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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.

This chapter discusses the notion of the content of a cognitive attitude, such as a belief or a desire. According to the doctrine of propositions, the content of such an attitude is always a proposition. The problem posed by de se beliefs for the doctrine of propositions is discussed, and the property theory of content is identified as a competitor to the doctrine of propositions. The chapter concludes with a preliminary defense of an internalist, or individualistic, version of the property theory of content.

Proposes a picture of attitude ascriptions, which relies on the notion of quasi-indicators. The main idea defended is that in an attitude ascription we relate the attributee to a proposition and a sentence. The latter is the sentence the reporter uses to classify the attributee’s mental state. This classification can be more or less accurate and often it can only be partial.

‘De Se Preservation and Personal Identity: Reply to Shoemaker’ (2011) responds to Shoemaker’s defense of his reductive strategy against the arguments of ‘Memory and Persons’. The response shows that a scenario that Shoemaker takes to support his approach confirms Burge’s. Two functions for de se capacities that must figure in any representational psychology are highlighted. One is to be sensitive to, and privilege, the individual’s needs, goals, and point of view. The other is to serve those needs, goals, and point of view through representational powers. Part of what it is to have an individual mind is to be sensitive to one’s own needs, projects, and perspectives, and to do things for oneself. The essay concludes by contrasting Burge’s account of the role of de se capacities in a propositional psychology with Kant’s account of the unity of apperception. The essay emphasizes that de se capacities are more primitive than apperception (self-consciousness).

Focuses on ‘I’-thoughts and the way we attribute them. It defends the thesis that the only way one can capture an ‘I’-thought in an attribution is via the quasi-indicator ‘s/he (her/himself)’: ‘Jane said that she (herself) is rich’ represents Jane saying, ‘I am rich’. It is shown how quasi-indicators should be understood along with logophoric pronouns.

This chapter explores, and ultimately rejects, the thought that enjoying erotica or pornography must always involve imagining something about oneself. After distinguishing between different kinds of imagining de se, and clarifying the general claim that there is a connection between emotional engagement with fiction and implicitly imagining de se, it turns to the case of pornography, examining and rejecting three possible arguments for a necessary connection between imagining, from the inside, being aware of represented events (that is, implicitly imagining de se), and being aroused by them. Since versions of these arguments might equally be applied to affective responses to fiction more generally, this chapter goes at least part way to undermining the ‘argument from affective response’, that is, the claim that one can provide a good explanation of our emotional responses to fictional events by construing imagining in relation to these events as imagining being aware of those events.

‘Memory and Persons’ (2003) argues that purely preservative memory with either de se content or de se presuppositions is constitutive to three psychological activities: use of perception in action; carrying out intentions; and engaging in inference. The essay maintains that these activities are constitutive to being an individual with propositional attitudes, hence to being a person. These arguments are used to refute Parfit and Shoemaker’s attempts to defend Lockean reduction of persons to memory‐like connections among psychological states. The essay claims that because (a) de se markers in psychological states are constitutive to any individual with propositional attitudes, (b) Parfit and Shoemakers’ quasi‐memory presupposes de se markers, and (c) relevant markers refer to individuals as such, those philosophers’ strategy is inevitably guilty of circularity in constitutive explanation of what an individual with propositional attitudes is. The main value of the essay lies in emphasizing the constitutive primitivity of de se or ego‐centric markers in any psychology.

Sentences that ascribe knowing how contain the unpronounced pronoun PRO, which has a de se, or first-personal meaning, in such sentences. On the account of knowing how defended in the book, then, knowing how to do something is a kind of first-personal, or de se knowledge. This chapter presents a novel account of the meaning of such uses of PRO, connecting the account of PRO in the theory of controlled PRO to a broader account of the nature of propositions according to which they contain ways of thinking of objects, including first-personal ways of thinking of objects. The propositional view of the de se is defended against the predicational view advocated by David Lewis and others. Various arguments for the predicational theory, for example from the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification, are considered and rejected.

Do de se thoughts pose a distinctive problem for traditional theories of propositional attitudes? Ever since the seminal work of Perry and Lewis, the standard answer to this question has been in the affirmative. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that there is no distinctive problem of de se attitudes: any problem posed by de se attitudes is simply an instance of some more general problem. While these skeptics are right that many of the arguments discussed in the literature do not reveal what the distinctive problem is, this chapter argues that there is nevertheless a distinctive problem of de se attitudes and tries to say what that problem is, why it is specific to the de se, and how various theories of the de se can all be seen as responding to this common problem.

