them [the police] that I am your lawyer.

Let us legalistically suppose that rTell X that P' here means rSay to X a sentence which expresses precisely the proposition that P'. Now, in his declaration to Tragg, Whipsnade has told the police that Mason (that very person, etc.) is his lawyer. Thus Whipsnade has obeyed the unuttered command

(16) Tell the police that Mason (here) is your lawyer.

But, if the Irreducibility Thesis is correct, (16) is not equivalent to (15) as uttered by Mason, since Mason "may not know that he himself is Mason," and so on. And, according to Castafieda's view, Whipsnade has not obeyed (15), since the proposition expressed by the first sentence he uttered to Tragg is not the same proposition as that (if any) expressed by (15)'s complement. Indeed, if the Irreducibility Thesis is correct, Whipsnade is powerless to obey Mason's order, since nothing he (Whipsnade) could say to Tragg would express exactly what Mason expressed in using 'I'. But this consequence is absurd: surely Whipsnade can obey and has obeyed Mason's order, in as strict a sense of 'obey' as any nonpartisan might care to invoke. So much the worse for the Irreducibility Thesis.

We suspect Castafieda might respond that 'I' has a special, nonperspectival interpretation that operates inside certain sentential operators and that is in force in this case in particular. 10 But this suggestion cannot be sustained, for Mason's utterance can and should still be reported in perspectival, de se terms:

10 Such uses are discussed by Castafieda on p. 147 of [9] and on pp. 5-6 of [10].

442

WHO, ME?

(17) Mason ordered Whipsnade to tell the police that he himself was Whipsnade's lawyer.

And one can imagine an amnesiac Mason reacting to Whip- snade's statement to Tragg by snapping, "Tell him that I am your lawyer, you idiot, not that this Mason person is!"

So far as we can see, the only option available to the Irreduci- bility Theorist is to deny that Whipsnade has literally obeyed Mason's order and to swallow the consequence that the order cannot be obeyed, but only somehow approximated. In effect, this latter claim is just a special case of what the Irreducibility Thesis asserts; so perhaps our Perry Mason argument begs the question against Castafieda in an extended sense of that term. But we take the argument to show that the Irreducibility Thesis's plausible consequences for Castanfeda's amnesiac cases and mirror cases are offset at least to some degree by its crassly implausible consequences for other cases.

Earlier we concluded only that our view had not been refuted out of hand by Castafieda's data alone. Our Perry Mason argument now entitles us to make the stronger claim that our view is tenable, since intuition is not altogether on the side of the adverse party either. This tenability of our view opens the way to a further invidious comparison. Since our view makes use only of semantic and pragmatic notions that are already in play, while Castafieda's requires the introduction of a semantically anomalous device (to say nothing of the complications that Perry, Lewis and the rest propose to make in our meta- physics of propositions and even in our psychology), it seems to us that our view should be preferred. Let us explain more fully what it is that prompts us to characterize Castafieda's starred pronoun as a surd or anomaly in semantics.

One would think that the logical form of a propositional- attitude ascription would be expressible in standard logic plus the appropriate sentential operator (and perhaps an intensional abstractor), even if the values of some of its variables and con- stants were intentional objects such as properties, Fregean senses, individual concepts, possible worlds, or world-lines. For example, the logical form of the de re ascription (12) can be plausibly formulated as follows:

443

STEVEN E. BOOER AND WILLIAM G. LYCAN

(18) BELIEVES (Ralph, John, Xx (x is a spy)).11

But Castafieda contends in effect that the logical forms of de se attitude ascriptions are not expressible within this already very rich logical idiom. In what way would he assign a semantic interpretation to the starred variable which would figure in the irreducibly reflexive logical form that his theory would attribute to (la)?:

(19) BELIEVES (John.,, he*X, Xy (y is in danger)).

'He*x' in (19) is not interpreted simply by being assigned a denotatum, according to Castafieda; if it were, our view, and not his view, would be straightforwardly correct. Nor can the subscript 'x' (which we have inserted only to indicate that John is the referent of the reflexive pronoun) be regarded as a variable bound by a name functioning as a quantifier, as in

(20) (John x) BELIEVES (x, x, Xy (y is in danger)),

for (20) attributes to John the property Xz (z believes z to be in danger)-i.e., the property of believing oneself to be in danger- which anyone may have, while according to Castafieda the property ascribed to John by (la) can be exemplified by no one but John. What semantic interpretation is (19) to receive, then? We might simply announce that 'he *x' "expresses John's ineffable first-person concept" or the like, but for our money that would have all the explanatory force of intoning 'O magnum mysterium!' and offering up a prayer.

" This formula is open to considerable further interpretation and rein- terpretation, on at least two counts. First, the property abstract may be understood (by inscriptionalists) as a reference to an open sentence, or (by Sellarsians) as a dot-quoted open sentence representing some item of the language of thought. Second, we may better serve the Russellian idea toward which we gestured in Section I above by pairing (18)'s second and third elements and treating that pair as being the singular proposition that Ralph believes; by doing this we also permit a more general syntactic characteriza- tion of our primitive 'BELIEVES', as always relating its subject to some pair whose members are a (possibly null) ordered n-tuple and an open or closed proposition/sentence.

444

WHO, ME?

