Subjects as Objects

We tend to put our notion of the soul, the self, the “I” in a different category than other objects we think about. This is not only a common attitude in the general population, but it is also reflected in many examples of philosophical discourse. Philosophers differ, however, in their opinions of how and why the self attains its special status. The two traditional extreme points of view, which are still commonly taken as viable positions at present, are those of Descartes and Hume [3, 7]. To caricature: in the Cartesian view the “I” is the only undoubtably existing object of thought, whereas Hume denies that the “I” is an object of thought at all. Under the influence of these two views, or perhaps sometimes independently arriving at similar ones, philosophers have tried to defend some version of the special status of the “I”, or alternatively denied it its special status or its very existence. In this paper, I will discuss some particular lines of argument that follow the views of Descartes and Hume, namely those of Wittgenstein and Kripke [9, 18]. In the process, I will argue that the two original views and their followers commit what Smith calls an inscription error [15] . By assuming a world in which objects are given to us as objects, they assume a difference between thinking about everyday objects and thinking about the “I” that