The First-Person Point of View 9783110362855, 9783110359176

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Wolfgang Carl The First-Person Point of View

Wolfgang Carl

The First-Person Point of View

ISBN 978-3-11-035917-6 e-ISBN 978-3-11-036285-5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: eScriptum GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface This book originated in lectures and seminars given at the universities of Göttingen, Florence and Halle. Its various topics were also presented at different talks in the philosophy departments of the universities of Buenos Aires and Campinas (Brazil) as well as at Columbia University and the University of Heidelberg. The many objections and challenges raised by my colleagues and students have helped me clarify my thoughts and focus on what is essential to my project. I want to thank in particular Sergio Bernini for his enduring interest and the patience he showed through discussions of the various issues over caffè latte. I do appreciate the perseverance and understanding of Klaus Nickau who read a final German version of the entire book. I am especially grateful for substantial comments and constructive support from Andor Carius who translated a very German text into an understandable English equivalent. Christopher Evans reviewed the whole translation and improved it in various respects. My debts to my wife Helga remain primary. She gave love, inspiration, and encouragement. The topic of the book can be designated briefly and simply, but it is not so easy to describe the project. It transcends the narrow limits of established philosophical disciplines, because it plays an important role in various fields of philosophy. The topic it concerns is not only addressed by philosophers. My aim was to account for this thematic complexity by identifying its core issues and by discussing their manifestations in different philosophical disciplines. I am sure that this can be achieved in many other ways as well. I wanted to show that such a nucleus exists at all.

Contents Introduction | 1 A Primate Research | 2 B Neuroscientific Accounts | 6 C Evolutionary Biology | 22 1

The Use of ‘I’ Sentences | 27

2

Frege on I Thoughts | 55

3

Direct Reference | 82

4

Epistemic Asymmetry and First-Person Authority | 101

5

Authoritative Self-Knowledge | 121

6

My Future | 151

7

Afterword | 180

Bibliography | 185 Index | 190

Introduction The topic ‘I’ provokes amazement as well as irritation among philosophers. Kant believed that “the I is the strongest thought a human being may comprehend”¹ and Wittgenstein claimed: “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.”² How is one to explain this fascination? Clearly, what is distinctive about the first-person singular pronoun is that it is used and can only be used to refer to oneself; but what exactly are we referring to in this way? Sometimes, the answer is provided by appealing to the notion of self, which plays an important role in explicating the concept of person. It may be that the philosophers’ fascination concerns these issues; but there is another way of approaching the topic. Instead of starting with considerations concerning the self or having a self, I will address the very activity of referring to oneself by using the first-person singular pronoun and discuss it within the broader context of the ability to adopt a first-person point of view. Such a point of view will, in turn, be explained through the use of different kinds of ‘I’ sentences. Discussion of the topic ‘I’ has a long and rich tradition in the history of philosophy. Descartes and Locke, Hume and Kant, as well as Wittgenstein and Heidegger have all grappled with it. In contemporary philosophy, there are also many discussions of this subject; as one can see from the research into indexical reference or the debates regarding personal identity and consciousness. The issue is not, however, only taken up by philosophers. Concern with the notion of ‘I’, in terms of different “egos”, has been present in psychoanalysis consistently since Freud, and this approach has been extensively discussed by philosophers. However, one can also find various approaches and research programs in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences which concern ‘I’, ‘the self’ or ‘consciousness’. Research in these disciplines has only recently attracted the attention of philosophers. Contemporary discussions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind deal with highly specialized issues in their respective highly specialized fields, and do not normally consider the philosophical tradition or the pertinent scientific research. In turn, the sciences have shown little interest in the contributions made from within contemporary philosophy. Given the variety of approaches to the topic ‘I’, it is all the more surprising that the most obvious initial question has so seldom been asked: How can we know that all these different approaches are all really talking about the same topic? Without some shared understanding, one may suspect that the thematic unity is merely due to terminological convergence and that in discussions of ‘I’, everybody is referring to some-

1 Kant (1997), p. 860 2 Wittgenstein (1961), p. 80

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 Introduction

thing different. We can avoid this predicament only by identifying a number of core issues that are relevant to the topic ‘I’. Since both philosophy and the sciences are concerned with the topic ‘I’, it is not evident that philosophy has any privileged or special competence in this field of research. Therefore, I will not rely on the history of philosophy or current philosophical debates; but I will start instead by reviewing some significant contributions from the sciences. I take evolutionary biology and neuroscience as examples to show that there are some central problems and issues which need to be dealt with in any discussion on the topic ‘I’. They are the focus of my philosophical analysis of the first-person point of view. In the course of my work, I also try to clarify some philosophical ideas and assumptions that are taken for granted by different scientific approaches and are often treated in a vague and loose manner. In my multiple analyses of the first-person point of view, I deal with the central issues of ‘I’ and also assess the progress of scientific knowledge in this area.

A Primate Research The use of the first-person singular pronoun is connected with the idea that human speakers have certain cognitive faculties that allow us to assess and evaluate our own behavior and thinking. We do not have to mention these abilities verbally; but if we do, we must use the first-person singular pronoun in one way or another. The opinion that only humans possess such superior capabilities and are distinguished by the language skills that enable us to use this word is widespread. Kant typifies this view: “That man can possess the I in his mind raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth.”³ In his Anthropology Lectures, Kant made a more modest claim: “This idea of an I and the ability to grasp the thought [of an I] is the essential difference between man all other animals.”⁴ Is this really a significant difference? Does it exist at all? In his paper Self-Recognition in Primates, the evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup reports his observations of the behavior of chimpanzees when faced with mirrors and claims: “To the extent that self-recognition implies a rudimentary concept of self, these data show that contrary to popular opinion and preconceived ideas, man may not have a monopoly on the self-concept. Man may not be evolution’s only experiment in self-awareness.”⁵ Do we therefore have to reject Kant’s idea regarding such a unique human ability?

3 Kant 1968, p. 127 4 Kant 1997, p. 473 5 Gallup 1977, p. 333a

A Primate Research 

 3

Gallup employs a “mirror-image stimulation” (MIS) test to study the behavior of animals that confronted their own image in a mirror. The response varies in different animals, but two possibilities are particularly relevant to the issue at hand. Many animals respond to their own reflection as if it were another animal, especially in aggressive settings. Gallup calls this behavior “other-directed behavior”. However, chimpanzees and orangutans may exhibit “self-directed behaviors” after some training. He writes: “Rather than to respond to the mirror as such, after the second or third day the chimpanzees began to use the mirror to respond to themselves. Under conditions of self-directed responding, they used the reflection to gain visual access to and experiment with otherwise inaccessible information about themselves …”⁶ The animals may touch body parts that cannot be seen directly, fumble with their teeth or grimace, etc. Gallup then refined his experiments and put an odorless, nonirritating, pressure-insensitive dye on the nose or forehead of anesthetized chimpanzees and studied their behavior after they came to. He writes: “As evidence for self-recognition, the number of mark-directed responses, or attempts to touch a marked area on themselves through visually guided mirror feedback, increased by a factor of over 25 times in the presence of the mirror.”⁷ What are we to conclude from these experiments? The MIS experiments are considered to test self-recognition ability; chimpanzees that pass the test adopt a new form of self-directed behavior. Of course, they could touch their nose or pick their teeth regardless of the test, thanks to tactile and other kinesthetic or proprioceptive perceptions of their bodies.⁸ It is not completely newly learned behavior. What is new is that the chimpanzees exhibit such behavior by looking at their image in the mirror, and that they show concern with their own bodies based on information they receive by seeing their image in the mirror. This way of acquiring information about their own bodies should explain that Gallup’s experiments can be used as a test for self-recognition. Apes and many other animals have different ways of acquiring information about their own bodies.⁹ So far, four species of ape have been shown to be capable of learning new skills by interacting with mirrors: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos and gorillas. Furthermore, other species of animals, including bottlenose dolphins, orcas, elephants and European magpies, also learn to acquire information about the condition and nature of their bodies by looking at their 6 Gallup 1968, p. 788 7 Gallup 1977, p. 332b 8 Cf. Mitchell 1993, p. 297: “Presumably all creatures which initiate their own movement have a kinesthetic sense of their body which provides considerable knowledge (and error) about the body self.” 9 Cf. Mitchell 1993, p. 297–298

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 Introduction

image in a mirror. Can we, however, claim that the MIS test is a “rigorous test of self-recognition”?¹⁰ Recognition of one’s own body parts can be accomplished in various ways, and many animals have such a capacity. The self-recognition Gallup ascribes to chimpanzees that pass the mirror test must therefore differ from and go beyond that other type of recognition. He believes that apes that pass the mirror test already have a “concept of self”.¹¹ What cognitive achievements are related to the possession of such a concept? According to Gallup, the apes are able to make an inference by connecting their identity as observer with the image of the being they see in the mirror. This cognition presupposes “an already existing identity on the part of the organism making this inference”.¹² Through handling mirrors, we can learn about the correspondence between the appearance or behavior of the observer looking in the mirror and the appearance or behavior of what is seen in the mirror. What does that have to do with recognizing identity? Gallup considers identity to be a “sense of continuity over time and space”.¹³ This strange “definition” shows that he is not concerned with identity as such, but rather with understanding one’s own identity somehow as a diachronic continuity. However, such comprehension cannot be tested by learning how to use mirrors, which only teaches one about a current and momentary correspondence between the appearance and behavior of the observer and the appearance and behavior of what is seen. Gallup overestimates the cognitive achievements of an animal that passes the MIS test in other ways, too. Those that know how to use mirrors are able to perceive the appearance and behavior of their face and head. From this ability we cannot conclude that they know or are aware of how others perceive them, or that their perception of themselves accounts somehow for such an understanding, as Gallup claims.¹⁴ Therefore the concept of self he attributes to chimpanzees has to be understood as not implying either an understanding of their own diachronic identity or an understanding of how others perceive them. In the discussion of Gallup’s experiments, other shortcomings of his considerations have been pointed out. Karyl Swartz claims that chimpanzees that pass the mirror test have the ability of self-recognition, but they do not have a “self-concept”.¹⁵ To consider the behavior of chimpanzees in front of mirrors as evidence for self-recognition follows, according to Swartz, from the fact that they use their image in the mirror as a means to 10 Gallup 1977, p. 332b 11 Gallup 1977, p. 333a; 335a 12 Gallup 1977, p. 335a 13 Gallup 1977, p. 334b. note 14 Gallup, 1977, p. 335a 15 Swartz 1997, p. 68

A Primate Research 

 5

control their behavior.¹⁶ Being able to use what you see in the mirror in this way requires an understanding of how mirrors work. Can one have that understanding only if one has the capacity of self-recognition? As Swartz rightly points out, it is necessary to define “the cognitive capacities involved in being able to understand the nature of the mirror image.”¹⁷ However, those cognitive capacities are not accounted for by self-recognition if this is a faculty of being able to “differentiate itself from other environmental objects”.¹⁸ While the relationship between using mirrors and thereby achieving some kind of self-recognition is not clarified, the results of Gallup’s research into the behavior of chimpanzees cannot be assessed. Robert Mitchell has pointed out that animals can deal with mirrors and recognize images of food in a mirror without being able to recognize themselves.¹⁹ His explanation of interaction with mirrors refers to “the kinesthetic-visual matching ability” of the animal.²⁰ This is an ability that provides a representation of the appearance of the body and its movements which is supported by the visual perception of the appearance and behavior of other members of the same species. If this ability is added to the understanding of how mirrors function, then the animal is able to recognize itself in the mirror. An animal that passes the mirror test has a self-representation ability that has to do with the appearance and movements of its body. Gallup calls this self-concept. Being in possession of this concept does not, however, imply that one is aware of one’s own experiences and feelings or of one’s diachronic identity. The MIS test cannot empirically establish whether the animal has a consciousness of itself in its mental and diachronic dimensions. Mitchell emphasizes the differences between various forms of consciousness, which he calls “self-awareness”, in order to identify the particular cognitive achievement of recognizing oneself in a mirror and to distinguish it from other kinds of self-recognition.²¹ According to Gallup, his behavioral studies of chimpanzees interacting with mirrors confirm his claim that not only human beings have a self-concept and self-awareness.²² As we have seen, he does not give a detailed explanation of that self-concept and adds skills to the repertoire of apes that cannot be determined empirically by the mirror test. His claim that the “self-directed behavior” of chimpanzees using mirrors reflects some kind of self-recognition that requires the pos-

16 Swartz 1997, p. 69 17 Swartz 1997, p. 69 18 Swartz 1997, p. 69 19 Mitchell 1993, p. 298–299 20 Mitchell 1993, p. 299–300 21 Mitchell 1993, p. 313–318; cf. Burge 2007c, p. 148–152 22 Gallup 1977, p. 333a

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 Introduction

session of a self-concept, is controversial. Gallup did not prove that the behavior can be considered self-recognition, and neither did he explain what kind of cognitive achievements are connected with the possession of such a concept. The controversy stems from the conceptual confusion surrounding the concepts of self and self-knowledge. These ambiguities can be avoided if one considers paradigm cases of self-reference and self-knowledge. Linguistic representations of such concepts require the use of the reflexive pronoun ‘self’, which is based on the epistemically transparent use of the first-person pronoun. An analysis of the cognitive achievements connected with the use of this word not only provides information about “evolution’s experiment in self-awareness”,²³ but also allows the identification of phylogenetic and ontogenetic predecessors of self-reference. The conceptual determination of these predecessors requires an understanding of what they are predecessors of. This is the only way to establish whether Gallup’s research really does refute Kant’s view. Philosophical analysis of the use of the first-person singular pronoun may make an important contribution.

B Neuroscientific Accounts Considering the theory of evolution, there is not much support for Kant’s view that man occupies a special place among “all other living beings on earth”.²⁴ The earliest primates originated about 65 million years ago, but only about 6.5 million years ago did chimpanzees and hominids branch off. The traditional distinction between Pongids (which include orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees) and Hominids (to which modern humans and our predecessors belong) cannot be justified by contemporary taxonomy and biology, since modern humans share approximately 99% of our genes with chimpanzees.²⁵ The discussion of this topic in neuroscience does not give any indication of such a distinguished position for humans either. The structure of nerve cells and their biochemical composition in vertebrates originated millions of years ago. The synapses in the nerve cells of mammals function the same way as the synapses in the nerve cells of insects and mollusks.²⁶ The structure of the brain does not differ among animals with a spinal

23 Gallup 1977, p. 333a 24 Kant 1968, p. 127 25 King/Wilson 1975, p. 114–115; Roth 2002, p. 77 26 Cf. Singer 2002a, p. 62–63

B Neuroscientific Accounts 

 7

cord, and we can divide the different parts of the brain the same way.²⁷ Brain volume increases with increasing body size, but more slowly: small animals have larger brains relative to their body size (while the brain of a shrew makes up about 10% of its total volume, the human brain amounts to only about 2%).²⁸ It is striking, however, that the relationship between brain and body volume in humans is unusually large; about seven times greater than expected in comparison to other mammals and about three times larger than expected compared to chimpanzees.²⁹ Primates’ brains are distinguished by the large volume of the cerebral cortex,³⁰ but the human prefrontal cortex (which is mainly responsible for higher cognition) has a volume roughly proportional to that of other mammals, and precisely proportional to that of other primates.³¹ Thus, by taking the anatomy of the human brain into account, there is no reason to believe that Homo sapiens occupies a distinguished cognitive position in evolution. If there are so few differences between humans and other higher organisms from a neuroanatomical point of view, it is natural to ask why we believe that there are so many differences. Since it is not plausible that we will abandon this belief, recent neuroscientific research has tried to explain this clearly unique position of the human being in nature. Various different approaches have been adopted, and I address just one here: the explanation of the idea, already proposed by Kant, that the particular nature of human beings has something to do with the fact that “man can have the I in his mind”, i.e., that humans are able to talk and think about themselves by using the first-person singular pronoun. This ability is an essential property of people or beings who can refer to themselves, reflect on their own actions, assess them critically and change their behavior accordingly. The capacity for reflexive reference is expressed verbally by the use of various sentences containing the first-person singular pronoun, and for this reason I coin the term ‘I-centered life form of persons’. This does not mean that people are inevitably egocentric, but emphasizes the constitutive role of the pronoun ‘I’ in the reflexive thought and speech of people. I consider two attempts by contemporary neuroscientists to explain the I-centered life form of persons. Antonio Damasio writes: “Understanding how the brain produces that something extra, the protagonist we carry around and call self, or me, or I, is an important goal of the neurobiology of consciousness.”³² 27 Singer 2002a, p. 63 28 Roth 2003, p. 82–85 29 Cf. Roth 2000, p. 90–91 30 Singer 2002a, p. 63; cf. Singer 2002b, p. 215–216 31 Roth 2000, p. 92–93 32 Damasio 2012, p. 17

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 Introduction

Wolf Singer talks “of those phenomena which are only available through self-experience and can be derived only from the I or ‘first-person perspective’.”³³ Elsewhere he mentions the project “of giving a neurobiological system of describing how our self-concepts originate.”³⁴ The terminology of Damasio differs from that of Singer and they clearly diverge in their expositions and explanations. It is obvious, however, that they both try to explain something that is expressed through the use of the first-person singular pronoun. Both of them reject explanations that assume a “homunculus”.³⁵ As Singer points out, such an assumption would mean “that somewhere in the brain must exist a convergence center, where all the signals which are collected via the senses converge … a place where the homunculus equipped with mental properties controls all the brain functions and coordinates them.”³⁶ He adds, “we learn from modern neurobiology … that the real organization of the nervous system is different in a dramatic way.” If we want to explain the I-centered life form of persons, we at least know that we cannot point to a single specific area of the brain as a neural domain and call it the self or seat of consciousness; so there is something resembling a negative condition of adequacy for such an explanation. As we will see, it is not clear whether the theories of Damasio and Singer fulfill this condition. Only a few neuroscientists discuss the subject of ‘consciousness’ with such strong emphasis on the ‘I’ or ‘self’ concept,³⁷ as Damasio in his book The Feeling of What Happens, published in 2000, and his more recent book Self Comes to Mind, which I consider here. Its very title reveals something about his approach to the topic ‘I’. The expression ‘self’ is not, for him, a misleading nominalization of the reflexive pronoun which has something to do with self-reference through the use of first-person pronouns. Rather, this expression denotes a property, or more precisely, a process, that takes place in the mind and acquires a new quality called consciousness.³⁸ What is added to the mind in this way, can be lost again, as is shown, according to Damasio, by epileptic absences.³⁹ Being a self or having a self is therefore a contingent quality of the mind, which may be retained or lost. What quality does the mind acquire when such a self-process takes place? Organisms can have a mind without being conscious of it. Only when they have or become a self do they know that they have a mind. The self is a “witness to

33 Singer 2000, p. 333 34 Singer 2002a, p. 73 35 Damasio 2000, p. 11; 2012, p. 201 36 Singer 2002a, p. 65 37 Damasio 2012, p. 183 38 Damasio 2012, p. 22; 157; 203 39 Damasio 2012, p. 162–166

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the mind”.⁴⁰ Being a self is therefore a sufficient condition for knowing one’s own mind; but it is also a necessary condition, because “the self is our only natural means to know the mind.”⁴¹ Thus, one has knowledge of one’s own mind or of one’s own mental states, only if one is or has a self. In other words: consciousness is self-consciousness. Damasio already propounded this controversial thesis in his earlier book The Feeling of What Happens.⁴² Neither the identification of consciousness with self-consciousness, nor the reduction of self-consciousness to knowledge of one’s own mental states is established by argument. But the self is not only a “witness to the mind”, it also plays a role whenever it comes to the self-referential behavior and reflexive knowledge of people. Damasio’s conception of the self does not account for this role, since it should have a “direct-witness” perspective on the individual conscious mind which is “personal, private and unique to each of us”.⁴³ The self is whatever we can know about our mind. Damasio’s strategy is “to approach consciousness via the self” and this leads him to locate the self in the realm of consciousness and identify it with something that is “in the mind”. This traditional conception of the self cannot be justified by the reflexive knowledge people have of themselves. Damasio’s consciousness is a reflexive kind of knowledge of one’s own mental states, but it is obvious that not all reflexive knowledge is this kind of consciousness. Our self-knowledge is not confined to consciousness of our mental states. Thus, the role of the word ‘self’ as a reflexive pronoun cannot justify his mentalistic conception of the self. It is therefore not clear whether this notion and its neurobiological foundation can provide an explanation of what Damasio claims to be an “important goal of the neurobiology of consciousness”: of “the self, or me, or I”.⁴⁴ His further expositions fail to remove these doubts. Damasio employs a dual concept of self: “the self-as-object” and the “self-asknower”. This distinction arises from different “vantage points of an observer” of the self.⁴⁵ He calls the “self-as-object” also “the material me” and explains, following William James, what belongs to it: his clothes, as well as his wife, his bank account, and his ancestors. If these things constitute the material me, they cannot fit Damasio’s “working definition of the material me” as “a dynamic collection of integrated neural processes, centered on the representation of the living 40 Damasio 2012, p. 12 41 Damasio 2012, p. 12 42 Damasio 2000, p. 19 43 Damasio 2000, p. 15 44 Damasio 2012, p. 17 45 Damasio 2012, p. 8

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 Introduction

body”.⁴⁶ This material me can hardly be what James had in mind, because neuronal processes cannot have bank accounts or wives. It is strange that Damasio does not notice these inconsistencies. His concept of self is defined by reference to neural activities of the brain and their mentalistic “aspects” in the mind. The material me has nothing to do with the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ or the reflexive pronoun ‘self’. Without being informed about neural processes in the brain, we know what these terms refer to in a given context. Even if we had such information, it would be irrelevant to the knowledge of what these words refer to in that context. Damasio’s neuroscientific interpretation of his first concept of the self is derived from the assumption that the self is something mental that is somehow correlated to certain brain states which are supposed to be just another “aspect” of the mind. This assumption is also at the basis of his second concept of the self. The self as a knowing subject is in fact not a person who knows this or that; it is rather a kind of knowing of “our experiences” that matters for deliberative reflection on our attitudes.⁴⁷ But this is not knowledge that people have of their experiences and attitudes while they use it in their deliberations: “The self-as-subject, as knower, as the ‘I’, is a more elusive presence, far less collected in mental or biological terms than the me, more dispersed, often dissolved in the stream of consciousness …”⁴⁸ The self as a knowing subject is something in the mind that permeates the stream of consciousness as an unobserved common thread. This is not the ‘I’ referred to by someone who is using the first-person singular pronoun in a given context or a person one could meet on the street. Damasio’s self has an “exclusive, first-person perspective” with regard to its own mental states.⁴⁹ This perspective is an “introspective perspective”⁵⁰ that should account for the peculiar character of our immediate, noninferential knowledge. Damasio combines this traditional view of the knowledge of one’s own mental states with the familiar distinction of internal and external perception.⁵¹ The view that knowledge of our own mental states is based on introspection has a long philosophical and scientific tradition. Contemporary philosophers frequently reject it, and it is regrettable that Damasio did not take note of such criticism. This shortcoming has implications for his neuroscientific theory of self and consciousness. He claims that “introspection offers the only direct view of 46 Damasio 2012, p. 9 47 Damasio 2012, p. 29; 176 48 Damasio 2012, p. 9 49 Damasio 2012, p. 157 50 Damasio 2012, p. 167 51 Damasio 2012, p. 14

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what we wish to explain.”⁵² Thus, the explanandum of such a theory is shaped by a traditional and, as will be seen later, erroneous conception of knowledge of one’s own mental states; the goal is burdened with philosophical assumptions that would better have been avoided. A glance at what Damasio discovers in his introspective attempt at “plunging into the depths of the conscious mind”,⁵³ confirms this suspicion. He sees consciousness as a “composite of different images” and distinguishes them according to their contents as images that “describe the objects in consciousness”, and images that “describe me.” Thus, the conscious mind consists of representations relating either to the subject or to representations of objects referred to by the subject. Damasio claims that the images describing “me” include representations of “the perspective in which the objects are being mapped …”.⁵⁴ My perceptions do have such a perspective; but can I really discover by introspection that they have it? Introspection is considered to be some kind of observation. Conceptual presuppositions cannot be observed. Thus, introspection does not explain what is peculiar to our knowledge of our own mental state. There are other images describing “me” that are called feelings, e.g., the feeling that the objects are represented by my mind and not by someone else’s mind, or the feeling that I am able to act upon objects. Here too, one gets the impression that Damasio postulates feelings related to conceptual presuppositions and background knowledge. It is the content of these feelings that makes their assumption and observation by introspection quite implausible. Damasio emphasizes the significance of a special kind of feelings, called “primordial feelings”. There are many of them, and they are supposed “to designate” various things, among them the existence of my living body which is independent from its interactions with objects. How can one feel this? In his previous book The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio tried to explain consciousness and the self by meta-representations of representations which refer to the organism and its relations to external objects.⁵⁵ Now he relies on primordial feelings: “On the matter of feelings in the mind, I have this to add: the feeling of what happens is not the whole story. There is some deeper feeling to be guessed and then found in the depths of the conscious mind. It is the feeling that my own body exists, and it is present, independently of any object with which it interacts, as a rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive.”⁵⁶ In contrast to

52 Damasio 2012, p. 184 53 Damasio 2012, p. 185 54 Damasio 2012, p. 185 55 Damasio 2000, p. 168–182 56 Damasio 2012, p. 185

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 Introduction

the feelings discussed in his earlier book, the primordial feelings have something to do with the existence of a living body and not with its relationship to external objects: they are not feelings of how my body reacts to or interacts with external objects. The content of primordial feelings is supposed to be independent of such objects, and those feelings arise quite independently of any experience of external objects. No matter how one understands this independence – as a feeling of one’s own body that has nothing to do with the objects that affect it, or on which it acts; or as a feeling of one’s body, independent from the fact that there are such objects – it is definitely clear that these primordial feelings are an experience of the existence of one’s own body. Such a “pure” body experience is supposed to be unrelated to anything else. Damasio’s “rock-solid, wordless affirmation that I am alive” seems to be a neuroscientific counterpart to Descartes’ Cogito. In short, one can say that Damasio’s considerations concerning consciousness rely on traditional ideas regarding knowledge of one’s own mental states, without any explication or critical discussion. Above all, it must be emphasized that these considerations do not provide a neuroscientific explanation of how the human brain has to operate for a conscious mind to emerge. Damasio takes up this issue and mentions two basic ingredients of consciousness: wakefulness of the body and conscious representations. He also identifies their neural correlates: “On the matter of wakefulness, we know that it depends on the operation of certain nuclei in the brain-stem tegmentum and the hypothalamus. Using both neural and chemical routes, these nuclei exert their influence on the cerebral cortex.”⁵⁷ He considers representations in the mind as neural representations of the brain, and they are mental because they are described under a different “aspect”. In The Feeling of What Happens, Damasio suggests that these representations refer to the organism, the object and the relationship between them. He modified this suggestion later by introducing a distinction between neural representations of objects and representations of the organism itself. The latter are distinguished by the fact that “they originate in the body’s interior and represent aspects of the body in action…. They are felt images of the body, primordial bodily feelings …”⁵⁸ These representations are not only distinguished by their content, but also by a certain quality which Damasio calls “feeling”. He emphasizes this as a qualitative aspect, because the information the brain receives from the states of the body does not only affect quantitative aspects, such as the amount of oxygen or sugar in the blood, but also registers qualitative body states, such as tension or pain.⁵⁹

57 Damasio 2012, p. 186 58 Damasio 2012, p. 188 59 Damasio 2012, p. 97

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The neural representations of such states are feelings. For Damasio, these feelings have something to do with the mental aspect of neural activities in the regions of the brain’s networked areas which regulate the representations of body states.⁶⁰ The idea of “felt” neural activities and body representations has two components: one neuroscientific; the other, mental. The neuroscientific component consists of interactions between brain areas and body states that are determined by well-defined biological functions. The feelings experienced thereby refer to the mental component of the interactions between brain and body states, and the assumption that there are such feelings is regarded as a “hypothesis”.⁶¹ But in order to feel something, there must be someone who feels it. Who has these feelings? The brain; some particular areas of the brain; or what? Damasio does not answer this question. The hypothesis of felt neural activities is not explained by neuroscientific considerations or established by empirical evidence, but alluded to by a thought experiment. Readers are invited to imagine something that gives them pleasure and think of the various parts of the body that are changed by this imagination.⁶² There are cardiac, circulatory and respiratory changes, among many others. Often we do not notice these changes, and even if we do take note of them we do not perceive them for what they are. The feeling postulated by Damasio in his thought experiment has particular subject: the reader whom he is addressing. But who is the subject of the neural activities that process the signals from the body to the brain and vice versa? The idea that neural activities in certain areas of the brain are feelings does not make sense. The thought experiment leads to a mental disguise of these activities and crosses the boundaries between neuroscientific and psychological descriptions of an organism. In reading Self Comes to Mind, one is confronted with two different problems. The first problem has to do with the consistency and argumentative rigor of Damasio’s considerations, while the second problem is related to his conceptual framework. As far as the first is concerned, his “dual view” of the self is not established by argument, and the concept of the material me is inconsistent. The relationship between brain and mind, between neural representations and images in the mind, remains unclear because his idea of “aspect-dualism” is not explicated. In particular, “primordial feelings” are experiences that cannot be understood as qualitative properties of neural activities. Too many of Damasio’s ideas have the status of conjectures, hypotheses, or thought experiments.

60 Damasio 2012, p. 99; 191 61 Damasio 2012, p. 99 62 Damasio 2012, p. 99–100

14 

 Introduction

The second problem has to do with the philosophical shortcomings of Damasio’s considerations. First of all, there is the obscure ontological status of the self that is not a “thing”, but a “dynamic process”.⁶³ He also speaks of a “dynamic object,”⁶⁴ and points out that the proto-self is built “on the body as the rock.”⁶⁵ But this hardly fits the notion of the self as a process. The different kinds of self are actually neuronal representations produced by the brain. The dynamic character of the self has something to do with the genesis and sequence of such representations. To approach consciousness via the self leads to the idea of a mental core-self that corresponds to the neural notion of a proto-self; but the approach is fraught with conceptual ambiguities. The subjects of consciousness Damasio is concerned with are people, and the concept of self that is relevant here has something to do with the reflexive nature of the knowledge he determines to be consciousness. That knowledge is not restricted to the mental states of people, and their reflexive behavior goes beyond the mental realm. To speak of a self is supposed to be only a façon de parler,⁶⁶ but it leads to misunderstandings and biases which may be avoided by an adequate understanding of reflexive references. Another weakness of Damasio’s considerations is due to his disregard for issues that arise within the philosophy of language. Already in his earlier book he claimed: “The personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ are deemed satisfactory to designate an entity that could have its own name – a direct translation of self – but does not.”⁶⁷ These pronouns are not, however, names or comparable designators; they refer to something only in a given context of their use, and what they refer to is certainly not a self as understood by Damasio. He wants to explain the reference of first-person pronouns by means of the nominalized reflexive pronoun,⁶⁸ but this is inconsistent with his way of describing the content of reflexive representations through the use of the first-person pronoun. This applies in particular to his account of primordial feelings. Furthermore, there are philosophical flaws in his conception of consciousness as a kind of reflexive knowledge gained by introspection. Neither his view that introspection is a special “sort of optic”,⁶⁹ nor his claims regarding consciousness reached by introspection is convincing. Given these shortcomings, one has to conclude that Damasio missed “an impor-

63 Damasio 2012, p. 165 64 Damasio 2012, p. 8 65 Damasio 2012, p. 21 66 Damasio 2012, p. 165 67 Damasio 2000, p. 233 68 Damasio 2000, p. 186 69 Damasio 2012, p. 14

B Neuroscientific Accounts 

 15

tant goal of the neurobiology of consciousness”, i.e., “understanding how the brain produces that something extra, the protagonist we carry around and call self, or me, or I …”⁷⁰ In contrast to Damasio, I now consider a position that does not identify consciousness with self-consciousness, but assumes an irreducible difference between two types of consciousness. Following Ned Block, one is often called phenomenal consciousness and distinguished from access consciousness.⁷¹ Singer seems to draw a similar distinction: “The term ‘consciousness’ has a number of different connotations ranging from awareness of one’s perceptions and sensations to self-awareness, the perception of oneself as an agent that is endowed with intentionality.”⁷² According to Singer, phenomenal consciousness can be described and explained by neurobiology, while the second type of consciousness, also called self-consciousness, “cannot [be] dealt with exclusively by a system of neurobiological description”.⁷³ Unlike Damasio, he claims that consciousness cannot be completely explained by neuroscientific theories. Thus, the subject of consciousness has to be split into a phenomenal consciousness that is described and explained by neurobiology, and a self-consciousness as a “cultural construct” that is explained by “cultural evolution”.⁷⁴ Singer’s account of phenomenal consciousness starts from the observation that “the highly developed brains of primates are distinguished in the first place from the brains of other mammals by the enormous increase in the volume of the cerebral cortex.”⁷⁵ How can this quantitative difference be related to the origins of cognitive performance? Singer points out that “in the evolution of cortical areas, which were added later, the inputs are not any more directly connected with the sense organs, but rather with phylogenetically older areas which are in turn connected to the senses.”⁷⁶ Singer interprets this fact in two different ways. First, he mentions the complexity of signal processing and points out that the structure of the cerebral cortex suggests the hypothesis that the same neural processes operating at the peripheral level are repeated at a higher level of processing and the results are then applied to the peripheral processes.⁷⁷ This feedback process

70 Damasio 2012, p. 17 71 Block 2007a, p. 166–187; Block 2007b, p. 481–498 72 Singer 2006, p. 135 73 Singer 2002a, p. 73 74 Singer 2002a, p. 73 75 Singer 2002a, p. 63 76 Singer 2002a, p. 70; Singer 2002b, p. 217; Singer 2006, p. 136 77 Singer 2002b, p. 217

16 

 Introduction

between different, hierarchically arranged levels of the brain is Singer’s model for his proposed solution to the so-called “binding problem”.⁷⁸ In his further exposition, however, Singer gives a different interpretation when he describes the hierarchically structured processing operations of the sensory signals generated in the peripheral areas of the brain as “meta-representations”⁷⁹ and “hierarchical, i.e. reflective levels of the human brain”.⁸⁰ Meta-representation and reflexivity require a hierarchy of levels, but the converse is not true: not every hierarchically organized process requires second-level representations or some kind of reflexive reference. Singer raises the question: “How is it possible to explain that we not only can represent in our brain what is given in the environment, but that we can also be conscious of it, that we are aware of having perceptions and sensations…”⁸¹ Conscious perception and sensation are supposed to be a kind of attention to one’s own experience, a “self-awareness of one’s own perceptions and feelings”⁸² described as a state of having representations of our “representations of what is outside”. His picture of an “inner eye” is quite revealing: just as our “external eye” provides us with visual information about the environment, our so-called “inner eye” generates “meta-representations … which map brain internal processes rather than the outside world.”⁸³ The “neural realization” of this eye takes place, according to Singer, in the cortical areas that receive their information from the sensorimotor cortex lobes and “look on brain internal processes in the same way as the already existing areas [look] on the periphery.”⁸⁴ For Singer, conscious perceptions are meta-representations, which refer to “internal brain processes” that are operational in the sensorimotor cortex. The concept of meta-representation is problematic, because the talk of representations in the brain is diffuse and vague.⁸⁵ Also, the content of meta-representations is supposed to refer to “internal brain processes” in the sensorimotor cortex; the determination of their content and composition therefore makes it doubtful that they really are meta-representations. Why should these processes generate meta-representations? Singer writes: “Apparently it suffices for constructing meta-representations to add areas that

78 Singer 2002c, p. 155–165 79 Singer 2002a, p. 70–72 80 Singer 2002b, p. 217 81 Singer 2002a, p. 70 82 Singer 2002a, p. 72 83 Singer 2002a, p. 72 84 Singer 2002a, p. 72 85 Cf. Burge 2010, p. 292–308

B Neuroscientific Accounts 

 17

‘look’ upon brain internal processes in the same way the already existing areas ‘look’ upon the periphery.”⁸⁶ Even if one disregards the metaphors of “looking” and the “inner eye” which suggest a visual interpretation of the relationship between first-order and second-order representations, Singer’s claim about a sufficient condition for meta-representation is wrong. To assume that there are “subsequent processing structures” within brain areas that have been added later in evolution, has nothing to do with meta-representations.⁸⁷ The following example shows that Singer’s use of the term is not precise at all. By using noninvasive imaging techniques, one can reveal neural activities in certain brain areas when subjects are asked to imagine certain things that cannot be perceived. Due to parallel processing, many areas are activated simultaneously, but “there are as well areas that are activated only during the imagination and not the perception of real contents.”⁸⁸ However, the perception that it is raining outside is quite different from imagining it; and the latter has nothing to do with meta-representation, because the imagination refers to the weather and not to some representation of it. These facts do not support the view that there is an “inner eye” at work when one imagines something which generates some kind of neural meta-representation. Another conceptual difficulty arises from Singer’s use of the term ‘reflexive’. In his discussion of the “binding problem” he wonders how to distinguish the many neurons that are simultaneously activated from those which belong together because of their content, and are marked as such for subsequent processing.⁸⁹ He suggests that the synchronization of neuronal responses is preserved in “the answers of the subsequent cells”.⁹⁰ Given the distributive organization of processing stimuli, this synchronization plays an important role in the interaction between different levels of subsequent processing.⁹¹ The hierarchical structure of processing in higher vertebrates is not a reflexive structure, as suggested by Singer. The increase in volume of the cerebral cortex in humans concerns, above all, as he emphasizes again and again, the “cortical areas that receive their information primarily and in some cases exclusively from already existing cortical areas.”⁹² He concludes that “brain internal processes … become the object of the processing of higher-level brain structures …” which are supposed to be “reflex-

86 Singer 2002a, p. 72 87 Singer 2002a, p.69 88 Singer 2002a, p.71 89 Singer 2002c, p. 154 90 Singer 2002c, p. 160 91 Singer 2002c, p. 161–165 92 Singer 2002b, p. 217

18 

 Introduction

ive or hierarchical levels”.⁹³ However, the hierarchical structure of the brain does not imply that it is a “reflexive system” and can give a “reflexive analysis” of its own states and activities. The hierarchical, distributively organized process of selective neuronal response at the periphery is mistaken by Singer for reflexive activity of different “levels” of the brain. The notions of meta-representation and reflexive representation that Singer employs have to do with his project of identifying the neural correlate of phenomenal consciousness and explaining it within the framework of neurobiology. According to him, this consciousness, being an awareness of perceptions and feelings, is a second-order representation; and because it is an awareness of one’s own mental state, it is a reflexive representation. I have already pointed out that the application of these notions to descriptions of neural processing operations is misguided; but even if it were justified, it is clear that these notions do not provide an adequate description of phenomenal consciousness. Singer understands this consciousness as an “awareness” of perceptions and feelings and considers it a meta-representation. There are two objections: first, it is by no means necessary to understand phenomenal consciousness as a meta-representation; and second, as a mere “awareness” of one’s own perceptions and feelings, this consciousness is not adequately described. As far as the first point is concerned, according to Singer, one is only in a phenomenally conscious state if one represents somehow that one is in that state. A perception or sensation is therefore a phenomenally conscious state, because there is another state which refers to the first state. Block and Burge have denied this “higher level view” of phenomenal consciousness.⁹⁴ It is a great pity that neuroscientists do not take more notice of philosophical studies that deal explicitly with their science. As to the second point, it is striking that Singer does not mention the phenomenal character of the states we are phenomenally conscious of. Examples of such states include pain, or the feelings of biting into a sour apple. Phenomenal states have a certain quality of experience, and the knowledge we have of them is an awareness of such experiences. Even though phenomenal states need not be conscious, their consciousness is essentially a consciousness of certain experiences. Phenomenal consciousness is a consciousness of the phenomenal states of a subject and therefore consciousness of the subject; and because of the quality of experience of these states, it is also a consciousness of something for the subject.⁹⁵ Singer refers to the terminology of the “Anglo-Saxons” when he

93 Singer 2002b, p. 217 94 Block 2007b, p. 485a; Burge 2007a, 398–408 95 Burge 2007a, 403–408

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 19

employs the term phenomenal consciousness.⁹⁶ It is not clear who he has in mind, and therefore it is not clear exactly what he means: a phenomenal consciousness of one’s phenomenal states, or some kind of consciousness in the form of attention, perception or thinking. Anyway, it is obvious that his conception of an “observer in the brain” does not fit phenomenal consciousness, because it has nothing to do with perceiving or observing. Singer says a lot about what his postulated “inner eye” sees, but he does not give a convincing answer to the question of who sees something with that eye. According to him, it is the brain: “Thus brains that have consciousness possess a meta-representational level at which internal states are explicitly represented, they have, what one might call, an ‘inner eye’ function. They can compare protocols of their own performance with incoming signals and derive from the outcome of these ‘internal deliberations’ decisions for future acts.”⁹⁷ However, these considerations are not very plausible. First, he does not explain how certain areas of the brain can be cognitive actors and decision-makers. The idea of a homunculus in the brain should certainly be avoided in any case! Secondly, Singer wants to identify the neural correlate of our phenomenal consciousness of our perceptions and feelings. We learn that the brain has a consciousness of its mental activities. Thus, the neural correlate of our consciousness is the consciousness of the brain! This idea is certainly no explanation of consciousness and neither does it make much sense. Singer wants to draw a boundary between what can and what cannot be described and explained by neurobiology. While phenomenal consciousness belongs to the realm of neurobiology; self-consciousness or self-awareness is beyond its reach. By drawing such a boundary, one is confronted with the question of whether the phenomenal consciousness we have of our own perceptions and feelings can be understood without assuming a self or an ‘I’ which is conscious of its own perceptions and feeling. This seems to be a kind of self-consciousness. Singer has to deny that. But how can we understand the consciousness of our perceptions and feelings? There is a fundamental weakness in his project of drawing a boundary between phenomenal consciousness as explained by neurobiology and self-consciousness that falls outside the realm of neurobiology. That we are aware of our perceptions and feelings cannot be understood without the assumption of a self or an ‘I’; and thus, not without assuming self-consciousness. The project can provide no account of the phenomenal consciousness of beings who are self-conscious as well.

96 Singer 2002a, p. 70; Singer 2006, p. 135a 97 Singer 2006, p. 135a; cf. Singer 2002a, p. 70

20 

 Introduction

However, Singer is convinced that the limits of his project are only encountered if we want to explain “how our self-concepts emerge, our self-awareness and our experience to be an autonomous agent who is free making decisions.”⁹⁸ Thus, what neurobiology cannot explain has to do with some concepts that are supposedly necessary to describe self-consciousness  – the concept of a self or of an ‘I’ – on the one hand and with certain self-experiences on the other. These experiences include that of being an “autonomous agent” and the experience of being a “mental entity”.⁹⁹ I first consider how Singer wants to resolve the conceptual shortcomings of his project, and then discuss his explanation of what he considers self-experiences to be. He proposes the “hypothesis” that “self-concepts” emerge from “cultural evolution.” This occurred in the course of biological evolution and has led to creatures whose brains possess an “inner eye” and are able to construct mental models of themselves or of other living creatures, i.e., to develop a “theory of mind”.¹⁰⁰ We have already seen that the neural implementation of an “inner eye” does not explain the existence of meta-representations, much less an ‘I’ or self as the subject of such representations. Therefore an explanation has to be provided by developing a “theory of mind”. That requires the ability to ascribe mental states and actions to oneself and to others; and to explain one’s own behavior to others, and the behavior of others to oneself, on the basis of such ascriptions.¹⁰¹ This ability has been empirically studied in autism research, since autistic people have difficulty attributing mental properties to others. The ability can be impaired to varying degrees and neuroscientific research into autistic patients is trying to identify the neural basis for these deficits. Studies based on noninvasive imaging techniques have shown that ascribing mental properties to others is connected with the activation of brain regions that are also stimulated when one is aware of one’s own thoughts, feelings and actions. In autistic patients, the activation of these areas is significantly impaired.¹⁰² Thus, the ascription of mental states to oneself and to others seems to be connected with the activation of the same brain areas. What can be concluded from these findings in regard to Singer’s claim that a “theory of mind” plays an important role in the formation of “self-concepts”? If the emergence of those concepts has something to do with the emergence of self-consciousness, then one should assume that knowledge of one’s own

98 Singer 2002a, p. 73 99 Singer 2002a, p. 73; Singer 2006, p. 136b 100 Singer 2002a, p. 73; Singer 2006, p. 135b 101 Cf. Zahavi 2008, p. 179–183 102 C. Frith/ U. Frith 2000, p. 233–258

B Neuroscientific Accounts 

 21

mental states is acquired in more or less the same way as knowledge of the mental states of others. This assumption is shared by many theorists.¹⁰³ However, having a “theory of mind” presupposes that one understands the distinction between self- and other-ascription of mental states and thus it cannot explain the emergence of “self-concepts”. The path of the “cultural evolution” of these concepts, as outlined by Singer, seems to fall foul of petitio principii. Furthermore, Singer is definitely going beyond the findings of empirical research on autism when he talks of a “dialogue between brains”¹⁰⁴ and attributes to the brain the “ability to create mental models of the states of other brains”.¹⁰⁵ Thereby, abilities and capacities that people only have under certain neuronal conditions are transferred to properties of the brain and its different areas. This transfer from what is only possible under certain neural conditions to the conditions themselves is explicitly intended. Singer claims programmatically: “Self-consciousness and all the phenomena derived from it, those that require a first person, a first-person perspective, would be therefore phenomena that have to be attributed to the individual brains as their foundations …”¹⁰⁶ Thus, Singer insists, whatever is based upon the brain and its neural activities has to be attributed to the brain. This is not a good argument, however: if my bad mood is due to my stomach problems, it is not my stomach that is in a bad mood. In other words: causal dependencies do not justify a referential transfer of predicates. Only people can be engaged in dialogues with each other, and we have this ability only because of a particular organization and functioning of our brains. It does not follow that it is the brain that is engaging in dialogue. The very idea of an “intercerebral discourse” is science fiction. Singer’s assumptions about the content of our self-experiences deal with different topics. The experiences have something to do with the idea that one is “an autonomous agent … free to decide” and that we sense “our I being a mental entity”.¹⁰⁷ He treats these experiences as having an “illusory component” and wants to describe their “psychological emergence” in terms of developmental psychology.¹⁰⁸ Singer emphasizes the interactions between caregivers and children over their first two to three years of life. Whatever one may think of such an explanation, it is clear that Singer does not attempt to prove that we experience ourselves according to his descriptions. He also does not explain why we experi103 Cf. Zahavi 2008, 183–189 104 Singer 2002a, p. 73; cf. Singer 2000, p. 339; 340 105 Singer 2002a, p. 73 106 Singer 2000, p. 340 107 Singer 2002a, p. 73 108 Singer 2002a, p. 74–75

22 

 Introduction

ence ourselves in this way and not in others. In short, one can say that cultural evolution as he outlines it explains neither the notion of self nor the content of our self-experiences. This has to do with the lack of clarity and precision of Singer’s terms: self-concept, self-consciousness and ‘I’ as a mental entity. These concepts, used alone without further explication, cannot provide a particular and specific explanandum.

