Knowledge Tree
first-person pronoun 'I'
Also known as: first-person pronoun 'I', first-person pronoun
Facts (24)
Sources
Self-Consciousness - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu Jul 13, 2017 22 facts
claimG.E.M. Anscombe's argument that "I" does not function like a demonstrative is reminiscent of Avicenna's Flying Man argument.
claimThe first-person pronoun 'I' is widely recognized as the paradigmatic linguistic expression of self-consciousness in English, allowing a speaker to refer to oneself as oneself.
claimDavid Kaplan (1977) claimed that the particular and primitive way in which each person is presented to themselves is that each is presented to himself under the character of "I".
perspectiveCritics including O'Brien (1994, 1995a), Garrett (1998), Campbell (1994), and Peacocke (2008) argue that the Self-Reference Rule (SRR) was not intended to explain the connection between self-consciousness and the first-person pronoun, but rather to account for the character of "I".
claimG.E.M. Anscombe posits that a subject in a sensory deprivation tank who is anaesthetized and suffering from amnesia could still think "I-thoughts" (e.g., "How did I get into this mess?"), which she uses to argue that "I" cannot mean "this person" because demonstratives require the object to be presented to conscious awareness.
claimElizabeth Anscombe (1975) famously claimed that "I" is not a referring expression at all.
claimGareth Evans argues that the problem with G.E.M. Anscombe's argument against the demonstrative model of "I" is that it fails to recognize that "I" can be modeled on "here" rather than "this".
claimElizabeth Anscombe (1975) argued that the Self-Reference Rule (SRR) is an incomplete account of the meaning of the first-person pronoun "I".
claimThe fact that certain first-person thoughts are 'identification-free'—meaning they depend for their reference on no identification of oneself as a publicly presented object—contributes to the philosophical idea that these thoughts pick out a private object, such as a soul. This concept is connected to G.E.M. Anscombe's argument for the non-referential character of 'I'.
claimEvery utterance of a sentence containing the first-person pronoun 'I' is considered expressive of a self-conscious 'I-thought', which is a thought containing the first-person concept.
claimNorman Malcolm questions whether the first-person pronoun 'I' functions as a referring expression in his 1979 paper 'Whether ‘I’ is a Referring Expression'.
claimG.E.M. Anscombe argues that the first-person pronoun "I" cannot be understood as a proper name, a demonstrative, or an abbreviation of a definite description because each of these models requires a "conception" to reach its referent, and no such conception can be specified for "I" without either failing to guarantee reference or implying the existence of an immaterial soul.
claimIn 'The Blue and Brown Books', Ludwig Wittgenstein distinguishes between two uses of the term 'I': the 'use as subject' and the 'use as object'.
claimSydney Shoemaker formulated the concept of 'immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun' (IEM), defining an error of misidentification as occurring when one knows a particular thing 'a' to be 'F' and judges that 'b' is 'F' because one mistakenly believes 'a' is identical to 'b'.
claimG.E.M. Anscombe argues that "I" is not a referring expression because it does not function like a proper name, demonstrative, or definite description, and there is independent reason to believe immaterial souls do not exist.
claimLudwig Wittgenstein illustrates that when 'I' is used as an object, one can make an error of misidentification, such as mistakenly judging 'I have a broken arm' when seeing another person's broken arm in a tangle of bodies.
claimLudwig Wittgenstein suggests that the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is responsible for the mistaken opinion that the use of 'I' as a subject refers to an immaterial soul. Wittgenstein argues that self-ascriptions of psychological predicates do not rely on an identification of a bodily or non-bodily entity, but rather rely on no identification at all.
claimLudwig Wittgenstein argues that when one judges 'I have a pain' based on feeling pain, it makes no sense to wonder whether the pain is one's own, meaning self-ascriptions of pain based on introspective grounds are immune to errors of misidentification.
claimMark Sainsbury argued in 2011 that English speakers should use the first-person pronoun 'I' to refer to themselves.
referenceHans Johann Glock and P.M.S. Hacker published the article 'Reference and the First Person Pronoun' in the journal Language and Communication in 1996.
claimP.F. Strawson argues that 'criterionless' self-ascription gives rise to the idea of a 'purely inner and yet subject-referring use for I,' which he identifies as the root of the 'Cartesian illusion.'
referenceMichael J. White replied to G.E.M. Anscombe and Thompson Clarke regarding the first-person pronoun in his 1979 article 'The First Person Pronoun: A Reply to Anscombe and Clarke' published in Analysis.
Self-Consciousness - Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science oecs.mit.edu Jul 24, 2024 2 facts
claimOne theory of self-consciousness suggests that it is defined by its unique role in generating intentional action, specifically that only thoughts about oneself expressed using the first-person pronoun 'I' feed directly into action.
claimThe paradox of self-consciousness, as termed by José Luis Bermúdez, refers to the circularity of attempting to explain self-consciousness through the use of the first-person pronoun 'I', because the ability to use 'I' already presupposes the very notion of self-consciousness one is trying to explain.