Guillot, Marie; (2014) Identification-free at last: Semantic relativism, Evans’s legacy and a unified approach to immunity to error through misidentification. Teorema: Revista internacional de filosofía , 33 (3) pp. 7-30.

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Abstract

One broadly recognised characteristic feature of (a core subset of) the self-attributions constitu-tive of self-knowledge is that they are ‘immune to error through misidentification’ (hereafter IEM). In the last thirty years, Evans’s notion of “identification-freedom” (Evans 1982) has been central to most classical approaches to IEM. In the Evansian picture, it is not clear, however, whether there is room for a description of what may be the strongest and most interesting variant of IEM; namely what Pryor (1999) has first brought to the fore under the name “Which-object IEM”, and which I’ll prefer calling existential IEM. I argue that recent development of relativist frameworks in semantics and pragmatics, particularly in Recanati (2007a-b), (2009), (2010), (2012a), may be precisely of a nature to address this limitation. The relativist theory of IEM, and in particular its suitability to cover exis-tential IEM, may superficially seem to stem from a rejection of the core elements of the classical identification-freedom approach. However, I hope to show that, modulo a clarification and richer un-derstanding of the relevant notions of identification and identification-freedom, the relativist theory of IEM can be seen as both pushing further and complementing Evans’s intuitions, rather than conflict-ing with them.

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