The first suggestion concerns our ability to “grasp the literal meaning of the indexical 'I'.” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 4) Pacholik-Żuromska contends that this may require, on the part of both speaker and hearer, „a capacity to identify themselves as subjects of a certain state, which is a capacity belonging to the unintentional background.” (Pacholik-Żuromska this collection, p. 4) I agree that (1) the same sort of capacity is in play with both speaker and hearer, and that (2) this capacity belongs to the background. I reject the claim, though, that this capacity is non-intentional. Let me explain.
Ad (1): In The Thought Gottlob Frege contends that only the speaker herself can grasp the proposition expressed by the sentence “I have been wounded,” as used in a soliloquy, and that the hearer therefore has to grasp a different proposition, provided by the utterance context, in order to understand a corresponding sentential utterance, such as the proposition expressed by “She who is speaking to you at this moment has been wounded” (Frege 1956, p. 298). This flies in the face of the Husserlian conception of linguistic communication from which I start out in my article, which requires that the hearer ascribes the right meaning-bestowing act to the speaker in a case of successful communication; which means, in the case at hand, that he ascribes to the speaker what Pacholik-Żuromska aptly calls a self-identification (rather than an act of speaking to the hearer, as Frege has it). In fact, this is precisely the way Husserl himself describes what happens in the case of the correct interpretation of “I”-utterances:
Es ist klar: Wer 'ich' sagt, nennt sich nicht nur selbst, sondern er ist sich dieser Selbstnennung auch als solcher bewußt, und dieses Bewußtsein gehört wesentlich mit zum Bedeutungskonstituierenden des Wortes 'ich'. Das aktuelle Sich-selbst-Meinen fungiert […] so, daß darin sein Gegenstand als Gegenstand eines Selbstmeinens gemeint […] ist. […] Der Hörende versteht es, sofern es ihm Anzeige für dieses ganze Bewußtseinsgebilde ist, also der Redende für ihn als jemand dasteht, der sich selbst, und zwar als 'ich' nennt, d.i. sich als Gegenstand seiner als Selbsterfassung erkannten Selbsterfassung nennt.[1] (Husserl 1984, p. 813)
Thus, if the speaker asserts “I have been wounded,” she presents herself as someone who refers to herself as referring to herself (or as meaning herself/having herself in mind/thinking of herself), in order to state about herself that she has been wounded; and the hearer understands this assertion if he takes the speaker to refer to herself as referring to herself and to assert about herself that she has been wounded. I regard this metarepresentational view of the meaning-bestowing acts underlying the assertive use of “I”-sentences as quite plausible. After all, if someone claims, say, “I have a broken leg,” then she eo ipso knows that she refers to herself by “I;” she could instantly add: “I am speaking of myself.” (Contrast this to a case in which a speaker unknowingly looks at herself in a mirror and exclaims “She has a broken leg.” See Beyer 2006, pp. 33 ff.) Incidentally, this view fits in well with a dispositionalist higher-order judgment theory of consciousness, which implies that (thanks to an underlying, “pre-reflective” structure of inner time-consciousness) “I”-awareness disposes its subject to judge that she herself is thinking of herself (see Beyer 2006, pp. 33 ff.).[2] If a mental disposition such as this is actualized (which is not required for self-identification), then the resulting (“reflective”) “I”-judgment is based upon, and epistemically motivated by, a (“pre-predicative”) act of referring to oneself as referring to oneself.
Ad (2): In order for the hearer to ascribe such a meaning-bestowing act of self-identification to the speaker, he does not, of course, have to actualize his own capacity for self-identification, in the sense of actually thinking of himself as thinking of himself. But in the absence of this capacity he would be unable to ascribe such an act to the speaker, at least if we follow Husserl and Edith Stein and conceive of third-person act ascriptions as based on empathy, where the ascriber mentally simulates the cognitive situation of the target person (see Beyer 2006, ch. 3). So I agree with Pacholik-Żuromska that an element of the background (notably, the capacity for self-identification) is required for the ability to understand “I”-utterances. However, I deny that this capacity is completely non-intentional. It is precisely a mental disposition that is actualized (if it gets actualized) in intentional consciousness, namely in pre-predicative acts of referring to oneself as oneself—acts which may, but need not, give rise to corresponding “self-reflective” higher-order judgments.