Egocentric thoughts, such as those that we express using words like \u2018I\u2019, \u2018here\u2019, and \u2018now\u2019, have led to many puzzles. One of these arises from the fact that one might think that communication involves the sharing of thoughts; but, if my \u2018I\u2019 thought can be shared with you, then you will not express it using the word \u2018I\u2019, and it will have a different significance for your actions. This famously led Frege to the view that \u2018I\u2019 has both a public and a private sense, and hence there is both a public and a private thought. John Perry\u2019s work in the late 1970s offered a different approach, wherein the same coarse-grained \u2018thought\u2019 could be shared, but those sharing it would be in different \u2018belief states\u2019; so, egocentric thoughts could only be shared in a weakened sense. I shall discuss a different approach that can be taken by those who accept a relational individuation of thoughts, according to which the question of whether two people share the same thought is determined by the epistemic relations between their thought tokens. I shall conclude that although Perry is right that something in the original Fregean doctrine has to be abandoned, it is possible to individuate thoughts in a way that better captures their psychological roles. The cost is that we must modify the assumption that behaviour can be explained entirely in terms of thoughts (and attitudes to them). Instead, we must add to this a distinction between thoughts that are entertained egocentrically (the meaning of which will be explained), and those that are not.<\/p>\n
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Egocentric thoughts, such as those that we express using words like \u2018I\u2019, \u2018here\u2019, and \u2018now\u2019, have led to many puzzles. One of these arises from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[40],"class_list":["post-8897","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-language-and-mind-seminar","cat_language-and-mind-seminar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/8897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/8897\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10078,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/8897\/revisions\/10078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8897"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=8897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}