Abstract
I here adapt some ideas of Prior’s 1967 paper ‘On spurious egocentricity’ in the interest of seeing how much sense can be made of the doctrine that ‘I’ is not a referring-expression. I suggest how an account of ‘I’ might draw upon both Prior’s treatment of the operator ‘I believe that’ and of operators like ‘it is true that’ and ‘it is now the case that’, which Prior argues are logically very different from ‘I believe that’. In the final section I present some objections to Prior’s account of ‘now’, and try to give a more adequate account of the analogy between ‘now’ and ‘I’.
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Notes
I take referring to something to be a matter of speaking of it, and I take a referring-expression to be an expression whose function in the language is to pick out some individual thing, for the purpose of saying something about it.
Anscombe said nothing about this problem, and provided no indication of how a positive non-referentialist position might go beyond some rather obscure hints in her (1975). In his own paper on the topic, S Kripke remarks, ‘I was never able to talk to Anscombe about these matters, but I do recall a report from someone else as to what she said when queried as to why “I” behaves as if it refers in inference patterns. Her answer as reported was “I don’t know”’ (2011, p. 312).
This is a slight simplification. The line of descent is actually required to cross the buffer zone separating the voluntary from the intentional, which is a species of the voluntary. On the voluntary/intentional distinction, see Anscombe (2000, §17,26).
This expression, and the analogy it points to, were suggested to me by Kit Fine.
On the indirect reflexive, see Geach (1957), Castañeda (1966), Anscombe (1975). Its existence as a distinct grammatical category is controversial, but the distinction it marks is real and must be drawn somehow: it is the distinction between occurrences of ‘he’ in indirect discourse clauses whose content the pronoun’s referent is in a position to express using ‘I’, and occurrences in which he is not. Occurrences of Prior’s ‘Self’ in indirect discourse are clearly of the former kind. Since in direct discourse ‘Self’ is equivalent to ‘I’, the pronoun ingeniously eliminates the ambiguity of ‘he’ in indirect discourse by taking over one of its meanings, whose connection with the first person it simultaneously makes clear
—although this seems to have been no part of Prior’s intention.
I present a full version of the argument alluded to here in a MS, “‘I” as a device of self-reference: still a problem’.
References
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Doyle, J. ‘Spurious egocentricity’ and the first person. Synthese 193, 3579–3589 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0948-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0948-1