John McDowell

REFERRING TO ONESELF

[In Hahn, Ed. The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson, @@]

 

I

In an influential passage in The Blue Book, [1] Wittgenstein distinguishes "two different cases in the use of the word 'I' (or 'my')," which he calls "the use as object" and "the use as subject." We have the use as object in, for instance, "My arm is broken," "I have grown six inches," "I have a bump on my forehead"; we have the use as subject in, for instance, "I see such-and-such," "I think it will rain," "I have a toothache." Wittgenstein explains the distinction like this:

One can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it: The possibility of an error has been provided for . 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 neighbour's. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask "are you sure that it's you who have pains?" would be nonsensical . . . . And now this way of stating our idea suggests itself: that it is as impossible that in making the statement "I have a toothache" I should have mistaken another person for myself, as it is to moan with pain by mistake, having mistaken someone else for me.

And he suggests a conclusion: "To say, 'I have pain' is no more a statement about a particular person than moaning is." That is, "I," at any rate in the use as subject, does not serve to refer to a particular person. It is not the case that the role of an utterance of "I," in helping to determine the significance of an utterance of a form of words like "I have toothache," is to indicate that of which the rest of the


[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), pp. 66-67.

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utterance is predicated -- what the rest of the utterance has to be true of if what one says in making the utterance is to be true.

 

II

In "The First Person," [2] G.E.M. Anscombe explicitly argues that "I" is not a referring expression (p. 61):

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. With names, or denoting expressions (in Russell's sense) there are two things to grasp: the kind of use, and what to apply them to from time to time. With "I" there is only the use.

"I"-statements have, as it were, the look of predications, with "I" in subject position. And there is indeed a subject of predication, a target of reference, in the offing: in the case of my "I"-statements, the person John McDowell. [3] If I make an "I"-statement, it is true just in case its apparently predicative material is true of the person John McDowell; and in that specification of a truth-condition, we have a proper predication, with an authentic singular term denoting the item of which the predication is made (see p. 60). But according to Anscombe, it would be wrong to suppose that my "I"-statement is another way of predicating that material of that same item. "I" said by me is not another way for me to refer to that item.

Anscombe does not invoke the passage from Wittgenstein or exploit the distinction between the use as subject and the use as object. Her thesis seems to be quite general: an utterance of "I" does not refer, no matter what apparently predicative material it is concatenated with -- "have a broken arm" no less than "have a toothache." Wittgenstein's suggestion, in contrast, seems to leave it open to us to suppose that at least in the use as object "I" is a referring expression. Still, Anscombe's point that "getting hold of the wrong object is excluded" is surely a descendant of Wittgenstein's point that no provision is made for a certain possibility of error. [4]

Her treatment of "I" centers on its role in giving expression to "unmediated conceptions (knowledge or belief, true or false) of states, motions, etc." (p. 62), where the truth or falsity of the "I"-statements turns on whether the states, motions, etc. can be truly predicated of (in my case) the person John McDowell. The significance of "unmediated" comes out clearly in her exploitation of an anecdote from William James (pp. 64-65). A person nicknamed "Baldy" had fallen out of a carriage; he had the idea that someone had fallen out of the carriage; and, on being


[2] In Samuel Guttenplan, ed., Mind and Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 45-65.

[3] Anscombe says that a person is "a living human body" (p. 61). She means to be talking about something that is not "still there when someone is dead." But I do not see how the words "living human body" can be intelligibly construed otherwise than by taking "living" to attribute a property that a human body can lose, scilicet without going out of existence. When there is no longer life in it, my body will probably "still be there" for a while. (It may not be, but only if the life is snuffed out by the body's, say, being blown to smithereens.) What will not "still be there" is the human being I am -- not a human body, though certainly a bodily thing.


[4] I am isolating one strand in Anscombe's complex case for her conclusion; I prescind, for instance, from her claim that Frege's notion of sense cannot be made to fit a construal of "I," uttered by a particular person, as a referring expression. I believe Frege had a better view of that question; and he does not hesitate to speak of the "particular and primitive" mode of presentation under which one can figure only in one's own thoughts (pp. 25-26 of "The Thought: a Logical Inquiry," translated by A. M. and Marcelle Quinton, in P. F. Strawson, ed., Philosophical Logic [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967], pp. 17-38).

