Speaking about oneself*

Isidora Stojanovic
Institut Jean-Nicod
(CNRS & ENS)

1.

Introduction: from de se attitudes to de se speech

It has been long known (cf. Frege 1918/1956, Castaeda 1968, Anscombe 1975, Perry (1977,
1979), Lewis 1981) that de se attitudes, that is beliefs, desires, hopes etc. that one has about
oneself as oneself,1 are interestingly different from the attitudes that one holds in a thirdpersonal mode about some individual, who might or might not turn out to be them. Frege
suggested that Dr. Lauben's belief that he has been wounded is a belief that only Dr. Lauben
himself can entertain. Another person's belief that Dr. Lauben has been wounded would be a
different belief, one that would motivate action in a completely different way. This led Frege
to the following puzzle. When Dr. Lauben says I have been wounded, he cannot be
plausibly taken to express his own first-personal belief that he has been wounded, since
nobody else can come to have that same belief. So what is, then, the content that he does
express, in order to communicate to others that he has been wounded? Different solutions to
the puzzle have been proposed, and my paper may be seen as yet another attempt at
addressing this question. I shall try to show that not only de se attitudes but also de se speech
is interestingly different from third-personal attitudes/speech.
The paper proceeds as follows. In the remainder of this introduction, after a very brief
overview of the mainstream view regarding 'what is said', I explain why de se speech presents
a major challenge to the mainstream view. In section 2, I present a novel account of 'what is
said' that relies on several independently motivated ideas: (a) the semantic content associated
with a sentence containing pronouns does not include the reference of those pronouns and is
more akin to a property or to a relation than to a proposition; (b) one who states a sentence
with this sort of semantic content will typically state it about some person, object or event
that, qua speakers, they will be referring to; (c) speech acts that are about oneself have
features that distinguish them from the rest of speech acts; and (d) our intuitive notion of
what is said is derivative upon our linguistic practices of talking about and reporting what
*

The research leading to the results presented here has been funded by a Marie Curie Intra European
Fellowship for Career Development, FP7-People-IEF 2011, under grant agreement no. 302596. Older
versions of this paper have been presented at a number of occasions; I am particularly grateful to the
audiences at the Conference Centered Content and Communication (Barcelona, June 2012) and at 5th
Workshop Context, Cognition and Language (Villa de Leyva, Colombia, May 2014), as well as to the
participants of the LOGOS reading group Centered Content and Conversational Dynamics and its
convenors Stephan Torre and Max Klbel for feedback on an ancestor version of the paper. I would
also like to thank an anonymous referee, Gregory Bochner and Yutaka Morinaga, as well as the editors
Stephan Torre and Manuel Garca-Carpintero, for their comments.
1
How precisely to characterize de se attitudes is a controversial issue. For discussion, see the editors'
introduction to the present volume.
Isidora Stojanovic

Speaking about oneself

people say. Section 3 shows how this proposal accounts for the relevant data, those that
motivate the mainstream view as well as those that represent a challenge for it.
1.1. The mainstream view and the 1st person pronoun's contribution to what is said
The mainstream view in philosophy of language regarding what is said takes as one of its
starting points David Kaplan's work on indexicals (Kaplan 1989), with which I shall assume
that the reader is familiar enough. The mainstream view, then, takes what is said to be the
Kaplanian content, which, in the case of pronouns, includes their contextually specified
reference, but does not include any constraints associated with the pronoun's character (that
is, with the lexical, conventionally encoded meaning of the pronoun), such as the gender
constraints for 'she' or 'he', the plurality constraint for 'they', the speaker constraint for 'I', the
addressee constraint for 'you', and the like.
There are two closely connected motivations for the mainstream view. The first is that
different speakers may say the same thing (or same-say, to employ a term of art) by means of
sentences that are not conventionally synonymous. Recall Dr. Lauben, who on June 15, 1891
says:
(1) I have been wounded today.
How can Helga, Dr. Lauben's wife, state what was stated in (1) on the next day? She cannot
just repeat the same sentence, since she would thereby state that she has been wounded on
June 16. Rather, she should say, for instance:
(2) My husband was wounded yesterday.
Or, if Dr. Lauben is present in the context of her utterance, or mentioned in the preceding
discourse, she might simply say:
(3) He was wounded yesterday.
The second motivation comes from the fact that by using one and the same sentence, we
may say different things on different occasions. Thus imagine that on June 11, 2014, pointing
to a little puppy, I utter (3). I would then be saying that this little puppy was wounded on June
10, 2014, and I would not be intuitively perceived as stating the same thing that Helga stated
on June 16, 1891.
Both motivations may be traced back to Frege himself, who wrote: The sentence I am
cold expresses a different thought in the mouth of one person from what it expresses in the
mouth of another. [...] It is not necessary that the person who feels cold should himself give
utterance to the thought that he feels cold. Another person can do this by using a name to
designate the one who feels cold (1899: 236). The mainstream view, consolidated through
Kaplan's work,2 endorses both motivations and avoids Dr. Lauben's puzzle by taking the first
2

Kaplans writings actually leave it somewhat unclear whether his notion of content is meant to account

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Speaking about oneself

person pronoun's contribution to what is said to be its referent and nothing but its referent
hence nothing like a private first-personal mode of presentation that would be ungraspable by
others.3
The mainstream view has, of course, been questioned in the past; in particular, it has been
pointed out (e.g. Feldman 1980: 80; Lewis 1980: 97) that if different people say I am cold,
in a sense, they are also saying the same thing, for they are both saying that they are cold.
This observation is further supported by our linguistic practices of reporting same-saying.
Consider the following dialogue:
(4) Helga: I am cold.
(5) Deeti: Xiaoming said that, too.
Deeti's report in (5) is ambiguous. It can be understood as reporting Xiaoming to have said
that Helga is cold, or that he himself is cold. This ambiguity is similar (at least superficially)
to the well-known syntactic ambiguity with VP-ellipsis. Suppose that Helga says:
(6) I trust my husband, and so does Deeti.
On its strict reading, (6) says that Deeti trusts Helga's husband, while on its sloppy reading, it
says that she trusts her own husband. For the sake of convenience, I shall use the terminology
of strict and sloppy readings when discussing the ambiguity that we find with reports of
same-saying such as (5).
The idea that different people same-say when they say "I am cold" has not been taken
to pose any major problem to the mainstream view, whose defenders would reply as follows.
The phrase "saying the same thing" does not distinguish between expressing the same content
and deploying words with the same character. When different people say "I am cold", they
are uttering, after all, the same words, they are deploying sentences with the same character,
hence this might explain why we easily perceive them as same-saying. In Stojanovic (2012), I
argued that this line of reply does not work. I shall develop the argument further here, and by
doing so, make a step towards identifying further patterns of same-saying that any theory of
what is said ought to take into account. But before I move to the argument, let me devote the
next section to the idea that same-saying reports do not always target the content.

