Ansh Akshintulu

Following Arthur Prior, some philosophers have thought that English allows predicate quantification, as exemplified by a sentence like ‘Carlos is something Diana is not—kind’. This paper both defends this conclusion and argues that if the second-order reading of Prior sentences is correct, English also admits of self-applicative predication (SAP): cases in which a predicate applies directly to itself, not to a reified variant of itself. The presence of SAP in English is used to argue for the use of a SAP-friendly language for the purposes of metaphysics, based largely on grounds analogous to those on which some philosophers have recently defended the use of higher-order languages.

The paper distinguishes two approaches to understanding the representational content of sentences and intentional states, and its role in describing people, predicting and explaining their behavior, and so forth. It sets forth the case for one of these approaches, the “egocentric” one, initially on the basis of its ability to explain the near‐indefeasibility of ascriptions of content to our own terms (“‘dogs’ as I use it means dogs”), but more generally on the basis of its providing an attractive overall picture of the descriptive and explanatory role of representational content. In doing this, the paper relates the egocentric view to an “immanent” or “deflationary” view of reference and truth conditions, and also to the view of reference‐talk and truth‐talk as anaphoric devices. It discusses the indeterminacy of content ascriptions to those in communities with radically different theories, a phenomenon that is unsurprising on the egocentric approach, and connects this to the thesis of the normativity of meaning. (It does all this in rather broad brush: many strands of the egocentric account will be familiar, and are the subject of familiar controversies; the point of the paper is less to address these controversies individually than to tie the strands together into what is hoped to be an appealing package.)