Andreas Stokke: Modal Metarepresentation

Lecture by Andreas Stokke (Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies, Uppsala), organized by the Department of Theoretical Philosophy

A key feature of language use is representation of states of affairs in the world. But we also use language to represent representations, that is, to report on the thought and talk of others, or indeed ourselves. This kind of metarepresentation comes in many forms, and has been widely studied. In this paper I draw attention to a so far under-explored kind of metarepresentation.

Modal metarepresentation occurs when language is used to represent non-actual representation. That is, representation of what someone could have said or thought, rather than what they actually said or thought. I argue that recognizing uses of modal metarepresentation can account for a number of ways in which we use metarepresentational forms, as well as some more subtle phenomena involving perspective shifting and forms of speaking from someone else’s point of view.