Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

LingPhil Reading Group 11/19 – on Torre (2018)

Abigail Thwaites will be presenting a paper by Torres on De Se content. The meeting will take place on Monday 19th in the 8th floor seminar room.

Title : In Defense of De Se Content

Author(s) : Stephan Torre

Abstract :

There is currently disagreement about whether the phenomenon of first-person, or de se, thought motivates a move towards special kinds of contents. Some take the conclusion that traditional propositions are unable to serve as the content of de se belief to be old news, successfully argued for in a number of influential works several decades ago. Recently, some philosophers have challenged the view that there exist uniquely de se contents, claiming that most of the philosophical community has been under the grip of an attractive but unmotivated myth. At the very least, this latter group has brought into question the arguments in favor of positing special kinds of content for de se belief; I think they have successfully shown that these arguments are not as conclusive, or fully articulated, as many have taken them to be. In this paper I will address these challenges directly and I will present and defend an argument for the conclusion that the phenomenon
of de se thought does indeed motivate the move to a special kind of content, content that is uniquely de se.