C Evolutionary Biology Now I turn to considerations of the topic ‘I’ that could be understood as a clarification of Singer’s cultural evolution. In his book The Cultural Origin of Human Cognition, Michael Tomasello argues that children are social, even “ultra-social,” in comparison to primates, especially chimpanzees.¹⁰⁹ He justifies his claim by pointing out that children aged 9 to 12 months are able to establish triadic relations between themselves, a reference-person and an object or event (the ninemonth revolution).¹¹⁰ In these relations of “joint attention,” the caregiver directs the attention of the child to something, or attends and responds to signals from the child who has noticed something. These different types of behavior are, according to Tomasello, manifestations of intentional behavior and of understanding oneself and others as intentional agents.¹¹¹ To understand others as beings “like me” presupposes a certain kind of self-understanding and self-experience. The priority of self-understanding over understanding others is justified by the epistemological assumption of direct self-knowledge and by the conceptual assumption that children have an idea of themselves that allows them to represent their experiences and behavior as “experiences of the self” or “self-agency”.¹¹² In a paper published later and written in cooperation with colleagues, Tomasello gives a different, less “Cartesian” version of the nine-month revolution which makes even stronger assumptions about the ability of children in their first year to attribute mental states to themselves and others.¹¹³ They are not only able to understand themselves and others as “intentional actors,” but can also interact and cooperate. This is based on shared intentions. Such behavior does not consist only of having the same goal and being aware of it, which also holds true for

109 Tomasello 1999, p. 59 110 Tomasello 1999, p. 61–77 111 Tomasello 1999, p. 69 112 Tomasello 1999, p. 69–70 113 Tomasello 2005

C Evolutionary Biology 

 23

competitive situations in which the goal will be reached by only one actor without the help of others. In cooperative situations, it is essential for the participants to understand that the goal can only be achieved with the help of others. The participants do not merely have the same intentions, they also share a commitment to carry them out through cooperation. To be able to reverse their roles and offer mutual aid, they must have a representation of their own actions and those of other participants.¹¹⁴ According to Tomasello, this representation is a “bird’seye view” of things, and is explained by referring to the distinction between a first-person and a third-person point of view.¹¹⁵ By connecting the two, it is possible to gain an understanding of cooperative behavior from a “bird’s-eye view”. A necessary but not sufficient condition for cooperative behavior is the ability of the participants to ascribe intentions to themselves and to others. Cooperative behavior is distinguished by the fact that the participants are able to attribute knowledge of their own intentions towards others and to attribute knowledge of the others’ intentions towards themselves, individually. Shared knowledge also requires that the participants have knowledge of this knowledge. Because shared intentions and cooperative behavior presuppose some common knowledge of the participants, they also know that different roles require particular behavior. Children aged 12 to 18 months demonstrate such understanding; they expect participants to behave in keeping with their roles in the cooperation, and are able to reverse roles.¹¹⁶ In corresponding experiments with a reference person, chimpanzees, in contrast, are unable to carry out role reversal and have no expectations with regard to the role-compliant behavior of the caregiver. Tomasello writes: “Our interpretation is that human infants understand joint activity from a ‘bird’seye view’, with the joint goal and complementary roles all in a single representational format – which enables them to reverse roles as needed. In contrast, chimpanzees understand their own action from a first-person perspective and that of the partner from a third-person perspective, but they do not have a bird’s-eye view of the interaction …”¹¹⁷ Understanding the roles of participants in cooperative action and their ability to reverse roles, implies an understanding of cooperative behavior from a “bird’seye view”. This in turn implies a representation of the behavior of the participants from a first- and a third-person point of view. This representational capacity is missing in chimpanzees. According to Tomasello, human infants understand their

114 Tomasello 2005, p. 681a 115 Tomasello 2005, p. 689b; cf. 725a 116 Tomasello 2005, p. 683a; Tomasello 2008, p. 177–179 117 Tomasello 2008, p. 179

24 

 Introduction

own behavior from the first-person point of view, as well as from the third-person point of view. The distinction between these points of view is not explained by Tomasello. He adopts it from contemporary philosophical discussion. The first-person point of view is considered an attitude of a person, which is verbalized through the use of certain kinds of sentences containing the first-person singular pronoun and a predicate in the present tense. These grammatical features are supposed to be essential for the linguistic expression of a first-person point of view; although not every sentence with these features is supposed to express that point of view. The very nature of this point of view is still controversial. However, it is uncontested that it has something to do with attitudes which are verbalized through the use of a particular class of sentences which satisfy those grammatical conditions. If Tomasello ascribes to infants aged 9 to 12 months representations of their cooperative behavior from a “bird’s-eye view”, and if such a representation is explained by referring to the distinction between a first- and third-person point of view, then the distinction can be applied regardless of speaking a language or not. Infants at such an age do not know or use language according to grammatical categories. By presupposing that chimpanzees understand their own behavior only from the first-person point of view, Tomasello is committed to the idea that the distinction between different points of view has nothing to do with being able to express one’s attitudes in a language containing indexicals and sentences in the present tense. Tomasello is apparently not troubled by this problem, since he emphasizes that knowing a language is a cooperative capacity based upon an ontogenetically prior ability to express common aims in cooperative behavior.¹¹⁸ I do not want to discuss here the general claim that the communicative use of language is rooted in the ability to perform cooperative behavior. However, that claim cannot disarm the objections of critics who point out that only the possession of language enables subjects with shared intentionality to apply the distinction between the first- and third-person points of view.¹¹⁹ To counter that objection, one has to show that the behavior of chimpanzees without such language skills and the behavior of infants who do not yet have such language skills can be described by making use of a distinction defined in terms of grammatical categories, such as indexicals and the tense forms of sentences. Tomasello, however, does not attempt to prove this. There is a further conceptual difficulty involved in such an assumption. The experiments of Tomasello and his colleagues demonstrate the ability of young

118 Tomasello 2005, p. 690a 119 Cf. Tomasello 2005, p. 724a; cf. Spelke in: Tomasello 2009, p. 162–172

C Evolutionary Biology 

 25

children to act cooperatively, which includes expectations of role-compliant behavior from the participants and the capacity to change roles. That requires the understanding of one’s own behavior and the behavior of others described as a representation of the cooperation from the “bird’s-eye view”. According to Tomasello, this representation accounts for the participants’ expectations and their ability to reverse roles. What really matters is the role-compliant behavior of the participants who expect and know that others behave according to their role. If the “bird’s-eye view” representation of cooperative activities can be described this way, then it is not clear at all why this representation can or even should be described in terms of the first- and third-person points of view, as Tomasello consistently does. For neither the understanding of one’s own behavior as role-specific behavior in a cooperative context is eo ipso a self-understanding from the first-person point of view; nor is the appropriate understanding of the behavior of others an understanding from the third-person point of view. As long as the concepts of a first-person point of view and a third-person point of view are not explicated, it remains totally unclear whether the cooperative behavior of 9- to 12-month-old infants is correctly characterized in the way Tomasello describes it. He raises the problem of justifying the application of this distinction, but does not solve it; the problem also has nothing to do with his view that “shared intentionality” in cooperative behavior is in some way ontogenetically prior to verbal communication. I began with the observation that the subject ‘I’ is not an issue that is dealt with by philosophers only. However, even if philosophy does not occupy a privileged position in this discussion, that does not exclude the possibility that it could contribute to the conceptual clarification of ideas and notions in contemporary neuroscience and biology. As we have seen, philosophical terms and concepts are often employed in the sciences without being adequately understood. Current philosophical studies of the topic ‘I’ are more or less ignored from within the sciences; whereas, they should to be taken into account for two reasons. Philosophy may contribute critical analysis and explication of key terms, as well as clarification of controversial issues in data interpretation and the evaluation of the conclusions drawn from it. That is why the debate around Gallup’s experiments is riddled with confusion about the concepts of self and self-knowledge. The same holds true for the distinction between the first- and third-person points of view for the cooperative behavior of infants and primates. The second reason to explore and study the contributions of contemporary philosophy concerns the critical assessment of current views and ideas in the sciences. For instance, Damasio’s conception of neural representations as “primordial feelings” and his “dual notion of self” have serious theoretical shortcomings. Likewise, Singer’s attribution of meta-representations to the brain identifies hierar-

26 

 Introduction

chical structures and levels of processing with different orders of representations. Taking philosophical considerations into account may contribute to a more adequate description of the empirical facts and a better understanding of the issues. In turn contemporary philosophy can benefit from the current discussions of the topic ‘I’ in the sciences. The issues discussed in philosophy are determined by different views arising from the theory of knowledge, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. These views overlap in many ways, thereby giving rise to highly specialized and restricted discussions. By considering the issues raised by the sciences, one can get an idea of the core subject area philosophy has to deal with. The topics include the concept of self and self-knowledge of one’s mental states and actions, as well as some self- and other-directed behaviors in Tomasello’s experiments. The focal points of these studies in the sciences provide the guiding framework for my work. I begin by analyzing the concept of ‘self’ and its relation to self-reference in the use of the first-person singular pronoun. Then I focus on self-knowledge; particularly the knowledge one has of one’s own mental states. I will clarify the epistemological features of this knowledge and establish that there is self-knowledge from the first-person point of view. Because the conception of this stance is understood here in a broader sense than usual, it allows for a discussion of the third focal point I have found in the sciences that deal with the topic ‘I’: the special relationship one can have with oneself as distinguished from the ways others can relate to and interact with one. I treat this topic through a discussion of the concern with one’s own future.

1 The Use of ‘I’ Sentences The different theses and theories that are concerned with the topic ‘I’ are motivated by different research interests and deal with different aspects of the subject. As I mention in the Introduction, one of the core issues concerns the concept of ‘self’. How are we to explain this concept? By transforming the reflexive pronoun into a noun, John Locke aimed to designate a particular kind of entity that is distinguished by only being accessible via consciousness.¹ He identified consciousness as an awareness of one’s own mental states and actions. The Cartesian underpinning of Locke’s notion of self can be avoided by reverting to the reflexive pronoun and considering its use in connection with first-person singular pronoun. After all, selves are beings who refer to their own states or conditions by using this pronoun; and reflexive self-awareness cannot be expressed in language without this kind of self-reference. Thus, I will explain the concept of self by examining the use of ‘I’ as it occurs in sentences. There is an obvious objection to this approach, since it assumes that one has to know a language in order to have a concept of self. This assumption is not made in traditional philosophy, and the different theories considered so far also reject it explicitly. So, why make such an assumption at all? To avoid misunderstandings, I want to point out that my approach does not presuppose the view that only beings that actually know a language are to be considered as relevant for the discussion of the issues raised in the Introduction. Below, I present some arguments in favor of such a claim; but for the time being, this should be understood only in a methodological sense. My analysis of the ability to use sentences that contain first-person pronouns identifies paradigmatic cases of different activities of human beings who know a language. This should be central in the discussion of the topic ‘I’. Even if one believes, as Tyler Burge does, that nonhuman higher animals have “lower level egocentric sensitivities or modes of reference”,² one still has to distinguish such sensitivities from the ability to articulate a “full first-person concept” that we do not ascribe to nonhuman animals or small children.³ The possession of such a concept is manifested paradigmatically by the ability to use various kinds of sentences that contain the first-person singular pronouns. This linguistic competence reveals different cognitive faculties that involve reflexive reference. I explore these abilities by examining their linguistic manifestations. This does not mean that “self

1 Locke 1694, II. 27, 9 2 Burge 1998, p. 383 3 Burge 1998, p. 259

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and consciousness would emerge after language”, as Damasio puts it.⁴ I am not concerned with genetic priorities, nor do I postulate a “verbal self”, in contrast to Damasio’s favored “nonverbal self”, whatever that may be. What matters here is to understand what the possession of a self-concept amounts to; and this will be clarified by considering sentences containing the word ‘I’. In this chapter I argue that a philosophical understanding of the use of such sentences cannot be confined to semantic issues but has to take into account epistemic issues as well. Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed this topic by distinguishing different uses of ‘I’ in terms of immunity from error through misidentification; but there are other peculiarities in the use of ‘I’ sentences. A complete account of the use of such sentences has to focus on how the attitude of the first-person point of view is invoked. I will start with semantic considerations concerning the pronoun ‘I’ and then account for the other features of its use. In contemporary philosophy of language there is growing interest in the semantics and pragmatics of indexicals, which include demonstratives, personal pronouns and temporal adverbs. What does the pronoun ‘I’ refer to? The obvious answer is that it refers to the person uttering it. Consequently, Hans Reichenbach coined the term token-reflexive. He claims: “The word ‘I’ … means the same as the person who utters this token …”.⁵ To understand this statement one must grasp the distinction between words and their utterances or uses of them as tokens. The same word can be used by different speakers or by the same speaker at different times, in writing or speech. The word is an abstract entity, a type; its uses are concrete occurrences called tokens. According to Reichenbach, it is peculiar of indexicals in general that they refer to something that has to do with their different uses: “The words under consideration are words which refer to the corresponding token used in an individual act of speech, or writing; they may therefore be called token-reflexive words.”⁶ This claim can be misleading: indexicals such as ‘here’ or ‘I’ when uttered, do not refer to the utterances made by a speaker at a certain place; they refer, to a particular place or a particular person. What Reichenbach means, is rather that these words refer to something which can be determined only by taking into account the circumstances of their use. Words can only be uttered by people at a certain time and in a certain place. These circumstances constitute the context of the utterance, and words such as ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ refer to different elements of that context.

4 Damasio 2000, p. 108 5 Reichenbach 1966, p. 284 6 Reichenbach 1966, p. 284

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 29

Reichenbach says: “It is easily seen that all these words can be defined in terms of the phrase ‘this token’.”⁷ However, the meaning of ‘here’, for example, cannot be defined that way. What he has in mind is that what the word refers to in a given context can be determined by using ‘this token’.⁸ The word ‘here’, uttered by me here and now, i.e., “this token”, refers to the place where it is uttered by me. Therefore Reichenbach does not talk about the meaning of a word, as given by a definition, but rather about its referent. Concerning the first-person singular pronoun, he states that “the word ‘I’ means the same as ‘the person who makes this utterance’ …”.⁹ He considers this to be a rule for determining the referent of the word in a given context of its utterance. As David Kaplan points out, it is not the referent of the word (which can be uttered by many speakers at the same time) but rather the referent of its utterance or of the token which is determined by this rule: “‘I’ refers to the speaker or writer of the relevant occurrence of the word ‘I’, that is, the agent of the context.”¹⁰ Each use of a word occurs within a particular context, and for every context there is a particular speaker or writer, “the agent of the context”, as Kaplan says. This rule gives the meaning of the word ‘I’, understood as a rule for determining the referent of its tokens, called character by Kaplan, and allows one to determine the referent of its use in a given context. By knowing the meaning of an indexical expression such as ‘I’, ‘here’ or ‘now’, one knows how to determine the referent of its tokens. This does not imply that one knows what is referred to. That knowledge requires information about the context of a use, and there can be a remarkable difference between the knowledge of a speaker and that of a listener, as Kaplan’s following example makes clear: “I may twice use ‘here’ on separate occasions and not recognize that the place is the same, or hear twice ‘I’ and not know if the content is the same. What I do know is this: if it was the same person speaking, then the content was the same.”¹¹ It is strange that Kaplan moves from the point of view of the speaker to that of a listener to show that understanding the meaning of an indexical expression (character) may not be sufficient to know what it refers to in a given context of use (content). He does not explain the change in point of view, nor does he explain why he illustrates this point by considering different indexicals.

7 Reichenbach 1966, p. 284 8 Cf. Nozick 1981, p. 77–78 9 Reichenbach 1966, p. 284 10 Kaplan 1989, p. 505 11 Kaplan 1989, p. 505 note 30

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As far as my use of ‘here’ is concerned, I know what the term refers to in a given context of its use: the place where I am now. I may be completely wrong about where ‘here’ is: the definite descriptions I give may not refer to the place where I am. But this does not matter for my knowledge that I am here now, however uninformative this knowledge may be; it does not require that I recognize the place where I am now as the same place where I was once before, for example. For a listener, things can function very differently; the listener may guess or may just not know where I am on hearing my utterance of ‘here’. This does not imply a lack of knowledge of the linguistic meaning of the word; it probably shows a simple lack of complete knowledge of the context of my utterance, and hence the inability to identify the place where I am. As far as my utterance of ‘I’ is concerned, Kaplan considers only the listener’s point of view in order to establish his general claim that understanding the linguistic meaning of an indexical expression does not guarantee knowledge of its referent. However, what is true for listeners does not hold for the speakers; speakers cannot know that they have uttered the word ‘I’ without knowing that it refers to themselves. Hence Kaplan’s general claim that understanding the linguistic meaning of indexicals does not provide eo ipso knowledge of what their uses refer to in a given context, is true only for the listener. While, with regard to my utterance of ‘here’, he is postulating a condition which is too strong, he does not consider my use of ‘I’ from the perspective of the speaker. Kaplan’s account of the referential mechanism of indexicals fails to fit the peculiar epistemic situation of the speaker. This applies in particular to the use of ‘I’ from the perspective of the speaker. Instances of such use are conscious references by speakers to themselves: they refer to themselves and know that they do so. Not every reference to oneself is a conscious self-reference. One can refer to oneself without knowing that one does so.¹² I may be angry, for example, at the person who most recently entered the room and did not shut the door, without knowing that I am angry at myself, since I had not realized that it was me! Lucy O’Brien calls this a de facto reflexive reference represented by the schema: ‘A refers to B when A = B’.¹³ Such self-reference does not require that, in referring to B, A knows that A and B are one and the same person; but it does not rule it out, either. Furthermore, O’Brien draws a distinction between “systematically reflexive reference” and “fully self-conscious self-reference”: While the former is represented by the schema ‘A refers to A’, she defines the latter as: ‘A refers self-consciously to A’.¹⁴ The former has something to

12 Cf. Nozick 1981, p. 71–78 13 O’Brien 1995a, p. 243 14 O’Brien 1995a, p. 243

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 31

do with the linguistic meaning of the expression used by the speaker or thinker. A reference is called systematic when it is determined solely by the linguistic meaning of the expression; which does not hold either for “de facto-reference” or for “self-conscious self-reference”. The use of the word ‘I’ from the perspective of the speaker, not considered by Kaplan in the scenario mentioned, is a conscious self-reference. Ernst Tugendhat has suggested that the “rule of use” for this word is that “by means of this expression each speaker designates himself”.¹⁵ He believes that this rule provides a “definitional explanation of the word”.¹⁶ Speakers can designate themselves, however, without using the word ‘I’; e.g., by using their names or definite descriptions. Thus, Tugendhat’s “rule of use” states only a sufficient condition for designating oneself. When using names or definite descriptions, there is the possibility that speakers refer to themselves without knowing it. As far as the use of ‘I’ is concerned, no such possibility exists: its use is distinguished by the fact that it is a conscious self-reference. However, Tugendhat’s rule has to be explained in a certain way. What does a speaker refer to, if he or she knowingly refers to himself or herself? Of course, to himself or herself. However, this trivial answer needs clarification. The reflexive pronouns ‘herself’ and ‘himself’ have to be understood so that they account for the peculiar character of conscious self-reference. Elizabeth Anscombe speaks therefore of an “indirect reflexive pronoun”: “For what is in question is not the ordinary reflexive pronoun, but a peculiar reflexive, which has to be explained in terms of ‘I’.”¹⁷ What she has in mind can be explained in the following way: one can talk about or refer to oneself without knowing it, as in O’Brien’s de facto reflexive reference. The use of ‘I’, however, is distinguished by the fact that the speaker knows that he or she is speaking of himself or herself. Therefore, Anscombe claims the referent of the reflexive pronoun ‘oneself’ can be determined only by the speaker’s use of ‘I’. She objects to Tugendhat’s proposal and points out that his explanation is circular.¹⁸ This charge is justified, since what the reflexive pronoun ‘oneself’ refers to can be determined by the speaker only by means of using ‘I’. This is true of the speaker, not of the listener. O’Brien disagrees with this charge of circularity, but I think that she misses Anscombe’s point. O’Brien writes: “The general point seems to be that ‘I’ cannot be understood merely as a device of reflexive self-reference because reflexive self-reference is possible in the absence of genuine first-person self-conscious

15 Tugendhat 1979, p. 73 16 Tugendhat 1979, p. 74 17 Anscombe 1994, p. 141; cf. Castaneda 1966, p. 130–157 18 Anscombe 1994, p. 142

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self-reference.”¹⁹ But Anscombe is not concerned with the difference between reflexive self-reference and self-conscious self-reference, and does not ask for the additional conditions that must be met by reflexive self-reference in order for it to become self-conscious self-reference. Anscombe deals only with the latter: the proposal that “‘I’ is the word that each one uses when he knowingly and intentionally speaks of himself.”²⁰ This proposal is circular, because the speaker can only determine what is referred to by the reflexive pronoun by means of using ‘I’. O’Brien rejects the idea of an epistemically transparent “indirect reflexive pronoun”, but she does not show that the rule of use of ‘I’ as a device of self-conscious self-reference can be stated without the use of this pronoun.²¹ While Anscombe does not want to give an explanation of conscious self-reference by criticizing the rule of use of ‘I’ proposed by Tugendhat, O’Brien does indeed aim at just such an explanation. Her explanation has two parts: the semantic claim that the word ‘I’ is a device for designating the person who uses it; and the epistemic claim that the speaker knows they are using the word this way when they use it.²² By understanding the meaning of ‘I’ – that is, the rule of its use – I know that when people use it they refer to themselves. As Kaplan shows in his scenario, it is possible that this knowledge is not yet sufficient to identify who is referred to in a given context of its use, and it is certainly not sufficient for knowing that one refers to oneself. Therefore, O’Brien claims that one has also to know that one uses the word according to its rule of use. Thus, conscious self-reference is explained by the knowledge a speaker has when using the word ‘I’. But how does the speaker know about that use without knowing that they themselves are using it in that way? This explanation of conscious self-reference seems to presuppose that which has to be explained. As O’Brien herself points out: “Therefore, this explanation seems to have left an unexplained capacity for self-identification – identification of myself as the user of the term – at the heart of the account.”²³ However, the real problem is not that the explanation makes use of something that has not been explained, but rather that the proposed explanation is circular, because knowing one is using a word in a certain way presupposes a conscious reference to oneself. O’Brien calls this an “identification of myself as the user of the term”. She does not explain the concept of identification, and this may well cause confusion.²⁴ Whatever terminology one adopts, the issue remains: if you 19 O’Brien 1994, p. 278 20 Anscombe 1994, p. 142 21 Cf. O’Brien 1994, p. 279–280 22 Cf. O’Brien 1995a, p. 238 23 O’Brien 1995a, p. 238 24 Cf. Evans 1982, p. 218

1 The Use of ‘I’ Sentences 

 33

know you are using a word in a certain way, this self-knowledge presupposes a conscious self-reference. O’Brien sees a way out of this difficulty by analyzing the kind of knowledge we have about our own actions. Wittgenstein already pointed out that “I do not relate to my actions by observation.”²⁵ If that is correct, or at least often correct, then my knowledge of my actions cannot always be based on observation. How, then, do I know of them? O’Brien writes: ”… if I am aware of an action through participation then that awareness provides me with sufficient grounds for concluding that the action is an action of mine.”²⁶ She seems to suggest that our knowledge of our actions is somehow inferred. What could the justification of this inference be, if not an observation of my behavior? However, she wants to exclude that possibility: “I suggest that we have an awareness of ourselves through participation in our actions – whether physical or mental – which is non-observational or quasi-observational.”²⁷ It should be noted that she does not mention knowledge anymore, but rather some kind of “awareness” or consciousness. How are they related to each other? It is also striking that what we are aware of is described in two different ways: sometimes as actor, sometimes as action; as can be seen from the quotations. This needs to be clarified; but above all, it is important to show that awareness of one’s own actions can be explained without any conscious reference to oneself. O’Brien claims such an awareness does not refer to anything: “The thought is that the kind of knowledge we have of ourselves in acting – call it knowledge by participation – is different from our knowledge of others in being non-referential. Consider what might be a helpful analogy: when it is said of me that I enjoy myself, it is not usually the claim that there is an object – myself – that I enjoy. I just enjoy myself.”²⁸ I do not believe her analogy is illuminating because such a feeling has a particular content: one’s own joyful condition, compared to being bored. But even if one adopts the view that there are nonrepresentational phenomenal states of consciousness, nothing would follow that is relevant to self-knowledge of one’s use of a word. That knowledge is not just a conscious phenomenal state, as suffering pain or enjoying oneself are. However, it is not even necessary here to clarify the much discussed issue of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and self-knowledge, because O’Brien is concerned with the explanation of conscious self-reference through the use of ‘I’. Thus, all we need is to consider a particular kind of action: the use of that word in accordance with its meaning. Is there any

25 Wittgenstein 1984, § 712; cf. Anscombe 1966, p. 49–53 26 O’Brien 1995a, p. 246 27 O’Brien 1995a, p. 246 28 O’Brien 1995a, p. 248

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reason to believe that we have non-referential self-knowledge of such an action? I use the word according to the rule that it refers to its user. Not only do I use it this way, but I also know that I do so. This knowledge is supposed to be a particular kind of knowledge: “knowledge through participation”; and it refers to me or to my doing. The term ‘participation’ can denote the special relation that holds between me and my doing: I do not observe my doing. Participation, not observation, is the foundation of my self-knowledge.²⁹ However, the term ‘participation’ is also used to identify a particular kind of knowledge: our knowledge of our own actions is not knowledge of anything, it is non-referential knowledge.³⁰ If ‘participation’ is understood in the former sense, it relates to the foundation of my knowledge that I am referring to myself by using the word ‘I’ according to its rule of use. That knowledge shares such a character with the knowledge I have of my actions, as pointed out correctly by Wittgenstein and Anscombe: I use the word according to the rule that its use refers to the person who uses it. O’Brien points out that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for conscious self-reference by the speaker.³¹ Since self-knowledge by participation is not confined to the knowledge of one’s use of words, participation as the source of our knowledge cannot by itself explain the conscious self-reference of the speaker when using the word ‘I’ according to its meaning. Thus, we have to stick to the particular content of this self-knowledge, i.e., the use of the word according to its meaning. As stated by O’Brien, that action considered by itself does not explain the conscious character of self-reference. Why should the additional claim that the knowledge of such an action is knowledge by participation, explain this? We have this knowledge of our actions that have nothing to do with the use of words according to their meaning in general or with self-reference in particular. Thus, O’Brien does not show that the conscious and meaningful use of the word ‘I’ as participatory knowledge explains conscious self-reference. Let us consider now the second interpretation of the term ‘participation’. It has something to do with “the kind of awareness a subject has of himself in acting”.³² It is non-referential knowledge of our present actions: knowledge from the first-person point of view, because it is knowledge of my way of using words and not the ways of others. It refers to my present use and not to my use two hours ago. My self-knowledge is not based on observation or inference. However, it does not follow that knowledge from the first-person point of view is non-referential

29 O’Brien 1995a, p. 246 30 O’Brien 1995a, p. 248 31 O’Brien 1995a, p. 249 32 O’Brien 1995a, p. 246

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self-knowledge or, as O’Brien puts it, “self-conscious (though non-referential) knowledge of our own actions”.³³ Quite to the contrary! The distinguished character of self-knowledge from the first-person point of view cannot be explained without accounting for its content, and thus for what it refers to. It is knowledge about me and my present actions; it is a special kind of referential knowledge. Thus, knowledge by participation does not exclude the referential character of that knowledge; because it is self-knowledge from the first-person point of view, this knowledge presupposes conscious self-reference and therefore cannot explain it. Let us take stock. We have seen that a semantic explanation of the meaning of the word ‘I’, as proposed by Kaplan and others, does not account for its use. It consists of a conscious self-reference and the reflexive character of the reference cannot be established by the referring subject, except by using this very word. Its use is constitutive of and indispensable for conscious self-reference. O’Brien’s project to explain conscious self-reference by a kind of self-knowledge that does not presuppose such a reference, fails. In what follows, I defend my claim that the use of ‘I’ consists of a conscious self-reference, against Anscombe’s claim that it is not a way of referring at all, and also against Wittgenstein’s assumption that we have to distinguish between two different ways of using the word ‘I’. As we will see below, Anscombe’s view is entailed by Wittgenstein’s; and the criticism of the latter bears upon the former as well. According to Anscombe, there are two kinds of “guaranteed reference” involved in the use of ‘I’. First, there is something that is referred to by a speaker who uses it. Second, what the speaker is referring to cannot be wrong.³⁴ While the “guaranteed existence” of what is referred to is neither contested nor explained, Anscombe extensively criticizes the idea of “immunity to mistaken identification”. She writes: “Getting hold of the wrong object is excluded, and that makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But the reason is that there is no getting hold of an object at all.”³⁵ What does she want to explain? To claim that the use of ‘I’ having “immunity to mistaken identification” is wrong, could mean that there is a possibility of such an error. Anscombe, however, does not make that claim, because she agrees that “getting hold of the wrong object is excluded”. What she criticizes is the claim that the use of ‘I’ has the mentioned immunity because an error through misidentification is excluded. In other words, she accepts the view that such an error is excluded, but she rejects the claim that one has to assume for this reason that there is a special kind of reference distinguished

33 O’Brien 1995a, p. 249 34 Anscombe 1994, p. 151–152 35 Anscombe 1994, p. 153

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by “immunity to mistaken identification”. She wants to explain why we conclude that there is a special kind of reference “erroneously from the immunity to mistaken identification”. There can be no risk of misidentification, Anscombe claims, because there is no identification or reference to anything at all. Thus, there are conceptual reasons for the immunity to mistaken identification. For Anscombe, that immunity is a result of the fact that the question of a possible reference-mistake does not arise; the immunity does not consist of a special kind of reference which is immune to any mistaken identification. This conceptual interpretation of the immunity resumes a famous claim of Wittgenstein. His considerations, even if they are not cited explicitly, form the background of Anscombe’s view that the use of ‘I’ does not “make a reference at all”.³⁶ Her view presupposes the claim that reference is always an identification, which I now discuss by considering Wittgenstein’s arguments for immunity to error through misidentification. Wittgenstein distinguishes between the use of ‘I’ as subject and the use of ‘I’ as object and explains his distinction by examples. ‘I’ as subject is used in sentences such as ‘I have a toothache’ and ‘I think it will rain’; sentences in which ‘I’ is used as object are, for instance: ‘I have a broken arm’ and ‘I have grown six inches’. What is the difference? According to Wittgenstein, the latter cases “involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error”, while in the former cases “there is no question of recognizing a person … and no error is possible …”.³⁷ Thus, Wittgenstein’s distinction is a distinction between use of ‘I’ which is immune to an error of recognition or identification, and use of ‘I’ which is susceptible to this kind of error. The examples of the first use have to do with the self-ascription of mental properties while the examples of the second use are self-ascriptions of physical properties. Is the distinction between different uses of ‘I’ related to the distinction between a subject having mental properties on the one hand and a subject having physical properties on the other? Wittgenstein points out that “the idea that the real I lives in my body is connected with the peculiar grammar of the word ‘I’”.³⁸ The distinction between different uses of ‘I’ is part of this grammar; and grammatical mistakes may lead to errors in how to conceive the relation between an I and its body. Such a mistake would be to confuse the use of ‘I’ as subject with the use of ‘I’ as object and, thus, to conceive the latter as referring to something which is “recognized” or identified by its mental properties.³⁹

36 Anscombe 1995, p. 154 37 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 67 38 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 66 39 Sluga 1996, p. 335

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However we assess this diagnosis, it is at least clear that Wittgenstein is concerned with the mistake of modeling the use of ‘I’ as subject on the use of ‘I’ as object. This mistake can be avoided by considering the different uses as fundamental and not reducible to each other. Let us take a closer look at the use of ‘I’ as object. He gives the following example: “It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine, when really it is my neighbor’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one of mine.”⁴⁰ It is a mistaken self-ascription which, correct or not, is based upon an inference. There is the possibility of a mistake. But why should this possibility be constitutive of a special use of ‘I’? Wittgenstein’s example shows only that there are indexical self-ascriptions, based on inferences, that can be wrong. What about the use of ‘I’ as subject? As an example, he mentions the statement that I have a toothache and says that “it is … impossible … that I should have mistaken another person for myself …”⁴¹ What he wants to point out has nothing to do with my knowledge of having a toothache: but it is a special feature of my reference to myself, because the impossibility of a mistaken reference is highlighted through the meaningless question: “Are you sure that it is you who have pains?”⁴² Thus, Wittgenstein wants to distinguish between different uses of ‘I’ in cases where I can mistake another person for myself, and others in which there is no such possibility. But does this distinction really have something to do with the use of the word ‘I’? Or does the distinction refer to the self-ascribed beliefs mentioned and to the different ways one may acquire such a belief? As far as my present toothache is concerned, I cannot be wrong about whether I have it; while under certain circumstances, I may be wrong about whose arm is broken. However, it depends on the circumstances, and thus the way I acquire the belief about myself, which explains the possibility of a mistaken identification; not all my beliefs about my arms are based on identification. Even if my beliefs are based on identification, the possible mistakes have nothing to do with a special kind of use of ‘I’, but rather with the special way I acquire my belief. With regard to my own pain, the possibility that my pertinent beliefs are based on inference does not make sense. Thus, Wittgenstein claims that there are two different uses of ‘I’, but the examples given by him are of different kinds of beliefs that are distinguished by the way we acquire them. While I have a direct, non-inferential knowledge of my current pain and there is no other way for me to have such knowledge, the same

40 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 67 41 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 67 42 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 67

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does not hold for my knowledge of the condition of my arm in general. However, this distinction has nothing to do with different uses of ‘I’; rather it is between different ways of acquiring different self-knowledge. Can we explicate the thesis of different uses of ‘I’ without relying on this distinction? Wittgenstein first distinguishes between indexical self-ascriptions susceptible to mistaken self-reference and immune indexical self-ascriptions. Then he distinguishes between self-ascriptions that are based on the identification of the speaker and those that are not. These two distinctions are connected: self-ascriptions are prone to mistaken self-reference if they are based on an identification of the speaker; and they are not prone to mistaken self-reference if they are not based on an identification of the speaker. Thus, self-ascriptions are susceptible to mistaken self-reference if and only if they are based on an identification of the speaker. I think this way of drawing a distinction between two uses of ‘I’ can be explained by distinguishing the different kinds of beliefs about oneself according to the evidence one has for them. By way of confirming this view, I consider the case in which the use of ‘I’ is prone to mistaken self-reference, but use an example that is not as far-fetched as Wittgenstein’s broken arm. I return to my room, see an open window and think that I opened it before leaving. However, this is a mistake. Unbeknown to me, a burglar left my apartment through the window shortly before my return. In such a case, I do not confuse myself with the unknown burglar, but I am wrong about who opened the window. The mistake is that I consider myself to be the agent who brought about a situation for which someone else is in fact responsible. My belief is explained by my background beliefs about who, given my current situation, is responsible for the condition of my room. The mistaken self-ascription is based on these beliefs: it is an inferential belief. It may be said that I confuse myself with someone else; with the burglar who opened the window. My mistaken belief is that I was the one who opened the window, when this identification is not true. It may also be said that I think that I am someone I am not. However, if I recognize my mistake, retrospectively I will say that I did not know who opened the window; I will not say that I did not know who I was. If we apply Wittgenstein’s considerations to this case, we have to define the notion of mistake more precisely. He says that “I have mistaken another person for myself.”⁴³ But this is misleading because this can be said about me only by someone else. What, from the standpoint of another person, can be described as “having mistaken another person for myself”, I can express only by correcting my self-ascription. I believed that I had done something, and that belief was wrong. What I believe about myself is not wrong because it does not refer to me, but to

43 Wittgenstein 1965, p. 67

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 39

someone else; the belief is wrong because I consider myself to be someone I was not by ascribing an action to myself that I did not perform.⁴⁴ Therefore, it is not the use of ‘I’, but the self-ascription as such that involves the mistake. Wittgenstein is wrong because he transfers what can be said only of the belief expressed by the whole sentence to the use of ‘I’. His distinction is not between different uses of this word, but different kinds of self-ascription. Therefore, in the philosophical discussion of issues raised by Wittgenstein, his distinction between different uses of the word ‘I’ has been substituted by a distinction between different kinds of self-ascription. Shoemaker introduces the notion of mistaken self-reference the following way: “… a statement ‘α is φ’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘α’ means that the following is possible: the speaker knows some particular thing to be φ, but makes the mistake of asserting ‘α is φ’ because and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be φ is what ‘α’ refers to.”⁴⁵ Thus, it is the statement as such which is exposed to the risk of error of mistaken self-identification. The mistake has something to do with the evidence one has for believing the proposition. One can know that something or other is φ without knowing which object it is. This possibility is a presupposition of the mistake described by Shoemaker. Mistaken self-identifications rest on wrong beliefs regarding one’s identity. As far as indexical self-ascriptions are concerned, these mistakes can occur only if they are established by inference. Given Shoemaker’s explanation of error through misidentification, how can he account for Wittgenstein’s immunity to such error? The immunity requires the exclusion of the possibility that one knows that something or other has a property without knowing who or what has that property. But how can this possibility be excluded? It always seems to be possible to know that a property is instantiated without knowing what instantiates it. Since we are dealing with indexical self-ascriptions, we have to consider the exclusion of this possibility with reference to the ascribing subject. Such a possibility requires that one can know a predicate may apply to someone without knowing that it is applied to oneself. So, one can ask the question: ‘Something is F, but is it me?’.⁴⁶ An indexical self-ascription has immunity to error through misidentification if one cannot ask this question. Which self-ascriptions exclude the possibility of this question? Shoemaker points out that there is a special class of psychological predicates “each of which can be known to be instantiated in such a way that knowing it

44 Cf. G. Strawson 2012, p. 219–220 45 Shoemaker 1994, p. 82 46 Cf. Evans 1982, p. 189–190

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to be instantiated that way is equivalent to knowing it to be instantiated in oneself.”⁴⁷ Hence, we have to distinguish between different ways of knowing that a psychological predicate is correctly applied. These ways of knowing have something to do with the reasons or warrants we have for our knowledge claims. Concerning self-ascriptions which are immune to error through misidentification, there has to be a way of knowing that, if a predicate is correctly applied at all, it entails the knowledge that it is applied to oneself. Thus, the question: ‘Someone is F, but is it me?’ cannot be asked. Self-ascriptions that are immune to error through misidentification are distinguished by the way one knows that the predicate is correctly applied to a particular person. By considering the example of knowledge of one’s pain, we can illustrate the general idea: you may believe I am in pain by mistaking the painful face of someone standing next to me for my painful face in the mirror; but this cannot occur to me. I know my pain in such a way that the question ‘someone is in pain, but is it me?’ cannot be asked. This is not true of all psychological predicates. Observing the behavior of my neighbor, I may realize that someone has upset her; and although that person is me, I do not know who it is. To know that the predicate ‘has upset my neighbor’ is correctly applied does not entail knowledge of who has upset her. This is also true of the predicate ‘is in pain’: I can know someone is in pain without knowing who is in pain. What distinguishes this case from the case of upsetting my neighbor is the fact that if I do not know who is in pain, I know ipso facto that it is not me who is in pain. Thus, it is not the use of the predicate in general, but its self-ascription which has a special status. To know it is true does not consist of knowing a predicate is correctly applied and of correctly identifying the object it is applied to. There is something special about the self-ascription of it, because to establish that it is correctly applied and to identify what it is applied to, are not independent of each other. This interdependence reveals that the immunity to error through misidentification has something to do with the first-person point of view. Shoemaker does not deal with this topic, because he does not clarify the special kind of self-knowledge we have when self-ascribing a predicate that exhibits the mentioned interdependence. He draws attention to a fact about the use of certain psychological predicates, but does not attempt to explain it. Neither does he determine the class of indexical self-ascriptions that have immunity to error through misidentification. These two shortcomings are connected: Shoemaker does not give an account of the class because he does not explain the fact mentioned. In this respect, the considerations of Evans are more promising; although his explanation has serious drawbacks.

47 Shoemaker 1994, p. 90

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Like Shoemaker, Evans conceives immunity to error through misidentification to be a property of the statement as such and not a feature of the use of the first-person singular pronoun. Unlike Shoemaker, however, he believes that the immunity has something to do with the warrant one needs for such a statement.⁴⁸ According to Evans, not only indexical self-ascriptions have this immunity, but so do statements containing indexicals such as ‘here’ or ‘now’ and demonstratives as well.⁴⁹ What is peculiar about the immunity of indexical self-ascriptions is explained by reference to those other immune statements. They are singular statements which are made, in the simplest cases, by the use of sentences yielded by connecting a one-place predicate ‘F(x)’ to a singular term ‘a’. Evans draws a distinction between two ways of coming to know the truth of a statement ‘F(a)’. First, one may have inferential knowledge through knowing that F(b) and that a = b. The knowledge F(a) is “identification-dependent”.⁵⁰ Secondly, one may have “identification-free” knowledge of F(a). Knowledge is “identification-free” if and only if it is not “identification-dependent”. In order also to exclude the attributive use of definite descriptions which are immune to error through misidentification, in the sense of Donnellan, Evans defines a narrower notion of “identification-free” knowledge which is “identification-free” in the sense explained and “based on a way of gaining information from objects.”⁵¹ In this way he hopes to account for the particular information-link between a perceiving subject and an object.⁵² I will always use the notion of “identification-free” knowledge in this second, more restricted sense. In what follows, I first discuss this notion and then discuss its application to self-knowledge. Evans deals with beliefs acquired via perception which can be expressed in a language through the use of demonstratives or indexicals. If I believe it is rather hot here, my belief is based on my immediate awareness of the temperature in the place where I am. This awareness is non-inferential knowledge based on my feelings or sensations here and now. Therefore, the belief that it is hot here is not based on the beliefs that it is hot somewhere and that that somewhere is here. Acquiring beliefs via perception does not require one to identify or draw a conclusion regarding the place where one experiences the sensation. I have “identification-free” knowledge of the place in accordance with my current perceptions; and this knowledge is quite different from the knowledge I acquire by listening to somebody on the phone say:

48 Evans 1982, p. 218–219; cf. Wright 1998, p. 19 49 Evans 1982, p. 218–220 50 Evans 1982, p. 180 51 Evans 1982, p. 181; cf. Donnellan 1966, p. 285–289 52 Cf. Evans 1982, p. 145–151

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it is rather hot here. In the latter case, my knowledge of the place where it is hot depends on my knowing the place the person is calling from. Hence, this knowledge is based upon an inference and I may misidentify the place where it is hot – especially in these times of mobile phones. The “identification-free” knowledge of places and things which is immune to error through misidentification results from the cognitive situation of a perceiving subject; and a mobile phone scenario is obviously not of that kind. How can this distinction be applied to our self-knowledge? Consider first the case of “identification-dependent” self-knowledge. This is inferential knowledge: I know I am F, because I know a certain person is F, and I know I am that person. We have this kind of self-knowledge when we are stopped by the police for speeding due to the results of their radar equipment, or when I realize that I broke the teapot because I know the person who was last in the room did it, and I am that person. This self-knowledge is not immune to error through misidentification because the assumption of identity may be wrong. Obviously we have self-knowledge that does not depend on an identification of the subject of that knowledge. Can we explain the immunity to error through misidentification using the example of my non-inferential knowledge of the place where it is pretty hot? Evans seems to have this in mind when he tries to explain the fact that our self-knowledge, which he also calls self-consciousness, is determined by the different ways we acquire knowledge about ourselves and which are connected to the various information links between our senses and our conditions.⁵³ He points out that there is an affinity between ‘I’ and ‘here’ thoughts.⁵⁴ Evans claims that immunity to error through misidentification is central to the notion of self-knowledge.⁵⁵ How can this claim be justified if this immunity is supposed to be “a straightforward consequence of demonstrative identification”?⁵⁶ Self-knowledge is knowledge whose content refers to the subject of knowledge and that can also be known by other people. The particular way in which the subject of “identification-free” knowledge knows something about themselves is distinguished by the fact that that subject cannot know that someone is F without knowing that it is they themselves that are F: the subject cannot meaningfully ask the question: ‘Someone is F, but is it me?’.⁵⁷ This question cannot be asked because it would imply excluding the self-ascription of being F; the question is not impossible because of what is being ascribed, but because of the

53 Evans 1982, p. 216 54 Evans 1982, p. 216, note 21; cf. O’Brien 1995, p. 242–245 55 Evans 1982, p. 218 56 Evans 1982, p. 218 57 Evans 1982, p. 216; 233

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self-ascription. One can know that someone is in pain without knowing who it is; and someone else may wrongly believe that I am in pain, thereby committing the error of misidentification. What matters is that the subject knows that it is they themselves that are in pain. This case is distinguished by the epistemic transparency of the feeling or sensation to its subject, and in this respect knowledge of one’s feelings differs from knowledge of one’s books or shirts. One cannot know one’s feelings or sensations without knowing their subject. This transparency is due to the way I know them. Only I can know them by experiencing them. It is this particular way of knowing, accessible to me alone, that excludes the possibility of asking the question: ‘Somebody is in pain, but who is it?’, and this way of knowing is the real foundation of my “identification-free” knowledge of being in pain. This is true, of course, only of my present feelings; and the same applies to my knowledge that I am cold now or that I have received a blow, because I notice these experiences by proprioceptive perceptions. Other people can know all this about me, but they do not know it in the same way as I do, since they cannot have my present experiences. With respect to my past feelings and sensations, I cannot know them this way either; and one can always ask the question, ‘somebody was F, but was it me?’. The self-knowledge Evans is concerned with is “identification-free” because it is gained by the subject in a particular way that is only accessible to the subject.⁵⁸ This exclusive way of gaining knowledge about oneself explains that the corresponding statements are immune to error through misidentification. This explanation differs from Evans’ explanation, which refers to demonstrative identifications and thus to a situation of perception. He claims that immunity to error through misidentification is a “straightforward consequence” of such identification and justifies this claim by pointing out the particular way we are related to the objects in our surroundings.⁵⁹ This is certainly true of our knowledge about the here and now, and sometimes even of objects we can refer to using demonstrative pronouns; but this model cannot be applied to our self-knowledge in general. Evans himself repeatedly emphasizes that the vague notion of such knowledge as some kind of perception has to be rejected;⁶⁰ and his explanation of self-knowledge, the contents of which have nothing to do with perceptions, does not refer to demonstrative identifications or the corresponding perceptions at all.⁶¹ This is particularly true when he explains our knowledge

58 Cf. Longuenesse 2012, p. 83–84; Recanati 2012, p. 185 59 Evans 1982, p. 218; 181 60 Evans 1982, p. 225; 228; 230 61 Cf. Evans 1982, p. 222; 226–228

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of our propositional attitudes.⁶² A general explanation of the immunity of our self-knowledge to error through misidentification is not given by Evans’ model of demonstrative identification; and that model cannot account for a basic feature of this kind of self-knowledge. As we will see, the explanation of the immunity of such self-knowledge as outlined above, implies that it is self-knowledge from the first-person point of view. The knowledge we gain by perception, in contrast, and which is expressed by demonstratives can be acquired by anyone in the same perceptual situation who is equipped with the same cognitive faculties; it has nothing to do with knowledge from the first-person point of view. Evans blames Wittgenstein for only being concerned with a stronger, but less interesting, concept of immunity that applies to a form of self-knowledge whose content excludes the possibility of knowing it in any way other than through its being immune to error through misidentification.⁶³ However, it is this strong concept of immunity that accounts for Evans’ criterion that the question ‘someone is F, but is it me?’ does not make sense.⁶⁴ He correctly criticizes Wittgenstein for applying his concept of immunity, i.e., of the ‘I’ as subject, only to mental ascriptions, while it holds true of certain physical self-ascriptions and even of “ordinary unreflective here-judgments”⁶⁵ as well. That Wittgenstein is wrong about the extension of self-knowledge which is immune to error through misidentification, does not imply that his concept of immunity is less interesting. It is rather this concept which accounts for the immunity of a certain kind of self-knowledge of our physical, as well as mental states, and of our actions. Evans’ considerations do not clarify the connection between immunity and self-knowledge. He correctly emphasizes that immunity to error through misidentification does not provide any reason for assuming what he calls a Cartesian conception of the self.⁶⁶ However, if the point he wants to establish is that the concept of immunity is central to our notion of self-knowledge, then it is not enough to emphasize that self-reference is “the essence of ‘I’” or “the essence of self-consciousness”.⁶⁷ These claims are rather vague and do not explain that point or why “identification-free” self-knowledge is in some way distinguished from other kinds of self-knowledge. The latter claim seems to be assumed as part of the view that immunity is central to self-knowledge, but Evans does not establish it by argument. 62 Evans 1982, p. 225–226 63 Evans 1982, p. 219–220 64 Evans 1982, 216; cf. 220–221; 224; 230 65 Evans 1982, p. 221; 185 66 Evans 1982, p. 220; 224 67 Evans 1982, p. 207; 213

