Self-Reference and Self-Knowledge

Francesco Orilia

《東吳哲學學報》 16期 (2007/08) Pp. 257-281

並列摘要

Linguistic first-person self-reference takes place when one utters tokens of the first-person pronoun (”I,” in English). Despite the dominant referentialist trend according to which any such token directly refers to the utterer of the token, it can be argued that a token of ”I” expresses a descriptive content of the form the F and thus refers to the utterer only in an indirect way, insofar as the utterer is the only entity with the property F. In particular, as I see it, |the F| is, à la Reichenbach, a ”token-reflexive” content, which crucially involves as constituent to the token itself.
This descriptivist position however faces a puzzle. For we are capable, currently fashionable contrary opinions notwithstanding, of first-person judgments with the following features. They are non-inferentially justified, private and incorrigible. Indeed, it is argued, such judgments involve ”self-knowledge propositions” with the judging subject as constituent. Now, prima fade, these self-knowledge propositions may seem to be propositions expressible by a subject X by means of a token of ”I” that directly refers to X. If so, however, descriptivism is jeopardized. I argue however that language, and thus the use of a token of ”I,” is not really necessary in order to entertain a self-knowledge proposition. One can admit that such propositions can be expressed by using ”I,” only if one distinguishes, like Frege, between an ”I” of soliloquy and an ”I” of communication. Since a proposition expressed by relying on the former is not intersubjectively graspable, it is not an official meaning, but it is at the level of official meaning that the dispute among descriptivists and referentialists should be understood.

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