Immunity to Error through Misidentification and (Direct and Indirect) Experience Reports

In this contribution, we address the issues concerning the semantic value of Wittgenstein’s subject “I”, as in (i) “I have a toothache”, resulting from the use of predicates that involve first-person knowledge of the mental states to which they refer. As is well-known, these contexts give rise to the phenomenon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM): the utterer of (i) cannot be mistaken as to whether he is the person having a toothache. We provide a series of arguments in favor of a principled distinction between a de facto IEM, grounded in perceptual and proprioceptive judgments, and a de iure IEM, grounded in experience reports whereby the experience wears the experiencer on its sleeve. From this perspective, the no-referent account of subject “I” advocated by Wittgenstein/Anscombe is correct. In fact, we show how this analysis can be made compatible with a Kaplanian account of first-person indexicals, by identifying the speaker in the context of utterance with the person who has access to the reported private experience.