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The 'I' In First-Person Thought And What Is Meant By Self-Knowledge, Aaron Morris

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been a great deal of disagreement over what exactly it is that is being referenced by the first-person pronoun, ‘I.’ Immanuel Kant believed the ‘I’ associated with a thinking subject is just a formal representation of the substantially existing subject. This raises the question about whether or not ‘I’ is actually a referring expression? In this paper I explore two accounts from both sides of the debate which opens up a dialectical space for determining a positive answer for this question. On the one hand, ‘I’ is said to be a referring term for the speaker or utterer …