Self-Reference, Self-Consciousness, and Moore’s Paradox

Abstract

Moore’s paradox is that kind of absurdity of, among other things, the assertion of a sentence having the form of “p but I do not believe that p”. I put forward an explanation of the paradox in terms of the use of the personal pronoun “I”. Moreover, I resort to a model of the competent use to which I will refer as a model of the self-conscious self-reference. Then, I show that the explanation set forth is independent of other recent explanations based on the conscious nature of both the assertion and the belief. But, besides, I conclude that there is good reason for thinking that neither the assertion nor the belief are of a conscious nature.