First-Person Thought

Abstract

Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), demonstratively (that person) or by mentally mouthing her name (NN). Whenever a subject thinks of herself in one of these ways, there is a further question whether she also realizes that it is she herself she is thereby thinking of. In contrast, there is another way of thinking of oneself deserving of a place on this list that seemingly differs in this respect – the way of thinking of oneself first-personally, or de se (we’ll use these terms interchangeably). As a heuristic, we might say that this is the kind of thought about herself that a thinker would naturally express using a first-person pronoun in language (‘I am F’ or ‘The F is me’). It’s easy to feel that de se thought doesn’t just deserve a place on our list; it deserves a top spot. After all, even if a subject can think of herself in the three initial ways mentioned above, surely her first-personal way of thinking of herself looms much larger in her mental life than the others, both with respect to how often she thinks of herself in that way and how important the capacity to do so is to her normal functioning. Historically, first-person thought has attracted a great deal of philosophical attention. As Peacocke writes, ‘[a]rticulating the phenomena distinctive of the first-person has drawn forth some of the most striking contributions from the greatest philosophers …’ (2008: 77). The aim of this article is to frame some of the more recent movements and insights in the area from the last decade or so.