I have so far referred to first-person experience as a sense-of-self. Philosophers have asked how we get to know this reality. It is not sufficient to say that we just know it intuitively and immediately – or at least a constructionist is not content with that answer. I will first spend a few paragraphs introducing Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’ and then go on to discuss some views of self that have been put forward by phenomenologists.

On the face of it, my sense-of-self rests on the fact that my experiences are private to me and are not accessible to anyone else. This is most evident in the case of pain. Although you and I understand the word ‘pain’ in the same way, my understanding of it, when I am actually experiencing pain, is different from yours, as you can only empathise with me rather than experience my pain yourself. We talk about a first-person perspective on events and contrast it with a third-person perspective that can be had by anyone in possession of their normal senses. So, for instance, we assume that a person who is blind or deaf does not have experiences that a sighted or hearing person has. Extending this idea to a sense-of-self, it could be concluded that only I know what it is like to have my experiences.