A number of studies in the extant literature report findings that suggest asymmetry in the way reflexive and pronoun anaphors are interpreted in the early stages of processing: that pronouns are less sensitive to structural constraints, as formulated by Binding Theory, than reflexives, in the initial antecedent retrieval process. However, in previous visual world paradigm eye-tracking studies, these conclusions were based on sentences that placed the critical anaphors within picture noun phrases or prepositional phrases, which have independently been (...) shown not to neatly conform to the Binding Theory principles. We present results from a visual world paradigm eye-tracking experiment that show that when critical anaphors are placed in the indirect object position immediately following a verb as a recipient argument, pronoun and reflexive processing are equally sensitive to structural constraints. (shrink)

Stern’s Columbia School Theory contribution on English self-pronouns provides a wonderful illustration of the explanatory power of an approach that refuses to be taken in by a priori grammatical categories like reflexivity, which have the unfortunate consequence of giving the analyst the impression that he or she already knows all about the semantics of the form under study before looking at real usage, and attempts rather to uncover the semantic content of the linguistic sign -self based on careful observation (...) and deep reflection on what might explain the way this sign is used in English. Stern shows that a purely syntactic account is unable to account for the fact that self-pronouns occur not only in syntactically reflexive environments, but also in non-reflexive ones, and conversely that simple pronouns also appear in both types of contexts. A faint glimmer of the structuralist origins of Columbia School Theory shows through in one case however. (shrink)

This thesis investigates reflexivity in ancient Greek literature and philosophy from Homer to Plato. It contends that ancient Greek culture developed a notion of personhood that was characteristically reflexive, and that this was linked to a linguistic development of specialized reflexive pronouns, which are the words for 'self'.

This chapter discusses the defective paradigms of the reflexive nouns and participles in the Latvian language. In Latvian, the reflexiveness of the nouns and the verbs functions as a complex derivational and inflectional system. In this language, the reflexive verbs, participles, and nouns are formed through the fusion of verbal or noun forms with enclitic accusative form of the reflexive pronoun. Reflexive verbs have full person, tense and mood paradigms whilst reflexive nouns and participles have (...) defective paradigms in Latvian. Although the rationale behind defectiveness of the paradigms of the reflexive nouns and participles are difficult to pinpoint, there are several types of compensation for the defectiveness in the Modern Latvian. These include the use of non-standard forms, the use of corresponding non-reflexive participle and noun forms, and the use of other forms of paradigms in lieu of the missing ones. These alternative paradigms depend however on the syntactic function of the word-form. Some topics discussed herein include: derivation and semantics of reflexive nouns; paradigmatic system of reflexive nouns and participles; and functioning of the paradigms of reflexive nouns and participles. (shrink)

It has been persuasively argued by David Kaplan and others that the proposition expressed by statements like (1) is a singular proposition, true in just those worlds in which a certain person, David Israel, is a computer scientist. Call this proposition P . The truth of this proposition does not require that the utterance (1) occur, or even that Israel has ever said anything at all. Marcus, Donnellan, Kripke and others have persuasively argued for a view of proper names that, (...) put in Kaplan’s terms and applied to this example, implies that the proposition expressed by (2) is also simply P .1 The thesis that expressions of a certain category (names, indexicals, demonstratives, pronouns, descriptions, etc.) are referential 2holds that these expressions contribute the object to which they refer, rather than a mode of presentation of that object, to the propositions expressed by statements containing them. The thesis that indexicals and names are referential creates the challenge of explaining the difference in cognitive significance between statements like (1) and (2), that express the same proposition[Wettstein, 1986]. The problem has two parts, which.. (shrink)

Certain anaphoric forms are widely supposed to give rise to ‘de se’ interpretations. Castanteda (1966a/b, 1967) argues that intensive reflexive anaphors such as ‘he himself’ and ‘she herself’ act as devices for the indirect report of essentially ‘first person’ contents when they occur with singular antecedents. In this paper, I argue that first and third person pronouns that occur as anaphors on c-commanding quantified antecedents (so-called ‘bound variable pronouns’) also give rise to de se interpretations. I draw (...) out a problem that this observation raises for a well-accepted account according to which bound pronouns occur as featureless variables. I argue that the best way to account for de se interpretations of bound first and third person pronouns is to abandon the view that pronouns lack features when bound. I offer a new account of bound pronominal anaphora which assigns the features of pronouns a crucial role in deriving bound readings. (shrink)

