Knowing Who

This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowingwho someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notionswithin the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- andknowledge-ascriptions.The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someoneis, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort ofpredication to know who someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicatethat is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined bycontext. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-whoin particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quinesdifficulties with de re belief, along the way.The authors apply their analysis to each of severalimportant issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which thepreviously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguisticreferring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief,universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus"impartialism."Stephen Boër is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. William Lycanis Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina and author of Logical Form in NaturalLanguage (Bradford Books, 1984). A Bradford Book.