Past Event: ELLMM City: Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo (Rutgers/NYU)

ELLMM City is hosting Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Rutgers and a Visiting Fellow at NYU, for a talk on Virtual Subjectivity and Self-Reference.

Title: Virtual subjectivity and self-reference

Abstract: Recent attention to the phenomenon of virtual subjectivity has given rise to a debate about the puzzle of reference shifts in the usage of ‘I’ as the utterer or thinker shifts subjective perspectives (Ganeri 2021, McDaniel 2022). I argue that the semantic puzzle in question – the puzzle of the first-person pronoun’s shift of reference – is not to be solved by inquiring into the identity of the subject (a question of metaphysics), as current approaches do, but by looking into their mental state. More generally, however, I contend that the phenomenon of virtual subjectivity is more common than the present debate suggests.