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Instead Evans draws a distinction between different kinds of self-knowledge based on the traditional dichotomy of mental and physical self-ascriptions. Then he describes the various procedures by which we gain self-knowledge which is immune to error through misidentification. Concerning physical self-ascriptions, he deals with cases which satisfy his test question and employs the notion of immunity in the strong sense that Wittgenstein applied only to mental self-ascriptions. Evans’ discussion and knowledge of such self-ascription is “extremely incomplete”, as he himself admits,⁶⁸ and one cannot discover any “common thread” or general structure to our mental self-knowledge. He briefly considers the self-knowledge we have of our perceptions and beliefs.⁶⁹ Here he emphasizes the importance of the notion of immunity in the strong sense, but in his discussion he does not make any attempt to clarify the importance of this particular self-knowledge, as distinguished from self-knowledge in general by the immunity criterion. Looking at the views that deal with the use of ‘I’ as distinguished by immunity to error through misidentification, it is obvious that one cannot understand this phenomenon without taking into account a special kind of self-knowledge of the speaker. This topic is missing in semantic theories of the word ‘I’, but it is essential for an understanding of its use as conscious self-reference. Wittgenstein probably discovered the phenomenon of immunity; in any case, he pursued it vigorously. As we have seen, the distinction between I as subject and I as object has something to do with the distinction between direct, non-inferential and inferential self-ascriptions, and cannot be applied to different uses of the word ‘I’. Wittgenstein committed the error of correlating this difference between self-ascriptions with the difference between self-ascriptions of physical and mental qualities. Shoemaker has shown that the presence or absence of immunity in the use of a singular term has to do with the kind of knowledge a speaker has of the statement that contains that term. Applied to the use of ‘I’, it means that one has to consider the speaker’s knowledge of self-ascriptions. Explaining the immunity of self-reference therefore requires an account of predicates that cannot be known to apply to someone without knowing that they apply to oneself. To know that such a predicate holds true for something does not consist of knowing both that the conditions of its correct application are satisfied and the object to which it applies; rather, knowing the object is entailed by knowing that the predicate applies. Only the subject of such a self-ascription can have this kind of knowledge. It is knowledge from the first-person point of view. Shoemaker does not

68 Evans 1982, p. 224 69 Evans 1982, p. 232–233; 225–226

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account for this basic feature of self-reference as distinguished by immunity to error through misidentification. Evans accepts Shoemaker’s way of explaining the immunity as being independent of any identification. The independence is supposed to be due to the particular situation of perception and it holds for the use of ‘here’ and ‘now’, and for demonstratives as well. This expansion of “identification-free” knowledge is correct, but does not help very much when it comes to understanding the immunity of self-reference that uses ‘I’. Evans does not show how this latter kind of immunity can be explained by the immunity of demonstrative identifications within the context of a perceptual situation. His considerations focus on the fact that the possibility of asking the question, ‘something is F, but is it me?’ does not arise, and thus bring into play the special way the subject knows about certain self-ascribed predicates, already pointed out by Shoemaker. Evans does not, however, discuss this special way of knowing in the broader context of self-knowledge from the first-person point of view. Immunity to error through misidentification is a distinguishing criterion for using ‘I’ in a particular fashion and is based upon the special way a subject acquires a certain kind of self-knowledge. A subject’s privileged position when it comes to formulating self-ascriptions does not consist only of the exclusive way of knowing something about oneself, but has also to be considered within the broader context of special features of their use which have something to do with the exclusive position of the speaker. Some semantic exclusiveness can be established by comparing the use of ‘I’ sentences with the use of other indexical sentences which contain words such as ‘you’, ‘here’ or ‘yesterday’, and refer through the tense of the verb to the time of their use. Indexical terms have one and the same linguistic meaning in their various applications, but what they refer to depends on the particular context of their use. The use of the word ‘I’ shares this dependence with the use of all other indexical expressions and of all expressions which contain indexicals, explicitly or implicitly; e.g., definite descriptions or sentences. Thus, sentences containing this word can refer to different speakers in different contexts and can be used to make different statements, although they have the same linguistic meaning. Using the same expression does not imply that what is said is the same. Understanding the use of ‘I’ sentences therefore requires a context-sensitive understanding of what is said through the utterance of such sentences. To understand the use of sentences requires an understanding of their use in communication. What a speaker says by employing an indexical sentence can be repeated, confirmed or denied by some other speaker. So it must be possible for the same speaker or different speakers to say the same thing in the same context or in different contexts. What is ‘here’ for me now, can be ‘there’ for someone else; what I say about myself, another can say only by using ‘you’ or some other

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expression; and what concerns me today I can say tomorrow, only by using the past tense and the word ‘yesterday’. Indexical expressions belong to a linguistic system that enables its users to refer to the same topic in different contexts. Understanding indexical expressions requires the knowledge both that the use of the same expression with the same linguistic meaning may not say the same thing; and that the same thing can be said through the use of words with a different linguistic meaning. Invariance and variation of the indexical in use do not correlate with identity and difference in its linguistic meaning. All this is true of ‘I’ sentences, but in a stronger sense. The same sentence, uttered by different speakers, cannot say the same thing, even if the time and place of utterance are identical. To say what I say about myself, someone else must use a sentence with a different linguistic meaning. While both of us say the same thing in a given context by uttering ‘it is raining here’, we cannot say the same thing in that context by uttering ‘I am soaking wet’. Another person must use a different sentence if they want to say that I am soaking wet. Understanding the communicative use of ‘I’ sentences requires the knowledge that the speaker and listener can say the same thing only by using sentences with different linguistic meanings. In this respect, the use of ‘I’ sentences differs from the use of other indexical sentences that contain words such as ‘here’ and ‘now’. What is peculiar about the use of ‘I’ is the fact that only I can refer to me by using it. You can refer to me and say the same as I say about myself, but you must use another word. Thus, the identity of the referent and of the propositional content of what we say necessarily requires a difference in the linguistic meaning of our utterances. What is special about the use of ‘I’ has nothing to with what one refers to; but with the way one talks about it. As far as speakers are concerned, this way is determined by the exclusiveness of the fact that only they can refer to themselves by using the word. Besides this peculiar semantic fact, there are some other special features which have something to do with what is said by the use of ‘I’ sentences. These features can be determined by considering the intersubjectivity of whatever can be said in a language. An understanding of the use of ‘I’ sentences within such a framework produces two claims. First, whatever I can say about myself can be said by others as well; the utterances have the same truth-conditions: whatever can be said can be said by different speakers. Second, whatever I can say of me, I can say of others as well. The self-ascription of a predicate implies the possibility of ascribing it to others as well. There is no solipsistic use of predicates. Given these clear claims, the features I describe below are noteworthy. I and others can say and know that I am in pain, but even if we know the same thing, the evidence each of us has for that knowledge cannot be the same. While I know of my pain through my feelings, others can know of it only by observing my behavior or understanding my utterances. Thus, the criteria for self-ascribing

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certain mental predicates differ from those for ascribing them to others. Donald Davidson calls this the asymmetry of first- and other-person attribution of attitudes. It is an important epistemological feature if we are to understand self- and other-ascriptions of certain mental predicates. Another special feature has to do with the performative use of some ‘I’ sentences, called by John Austin explicit performative utterances. Given certain conditions, the use of such sentences is the performance of an act by the speaker. Austin writes: “The ‘I’ who is doing the action does thus come essentially into the picture… Moreover, the verbs which seem, on grounds of vocabulary, to be specially performative verbs serve the special purpose of making explicit (which is not the same as stating or describing) what precise action it is that is being performed by the issuing of the utterance … .”⁷⁰ The speaker does not describe himself or herself as someone who is performing the action, but the utterance is the performance of the action; and the use of ‘I’ is not a device for indicating who the actor is, but belongs to an utterance by which the speaker presents himself or herself as the agent of a particular action. The utterance of ‘I’ sentences, considered by Austin, differs from the utterance of comparable sentences in a way that is characteristic of performative utterances: in the past tense, they are self-ascriptions of an action by the speaker which can be true or false. If the word ‘I’ is substituted for a proper name, a definite description or a different pronoun, then it is an ascription of an action, usually to someone else, which can be true or false. Thus, in both cases the utterance is not the performance of the ascribed action. Performative uses of ‘I’ sentences are acts of the speaker and therefore cannot be carried out by someone else. Another person can describe what the speaker does, criticize them or whatever; but they cannot perform the action. Only I can commit myself to behaving a certain way by promising it. Someone else can state that I promised it, or can be worried about it, but they cannot make my promise. Even if they were to utter the same words as I do, it would be a different promise with a different content. To understand the performative use of ‘I’ sentences involves an understanding of the difference between the roles and attitudes that only the speaker can adopt and the appropriate reactions of the listener.⁷¹ The peculiarities of using ‘I’ sentences, as shown by their performative use, are contingent upon the fact that the speaker is doing something while others can only describe the speaker’s action or react to it in some way or other. The difference

70 Austin 1962, p. 61 71 Brandom 1998, p.  553–554. However, he overstates his view by claiming that “‘I’ finds its home language-game in acknowledgments of commitments to act …” (553)

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is not that the corresponding sentences spoken by others would have a different linguistic meaning, but that they are different kinds of speech acts. Another feature of the use of ‘I’ sentences comes into focus when we consider attitudes as being necessarily de se. Attitudes which are necessarily de se are those whose content refers to the subject of the attitude and can be adopted only by the speaker; for example, to regret something or to intend something. Only I can repent my past behavior: others can admire or resent it, but they cannot repent it. Similarly, what I intend is always my action or omission: others can want or hope that I do it, but they can intend to do only their own actions, which may consist of getting me to intend to do something. Everybody can assume attitudes which are necessarily de se, but they always refer to the subject of the attitude. Nobody else can entertain such an attitude with the same content. The exclusive role of the subject in the attitudes considered here does not imply that there is anything private about them or that others cannot assess them somehow. Rather, it is the subject who has the exclusive competence to adopt such attitudes towards his or her own doing and behaving. Attitudes that are necessarily de se are reflexive, and this reflexivity is epistemically transparent; which is guaranteed by the use of ‘I’ and its cognates, if the attitude is expressed in language. In concluding this overview of the peculiar features in using ‘I’ sentences, I wish to emphasize that a competent speaker must understand the semantic difference between such sentences uttered by oneself and the corresponding sentences that convey the same information uttered by somebody else. Both people express the same thing, but they use sentences which differ in their linguistic meaning. As we have seen, the differences cannot always be adequately described this way. First, there are ‘I’ sentences which are connected to the speaker’s peculiar knowledge; somebody else can know the same thing, but not in the same way. This is the well-known epistemological asymmetry between self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person which is based on the different criteria for self- and other-ascription of certain predicates. To know how to use such an ‘I’ sentence implies an understanding of that difference. Secondly, there is the performative use of some ‘I’ sentences which, under certain conditions, is an action of the speaker. Another person can ascribe such an action to the speaker but, thereby, only describes it. To understand the difference between performing an action and describing it is crucial for understanding performative utterances. Finally, there are attitudes which are necessarily de se: only the subject of the attitudes can adopt them, and their content refers to that subject. These are reflexive attitudes. To know how to use sentences which express such attitudes includes being aware of the speaker’s exclusive competence. These three examples show clearly that there can be differences between a speaker’s use of an ‘I’ sentence and a listener’s use of a corresponding sentence

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that cannot be entirely accounted for as ‘saying the same thing in different words’. In all these cases, speakers occupy a special, exclusive position which has to do with the way they know something about themselves, sometimes by performing an action or by adopting certain attitudes. The concept of the first-person point of view, as used here, refers to this exclusive position. Since this concept and the distinction between a first-person and a third-person point of view may be used differently in contemporary philosophy, I need to clarify my use of the terminology. First, a point of view is always someone’s point of view with regard to something. It consists of an attitude adopted by the subject of the point of view and is related to the content of that attitude. Since the content refers to the subject, these attitudes are reflexive. However, not every reflexive attitude is a manifestation of the first-person point of view. Second, such a point of view requires the possibility of a third-person point of view as someone else’s non-reflexive attitude towards the content of the reflexive, first-person attitude. Third, there has to be a difference between these two attitudes which is not sufficiently accounted for by the distinction between reflexive and non-reflexive attitudes. This last requirement is rather vague because the differences between these two points of view vary according to their application. The concept of the first-person point of view is meant to identify peculiar features of certain reflexive attitudes. This can be done by comparing them with attitudes from of a third-person point of view whose content refers to the content of the reflexive attitude from the first-person point of view. To compare these different attitudes may contribute to a better understanding of the differences between my concern with myself and someone else’s concern with me. The notion of the first-person point of view is meant to account for special features, if there are any, in the case of my own concern. This can all be illustrated by some fitting examples. If you and I both wonder about me having been rude to my neighbor yesterday, these attitudes have nothing to do with different points of view; notwithstanding the fact that clearly if I wonder about my past behavior, it is a reflexive attitude, whereas if you wonder about it, it is not. We have the same attitude to my past behavior and we may even have the same reasons. The situation is quite different if I repent my behavior, because this is an attitude about my behavior which only I can adopt. You may deplore it or assess it in some other way. Repenting is necessarily a reflexive attitude and manifests a first-person point of view: I notice that I acted wrongly and wish things had been different. I am willing to accept criticism of my behavior and take responsibility for the consequences of my actions. You may feel bad about my behavior, but you cannot repent it. To apply the distinction between the two points of view does not always require that the attitudes I adopt and those someone else adopts have to be different, although their content refers to me. You and I may know that I am in pain,

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thus we are dealing with the same attitude towards things concerning me. There is, however, a significant difference between the ways we know this fact or the reasons we have for our respective knowledge. Thus, different points of view do not necessarily entail different attitudes. The difference in the case of pain, for example, is connected to an epistemological distinction of warrants for different kinds of knowledge with the same content. This epistemological distinction is just one possible way of drawing the distinction between the first-person and the third-person point of view, as demonstrated by attitudes that are necessarily de se. The distinction I employ here is broader than that drawn by Akeel Bilgrami, who defines the first-person point of view as “the rational point of view, the point of view … of the rational deliberator”,⁷² and the third-person point of view in terms of passivity and disengagement.⁷³ I have some objections to Bilgrami’s definitions. First, his distinction does not consider the correlation between first- and third-person points of view. Therefore, the possibility that someone else can have an attitude the content of which refers to me but which necessarily differs from my attitude, is not included in his considerations. Second, my behavior regarding my feelings or sensations may be passive, but this does not exclude me from having knowledge of them from the first-person point of view. Thus, passivity does not imply a third-person point of view. Third, it is a mistake, as we will see, to identify the first-person point of view with agency and rational deliberation. The distinction between these points of view that I make here is more restricted than Thomas Nagel’s distinction between a subjective or internal and an objective or external point of view. He distinguishes between things that are not accessible or recognizable from a certain point of view, and things for which there is no such limitation.⁷⁴ Nagel believes that the mental realm or whatever constitutes consciousness can only be understood from a subjective point of view, while the realm of physics is accessible from an objective point of view; which is not really a point of view at all, but rather “a view from nowhere”. For Nagel, the subjective point of view is determined by sensory and emotional capacities and may be the same for the members of a biological species such as human beings or bats. Thus, this point of view has nothing to do with the first-person point of view.⁷⁵ Also, my notion of the third-person point of view is not defined in terms of an objective or scientific account. Nagel’s distinction is concerned with topics which may allow for a distinction between a first-person and third-person point

72 Bilgrami 2006, p. 162 73 Bilgrami 2006, p. 164 74 Nagel 1986, p. 3–9 75 Nagel 1979, p. 172

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of view, but his distinction does not account for the differences explored via the first- versus the third-person point of view. We use many ‘I’ sentences that have nothing to do with the first-person point of view. To understand their use, one only has to consider the possibility that someone else says the same as the speaker, but necessarily in other words. Furthermore, there are many predicates that are self- or other-ascribed without involving different criteria for ascribing them. However, there are sentences and predicates whose use is connected with these distinctions; as can be seen from the examples above. Therefore, one has to raise the issue of the significance of the distinction between a first-person and a third-person point of view to understand the use of ‘I’ sentences in general. I now attempt to demonstrate that significance by assuming, in the following example, that such a distinction is not relevant at all. Let us take the ascription of a predicate for which the criteria for self- and other-ascription differ. We assume that the same person ascribes the same predicate to different people. To understand a self-ascription of a predicate implies understanding the possibility of other-ascription. However, if the speaker does not know the distinction between self-knowledge from the first-person point of view and knowledge of others from a third-person point of view, the warrant for self-ascribing the predicate differs only from that of other-ascribing it by the fact that the same predicate is applied to different people. So the speaker may know that someone is in pain, but the only difference between it being the speaker or somebody else who is in pain is that the predicate applies to a different person. There are two ways of knowing that someone is in pain: by feeling it and by observing behavior or interpreting utterances. The pain of others is inaccessible via feeling: one cannot feel the pain of someone else. Thus the speaker cannot know the pain of others. If we consider the case of observing behavior and interpreting utterances, our speaker cannot know their own pain, because one does not know one’s own pain by observing oneself or interpreting one’s verbal behavior. Thus, without any distinction between the criteria for self- and other-ascription of the predicate in pain, there is no way to know that oneself or another is in pain. It would not be knowledge of what we call pain. To avoid this consequence Peter Strawson claims that the predicate belongs to a class of predicates he defines in the following way: “But it is essential to the character of these predicates that they have both first- and third-person ascriptive uses, that they are both self-ascribable otherwise than on the basis of observation of the behavior of the subject of them, and other-ascribable on the basis of behavior criteria. To learn their use is to learn both aspects of their use.”⁷⁶ Thus,

76 P. Strawson 1959, p. 108

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the possibility that someone can use the sentence ‘I am in pain’ without understanding the distinction between self-knowledge from the first-person point of view and knowledge of someone else’s state from a third-person point of view is excluded for conceptual reasons. Therefore, the speaker cannot use the sentence ‘I am in pain’ in a meaningful way. This shortcoming can be considered as a lack of linguistic competence or as a conceptual deficit. Thus, the faculty of being able to use ‘I’ sentences without understanding the distinction between the first-person and third-person points of view is a limited, restricted competence which excludes the meaningful use of all those ‘I’ sentences that rely on understanding this distinction. This result is obvious and by no means a surprise. But how can one imagine a subject with such restricted competence? It must be a being who lacks the faculty of being able to speak or think in a meaningful way about their current sensations, beliefs or desires; someone who is not able to distinguish between repenting and deploring, or intending and wanting. Continuing along these lines may lead us to all kinds of speculative thought experiments about zombies or other imaginary creatures that can be found in contemporary philosophical literature. But I will not engage in such speculations and will confine myself to the point that an all-inclusive competence in the use of ‘I’ sentences requires an understanding of the distinction between the first-person and third-person points of view. Therefore, a philosophical discussion of the topic ‘I’ and the use of ‘I’ sentences cannot be restricted to an analysis of the semantic differences between the first-person singular pronoun and proper names or definite descriptions; it also has to consider the peculiarities of a certain kind of self-knowledge and certain reflexive attitudes. Such an account will be given here in terms of the first-person point of view. Evans claims that the basic nature of the ‘I’ is self-reference and writes: “I-thoughts are thoughts in which a subject of thought and action is thinking about himself – i.e. about a subject of thought and action.”⁷⁷ This is also true for sentences that express such thoughts. By connecting the use of ‘I’ sentences to the first-person point of view, the special relationship a speaker has towards himself or herself as a “subject of thought and action” can be revealed. A philosophical analysis of the use of ‘I’ sentences must therefore consider the various self-referential attitudes of a speaker from the first-person point of view. Gottlob Frege may have been the first to notice this. However, his conception of incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts is restricted to a very narrow range of issues for which the first-person point of view is relevant. Also, once the condition of intersubjective accessibility is removed, the requirement of correlation between a first-person and a third-person points of

77 Evans 1982, p. 207

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view cannot be fulfilled anymore. I discuss Frege’s view in the next chapter and then turn to Kaplan’s theory of direct reference, as applied to ‘I’ sentences, which focuses exclusively on semantic peculiarities. His criticism misses the mark of Frege’s early insight, although it was inappropriately explicated, that there is a connection between certain ‘I’ thoughts and self-referential attitudes that have to be conceived from the first-person point of view.

2 Frege on I Thoughts Frege’s reflections on ‘I’ speech start with an analysis of communication that uses first-person-pronoun sentences. His central question is: under what conditions does a listener express a thought a speaker would formulate as an ‘I’ sentence? It is obvious that the listener cannot use the same sentence. From this basic case of communicative ‘I’ speech, Frege turns to the question of how a person’s self-reference can be understood independently of the context of the communication. As we will see, this leads him to develop some notions that are close to the concept of a first-person point of view. His considerations move him towards a general semantic theory of indexical sentences; even if the term ‘theory’ seems to be somewhat exaggerated here in view of the fact that in total they are no more than a collection of scattered remarks. However, one cannot overlook the fact that Frege made efforts to develop an analysis of first-person-pronoun sentences in the context of his theory of Sense and Reference, even if he does not use these terms explicitly, for reasons that need not be discussed here.¹ Frege’s analysis of ‘I’ sentences is guided by his interest in refuting an objection against his notion of thought: “The thought is something impersonal. A writing on a wall. Objection: a sentence, such as, ‘I am cold’.”² This remark can be understood better if one compares it with its further explication in Frege’s Logic, which he worked on in 1897. A thought is impersonal if knowledge of who, where and when that thought was expressed by means of a sentence, is irrelevant for understanding it. If we understand such a sentence, which is “written” somewhere, then we know what thought is expressed. This does not, however, apply to sentences containing indexical expressions. Frege points out: “The word ‘I’ does not always designate the same person.”³ What does this have to do with the “impersonality” of thought? To answer this question we must bear in mind that what a term designates is, for Frege, its referent and in the case of indexical expressions, that may change from speaker to speaker. To understand its referent, we must know who used the term and when. Indexical sentences seem to violate the “impersonal” character of the referent of linguistic expressions. That Frege invokes the notion of reference to explain a particular feature of these sentences, reveals what really matters: it seems that the thoughts expressed by indexical sentences are not impersonal because they seem to cancel out the “impersonality” of their referent. This gives rise to the impression that such sentences express

1 Cf. Carl 1994, p. 10–11 2 Frege 1969, p. 138, Frege 1979, p. 127 3 Frege 1969, p. 138, Frege 1979, p. 127

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a thought that “can be true for one person and false for another, and thus not true in itself.”⁴ Frege’s explication of this objection shows clearly that the “impersonality” of thought must be connected to that of its truth values. It is often irrelevant for the understanding of a thought expressed by a sentence, to know who uttered it, when and where. To know such things is also often irrelevant for knowing its referent. But if there is no referent of a sentence, uniquely determined by the thought it expresses, then it is not clear what that thought is. It is the very notion of a constant connection between a sentence and its thought and truth value, which is brought into question by indexical speech. In 1897, Frege seems to have been of the opinion that this state of affairs can be remedied if “a sentence containing ‘I’ can be cast into a more appropriate form”.⁵ What he has in mind is clear from his later remarks. He is concerned that “a thought can be clothed in a sentence that is more in keeping with its being independent of the person thinking it.”⁶ That thoughts are independent of the person who thinks them, is a central thesis of his critique of psychologism, and Frege’s involvement with indexical speech belongs within the context of that critique. This is usually not noted by those who interpret his work. If this independence is understood as implying an intersubjective access to thought, then he later appears to have denied that every ‘I’ thought can be expressed in a “more appropriate form.” In the text quoted here, Frege assumes that a thought expressed by a speaker in an ‘I’ sentence can also be expressed by a sentence containing the speaker’s name.⁷ Those who have interpreted his work have regarded this as an error that Frege committed in just one unpublished manuscript.⁸ However, it is a view that he also expressed in his first Logical Investigation, though there he held it only when he considered the communicative use of first-person-pronoun sentences with respect to the case of a listener reporting such sentences to someone else. He rejects this view, if thinking a thought does not belong to communication. The question, of whether this distinction between the “communication” of ‘I’ thoughts and merely thinking them is justified, I will leave unanswered for the time being. It should be noted, however, that Frege’s interest in indexical speech resides in his desire to eliminate a possible objection to his view that a sentence expresses one and only one thought which has a determinate truth value. Thus,

4 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, p. 134 5 Frege 1969, p. 138, Frege 1979, p. 127 6 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, p. 135 7 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, p. 134–135 8 Cf. Dummett 1981, p. 19; Kemmerling 1996, p. 12; 20

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he wants to show that indexical sentences can be interpreted in a way that fits this view. This project determines the majority of the considerations he devoted to this subject in the first Logical Investigation. Frege provides an analysis of assertoric sentences that distinguishes between the sentence, the thought it expresses and its truth value. He also determines the associated cognitive activities: thinking is grasping the thought expressed by a sentence; and judgment is recognition of the truth expressed verbally by an assertoric sentence.⁹ In this standard model for the interpretation of assertoric sentences, an assertion is considered a linguistic articulation to recognize the truth of a thought expressed by a sentence. Frege considers three deviations from this model, and in this context he develops his views about indexical speech. The first deviation concerns the use of a sentence, which expresses a thought, without really representing it as true “even if it is formulated as an assertoric sentence”.¹⁰ He refers here to poetry, which he characterizes as nonassertoric use of assertoric sentences. Since the deviation relates to the standard use of such sentences, we are dealing with “mock assertions”. The second deviation is of an entirely different kind: it concerns the semantic content of a sentence. The thought such a sentence expresses, and whose truth is recognized by a judgment, is not everything that should be regarded as the content of the sentence. Rather, its content also includes nuances that have an effect “on the feeling, the mood of the listener or to arouse his imagination”.¹¹ Therefore, Frege can say that “the content of a sentence often goes beyond the thought expressed by it.”¹² This implies that his interpretation of assertoric sentences, which is confined to the thoughts they express, does not claim to account completely for the content of a sentence. Frege is only concerned with what is asserted, defined by the thought expressed by the sentence, and with its truth value. As a third deviation from the standard model of assertoric sentences, Frege considers “the opposite” of the second case.¹³ Previously, he mentioned a thought expressed by a sentence whose content “goes beyond it”, but now he points out that the content may not contain the whole thought. Thus, Frege contrasts the case of a thought that is not the complete content of what is expressed by a sentence, with the case that the content of the sentence does not contain the thought completely. In this latter case, he adds that “the mere wording, which can be grasped

9 Frege 1918, p. 62, Frege 1967b, p. 22 10 Frege 1918, p. 63, Frege 1967b, p.22 11 Frege 1918, p. 63, Frege 1967b, p. 22 12 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 13 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24

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by writing or the gramophone, is insufficient for the expression of the thought” and that therefore this wording is “not the full expression of the thought”.¹⁴ Thus, there is a close connection between the fact that the content of a sentence does not contain the thought completely, and the fact that its wording is not the complete expression of a thought: the wording, the sentence as a verbal expression, does have a linguistic meaning, but this does not determine any thought, because the sentence is not a complete expression of a thought. This does not mean that there are sentences with an incomplete sense which express an incomplete thought, as Perry assumes;¹⁵ rather it indicates that there are sentences which are incomplete expressions of thought.¹⁶ Therefore, Frege emphasizes that in such a case “the words have to be supplemented”.¹⁷ Such supplementation does not consist of more words, but of the “accompanying conditions which are used as means of expressing the thought”.¹⁸ Perry presumes that according to Frege, only linguistic expressions could be considered as such means, but that is not Frege’s view. The third deviation from the standard model for assertoric sentences requires the scope of what is to be regarded as an expression of thought to be extended beyond the realm of “mere wording” or linguistic expression. Frege does just that by pointing to “the time of speaking” and the “accompanying conditions of speech”. The deviation consists precisely of the fact that the context of the utterance of a sentence plays a constitutive role in expressing thoughts.¹⁹ To understand the relationship between these three deviations, one must start with Frege’s standard model which presents a view of the assertoric use of sentences. Sentences express thoughts, and their use amounts to the recognition of their truth. This is reflected in the “form of an assertoric sentence” in which

14 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 15 Perry 1990, p. 53–54 16 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, 134 17 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, 134 18 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 19 Kripke 2008, p. 181–216, has misunderstood the relationship between an indexical sentence and the context of its utterance if he includes the timing of its uttering as a part of a “real sentence”: “Also included in the expression of the thought, and hence in the sentence (Satz), is not merely the verbiage, but also a time. The real Satz or expression of thought … is therefore an ordered pair: ….since it [the time of utterance] is part of the expression of the thought, the time of utterance, is for Frege, an unrecognized piece of language.” (201–202) Frege was concerned about the possibility that thoughts cannot be expressed by a “real sentence” or an “unnoticed piece of language”, whatever that may mean exactly. Kripke’s further considerations regarding the “autonymous time designations” of an uttering are inconsistent with Frege’s theory of sense and reference.

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“we express the recognition of truth.”²⁰ These two conditions are both necessary and jointly sufficient for an assertion. The deviations Frege considers are different modifications of a stable relationship between sentence, thought and assertion. The first case is a radical deviation: sentences that express a thought and may have the “form of an assertoric sentence”, but whose use cannot be considered as recognition of the truth of a thought, because “we are not speaking seriously.”²¹ So we are not dealing with assertions, but with “mock assertions.” The second deviation concerns the relationship between sentence and thought. Demarcating thought from content leads to a restrictive determination of what is asserted; only the thought expressed by a sentence is what is asserted, but that is not the entire content of the sentence. The third case concerns the possibility that some sentences do not express a thought. If we want to understand the assertions made by the use of such sentences, we cannot limit ourselves to just noticing what is said; we also have to consider the context of their use, or “certain accompanying conditions of utterance”. All these deviations show that we must consider several things to see if an assertion is made by a speaker and what is asserted. Frege’s concern with indexical sentences, which are the third case of deviation from his standard model, is how to provide an adequate understanding of assertions made by the use of such sentences. The overall issue comes to the fore by discussing a case where two speakers make the same assertions, and thereby express the same thoughts. The interest in the identity of thoughts, expressed by different sentences, guides Frege’s considerations about “the occurrence of the word ‘I’ in a sentence”.²² Frege starts with the observation of an ambiguity, which is related to the present tense in assertoric sentences: it can be used to mark the time when a sentence was uttered; it can also be used in sentences without temporal restriction – such as ‘2 + 2 is 4’. In the first case, it is important to know when the sentence is uttered; the time of its utterance belongs to the expression of the thought. Here “the time of utterance is part of the expression of thought”.²³ Furthermore, he considers the case that one can make the same assertion at different times by using different sentences with indexical time markers. The thought expressed here is determined in each case by the time of the utterance of the sentence and the indexical time information contained in it. What applies here is that: “If someone wants to say the same he said yesterday by using the word ‘today’, he

20 Frege 1918, p. 63, Frege 1967b, p. 22 21 Frege 1918, p. 63, Frege 1967b, p. 22 22 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 24 23 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24

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will replace this word with ‘yesterday’.”²⁴ Different sentences which are formed by such substitutions and the corresponding changes of tense, can therefore express the same thought. Thus, sentences may differ in terms of their linguistic meaning, but not in relation to the thought they express in different contexts of their utterance. On the other hand, the identity of linguistic meaning does not imply identity of thoughts, as Frege shows in the example of sentences that contain the word ‘I’. The point is, that “the same utterance containing the word ‘I’ will express different thoughts in the mouths of different men, of which some may be true, others false.”²⁵ In order to know what statement is made, one must know what thought is expressed by the sentence uttered. With indexical sentences, one can know this only if one knows the context of its utterance; in the case under consideration, the time of utterance and the speaker. A change of context can lead to a change of the expressed thought, and thus to a change of the speaker’s assertion. So far Frege’s views about whether and how ‘I’ sentences express a thought, and about the condition that someone else can comprehend it, can be located within the general framework of his interpretation of indexical speech. The questions that interest him, concerning “the occurrence of the word ‘I’ in a sentence,” have not yet been posed. They arise only from the considerations that follow. After Frege stated a sufficient condition for utterances of the same ‘I’ sentence to express different thoughts, he brings into focus the issue of assertoric statements, formulated by different speakers, that are to be understood to assert the truth of the same thought. The sentences in his example are: (1) I have been wounded. and (2) Dr. Gustav Lauben has been wounded. The context of utterance (1) is that Dr. Lauben in the presence of Leo Peter and Rudolph Lingens claims (1). Frege intends to clarify under what conditions (2) expresses the same thought the speaker of (1) has expressed. He assumes that (2) is a “report” of what Dr. Gustav Lauben has said by uttering (1).²⁶ This scenario considers ‘I’ sentences from the standpoint of a listener and deals with the pos-

24 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 25 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1987b, p. 24 26 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 24

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sibility that a thought expressed by them is repeated by someone else who must use the name of the speaker or some other co-referring expression. Frege starts from the obvious assumption that the thought expressed by the speaker of (1) can be understood and formulated verbally by another person. He does not consider the possibility of the report of what the speaker said containing an indexical expression that refers to him. Neither does Frege try to justify this assumption.²⁷ As the example shows, he takes for granted that someone else can only say what Dr. Lauben says in (1) by using another term instead of ‘I’. To make it clear that a thought expressed by an ‘I’ sentence cannot only be understood within the context of its utterance, Frege discusses the case of the listener Leo Peter who informs the listener Rudolf Lingens “some days later” about what Dr. Lauben said. The point is to determine whether the assertion of Leo Peter to Rudolf Lingens contains the thought the speaker of (1) expressed. According to Frege, this is the case if Rudolf Lingens, “who is fully master of the German language and remembers what Dr. Lauben said in his presence, knows at once from Leo Peter’s report that it deals the same topic”.²⁸ This consideration is based on the premise of a cognitive criterion for the identity of thoughts. Frege formulated this elsewhere as: “Two sentences A and B can stand in such a relation that anyone who recognizes the content of A as true, also has to recognize the content of B as true; and conversely, that anyone who accepts the content of B must straightway accept that of A (equipollence), assuming that it is not difficult to grasp the content of A and B.”²⁹ If one applies this criterion to sentences containing indexicals or proper names, then to know that the same thought is expressed by uttering (1) and (2) requires not only a shared understanding of a language, but some empirical knowledge as well. As Frege points out, the listener must not only be “fully master of the German language,” but in this case must also remember what was “said in his presence” and know that Dr. Lauben was the speaker of (1). This additionally required knowledge can be provided for different people in different ways; so the question of whether sentences such as (1) and (2) express the same thought, must be answered relative to the pertinent knowledge of the listeners and speakers. In other words, in sentences that contain indexicals or proper names, the thoughts they express are identified in accordance with the knowledge of the speaker or listener regarding what the expressions refer to. Furthermore, Frege discusses the question of the conditions under which (2) expresses the same thought for Leo

27 Cf. Kemmerling 1996, p. 11–13 28 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 24 29 Frege 1969, p. 213, Frege 1979, p. 197; cf. Frege 1976, p. 105–106

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Peter and Rudolph Lingens. He notes that this is only the case if they identify Dr. Gustav Lauben as the bearer of the name in the same way; for example, that he is the only doctor who lives in an apartment known to both of them. In this case, the two can grasp the same thought, even if Rudolf Lingens does not know that Dr. Gustav Lauben is the speaker of (1). However, assertion (2) by Leo Peter would no longer express the same thought that was expressed by the utterance of (1). For it to do so, it would be necessary for both to identify the referent of the name ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben’ as the speaker of (1) in the previous context of utterance. The same speaker can therefore connect different identifications with the same name, according to the context or their empirical knowledge. These considerations deal with communicative, intersubjectively understandable ‘I’ speech. That only exists for Frege if a listener grasps the same thought as that a speaker expresses via ‘I’ speech which a listener could not formulate verbally in the same way. For Frege, the possibility of expressing what is said by using an ‘I’ sentence, without using an ‘I’ sentence, is of central importance. He already emphasized this in his first discussion of indexical speech, mentioned above.³⁰ This possibility can become a reality through the listener using the name of the speaker. However, due to a restrictive criterion for the identity of thought, it is possible that different people connect different thoughts with the same sentence. There are boundaries to a shared understanding of thoughts determined by the empirical knowledge people have of the bearer of a name. This knowledge is required to identify the person and it may differ among those who use the same name. Frege says that “it matters for a proper name, how, whatever it refers to, is presented,”³¹ and thus he explains the sense of a name in a way that is well known from his earlier essay On Sense and Reference. What is presented in this way is always presented to someone – to someone who uses the name in a sentence expressing a thought, or to someone who listens to the corresponding utterance. The way of being presented to someone is determined by what knowledge of theirs it is that enables them to identify the name bearer. This conception of what is presented to someone fits very well with the position of the listener, from which ‘I’ speech has been considered so far. How can this conception be applied to understanding the use of ‘I’ sentences, when viewed from the standpoint of the speaker? Frege writes: “Now everyone is presented to himself in a particular and primitive way, in which he is presented to no-one else.”³² Is the way, in which one is

30 Cf. Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, p. 134–135 31 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 25 32 Frege 1918, p. 66, Frege 1967b, p. 25–26

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presented to oneself a special case of the way, in which what is referred to by a name is presented to a listener or a speaker? This question is answered in the negative, and those who have interpreted Frege’s work have given different reasons for this. Thus, one may claim that the use of ‘I’ in a given context does not refer to or designate anything; and therefore talking about the mode of presentation of what is designated does not make sense. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, this is what Anscombe claims.³³ But Frege believes that there is an object that “I call I,”³⁴ and that “the word ‘I’ refers to different people in sentences uttered by different people.”³⁵ Another reason for a negative answer to the question may be that the word ‘I’ is, as Andreas Kemmerling points out, “for Frege the expression of a function” , and therefore it “cannot designate any object”.³⁶ As the quotations from Frege just given show, this does not apply to a particular utterance of this word. For Frege, an expression is not the expression of a function, because it only designates something in the context of its use. In contrast to Kaplan, Frege does not consider functions whose arguments are contexts and whose values are objects, such as people, places or times. Wolfgang Künne disputes this³⁷ and quotes a remark by Frege concerning the use of the expression ‘this man’: “It is not the concept-word alone, but the whole, consisting of the concept-word together with the demonstrative pronoun and accompanying circumstances which has to be understood as a proper name.”³⁸ That this “whole” has to be deconstructed in terms of function theory according to the model exemplified by the analysis of ‘the capital of the German Empire’, is not considered by Frege.³⁹ ‘This man’ is not an incomplete expression, as ‘the capital of’ is, but an expression, “with which I want to designate… in one case this man, in another case that man. But still on each single occasion I mean just one man. The sentences of our everyday language leave a good deal to guesswork. It is the accompanying circumstances that enable us to make the right guess.”⁴⁰ Accounting for these circumstances serves to grasp what the speaker wishes to refer to by using the expression, and should not introduce a special class of functions whose arguments are “accompanying circumstances” and whose values are people. Which function should be designated by “‘I’ as a name-form-

33 Anscombe 1994, p. 154 34 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 32 35 Frege 1969, p. 146, Frege 1979, p. 134 36 Kemmerling 1996, p. 10 37 Künne 1982, p. 66 38 Frege 1969, p. 230, Frege 1979, p. 213 39 Cf. Frege 1891, p. 17–18, Geach 1952, p. 31–32 40 Frege 1969, p. 230, Frege 1979, p. 213

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ing functor”? For Künne, it is to do with a function whose arguments are “the accompanying circumstances of the individual utterances” and whose values are the respective speakers.⁴¹ But arguments are referred to by singular terms such as ‘Bavaria’ or the ‘German Empire’. There is no evidence that Frege was of the opinion that the “accompanying circumstances”, or what has to be supplied by “the pointing of fingers, hand movements, glances”, can be referred to by a linguistic expression such as a name or a definite description.⁴² The way one is presented to oneself through the use of the first person singular pronoun is not a special case of how the referent of a name is presented to a listener or speaker. This is because it is not the object itself, designated by this pronoun and presented to me in a given context of its utterance, which is “particular and original”, but the way it is presented to me. We must therefore reject Colin McGinn’s assumption: “Frege believes that I cannot really be presented with Dr. Lauben’s self at all … The reference of ‘I’ would then be inaccessible from a third-person perspective.”⁴³ Frege distinguishes clearly between physical and mental properties of a person; but he does not take a stance in favor of a dualism of physical and mental substances, and he does not assume that the subject of mental states is not intersubjectively accessible, as McGinn conjectures. The real reason why the “original and particular” way I am presented to myself cannot be understood as a special case of the ways in which the referent of a singular term is presented to someone or other, is quite different from the reasons given by those who have interpreted Frege. It has to do with the fact that Frege’s account of the means by which the referent of a singular term is presented to someone excludes the very possibility of the “particular and original way” one is presented to oneself. As we have seen, the same person can connect a different mode of presentation of an object to the same name. Of course, one can do this only in different contexts of the use of the name, because otherwise it would not be clear which thought one connects with each given sentence. The same sentence can therefore express different thoughts in different contexts of its use. In the case of thinking about oneself, Frege does not consider the possibility that one assumes an “original” and in each case different way, as a basis of how one is presented to oneself. Furthermore, for sentences that contain a name, it always “matters” that a mode of presentation is determined, but “this can happen in different ways …”.⁴⁴ The various possibilities have in common that they are means of

41 Künne 1982, p. 68 42 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 43 McGinn 1983, p. 63 44 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 25

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presenting the same object, but none of them is preferred over any other by Frege. In contrast, I am presented to myself in a particular way. Finally, it is characteristic of this conception that different people can connect with a name the same mode of presentation of the referent. This possibility allows for successful understanding. In contrast, the particular way in which I am presented to myself has no communicative function here: it cannot be conveyed to others and thus cannot be shared by them either. Thus, the general conception of a mode of presentation of what is referred to by a name cannot explain the “particular and original” aspect of my being presented to myself. Because of the differences between this way and the way in which what is referred to by a name is presented to somebody, the former cannot be understood as a special case of the latter. Frege’s assumption of a “particular and original way,” by which everyone is presented to themselves, stands rather in an explicit contrast to the ways in which what is designated by a name is presented to a speaker or listener in general. Nothing, however, is said here about the meaning and validity of this assumption; I address this issue now. The short paragraph Frege devotes to this barely contains an explanation, and is not an attempt to justify his claims. Let us start with the claim that everyone is presented to themselves. Who is this valid for? And what does it mean? Immediately before, Frege said that what is designated by a name is presented to somebody who expresses a thought by uttering a sentence containing that name. Usually, what is designated is not the speakers themselves; therefore we can assume that Frege now considers the special case of speakers using a word that designates themselves, and thus they are presented to themselves. The word ‘I’ is certainly such a word: each utterance of this word refers to the person who expresses it. So one can assume that this theory applies to people who are capable of using the word ‘I’ in a meaningful way. This is the way Kaplan understands Frege: “Dr.  Lauben is presented to himself under the character of ‘I’.”⁴⁵ Since this character consists of the rule that each utterance of the word ‘I’ refers to the person who utters it,⁴⁶ Kaplan’s interpretation claims that Dr.  Lauben is presented to himself as someone who utters the word that has this character. However, it is clear that this explication does not correspond to what Frege says. He does not mention the use of a linguistic expression, and this should not be the issue, as is shown by the fact that he considers the case in which Dr. Lauben only thinks, and does not tell others, that he has been wounded. That everyone is presented to themselves has nothing to do with the use of language. A better inter-

45 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533 46 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533

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pretation can be given by relying on Frege’s conception of thought: the thought to be connected with a sentence is determined by the mode of presentation of what is designated by the name occurring in the sentence. Putting aside “the thought, in itself insensible, dressed in sensible linguistic form”⁴⁷ and limiting ourselves to the thinking of thoughts, we can understand the thesis that everyone is presented to themselves as a claim about beings who are able to think, or more accurately, to think thoughts about themselves: thoughts in which they are the object of what the thoughts are about. Frege shows in his refutation of idealism that “there is something which is not my representation and yet which can be the object of my consideration, of my thought, and I am myself of this kind.”⁴⁸ Shortly thereafter, he declares: “I have a representation of myself, but I am not identical with this representation. What is a content of my consciousness, my representation, should be sharply distinguished from what is an object of my thought.”⁴⁹ If I myself am this object, I am presented to myself. So Frege’s thesis is concerned with beings who are presented to themselves when they make themselves “the object of their thought”. This is the case when they think thoughts about themselves. Therefore Frege is concerned with clarifying how people are presented to themselves as the subjects of reflexive thinking. If something is “the object of my thought,” I think thoughts that relate to the object, but it is not a component of those thoughts.⁵⁰ Therefore, I cannot be part of the thoughts about myself. Rather, those thoughts contain a mode of self-presentation: they are about me, but I am not a part of them. Since every thought about an object contains a way of presenting the object and not the object itself, anyone who is presented to themselves by thinking, is presented to themselves in a certain way. Nothing can be presented to a thinking being, unless it is presented to them in a certain way.⁵¹ The possibility that one is the object of one’s own thinking and the relationship between an object and the thought thereof are the two constituents that form the background for Frege’s remarkable and controversial thesis that one is presented to oneself in a particular and original way. However, these premises do not imply his thesis: it does not follow from the possibility of reflexive thoughts and from Frege’s view of how thoughts are related to the object that the thinking of

47 Frege 1918, p. 66, note 4, Frege 1967b, p.26 note 48 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 33 49 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 33 50 Cf. Frege 1969, p. 203–204, Frege 1979, p. 187; Frege 1976, p. 127–128; 245 51 Cf. Schiffer 1978. He argues for the view that there are ways of presentation, but no Fregean thoughts (179–181). His criticism of Frege relies on the assumption that a mode of presentation has to be expressed verbally by a definite description (199–201).

