The central claim of this book is that I is a deictic term, like the other singular personal pronouns You and He/She. This is true of the logical character, inferential role, referential function, expressive use, and communicative role of all and only expressions used to formulate first-personal reference in any language. The first part of the book shows why the standard account of I as a ‘pure indexical’ (‘purism’) should be rejected. Purism requires three mutually supportive doctrines which turn out to be myths: a) that a simple rule is sufficient to give the meaning of I (‘rule theory’); b) that one can use I to express thoughts without having to identify what is being referred to (‘independence’); and c) that as a matter of the meaning of I, any use of the term is logically guaranteed against failure to refer (‘the guarantee’). The second part of the book shows why the radically new account of I should be endorsed as a deictic term. Substitution instances and the behaviour of I in inference reveal that it has an obligatorily deictic logical character and inferential role. I fulfils its referential function in the deictic way, providing determinacy of reference by making an individual referentially salient in the extra-sentential context. The discriminability of the referent of an I-use depends on recognizing the referentially salient individual. This is true of its discriminability both to the reference-maker and to the audience. So I has the expressive use and communicative role of a deictic term. The conclusion of the book directs research towards the next step, showing how the meaning of I may be used to elucidate the thoughts expressed by the term, and from there questions relating to self-knowledge, practical reasoning, belief-acquisition, and belief-ascription.

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Hilary Putnam is one of the most influential philosophers of recent times, and his authority stretches far beyond the confines of the discipline. He has had a dramatic influence on theories of meaning, semantic content, the nature of mental phenomena, on interpretations of quantum mechanics, theory-change, logic, mathematics, and on what shape we should desire for future philosophy. However, the diversity of Putnam's writings and his frequent spells of radical rethinking pose a considerable challenge to readers. De Gaynesford shows how these difficulties may be overcome by examining the whole of Putnam's career within its historical context in an accurate and accessible way. In so doing he reveals a basic unity in Putnam's work, achieved through repeated engagements with a small set of hard problems. By foregrounding this integrity, the book offers an account that is both true to Putnam and will be welcomed by students and philosophers alike as an aid to reading his work.

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This paper is about how action and perception are related in selfawareness. The main positive claim is that bodily awareness may consist in perceptual experiences that are sufficient to provide corporeal objects with introspective self-awareness. The short-term goal is to examine the grounds and motivations for strong versions of the claim that the self-awareness of corporeal objects is dependent on the exercise of their agency. As examples of 'patient perceivers' show, we should not underestimate the resources that perceptual experience alone offers to corporeal selves.Hamlet eventually takes arms against his sea of troubles and thus acquires sufficient self-knowledge to end them. Staple motifs of homespun wisdom collude with the moral of that tale: the inactive cannot hope to gain self-knowledge. A long philosophical tradition, which can claim George Berkeley as a most effective member, 1 puts the matter more technically: self-awareness in any form is dependent on the exercise of agency. What drives this tradition is the belief that perceptual experience alone is insufficient to provide for self-awareness:Perceptual experience alone is powerless to place its subject with respect to its objects… It is rather that perceptual contents are self-locating in virtue of their contribution to the subject's capacity for basic purposive action in the world. 2The positive heart of this paper upholds the opposed view. Certain forms of perceptual experience -bodily awareness -are sufficient to provide one with (introspective) self-awareness. This claim is consistent with the existence of plausible constitutive interdependence relations between the exercise of agency and self-awareness at certain levels, as I shall indicate.