338 The subjectivity of utterance

Defined like this the notion of locutionary subjectivity might seem to be wholly uncontroversial, and neither novel nor espe­cially interesting. After all, self-expression is something we talk about quite freely, non-technically, in everyday discourse. We say, for example, that X expresses herself well or that Y has diffi­culty in expressing himself; and we acknowledge that a capacity for self-expression is one of the dimensions of fluency in the use of language and varies from one speaker (or writer) to another. When we come to examine the notion of locutionary subjectivity from the viewpoint of modern linguistic theory, however, we soon discover that it is far from being as straightforward as it might appear to be at first sight.

As we have noted above, the standard, post-Cartesian, view of the self or the ego is that of a thinking being, conscious of itself as thinking, as it is also conscious of itself as having certain beliefs, attitudes and emotions; a being which is distinct from the mental activity of which it is the subject, or agent, and from the thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and emotions, of which it is the seat or locus. It has been responsibly argued, however, by many philosophers and psychologists that no such distinction can be drawn between the subject and the object of consciousness: more particularly, that Descartes, in his famous analysis of the (composite) proposition expressed in Latin in the sentence 'Cogito, ergo sum' (usually translated into English, as 'I think, therefore I am', but better translated in context with the aspec- tually different sentence 'I am thinking, therefore I am') was misled by the bipartite subject-predicate structure of Latin (and other Indo-European languages, including French, Eng­ lish, German, etc.) when he separated the ego from its cogita­ tion. Linguists do not need to take a view on the validity of the philosophical and psychological arguments (although they can contribute relevant evidence based on the grammatical and semantic analysis of particular natural languages). But they must not accept uncritically what I am referring to as the stan­ dard, post-Cartesian, dualist view of the self, or the ego, as the subject of consciousness and activity.

Still less should they accept without question the view which underpins the currently dominant intellectualist and objectivist

10.6 Subjectivity and locutionary agency 339

approach to formal semantics: the view which represents the self, implicitly if not always explicitly, as the reasoning faculty oper­ating dispassionately upon the propositions stored in the mind (or the mind/brain) or brought to it for judgement from observa­tion of the (objective) external world. Throughout this book, and especially in Part 4, I have been stressing the importance of the non-propositional aspect of language. The inadequacy of truth-conditional semantics as a total theory, not only of utter­ance-meaning, but also of sentence-meaning, derives ultimately from its restriction to propositional content and its inability to handle the phenomenon of subjectivity. Self-expression cannot be reduced to the expression of propositional knowledge and beliefs.

A second point to be made here is that the self which the locu­tionary agent expresses is the product of the social and interper­sonal roles that he or she has played in the past, and it manifests itself, in a socially identifiable way, in the role that he or she is playing in the context of utterance. As I pointed out in the dis­cussion of Austin's theory of speech acts in Chapter 8, the central concepts of epistemic and deontic authority have a social basis. But they are vested by society in particular individuals; they are part of the self that is expressed whenever the locutionary agent utters a sentence in some socially appropriate context.

As there are those who have argued that there is no sharp dis­tinction to be drawn between the self that is expressed in language and the expression of that self, so there are those, especially anthropologists and social psychologists, who have argued that there is no single, unitary, self which is constant across all experience and, more especially, across all encounters with others, but rather a set of selves (not one persona, but a set of personae), each of which is the product of past encounters with others, including, crucially, past dialogic, or interlocution-ary, encounters. Once again, there is no need for linguists to take a view on this issue. Even if there is such a thing as a monadic and unitary, Cartesian, self, ontologically independent of, and unaffected by, the language which it uses for self-expression, this self cannot but express itself (or be expressed) linguistically in terms of the grammatical categories and semantic distinctions