This chapter has both a negative and a positive agenda. Negatively, it argues that two prominent approaches to the self—namely animalist (or biological) approaches and Lockean (or psychological) approaches—fail on account of the fact that they cannot ensure that no subject of experience can have disunified experiences. Positively, the chapter sketches an account of the self that is able to capture the connection between being a self and having a unified consciousness. The account in question—‘virtual phenomenalism’—holds that selves are virtual entities whose identity conditions are fixed by the intentional structure of the phenomenal field and is grounded in de se representation.

The first part of the paper proposes a positive account of de se intentional content. De se content is individuated by the condition that it refers de jure to the owner of the mental state or event in whose content it features. There is a corresponding account of the distinctive way in which de se information is updated as time passes. Three degrees of involvement of self-representation in a subject’s conception of the world are distinguished. The second part gives an account of the ontology of subjects, as metaphysically interdependent with conscious mental states and events. Subjects of consciousness are individuated by the identity of the apparatus that integrates information to produce unified conscious states. The theory is applied in critical discussion of the classical views of Hume, Kant, and the early Wittgenstein on the self.

The claim that temporal contents may be the semantic values of truth-evaluable sentences is relatively uncontroversial. Eternalists such as Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, Mark Richard, Nathan Salmon, and Jason Stanley have all defended this claim. However, these eternalists prefer to reserve the term ‘proposition’ for eternal content. The most controversial claims made by temporalists are (i) that we may stand in belief relations to temporal contents, (ii) that temporal contents can be the objects of agreement and disagreement and (iii) that successful communication may involve temporal contents. I defend the first claim in this chapter and the second and third claims in the subsequent chapter.

This chapter addresses the assumed connection between de se attitude ascription and logophoricity in the case of Chinese ziji. It is widely believed that logophors are among the paradigm cases of de se marking, and that long-distance ziji is logophoric. Drawing on a critical examination of a variety of analyses, this chapter argues that long-distance anaphora, de se interpretation, and logophoric marking are overlapping but distinct phenomena. Even if ziji is logophoric, it does not automatically trigger de se requirement. A de se-neutral analysis of ziji is consistent with pragmatic derivations of interpretations that emphasize the self. The findings point to a new approach to long-distance binding, and identify the blocking effect as the key issue for further research.

In this chapter Kasia M. Jaszczolt and Maciej Witek discuss the cognitive significance of the devices used to communicate de se thoughts and argue (and also partially empirically demonstrate) that, pace some extant proposals and pace the dominant presumption in semantics and philosophy of language, there is no evidence that natural languages use different kinds of expressions for externalizing different aspects of self-reference. On the basis of their empirical results from Polish, as well as evidence from a range of other languages and some theoretical argumentation, they sketch a possible future model founded on a correlation between speech-act types, interlocutors’ goals, and associated linguistic conventions on the one hand and expression type on the other. An additional corollary of this research is further justification for the claim of functional indexicality defended for example in Chapter 12 of this volume.

When thinking about intentional states such as memory, there is a distinction drawn between “content” and “modes of presentation” of that content. How do field and observer perspectives relate to this distinction? By exploring the nature of first-personal de se thoughts, and how the self is represented in perspectival memory imagery, this chapter argues that field and observer perspectives are different ways of thinking about a particular past event. Field and observer perspective memories can have the same intentional object, in that they can be about the same past event, but they involve different modes of presentation of that past event. This chapter looks at how the mode of presentation affects the content of memory, and it shows that the self-presence of remembering from-the-outside is provided implicitly by the mode of presentation.

This chapter addresses the question of whether the semantics of PRO constructions can be helpful to those who think there is a distinctive kind of de se content. First, it argues that even if the data about PRO constructions were all taken at face value, it provides no evidence for anything like an Essential Indexicality thesis and provides no illumination of the philosophical areas where the de se is alleged to be important. Second, it argues that the PRO data theorists standardly focus on is biased. It shows that these constructions can be used in cases where there is not even a prima facie case to be made for distinctly de se (or other perspectival) content.