Generalizing Detached Self-Reference and the Semantics of Generic One

In this paper I will give an analysis of what I call ‘generalizing detached self-reference’ within a general account of reference to the first person. With generalizing detached self-reference an agent attributes properties to a range of individuals by putting himself into their shoes, or simulating them. I will show that generalizing detached self-reference plays an important role in the semantics of natural language, in particular in the English generic one and in what syntacticians call arbitrary PRO. The pronoun one as in (1a) is a generic pronoun that bears a particular semantic connection to the first person and is of significant philosophical interest: (1a) One can see the picture from the entrance. Generic one is a pronoun that, I will argue, expresses generalizing detached selfreference. It is a first-person oriented generic pronoun in the sense that it does not stand for the speaker’s actual person, but rather for a range of individuals that the speaker identifies with or simulates. In this paper, I will develop a semantic analysis of generic one within a general account of detached self-reference. Detached self-reference is more familiar from attitude reports such as I imagine being Napoleon, and my account will apply to those as well. The analysis I will develop is what I will call an attitudinal account of detached self-reference, an account that assigns a central role to notions of self-attribution and pretend self-attribution of properties and to the notion of simulation. The account is based on a view on which it is not propositions that play the central semantic role for the semantics of sentences, but rather ‘attitudinal objects’, objects of the sort ‘John’s belief that S or ‘John’s assertion that S’. The analysis I will develop captures intuitions according to which generic one involves a ‘detached’ (or ‘objective’ or ‘attenuated’) self, while avoiding objectifying a ‘detached’ self. The attitudinal account of detached self-reference accounts for a range of semantic and pragmatic properties of generic-one sentences that are rather independent of their truth conditions. I would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their comments as well as John Campbell, Mike Martin, Chris Peacock, Ken Safir, and Robert Stalnaker for discussions of material in this paper. Address for correspondence: Institut d’Histoire de Philosophie de Sciences et de Technique, 13 rue du Four 75006, Paris, France. Email: [email protected] Mind & Language, Vol. 25, No. 4 September 2010, pp. 440–473. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Generalizing Detached Self-Reference and the Semantics of Generic One 441 Generic one, as in (1a) has an empty, unpronounced counterpart, namely what generative syntacticians call ‘arbitrary PRO’ (PROarb), which corresponds to the empty subject position in (1b) and which has exactly the same semantic function as generic one (though a complementary syntactic distribution): (1b) It is nice PROarb to see the picture from the entrance. The first-person connection of generic one or its empty counterpart can manifest itself in various ways. One such way consists in drawing a generalization on the basis of the speaker’s own, perhaps unique, experience or action. Thus, (1a) can be truthfully uttered on the basis of the speaker’s own, perhaps unique experience of seeing the picture from the entrance, while at the same time making a generalization: for anyone x, x can see the picture from the entrance. Similarly, (1b) is naturally used as an expression of the speaker’s own evaluation of his seeing the picture from the entrance, while at the same time making a generalization: for anyone x, x’s seeing the picture from the entrance is nice for x. With this particular manifestation of the first-person connection, an agent generalizes a self-ascription of a property by abstracting from the particuliarities of his own situation and thus ascribing the property to anyone else—or rather anyone the agent can assume is as normal as he himself. Both of these components, the first-person connection, in whatever way it may manifest itself, and the generalization, are part of the meaning of generic one (or arbitrary PRO), or so I will argue. The first-person connection consists in a certain detached form of self-reference, which makes generic one particularly interesting philosophically. The first-person connection of generic one does not necessarily consist in an ascription of the predicate to the speaker’s own person. With generic one, rather, the speaker may just project himself onto others or in fact simulate entirely counterfactual conditions. Thus, even (1a) could be uttered truthfully by someone unable to see, as long as that speaker is able to project himself onto those who can. First-person-oriented generic sentences involve self-reference in a quite different way than the most familiar cases of de se-interpreted pronouns. In the familiar cases, self-reference with pronouns interpreted de se is reference to the actual person. With generic one, by contrast, the self-reference may be ‘detached’ from the actual person and thus may be self-reference while identifying with another person or the set of people meeting a certain condition. Generic one appears to involve reference to an impersonal self—the ‘objective self’ in the sense of Nagel (1983, 1986) or what Williams (1973) calls the ‘attenuated self’, a self that is dissociated from the actual person with her various experiences and activities, and that can instead take the point of view of anyone else (or no point of view at all, as Nagel would say). In some cases, also non-generic first-person pronouns or their empty counterparts, in particular what linguists call ‘controlled PRO’, may involve such ‘detached selfreference’. This is possible especially in contexts of propositional attitudes such as imagination and desire, as in I imagine PRO being Napoleon or I want PRO to be Napoleon. I will propose an account of both detached self-reference and generalizing detached self-reference which will not involve positing an ‘objective’ or ‘attenuated’ © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd