‘Spurious egocentricity’ and the first person

I here adapt some ideas of Prior’s 1967 paper ‘On spurious egocentricity’ in the interest of seeing how much sense can be made of the doctrine that ‘I’ is not a referring-expression. I suggest how an account of ‘I’ might draw upon both Prior’s treatment of the operator ‘I believe that’ and of operators like ‘it is true that’ and ‘it is now the case that’, which Prior argues are logically very different from ‘I believe that’. In the final section I present some objections to Prior’s account of ‘now’, and try to give a more adequate account of the analogy between ‘now’ and ‘I’.