to rid the discourse of self-reference of 'as'-talk. Yet in what could the
difference of presentational mode consist if not in the fact that 'I'
presents the self to itself 'as such', tout entier, whereas 'me' presents
the self to itself as a single 'ray' of illumination, as it were, within an
entire effulgence of 'ego-profiles'. There is, then, no more reason for
regarding 'Me suy-nghi as a single sentential mask concealing a diptych of
propositional conjuncts than for the converse view whereby 'I am thinking'
and 'I am your mother' are regarded as an illusory duality of sentences
united in the mysterious depths by a single (Vietnamese) proposition. The
English and Vietnamese self-referential expressions are simply irreducible
to one another. [41]

　　　　　　　　  Assertability and the Real World

We find, to be sure, a rough second-personal analogue of the V-expressions
in German and in the romance languages. French, to take a familiar example,
generally employs 'tu' in addressing familiars, and 'vous' in addressing
those with whom a more formal and distant relationship is maintained. Do
the sentences, 'tu penses' and 'vous pensez', express different
propositions? Were this so, we should expect them to differ in
truth-conditions. However, it would seem not to be a condition of the truth
of 'tu penses', for example, that the interlocutor is a close friend or
member of the speaker's family. It is entirely possible for 'tu penses' to
be true while the individual addressed stands beyond the range of social
familiarity. Thus, it would be inappropriate for the interlocutor to
retort, 'What you say is false, because I do not know you'.

But if 'tu penses' does not of itself support the implication of
familiarity, what does account for the offense which might be taken when
one is addressed in the 'tu' form by a perfect stranger? Why do we assume a
'suggestion' of contempt or belittlement? Something, it seems, conveys to
us the distinct impression that the other is 'saying': 'You are my social
familiar'. And this we may find audacious and offensive. What, then,
delivers the suggestion? It is neither the sentence, 'tu penses' nor the
proposition expressed by it which bears the implication of familiarity, but
rather certain propositions articulating features of the speech-act
environment, analysable, perhaps, in terms of Grice's notion of the
'conversational implicature'. We must leave for others the presentation and
defence of a thoroughly nuanced account. But it would not be out of place
to nod to the obvious. If the offending suggestion is not implied by the
proposition (or sentence) 'tu penses', we must find it in the 'assertion'
(the use of the sentence in expressing the proposition) or in the
contextual conditions of assertability. The relevance of these
considerations to the V-indexicals is immediate. 'Me suy-nghi, and 'Con
suy-nghi have precisely the same propositional entailments, but differ
sharply in 'assertion-entailment'.

Indeed, assertion-entailment is particularly relevant to self-reference. It
is a condition of the assertion of 'I am thinking' that I produce (and can
produce) the token, 'I', in the sentence (not, it would seem, an
implication of the proposition). 'I can produce the token, "I",' is not
logically tautologous, but pragmatically required. And 'I cannot produce
the token "I"' does not represent a logical contradiction, but rather a
pragmatic self-refutation analogous, perhaps, to the sentence 'Nothing is
written on the blackboard' written on the blackboard. Though we do not
accept the token-reflexive analysis of 'I' (as a theory of reference), [42]
token-reflexivity does seem to be an assertion-condition.

Of course, there is more to the assertion-conditions of the V-indexicals
than tokening capacity. At first thought, one might, for example, assume it
to be a straightforward condition of the stating of 'me suy-nghi that the
speaker actually be the addressee's mother. Yet there are contexts (such as
that of make-believe) in which a statement of this sort does not require
that 'me' be tokened by the mother. A Vietnamese child, for example, could
always throw protocol to the winds and perversely use 'me' for
self-reference in addressing a parent. The mere use of a given
V-expressions such as 'me' for self-reference does not thereby guarantee
that the speaker is the mother of the addressee.

Nothing about the Vietnamese mode of self-reference detracts in the least
from the possibility of make-believe, imaginary conversations,
role-playing, language-acquisition dialogues, etc. A Vietnamese child may,
for example, address her doll as 'con' and refer to herself as 'me'
implying only that, within this particular context of make-believe, the
child is playing the role of mother, not that the child is, in the