[lit-ideas] I, Me, Mine: The Implicatures
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:48:34 -0400 (EDT)
Refs: "Personal Identity" by HPG, Mind 1941.
--- Strawson, "The first person.
--- Myro, "Time and identity"
--- Perry, in Grandy/Warner.
-- or Witters, rather, but what are you gonna do?
Excerpts from
http://oxford.academia.edu/WilliamChild/Papers/1220460/Wittgenstein_on_the_F
irst_Person
"Questions about the use of ‘I’ arise throughout Wittgenstein’s writings."
‘My arm is broken.' CORRIGIBLE
‘I have grown six inches.'
‘I have a bump on my forehead’. CORRIGIBLE
‘The wind blows my hair about’.
INCORRIGIBLE:
‘I see so-and-so’, ‘I hear so-and-so’, ‘I try to lift my arm’, ‘I think
it will rain’, ‘I have toothache’.
"It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm,
see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine, when it is really my
neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his
forehead for one on mine."
"someone who asserts ‘I have a bump on my forehead’ or ‘I have toothache’
is doing two things:
a) she is saying which person has a particular property (it is I rather
than you who has a bump or a toothache); and
b) she is saying what property that person has (I have a bump rather than
a scratch, or a toothache rather than a headache).
A question about the possibility of error arises in each case: can the
subject be wrong about which person it is who has a bump or a 2 toothache?; and
can she be wrong that what that person has is a bump or a toothache?
"It can seem a piece of simple common sense to say that the word ‘I’ is a
referring expression – a word that is guaranteed, on each occasion of its
use, to refer to whoever produced it."
"That is certainly the orthodox view in contemporary philosophy."
"But Wittgenstein appears flatly to deny this view."\
"‘The word “I”’, he writes, ‘does not designate a person’ (NFL 228).
Why does he say that? And are his views defensible? Wittgenstein’s writings
contain a series of negative claims about ‘I’. For example:"
1. The word ‘I’ does not mean the same as ‘LW’, even if I am LW (BB 67).
8
2. ‘I’ is not the name of a person (PI §410).
3. The word ‘I’ . . . [does not] mean the same as ‘the person who is now
speaking’ (BB 67).
4. In ‘I have pain’, ‘I’ is not a demonstrative pronoun (BB 68). What
should we make of these claims?
"Wittgenstein says, it is an ‘illusion that we use [the word ‘I’] to
refer to something bodiless, which, however has its seat in our body’ (BB 69)."
"‘I’ is a referring expression that has the same reference as a person’s
name but a different sense; it picks out the same object that can be picked
out using various names or descriptions, but picks out that object in a
distinctive way. But if we do treat ‘I’ as a referring expression, what sort
of referring expression is it?"
"One proposal, advanced by Gareth Evans, is that despite what Wittgenstein
says, ‘I’ does function in a way that is broadly analogous to a
demonstrative; its use requires an information link with a particular human
being,
on the basis of which one can distinguish that human being from all other
things."
"A feature of Wittgenstein’s account is his claim that, while someone who
says ‘Mary is in pain’ thereby makes a statement about Mary, someone who
says ‘I am in pain’ is not normally making a statement about herself."
: ‘Whenever [the expression “I”] is used by a speaker of English, it
stands for, or designates, that person’; David Kaplan, ‘Demonstratives’ in J.
Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein (ed.) Themes from Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 505:
‘“I” refers to the speaker or writer . . . of the relevant occurrence of
the word “I”’;
P. F. Strawson, ‘The First Person – and Others’ in Q. Cassam (ed.)
Self-Knowledge, 210:
‘the first personal pronoun refers, on each occasion of its use, to
whoever then uses it’; Shoemaker, ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’, 91:
the meaning of ‘I’ ‘is given by the rule that it refers to the person who
uses it’; John Campbell, Past, Space, and Self (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1994), 102:
‘Any token of “I” refers to whoever produced it’. For other
formulations, and discussion of differences between them, see Maximilian de
Gaynesford,
I: The Meaning of the First Person Term (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), ch. 2. 16 '''
And so on.
Cheers,
Speranza
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