In Defence of the Shareability of Fregean Self-Thought
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In Defence of the Shareability of Fregean Self-Thought Víctor M. Verdejo 1 Received: 1 October 2018 / Accepted: 27 November 2018/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract Consider the Unshareability View, namely, the view that first person thought or selfthought—thought as typically expressed via the first person pronoun—is not shareable from subject to subject. In this article, I (i) show that a significant number of Fregean and non-Fregean commentators of Frege have taken the Unshareability View to be the default Fregean position, (ii) rehearse Frege’s chief claims about self-thought and suggest that their combination entails the Unshareability View only on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between way of thinking and thoughtindividuating cognitive value, (iii) outline an account of self-thought that rejects the assumption and keeps intact all of Frege’s chief claims, and (iv) respond to a number of worries to the effect that this proposal yields undesirable results from the point of view of the individuation of self-thought at the level of cognitive value. Keywords First person . Frege . Perspective . Cognitive value . Thought sharing
It seems platitudinous that people can, and generally, do share all sorts of thoughts. Consider the thought expressed by an utterance of BFido is wounded^. It is relatively unproblematic to make sense of the possibility of two people sharing that thought. They do so insofar as they entertain or have the capacity to entertain instances of the same relevant type of thought, namely, the BFido is wounded^-type. In general, we might say, for two subjects S and S’ to share the thought that p is for them to be able to think instances of the same p-type.1 Things are not so simple when considering what is usually called ‘first person thought’ or as I shall be using interchangeably, ‘self-thought’. Self-thought is the 1
Jerry Fodor takes this to be one of the non-negotiable constraints in the theory of concepts (cf. Fodor 1998, 28ff). This initial characterisation is neutral on what exactly the notion of relevant type specified by a sentence type is, and in particular, on whether two distinct sentence types may pick out the same relevant thought type (see Verdejo 2018 for detailed discussion).
* Víctor M. Verdejo [email protected]; [email protected]
1
LOGOS Research Group/BIAP (Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy), University of Barcelona, Room 4013, Montealegre 6-8, 4th floor, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
V. M. Verdejo
type of thought one typically expresses via utterances of sentences containing the first person pronoun.2 A pervasive Frege-inspired tradition has assumed that selfthought is not shareable from subject to subject. Consider the sentence BI am wounded^. On this view, no two people can think a thought of the same relevant type as the one expressible by means of an utterance of that sentence. We may call this the Unshareability View. For many years now, and as we shall see at length below (Section 1), it has seemed that the most reasonable way,
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