the contrastive mineness argument

I will develop an argument I call ‘the contrastive mineness argument’ which suggests that if a creature is capable of self-discrimination, then that creature must be aware of other perceivers. Self-discrimination is the ability to distinguish between oneself and the world in perception. The overall intuition behind the argument is that in order to contrast oneself with the rest of the world, one would need to contrast oneself with other creatures that are like oneself, because otherwise, one would remain part of the world and never arise from the material or sensible world as a distinct being. Being a perceiver is to be a perceiver among perceivers. The contrastive mineness argument is: if a creature is capable of self-discrimination, then that creature is capable of ownership or possession of perceptions; being capable of the ownership or possession of perceptions requires contrasting one’s own perceptions with an other’s perceptions; contrasting one’s own perceptions with an other’s perceptions requires being aware of other perceivers. I suggest below that the critique of this argument does not allow us to defend the Others thesis- that being aware of oneself requires being aware of others- but I do advance what I take to be a condition of self-consciousness: perceptual content contains self-specifying information— information about the subject of a creature’s sensibility, so self-discrimination requires that a creature have a form or structure of its sensibility.

premise 1:
The first premise suggests that self-discrimination requires that a creature is capable of ownership of perceptions. The problem of ownership is central in the literature on self-consciousness, given that it is often taken to be a defining feature or mark of self-consciousness (Kriegel (2008)). The intuition is that if one is self-conscious, then one is aware of one’s own mental states as one’s own. However, it is often left unclear how ownership should be understood. The notion of ownership and possession is often understood in terms of that creature’s experience being (or at least seeming or appearing to be) reasonably unified. A creature’s experiences in general are thought to be reasonably unified if, for instance, it has memory and projection of perceptions, it can entertain multiple perceptual states or processes at a time, or all its experiences seem to be connected to one locus or center of consciousness. In order for a creature to entertain self-conscious experience, it must be its experience, i.e., it must be experience for that creature. If it were not experience for a creature, then either it would not be experience at all (meaning, it would be nothing), or it would have to be experience for another creature. Often, the ownership or possession of consciousness is understood to imply that it is necessary that one’s consciousness is an actual unified thing. I do not think this is necessary. I offer two reasons to be reluctant to accept that there is an actual unity required for self-discrimination.

The first reason is that experiences might represent as being in two loci of consciousness, when in fact they inhere or are supported by or located in what is in fact one subject. Suppose S were capable of adopting two divergent experiences of the world, I and I*. For example, Solo might be a subject of the experience of prey today (I) and a subject of the experience of prey tomorrow (I*). However, through third-personal description of the sensibility of the creature, it could be discovered (independently of those perspectives) that such experiences inhere or are supported by one actual subject, the biological organism itself. If such divergent experiences are possible, then while there may appear to be two loci of unity, the individual is, nevertheless, actually a single subject.

The second reason is that experiences might represent as being in one locus of consciousness, but in fact, they inhere or are supported by or located in a diversity of different subjects. For instance, suppose a creature entertains an experience on the world. That experience might be supported by two (or more) different subjects S1 and S2, however, it only appears as if it is supported by one subject of that subjective intuition. However, through third-personal description of the sensibility of the creature, it might be discovered that the experience is supported by two discernible beings, for instance left brain and right brain distinctions enable this sort of split. If such a seemingly actually unified experience is possibly supported by two diverse subjects, then we have reason to be skeptical that there is an actual unity.

Sure, these reasons are not decisive. But, my suggestion in this section is that rather than appealing to an actual unity, it is sufficient to capture the feeling or sense of unity in terms of the first order property of mineness that our perceptions possess. A creature’s perceptions are sensed or appear with the phenomenon of mineness when its perceptions are proximal in space and time and dependent upon the body of that creature. I take this to be Kant’s pivotal aesthetic insight, viz. that what is important in understanding the unity of the subject of consciousness is not an actual unity, but rather actual sense or feeling of unity that perceptual experience provides.