Lewis and Chisholm in parallel (cf. [24] and [13]) offer genuine approaches to our difficulty: each proposes to treat all attitudes as being special cases of attitudes de se. Lewis suggests that for John to believe that grass is green is for John to "self-ascribe" the property of inhabiting a possible world in which grass is green; Chisholm maintains that it is for John to "directly attribute to himself" some individuating property such as: con- ceiving of exactly one proposition concerning grass at that moment and that proposition's being true. But, clever as it is, the expedient of insisting that all attitudes are really a species of attitudes de se is an awfully desperate lunge, and it is motivated only by Castafieda's data (combined with a natural desire to provide a uniform category of objects for the attitudes). Again, therefore, if a tenable alternative interpretation of those data should present itself, as it has earlier in this section, the Lewis- Chisholm expedient should be eschewed. (We daresay Lewis and Chisholm themselves would agree.) Further, the expedient involves the creation of a new theoretical primitive which is only dubiously intelligible. This fact is obscured by the cozy but purely orthographic occurrence of 'ascribe' in Lewis's term 'self-ascribe' and that of 'attribute' in Chisholm's 'directly attribute to oneself. Ascription or attribution, as we understand this notion, is a triadic relation between a person, a person or other thing, and a property. But "self-ascription" and "direct attribution to oneself' are simple dyadic relations between a single person and a property. Thus, it would have been less misleading of Lewis and Chisholm to have introduced a new syntactically and semantically primitive dyadic predicate to express these relations, such as 'glop'. Now, how are we to grasp the meaning of 'John glops the property of inhabiting a world in which grass is green'?

We have explained the sense in which Castanfeda's starred pronouns (as he interprets them) are a surd in semantics. It is worth pointing out that they offer aid and comfort to surds in nature as well. Suppose John correctly believes that he himself is in danger, and that this true belief is completely and nondefectively justified (he is not being gettiered, etc.). Then it seems that John knows a certain fact. But this fact is not expressible by any ordinary third-person or nonperspectival proposition. From this and the

445


entirely worthy assumption that any scientific fact is expressible in objective, nonperspectival terms, it follows that what John knows is inaccessible to science."2 Yet what he knows is no Car- tesian mystery or gnostic triumph, any more than is his knowing that he himself weighs 200 pounds. The facts he knows are facts of nature, and so much the worse for the Irreducibility Thesis.

We maintain, then, that our view is to be preferred to the Irreducibility Thesis so long as it is "tenable" in the sense of accommodating Castafieda's data and claiming some independent intuitive support of its own-unless, of course, some further objection should be raised against it that turns out to succeed. We assume that such an objection would take the form of showing that our account leaves something important unex- plained and that some further datum forces us to introduce irreducibly reflexive pronouns. In the remainder of this paper we shall examine several proposed objections. It will perhaps be necessary to overexplain a bit, since Castafieda's data do have a way of getting hold of our intuitions even when we cannot come up with any sound defense of his account of them as against ours.

III

The Mirror Objection. There is a kind of case which illustrates Castafieda's intuition with particular vividness, and which seems to enforce the alleged distinction between attitudes de re and attitudes de se. We mentioned such a case briefly in ex- pounding the Irreducibility Thesis; here is another: Suppose that John is in the forest and is looking at a mirror some dis- tance away, but does not know that he is looking at a mirror (he does not see its edges). What he sees (in it) is a man, and behind that man he sees a fierce jungle beast gathering to spring. Wishing to express his horror, he quickly coins a name for that man: 'Gonzo'. He then whispers to himself, 'Gonzo is in danger'.

12 The conflict between the Irreducibility Thesis and our "worthy assumption" is brought out, though expressed in entirely different terms and set in a different context, by Charles Sayward in [33]; Sayward's argument is criticized in [25]. Cf. also Thomas Nagel's suggestion (in [26]) that no objective, scientific account of reality will ever be able to capture the essentially perspectival character of the mental.

446

WHO, ME?

We may suppose that the occurrence of 'Gonzo' in this utterance is referential and rigid; all the right causal, epistemic, and perceptual factors (whatever they may be) are present. The man, of course, is John himself. John's companion, Ralph, observing Gonzo from much the same point of view, idly tokens

(if) John believes that Gonzo is in danger.

Since Ralph, too, is connected in all the right causal, epistemic, etc., ways with the image in the mirror, Ralph's token of 'Gonzo' in (I f) is also referential and rigid, so that (I f) is a de re belief- ascription. But Ralph does not assert (la), for John shows no signs at all of believing that he himself is in danger. Save for his altruistic concern for Gonzo, John is to all appearances carefree. And had we time to ask him a few leading questions, he would deny believing that he himself is in danger, and perhaps offer to submit to the most searching psychoanalysis or truth serum to help establish this. In this case, therefore, (If) seems to be true while (la) seems to be false. But it follows from the view we have put forward in the foregoing section that (la) and (if) are exactly the same in semantic content: both ascribe to John the belief that . . . (that very person) is in danger, and differ only pragmatically.

We are committed to the conclusion that either (la) and (If) are both true or they are both false. Which? Again, plausible arguments could be made either way, such as the following:

(R) Both are true. (1f) is true because John is connected via a referential designator to Gonzo (=John), and this suffices on our standard account of belief de re to ensure that John's belief is a real or genuine relation between himself and Gonzo (=John). (la) is true for exactly the same reason. (la) is still unacceptable or deviant, however, because, even though its truth- condition is fulfilled, (la) is pragmatically flawed in some way yet to be explained. (la) may even be syntactically deviant due to mislexicalization (cf. [8], ch. 5). (More on this below.)

