Asymmetries between 'you' and 'I'

Abstract

Can others grasp my first-person thoughts, or are such thoughts inherently private? Philosophers disagree: some argue that first-person thoughts are apprehensible only by their owners, while others contend that they can be shared through communication—expressible by ‘you’ as readily as by ‘I’. In this paper, I set out to clarify the stakes of this age-long dispute. Taking J. L. Bermúdez’s forceful defence of shareability as the backdrop of my discussion, I examine how the intersubjective availability of thoughts interacts with issues concerning the objectivity of thought, testimonial knowledge transmission, and rational action. The bulk of this paper is an elaboration of the Asymmetry Argument, which grounds the privacy of first-person thoughts in the need to explain how thinkers who believe and desire the same as each other might nonetheless have distinct reasons for action. If successful, the argument reveals how first-person thoughts cannot be shareable in a philosophically significant sense without compromising their fundamental connection to motivating reasons for action.