Document Type

Article

Publication Date

January 2018

Source

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volume

49

Issue

1

First Page

70

Last Page

93

Abstract

According to a certain ‘Straight Reading’ of Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘The First Person’, she holds a Radically Non-Referring view of ‘I’. Specifically, ‘I’ is analogized to the expletive ‘it’ in ‘It’s raining’. I argue that this is not her position. Her substantive view on ‘I’, rather, is that if what you mean by ‘referring term’ is a certain rich and recherché Frege-inspired notion, then ‘I’ is not one. Her methodological point is that one shouldn’t be bewitched by language into thinking that ‘I’, because of its syntax and logical role, must exhibit ‘reference’ in this sense. Anscombe uses this insight to defang a neo-Cartesian semantic argument for dualism, itself based on an alleged descriptive sense for ‘I’.

Notes

Pre-publication manuscript

Download

Share

COinS