: Traditional accounts regard the first-person pronoun as a special token-reflexive indexical whose referent, the utterer, is identified by the linguistic rule expressed by the term plus the context of utterance. This view falls short in accounting for all the I-uses in narrative practices, a domain broader than fiction including storytelling, pretense, direct speech reports, delayed communication, the historical present, and any other linguistic act in which the referent of the indexical is not perceptually accessible to the receiver. I (...) propose a model for the reference of “I” based on the distinction between three functions carried out by indexicals in communication, namely, the anaphoric, perceptual, and phantasmatic functions. The referential mechanism of the phantasmatic “I”, that is, the “I” used in phantasmatic function, is understood as an instance of imagination-oriented pointing exploiting the phantasmatic context, and not the perceptual context relevant in perceptual uses of indexicals. The rule for “I” is revised in light of the perceptual vs. phantasmatic deixis distinction; the resulting rule governing the reference of the phantasmatic “I” allows for a homogeneous treatment of ‘I’-tokens in narrative practices spanning the spectrum from fiction to non-fiction. Keywords : First-person Pronoun; Context; Imagination; Fiction; Indexicals; Narration; L'io fantasmatico. Sull’uso immaginativo del pronome di prima persona tra finzione e realtà Riassunto : Tradizionalmente “io” viene trattato come un indicale token-riflessivo speciale il cui referente, il produttore dell’occorrenza, è identificato attraverso la sola regola linguistica e il contesto di proferimento. Questo approccio, tuttavia, non riesce a rendere conto di quei casi in cui “io” appare all’interno di pratiche di narrazione, un dominio più ampio della finzione e che include lo storytelling, i racconti in discorso diretto e indiretto, la comunicazione differita, il presente storico e ogni altro atto linguistico in cui il referente indicale non è percettivamente accessibile al ricevente. Il modello per il riferimento di “io” qui proposto si basa sulla distinzione tra tre funzioni svolte dagli indicali nella comunicazione: la funzione anaforica, la funzione percettiva, e la funzione fantasmatica. Il meccanismo referenziale dell’io fantasmatico, ovvero del pronome di prima persona usato in funzione fantasmatica, è inteso come una istanza di deissi orientata dall’immaginazione che sfrutta il contesto fantasmatico, piuttosto che il contesto percettivo rilevante negli usi percettivi degli indicali. La regola per “io” è riformulata alla luce della distinzione tra deissi fantasmatica e deissi percettiva; la risultante regola per il riferimento indicale dell’io fantasmatico permette un trattamento omogeneo delle occorrenze di “io” nelle pratiche di narrazione che pertengono indistintamente alla finzione e alla realtà. Parole chiave : Pronome di prima persona; Contesto; Immaginazione; Finzione; Indicali; Narrazione. (shrink)

Both young children and agrammatic aphasic speakers have difficulty interpreting pronouns, but not reflexive elements. This phenomenon is known as the delay of Principle B effect in language acquisition. The interpretation of pronouns is non-adult-like for children and disturbed in agrammatic aphasia, yet there is evidence that interpretation of pronouns is not always problematic for these populations and that it seems to be governed by linguistic principles. This chapter examines the linguistic principles underlying the interpretation of (...) pronouns and reflexives among children and agrammatic aphasic speakers whose native languages were Dutch, Spanish, and Italian by focusing on two types of sentences: simple transitive sentences and Exceptional Case Marking constructions. It first looks at earlier research on language acquisition and agrammatism before discussing two important linguistic theories, Government and Binding Theory and Reflexivity and Primitives of Binding. (shrink)

It is argued that binding theory (BT) must recognize two types of covaluation: the familiar type, which holds between two NPs when they have the same semantic value, and a new type, which holds between two NPs when one of them denotes an attitude holder and the other the ‘self’ of the attitude holder. This is shown to account for the acceptability of ‘de re’ reflexive pronouns and unacceptability of some ‘de re’ non-reflexive pronouns. Alternative theories, (...) which attempt to preserve the standard BT, are also discussed. (shrink)