for our pre-theoretical, intuitive notion of what is said, or whether when he speaks about what is said,
he merely deploys another term of art for his purely theoretical notion of content. The view in which I
am interested here is the mainstream view of what is said, which may be called Kaplanian to the extent
that it builds on Kaplan (1989), even if he himself may have only accidentally (and misleadingly) used
the phrase what is said as just some other technical term.
3
Strictly speaking, the Kaplanian content of an indexical pronoun is not the referent itself, but rather, a
constant function from world-time pairs to the referent. I shall follow the custom of discussing the view
as if it were a genuine Direct Reference view, that is, one in which a pronoun's contribution to content is
the referent. In the context of the present discussion, nothing important hinges on this assumption.
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Speaking about oneself

1.2. The many senses of 'what is said'

As noted long ago (e.g. Ziff 1972, Lewis 1980), people report same-saying in cases in which
the reported utterances do not have the same content, but have something else in common;
the latter may be the phonological form, the character, or some salient implicature. Let me
give an illustration of each case. Consider:
(7) The connections between Georgia and Armenia were bad.
Imagine two settings in which the sentence in (7) gets uttered: one in which Aisha is talking
about telephone connections between her hometown in the state of Georgia, U.S., and the city
of Armenia, Colombia, and another in which Boris is discussing the diplomatic connections
between the Asian countries of Georgia and Armenia. Despite the fact that the two sentences,
on the two occasions, mean very different things, there is still a sense in which Aisha and
Boris "said the same thing", for they uttered (what looks like) the same words. 4
To see that same-saying may target the character (or the lexically encoded meaning, if
you prefer) rather than the content or the phonological form, recall Dr. Lauben who, being
wounded, needs to go to a French hospital. He tells Helga, who is fluent in French:
(8) I have been wounded. How do you say that in French?
We would expect Helga to reply J'ai t bless (the translation of I have been wounded),
rather than, say, Tu as t bless (you have been wounded), even though it is with latter,
not the former, that she would express in French the same content as the one that Dr. Lauben
expressed in English.
Finally, to see that same-saying reports sometimes target implicature rather than content,
consider Deeti, who, after a concert by Tom Waits on Friday night, tells Xiaoming:
(9) How disappointing!
Suppose that a couple of days later, Xiaoming meets Boris, who was also at the concert, and
asks him what he thought. He replies:
(10) I regret I went to that concert. It was a sheer waste of time and money!
Xiaoming might well reply:
(11) Deeti said that, too.
Although Deeti and Boris clearly expressed different contents, there is a sense in which
Xiaoming's report in (11) may strike us as true, for both Deeti and Boris implicated (if not
outright implied) that Tom Waits' concert didn't stand up to their expectations and wasn't
4

Some theoreticians hold that names that sound the same but refer to different individuals are distinct
names. If so, Aisha and Boris are not even uttering the same words, hence the qualification what looks
like. Thanks to an anonymous referee for stressing this point.
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Speaking about oneself

worth it.
Having thus stressed the diversity and flexibility with which people report same-saying,
let us turn back to the initial puzzle: why is it that when different people say I am cold, we
so easily perceive them as same-saying, even though they express different contents and thus,
strictly speaking, what is said by them is different? It may now seem that the Kaplanian has
not only a way but even an embarras du choix to account for this, for she or he might say that
when different people say I am cold, first, they utter the same words, second, they deploy
sentences with the same character, and third, they also typically implicate the same thing,
namely, that it is cold.
One of my aims in this paper is to show that the same-saying that we observe with de se
speech cannot or, at least, should not be assimilated to any of those three categories. I shall
start by arguing that reporting same-saying when different people say that they are cold is
different from a case like (7) (same phonological form) or a case (11) (same implicature), and
then, in 1.3., I shall undertake the more difficult task of showing that de se same-saying is not
merely a matter of the sameness of character.
To see that a case like (4)-(5) (I am cold said by different people) is quite different
from a case like (7) (said by people who by connections mean telephone vs. diplomatic
connections and who refer to different places by Armenia and Georgia), it may suffice to
consult one's intuitions. While there is a very robust intuition that two people who say I am
cold say the same thing namely, that they are cold there is much more reluctance to
consider Boris and Aisha as saying the same thing when each utters (7). 5 Should the appeal
to intuition be seen as insufficient, section 1.3. will provide cases that show that de se samesaying is different not only from using sentences with the same character, but also, from
using one and the same sentence (or one and the same phonological string).
To see that de se same-saying in (4)-(5) is quite different from the implication sense of
what is said, as Ziff (1972) calls it and which I illustrated with the pair in (9)-(10), it may be
enough to observe that when different people say I am cold, we hear them and truly report
them as same-saying even when we have no information about the conversational contexts in
which they said what they said and are thus ignorant about the possible implicatures they may
have made. What is more, same-saying persists even in a situation in which when Helga says
I am cold she implicates that it is cold, but Xiaoming, when he says I am cold, conveys
nothing similar and may even explicitly add even though I realize it is warm to convey that,
for instance, he has shivers from a flu, or some other bodily temperature disorder. 6
5

