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de se judgement

Posted: February 9th, 2009 | Author: emma | Filed under: misc | 8 Comments »

quick question for the web-o-verse, what is your judgment about the sentences below (w.r.t. to the context provided)?

context: david is a famous philosopher who, while roaming around in the library bookstacks is hit on the head with a heavy book rendering him incapable of remembering who he is or where he is (or anything about his condition). realizing that he is in a library, he decides to do some reading. eventually he makes his way to the philosophy part of the bookstacks, and starts reading some books that he had written, though he has no memory of having written these books and is completely unaware that he is reading his own work. ignorant about who the author is, david nonetheless finds these books incredibly well-written and very insightful.
(1) David thinks he himself is smart.
(2) David thinks he is smart.

thx.

8 Comments on “de se judgement”

  1. 1 simon said at 7:02 pm on February 9th, 2009:

    my sense is that (1) is out but (2) is in, in that goofy de se sorta way.

    (when looking for judgments from a generally linguistically sophisticated crowd, you might want to avoid presaging the answers you get with such.. well-worn.. scenarios)

  2. 2 emma said at 10:41 pm on February 9th, 2009:

    not to diss my following, but i’m not sure i’d call most of the people who i think i know would read and comment “linguistically sophisticated” ;-P

    anyway, i’m not sure how the well-worn scenario would necessarily affect someone’s judgment (at least in this case). i mean, (1) is just not good, right? i think that part of the trick is getting someone to see that you can get away with the non-de se (2) and then, if they can get to thinking about that sort of interpretation, if they still can’t get (1), then that’s a good sign (for the badness of (1))?

  3. 3 Aidan Kehoe said at 9:38 am on February 10th, 2009:

    I think both are fine, with the first slightly preferable in the context of that story. Not the answer you wanted, I know!

  4. 4 emma said at 9:47 am on February 10th, 2009:

    well, my judgment is similar to simon’s, but it’s not actually clear to me why that should be. if the “himself” in (1) is functioning in a way similar to a use like “mccain himself supported the stimulus”, there’s no reason why (1) should be any different than (2). that is, if “himself” is functioning as just some sort of intensifier, then it should just intensify the non-de se reading of “he”, but my intuitions are that there is a strong difference between (1) and (2); namely, that (1) has the interpretation that john has this belief about himself and not some guy that just happens to be him.

  5. 5 Aidan Kehoe said at 6:41 pm on February 24th, 2009:

    I asked a German acquaintance here in Dublin a few days ago ‘and how are you yourself?’ (which wouldn’t get asterisks from you two, I imagine) and the construction fazed her. The corresponding one wouldn’t work in German; I wonder does it in the other Germanic languages–do we have any Scandinavians around?

  6. 6 kyle said at 7:34 pm on February 24th, 2009:

    1 is out, 2 is fine, as simon said. is this different from “the unfortunate”?

  7. 7 kyle said at 7:36 pm on February 24th, 2009:

    really tho emma i came to post this:

    http://www.ayler.org/albert/assets/multimedia/myname.MP3

    try listening to like it in 5 tabs all at once!

  8. 8 some-antics.com » Blog Archive » self-knowledge and intensification said at 5:05 pm on March 8th, 2009:

    [...] in a previous post, i tried to elicit judgments on the occurrence of the adnominal ER with a non-de se instance of a [...]

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