Abstract
If we adopt the "logocentric" perspective on "I" that has come to the fore in the wake of the work of authors such as Reichenbach and Benveniste, an obvious problem arises. What happens to the "I" in this theory? The ego is the conscious subject who has access to his or her own mental states from within. How can we bridge the gap that seems to exist between the narrowly linguistic phenomenon of token-reflexivity and the psychological phenomenon of consciousness and subjectivity?
I see at least three options for resolving the problem and building a bridge between the "I" and the "me". The first option is to start from the logocentric perspective and derive the self from the "I", as it were. According to this point of view, defended by Benveniste, what is primary is discourse, communication, the interlocutionary practice within which the "I" is defined by the token-reflexive procedure. The self, the subject of consciousness, constitutes itself through dialogical exchange: subjectivity is made possible by inter-subjectivity, of which discourse, with its alternation of "I" and "you", provides the paradigm.
The second, more traditional option is quite the opposite. It starts with the ego, a psychological reality, and involves the "I" only in the second place. It's the concept of myself that's first, in this perspective; the word "I" (and the first person more generally) is the way it's expressed linguistically. It's true, as Benveniste points out, that the word "I" doesn't encode any concept: the meaning of "I" is a rule of use. But each occurrence of "I" serves to express a first-person thought, i.e. a thought in which the self-concept intervenes.
The third option is to emphasize the abstract structure common to "I" and "me". As we've seen, the reference of an indexical such as "I" or "here" is the entity that stands in a certain contextual relationship with the occurrence of the word: an occurrence of "I" designates the person who utters or produces that occurrence, and an occurrence of "here" designates the place where that occurrence is produced. But there are concepts - egocentric concepts - that also exploit relations to the referent, and the concept of self belongs to this family. These are the concepts that the indexicals of language express (without encoding).
An egocentric concept refers to the entity with which the thinker deploying the concept finds himself in a certain relationship. We can only represent an entity under a given egocentric concept if we find ourselves with the entity in question in the particular contextual relationship that governs that concept. In the case of the concept HERE, the reference is a place, and the contextual relation is the occupation of the place in question. In the case of the concept of self (Ego), the reference is a person, and the relation to the person in question is quite simply identity: the thinker must be identical to the individual he represents in order to be able to represent this individual under the concept Ego. These relations between thinker and referent are themselves reduced to token-reflexive relations between the entities to which the concept refers and the thought occurrence in which the concept is deployed.
