This chapter motivates a fragmentationist research program by identifying a cluster of problems that such a research program is better positioned to address or resolve than a unified model—all instances of the phenomenon of subjects having information that’s available to them for some behavior-guiding purposes but that isn’t available for every purpose. It also identifies some of the challenges and research questions that the fragmentationist program will need to address and where the space of possible answers is not yet well charted. One cluster of such problems is about how to construct fragmented models of belief, and another cluster is about normative questions that arise concerning the rational evaluation of fragmented beliefs and believers.

De se relativism claims that thought and talk about subjective matters such as personal taste or epistemic modality is best understood as a kind of de se, or first-personal, thought and talk. It says that claims about what's tasty, or what's epistemically possible, can take different truth values relative to different assessors, because such claims express de se contents that can be true of some assessors and false of others. This chapter presents the main motivations for de se relativism, its account of mental and linguistic content in terms of de se, centered-worlds propositions, the role of de se propositions in communication, and the view's similarities and differences with respect to a variety of other forms of contemporary relativisms.

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. EARLY ACCESS

Philosophical PerspectivesVolume 32, Issue 1 p. 144-164 Original Article De Se Pragmatics Andy Egan, Andy Egan Rutgers UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Andy Egan, Andy Egan Rutgers UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 30 May 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12115Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume32, Issue1December 2018Pages 144-164 RelatedInformation

Very often, different people, with different constitutions and comic sensibilities, will make divergent, conflicting judgments about the comic properties of a given person, object, or event, on account of those differences in their constitutions and comic sensibilities. And in many such cases, while we are inclined to say that their comic judgments are in conflict, we are not inclined to say that anybody is in error. The comic looks like a poster domain for the phenomenon of faultless disagreement . I argue that the kind of theory that does the best job of accounting for the appearance of faultless disagreement is a de se version of a response-dependence account, according to which thinking that x is funny is self-attributing a property of the type, being disposed to have R to x in C .

and so I will focus on this aspect of the volume, summarizing the remaining papers in my concluding remarks. The classical approach to modals from Kratzer treats them as existential or universal quantifiers over a contextually restricted set of possible worlds. Different flavors of modality—circumstantial, deontic, epistemic, etc.—correspond to different choices of contextually provided restrictors, preserving a unity in the semantics of modals while accounting for the variety of their interpretations in context. Epistemic interpretations arise in case the modal is interpreted as a quantifier over a set of possible worlds projected from a contextually salient body of evidence. If the contextually salient body of evidence is Bob’s knowledge, for instance, the proposition expressed by (1) is articulated explicitly thus:

Delusions in individuals with schizophrenia are personal-level phenomena and no account of delusion could be complete unless it included a rich phenomenological description of individuals’ experience of their delusions (Sass and Pienkos, Chapter 39, this volume). Cognitive approaches aim to contribute to our understanding of delusions by providing an explanatory framework that extends beyond the personal level to the subpersonal level of information-processing systems (Cratsley and Samuels, Chapter 27, this volume). At other subpersonal levels, contributions are also off ered by neurobiological, neurocomputational, and psychopharmacological approaches. 1 Th ere are questions to be asked about the relationships between these diff erent subpersonal levels (for example, about the relationship between the level of cognitive psychology and the level of neurobiology; Gold and Stoljar 1999). Th ere are also questions about the relationship between the personal level, where description extends to phenomenology and normativity and where there are distinctive practices of rationalizing explanation, and subpersonal levels of mechanistic description and explanation. According to one extreme view of this relationship, all that is literally true at the personal level can be recast in the terms favored by the sciences of the mind. According to the opposite extreme, what is distinctive

Adopting a dispositional theory of value promises to deliver a lot of theoretical goodies. One recurring problem for dispositional theories of value, though, is a problem about nonconvergence. If being a value is being disposed to elicit response R in us, what should we say if it turns out that not everybody is disposed to have R to the same things? One horn of the problem here is a danger of the view collapsing into an error theoryof it turning out, on account of the diversity of agents' relevant dispositions, that nothing is really a value, since nothing is disposed to elicit R in everybody. Alternatively, there is a danger of an objectionable fragmentation of value, according to which there is no such thing as a value simpliciter, but only valuesme and valuesyou, valuesus and valuesthem. I advocate a de se relativist version of a dispositional theory of value. If we go for this sort of de-se-ified dispositional theory, we get to keep our theoretical goodies, but we avoid the problem of nonconvergence that leads to a danger of either collapse into an error theory, or else talking-past, and a loss of common subject matter.

Analytic PhilosophyVolume 53, Issue 3 p. 306-312 BOOK SYMPOSIUM Comments on Jonathan Cohen's The Red and the Real Andy Egan, Andy Egan Rutgers University and Arché Philosophical Research Centre, University of St. AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author Andy Egan, Andy Egan Rutgers University and Arché Philosophical Research Centre, University of St. AndrewsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 September 2012 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2153-960X.2012.00570.xCitations: 4Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume53, Issue3September 2012Pages 306-312 RelatedInformation

This chapter discusses disagreement about matters of taste. It contends that these disputes are best explained by saying that what is at stake in them is the self-attribution of certain properties and that resolution of the disputes amounts to the parties making the same self-attributions. It argues that this account explains a special sort of defectiveness to which disputes about taste are subject.

It's a presupposition of a very common way of thinking about context-sensitivity in language that the semantic contribution made by a bit of context-sensitive vocabulary is sensitive only to features of the speaker's situation at the time of utterance. I argue that this is false, and that we need a theory of context-dependence that allows for content to depend not just on the features of the utterance's origin, but also on features of its destination. There are cases in which a single utterance semantically conveys different propositions to different members of its audience, which force us to say that what a sentence conveys depends not just on the context in which it is uttered, but also on the context in which it is received.

But this is problematic for a few reasons. One issue, one that we’ll come back to, concerns the first two words. The analysis appears to quantify over possibilities. But what are they? As we said, that will become a large issue pretty soon, so let’s set it aside for now. A more immediate problem is that it isn’t clear what it is to have de re attitudes towards possibilities, such that we know a particular possibility does or doesn’t obtain. Let’s try rephrasing our analysis so that it avoids this complication.

On many of the idealized models of human cognition and behavior in use by philosophers, agents are represented as having a single corpus of beliefs which (a) is consistent and deductively closed, and (b) guides all of their (rational, deliberate, intentional) actions all the time. In graded-belief frameworks, agents are represented as having a single, coherent distribution of credences, which guides all of their (rational, deliberate, intentional) actions all of the time. It's clear that actual human beings don't live up to this idealization. The systems of belief that we in fact have are fragmented. Rather than having a single system of beliefs that guides all of our behavior all of the time, we have a number of distinct, compartmentalized systems of belief, different ones of which drive different aspects of our behavior in different contexts. It's tempting to think that, while of course people are fragmented, it would be better (from the perspective of rationality) if they weren't, and the only reason why our fragmentation is excusable is that we have limited cognitive resources, which prevents us from holding too much information before our minds at a time. Give us enough additional processing capacity, and there'd be no justification for any continued fragmentation. I argue that this is not so. There are good reasons to be fragmented rather than unified, independent of the limitations on our available processing power. In particular, there are ways our belief-forming mechanisms-including our perceptual systems-could be constructed that would make it better to be fragmented than to be unified. And there are reasons to think that some of our belief-forming mechanisms really are constructed that way.