 In an influential 1962 paper, Jaakko Hintikka’s argues that it should be understood non-inferentially, as a performative utterance. On his analysis, I exist doesn’t follow logically from I think, nor does Descartes suppose otherwise. Rather, the transition from I think to I exist is non-logical – indeed, the statement that “I do not exist” is not logically incoherent. The key point, according to Hintikka, is that the very act of thinking that statement – the cognitive performance – is existentially incoherent: I cannot both think the statement and believe it to be true. Hintikka takes the emphasis on “cogito” as intended “to express the performatory character of Descartes’s insight; it refers to the ‘performance’ (to the act of thinking) through which the sentence ‘I exist’ may be said to verify itself” (1962, 17).