447


(S) Both are false. (la) is false because John simply does not believe of himself (=John) that he is in danger. (if) is false, contrary to hypothesis, because a "reference" to something which is mediated by a mirror image could not really be purely referential; it could not satisfy the right causal, epistemic, etc., conditions for referentiality, for reasons yet to be explained.

We have no clear preference as between (R) and (S). One might incline toward (S) due to a suspicion of causal or perceptual chains that pass through mirrors, but the mirror trick is not essential to this kind of case."3 Luckily, we need not make or defend a choice against the Mirror Objection in order to save our view from counterexample. What we are able to show instead is that the same kind of problem arises for standard cases of purely de re belief. Consider the following variation.

John is in the forest again, watching a man-this time, a real (second) man, whom he has dubbed 'Wilfrid'. Wilfrid seems to John to be well situated and to have an enviable lease on life. John idly casts his eye in another direction and seems to see still another man; behind this man is our fierce jungle predator in full predatory fig. Hastily dubbing this man 'Van', John whispers, 'Van is in danger!' The alert reader will have guessed that John is again looking at a distant mirror, and that what he sees in it is a reflection of Wilfrid; the mirror is showing him Wilfrid from a different angle, in such a way that John can see the threatening animal in the mirror, though not in the flesh.

Ralph is present as before and tokens

(21) John believes that Van is in danger.

But Ralph would refuse to assent to

(22) John believes that Wilfrid is in danger.

1" Edmund Gettier (in conversation) has offered cases in which a person directly sees or feels a part of that person's own body without realizing that it is his own.

448

WHO, ME?

And, as before, John would not admit to believing that Wilfrid is in danger; he may believe that Wilfrid leads a charmed life.

This is a nasty problem for the theory of belief de re. (Schiffer [34] raises a similar difficulty involving simple disguises.)14 If we assume that Ralph's tokens of 'Van' and 'Wilfrid' are both purely referential, we have the same two choices as before:

(T) Both (21) and (22) are true. (21) is straightforwardly true; (22) is true, contrary to John's and Ralph's pro- tests, because (by principle C) the term 'Wilfrid' is in our mouths when we consider (22)-we have in- herited its referential use from its being passed along to us in the little story we were told two paragraphs back. Since John is related to . . . (that very person) in the right causal, epistemic, etc., way, the truth- condition of (22) as we are using it is fulfilled.

(U) Neither (21) nor (22) is true. (22) is straightforwardly false. (21) is false, contrary to appearances, because a "reference" to something which is mediated by a mirror image could not really be transparent; it could not satisfy the right causal, epistemic, etc., conditions for referentiality, for reasons yet to be explained. (Of course, (21) might at the same time be true on some de dicto reading.)

As in the previous case, we need not make a definite choice here. Our point in calling attention to the present case is just that it is exactly parallel to the mirror case that is alleged to cause trouble for our assimilation of attitudes de se to attitudes de re. The problems are the same. Therefore, if the case of Van and Wilfrid has a solution, the case of Gonzo has a solution. Further: not only does the mirror case not point to an irreducible

14 Schiffer ends up taking the view that our assumption A is false-that we cannot make pure references to anything but ourselves and the present moment. Thus, nominally, Schiffer could agree with our conditional conclusion that if A and B are true, then the Irreducibility Thesis is groundless, and also with our claim that attitudes de se are simply attitudes (purely) de their owners.

449


split between the de se and the de re, it supports our view that the de se is merely a (pragmatically) special case of the de re.

So much the worse, some may say, for attitudes de re. Perhaps the problem of Van and Wilfrid should make us reconsider whether our vague intuitive notion of an attitude "de re" is as coherent and/or as serviceable as it has seemed to its patrons;" the mirror problem impugns attitudes de re generally. We have some sympathy with this line. But to take it is simply to reject our assumption A, and so to change the rules of the (standard) game we are playing. It remains evident that if there are attitudes de ordinary objects and other persons, of the sort that philosophers have traditionally thought that there are, then no evidence has yet been provided to show why attitudes de se are not (semantically speaking) merely attitudes of that sort.

The "Explanatory Asymmetry" Objection. At this point the Ir- reducibility Theorist may attempt to bolster his initial appeal to our intuitions about the difference between (1 a) and (I f) by pointing to an alleged difference in their explanatory powers. (Perry in particular has emphasized this strategy in [30].) Peo- ple's beliefs are supposed to be relevant to explaining their verbal and nonverbal behavior, and in the mirror case we need an explanation of why John shouts a warning toward the mirror

15 Ernest Sosa argued some years ago (in [35]) against our elitist idea of a "real relation in nature" between a believer and the topic of his belief. More recently, a number of philosophers have taken up this fairly radical claim that there are no attitudes "de re" in the sense we have made use of here. (Mark Pastin in [28]; Howard Burdick, in a talk presented at the 1978 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference; Richard Grandy, in a talk presented at the University of South Carolina conference on Prag- matics (April, 1979).) Attacks have also been made, from a different quarter, on our still vague notion of "purely referential" designation, in terms of which attitudes "de se" are supposedly to be explained. (Diana Ackerman, in [1]; Saul Kripke, in [23].) Either or both sorts of attack may eventually be seen to succeed. So we do not insist on the truth of assumption A. If A is false, then an entirely new picture of reference, opacity, quantifying in, and the like, would have to be developed (for beginnings, see [1] and [31]). Once the dust had settled following this development, we would then have to return to Castafieda's issue and see whether attitudes de se were not then reducible to elements of the standard apparatus of the new theory. That is a question which plainly cannot be decided in advance of seeing what that new apparatus might be.

