Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

At least since John Perry’s influential writings in the late seventies, a pervasive interpretation of Frege endorses the view that first person thought or self-thought—thought as typically expressed via the first person pronoun—is not shareable from subject to subject. In this talk I (i) briefly rehearse Frege’s chief claims about self-thought and suggest that their combination entails subject-to-subject unshareability only on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between modes of presentation and thought-individuating cognitive value, (ii) outline a perspective-based account of self-thought that rejects the assumption and keeps intact all of Frege’s chief claims, and (iii) show that the proposed framework has a number of promising applications in the elucidation of the role of self-thought in communication and action.