Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether itconstitutesan important status of judgments, whether itexplainsan important characteristic of judgments, or (...) whether it merelymarksan important characteristic of judgments. Nevertheless, reference to IEM abounds, making this obscure notion seem all the more significant. (shrink)

According to John McDowell, in its central uses, ‘I’ is immune to error through misidentification and thus to be accounted strongly identification‐free (I–II). Neither doctrine is obviously well founded (III); indeed, given that deixis is a proper part of ‘I’ (IV–VIII), it appears that uses of ‘I’ are identification‐dependent (IX–X).

The aim of the paper is to bring out exactly what makes first-personal contents special, by showing that they perform a distinctive cognitive function. Namely, they are stopping points of inquiry. First, I articulate this idea and then I use it to clear the ground from a troublesome conflation. That is, the conflation of this particular function all first-person thoughts have with the property of immunity to error through misidentification, which only some I-thoughts enjoy. Afterward, I show the implications of (...) this idea for a theory of first-person content and of immunity to error though misidentification. I then make some comparisons with Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification and immunity thereof and with Cappelen and Dever’s position on immunity to error through misidentification and show why they are defective. (shrink)

En un artículo publicado recientemente en esta revista, Javier Vidal argumenta que toda creencia de primera persona es una creencia consciente, una conclusión que pone en jaque ciertas teorías de la consciencia, como él mismo expone. El razonamiento de Vidal se basa en un argumento que muestra que uno conoce toda creencia de primera persona que tiene y en un principio que vincula conocimiento y consciencia. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es mostrar que el razonamiento de Vidal no es sólido. (...) En particular, hago patente que el argumento depende de rechazar la relación ampliamente aceptada en epistemología entre creencia y conocimiento. Además, argumento que SC* o bien prejuzga la cuestión o bien involucra una noción de consciencia no relevante para la discusión. (shrink)