 

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told that Baldy had, said "Did Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!" This indicates a "lapse of self-consciousness," which Anscombe locates in the fact that Baldy's "thought of the happening, falling out of the carriage, was one for which he looked for a subject " (p. 65). An unmediated conception of the falling, in the relevant sense, would have been one for which that was not so. (Compare Wittgenstein's "there is no question of recognizing a person.")

This connects in an obvious way with the fact that "getting hold of the wrong object is excluded." Getting hold of the wrong object would be going wrong in looking for a subject of which to predicate the content of a conception. If there is no looking for a subject, there is no going wrong in looking for a subject.

We need also to deal with the use as object. There Wittgenstein's point, in the present terms, is that the conceptions expressed are not unmediated: looking for a subject is not excluded. I have a conception of, say, having a broken arm, and in Wittgenstein's accident case I need to look for a person of whom the state that my conception is a conception of could be truly predicated. (In another case I might not need to look for a subject for the predication; but even so, I know which person it is whose arm is broken in the sort of way in which one knows when one came to know by looking for a subject for predication.) But Anscombe's position is that here too, when I say "I have a broken arm," I am not predicating the state, having a broken arm, of a person to whom I refer by my use of "I." And that seems the right line for her to take.

What do I convey by saying "I have a broken arm," rather than, say, "John McDowell has a broken arm," which would be unproblematically a reference concatenated with a predication? [5] Presumably the point of using the first-person form is to effect a certain association between my mediated conception of the state, having a broken arm, and the unmediated conceptions to which I could give expression in what we can think of as the central uses of "I." By saying "I have a broken arm," I indicate that the person whose possession or not of a broken arm is to determine the truth or falsity of my statement is the one whose states, motions, etc. would determine the truth or falsity of statements I might make in which the first-person form would give expression to unmediated conceptions of those states, motions, etc. But if we must suppose that in the case of these potential other statements, where the conceptions are unmediated, the person in question would not be determined by being referred to, surely we had better suppose that in the associated uses too.

Anscombe says: "The expression 'self-consciousness' can be respectably explained as 'consciousness that such-and-such holds of oneself" (p. 51). Here "oneself' is the "indirect reflexive," which is intelligible only


[5] Perhaps I have forgotten my name in the accident. But then we can ask why I say "I ..." rather than, say, "The person in this bed...," or whatever other (non-first-personal) designation is at my disposal.

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in terms of the first person. The only explanation of the oratio obliqua form, "consciousness that such-and-such holds of oneself," is in terms of an oratio recta form containing an expression of the first person: consciousness whose content is given by "Such-and-such holds of me." (See pp. 46-47.) Now this account of self-consciousness is indifferent to whether the conception expressed in a replacement for "such-and-such" is mediated or unmediated. But Baldy's lapse of self-consciousness, in Anscombe's account, lies in his lack of unmediated conceptions of states, motions, etc. of the person Baldy (p. 65). That is surely right; and that is why expressions of unmediated conceptions are the central uses of "I," even though self-consciousness (in the sense of Anscombe's general account) is exemplified also in uses of "I" that express mediated conceptions. If there are no unmediated conceptions, as perhaps in some states of dissociation, then first-person talk and thought lapses altogether. But if first-person talk and thought is available at all, then it -- that very thing, and hence self-consciousness -- can extend to mediated conceptions (the use as object) as well.

 

III

Anscombe's thinking here starts with an insight. It is indeed fundamental to an understanding of first-person forms that their central use is in expressing unmediated conceptions. But we can acknowledge that, and nevertheless refuse to accept that "I" is not a referring expression. We can block the inference by giving proper weight to this remark of P. F. Strawson's, which formulates the beginning of wisdom on these questions: " 'I' can be used without criteria of subject-identity and yet refer to a subject because, even in such a use, the links with those criteria are not in practice severed." [6]

What Strawson describes as a use of "I" without criteria of subject-identity is what Anscombe describes in terms of unmediatedness, the absence of any need to look for a subject. I do not look for a subject for the unmediated conceptions that I express in some of my "I"-statements (the central ones). Strawson's point is that that is no reason not to suppose that by "I" I refer to the person (in my case John McDowell) whose having the content of those conceptions truly predicable of him or not determines the truth or falsity of the statements (to put the matter in Anscombe's terms). [7]

As the possibility of putting it like that indicates, Anscombe does not simply reject the claim that the links with criteria of subject-identity are not severed. For her too, my "I"-statements are semantically connected


[6] The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 165.

