**Links to**: [[Sameness]], [[Metalearning]], [[Neologistics]], [[Dialove]], [[Dialogics]], [[E 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 [[Sameness]] and [[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. >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. %% The phenomenon of children speaking in the third person offers a revealing entry point into understanding the relationship between pronouns, agency, and consciousness. Children initially adopt third-person self-reference because it matches their environmental input - they are predominantly referred to by others in the third person. This practice persists until they develop a more sophisticated sense of agency, marked by the transition to first-person pronouns. This developmental pattern illuminates deeper connections between pronouns, selfhood, and memory, all unified through the concept of control. What we conventionally term "free will" typically refers to the presence of a sufficiently coherent and sustained narrative volition attributed to an entity, whether human or animal. However, the narrativity of selfhood - its apparent permanence and coherence - is fundamentally unstable. Contemporary research frames this in terms of confabulation: our sense of self is largely determined by contextual constraints, historical contingencies, and environmental dynamics beyond our direct control. In this light, volition or free will can be reconceptualized as the perceived length, stability, and reliability of the self-as-project. This understanding is inherently chronological and embedded in power relations. It explains, for instance, why confidence functions as a social signal of stability and reliability, often becoming self-fulfilling through others' trust. This creates a complex dynamic between productive confidence that benefits collective projects and mere performative confidence. Free will, then, might be better understood as confidence in one's estimated ability to maintain self-projection as an ongoing project. Yet this understanding must contend with our nature as collective assemblages of organs, environments, and narratives that often lack strict coherence. Our pronoun usage reflects this complexity, not only in childhood development but in how we navigate perspective shifts and maintain identity across time. Rather than assuming the underlying sameness that pronouns suggest, a more critical examination of pronominal relations might guide us toward less voluntaristic and more democratically distributed forms of agency. This analysis suggests we should question standard assumptions about individual agency and reconsider how linguistic structures, particularly pronouns, shape our understanding of selfhood and collective action. Such questioning could lead to more nuanced approaches to agency and responsibility in both theoretical and practical contexts. >“In McDowell’s approach sociality is articulated as an I–We relation rather than in terms of I–Thou relations privileged by interpretationism. 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 encounter a pronoun like “she” in a text or conversation, we seem to perform multiple operations simultaneously: First, there’s a backward-reaching movement of consciousness, where we scan our recent memory for suitable antecedents. This creates a kind of temporal bridge between the present moment of the pronoun and the past moment of its referent. But something more complex is happening too. We’re not just connecting two points in time - we’re maintaining what linguists sometimes call a “discourse model.” The pronoun acts as a kind of compression algorithm, taking all the rich information about its antecedent and holding it in a more efficient form. “The old woman who lived in the cottage by the stream” becomes simply “she,” yet somehow carries forward all the relevant meanings. There’s also an interesting phenomenological aspect to this cognitive space. When we process “Mary picked up the book. She began to read,” there’s a felt sense of continuity between these sentences. The pronoun creates a kind of semantic transparency - we seem to look right through it to its referent. Yet paradoxically, this very transparency depends on the pronoun’s presence. Without it, the sentences would feel disconnected. This leads to an intriguing possibility: perhaps the space between pronoun and antecedent isn’t really a gap at all, but rather a kind of active binding force that helps create the coherence of our linguistic experience. The pronoun doesn’t just point backward to its antecedent - it maintains that antecedent’s active presence in our understanding. *Reminder notes:* Glenda Satne in Kiverstein 2016, pp. 536-7, super important paper for perspective. [[Quine]], [[On what there is]] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/#RelaItDepeH The _Zhuangzi_ emphasizes the plurality of natural stances or points of view from which one may see paths of possible behavior as “natural”. For one of the paths to be available for _me_ will be dependent on where I am _galloping_ and at what speed and direction in my _given_ trajectory in the network. All the appeals to _tiān_ (nature) as an authority are right in insisting their _dào_s are natural, but mistaken in using that as a reason to deny a similar status to the _dào_s of rival normative thinkers. _Tiān_ cannot serve as an arbiter of which rival norm is correct since it equally “puffs” all of them out. This allows each to claim their choices are of _tiān_ (natural) _dào_s but does not allow them the corollary that their rival’s choices _violate tiān_. They, like us, conform with _tiān_’s constancies in being committed to their _dào_s. Any _shì-fēi_ (this: right) judgment concerning a _dào_ would be a naturally _yīn_ (因 dependent) _shì_ judgment, based on prior or enacted commitments, gestalts orientations, and inner processes. Those past _dào_ commitments bring us to a normative stance here, now, from which successive judgments of _shì-fēi_ and _kě_ (可 permissible) vs. not _kě_ arise. Zhuangzi’s pivotal illustration pairs 是 _shì_ (this) with 彼 _bǐ_ (that) as near and far indexicals. “Any thing can be a ‘this;’ any thing can be a ‘that’”. Local justifications for having _shì-fēi_ (this-not that) or _kě_ (assertible) are delivered in accordance our _chéng_ (fixed) commitment momentum along the _dào_s that guided us to this point in time and space. This relativity of normative dependence underpins Zhuangzi’s mildly ironic skepticism of special or extraordinary normative statuses we give to, e.g., sages. We should doubt any transcendent or allegedly perfect, totalistic epistemic access