Rudolph Lingens is a fictional character often used by contemporary analytic philosophers as a

placeholder name Placeholder names are words that can refer to things or people whose names do not exist, are tip of the tongue, temporarily forgotten, are not relevant to the salient point at hand, are to avoid stigmatization, are unknowable/unpredictable in ...

in a hypothetical scenario which illustrates some feature of the

indexicality In semiotics, linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy of language, indexicality is the phenomenon of a ''sign'' pointing to (or ''indexing'') some object in the context in which it occurs. A sign that signifies indexically is called an index or, ...

of natural language. He was created by the logician

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic phil ...

in the course of one of the earliest systematic discussions of indexicals. A number of philosophers picking up on Frege's discussion of indexicals, notably John Perry, David Lewis, and

Robert Stalnaker Robert Culp Stalnaker (born 1940) is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Correspond ...

, have adopted Lingens to make their own points about indexicals.

''De se'' attitudes

Lingens first appeared in Frege's influential essay 'Thought' ('Der Gedanke', published in ''Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I'' (1918–19), pp. 58–77). Mr. Lingens appears in the company of Leo Peter. Both are concerned with Dr. Gustav Lauben's having been wounded, and are later joined by Herbert Garner who is possessed of the knowledge that Gustav Lauben was born on 13 September 1875. Frege's discussion is concerned with how proper names and indexicals like 'I' function and how they are connected with the sense (or mode of presentation) that, on his account, each speaker who uses them associates with them. Rudolph Lingens makes a number of appearances in the subsequent literature on Frege and on indexicals. Notably, he occurs in an influential 1977 paper by John Perry ('Frege on Demonstratives'), in which Perry asks us to imagine Lingens as an

amnesiac Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage or disease,Gazzaniga, M., Ivry, R., & Mangun, G. (2009) Cognitive Neuroscience: The biology of the mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. but it can also be caused temporarily by the use o ...

in Main Library at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...

who comes to read a complete biography of himself. By reading the biography, Lingens comes to have a rich body of factual information about Rudolph Lingens, but he still fails to realize that (as we would put it) ''he himself'' is Lingens. Here we resort to natural language indexicals—''he himself''—to try to express what knowledge it is Lingens lacks; and our resort to such indexicals for expressing this knowledge seems to be ineliminable. Much of the philosophical literature on indexicality is concerned with trying to explicate the apparently "essentially indexical" character of the information Lingens lacks in Perry's imagined scenario. Attitudes that essentially require indexical reference to oneself to express—such as the belief Lingens would express by saying I'' am Rudolph Lingens'—are often called ''de se'' attitudes. Philosophers David Lewis and

pick up on Perry's discussion. Lingens reappears in David Lewis's 1979 paper on the topic ('Attitudes ''de dicto'' and ''de se) and also in a 1981 paper by

('Indexical Belief'). In his paper, Stalnaker suggests that Lingens is the cousin of Bernard J. Ortcutt, a character originally created by

W.V. Quine West Virginia is a state in the Appalachian, Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States.The Census Bureau and the Association of American Geographers classify West Virginia as part of the Southern United States while the Bu ...

to illustrate the distinction between ''

de dicto ''De dicto'' and ''de re'' are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinction is used regularly in metaphysics and in philosophy of language. T ...

'' and ''

de re ''De dicto'' and ''de re'' are two phrases used to mark a distinction in intensional statements, associated with the intensional operators in many such statements. The distinction is used regularly in metaphysics and in philosophy of language. T ...

'' attitude ascriptions.

References

(Standard philosophical references for ''de se'' that discuss Lingens' predicament) *Gottlob Frege (1997 918–19. Thought. In ''The Frege Reader'', ed. by Michael Beaney. New York: Blackwell. pp. 325–345. *John Perry (1977). Frege on demonstratives ''Philosophical Review'' 86. pp. 474–97 *David Lewis (1979). Attitudes ''de dicto'' and ''de se'' ''Philosophical Review'' 88. pp. 513–43 *David Kaplan (1989). Demonstratives. In ''Themes from Kaplan'', ed. by Joseph Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481–614. {{DEFAULTSORT:Lingens, Rudolf Concepts in the philosophy of language Thought experiments in philosophy Literary characters introduced in 1918 Placeholder names