I am suggesting that when we characterize the content of Solo’s perceptions, we must assume that the creature is registered in the content of the perception as an element, where being an element of a perception is contrasted with being an object of a perception. To be an element in a content leaves open the possibility that that element is a form or structure of sensibility. Moreover, while that form or structure cannot be captured as an object, the content of the perception may be of an object external to the subject. However, I have left unclear and imprecise how we should understand this sense or feeling of mineness. If a creature is have the sense that its perceptions are its own, then this would require that one recognize what is sometimes called “the first order property of mineness” that attends its perceptions. For instance, if Solo is to have the sense that a perception of a tree is its own, then his behavior needs to express “the perception of that tree is mine.” Given that I have suggested that we should avoid reifying the unity of consciousness, I am suggesting that the sense of the unity of perception is a product of the sense of this first order property of mineness.

In order to understand this property I turn to P. F. Strawson’s account of mineness. On some occasions, P.F. Strawson suggests that the unity of the perceptions of a subject is a matter of a perception p being owned or possessed by a subject S. On other occasions, Strawson suggests that the unity of perceptions by a subject S are a matter of the subject S being capable of self-ascribing a perception p. (Peacocke suggested this in a class once... (not sure if it's in publication...)). The latter interpretation of the unity of perception would require that a creature thinks about its perceptions. It would require that it ascribe such perceptions to itself with the thought, “This is my perception” or “This perception is mine.” However, this notion of self-consciousness is self-ascription. Given that self-ascription is a higher level of self-consciousness than self-discrimination, this interpretation of the first order property of mineness is too strong. At the level of the perception itself, for instance, "seeing a goat" there is no self-ascription present. Creatures that do not have the capacity for self-ascription, can entertain perceptions as owned or possessed by them. For instance, migrating birds are sensitive to their perceptions as being owned or possessed by them, which is required for migration. In addition, we do not attribute to migrating birds the self-ascription of experiences, but we need to attribute the ownership of perceptions. So, some other explanation of ownership is required.

The former interpretation of mineness, however, might commit us to describing a self-discriminating creature as having a special relationship of ownership between itself and its experiences. This might suggest that the relationship of ownership is an extrinsic relation that requires a mediating representation that distinguished the subject and the subject’s perception and related the two to each other. For instance, it might suggest that a creature has to think about itself as a subject, think about its perception, and relate the two. However, what could be the relata and the relatum of this relation? If I am a self-discriminating creature, then, what type of first-order property of mineness do my perceptions possess? There are two different senses in which perceptions can be mine, so I make a distinction between mineness as ‘perception of oneself’ and mineness as ‘one’s own perception.’

On the one hand, perceptions can be ‘mine’ by being perceptions of me (or parts of me). This sense of ‘mineness,’ or mineness as perception of oneself is to be opposed with the sense of not-mineness, or perceptions of things (or parts of things) that are (in fact) not oneself. (This is actually the only grounds for the distinction between inner and outer that is so favored in the Cartesian picture.) For example, I may perceive my broken arm and I may perceive someone else’s broken arm. In this case, what distinguishes between something being mine and something being not mine is the object of the perception.

On the other hand, experiences can be ‘mine’ by being described in terms of perceptual contents that are ‘mine.’ This relevant sense of mineness is one’s own experience. This sense is to be opposed to perceptual contents that are ‘not mine.’ In this case, there are perceptual contents that are not mine, by being not one’s own experience. For example, I may perceive my broken arm, and that perception may be ‘mine’ in the sense that it is my experience of my broken arm, and the contrast to this is that another may perceive my broken arm, and that perceptual content is not-mine in the sense that it is not my experience of my broken arm.

I am not concerned here with the perceptual content expressed by the phrase ‘my broken arm,’ as this is gained via proprioception, or perception of what is proper to oneself as an object. In later posts, I will analyze the sense of unity or mineness as perception of oneself. However, mineness as one’s own experience might suggest that the unity that is involved in the perceptions appearing to be mine is dependent upon an actual unified perceiver, but we have already discussed above why such actual unity is not necessary. Otherwise, mineness as one’s own experience might suggest that one represents that there is a togetherness or oneness to one’s states or processes. This might suggest that there is actually a predicate or property of “mineness” that attends one’s perceptions, which means that one must own or possess one’s perceptions.

premise 2:
The second premise of the contrastive mineness argument suggests that the first order property of mineness requires that a creature contrast MINE with NOT MINE or SOMEONE ELSE’S. This predicative notion of “mineness” being attendant to one’s perceptions might suggest that this property of “mineness” should be contrasted with representations that are not mine— “not mine” in the sense of being someone else’s or being no one’s. This is the most important premise for the contrastive mineness argument, because it is central for the idea that MINE is a contrastive predicate. For instance, one type of contrastive predicate is ‘here’. In order for one to be capable of saying “Here are my shoes,” if ‘here’ is a contrastive predicate, one must be capable of saying something like, “My shoes are there.” The argument is that ‘mine’ is contrastive with ‘yours’ just like ‘here’ is contrastive with ‘there.’