450

WHO, ME?

but takes no steps to defend his own person. Surely (it is claimed) part of the most natural and obvious explanation is that John believes that Gonzo is in danger but does not believe that he himself is in danger. Uttering (1f) and the denial of (la) is just what an ordinary person would do when called upon to explain John's inutile behavior. But if (if), understood de re, is logically equivalent to (la), then no such explanation is possible. The challenge to those of us who reject the Irreducibility Thesis, then, is to show how one might construct a plausible explanation of John's actions that does not itself contain any quasi-indicator referring to John and that does not also entail extraneous false- hoods.

This is a tricky task, but not just because of the oddness of John's situation or because of the peculiar properties of Cas- tanieda's reflexives. For no action, however uncomplicated, is explained simply by allusion to a single belief held by the agent, even when a fairly detailed description of the agent's desires and goals is thrown in. Beliefs function in the production of action only jointly with other beliefs, and doubtless only in the context of other of the agent's psychological states, such as memories and perceptual conditions, even when the agent's desires are held fixed. John may well have some relevant psychological property that distinguishes him from a man who thinks for some more ordinary reason (such as hearing a warning shout) that a ferocious animal is about to pounce on him. Certainly it is agreed by all concerned (indeed, emphasized by Perry) that John is in a psychological state different from that which he would be in, had he a "more ordinary" reason. The afferent visual signal which prompts and fixes the reference of his use of 'Gonzo' takes a causal route through the brain quite different from that which would be traversed by the auditory information generated by a warning shout that prompted a use of 'I' instead; and we may suppose (though cash for this supposition could be provided only by major advances in perceptual and cognitive psychology) that the signal set up by the shout would reach and affect John's executive control unit in a more direct and intimate way, especially since it is likely to contain an imperative element that is psychologically marked for priority, such as 'Look out!' or 'Duck!' Further, it is not unreasonable to think that the efferent

451


signals that would result from the processing of the mirror view of Gonzo and the warning shout respectively would leave executive control by accordingly different routes, producing different behavioral responses. (This suggestion is much the psychological equivalent of our semiotic thesis that, although the beliefs ascribed to John by (la) and instances of (lb) have exactly the same propositional content, this content is computed by entirely different sorts of pragmatic valuation rules. And perhaps it gives some substance to Perry's plausible claim that, although what John believes is the same in each of the two cases, he believes it "in different ways"-we might add, third- personishly in our case but first-personishly as a result of the warning shout.)

Fortunately, we need not offer any more adequate response to the challenge at hand in order to ward off the Explanatory Asymmetry Objection; for we may revert to the same strategy as that which collapsed the Mirror Objection: viz., to show that a parallel line of reasoning impugns belief de re generally if it impugns anything. Let us return to the case of Van and Wilfrid. We may suppose that John, having whispered 'Van is in danger!', thereupon shouts, in the direction of the mirror, 'Van, look out!' But of course he does not shout anything in Wilfrid's direction, unless it is to add, 'Lucky so-and-so!' We need an explanation of his shouting in the direction of the mirror but doing nothing useful in the direction of Wilfrid, the actual incipient victim. As before, the problem is that any belief that John has de Van (that very person) is one that he has de Wilfrid (that very same person), tautologously; so it seems that we are denied the obvious and natural explanation, viz., that John believes Van to be in danger but does not believe Wilfrid to be in danger.

This, too, is a nasty problem for the theory of belief de re; and, just as before, the exact parallel between this problem and the Explanatory Asymmetry Objection to our view counts in favor of our view and against the objection. One may be inclined to have doubts about the general notion of belief de re on the basis of this sort of example, but (again) that is just to have doubts about our assumption A, and not to incline toward the Irreducibility Thesis in its standard form.

452

WHO, ME?

It may still be felt that we owe the reader more than just the hint we have given of how a merely pragmatic difference between belief-states could issue in strikingly disparate behavior. If so, let us point out that Irreducibility Theorists offer no detail on this point either. They simply take it as obvious that someone's peculiarly ineffable first-person belief content, or perhaps that person's willingness to assert 'I am in danger', would result in his ducking or running away, while John's nonperspectival belief content and unwillingness to use 'I' explains John's own inaction. Whatever actual account of this causal connection they may eventually see fit to give may well be equally available to us; the psychology attending their ineffable semantics, when articulated, might readily be taken over into a pragmatic explanation of the sort we have pointed toward.

The literature contains several variants on the Mirror and Explanatory Asymmetry Objections, each of which variants can easily be seen to succumb to the strategy we have been pursuing (that of matching a de se/de re difficulty with a parallel difficulty generated by a pair of ordinary de re formulations). 6 But there is one argument for the nonparaphrasability of de se by de re formulations against which that strategy seems to fail.

IV

The "Special Implicatum" Objection. Castafieda contends (e.g., in [12]: 441) that any de se ascription implies its subject's willingness to express the ascribed attitude in the first person, while no nonreflexive attitude-ascription carries any such implication. Thus (la) implies that John would be willing to assert 'I am in danger', while no instance of (lb), even a frankly de re instance, implies this; therefore (la) is not equivalent to any instance of (lb). No parallel difficulty obtains in the case of Van and Wilfrid.

In the preceding section we mentioned a pragmatic difference between de se attributions and their de re correlates, a striking difference in the valuation rules according to which the denotata of

16 E.g., Perry's argument concerning Heimson and Hume (in [29]); Perry's remarks concerning disagreement and contradiction (in [30]); and Lewis's "two gods" case (in [24]). Cf. note 9 above.

