On the Concept of the _De Se_

When John Perry believes that he is making a mess, he has a so-called ‘attitude’ de se—a representation in which the subject is represented in its capacity as subject. I argue that what is picked out by the ‘that’-clause—what I call representational content—is itself de se, hence not merely something truth-apt but about the subject qua subject, here, Perry. So there is some element in such a content which renders it ‘about the subject qua subject’. These two claims are commonly bound up with a third: that that element in a content which makes it de se is first-personal, such that the subject in question is actually or potentially self-conscious, i.e., is either actually thinking or actually able to think of itself in the first-person way. I deny the third claim while retaining the previous two. I first elaborate what Perry’s argument for so-called essential indexicality is and identify precisely what that problem is which the essentiality of indexicality presents for the notion of content. I then both refute the critique mounted by Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever against Perry; and show that when the third-person pronoun is used to refer to a subject simply as subject, it does not also, pace Castañeda, ‘quasi-indicate’ first-personal reference on the part of this subject itself. This leads in turn to a critique of first-personal elements in content as incoherent: “self-awareness” is so little “(t)he essence of [the] de se” (Jaszczolt 2013, p. 82) that it presupposes the latter. On this basis, I develop a heterodox account of self-consciousness. I then argue that the self-ascriptive account of representation and locution de se proposed by Loar and adopted by Lewis cannot accommodate the character of what is represented or locuted de se as something a subject can merely ‘entertain’. For this, content must be genuinely predicative, hence representation and locution de se ‘self-ascriptive’ at the level of, i.e., in content. Finally, I show that, while it endorses a broadly Fregean conception of content in general, the conception of both representation and locution de se I defend requires rejection of Frege’s Platonism. Contents cannot exist in a third realm beyond space and time yet neither can they be sentences as uttered. They exist only in dicentibus, not ante dicentia. I conclude with some highly speculative hypotheses as to why one has not countenanced the conception of the de se I advance.