To rephrase the contrast in more technical language, it might be argued that ‘mine’ is an indefinite specific. An indefinite specific ‘mine’ refers specifically to the possessor of the perception, but it does so in a way that does not identify the possessor, so in that sense it is indefinite. However, the argument is that in order to identify the possessor one needs to be able to make the indefinite specific definite, and one can only do so by contrasting ‘mine’ with ‘yours’ or ‘someone else’s.’

Strawson argues that in order for a creature to be self-conscious, that creature needs to utilize the contrastive predicate “mine.” In this sense of mineness, there is some property of the subject that the creature uses in order to say that its perception is its own. According to Strawson, the predicate is tied to a description of the type of being that possesses the perception. For instance, in order for Solo (the supposed deserted island subject of the classic thought experiment) to say that its perception is its own, he would need to recognize that some type of being possessed the perception. In the case in which he is a human being, then he would have to tie the predicate ‘mine’ to that description. Therefore, in order for the content of the perception to be entertained as one’s own, it would be required that the creature entertain that perception as a type of being. It is then argued that he can only do so assuming that he can make the contrast between different types of beings.

Another way to capture this idea is to suggest that perception occurs within a certain form of life, and it is only within that form of life that one can say that one’s experiences are one’s own rather than someone else’s. Further, in order to say that a perception is someone else’s one needs to be able to identify that type of perceiver. So, according to Strawson’s reasoning, entertaining perceptions with the first order property of mineness would require contrasting that property with the possession of perceptions by other subjects, such as other human beings, or persons, or perceivers. This brings us to the third and final premise of this argument.

premise 3:
Given that the first order property of mineness is assumed to be contrastive, then it would be necessary that creatures are perceptually aware of other perceivers. Being perceptually aware of other perceivers would require recognizing the types of beings that met those conditions that are required of self-discrimination. In this context, it would be required that one recognize that there are other beings that own or possess perceptions, with which one can contrast one’s ownership and possession of perceptions. But, what would that be? To perceive that others have sense organs? orient them in a certain way? or are located in such and such space and time? I have already suggested that what makes a creature own or possess perceptions may be that one’s perceptions appear or seem to be reasonably unified. To this extent, the Others thesis would require that they recognize that others have perceptions that are reasonably unified. Another way to argue for the Others thesis might be to follow P. F. Strawson’s reasoning discussed above. If we assume that the perceiver under consideration is a person, then the self-discriminating creature would need to recognize that there were other persons that owned and possessed perceptions. If these premises are accepted, then it appears that the Others thesis follows. However, I have two objections to the above argument.

Objections
The first objection focuses on what is required in order to entertain perceptions with the first order property of mineness. The first premise suggests that mineness is an actual property of perceptions. However, it is sufficient to account for ‘mineness’ that we account for the creature’s recognition of two aspects or features of its perception. The first requirement is the quantitative content of the perception, i.e., that perceptions are spatiotemporally formed or structured. The second requirement is the recognition of what I will call ‘embodiment facts,’ i.e., facts about the creature’s body that enable that creature to entertain perceptions as its own.

The first requirement suggests that we cannot suppose that a creature’s perceptions are of one sensibility without supposing that that creature’s perception possesses quantitative content. What this suggestion amounts to is the claim that the clearest way to make sense of perceptions being owned by a subject is that those perceptions are proximal in space and time to the creature. For example, if we suppose Solo perceives a blue bird, then what makes that perception his own are the spatiotemporal relations between the blue bird and himself. The argument for this is that we cannot coherently suppose that a creature could perceive an object, unless we also suppose that that creature’s sentience is governed by the spatiotemporal relations to those material objects. To be a perceiver of that world, one’s perceptions must represent one at a particular space and time.