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive (...) mood of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language. (shrink)

It has been suggested that a rational being stands in what is called a “second-personal relation” to herself. According to philosophers like S. Darwall and Ch. Korsgaard, being a rational agent is to interact with oneself, to make demands on oneself. The thesis of the paper is that this view rests on a logical confusion. Transitive verbs like “asking”, “making a demand” or “obligating” can occur with the reflexive pronoun, but it is a mistake to assume that the (...) class='Hi'>reflexive and the non-reflexive use exhibit the same logical grammar. The thesis that they do is in part motivated by the assumption that to show that my relation to you bears the same form as my practical self-relation is to show that, fundamentally, you are not an object for me to think about and act on, but a subject with whom to think and act together. I argue, to the contrary, that if my addressing you exhibited the same form as a relation I could literally be said to stand in to myself, then the nexus between us would be such that I am irretr.. (shrink)

We recorded participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing verb‐phrase coordination. Results showed evidence of immediate processing disruption when a reflexive pronoun embedded in the conjoined verb phrase mismatched the sentence subject. We argue that this result is incompatible with models of human parsing that employ only bottom‐up parsing procedures, even when flexible constituency is employed. Models need to incorporate a mechanism similar to the adjoining operation in Tree‐Adjoining Grammar, in which one structure is inserted into another.

Signed languages display a variety of pointing signs that serve the functions of deictic and anaphoric pronouns, possessive and reflexive pronouns, demonstratives, locatives, determiners, body part labels, and verb agreement. We consider criteria for determining the linguistic status of pointing signs. Among those criteria are conventionality, indexicality, phonological compositionality, being subject to grammatical constraints, and marking the kinds of grammatical distinctions expected of pronouns. We conclude that first-person points meet all these proposed criteria, but that nonfirst (...) person points are in part gestural. Lastly, we review evidence for the grammaticization over time of systems of pointing signs within signed languages. (shrink)

In English, we use the word "I" to express thoughts that we have about ourselves, and we use the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" to attribute such thoughts to others. Philosophers and linguists call such thoughts, and the statements we use to express them, de se. De se thoughts and statements, although they appear often in our day-to-day lives, pose a series of challenging problems for both linguists and philosophers. This interdisciplinary volume examines the structure of de se (...) thought, various issues concerning the semantics and pragmatics of our discourse about it, and also what it reveals about how humans think about themselves and the world around them. (shrink)

The VP ellipsis (VPE) ‘remnants’ did too/did in sentences like (1) and (2) below can have two different readings depending on whether the reflexive pronoun himself covertly recovered at the VPE site is interpreted as referring back to John (the strict reading) or to Bill (the sloppy reading).

I show how a de se belief ascription such as "Privatus believes that he himself is rich" may be dealt with by means of a scope distinction over and above that one separating de dicto and de re ascriptions. The idea is, roughly, that 'Privatus...himself' forms in this statement a unity, a single "spread" sign that is at the same time in a de re and de dicto position. If so, H-N. Castañeda's contention that the "quasi-indicator" 'he himself' ('she herself', (...) 'it itself') belongs to a "unique, irreducible logical category" of singular terms is, at best, misleading. Further, my account is superior to the well-known theories of R. Chisholm and D. Lewis, according to which de se ascriptions state that the believer "directly attributes properties to himself or herself". 1. Introduction 2. Chisholm and Lewis on de se belief ascriptions 3. Fregean and Sellarsian theories of belief ascriptions 4. Geach on the reflexive pronoun 5. Admiring and self-admiring 6. A solution to the problem de se belief ascriptions 7. Belief de se 8. Conclusion. (shrink)

