Anscombe’s famous paper on the first person makes claims which may seem bewildering or absurd, that we have ‘unmediated conceptions’ of some of our states and actions, that these conceptions are ‘subjectless’, and also, very controversially, that ‘I’ does not refer. Anscombe would not have identified herself as a pragmatist. But we can gain insight into and sympathy with some of these claims...