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those thoughts is directed at. As I said before, Frege does not endeavor to give an explanation, and so now we have to consider the thesis more closely. It concerns a mode of presentation which is: first, particular for everyone; second, original; and third, of such a kind that it is presented to nobody else in the same way. Let us start with the last characteristic, since it suggests the distinction between the way in which one is presented to both oneself and others, and a way in which one is presented only to oneself. If this way is the particular way, then the particularity has the character of exclusivity: in this way everyone is presented only to themselves. Frege’s thesis therefore is that everyone is presented to themselves in a way in which they are presented only to themselves, and that this is an original way. The thesis does not say that everyone is presented to themselves only in one way – an assumption that is explicitly rejected by Frege later on. Before I consider the relationship between the exclusivity and the originality of the modes of presentation in detail, I will briefly address the criticism that Frege’s theory is ambiguous. McGinn has raised this objection and justified it by saying that the theory either says that there is a particular way in which each person is presented to themselves and to no one else, or it is to be understood that there is a particular way in which all people are presented just to themselves.⁵² McGinn favors the second interpretation,⁵³ and states that “there is a single mode of presentation which is common to all people – they all think of themselves in the same way when they use ‘I’”.⁵⁴ Such a mode of presentation would be “a constant mode [of self-presentation] for any person, at any time”.⁵⁵ But already the wording of Frege’s remark speaks against such a reading. It also contradicts his view that not only the referent, but also the sense of an indexical expression can only be specified relative to a given context of its use. That sense should not be identified with the constant linguistic meaning of the expression, as it is for McGinn. He overlooks – as does Kaplan – the fact that the particular mode of presentation cannot be understood by recourse to the linguistic way of thinking about oneself, which is comprehensible to every speaker of the language and their way of thinking. Another objection against McGinn’s favored interpretation is that it does not account for the original character of self-presentation in thinking about oneself at all. This is because he is primarily concerned with finding an explanation for a linguistic feature of the use of indexical expressions: “The first and fundamen-

52 McGinn 1983, p. 58–60 53 McGinn 1983, p. 64–69 54 McGinn, p. 58–59 55 McGinn 1983, p. 60

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tal consideration is the constancy of the linguistic meaning of indexicals from occasion to occasion.”⁵⁶ But this was not Frege’s concern, and it is also seems highly uncharitable to consider his claim to be ambiguous; the exclusivity of the way in which one is presented to oneself is only mentioned in McGinn’s first interpretation (which furthermore should not be interpreted in Husserl’s sense, as McGinn suggests).⁵⁷ McGinn’s allegation of ambiguity is in fact incompatible with Frege’s assumption of the exclusivity of the way one is presented to oneself; that assumption is only compatible with the first of McGinn’s interpretation: the second, favored by McGinn, is incompatible with it. There are different possible ways to conceive the relationship between the exclusivity and originality of the mode in which one is, or may be, presented to oneself. These characteristics may be independent of each other, so that the mode of self-presentation is both: exclusive and original. This possibility is undermined by the fact that in the remarks immediately following his thesis, Frege only mentions “this original way” and concludes from it that thoughts in which it functions as a mode of presentation cannot be grasped by others.⁵⁸ Since this is a direct consequence of the exclusivity of presentation, one can assume that the original way is also the reason for the exclusivity of presentation. Thus, a second possibility seems to offer the view that the way I am presented to myself when I think about myself is particular because it is original. However, this interpretation emphasizes a characteristic that Frege does not explain at all. As I show later, there are considerations of his that can be helpful in this context. However, before I continue arguing for this latter interpretation, I initially consider interpretations concerning the former, i.e., understanding the exclusivity of the mode of presentation as independent from its originality. Commentators on Frege’s work tend to focus on the particularity that, understood as exclusive access, leads to the controversial assumption of incommunicable thoughts. It must indeed appear strange that Frege considers the possibility of such thoughts, although he wanted thought to be understood as something that “is able to be the common property of many”⁵⁹ and be understood by “all those who grasp it in the same way and as the same”.⁶⁰ How can he allow for incommunicable thoughts, if he argues in the same essay for the view that “I can recognize a thought, which other people can grasp just as much as I, as being independent

56 McGinn 1983, p. 64 57 McGinn 1983, p. 61; 67–68; cf. Husserl 1928, p. 82–83 58 Frege 1918, p. 66, Frege 1967b, p. 26 59 Frege 1892, p. 32, Anm. 5, Geach 1952, p. 62, note 60 Frege 1969, p. 145, Frege 1979, p. 133

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of me”?⁶¹ How are we to reconcile these claims with the particularity of the way I am presented to myself in thinking about myself? Michael Dummett discusses the possibility of incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts by distinguishing between thinking a thought and grasping or understanding it. “There does indeed appear to be a sense in which although you, the hearer, know what thought I had when I thought to myself, ‘I have been wounded’, you cannot think that thought yourself.”⁶² What applies to thinking also applies to speaking: only I can say that I was wounded by uttering the sentence ‘I was wounded’. This does not exclude the possibility that others may also think or say that I was wounded; but because of the contextual dependency of indexical thought and speech, they cannot express what they think or say as I do. If what is thought or said is determined by the way it is thought or said, then – it seems – there are thoughts that only the person who is the object of them can think. According to Frege, however, this appearance is deceptive, since tomorrow I can express the thought I utter today ‘the weather is beautiful today,’ only by saying, ‘the weather was beautiful yesterday’. For him, this is the same thought, expressed in different ways.⁶³ This applies to ‘I’ sentences, too: even if only I can think or say that I was wounded by thinking this or uttering the sentence, ‘I was wounded’, it is obviously not impossible that others also think or say it – but certainly not the way I do. Dummett believes to have discovered the error in Frege’s reasoning here that leads to the assumption of incommunicable thoughts. To express the thought that a speaker expresses by using the word ‘I’, a listener cannot use the same words as the speaker, but must use only words with the same meaning.⁶⁴ Thus, McDowell claims: “Mutual understanding … requires not shared thoughts but different thoughts which, however, stand and are mutually known to stand in a suitable relation of correspondence.”⁶⁵ There is no reason for Frege to deny this, but he would certainly deny that a listener is not thinking the same thought as a speaker, if he cannot express it in the same linguistic form as the speaker. His example of Dr. Gustav Lauben and Leo Peter makes this clear. However problematic the notion of incommunicable thoughts may be, Frege cannot have arrived at it by assuming that there are thoughts that someone thinks or verbally expresses them in a way in which nobody else can think or utter them, because that assumption would apply to all

61 Frege 1918, p. 74, Frege 1967b, p. 34 62 Dummett 1981, p. 122, 63 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 64 Dummett 1981, p. 127 65 McDowell 1984, p. 290

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thoughts expressed by the utterance of an ‘I’ sentence.⁶⁶ But such thoughts can certainly be grasped by others and are therefore communicable. Frege’s claim that the particular way of being presented to myself in my thinking about me does not result from the fact that only I can think that I was wounded by thinking this very thought. But the possibility of incommunicable thoughts may arise if one considers the originality of the mode of being presented to oneself. Following the English translation of original by the word primitive, the misunderstanding has spread that an original way of being presented is a simple way of being presented, which is not composed of other modes of presentation.⁶⁷ According to Perry, the search for a sense that is both simple and incommunicable is in vain: “While there are doubtless complex aspects that only I have, and primitive aspects that only I am aware of myself as having, I see no reason to believe there are primitive aspects that only I have.”⁶⁸ For him it is obvious that a sense which is to be connected to my use of ‘I’, is expressed by a definite description in the form of the M. But it is true of any such expression that I may not know that it applies to me. Perry does not mention the exclusivity of the mode by which I am presented to myself, at all, even though this is supposed to be responsible for the incommunicability of the corresponding thoughts. Perry’s interpretation – if one can call his considerations such  – is only the repetition of his thesis that, according to Frege, the sense of a singular term has to be expressed by a definite description – a thesis that Frege explicitly excludes at this point.⁶⁹ The same applies to Perry’s further objection. He presumes that Frege is searching for a description of a “non-demonstrative informational equivalent” of the expression that contains the information.⁷⁰ The view that the original mode of presentation has to be simple and cannot be expressed verbally by a complex definite description, must be viewed in connection with Perry’s criticism of the project to eliminate indexical expressions – a project that Frege was not concerned with at all. Thus Frege did not have to exclude indexical expressions from his analysis of the way in which I am presented to myself by thinking about myself. Evans gets closer to the meaning of ‘original’ when he points out that an original way of thinking cannot be reduced to something else.⁷¹ Something is original in this sense if it cannot be explained

66 Künne 1997 attributes such an argument to Frege by claiming that he makes an “assumption concerning the structure of communication” that has such an implication (63). 67 Cf. Künne 1997, p. 54 68 Perry 1990, p. 65 69 Vgl. Evans 1996, p. 314 70 Perry 1990, p. 65 71 Evans 1996, p. 315

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by something else and “reduced” by means of a conceptual explication. But Evans’ interpretation of thoughts that I think about myself does not account for the “originality” of the manner in which I am presented to myself.⁷² Frege, as I said, provides no explanation of the original way in which I am presented to myself by thinking about myself. It is worth, however, taking a look at other parts of his first Logical Investigation in which he deals with the refutation of the idealistic or psychologistic claim that whatever I think or know is a representation of mine. Frege’s refutation is conceived from the first-person point of view and seeks to elaborate the “particular position” of the object “I  call I”.⁷³ The position consists of the way I am related to my “sensations, feelings, moods, inclinations, wishes,” and thus to my mental states and actions that Frege collectively calls representations.⁷⁴ This relationship is described in terms of independence or dependence. Thus, my representations are dependent on me in the sense that they “exist only because of me”.⁷⁵ Frege writes: “It seems absurd to us that a pain, a mood, a wish should rove about the world independently without a bearer. An experience is impossible without someone having it.”⁷⁶ The dependence of my representations appears in two ways. First, they are conceptually dependent on me, since it belongs to “the essence of each of my representations” that I am their bearer.⁷⁷ Second, their existence is dependent on mine: “If there is no bearer of representations, then there are no representations, because representations need a support, they cannot do without.”⁷⁸ By thinking of myself as the “bearer” of my representations, I consider myself a being who takes a “particular position” with regard to my mental states: I “have” them, they belong to the “content of my consciousness”, but “I am not identical with that representation.”⁷⁹ They are dependent on me conceptually and in terms of their existence. Frege contrasts the dependence of my representations with my independence. By this, he means that I do not need “any extraneous bearer”.⁸⁰ My independence is to be understood as a negation of dependence, as it is found to pertain to my representations for instance. Insofar as I can make myself the object of my

72 Cf. Evans 1996, p. 315 73 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, 32 74 Frege 1918, p. 67, Frege 1967b, p. 26–27 75 Frege 1918, p. 67, Frege 1967b, p. 27 76 Frege 1918, p. 67, Frege 1967b, p. 27 77 Frege 1918, p. 67, Frege 1967b, p. 27 78 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 32 79 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 33 80 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 32

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thoughts, my independence shows that the idealist thesis, that whatever I think or know is a representation of mine, is wrong: “But there is something which is not my representation and yet which can be the object of my consideration, of my thought, and I am myself of this kind.”⁸¹ Due to the “particular position” I have with regard to my representations, any reference to me – be it in the form of representing, perceiving or thinking – is a reference to something that is not a representation or content of consciousness.⁸² In the course of refuting the idealist thesis, Frege is concerned with clarifying the “particular position” of me with regard to my representations. Since thoughts are not representations, these considerations only indirectly yield something about my “position” with respect to the thoughts I think. It is clear that I am not the bearer of such thoughts and do not differ from them because I am independent while they are dependent. Rather, thoughts are “independent of me,” and “other people can grasp them as much as I.”⁸³ My relation to my thoughts is described as a “grasping” and is distinguished from “having” my representations.⁸⁴ Accordingly, my position towards the thoughts I think cannot be described by the concept of independence and the notion of an asymmetric bearer relationship. This negative result has to be supplemented by considerations regarding the thinking of thoughts that shed some light on my particular position. Frege writes: “Grasping a thought presupposes someone who grasps it, who thinks. He is the bearer of the thinking but not of the thought.”⁸⁵ As such a bearer, I am the subject of my thinking and have just as much independence from this activity as I have from my representations. That I am a subject of thinking, according to Frege is of central importance for the “reality” of thoughts as well as for me. Concerning reality, Frege thinks of causal interaction in the sense of “acting upon” or “effecting.” Thoughts are “for us something” only in that we are the subjects of thought: “What would a thought be for me that was never grasped by me!”⁸⁶ The grammatical question is in fact an emphatic assertion: thoughts can only be something “for me” if I am a subject of thinking them. This thinking is understood as an “effecting” (wirken) of thoughts.⁸⁷ The subject of thinking is an actor of cognitive activities, who Frege describes in terms of “thinking,

81 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 33 82 Cf. Frege 1918, p. 69 note 5, Frege 1967b, p. 29–30 note 83 Frege 1918, p. 74, Frege 1967b, p. 34 84 Frege 1918, p. 74, Frege 1967b, p. 35 85 Frege 1918, p. 75, Frege 1967b, p. 35 86 Frege 1918, p. 76, Frege 1967b, p.37 87 Frege 1918, p. 76, Frege 1967b, p. 38

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judging, communicating.”⁸⁸ But as the subject of thinking I am not only a being who thinks, judges and asserts; I’m also a being whose actions and behavior are determined by my thinking.⁸⁹ Thus, my “particular position” is not limited to my relationship with my representations, it also extends to my thinking: as a subject of thinking I am an actor of cognitive, though not just cognitive, activities. Only in this way can thoughts be something “for me.” I am a subject of such activities, and without me they cannot be realized. What does this mean for the thoughts I have about myself? I am not only a bearer of the thinking of thoughts, but also a bearer of representations. I perceive things in the “outside world” and have a will that determines my actions and behavior. The thoughts I think about myself are thoughts that concern me in these various respects. But whatever I may think about myself, as the subject of thinking these thoughts, first of all I am an actor of cognitive activities. What follows from this for the way in which I am presented to myself in my thinking about myself? Frege characterizes this way as “original”. As a subject of thinking, I am the cause and thus the origin of the fact that thoughts are something “for me.” On this Frege writes: “How does a thought have an effect? By being grasped and taken to be true. This is a process in the inner world of a thinking creature that may have further consequences in this inner world and which, encroaching on the sphere of the will, can also itself make noticeable in the outer world.”⁹⁰ This concerns activities that presuppose either cognitive activities or consist of them. In my thinking of thoughts about myself, I am presented to myself as an actor of such activities. The way I am presented to myself is original in the sense that I am presented to myself as the origin or cause of these occurrences. That this way of being presented is original, follows from the content of my being presented to me. Other aspects that determine this mode of presentation arise if one looks at Frege’s use of original. Many interpreters of Frege fail to notice that he uses the word ‘original’ in a very specific sense. In his annotations on Jourdain’s essay The Development of the Theories of Mathematical Logic and the Principles of Mathematics Frege writes: “The class is actually something derived while with the concept, as I understand the word, we have something original. Accordingly, the laws of classes are less original than the laws of concepts … ”.⁹¹ Something is original, therefore, if and only if it cannot be derived from something else. The English translation ‘primi-

88 Frege 1918, p. 77, Frege 1967b, p. 38 89 Frege 1918, p. 77, Frege 1967b, p. 38 90 Frege 1918, p. 76, Frege 1967b, p. 38 91 Frege 1976, p. 121

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tive’ does not take this into account. For Frege, concepts are “something original, logic cannot do without.”⁹² That something is original, excludes the possibility of it being derived or explained by recourse to something else. Frege determines the way in which I am presented to myself by thinking thoughts about myself as original, in the very sense mentioned. To understand why, one has to realize that I am a subject of thinking, whenever I grasp this or that or any thought. But I am not always presented to myself as such a subject. This is only the case if I think thoughts about myself and if they are expressed by sentences of the form I think that I …. If what I think has something to do with me, these thoughts represent me as a subject of thinking in relation to other qualities or states of mine. In such thoughts, I am presented to myself as a subject of thinking such thoughts, and this mode of presentation is original, because the fact that I am presented to myself as a subject of thoughts, has no explanation and needs none. Every explanation I give myself or that is intelligible to me, already assumes that I am a subject of thinking thoughts and that I am able to think thoughts in which I am presented to myself as such a subject. Not only is the concept of the thought original, but so too is the concept of the subject of thinking thoughts, in the sense that they can be explicated but cannot be deduced from other concepts or made understandable by them. That I am presented to myself as the subject of thinking thoughts is also original in another sense of the word, which is found in Frege. For him, “all of geometry must rather be originally intuitive.”⁹³ This means that “the elements of all geometric constructions are intuitions, and geometry refers to intuitions as a source of their axioms.”⁹⁴ Spatial intuition is the specific and essential realm geometry is concerned with: the validity of its axioms is based on the “nature of our intuitive capacity”.⁹⁵ This foundation determines the boundaries of science: “If we deal originally with spatial entities as in geometry, then this science is also limited to what is in space.”.⁹⁶ The original character of spatial intuition thereby determines the specific realm geometry is concerned with, and provides information about the “nature of their fundamental components”.⁹⁷ In this sense, spatial intuition is essential for making geometry possible: without an understanding of this intuition, one would not understand the basic validity of its axioms or the limits of their application. Describing the relation in which I stand to my thinking 92 Frege 1976, p. 122 93 Frege 1884, p. 75, Frege 1950, p. 75e 94 Frege 1874, p. 1; reprinted in: Frege 1967a, p. 50 95 Frege 1873, p. 1; reprinted in: Frege 1967a, p. 1 96 Frege 1885, p. 95, Frege 1971, p. 143 97 Frege 1885, p. 95. Frege 1971, p. 143

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in this sense as original, indicates that the relationship is essential and constitutive of me. It shows that I am a subject of thinking, and this role belongs to the “fundamental components” that determine my being. Taking into account Frege’s use of the word ‘original’, one can make sense of his thesis concerning the “original way” in which everyone is presented to themselves and give it a precise meaning. In my thinking of thoughts about myself, I am presented to myself as a subject of thoughts and consequently also as the origin or cause of this cognitive activity. This way of being presented to myself is, furthermore, original in the sense that it cannot be derived from or explained by something else. Finally, it is original in the sense that it is constitutive for me to be a subject who thinks thoughts. The thesis mentioned above is not discussed by Frege specifically, and as we will see, my interpretation stands in contrast to his own considerations concerning the way of being presented to oneself. More accurately, one can say that the originality, as explicated here, does not fit the notion of something being presented to somebody very well. That notion is modeled on paradigmatic cases of using language referentially; it is a notion of something presented as being different from me and referred to by a singular term. I already pointed out that the “particular and original way” I am presented to myself does not fit with that notion, because the concept of presentation does not allow for an adequate description of the phenomenon that Frege’s conception of the original mode of presentation aims at.⁹⁸ Frege writes: “So, when Dr.  Lauben thinks that he has been wounded, he will probably take as a basis this original way in which he is presented to himself.”⁹⁹ It is related to the ascription of thinking a thought from a third-person point of view. The name ‘Dr. Lauben’ has a particular way of presenting its bearer to someone who is using that name, i.e., to Frege. In the case of self-ascription, the story is different; and the other-ascription given by Frege implies such self-ascription on the part of Dr.  Lauben.¹⁰⁰ Since the other-ascription is true only if Dr. Lauben does something that is expressed in incommunicative speech, in soliloquy, by uttering the true sentence, “I think that I was wounded”. However, he does not say anything, but he does what would make the sentence true. To do so, he does not have to utter it. It is about a particular cognitive act; and by thinking the thought the subject of thinking is presented to him- or herself in an “original way” – as the origin and cause of this act. Following Frege one could say that the subject of thinking is presented to him- or herself as an actor. The talk of being

98 Cf. p. 64–65 99 Frege 1918, p. 66, Frege 1967b, p. 26 100 Cf. Castañeda 1966, p. 130–157

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presented is misleading, though, because the subject of thinking presents him- or herself as an actor by carrying out what would make the sentence true. It is about the performance of thinking. Due to the “original” relationship between me as the subject of thinking and my thinking, this performance is an embodiment of both me as an actor and my cognitive activity. For me, neither is just given; rather, both are made. I do not observe me in my actions, but I do carry them out. For me, from the perspective of the actor, neither the subject of thinking nor the actions of that subject are given in any way that would mean that they could be observed or identified by me. It is – as we call it today – the first-person point of view from which I relate to my action. Frege did not know this terminology, but his conception of thinking incommunicable thoughts suggests the idea of the first-person point of view and that his considerations should be pursued further in this context. This is so, even if the concept of the mode of presentation is modeled on the reference of signs to objects that are different from the speaker or thinker and thus would not need this idea. In the case of talking and thinking about oneself, this conception fails; and his view that there is a mode of presentation of a thinking subject which gives rise to incommunicable thoughts clearly shows the limits of that model. To understand the particular nature of thinking ‘I’ thoughts that Frege wants to account for with his conception of incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts, I consider a clear-cut case of communicable singular thoughts. He writes: “Now, if both Leo Peter and Rudolf Lingens know ‘Dr. Lauben’ as the doctor in a house both of them are familiar with, then they both understand the sentence ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben has been wounded’ in the same way, they connect the same thought with it.”¹⁰¹ Communicable thoughts are thoughts that can be grasped by the speaker and the listener. They think the same thought when they understand a particular sentence. If the sentence contains the name of a person, and the listener and the speaker connect the same identifying definite description to the name, then the person designated by the name is presented to them in the same way. This is modeled on the case in which the object “dealt with” by the thoughts of the listener and the speaker is different from both of them, and that both have the same kind of knowledge of.¹⁰² Concerning the thinking of ‘I’ thoughts, this model fails, because speakers think thoughts about themselves, while for listeners the thoughts relate to someone other than themselves. There is no third party, to which both speaker and listener could stand in the same epistemic relationship. Frege tries to account for the special case in which the subjects of thinking think thoughts about themselves, by distinguishing two kinds of ‘I’ thoughts:

101 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 25 102 Cf. Frege 1969, p. 203, Frege 1979, p. 187

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communicable and incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts. The first are grasped by speaker and listener in the same manner if they contain a mode of presentation of the speaker which determines how the person who utters word ‘I’ is to be identified – for speaker and listener alike. With such thoughts, the understanding according to the model of talking about Dr. Gustav Lauben outlined above should work, so that listener and speaker know in the same way who uses the word ‘I’ in a given context; for instance, “he who is speaking to you at this moment”.¹⁰³ But does the speaker have to know that they are the one who is speaking to someone now in order to know that they refer to themselves by uttering ‘I’? This knowledge seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient. It is not sufficient because it is possible that several people are talking simultaneously to the same listener. It is not necessary because the speaker also knows that with their utterance of ‘I’ they refer to themselves if they are not addressing anyone, but believe erroneously that they are doing so. If the listeners know whom the definite description Frege is giving applies to, then they can grasp the thought the speaker expresses; for example, when a doctor, facing a group of people, asks ‘who was wounded?’ and someone answers: ‘I was wounded’. From the speaker’s perspective, however, the consideration of the listener’s perspective appears artificial and inappropriate. The speaker knows that by uttering an ‘I’ sentence they speak of themselves and their understanding of the word ‘I’ is enough to know this; they do not need any additional knowledge in order to recognize the speaker. From the speaker’s perspective, the mode of presentation of the speaker, connected to the use of the word ‘I’, makes little sense if this way is interpreted according to the model of the connection between the understanding of a proper name and its identifying definite description, as it is for Frege in his example of the communication about Dr. Lauben. If ‘I’ sentences aim to express a thought in the given context of their use for the speaker, then the mode of presentation has to be put otherwise. Here it may make sense to return to Frege’s conception of the “original” way, in which everyone is presented to themselves. However, this conception has the disadvantage that it is connected with the assumption of incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts. Such a connection seems to me, however, to be unfounded. Frege writes: “When Dr.  Lauben thinks that he has been wounded, he will probably take as a basis this original way, in which he is presented to himself.”¹⁰⁴ Thus we “can base” our thinking of ‘I’ thoughts on this way, but we do not have to. If we do, then it follows, according to Frege, that only the subject of thinking “can grasp” the thoughts. However, what I am thinking about myself, when I think

103 Frege 1918, p. 66, Frege 1967b, p. 26 104 Frege 1918, p. 66, Frege 1967b, p. 26

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I was wounded, others can think as well and take note of. The reason for the incommunicability of my thought can only have to do with the way I am presented to myself, in thinking something that is, or can be, independent of the context of communicative speech. I have already pointed out that the talk of “being presented” in this case is problematic. Frege speaks of a “particular and original way”, but holds fast to the concept of presentation. This way should mean that I am presented to myself as a subject who is thinking, as a cognitive actor. I am also presented to myself as a subject or “bearer” of my representations, fears, suspicions, because I not only can I think that I was wounded, I can also imagine, fear or suspect it. In these cases too, as a subject of these attitudes or as bearer of representations, I have this “particular position”, Frege ascribes to “that object I call I”.¹⁰⁵ We have seen that for Frege this position is not limited just to the mental realm. It also pertains to “our actions” if they are determined by our thoughts and intentions.¹⁰⁶ In my thinking of ‘I’ thoughts, the object the thought is about is identical with the subject thinking the thought. The object is determined by the thinking; the thinking of the thought is essentially connected to the object it deals with. Frege says of pain: “Being experienced is necessarily connected with pain, and someone experiencing it is necessarily connected with being experienced.”¹⁰⁷ And – one has to add – they know that it is they who feel the pain. This applies equally to thinking: it is a conscious activity that is performed by someone who knows that they do it. In the thinking of ‘I’ thoughts there is identity of the subject of the thinking and the object the thinking is about. Knowledge of this identity is direct, immediately given to the subject. It requires no additional knowledge, it does not have to be discovered or inferred in some way in order for the thought to be related to the object it is about. Therefore ‘I’ thoughts differ from thoughts that are expressed by sentences that contain a name or a definite description of the subject of the thought. What is the particular nature of thoughts that are determined by the “original” way in which the subjects of thinking these thoughts are presented to themselves? It is reflexive thinking, and the identity of the subject of thinking with the person who the thought “deals with” has something to do with the realm of reference of the terms we use to describe reflexive thinking. Because subjects know of this identity, they are presented to themselves as the subjects of reflexive thinking, and this determines the thoughts they think. Frege was of the opinion that such a thought shows a particularity and defined it as incommunicability. I share this

105 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 32 106 Frege 1918, p. 76–77, Frege 1967b, p. 38 107 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 33

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opinion, but reject this characterization. As I will show later, the special feature of thinking reflexive thoughts gives rise to the possibility of cognitive activities which consist of particular forms of assessing, evaluating and changing one’s own attitudes. This activity is essentially bound to the first-person point of view: it is about one’s own thoughts and attitudes, and can be exercised as a reflexive activity only by the subject who has those thoughts and attitudes. However, it is clear that Frege does not mention the reflexive character of assessments and evaluations in his remarks about the “particular position” of mental states, thinking, intentions and actions. But the reflexive relations he is concerned with regard properties and activities of the subject, which, as we will see, have to do with the first-person point of view in one way or another. The conception of such an attitude provides an adequate description of the way in which a subject is presented to herself in thinking reflexive thoughts, and this is preferable to the incommunicability postulated by Frege. The conscious self-relationship that manifests itself in the thinking of ‘I’ thoughts is not only present in solitary thinking, but in communication as well; this is a further reason to reject Frege’s ‘incommunicable’ characterization. To think such thoughts, it is of central importance to know the identity between the thinking subject and the object of the thought. Since ‘I’ assertions are to be considered “manifestation” of ‘I’ judgments and hence contain an instance of thinking ‘I’ thoughts, that knowledge is also a constitutive part of the communicative use of ‘I’ sentences. Thoughts that are communicated are always thoughts that are thought. Knowledge of the identity does not constitute a difference between ‘I’ thoughts expressed in a language for the purpose of communication and ‘I’ thoughts that are merely thought; and so there is no reason to assume that the object dealt with by an ‘I’ thought is in each case “presented” differently. Frege’s distinction between communicable and incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts should be rejected because his analysis concerning the former class of such thoughts is geared to the listener’s perspective and is therefore unsatisfactory, while his considerations of the latter class emphasize something that is characteristic of the thinking of ‘I’ thoughts in general. It does not imply that such thoughts are not communicable; and understanding them does not pose any additional difficulties for the listener to those which occur in any ‘I’ speech. The knowledge of the identity between the subject of thinking and the object that is dealt with by an ‘I’ thought is constitutive of the thinking of ‘I’ thoughts in general, regardless of whether such thoughts are just thought or also communicated. There are good reasons not mentioned explicitly by Frege for the assumption of an “original way” in which the object of an ‘I’ thought is presented to the subject of thinking such thoughts, provided one accepts the idea of “being presented to oneself”. However, there are no good reasons for believing that thoughts, deter-

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mined by such a mode of presentation, are not communicable. Merely thought ‘I’ thoughts are not communicated, but they could be communicated. To summarize, Frege’s considerations regarding ‘I’ sentences are concerned with the thoughts they express. The thought that corresponds to a singular sentence depends on the way the referent, designated by a singular term, is presented to someone. Therefore, Frege is concerned with the sense of ‘I’ in a given context of its use. Its referent is a person as a bearer of properties that people usually have: we are born at some time, live somewhere, have perceptions, sensations and think this and that. As for its sense, Frege is tied to the conception of a mode of presentation of what is referred to, which he developed in the framework of his theory of the sense and reference of singular terms. His distinction between communicable and incommunicable thoughts can be considered as a not very convincing attempt to account for the distinction between a first-person and a third-person point of view. From the third-person point of view, the perspective of the listener, the thought a speaker expresses by uttering an ‘I’ sentence has to be formulated so that instead of ‘I’ another co-referential term is chosen. Frege considers the case that the name of the speaker is taken, and this leads to the discussion being oriented towards the semantic model of proper names and definite descriptions. As for understanding the utterance of an ‘I’ sentence from the first-person point of view, Frege distinguishes between two ways in which speakers are presented to themselves. The first way – or rather, a whole class of such ways – is characterized in such a way that the speakers are presented to themselves as they are also presented or can be presented to others. The second way is the “original way”: how everyone is presented to themselves, and this is not accessible to others. This distinction is misleading. From the first-person point of view, the assumption of a way in which speakers are presented to themselves makes little sense if this way is understood as an identifying determination of the speaker following the model of the relationship between proper names or definite descriptions and their objects. The speaker has direct knowledge of the thinking subject’s shared identity with the object of the thought, as expressed by the sentence uttered. However, this does not mean that the word ‘I’ in a given context of its use has no sense. One rather should take on the task of transforming the conception of an “original way” – how speakers or thinkers are presented to themselves – into a proper theory of epistemically transparent self-reference. The speaker or thinker is a subject of attitudes that are “manifested” via utterances of ‘I’ sentences. Frege focuses on the case of thinking, but I am, as he emphasizes, not just a subject of thinking, but also a bearer of sensations and an actor in cognitive and practical respects. The subject has immediate knowledge of the identity of the subject who is thinking a thought, or more generally: the identity between the subject of atti-

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tudes and the object referred to by their content. This knowledge does not require the knowledge of an identifying definite description of that object. The “original” way, highlighted by Frege, in which I am presented to myself, can be understood as the special relationship I have with my own attitudes. Only I can have such a relationship, but this does not mean that the corresponding thoughts are not communicable and others cannot recognize them. Therefore Frege’s conception of incommunicable ‘I’ thoughts should be rejected.

3 Direct Reference In Demonstratives Kaplan deals not only with first-person singular pronouns, but also with indexical demonstratives and adverbs, such as ‘here’ and ‘yesterday’. His theory of “direct reference” is seen as a theory that deliberately excludes epistemological considerations and is limited to “essentially semantical phenomena.”¹ In this chapter, I discuss the plausibility of this approach by considering only the reference of first-person singular pronouns. Kaplan distinguishes two ways of connecting singular terms with individual objects: “The road through what is said, the propositional component, through content. And the direct road, outside of what is said, outside content.”² The word ‘I’ is an expression of the latter kind. What this means, and what kind of philosophical understanding of its use can be achieved, is discussed below. Kaplan distinguishes two classes of indexical expressions: demonstrative pronouns, which refer to something only with the help of an indicative act, and “pure indexical expressions”, which do not require such a gesture and refer to something because of their linguistic meaning.³ The pronoun ‘I’, as well as the adverbs ‘here’ and ‘yesterday’, are such indexical expressions. All indexical expressions share a way of referring to something: they refer “directly”. Kaplan writes: “The semantical feature that I wish to highlight in calling an expression directly referential is not the fact that it designates the same object in any circumstance, but the way in which it designates an object in any circumstance. Such an expression is a device of direct reference.”⁴ I begin with some explanations. Consider the sentence: (1) I am sitting at a desk. It is clear that the use of this sentence says something which can be specified by truth conditions only in a certain context, defined by place, time and the speaker. The use of the same sentence in other contexts expresses something different in each case. Kaplan distinguishes between its linguistic meaning (character) and what is said in a given context (content). The linguistic meaning of a pure indexical term is the same in every context and provides a way of determining what is said in a given context through the use of a sentence that contains it. Kaplan

1 Kaplan 1989a, p. 537 2 Kaplan 1989b, p. 576 3 Kaplan 1989a, p. 490–491 4 Kaplan 1989a, p. 495

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therefore considers the linguistic meaning of indexical expressions, or expressions containing indexicals, as functions that assign possible contexts of their use to what is said by them.⁵ Only in a given context of its use does sentence (1) refer to something. This distinguishes it from a sentence, such as: (2) The most important disciple of Plato never sat at a desk. This second sentence refers, independently of the context of its use, to a particular well-known philosopher. The conception of direct reference is not, however, intended to explain what is specific to indexical expressions by emphasizing their contextual dependence, as a comparison with the following sentence clearly shows: (3) My desk is full of books. This third sentence refers to something only if there is a particular context of its use, and says some different in different contexts of its use, without there being any change in its linguistic meaning. This does not mean that the word ‘I’ in (1) and the expression ‘my desk’ in (3) refer in the same way to whatever is relevant for determining what is said by these sentences in a given context of their utterance. At this point, Kaplan takes up the idea of direct reference: ‘I’, in a given context, refers directly to something, while this does not apply to ‘my desk’. To make this difference clear, it is necessary to introduce an additional idea of Kaplan’s: the possible circumstances of evaluation of what an expression means in a given context of its use.⁶ He rightly attaches great importance to the difference between possible contexts of using an expression and possible circumstances of evaluating what it says. Sentences such as (1) and (3) say something only due to their particular context of use, and what they say varies accordingly. Different contexts of use of such sentences provide different determinations of what is said in each case (content). In contrast, different circumstances of evaluation of given content lead to different determinations of the truth values of sentences and the extension of expressions that occur in them.⁷ Such circumstances are specified, for instance, by assuming counterfactual situations with regard to sentence (3). They allow us to consider not only other states of my desk, but also pieces of furniture other than the one I am working at here and now. In a counterfactual situa-

5 Kaplan 1989a, p. 505–506 6 Kaplan 1989a, p. 493–494 7 Kaplan 1989a, p. 501

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tion, we determine the truth value of sentence (3), and possibly also the extension of the expressions contained in (3), differently. However much we may change the extensions, though, it is clear that in such a situation, the expression ‘my desk’ must refer to something that satisfies the conditions necessary for this expression to apply, and that has to be considered as my desk in the situation. The assumed counterfactual situation and “the propositional component” define what that term refers to. The terminology is borrowed from Russell’s theory of “propositions” which he developed 1902 in Principles of Mathematics, and discarded 1905 in his essay On Denoting. This historical reference will not be pursued here any further. In every counterfactual situation I consider other possibilities of what sentence (3) says in a given context of its use. If the expression ‘my desk’ refers to something at all, it must refer to something that fulfills the conditions for the correct application of the term in that situation; it cannot refer to my left ear or my bike, for example. In other words: the object referred to by the expression ‘my desk’ in some counterfactual situation, is whatever satisfies the conditions for its correct application in that situation. Those conditions  – or, as Kaplan says, “the propositional component”  – in conjunction with the situation assumed, determine what the expression refers to. In the case of an expression that refers “directly” to an object, this does not apply and with regard to this point, the expressions ‘I’ and ‘my desk’ differ radically. We can also think of a counterfactual situation relative to what is said by (1) in a given context. Since assuming such a situation yields a different evaluation of what a sentence says, we can only assess it if we start from the given context of the use of the sentence. Only in such a context is something said; and this is what is evaluated.⁸ Therefore, we have to distinguish between assuming a counterfactual situation relative to a given use of (1), and the consideration of another context of use for the sentence. Since the latter does not deal with a counterfactual situation, but with another use of the sentence by the same or another speaker at the same or another time, it therefore leads to a different determination of what the sentence says. However, the counterfactual assumption concerns the case that I do something else or am elsewhere compared to what is the case in the context of the original use of (1). In such a situation, the truth value of (1) and the extension of the predicate ‘sitting at the desk’, may change; but what does not change is what ‘I’ refers to. Why not? Kaplan answers this question in his theory of direct reference: “A directly referential term may designate different objects when used in different contexts. But when evaluating what is said in a given context, only a single object will be

8 Kaplan 1989a, p. 501

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relevant to the evaluation in all circumstances.”⁹ Singular expressions that refer directly to an object are first and foremost expressions that designate something only in a specific context of their use. This applies to ‘I’, as well as to ‘my desk’, but not to ‘the most important disciple of Plato’ or ‘the smallest prime number’. Second, they are expressions that designate the same object in each possible evaluation, in each counterfactual situation. They are rigid designators in the sense of Kripke, and this distinguishes ‘I’ from the other two singular terms. It is the combination of contextual dependence and rigidity that characterizes the particular kind of reference of “pure indexical expressions.” Therefore, Kaplan aims to explicate the difference between such expressions and rigid definite descriptions.¹⁰ To this end he makes two proposals. The first proposal is found in Demonstratives and relies on a “metaphysical picture of the structure of a proposition”.¹¹ This is explained as follows: “For each occurrence of a singular term there will be a corresponding constituent in the proposition expressed. The constituent of the proposition determines for each circumstance of evaluation the object relevant to evaluating the proposition in that circumstance.”¹² If we assign a singular expression to a constituent of the proposition and determine the role of this constituent in a specific evaluation of the proposition, nothing is as yet indicated about the way in which the singular term refers to the constituent of the proposition. The semantic difference between a definite description, contingent or rigid, and a directly referential term follows only from a distinction between different kinds of propositional constituents. Kaplan tells us: “In general, the constituent of the proposition will be some sort of complex, constructed from various attributes by logical composition. But in the case of a singular term which is directly referential the constituent of the proposition is just the object itself.”¹³ Singular terms that are not directly referential only refer to objects if one considers a certain evaluation of the sentences in which they occur. Thus Kaplan emphasizes that the constituent of the proposition in conjunction with a certain evaluation determines the relevant object. In contrast, directly referential singular terms are supposed to refer to an object independently of any evaluation of the sentences in which they occur. In this sense, Kaplan says of the semantic rules that are to be connected with such expressions that they “do not provide a complex which together with a

9 Kaplan 1989a, p. 494 10 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 493–495 11 Kaplan 1989a, p. 496 12 Kaplan 1989a, p. 494 13 Kaplan 1989a, p. 494

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circumstance of evaluation yields an object. They just provide an object.”¹⁴ That the term ‘the most important disciple of Plato’ refers to Aristotle, is correct only if we assume certain circumstances of evaluation. We base our assumptions on available facts regarding the historical circumstances. But we also do this if we consider a directly referential expression which refers to a particular object only in a particular context of its use, since a specific evaluation of the corresponding proposition belongs eo ipso to that context.¹⁵ Hence, for both sentence (1) and sentence (2), a specific evaluation of the proposition that is expressed by the singular sentence is to be considered. So, this cannot be a reason for assuming that in a given context of its use ‘I’ refers to a person in a way that the expression, ‘the most important disciple of Plato’ does not and cannot. However, Kaplan is not interested in distinguishing the reference of a directly referential expression in a given evaluation from the reference of some definite description or other. Rather, he wishes to clarify the nature of rigid reference of a directly referential expression in a particular context of its use, and here he sees a significant difference with the reference of rigid definite descriptions. Direct reference is rigid reference, but not vice versa. Both directly referential expressions and rigid definite descriptions designate the same object in all possible circumstances of evaluation; but they differ in how they do this. For an example of the former “it does not just turn out that the constituent determines the same object in every circumstance, the constituent (corresponding to a rigid designator) just is the object. There is no determining to do at all.”¹⁶ The semantic rules of the expression readily provide the object, which is the same in all circumstances of evaluation. The difference between directly referential expressions and rigid definite descriptions is provided by the semantic rules that are associated with them – more accurately, by the way those rules connect each to a referent referred to rigidly. Thus, ‘I’ refers to the speaker or writer in every possible context of its use. This rule “determines directly” what this word refers to, in a particular context of its use and in all possible circumstances of its evaluation: the speaker or writer in that context. In contrast, the semantic rule associated with the term ‘the smallest prime number’ determines only implicitly what it refers to in all possible circumstances of its evaluation. That this happens only implicitly is a result of the fact that the rule determines a certain number for the actual world, but that it has not yet been determined in accordance with other circumstances of evaluation and other counterfactual circumstances. Here, it is only the case that “it turns out”

14 Kaplan 1989a, p. 495 15 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 522; Kaplan 1989b, p. 596 16 Kaplan 1989a, p. 494

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to be always the same number under these circumstances. While the semantic rules of directly referential expressions deliver a “direct” determination of what they designate in all possible circumstances of evaluation, rigid definite descriptions do this only in an “implicit” way; since, by considering the circumstances, it turns out that one and the same object fulfills the conceptual determinations of the definite description. Kaplan’s conception of directly referential expressions can be understood as an extension of Kripke’s view that proper names are rigid designators, even if the two authors have different ideas of such designators.¹⁷ As Kripke points out, “the term ‘Nixon’ is just a name of this man. When you ask whether it is necessary or contingent that Nixon won the election, you are asking the intuitive question whether in some counterfactual situation, this man would in fact have lost the election.”¹⁸ What applies to proper names, also applies to demonstratives in Kaplan’s sense, and is valid for indexical expressions in general. Unlike Kripke, Kaplan is not dealing with the distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators, but with a distinction within the class of rigid designators; the distinction between definite descriptions that are rigid designators due to their “propositional component”, such as ‘the smallest prime number’, and directly referential expressions which, according to their semantic rules and in all possible circumstances of evaluation, refer to the object they designate in the context of their given use. This last class that Kaplan aims to distinguish includes proper names, demonstratives and the indexical expressions Kaplan calls “pure indexicals.” However, what follows from this for our understanding of the reference of the word ‘I’, if we include it in the class of rigid designators? Before I turn to that question, I want to consider another explication of the notion of direct reference that emphasizes the difference between, on the one hand, the connection between a directly referential expression and its referent; and on the other, the connection between a correct definite description and its object. The explication can be found in Kaplan’s Afterthoughts published in 1989. It is based on the reference of true demonstratives, which was the starting point for his considerations of direct reference. He writes: “One does feel initially that in the use of a true demonstrative, not only is one trying to put the object itself into the proposition (direct reference), but that the connection between demonstrative and object, call this reference, is also extraordinarily direct as, compared with the connection between a definite description and its denotation. Demonstratives are transparent, whereas descriptions are visibly at work, searching,

17 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 493; Kaplan 1989b, p. 569–571 18 Kripke 1980, p. 41; cf. p. 46

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searching, searching.”¹⁹ This comparison uses metaphors: demonstratives are transparent; while designations are searching. How can we spell out the meaning of these metaphors? That directly referential expressions are transparent means that “only the referent itself figures in content.”²⁰ This statement is intended to exclude the possibility of something else occurring in the respective content. One can understand it only if one knows what to exclude. He describes this with a reference to Frege: “Directly referential expressions are said to refer directly without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn.”²¹ According to Kaplan, this does not say that “nothing mediates the relation between the linguistic expression and the individual object”;²² an interpretation that he considers to be a “wildly implausible idea,” which is excluded by the fact that directly referential expressions have linguistic meaning. How can this assumption lead to the, albeit erroneous, opinion that this relation should somehow be “mediated”? Kaplan pointed out earlier that his terminology suggests the wrong conjecture that direct reference is not “mediated” by the linguistic meaning of expressions.²³ This kind of “mediation”, however, does not affect the “transparency” of directly referential expressions; for what they refer to, is determined on the basis of their linguistic meaning and the context of their use. But this does not imply that these conditions occur at all in what is determined by them. Their character is provided by rules determining the referent in a given context of their use, but they are not part of what is determined this way.²⁴ What is excluded by the transparency of directly referential expressions is that their character belongs to what they refer to in a given context of use. Can transparency in this sense elucidate the difference between the connection of a directly referential expression to its referent and the connection of a correct definite expression to its object? Such a description also has a linguistic meaning, which can be understood as a rule that determines what the expression refers to. With definite descriptions such as “my desk,” the context of their use must be taken into account; for other definite descriptions such as “the most important student of Plato” or “the smallest prime number”, the context can be disregarded. Neither do the semantic rules of such expressions belong to what is said by them, which is part of their content. Regarding directly referential expressions, Kaplan accurately notices that one can 19 Kaplan 1989b, p. 573 20 Kaplan 1989b, p. 572 21 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 22 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 23 Kaplan 1989a, p. 520, note 4 24 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 523

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use such expressions correctly without knowing their semantic rules.²⁵ This also applies to definite descriptions, because we are able to use expressions such as “the most important disciple of Plato,” or “the smallest prime number” and to say something without an explicit knowledge of the semantic rules of their use. Also in such cases, the semantic rules are not included in what is said. Therefore, the transparency of an expression cannot mean that the semantic rules do not belong to what is said, since this also applies to definite descriptions; so they are no less transparent than directly referential expressions. We must therefore consider Kaplan’s concept of direct reference as defined by its demarcation from Frege and understood as direct reference “without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn.” What he means by this is not clear, as Kaplan believes that Frege’s conception of sense refers to several things that should be better distinguished. To grasp the difference between directly referential expressions and rigid definite descriptions, it is necessary to consider Kaplan’s criticism of Frege. He is convinced that Frege’s theory of sense and reference, if applied directly to referential expressions, leads to an “entirely wrong picture”.²⁶ This harsh criticism is astonishing, considering Kaplan believes that Frege’s remarks on the use of ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ display a close proximity to a theory of direct reference.²⁷ Frege’s theory of sense (or more precisely, the confusion behind it) was responsible for the correct theory of indexical expressions not being discovered until much later. Because, as Kaplan puts it, “Frege mixed together two kinds of meaning in what he called Sinn … Sinn is first introduced to represent the cognitive significance of a sign … However, it also is taken to represent the truth-conditions or content (in our sense).”²⁸ Kaplan is mistaken. The cognitive value of a sentence is not the sense that it expresses, but results from the relation the thought stands in to its truth value, and is therefore attributed more accurately to judgments.²⁹ What Kaplan calls ‘content’, however, has no corresponding term in Frege’s theory and can therefore not be what he considered to be the sense of a sentence. The “mixing together” diagnosed by Kaplan cannot have taken place and thus cannot be the reason why Frege missed the correct interpretation of indexical reference – assuming that he did miss it. The same result ensues from a closer examination of Kaplan’s accusation that Frege “conflates elements of two quite different notions of meaning”: meaning as character and meaning as con-

25 Loc. cit., 577 26 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 27 Kaplan 1989a, p. 501 note 26; cf. 521; 533 28 Kaplan 1989a, p. 501 note 26 29 Cf. Frege 1892, p. 35; 50, Geach 1952, p. 64, 78

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tent.³⁰ We have already seen that Frege’s conception of sense cannot be understood in either of these ways, thus the accusation of conflation is unwarranted. How does Kaplan arrive at such an accusation? To understand Kaplan’s diagnosis of Frege’s considerations of indexicals, it is necessary to consider the relationship between content and character. In his opinion, Frege had no reason to distinguish between the two, as long as he dealt with non-indexical expressions.³¹ Not only the linguistic meaning, but also the relationship between this and the content are constant or stable. This is so because expressions that do not contain indexical elements and have the same linguistic character, express the same content in every context of their use.³² Even if both Kaplan’s concept of character and his concept of content are irrelevant to Frege, he does of course know of the case of stable attribution of thought and truth values. That it seems to be different with indexical sentences, was the starting point of his considerations; but this does not imply that he differentiated the concept of sense the way Kaplan proposes. Frege had no reason to revise a “natural identification” of character and content,³³ since he did not have the appropriate concepts and therefore could neither conflate nor identify them. The difficulties Kaplan has with Frege can be largely explained by the erroneous assumption that his notion of the content of what is said is essential for Frege’s conception of sense.³⁴ For Kaplan, the content of indexical sentences includes the object designated by the directly referential expression. Frege’s thoughts cannot contain any objects that are referred to, so the sense of sentences cannot be understood in the way Kaplan proposes. If Frege considers what “someone wants to say”³⁵ as thoughts or as “the … thing that is under discussion”,³⁶ then he cannot have referred to Kaplan’s notion of content. Thoughts are the contents of propositional attitudes. They are identified according to the criterion that one and the same person cannot regard the same thought as true and not true at the same time. In this sense, my current remark ‘today the weather is fine’ and my remark tomorrow ‘yesterday the weather was fine’ obviously express the same thought – provided I “know at once that the same thing is under discussion”³⁷ and that it is clear to me that the words ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ used by me refer to the same day.