A referee even writes: I don't think anyone would say that the two speakers, A and B, of (7), about
Armenia/connections, "said the same thing". In fact, I wouldn't even say they "used the same words".
However, pace the referee's intuition, there are many people who are willing to accept such reports as
correct. To be sure, if I merely reply to Boris's utterance of (7) That's what Aisha said, too, knowing
well that she was talking of the telephone connections between her hometown in Georgia, U.S., and the
Colombia city, my reply will be misleading; but to render it correct, all I would need to do is add, say,
...but she was talking about the telephone connections between her hometown in Georgia, U.S. and the
city of Armenia.
6
In Stojanovic (2012: 56-7), I discuss at greater length the differences between the two sorts of cases
and I show that reports of same-saying in the case of de se speech pattern differently from such reports
in those other cases discussed in the literature. I also argue that in reports such as (11), which target
Isidora Stojanovic

Speaking about oneself

1.3. First-person speech as a major challenge to the mainstream view

In this section, I will argue against the idea that what licenses the same-saying reports in de
se speech is simply that the two speakers are using sentences with the same character. This
does not to amount to saying that a same-saying report can never target the character (or the
conventional meaning) indeed, the example I gave in (8) shows that it can. My point is that
the same-saying in (4)-(5) is quite different from a case such as (8). What I aim to show, then,
is that the mainstream view of what is said does not have any straightforward, easy way of
accounting for the fact that when Aisha and Boris both say I am cold, there is a robust
sense in which they are saying the same thing. Recall that the proposal that I shall presently
consider on behalf of the mainstream view predicts same-saying not only when the same
contents are asserted, but also when different contents are asserted, provided that they are
asserted using sentences with the same character. 7
To show that this proposal is on a wrong track when it comes to de se speech, I shall first
provide a case of de se speech in which we get a robust sense of same-saying even though
neither the characters nor the Kaplanian contents are the same. Then I shall provide a case in
which we get the sameness of character, yet we fail to perceive same-saying. Jointly, the two
cases establish that sameness of character is neither necessary 8 nor sufficient to give rise to
same-saying. I shall end the section by arguing against yet another possible development of
the mainstream view, on which same-saying could result from a combination of character and
content.
To begin with a case of de se speech in which we hear two speakers as same-saying, even
though neither the characters nor the contents are the same, consider Xiaoming who is talking
to Aisha after the concert given by Tom Waits on the previous Friday in the Royal Albert
Hall in London. Aisha tells Xiaoming, in Deeti's presence:
(12) I saw your sister at the concert.
Now Boris has also been to the concert, and he also knows Zhang, Xiaoming's sister. Talking
casually to Deeti, Boris says:
either an implicature or a consequence of the asserted content, the locution saying the same thing is
used loosely rather than literally, contrary to same-saying reports in de se cases, such as (5), which
belong squarely among literal reports.
7
Although I am not aware of anyone who has defended and developed in print this sort of Kaplanian
view, the proposal under consideration comes to mind naturally enough. An anonymous referee writes:
Kaplan's system is perfectly able to capture this indexical samesaying. The idea would be that there are
two kinds of samesaying: sameness of content and sameness of character. Nevertheless, it is worth
emphasizing that the view at stake, on which same-saying sometimes tracks sameness of or content and
sometimes sameness of character, is, really, already a departure from the mainstream view, on which it
is the job for the notion of content, not of character, to account for what is said.
8
To be sure, we already know that it is not necessary, as cases such as (1)-(2) remind us (Lauben's I
have been wounded and his wife's My husband has been wounded). What this section establishes is
something stronger, namely that even if neither the Kaplanian content, nor the phonological form, nor
the implicatures are shared by two given utterances, sameness of character is not necessary for the two
utterances to be perceived and reported as same-saying.
Isidora Stojanovic

Speaking about oneself

(13) I saw Zhang when we were at the Royal Albert Hall last Friday.
Deeti may then correctly reply to Boris:
(14) Aisha said that, too.
To be sure, as it stands on its own, Deeti's report in (14) is ambiguous. On its strict reading, it
reports Aisha to have said that Boris saw Zhang at Tom Waits' concert. However, its sloppy
reading, more natural in this case, reports Aisha to have said that she herself saw Zhang at the
concert. The crucial observation is that we have this reading even though the sentence that
Aisha used does not have the same character as the one that Boris used. What is more, had
Boris used a sentence with the same character as Aisha, he would have said that he saw
Deeti's sister, and we would not perceive him at all as having said the same thing as Aisha.
Just as using sentences with the same character is not required for same-saying, it is not
enough either. To see this, consider a minimal change to our working example I am cold.
Consider this short dialogue:
(15) He is cold. (said by Deeti while pointing to Xiaoming)
(16) Helga said that, too.
In an ordinary context, (16) is not ambiguous, but is straightforwardly taken to report Helga
to have said that Xiaoming is (or was) cold. In this respect, (16) stands in sharp contrasts with
(5), which is ambiguous between reporting Xiaoming to have said that Helga is cold (strict)
vs. that he himself is cold (sloppy). The upshot of this comparison is that if the sameness of
character were responsible for the ambiguity in (5), then we should expect (16), too, to be
systematically ambiguous yet it is not. 9 I would like to suggest that this asymmetry is best
explained if we see the sloppy readings that systematically arise with first-personal speech
not as resulting from using sentences with the same character, but rather, as being specifically
tied to the role of the first person in speech.10
9

To forestall a possible misunderstanding, I do not claim that there is no context whatsoever in which
(16) could get a sloppy reading. Here is a tentative case. Suppose that Deeti utters (15) in the context of
an experiment where her task is to recognize how a person feels based on their facial expression.
Suppose that Helga took part in the same sort of experiment, but that her target person was not
Xiaoming but Boris. If Helga said (hence pointing to Boris) "He is cold", the report in (16) will likely
be judged as true. My point is not that sloppy same-saying reports with 3rd person persons are
impossible, but rather, that they are not readily available in ordinary contexts. Let me also acknowledge
that the (un)availability of sloppy readings with third-personal statements may partly depend on the
expressions used in the same-saying report. Thus Morinaga (ms.) suggests that reports of the form He
said that again elicit more easily sloppy readings in non-de-se cases than reports of the form He said
that, too do.
10
A line of response on the behalf of the mainstream view has been suggested to me by an anonymous
referee, who writes: As a Kaplanian I would reply that the two ocurrences of the third person
demonstrative pronoun "he" do not constitute the same words (and do not have the same character).
Demonstratives are "incomplete" expressions that need a demonstration to complete them (Kaplan
1989), and these demonstration components are different here. I find this response unsatisfactory for
the following reason. If it is possible to have two occurrences of a pronoun like 'he' that have different
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Speaking about oneself

