Language, Action and Thought

John Perry and David Lewis introduced some smart examples, respectively, in “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” and “Attitudes de dicto and de se”, which allegedly showed that some quite common stance concerning the nature of our thoughts was in trouble. All of those examples involve what we might call “thoughts about oneself*”, thoughts an agent has about themselves, as themselves. Both papers happened to be extremely influential in the philosophies of mind and language, but during the last decade there have been many discussions between so-called “de seskeptics” and “de se exceptionalists”. I think that part of that discussion is a little mess. Hence, in my talk, I shall try to throw a bit of light onto the whole discussion, and I shall try to re-locate some of the positions defended when discussing these issues. In order to do so, I shall focus on a thesis that, in my opinion, has been widely overlooked, even though, it seems to me, it plays a very important role in this whole story: the thesis of the transparency of content. I shall argue that Perry’s and Lewis’s examples present a problem for the position they attack insofar as such theses of transparency are seen as a part of that position, and I shall argue that the same point could be made by using similar examples that do not appeal to thoughts about oneself*. Last, I shall make use of those theses of transparency in order to classify the different positions defended in the literature.