Who, Me?

An attempt to repudiate H.-N. Castaneda's irreducibility thesis, which argued the uniqueness of sentences attributing first-person propositional attitudes ("'He': A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness," Ratio, 1966, 8) & to demonstrate the adequateness of a version of the traditional de re/de dicto distinction to account for the data. Given two assumptions - that there are genuinely de re attitudes toward ordinary objects, & that Eng sentences have logical forms, it is contended that attitudes de se are attitudes de their owners, & that they are pragmatically, not semantically, distinctive. A critical analysis of Castaneda's arguments is offered. It is claimed that only semantic & pragmatic criteria are needed to account for the data, while Castaneda's thesis requires the introduction of a surd, a semantically anomalous device. Several proposed objections to the theory are examined, & it is concluded that the objections do not invalidate the proposed theory. C. Ornatowski