First Person Thoughts: Shareability and Symmetry

Abstract

Victor Verdejo’s paper ‘On Having the Same First Person Thoughts’ introduces an interesting and fruitful framework for applying the type-token distinction to first person thoughts. He draws a three-way distinction between types, instantiable types, and instantiated types, and uses that distinction to open up a conceptual space for the possibility of shareable first person thoughts. This note distinguishes two types of interpersonal shareability and argues that Verdejo’s suggestions about instantiable types can only secure shareability of the first kind, but not the second. The author then shows how his own account of what he terms the token-sense of “I” (Bermúdez 2011 and 2017) succeeds in making possible this second type of interpersonal shareability, despite the criticisms in Verdejo’s paper.