to nature’s inexpressible normative know-how. There are no _naturally ideal_ observers. ... The philosophical advantage of Zhuangzi’s way of discussing _dào_s, thus, does not leave him suggesting that what is natural is moral (analogous to implying “ought” from “is”). Nature gives us a complex three-dimensional network with levels of guiding structures in which we humans are left to navigate (_Zhuangzi_ 6:6). > Greater knowing is calm and comprehensive; smaller knowing is cramped and contentious. Greater language ignites insight; smaller language dims and diminishes. We sleep and interact with ghosts; Waking we start up our bodies. In interacting, we construct; our guiding-organs contend. We start simply then complexities arise and get more entangled. Our lesser anxieties motivate us, the greater anxieties paralyze us. Like a mechanical bow, we spit out directions, “This! Not that! (_shì-fēi_)” The ones that dominate lie embedded like sworn oaths as we continue on to our deaths which approach like fall and winter. Gradually we disappear, sink below the surface. We cannot recover the dynamism with which we began to construct the cords which, in our feeble old-age, bring our guiding-organ near death with no way back to its original creativity. (_Zhuangzi_ 2:2) This metaphorically florid description of the existential worry about the point of our existence reflects the “we” orientation of Classical Chinese conceptions of normativity. The issue of knowing-how and guiding with language replaces the belief-knowledge, appearance-reality dynamics in the West. We participate in a social unit as it constructs its _dàos_. We contend with each other using our own heart-mind—the organ along with the eye that interacts with natural paths. As our commitments to past agreed norms or directions accumulate, the social guidance in language becomes complex and constricting. The resulting inflexibility in our individual and social old age is symbolic of our intellectual death, our loss of the ability to find and follow new ways. Zhuangzi’s narrative turns to the individual processes of choosing a direction. > Attitudinal states—happiness, anger, sorrow, delight; concern, admiration, perplexity, resolve; attraction, absorption, excitement, familiarity—arise in turn, like music from hollows, mushrooms from the damp; they confront us day and night, Yet, there is no knowing how to interpret them. Still, never mind. They’re there constantly; they come from somewhere. (_Zhuangzi_ 2:2) We don’t know what role these states play but they seem central to our choosing activity—indeed, in a twist on Buddhism and Hume, without their role in our choosing, we would not have an indexed perspective, an ‘I’. (The narrator had introduced the above “[pipes of heaven](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/#pipesoftianquote)” metaphor to describe a gestalt he describes as having “said farewell to my _wǒ_ (I:me)”.) All guidance is from a point, an index in the cosmic network of paths for things. The paths are available to different parts of the cosmos, emergent objects—physical or living, plants or animals, birds, humans, snakes. Like other animals, our paths are entangled with each others’. Individuals are parts of the cosmos, and of their families, clubs, linguistic communities, political units, etc. which are also parts of the cosmos with _dào_s in the cosmos. Each part has its inner processes of seeking, deciding on, and carrying out some of the _dào_s that lead from node to node. As each part performs one of its _dào_s, the structure of _dào_s changes. Things emerge and disappear. > We can walk the paths we’ve been guided to but still see no sign of their endorsement by authority. We light on paths and react with heart-mind responses. That’s it. Are all lives as pointless as this? Or only mine? (_Zhuangzi 2:3_) Appeal to the guiding organ’s (心 _xīn_ heart-mind) inclinations faces the same problem as appeal to nature. All hearts are natural—the sage’s as well as the fool’s. Our bodies and our guiding organs both change as we pursue a trajectory through our lives (_Zhuangzi_ 2:3). The shape that is _constructed_ (成 _chéng_) by life is implicated in all the decisions we go on to make. Any output from our _constructed_ guiding organ will be a product of our having walked one of a range of possible _dào_s to this point. When we view Zhuangzi’s skeptical relativism in the context of his path, learning, and know-how conceptual space, we can see it as metaphorically more like Einstein’s physical relativism than cultural relativism about truth. We choose and enact _dào_s from a moving frame of reference constructed or matured (成 _chéng_) from past commitments. Our heart-minds reach a point with a frame of reference—at speed on a path. Our point of view, our perspective, comes complete with prior _commitments_ to _dào_s (ways) of appreciating and selecting among available paths. .... Zhuangzi postulates no homunculus exercising authority over the organs, joints, openings in the body. So, what does the choosing? Despite the earlier linking of choosing to the mysterious moods, Zhuangzi focuses less on the conscious subjective experience of our mental substance or cognitive self and more on the indexical locus of the body in space-time. The I:me (我 _wǒ_) is analogous to the “this” and “that” within the linguistic _dào_ structure—the grammatical indexical marks a choosing point in the conceptual **and** space-time structure. Like Hume’s self, without the naturally occurring grab-bag of emotional attitudes, it would not be there to play its choosing role. But it is the whole body, not just those attitudes, that chooses my way of behavior. The _wǒ_ (I:me) is situated in a multi-layered frame of reference with its own complicated _chéng_ (成 commitments)—swimming along in sea of _dào_s available for its choice. Humans are the parts of the natural cosmos that engage in extensive teaching and learning of behaviors with a language. The _wǒ_ (I:me) that has learned and knows-how is situated in existing commitments embedded in an indexed here-now in the network of ways to which is has and will assign _shì-fēi_ (this-not that). Each _shì-fēi_ (this-not that) it “shoots out” further commits it to a path. The first level paths have a shape, but the _dào_s of correct choice and performance are acquired by learning and lodged inside the performer’s body and not always plainly visible. I LOVE ZHUANGZHI Kant, Anthropology, p. 9: ![[kant anthropology pronoun.png|300]] spider web? Ask Claude: [[Singing neanthertals]] [[Mitochondria]] [[NESS]] [[HoTT workshop PAF]] [[Category theory dual]] %% ### Footnotes