Understanding "e;I"e;

No words in English are shorter than "e;I"e; and few, if any, play a more fundamental role in language and thought. In Understanding "e;I"e;: Thought and Language Jose Luis Bermudez continues his longstanding work on the self and self-consciousness. Bermudez develops a model of how language-users understand sentences involving the first person pronoun "e;I"e;. This model illuminates the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts (typically expressed using "e;I"e;) play in action and thought - a unique role often summarized by describing "e;I"e; as an essential indexical. The book opens with an argument directly supporting the indispensability of "e;I"e;-thoughts in explaining action. After motivating a broadly Fregean approach linguistic understanding it critically examines Frege's own remarks on "e;I"e; as well as the Fregean account offered by Gareth Evans. The main part of the book develops an account of the sense of "e;I"e; that explains a cluster of related phenomena, including essential indexicality, immunity to error through misidentification, the shareability of "e;I"e;-thoughts, the relation between "e;I"e; and "e;you"e;, and the role of autobiographical memory in self-consciousness.