UNDERSTANDING “I”: LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT (Forthcoming, Oxford University Press) José Luis Bermúdez PREFACE I have been working on self-consciousness and self-awareness for over twenty years. Much of my work in this area has taken as target the widely held view that the distinguishing mark of self- conscious thought is the ability to speak and think about oneself using the first-person pronoun “I” and comparable linguistic devices. In The Paradox of Self-Consciousness and subsequent work I argued that the full-fledged self-consciousness that comes with linguistic self-reference emerges from a rich foundation of nonconceptual self-consciousness, available to nonlinguistic animals and prelinguistic infants as well as to language-using humans. My primary emphasis has been, as it were, on the part of the iceberg that lie beneath the surface – on the ways in which animals, human and non-human, receive and exploit distinctively self- specifying forms of information that allow them to think nonconceptually about themselves. Such information comes from a range of sources. We find it in somatic proprioception and kinesthesis, for example, which provide body-relative information, including information about limb position and movement). Ordinary “outward-directed” perception carries a great deal of information about the perceiver’s own location and trajectory, while basic navigational abilities exploit the intimate connection between awareness of one’s own egocentric route through the environment and awareness of allocentric spatial relations between landmarks. That there are such nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness seems now to be much more widely accepted than it was in 1998 when I published The Paradox of Self-Consciousness and the late Susan Hurley published her book Consciousness in Action, which contained a similarly motivated discussion. The focus of this book is the visible part of the iceberg – the various forms of full-fledged self- conscious thought that are typically expressed with the first person pronoun. The aim is to elucidate the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts (typically expressed using “I”) play in action and cognition – a unique role often summarized by describing “I” as an essential