The paper discusses one of the central problems of contemporary formal semantics — counterexamples to the predictions of the theory of binding (due to N. Chomsky). In particular, the author addresses cases of the so-called coreferential readings of reflexive pronouns which are standardly predicted to receive only the bound reading. The author examines theories of T. Reinhart and I. Heim and suggests an extension ofthe latter theory in order to enable it to account for the aforementioned readings of (...) reflexive pronouns. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with locating the specific assumption that led Frege into Russell's Paradox. His understanding of reflexive pronouns was weak, for one thing, but also, by assimilating concepts to functions he was misled into thinking one could invariably replace a two-place relation with a one-place property. /// Este trabajo se ocupa de localizar el supuesto específico que llevó a Frege a la Paradoja de Russell. Por una parte, su comprensión de los pronombres reflexivos era débil pero, (...) por otra, al asimilar los conceptos a las funciones pensó equivocadamente que siempre podíamos reemplazar una relación diádica con una propiedad monádica. (shrink)

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure (...) in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent. (shrink)

The paper discusses one of the central problems of contemporary formal semantics — counterexamples to the predictions of the theory of binding (due to N. Chomsky). In particular, the author addresses cases of the so-called coreferential readings of reflexive pronouns which are standardly predicted to receive only the bound reading. The author examines theories of T. Reinhart and I. Heim and suggests an extension ofthe latter theory in order to enable it to account for the aforementioned readings of (...) reflexive pronouns. (shrink)

In 'You and She*' (ANALYSIS 51.3, June 1991) C.J.F. Williams notes the importance of reflexive pronouns in attributions of propositional attitudes, and claims to improve upon an earlier account of Hector-Neri Castaneda's in [1]. However, to the extent which his remarks are accurate, they reveal nothing that Castaneda hasn't already said, while insofar as they are new, they obliterate distinctions vital to Castaneda's theory. Castaneda called these pronouns quasi-indicators and noted that they function as linguistic devices used (...) for attributing indexical reference to others. For example, in hearing Arthur say 'I am wise' we would report his claim in English with, (1) Arthur thinks that he himself is wise. where 'he himself' is a quasi-indicator used to attribute to Arthur reference to himself qua self -- an expression that Castaneda abbreviated with 'he*.' Note that (1) is quite different from, (2) Arthur thinks that I am wise for 'I', functioning here as an indexical term, represents only the speaker's reference. Nor can (1) be identified with, (3) Arthur thinks that Arthur is wise. for this fails to represent the indexical character of Arthur's thought. Thus, (3) falls short of the informational content of (1). Moreover, as Williams, echoing Castaneda, points out, Arthur might not know that he himself is Arthur, or that he is named 'Arthur.' Hence, (3) might be false even if (1) is true. Williams observes that 'she' can also be used in oratio obliqua to report an indexical 1 usage, e.g., in (4) Arthur told Mary that she ought to talk to Shirley Makepeace's.. (shrink)

This book makes a novel contribution to our understanding of Romance SE constructions by combining both diachronic and synchronic theoretical perspectives along with a range of empirical data from different languages and dialects. The collection, divided into four sections, proposes that SE constructions may be divided into one class that is the result of grammaticalization of a reflexive pronoun up the syntactic tree, from Voice and above, and another class that has resulted from the reanalysis of reflexive and (...) anticausative morphemes as an argument expletive or verbal morpheme generated in positions from Voice and below. The contributions, while varied in both empirical content and theoretical approach, all serve to highlight different aspects of the overarching idea that SE constructions have evolved from these two distinct grammaticalization paths. The book appeals to researchers and academics in the field and closes with a unified approach to various SE constructions that makes important use of its status as a verbal morpheme. In addition to aligning a novel string of empirical contributions under a new theoretical umbrella, a clear research direction emerges from this volume based on the morphosyntactic nature of SE itself: Is it a clitic, an agreement morpheme, or a verbal morpheme? (shrink)

Self-awareness is commonly expressed by means of indexical expressions, primarily, first- person pronouns like.

This article proposes a new acrostic (SAPI) and telestic (SOIS) at Laus Pisonis 227–30. Their position opposite one another is an indication that they are to be read as a single sentence and an admonition to both dedicatee and reader that poet and patron need each other to gain eternal fame. The telestic allows us to reconstruct the poet's usus scribendi of the reflexive possessive pronoun suus.