P. F. Strawson (1959: 31; 1966: 163) suggests that the creature’s sensibility must exist at a location. To paraphrase Strawson’s claim more closely: self-consciousness is dependent upon empirical criteria for subject identity, the central criteria of which is the spatiotemporal content of perceptions. Gareth Evans (1982: 227-228) expands on this view to suggest that a mere location is not sufficient, but self-consciousness— in the context of self-discrimination, the “I” is interpreted as a self-indexical implicit in perceptual content— must include a variety of bodies that are hypothesized as forms or structures of sensibility. The creature cannot merely be a geometrical point, but also must occupy space and time by being embodied in a variety of ways, e.g., by having certain sensory organs, by those sensory organs being located in a certain space and time, and by being capable of orienting those sensory organs. This suggests that the first order property of mineness should not be conceived as an actual property, but instead, conceived to be generated by the spatiotemporal content of one’s perceptions.

The second requirement needs an argument. The argument for the dependency of self-discrimination on the embodiment of the creature is important for understanding how perceptions possess the first order property of mineness. So, Descartes was correct when he suggested in the Sixth Meditation, “I am not lodged in my body like a pilot in a vessel,” but, his account of perception did not bring him to this conclusion. In the case of the content of perception, the self of self-discrimination is not lodged in the body, but instead the creature’s sensibility depends upon the body of the creature in such a way that as P. F. Strawson suggests “the character of a person’s perceptual experience is dependent upon facts about his own body” (1959: 84).

I now turn to an interpretation of this quote in order to understand the dependency of sensibility on what I call ‘functional bodies.’ Unfortunately, in the text, P. F. Strawson does not notice that he could do this work. It should also be said to suggest that the creature’s sensibility depends upon facts about his own body does not entail that such facts need be presented to the subject in perception. I am suggesting that the subject needs to detect such embodiment facts, to the extent that we attribute or ascribe contents to the creature, which depend upon a theoretical description that embeds those embodiment facts as central features. In this case it is not the character of the perception of which the creature is aware, but instead the required features that we must rely upon in our characterization of the contents of the creature’s sensibility.

Strawson argues in “Persons” that the content of perception depends upon three functional bodies: the sensation body, the location body, and the orientation body (1959: 87). The sensation body is the body that determines that one’s sensory apparatuses are working properly. For example, if Solo’s eyes are closed, then he cannot see. Similar embodiment facts obtain in other modalities, but I leave these to the reader to ponder. The location body is the body where Solo perceives from— his sensory perspective. For example, Solo’s perception is determined by where his body is located— in the case of seeing, his seeing is determined by where his head is located. The orientation body is the body that determines that one’s perception is not only working properly and in a specific location, but that it is oriented in a certain way. These three functional bodies are determined by facts external to the consciousness of the subject. Do these requirements of the functional bodies enable us to argue for the Others thesis?

It might be suggested that a creature has to recognize that the other perceiver possesses those same embodiment facts as the subject. For example, the hypothetically necessary other creatures might possess the same sensation body, e.g., eyes, ears, nose, hands, or tongue. It might be argued that they must possess the same location body, that if it were to occupy the same space and time as that subject, then it would entertain the same perception. Further, it might be suggested that it must possess the same orientation body, that if it were to orient its body in certain ways, it would be able to access certain objects. However, the contrastive mineness argument for the Others thesis cannot go through, because it assumes that one needs to be aware of the bodies of other perceivers in order to detect the embodiment facts about oneself. However, creatures can be aware of these embodiment facts about themselves without being aware of the bodies of others qua perceivers, because creatures learn these embodiment facts purely by induction from experience.

What I am suggesting here is that it is sufficient to account for the first order property of mineness that we appeal to the quantitative content of perception and functional bodies upon which perception depends. This objection leads us to the first condition of self-consciousness:
Condition 1: Self-consciousness as self-discrimination requires the functional unity of perception, which is that one’s perceptions are one’s own in the following sense: a creature’s perceptions are spatiotemporally structured and are enabled by the embodiment facts of that creature as a perceiver.

In order to meet this condition, is it required that a creature be able to recognize that other creatures have perceptions from certain spaces and times? Further, is it required that the creature recognize other individuals’ embodiment facts? Awareness of others does not seem to be necessary in order to meet condition 1.

