The Self File and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification

ing to Fregeans, on which thinking a de dicto proposition that predi-cates some property f with respect to some individuating concept a of x suffices for having a singular thought about x; and a narrower one attractive to Millians, on which it requires acquaintance — some special relation binding the thinker with the object of reference, a causal psychological relation like perception or memory. In Mental Files, François Recanati advances a liberalization of the acquaintance view which, even if I do not find it fully convincing, I will not ques-tion here; I will assume that it deals well with Millian concerns from a perspective hospitable to the Fregean.1 Now, in the 1960s and 1970s Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself ’ — de se thoughts — raise special issues. In the first section I briefly survey the data, and Per-ry’s and Lewis’s contrasting proposals: while Lewis aims to account for de se thoughts by taking the subject away from such contents