We argue that some sign language loci (i.e. positions in signing space that realize discourse referents) are both formal variables and simplified representations of what they denote; in other words, they are simultaneously logical symbols and pictorial representations. We develop a 'formal semantics with iconicity' that accounts for their dual life; the key idea ('formal iconicity') is that some geometric properties of signs must be preserved by the interpretation function. We analyze in these terms three kinds of iconic effects in (...) American and French Sign Language (ASL and LSF): (i) structural iconicity, where relations of inclusion and complementation among loci are directly reflected in their denotations; (ii) locus-external iconicity, where the high or low position of a locus in signing space has a direct semantic reflex, akin to the semantic contribution of gender features of pronouns; and (iii) locus-internal iconicity, where different parts of a structured locus are targeted by different directional verbs, as was argued by Liddell and Kegl. The resulting semantics combines insights of two traditions that have been sharply divided by recent debates. In line with the 'formalist camp' (e.g. Lillo-Martin and Klima, Neidle, and Sandler and Lillo-Martin), our theory treats loci as variables, and develops an explicit formal analysis of their behavior. But we also incorporate insights of the 'iconic camp', which emphasized the role of iconic constraints in sign language in general and in pronominals in particular (e.g. Cuxac, Taub, Liddell). However, this synthesis is only possible if formal semantics makes provisions for iconic requirements at the very core of its interpretive procedure. (An Appendix discusses relevant data from Italian Sign Language [LIS].). (shrink)

Let us call a thought or belief whose content would be expressed by a sentence of subject-predicate form (by the thinker or someone attributing the thought to the thinker) an ‘ascription’. Thus, the thought that Madonna is middle-aged is an ascription of the property of being middle-aged to Madonna. To call a thought of this form an ascription is to emphasize the predicate in the sentence that gives its content. Let us call an ‘x-ascription’ an ascription whose subject is x, (...) that is, an ascription such that the subject of the sentence which would express its content is x. Let us call a ‘self-ascription’ an ascription whose subject is identical with the ascriber. Let us call a ‘reflexive ascription’ a selfascription such that either (i) in the sentence the ascriber would use to attribute correctly the ascription to himself he would use the first person pronoun to refer to himself both as the ascriber and as the subject of the ascription, as in a sentence of the form, I believe that I ö. (shrink)

This paper presents a new cognitivist account for the old puzzle of self-consciousness or knowing self-reference. Knowing self-reference does not rely on reflection on some putative pre-existent pre-reflexive self-consciousness, nor is it the result of a process of identification of oneself as the employer of the relevant token of “I” according to the token-reflexive rule of the first-person pronoun. Rather, it relies on the architecture of the cognitive system. By exploiting the acquaintance relation that every brain has to (...) one’s own body, a “mental file” is opened in a subliminal way to house information about oneself gained through the appropriate proprioceptors. Knowing self-reference based on self-files dispenses with self-identification because the opening of the file in the same brain/body is not a deed of the cognitive system but rather something that takes place sub-personally. (shrink)

In many cases, the ascription of self-consciousness is uncontroversial. For example, the ability to use the first person pronoun ‘I’ in the right way is obviously related to self-consciousness, although this is not true in all cases. The ascription of self-consciousness to infants, to persons with psychopathological syndromes, or to animals is controversial. In this paper, I will focus on the question of how ascribing self-consciousness to infants can be justified. There are two main subjects relevant to this debate. Firstly, (...) the conceptual question: What notion of self-consciousness should be under discussion regarding infants? In other words: how minimal can a feasible notion of selfconsciousness be? Positions in this debate vary from presuming innate abilities such as the postulation of pre-reflexive self-consciousness (cp. Frank 1991) and the claim that language has to be developed and the right use of the personal pronoun ‘I’ has to be proven (cp. Castaneda 1966). Claiming that self-ascription abilities are an essential condition for all notions of self-consciousness, I begin by analyzing self-ascription abilities using the terminology of the sense of ownership, the sense of agency, and the sense of authorship. Equipped with this clarification, I suggest a minimal notion of self-consciousness that may serve as a foundation of a broader notion of self-consciousness. Secondly, the epistemological question: How can we know when ascribing self-consciousness is justified? This question is combined with an additional problem concerning the ascription of self-consciousness to infants. Infants show impressive behavior that seems to be tied to self-consciousness, but in some cases there are convincing alternative explanations for such behavior. Such alternatives do not refer to self-consciousness and still provide satisfying explanations. Finally, I will discuss several paradigmatic cases regarding the question of whether the ascription of self-consciousness is justified in such cases. (shrink)