453


their respective object terms are computed. There are other interesting pragmatic differences as well. We intend to argue that (la) "implies" John's willingness to use 'I' only pragmatically and/ or surface-syntactically, and not semantically in the sense of entailment. If we are right in this, then the difference in "implications," which we grant, fails to count against the logical or semantical equivalence of (la) and instances of (Ib). But before the Special Implicatum Objection or any argument in rebuttal can be assessed, we must inquire both what, more exactly, the alleged implicatum is, and what sort of "implication" the objector has in mind.

Theorists who take the Special Implicatum line usually express their objection as we did above: that (la) implies John's willingness to speak in a certain mode. And by 'implies' they characteristically seem to mean an apodeictic relation, in the sense that in no conceivable circumstances would (la) be true or assertible unless John were willing to express the relevant belief in the first person. This strong conjoint claim can easily be seen to be wrong. For (la) may clearly be true even though (23) is false:

(23) John is willing to assert 'I am in danger' (or some suitably first-person translation thereof into his language)-

John may not be willing to assert anything, having been hand- somely bribed by Boer and Lycan (who will stop at nothing to gain their philosophical ends) never to assert anything ever again. Therefore: if (la) carries any "special implication," either the implicatum is something other than (23) or else the "implication" in question is not apodeictic but is somehow defeasible. We shall examine each of these alternatives in turn.

It seems clear that (la) apodeictically implies nothing (even counterfactual) about John's overt behavior. For it is logically possible for John to believe himself to be in danger and yet neither to behave in any particular way, nor to be counter- factually disposed to behave in that way (no matter what antecedent background conditions might feasibly be specified);

454

WHO, ME?

logical behaviorism is false. Does (la) apodeictically imply something else, then?

If any Sellarsian theory of believing is correct, then perhaps (la) apodeictically implies some statement about actual "speech" inforo interno rather than anything about public verbal behavior. It may be true to claim that (1 a) implies the actual inner tokening of some 'I am in danger in John's "language of thought." But, as we have admitted, no instance of (lb) implies this.

Before Sellarsians among us admit defeat and concede the Irreducibility Thesis, we must remind ourselves that semantic entailment is not the only type of apodeictic or indefeasible implication that can hold between sentences. What Grice has called "conventional implicature" (as opposed to "conversational implicature") is another.17 As we understand that notion, a sentence S, conventionally implicates that p iff certain words or expressions that are surface constituents of S, would be inappropriately chosen by an utterer unless it were true that p, where the inappropriateness is the indefeasible and noncancellable price of violating a lexical convention of a certain kind. The inappropriateness (and hence the implicature) is "detachable" in Grice's sense, however, since another sentence S2 may be semantically equivalent to S, in the sense of sharing S,'s truth- condition, and yet not carry the conventional implicature, due to not containing the lexical item that is governed by the special convention in question. The most obvious example of a lexical item of this kind is the word 'but'. Consider

(24) a. Hector is a philosopher but he's smart. b. Hector is a philosopher and he's smart.

(24a) "implies" (25), while (24b) does not:

(25) Being a philosopher tends to preclude being smart.

Yet we would be reluctant to suppose that (24a) differs truth- conditionally from (24b); (24a) is notfalse (or "truth-valueless")

17 See Grice [19]. We believe that "conventional implicature," whose essential nature Grice never explains, is importantly reducible to the notion of "lexical presumption" that we developed in chapter 5 of [8].

455


just because (25) is false. Rather, we feel, (24a) would just be inappropriately lexicalized: the utterer would have expressed a logical form that is in fact true, but chosen the wrong word in realizing that logical form at the surface. Thus, (24a) implies (25) in an apodeictic way (the convention governing 'but' is indefeasible and noncancellable) but does not semantically entail (25).

If we can show that (la)'s implication of John's inner tokening of an * I am in danger' (granted for the sake of discussion) is conventional in this way or something like it, then we will be able to turn aside the "apodeictic" version of the Special Implica- tum Objection, by explaining the felt implication without conceding the semantical nonequivalence of (la) and de re instances of (lb).

To see how this may be done, let us join Quine, Davidson, and others in regarding the reporting of other people's beliefs as a translational exercise. When Galileo said 'Eppur si muove' and Donald reports 'Galileo said that the earth moves', Donald is noting Galileo's utterance (along with his sincere demeanor, etc.) and in effect translating it into words of Donald's own and his hearers' language: 'the earth moves'. Likewise, we may say, an utterer of (la) is noting John's assertion, or in our case John's presumed inner tokening, of 'I am in danger' and translating it into the utterer's own speech. Of course, even when one speaker's English is being translated into another speaker's English, certain permutations must be performed. If what Walter uttered in 1935 was 'The USA will put a man on the moon by the year 2000', we would now translate it by ascribing to Walter the statement or the belief that the USA would put a man on the moon by the year 2000. In general, pronouns, tenses, modal auxiliaries, and other lexical items are shifted in such ways in response to the overall shift in context from the believer's overt or inner tokening to the (normally subsequent) belief- report. And these shifts are largely a matter of convention.

