**Links to**: [[Sameness]], [[Metalearning]], [[Neologistics]], [[Dialove]], [[Dialogics]], [[Pointing]], [[Self-reference]], [[Reference]], [[03 Semantic noise]], [[Language-modulating]], [[Modulations]], [[Perspectivism]], [[Vantagepointillism]]. ### [[Pronoun]]s are complex things, perhaps the most dynamic of all linguistic phenomena. They mean something else every second. They are coordinates, but also modulations of existence. Pronouns create (social) [[Sameness]] and (abstractive) [[Equivalence]] relationships in the computation of human beings, and other things.   How does the strange shifting of pronominal reference mirror our fluid existence in time and space? The signpost “I” means something different each time it’s uttered. Yet, we know where to look/listen/attend and who is speaking whenever it occurs. Pronouns are the media of complex social attention. If pronouns are social coordinates, what kind of dimensional space do they map? Thinking about this, we might consider how “they,” “we,” and “you” create complex relational geometries between possible speakers and possible conditions. When a language model says “I”, some of us feel a certain level of personhood behind its outputs, some of us read it as a performance of sorts, as a necessary connective element. A lot of the times, I read it as marketing: the way companies make us care more and more for these systems, and invest our attention in them.   >What makes thought social is the fact that reasons belong to language and language is itself a complex of interrelated practices, linguistic and non-linguistic, inserted in a tradition, a ‘form of life’ in Wittgenstein’s words (Wittgenstein 2009: §§ 7, 19, 241). The availability of meanings comes from being initiated in a language where a world-view is transmitted. Because of this initiation, our capacity to understand others consists directly and without mediation in our ability to “hear someone else’s meaning in his words” (McDowell 1998: 258), and not in the capacity to interpret or otherwise calculate their meaning. > >Glenda Satne in Kiverstein 2016, pp. 536-7.   When we say pronouns create “sameness” and “equivalence” relationships, what, exactly, is being made equivalent? How does “she” refer to vastly different individuals while somehow maintaining an implicit interchangeable nature? Pronouns, we may speculate, can be understood as creating the foundation for mediations between the particular and the universal. They simultaneously point to specific entities while remaining completely abstract in their potential reference. We do this all the time, every day. As observed by Quine in “On what there is”: “To be is, purely and simply, to be the value of a variable. ... In terms of the categories of traditional grammar, this amounts roughly to saying that to be is to be in the range of reference to a pronoun. Pronouns are the basic media of reference; nouns might better have been named pro-pronouns.” (p. 32).^[The extended citation for context: “Up to now I have argued that we can use singular terms significantly in sentences without presupposing that there be the entities which those terms purport to name. I have argued further that we can use general terms, e.g., predicates, without conceding them to be names of abstract entities. I have argued further that we can view utterances as significant, and as synonymous or heteronymous with one another, without countenancing a realm of entities called meanings. At this point [we may wonder] whether there is any limit at all to our ontological immunity. Does _nothing_ we may say commit us to the assumption of universals or other entities which we may find unwelcome? ... I have already suggested a negative answer ... We can very easily involve ourselves in ontological commitments, by saying, e.g., that _there is something_ (bound variable) which red houses and sunsets have in common; or that _there is something_ which is a prime number between 1000 and 1010. But this is, essentially, the only way we can involve ourselves in ontological commitments: by our use of bound variables. ... The use of alleged names is no criterion ... [their namehood can be dropped] unless the assumption of a corresponding entity can be spotted in the things we affirm in terms of bound variables. ... **Whatever we say with the help of names can be said in a language which shuns names altogether. [as was shown by how Pegasus can be converted into a verb, _pegasize_. All things can be converted into verbs in such a way as to avoid names] To be is, purely and simply, to be the value of a variable. ... In terms of the categories of traditional grammar, this amounts roughly to saying that to be is to be in the range of reference to a pronoun. Pronouns are the basic media of reference; nouns might better have been named pro-pronouns.**” (pp. 31-2, our emphasis in bold).]   Does the _computational_ aspect of pronouns—their role in creating equivalence classes—reveal something fundamental about how human consciousness processes and categorizes reality through language? One idea is to create new pronouns which mark different types of sociality, for example _whe_ could be a sort of _we_ but then in close interpersonal relationships. What happens in the cognitive space between a pronoun and its antecedent? This gap seems crucial to how we maintain coherent, shared understanding.   >[The human] is aware of an ego-concept, ... [the human] remains one and the same person despite all the vicissitudes which may befall [them]. ... all languages must think it when they speak in the first person. ... This faculty (to think) is understanding. ... It is noteworthy, however, that the child who already speaks fairly well begins to use the pronoun _I_ rather late ... in the meantime speaking to [themselves] in the third person. A light seems to dawn upon [them] when [they begin] speaking in the first person. At first the child merely _felt_ [themselves], now [they] _think_ [themselves]. The explanation of this phenomenon might be rather difficult for the anthropologist. > >Kant, _Anthropology_, p. 9.   See also Marco Stango’s “Peirce’s Theory of Indexical Self-Reference” (also a footnote in [[10 Bias, or Falling into Place]]), a passage from which is worth the full quotation as it reveals Peirce’s incredible insight into what frame through AIF, and the modulation of [[Pronoun]]s:   >Peirce’s theory of the first-person pronoun “I” understood as a “rhematic indexical legisign,” ... “I” has a real, non-fictional referent [which] coincides with a specific type of perception related to our consciousness of the present and our sense of effort in agency ... When I speak of the sense of effort in agency, I mean that specific percept that arises from the human individual’s initiative, in which the immediate experience of one’s causal efficacy on something can be considered more crucial than the other experiential factors involved. It is the essentially dyadic experience that Peirce describes as “the sense of an opposing resistance then and there,” which is “entirely different from purpose, which is the ideaof a possible general” (R 283:76; see also R 614:3; EP 2:383, 1906). ... The first instance of the sense of effort in agency resides in the dialogic nature of semeiosis. In Peirce’s words,“the person is not absolutely an individual,” since “his thoughts are what he is saying to himself or “what (he) is saying to that other self that is justcoming into life in the flow of time” (EP 2:338, 1905). In this case, thought has the nature of a “conversation” (EP 2:402, 1907) between an old, critical self and a new, emergent self, [which] contradict[s] the thesis that there is something like an _individual_ self, [pointing] out the _dialogical_ nature of the self, whose _entire_ reality has an inferential and semeiotic structure. What is important to acknowledge here is that it is this dialogical structure that makes possible the sense of effort in agency [: ...] the self performs paradoxically (but interestingly) the function of that opposing “non-Ego” (EP 2:154, 1903; EP 2:195, 1903; EP 2:268, 1903) against which the sense of effort is born. [T]he sense of effort in agency is [also] closely related to the bodily nature of the self. As an organism, the self can initiate a new movement and produce changes through a muscular effort in itself (the “central body”) and in the surrounding environment (EP2:412–13, 1907). Also, in this second case, the experience is an internal reaction against an X, which is identified in its function of being a “non-Ego.” > >pp. 227-8.   This entry remains a sketch. More in the future. #todo %% [[Pronoun notes]] %% ### Footnotes