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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
This fact about the grammar of selfhypenreference doesn't answer the ontological question, however, of what sort of entity I am in so far as I am a speaker. Thinking about what is presumed in my understanding the concepts ‘one’ and ‘one who is speaking’ tells us this much, that I must be able to differentiate myself from other speakers at the same time as I must be like them. If I cannot differentiate myself from you then of course I cannot refer to myself to begin with. But I must be like you enough to be intelligible to you, and I must know that I am. Otherwise I could not know myself as ‘the one who is speaking’, speaking in the first person to others who also speak in the first person.
1 This point is made both in Sydney Shoemaker's ‘SelfhypenIdentity, Selfhypen Reference and SelfhypenAwareness’, Journal of Philosoph LXV, No. 19(1968), 555–567; and in Thoma's, Nagels ‘Physicalism’, Philosophical Review LXXTV, No. 3 (07 1965), 339–356.Google Scholar
1 Donald, Davidson argues this point in a number of essays both in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford University Press, 1980) (see particularly the essays ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, and ‘Mental Events’) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984).Google Scholar
3 Donald, Davidson, Thought and Talk, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, op. cit.Google Scholar
4 Bernard, Williams, Imagination and the Self, Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
5 Constantin, Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares (New York:Theatre Arts and Co, 1935).Google Scholar
6 Richard, Wollheim, ‘Identification and Imagination’, Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays, R., Wollheim (ed.) (New York: Anchor Books, 1974).Google Scholar
7 Donald, Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, op. cit.Google Scholar
8 Stanley Cavell, , Knowing and Acknowledging, Must We Mean What We Say? (New York:Scribner's, 1969).Google Scholar
9 Donald Davidson, , Thought and Talk, op. cit.Google Scholar
10 This argument of Davidson's is developed also in ‘Rational Animals’, Dialectica 36, No. 4 (1982).
11 Daniel Stern, , The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1.Google Scholar
12 Daniel, Stern, Lynne, Hofer, Wendy, Haft, John, Dore, ‘Affect Attunement: The Sharing of Feeling States Between Mother and Infant by Means of Interhypenmodal Fluence’, Social Perception in Infants, T., Field and N., Fox (eds.)(Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1984).Google Scholar
12 Thomas Nagel, , The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford University Press, 1970).Google Scholar
