Why my I is your you: On the communication of de se attitudes
In Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Stephan Torre (eds.), About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication. Oxford University Press (2016)
Abstract
The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant-
neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or
proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”,
you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. I argue that when we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. To prove this I propose a concrete model of communication as the transmission of information from the speaker’s mental state to the hearer’s. My analysis is couched in Discourse Representation Theory, a formal semantic framework that linguists use for modeling conversational common ground updates, but that can also be applied to describe the individual speech participants’ dynamically changing mental states.
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2014-07-13
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