Before moving on to my own proposal, I would like to rebut one last line of response that
a defender of the mainstream view might contemplate. Reconsider the case of (12)-(13).
What the two statements have in common is not the content (for their respective contents are
that Aisha/Boris saw Zhang at Tom Waits' concert), nor is it the character (for the character
of my sister is different from the character of a proper name like 'Zhang', and so are the
characters of the expressions with which the two speakers refer to the event). Rather, what
they have in common is something like a mixture of character and content, one that we might
capture by the description The speaker saw Zhang at event e, where e refers to Tom Waits's
concert on Friday at Royal Albert Hall in London.
Once such character-content mixtures have been acknowledged as possible, one might
think that the mainstream view has at its disposal the necessary elements to account for the
same-saying reported in (14).11 However, the view that we are now considering, on which, to
recapitulate, what is said can track the content, or can track the character, or can track any
mixture of the content and the character (and can perhaps track other things as well, such as
the phonological form or such relevant implicatures, as discussed in 1.2.), constitutes a
significant departure from the mainstream view. Indeed, one of the driving motivations for
having the notion of content in the first place was so that it would capture 'what is said'. But
there is a more serious worry that this view faces. If a mixture of the content and the
character is what explains the same-saying that we perceive in (12)-(13), then the view
presumably predicts that we should perceive same-saying among other utterances that share
some relevantly similar mixture of character and content. But consider again (12), repeated as
(17), where Aisha is talking to Xiaoming and referring to Tom Waits' concert:
(17) I saw your sister at the concert.
Now consider Boris, who has been at the concert of Berliner Philharmonic at the Thtre
des Champs-Elyses in Paris, and is talking to Deeti about it. He says:
(18) Aisha saw your sister at the concert.
Hard though one might try, there does not seem to be any sense in which Boris said the
same thing as Aisha: Aisha said that she saw Xiaoming's sister at Tom Waits' concert, while
Boris said that Aisha saw Deeti's sister at the concert of Berliner Philharmonic. However, if
the same-saying in (12)-(13) should result from taking the character of the sentence and
referents but nevertheless have the same character (for instance, because they are accompagnied by
demonstrations of the same type), then we should expect (16) to be ambiguous and to have a reading on
which Helga is reported to have said of somebody other than Xiaoming that he is cold. However, even
if such a reading may be possible is certain contexts (see the previous footnote), it is not readily
available: there is only one straightforward reading that we get for (16), on which she is reported to
have said that Xiaoming is cold. Alternatively, if numerically different demonstrations entail different
characters for any two occurrences of the third person pronoun, then we end up with a highly
problematic proposal, and with a notion of character so finely individuated that no two occurrences of a
third person pronoun (whether or not they have the same referent) can ever have the same character.
11
For instance, Franois Recanati (p.c.) suggested to me that such a combination of character and
content could license same-saying. Let me add that positing such contents is not necessarily an ad hoc
move: such reflexive-referential contents are most notably discussed and defended in Perry (2001).
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Speaking about oneself

resolving some of its content, but not all (viz. we resolve your sister to refer to Zhang and
the concert to refer to Tom Waits' concert) then there is no obvious reason why a different
way of resolving some, but not all, of this character should not make it possible to hear (12)/
(17) as saying the same thing as (18): for if we resolve the pronoun 'I' to refer to Aisha and
leave the remainder of the character unresolved, we get a character-content mixture that
corresponds to the description Aisha saw the addressee's sister at the concert about which
the speaker is talking, which is indeed something that (17) and (18) have in common.
Let me take stock. The cases discussed throughout this section admittedly do not refute
the mainstream view, but they are enough of an obstacle for it to continue to be plausible. A
conservative defender of the mainstream view will perhaps insist that only those utterances
that express the same content really say the same thing. This move is deeply unsatisfactory
for anyone who is interested in understanding the empirical notion of what is said and in
accounting for our practices of reporting same-saying. On the other hand, a liberal defender
of the mainstream view might acknowledge that there are utterances that express different
Kaplanian contents but are still perceived and (truly) reported as saying the same thing. The
problem, however, is that when it comes to accounting for such cases, the view does not have
much to offer. Indeed, what (15)-(16) and (17)-(18) establish is that not any sameness of
character will license same-saying, and that not any mixture of character and content will
license it either. The challenge for the liberal version of the mainstream view is, then, to tell
us which characters, and which combinations of character and content, generate same-saying
and when. In principle, I have no reason to doubt that this can be done. But in the meantime,
and in the absence of any straightforward amendments to the mainstream view, I think that
we have enough of a reason to look for an alternative account of what is said. It is with this
optic that I shall devote the rest of the paper to that task.

2.

The proposal

As mentioned earlier, one of Kaplan's main motivations for introducing the notion of content,
as distinguished from character, was that it would play the role of what is said. Shaping what
would become the mainstream view, he focused on those cases in which we perceive samesaying between sentences that have the same Kaplanian content, as in (1)-(2). Let us call
cases of this sort content-converging.12 We saw in the last section that there is an important
12

In many cases, as (1)-(2), the content on which the two utterances converge corresponds to the classic
notion of proposition. However, things are more complicated than that, since there is also a widespread
range of cases in which the content converged on is a temporal proposition, one that can change truth
value over time. To see this, it is enough to consider a version of (1)-(2) in which there are no temporal
indicators. Dr. Lauben says I have been wounded, and Helga later says, referring to him, He has
been wounded. If we insisted that what is said is strictly propositional, those two utterances would fail
to same-say, as they would not express the same proposition (the first would say that there is a time
prior to Dr. Lauben's utterance at which he was wounded, and the second, that there is a time prior to
Helga's utterance at which Dr. Lauben was wounded.) For a discussion of the question of how time
affects what is said, see Stojanovic (2008: 103-109). In order to keep the discussion here manageable, I
shall set aside time-sensitivity.
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Speaking about oneself

range of cases in which the Kaplanian contents differ because the referents of the first person
pronoun differ, yet we robustly perceive same-saying. Let us call this sort of cases propertyconverging. We also saw that such cases are not reducible to those cases of same-saying in
which the utterances coincide on character (hence character-converging), and even less so to
the cases in which the same sentences or phonological forms are uttered (hence formconverging). In form-converging cases in which the words refer to different things or
concepts, as in the case of connections between Georgia and Armenia in (7), the samesaying report requires a suitable context. To put it differently, if you have a target sentence
and a report of the form X said that, too, there is something like a default reading of the
report, on which the demonstrative and non-first-personal indexicals of the target sentence
are resolved in the context of the target sentence, and proper names and other expressions are
similarly disambiguated in that context, rather than in the context of the reported utterance.
However, when it comes to the 1st person pronoun,13 we have seen that there is a systematic
ambiguity between resolving the pronoun to the speaker of the target utterance vs. resolving
it to the speaker of the reported utterance.

