In
Being known. New York: Oxford University Press (
1999)
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Abstract
Thinkers who have postulated a transcendental subject of experience have responded to an epistemological insight about first‐person thought with a metaphysical error. The distinctive features of the first person that has produced the illusion is not immunity to error through misidentification, but a certain kind of representational independence. Representationally independent uses of the first person are those in which the thinker rationally forms a present‐tense first‐person belief, but not by endorsing the content of some conscious state, which itself has a first‐person representational content. Mis‐characterization of this phenomenon provides an explanation of the source of the illusion that there is a transcendental subject of experience.