Why my I is your you: On the communication of de se attitudes

The communication of de se attitudes poses a problem for “participant-neutral” analyses of communication in terms of propositions expressed or proposed updates to the common ground: when you tell me “I am an idiot”, you express a first person de se attitude, but as a result I form a different, second person attitude, viz. that you are an idiot. When we take seriously the asymmetry between speaker and hearer in semantics this problem disappears. This chapter proposes a concrete model of communication as the transmission of information from the speaker’s mental state to the hearer’s. The analysis is couched in Discourse Representation Theory, a formal semantic framework that linguists use for modeling conversational common ground updates, but that can also be applied to describe the individual speech participants’ dynamically changing mental states.