In order for the child to give the correct answer,

when
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 279
he returns. In order for the child to give the correct answer, he must understand
that Maxi still represents the chocolate as being where in fact it
is not, namely where Maxi originally left it. And that means that the child
must be able to contrast his perception of the situation as it is with Maxi’s
beliefs about the situation as it is no longer. The experimental evidence is
that children consistently fail on this task until well into their fourth year
(Wimmer and Perner 1983; see Perner 1991 for further discussion). Now,
although there is, of course, much to be said about the false-belief task,
the central point for present purposes is that no subject who fails the
false-belief task can be ascribed the concept of belief, since possessing the
concept of belief requires comprehension of the possibility that another
subject represents the world in a way other than it is.2 This has the
straightforward consequence that the concept of belief cannot feature in
any communicative intention that is to be ascribed to infant language
users younger than three years of age. So, on the assumption that the
notion of communicative intent is indeed applicable here, it must at least
be possible for there to be an appropriate informational communicative
intention that does not take the concept of belief to be central.
To return, then, to the first point, what is the communicative intention
governing my demonstrative reference to the apple, since it is not an intention
that Jones should come to believe (via the Gricean mechanism) that
the apple is the subject of my sentence? The simplest and most straightforward
suggestion would be that I intend the demonstrative reference to
the apple to draw Jones’s attention to the apple. Of course, this is hardly
sufficient. I could call Jones’s attention to the apple by biting into it or by
placing it on my son’s head and shooting an arrow at it. These would not
be ways of drawing attention to the apple that would count as instances
of demonstrative reference, the reason being, of course, that they can be
effective without proceeding through Jones’s recognition of my intention.
Genuine demonstrative reference occurs when I intend Jones’s attention
to be drawn to the apple by means of the Gricean mechanism, namely that
my utterance of the demonstrative pronoun accompanied by a suitable
ostensive gesture should identify the apple to Jones in virtue of his recognition
that such is my intention.
This proposal brings out what is wrong with the bifurcation between
informational and practical communicative intent at the subsentential
280 Chapter 10
level. When I intend to draw Jones’s attention to the apple, I do not intend
simply to produce beliefs in Jones (as the purely informational account of
communicative intent at the level of the sentence would maintain). Nor
do I intend simply to get Jones to do something. What I intend is that
Jones should do something (redirect his attention) in a way that will put
him in informational contact with the apple. This is, moreover, fully in
line with the second point. When I intend that Jones’s attention should
be drawn via the Gricean mechanism to the apple, I do not intend Jones
to form any beliefs about the subject of my sentence. Nor is it necessary
for Jones to form any such beliefs. All that is required is that his attention
should in fact be drawn to the apple through the Gricean mechanism in
a way that will lead him correctly to realize that the apple is what I am
describing as green.
Of course, these observations fall a long way short of a general communication-
theoretic account of reference. There are all sorts of other conditions
that might arguably be needed. It might be thought necessary, for
example, that linguistic reference take place as part of the utterance of a
complete sentence. Something also needs to be said (and will be shortly)
about the linguistic meaning of the word through which reference is effected.
I take it, however, that from what’s been said we can derive at least
the bare bones of a satisfactory account of the communicative intent that
governs linguistic reference. Such an account will proceed along something
like the following lines:
An utterer u utters x to refer to an object o if and only if u utters x
intending
a. that some audience a should have their attention drawn to o,
b. that a should be aware of intention (a),
c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of the explanation
for a’s attention being drawn to o.
This general outline gives us sufficient tools to return to the problem of
self-reference.
Recall what led us to communication-theoretic accounts of reference.
I originally raised the question of whether it is sufficient for genuine linguistic
self-reference that a speaker should knowingly produce a token of
‘I’ in full knowledge of the token-reflexive rule governing the reference of
‘I’. I showed that this is not sufficient and suggested that what would be
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 281
sufficient would be producing a token of ‘I’ in full knowledge of the
token-reflexive rule and with the intention to refer to oneself. This is what
led me to investigate the communicative intent that governs linguistic reference—
on the two assumptions, first, that intentional self-reference will
be a special case of intentional reference and, second, that the best way
to understand intentional reference is in terms of the communicative intent
that governs acts of reference. The next step must be to apply this to
the first-person pronoun.
A straightforward application of the sketch just given of the communicative
intent governing the act of reference yields something like the
following:
An utterer u utters ‘I’ to refer to himself* if and only if u utters ‘I’ in full
comprehension of the token-reflexive rule that tokens of ‘I’ refer to their
producer and with the tripartite intention
a. that some audience a should have their attention drawn to u,
b. that a should be aware of u’s intention that a’s attention should be
drawn to u,
c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of the explanation
for a’s attention being drawn to u.
For familiar reasons, this cannot be satisfactory. An utterer’s intentional
self-reference does not require that he intend to draw attention to himself
in the way just mentioned. Utterer u can refer to himself (more accurately,
himself*) without intending to draw attention to u. This, after all, is the
problem that initially led to the paradox of self-consciousness. It will not
be of any use to replace ‘u’ with ‘the utterer of this token’ in each of the
three parts of the tripartite intention. Although that would undoubtedly
secure successful self-reference in cases where, for example, u is unaware
that he is u, it is surely only in the most unusual cases that people intend
to refer to themselves as producers of tokens of ‘I’. This is sufficient to
prevent it from featuring in a statement of the communicative intent governing
paradigm cases of intentional self-reference. It is, of course, reasoning
along precisely these lines that brought us to the paradox of selfconsciousness
in chapter 1, via the conclusion that any adequate account
of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun would have to include
certain first-person thoughts among its conditions. We can now see the
form that such an account will have to take: