Self-ascription and primitiveness

Lewis’s property theory of the attitudes hinges on a notion of self-ascription that some philosophers allege is a primitive of the theory, and is suspect on those grounds. The present paper unpacks this complaint and the objections that flow from it. I argue that two sorts of objections can be made on the basis of the primitiveness complaint—what I call the evasion and the arbitrariness objections. Recent defenses of Lewis (e.g., Jackson and Stoljar 2020, Openshaw 2020) aim to rebut the primitiveness complaint by offering (differing) accounts of what self-ascription amounts to. In response, I examine how these different accounts fit together, and evaluate how they fare against the two types of objections. The upshot of the discussion is as follows. On the whole, the primitiveness complaint itself is inapt, but the two objections have some bite. The accounts of self-ascription given by Jackson & Stoljar and Openshaw provide persuasive answers to objections, but the arbitrariness objection proves recalcitrant. The fact that it couldn’t be dispatched decisively allows the evasion objection to resurface, albeit in a modified form.