[7] I follow Strawson in assuming that the criteria of subject-identity are (at least for the subjects we know about) criteria for the identity of human beings; that is, animals of a certain kind. In this connection, Strawson wrote (in 1966):

"The topic of personal identity has been well discussed in recent philosophy. I shall take the matter as understood." (The Bounds of Sense, p. 164).

This remark looks dated now, but those were better days.

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to a particular human being: something that can be referred to in a way that is governed by criteria of identity. Where Anscombe diverges from Strawson is that she thinks this semantical connection cannot be a matter of reference. My "I"-statements are indeed true or false according to how it is with a particular human being, a potential target for reference that would be governed by criteria of identity; but not, according to her, because the utterances of "I" that figure in what looks like subject position in those statements refer to that human being.

Anscombe thinks that if one did take one's utterances or thoughts of "I" to be cases of referring, and tried to respect the facts about the use of "I," then the only thing one could find (or invent) for one's "I" to refer to would be a Cartesian Ego: "if 'I' is a referring expression, then Descartes was right about what the referent is" (p. 58). She argues for this by imagining herself in a condition of sensory deprivation, telling herself "I won't let this happen again!"


If the object meant by "I" is ... this human being, then in these circumstances it won't be present to my senses; and how else can it be 'present to me'? But have I lost what I mean by "I?". . . I have not lost my 'self- consciousness'; nor can what I mean by "I" be an object no longer present to me... . Nothing but a Cartesian Ego will serve.

We can consider this as an extreme case of unmediatedness, where there is not even a possibility of finding (as a result of looking for) a human being who could be said to have the intention expressed in "I can't let this happen again!" In less extreme cases, finding a subject of which to predicate the content of one's unmediated conceptions is not an outright impossibility; it is just that if one did that, one would not be respecting the fact that the conceptions are unmediated, and the resulting judgments and statements would not be first-personal.

Anscombe's thought here seems to be something on these lines: if "I" were a referring expression, its character as such would need to be entirely securable from within its central uses. The unmediatedness of those uses then precludes crediting "I" with a referent that is subject to the criteria of identity for human beings, since no such criteria are appealed to in those uses.

For another application of that thought, consider the succession of "I"-statements that would give expression to a stream of consciousness (self-consciousness). If "I" refers, how is it that in the course of such a succession no question arises about whether there has been an unnoticed substitution of a new referent for the old? [8] Now suppose one takes it that the resources for responding to such questions must come from within the stream of consciousness itself. In that case one might be tempted to think the answer must be that the continuing referent of "I" is especially


[8] See Anscombe, pp. 57-58.

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easy to keep track of: there is nothing to its persisting as one and the same thing, over and above the experienced continuity within the stream. [9]

This temptation is precisely what leads to the illusion of the Cartesian Ego, according to Strawson's reading of Kant's diagnosis in his section on the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. It is this line of thought to which Strawson responds, on Kant's behalf, with the remark that the links to criteria of subject-identity are not severed, even in thought and talk where there is no appeal to those criteria. Continuing "I"-thinking involves no keeping track of a persisting referent; but it is nevertheless rightly understood as involving continuing reference, to something whose sameness over time involves satisfaction of those criteria -- a particular person. "I" can refer, without being governed by criteria of identity, to something for which there are criteria of identity, because understanding "I" requires understanding that the first person is also a third person, an element in the objective world. [10]

This claim also fits the extreme case of unmediatedness that Anscombe tries to exploit. I can think "I won't let this happen again!" in sensory deprivation only against a background understanding, which I cannot suspend on pain of suspending my ability to think first-personally altogether, that the first person is also a third person. It is that third person -- who is present to me, in these circumstances, only as the subject of my thinkings, intentions, and so forth -- that I mean by "I," even in this condition. Certainly some of the usual materials for bringing that background understanding to bear -- for identifying the relevant third person third-personally -- are not currently at my disposal. But that does not show that my "I," in these circumstances, cannot refer to the person who, on Anscombe's own account, has those thoughts and forms those intentions. It would show that only on the assumption that a referring role for "I" would need to be fully accountable for within my stream of consciousness. And in the light of the point Strawson finds in Kant, that assumption, which drives Anscombe's argument, looks profoundly Cartesian.

