Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

In her 2003 article “The first person: error through misidentification, the split between speaker’s and semantic reference, and the real guarantee”, Annalisa Coliva distinguishes three epistemic properties attaching to the use of “I”. She argues that several contributors to the debate on the nature of (i) immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) with respect to the first-person pronoun, including Anscombe, have conflated IEM with the two other phenomena she analyses, namely (ii) the putative impossibility of a “split between speaker’s and semantic reference” in comprehending uses of “I”, and (iii) the “real guarantee” that attaches to those uses, ensuring that the speaker always knows what object is the semantic reference of her utterances of “I”. 

I acknowledge the need for Coliva’s three-way distinction, but aim to show that all three phenomena have a deeper unity, because of a common source, which helps explain why they are often conflated. This common source, I argue, lies in the nature of the self-concept, which I propose to analyse as a special type of phenomenal concept.