real-world context, quite literally the mother of the doll. Thus, we must
recognise that the use of a V-expression determines a context, C, such
that, in C, the speaker bears a given relationship to the addressee. And
where 'C' designates the real world, the use of such an expression implies
that, in reality, the speaker stands in that relationship.

Semantic correctness for real-world use involves, among other things, a
belief on the part of the speaker that the implied relationship really
obtains. 'Me' for example, cannot achieve self-reference in the real-world
context unless the speaker believes that she is the mother of the person
addressed. Without such a belief, the context of use becomes that of
make-believe, imagination, insult, prevarication, etc. Yet it remains a
strict condition of assertion that whenever the speaker believes herself to
be speaking in the 'real world' context, she also believes herself to be
the mother. The real world context is thus 'privileged'. One simply cannot
believe oneself to be making the statement, 'me suy-nghi', in the real
world context without holding the appropriate belief about oneself. In this
sense, the real world context specifies, for each V-indexical, a certain
range of beliefs concerning the speaker's identity. Vietnamese thus
establishes determinate 'sincerity conditions' for certain of the
assertion-entailments associated with its self-referential expressions.
English does not.

　　　　　　　　   The Impossibility of Solipsism

In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl confronts the question of the constitution
of other minds within one's own subjectivity. To be sure "... if what
belongs to the other's own essence were directly accessible, it would be
merely a moment of my own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself
would be the same". [43] Husserl's problem is not that of how we know what
the other is experiencing. He seeks, rather, to articulate the intuitively
given conditions without which awareness of the other would be impossible.
In order to bring these conditions to light, Husserl first limits his
attention to the 'sphere of ownness' brought about by the 'egological
reduction':

　　 If I 'abstract' (in the usual sense) from others, I 'alone' remain.
　　 But such abstraction is not radical; such aloneness in no respect
　　 alters the natural world-sense, 'experienceable by everyone', which
　　 attaches to the naturally understood Ego and would not be lost, even
　　 if a universal plague had left only me. [44]

The 'sphere of ownness' leaves experience untouched. But the methodological
exclusion of any pre-reductive reference to the other enables the
phenomenologist to discover the constitutive conditions for our awareness
of the other precisely within the residual field of experience thus
disclosed. Husserl is now prepared to pose the question to which the
Vietnamese ontology of ego-profiles provides an admirably feasible
response: "How can appresentation of another original sphere, and thereby
the sense 'someone else', be motivated in my original sphere and, in fact,
motivated as experience ...?" [45] The theory of appresentational 'pairing'
developed in the Cartesian Meditations is, and has frequently been argued
to be, unsuccessful. [46] This is not the place to expand on that issue.
But I do want to suggest that the theory of ego-profiles meets a crucial
desideratum implicit in Husserl's description of pairing as involving an
'intentional overreaching' [47] conceived as 'a living mutual awakening and
an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other'. [48] We shall
see that the Vietnamese mode of self-reference requires a surprisingly
intimate, and surprisingly significant, 'overlaying' of the senses of self
and other.

We have thus far presented the various V-expressions as representing
ego-profiles of the form, 'the-self-as-your...' this formulation is, in
fact, elliptical. For as noted earlier in passing, there are as many
addressive expressions in Vietnamese as self-referential expressions. And
any expression used for self-reference can be used for address. There is,
in Vietnamese, no word which can be straightforwardly translated as 'you'.
And thus, to characterise 'me', for example, as referring to
the-self-as-your-mother, while harmless given our earlier purposes, is
nonetheless misleading. Just as Vietnamese self-referential expressions
represent the various ways in which a given ego presents itself to itself,
Vietnamese addressive expressions represent the various ways in which a
given alterior ego appears to oneself "Me', used addressively, represents
the-other-as-my-mother.

But a curious difficulty arises at this point. 'My', of course, means 'of,