Of course Anscombe is not tempted to postulate Cartesian Egos to be the referents of our uses of "I." On the contrary, she uses the fact that that would be hopeless in order to argue, by modus tollens, that "I" is not a referring expression. But we can see something Cartesian in the thought that underlies the conditional premise of her modus tollens: the thought that if "I" is a referring expression, its character as such must be able to be wholly provided for from within its use in the articulation of unmediated conceptions. The ultimate Cartesian error is not the postulation of the Ego, but rather an idea to this effect, which underlies the postulation of the Ego: the semantical character of the judgments that


[9] If one is tempted by this answer, one ought still to worry about unnoticed substitutions when one picks up one's "I"-thinking after intervals of sleep.

[10] Compare Anscombe's explanation of why "no problem of the continuity or reidentification of 'the I' can arise" (p. 62).

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articulate a stream of consciousness is self-contained, able to be completely provided for within the stream. Certainly Anscombe does not embrace that idea in the unqualified form in which I have stated it: she allows, indeed insists, that the truth or falsity of my "I"-judgments turns on whether their content can be truly predicated of a certain third person, a certain particular element in the objective world. But she thinks avoidance of the Ego requires us to hold that "I" does not refer. Ironically enough, given that anti-Cartesian motivation, this reflects a vestigial form of the Cartesian idea that a stream of consciousness is semantically self-sufficient: she does not let her denial that the judgments in question are semantically self-contained extend to the question whether their logical form is that of reference and predication.

I have already quoted something she says about Baldy's lapse of self-consciousness: it lay in the fact that "his thought of the happening, falling out of the carriage, was one for which he looked for a subject " In a continuation that I omitted, Anscombe implicitly equates that with saying that "his grasp of it" was "one which required a subject" (p. 65). This equation encapsulates her thought that the unmediated conceptions that the central cases of first-person talk express must be "subjectless." To give proper weight to Strawson's point is to see that the equation is a mistake. We must indeed insist that the conceptions exclude looking for a subject, if we are to keep our hold on what is special about the first person. But even so, we can suppose that the conceptions require to be predicated of a subject: the particular person each of us refers to by "I." Of course one does not single out that subject, as if from other candidates, to be what one predicates the content of the conceptions of; but it would be a mistake to think reference must always be a matter of singling out in that sense. [11]

 

IV

Strawson credits the essential point to Kant, but I think this may be generous to Kant. We should not underestimate Strawson's own creativity in what he offers as a reading of Kant. (I do not mean to dispute that his thought is deeply Kantian in spirit.)

As Strawson concedes, Kant "barely alludes" to the fact that we have empirical criteria of identity for persons. Strawson manages to cite only one passage, where Kant says: "Its [the soul's] persistence during life is, of course, evident per se, since the thinking being (as man) is itself likewise an object of the outer senses. " [12]

And it is not just that a topic that is central to the point Strawson finds in the section on the Paralogisms is scarcely mentioned there. That


[11] Strawson himself encouraged a step in this direction when he suggested (Individuals [London: Methuen, 1959], p. 100) that one singles the right item out, as from other candidates, at least for others. For a protest, see Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 208.

[12] Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1929), B415; cited (in a slightly modified form) by Strawson at p. 164 of The Bounds of Sense.

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one remark certainly displays Kant as splendidly immune to a familiar Cartesian temptation, the temptation to suppose that what does one's thinking is something other than a certain human being. [13] And the main business of the section is certainly to uncover, at the foundation of rational psychology, a misconstrual of the functioning of "I," in the "I think" that must be able "to accompany all my representations" (B131): "The unity of consciousness, which underlies the categories, is here mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object, and the category of substance is then applied to it" (B421). But Kant can diagnose the misconstrual of that extraordinary use of "I" without needing to take any view about its ordinary uses. Specifically, the diagnosis does not require him to claim that the human being that does one's thinking is the referent of one's ordinary uses of "I."

