Zibun and Non-De Se Interpretations: Empirical Findings and Theoretical Implications

This study investigates whether the Japanese pronoun zibun (‘self’) in attitude contexts is obligatorily interpreted de se. Previous research has generally assumed a de se requirement, with the important exception of Oshima (2004, 2006). An online survey with 365 native speakers (filtered from 720 responses by excluding non-natives and control-failures) revealed systematic variation: while many rejected zibun in describing misidentification scenarios, about 40% accepted such uses. These findings show that zibun is not uniformly de se. I propose that non-de se readings arise from a de re construal anchored to the reporter, who can identify the attitude-holder as zibun even when the attitude-holder fails to recognize herself / himself. The novelty of this study lies in two contributions: (i) connecting zibun with the philosophical foundations of de se (Castañeda 1966, 1967, 1968; Lewis 1979; Shoemaker 1968), and (ii) presenting large-scale survey data on zibun’s indexicality. While the results show only that zibun allows non-self-recognition for some speakers, I further consider its relation to Shoemaker’s notion of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) via native-speaker reflection.