Identification-free at last semantic relativism, evans's legacy and a unified approach to immunity to error through misidentification

One broadly recognised characteristic feature of (a core subset of) the selfattributions constitutive of self-knowledge is that they are 'immune to error through misidentification' (hereafter IEM). In the last thirty years, Evans's notion of "identification- freedom" (Evans 1982) has been central to most classical approaches to IEM. In the Evansian picture, it is not clear, however, whether there is room for a description of what may be the strongest and most interesting variant of IEM; namely what Pryor (1999) has first brought to the fore under the name "Which-object IEM", and which I'll prefer calling existential IEM. I argue that recent development of relativist frameworks in semantics and pragmatics, particularly in Recanati (2007a-b), (2009), (2010), (2012a), may be precisely of a nature to address this limitation. The relativist theory of IEM, and in particular its suitability to cover existential IEM, may superficially seem to stem from a rejection of the core elements of the classical identification- freedom approach. However, I hope to show that, modulo a clarification and richer understanding of the relevant notions of identification and identificationfreedom, the relativist theory of IEM can be seen as both pushing further and complementing Evans's intuitions, rather than conflicting with them.