30 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 31 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533 32 Kaplan 1989a, p. 521 33 Kaplan 1989a, p. 523 34 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 35 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 36 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 24 37 Frege 1918, p. 65, Frege 1967b, p. 24

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In other words, I have not changed my opinion about the previous day’s weather.³⁸ Thus, the relevant difference between Kaplan and Frege amounts to this distinction: what is expressed by the utterance of an indexical sentence is content for Kaplan, and it is designated by its use in a given context, while for Frege it is a thought that contains a means of presentation of what is designated. Moreover, Kaplan’s critique of Frege can be summarized in this point: an adequate theory of indexical expressions requires the view that what is expressed by an indexical sentence in a given context of its use, has to be determined as content and not as thought in Frege’s sense.³⁹ I will not delve further into this issue here, because it can only be solved in the context of considering the semantics of sentences in general. Since the reference of indexical expressions is the topic here, I limit myself to examining Kaplan’s critique of Frege along those lines. Indexical expressions, in a given context of their use, can refer to something, only if they have a certain linguistic meaning. However, the meaning of sentences in a natural language is frequently not the thought a sentence expresses;⁴⁰ and with indexical sentences, it cannot be that thought, even though they have a complete linguistic meaning.⁴¹ Kaplan takes one version of Frege’s notion of the sense of a sentence as its linguistic meaning. Such an identification is wrong for various reasons, and in particular because of his theory of indexical sentences. Frege calls the linguistic meaning of an indexical sentence content; this is neither the sense of the sentence nor the referent the sentence can have in a particular context of its use. Regarding the assumption that such a sentence has a linguistic meaning, there is no difference between Frege and Kaplan. Furthermore, Kaplan claims that “the meaning determines the referent; and the referent determines the content”.⁴² As to the first part of the sentence, this claim of Kaplan’s is incomplete: the linguistic meaning of an indexical expression determines what it refers to only in a context of its use. On this point Kaplan and Frege agree, too. It should be added, however, that for Frege, what is determined in this way is not only the referent of the expression; such an expression determines what is designated in a given context of its use, and also a way in which what is designated is presented. Frege distinguishes three items: the linguistic meaning of an indexical expression, the sense of such an expression in a given context of its use, and its referent, i.e. that which is designated in this context. The principle ‘no reference

38 Cf. Evans 1996, p. 306–311 39 Cf. Kaplan 1989b, p. 578 40 Frege 1918, p. 63, Frege 1967b, p. 23–24 41 Frege 1918, p. 64, Frege 1967b, p. 24 42 Kaplan 1989a, p. 520 note 44

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without sense’ also applies to indexical expressions that have sense as well as reference, in general, only in a context of their use. Since Kaplan starts out from the dichotomy character versus content, he has no room for what Frege calls ‘sense’ and believes that this sense is something that is identified or confused with content.⁴³ This allegation does not apply to Frege, as the discussion of indexical sentences clearly shows. According to Kaplan this creates an “entirely wrong picture” of the semantic relationships; since indexical expressions have a direct referent, they refer to something without the mediation of a sense. The directness of reference is contrasted with the indirectness or mediation which Frege allegedly claimed. Kaplan gives two explanations of this mediation; neither has anything to do with Frege. He writes: “It might mean that the relation between the linguistic expression and the referent is not mediated by the corresponding propositional component, the content or what is said. This would be directly contrary to Frege …”.⁴⁴ Why Kaplan suspects a contrast to Frege here is not immediately evident, since Frege does not possess the concept of a propositional component or Russell’s notion of a proposition. It is revealing, however, that Kaplan, in his so called “Fregean Picture,” representing the relationship between a singular term and a single object, introduces a third notion as a “propositional component” that should stand in for Frege’s concept of sense. This component should be “a concept, something like a description in purely qualitative language,” and the designated object is what falls uniquely under this concept.⁴⁵ This is related to the well-known criticism that Frege considered singular terms as definite descriptions, explicitly or implicitly disguised. This view is attributed to him, since expressions cannot have a referent if they do not have a sense. However, the principle ‘no reference without sense’ does not imply such a view. As we have seen in his considerations concerning the semantics of indexical expressions, this view is not relevant, and in regard to a particular use of ‘I’, he explicitly rejected it. What Frege calls the way of presentation of an object, does not have to be expressed by a definite description. But from the assumption of such a way of presentation, or from his thesis that singular terms endowed with reference must also have sense, it does not follow that indexical expressions refer to an object in the way definite descriptions do. Aside from Kaplan’s misunderstandings, his explanation of direct reference as reference “without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn” says nothing more than that this reference is different from the reference of definite descriptions; and that what a directly referential expression

43 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533; Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 44 Kaplan 1989b, p. 568 45 Kaplan 1989a, p. 485

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refers to is not identified as an object that falls uniquely under a certain concept. This is a correct, but not very remarkable, assertion. The second explanation of direct reference based on a comparison with Frege can be found in the following statement: “The directly referential term goes directly to its referent, in the sense that it does not first pass through the proposition. Whatever rule, procedures, or mechanisms there are that govern the search for the referent, they are irrelevant to the propositional component, to content.”⁴⁶ Furthermore, this characterization of reference “without the mediation of a Fregean Sinn” contains a misleading deviation from Frege, since he was not at all of the opinion that an indexical expression in a particular context of its use refers only obliquely or indirectly to an object. Thus he speaks of “that object which I call I”, and it is Frege himself who is referred to in this way.⁴⁷ What Kaplan calls “mediation of a Fregean Sinn,” should not be construed in any way as a “detour;”⁴⁸ the reference mentioned is only “mediated” by a sense for Frege in that an expression can have a referent only under the condition that it has a sense. This dependence is quite compatible with direct reference existing between an indexical expression in a particular context of its use and the designated object: it does not jeopardize it in any way. In short, one can say that Kaplan’s discrepancies with Frege are based on misunderstandings. Therefore his explanations of direct reference by resorting to these discrepancies are unsatisfactory. The transparency of directly referential expressions emphasized by Kaplan – the reference to an object without mediation of a Fregean Sinn – can only mean that the referent is not identified as an object that falls uniquely under a certain concept. This is indisputable, because it only excludes all singular terms from being considered as definite descriptions. However, one can understand the transparency of directly referential expressions in another way. Kaplan himself does this when he explains it by resorting to what is obvious and self-evident.⁴⁹ But then it is related to how we determine or recognize what they refer to in a given context of their use. Furthermore, the characterization of designations as “visibly at work, searching, searching, searching” makes good sense in this cognitive, epistemic context. This context is excluded by Kaplan, however, because he wants to avoid “epistemological pseudo-explanations of what are essentially semantical phenomena”.⁵⁰

46 Kaplan 1989b, p. 569 47 Frege 1918, p. 72, Frege 1967b, p. 32 48 Cf. Evans 1996, p. 302–303; Kremer 2010, p. 260 49 Kaplan 1989b, p. 573–574 note 16 50 Kaplan 1989a, p. 537

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I turn now to the application of the concept of direct reference to the first-person singular pronoun. As we have seen, this concept is explicated differently in Afterthoughts and in the previous work Demonstratives. Therefore, to understand the direct reference of ‘I’ in a given context of its use, different emphasis and demarcations arise. By adhering to his earlier work, the thesis of direct reference of ‘I’ claims that its linguistic meaning determines what is referred to in a particular context of its use (the actual referent), and this has to be considered in all circumstances of evaluation. The direct reference of ‘I’ in a given context of its use is rigid reference. What it refers to is given immediately by its linguistic meaning and the context of its use, and does not just come about as a result of considering possible circumstances of evaluation, as occurs with rigid definite descriptions. The difference between directly referential expressions and such descriptions is the central theme of Kaplan’s considerations in Demonstratives. Thus, the way ‘I’ refers should not be understood according to the model of rigid definite descriptions, but according to the model of “pure indexicals” and proper names. Furthermore, Afterthoughts is concerned with the demarcation of directly referential expressions from definite descriptions. The difference is the “transparency” of such expressions, which does not mean that their referent can be determined without an understanding of the relevant semantic rules (character). That such expressions refer to an object without mediation of a Fregean Sinn means, according to Kaplan’s interpretation of Frege, that direct reference cannot be understood by following the model of the reference of definite descriptions. It appears to me that the results of Kaplan’s theory of direct reference of ‘I’ do not contribute much to a philosophical understanding of the use of the first-person singular pronoun. This should not be seen as a major shortcoming, since the theory deals with semantic properties of a class of expressions that contain demonstratives and quite different indexicals. From such a theory one cannot expect to point out anything semantically relevant to the specific characteristics of the first-person singular pronoun, if there are such characteristics at all. Some thoughts of Kaplan’s about this pronoun, however, do clarify its special role in a semantic theory based on the notions of context, linguistic meaning and circumstances of evaluation. These thoughts I consider in more detail below. The linguistic meaning of ‘I’ is that it refers to the speaker or writer, or more precisely to “the speaker or writer of the corresponding occurrence of the word ‘I’.”⁵¹ The expression ‘the speaker or writer of the corresponding occurrence of the word ‘I’’ designates what the word refers to in a given context of its use; that is, the speaker or writer who produces the occurrence of the word. Speaking and

51 Kaplan 1989a, p. 505

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writing are actions, and therefore the person the word ‘I’ refers to, is also called the agent of the context.⁵² Since the context relevant to indexical expressions is always a context in which words are used, and since the use of a word is always an action, any such context must contain an actor and thus provide the possibility that the word ‘I’ be used.⁵³ The notion of context implies that this possibility is important and provides a substantial characterization of its referent as an actor. There is no context without an actor. In this respect, a further peculiarity of contexts should be mentioned. Kaplan emphasizes that the notion of context shares the idea of perspective with the notion of what is actually the case, because the actual world is the world in which we are now.⁵⁴ If the actual world can only be distinguished from all possible worlds by resorting to the use of indexical expressions, and thus only with the help of a context of their use, then such a distinction has something to do with the conditions for applying the very notion of context. Kaplan speaks of a “perspective” and claims that the semantic rules for the use of indexical expressions “characterize the referent from the perspective of the context of use.”⁵⁵ This perspective is supposed to be different from a “world perspective”, but Kaplan does not explain the difference between these perspectives. In any case, it is clear that there cannot be any perspective without a point of view and someone who adopts it: “Indexicals are perspectival, their content is dependent on the speaker’s point of view, the context of utterance.”⁵⁶ What is the speaker’s point of view? Resorting to the context of utterance does not answer this question. The context of utterance of an indexical expression is a point of view of an actor, and is to be described as perspectival only, because the determination of what the expression refers to is dependent on a point of view. This means that an essential property of indexical expressions can only be explained by means of the cognitive abilities or achievements of the person using the word ‘I’. Only that person can be said to have or occupy a point of view. Both, the notion of context and the perspectival character of indexical expressions imply that the concept of reference of the first-person singular pronoun has a special significance for Kaplan’s semantic theory, but he does not address this as a central theme and neither does he provide a more accurate explication. However, one may argue that this is not the task of a theory that deals with direct reference as a particular form of rigid reference. Purely indexical

52 Kaplan 1989a, p. 505; cf. p. 495 53 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 495; p. 511 note 35 54 Kaplan 1989b, p. 595–596 55 Kaplan 1989b, p. 576 note 24 56 Kaplan 1989b, p. 593

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expressions are just a special case of directly referential expressions, and Kaplan is concerned with a semantic theory of such expressions in general. Yet again, since indexical expressions are central to his considerations, one can legitimately expect him to explain the conceptual dependence of indexical reference on the reference of the first-person singular pronoun and also to explain in more detail the notions of an actor’s and a speaker’s point of view. These expectations are not met. Kaplan’s thoughts on the personal pronoun ‘I’ are unsatisfactory in other respects. He calls for a strict separation of semantic and epistemological questions,⁵⁷ thereby missing a particularity of sentences in which the word ‘I’ occurs and that sentences with ‘here’ or ‘now’ do not exhibit. According to Kaplan’s general thesis, “ignorance of the referent does not defeat the directly referential character of indexicals.”⁵⁸ In such general terms, the thesis is wrong; it roughly applies to ‘here’ and ‘now’, but not to ‘I’. This does not mean, as Kaplan suggests, that one has to follow Russell and assume something like “direct acquaintance” with an object called ‘I’.⁵⁹ This notion, as Evans rightly says, is based on a Cartesian conception of the mind that one can easily do without when accounting for the particularities of ‘I’ sentences in comparison to sentences containing ‘here’ or ‘now’.⁶⁰ Let us consider Kaplan’s example for his thesis: “A kidnapped heiress, locked in the trunk of a car, knowing neither the time nor location, may think ‘it is quiet here now’ and the indexicals will remain directly referential.”⁶¹ The questions “where is here?” and “when is now?” can be asked and require answers that put here and now in relation to other places and other times. These answers themselves can, in turn, contain indexical expressions. Asking such questions, does not imply the ability to give correct answers. The questioner may not only have completely erroneous ideas about where here is and when now is; it is also possible that she has absolutely no idea at all. In the same way, it is certain that the kidnapped heiress is referring to a place at a time with the words ‘here’ and ‘now’: what they refer to is given in any case, even if she has misidentified both or cannot identify them at all. Kaplan overlooks, however, that what is true when using ‘here’ and ‘now’ cannot be transferred to the use of ‘I’. Even if the kidnapped heiress forgot her entire life history and had no idea how she got into her disastrous situation, her utterance ‘I‘m pretty tired’ is not

57 Kaplan 1989a, p. 536–537 58 Kaplan 1989a, p. 536 59 Kaplan 1989a, p. 536–537 60 Evans 1982, p. 44–45 61 Kaplan 1989a, p. 536

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only a reference to someone, who definitely exists, whoever that may be; but she also knows that she refers to herself: that she is talking about herself and thinking about her situation. In her thinking about here and now, she may be confused and locate her whereabouts wrongly in place or time. It is different when she thinks about herself: she can describe or characterize herself incorrectly, but she cannot confuse herself with someone else when she says or thinks that she is pretty tired. She knows that she is talking or thinking about herself, and this knowledge is a constitutive component of her use of ‘I’.⁶² Hector Castañeda speaks of a “referential harpooning of the unknown” and distinguished between an “external semantic hit” and the “internal, cognitive content of indexical thought”.⁶³ The theory of direct reference has the advantage for him that it clarifies essential features of the indexical expressions ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’: “… their correct indexical uses succeed always in harpooning a real thinker, a real place, a real time in the causal order of the world.”⁶⁴ But Castañeda also ignores a significant difference between these expressions. As far as their use in general is concerned, it is true that there is always something to which they relate in a given context of use, but for the case of ‘I’, it is furthermore necessary that the person who uses the term knows who it refers to. Could it not be argued that the speaker knows that ‘here’ in this context refers to here and ‘now’ to now? The speaker’s knowledge in these cases, however, is only that the words refer to a place and a time, while in the case of ‘I’, speakers know that they refer to someone and also that they refer to themselves. In contrast to the knowledge of here and now, speakers cannot confuse themselves with someone else. Thus it is assured, as Anscombe puts it, “not just that there is such a thing as X, but also that what I take to be X is X.”⁶⁵ The fact that speakers know that they refer to themselves, does not require knowledge that relies on the cognitive resources of memory, but it gives us the certainty to refer to ourselves in this physical condition with these thoughts, hopes and fears. Knowledge that it is oneself who believes, fears or wishes this or that, is a prerequisite for thinking and talking about oneself; and these capabilities are not lost in the situation considered by Kaplan. Another shortcoming of Kaplan’s considerations of ‘I’ sentences is that the basic semantic concepts of context, content and linguistic meaning do not allow him to account for the particularities of such ‘I’ sentences that are to be regarded as a manifestation of the first-person point of view. He addresses this issue in

62 Cf. Anscombe 1994, p. 151–152 63 Castañeda 1989, p. 118–120 64 Castañeda 1989, p. 120 65 Anscombe 1994, p. 151

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connection with an example from Perry.⁶⁶ The sentence “A bear is about to attack me,” uttered by different people, has – in Kaplan’s terminology – different content but the same linguistic meaning, and usually leads to similar behavior. If both I and someone else are of the opinion that a bear is about to attack me, then the corresponding sentences have the same content, but they differ in their linguistic meaning and usually lead to different behavior: I try to avoid the attack, while maybe the other person attempts to get help. The connection between the use of ‘I’ sentences and certain behavior of the speaker can be described using the concept of the first-person point of view. Such a description provides a better explanation of this connection than Kaplan’s proposal. To clarify the role of the linguistic meaning, which is important for behavior resulting from grasping the content of a sentence, Kaplan gives another example: “If I see, reflected in a window, the image of a man whose pants appear to be on fire, my behavior is sensitive to whether I think‚ ‘His pants are on fire,’ or ‘My pants are on fire’, though the object of thought may be the same.”⁶⁷ Let us assume that the object of thought is indeed the same, then we have two sentences with the same content, but different linguistic meaning, each leading to different behavior on my part. If I think that my pants have caught fire, I will usually do whatever I can to change that situation. If I think erroneously that “his” pants are on fire, then I think something that is expressed by a sentence in this context of its use that has the same content as the corresponding ‘I’ sentence, and I also use an indexical expression, which directly refers to me. However, my behavior will usually be different. So for my behavior and its explanation it is important to know whether I refer to myself by using ‘I’ or an expression such as ‘he’ or ‘this one here’. The question is how the particular nature of representing a content by an ‘I’ sentence can be compared to the representation of the same content by another sentence. Here Kaplan draws on Frege’s assumption of a particular and original way of presentation, in which everyone is presented to themselves in their thinking of reflexive thoughts, and he determines it to be the way in which one is presented to oneself according to the linguistic meaning of ‘I’.⁶⁸ I already pointed out that Kaplan’s interpretation of Frege is wrong and why.⁶⁹ Here I only want to clarify whether his interpretation does justice to the difference between the two sentences just mentioned: the same content, but dif-

66 Perry 1990, p. 68 67 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533 68 Kaplan, 1989a, p. 533 69 Cf. p. 65

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ferent linguistic meaning of the directly referential expressions and therefore different behavior. The particular feature of the ‘I’ sentence is that I refer to me according to the linguistic meaning of ‘I’. This meaning consists of the rule that the word ‘I’ in a given context of its use refers to the speaker or writer of the occurrence of the word.⁷⁰ It is a semantic rule of the English language, that states: “only I can refer to me as ‘I’.”⁷¹ But I can also refer to me by uttering the word ‘he’ or ‘this one’, as in the example above. That I am presented to myself according to the semantic rule for the word ‘I’ explains, according to Kaplan, “the privileged perspective we each have on ourselves …, which we make use of by uttering ‘I’.”⁷² The linguistic meaning of ‘I’ should provide the assumed privileged perspective, while the content analysis of a given word use can do without the assumption of anything privileged.⁷³ It is certainly correct, as Kaplan emphasizes, that one may not infer from a privileged perspective to a privileged status of whatever the perspective or standpoint allows us to be acquainted with.⁷⁴ But he fails to explain how the linguistic meaning of ‘I’ provides a perspective at all, and what the acknowledgment of such a perspective should consist of. Kaplan resorts to the linguistic meaning, by which content is provided, to make a well-known phenomenon understandable: that a given content can be represented by various non-synonymous terms, and that our propositional attitudes, depending on the linguistic meaning of the presentation of the content, may vary.⁷⁵ If one applies this to the case of my belief about my burning pants, or about those I mistake for my neighbor’s, then it is important to determine the particular privileged perspective I assume by believing my own pants caught fire, and to distinguish it from the corresponding perspective I assume by believing that the pants of my neighbor caught fire. Kaplan does not show that the knowledge of the semantic rule for the word ‘I’ can do this. Following Perry, Kaplan emphasizes the connection between ‘I’ sentences uttered by me and my actions or behavior. As we will see, such a relationship is an important aspect of the first-person point of view a speaker or thinker can assume. Knowing the semantic rule is a condition for articulating such a point of view verbally, but it does not explain what it means to actually adopt it. Kaplan’s conception of a privileged perspective invites us to assume the relationship mentioned above and connect certain ‘I’ sentences, uttered by me, to my particular 70 Cf. Kaplan 1989a, p. 505 71 Kaplan 1989 a, p. 533 72 Kaplan 1989a, p. 533 73 Kaplan 1989a, p. 534 74 Kaplan 1989a, p. 534–535 75 Kaplan 1989a, p. 534–535

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decisions, reactions or behavior. As long as this perspective is determined only by knowing the character of the word ‘I’, these relations and connections are only evoked, but not explained. The ability to have a self-relationship from the first-person point of view, does not consist of knowing the semantic rule for the word ‘I’.

4 Epistemic Asymmetry and First-Person Authority The knowledge people have of themselves is reflexive knowledge. Not only does its content concern the subject of the knowledge, but the subject is also aware of it. The epistemic transparency of the reflexive relationship between the subject of knowledge and the person whom its content refers to, is expressed verbally by a true sentence of the form: I know that I am so-and-so. Being able to use such a sentence is a sufficient condition for reflexive knowledge. This is a preliminary formulation of a sufficient condition, which will not be specified any further here. I will not attempt to provide the necessary conditions for reflexive knowledge, neither will I tackle the question of whether one can only have such knowledge by mastering the use of first-person singular pronouns. The use of the word ‘I’ guarantees the epistemic transparency of the reflexive relationship; but the question as to whether this use is also a necessary condition for such transparency can be left open. I will therefore not discuss whether beings who have perceptions and sensations but do not have or have not yet mastered ‘I’ speech, can have reflexive knowledge. The problem, or problem area, concerning the “non-conceptual egocentric sensitivity” of creatures that do not, or do not yet, have a language, will not be addressed here.¹ Instead, I limit myself to considering the particularities of the reflexive knowledge of people who are able to express that knowledge verbally through the use of the first-person singular pronoun. Reflexive knowledge varies from person to person and also within the same person according to their life circumstances. Its contents refer to different things, and it is not clear how philosophy can say something meaningful about such knowledge in general. We know many things about ourselves: our date of birth, where we live, how we usually get home, the color of our hair, our preferences concerning cheese and wine, as well as our desires, plans, feelings, opinions, and so on. What we know about ourselves are not only things that concern us here and now, but we also have knowledge of our near and distant past. This knowledge is fed by various sources of information: our memory, the testimony of others and our own thinking. Reflexive knowledge in general is too diffuse for thematic and methodological study, and does not lend itself readily to philosophical reflection. Therefore, philosophical considerations usually deal with reflexive knowledge that is restricted in a thematic way. Such knowledge is supposed to have a special status, not only because of its content, but also because of the nature of

1 Burge 1998, p. 387

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knowledge itself. Thus, Bilgrami states “that self-knowledge has a special authority and transparency that no other knowledge possesses”,² and attempts to give an explanation of the special status of self-knowledge.³ Christopher Peacocke claims that there is “a special kind of knowledge about one’s own thoughts and attitudes”,⁴ while Burge resorts to Descartes and says: “He was … right in thinking that we have a special, strong, intuitively direct, authoritative knowledge of our present mental events.”⁵ Clearly, the peculiarity of reflexive knowledge is seen as pertaining to thematically specialized knowledge  – our knowledge of certain mental states or activities of ours  – but such knowledge is also distinguished as a certain manner of knowing. This can be explained in various ways, and I will consider two of those ways here. First, one can start with epistemic asymmetry and focus on the epistemological differences between the self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person. The particularity of reflexive knowledge results here from comparison with the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge someone else has, or can have, concerning the content of given self-knowledge. Such an approach is presented and discussed here by referring to the considerations of Wright and Davidson as examples. The other possibility I consider is to identify certain reflexive knowledge as authoritative self-knowledge, which is distinguished by its content. Self-knowledge is related to propositional attitudes which are, according to Bilgrami, relevant for responsible action or, according to Burge, accessible to reflexive assessment in the context of deliberation. While the first of these two approaches aims to determine the particularities of reflexive knowledge by a contrasting comparison with knowledge having the same content held by others, the second deals with explaining the importance a particular kind of self-knowledge has for our actions or the exercise of our cognitive capacities. My approach shares with the aforementioned positions the assumption that reflexive knowledge only has peculiarities if it is thematically restricted, but my approach differs from the other two in that the thematic restriction of one’s own mental sphere is not simply assumed. Rather, the thematic restriction is justified by an explication of the very concept of reflexive knowledge. Such an approach enables us, as we will see, to extend the reach of our particular reflexive knowledge beyond the domain of our own mental states or activities.

2 Bilgrami 2006, p. IX 3 Bilgrami 2006, p. 285 4 Peacocke 1966, p. 118 5 Burge 2007a, p. 209

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First, however, I would like to look at a conception which critically opposes the position I want to argue for here and all the other positions that share the assumption of the epistemological peculiarity of reflexive knowledge. The most famous representative of this school of thought, Gilbert Ryle, states programmatically: “The sorts of things that I can find about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.”⁶ Although Ryle’s theory of self-knowledge does not enjoy great recognition today, one can learn from it how not to approach the issue of its distinct epistemological character. The theory only considers self-knowledge of mental states. This restriction is not explained any further, with the result that the intended refutation of the thesis of the epistemological distinction of our reflexive knowledge is limited to showing that there are no relevant epistemological differences between my knowledge of my mental states and my knowledge of the mental states of others or the knowledge others have of my mental states. Our reflexive knowledge is not limited to knowing our mental states, and therefore the possibility of its epistemological peculiarity is not excluded by demonstrating that it does not apply to the knowledge of one’s own mental states. Furthermore, Ryle’s discussion suffers from the fact that his account of an epistemological distinction of reflexive knowledge is connected with the assumption of a “two-fold privileged access” attributed to Descartes and other modern philosophers.⁷ This means that our awareness of our own mental states and the ability to observe them through “internal perception” or introspection provides an access everyone has only to their own mental world. However, this access should be “privileged”, not only in the sense of being exclusive to the subject who has such access to their mental state, but it should also be access to something which excludes others from knowing about it and thus it would essentially be “private”. Thus, “privileged access” to one’s own mental state is exclusive access to something private. If the question concerning the epistemological particularity of our reflexive knowledge is understood as a question about the specificity of our own mental knowledge, which is based on exclusive access to something private, then it is not surprising that by rejecting the possibility of this kind of knowledge one avoids a situation that should be characterized as “epistemological isolationism” and “solipsism”.⁸ Ryle’s approach is not convincing because he does not justify the assumption that the epistemological particularity of our self-knowledge would imply

6 Ryle 1960, p. 155 7 Ryle 1960, p. 154 8 Ryle 1960, p. 156

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“privileged access”. From the proof that this premise leads to logical muddles, it does not follow that our self-knowledge does not differ or cannot differ in epistemological terms from our knowledge of others and their knowledge of us. Ryle claims that “knowledge of what there is to be known about other people is restored to approximate parity with self-knowledge”.⁹ But the issue is not that what one knows or can know of others, one also knows or can know of oneself. That would only be remarkable if assuming the epistemological distinctiveness of our self-knowledge implied the privacy of its contents; which is not the case. Ryle’s strategy – of linking the question about the epistemological particularity of our self-knowledge with the thesis of the epistemic privacy of its contents – is not convincing and will only lead to confusion. Therefore, I focus only on his thoughts that deal with epistemological particularity, without connecting it with the thesis of “privileged access” in the sense of the privacy of the content. Ryle assumes that “our knowledge of other people and of ourselves depends upon our noticing how they and we behave”.¹⁰ He emphasizes the importance of linguistic behavior, in particular “unstudied, conversational talk”.¹¹ This dependence on observation is certainly true of our knowledge of others, and sometimes also of our reflexive knowledge. But when and in what circumstances? Ryle writes: “Now many unstudied utterances embody explicit interest phrases, or what I have elsewhere been calling ‘avowals’, like ‘I want’, ‘I hope’, ‘I intend’ …; and the grammar makes it tempting to misconstrue all the sentences in which they occur as self-descriptions. But in its primary employment ‘I want’ … is not used to convey information, but to make a request or demand. It is no more meant as a contribution to general knowledge than ‘please’.”¹² What should follow from this observation? Can I only know that I want, intend to do or hope for something if I express this verbally? This applies neither to my knowledge nor to the corresponding knowledge of others. Or is Ryle attempting to say that I cannot know such things, because the examples given by him are not meant to be “descriptions” that provide “information” about the speaker? This interpretation is suggested by his assertion that “… in their primary employment ‘I hate …’ and ‘I intend …’ are not used for the purpose of telling the hearer facts about the speaker …”.¹³ What does my knowledge of my feelings or intentions have to do with the communicative intentions of my corresponding utterances? The unclear

9 Ryle 1960, p. 155 10 Ryle 1960, p. 181; cf. p. 169 11 Ryle 1960, p. 182 12 Ryle 1960, p. 183 13 Ryle 1960, p. 183

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and unfounded assumption of a “primary use” of a sentence cannot hide the fact that a listener can learn something about the speaker in such cases. Ryle says that “they are things said in detestation and resolution and not things said in order to advance biographical knowledge about detestations and resolutions.”¹⁴ Disregarding the remarkable fact that the utterances of a speaker are perceived from the position of a listener, thus from the third-person point of view, it should be pointed out that the alternative suggested by Ryle is no alternative at all. What is said with contempt or determination may well be something that enriches a listener’s knowledge of the speaker and can be precisely what a speaker knows about that speaker’s feelings or decisions. This kind of reasoning, in terms of the philosophy of language, does not prove the specific thesis that knowledge concerning one’s own feelings, desires, intentions depends on an interpretation of the verbal utterances of the subject of knowledge, nor does it refute the hypothesis that our reflexive knowledge in general has some epistemological particularity. Returning to that hypothesis, one can learn from Ryle that it should not be burdened with an assumption of a “privileged access”. Since he denies that there is such peculiarity, he comes to the conclusion that our self-knowledge is based entirely on observation of our behavior. This is not shown by him and furthermore it is very implausible. Since it cannot be denied that we can acquire knowledge of ourselves by observing our behavior and that this is equally true for others, it is necessary to ask whether our reflexive knowledge can have some distinct epistemological character – with regard to content-specific, thematically restricted, reflexive knowledge, not to reflexive knowledge in general. The task is to establish such a thematically restricted area of which it is possible to state some particularity. In what follows, as I mention at the start of this chapter, I discuss two different approaches to this task. I find them both unconvincing, but for different reasons. So I then make my own proposal. As I advanced above, the first approach is based on the self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person, and considers the possibility that, despite the identity of the truth conditions of these ascriptions, epistemological differences exist between them. One speaks in such a case of an epistemic asymmetry between the self- and other-ascription. For example, both I myself and another person may know that I am in pain or want to travel tomorrow, but the other person can know this only by observing my behavior or listening to my words whereas my knowledge is not founded on such a basis. Both of us know the same thing; but despite this agreement with regards to content, there is a relevant difference between my knowledge and the knowledge of the other person. The

14 Ryle 1960, p. 184

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thesis of epistemic asymmetry refers to this difference and attempts to use it to determine the particular nature of a thematically restricted self-knowledge. Epistemic asymmetry has to do with the fact that one knows something about oneself and that other people may know the very same about that same person. What one knows of oneself, must therefore be accessible to others. It is assumed that both sides can know the same thing. Therefore, without assuming the intersubjective content of that knowledge, the thesis of epistemic asymmetry does not make sense. Epistemic asymmetry applies if, although two different people know the same thing, the ways in which they know or acquire their knowledge are different. As far as reflexive knowledge is concerned, its content comes to be known in a way that others cannot know it; and so the knowledge others have of that content would have to be acquired in a different from the way reflexive knowledge is acquired. The thesis of epistemic asymmetry implies, therefore, that these differences between the ways of knowing the same thing are unavoidable and necessary: others cannot know something about me, in the same way as I know it; and I cannot know something about them in the same way they know it. The concept of epistemic asymmetry raises some questions. It involves a comparison or a juxtaposition of the knowledge I have of things to do with me and the knowledge others have, or can have, of those things. The verbal representation of the contents in these two cases involves the self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person. Does this require that self-ascriptions are expressed using the first-person singular subject pronoun? In other words: what is the relationship between epistemic asymmetry and ‘I’ speech? Furthermore, it should be considered that this asymmetry does not apply to all the knowledge we have of ourselves. Many things I know about myself, others can get to know the same way as I do: through testimony, memory, observation, and so on. Therefore, the thesis of epistemic asymmetry has to be restricted to a certain class of reflexive knowledge and the corresponding knowledge others have of it. How can this restriction be made and justified? Also, the thesis concerning these two kinds of knowledge claims that there are various ways in which different people can come to know the same thing. How can the different ways of knowing the same thing be explained? And finally, it should be emphasized that the thesis of epistemic asymmetry does not claim that there is simply an actual difference between ways of knowing the same thing, but speaks of a necessary difference in the ways of acquiring reflexive knowledge and the corresponding knowledge that others may have. How is the assumption of this necessary difference between ways of knowing the same thing to be understood and justified? Regarding the first question, it raises the general problem of the relation between reflexive knowledge and the possession of a language which can express the distinction between self- and other-ascriptions of predicates. That others can

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know what we know of ourselves seems to be a necessary condition for “shared intentionality,” which we can find, according to some behavioral biologists, in infants and primates, too.¹⁵ In the latter case, we have to ascribe reflexive knowledge to creatures who do not have, or have not yet acquired, a language; but who can know of others what they know of themselves in a different way, without being able to represent that difference verbally. This is a serious problem, but not one I discuss here. Here, I discuss only epistemic asymmetry as it may arise in the self-knowledge of persons who have a language and who are able to distinguish between self- and other-ascription of the same predicate in a familiar manner. This kind of epistemic asymmetry applies to knowledge that one cannot have without being able to represent the relevant distinctions through language. The other questions deal with how one should understand epistemic asymmetry and define the limits of its application. I begin by discussing how the validity of the thesis is restricted. As I said, it is obvious that it does not apply to everything we know of ourselves. There are many things that concern me and that I know in a way that others may know them, too. This applies to my knowledge of my hair color, my bank balance or the fact that I water my camellias during the winter. But there are also things that concern me, that both I myself and others also know, but that others cannot know in the same way as I do. This includes, for Tugendhat, my “states of consciousness”;¹⁶ for Davidson, what someone thinks and believes;¹⁷ and for Wright, one’s own current feelings and emotions.¹⁸ Others have challenged the validity of this restriction to mental states. Evans mentions knowledge one has of the attitude or position of one’s body and its limbs,¹⁹ and Anscombe refers to knowledge of one’s own intentional actions.²⁰ Whatever the validity restriction for the realm of the asymmetry thesis may be, it is clear that this restriction must have something to do with the different ways in which I and others can know of such things. Thus Tugendhat says that I have an “immediate knowledge”, “while the same fact from the ‘he’- perspective is discovered by observation …”.²¹ Davidson points out that “it is seldom the case that I need or appeal to evidence or observation in order to find out what I believe…”.²² In contrast, the way others know of my beliefs is just the way I know about the beliefs

15 Tomasello et al. (2005), p. 675–691 16 Tugendhat 1979, p. 50; 89 17 Davidson 2001a, p. 15 18 Wright 1998, p. 13–14 19 Evans 1982, p. 220–224 20 Anscombe 1963, 14–15; 50–51 21 Tugendhat 1979, p. 89 22 Davidson 2001b, p. 15

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of others: they observe my actions, pay attention to what I say and how I behave; and that is the way I know about their mental states.²³ From this we can conclude that the thesis of asymmetry applies only if the self-knowledge differs from the corresponding knowledge of others in the way one knows about oneself. Others do not or cannot know the same in the same way. It is important to point out that the thesis of epistemic asymmetry, if so construed, does not imply any epistemological distinction of reflexive knowledge. Its epistemic status remains completely undetermined within the context of the distinction made. The thesis does not imply that my self-ascriptions cannot be wrong; so far it claims only that I can recognize some things about me in a certain way that others cannot. As far as the others are concerned, Tugendhat points to their observation of my behavior, while Davidson mentions still more ways by which others can come to know what I believe. They have various reasons that justify their beliefs about me. As for me, it is not clear for the cases mentioned that I can justify my beliefs at all; but this does not mean I have no reasons for them. Here one can use a distinction Burge made between justification and entitlement.²⁴ Even if we are not able to give reasons for our beliefs or to justify them, we can still be warranted in having them. Burge uses this distinction in the context of an externalist epistemology; I use it to dismiss the view that beliefs for which I cannot explicitly give reasons, have no reasons.²⁵ The epistemic asymmetry thesis does not concern a distinction between my beliefs about me for which I have no reasons, and the beliefs of others who may have such reasons. If we understand the different ways in which I and others know certain things about me as different reasons that my and their beliefs are based on, then the thesis of epistemic asymmetry is not yet adequately vindicated. It implies not only that I and others know things about me in different ways, or have different reasons for our corresponding beliefs about me; but it also implies that others cannot have the reasons for their beliefs about me which I have for my beliefs. The reasons that I have are reasons only I can have. Such reasons are referred to here as exclusive reasons in the sense that they are available only to me. This does not imply that the content of my beliefs is only accessible to me. Subjects have exclusive reasons for beliefs about themselves, for which others necessarily have other reasons. Therefore, exclusive reasons can only apply to beliefs whose content is accessible to others. The conception of the exclusive reasons subjects have for their beliefs about themselves allows a positive determination of self-knowledge to which epistemic

23 Davidson 2001b, p. 15 24 Burge 2003a, p. 504–505; Burge 1996, p. 93–94 25 Cf. Wittgenstein 1963, § 289

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asymmetry applies. As we have seen, Tugendhat and Davidson define this knowledge only negatively by saying that it is not based on observation or interpretation. In contrast, if one starts from the idea that subjects have reasons for their beliefs about themselves that others cannot have for the corresponding beliefs, then a more detailed consideration of such exclusive reasons can provide some insight into the kind of knowledge that subjects have about themselves that others cannot have in this way, even though they know just these same things. This approach provides a new answer to the question concerning the extent and limits of reflexive knowledge to which the thesis of epistemic asymmetry applies, and avoids a hasty, unfounded restriction to the knowledge of one’s own mental states. Since not all beliefs subjects have about themselves are based on reasons that only they can have, the approach based on the notion of exclusive reasons guarantees that the thesis of epistemic asymmetry applies only to some cases of self-knowledge. Since one cannot give an account of the thesis without restricting the extension of its validity, this approach fulfills a necessary condition for the interpretation of the thesis. In summary, epistemic asymmetry applies only to certain cases of reflexive knowledge; and if it holds, there must be an epistemological difference between some knowledge subjects have of themselves, and the corresponding knowledge others have, or may have of them. There is no difference in content between the subject’s own knowledge and the knowledge of others which are expressed by self- or other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person. Even if the content of my self-knowledge is exactly the same as what others know of me, my self-knowledge is different from the corresponding knowledge of the others, since it is based on reasons that only I, as the subject of reflexive knowledge, can have. Such reasons are exclusive reasons. One way to clarify this particular reflexive knowledge, deals with the special status of self-ascriptions. The status is called First Person Authority. Since epistemic asymmetry is concerned with the special way in which subjects know things about themselves, this status must have something to do with an epistemically relevant “authority” that subjects possess for their self-ascriptions. It is this authority that other-ascriptions lack that explains the epistemic asymmetry between self- and other-ascriptions of the same predicate to the same person. In his essay Self-Knowledge: The Wittgensteinian Legacy, Crispin Wright is concerned with what he calls “psychological self-knowledge”.²⁶ He considers it a “truism that for the most part we know ourselves best  – better than we know

26 Wright 1998, p. 13

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others and better than they know us.”²⁷ If someone knows something best, they usually have not only a particularly extensive, but also a relevant and pertinent special knowledge of it. It may not be the case that this can be said consistently about our knowledge of our own psychological states or events, but it certainly is not trivial.²⁸ But even if it is the case, it has nothing to do with what the asymmetry thesis deals with, because it is not concerned with the content of the knowledge that I have of myself and others, but with the different ways in which something is known correspondingly. Wright speaks of an “essential self/other asymmetry in the means of knowledge” and claims that “in the most salient type of cases, we do not merely know ourselves best, but also differently from the way in which we know others and they know us.”²⁹ The content of such self-knowledge is an “authoritative, non-inferential self-ascription”, and according to Wright, “the basic philosophical problem of self-knowledge is to explain this phenomenon.”³⁰ One may well be skeptical about this programmatic thesis; not only because the problem is not described accurately,³¹ but also because our self-knowledge is limited without any further justification to “the wide and seemingly immediate cognitive dominion of minds over themselves”.³² But even if we accept the restriction of its content, we still have not met the particular case Wright considers exclusively, i.e. self-ascriptions in the present tense of mental states or events that have a certain “phenomenal quality”. However, we do not only have special self-knowledge of such things, and that knowledge does not consist of just knowing our present condition. Wright does not explain why a philosophical analysis of our reflexive knowledge must be limited to the explanation of the asymmetry between my knowledge of my present phenomenal mental states and events, on one hand; and the knowledge that others have of them, on the other. He distinguishes two different types of avowals: the first concerns pain, feelings or sensations of one’s own physical condition; the second concerns one’s propositional attitudes. With the latter, there is the possibility that the subjects of the “avowal” ascribes a wish or belief to themselves because of an interpretation of their state of mind and are thereby exposed to the danger of self-deception.³³ However, this possibility cannot be valid for all self-ascriptions of propositional

27 Wright 1998, p. 13 28 Wright 1998, p. 14 29 Wright 1998, p. 14 30 Wright 1998, p. 14 31 Cf. McDowell 1998, p. 57–58 32 Wright 1998, p. 13 33 Wright 1998, p. 15–17

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attitudes.³⁴ For Wright’s explanation of epistemic asymmetry, the following peculiarities are important, which – in his opinion – only or mainly self-ascriptions of the first kind exhibit. First, they require no justification. Second, they are “strongly authoritative,” so that the understanding of such an assertion and its sincere utterance guarantee the truth of what one says.³⁵ Third, the truth of such self-ascriptions is obvious to the person who utters them: “… the subject’s ignorance of the truth or falsity of an avowal of this kind is not, it seems, an option.”³⁶ Let me elucidate this with an example. First, if I say I feel sick, the question of how I know this does not arise. I do not ask myself that question, nor would someone else under normal circumstances pose such a question to me. It is unclear what the answer to such a question would be like: I could only repeat my statement, and this suggests that I am not relying on any evidence for making such a self-ascription. Second, the truth of my statement is usually beyond doubt and it is sufficient that I say what I say. A doubt will only be appropriate if there is some reason to suspect that I do not understand my words or am not speaking sincerely. Wright refers to this property of my self-ascription as “strongly authoritative.” Third, since it is obvious, it cannot be hidden from me that I feel ill when I do. I cannot have such a feeling, without knowing it. Only self-ascriptions in the present tense exhibit these peculiarities; and it should be clear that not all such self-ascriptions do. How are these properties related to each other? The “authoritative” character seems to have something to do with the first and the third property; if the question about reasons for the correctness of my self-ascription does not arise – either for me or for others – and if it is obvious to me that it is correct, then my corresponding utterance guarantees the truth of what I say (assuming I understand my words and I am sincere). A doubt is possible only if there are reasons to believe that these conditions are not met. That my self-ascriptions do not require justification has something to do with the fact that their correctness is obvious to me, and I cannot help but know that they are correct. In self-ascriptions whose correctness is obvious to me, the question of justification does not occur to me. Since others are aware of the special status of such statements, and since they know that their truth is obvious to me, it is unnecessary for them to pose such a question to me either. It seems, therefore, that obvious correctness is a fundamental property of self-ascriptions for which the subject of the ascription takes, or may take, a special “authority” over the utterances. Obviousness or “transparency”, as Wright calls it, excludes for him

34 Wright 1998, p. 14 35 Wright 1998, p. 14 36 Wright 1998, p. 15

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the possibility that the subject does not know that the ascription is correct. Therefore, the special epistemic authority of self-ascriptions concerns the claims of a subject regarding what is obvious to that subject. Wright does not attempt to establish any connection between the characteristics of self-ascriptions he mentions. His explanation of the epistemic asymmetry between these ascriptions and their corresponding other-ascriptions deals with the “authoritative” character of self-ascriptions. Wright sees his attempt as an alternative to the Cartesian view that the subject’s privileged epistemic situation of self-ascription is “a position of (something like an) observational privilege”.³⁷ The authoritative character of self-ascriptions is exhibited through the fact that a question for the reasons of their correctness appears to be inappropriate; thus Wright believes he can deduce that “there is nothing upon which such claims are based.”³⁸ However, knowledge that is not based on reasons, such as our direct perceptual knowledge, is not knowledge without reasons. What is not inferred therefore is not necessarily without reasons.³⁹ As an alternative to the so-called “Cartesian picture” he presents a conception he calls the “default position”: “… it is just primitively constitutive of the acceptability of psychological claims that … a subject’s opinions about herself are default-authoritative and default-limitative: unless you can show how to make better sense of her by overriding or going beyond it, her active self-conception, as manifest in what she is willing to avow, must be deferred to.”⁴⁰ This description of the particular situation of the subject of self-ascriptions is conceived from the third-person point of view. It is all about the fact that others can accept my self-ascriptions, and interpret and understand my utterances. The special or privileged position I have with regard to the correctness of my self-ascriptions is supposed to be based on the fact that “the language game of intentional states”, as Wright puts it, works better, because “the practice of ascribing intentional states to oneself and others” requires “taking the self-conceptions of others seriously”.⁴¹ Unlike Wright, I am of the opinion that the “authoritative” character of my self-ascriptions can be explained by the other two particularities he mentioned: by their obviousness or “transparency” and by their lacking the requirement for justification. It is not clear, at least Wright has not shown, that these features can

37 Wright 1998, p. 22 38 Wright, p. 14 39 Cf. McDowell 1998, p. 48 40 Wright 1998, p. 41 41 Cf. Wright 1989, p. 632

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be explained by his “default position”. It does not seem to be any coincidence that he gives no account of these peculiarities of self-ascriptions. He simply explains the role of self-ascriptions in the understanding of a subject by others. The special situation of subjects is defined by the authority their statements have for others. From this, nothing follows for the particular kind of knowledge subjects have of themselves. Wright does not intend to explain this either, because “we do not cognitively interact with states of affairs which confer truth upon our opinions concerning our own intentional states.”⁴² Thus the authority of the first-person is, for Wright, not an authority that has anything to do with knowledge. An explanation of epistemic asymmetry cannot and clearly therefore should not be given.⁴³ Davidson, too, focuses on the “authoritative” character of self-ascriptions. In his essay First Person Authority he writes: “When a speaker avers that he has a belief, hope, desire or intention, there is a presumption that he is not mistaken, a presumption that does not attach to his ascriptions of similar mental states to others.”⁴⁴ Davidson calls this “the authority accorded first person present tense claims of this sort, and denied second or third person claims.”⁴⁵ We have to distinguish between the self- and other-ascription of the same attitude to the same person and the self- and other-ascription of the same attitude to different people. In the first case, there are different subjects ascribing a predicate, while in the second case there is a single subject ascribing the same predicate to different people. Considering these cases, Davidson emphasizes the special authority the subjects of ascription have regarding their self- but not their other-ascriptions. This authority must therefore be related to the conditions that apply to the subject in the case of self-ascriptions. How can these conditions be determined more accurately? The presumption that the subject is not mistaken should not imply that a mistake is impossible,⁴⁶ or that such ascriptions are incorrigible.⁴⁷ But neither should this be an empirical claim obtained by induction. If errors are possible, knowledge is possible, too. Thus, the project of explaining the special epistemic status of the self-ascription of an attitude requires us to consider the subject’s particular epistemic situation of self-ascription. Such a project must therefore be an epistemological project, or part of one. Davidson seems to think otherwise: “The point may be made … either in the modality of language or of epistemology. 42 Wright 1989, p. 632–633 43 Cf. McDowell 1991, p. 167 44 Davidson 2001a, p. 3 45 Davidson 2001a, p. 3 46 Davidson 2001a, p. 4 47 Davidson 2001b, p. 16

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For if one can speak with special authority, the status of one’s knowledge must somehow accord; while if one’s knowledge shows some systematic difference, claims to know must reflect the difference.”⁴⁸ Davidson opts for an explanation of what he calls First Person Authority in speech and gears it to an authority that is associated with linguistic utterances, or, as he puts it, “in the modality of language”. He assumes that there is a dependence of our knowledge on our speech, or a correlation between them, and this assumption is far from being obvious. Given, however, that the special status of our knowledge manifests itself in a particular way of speaking, or is correlated to it, one should still remain aware of the fact that the “authority of the first person in speech” has to explain in some way the special epistemic situation of the speaker. As Davidson points out, he is specifically concerned with the explanation of “the difference between my knowledge of my own thoughts and the thoughts of others …”⁴⁹ However, he does not give such an explanation because he discusses an asymmetry that leads to a notion of first-person authority which presupposes epistemic asymmetry. Davidson reviews some other explanatory attempts and finds them unconvincing. Then he puts forth his own proposal to explain first-person authority. It can be broken down into two steps. First, he switches from the previously discussed asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of the same attitude to different people, to the associated asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of the same attitude to the same person, and then relates it to a different asymmetry. Second, he tries to explain first person authority in terms of this second asymmetry. Davidson writes: “These two asymmetries are of course connected since we are inclined to say your warrant for thinking I speak the truth when I say ‘I believe Wagner died happy’ must be closely related to your warrant for thinking you would be speaking the truth if you said ‘Davidson believes Wagner died happy’.”⁵⁰ The asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of the same attitude to the same person is closely related to an asymmetry of the reasons that a speaker and a listener can have for their beliefs that the utterances of a speaker expresses something true. The utterance is an assertion by which the speaker expresses their belief verbally. In what follows, Davidson deals only with the special case of self- and other-ascription of beliefs, while the asymmetry he started out with applied to the different knowledge of self- and other-ascriptions of propositional attitudes in general. He does not clarify whether these epistemic differences can

48 Davidson 2001a, p. 3 49 Davidson 1993, p. 248; cf. Davidson 2001b, p. 24 50 Davidson 2001a, p. 11

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be reduced to the differences that occur in the special case of ascriptions of beliefs. Moreover, it should be noted that the assumed asymmetry of the reasons that I and another person have for the belief that I say something true, has nothing to do with the reasons that I and my listener have for our belief that what I think is true. The thesis of first-person authority does not claim that the speaker has a particular authority in this regard. Rather, it is to do with the specific character of the reasons speakers have for the belief that they mean what they say, and thus determine the content of their beliefs correctly.⁵¹ Subsequently, Davidson deals only with the second asymmetry. This approach raises a number of difficulties. First of all, it should be noted that the relationship between the two asymmetries has not been clarified. Davidson speaks of “two related but different asymmetries”, but then also of the fact that the second asymmetry is “the second version of the asymmetry” he refers to as “the basic asymmetry.”⁵² The assumption of two different asymmetries is hardly compatible with the notion that they are two versions of one and the same asymmetry, of which we can say that one is “basic”. Davidson claims that the two asymmetries are “closely related”. However, this is not true, because the first asymmetry is concerned with the difference between the knowledge that the same person or different people have when ascribing the same attitude to different people or the same person; while the second asymmetry has something to do with the different reasons that I and someone else have for our beliefs that I say something true in the sense that I mean what I say. As far as the first asymmetry is concerned, other-ascriptions do not require that the person an attitude is ascribed to, utters a sentence. This also applies to self-ascriptions if applied, for example, to carrying it out for oneself “in thought.” One can form a belief and embrace it as one’s own without uttering a sentence. The first asymmetry not only applies to the case in which the subject of self-ascription utters a sentence, while this is a necessary condition for the second asymmetry. The close relation between the two asymmetries that Davidson assumes, does not exist. There is such a relation, however, in the case of an other-ascription that is based on a corresponding utterance by a speaker; but this connection does not prove what Davidson wants to show. He is concerned with an explanation of “the difference in the sort of assurance you have that I am right when I say, ‘I believe Wagner died happy’ and the sort of assurance I have.”⁵³ Due to the difference between these reasons, the epistemic asymmetry of the self- and other-ascrip-

51 Cf. Davidson 1993, p. 250 52 Davidson 2001a, p. 11–12; cf. Davidson 1993, p. 249 53 Davidson 2001a, p. 11

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tion of the attitude to the same person should be explained. This project fails because, as we will see, these reasons include reasons that presuppose epistemic asymmetry. The asymmetry of those reasons cannot therefore explain the epistemic asymmetry. Let us consider first the case of the listener. As I said, the reasons for an other-ascription of a belief has nothing to do with the fact that someone believes that a speaker says something true by uttering a sentence; as that belief can also be ascribed to her or him without the speaker uttering anything. If, however, the speaker expresses something that is regarded as a self-ascription of a belief, then a listener has different reasons from those of the speaker, for the ascription. The listener’s reasons include the conviction that the speaker is not lying; that the speaker knows what they are saying; that the belief ascribed “fits” the behavior of the speaker, and so on. Only under these conditions are the reasons for the listener’s belief that the speaker means what they say, reasons for the ascription of a belief to the speaker. The conditions for normal communication require that these presumptions are considered to be fulfilled. However, they include that speaker and listener know that the sentence uttered by the speaker is a sentence that speaker believes to be true, as pointed out by Davidson himself.⁵⁴ But the listener can only know this in a way that is different from the way the speaker knows it; so the differences between speaker and listener under conditions of normal communication cannot be described adequately without the assumption of epistemic asymmetry. What about the case of a self-ascribed belief? What does it mean that speakers have reasons to think that they mean what they say? I utter a sentence, and this uttering is my self-ascription of a belief. A belief is true if and only if the content of the belief is indeed the case. But Davidson cannot mean that the speaker’s particular reasons are to do with the truth of the belief. Epistemic asymmetry is not concerned with knowing the truth of matters. What reasons is he referring to? Perhaps Davidson refers to the reasons speakers have for believing or thinking that their uttering is the self-ascription of a belief. But the assumption that they think something in this way is strange. A listener may consider whether the speaker’s uttering should be taken as the self-ascription of a belief. They may wonder whether the speaker is lying, is expressing only a guess or a wish, or is confused and muddled; and after weighing the circumstances the listener may arrive at the conviction that the uttering is a self-ascription of a belief. Davidson establishes a “close relation” between reasons that justify someone’s thinking about the speaker saying something true and the ascription of a belief, only in

54 Davidson 2001a, p. 12

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the case of the listener.⁵⁵ The situation of the speaker looks very different. For the speaker, the listener’s questions do not arise. If I utter something that is to be regarded as a self-ascription of a belief, then I have no belief about the fact that I mean what I say, and therefore also no reasons for this belief. I may have reasons for believing the content of my utterance, or reasons for taking this to be true and not just supposed or wished to be true; but these reasons are not reasons for believing that I mean what I say. What does this have to do with the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of the same attitude to the same person from which Davidson started out? Surely this should be clarified by the second asymmetry. The first asymmetry implies that speakers know that they have certain beliefs in a way a listener cannot know this. The special knowledge of speakers should be explained by the reasons they have for holding their beliefs that they mean what they say. But the listener can have such reasons, while usually speakers do not have such reasons at all, unless they feel compelled to check whether they really mean what they say, and thereby come to the conclusion that indeed they do. Considerations of this kind are concerned with sincerity, the ability to distinguish between wishful thinking and believing, and with language skills. Here, when checking their beliefs, speakers treat their utterances as if they were listeners: from the standpoint of a third person. It is entirely unclear whether the speaker has special knowledge in these matters. In any case, the epistemic asymmetry is not about such knowledge of the speaker. Summarizing, one can say that the “close relation” between the two asymmetries, as Davidson assumes it, does not exist. There are cases for which epistemic asymmetry applies without there being an asymmetry between the reasons of the speaker and the listener with regard to their belief that the speaker means what he says. This asymmetry has something to do with the different positions that speakers and listeners take in the communicative use of linguistic utterances. These differences do not only apply to the communication of beliefs, but to communicative utterance of all sentence. Thus it is only reasonable and consistent that Davidson abstains from going on to discuss the self-ascription of beliefs and deals instead with utterances of any sentence in general. But his considerations do not demonstrate that the different positions of speaker and listener in communicative utterances explain the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of a belief to the same person, because these different positions presuppose the epistemic asymmetry, as shown by the speaker’s and the listener’s knowledge that the speaker considers the sentences he utters to be true.

