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Referring to Oneself

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William W. Taschek
William W. Taschek*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MA21218
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Extract

In her influential paper, ‘The First Person,’ Elizabeth Anscombe brings together a number of considerations which, she believes, lead to the startling conclusion that the first person pronoun is not a referring expression — that ‘I’ is never used to refer. This is startling, because if we consider even superficially the logical properties of first person statements, nothing could, prima facie, seem more obvious than that in any such statement, the first person pronoun functions logically as a singular referring expression. Moreover, Anscombe herself offers the following informal gloss on the truth conditions of first person assertions: ‘If X asserts something with ‘I’ as subject, his assertion will be true if and only if what he asserts is true of X.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 1985 , pp. 629 - 652
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1985

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Footnotes

1

In GuttenplanSamuel ed., Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures 1974 , (Oxford: Oxford University Press1975), 45–65.

References

2 Anscombe, ‘The First Person,’ 60

3 Ibid., 60. Anscombe's commitment to this position is evident already in her earlier piece, ‘The Subjectivity of Sensation,’ Ajatus , 36 (1976), see esp. 17-18.

4 See especially Lewis, David ‘Attitude De Dicto and De Re,’ The Philosophical Review , 87 (1979), 513–43;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Chisholm, Roderick The First Person: An Essay on Reference and Intentionality (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota 1981).Google Scholar

5 See especially Casteñeda, Hector-Neri “'He“: A study in the Logic of SelfConsciousness,’ Ratio , 8 (1966)Google Scholar and ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators,’ American Philosophical Quarterly , 4 (1967), 85-100.

6 As it stands, this characterization is inadequate since it does not explicitly take into account the possibility of quantifier antecedents. It will become clear, however, that they raise no difficulties for the general point I am trying to make here.

7 Casteñeda

8 I recently noticed that Steven Boer and William Lycan, in their article, ‘Who, Me?,’ The Philosophical Review , 89 (1980). 427-66, also attempt to argue against the semantical uniqueness of first person ascriptions. Unlike me, however, they do regard our (1) and (2) as semantically equivalent , though ‘pragmatically’ distinct. Although I am sympathetic with their aim, I obviously disagree with their positive account of the distinction between the ‘two’ reflexives.

9 As Anscombe points out, however, in her footnote no. 1, p. 46, there are languages in which the distinction is both phonetically and orthographically marked, as, for example, in classical Greek

10 See Grice, Paul ‘Logic and Conversation’ in Cole and Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics , (New York, NY: Academic Press 1975), 41–58.Google Scholar

11 Alternatively, there may be adjustments in the syntax. The most common such adjustment is to bring the reflexive out of the context and to the front of the sentence, e.g., ‘It was himself that. .. ’

12 Cf. Quine's notion of the ‘purely referential’ occurrence of a singular term in his Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press 1960). 142ff. 146f.

13 The bar linking the antecedent with the reflexive should be taken to indicate coreference.

14 I do not mean for too much to hinge on the notation here. One of the reasons for adopting this noncommittal way of representing the additional contribution made by singular terms in propositional attitude contexts was to avoid having to represent them as predications in the way that Brian Loar does in his ‘Reference and Propositional Attitudes,’ The Philosophical Review , 81 (1972), 43-62.

15 Anscombe. ‘The First Person,’ 48.

16 Ibid., 47

17 Ibid., 55

18 Ibid., 51-2

19 Ibid., 57

20 I am indebted to and grateful for the invaluable discussions, criticism, and help offered by my colleagues George Wilson and David Sachs.