Combinatory logic (Curry and Feys 1958) is a “variable-free” alternative to the lambda calculus. The two have the same expressive power but build their expressions differently. “Variable-free” semantics is, more precisely, “free of variable binding”: it has no operation like abstraction that turns a free variable into a bound one; it uses combinators—operations on functions—instead. For the general linguistic motivation of this approach, see the works of Steedman, Szabolcsi, and Jacobson, among others. The standard view in linguistics is that (...) class='Hi'>reflexive and personal pronouns are free variables that get bound by an antecedent through some coindexing mechanism. In variable free semantics the same task is performed by some combinator that identifies two arguments of the function it operates on (a duplicator). This combinator may be built into the lexical semantics of the pronoun, into that of the antecedent, or it may be a free-floating operation applicable to predicates or larger chunks of texts, i.e. a typeshifter. This note is concerned with the case of cross-sentential anaphora. It adopts Hepple’s and Jacobson’s interpretation of pronouns as identity maps and asks how this can be extended to the cross-sentential case, assuming the dynamic semantic view of anaphora. It first outlines the possibility of interpreting indefinites that antecede non-ccommanded pronouns as existential quantifiers enriched with a duplicator. Then it argues that it is preferable to use the duplicator as a type-shifter that applies “on the fly”. The proposal has consequences for two central ingredients of the classical dynamic semantic treatment: it does away with abstraction over assignments and with treating indefinites as inherently existentially quantified. However, cross-sentential anaphora remains a matter of binding, and the idea of propositions as context change potentials is retained. (shrink)

In the sixth century a.d., in a debate with the Buddhists about the nature of Self, the well-known Naiyāyika Uddyotakara declared that there is no need prove that the Self or what is referred to by the pronoun “I” exists, for on that score there cannot be any significant disagreement.1 It is only this or that specific metaphysical nature of the self that is the subject of controversy. To limit the scope of the debate at issue here, we employ the (...) same strategy. It is beyond doubt that many cognitive processes involve consciousness of the self, for example monitoring one’s activities, as in learning how to dance or planning an important event in the near future. We can safely assume that there cannot be any .. (shrink)

A much discussed morpheme in Semitic historical linguistics is the suffix *-n. Its reflexes include the energic in Classical Arabic, the ventive in Akkadian, and many languages with a [V – n – object pronoun] reflex. Explanations of its origins fall broadly into two camps. One sees it originally as a proto-Semitic verbal suffix, while the other derives it from a grammaticalization of an originally independent [deictic/presentative + object pronoun] element. This paper argues for the correctness of the second explanation, (...) to which end a general reconstruction of the historical development of the morpheme in West Semitic is developed, with particular attention given to Arabic. Although a modest and unobtrusive morpheme, it is argued that the linguistics of *-n is of considerable significance for conceptualizations of Arabic and Semitic historical linguistics. (shrink)

O si como reflexivo designa todos os pronomes pessoais e impessoais pelo seu caráter de omnipessoal, já evidenciado pela gramática das línguas naturais o que viabiliza uma proposta de Hermenêutica do Si, apresentada por Ricoeur em Soi-meme comme un autre, e articulada com princípios da Filosofia da Linguagem em seu aspecto semântico para a designação de uma coisa pela sua referência; e pragmático no que diz respeito às condições da interlocução que implicam a expressão: “falar é dirigir a”, evidenciado a (...) transitoriedade na relação do sujeito com o seu outro que se revela na intenção ética, na norma moral e na sabedoria prática.: The self as reflexive means all personal pronouns and impersonal for its character omnipessoal, as evidenced by the grammar of natural languages​​, thus justifying a proposed Hermeneutics of the Self, by Ricoeur on Soi-meme comme un Autre, and articulated within the Philosophy of Language in semantic aspect to the appointment of a thing by its reference; and pragmatic with regard to the conditions of dialogue involving the expression: "Talking is refers to", evidencing the transience on the subject's relation to his other which reveals on the intention ethics, moral norm and practical wisdom. Keywords: Hermeneutic of self, semantic, pragmatic, ethic, moral, politics. (shrink)