55 Davidson 2001a, p. 11

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Now I come to the second step of how Davidson explains first-person authority. This step deals with the different positions of speaker and listener in general, explicated in his well-known theory of interpretation. Let us take it as read that both I and someone else know that my uttering a sentence is to be considered as an assertoric use of the sentence: as taking something to be true. So both of us can know what belief I express if we both know what the sentence I uttered means. Or we can both know what the sentence means if we know what belief I have. Davidson considers only the differences between the knowledge I have and the knowledge someone else has regarding what the sentence I express means.⁵⁶ The other person can only know this by interpreting my uttering; and such an interpretation is always exposed to the risk of error.⁵⁷ Elsewhere Davidson points out that “our knowledge of what others mean by what they say must depend on observation.”⁵⁸ Therefore, the knowledge that another person has of what I mean by my words or utterances is always knowledge based on interpretation and supported by observation and inferences.⁵⁹ However, the situation is quite different as far as my corresponding knowledge is concerned: “The speaker cannot, in the same way, interpret his own words.”⁶⁰ How should the asymmetry  – between my knowledge of what I mean by my uttering and the knowledge of others about it – be understood? How can it explain the special authority of my knowledge? That the question of how I know what I mean by my statement, does not arise for me, can have various reasons. It may be unnecessary to pose it, because it is obvious to me what I mean. But one can also think that it is meaningless to ask this question because one can only talk of knowledge when it has to do with finding something out. Davidson seems to opt for the first possibility when he remarks, that “justification is simply out of place here.”⁶¹ This knowledge concerns my correct use of words to express my thoughts, and the question of justification does not occur to me, because “a person cannot generally misuse his own words, because it is that use which gives his words their meaning.”⁶² The question of how I know what I mean by my statement does not arise for me because my use of the words expresses what I mean. For Davidson, this is a “presumption” of the fact that my utterances are understandable and thus can be interpreted: “… unless there is a presumption that the speaker knows what she means, i.e. is

56 Cf. Thöle 1993, p. 238 57 Davidson 2001a, p. 12 58 Davidson 1993, p. 249 59 Davidson 2001a, p. 12 60 Davidson 2001a, p. 12 61 Davidson 1993, p. 250 62 Davidson 1993, p. 250; cf. Davidson 2001b, p. 37–38

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getting her own language right, there would be nothing for an interpreter to interpret.”⁶³ Speakers’ knowledge of what they mean by their own utterances is identified with their understanding of the language. What kind of knowledge is given by such an understanding is not clarified by Davidson any further. The issue here is to explore the consequences of assuming such knowledge for his project of explaining the speaker’s first-person authority. The assumption is that speakers know what they mean by their utterances, therefore they cannot be wrong about their belief.⁶⁴ As Davidson himself says, he is pleading for a “fairly extreme form of individualism about meaning.”⁶⁵ Disregarding the problems of such a theory of meaning, Davidson’s proposed explanation resorts to the difference that exists between my knowledge of what I mean by my utterance, and the corresponding knowledge of another person. My beliefs about what I mean do not need any justification, while the beliefs of others do. My beliefs have, according to Davidson, this particular epistemic status because “the speaker usually knows what he means.”⁶⁶ This thesis says nothing other than claiming that my beliefs about what I mean by my utterances have a special epistemic authority. But it is just this authority that should be accounted for by an explanation of the epistemic asymmetry between my knowledge and the knowledge of another person with regard to my beliefs. To explain this asymmetry and thus the authority of the first-person point of view in the ascription of attitudes, Davidson resorts to a special case of belief: beliefs that I and another person have about what I mean by my words. In this case, the asymmetry is not explained, but presupposed.⁶⁷ This raises the question: how important is the particular case of our knowledge of what we mean by our words in general for self-knowledge with such authority? According to Davidson, the question is important because this case represents “the basic asymmetry”. As he puts it, “there must be a presumption that speakers, but not their interpreters, are not wrong about what their words mean.”⁶⁸ Yet these considerations can only be regarded as relevant if one is convinced that the epistemic authority of the first-person point of view in the ascription of attitudes (and thus the epistemic asymmetry between self- and other-ascriptions of such attitudes in general) can be explained solely on the basis of the special case Davidson considers here. However, he lacks evidence for this, so that his 63 Davidson 2001b, p. 38 64 Cf. Davidson 1993, p. 250 65 Davidson 1993, p. 250; cf. Thöle 1993, p. 243–244 66 Davidson 2001a, p. 14 67 Cf. Thöle 1993, p. 244–245 68 Davidson 2001a, p. 12

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thesis of the second asymmetry as the “basic” one is not justified. As long as such evidence is lacking, the particular case can be regarded only as a special case of general first-person authority and of a general asymmetry which should be explained, and not exemplified by a particular instance. Therefore, Davidson’s project to explain epistemic first-person authority via the conditions for interpreting a speaker’s utterances, fails.

5 Authoritative Self-Knowledge The conceptions of self-knowledge discussed in the last chapter are based on the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person. They represent attempts to explain the epistemological particularities of a certain kind of self-knowledge by means of the notion of first-person authority. This authority is due to the particular role that self-ascriptions of feelings and sensations or propositional attitudes play in the communicative use of linguistic utterances. The project of Wright and Davidson fails because the difference between the knowledge I have of myself and the knowledge that others have of what I know about myself, cannot be explained by the difference between self- and other-ascriptions of the same predicate to the same person, if they are interpreted in terms of the philosophy of language. Without justification, their discussion of our self-knowledge is restricted to a consideration of our “psychological self-knowledge”. This self-knowledge is treated thematically in a rather narrow sense as knowledge of phenomenal states, according to Wright, or more widely as knowledge of our propositional attitudes, according to Davidson. There are no systematic considerations regarding the extent of self-knowledge that differs from the corresponding knowledge of others due to epistemic asymmetry. The approaches, considered below, maintain the notion of an epistemological particularity of our self-knowledge and are geared to the role that such knowledge plays in the achievements or activities of its subject. The authority of this self-knowledge is grounded in the constitutive role that knowledge of our mental states plays in our capacity for responsible action and deliberation. Such self-knowledge is mainly about beliefs and intentions that guide our actions or are accessible to rational assessment and a thereby established change. The epistemological particularities of our self-knowledge apply to a thematically specified self-knowledge as such and are founded on its contents. I will show that such an approach cannot do justice to important cases of epistemologically distinguished self-knowledge. I aim to remedy this deficiency by justifying the particularity of self-knowledge, not in terms of its content but of the structure of such knowledge. Bilgrami starts out with the conviction that our self-knowledge has a special character, and tries to explain its particularities. From the outset, he accounts only for a thematically restricted self-knowledge: the knowledge we have of our propositional attitudes, such as our beliefs and desires.¹ This restriction is rather unsatisfactory if one believes that philosophy is interested in self-know-

1 Bilgrami 2006, p. 1

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ledge “at the highest level of generality”.² Although the knowledge of our intentional states of the kind mentioned constitutes an essential and integral part of our self-knowledge, an exclusive consideration of this knowledge cannot answer questions about the peculiarity of our self-knowledge in general. Answers to those questions can only be found through an analysis of the form or structure of our self-knowledge as it is developed here, following the discussion of Burge’s considerations. Bilgrami’s discussion of the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person characterizes his overall approach. This asymmetry is often seen as providing us with some information about details of our self-knowledge, at least for the limited area of our own mental states and activities. Strawson proposes that we consider the asymmetry as the basis for understanding the concept of ‘person’: a person is a being who predicates are ascribed to, some of which epistemic asymmetry does not apply to, but for others of which it does.³ Strawson explains the special importance of the second class of predicates via the “language structure” in which we talk about our own mental states and those of others.⁴ Bilgrami criticizes this approach and points out that Strawson does not attempt to explain the asymmetry by analyzing the notion of person. If he does not provide such an analysis, then, according to Bilgrami, his considerations just show “a superior form of intellectual laziness”.⁵ This evaluation of a Descriptive Metaphysics in Strawson’s sense must be seen against the background of Bilgrami’s project to found the asymmetry on the concept of a person, and more precisely to rely on the concepts of freedom and responsibility.⁶ That project is an attempt to consider the asymmetry in a “wider context” and not to restrict its consideration to a “specific epistemological point about a certain asymmetry”.⁷ The peculiarity of self-knowledge can easily get lost from sight with such lofty explanatory projects. Bilgrami argues for a “constitutive view” of self-knowledge, which he explains thus: “The idea that our intentional states are not in the same way independent of our capacities for self-knowledge is what defines the idea of the constitutive role of self-knowledge, defines the idea that it is constitutive of the intentional states it is knowledge of.”⁸ The conception of self-knowledge is ‘constitutive’

2 Bilgrami 2006, p. 3 3 P. Strawson 1959, p. 105–107 4 P. Strawson 1959, p. 109–110 5 Bilgrami 2006, p. 44 6 Bilgrami 2006, p. 46 7 Bilgrami 2006, p. 47 8 Bilgrami 2006, p. 14

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because the contents of this knowledge are somehow “constituted” by its knowledge in contrast to the relationship that exists between perception and its object. Therefore, the constitutive conception of self-knowledge is contrasted with “the perceptual conception of self-knowledge”.⁹ These different conceptions are distinguished by different relationships which hold between knowledge and its content. But this distinction does not explain the peculiar nature of a certain kind of self-knowledge, because the alternative formulated by Bilgrami can be interpreted in different ways. From this alone, nothing yet follows regarding the special character of our self-knowledge. Over long passages Bilgrami deals with the topic of the knowledge he considers to be special, which leads him to consider intentional states and their role in responsible action, without going into the specific nature of this knowledge. The core of Bilgrami’s “constitutive” conception of self-knowledge consists of two theses that are introduced as “presumptions”,¹⁰ and their extensive justification is an essential part of the book. They are implications, referred to as the condition of authority, (A), and the condition of transparency, (T). The first is: (A) If S believes that she believes (desires) that p, then she believes (desires) that p. The second is: (T) If S believes (desires) that p, then S believes that she believes (desires) that p. Connecting these conditions yields the result that, according to Bilgrami, we have a certain desire or a certain belief if and only if we believe that we have it. The two conditions are supposed to characterize a particular conception of self-knowledge; but it is striking that knowledge is not mentioned in either of the two theses at all. (A) deals with a second-order attitude, more precisely: a belief about one’s own first-order desires or beliefs, and says that its subject cannot be wrong here. But as Bilgrami himself admits, knowledge consists not only of having a true belief.¹¹ Therefore, (A) by itself does not deal with knowledge of one’s own beliefs or wishes. On the other hand, (T) deals with an epistemic property of our first-order beliefs and desires: they cannot escape us, they are not hidden from us. If we have such attitudes, then we also believe that we have them. This “transparency” of our

9 Bilgrami 2006, p. 27 10 Bilgrami 2006, p. 30–31 11 Bilgrami 2006, p. 29

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own beliefs and desires is certainly a remarkable property which is not so common, unfortunately or fortunately, in our ordinary mental lives. Bilgrami emphasizes that (A) and (T) together characterize the relationship that exists between the kind of self-knowledge considered by him and its object, i.e., the dependence of certain mental states on our beliefs about them.¹² Therefore, this knowledge cannot be understood by a model of knowledge that is based on perception; because the object of the latter type of knowledge is what it is, as emphasized time and again, independently of our taking note of it. Again, for this latter type of knowledge, of course, it is not true that we cannot be wrong about it or that it cannot escape our attention. This is certainly correct; but what follows from this comparison? According to Bilgrami, our first-order intentional states lack “the independence possessed by the things of which we have perceptual knowledge”.¹³ That independence is an ontological independence: the existence and nature of things in the world is independent of the fact that there are perceptions and other mental representations of them. (A) and (T) are about relationships between our beliefs about our first-order attitudes and those attitudes themselves. Only (T) establishes a dependency between such attitudes and our belief in them – a dependency that indicates that our first-order attitudes cannot be hidden from us. Thus we have something that resembles doxastic or epistemic dependence of these attitudes on our beliefs about them, which should not be understood as negating the ontological independence of the things in the world from their mental representations. Because the negation of (T) implies that we have first-order attitudes that we do not believe we have, they are thus hidden from us. Such attitudes are not “transparent”: they are unconscious for us. This means that we have no, or no correct, representation of them; while the independence of the objects of perception from perception is an ontological independence: the existence of such an object and its properties is independent of there being any mental representation of it at all, correct or not. In the case of unconscious or misidentified attitudes, it is misleading to understand the independence of such first-order attitudes from the respective beliefs about them as analogous to the ontological independence of the object of perception from that perception. Unconscious or misidentified attitudes are attitudes we have without knowing we have them or without holding correct beliefs about them. This independence is more specific than the ontological independence that exists between perception and its objects. Therefore, that Bilgrami tries to capture the special character of self-knowledge through his “constitutive con-

12 Bilgrami 2006, p. 29 13 Bilgrami 2006, p. 29

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ception” can only yield disappointing results if it is compared and explained in contrast to the “perceptual model of self-knowledge”. Another problem arises if one questions the validity of the assumption of (A) and (T). Bilgrami emphasizes that only the current intentional states of a subject are relevant for consideration as appropriate, and that it is therefore all about the corresponding current beliefs.¹⁴ However, he objects to Burge that (A) and (T) do not hold only for “occurrent states self-ascribed in the present”.¹⁵ He is thinking here of “standing states”: beliefs or wishes that one would readily ascribe to oneself if one were asked about them.¹⁶ It would be more interesting, however, to gain some information about “occurrent states” in the past; since, as we will see, Bilgrami discusses his favorite intentional states in terms of their role in the explanation of actions and in the ascription of responsibility. They can only play this role though, if the diachronic dimension of responsibility is taken into account and with it, earlier beliefs and desires, which need not be “permanent states”. Should (A) and (T) apply to them as well? Bilgrami does not answer this question. However, the real problem with (A) and (T) is quite different: they are, as Bilgrami points out, “obviously false”.¹⁷ He tries to counter this deplorable state of affairs by pursuing the “project of a philosophical integration”.¹⁸ What is meant will be illustrated here in reference to his discussion of (T). The thesis that (T) expresses is wrong because we often have wishes and beliefs, not to mention other intentional first-order attitudes, that we are not aware of and may not even be able to be or want to be aware of. Bilgrami tries to account for this by formulating (T) first as a “presumption” and then, in trying to explain it, switches to the assertion of (T).¹⁹ The strategy consists of distinguishing between first-order attitudes for which such a claim holds, and those attitudes for which this is not the case. The former attitudes are those that are relevant for responsible action, but this does not imply, as Bilgrami seems to suggest, that “if responsible is not in the offing, … then self-knowledge need not be present either.”²⁰ Being relevant for responsible action provides a sufficient condition for attitudes that satisfy (T), but – as we will see – it is not a necessary condition. It would go beyond the scope of the present work to discuss the detailed analysis of actions for which the agent may be held responsible. To understand Bil-

14 Bilgrami 2006, p. 32 15 Bilgrami 2006, p. 97 16 Bilgrami 2006, p. 98 17 Bilgrami 2006, p. 291 18 Cf. Bilgrami 2006, p. 291–294 19 Bilgrami 2006, p. 31 20 Bilgrami 2006, p. 118

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grami’s approach, I think the following remarks suffice. The desires and beliefs he considers are crucial for actions and their explanations; and our knowledge of these attitudes when we act is a condition for us to know what we are doing. Furthermore, this knowledge is presupposed if we regard agents as responsible for their actions, and if they are able to evaluate their own behavior. Evaluations of our own actions and the underlying intentional attitudes in the form of pride, remorse, shame and so on, are a constitutive part of our conception of responsible action. These self-referential attitudes are only possible under the condition that agents know of their actions and the corresponding intentional states. Bilgrami suggests therefore, that self-knowledge, as considered by him, holds for intentional states that play a role in the context of responsible action.²¹ We are dealing here with a particular kind of self-knowledge that is a necessary condition for responsible action, and thus the relevant intentional states must be “transparent”.²² If we accept all of this as true for the sake of argument, what follows for our self-knowledge – or more precisely, for our self-knowledge of propositional attitudes to which (T) should apply? One cannot doubt that self-knowledge of such propositional attitudes is a necessary condition for responsible action. But neither can one doubt that we also have self-knowledge of desires and beliefs, as well as other intentional and nonintentional states that all satisfy (T), without these states having anything to do with responsible action and normative self-evaluation. Bilgrami points out that there is a connection between a lack of responsibility and the absence of corresponding true second-order beliefs about our first-order beliefs and desires; more precisely, that the latter is a sufficient condition for the former. This is true, but the converse does not hold, as he himself admits. This not only implies, as Bilgrami emphasizes, that responsibility requires more than just self-knowledge,²³ but also, and above all, that a lack of responsibility does not exclude the transparency of our first-order beliefs and desires. Bilgrami is wrong, therefore, in claiming that the transparency of beliefs and desires as a necessary condition for responsible action, demonstrates that this transparency can be explained by (T).²⁴ What he has shown is that intentional states such as beliefs and desires that play a role for responsible action require self-knowledge and must therefore satisfy (T).²⁵ Since the converse does not apply, his claim that (T) can be explained by this relationship is wrong. There is

21 Bilgrami 2006, p. 97; Cf. p. 119 22 Bilgrami 2006, p. 99 23 Bilgrami 2006, p. 99 24 Bilgrami 2006, p. 99 25 Bilgrami 2006, p. 129

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no doubt that the concept of responsible action cannot be understood without the assumption of knowledge of one’s own beliefs and desires. It does not follow, however, that the consideration of self-knowledge in general and of our occurrent mental states in particular, must or can be limited to one’s own propositional attitudes that have something to do with responsible action. Bilgrami thinks otherwise, and tries to justify his one-sided discussion of self-knowledge by suggesting that in this way one would come to the conclusion that self-knowledge is a fallout from the concept of responsible action.²⁶ That the capacity for responsible action without knowledge of one’s own beliefs and desires is not possible, does not justify discussion of the knowledge we have of our beliefs and desires only in connection with this capacity or confining our analysis to this. Bilgrami is critical of a view of self-knowledge that does not account for its role in responsible action.²⁷ But one does not have to adopt such a view to claim that the knowledge we have of our beliefs and desires should not only be explained in those cases that have something to do with responsible action. This claim is justified since there are intentional states that satisfy (T) but have nothing to do with responsibility. Neither does this claim necessarily commit one to the thesis “that if something is a necessary condition for something else, one must have an account of it that is independent of what it is a necessary condition for”.²⁸ Moreover, it is not based on the assumption that the only form of explication “lay in some sort of reductive analysis.”²⁹ Whatever such views may be, the crucial objection to Bilgrami is that his reflections on self-knowledge revolve exclusively around the theme of ‘no action without self-knowledge’. Therefore, they cannot provide a satisfactory analysis of such knowledge, because we know about our intentional states in a way that has nothing to do with responsible action. This criticism of his one-sided, “practical” notion of self-knowledge has nothing to do with the aforementioned strong meta-philosophical theses. Furthermore, his suggestion that the only alternative to his approach would be “a reductive analysis” is unfounded. He understands our self-knowledge of intentional states as “a fallout of agency”.³⁰ This implies that self-knowledge is a necessary condition for responsible action, and that the relevant intentional attitudes are transparent in the sense of (T).³¹ The advantage of his view should be that “we have brought together two 26 Bilgrami 2006, p. 129 27 Bilgrami 2006, p. 129 28 Bilgrami 2006, p. 130 29 Bilgrami 2006, p. 131 30 Bilgrami 2006, p. 129 31 Bilgrami 2006, p. 129

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seemingly different ideas (that of freedom or agency and that of self-knowledge) in a way that makes it clear that the latter may be just a fallout of the former …”.³² Apparently these ideas are not so different, since it is a “conspicuous fact”, for Bilgrami as for anybody else, that the concept of action cannot be made intelligible without the assumption of some self-knowledge.³³ Be that as it may, for Bilgrami it is all about establishing a “project of philosophical integration of different philosophical notions”, which is to serve to justify our “intuitions about self-knowledge” as formulated by (A) and (T).³⁴ What kind of justification can one expect from such a project? Let us restrict ourselves to (T) and the idea that transparency is a “fallout of a conception of agency.” It is difficult to understand this idea in a way other than how Bilgrami expresses it over and over again with his completely uncontroversial theses, that responsible action presupposes self-knowledge of certain intentional states by the agent and that therefore (T) must be met. To explicate such conceptual conditions is certainly meritorious; but in this way, the extension of the particular self-knowledge that is the central issue of his philosophical analysis is not adequately determined, and neither is the concept of such knowledge made explicit in a satisfactory manner. In summary, one can say that Bilgrami’s constitutive conception of self-knowledge does not deal with the particular nature of a certain kind of self-knowledge, but with the particular contents of our self-knowledge. This thematic shift is intended.³⁵ His book could more aptly be titled Agency and Resentment. I have shown for the example of (T), that the plausibility of his reflections is exhausted by the claim that self-knowledge of certain first-order propositional attitudes is a condition for responsible action. That is certainly true and means, according to Bilgrami, that self-knowledge has to be considered “in a normative framework”. But such a view does not lead us to abandon our search for the particular nature of self-knowledge and to turn to a theory of “normative foundations of our thought and action” because self-knowledge is just a necessary condition for responsible action, as it is for other states of affairs. Bilgrami’s considerations regarding self-knowledge are shaped by the idea that our self-knowledge is “in some sense unique”³⁶, because it is distinguished by an authority and transparency that no other knowledge has. While author-

32 Bilgrami 2006, p. 184 33 Bilgrami 2006, p. 93 34 Bilgrami 2006, p. XIII 35 Bilgrami 2006, p. XIII 36 Bilgrami 2006, p. XIII

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ity indicates that our beliefs about certain intentional attitudes that we have imply their truth, transparency is concerned with the content of those beliefs and requires that we also believe that we have such attitudes, when we have them. Whereas authority refers to a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowledge, this does not apply to transparency. That our desires and beliefs are not hidden from us, as far as they are relevant for our responsible actions, is a property of these propositional attitudes. Thus, if authority and transparency constitute the particular nature of self-knowledge discussed by Bilgrami, then its particularity consists, on one hand, of the fact that certain beliefs cannot be mistaken; and on the other, of the transparency of their content. Is it sufficient to consider this knowledge? Bilgrami does not ask himself this question, or deems it unnecessary to ask it at all, because he is convinced that the particularities he emphasizes make plausible a project that he describes as “seeing self-knowledge in its normative setting, thereby transforming and transporting the idea of such a knowledge to a place outside epistemology in the standard sense”.³⁷ He abandons an epistemological discussion of self-knowledge or dismisses it because it is supposed to be “the more standard perceptual and inferential view of self-knowledge”.³⁸ First of all, however, Bilgrami does not show that the alternative he offers between his favored “constitutive conception” of self-knowledge and the “observational model of self-knowledge” is complete or exclusive. Second, he is wrong in assuming that epistemological considerations of self-knowledge imply the view that only perception and inferences can be suitable as foundations for such knowledge. This we can see clearly in the considerations of Burge, which I discuss now. Burge speaks of “basic self-knowledge”, and later also of “authoritative self-knowledge”. In the following, I use the latter term. Such knowledge has peculiarities that concern both its content and the kind of knowledge it is. For this connection between a thematic restriction and epistemological peculiarity he refers to Descartes.³⁹ Like Bilgrami, Burge develops his conception of a particular self-knowledge by distinguishing it from self-knowledge based on observation. Authoritative self-knowledge is characterized first by the fact that the possibility of brute error does not exist; and second, it is determined by the first-person point of view. Neither of these two defining features applies to knowledge based on observation. As I show, these two viewpoints lead to different conceptions of authoritative self-knowledge. Beliefs based on perceptions are exposed to the risk of brute error, because perceptions rely on causal relationships between our

37 Bilgrami 2006, p. XIV 38 Bilgrami 2006, p. XIV 39 Burge 1988, p. 55

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perception and the perceived object that exists independently of our perception. Under unfavorable circumstances, we may be wrong even if our perceptual abilities are not malfunctioning.⁴⁰ If authoritative self-knowledge is distinguished by not being exposed to the risk of brute error, then the relation that exists between the subject of knowledge and its contents, has to be different from the relation in the case of perception. For a positive determination of this relation, Burge turns to “self-verifying cogito-judgments”.⁴¹ The authoritative self-knowledge dealt with in this way is thematically restricted to current acts of propositional thoughts. This restriction does not do justice to the extension and limits of such knowledge. Relying on Descartes does not lead to an adequate understanding of self-knowledge that is epistemologically distinguished. In contrast, the approach of considering authoritative self-knowledge as knowledge from the first-person point of view, goes further and provides an appropriate starting point for such an understanding. Burge developed this approach by distinguishing self-knowledge from knowledge by observation as well.⁴² The intersubjectivity of knowledge based on observation results from the inter-subjective access to what can be observed. Such observation is possible for anyone who has the appropriate capacities and fulfills the specific conditions of the situation. While such knowledge is always certain person’s knowledge, anyone can acquire it in just the same way. This knowledge is “impersonal” in the sense of not requiring a specific person; either in terms of its content or with regard to the way it is acquired.⁴³ Authoritative self-knowledge, in contrast, should be distinguished by its “first-person character”.⁴⁴ Burge justifies this by emphasizing the role of the first-person point of view in the assessment of one’s own first-order attitudes, which can be changed accordingly. The rational assessment of one’s attitudes and their formation or change in the light of such assessments are characteristic features of deliberation. The paradigm of self-verifying cogito-judgments does not have much to do with deliberation. The knowledge that is expressed through self-verifying judgments does not require deliberation, and this does not lead to cognition that is formulated through such judgments. An understanding of authoritative self-knowledge based on a Cartesian paradigm does not therefore coincide with the understanding that places deliberation at the center. Below, I show that the two differences between knowledge based on

40 Burge 1988, p. 73; cf. Burge 1996, p. 77–81 41 Burge 1988, p. 62–63 42 Burge 1988, p. 63 43 Burge 1988, p. 62 44 Burge 1988, p. 63; cf. Burge 1996, p. 86

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observation and authoritative self-knowledge, as pointed out by Burge, lead to different conceptions of the latter knowledge. By focusing on the exclusion of the possibility of a brute error, he argues for a Cartesian paradigm of self-knowledge; meanwhile, accounting for self-knowledge from the first-person point of view leads to its explication within the context of deliberation. The first-person point of view plays a central role in both approaches. Even the self-knowledge expressed by cogito-judgments can only be understood by assuming that point of view. As we will see, both approaches make use of it, but in different ways. The first-person point of view, relevant to authoritative self-knowledge, does not consist in the simple linguistic fact, that the natural and obvious form in which a speaker ascribes a self-knowledge to himself, uses the first-person singular pronoun. Also, the authority that a certain self-knowledge possesses should have nothing to do with inner observation or familiarity with oneself.⁴⁵ It is this notion of some overall empirical character of our self-knowledge, which appears to be entailed by the idea of knowledge based on observation, that is to be criticized by the conception of authoritative self-knowledge. Burge says: “The rationalist tradition, in its emphasis on the role of self-knowledge in rationality, and the role of understanding (not sensory observation) in self-knowledge, is the source of my view.”⁴⁶ It is therefore not surprising that our knowledge of our pain and other sensations – which many philosophers take as paradigmatic cases for authoritative self-knowledge – is not central for Burge at all.⁴⁷ What should non-empirical self-knowledge be like and what grounds should it be based on? Consider first Burge’s response based on Descartes’ cogito-judgments. They deal with a subject’s current thinking and its content. This thematic restriction of self-knowledge has something to do with Burge’s interest in a priori self-knowledge and with his well-known “anti-individualistic” theory of the content of propositional attitudes or mental representations in general. He wants to show that that theory does not, as one might suspect, exclude the possibility of a priori self-knowledge.⁴⁸ It is characterized by “directness and certainty”.⁴⁹ I will not here consider the compatibility of an “anti-individualistic” theory of mental representations with the assumption of a priori self-knowledge as it is expressed in cogito-judgments. My aim is rather to show that such judgments do not provide a foundation for an adequate understanding of authoritative self-knowledge.

45 Burge 1996, p. 78 46 Burge 1996, p. 78 note 10 47 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 81; Burge 1999, p. 110 note 6 48 Cf. Burge 2003b, p. 135; Burge 1988, p. 55 49 Burge 1988, p. 55

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Burge assumes that one must understand a thought in order to think it. This is not to say that one is able to give a correct explication of one’s thoughts and the notions that occur in them.⁵⁰ Thus, one can know what one thinks, without being able to explicate it. Such knowledge is due to the understanding of what one thinks. My thoughts cannot exist without me thinking them. A self-ascription of this thinking has the form of a cogito-judgment. I can only ascribe a thought to myself if I say what I think, and thus determine the thought I am thinking. This thought is the “intentional content” of my thinking, and thus a constitutive part of that thinking.⁵¹ Since the content of my self-knowledge, which is expressed in the form of cogito-judgments, is thought via such a judgment itself, and since this thinking is not possible without determining what is thought, such judgments cannot be wrong.⁵² According to Burge, these considerations show that the assumption of authoritative self-knowledge of thinking thoughts which we ascribe to ourselves in the form of cogito-judgments, does not conflict with a non-individualistic view of the contents of our thoughts. This compatibility was, and remains, Burge’s point of view from which he discusses authoritative self-knowledge,⁵³ and it informs his selection of examples considered as “useful paradigms”⁵⁴ and as “the basic cases [that] … provide a key to understanding the whole range”.⁵⁵ In contrast, I will show that these cases have logical and epistemological particularities that other cases of authoritative self-knowledge do not share. Therefore, the analysis of cogito-judgments does not provide an apt basis for an adequate understanding of such knowledge in general. The logical peculiarity consists of the fact that cogito-judgments are self-verifying, while their epistemological peculiarity has something to do with the rational grounds on which that knowledge is based.⁵⁶ The logical peculiarity of verifying self-judgments can be illustrated by a judgment whose content is about the fact that: (1) I think there are physical things. Judgments whose content is described by (1), are judgments that can be made by different people, and have different truth conditions accordingly. Furthermore, I

50 Burge 1988, p. 66; cf. Burge 2003c, p. 308 51 Burge 1996, p. 71–72; cf. Burge 1988, p. 59 52 Burge 1996, p.72 53 Burge 1996, p. 68 54 Burge 2003b, p. 128 55 Burge 2003b, p. 128 56 Burge 1996, p. 78

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can ascribe the judgment that I think there are physical things to others. Such a judgment is certainly not a case of a self-verifying judgment. Thus it is not the judgment whose content is identified by (1) which is self-verifying. What matters is that a particular person makes a judgment whose content consists of (1) – in this case, that I do so. That judgment is self-verifying, because it is true, when I acknowledge its content as true; and this is the case if I think there are physical things. The self-verification of a cogito-judgment requires coordination between the judgment and its content, which consists of the identity of the subject who judges and the subject of the thinking, who the content of the judgment refers to. The subject must have knowledge of this identity. The self-verification results from the particular role that the thinking of such thoughts plays for the relevant judgments. If there is no such coordination, there is no self-verification. So my judgment with the content: (2) Burge thinks there are physical things. is obviously not self-verifying. And my judgment with the content: (3) I have lost my house key. is not self-verifying either. I cannot make that judgment without thinking (3), but it is clear that my thinking is neither necessary nor sufficient for the truth of the judgment that (3). Self-verifying cogito-judgments require not only that their contents relate to the thinking of the person who makes the judgment, but also that thinking the thought has to be a sufficient condition for making such a judgment true. Therefore, a judgment with the content: (4) I was thinking yesterday there are physical things. is not self-verifying, in contrast to my judgment that: (5) I think I was thinking yesterday there are physical things. This is because my thinking which took place yesterday, cannot be thinking that makes my present judgment true. The content of such self-verifying judgments is just the thinking of thoughts that is a constitutive part of the judgment itself.⁵⁷

57 Burge 1996, p.  71–71; cf. Burge 2003b: “… the intentional content that they attribute is thought and thought about at the same time.” (133)

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As we have already seen, it is all about thinking whose subject is identical to the subject who makes the judgment in an epistemically transparent way. This requires ‘I’-speech: thinking and judging that cannot be understood without the use of the first-person singular pronoun. Furthermore, it has to do with the thinking of thoughts, which is accomplished by the very act of judging. This not only excludes cases such as (4), but also deals with just that thinking of thoughts that is already given as soon as they become the content of a cogito-judgment.⁵⁸ Burge speaks of “pure cogito cases” that are “logically self-verifying”.⁵⁹ The restrictive nature of this provision becomes clear when one considers an impure cogito case, for example my judgment that I want to make a donation to the Red Cross. The person who utters such a judgment, declares their intention, and thus determines that they have an intention and what they intend to do. However, this applies only to the utterance of such a judgment under normal conditions. The assumption of such conditions is necessary because it is possible that one makes this judgment, but is not really able to intend it or to make it one’s own intention.⁶⁰ To have an intention or to make it one’s own is not enough to make an appropriate judgment. In a “pure” cogito-judgment, in contrast, it is not possible to assume a divergence between the judgment and its content: if I judge that I think there are physical things, I can make such a judgment only if I think its content and thereby verify the judgment. I may be wrong in believing that there are physical things, but not in believing I think it when I think it; because thinking it is a prerequisite for any kind of attitude towards the thought that there are physical things. In contrast, I can certainly think that I have the intention of donating something to the Red Cross, without having this intention. Because to think that one has the intention, is not sufficient for having it. The judgment is not related to its content so that it becomes true and one has the attitude already when the content is being thought. Thus a declaration of one’s intention is not self-verifying. The fundamental case of self-knowledge requires only that “one thinks one’s thoughts in the self-referential, self-ascriptive manner”.⁶¹ That only this is sufficient means that the thematic area of such self-knowledge is very limited, and already the knowledge of our intentions or other complex attitudes cannot be understood in this way. Burge calls self-knowledge expressed in cogito-judgments basic self-knowledge.⁶² Although he chose this term initially only for terminological reasons,

58 Cf. Burge 1988, p. 66 59 Burge 2003b, p. 124 60 Burge 2003b, p. 124 61 Burge 1988, p. 66 62 Burge 1988, p. 66

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and he is quite clear about the fact “that there are features of self-knowledge – other than self-verification – that are dramatically and paradigmatically realized in what I call the basic cases…”⁶³ What kind of features should they be? They cannot be related to the semantic and logical peculiarities of cogito-judgments, i.e., their truth conditions and their logical form.⁶⁴ As I mentioned earlier, it must rather be epistemological particularities that characterize such judgments and consist of their warrant depending “for its force purely on intellectual understanding …”.⁶⁵ This distinguishes them from other self-verifying judgments, such as, that I think now, or that I am here now. What is meant by such an understanding? In his early essay Individualism and Self-Knowledge, Burge points out that one thinks thoughts in “the self-referential, self-ascriptive manner.”⁶⁶ This seems to have little to do with “intellectual understanding”, but rather with the conditions under which people think and are conscious of it. Later he claims that the warrants for our self-knowledge, articulated in cogito-judgments, are given by their “role … in critical reasoning”.⁶⁷ By exploring this role, one discovers warrants for authoritative self-knowledge which are not expressed by self-verifying cogito-judgments; and thus a new, more comprehensive conception of authoritative self-knowledge emerges. This brings me to Burge’s second approach to explicating authoritative self-knowledge. His term critical reasoning describes a complex cognitive activity that is present both in the area of thinking and reasoning, as well as in the realm of action. It is an activity that consists of the recognition and assessment of reasons and covers everything that has to do with this. In what follows, I use the term deliberation without dealing with its restrictive application to issues of practical philosophy. I will first consider Burge’s analysis, in which he elaborates on the structure of deliberation, and then provide a clarification of whether and how it can function as justification for authoritative knowledge. Finally, this will lead to the determination of the extension and limits of self-knowledge, which can be explained by the practice of deliberation. Deliberation is based on an understanding or knowledge of good reasons which guides us in our first-order thinking in theoretical as well as in practical areas.⁶⁸ Such thinking is concerned with what is true, or what we want and desire, and its deliberative assessment consists of working out the relations of inference, 63 Burge 2003b, p. 128 64 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 69; Burge 2003b, 133 65 Burge 2000, p. 374 66 Burge 1988, p. 66 67 Burge 1996, p. 73 68 Burge 1996, p. 73

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consistency and inconsistency among our beliefs; and of weighing goals, and their priorities and compatibilities. It is not that our thinking is constantly accompanied by a deliberation; we often change our attitudes without being aware of it or able to provide a rationale for it. But this does not rule out the possibility that our thinking on the level of first-order attitudes can be controlled by deliberation. Moreover, there are cognitive accomplishments, such as coming up with a proof, designing a plan of action or participating in a discussion, which are not possible without deliberation. Deliberation is an assessment of our first-order thinking: an examination and appraisal with respect to the plausibility, coherence and cogency of reasons. It is an ability to entertain second-order reflexive thinking, and its application yields a normative evaluation of first-order thinking. Deliberation cannot only assess our first-order thinking, but it can also change it. For a change of attitudes to occur that way, it is essential that it be made by assessing our reasons.⁶⁹ We do not change our beliefs and intentions by simply giving them up or by moving on to others, for whatever reason; rather the change results from an assessment of first-order thinking on the basis of normative criteria. Therefore, deliberation must be understood as an ability that not only assesses that thinking, but also changes it on the basis of such assessments.⁷⁰ Finally, it pertains to deliberation that it centers on the thinking of the subject of the deliberation. It is an ability that must be applied to one’s own thinking. If its application were limited only to the thinking of others, or to thought contents and their connections, such an assessment would not be a realization of deliberative capacity. Since it consists of a normative assessment of attitudes and thinking as such, it must be applied to the thinking of the deliberating subject and that subject’s attitudes. Therefore, Burge emphasizes that deliberation is essentially a consideration and assessment of one’s own attitudes. Applied to one’s own thinking, particular features of deliberation that do not belong to a normative, rational assessment of first-order thinking in general, become obvious. If I assess my beliefs, intentions or other propositional attitudes and thereby become aware that the reasons I have for them do not withstand critical examination, then this is eo ipso a reason for me to modify or give up my attitudes. There is a “rationally immediate and necessary connection” between my first-order attitudes and their deliberative evaluation.⁷¹ This relationship is reciprocal in a certain sense. Deliberative assessment is always concerned with one’s own first-order attitudes, and these are not independent of the possibil-

69 Burge 1996, p. 74 70 Burge 1996, p. 75 71 Burge 1996, p. 82

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ity of their deliberative assessment. We can have such attitudes, and mainly do have them, without their deliberative assessment; but nonetheless, in doing so we assume that they would satisfy such an assessment. Let me illustrate this with an example. If we form a certain belief we will not always make the effort to ascertain whether error has been excluded, but we are satisfied by assuming so. If it turns out, in the context of a deliberative activity, that that assumption is wrong, this will effect an immediate change in our belief. To understand the possibility of such an activity, and the relationship between a belief and its revision upon detection of an error, are part of the constitutive conditions under which we have and acquire beliefs. This means that we do not have beliefs or cannot acquire them without understanding the possibility of their reflexive, secondorder evaluation. Similar considerations apply to intentions and the assessment of the goals to be achieved by our actions. Thus, the point of view we assume in a reflexive evaluation must be identical to the point of view of the thoughts considered; and this must take into account the possibility of a reflexive assessment. The point of view is an identical point of view for attitudes of different orders. Only a point of view understood in such a way will account for the interrelations between first-order thinking and its assessment. The “rationally immediate and necessary” relationship between our first-order attitudes and their second-order deliberative evaluations requires the applicability of deliberation to one’s own first-order thinking. Another person may notice that I am wrong, or I may ascertain that he or she is wrong, without such findings eo ipso leading to a change or dismissal of my or the other’s belief. Each of us may like to take these findings as an opportunity to check their own belief, but the other’s assessment of my belief or my assessment of theirs are second-order activities and do not share the point of view of the first-order thoughts that are evaluated. The subject of first-order thinking is not identical to the subject of evaluation and thus, the assessment is not a reflexive activity. In contrast, the deliberation applied to one’s own thought is distinguished by being a reflexive activity, so that the subject of the first-order thinking is identical to the subject of the deliberation and this is also known. This identity of points of view is a necessary condition for the existence of an immediate, rational relationship between first-order thinking and deliberation regarding it. After having presented Burge’s concept of deliberation, we can now turn to the question of its consequences for an understanding of our authoritative self-knowledge. His term entitlement is related to general epistemological considerations and has to be included here. Burge distinguishes between “entitlement” and “justification”, which are two ways of giving warrants or reasons for one’s attitudes. While being justified requires us to be able to provide an explicit justification, one could still have reasons for one’s attitude even if one were not

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able to identify them and give an explicit justification.⁷² The reasons relevant to authoritative self-knowledge are reasons based on one’s ability to deliberate. They are entitlements to certain knowledge about one’s first-order thinking and its assessments. Such entitlement is also available, even if one is not able to explicitly specify one’s reasons. How does Burge justify the fact that the subject of deliberation has such an entitlement? His response can be divided into two steps. First, the ability to deliberate is understood as an ability that is essentially associated with its application to one’s own thinking and attitudes. Our entitlement includes the entitlement to whatever is a necessary condition for deliberation. This includes the entitlement to assess our first-order thinking according to normative criteria and to its rational change or modification. This is not possible without being able to think second-order reflexive thoughts. The entitlement to such thoughts provides a reason for their knowledge as well as for knowledge of one’s first order thoughts that our reflexive thinking is about. Given our entitlement to deliberation, we have reasons not only for our knowledge of our thoughts as objects of deliberation, but also for our knowledge of what is necessary for being engaged in this activity.⁷³ Second, by justifying authoritative self-knowledge by resorting to deliberation one assumes that the ability to judge one’s own thinking and one’s own attitudes, just like any other cognitive ability, would  – under normal circumstances – provide an entitlement to a corresponding knowledge. In the case of deliberation, however, such an entitlement is provided not only by the general notion of applying cognitive abilities under normal conditions, but also by essential features of the deliberative practice itself. Our authoritative self-knowledge is a constitutive condition of this practice, as Burge makes clear via two considerations. First, deliberation requires reflexive judgments about one’s own first-order thinking and the corresponding attitudes. If the subject of deliberation were not epistemically entitled to these judgments, the assessment of one’s thinking would not make sense. Then there could be no direct and rational connection between the judgments and the attitudes assessed, which is characteristic for the formation and change of our attitudes in light of their deliberation.⁷⁴ This means that without an epistemic entitlement to reflexive judgments about one’s own thinking, the practice of deliberation is neither conceivable nor possible. Second, Burge tries to exclude the possibility that, although we have such an entitlement, we nevertheless have no authoritative knowledge, because, due to abnormal

72 Burge 1996, p. 70; cf. Burge 2003a, p. 504–505 73 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 74–74 74 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 76–77

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conditions, we are constantly wrong; or because our entitlement is connected to the truth of our reflexive judgments in an accidental way and does not establish knowledge (Gettier cases). But such a possibility is excluded, since deliberation is a cognitive ability that requires a rational connection between first-order thinking and its reflexive judgment. This activity presupposes an identical point of view for this thinking and its assessment, and such a point of view can exist only if we know what we think and how we assess it. Thus, the scenarios mentioned would not present unfavorable circumstances for the practice of deliberation, but would rather exclude its very possibility. These considerations explain authoritative self-knowledge of our thinking and our attitudes by emphasizing the constitutive role of this knowledge for the practice of deliberation. The self-knowledge which is of concern here, is based on the epistemic entitlement to reflexive judgments about our thoughts and our attitudes, and this entitlement “stands or falls” with the practice of deliberation. Were it not for this, we would have no entitlement to the self-knowledge that is required for deliberation and is gained by it.⁷⁵ This knowledge concerns those thoughts and attitudes that are the objects of deliberation; that are evaluated and altered or modified in the light of their rational assessment. The authoritative self-knowledge that Burge explains by recurring to the practice of deliberation, is knowledge whose thematic boundaries are defined by such an explanation. There is no doubt that here the narrow range of self-verifying cogito-judgments is surpassed, and this is one of the objectives Burge pursues with his analysis of deliberation.⁷⁶ While self-knowledge based on self-verification of cogito-judgments is confined to a subject’s present act of thinking and the contents thereof, self-knowledge based on deliberation extends to all the subject’s attitudes, insofar as they can be formed and modified by them. These attitudes are not only momentary events, but also states that continue for a certain period of time. Furthermore, deliberation brings a cognitive dynamic into play, in that it leads to a justified change of attitudes and the formation of new attitudes. This dynamic is absent in the constative statements of momentary thinking in terms of cogito-judgments. Burge recognizes the limits of authoritative self-knowledge based upon self-verification, but it is not clear whether he has also noticed the limitations of his project to explain such knowledge by recurring to deliberation. He writes: “But I was fully aware … that there is a range of other cases of authoritative self-knowledge that does not exhibit self-verification. There is first-person knowledge of sensation, of occurrent perceptual beliefs, of nearly all

