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Separate Minds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
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This fact about the grammar of selfhypenreference doesn't answer the ontological question, however, of what sort of entity I am in so far as I am a speaker. Thinking about what is presumed in my understanding the concepts ‘one’ and ‘one who is speaking’ tells us this much, that I must be able to differentiate myself from other speakers at the same time as I must be like them. If I cannot differentiate myself from you then of course I cannot refer to myself to begin with. But I must be like you enough to be intelligible to you, and I must know that I am. Otherwise I could not know myself as ‘the one who is speaking’, speaking in the first person to others who also speak in the first person.
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References
1 This point is made both in Sydney Shoemaker's ‘SelfhypenIdentity, Selfhypen Reference and SelfhypenAwareness’, Journal of Philosoph LXV, No. 19(1968), 555–567; and in Thoma's, Nagels ‘Physicalism’, Philosophical Review LXXTV, No. 3 (07 1965), 339–356.Google Scholar
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