Ismael’s Anscombian and Dennettian Selves *

A member of the Harvard Philosophy Department, to remain unnamed, is reported to have uttered a sentence, in Italy, in which the word “here” meant Harvard University—the institution, not the location. That was a small-scale reminder that the straightforward analysis of one of the easier indexicals does not always match up neatly with more freewheeling uses of what sounds like the same word. An analogous phenomenon is of greater philosophical importance. On the one hand, there is a relatively straightforward use of the first-person pronoun that has attracted ongoing philosophical attention, generally because its apparent immunity to error has been seen as an anchor for ambitious results of one sort or another. On the other hand, there are much more complex notions of the self, amounting to answers to the question of who one is. Both of these contrasting notions of self appear towards the end of Jenann Ismael’s fascinating treatise. There is a long tradition of philosophers attempting to explain how these more minimal and more contentful renditions of the self are tailored to one another, probably because it is the promise of traversing the link from the error-immune ‘I’ to the contentful ‘I’ that promises all those ambitious results. Against this background, Ismael’s marvelously clear discussion amounts to a large, blinking red light: we should not expect a particularly good fit between these two notions of the self at all. Sydney Shoemaker once observed that it was easy to account for a rather thin form of self-knowledge: simply prepend “I believe that. . . ” to whatever ∗I’m grateful to Ben Crowe for conversation about this material.