What Kant's purpose requires him to say about "I" is just that in the "I think" that can accompany all my representations, it does not give expression to "an intuition of the subject as object." This "I," the "I" that expresses "the unity of consciousness," does not refer; the rational psychologists' misunderstanding is precisely to suppose that it refers, and invent a referent for it. Empirical uses of "I," in contrast to that transcendental use, figure in the section on the Paralogisms only for Kant to stress that they are out of bounds for rational psychology. He has no need to offer a doctrine about how they are to be understood. The remark about "the thinking being (as man)" is not made in the context of offering any such doctrine: the thinking being (as man) is not introduced as the referent of its own empirical uses of "I." Anscombe too, of course, has the minimally anti-Cartesian view that the thinking being (as man) is an object of outer sense. As far as I can see, everything Kant says is compatible with her view that it is not by way of reference that one's empirical uses of "I" relate to the human being one is. [14] And in that case Stawson's reading takes a decisive step beyond what is actually in Kant.

 

V

The Kantian context in which that insight of Strawson's figures threatens, indeed, to have a positively damaging effect on our understanding of an indispensable thought, which Strawson expresses, in Individuals, like this (p. 102): "a necessary condition of states of consciousness being ascribed at all is that they should be ascribed to the very same things as certain corporeal characteristics, a certain physical situation &c."

Strawson's avowedly Kantian treatment of self-reference focuses on that unity of a series of experiences that we can capture by saying that its members "collectively build up or yield, though not all of them contrib--

 

[13] Contrast the topic of the reflections that include the Cartesian cogito, which is not the human being, Rene Descartes. See Anscombe's perceptive discussion of this, pp. 45-46.

[14] It would be wrong to suppose that "the human being one is" already rules out Anscombe's position. She holds, as she must, that "I am E. A.," said by her "is not an identity proposition;" see pp. 60-61.

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ute to, a picture of a unified objective world through which the experiences themselves collectively constitute a single, subjective, experiential route, one among other possible subjective routes through the same objective world." [15] He (in effect) seeks to preserve the thought I quoted from Individuals by insisting that this conception -- the conception of "a temporally extended point of view on the world" (ibid.) -- does not contain a sufficient condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. To approach a sufficient condition, we need to make it explicit that the temporally extended point of view is an aspect of the career of an embodied subject of experience -- a human being, in the only case we are familiar with. But about the conception of a temporally extended point of view on the world, abstracted from the full conditions for the possibility of self-consciousness, Strawson claims on Kant's behalf that, since that conception provides for the distinction between how things are and how things are experienced as being, it can be recognized to contain "the basic condition for that possibility" (p. 108). And it is easy to read this as suggesting that the conception does, as it were, almost all the work: that in order to build up an adequate (if skeletal) understanding of self-consciousness, we need only put the conception back into the context from which it is abstracted, stipulating (in accordance with the remark from Individuals) that the experiences that make up a stream of consciousness are to be attributed to a bodily thing.

I think any such suggestion would be seriously wrong. In order to bring out why, I shall adapt and extend a thought experiment of Anscombe's.


Anscombe envisages (p. 49)


a society in which everyone is labeled with two names. One appears on their backs and at the tops of their chests, and these names, which their bearers cannot see, are various: "B" to "Z", let us say. The other, "A", is stamped on the inside of their wrists, and is the same for everyone. In making reports on people's actions everyone uses the names on their chests or backs if he can see these names or is used to seeing them. Everyone also learns to respond to utterance of the name on his own chest and back in the sort of way and circumstances in which we tend to respond to utterance of our own names. Reports on one's own actions, which are given straight off from observation, are made using the name on the wrist. Such reports are made, not on the basis of observation alone, but also on that of inference and testimony or other information. B, for example, derives conclusions expressed by sentences with "A" as subject, from other people's statements using "B" as subject.

What I want to exploit from this description is the point that "reports on one's own actions" are made primarily on the basis of observation. (The other modes of informational access that Anscombe mentions can be thought of as substitutes for observation.) In a central case of a


[15] Bounds of Sense, p. 104.

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"report on one's own actions," B (say) observes the clenching of a fist (say) with an inscribed "A" visible on the inside of the wrist to which it is attached, and says "A is clenching his fist." This kind of report can be mistaken in that the fist actually belongs to a body other than the one whose chest-and-back label is "B." (Perhaps the report could have been truly made; but only by coincidence, if B's fist was being clenched also.) Such a report gives expression to an observationally acquired conception of a bodily movement, and the observation includes finding a subject of which to predicate the movement. Getting hold of the wrong object is not excluded. In short, the conceptions expressed in these reports are not unmediated. And that is enough to justify saying that, at least so far, the practice does not provide for expressions of self-consciousness: "A" does not function like "I." [16]

