Immunity to wh-misidentification
- PDF / 331,405 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 79 Downloads / 198 Views
Immunity to wh-misidentification Aidan McGlynn1 Received: 20 October 2019 / Accepted: 18 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper responds to arguments due to Joel Smith and Annalisa Coliva that try to show that James Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification is philosophically uninteresting, and perhaps even spurious. It also proposes definitions of wh-misidentification and immunity to wh-misidentification which try to improve in various ways on the characterisations that standardly figure in the literature, and explores the relationship between misidentification and the epistemic structures characteristic of some kinds of Gettier cases. Keywords Immunity to error through misidentification · First-person thought · De se · GETTIER Problem · Wh-misidentification
1 Introduction Certain judgments seem to be immune to error through misidentification when made on the right kinds of grounds. For example, suppose that I judge that I see a barn, as a piece of routine psychological self-knowledge. My judgment might be in error, since I may be looking at a convincing façade. But there doesn’t seem to be any room for me to be in error in the following way; I’m right that someone sees a barn, but I’ve misidentified them as myself. In contrast, if I judge that Lisa sees a barn, based on tracking her direction of gaze and so on, I can (in principle at least) fall into error either because Lisa is not seeing a barn or because it is not Lisa who is seeing a barn, but rather someone I’ve misidentified as Lisa. In an influential paper (1999), James Pryor refined our understanding of this phenomenon in at least two respects. First, we can note that error through misidentification is a species of a more general phenomenon, which we can simply call misidentifica-
B 1
Aidan McGlynn [email protected] Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AD, UK
123
Synthese
tion.1 Suppose that I judge that Lisa sees a barn, as above. In fact, it is not Lisa, but a lookalike. Now, here’s the twist (of a sort familiar from the literature on Gettier cases); as it happens, Lisa is seeing a barn right as I judge that she is. My judgment that Lisa sees a barn doesn’t involve an error through misidentification, since it’s correct. Still, it does involve misidentification, as I’m conceiving of it; my judgment is only true by luck, and this is because it rests on a mistaken identification. Pryor also proposed that there are two varieties of misidentification to be reckoned with. I might be justified in judging that some particular person—the woman whose direction of gaze I’m tracking, say—sees a barn, and misidentify that woman as Lisa. Or I might have grounds for the existential claim that someone sees a barn, and misidentify Lisa as a witness to that existential. Let us call the first de re misidentification, and the second which object misidentification, or wh-misidentification for short. Corresponding to these, we will have two notions
Data Loading...
