An utterer u utters ‘I’ to refer to himself*

take:
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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 him*,
b. that a should be aware of his* intention that a’s attention should be
drawn to him*,
c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of the explanation
for a’s attention being drawn to him*.
Each of the three clauses of the tripartite intention is a first person
thought, in virtue of the presence in each of them of the indirect reflexive
pronoun he*.
If this account of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun is to
escape the explanatory circularity that partly creates the paradox of selfconsciousness,
then, for reasons that have already been discussed in this
chapter, each of the three clauses in the statement of the tripartite communicative
intention must be formulable in terms of nonconceptual firstperson
thoughts. It is at this point that the exploration of nonconceptual
first-person thoughts in the main body of this book pays dividends, for
we now have the materials to provide such a formulation. That is, the
methodology of inference to the best and most parsimonious explanation
has shown how we can be warranted in identifying and explaining behavior
by means of nonconceptual first-person contents of precisely the sort
that would provide a noncircular account of linguistic mastery of the firstperson
pronoun.
Clause (a) in the tripartite intention is that the utterer should utter a
token of ‘I’ with the intention that some audience should have their attention
drawn to himself*. There are two key components here. The first
component is that the utterer should intend to draw another’s attention
to something. That this is possible at the nonconceptual level is clearly
shown by my discussion of joint selective visual attention in the previous
chapter. The best explanation of joint selective visual attention involving
young infants is that they are acting on the intention to direct another
individual’s attention to an object in which they are interested. Of course,
in the cases of joint selective visual attention I examined, the objects in
question are not the infants themselves. Accordingly, the second component
of clause (a) of the communicative intention is that the utterer should
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 283
be aware of himself* as a possible object of another’s attention. This is
largely a matter of physical self-consciousness. The materials here are provided
by proprioceptive self-consciousness and the various forms of
bodily self-consciousness implicated in possession of a nonconceptual
point of view. Proprioceptive self-consciousness in particular provides a
conception of the body as a spatially extended and bounded physical object
that is unique in its responsiveness to the will. One way, therefore, in
which clause (a) of the complex tripartite intention might be satisfied at a
nonconceptual level would be through an intention to draw an audience’s
attention to the material self as revealed in proprioceptive selfconsciousness.
Another way would be through an intention to draw an
audience’s attention to the material self as a spatial element moving
within, acting upon, and being acted upon by, the spatial environment—
the conception of the self that is implicated in possession of a nonconceptual
point of view.
In clause (b) the requirement is that the utterer of ‘I’ should intend that
his audience recognize his* intention to draw its attention to him*. This
is a reflexive awareness of the intention in the first clause. The real issue
that it raises is one about how iterated psychological states can feature in
the content of intentions. In the first clause we have what can usefully be
described as an uniterated intention. An uniterated intention is one in
which a psychological state does not feature within the scope of the ‘that’
clause specifying the content of an intention or any other content-bearing
state, or where a psychological state does so feature, that psychological
state does not have a further psychological state featuring in the ‘that’
clause that specifies its content. The first clause in the intention is an uniterated
intention in the second of these two senses because the psychological
state that features in the content of the intention does not take a
further psychological state as its object. A first-order iteration occurs
when a further psychological state is embedded within the context created
by the psychological state featuring within the scope of the ‘that’
clause specifying the intention. A second-order iteration occurs when
there is a third psychological state embedded within the context created
by that further psychological state. Generally, an iteration to the order n
occurs when there is an (n 2 1)th order psychological state embedded
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within the scope of the ‘that’ clause specifying the content of a given psychological
state. Clearly, in clause (b) specifying the communicative intent
governing the use of ‘I’, we have a second-order iteration. There are three
psychological states embedded within the scope of the ‘that’ clause. What
complicates the matter further is that one of those psychological states is
a first-person state. Moreover, it is a first-person psychological state that
has a further psychological state within the scope of the ‘that’ clause specifying
its content. This poses an obvious challenge. Are there resources at
the nonconceptual level for thinking an intention of this complexity?
There are two distinguishable questions here. The first question is
whether there are resources at the nonconceptual level for thinking a
thought whose content contains a second-order iteration. The second
question is whether there are resources at the nonconceptual level for embedding
a first-person psychological state within a first- or higher-order
iteration. Let me take them in reverse order. The discussion of psychological
self-consciousness in the previous chapter revealed several examples
of first-person psychological states embedded within first- or higher-order
iterations. A canonical example comes from joint visual attention, where
inference to the best explanation seems to require attributing to infants
contents like the following:
(1) The infant recognizes, “Mother wants me to look where she is
looking.”
This is a first-person content embedded in a first-order iteration. The
structure emerges more clearly when (1) is reformulated less idiomatically
as follows:
(2) The infant recognizes, “Mother wants that I look where she is
looking.”
Of course, this is not simply a peculiarity of joint visual attention. This
sort of embedding of first-person contents in first-order iterations occurs
whenever there is recognition of another’s intention that one should do
something. Recognitional states like these play a crucial role in the cooperative
games and projects that are so important in infancy after the last
quarter of the first year. An important source of infants’ pleasure and
enjoyment is their recognition that they have successfully performed what