Immunity to Error and Subjectivity

and Self-Awareness ’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentifi cation ’ (IEM) has received much attention.1 It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James.2 The precise signifi cance of IEM is often unspecifi ed in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether it constitutes an important status of judgments, whether it ex-plains an important characteristic of judgments, or whether it merely 1 At times I will use IEM to stand for the adjective ‘immune to error though misiden-tifi cation ’ and at other times for the noun, ‘immunity to error though misidenti-fi cation. ’ Context will make it clear which I mean, and the notational ambiguity seems less cumbersome than repeated explicit attempts to disambiguate. 2 The original presentation of IEM can be found in Shoemaker (1968), but see also Shoemaker’s (1970) and (1994). IEM received signifi cant further discussion by Ev-ans (1982). Other mentions of IEM are so numerous that paying some lip service to the status now seems a condition of entry into discussions of self-knowledge and subjectivity. Authors who mention it, or something like it, include Peacocke (1983)