2.1. Motivating the proposal

The account of what is said that I would like to defend is motivated, on the one hand, by the
account of de se attitudes put forward in Lewis (1981) and on the other, by some independent
reflections on the notion of semantic content (cf. Stojanovic (2009), (2014)). My proposal, in
a nutshell, is to model semantic content as a (possibly relational) property; or, more precisely,
as a function from sequences composed of individuals, times, worlds, and possibly other
parameters into truth values. However, what is crucial is that speakers do not state such
semantic contents simpliciter: rather, they state them about, or with respect to, or of various
objects, places, events, people, and sometimes, of course, of themselves. In other words, I
propose that the relation of stating (and other relations of its ilk, namely saying, expressing,
asserting and so on) no longer be viewed as a binary relation between the speaker and what is
stated, but rather, as a many-place relation between the speaker, what is stated, and the
people, events or other things about whom or which it is stated.
Let me first illustrate the idea with some examples, before discussing it in greater detail.
Suppose that, pointing at a work of art, I simply say Impressive! Then I will be saying
something about that work of art, and what I will be saying of it is that it is impressive. In
other words, the property of being impressive is what I state, or assert, of the work of art at
stake. Similarly, if, talking of that same work, I now say This work is impressive, what I
have stated is, I suggest, again simply the property of impressiveness, and it is again stated
13

For simplicity, I have limited discussion to the 1st person pronoun 'I'. However, we should keep in
mind that there may be forms of de se speech that need not involve explicit mention of this pronoun. As
a tentative case, suppose that Marie, who is French, says The capital is polluted (thus saying that
Paris is polluted) and that you reply to her A Spanish friend of mine said that, too. Your report will be
ambiguous between reporting your friend to have said that Paris is polluted vs. that his own capital, viz.
Madrid, is polluted. It may be argued that this ambiguity is derivative from the sloppy-strict ambiguity
that we saw in (5), and that in the sloppy reading, 'the capital' contains an implicit 1st person reference.
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about that work of art.14

Just as we speak about various objects and people, we also speak about ourselves. The
same properties that we may state of other people, we may state of ourselves. To illustrate the
difference, suppose that, pointing at Dr. Lauben, Helga says He is cold. What is said will
be the property of being cold, and it is this property that Helga states of Dr. Lauben. Now,
suppose that she says I am cold. What she states will be that same property, but this time,
she states it of herself. In other words, she self-states the property of being cold.
Although my proposal draws on the proposal in Lewis (1981), there is an important
difference between his account of attitudes and the present account of assertion. For Lewis,
an attitude like belief, even when it is not first-personal, is still a binary relation between the
attitude holder and the content of the attitude (which is a property), because the content is
always self-ascribed. Thus according to Lewis, the belief that Helga expresses by saying, in
reference to Dr. Lauben, He is cold would have for its content the property of perceptually
attending to a male individual who is cold, and Helga would self-ascribe that property.
Alternatively, the property that Helga self-ascribes could be the property of inhabiting a
world in which Dr. Lauben is cold. Regardless of the way in which one generalizes the
Lewisian account of (genuine) de se attitudes to de re attitudes, I believe that this sort of
move ought to be avoided when it comes to speech. The route that I shall take acknowledges
the distinction between self-stating a content vs. stating it about something or someone else.
My proposal combines the following ingredients, all of which I believe to be motivated by
independent considerations:
(i) a notion of semantic content that is not propositional but is, rather, to be modeled by
functions that take sequences that contain not only possible worlds and times, but other
parameters as well (such as scales, thresholds, domains of quantification, and, importantly,
sequences of individuals), to truth values. 15 For our purposes, simpler functions that take a
world, a time, and an individual (or an n-tuple of individuals) will most often suffice.
(ii) a notion of what the speaker is speaking about, which has played an important role in
certain theories of direct reference, such as Keith Donnellan's. 16 I shall take it for granted that
the notion of aboutness, both in the sense of what our thoughts are about and what our speech
is about, can, and ought to be developed independently from any assumptions about the
semantics of any fragment of the language. I shall not defend here the need for this notion, let
alone try to develop an account of aboutness. For a recent promising such account, see e.g.
14

For the sake of simplicity, let us set aside the question whether in saying that something is impressive,
one is also saying something about oneself, viz. that the thing at stake impressive from their point of
view; for a discussion of this idea, see Stojanovic (2007). The proposal presented here has been also
used (in one of its earlier forms) by Pearson (2013) in application to predicates of personal taste.
15
I have argued elsewhere (e.g. Stojanovic (2009), (2014)) that the reference of indexicals, although
relevant to truth value, is not part of the semantic content. In certain respects, that was also Lewis's own
take on semantic content: see Lewis (1980) (although he takes content to correspond to a function from
context-index pairs to truth values).
16
The vast literature on Donnellan (1966) tends to focus exclusively on the referential-attributive
distinction, neglecting the fact that the notion of referential use crucially involves the idea that the
speaker can say something true about a thing or a person, even when the latter is not singled out by the
description itself.
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Dickie (fortchoming).
(iii) a subclass of speech acts that are self-oriented, such as self-stating, as distinguished
(though perhaps derived) from stating, self-asserting (vs. asserting), and so on. 17 Self-oriented
speech acts may be seen as an instance of the more general phenomenon of self-oriented
actions (e.g. washing oneself vs. washing somebody or something, and so on).
(iv) a notion of same-saying, which is relational and serves, in turn, as a guide to the
notion of what is said. The idea is that the notion of what is said emerges from an
equivalence class over utterances, viz. those whose speakers same-say. The primacy of the
relation of same-saying over the unary notion of what is said has been defended, for instance,
by Everett (2000). For our purposes, it does not matter whether the one is more basic than the
other. What matters, though, is that when it comes to finding out about speakers' intuitions
about what is said, our best guide is to ask whether a corresponding same-saying report is
true.