75 Burge 1996, 77 76 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 69; 85–86

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standing states that predate the formation of judgments or even knowledge about them. There are certain cases of memory. There is knowledge of some of one’s feelings and emotions.”⁷⁷ It is obvious that the above examples of self-knowledge “from the first-person point of view” cannot be understood by recurring to the practice of deliberation. As far as our knowledge of our own sensations is concerned, Burge points this out himself.⁷⁸ Furthermore, our knowledge of our feelings or our beliefs that we acquire through perceptions,⁷⁹ and many other of our mental states seem to have little to do with deliberation. Burge is aware that his so-called “paradigmatic, basic cases” of cogito-judgments, do not represent the entire range of authoritative self-knowledge; but this also seems to apply to the self-knowledge that can be explained by recourse to the practice of deliberation. Burge overestimates the importance and range of such knowledge, because he considers this practice a necessary condition for the use of ‘I’-speech, or the “full” first-person concept, as he puts it.⁸⁰ What does that concept cover? It is certainly true that the practice of deliberation is not possible without the use of the first-person concept; but the reverse does not hold, as shown in cases of self-ascription of sensations and feelings, but also of propositional attitudes, such as fears or hopes. My fear that my neighbor wants to talk to me again, or my hope that everything will turn out fine for me, can be known by me in an authoritative way, but they need not be shaped by deliberation, and often they cannot be changed by deliberation. Burge refers to a philosophical tradition, which he calls “the rationalist tradition, in its emphasis on the role of self-knowledge in rationality”,⁸¹ but he himself emphasizes the role of rationality for our self-knowledge by focusing on the authoritative self-knowledge of our propositional attitudes, which “constitute our concept of ourselves as persons, as rational, deliberative beings”.⁸² But people are not only such beings, they also have feelings, expectations, moods; and their authoritative self-knowledge is not confined to the realm of what can be formed and changed by deliberation. Burge draws the thematic boundaries of such self-knowledge too narrow, because he focuses on it exclusively in terms of the rational assessment of our attitudes in the process of deliberation. How can this limitation be avoided? It can be avoided if one adheres to the assumption that there is a particular kind of self-knowledge distinguished by its epistemological character, but 77 Burge 2003b, p. 127 78 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 80 note 13; Burge 1999a, p. 110 note 6 79 Cf. Burge 2003b, 128 80 Burge 1999a, p. 119–120; cf. Burge 1996, p. 73 note 3 81 Burge 1996, p. 78 note 10 82 Burge 1999a, p. 121; cf. Burge 1996, p. 85

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gives up the view that it has to be a kind of non-empirical self-knowledge, as it is acquired by self-verifying cogito-judgments or deliberation. According to Burge, one can only keep up the assumption if one denies that our self-knowledge is based on observation, be it introspective or behavioral;⁸³ if one instead sticks to the view that the particular self-knowledge has to be a non-empirical, rational knowledge. In what follows I show that one can share this assumption, without accepting that view. Like Burge, Bilgrami is convinced that there is self-knowledge that is particular in some way. Both authors justify this assumption by taking into account only a particular kind of self-knowledge, distinguished by its content: the knowledge of some of one’s own mental states and activities. They both also reject the view that the particular nature of this self-knowledge has something to do with observation. Despite these similarities, there is a fundamental difference in their conceptions of the distinctive nature of our self-knowledge. For Bilgrami it consists of a normative understanding of the particular topic of self-knowledge; while Burge is concerned with the particular epistemological status of rational self-knowledge. We have seen that both approaches are unsatisfactory, though for different reasons. Is there a possible way to justify the thesis that there is special self-knowledge, without relying upon a particular topic of this knowledge or upon its non-empirical, rational status? Self-knowledge is reflexive knowledge: its content refers to the knowing subject, and the subject knows that. The content includes an epistemically transparent reference to the subject, a de se reference. The linguistic expression of such self-knowledge has the form of I know that I am so-and-so. The self-ascription of knowledge as well as the self-ascription of what one knows about oneself, can be put in the present or other tenses. My present self-knowledge extends to my past, and my past self-knowledge plays an important role in my present life. The diachronic nature of my self-knowledge, which affects both the knowledge as well as its contents, is not considered here. This is without doubt an important limitation of the following discussion of self-knowledge. As the linguistic expression of self-knowledge shows, we can distinguish between the fact that the subject knows something or other, and the fact that there is a particular state of affairs known by a subject; and both allow some variability. The knowledge I have of myself, I can share with others; and what I know about myself, I can also know of others. The linguistic articulation of self-knowledge requires a self-ascription of knowledge as well as a self-ascription of its content. Both self-ascriptions must be considered in connection with the corresponding

83 Cf. Burge 1996, p. 78

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other-ascriptions, because self-ascriptions are a special case of the ascription of a predicate, and because the use of a predicate is essentially connected with the idea of its application to different things.⁸⁴ Even if a predicate should be applied correctly to just one object, the very possibility of its application to different objects is a constitutive condition for its use; and the understanding of this possibility is part of being competent in its use. Therefore, the ability to self-ascribe a predicate cannot be considered without an understanding of the possibility to ascribe the same predicate to someone or something else. Such ascriptions are called other-ascriptions. There is no solipsistic use of predicates. Applying these considerations to self-ascriptions of knowledge in the form I know that I am so-and-so, one can establish the following claims. First, one can make such a self-ascription only if one understands the possibility that others also know what one knows about oneself. Second, it requires an understanding of the possibility that one knows of others what one knows about oneself. In the first case, the point is that such self-knowledge may be knowledge shared with others, in the sense that others know of the subject what that subject knows of himself or herself. The second case is that the subject may also know of others that something or other applies to them as well as to himself or herself. It is knowledge of states, properties or whatever can be shared with others. In both cases it is necessary to understand the possibility of a certain kind of non-reflexive knowledge in order to have some kind of reflexive knowledge. To understand these possibilities is a constitutive condition for self-knowledge. The two types of non-reflexive knowledge are identified by reflecting upon the structure of propositional self-knowledge. To understand their possibility is a necessary condition for possession of self-knowledge. This does not rule out the possibility that an understanding of other kinds of non-reflexive knowledge is also constitutive for self-knowledge. It is not about such conditions in general, but just about two special conditions that are determined by the structure of propositional self-knowledge and allow us to define two special types of non-reflexive knowledge. Comparing the two types of non-reflexive knowledge with the corresponding self-knowledge, a distinction can be drawn that allows us to characterize a particular kind of self-knowledge. On the one hand, we have the possibility that the difference between reflexive knowledge and the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge consists solely of the fact that different people know the same, or that the same person knows the same thing about different people. On the other hand, there is the possibility that the difference consists either of different people knowing the same thing in different ways, or of the same person knowing

84 Cf. P. Strawson 1959, p. 99 note 1; Evans 1982, 103–104

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the same thing about different people in different ways. The first possibility may apply for instance, if someone else and I both know that I am ambitious or easily intimidated or wear shoes that do not match the color of my pants; or if I know something similar about both myself and another person. In these cases both the other person and I can know such things by observation or interpretation of my behavior or my appearance; and that is also the way I can know such things about other people. The difference between reflexive and non-reflexive knowledge consists only of the fact that there are different people who know the same thing, or that the same person knows the same thing about different people. The second possibility applies if there is an epistemologically relevant difference between self-knowledge and the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge. Thus, other people can know about me exactly what I know about myself, but their knowledge is not acquired or justified in the same way as my knowledge. They may know that I am in pain or want to go home, but they can only know this by observing my behavior or by trusting my words. My knowledge, in contrast, is based on the fact that I feel my pain, or that I have decided to go home. In these cases, epistemic asymmetry applies between the self-ascription and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person: both the other person and I know the same thing, but the way we know it, or the justifications we each have for our knowledge, differ in principle. In such cases, an understanding of the epistemic asymmetry is essential to understand the possibility of non-reflexive knowledge; and understanding this possibility is a constitutive condition for the corresponding self-knowledge. Let us now consider the other case of non-reflexive knowledge that is epistemologically different from self-knowledge and distinguished by its possibility of being a constitutive condition for the corresponding self-knowledge. I can know about others what I know about myself, but I know it in different ways. I can know that others have pain, but the reasons for the other-ascription of the predicate are different from the reasons that apply to its self-ascription. In such a case, the difference between self-knowledge and non-reflexive knowledge consists not only of the fact that I know that what I know about myself I also know about others; but also of the fact that the other-ascription of the predicate is based on different criteria from those of its self-ascription. Understanding the possibility of non-reflexive knowledge in such cases includes an understanding of the different criteria for self- and other-ascriptions of the same predicate which, in turn, is a necessary condition for the possession of self-knowledge. In this way, two kinds or classes of self-knowledge can be determined whose particular nature is that they differ in an epistemological way from the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge. The differences between self-knowledge and the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge are not exhausted by the fact that

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different people know the same, or that the same person knows the same thing about different people. Further differences have to be taken into account: the epistemic asymmetry between self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person, as well as different criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate. These differences determine the different ways of knowing, which are correlated with the difference between reflexive and non-reflexive knowledge. If we determine a particular self-knowledge by focusing on the different criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate, then a kind of self-knowledge comes into view that one can only have if one is aware of the fact that the corresponding knowledge about others differs epistemologically from one’s self-knowledge. If we determine a particular self-knowledge by focusing on the epistemic asymmetry, then we deal with self-knowledge one can only have if one recognizes the fact that the corresponding knowledge of others differs epistemologically from self-knowledge. This recognition implies that one knows that there are different criteria for correct self- and other-ascriptions of the same predicate to the same person. Thus, an understanding of the epistemic asymmetry implies an understanding of the difference in the criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate. What can we say about the reverse? Understanding the difference between the criteria means that the ascribing subject recognizes that the correctness of the self-ascription of a predicate is based on criteria that are different from those that are relevant for the correctness of its other-ascription. This difference in the criteria between the self- and other-ascription of the same predicate also holds if different people ascribe the same predicate to the same person. Such is the case for epistemic asymmetry. Therefore, understanding the different criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate, implies an understanding of epistemic asymmetry, and vice versa. The project to identify the particular kind of self-knowledge philosophy deals with by analyzing the structure of propositional self-knowledge consists of the following steps. First, this self-knowledge is supposed to be distinguished by its epistemological character. Second, this character is discovered by comparing self-knowledge with the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge. Third, because the possession of the former requires an understanding of the possibility of the latter, the particular self-knowledge is a kind of knowledge which one cannot have without understanding epistemic asymmetry and the difference between the criteria of self- and other-ascription of the same predicate. As we have seen, understanding the asymmetry implies understanding the different criteria, and vice versa. The self-knowledge that can be determined in this way is a particular self-knowledge, since it differs as knowledge from the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge. From the perspective of epistemic asymmetry, it is distinguished by the fact that the reasons I have for my knowledge cannot be the reasons others may have for their

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knowledge of me. Only I can have such reasons, and therefore I speak of exclusive reasons. Self-knowledge, which is based on exclusive reasons, is knowledge whose content can also be known by others, but their knowledge cannot be based on the grounds that the subject of self-knowledge has for their own knowledge.⁸⁵ Next I consider two cases of self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons. The first case is about knowledge of one’s own feelings and sensations, including body states, such as heat or the position of one’s limbs. These states are connected with a phenomenal awareness or a specific experience that should not be misconstrued as perception or thinking.⁸⁶ Our knowledge of being in pain or being pushed is based on such a phenomenal awareness. It is self-knowledge that is neither inferred nor does it rely on observation. The criteria of self-ascription of the corresponding predicates are often defined only negatively, by claiming they are not relevant for their other-ascription.⁸⁷ This is certainly true, but a positive account is provided by the phenomenal awareness one’s own feelings and body states are connected with. To regard such awareness as a criterion for the self-ascription of an appropriate predicate, should not be understood in the sense of our knowledge of it being indirect or inferred in any manner. We have a direct, non-inferential knowledge of current pain or the position of our body, as we feel or sense them now. We only have such access to our own pain and the states of our own bodies. This phenomenal awareness provides access to our condition or situation and can be considered as a criterion for the self-ascription of predicates.⁸⁸ It is clear that their other-ascription cannot be based on the phenomenal awareness of one’s own feelings, emotions or body conditions. Here, observations of other people’s behavior, understanding their utterances and background knowledge play a central role. This does not mean that our knowledge of emotions and feelings of other people is always inferred, but it is not possible without our observation of their behavior. This approach to knowledge is fundamentally different from the phenomenal awareness by which one knows one’s own feelings and emotions. The second case of self-knowledge which has to be connected to different criteria of self- and other-ascription of the same predicate consists of the knowledge of our propositional attitudes, but also our feelings and moods, as far as it is acquired or shaped by one’s own contemplation, reflection or weighing up;

85 Cf. p. 108–109. The notion of self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons satisfies the Uniformity Assumption rejected in Boyle 2009 with reference to Kant (157–158). 86 Cf. Burge 2007b, p. 398–403 87 Cf. Strawson 1959, p. 108 88 Cf. Burge 2007b, p. 403

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in short, by deliberation. It deals with our mental states and events discussed by Burge with respect to propositional attitudes under rational agency from the point of view of their rational assessment.⁸⁹ But deliberation need not only refer to propositional attitudes, and also does not need to be based only on the rational assessment of beliefs and intentions, as considered by him.⁹⁰ As for attitudes in general, one can have them without knowing about them, and one can arrive at knowledge about them by observing and interpreting one’s own behavior or by relying on the beliefs of others, for example. However, we can also acquire knowledge of our attitudes by deliberating on what we “really” want or take to be true. This we do if we do not know what we want or what we believe. This lack of knowledge is not resolved by a closer look, by direct or inferential cognition which discovers what is the case; but by an assessment and interpretation of one’s state or condition. These processes are reflexive activities that can lead to the forming of a definite intention, belief or feeling.⁹¹ Let us consider the case of intention. That one does not know what one intends to do, means that one has not, or has not yet, determined a specific intention. If one does not know what one intends, then one does not have an intention. This implication is remarkable because it is not usually true that something is not the case, if one does not know that it is not the case. For constative knowledge that is gained by observation and has the character of discovery, this implication just does not apply. The implication says that I only intend to do something, if I also know it. Since it deals with attitudes that are obtained by the process of deliberation, this process must be understood not only as a way of forming an attitude, but also as a way of acquiring the pertinent knowledge. How can we explain this connection? Descartes was of the opinion that there is such a connection for everything that “is in the mind”, and considered it as something “that is recognized by itself”.⁹² Although he saw no need for an explanation here, he gave at least a useful hint by pointing out that this knowledge extends itself to “the actions or operations of our mind,” precisely at the moment of their performance.⁹³ Thus, it is about knowledge that is acquired and linked to the performance of an activity. One can explain Descartes’ hint by considering self-verifying judgments; and it is no coincidence that “cogito-sentences” lead to such judgments. How can the 89 Cf. Burge 1998, p. 73–77 90 Cf. Burge 1999a, p. 118–119; 121 91 Cf. Moran 2001, p. 55–60 92 Descartes 1964, p. 246 93 Descartes 1964; “Sed notandum est, actuum quidem, sive operationem, nostrae mentis nos semper actu conscios esse …” (p. 246)

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notion of action-based knowledge be expanded from its narrow range of application and be used to understand the knowledge of attitudes acquired by a process of deliberation? Such attitudes are not articulated by the use of sentences that are somehow self-verifying, or express a thought that one only has to think in order to know it to be true. By deliberation we can acquire a certain attitude and also knowledge of it. This connection is crucial for an understanding of the kind of self-knowledge involved. Such a deliberation starts with the awareness that one does not know what one believes, desires, expects, and so on. The fact that one does not know implies that one has no definite belief, desire or expectation with regard to the issue under consideration. For a lack of knowledge that is resolved by observation and discovery, this implication is not true; which indicates that knowledge gained by the practice of deliberation cannot be acquired in that way. If I do not know what I believe or intend, then there is no chance of my discovering what is hidden from me: rather what is required are processes of clarifying, weighing things up and making up my mind. This is the way in which facts that are relevant to the knowledge in question, or the lack thereof, are brought to the fore. In contrast to constative knowledge, we can speak of performative knowledge: self-knowledge acquired by the practice of deliberation. This practice constitutes the content of such knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. Only by practicing reflexive deliberation of the pros and cons, can the subject acquire such self-knowledge. In contrast to observation  – by which everyone with the same cognitive faculties and the same point of view can know the same things – performative self-knowledge is bound to and by the first-person point of view, and is accessible only to the practitioner of deliberation. This does not mean that others cannot know the same things that I have performative knowledge of. But their knowledge can only be a kind of constative knowledge. Finally, I want to point out that the self-knowledge considered here is distinguished by epistemological and thematic particularities. In contrast to other approaches, the particular self-knowledge considered in philosophy is identified by recurring to the very concept of propositional self-knowledge. It deals with a kind of self-knowledge whose particular character becomes transparent by comparing it with the content of the corresponding, non-reflexive knowledge. Understanding the possibility of such non-reflexive knowledge is a constitutive condition for self-knowledge. What I know about myself, others can also know about me, and what I know about myself, I can also know of others. As we have seen, there are cases in which the non-reflexive knowledge of others and my non-reflexive knowledge about others also differ from my corresponding self-knowledge in epistemological terms. Such self-knowledge should be at the center of philosophical analysis, because its particular nature emerges from the very concept of

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propositional self-knowledge and from the necessity for an epistemological distinction between reflexive and non-reflexive knowledge. Two kinds of self-knowledge identified this way have been considered here: knowledge of one’s own feelings, sensations and physical conditions which are associated with a specific phenomenal awareness; and knowledge of attitudes that are formed and changed in the process of deliberation. These examples are not the only cases of the particular kind of self-knowledge considered here. Epistemic asymmetry also applies to the content of the knowledge we have of our own intentional actions; but it would lead us too far afield to consider this complicated case of self-knowledge in more detail here. I do not want to discuss the extension and limits of self-knowledge which is based on exclusive reasons. The thematically particular self-knowledge which is also epistemologically distinguished from the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge, is self-knowledge not based on observation. This well-known and widely accepted restriction has been supplemented by a positive determination of its sources or reasons. In order to understand self-knowledge as a particular kind of self-knowledge from the point of view of its content and epistemology, it is important to supplement the thesis that our self-knowledge is not based on observation, by determining the reasons on which it is based. The conception of authoritative self-knowledge as knowledge which is based on exclusive reasons picks up in many ways on the considerations of other authors discussed here, but differs from them too. Common to them all is the view that the self-knowledge philosophy deals with, or should do, is particular self-knowledge with respect to its content. There is a great variety of self-knowledge that is based on many different sources. Thus, it cannot be a well-defined topic of philosophical reflection without specifying the terms under which it is to be considered. As we have seen, this can be done in different ways. Wright and Davidson start with the difference of criteria for the self- and other-ascription that may occur by using the same predicate, and limit themselves to the authoritative nature of the self-ascription of feelings and experiences or of propositional attitudes. Because they consider this authoritative nature a property of the utterances of a speaker defined by its particular communicative role, they do not give an epistemological account of the self-knowledge of a speaker. The conception of self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons, shares with these approaches the assumption that the difference of criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate is an important point of view for the determination of the particular kind of self-knowledge philosophy should deal with, but it differs from them by not giving up the project of providing an epistemological explication of the relevant self-knowledge. Bilgrami and Burge deal with a particular kind of self-knowledge, and the thematic restrictions each introduces are comparable; but the reasons for this

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restriction and the aims they pursue through their considerations are quite different. Bilgrami starts out with the idea that our self-knowledge is “unique,” and explicates this by means of the transparency of certain attitudes and the authority of the beliefs the subject has about these attitudes. Transparency and authority are supposed to be conditions for the possibility for responsible action, and the idea of uniqueness of our self-knowledge is ultimately based on this possibility. This idea leads to the discussion of the particular importance of this possibility, and thus Bilgrami abandons the view of self-knowledge as special knowledge defined in epistemological terms. In contrast, Burge wants to hold on to this view by emphasizing the importance of self-knowledge for our rational activities. He deals with rational, non-empirical self-knowledge, that consists of self-verifying cogito-judgments and the knowledge of attitudes formed and changed by deliberation. Burge limits himself to consideration of a thematically restricted self-knowledge, because he is concerned with epistemologically distinguished a priori self-knowledge. In contrast Bilgrami wants to give up the notion of epistemologically distinguished self-knowledge, because he is concerned with the content of thematically restricted self-knowledge. In both cases, the thematic restriction of self-knowledge is not justified by considerations that are based on self-knowledge itself, or the concept of self-knowledge. The conception of self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons, however, provides such a justification. I proceed from the undisputed assumption that not all self-knowledge has epistemological characteristics, and that determining its features requires us to consider thematically restricted self-knowledge. The starting point for Wright and Davidson, the asymmetry between the self- and other-ascription of the same predicate, plays an important role in my approach. In contrast to their interpretation of this fact in terms of the philosophy of language, this difference is to be used for epistemological considerations. Self-knowledge is expressed linguistically by sentences of the form of ‘I know that I am so-and-so’. Criteria for self- and other-ascription play a role for both the ascription of knowledge and the ascription of its content. Therefore, self-knowledge as reflexive knowledge should be distinguished from two kinds of non-reflexive knowledge. It has to be compared both to knowledge that others have if they know what the subject of self-knowledge knows, and to knowledge the subject has of others, if that subject knows about those others the same as about himself or herself. Since there is a particular kind of self-knowledge that differs epistemologically from the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge, it is possible to identify thematically restricted self-knowledge just by epistemological considerations. It is self-knowledge to which epistemic asymmetry applies, and this is the case if and only if the difference between the criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate applies to its content.

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This way we arrive at the conception of self-knowledge as based on exclusive reasons. One can determine the epistemological particularity of self-knowledge and its thematic restriction by means of an analysis of the concept of self-knowledge. This approach is based on the idea that for any self-knowledge there is the possibility of a corresponding non-reflexive knowledge, and on the assumption that there can be epistemological differences between self-knowledge and the corresponding non-reflexive knowledge, arising from the epistemic asymmetry, or from the difference between the criteria for self- and other-ascription of the same predicate. In contrast to Wright, Davidson and Bilgrami, the conception of self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons holds on to the view that there is a particular kind of self-knowledge defined in epistemological terms, without determining its content rather narrowly by reference to its rational, non-empirical character, as Burge does. This conception avoids the one-sided character of those other approaches, because it is based on the structure of propositional self-knowledge.

6 My Future The ability to adopt the first-person point of view is based on the faculty of being able to use sentences that contain the first-person singular pronoun. Its most distinct and particular feature is its exclusivity: the first-person point of view is an exclusive point of view. So far we have considered a certain kind of self-knowledge that satisfies this condition. Its exclusivity is determined by the reasons the self-knowledge is based on. Using the concept of a first-person point of view is not limited to the field of epistemology, but applies to other self-relationships that satisfy the condition of exclusivity as well. Since competence in the use of first-person-pronoun sentences includes the ability to use such sentences in different tenses, we may consider exclusive ways in which each of us is related to our own past or future. The use of ‘I’ sentences in the different tenses shows that we see ourselves as beings who not only exist now, but who have also existed before and will exist in the future. We understand ourselves as people who exist diachronically and whose self-relations therefore extend into our past and our future. With regard to the past, repenting is an example of an exclusive relationship. I can only repent what I have done myself: I cannot repent what others have done, and others cannot repent what I have done. In what follows, I limit myself to considerations regarding attitudes people can adopt towards their own future, which is something we deal with in varying degrees and in different ways. Butler believes that being concerned with one’s own future is of special importance: “Whether we are to live in a future state, is the most important question which can be possibly asked, so it is the most intelligible one which can be expressed in language.”¹ Limiting ourselves to the first part of the assertion, it should be noted that Butler fails to specify who this question is so important for; although clearly we can think of him as asking himself the question. Butler asserts, therefore, that being concerned with one’s own future is of particular importance to oneself. Butler is thinking of the question of whether one will still be alive; but it is clear that one’s concern with the future need not be confined to this question. We can also think about what we will do, or what will happen to us. We do not have to think about such things if we have good reasons to believe that we will not live any longer. But we usually do not have such reasons and deal with our future by assuming that we keep on living. What follows is about this approach to one’s future. Does Butler’s thesis apply to such concerns as well? For Butler, the “importance” is particular in the sense of an evaluative distinction that perhaps can be explained by the special value our own future has for

1 Butler 1736, p. 99

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us, or our concern with it.² I do not want to consider the possibility of explaining the evaluative distinction of our concern with our own future in more detail here, because in what follows I am not interested in such a distinction. We do not have to deal with this particular “importance” only in an evaluative sense; we can also understand it in conceptual terms, and broach the issue by discussing the particular nature of my concern with my own future and how it differs from how others view and are affected by my future. Butler’s thesis does not refer to this issue, and cannot be justified by expounding conceptual particularities of the concern with one’s future. An evaluative and a conceptual understanding of that concern are independent of each other and thus do not enter into competition. Being concerned with one’s own future is actually a particular case of how we view and are affected by the future of someone or something. It is about the state, nature, behavior, and so on, of something at a certain time or period of time that is later than the moment of the concern. Only relative to a present concern can the future of something be identified, and frequently such a concern is based on the assumption that what it is about already exists. One can only deal with the future of things that exist or may exist continuously over a period of time; their existence is therefore considered to be diachronic. Numbers, concepts, properties, and so forth, have no future and cannot have such a status; while material objects, institutions, applications of methods and practices, for example, all can have a future. I will not pursue the interesting question of what may have a future at all, and will restrict my considerations to the future of people, because I am dealing with an analysis of the engagement with one’s own future. Being concerned with the future of someone or something can be limited in time, but need not be. I can deal with my own or someone else’s prospects for tomorrow or the next year, but I can also ask in general about my future or that of another person. This general question can give rise to very different considerations and stands in clear contrast to the concern with someone’s future that is not only temporally determined, but also thematically specified. In the latter case, the concern may have to do with someone overcoming an illness tomorrow or finishing a book next year. Dealing with a temporally defined future in thematically specified terms, is a kind of engagement with someone’s future that is expressed in speech and thought as desires, expectations and intentions regarding the future state, condition or behavior of a person. That is how we usually consider the future of someone. The engagement with one’s own future is undoubtedly a concern with the future of someone, but from such a description one cannot see that this is a reflexive activity. We can only account for that if we relate the subject of such

2 Cf. Nagel 1978, p. 57–76

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an activity to its content in an epistemically transparent way. The subject can and normally will use first-person singular pronouns. Being concerned with one’s own future is an epistemically transparent reflexive activity. To pursue this activity, the subject has to have a diachronic self-understanding and interpret their existence in diachronic terms. This also applies to one’s interest in one’s own past. Particularly interesting here is that concern with one’s own future affects and shapes one’s present life in a way which does not necessarily apply to the engagement with one’s own past. This, of course, needs clarification, because remorse, shame, or the assumption of responsibility for what one has done, also determine our present condition and are important for how we live as persons. In contrast, we entertain hopes or fears, intentions or wishes, and many different attitudes that do not refer to something that is already given, but rather to something that will happen, and may be changed by our actions or behavior here and now. Such attitudes are of particular importance for the lives of persons because they account for the diachronic dimension of life in its orientation towards the future. In what follows, I first pursue the question of what one is occupied with if one is concerned with one’s own future, and then consider different forms of such a concern. The term ‘my future’ refers to a specific stage in the life history of the person who uses it.³ This also applies to expressions such as ‘my youth’ or ‘at my old age’. In contrast to these latter expressions, what ‘my future’ refers to can only be determined by considering the moment when the term is used. In this regard, the expression is similar to the word ‘tomorrow’; it refers to the day that follows the day on which it is uttered. There is only one day from which a day can be seen as tomorrow, and from which a day can be regarded as yesterday, and that day is today. Accordingly, what is now part of my future can later be part of my past. In contrast to ‘tomorrow’, however, what ‘my future’ refers to, uttered by a particular speaker at a particular time, does not seem to change with the start of a new day, or at least not necessarily. To clarify this in more detail, one has to consider what the expression ‘my future’ can refer to. The expression ‘my future’ is a singular term, but its suggested uniqueness is not easy to explain. First of all, it should be noted that my future is not only a future for me, but also includes the future of other people and things. My future is not a solipsistic future. Perhaps it is more appropriate to speak not just of my future, but of what belongs to my future. This can be regarded in a broad sense as what affects me at a later date: all the events I will be involved in, all situations in which I will find myself, all my future states and actions. Common to them all is

3 For the concept of stage see Hirsch 1972, p. 7–33

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their temporal location: whatever belongs to my future is later than the moment when I use the term ‘my future’, or when I am concerned with my future. These are many and varied things: what I expect or plan now; what I neither expect nor plan now; and what I do not think of, or maybe do not even notice that they happen, when they happen. In this sense, my future includes things that do not have to be connected to the existence or non-existence of my current attitudes towards my future. It is a future of mine that I cannot involve myself with now, because it contains things that do not have anything to do with the fulfillment of my current attitudes towards my future. Their occurrence should be neither surprising nor not surprising, disappointing nor not disappointing to me, because they neither satisfy nor thwart my guesses, expectations and plans. However, one can also understand ‘my future’ differently. The term refers to what I am dealing with now as my future, and only that. In other words: my future is the correlate of my current interest in it, and whatever belongs to it, is only what has to do with the fulfillment or otherwise of my current attitudes towards it. The concept of ‘my future’ must therefore be understood in the light of my current interest in it. Only beings that are concerned with their future have a future which is their own future. Such concern is a conscious activity of articulating different attitudes. What can we say about being engaged with one’s future via unconscious hopes or fears and forebodings that are not articulated? One cannot deny that there are such relationships, but they are not about concern with one’s own future. This is not because they are activities that we are not free to choose ourselves, for neither are we free to choose many of our conscious expectations, desires or fears regarding our own future. Rather, it is because they are unconscious relationships with one’s future that cannot be articulated by the subject. They cannot become the object of one’s consideration or evaluation and therefore cannot be changed in the way some conscious attitudes towards one’s future can be. If one’s own future cannot be understood independently of one’s concern with it, then this interest must be considered in more detail. What does it consist of? What kinds of concern can be distinguished and what are the criteria for distinguishing them? We live by the assumption that we have a future and are engaged with it, consciously or unconsciously, by guesses, fears and desires that refer to our future circumstances or situations. In this way, self-understanding of beings who exist continuously over a period of time emerges. Since only the attitudes one is aware of are relevant as concerning one’s own future, in what follows I deal only with these attitudes. Subjects can ascribe them explicitly and know that their content has something to do with themselves. If we aim to establish the conceptual particularities of one’s interest in one’s future, we may do so by looking at the various forms and topics of that interest, and

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compare them with the corresponding activities of others. It is a task of analyzing reflexive concerns with the future as well as non-reflexive concerns with that same future and working out the differences. Or, formulating the issue via use of first-person singular pronouns: it is about considering the relation between my interest in my future and the interest of others in it. In what way do they differ, if at all? With regard to my interest in my future, we can distinguish between attitudes whose content necessarily refers to me, the subject of those attitudes; and attitudes whose content does not necessarily have anything to do with me. Only I can interest myself in my future via the first kind of attitudes, while this does not apply to the second kind. With regard to the latter attitudes, it is possible, but not necessary, that their contents have something to do with the subject of the attitudes. Attitudes in general regarding my future, however, can be adopted both by me and by others; attitudes such as assumptions, hopes or fears. In contrast, attitudes whose content refers necessarily to the subject of those attitudes, are attitudes that only I can assume with regard to my future, and others can assume only with regard to their future; attitudes such as intentions, promises or decisions of a certain type. In what follows, these different kinds of attitudes will be considered in order to establish whether they have properties that can justify the hypothesis that the interest in one’s own future possesses a conceptual peculiarity. I begin with an analysis of intending, an attitude whose content necessarily has something to do with the subject of that attitude. This is an example that seems to lead to confirmation of the hypothesis. I will show that other attitudes, whose content may relate to the subject of the attitude but need not, also speak in favor of this hypothesis. Then I will account for the conceptual particularities of the interest in one’s own future in terms of the distinction between a first- and a third-person point of view, or rather, that of a second-person point of view. First, I consider attitudes towards my future, that only I can have, and I choose an example of an attitude that is expressed in English by the use of the words ‘will’ or ‘intend to’, or just by sentences with a future form that express the self-ascription of an action. Dummett claims: “I may assert such a sentence in one of two cases. That in which I have inductive grounds of doing so; and that in which I assert it as an expression of my intention.”⁴ In the first case, he speaks of predictions that can refer not only to my future actions and omissions, but also to any other future states or situations of mine. Here Dummett mentions only predictions of one’s own actions because of his emphasis on their contrast with intentions. They play a central role in the context of action theory because they allow a certain

4 Dummett 1973, p. 350

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kind of explanation of action by relying on exemplary cases, such as someone does something with a particular intention, and there is a relationship of a means to an end between the action and the intention. This has to be distinguished from doing something intentionally. One can do something intentionally without acting with a certain intention. Finally, one can have an intention without doing anything to fulfill it. Given the dominance of the explanation of action approach to the topic, the last case is often considered only “marginally”. Anscombe, in her book Intention, deals with it in just seven of the fifty-two chapters; and Davidson speaks of “pure intentions  – intendings abstracted from normal outcomes”.⁵ Since intending is often considered only in the context of actions and their reasons, an “abstraction” of such a context is required to address it thematically as “pure intending.” In contrast, it should be stressed that one cannot act with an intention without having an intention, even though the converse does not hold. Thus, one should not consider intending or having intentions only as reasons for actions and only in the context of explaining an action. Such a limitation is not conducive to bringing out the particular way one’s intentions are related to one’s future. There is no doubt that such a relationship cannot be conceived without the possibility of one’s acting, thus intentions are significantly connected with the possibility of their fulfillment, or otherwise, as a result of one’s own doing. This does not mean that this attitude towards one’s future must be solely viewed in the context of what one actually does and how it is explained, since the particular character of the attitude, the particular nature of referring to one’s own future, is not accounted for in that way. There is such a reference, even if it does not lead to an act directed at fulfilling one’s intention, whatever the reasons may be. In the following, I try to clarify the peculiarity of this reference. Anscombe notes that expressions of intention and predictions refer equally to the future, and therefore the question of the difference between the two attitudes arises.⁶ The question is indeed important, but not for the reasons Anscombe gives. It is the reference, not to the future overall or to the future of just anything, but to one’s own future – or more precisely to one’s own actions and omissions – which is a characteristic of intentions, but not a specific property of them. In contrast, predictions are not thematically restricted in this way; and although predictions regarding one’s own actions and omissions are possible, they express a reference to one’s own future action that needs some special explanation.⁷ Anscombe’s characterization of intentions as a special kind of predictions is

5 Davidson 1980, p. 89 6 Anscombe 1963, p. 2 7 Cf. Bilgrami 2006, p. 251–260

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therefore not very plausible.⁸ She is of the belief that neither a consideration of the linguistic expression of a declaration of an intention nor a discussion of what is expressed is helpful or leads anywhere. In the first case, one would come to the notion that such expressions are “a  – queer  – species of prediction”,⁹ while in the second case intention would be reduced “to a species of desire, i.e. a kind of emotion”.¹⁰ Anscombe does not give any reasons for these claims; and they are probably hard to find! She then deals with another question: “How do we tell someone’s intention”; or: “What kind of true statements about people’s intentions can we certainly make, and how do we know that they are true?”¹¹ These are interesting issues, but they have little to do with her original question. She is now concerned with the justification of other-ascriptions of intentions and knowledge of intentions from the third-person point of view. Answers to these questions do not give us any information about the particular kind of reference to one’s own future Anscombe wanted to occupy herself with in the beginning. This theme does not reveal itself by sticking to her maxim that one can recognize someone’s intentions mostly by their actions.¹² This consideration is certainly useful and important for the other-ascription of intentions; however, it does not further our understanding of their self-ascription from the first-person point of view. Anscombe tries to disqualify the quest for such understanding by connecting it to the assumption that intentions are “a purely interior thing … whose existence is purely in the sphere of the mind …”¹³ However, considering the self-ascription of intentions does not have to lead to a “queer” mentalism and does not justify abandoning the theme intentions and turning to the topic intentional action instead. Paul Grice also places the distinction between intending and predicting at the center of his considerations. In the essay Intention and Uncertainty, he criticizes a conception of intending which he supported once himself, as he admits.¹⁴ Its “central idea suggests… that the focal element in an intention is a certain sort of belief.”¹⁵ In his earlier theory he distinguished between theoretical and practical questions: the former are answered by investigation, while the latter are settled by decisions and actions.¹⁶ These responses should also involve beliefs

8 Anscombe 1963, p. 2–4 9 Anscombe 1963, p. 5 10 Anscombe 1963, p. 6 11 Anscombe 1963, p. 7 12 Anscombe 1963, p. 9 13 Anscombe 1963, p. 9 14 Grice 1971, p. 263 15 Grice 1971, p. 267 16 Grice 1971, p. 265

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that differ from the prior beliefs by not depending on evidence. The possibility of being able to answer the same question both ways should be excluded. Intending consists of a belief about a future act by the one who intends something. In contrast to predicting one’s own future actions, there are no reasons for this belief. Can one explain the difference between intending and predicting in this way? Against a positive answer to the preceding question stand the following objections. While both I and others can predict my future actions, only I can refer to them in the form of intending. Grice does not explain this difference. Also, the future action has something to do with intending: it comes about under normal circumstances because it is intended by me now. Such a dependency does not usually exist for the prediction of my future action. Finally, this dependency is there because intending is a commitment to one’s own future actions. It is not clear how Grice can explain the normative status of declarations of intent. Grice’s objections to his earlier opinion, however, have nothing to do with these deficiencies. Instead he is interested in a revision of the distinction between intending and predicting which he hopes will show that “the ordinary concept of intention is incoherent” because it connects two points of view that he maintains are incompatible and cannot be reconciled. The first point of view is based on the normative status of declarations of intent and he understands it as a “factual commitment … to a factual statement to the effect that [one] will do A”.¹⁷ It is correct that one commits oneself by an intention: it is a commitment to a particular action. Grice sees it differently: as a commitment to a “factual statement” that one is going to do something, thus for Grice it is a prediction of one’s own actions. One can have such an attitude toward one’s future actions, and doing so does not necessarily mean that “the actions in question will be in some sense, or to some degree, involuntary, the effect of causes outside his control”, as Stuart Hampshire and Herbert Hart have claimed.¹⁸ We do not have to go that far, and can be content to emphasize that declarations of intent are commitments regarding one’s own future actions that have nothing to do with a corresponding prediction. This does not exclude the possibility that such a declaration can be a reason for another person to predict a certain action – for example, if they consider the person who declares their intention as someone who is honest, reliable, and so on. Grice’s error is that he does not distinguish between the commitment to one’s future actions, that only the intending subject can make, and the commitment to a belief in the form of predictions of future actions of that subject by

17 Grice 1971, p. 269 18 Hampshire and Hart 1958, p. 2

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another. There are usually reasons for such a commitment, including the declaration of intent by the subject of the action.¹⁹ The second point of view mentioned by Grice refers to the “ordinary concept of intention,” which on logical grounds excludes the possibility that the belief of actually doing A in the future relies on evidence.²⁰ Also here, it seems to me, Grice conflates two things that should be kept apart. Of course, a person who intends something has a reason for their future deeds. The reason is that they have this intention. Intentions explain future actions. But the person who has an intention has no reasons for a belief or assumption about their future doing, because that would be a prediction and not a declaration of intent. To the question: ‘Will you do A?’, I can respond with a declaration of my intention, and this provides a reason for my future behavior. To the question: ‘Do you believe that you will do A?’, I can respond in different ways. I can say ‘maybe’, or ‘depending on the state of things’, or ‘let us see’, and so forth; and my corresponding belief may have various reasons. There is only one answer that I cannot give, if I am asked to predict my future actions: that I intend to do A, because thereby I would commit myself to doing A and must have decided that I am going to do A. This does not mean that I believe for any reasons and with any certainty that I will do A. Commitments to one’s own future actions are to be distinguished from the corresponding predictions or beliefs which they do not imply, however justified or firmly believed they may be. The combination of the two points of view should lead to a “skeptical position” and show that the concept of intending is incoherent. This proof fails, if one distinguishes between intending and predicting in the way Dummett does. Grice speaks of a modal ambiguity in the future tense, “which can be resolved by distinguishing between a tense of ‘factual future’ and a tense of ‘intentional future’”.²¹ The view that intending could be represented verbally by the “intentional future” independently from the “factual future”, he considers “heroic” but wrong, and believes he can demonstrate this by showing that intending is based on a “factual commitment” to one’s own future actions that is expressed verbally in the “factual future tense” by a corresponding prediction.²² Grice refers to the possibility of being prevented from realizing one’s intention, so “that one will not do A (future factual)”.²³ That one can be prevented

19 Cf. Velleman 1997, p. 43–44 20 Grice 1971, p. 269 21 Grice 1971, p. 271 22 Grice 1971, p. 272 23 Grice 1971, p. 272

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from realizing one’s intention, is undeniable. The same applies to a promise. This does not mean that a promise should be understood as a more or less wellfounded prediction of one’s own future actions that is verbally formulated in the “factual future tense”. The same applies to intending. If prevented from realizing one’s intentions, the intended action will not happen; or it will happen, but not because one intended to do it. To understand a situation as a situation in which one is prevented from realizing one’s intention, it has to be described by mentioning the intention, and thus by making use of “the intentional future tense”. Being prevented from realizing one’s intention does not mean that “one will not do A (future factual)”, as Grice claims. If one is prevented from realizing one’s intention, then one does not do A, although it was intended, since only an action that is carried out because it is intended fulfills the intent. Therefore, it may also hold for the situation in which one is prevented from realizing one’s intention that such fulfillment is not achieved in spite of that intention. In other words: the consideration of the possibility that one will be prevented from doing what one intended, is not the consideration of a possible situation in which a particular event does not occur, but the consideration of a possible situation in which a particular event does not to occur as the fulfillment of an intention. This situation cannot be described without the use of “the intentional future tense”. Therefore, considering the possibility that one will be prevented from realizing one’s intention, does not show that the declaration of one’s intention is a prediction of one’s future action, as Grice claims. The concept of belief plays a central role in both Grice’s earlier conception of intending and in his later criticism. Both positions hold that “the focal element in an intention is a certain sort of belief”.²⁴ According to the earlier conception, the belief is not based on reasons and has something to do with answering a practical question by “action and decision” and not by a theoretical “investigation”.²⁵ The criticism advanced by Grice in the paper discussed here is supposed to be a “sceptical” position with respect to the concept of intention, because it says that, if one intends something, one has a belief about one’s future actions that is not based on any reason. That this belief can be expressed in different forms of the future tense, is reminiscent of his earlier distinction between practical and theoretical questions. But the distinction between the intentional future and the factual future does not move Grice to focus on the difference between intending and predicting. For he claims that intending cannot be understood without a belief about one’s own future that is expressed verbally by making use of the

24 Grice 1971, p. 267 25 Grice 1971, p. 266; cf. Hampshire and Hart 1958, p. 6; 11

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factual future. That tense is therefore the basic tense and the tense of the intentional future is explained by it. We have seen that this thesis is wrong, but that does justify a return to his previous position, because in this context he employs a notion of belief not based on reasons that is not explicated any further. Rather, we should attempt to understand the distinction between intending and predicting with regards to one’s own future as attitudes that are based on different points of view and are usually taken by different people, as Wittgenstein pointed out already.²⁶ I will show later that the difference between these positions can be described adequately by means of the distinction between a first-person point of view and a third-person point of view. Before that, however, I will consider another particular feature of intending. In contrast to predicting, and also to other attitudes that refer to the future such as wishing or hoping, intending essentially refers to one’s own future. I can only intend something that I will do. Others cannot have my intention, and neither can they carry it out. Whatever they may do, the result cannot be regarded as a fulfillment of my intention. My intention to complete my essay by tomorrow is not fulfilled if it is completed by someone else; for the fulfillment of my intention, it is essential that I complete the essay. Moreover, only I can have the intention to do so, others can only wish, hope or predict that I do it. That only I can have this intention is not to say that my intentions are intentions of mine, and that therefore no one else can have them; and similarly that the wishes and hopes of others are their attitudes, and therefore I cannot have them. We should rather say that only I can refer via intentions to my future actions or behavior, or more generally, to my future. That only I can refer to my future by intending is due to the fact that it is an attitude which is necessarily de se: everyone can only intend their own comings and goings: their own future life. Intending, just like promising, deciding or regretting, is an attitude whose content necessarily has something to do with the subject of the attitude. Such an attitude is an attitude towards one’s own future from the first-person point of view, because it is a reflexive attitude and satisfies the condition of an exclusive position of its subject. That intending is necessarily a de se attitude is a semantic feature that distinguishes it from other attitudes towards one’s own future, such as desires or expectations. We overlook this particular feature, as Davidson does, if we understand intentions as a special form of desires. He is concerned with avoiding the assumption of “mysterious acts of the will”²⁷, and believes this should be achieved by explicating the concept of intending in the context of an action theory that uses

26 Wittgenstein 1963, §§ 631–632 27 Davidson 1980, p. 83; cf. p. 87

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only the notions of action, belief and desire.²⁸ I do not consider here this overall goal, and will confine myself to his analysis of intending. To intend something, according to Davidson, is to deem something desirable. This assessment depends on a certain view of the current and future situation. If that changes, so does the intention one has. But this does not mean that intending is always a conditional intending of the kind ‘if the sun shines tomorrow, I intend to make a trip’. Rather, it holds that “the intention assumes, but does not contain a reference to a certain view of the future. A present intention with respect to the future is in itself like an interim report: given what I now know and believe, here is my judgment of what kind of action is desirable”.²⁹ It is certainly true that intentions are based on a particular view of the future or presuppose one. However, it is a mistake to believe that I would be able to conceive of this view explicitly in the form of an “interim report”, because it contains so many items taken for granted, which I am not aware of, and sets so many situational preconditions that I am unable to explicitly specify. It seems as if Davidson succumbs to the risk of intellectualist distortion. In other respects, his view is far too vague and does not allow intentions to be distinguished from other attitudes that refer to the future. Furthermore, expectations and predictions are based on a particular view of the future, and we would not have or make them if our view were different. But the relationship between intending and the view one has of the current and future situation, outlined by Davidson, not only leads to mistakes and remains too vague, it is also lacking an essential point. To intend something is, according to Davidson, to desire something that will be achieved by some action. Since one’s intentions refer to one’s own actions, this view of the future refers to one’s own future in particular. The de se character of referring to the future is completely disregarded, although his examples for intending assume it as self-evident. Davidson interprets intending in the context of his action theory as a certain kind of “positive attitude” which he alternately refers to as desire, wish or want. In the following I speak only of desires. He conceives of intending as an assessment that a certain kind of action is desirable in the light of what one believes is, and will be the case.³⁰ If one considers a certain action desirable, and this assessment occurs in the light of what one believes is and will be the case, then the assessment must be consistent with those beliefs. To intend to perform an action is not to believe something, but according to Davidson it involves a judgment

28 Davidson 1980, p. 89 29 Davidson 1980, p. 100 30 Davidson 1980, p. 101

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that a particular action is desirable. That the judgment is expressed in the light of the beliefs that one has, should exclude intending something impossible. But one can still wish for something similar: “wishes for things that are not consistent with what one believes”.³¹ Such wishes cannot be intentions. Intentions are based on beliefs, and that includes beliefs about actions that are possible or not possible in a given situation. One cannot intend an action if one believes that one cannot accomplish it. Furthermore, what one intends must not only be consistent with what one believes to be true, it must also be consistent with whatever else one intends. In contrast, I can have desires that exclude each other, and I can wish for one thing more than another. This latter fact does not imply that there is a conflict between my desires. If it is the case, and I want to do something to realize a desire of mine, then I have to choose between my wishes. However, if I wish for something more than some other thing, I will act to fulfill my wishes according to my preferences, if I do anything at all. This is not the case for intentions, which should be wishes that do not conflict with any of my other wishes, and compared to which there is no more important wish to me. In the words of Davidson: “… a judgment that something I think I can do, and that I think I see my way clear to doing, a judgment that such an action is desirable not only for one or another reason but in the light of all my reasons; a judgment like this is not a mere wish. It is an intention.”³² Intending, for Davidson, is not merely a wish to do something that one believes can be done. It is a desire that is consistent with whatever else one still wants. In particular, there is no other desire which is not consistent with it or is more important. But we can certainly deceive ourselves about the consistency of our desires. Do we err then, if we ascribe an intention to ourselves? Moreover, even if one considers only the desires one deems consistent with each other, this requirement also seems to create a distorted image of the person who intends something. We are often not very clearly aware of our wishes, and the relationships between all the things we want are often not visible clearly enough for us to recognize certain wishes as inconsistent with each other. In particular, the assessment of a wish “in the light” of all our reasons for action is a requirement that seems impossible to fulfill. How can we know that we have fully comprehended and taken into account all our reasons? Davidson draws an intellectualist caricature of how we deal with our desires to account for the particular character of intending as a certain form of assessing the desirability of an action.

