Julian Jaynes’s scientific contributions

... The ability to refer to 'things' was not the only argument put forward by Benveniste to justify the divorce between I/you and he but Benveniste considered it one of the most revealing: "Lastly it is important to be fully aware of the specific features of the 'third person' which is the only way in which a thing can be predicated verbally". 15 [4: p. 36] Indeed, Maillard [32: p. 60] observed that, in Benveniste's analysis, there was "a frequent ambiguity in the use of the term 'person', which sometimes refers to a purely formal grammatical category and sometimes to a substantial human presence in the enunciate". It is obviously not a coincidence that a theory whose goal is to found the subjectivity of the self-consciousness on the linguistic capacity of "the ego saying ego" views 'person' as exclusively that which can be taken on by human actors (I-you) and 'non-person' as what can be taken on by either human actors or nonhuman actors (he). ...

Reference:

Face and Mask: “Person” and “subjectivity” in Language and Through Signs