“Me” as speech act: a performative based psychology

Abstract

We propose to define a psychological hypothesis for the word “me” that designates, for each human being, his or her personal interior Ego. Every human being is naturally an Ego – it is a question of learning the particular linguistic sound (or the particular sign gesture in a sign language) in which it is named in one’s mother tongue. In fact, it is not important, for our analysis, that the Ego be innate or developed gradually through experience. The important point in the psychological hypothesis is that the Ego is an entity (psychological and internal, to be exact) of one kind, while the word “me” is an entity of a different kind. The second hypothesis, which we will call the externalist hypothesis, responds affirmatively to question a), and maintains that “me” indicates a certain individual body, that of the person who is using the word “me”. A possible advantage of this last hypothesis is that in it one is not obliged to admit the existence of presumed and invisible psychological states. In this case also, however, the word “me” is separated from that which is referred to.