We can think about ourselves in a variety of ways, but only some of the thoughts that we entertain about ourselves will be thoughts which we know concern ourselves. I call these first-person thoughts, and the component of such thoughts that picks out the object about which one is thinking—oneself—the self-concept. In this thesis I am concerned with providing an account of the content of the self-concept. The challenge is to provide an account that meets two conditions on first-person thought. (...) The account must show how we are aware of ourselves when we entertain first-person thoughts, so that we have an account that establishes the cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. But, in addition, this awareness must be as robust as the thinker’s ability to entertain first-person thoughts if our account is to respect the guaranteed referential success of the self-concept. I introduce both the subject matter of the thesis, and the constraints on a satisfactory account of that subject matter in the first chapter. In the second chapter I then set up a further problem: much of our self-knowledge is knowledge of our current mental states and it is often argued that we know about and can ascribe those mental states on the basis of introspection alone. The first constraint on an account of first-person thought described in the preceding paragraph requires that we be aware of ourselves in some way if our thoughts are to have the special cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. Yet, I argue, we neither do nor can introspectively observe a subject of thought and experience when we come to know about our mental states and experiences. The failure of introspection to supply us with perceptual information about a subject of thought presents us with the further potential problem. According to Fregean semantics sense determines reference: we count on the content of the elements of thought to determine the reference of terms that are used to express those elements. If we do not introspectively observe a subject of thought then we seem to be at a loss to account for the concept and we are at risk of having to accept that neither the self-concept nor the first-person pronoun are referential. In the remainder of my thesis I consider various responses that we can offer to this problem. First, I examine whether we can avoid the problem with an alternative account of first-person reference according to which reference is fixed by a reflexive rule, and whether we can also base an account of first-person thought on this account of first-person reference. Secondly, I look at the descriptivist view of first-person thought which could potentially provide both an account of first-person thought and first-person reference. These two suggestions must be rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the special cognitive significance of first-person thought. A third approach to first-person thought argues that we employ an objective self-concept when we think about ourselves, a concept that is informed by bodily experience, rather than by introspective observation of a subject. Yet such an account cannot make sense of first-person thoughts in which we question our own embodiment. Lastly I consider whether it is possible to explain the cognitive significance of first-person thought in terms of non-conceptual first-person contents. (shrink)

It is rather uncontroversial that there are different ways to report de se attitudes, but there is still disagreement about the number and the nature of the different mechanisms at work. Following Anand (2006), I distinguish three types of de se reporting: one a special case of de re, another expressed by shifted indexicals, and a third expressed by dedicated de se pronouns. For the first two I propose reductions to de re and de dicto reporting, respectively, couched in (...) a dynamic framework where presupposition resolution takes center stage. For the third, I part ways with all current proposals in offering what is essentially a de re analysis of dedicated de se pronouns. I motivate this radical departure with examples of de se pronouns binding de re reflexives, as recently brought into the spotlights by Charlow (2010) and Sharvit (2010). (shrink)

The notion of anaphoric conservativity, that is a property of specific functions taking sets and binary relations as arguments is studied. Such functions are denotations of anaphoric determiners forming nominal anaphors. It is shown that anaphoric conservativity is strictly stronger that ordinary conservativity of this type of functions. In consequence some novel semantic descriptions of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns are provided and a semantic universal stating that reflexive and reciprocal non-possessive determiners denote anaphorically conservative functions is proposed.

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to (...) be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate. (shrink)

