Thought Sharing, Communication, and Perspectives about the Self

Abstract

Many scholars are ready to accept that first person thought involves a special way w such that, for any thinker x, only x can access the first person way w of thinking about x. Standard articulations of this Frege-inspired view involve a rejection of the strict shareability of first person thought. I argue that this rejection eventually forces us to renounce an intuitively plausible characterisation of communication, and specifically, disagreement. This result invites us to explore alternative articulations which, still within an overall Fregean framework, may better explain how first person thoughts reach out into a public, shareable dimension. Here I shape this possibility in terms of perspectives, i.e. ways of thinking that do not individuate concepts or thoughts. Perspectives, I submit, can serve to unproblematically accommodate basic disagreement in indexical cases and to outline the dynamic character of first person thought.

The Second Person Perspective

“…One key idea here is that the roles traditionally assigned to the first person type of thought may, without loss, be carried out by the first person perspective understood as a type of information on which a thinker draws when thinking of a self. This theoretical articulation of the first person perspective and some of its main implications have already been laid out in other work (Verdejo 2017(Verdejo , 2018a(Verdejo , 2019; see also Ludlow 2019).…”

“…This is, indeed, a view that seems to be forced on any theorist that already clings to the unshareability of first person thought along the lines suggested by a firmly established Fregean tradition (see Verdejo 2019 for extensive discussion). While there is some plausibility in the idea that communication may not require thought sharing and may instead be framed, for instance, in terms of thought recognition or identification, I am ready to argue that there is no plausible interpretation available to deniers of shareability when it comes to disagreement (Verdejo 2018a). The main problem, in capsule form, is that 'I'/'you'-thoughts intervening in genuine cases of disagreement are not rationally cotenable-not possibly endorsed by the same rational subject-whereas 'I'/'you'-thought recognition or identification certainly is.…”

“…On a well-entrenched and unchallenged conception of disagreement, that is to say, if A and B disagree about whether p, the thought that p must be expressible by or accessible to both A and B. This is a line of argument I have developed at length elsewhere (Verdejo 2018a) and can easily be brought into alignment with the views independently laid out by José Luis Bermúdez (Bermúdez 2017; see also Bermúdez 2005). According to Bermúdez, the logical relations involved in disagreement between subjects as expressed via utterances of 'I'/'you'-sentences show that, in appropriate contexts, the sense of 'I' as uttered by one of the subjects and the sense of 'you' as uttered by the other must be the same.…”

“…Thus, the reference rule for the self-concept can be seen as itself displaying a number of perspectives on which a thinker may draw in instantiations of the selfthought type (Verdejo 2017(Verdejo , 2018a; see also Skiba 2017). These perspectives can be described, more accurately, in terms of awareness of the specific relations on which the 'instantiating' event of thinking-i.e.…”

“…Although autonomously developed (Verdejo 2017(Verdejo , 2018a, it is easy to see that the framework emerging from the consideration of perspectives can bring home the basic intuitions nourishing distinctivist and non-distinctivist standpoints. On the one hand, the perspective-based account can accommodate the idea that 'you'-thought of the sort expressible via (2) involves a primitive or non-reducible way of thinking about a subject, one which requires a special cognitive stance, namely, the one ensuing from drawing on the information (and hence being aware) that there is a relation of mutual awareness capable of triggering behavioural interaction between the thinker and the reference of a 'you'-thought.…”