31 Davidson 1980, p. 101 32 Davidson 1980, p. 101

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Even more critically, does this approach of understanding intentions as desires not lead us astray from the outset? One can desire a certain action more or less than another; but one cannot intend something more or less. We desire much that we do not intend, and we can intend something we do not want. Davidson agrees only with the first part and therefore requires that an action that is intended is desired “not only for one or another reason but in the light of all my reasons …”.³³ Such a judgment is a rationalist fiction; and if we assume it, then we can not account for the possibility that we intend something that we do not want at all. However, this last possibility can be explained easily if one assumes that intending and desiring are different attitudes towards one’s own future. Since Davidson rejects this assumption, he is forced to construct a case of desiring in which these differences seem to dissolve. His approach does not convince; as I intend to show. First, intending is an attitude that relates to the future and to one’s own future in particular, while neither applies to desiring. Intending is a de se attitude. Davidson considers only desires that relate de facto to one’s own future actions. But even this particular case of desiring still differs from intending, because, second, it is important to emphasize that intending involves an active relationship with one’s own future, in the way one commits oneself to particular behavior, and this may be related to one’s long-term life plans. This does not apply to desires. They have no binding character, and one may well simply wait and see what happens. Davidson tried to exclude this possibility by constructing an evaluative assessment of desires that we cannot usually carry out. He denies that intentions have something to do with a commitment to certain behavior, and warns us not to confuse intending with declarations of intent.³⁴ However, his diagnosis of such confusion is unfounded. He considers declarations of intent in the present tense. These should have the character of a commitment under certain circumstances, determined by the condition of sincerity in communicative utterances: as I declare my intention, I present myself to a listener as someone who believes that I will do something specific.³⁵ If my declaration of intent is sincere, then, according to Davidson, I have not only the intention to do something, but I also express the belief that I will do it. The sincerity of my statement ensures that I know or believe that I have a certain intention. Why should my sincerity guarantee that I intend something and believe that I am going to do something? Davidson writes: “The trouble is that we

33 Davidson 1980, p. 101 34 Davidson 1980, p. 100 35 Davidson 1980, p. 91

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have asked the notion of sincerity to do two different pieces of work. We began by considering cases where, by saying ‘I intend to’ or ‘I will’, I entitle someone who hears me to believe that I will. And here it is obvious that if I am sincere, if things are as I represent them, then I must believe that indeed I will. But it is an assumption unsupported by the argument that any time I sincerely say that I intend to do something, I must believe that I will do it; for sincerity in this case merely requires that I know I intend to do it.”³⁶ Because of my declaration of intent, the listener is justified in believing that I will do what I intend. This belief is the listener’s prediction, as Wittgenstein already stressed: “We can often predict a man’s action from his expression of a decision. An important language-game.”³⁷ In the case of cooperative behavior, this prediction can have consequences for the future behavior or conduct of the listener.³⁸ As for my utterance, I may know that my sincere declaration of intent justifies the listener’s prediction of my future actions; but it does not follow that if I sincerely utter my intention, I make a prediction about my actions or, “believe that I’ll do it,” as Davidson puts it. The sincerity of my statement guarantees that I believe what I say is true, and thus only that I have the intention to do something. That such a statement is a justification for a listener’s prediction concerning my future actions, has nothing to do with the issue of whether the concept of sincerity should take on two different tasks, but results from the fact that a sincere declaration of an intention can be described both from the speaker’s and from the listener’s point of view. As far as listeners are concerned, they may make a prediction by relying upon the declaration. This interplay between the speaker’s declaration of intent and the listener’s prediction applies to any communicative utterance of the sentence ‘I will do A’ and justifies the “general assumption” that Davidson denies. I can have intentions, or make them my own, without uttering them. They need not rely on cooperative behavior. Davidson claims that in such a case, intentions do not have the character of commitments to a future action and justifies this by a distinction between promising and intending. While, through a promise, one obliges oneself to perform a certain action, and in the case of an omission there is a need for an explanation and an apology, this does not apply to intending.³⁹ However, not every commitment to a future action must be a promise.⁴⁰ Anyone

36 Davidson 1980, p. 91 37 Wittgenstein 1963, § 632 38 Cf. Grice 1971, p. 272 39 Davidson 1980, p. 90 40 Cf. Brandom 1998, p. 264–265

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who does not keep their promise has to explain why they did not adhere to their commitment. According to Davidson, whoever changes their intention does not owe others such an explanation. But even this is not correct with such generality. Since our behavior shows, among other things, the intentions we have, it can therefore be a reason for others to adjust their behavior. If we change our intention, other people may, under certain circumstances, require an explanation from us as to why we have not fulfilled their justifiable expectations. Furthermore, that a person who changes their intention owes other people no explanation, does not mean that there is no need for that person to provide an explanation for themselves.⁴¹ And even if no excuse or explanation is required at all, it does not follow that an intention does not have the character of a commitment. We also change our minds, and it may happen that we cannot explain this. It does not follow that we do not or cannot commit ourselves to something through our beliefs.⁴² Neither Davidson’s description of the difference between intentions and declarations of intent, nor the distinction between promises and intentions can justify the thesis that intentions are not commitments to one’s own future actions. In summary, one can say that Davidson’s project to understand intentions as a special kind of desires is not convincing because he does not account for significant differences between intentions and desires. He overlooks the fact that intentions are necessarily de se attitudes, and he also misses the fact that they are commitments to behave in a certain way. By intending something, one commits oneself to behaving a certain way in the future, usually to performing an action that has to do with shaping one’s future, which would not come into being without one’s own activities – such as the intention to improve one’s parent–child relationships, or to become a better driver. Of course one can change one’s intentions, but intending can also be related to long-term commitments and obligations.⁴³ There is also a close connection between intending and planning, and declarations of intent can be the basis of planning by others. Therefore, such declarations of intent – some of which can even be legally binding – play an important role in the structuring of cooperative behavior that shapes one’s own future as a future shared with others. You can have intentions without explaining them to others, and others may recognize your intentions without them being expressed. Of course, intentions can also be pursued independently of any cooperative behavior. As I have said, it is possible that I do not bring my intentions to fruition and therefore do not fulfill the commitments I have taken on. There could be many

41 Cf. Velleman 1997, p. 44 42 Brandom 1998, p. 265 43 Cf. Bratman 1993, p. 100–101

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reasons for this, but the reasons must have something to do with me. I have changed my mind or I am being prevented from carrying out what I intended to do. Intentions concern my future, insofar as it is shaped by behavior that I consider appropriate. The concept of intention has both rational and normative traits that need to be considered from the first-person point of view. It deals with my commitments to behave in a certain way or to bring about a certain end that only I can adopt, and only I can assess the facts relevant for the realization of my intentions that determine my behavior in keeping with them. I could be wrong in behaving in such a way, both about my intentions being fulfilled and about my behavior bringing about their fulfillment. The first-person point of view is indispensable for an understanding of intentions and the behavior that matches their fulfillment, but it does not follow that the conditions for the fulfillment of intentions and the knowledge that they are fulfilled, or not, depend on the first-person point of view. Intending may also have something to do with how we live and our lifestyles that are not the result of habits and socio-cultural influences, but are brought about by choices we make. Intentions, desires and expectations are distinguished in terms of their temporal dimension and their genesis. Desires and expectations may become a “constant entity” in the life of a person, but it is equally possible that they come and go or are merely transient. One does not have to choose them or decide on them; it is possible that, for whatever reason, one may just have some wishes or expectations. Wishes and expectations referring to one’s own future do not imply an active relationship with that future. It can remain a “mere” wish, an abiding waitand-see expectation. Desiring something does not mean that one will or intends to do it, and – as I mention above – one can have the intention to do something without desiring to do it. The first holds because a wish does not imply an active relationship with one’s own future, while the second has to do with the fact that one can choose an aim that is independent of one’s desires and inclinations. One can possibly feel pity for someone who does not fulfill their desires, but one can blame them if they abandon their intentions. These differences argue against Davidson’s attempt to understand intentions as a special case of desires. Reviewing the different views of the concept of intending as discussed above, we can now see what they all have in common: they are reductive analyses. Certain features of intending as a particular attitude sui generis towards one’s own future will be lost in this way. The attempt to understand intending as a certain kind of belief about one’s own future results in abandoning the difference between intending and predicting one’s own actions, and will not do justice to the constitutive character of commitment in intending a particular course of action. Trying to understand intending as a particular kind of desire has this deficiency too, and this approach cannot explain that intending is an attitude whose content refers necessarily to the subject of the attitude. The particular de se character of intend-

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ing explains that someone commits themselves with a declaration of intent to a specific course of behavior, while this does not apply to desires. Let us now consider the attitudes towards one’s own future that are not necessarily de se. These are attitudes towards my future that others, as well as I, can have. I can wish, hope or assume that I am going to finish my essay tomorrow, and others may do so, too. These attitudes include not only attitudes that must have something to do with the future, such as hopes, fears or predictions, but also attitudes to which this does not apply, such as believing or assuming. In what follows I am concerned only with attitudes that are directed towards one’s future, and will clarify the differences between reflexive and non-reflexive attitudes of this kind. I first consider attitudes whose defining features can show that they have something to do with the first-person point of view. Consider the example that both I and someone else fear that soon the lease on my apartment will be terminated. As far as I am concerned, I have this fear now, and it affects my current situation, even if its content is something to do with my future. This is possible because I see myself as a diachronically existing being whose future circumstances and conditions concern or may concern me now. Therefore, this fear can determine my present actions and behavior and be a reason for action that seeks to prevent the occurrence of what I fear. My attitude towards the expected termination is only that of fear, if I believe or judge now that I will experience my eviction in a particular way. It makes no sense to worry about a future event and believe at the same time that I will be completely indifferent when it occurs, or even welcome it. In other words, my fear that soon I will be evicted from my apartment, implies beliefs about future attitudes that I will have with regard to the confirmation of my fear. These anticipated attitudes are an essential part of my current fear and show both that and how my diachronic self-understanding determines my current situation. Such anticipated attitudes articulate the future-oriented conceptions that I have of my continuous existence, and show both that I have these and how my involvement with my future is determined by my current beliefs about my later judgments and evaluations. The connection between attitudes that refer to the future and beliefs about future attitudes is also reflected by the fact that the future we are concerned with may give rise to two very different “surprises”. First, it may turn out differently from how we expect, and our attitudes will not be fulfilled. Second, although our attitudes are fulfilled, we may react to their fulfillment differently from how our present beliefs portray our reaction. In the first case, we are dealing with a correction of our present attitudes: in the second, there is a correction to our beliefs about our anticipated attitudes. Let us consider now the case of another person, my mother, who concerns herself with my future as I do, and fears that I will soon lose my apartment. Her

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fear is independent of my fear and vice versa. However, if someone else has such fear, this may very well determine my mother’s current behavior and possibly give her a good reason for doing something now to prevent the feared event from occurring. The other person’s fear, my mother’s, with regard to my future includes assumptions about her future attitudes towards the confirmation of her fear. She cannot fear this now and at the same time believe she would be indifferent when her fear is confirmed, or that she would even welcome it. The anticipated attitudes concern the experiences and judgments she will have when her fear is confirmed. The fear has to do with my future because of its content, but the anticipated attitudes do not, because they concern the future of the other. Her current fear about my future sees this in the light of her anticipated attitudes and articulates her conceptions directed towards the future of her diachronic existence. This results in a difference between my fear that I will soon lose my apartment, and my mother’s corresponding fear: even if these attitudes have identical conditions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, the truth conditions of the beliefs about the future attitudes that I connect and she connects with her fear vary. In my case they have something to do with the future my fear is aimed at. This does not apply to the case of my mother. Although her fear concerns my future, the truth conditions of her belief about her future attitudes have something to do with her future. What follows from this observation? To understand the peculiar nature of my reference to my future in the form of attitudes which can be shared by someone else, it is not sufficient to consider only the attitudes and their content. One must also take into account the conditions that apply to the attitudes towards my future that another person can share with me. In cases of identical attitudes with the same content, differences can occur – such as the beliefs about future evaluations or assessments of each subject with regard to whatever will satisfy their shared attitudes. These beliefs differ in that they refer to the assessments or evaluations of different people. While in the example considered here, the conditions for my concern have to do with my future and my future attitudes towards the fulfillment of my expectations; whereas, the conditions for my mother’s concern with my future have to do with her future. How can the distinction between first- and third-person point of view be applied to a concern with the future that deals with the kind of fears considered here? The difference between the two points of view does not come from the kind of concern or its content: my fear about my future and the fear of someone else about my future have the same conditions of satisfaction. It has to do with the subjects of the attitudes and their anticipated attitudes regarding the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of their expectations. My anticipated attitudes regard my future and belong to the conditions under which I am currently concerned with

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my future, while the anticipated attitudes of my mother have something to do with her future and belong to the conditions under which she currently deals with my future. Her concern requires current beliefs about her anticipated attitudes towards the fulfillment or otherwise of her expectations, and in the light of such attitudes, she is concerned with my future. These attitudes can be completely different from mine. Not every involvement with my future by me or someone else is based on such beliefs. There are also suppositions or predictions regarding my future situation which imply no beliefs about any later evaluations or assessments of the situation. In such cases, we encounter ourselves just as an observer without any participation would. It is useful here to revise the well-known and widely accepted dichotomy between a first-person point of view and third-person point of view, and instead speak of a trichotomy of three different viewpoints. Attitudes of others towards my future that contain beliefs about future assessments and evaluations, are attitudes from the second-person point of view.⁴⁴ My future is a shared future, because others see it in the light of their beliefs about their future assessments and evaluations and take part in it in that way. In contrast, attitudes of others towards my future that are not connected to such beliefs, are attitudes from the third-person point of view, because they are concerned with my future without any participation; this is comparable to predicting a future event or a situation.⁴⁵ As the considerations above demonstrate, there is a first-person point of view with regard to one’s own future. One can only adopt such a point of view if two conditions are met: first, there must be a kind of reference to one’s future that only oneself can have; and second, it must be possible for others to be concerned with that future. Exclusivity of reference and intersubjective access are the general conditions for applying the concept of the first-person point of view. The ways of referring to one’s own future from such a position, as I discuss above, fulfill these two conditions, each in a different way. Common to both is that they deal with reflexive references that are possible only under the condition that subjects understand themselves as diachronically existing beings and not as “time-slice agents”.⁴⁶ The first way of a referring to one’s own future from the first-person point of view consists of attitudes that are necessarily de se and are exemplified by intentions, promises and decisions that affect one’s own future actions. That

44 These attitudes belong to “to the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships.” discussed by Strawson 1974, p. 9; cf. Darwall 2006, p. 5–17 45 Cf. Strawson 1974, p. 9–10 46 Cf. Bratman 2007, p. 29

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these are instances of referring to one’s own future from the first-person point of view, arises from the fact that only those who intend or promise something can relate to their own future in this way. Others may encourage, coax or coerce someone to intend something or they may wish, expect or predict it, but they cannot intend or promise it. The first-person point of view that is revealed by the attitudes mentioned is a position which reveals one’s own future from the perspective of an agent: it is a future that is made or shaped by the subject of the point of view. But not only do we see our future from the first-person point of view as a future that is brought about by us and shaped by our plans and designs. This becomes clear if we look at the second way of being concerned with one’s own future from the first-person point of view. This second way encompasses attitudes that can refer to one’s own future, but do not have to. These attitudes are in a contingent way de se, and they are exemplified by expectations in the guise of hopes or fears. That the exclusive relationship with one’s own future is expressed in such attitudes is due to their presuppositions. Both I and others may fear that this or that will happen to me tomorrow; the attitudes and their conditions of satisfaction are identical and therefore do not imply any exclusive reference. This results from the different beliefs about future assessments or evaluations regarding the fulfillment of these attitudes; and these beliefs are an essential part of them. As far as I am concerned, it is about my assumptions of my future experience or the assessment of the situation that will confirm my fear. I cannot fear it, without assuming that I will regret its occurrence, or experience it as painful, or else judge it negatively. Such assumptions refer to my future behavior and define my relationship with my future; a relationship which I cannot share with anyone else. In contrast, the fears of others regarding my future are associated with assumptions about their future experience and assessment of the situation that will fulfill their attitudes: these anticipate their future and in the light of them they refer to my future. Therefore, a relationship to my future manifests itself in my fear; it is a relationship which, despite the identity of the attitude and its content, is distinguished by its exclusive character, which the same attitude with the same content if entertained by someone else cannot share with mine. So far I have considered two types of concern with one’s own future that satisfy the conditions for a relationship from the first-person point of view. I will not attempt to fully enumerate the different kinds of such a concern here. The future of one’s own that we encounter in the form of the two kinds mentioned has two different aspects. In the context of those attitudes which are necessarily de se, first and foremost there is a future shaped and fashioned by my present intentions and decisions. It is a future, “designed” and made by me. Second, it is a future that I experience in the light of my judgments or evaluations of my

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future situation or circumstances, which I regard as the fulfillment of my current expectations. This is a future that I may perhaps affect, but it is not created or produced by me. My future is accepted as something given, to which I will react in a certain way and of which not only I will take notice, as in the case of predictions and conjectures. It is a future I am participating in now and which will affect me. In summary, one can say that the first-person point of view with regard to one’s future consists of a self-understanding that presents oneself both as an agent and as a subject of reflexive attitudes which are reactions to situations in which one may find oneself, as a being who acts and who things happen to occur to. The two kinds of concerns with one’s own future from the first-person point of view can be connected with each other in various ways and can more or less determine our relationship with our future. This future comprises many varied cases of what and how we may be, and towards it we have different attitudes accordingly. That we have various attitudes at various times is not surprising. The question is, can we have different attitudes, of the kind distinguished here, at the same time for the same future event or situation? This is not possible because the two kinds of attitudes exclude each other at a given moment with regard to the same content. If I intend to travel tomorrow, then I cannot expect it as well. That I have this intention commits me firmly to doing something particular. My corresponding expectation does not contain such a commitment, it is also not compatible with an intention because it does not consider my future from the agent’s point of view, but from the perspective of someone who things happen to. I cannot be concerned with the same future action both in the form of an intention and in the form of an expectation at once. The conception of attitudes towards one’s own future from the first-person point of view takes into account the particular nature of intending as an attitude that is necessarily de se, and differs in this respect from the considerations of Grice and Davidson, who understand this attitude as a particular kind of belief or desire. Furthermore, this conception, as applied to expectations such as hopes and fears, allows a more enlightening understanding of the concern with our future. The future we encounter in the light of the different kinds of attitudes discussed here is not only a future conceived as a fulfillment of intentions realized by our actions, but it is also a future in the form of adjustments and reactions to future situations and circumstances, which are not created by us, but are taken as being given to us. Our future is not only made but also received and accepted by us as something given. The concern with our own future from the first-person point of view consists of, and is stimulated by, the dynamic crossover of active and reactive attitudes. In conclusion, I want to address two issues. The first deals with the particular significance that the concern with one’s own future from the first-person point of

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view has, in comparison to other kinds of concerns with one’s own future. The second has to do with the active and reactive properties that emerge from the process of being engaged with one’s own future from the first-person point of view. This second issue can be identified more clearly by comparison with Harry Frankfurt’s concept of caring. The discussion of the first topic requires an overview of the different attitudes that one can have towards one’s own future. I make do with a rather general idea. Because their content has something to do with the diachronic existence of people, it has to do with reflexive attitudes. If one applies the distinction between the first- and third-person points of view to them, an interesting, but rarely contemplated possibility emerges. This is that not only others but also I refer to my future from the third-person point of view. This occurs if I address it, as others can also do, through predictions or conjectures. In contrast to expectations, such as hopes and fears, predictions and conjectures do not contain any anticipated assessment or evaluation of the fulfillment of attitudes, and therefore one speaks from “the point of view of a spectator,” as opposed to the perspective of the “agent” or “participant”.⁴⁷ I will not discuss this distinction any further here. It allows us to make a classification of possible attitudes towards one’s own future that is connected to the distinction between the first- and the third-person points of view, that I use. I do not claim that this distinction will give us a complete classification of our attitudes towards our own future, that would require an overview of all the possible attitudes towards our own future – a project that will not be pursued here. For attitudes towards one’s own future from the first-person point of view, I will limit myself to clarifying the particular significance of a concern with one’s own future from this point of view by comparing them with such a concern from the third-person point of view. My aim is to prove that a concern with one’s own future from the third-person point of view cannot be considered without the assumption of such a concern from the first-person point of view. This will be proved indirectly by showing that the possibility of being concerned with one’s own future from the third-person point of view cannot be understood without such a relationship from the first-person point of view. To deny this implies that an involvement with one’s future can only consist of conjectures or predictions, without any intentions or expectations. How should such behavior be described? And how can one identify what is referred to in this way? An involvement with one’s own future, in which nothing is intended or expected by hopes or fears, is a behavior from which all efforts to shape one’s own future are missing. The conjectures or predictions concern what will happen with

47 Cf. Strawson 1974, p. 9–13; Bilgrami 2006, p. 162–164; 254; Moran 2001, p. 33–34; 60–64

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or to one, and suppose a passive waiting for what will come about. Goncharov describes such a situation impressively in his novel “Oblomov”. It is not an acceptance of what cannot be prevented; because such behavior only becomes plausible against the background of the distinction between what can be prevented, or what we believe can be prevented, here and now by one’s own actions, and what cannot. This distinction makes sense only if one understands the relationship to one’s own future in such a way that one can intend to prevent certain things. It should also hold that one has no expectations about one’s own future. This means that one has no beliefs now about one’s later assessments or evaluations of whatever satisfies one’s present attitudes. The conjectures or predictions do not refer to a future good or evil, but to future events which are now neither assessed nor evaluated. One does not take part in one’s own future; it offers neither the possibility of a positive surprise nor disappointment with respect to one’s own current attitudes. It is a matter of indifference whether the present attitudes are satisfied or not. Consider now the content of such a concern with one’s future – a future one encounters in a passive and uninvolved state, simply awaiting the confirmation, or otherwise, of one’s own predictions. It is one’s own future, because the content of the conjectures or predictions is verbally expressed by self-ascriptions in the future tense. But there is no future to which one stands in a special relationship because one can shape it through one’s current action or behavior or because one experiences it in the light of current expectations regarding later assessments or evaluations. Since here one has no intentions or expectations towards one’s future, such a future has no meaning for its subject. Such a person would not have to recognize anything important in the way things will turn out. Since one is awaiting the future unconcerned, it may not be important at all if, or when things turn out. One just does not care. A concern with one’s own future without any intention or expectation is a passive and uninvolved waiting for whatever will happen. It is lacking the essential qualities of a concern with one’s own future. What are those qualities or characteristics? Due to the reflexive nature of such a concern, it must first make a difference whether I am dealing with my future, or others are. This difference cannot just be that different people deal with my future, for my future has a special meaning for me. This may also apply to others, but it does not have to be so. For me, my future has a special significance, because it is part of my life story, which includes my past as well as my future, and without this particular life history nobody can be me. If I am concerned with my future only in the form of a passive, uninvolved ‘wait-and-see’ and ‘whatever-will-be-will-be’ way, then there is no explanation of the possibility of a significant difference between my concern with my future and the concern of others, because there is no such possibility.

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However, my future must have some meaning for me, while it may not have any meaning to others: they can adopt a detached waiting posture towards my future, but I am involved, and I cannot. Second: each concern with one’s own future is an example of intentional behavior with a specific content. It is about my future, and it should make a difference if am concerned with this, or with the future of anyone or anything else. A mere waiting cannot explain that I am just now dealing with what and how I will be. Such behavior cannot even explain why I concern myself with my future by way of conjectures or predictions. One has such attitudes to adapt to what is to be expected, and that is what one is usually interested in, if one wants to influence the course of events or use an opportunity to prevent something. Such behavior is not possible in a passive, uninvolved waiting state. Such waiting can neither explain why one just makes predictions about one’s own future, nor clarify what their use should be. Third, it must make a difference whether one deals with one’s future or one’s past. Is it possible to specify such a difference if one is concerned with one’s future exclusively by way of a passive and uninvolved attitude? One’s own future is a part of the life story of the person who deals with it. That subject also has their own past, which cannot be changed through one’s current actions or behavior, but one can assess or evaluate it. One can be proud of what one did, or one may regret it. If one limits oneself to an indifferent description of how life once was, then one cannot learn anything for one’s future conduct from an engagement with one’s past. Why should one learn something from it? A passive waiting for whatever will happen does not justify such an interest. The differences between the concern with one’s past and the concern with one’s future are reduced to the different tenses in which the contents of these attitudes are formulated. If one’s behavior towards one’s own future exhausts itself in a passive and uninvolved waiting state, then the difference of the tenses does not explain any difference between the attitudes towards one’s past and those towards one’s future. Therefore, such a waiting mode neither accounts for the particular significance of one’s own future, nor can it explain the special nature of the concern with it. These considerations should make it clear that a concern with one’s own future cannot be conceived exclusively in terms of conjectures and predictions. Those attitudes are a manifestation of a concern from the third-person point of view. If one accepts the further premise that one’s concern with one’s future is either from the first- or from the third-person point of view, then it follows that there can be no concern with one’s future without such concern being from the first-person point of view. As we have seen, this concern consists of intentions or expectations and of their various combinations. Thus, the concern with one’s future from the first-person point of view has active as well as reactive features.

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The interplay of different features of that concern will be underpinned in what follows by a critique of a position that interprets the interest in one’s own future exclusively as an active relationship, as it is paradigmatically exemplified by intending. Such a position is represented by Harry Frankfurt, whose work on the subject of caring is distinguished by his discussion of the relationship to one’s own future as a constitutive condition for self-understanding. He does not employ the terminology of the first-person point of view, but it is not difficult to apply it according to his considerations. Caring is essentially a “reflexive activity”.⁴⁸ For this reason I use the term self-care. There are good reasons to think of Heidegger’s considerations in Being and Time, but I will not explore their affinities or differences here. Self-care is an attitude one can only have towards oneself, and its content must refer to one’s own future. Identification with one’s own wishes and decisions plays a central role for Frankfurt. This brings out the exclusive character of self-care as an attitude towards oneself from the first-person point of view. He contrasts self-care with self-directed behavior described as the behavior of a “passive bystander,” who does not identify himself with his desires and his actions.⁴⁹ The behavior of such a bystander is self-directed behavior from the third-person point of view. For Frankfurt the difference between these different kinds of behavior is described in active–passive terminology.⁵⁰ In what follows, I will show that his identification of the first-person point of view with the point of view of an actor will lead us astray, and that the active–passive dichotomy does not do justice to the various kinds of concern with our own future. Frankfurt has modified his conception of self-care again and again, and I will confine myself to a consideration of what is important for such a concern with one’s own future. Self-care is a prospective effort to establish one’s own continuity, which is realized by attitudes as well as by their content. Such an effort cannot be understood as a desire we have over a certain period of time, because self-care is essentially reflexive behavior. Self-care is displayed if someone “purposefully does something with himself”.⁵¹ One does something with oneself by determining one’s doings and behavior, one’s intentions, desires and corresponding preferences in the light of what is important for oneself. There is an interplay between activity and reflexive behavior, and it is this connection through which self-care is distinguished from constant desires that relate to one’s own future.

48 Frankfurt 1982, p. 83 49 Frankfurt 1976, p. 54 50 Frankfurt 1988, p. IX 51 Frankfurt 1982, p. 83

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In contrast to first-order desires, the self-care of a person refers to one’s own future as part of a continuous life story, and this requires that one not only has reflexive attitudes about first-order desires and beliefs that focus on one’s own future, but that one also deals with them actively. After all, striving for the continuity of one’s own life story requires a coherence of the subject’s will, and this can only be achieved through the coherence of one’s first-order desires and beliefs, and particularly by one’s actions that are determined by those desires one really “cares about”. Frankfurt describes the possible conflicts of attitudes at different levels in the context of a hierarchical model, which is considered controversial in the literature. But for our topic of one’s concern with one’s future as part of a continuous life story, this is only interesting insofar as Frankfurt’s favored solution to resolve such conflicts by decisions based on deliberations, should make a very important contribution that such concern is established. He tells us: “It might be said, then, that a function of decision is to integrate the person both dynamically and statically. Dynamically insofar as it provides … for coherence and unity of purpose over time; statically insofar as it establishes … a reflexive or hierarchical structure by which the person’s identity may be in part constituted.”⁵² That decisions play an important role in “static integration”, i.e., in the determination of what a person at a particular time “really” wants, is obvious; and it is precisely this kind of “integration” or “constitution” of a person⁵³ that Frankfurt’s work deals with most.⁵⁴ But it is doubtful whether decisions also provide an adequate basis for the “dynamic integration” of a person and can account for the different forms in which we concern ourselves with our own future as part of a continuous life story. Decisions affect different things, and their significance for our own future as part of a continuous life story depends on what is to be decided, and what deliberations the decision is based on. Frankfurt himself points out that self-care comes about through a multitude of factors that have something to do with our thoughts, feelings and will.⁵⁵ It is obvious that these things cannot be shaped or altered entirely by decisions.⁵⁶ The concern with one’s own future as part of a continuous life story cannot therefore be understood by a recourse to decisions alone. They play a role in the formation of a self – which perhaps is over-estimated by Frankfurt – but taken by themselves, they do not establish a concern with one’s own diachronic continuity.⁵⁷ 52 Frankfurt 1987, p. 175 53 Cf. Frankfurt 1987, p. 164, 170, 171 54 Cf. Frankfurt 1971, p. 11–19; Frankfurt 1976, p. 58–68; Frankfurt 1987, p. 170–176 55 Frankfurt 1982, p. 85 56 Cf. Raz 1999, p. 13 57 Cf. Frankfurt 1987, p. 172

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His decisionistic interpretation of self-care leads to a one-sided and truncated conception of the concern with one’s own future as part of a continuous life story from the first-person point of view. For self-care is exclusively about the continuity of our intending and willing and does not take into account other forms of a continuous life story or ways of living, which are revealed, for example, by our fears and hopes. The “intentional unity or coherence”, whereby an “active life” is distinguished, consists for Frankfurt of a “thematic continuity and order in our volitional life”.⁵⁸ Looking at one’s own future in terms of intentions and purposes that one pursues over a period of time is certainly an indispensable element in the concern with one’s own future from the first-person point of view, but it does not exhaust its features. The interest one has in the continuity of one’s own life story and the diachronic unity of our lives, not only affects the “thematic continuity and order in our volitional life,” but it also applies to our feelings and emotions, and to their evaluations. Frankfurt allows only for the “unity” of our “active life” which is characterized by “thematic continuity… determined by will”, and self-care is solely aimed at that. The unity of a person’s life, one’s life story, cannot be reduced to a unity and continuity that is based on self-care and determined by will. Therefore, the reference to one’s own future, which is essential for the representation of a life story from the first-person point of view, cannot be explained only by recourse to self-care in the way Frankfurt explains it. The conception of concern with one’s own future from the first-person point of view shares with Frankfurt’s concept of self-care the view that people understand themselves as subjects of continuous life stories which their futures form an essential part or phase of. Another common feature is the assumption that there are different ways of being concerned with one’s own future. An important difference between the two views arises from the fact that Frankfurt classifies these different ways according to a dichotomous scheme of active versus passive, while the classification I give for the different kinds of concern is based on the distinction between the first-person and the third-person point of view. How can this difference be stated more precisely? Starting from the basic dichotomy of an active and a passive self-directed attitude, Frankfurt distinguishes between self-care and the behavior of a “passive bystander” as we have seen. He overlooks the existence of attitudes that express neither self-care nor passive bystander behavior from the third-person point of view. There can be expectations, such as hopes or fears, which are also attitudes towards one’s own future from the first-person point of view. These attitudes are not taken into account by Frankfurt’s concept of self-care. Therefore it is mis-

58 Frankfurt 1998, p. 473

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leading to determine one’s life story and concerns with one’s own future, either as a life story that has an “intentional unity or coherence”, or a life story that is nothing but a sequence of different moments or stages in the diachronic existence of a person. As we have seen, there are attitudes towards one’s own future that account for the continuity of one’s own life story in the form of anticipated assessments or evaluations. Frankfurt’s dichotomous distinction between active and passive interests with one’s own life story therefore paints an incomplete picture of the different possibilities for such an interest. But it also leads to an inadequate conception of one’s own future. That future is created and shaped not only by our intentions, but also by something that eludes our planning and our intentions. It is not only made by us but is also accepted by us and taken for granted. This does not mean that we are assuming the role of a “passive spectator” either, but that we have reactive attitudes to our own future. We cannot always change our attitudes towards it by decisions, but we take it as something that is given, with which we can deal more or less sympathetically. The concept of the first-person point of view as applied to the concern with one’s own future makes it possible to determine its particular character. It is exclusive: while others can deal with my future, too, there are forms of such concern that only I can experience. The identification of such exclusive forms of dealing with one’s own future is based on particular characteristics which are given by the use of the first-person singular pronoun and are therefore founded in the structure of ‘I’ speech. Frankfurt’s conception of self-care focuses on a paradigmatic case of a concern with one’s own future, which cannot be conceived without the use of this pronoun. Because he fails to clarify this condition, other de se relationships with one’s own future from the first-person point of view, elude him. The deficiencies and one-sidedness of his approach could be avoided by accounting for the linguistic or conceptual requirements for self-care.

7 Afterword In the Introduction, I pointed out that not only philosophers but also scientists from different disciplines deal with the topic ‘I’. It is striking that the research of contemporary philosophers is hardly acknowledged in the sciences, if at all. In my discussion there, I focused on conceptual and argumentative shortcomings of scientific theories. At this point, however, I do not want to dwell on such internal deficiencies any further, but rather concentrate on the fundamental differences between the considerations of the first-person point of view, as developed here, and the considerations of self and consciousness as outlined by neuroscientists and biologists. The philosophical explication of the use of the first-person singular pronoun leads to an examination of the ability to adopt the first-person point of view. Thus, conscious self-reference is considered, first, in the context of cognitive performance made possible through the use of this pronoun. Self-knowledge based on exclusive reasons and a special concern with one’s diachronic existence, illustrated by the concern with one’s own future, are examples of these achievements. Thus, the topic does not comprise isolated considerations of the use of a particular word, but encompasses an integrated treatment of cognitive abilities that cannot be imagined without the possibility of conscious self-reference. From the philosophical examination of the use of the first-person singular pronoun we have seen, second, that the ability to adopt a first-person point of view requires the possession of language. Since this competence requires an understanding of the possibility of a third-person point of view, one cannot adopt the first-person point of view without being able to represent the peculiar character of de se reference, as well as the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascriptions of certain attitudes to the same person. The possession of language is a necessary condition for being able to represent these features. The various considerations of the ‘I’ in the sciences I reviewed in the Introduction, are fundamentally different from my approach. Despite the multitude of differences that exist between the thoughts of Gallup and Tomasello, both share the view that the ascription of a self-concept or ego to living beings does not require that they have a language. Instead, they study a certain cognitive behavior of higher animals and consider this behavior the basis for such an ascription. Gallup focuses on the “self-directed behavior” of chimps in front of mirrors, while Tomasello is interested in the role-specific behavior of young children in cooperative interactions. The study of such behavior singles out some isolated achievements from the wide range of abilities that are connected to the faculty of adopting the first-person point of view and leads to a very limited notion of self. Those skills are not sufficient conditions for the possession of such a notion, for three reasons.

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First, the behavior they single out has nothing to do with the diachronic dimension of self-understanding that is expressed by the use of ‘I’ sentences in different tenses. This dimension is fundamental for beings who understand themselves as a self in some way and have the ability to assume the first-person point of view. Since the behavior studied provides no evidence of being able to consider oneself a diachronic being, it cannot serve as the basis for ascribing something that cannot be conceived of without such a self-understanding. Second, the achievements that are taken into consideration are very special cases of reflexive knowledge or reflexive behavior and cannot be taken as representative of self-relations from the first-person point of view. The ability to recognize parts of one’s own body in a mirror does not shed any light on what the many different cases of conscious self-reference have in common. Similar considerations apply to the understanding of one’s own intentions and those of others in cooperative behavior. It can only be regarded as a manifestation of understanding the difference between the first- and third-person points of view if it is related to the different kinds of knowledge one has of one’s own mental states and those of others. Furthermore it has to be considered together with the ability to entertain reflexive attitudes towards one’s own actions. If there is no empirical evidence for establishing such connections, ascribing the ability to understand the difference between the two points of view to primates or children in their first year of life is unfounded. As for the ontogeny of this understanding, there may be a priority to comprehending one’s own and others’ intentions before comprehending other attitudes of one’s own and those of others.¹ But any such priority does not prove that the former understanding is a sufficient condition for grasping the distinction between the two points of view. Third, I want to emphasize that the behavior studied by Gallup and Tomasello provides no indication of how to understand the exclusive role or position that the I or self has for one’s own thoughts and actions in comparison to the role or position they may occupy for others. But such an understanding is the core of self-understanding from the first-person point of view and the basis of the particularity of reflexive behavior in comparison to non-reflexive attitudes towards others. Since the first-person and the third-person points of view entail each other mutually, there can be no self-understanding from the first-person position without understanding the possibility of a corresponding other-understanding from the third-person position. Likewise, without such an understanding, it is not possible to know that there are ways of relating to oneself that others cannot share. Thus, self-understanding from the first-person point of view includes understanding

1 Cf. Tomasello 1998, p. 178–179

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this particular, exclusive position of the self. The behavior studied by Gallup and Tomasello does not exemplify such a position and thus cannot provide empirical evidence for being able to understand one’s exclusive role. Thus such behavior cannot be the basis for attributing the possession of a self-concept or the ability to adopt the first-person point of view. One may still want to hold on to the view that living beings have a concept of self and the ability to adopt the first-person point of view, even though they do not have a diachronic self-understanding and are not able to account for the different applications of this ability, and do not understand the subject’s exclusive role. In such a case, one could claim that such beings may possess something like a proto-self or be able to assume a proto first-person point of view. However, it is not at all clear what this might mean. One could imagine such an I perhaps as the lowest common denominator of what constitutes the full concept of the first-person point of view. But then one would have to show that the behavior considered by Gallup and Tomasello constitutes necessary conditions for the possession of this concept. It is not clear how such a proof could be given, and it is clear that they do not strive to provide it. It is also conceivable that one could regard the behavior discussed by Gallup and Tomasello as phylogenetic or ontogenetic precursors of a self-understanding from the first-person point of view.² However, one cannot assess or evaluate such precursors without having a clear conception of what they are precursors of. Philosophical considerations can provide a significant contribution here and show that possession of language is a central and indispensable condition for having the concept of self or the ability to adopt the first-person point of view. Gallup and Tomasello explicitly deny this. As to the neuroscientific explanations of consciousness I mention in the Introduction, I will limit myself to making some critical comments on Singer’s considerations. He wants to give a neuroscientific explanation of consciousness which is restricted to phenomenal consciousness and would not apply to self-consciousness. In this he differs from Damasio and agrees with philosophers who conceive phenomenal consciousness as a different variety of consciousness that can be understood independently of self-consciousness. Can such an approach do justice to the phenomenal consciousness we have of our sensations and emotions? Those phenomenal states possess certain experiential qualities which enable us to access the states in ourselves. This phenomenal consciousness is the basis for the knowledge of them from the first-person point of view that is verbally articulated via the corresponding self-ascriptions. Such consciousness is a sufficient condition for a certain kind of self-consciousness. Singer does not

2 Cf. Burge 2007c, p. 145–160

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account for this condition because he identifies self-consciousness with subjects’ consciousness of having experiences of themselves or having ideas about themselves which have nothing to do with their phenomenal states and are instead based on self-deception, in his opinion, and cannot be explained or described by means of neuroscience. As we have seen, his notion of self-consciousness is vague and unfounded. Singer’s project to provide an explanation of our phenomenal consciousness fails because he does not account for the possibility of having self-consciousness of one’s own phenomenal states. Phenomenal consciousness, considered as being independent from any selfconsciousness, also plays an important role in philosophical theories of consciousness. A distinction is drawn between creature consciousness and state consciousness, which are supposed to be independent of each other.³ Phenomenal consciousness is a paradigmatic case of state consciousness and should, for conceptual and genetic reasons, be independent of self-consciousness, in whatever way it may be conceived. Animals that do not have, or infants who have not yet acquired a language, also have the phenomenal consciousness we have of states such as being in pain or feeling cold. It is a characteristic of people that under normal conditions such consciousness is always connected with self-knowledge from the first-person point of view, thus with self-consciousness. We do not ascribe this to animals, and most authors do not ascribe it to infants either. Burge claims that for living creatures that possess abilities that can be distinguished phylogenetically, there is a possibility to occur separately from each other.⁴ But such a dissociation is a disease or a lesion of certain brain areas. The phenomenal consciousness that people have of their feelings and sensations is different from the phenomenal consciousness we ascribe to animals and human infants, since our phenomenal consciousness is essentially connected with a self-consciousness that we do not ascribe to such beings. Our phenomenal consciousness belongs to our conscious life, which cannot be assembled by a building block process from phylogenetic and ontogenetic precursors. Burge emphasizes the possibility of a “dissociation” of phenomenal consciousness and self-consciousness, because it serves his goal of identifying a particular form of “rational access consciousness”.⁵ Block in turn moves this possibility to center stage because he is interested in a phenomenal consciousness devoid of “access”, from which there is no possibility to report what one perceives or experiences. I cannot go into this discussion here and will make do with pointing out that

3 Cf. Block 2007a, p. 178–179 4 Burge 2007b, p. 392 5 Burge 2007b, p. 409

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Burge’s identification overloads the notion of self-consciousness with assumptions of rationality, which, as we have seen, do not account for our self- knowledge from the first-person point of view. And even if one grants Block’s favored possibility of a phenomenal consciousness without “access”, there can be no doubt that we constantly have phenomenal consciousness of our present sensations and feelings to which we have access and of which we possess self-knowledge from the first-person point of view. That we are constantly able to ascribe beliefs regarding our present phenomenal states to ourselves, shows the constitutive ‘I’ orientation of our phenomenal consciousness under normal conditions. This is not accounted for if one contrasts this state consciousness with a creature consciousness from which it is supposed to be independent. The ‘I’ orientation is an indispensable part of our phenomenal consciousness that is the basis for the particular self-knowledge we have of our present sensations and feelings. This self-knowledge is knowledge from the first-person point of view and has to be seen in the context of the epistemic asymmetry of self- and other-ascription of the same predicate to the same person. The phenomenal consciousness that people usually have is not possible without self-consciousness. Therefore, an explanation of the phenomenal consciousness we have of our phenomenal states and events cannot be given without bringing the concept of such knowledge into play. Despite the many differences that exist between Singer, Burge and Block, they all agree that they deny just that, while the conception of the first-person point of view allows a description of our phenomenal consciousness that accounts for the knowledge we have of our present sensations and feelings. I have emphasized that the theories discussed in the Introduction do not take into account contemporary philosophical considerations concerning the topic ‘I’. One of the main focuses of those theories has to do with particular aspects of the first-person point of view. As long as the sciences don’t address that topic, they will remain a long way from providing a satisfactory explanation of what essentially belongs to this most vital of topics. A more extensive mutual understanding of philosophy and science would not only be useful for a more adequate assessment of the insights gained in the sciences so far, but could also lead to a new and deeper understanding of what still remains to be done.

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Index access, privileged 103–104, 105 asymmetry, epistemic 102, 105–109, 111–112, 113–117, 119–120, 121–122, 143–144, 145, 148 Anscombe, E. 31–32, 34, 35–36, 63, 97, 107, 156–157 Austin, J. L. 48 avowal 104, 110–111 Bilgrami, A. 51, 102, 121–129, 141, 148–149, 150 Block, N. 15, 18, 183, 184 brute error 129–130 Burge, T. 18, 27, 102, 108, 125, 129–141, 148, 149, 150, 183–184 Butler, J. 151–152 caring 176–179 Castaneda, H. 97 cogito judgments 130–135, 139–140, 146 constitutive conception of self-knowledge  122–125, 129 context of use 28–30, 46–47, 60, 82–85, 94–95 Damasio, A. 7, 8–15, 28, 182 Davidson, D. 48, 107, 108, 109, 113–120, 121, 148, 149, 150, 156, 161–166, 172 default view of self-knowledge 112–113 deliberation 135–139, 140, 146, 177 demonstratives 42, 43, 82, 87–88 de se attitudes 49, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167–168, 170, 171, 172 Descartes, R. 102, 103, 129, 146 Dummett, M. 69, 155, 159 Evans, G. 41–45, 46, 53, 70–71, 96, 107 first-person authority 109, 113–114, 119–120, 121 Frankfurt, H. 173, 176–179 Frege, G. 53, 55–81, 88, 89–93, 94, 98 on thoughts 55, 56, 57–62, 66, 90–91 on incommunicable thoughts 68–70, 76–80 on the original way of self-presentation  62–65, 70–76, 77, 80–81 future, one’s own 151–152, 153–155, 173–175 Gallup, G. 2–6, 180–182

Grice, P. 157–161, 172 Hampshire, S. 158 Hart, H. 158 I as subject / I as object 36–39 identification-free 41–43 immunity to error through misidentification  35–38, 39–46 indexicals 55–60, 82, 85, 87, 94, 96–97 intention 155–167, 170–171, 174–175, 178 introspection 10–11, 14, 16–17, 103 Kant, I. 1, 2, 6, 7 Kaplan, D. 29–30, 32, 35, 54, 65, 67, 82–100 on Frege 65, 89–93, 98 Kemmerling, A. 63 knowledge, authoritative 112–114, 123, 129–131, 132, 135, 138–140 performative 147 reflexive 141–144, 147–148, 149–150 Kripke, S. 58, 85, 87 Künne, W. 63–64, 70 McGinn, C. 64, 67–68 mirror-image stimulation 3–6, 180–181 Mitchell, R. 5 Nagel, T. 51 O’Brien, L. 31–35 Peacocke, C. 102 performative utterances 48–49 Perry, J. 58, 70, 98, 99 phenomenal consciousness 15, 18–19, 110, 145, 182, 183–184 point of view, first-person 23–25, 40, 44, 50–54, 76, 79, 80, 97–100, 130–131, 151, 155, 169–170, 171–175, 176, 178–179, 180, 181–182, 183 second-person 155, 170 third-person 23–25, 50–53, 75, 80, 157, 169–170, 173–175, 176, 181 prediction 155, 156–161, 173–175 reason, exclusive 108–109, 145, 148, 149–150 Reichenbach, H. 28–29 reference, direct 82, 83–87, 94 rigid 85, 86–87, 94 Russell, B. 84, 92, 96

Index 

Ryle, G. 103–105 self-knowledge 101–105, 121–123, 126–132, 134–135, 138–140, 141–150 Shoemaker, S. 39–41, 45, 46 Singer, W. 8, 16–22, 182–183, 184 Strawson, P. 52–53, 122

 191

Swartz, K. 4–5 Tomasello, M. 22–25, 180–182 Tugendhat, E. 31, 32, 107, 108, 109 Wittgenstein, L. 1, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36–39, 44, 45, 161, 165 Wright, C. 102, 107, 109–113, 121, 148, 149, 150