Abstract

Necessarily and trivially, ‘I’ means its occurrent utterer or thinker. But how is self-reference possible? Providing an adequate answer to this very hard question is the task undertaken by John Campbell in Past, Space, and Self. His answer, in a nutshell, is that the fundamental ground of self-reference is self-consciousness; and the bulk of the book is devoted to sketching the architecture of this cognitive capacity. Campbell wants to say that the essence of self-consciousness is given in the set of cognitive abilities making it possible to think of oneself as presented and individuated by means of a causal-spatiotemporal self-narrative. Not only is self-consciousness the ground of self-reference, however, but also “possession of this core set of abilities defines possession of concepts”. While Campbell thinks of his account as making up a seamless whole, I would like to distinguish for the purposes of exposition between the thesis that self-consciousness in his sense explains self-reference and the thesis that Campbellian self-consciousness explains concept-possession. It may be that the case made for one of the theses is stronger and more convincing than the case made for the other; I shall address that issue briefly later.