This work investigates a series of phenomena that shed light on the analysis of attitudes de se. We adopt Lewis’ (1979) proposal that attitudes de se involve self-ascription of a property, and investigate how this view of mental content is reflected in natural language. The implementation favored is a strong version of Lewis’ position: root and embedded clauses are uniformly treated as being of property type. Our approach elaborates Chierchia’s (1990) view that de se construals arise via binding by an abstraction operator in the clausal left periphery. Part I develops an argument that such operators occur in root as well as embedded clauses. This is contrasted with the view that the evaluation index incorporates an individual parameter, a prominent version of which treats the behavior of predicates of taste such as tasty as evidence that truth is relativized to individuals (Lasersohn, 2005; Stephenson, 2007a, 2007b). Chapter 2 argues against this view, defending a semantics for taste predicates that requires no appeal to an individual parameter. Chapter 3 employs an argument from Moore’s Paradox to motivate the proposal that root clauses bear individual abstractors in their left periphery, while Chapter 4 identifies phenomena that the system accounts for. Part II concerns two elements whose distribution is confined to embedded clauses: controlled PRO and the logophoric pronoun in the Niger-Congo language Ewe. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the semantics of partial control, a variety of control where the controller denotes a proper subset of the understood subject. The view that control complements express properties lends itself to a principled account of which predicates license partial control. Chapter 7 presents novel data regarding the logophoric pronoun in Ewe. We show that, contrary to what had been assumed in the absence of the necessary fieldwork, Ewe logopohors are not obligatorily de se. We propose an account of this finding that is compatible with the implementation of the property view that we favor. Chapter 8 closes the dissertation by considering why it should be that certain expressions, such as PRO, are obligatorily de se while others, like the Ewe logophor, can be de re. / Linguistics

This dissertation is about the nature of perspectival thoughts and the context-sensitivity of the language used to express them. It focuses on two kinds of perspectival thoughts: ‘subjective' evaluative thoughts about matters of personal taste, such as 'Beetroot is delicious' or 'Skydiving is fun', and first-personal or de se thoughts about oneself, such as 'I am hungry' or 'I have been fooled.' The dissertation defends of a novel form of relativism about truth - the idea that the truth of some (but not all) perspectival thought and talk is relative to the perspective of an evaluating subject or group. In Part I, I argue that the realm of ‘subjective' evaluative thought and talk whose truth is perspective-relative includes attributions of knowledge of the form 'S knows that p.' Following a brief introduction (chapter 1), chapter 2 presents a new, error-theoretic objection against relativism about knowledge attributions. The case for relativism regarding knowledge attributions rests on the claim that relativism is the only view that explains all of the empirical data from speakers' use of the word "know" without recourse to an error theory. In chapter 2, I show that the relativist can only account for sceptical paradoxes and ordinary epistemic closure puzzles if she attributes a problematic form of semantic blindness to speakers. However, in 3 I show that all major competitor theories - forms of invariantism and contextualism - are subject to equally serious error-theoretic objections. This raises the following fundamental question for empirical theorising about the meaning of natural language expressions: If error attributions are ubiquitous, by which criteria do we evaluate and compare the force of error-theoretic objections and the plausibility of error attributions? I provide a number of criteria and argue that they give us reason to think that relativism's error attributions are more plausible than those of its competitors. In Part II, I develop a novel unified account of the content and communication of perspectival thoughts. Many relativists regarding ‘subjective' thoughts and Lewisians about de se thoughts endorse a view of belief as self-location. In chapter 4, I argue that the self-location view of belief is in conflict with the received picture of linguistic communication, which understands communication as the transmission of information from speaker's head to hearer's head. I argue that understanding mental content and speech act content in terms of sequenced worlds allows a reconciliation of these views. On the view I advocate, content is modelled as a set of sequenced worlds - possible worlds ‘centred' on a group of individuals inhabiting the world at some time. Intuitively, a sequenced world is a way a group of people may be. I develop a Stalnakerian model of communication based on sequenced worlds content, and I provide a suitable semantics for personal pronouns and predicates of personal taste. In chapter 5, I show that one of the advantages of this model is its compatibility with both nonindexical contextualism and truth relativism about taste. I argue in chapters 5 and 6 that the empirical data from eavesdropping, retraction, and disagreement cases supports a relativist completion of the model, and I show in detail how to account for these phenomena on the sequenced worlds view.