In her influential paper ʻThe First Personʼ, Elizabeth Anscombe concludes that , despite all syntactic and semantic appearances to the contrary, the first person singular pronoun is not a referring expression. She presents three main arguments. One is the argument intended to show that any account of ʻIʼ as a device of selfreference will either be insufficient or essentially involve circularity. The other two attempt to establish directly that ʻIʼ is not a device of reference. The aim of this paper is to show that all these arguments are mistaken.We should regard ʻIʼ as a referring expression and explain its reference by the ordinary token-reflexive rule or other similar ones.
