First Person Utterances - How Do We Achieve Them?

Our capacity to state these things straight off is the form that bodily self-awareness and the capacity for goal directed action takes in creatures who have acquired conceptual abilities. We acquire the ability to make statements of these kinds in the course of developing certain characteristic human capacities. Our first person utterances are not grounded in anything but as the exercise of our self-conscious ability to say what we think or intend or what we feel. They are essentially the performance of a rational being who understands his entitlement to say these things as residing in the authority that he possesses in speaking for himself on such matters.