Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Here is an apparently true claim: uses of the first person concept systematically refer to their thinkers. Here is another: nothing outside this rule is normally needed to settle questions of reference assignment for episodes of first person thought. As a result of these platitudes, the question who a given first person thought refers to almost never comes up. In this talk I consider extraordinary conditions of use of the first person concept in which it does. What follows (I will argue) is a surprising kind of referential indeterminacy in our uses of the first person concept that is normally kept out of sight by our ordinary conditions of use.