First Person, Self-Consciousness and Action

In her 1975 paper “The First Person”, Elizabeth Anscombe chooses a special type of examples to illustrate the claim that I-thoughts are “subjectless”, namely that first person sentences do not predicate something of an identified subject; a claim that will be further developed in the following paper: The reason why I take only thoughts of actions, postures, movements and intended actions is that only those thoughts both are unmediated, non-observational, and also descriptions (e.g. “standing”) which are directly verifiable or falsifiable about the person of E.A. Anyone, including myself, can look and see whether that person is standing. (FP: 35 – my emphasis) Any reader familiar with Anscombe’s Intention will recognise in this choice some features of what she there calls “non-observational knowledge”, a key concept for the understanding of practical knowledge and a kind of knowledge both characteristic of the knowledge of “the position of one’s limbs” and of one’s own intentional actions (Intention: § 8) . In this paper I would like to explore the reasons behind this choice of “Anscombianly-preferred examples” of “actions, postures, movements and intended actions”, as opposed to what Anscombe herself calls “Cartesianly-preferred examples”, which are “far removed in their descriptions from the descriptions of the proceedings, etc., of a person in which they might be verified” (FP: 35). My hypothesis is that this choice of examples in order to characterise “self-consciousness” – understood as “something manifested by the use of ‘I’”, granted that “I” is “not a name” everyone uses “to speak only of himself” (FP: 24-25) – may shed light on the role of “self-consciousness” in intentional action and more specifically in practical knowledge. In other words, rather than reading “The First Person” as a paper on the mere logic of the first person pronoun which defends the provocative thesis that “I” is non-referential , I shall read it as an extension of Intention focused on the philosophical concept of “self-consciousness” which is key to our understanding of practical knowledge and intentional action.