Abstract

In Part I of Self-Knowing Agents, Lucy O’Brien develops a theory of first-person reference. In what follows, I describe this account and then raise doubts about its success. Since I am not confident that I have understood her properly, I may be setting up and targeting a strawwoman, but I can only hope that what I said about the first-person will be of interest in its own right.

Highlights

  • There is a simpler approach to first-person reference that, like

  • It sacrifices the claim that first-person reference is identification free

  • Since indexical identification involves locating the referent, it agrees with one aspect of the perceptual approach, namely, that in first-person reference a critica / C131Kapitan / 17

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Summary

Introduction

O’Brien’s explanation of first-person reference combines the subject’s mastery of SRR with a basic self-awareness that subjects possess in virtue of being agents The “central idea,” she writes, “is that a subject who uses ‘I’ in accordance with SRR, and who has agent’s awareness of what she is doing, thereby simultaneously refers to herself first-personally and is able to know that she is so referring”

Results
Conclusion

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