Intentionality and First Person Reference

Roderick Chisholm contrasts semantic theories that presuppose "the primacy of the intentional" with those that presuppose "the primacy of the linguistic". In The First Person he attempts to develop an analysis of first person singular reference that presupposes the primacy of the intentional. In this paper I attempt to develop a semantics of first person singular reference (what I call 'I-reference') that presupposes the primacy of the linguistic. I do three things in the paper. First, I criticize Chisholm's (and Frege's) account. Second, I attempt to answer the general criticism that is commonly leveled against an analysis of 'I' that presupposes the primacy of the linguistic. Third and finally, building upon insights of David Kaplan, I present an interpretation of meaning-rule under which'!' operates in its first person use. It is customary in the philosophy of language to contrast semantical theories that provide a truth-functional analysis of meaning with those that provide a communicational analysis. In The First Person: A Study in Intentionality and Reference (Chisholm, 1983) Roderick Chisholm cuts up this territory differently. He advises us to distinguish between theories that "presuppose the primacy of the intentional" and those that "presuppose the primacy of the linguistic". These are broad categories, but as I shall use the terms in this paper, a theory which presupposes the primacy of the intentional (hereinafter IT or ITR) takes thought or some other intentional entity to be conceptually prior to language in the mechanism of reference. Conversely, a theory that presupposes the primacy of the linguistic (hereinafter LT or LTR) takes language to be logically prior to thought. In contrast to the traditional classification, Chisholm's revised scheme groups Frege and, for example, a philosopher such as Grice into the same camp, for each takes an intentional entity (for Frege, a "sense"; for Grice, a "speaker's intention") to operate as the primary vehicle of reference. Chisholm's program is to use first person singular reference--what we may call 'I-reference'--as a test against which both ITR and LTR may be evaluated. His thesis contains both a metaphysical and semantical component. The metaphysical component, largely a holdover from the views developed in Person and Object (Chisholm, 1976), consists of the theory that the structure of reulity is built upon the irreducibly sub-