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Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2008

De Se Assertion

Isidora Stojanovic

Résumé

David Lewis (1981) famously proposed an account of de se beliefs in terms of self-ascription of properties. The gist of his proposal was that the content of, for example, Mirka's belief that she is hungry, which she might express by saying “I am hungry,” is simply the property of being hungry, and it is a property that Mirka ascribes to herself. Lewis never held, though, that the content of assertion should be analyzed along the same lines, and the dominant view today is that if Mirka says “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said, is the proposition that Mirka is hungry (at a given time). In this paper, I argue, against the dominant view, that Lewis's proposal for de se attitudes plausibly holds for assertion as well. The content of Mirka's utterance of “I am hungry” is, I suggest, the property of being hungry, and it is a property that Mirka asserts of herself. My primary motivation comes from the fact that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” it is correct to report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I will show that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be correctly reported as having said the same thing. I will also show that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case in which the speakers are merely implicating the same thing.

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Dates et versions

ijn_00280484 , version 1 (18-05-2008)
ijn_00280484 , version 2 (10-06-2008)
ijn_00280484 , version 3 (13-06-2011)
ijn_00280484 , version 4 (09-07-2011)
ijn_00280484 , version 5 (23-01-2013)

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  • HAL Id : ijn_00280484 , version 1

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Isidora Stojanovic. De Se Assertion. 2008. ⟨ijn_00280484v1⟩
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