2.2. The proposal, in some detail

Before going back to the cases discussed in section 1, it will help to flesh out my proposal
somewhat more formally. Here are two definitions, one concerning semantic content and
another concerning the same-saying relation and the truth conditions for same-saying reports.
Def. 1. The semantic content of an expression , noted sc(), is a function from sequences
of the form (w1, w2, t1, t2, i1, i2,... in,...) to truth values (where the w's are possible world
parameters, the t's, time parameters, and the i's, individual parameters), defined as follows:
1. sc(Rn (x1,... xn))(w1, w2, t1, t2, i1, i2 ,... in,...)=1 iff (i1,... in) Int(R)(w1, t1)
2. sc()(w1, etc.)=1 iff sc()(w1, etc.)=0;
sc()(w1, etc.)=1 iff sc()(w 1, etc.)=sc()(w1, etc.)=1;
sc()(w1, etc.)=1 iff there is w'1 accessible from w1 s.t. sc()(w'1, etc.)=1;
sc(@)(w1, w2 , etc.)=1 iff sc()(w 2, w2, etc.)=1;
similarly for other connectives, intensional and indexical operators;
3. sc(())(w1, w2 , etc.)=1 iff sc((x i))(w1, w2, etc.)=1
where is a 1st, 2nd or 3rd person pronoun, and xi is a newly introduced variable.
Though the definition may look complicated, the underlying ideas are simple, so let me
make a couple of remarks to explain what is going on here. First, having two possible world
parameters and similarly two time parameters is a standard move known as doubleindexing and is required for dealing with embedded occurrences of modal and temporal
indexicals (viz. the modal indexical 'actually', noted '@', and the temporal indexical 'now'; cf.
Kamp 1971). Even though I am not concerned in this paper with modal and temporal
17

Whether there are speech acts that are intrinsically self-oriented is an interesting question that I shall
not attempt to answer here. One plausible candidate would be confessing: I cannot confess somebody
else's actions or thoughts, just as they cannot confess mine.
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indexicals, let me still note that different utterances of a sentence containing 'actually' or
'now', even if made in different worlds and at different times, will be associated with the
same semantic content. This also shows that the notion of semantic content as defined here
comes much closer to Kaplan's notion of character than his notion of content. But there are
interesting differences, too. Recall that Kaplan's characters are functions from context-worldtime triples to truth values, and that special requirements are placed upon the context
parameter (e.g. that the agent be located at the context location at the time and in the world of
the context). Semantic content (as defined above) does not deploy any context parameter, and
no agent parameter either. Rather, when it comes to indexicals, all they do is contribute a
variable-like slot that requires evaluating the content at an individual before being able to
assign it a truth value. In other words, the semantic content defined above is, roughly, what
one would get if one took a Kaplanian content and abstracted over all the referential values
contributed by indexicals.
Relatedly, whether we have a first person, second person or third person pronoun, and
whether it is of feminine or masculine gender, and even whether it is singular or plural, none
of this has any impact on semantic content (as I propose that we understand the notion). The
idea is not to eliminate altogether such lexically encoded information, but it is to remove it
from the level of semantics; I discuss the motivations for this move at length in Stojanovic
(2014). With this in mind, let me turn to the second definition:
Def. 2. The same-saying relation obtains between any two utterances whose expressions'
semantic contents are the same. However, the truth conditions for reporting same-saying are
defined as follows.18 Let u1 and u2 be two utterances. Then u1 and u2 may be truly and literally
reported as saying the same thing if and only if they same-say (in the sense defined above)
and for every parameter to which their semantic content is sensitive in truth value, one of the
following obtains:
(a) the speakers of u1 and u2 self-state the semantic content (with respect to the
parameter at stake);
(b) the two speakers state the semantic content (with respect to that parameter) about
one and the same value and this is known to the reporter ;
(c) the reporter makes it explicit, or else the context makes it sufficiently clear, that the
two speakers state the semantic content (with respect to that parameter) about
different values; or else, the context makes it irrelevant whether or not they state it
about the same value.
This, too, may look complicated and cumbersome, but again, the idea is simple. What the
definition does is describe the conditions under which we would truly and literally report two
18

As Stephan Torre pointed out (p.c.), a somewhat odd consequence of the terminology is that one can
falsely report same-saying in cases where the same-saying relation obtains.
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people as having said the same thing. A necessary condition is that the semantic contents
associated with the sentences that they used be the same; 19 but that does not suffice. What is
further required is that they both self-state this content, or else that they state it de facto about
the same thing or individual (and that this is known to the reporter), or in case they don't, that
this is either irrelevant, or explicit, or made sufficiently clear in the context of the report. 20
Before moving on to explaining how this proposal handles the cases discussed in the first
part of the paper, let me pause for a second on the irrelevance clause. Suppose that I see Boris
rushing by, and he tells me I am late. A short time afterwards, I witness a conversation
between Deeti and Xiaoming in which Deeti says Boris is late. I may reply That's what he
said, too. Will I be speaking truly or not? It will depend on the context. If all that is at stake
is, for example, why Boris was in rush, then the question of what he was late for may well be
irrelevant; thus if Boris, in saying I am late, was talking about catching a bus that will take
him to the train station, and if Deeti was talking about the departure of the train itself, that
need not yet make my report false. However, suppose that what matters is whether Boris will
make it to his train, and that it is known that, were Boris to miss the bus, he would still have
plenty of time to catch a taxi and make it to his train. In such a context, if Boris says I am
late and is talking about catching the bus, and Deeti says He is late but is talking about
catching the train, we would probably be reluctant to consider the same-saying report as a
true one.

3.

