UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

The Demonstrative Model of first-person thought

Morgan, D; (2014) The Demonstrative Model of first-person thought. Philosophical Studies 10.1007/s11098-014-0391-z. Green open access

[thumbnail of art%3A10.1007%2Fs11098-014-0391-z.pdf]
Preview
PDF
art%3A10.1007%2Fs11098-014-0391-z.pdf
Available under License : See the attached licence file.

Download (218kB)

Abstract

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate.

Type: Article
Title: The Demonstrative Model of first-person thought
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-014-0391-z
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0391-z
Language: English
Additional information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1468804
Downloads since deposit
89Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item