From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Sat Dec 18 1999 - 21:40:59 MST
'What is your name?' 'Robert Owen.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':
> Still brooding over your original paper; I've no problem at all with your
> exposition of "token-reflexives", and while I am inclined to regard the
> experience "now" as an irreducible datum (i.e. a qualium) the situation
> with respect to "I" seems far more ambiguous.
As a matter of fact, I just happen to be finishing up a term course on the
philosophy of language and the first person. I turned in my term paper
just a week ago on Elizabeth Anscombe's "The First Person." I tentatively
agreed with her in saying that "I" does not have a referent.
> I want to emphasize that my particular approach to the phenomenology
> of consciousness in no way implies that I regard the "I" of putative
> "self-awareness" to be such a datum (or, if we must, a "qualium"). I am
> simply unable to find a convincing phenomenological referent for this
> pronoun either through introspection or logical analysis. The "First-
> Person Singular" has always seemed very mysterious to me.
Anscombe takes claims of the form "I am this thing right here [pointing at
herself]" not to be identity statements, but rather statements of relation
between some ideas that she has (that is, Fregean "ideas," not "thoughts"
in any way) and the thing at which she points. That is, she has some
ideas of movement, and those ideas of movement are *of* or *about* "this
thing right here." Actually, heck, I'll just quote:
"'I am this thing here' is, then, a real proposition, but not a
proposition of identity. It means: this thing here is the thing, the
person ... of whose action *this* idea of action is an idea, of whose
movements *these* ideas of movement are ideas, of whose posture *this*
idea of posture is the idea. And also, of which *these* intended actions,
if carried out, will be the actions." (All quotes from Anscombe's "The
First Person," which I've taken from _Self Knowledge_, Quassim Cassam ed.
Oxford University Press, New York 1994.)
When she says "I am Elizabeth Anscombe," then, she's saying "I am this
thing right here" (a relation, as above) and "This thing right here is
Elizabeth Anscombe" (an identity, as we'd expect).
This solves what she takes to be a dilemma of identifying the same self
across many I-thoughts, as well as the trouble of noting that more than
one person may be thinking this thought that "I exist." Hume, as you
surely know, could find no "self" when he introspected. We'd assume that
neither can she. (Can you?) Immunity to error is solved when we notice
that "I" cannot latch on to the WRONG thing because it does not latch on
to ANYTHING. :)
An interesting characteristic of this analysis: Anscombe argues that any
analysis of "I" which requires a referent for "I" requires us to accept
dualism. This is basically Descartes' argument, and Perry's thought
experiment. "I could suppose I had no body," Anscombe quotes Descartes as
saying, "but not that I was not." Similarly, if I performed the relevant
drugging and amnesia trick I did before, you would have no way of locating
your body, or even determining that you had one, thanks to the
super-anaesthetic. Nonetheless, Anscombe's critics might argue, you would
still able to refer to yourself; it seems nonsense to think that you could
refer to yourself in absentia, either, so you must be something that is
not your body.
Anscombe argues instead that under total sensory deprivation, she could
identify no particular thing which had the property of being her. "I
could not have the thought 'this object,' 'this body' -- there would be
nothing for 'this' to latch on to. But that is not to say I could not
still have the ideas of actions, motion, etc. For these ideas are not
extracts from sensory observation. If I do have them under sensory
deprivation, I shall perhaps *believe* that there is such a body. But the
possibility will perhaps strike me that there is none. That is, the
possibility that there is then nothing that I am."
It's not obvious that she can give a similar account of "this place" and
"this time," but I'll leave that for elsewhere.
> [1] Would you please read "Self-Identification and Self-Reference"
> by Ingar Brinck at http://www.phil.indiana.edu/ejap/ejap.html
> and share with me your impressions and opinions?
Let me see. As I said before, I tentatively agree with Anscombe, and on
account of that, Evans seems to be missing the point. Same goes for
Brinck, who, though challenging Evans in a variety of ways, still makes
the assumption that "I" HAS a referent. It's really shocking how many
papers I've read bring up Anscombe during the first paragraph or
introduction, and then move on, spending no time whatsoever attacking this
(Wittgensteinian?) view. It's almost as if to say "This is a very
interesting question in philosophy. People have come up with some pretty
half-witted answers to it, don't you think? Well, anyway, here's my
approach..."
> [2] With respect to your analogy in part drawn from analytic philosophy,
> did you have anyone specific in mind, e.g. Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein,
> the logical positivists, Ryle, Austin, Bergmann, or Quine? Maybe you
> could discuss this a little more?
Actually, I was being very sloppy when I wrote that. This analogy is just
that, an analogy, not really entailed by anything so much as it is an
interesting parallel, and if it is related to the ideas of analytic
philosophy, it is thematically related more than anything else. I hit
upon this analogy when the idea was first presented to me that doing
philosophy of language would tell us something about thought. The
argument, as it was put to me, is that our thoughts need a relation of
aboutness, just like our words, (after all, we take ourselves to be
thinking ABOUT things, don't we?) and they seem just similar enough that
analysis of words should carry over to analysis of thoughts. Where Words
were the thing above or behind the written page, where would the Thoughts
be instantiated/written? Well, in the brain, of course. This led me to
imagine that Thoughts were the things behind/above the "marks" (or, as I
put it earlier, organization) of the brain. Not at all at odds with the
picture of the world held by most analytic philosophers, and it adds a
certain completeness to the view.
If this seems a little fishy to you, well, I think it is. As you know, I
don't believe in qualia, so I certainly don't believe in a "now" qualia or
any other indexical qualia. On this account, I don't take there to be
some spooky Meaning to our words, either. Visions of Frege's "third
realm," where the Thought/Sinn lives, leap to mind. Rather, instead of
this picture of Sense/Reference, it seems to me that there is only the
use.
I'm not sure I'm going to be able to back up this picture very much
further, as I have not studied the philosophy of language all that much;
you just happened to hit upon something very specific that I knew more
than a little about.
-Dan
-unless you love someone-
-nothing else makes any sense-
e.e. cummings
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