1 When discussing language development in the species, language development in the individual, and consciousness, the views Canfield targets are variously characterized as “mentalist” (p. 16), “mentalistic” (p. 34), and “the mentalist view of the mind” (p. 134), by contrast with his “anti-mentalist position” (p. 134). Likewise the name “Descartes” and the label “Cartesian” occur throughout in bad odour only.

2 Canfield cites approvingly Condillac’s speculations about the origin of language. Condillac’s affinities with Wittgenstein are discussed in Hans Aarsleff’s introduction to Condillac’s An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge of 1746, trans. and ed. H. A. Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and in Aarsleff’s, “Philosophy of Language” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Philosophy, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 468Google Scholar. In that essay Aarsleff notes the place assigned to a literal Eden in seventeenth-century accounts of the origin of language (p. 458) and, after the Fall, in Condillac (p. 467).

3 Canfield, however, cites Stendahl rather than Alger for his literary reference. His claim otherwise seems to fall somewhere between Daniel Dennett (e.g., Consciousness Explained [ Toronto: Little, Brown, and Co., 1991]) and Eckhart Tolle (e.g., The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment [ New York: New World Library, 2004]).

4 I have quoted above the final sentence of Becoming Human – “To be human is to live in oneness” – which signals the third sense of Canfield’s triple-entendre title. Thus, while endorsing the first two senses – how the human species got language and how the human individual gets language – I am rejecting, or anyway failing to respond to, the third mystico-redemptive sense of “becoming human.”

5 Yet the song says “The snow is snowing.” See “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” I. Berlin.

6 As Canfield seems to indicate when he says, “ … in learning to use ‘I’ in such cases the child does not have to learn to identify or pick out anyone or anything to whom or to which he attributes the property of being in pain” (p. 90), and, just saying “no” to ecstasy, “We do not stand outside ourselves and pick out the one we want to say is in pain” (p. 93). However, even if one does say that all reference, predication, and general “talking about” are sorts of “picking out,” then one should distinguish “linguistic picking out” from other properly cognitive – or, better, recognitional – pickings out. After all, even in second-person reference one can refer to someone without realizing it, but there should be no proper sense of “pick out” where one picks something out (cf. Canfield’s “identify”) without realizing it.

7 The dogma seems to be traceable to Frege, or Frege as he struck Anscombe. Anscombe’s case for holding that “I” does not refer seems to rest entirely on the joint supposition that “We seem to need a sense to be specified for this quasi-name ‘I’” (“The First Person” in Mind and Language, ed. Guttenplan, S. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975] p. 48Google Scholar), and since there is no available sense for “I” it lacks a reference. Anscombe gives no argument in support of this last conclusion, appearing to find it enthymematically obvious. Canfield and the other neo-Wittgensteinians evidently follow this dictum: no sense, no reference (no criteria for reference, no reference). Whether or not Frege himself held something this strong, it is, to repeat, a mistake. It is the fallacy of supposing that what cannot always happen can never happen. No doubt if there were no “sense” in general (no such thing as sense) there would be no “reference” (ever). But that does not mean there can never be a reference without a sense. So: no reference if never a sense – yes; never a reference if no sense – no.

8 To say nothing of the neglect by determinedly non-Wittgensteinian philosophers such as Dainton, Barry (Stream of Consciousness [London: Routledge, 2000])CrossRefGoogle Scholar or (Sir Peter’s own flesh and blood!) Strawson, Galen (Mental Reality [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994])Google Scholar, and other philosophical sons and daughters of William James (“streamers,” I call them). To his claim that “The treatment of I as a grammatical fiction comes from Wittgenstein” (p. 84), Canfield attaches this note: “See Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, pp. 66, 67, and PI, sec. 404 ff. See also Anscombe, G. E. M., ‘The first person’. In Guttenplan, S. ed. Mind and Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975Google Scholar; Kenny, Anthony, ‘The First Person.’ In Diamond, Cora and Teichman, Jenny, eds, Intention and Intentionality,[Essays in honour of G. E. M. Anscombe], Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979Google Scholar; Malcolm, Norman, ‘Whether “I” is a referring expression.’ In Intention and IntentionalityGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Hans, ‘“Whose house is that?” Wittgenstein on the Self.’ In Sluga, Hans and Stern, David G., eds, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1996” (sic)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is not the faintest acknowledgement of P. F. Strawson, good or bad, by Canfield or of any of the philosophers he cites, all of whom (with the likely exception of Wittgenstein) had to be acquainted with Strawson’s argument. I believe they must be repressing their memories of Strawson pere’s argument (and that without the bona fide Oedipal excuse of Strawson fils!).

9 See Dainton and G. Strawson cited in n. 8 above. Lockean “persons” are owned streams of consciousness at any given time, but their ownedness is held to be irrelevant to their integrity and identity as “persons.” In his Self, Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006Google Scholar), Richard Sorabji argues against doctrines of “ownerless streams of consciousness” which he finds championed by Derek Parfit and (no surprise here) certain ancient Buddhist figures, as well as by Anscombe and Malcolm.

10 “Consciousness seems obviously real and indeed ever-present when one is awake and alert.” (p. 125); “No one can deny, for example, that fear is an inner state; in some sense my fear-utterance describes a mental phenomenon.” (p. 131); “That is not to say that Wittgenstein is a behaviorist. The person is speaking of (signaling about) his pain, not his pain behavior. What he does is paradigmatically a case of referring to pain.” (p. 144)

11 Here Strawson deftly dispatches the worry that owned mental states, if “logically non-transferable,” will be “private.” Indeed, mental states, like any predicable and thus non-basic particular, will be “logically non-transferable,” but not as a metaphysical matter of their “innerness,” nor as an epistemological matter of their “privacy,” but as a logical matter of their identity: you can’t have my states – be they mental, physical, or financial – insofar as my states, as particulars, can’t be your states. That of course turns on the logical truth that I can’t be you and gotta be me and not another thing. Nothing is private. See also n. 14 below for Strawson’s further exposing of the farce which is “the privacy of experience.”

12 The “bundle” fancy, as found in Hume, has, of course, as its entire raison d’etre, the suggestion of “no owner,” its cognate bit of philosophical silliness.

13 In a case of ramifying ironies Anthony Kenny, in his article “The First Person” (see n. 8 above), declares his allegiance to the no-reference view — “For myself, I am wholly persuaded that ‘I’ is not a referring expression” (p. 6) — while going on to take Anscombe to task: “Astonishingly, it seems to me, she falls into the Cartesian trap from which Wittgenstein showed us the way out” (p. 7). But, as I am arguing, Anscombe’s recessive Cartesianism is not astonishing; it is to be expected given her no-reference/no-ownership views. What is astonishing is that Kenny should (rightly) insist that “I” has “a clear sense” when and only when it is clear which “person … utters it as its primary utterer” (p. 12) and then deny that it has or makes a reference to its utterer.

14 “To put it briefly. One can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. One can ascribe them to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience. And one cannot identify others if one can identify them only as subjects of experience, possessors of states of consciousness” (Individuals, p. 100).

15 Oh yes, there are still a few out there.

16 Winston Churchill, quoted in D’Este, Carlo, Warlord (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 77Google Scholar.