In Anscombe's scenario, the bodily thing whose movements one can correctly report using "A" is singled out by the fact that its back and chest are inaccessible to one's vision (ignoring mirrors). The detail depends on the fact that she wants it to be especially clear that the various terms in play function as names: their bearers are actually labelled with them. But that is inessential for my purposes. In a variation on Anscombe's case, we can leave out the labels, but preserve the role of the point of view from which one sees. So "A is clenching his fist" is said, as before, when one observes a fist clenching, and, now, when one can tell by observation that the fist belongs to the body at the front of whose head is the point from which the observed scene is seen. (As before, one can short-cut observation by relying on testimony, inference, and perhaps just guesswork.) The effect is to turn "A" into an indexical expression rather than a label, and, to that extent, to bring it closer to "I." But the conceptions expressed are still not unmediated, so we have still not made provision for self-consciousness.

The "A"-language was introduced only in connection with "reports of actions." One obvious addition would be reports on the posture, relation to other objects, and so forth of the singled out bodily thing. (We could hardly countenance "A is clenching his fist" while refusing to make sense of "A's fist is clenched.") Nothing essential is altered so long as these reports too are made primarily on the basis of observation. All the reports we are envisaging so far are, we might say, third-personal, just because they are fundamentally observational; it makes no difference that one of the potential referents for third-personal talk is singled out in that special way. [17]

Can the "A"-language be extended to psychological predications? We are already contemplating reports made on the basis of observation (which we have tacitly limited to visual observation). So far we have restricted the topics of observation to the bodily movements, postures,


[16] This vitiates the use to which Anscombe puts the case. She wants the trouble with "A," as a candidate for a way of giving expression to self-consciousness, to be just that it is a referring expression. Thus she suggests that people who treat "I" as a referring expression either represent "I" as in principle no different from ... 'A'" or, seeing the difference between "I" and "A" "are led to rave in consequence" (p. 60). But the difference between "A" and "I" is already sufficiently in place when we register that the conceptions expressed in the "A"-language are not unmediated; we do not need to say as well that one refers and the other does not. (Anscombe's mistake, which Strawson's insight allows us to expose, is exactly not to see that we can endorse the first of these claims and reject the second. But at this point I mean to have left Anscombe's mistake behind; I am exploiting her thought experiment for my own purposes.)

[17] "Third-personal" is not completely felicitous, just because there is nothing in the language that answers to the contrasting description "first-personal."

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and so forth of the speakers themselves and others of their kind, but that is surely inessential; we can imagine that the language provides for observational reports on other aspects of the passing show. Now let us enrich the range of predications with "A" in subject position like this: when a speaker is in a position to make an observational report of some state of affairs, that very position equally entitles the speaker to produce a statement of a new kind, in which the report of the state of affairs is prefaced by "A sees that ... ."

This is radically unlike the predications with "A" in subject position that we have so far had in view, in that the basis on which these reports are made does not include identifying an object of which to predicate the rest of the statement. There is no such thing as making sure it is A who sees that such-and-such is the case, as one might need to make sure it is A who is clenching his fist. These new "A"-statements give expression to conceptions that are unmediated.

Does that mean we have brought self-consciousness into the picture? Surely not. These statements attribute seeing that such-and-such is the case to a bodily thing whose movements, posture, and so forth are still reported only on the basis of observation and surrogates for observation. If it was right to conclude that the original "A"-language did not provide for one to think of the things whose "actions" one reported as oneself (indirect reflexive), how can we have brought self-consciousness into the picture by allowing for describing that thing as something that sees as well as "acts"?

We can increase the psychological resources of the "A"-language. One obvious addition is a notion of appearance. When one says "A sees that P" on the usual sort of observational basis, and it turns out not to be the case that P, let it be correct to say "It seemed to A that P." (This presupposes a capacity for a certain sort of memory.) The present-tensed form, "It seems to A that P," will be suitable instead of "A sees that P" in circumstances in which there is some palpable risk that the latter statement may need to be withdrawn; but we can count it true whenever one has the usual sort of observational entitlement to the less cautious form.

