Three Questions About Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

Abstract

It has been observed that, unlike other kinds of singular judgments, mental self-ascriptions are immune to error through misidentification: they may go wrong, but not as a result of mistaking someone else's mental states for one's own. Although recent years have witnessed increasing interest in this phenomenon, three basic questions about it remain without a satisfactory answer: what is exactly an error through misidentification? What does immunity to such errors consist in?And what does it take to explain the fact that mental self-ascriptions exhibit this sort of immunity?The aim of this paper is to bring these questions into focus, propose some tentative answers and use them to show that one prominent attempt to explain the immunity to error through misidentification of mental self-ascriptions is unsuccessful.When one forms a judgment, there are various kinds of errors one can make. One may judge that someone is crossing the street when, in reality, nobody is crossing the street. One may judge that the person crossing the street is wearing blue trousers, when, in reality, the person crossing the street is wearing black trousers. Or one may judge that Paul McCartney is crossing the street, when, in reality, someone is crossing the street, but it is not Paul McCartney. Errors of the last sortwhereby one mistakes someone for someone else -are often referred to as cases of error through misidentification.It was Wittgenstein who first pointed out, in a famous passage of the Blue Book, that in the case of mental self-ascriptions "no error [through misidentification] is possible" (Wittgenstein 1958, 67.). For example, "there is no question of recognizing a person when I say that I have a toothache" and so it is "impossible that in making the statement 'I have a toothache' I should have mistaken

Immunity to error through misidentification and the functionalist, self-reflexive account of episodic memory

“…It might inform our understanding of the semantics of indexicals and demonstratives (Evans, 1982;Recanati, 2007). It might inform our understanding of the structure of self-knowledge (Evans, 1982;Ismael, 2012;Merlo, 2017). And most importantly for present purposes, it might reveal something important about our awareness of ourselves in memory, and our conception of the self (Evans, 1982;Fernández, 2019).…”

“…19 See the above discussion of Merlo (2017), Pryor (1999, p. 283) and Shoemaker (1968) -note 9 and associated text. See also Cappelen & Dever (2013, pp.…”

First-Person Thought

“…23 Pryor 1999; several recent writers have attempted to improve on Pryor's original formulation (e.g. Hu (2017), Merlo (2017), Morgan (2018), Recanati (2012), McGlynn 2016 The second is the notion of wh-misidentification, and is still usually introduced with Pryor's original example:…”