ABSTRACT
IF Aristotle were right in saying that when a man is asleep he can assert that ‘an approaching object’ is a man or a horse, one would think that another thing he could do would be to assert that he himself is asleep. It will be useful to reflect on the sentence ‘I am asleep’ and the supposed possibility that, by uttering it, a person could claim that he is asleep. It is possible that the sentence ‘I am asleep’ should come from the lips of a sleeping person. In this sense he could ‘say’ that he is asleep: but could he assert (claim, maintain) that he is asleep? If so it would appear that you might find out that he is asleep from his own testimony. This will strike everyone as absurd. If it was a question in a court of law whether a certain man had been asleep at such and such a time, the fact that he had said the sentence ‘I am asleep’ at that time would not be admitted as affirmative evidence.