And must we limit the reportable contents of streams of consciousness to perceptual experiences? Statements of the form "It seems to A that...," like statements of the form "A sees that ... " are made without any need to make sure it is A who enjoys the experience. Negation yields "It is not the case that it seems to A that ...," and that cannot import a new obligation to make sure that it is A of whom the statement is true. Now suppose a speaker of our expanding language suffers complete sensory deprivation. If what we are describing is a mode of intelligible speech, it must give expression to a possible mode of

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thought. So why not suppose this speaker can think (say to itself) something to the effect of "A has no experience at all" -- so that the otherwise empty stream of consciousness nevertheless contains occurrent thoughts?

When we introduced "A sees that ...," we already made room for the thought that "A" refers to something like a subject of experience, not something with only corporeal properties. With this last move, we might wonder if we have made room for an "A"-speaking philosopher who, impressed by the continuing possibility of "A"-thinking in sensory deprivation, or perhaps by the susceptibility to hyperbolical doubt of all bodily predications with "A" in subject position, argues like this: "Even in sensory deprivation or while entertaining hyperbolical doubt, A can be certain of A's existence: A thinks, therefore A is. This shows that what "A" really refers to is not a bodily thing at all, but a thing that thinks -- that is, enjoys a mental life. If, as normal sensory experience suggests, there is a body through whose eyes A sees, and so forth, that body is something to which A has a special relation; it is not what A is." And perhaps another philosopher might diagnose this as a paralogism of pure reason, a result of mistaking the purely formal "A thinks" that can accompany all A's representations for a genuine reference to a substantial object.

We have, apparently at least, given the "A"-language materials for constructing something like the notion of a temporally extended point of view on the world, including the distinction between how things are and how things are experienced as being, which Strawson singles out as the most fundamental necessary condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. With the last development, we have even given the appearance of making room for an analogue to the illusion of rational psychology and its diagnosis. And the diagnosis might continue by insisting that although one does not appeal to criteria of identity when one predicates experiences with "A" in subject position, nevertheless the links to such criteria are not severed, and the target of these references is a bodily thing; so we seem to have the unity of consciousness in the required context, as an aspect of the career of a bodily thing.

But surely "A" still does not give expression to self-consciousness. In a characteristically Cartesian fashion, our quasi-Cartesian "A"-speaking philosopher focuses on the fact that the not purely psychological aspects of what he conceives as "A's biography" can be obliterated, for its subject, by sensory deprivation, or thought away in hyperbolical doubt; he concludes that the real subject of the biography is something whose properties are exclusively psychological. In this case, the composite biography out of which the quasi-Cartesian pure subject is distilled was attributed to a subject whose "actions" are accessible to everyone only

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by observation (or substitutes for observation). That still seems to ensure that no one can think of this item as himself (indirect reflexive). How could a fantasy of shedding its bodily aspects turn a way of being that is not that of a self into a case of self-consciousness?

 

VI

Clearly the trouble lies in the way "reports on one's own actions" functioned in the original "A"-language; what I have been exploiting is the fact that nothing in the enrichments has made any difference to that. What an A"-speaker is entitled to describe as "A's doings" is just a singled-out collection of what observably happens. It is true that these particular happenings are movements on the part of a body that is the point of acquisition of the sensory basis on which the speaker speaks. But they are known about only observationally (and by way of substitutes for observation), not through intention; and that means that, for all their intimate connection to the speaker's point of view on the world, they cannot be conceived as one's doing things. These reports are not reports on actions, one's own or anyone's, except in the sense in which one might report the action of water on a stone.

The behavior of the singled out bodily thing, not known through intention, is not a case of anyone's exercising agency. Trying to imagine oneself in the "A"-practice, one might be tempted to picture those merely observable happenings as the result, in the impersonal objective word, of something else that really is one's doing. I act, in some inner sphere, and thereby somehow bring about those observable motions on the part of the bodily thing that audibly calls itself "A." But nothing in the "A"-language provides for this conception of the inner I who is a genuine agent, manipulating the bodily thing called "A" like a puppeteer. And in any case, if we separate the real agent like this from the bodily thing through whose motions the agent makes its mark in objective reality, we surely prevent ourselves from making real sense of agency.

This must go for the speech behavior of the singled out bodily thing as much as any other. If that range of activity is likewise accessible to all parties only through observation and substitutes for it, what we have described is a repertoire of activity that is not undertaken, gone in for, by anyone. It would make no difference if we enriched the repertoire with "reports on actions" that are exercises of the repertoire itself, so long as the sole basis for these "reports on actions" was observation and substitutes for it.

