Tag: Reflexivity

Pragmatics of Utterance

The second chapter of Ricoeur’s Oneself as Another concerns speech acts in context. Here we begin to consider reflexive acts of self-designation. Like Brandom, Ricoeur emphasizes that saying is a form of doing. “I” is not an identifying reference, but more resembles terms like “here” and “now”. Linguistically, it is a performative associated with affirmation, promising, and similar actions.

Reflexivity applies to the utterance, rather than to the subject of the utterance. It “is not intrinsically bound up with a self in the strong sense of self-consciousness” (p. 47). Meanwhile, it is not utterances but speakers that refer to things, making reference an action rather than a property.

At a later stage, the performative “I” does after all get assimilated to an identifying reference tied to a body, but Ricoeur thinks it will be necessary to step outside the analysis of language and consider our status as incarnated beings to understand this.

Next in this series: Agentless Action?

Inferentialism vs Mentalism

Brandom’s “inferentialism” or emphasis on material inference effectively makes what I call ethical reason the most important thing in the constitution of subjectivity — not psychology, and not some putative immediate mental presence, or universal transparent representational medium, or supposedly perfect reflexivity.

This is not to deny that there is such a thing as immediacy; it is rather to specify that immediacy is not foundational, and has nothing to do with certainty. Immediacy has a very different role to play, in showing us the world’s “stubborn recalcitrance to mastery and agency” and providing occasions for learning. (See also Mind Without Mentalism; Psyche, Subjectivity.)