Explaining the data

In this final section, I would like to go back to the cases discussed in section 1 and show how
the proposal laid down in section 2 handles them.
19

I have opted in this paper for a proposal that gives necessary and sufficient conditions, which is why I
have added the qualification literally. The motivation for it is that we would still want to count as
true certain same-saying reports that do not fit in the proposed definition. One type of such reports
are those where the two utterances share a certain implicature particularly relevant in the context of the
report, as discussed in section 1.2. According to the present proposal, such reports may well be true, but
they would not be literally true. Another kind of arguably true same-saying reports that are not covered
by this definition are the form-converging cases. Suppose that Deeti says Xiaoming went to a bank
and that Boris also says Xiaoming went to a bank, but that Deeti is talking about a river bank and
Boris, about a financial institution. My proposal allows that they be truly reported as same-saying, but
not that they be literally so reported. (And of course, my proposal does not explain on which basis or in
which conditions they may be so reported.)
20
Note that the conditions specifying when we can truly report two people as having said the same
thing might eventually fall out of the more general conditions for reporting two people as having done
the same thing. Suppose that Deeti scratches her head, and that Boris scratches his head. We may report
them as having done the same thing (viz. scratching one's head). Now suppose that Deeti scratches her
head, and that Boris scratches Deeti's head. We may report them, again, as having done the same thing
(viz. scratching Deeti's head). To be sure, at this point, this is merely an analogy. It remains an open
issue whether the two are really an instance of one and the same phenomenon. (I am grateful to Ruth
Millikan for pointing out the analogy after a talk that I once gave.)
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3.1. The proposal at work (1): the traditional cases

Recall the kind of example that motivated the Kaplanian view:

(19) Dr. Lauben: I am cold.

(20) Helga (pointing at Dr. Lauben): He is cold.
(21) Deeti: That's what he said, too.
What needs to be accounted for is, on the one hand, the intuition that what is said in (19) is,
in some relevant sense, the same thing as what is said in (20), and, on the other, the related
intuition that the report in (21) is true. On the account that I have proposed, the semantic
content associated with (19) may be modeled as a function that takes an individual, as well as
a time and a world (and possibly other parameters) and returns value True iff that individual
is cold at that time and in that world. What is more, Dr. Lauben does not state this content
simpliciter, but rather, he states it of himself. Now, the semantic content associated with (20)
may be modeled by the very same function, and Helga states this content about Dr. Lauben.
The contents corresponding to (19) and (20) are, then, the same: it is one and the same
function, viz. the one that corresponds to the property of being cold. Furthermore, in (19) this
content is self-stated by Dr. Lauben, hence it is de facto stated about Dr. Lauben, while in
(20), it is also stated (albeit by a different speaker) about Dr. Lauben. Consequently, the
conditions for truly reporting same-saying are met. The report in (21) is true, and this is what,
in turn, explains the intuition that (19) and (20) say the same thing.
My account relies on the idea that it is hard to disentangle intuitions about what is said
from intuitions about the truth or falsity of some corresponding same-saying report. To better
appreciate this point, let us consider a case of utterances that same-say in the sense of the
definition proposed (because they are associated with the same semantic content), yet fail to
trigger the intuition that they say the same thing. Compare (19) and (20) with the following
pair:
(22) Helga (pointing at Dr. Lauben): He is cold.
(23) Boris (pointing at Helga): She is cold.
(24) Deeti: That's what she said, too.
Assuming that Helga never said that she was cold, the report in (24) ought to come out
false. According to the mainstream view, the content associated with (22) is different from
the content associated with (23), the first one being the proposition that Dr. Lauben is cold,
and the second, the proposition that Helga is cold. According to the present proposal, the
semantic contents associated with (22) and (23) are the same: it is one and the same function,
the same one that we had in (19) and (20), namely, the property of being cold. How can this

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proposal, then, account for the falsity of (24) and for the related intuition that (22) and (23)
say different things? Prima facie, this is a problem for my proposal but only prima facie!
The proposal predicts that the intuition that (22) and (23) say different things derives from
the intuition that a report like (24) is false. The falsity of (24) is explained as follows. Since
the reporter in (24) does not explicitly say about whom Helga was talking when she said what
she said, the default interpretation is that she must have been talking about the same person
as Boris, hence about herself. Since, by assumption, she did not say that she was cold, the
report comes out false.
It is important to realize that the falsity of the same-saying report in (24) does not entail
that Helga and Boris actually stated different contents. They stated the same content (or so I
suggest), but they stated it about different people: Helga stated it about Lauben, and Boris,
about Helga. Since the reporter does not make it explicit that different people were talked
about, the report in (24) is implicitly taken to report Helga to have said about the person that
Boris was talking about, i.e. Helga herself, that she is cold. This explanation is further
supported by the fact that if the reporter makes explicit reference to the person about whom
Helga said what she said, the report becomes true:
(25) Deeti: That's what she said, too, about Dr. Lauben.
The account of the falsity of the report in (24) applies immediately to the cases from
section 1.3., such as (15)-(16), in which the sentence he is cold is used in reference to
different people, and which were problematic for those who wished to handle de se speech by
appealing to the sameness of character.