If I try to imagine myself looking at the world through the eyes of a participant in the "A"-practice, I find no one with whom I can identify

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myself, no one for me to be. I hear utterances that are intelligible in their way, with "A" in subject position, coming from the mouth of the singled out bodily thing. But, not knowing these utterances through intention, I cannot find myself speaking in them; I can conceive them at best as results of my agency, not cases of it. In the fantasy of an inner I, which utterances get made is under my control, and some of them give expression to the content of experience that I undergo, through A's sense organs. But they attribute that experience not to me but to A, a bodily thing that I have to distinguish from myself, since it is not what acts when I act, but at best an instrument whereby my agency makes its mark in outer reality.

At least the final stage in my expansion of Anscombe's thought experiment now comes into doubt. If the "A"-practice is, from the start, a repertoire for things that are not agents, and so not a language anyone could speak, in a sense in which speaking is an exercise of agency, then we cannot assume that an elaboration of the practice yields a way of giving expression to a mode of thought. This undermines the pretext on which I introduced the quasi-Cartesian "A"-speaking philosopher. But the thought experiment, however shaky, can still serve my purpose, which is to point to the basic importance of agency for making self-consciousness intelligible.

A potential for reflectiveness belongs to thought as such; "I" encapsulates that potential into a way individual things can be presented in the contents of thinkings. It would be wrong to put this by saying that oneself (indirect reflexive) is presented to one, in any bit of "I"-thinking, as the thinker, as well as the object, of this bit of thinking. Of course thinking can be immersed in its ground-level concerns, so that the potential for reflectiveness is merely latent; and this goes for "I"-thinking too (consider "That rhinoceros is about to charge at me"). What we can say is this: if a thought presents an object as oneself, it presents the object in such a way that no further information is required, besides what is already there in the mode of presentation, to warrant the reflective judgment that the object of this reference is the maker of it.

We can understand how something can figure in that way in thought if we can understand how something can figure in that way in speech. It might seem that "A" presents its referent in just that way: that the mode of presentation associated with "A" itself contains enough to warrant the judgment -- whose materials, then, would have to be all at least implicit in the mode of presentation -- that the referent is also the maker of the reference. But that misses the point I have been insisting on, that in exercises of the "A"-practice there is no speaker, and so no maker of references. If we allow ourselves the fantasy of the inner puppeteer, we have a maker of references in view, at least in the sense of someone who

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sees to it that references get made; but now the referent is not the speaker -- the author or originator -- of the reference. Contrast how it would have been if reports on one's actions using "A" had been introduced as expressions of intention. Then we could indeed have said that the warrant, and materials, for the reflective judgment that the object of this reference is its maker are implicit in the mode of presentation associated with "A." But in that case "A" would have been, from the start, a first-person form, a mere variant on "I." The materials for the reflective judgment are indeed implicit already in the very idea of an ascription of action that is an expression of the intention being actualized.

When we try to think ourselves into the "A"-practice, a certain singled out bodily thing appears at best as an instrument for the will of a self that can only dubiously find a place in our imaginings, a self that recedes inward to the point of vanishing. With bodily agency in the picture, that bodily thing becomes something one can identify as oneself; now there is something plainly present in the world for oneself to be. And it is not clear that we can understand the specific agency exercised in referring -- the idea of which is implicit in the potentially reflective mode of presentation under which one is presented as oneself (indirect reflexive) -- except by beginning with referring as an element in speaking, a particular mode of physical intervention in the world on the part of the bodily agent that one can identify as oneself. Surely this cannot be less fundamental, in our understanding of self-consciousness, than providing a distinction between how things are and how things are experienced as being.

Strawson's reading of Kant is revelatory when the question is how self-reference can be reference at all, but it is less helpful towards understanding how self-reference works, what the mode of presentation expressed by someone's use of "I" is. Perhaps I can put the point like this. When it comes to understanding how self-reference works, we are better served by the division in P-predicates and M-predicates, as in Individuals, than by the Kantian abstraction of a temporally extended point of view on the world from the career of an embodied subject. P-predications include, from the start, ascriptions of intentionally undertaken bodily movements. [18] In that context, one's being a bodily agent cannot take on the look of an afterthought, a mere frame for something that could sensibly be supposed to be more fundamental to self-consciousness.

 

JOHN McDOWELL
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH
SEPTEMBER 1994

 

[18] See Individuals, pp. 111-12.

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