Précis
of
"Thinking and Talking about the Self"
By
John Perry
“Not long ago,” Mach wrote in 1885, “after a trying railway journey by
night, when I was very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man
appeared at the other end. ‘What
a shabby pedagogue that is, that has just entered,’ thought I. It was myself: opposite me hung a
large mirror. The
physiognomy of my class, accordingly, was better known to me than my own.”
Mach acquired a belief at the beginning of
the episode, that we can imagine him expressing as:
(1) That
man is a shabby pedagogue.
By the end of the episode he has another,
which we can imagine him expressing as:
(2) I
am a shabby pedagogue.
It will also be convenient to imagine that
Mach went on to make an obvious inference and to say,
(3) Mach
is a shabby pedagogue.
All three statements are true iff Mach is a
shabby pedagogue. But only (2)
expresses what we might call a “self-belief”.
There are three questions I want to address
in this talk. The first is about
beliefs; what makes the belief that (2) expresses a self-belief? This question has to do with the nature
of belief, and what is special about self-beliefs. The second question has to do with the connection between
language and belief. (2) expresses self-belief, while (1) and (3) do not. This clearly has something to do with
the use of the first-person, that is, in English, the word “I”. The way the word “I” works is not particularly
mysterious, but it is not trivial to say why the way it works makes it suitable
for expressing self-beliefs.
Finally, I want to say a little bit about the distinction between
thought and belief, and their connections to language.
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