Let us continue to suppose that John inwardly tokened an I am in danger*. Certainly we would be expected to translate

this, in the scope of an assertion or belief operator, as 'He was in danger' (where 'he' is equivalent to 'he himself'), rather than as 'John is in danger' or even 'John was in danger'. More to

456

WHO, ME?

the point, if we did ascribe to John the belief that "he himself was in danger," we would simply be mistranslating if what John actually had tokened was not an I am in danger but some third-person utterance. But exactly what sort of solecism would we have committed? According to the Irreducibility Thesis, we would have mistranslated John in the sense of substituting for his utterance a semantically inequivalent one. But this has not been proved. So far as has been shown, there is simply a translational convention to the effect that we translate a subject's designator as 'he himself' when that subject is presumed to have tokened 'I' (or an JIG). If this suggestion is right, then if a speaker used 'he himself' in the complement of a belief- report concerning a subject who had not at least inwardly tokened 'I' (or an *I) but only some neutral designator, the speaker would have lexicalized that belief-report in an inappropriate and indefeasibly contraconventional way. But to say this is precisely to say that a sentence like (1 a) conventionally implicates that John spoke in the first person. And if (la) conventionally implicates that, nothing forces us to admit that (la) semantically entails that-indeed, few sentences do entail what they also conventionally implicate.

Incidentally, our notion of "lexical convention" (motivated independently in [8]) also will account for the existence of what we might call "reflexive verbs."1 Consider

(26) a. John confessed to committing the murder. b. John admitted that T had committed the murder.

(27) a. John intended to knock Ralph's block off for constantly following him around.

b. John intended that T knock Ralph's block off for constantly following him around.

(28) a. John remembered being tricked by mirrors in the past.

8Jerry Fodor's argument (in [17]) for the existence of his syntactically unique morpheme 'set' is based on the behavior of such verbs. Herbert Heidelberger has called our attention to more examples.

457


b. John remembered that T had been tricked by mirrors in the past.

(In each case, let 'T' be replaced as before with some purely referential but third-person designator of John.) A proponent of the Irreducibility Thesis would naturally deny that the first members of the three pairs are equivalent respectively to the second members. This is because (26a), (27a), and (28a) are felt to imply respectively that John's admission was made in the first person, that his intention was (inwardly) formulated in the first person, and that the "inner sentence" which expressed John's memory was a first-person sentence. But notice that what goes wrong with (26a), (27a), and (28a) when these implications are false is again that the speaker's superficial choice of words is inappropriate: 'confess', 'intended to', 'remember being'. It is both possible and plausible to suppose that these particular words are governed by lexical conventions of the same sort as 'but' is, and hence that the "implications" felt here are conventional implicatures rather than entailments.

The "apodeictic" version of the Special Implicatum Ob- jection has failed to refute our account. To settle any remaining doubt about this, let us employ a device recommended by Kripke ([22]: 265): we can imagine a language which is just like English, except that we stipulate that our account is true of it. That is, in that language (called '"English" ') (la) and other superficially de se ascriptions are semantically equivalent simply to de re ascriptions which employ purely referential third-person designators, their distinctiveness being only pragmatic in the way(s) we have mentioned; and our lexical conventions concerning indirect discourse and governing "reflexive verbs" are in force. (Principles A, B, and C are also stipulated to be true of "English".) We do not see any way in which "Eng- lish"-speakers' verbal behavior would differ from that of their English-speaking counterparts in the real world. If we are right in thinking that there would be no difference at all in their speech habits, then nothing proves our account to be false; no datum or argument has shown or could show that English itself does not work in the way we have stipulated that "Eng- lish" does.

458

WHO, ME?

Of course, we have not proved the Irreducibility Thesis to be false of English either; we doubt that any knockdown argument is to be obtained on either side, unless our Perry Mason argument qualifies as one. All we have done is to show that our view is tenable (which may have come as a surprise to some students of the literature on indexical reference) and to draw the teeth of some leading objections to it. Our preference for our account over any that incorporates the Irreducibility Thesis is based only on our reluctance to accept "essential indexicals" (to use Perry's phrase) as surds in semantics and "perspectival facts" as surds in nature, when the data can be fairly plausibly ac- commodated within the familiar semiotic apparatus that we already do and must employ for hosts of other purposes. All we are claiming is that we have one solid systematic reason for rejecting the Thesis and have been shown no convincing reason for accepting it.

It remains to return to the non-"apodeictic" version of the Special Implicatum Objection. According to this version, (la) strongly suggests (23) in some way even though this "suggestion" is defeasible and hence not an entailment. An interesting feature of this claimed disparity between (la) and any instance of (lb) is that it does not seem to be explicable by reference to Gricean conversational implicature, even though the reasoning associated with conversational implicatures frequently does account for "strong suggestions" that are not entailments. The reason it seems as though Grice cannot help us here is that conversational implicatures, unlike conventional ones, are generated by logical forms or sentence-meanings themselves, quite apart from the vagaries of their surface realizations; hence, if (la) conversationally implicates (23) and instances of (Ib) do not, then (la) is not semantically equivalent to any instance of (lb).19

Nevertheless, we can explain the disparity in "strong suggestion" by reference to Gricean considerations plus some further

19 One can interpret at least some of Grice's "maxims" as relating to surface form. For example, the maxim 'Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)' certainly suggests that one would be in violation of it if, given two ways of expressing one and the same proposition, one terse and the other verbose, one were to utter the verbose candidate. The interpretation offered in the text, however, seems to us to be closer to the general spirit of Grice's essay.

