‘I’ and the First Person Perspective (original) (raw)

1998

Abstract

<jats:p>Do the special features of 'I' have epistemological and metaphysical implications? Many philosophers have thought so. Here I investigate the relation between the first person singular pronoun 'I' and the first person perspective, construed as the perspective of consciousness. First, I discuss the semantics of 'I' as a lexeme of a natural language. The fact that semantic reference and speaker reference always coincide in the case of 'I' is shown to have important consequences: it explains the 'referential guarantees' and the impossibility of 'misidentification' which have seemed so mysterious. Secondly, it is shown that these special features accrue only to actual uses. Consequently, the relation between 'I' and the first person perspective must be explicated within the context of linguistic action. It is then argued that the functioning of 'I' is not to be equated with that of a name, a description or an identifying singular term. Instead, I propose that a use of 'I' indexes a linguistic act with respect to the responsible agent. Thus construed, the use of 'I' in an utterance does more than express the first person perspective, since the first person perspective can be expressed by unmarked, impersonal or zero-pronominalization linguistic forms. I conclude by illustrating this claim with examples from the Wiener Kreis.</jats:p>

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