O si como reflexivo designa todos os pronomes pessoais e impessoais pelo seu caráter de omnipessoal, já evidenciado pela gramática das línguas naturais o que viabiliza uma proposta de Hermenêutica do Si, apresentada por Ricoeur em Soi-meme comme un autre, e articulada com princípios da Filosofia da Linguagem em seu aspecto semântico para a designação de uma coisa pela sua referência; e pragmático no que diz respeito às condições da interlocução que implicam a expressão: “falar é dirigir a”, evidenciado a (...) transitoriedade na relação do sujeito com o seu outro que se revela na intenção ética, na norma moral e na sabedoria prática.The self as reflexive means all personal pronouns and impersonal for its character omnipessoal, as evidenced by the grammar of natural languages​​, thus justifying a proposed Hermeneutics of the Self, by Ricoeur on Soi-meme comme un Autre, and articulated within the Philosophy of Language in semantic aspect to the appointment of a thing by its reference; and pragmatic with regard to the conditions of dialogue involving the expression: "Talking is refers to", evidencing the transience on the subject's relation to his other which reveals on the intention ethics, moral norm and practical wisdom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cultural Transactions: Nature, Self, SocietyRoger SeamonCultural Transactions: Nature, Self, Society, by Paul Hernadi; ix & 156 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, $27.50 paper.Thinkers have often found the world rather Gaulish—or, if you prefer, have carved it up to make it so. In Cultural Transactions Paul Hernadi starts from the premise that “We typically experience ourselves as objectively existing organisms, players of intersubjectively assigned and evaluated roles, or (...) as subjective selves” (p. 3), which correspond to the nature, society, and self of his subtitle. He then collects and creates triads which are meant to be homologous with the foundational trio. Some of these are traditional (truth, justice, beauty), others are cobbled out of folk psychology (desire with, desire that, desire for), some are taken from other thinkers (Martin Buber’s It, Thou, and I), but most are based on linguistic concepts. Thus, Hernadi sums up at one point by saying, “In the preceding sections I suggest that all discourse involves action, production, and signification, and that doing, making, and meaning tend respectively to predominate in speaking, writing, and thinking—the prime vehicles of communication, expression, and representation in our culture” (p. 28). The process culminates in the postulation of three triangles (discourse, awareness, and value) whose apices and sides constitute two triads. Each side is itself then divided into three, which makes for a total of five triads per triangle (pp. 111, 120, 130), to which we should add about twenty or so spelled out earlier. This is an argument by accumulation for a triadic human universe.Hernadi sees life (and Cultural Transactions is about nothing less) as a complex dance both within and between these cooperative triads: “Yet the natural domain of Its (to be individuated as such by one of Buber’s two Is) and the social domain of Buber’s I-Thou relations would not be what they are without self-conscious individuals who are able to pick out themselves as [George Herbert] Meadian Mes and other particulars as Its or Thous from what [End Page 535] thereby becomes someone’s natural and social environment” (p. 88). Again: “Consensus, coherence, and correspondence have sometimes been invoked as rival criteria of truth. From the present book, they should emerge rather as mutually supportive goals in our lifelong pursuit of interactive doing, self-expressive making, and world-oriented meaning” (p. 109). Sometimes the triads run parallel to each other, and at other times they are nested. Thus, the triad within beauty consists of Dionysian “world-absorbed engulfment” (nature), “ludic” imitation (the social dimension of art), and Apollonian “self-controlled detachment” (self) (pp. 130–31). In the next triad up, Beauty is parallel to self, goodness is the value analogous to society, and truth corresponds to the world.Some of the triads are indeed “quite clever” (p. 142) (Hernadi’s own phrase from a self-reflexive “Epilogue”), as when he writes, “Natural must gives way to social should only to make room, eventually, for personal may as well” (p. 99). This nicely captures our sense that freedom has degrees, but more often there are dubious appropriations and stretched similes. For example, Hernadi uses a mere pronoun to make his case for the possibility of a seamless blending of the three realms—“the ecumenical ‘we’ recombines the first-, second-, and third person perspectives of communication”—and he continues with a very unpersuasive simile—“just as a rapidly spinning top turns the three cardinal colors painted on it into the whitish hue of unrefracted light” (p. 75). This is not an argument, but the expression of a wish.Although each triad is meant to be homologous with the foundational trio, there are quite a few uncomfortable fits. For example, I don’t see how “being with” is the apex formed by truth and beauty, while “being of” comes between justice and beauty, and “being toward” belongs between beauty and truth (p. 130). There are also odd omissions. Hernadi rejects Freud’s id, ego, and superego as insufficiently fine-grained to capture our complex subjectivity (p. 90) (which they were never meant to do), but the parallel to his major triad of nature, self and society seems... (shrink)