459

STEVENE. BOER AND WILLIAM G. LYCAN

pragmatic factors that are sensitive to surface form. The mechanisms involved are quite simple: (i) it is mutually known in our linguistic community that 'I' is pragmatically distin- guished in English by the fact that a speaker who uses it automatically makes a self-reference. (ii) John is an English speaker and (by hypothesis) a member of our linguistic community. (iii) People almost never refer to themselves in any but the first person; a person making a de re reference to himself or herself is normally expected to use 'I' for this purpose (though there are special conventions that can contravene this expectation in certain formal circumstances, such as the authoring of formal essays and literary reviews). (iv) If a person has a propositional attitude de a person X, we would expect the owner of the attitude to voice it by referring to X in a contextually appropriate way. Therefore, (v) if X is one and the same person as the subject of the attitude, we would expect the subject to voice the attitude by tokening 'I' in any appropriate linguistic environment. Con- sequently, (vi) if one clearly and unambiguously attributes to John an attitude de John, one thereby invites one's audience to infer John's willingness to use 'I'. (Notice, incidentally, that the fact of John's idiolect's containing the distinctive device 'I' is purely contingent. Igor, the infamous hunchback of grade- B horror movies, always refers to himself as 'Igor'; his idiolect lacks the first person altogether. It is solely in virtue of the contingent collateral information we possess-i.e., the sort of information recorded in (i)-(iv) above-that we expect John to use 'I', whether aloud or silently to himself.)

But why, then, do we not have this expectation anent any instance of (Ib) or (Ic)? It is not enough just to show that John's willingness to use 'I' is pragmatically suggested by (la): we must also show that it is emphatically not suggested in the same or any other way by nonreflexive formulations of the same propositional content.20 The answer lies in the phrase 'clearly

20 David Austin has reminded us of the need to explain why John is not willing to use 'I' in, say, an amnesia or mirror case of Castafieda's type, granted that he is still in a position to make references de John. It is hard to think of a plausible explanation; but again there is a parallel in the case of Van and Wilfrid: why is John not willing to use 'Van' in alluding to what he sees in the first direction he looks in, or 'Wilfrid' in talking about what he sees in the mirror?

460

WHO, ME?

and unambiguously' in conclusion (vi) above. Due to the distinctive pragmatic valuation rule governing

quasi-indicators like 'he himself, (la) is unambiguously de re: it is a de re ascription whose pragmatic suggestion of the subject's indexical self-reference using 'I' is unclouded by misleading connotations of any sort. But nothing of the form (Ib) will have this pragmatically and syntactically unambiguous character. Any instance of (lb) will be at least potentially ambiguous in ways which cloud and cancel the conversational invitation extended by (la). As we mentioned earlier, any instance of (Ib) can be understood de dicto as well as de re: 'T' may be replaced by an attributive name or description (or by a pronoun of laziness echoing one of these). These de dicto understandings, which themselves of course carry no suggestion of the sort at issue, are far more colloquial and much easier to hear. We suppose that there are two reasons for this: (a) It seems that there is a conversational maxim to the effect that one should be unambiguous when one is in a position to do so without extraordinary effort; a speaker who tokens an instance of (lb) therefore gives us reason to suspect that John is not willing to use 'I', or at least that the speaker is unprepared to claim that John is willing to do so. (If the speaker were prepared to claim that and were also properly concerned to be unambiguous, the speaker would employ the properly reflexive 'he himself construction, since that construction forces the de re reading.) (b) A pragmatic mechanism parallel to the one we sketched above concerning 'I' also governs reflexives of Castafieda's type, including 'he himself; as we have seen, this phrase is pragmatically very specialized, in that a speaker who uses it automatically makes a de re reference to the subject of his sentence; since this special device exists, people almost never fail to use it when making de re references of the relevant type; therefore, if a speaker explicitly refrains from using a reflexive, as when uttering (le), hearers have statistical grounds for supposing that something is up-presumably that the belief being ascribed to John is not a straightforward attitude de John himself. The most ob- trusively available alternative is that the second occurrence of 'John' in (le) is functioning nonreferentially, and hence that the belief in question is de dicto rather than de re.

461


Reason (b) can be regarded as a Gricean-cum-lexical suggestion also. If there is a maxim to the effect that a cooperative speaker is colloquial when possible, an utterer of (ic), who forgoes re- flexivization and thus speaks noncolloquially, is cooperative only if he is not in a position to be colloquial, viz., only if he is not making a straightforward de re reference to John in tokening 'John' for the second time.

As before, we can imagine that there is an alien but English- like language which works in the way we have described; in fact, we can stipulate that our already imagined language, "English", does. And again it seems that nothing about the actual speech or behavior of English-speakers in the real world impugns the hypothesis that "English" and English are one and the same.

We mentioned in introducing the Special Implicatum Ob- jection that it seemed to have no parallel in the case of a pair of ordinary referential designators such as 'Van' and 'Wilfrid'. This is true only on the objection's "apodeictic" version; there is a case involving two nonreflexive referential terms that we think creates a parallel disparity of "implications," and that therefore serves to show that if the Special Implicatum Objection supports the nonequivalence of (la) with (ic) and instances of (lb), it impugns the notion of belief de re more generally. Suppose someone tokens

(29) John believes that 'Cicero' is an adjective.

Since the quote-name ' 'Cicero' ' rigidly designates 'Cicero' and lacks any standard attributive use, (29) is a straightforward de re attribution, adequately paraphrased by

(30) John believes of 'Cicero' that it is an adjective.

But, interestingly, people tend to hear (29) as suggesting

(31) John accepts ' 'Cicero' is an adjective',

even though (31) is clearly not entailed by (29) or (30) even with the addition of our operative assumption that John's language is

462

WHO, ME?

