Remembering, Imagining, and the First Person
Remembering, Imagining, and the First Person
It is widely supposed that certain uses of anaphoric forms (pronouns, reflexives, and others) give rise to peculiarly ‘first-personal’ interpretations, and it has become customary following David Lewis (1979) to call these interpretations de se. Assuming that de se interpretations do indeed contrast with interpretations along the familiar, if not necessarily pellucid, de dicto-de re axis, there are then four questions about the de se, the first two more philosophical and the latter two more linguistic: (i) what is the nature of de se interpretations?; (ii) what relation do they bear to ordinary uses of the first-person pronoun?; (iii) why are they triggered by the particular linguistic items that trigger them?; and (iv) are they universal in human language, and what relation, if any, do they bear to logophoric phenomena in languages having special logophoric forms? This chapter considers almost exclusively the first question, hazarding only a few remarks about the second and third; and omits the fourth, most properly linguistic, question entirely.
Keywords: anaphoric forms, de se interpretations, first-person pronoun, PRO
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