Lixiao Lin

Impossible worlds have been introduced by many philosophers to model attitudes and propositions. However, the complexities associated with first-person attitudes are often overlooked by advocates of this approach. This paper aims to address this gap by developing a novel impossible-worlds semantics for first-person belief ascriptions and arguing for its superiority over the prominent centred-worlds approach. I begin by presenting a challenge that first-person beliefs pose to traditional possible-worlds semantics. Next, I formulate a semantics for first-person belief ascriptions derived from the centred-worlds approach, demonstrating how it addresses the issues faced by possible-worlds semantics. I then critique the centred-worlds semantics by highlighting several issues it faces. Finally, I propose an impossible-worlds semantics for first- person belief ascriptions and argue that it resolves the problems the centred-worlds semantics aims to address while avoiding the issues inherent in that semantics.

De se exceptionalism is the view that de se attitudes pose a distinctive problem for traditional theories of propositional attitudes. A recent argument for de se exceptionalism attempts to prove that the distinctive problem of de se attitudes has something to do with the role of de se attitudes in explaining actions. The argument is based on a case where two subjects seem to believe and desire all the same propositions but perform different actions. This is the most promising argument for de se exceptionalism in the current literature. This paper rejects the argument by proposing a novel model of action explanation, according to which agents perform what they consider to be the best actions. I will argue that the case, based on which the recent argument for de se exceptionalism is developed, is philosophically interesting. Traditional theories of propositional attitudes can accommodate the case easily. I will conclude that de se exceptionalism should be rejected.