English. The reason that (31) is suggested by (29) and (30) is not far to seek: whatever it is that John "says to himself' must involve some rigid designator of 'Cicero'; but ' 'Cicero'' is the canonical name of 'Cicero' in our (=John's) language, and the absence of any other customary rigid designator of 'Cicero' makes it overwhelmingly likely that John himself uses ''Cicero'' to designate 'Cicero'. Consequently, we tend to hear (29) as explaining such facts as that John just now uttered 'Ralph is looking very Cicero today'. For, surely, if John accepts ' 'Cicero' is an adjective' (if (31) is true), then in virtue of the peculiar feature of quote-names (that one can see what they designate), John cannot fail to be aware of the fact that the word he believes to be an adjective is the very word he employed in his utterance.

Notice how the "diaphanous" character of quote-names parallels that of 'I': in each case we feel that one who uses such an expression, so long as he understands the language, cannot fail to know whom or what he is designating. In light of this, one can use (29) to mimic the original argument for the Irre- ducibility Thesis. Tongue firmly in cheek, we could claim that (29) expressed a special kind of belief-a belief de verbo-on the ground that nothing of the form (32) can capture its force:

(32) John believes that W is an adjective. ('W' is to be replaced by any nonquotational designator of 'Cicero'.)

For John may fail to believe that W = 'Cicero'! Now it seems tolerably clear in light of the foregoing discussion that there are no irreducibly de verbo beliefs; given the pragmatic parallel between beliefs de verbo and beliefs de se, it seems that "irreducibly de se" beliefs are down the same drain. Our pragmatic considerations obviate the need for positioning either sui generis sort of attitude.

There may be hidden difficulties, or new objections no one has yet put forward, which resist both the strategies we have employed in this paper. But for now it seems to us that the most reasonable answer to the skeptical 'Who, me?' is 'Yes; you'. The Ohio State University

21 We are grateful to Max Cresswell, Edmund Gettier, Herbert Heidel- berger, David Austin, Lynne Rudder Baker, and Murray Kiteley for very helpful criticisms of an earlier draft of this essay.

463


REFERENCES

[1] Ackerman, D., "Proper Names, Propositional Attitudes and Non- Descriptive Connotations," Philosophical Studies 35 (1979).

[2] Baker, L. R., "Underprivileged Access," in preparation.

[3] Baker, L. R., "Why Computers Can't Act," American Philosophical Quarterly, forthcoming.

[4] Baker, L. R., "On Making and Attributing Demonstrative Reference," Synthese, forthcoming.

[5] Boer, S., "Attributive Names," Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 19 (1978).

[6] Boer, S., "Proper Names and Formal Semiotic," Synthese 38 (1978).

[7] Boer, S. and W. Lycan, "Knowing Who," Philosophical Studies 28 (1975).

[8] Boer, S. and W. Lycan, "The Myth of Semantic Presupposi- tion," in A. Zwicky (ed.) Papers in Nonphonology (Ohio State Working Papers in Linguistics, No. 21: May, 1976); also distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club.

[9] Castafieda, H.-N., "'He': A Study in the Logic of Self-Con- sciousness," Ratio 8 (1966).

[10] Castafieda, H.-N., "Indicators and Quasi-Indicators," American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967).

[11] Castafieda, H.-N., "On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I," Pro- ceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy 3 (1968).

[12] Castafieda, H.-N., "On the Logic of Attributions of Self- Knowledge to Others," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968).

[13] Chisholm, R., "On the Meaning of Proper Names," unpublished MS.

464

WHO, ME?

[14] Clark, R., "Not Every Act of Thought Has a Matching Pro- position," presented to the 1979 Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium.

[15] Devitt, M., Designation, (Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

[16] Donnellan, K.,"Reference and Definite Descriptions," The Phil- osophical Review 75 (1966).

[17] Fodor, J., The Language of Thought (Harvester, 1976).

[18] Geach, P., "On Belief About Oneself," Analysis 18 (1957).

[19] Grice, H. P., "Logic and Conversation," in P. Cole and J. Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, vol. 3 (Academic Press, 1975).

[20] Kaplan, D., "Quantifying In," Synthese 19 (1968).

[21] Kripke, S., "Naming and Necessity," in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.) Semantics of Natural Language (D. Reidel, 1972).

[22] Kripke, S., "Speaker's Reference and Semantic Reference," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 2 (University of Minnesota, Morris: 1977).

[23] Kripke, S., "A Puzzle About Belief," in A. Margalit (ed.) Meaning and Use (D. Reidel, 1979).

[24] Lewis, D., "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se," The Philosophical Review 87 (1979).

[25] Lycan, W., "Eternal Sentences Again," Philosophical Studies 26 (1974).

[26] Nagel, T., "What Is It Like to be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review 82 (1974).

[27] Oldenquist, A., "The Possibility of Selfishness," American Philo- sophical Quarterly 17 (1980)

[28] Pastin, M., "About De Re Belief," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 (1974).

[29] Perry, J., "Frege on Demonstratives," The Philosophical Review 87 (1977).

[30] Perry, J., "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," Nouis 13 (1979).

465

STEVEN E. BOER AND WILLIAM G. L YCAN

[31] Plantinga, A., "The Boethian Compromise," American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978).

[32] Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (M.I.T. Press, 1960).

[33] Sayward, C., "Propositions and Eternal Sentences," Mind 77 (1968).

[34] Schiffer, S., "The Basis of Reference," Erkenntnis 13 (1978).

[35] Sosa, E., "Propositional Attitudes De Dicto and De Re," Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970).

466

boer & lycan - who, me

Documents