Understanding &quote;I&quote;

No words in English are shorter than &quote;I&quote; and few, if any, play a more fundamental role in language and thought. In Understanding &quote;I&quote;: Thought and Language Jose Luis Bermudez continues his longstanding work on the self and self-consciousness. Bermudez develops a model of how language-users understand sentences involving the first person pronoun &quote;I&quote;. This model illuminates the unique psychological role that self-conscious thoughts (typicallyexpressed using &quote;I&quote;) play in action and thought - a unique role often summarized by describing &quote;I&quote; as an essential indexical. The book opens with an argument directly supporting the indispensability of &quote;I&quote;-thoughts in explaining action. After motivating a broadly Fregean approach linguistic understanding it critically examines Frege's own remarks on &quote;I&quote; as well as the Fregean account offered by Gareth Evans. The main part of the book develops an account of the sense of &quote;I&quote; that explains a cluster of related phenomena, including essential indexicality, immunity to error through misidentification, the shareability of&quote;I&quote;-thoughts, the relation between &quote;I&quote; and &quote;you&quote;, and the role of autobiographical memory in self-consciousness.