James Higginbotham

(1941 - 2014)

The paper challenges Smith's contention that disquotational knowledge amounts to substantial knowledge, arguing that nothing more than such knowledge, thinly conceived, is needed to account for first‐personal knowledge of one's meanings. However, a distinction is offered between the kind of authority that attaches to disquotational claims and that which attaches to our intuitive judgements about what we mean. The latter may fall short of genuine knowledge while still involving entitlement and a presumption of correctness. Each species of authority is assessed with respect to issues in Smith's paper, and the view is defended that neither species is threatened by externalism. The extent of our linguistic knowledge is further explored with respect to a particular range of linguistic data.

The problem of self‐knowledge is examined and the linguistic strategy for tackling it is explored. The strategy attempts—as in Davidson's and Wright's discussions of self‐knowledge—to ground knowledge of one's mind on knowledge of what one means in speaking one's mind. If knowing what one is saying in speaking a language is to provide a means of knowing one's own mind, it cannot simply be a part of it. But if no account of knowledge of what one means is offered, there will be a lacuna in the strategy. The paper considers what form a full account should take, and argues that it will have to combine first‐personal, third‐personal and sub‐personal elements of our knowledge of language. All three elements are necessary to explicate what is made available in, and expressed by, instances of disquotational knowledge, such as ‘Snow is white’ means that snow is white.. Immediate and authoritative knowledge of which sentences are grammatical depends on the internal workings of the language faculty and their impact on the conscious experience of the speaker, but immediate and authoritative knowledge of word meaning is not solely a matter internal to the speaker. Knowledge of word meaning is knowledge of public norms that govern our use of words, which introduce third‐personal standards into our first‐personal use. It is argued that our knowledge of word meaning is immediately authoritative about objective standards governing the proper use of our words, and so the authority attaching to these disquotational pronouncements is substantial and not merely an artefact of disquotation. Without an account of that knowledge the lacuna in the linguistic strategy remains.

The paper challenges Smith's contention that disquotational knowledge amounts to substantial knowledge, arguing that nothing more than such knowledge, thinly conceived, is needed to account for first‐personal knowledge of one's meanings. However, a distinction is offered between the kind of authority that attaches to disquotational claims and that which attaches to our intuitive judgements about what we mean. The latter may fall short of genuine knowledge while still involving entitlement and a presumption of correctness. Each species of authority is assessed with respect to issues in Smith's paper, and the view is defended that neither species is threatened by externalism. The extent of our linguistic knowledge is further explored with respect to a particular range of linguistic data.

In this article we consider, relying in part upon comparative semantic evidence from English and Romanian, two contrasting dimensions of the sense in which our thoughts, including the contents of imagination and memory, and extending to objects of fear, enjoyment, and other emotions directed toward worldly happenings, may be distinctively first-personal, or "de se," to use the terminology introduced in Lewis (1979), and exhibit the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (hereafter: IEM) in the sense of Shoemaker (1968) and elsewhere. The different dimensions of the de se, we will argue, come apart in the following sense: some first-personal propositions, memories, and fears are about oneself as an experiencer of the contents in question, and others not; and some that are about the experiencer are not given as about oneself.