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De se is Latin for "of oneself" and, in philosophy, it is a phrase used to delineate what some consider a category of ascription distinct from "de dicto and de re". Such ascriptions are found with propositional attitudes, mental states an agent holds toward a proposition. Such de se ascriptions occur when an agent holds a mental state towards a proposition about themselves, knowing that this proposition is about themselves.
A sentence such as: "Peter thinks that he is pale," where the pronoun "he" is meant to refer to Peter, is ambiguous in a way not captured by the de dicto / de re distinction. Such a sentence could report that Peter has the following thought: "I am pale". Or Peter could have the following thought: "he is pale", where it so happens that the pronoun "he" refers to Peter, but Peter is unaware of it. The first meaning expresses a belief de se, while the second does not.
This notion is extensively discussed in the philosophical literature, as well as in the theoretical linguistic literature, the latter because some linguistic phenomena clearly are sensitive to this notion.
David Lewis's 1979 article "Attitudes De Dicto and De Se" gave full birth to the topic, and his expression of it draws heavily on his distinctive theory of possible worlds.
But modern discussions on this topic originate with Hector-Neri Castañeda's discovery of what he called quasi indexicals (or “quasi-indicators”): according to Castañeda, the speaker of the sentence “Mary believes that she herself is the winner” uses the quasi-indicator “she herself” (often written “she∗”) to express Mary's first-person reference to herself (i.e., to Mary). That sentence would be the speaker's way of depicting the proposition that Mary would unambiguously express in the first person by “I am the winner”.
A clearer case can be illustrated simply. Imagine the following scenario:
Peter, who is running for office, is drunk. He is watching an interview of a candidate on TV, not realizing that this candidate is himself. Liking what he hears, he says: "I hope this candidate gets elected." Having witnessed this, one can truthfully report Peter's hopes by uttering: "Peter hopes that he will get elected", where "he" refers to Peter, since "this candidate" indeed refers to Peter. However, one could not report Peter's hopes by saying: "Peter hopes to get elected". This last sentence is only appropriate if Peter had a de se hope, that is a hope in the first person as if he had said "I hope I get elected", which is not the case here.
The study of the notion of belief de se thus includes that of quasi-indexicals, the linguistic theory of logophoricity and logophoric pronouns, and the linguistic and literary theory of free indirect speech.
A belief is a subjective attitude that a proposition is true or a state of affairs is the case. A subjective attitude is a mental state of having some stance, take, or opinion about something. In epistemology, philosophers use the term "belief" to refer to attitudes about the world which can be either true or false. To believe something is to take it to be true; for instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". However, holding a belief does not require active introspection. For example, few individuals carefully consider whether or not the sun will rise tomorrow, simply assuming that it will. Moreover, beliefs need not be occurrent, but can instead be dispositional.
Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false, which noncognitivists deny. Cognitivism is so broad a thesis that it encompasses moral realism, ethical subjectivism, and error theory.
Truthmaker theory is "the branch of metaphysics that explores the relationships between what is true and what exists". The basic intuition behind truthmaker theory is that truth depends on being. For example, a perceptual experience of a green tree may be said to be true because there actually is a green tree. But if there were no tree there, it would be false. So the experience by itself does not ensure its truth or falsehood, it depends on something else. Expressed more generally, truthmaker theory is the thesis that "the truth of truthbearers depends on the existence of truthmakers". A perceptual experience is the truthbearer in the example above. Various representational entities, like beliefs, thoughts or assertions can act as truthbearers. Truthmaker theorists are divided about what type of entity plays the role of truthmaker; popular candidates include states of affairs and tropes.
De dicto and de re are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinction is used regularly in metaphysics and in philosophy of language.
In philosophy and logic, a deflationary theory of truth is one of a family of theories that all have in common the claim that assertions of predicate truth of a statement do not attribute a property called "truth" to such a statement.
The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure. On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax.
A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to another noun or pronoun within the same sentence.
In linguistics, binding is the phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents. For instance in the English sentence "Mary saw herself", the anaphor "herself" is bound by its antecedent "Mary". Binding can be licensed or blocked in certain contexts or syntactic configurations, e.g. the pronoun "her" cannot be bound by "Mary" in the English sentence "Mary saw her". While all languages have binding, restrictions on it vary even among closely related languages. Binding has been a major area of research in syntax and semantics since the 1970s and, as the name implies, is a core component of government and binding theory.
Rudolph Lingens is a fictional character often used by contemporary analytic philosophers as a placeholder name in a hypothetical scenario which illustrates some feature of the indexicality of natural language. He was created by the logician Gottlob Frege in the course of one of the earliest systematic discussions of indexicals. A number of philosophers picking up on Frege's discussion of indexicals, notably John Perry, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker, have adopted Lingens to make their own points about indexicals.
In meta-ethics, expressivism is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms – for example, "It is wrong to torture an innocent human being" – are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as "wrong", "good", or "just" do not refer to real, in-the-world properties. The primary function of moral sentences, according to expressivism, is not to assert any matter of fact but rather to express an evaluative attitude toward an object of evaluation. Because the function of moral language is non-descriptive, moral sentences do not have any truth conditions. Hence, expressivists either do not allow that moral sentences to have truth value, or rely on a notion of truth that does not appeal to any descriptive truth conditions being met for moral sentences.
Nathan U. Salmon is an American philosopher in the analytic tradition, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of logic.
Semantic holism is a theory in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a larger segment of language. There is substantial controversy, however, as to exactly what the larger segment of language in question consists of. In recent years, the debate surrounding semantic holism, which is one among the many forms of holism that are debated and discussed in contemporary philosophy, has tended to centre on the view that the "whole" in question consists of an entire language.
Kent Bach is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, linguistics and epistemology. He is the author of three books: Exit-existentialism: A philosophy of self-awareness, Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts, and Thought and Reference published by Wadsworth, the MIT Press, and Oxford University Press, respectively.
In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning, and thought.
Héctor-Neri Castañeda was a Guatemalan-American philosopher and founder of the journal Noûs.
William Joseph Rapaport is a North American philosopher who is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the University at Buffalo.
A bound variable pronoun is a pronoun that has a quantified determiner phrase (DP) – such as every, some, or who – as its antecedent.
Logophoricity is a phenomenon of binding relation that may employ a morphologically different set of anaphoric forms, in the context where the referent is an entity whose speech, thoughts, or feelings are being reported. This entity may or may not be distant from the discourse, but the referent must reside in a clause external to the one in which the logophor resides. The specially-formed anaphors that are morphologically distinct from the typical pronouns of a language are known as logophoric pronouns, originally coined by the linguist Claude Hagège. The linguistic importance of logophoricity is its capability to do away with ambiguity as to who is being referred to. A crucial element of logophoricity is the logophoric context, defined as the environment where use of logophoric pronouns is possible. Several syntactic and semantic accounts have been suggested. While some languages may not be purely logophoric, logophoric context may still be found in those languages; in those cases, it is common to find that in the place where logophoric pronouns would typically occur, non-clause-bounded reflexive pronouns appear instead.
This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language
Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.