3.2. The proposal at work (2): the cases of de se speech

When it comes to de se speech, the main observation that needs to be accounted for is the
ambiguity of reports such as (27) below:
(26) Deeti: I am cold.
(27) Boris: That's what Xiaoming said, too.
Given that Deeti in (26) states of herself the property of being cold, there are basically two
ways for the report in (27) to come out true: Xiaoming should have either self-stated that
same property, or he should have stated it about the same person that Deeti actually stated it
about, that is to say, about Deeti herself. The former corresponds to the sloppy reading, the
latter, to the strict reading.
The same explanation applies to the cases of de se speech discussed in section 1.3., in
which we get a fairly robust sense of same-saying even though neither the Kaplanian contents
nor the characters of the sentences coincide:
(28) Aisha, talking to Xiaoming, after Tom Waits' concert: I saw your sister at the concert.
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(29) Boris: I saw Zhang when we were at the Royal Albert Hall last Friday.
(30) Deeti (who knows that Zhang is Xiaoming's sister and Tom Waits' concert took place
in the Royal Albert Hall on that Friday): That's what Aisha said, too.
We ought to account for the ambiguity in (30) between reporting Aisha to have said that
Boris saw Zhang at the concert (= the strict reading) vs. that she herself saw her (= the sloppy
reading). The ambiguity falls out again from the fact that the target utterance of (30), namely
Boris' utterance of (29), is a de se statement, hence that there are essentially two ways to
make the report true: Aisha may have self-stated the property that Boris self-stated (the
relational property of having seen Zhang at Tom Waits' concert) or she may have stated that
property about the same person about whom Boris stated it, that is, about Boris himself.
Now, this case is less straightforward than de se speech that we discussed in (26)-(27),
since the sentences used by Aisha and Boris are different in character: we find a possessive
phrase in one and a proper name in the other, a locational phrase in one and a relative clause
in the other. The important point that this case brings out is that de se speech can give rise to
same-saying when neither the Kaplanian contents nor the characters coincide. To press on
that point and show that this is not just some isolated case, let us look at yet another example:
(31) Boris (on Monday, 9 June 2014): Yesterday I sent a copy of Recanati's latest book to
Tareq.
(32) Deeti (on Wednesday, talking to Tareq and referring to the book 'Mental Files'):
I sent you a copy of this book three days ago.
(33) Xiaoming: That's what Boris said, too.
In (33), Xiaoming, who is aware that Mental Files is Recanati's latest book, makes a true
report based on Boris's utterance in (31). To be sure, until properly disambiguated, (33) is
ambiguous between reporting Boris to have said that he sent vs. that Deeti sent a copy of the
book at stake to Tareq. We need to account for this ambiguity, and we need to do so without
predicting any additional ambiguities that, as a matter of fact, do not arise.
On the present account, both (31) and (32) are associated with the same semantic content,
which roughly corresponds to the three-place relation of sending. Now, this content will only
receive a truth value if evaluated at a world, a time, and three individual parameters: a sender,
a receiver, and a theme (i.e. the object sent). For the report in (33) to come out true, the first
condition, viz. that the utterances be associated with the same semantic content, is fulfilled.
As for the second condition, we need to check that for each of the parameters in which this
content varies in truth value, one of the (a)-(b)-(c) clauses is fulfilled. To begin with, the
content is stated about the same world, viz. the actual world, but also about the same time,
viz. about Sunday 8 June 2014. 21 As for the three parameters of individuals, note that in the
21

I promised I would set aside any time-related issues, and have broken the promise by including this
example that involves reference to time. The idea is that temporal indexicals such as 'yesterday' and
'three days ago' work like pronouns, and that the conditions lexically encoded in their meaning help the
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target utterance, (32), Deeti self-states the content with respect to the sender parameter. This
opens the doors to the sloppy-strict ambiguity: Boris could have also self-stated the content
(as he does indeed in (31)), or he could have stated it about the same person about whom
Deeti stated it, hence Deeti herself. As for the receiver and the theme parameter, both Deeti
and Boris state the content about the same values, namely, about Tareq and about a copy of
Mental Files.22 This is, then, how we explain that the report in (33), on its sloppy reading,
comes out true, and how we account for the intuition that (31) and (32) say the same thing,
even though they converge neither on their Kaplanian content nor on their character (and they
also obviously fail to converge on either the form or any of the implicatures).
To wrap up the discussion of this case, suppose that instead of (25) we had the following:
(34) Boris (on Monday, 9 June 2014, referring to Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice'):
Yesterday I sent a copy of this book to Tareq.
Boris's utterance of (34) cannot serve as a ground for the report in (33) to come out true,
and intuitively, (32) and (34) do not same-say. Our proposal accounts for this by appealing to
the fact that there are parameters to which the semantic content associated with (32) and (34)
is sensitive but for which none among the (a)-(b)-(c) clauses is fulfilled. And in fact, when
we look at the theme parameter (the object sent), Deeti in (32) and Boris and (34) are stating
the content about different values (viz. Mental Files vs. Pride and Prejudice), and the context
of the report does not make that explicit. What is more, if it did, that would satisfy clause (c),
and we would get a true report, which indeed we do:
(35) Xiaoming: That's what Boris said, too, though he was talking about Austen's Pride
and Prejudice.

3.3. By way of conclusion

The goals undertaken in this paper are at the same time ambitious and modest. Ambitious,
because at the bottom end, I have attempted to put forward a novel account of what is said,
one of the most problematic and controversial and nevertheless firmly entrenched notions in
philosophy of language. Modest, because the discussion was limited to relatively simple
cases, without trying to explain how the account applies to the immense range of phenomena.
My proposal relies on several independently motivated insights: (i) a non-standard notion of
semantic content, defended at greater length in Stojanovic (2009), (2014), which neither
includes the referential values of indexicals nor the lexically encoded constraints such as
speakerhood, gender, etc.; (ii) a Donnellanian notion of what the speaker is talking about;
(iii) a notion of de se speech, or the action of speaking about oneself, which is arguably just
hearer in figuring out which time the speaker is referring to, but are not themselves part of semantic
content. This is a simplification, and matters get more complicated when we get reference to multiple
times (As in Five days ago, Aisha announced that she would quit her job yesterday.) It is beyond the
scope of this paper to delve into the intricacies of temporal discourse; the present example simply gives
a hint at an approach that would be most in line with my proposal.
22
The indefinite a copy may raise further issues that, for the sake of simplicity, I shall not touch upon.
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another instance of the more familiar de se phenomena as they arise in the realm of belief and
action; (iv) an account of the notion of what is said, and of our intuitions on what is said, that
builds upon an account of speech reports. Of course, each and every of these insights
deserves further discussion, and in particular, when it comes to the same-saying reports, there
is more work to be done in identifying the possible patterns and accounting for them. Issues
such as how one disambiguates a report, or what demarcates literal reports from the rest,
remain important open issues to which I hope to return some time in the future. For the time
being, I hope to have shown that we have reasons to be unhappy with the mainstream view of
what is said, and that part of this unhappiness stems from the fact that, although de se
phenomena are widely acknowledged when it comes to what we believe, what we want and
how we act, they have not received yet the special status that they deserve when it comes to
how we speak.

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