The second objection suggests that there is a logical error in the argument from contrastive mineness. The argument depends upon the first order property of mineness being contrastive. The third premise suggests that in order for a creature’s perceptions to be for the creature, that creature would need to contrast such perceptions with perceptions that are for other creatures understood as other perceivers. Phrased with the first person singular possessive pronoun, the required contrast is between perceptions that are mine versus perceptions that are not mine. The contrast between mine and not mine is understood in terms of the contrast between perceptions that are someone’s own and perceptions that are someone else’s. The required contrast is between, on the one hand, the form or structure of perception MINE with the form or structure of perception SOMEONE ELSE’s.

However, the distinction between mine and not-mine does not necessarily commit one to the distinction between mine and someone else’s. Instead, to say that a perception is mine may merely imply a contrast between a perception being mine qua one’s own at a certain space and time and given a certain body, and not one’s own at a certain space and time and given a certain body. I am arguing that in order to make this contrast, it is not necessary to make the assumption of a contrast between two perceivers, one of which is myself as a subject of my own perception and the other of which is not-myself as some other subject of its own perception.

When we say that it is someone’s experience, but it is not mine, we are employing an indefinite specific. However, that we are employing an indefinite specific does not enable us to infer that the embedded description is made definite by being aware of an actual other perceiver. Instead, the content of the indefinite specific is governed by recognition of facts about the creature’s sensibility. The creature does not need to think about its experience or its conspecifics’ experience in order for its perceptions to be owned or possessed. For example, all that is required in order for my experience to be ‘mine’ is for it to be proximally perceived, for it to be an experience as some object or other being present for one.

Although the contrastive mineness argument may hold at other levels of self-consciousness— I will argue that it does in fact hold for self-ascription— this is not so at the level of self-discrimination. It is sufficient to capture the domain of ‘mineness’ as one’s own perception in terms of the content of a creature’s perceptions being a particular individual’s perceptions. For example, when we describe Solo’s sensations and perceptions, we attribute them to his sensibility, located at a certain space and time, and dependent upon certain embodiment facts. We describe both his spatiotemporal relations between his sensibility and the objects of his perception and to the embodiment facts, e.g., that his sensation body, location body and orientation body enable him to be perceptually sensitive to objects in his environment. The required concept of ownership is then understood through such spatiotemporal and embodiment enabling conditions.

summary
I suggested that a self-discriminating creature needs merely to possess a sentience that enables it to detect that its perceptions are enabled by the spatiotemporal form or structures of its sensibility and the recognition of salient embodiment facts. So, although the contrastive mineness argument does not go through, we discovered the first condition of self-consciousness: Self-consciousness as self-discrimination requires the functional unity of perception, which is that one’s perceptions are one’s own in the following sense: a creature’s perceptions are spatiotemporally structured and are enabled by the embodiment facts of that creature as a perceiver.

The argument from self-discrimination to condition 1 also has a positive result. The notion of the first order property of mineness as understood in terms of quantitative and material content helps to rule out an implausible conception of ownership and possession of experiences. There is a mysterious sense of ownership which implies solipsism, one in which perceptions of objects are only one’s own in such a way that they cannot in principle be anyone else’s. Often, philosophers suggest that ownership or possession is an intrinsic feature of the content of the experience in such a way that that type of content cannot be owned or possessed by others. This sense of ownership is also what motivates the assumption that is basic to individualism about self-consciousness, viz. that to attribute a perceptual content to a subject is only merited when that subject is aware of the ownership or possession of the perceptual content. It is this sense or feeling of mineness that is assumed to be in principle inaccessible by other perceivers. However, the argument from self-discrimination to condition 1 implies that ownership and possession is real, and inaccessible to others. However, the inaccessibility that is hypothesized here is unproblematic, because it suggests (following Kant’s aesthetic insight) merely that perceptions occur at a certain space and time or given a certain body. Therefore, the contents of such perceptions are not in principle inaccessible, but only spatiotemporally or materially inaccessible. Moreover, this is a type of inaccessibility that we can live with.

resources on mirror neurons

a virtual workshop on mirror neurons that asks, "What do Mirror Neurons mean?"

papers from "contribution of mirroring processes to human mindreading"...

"Belief about the Self: a Defense of the Property Theory of Content"

An NDPR review of Feit's book. He defines belief in terms of self-ascription. I am interested in what his account of self-ascription is. From what the reviewer quotes, here's his account of the property theory: "Property Theory of Content: Necessarily, a subject, S, believes something if and only if there is a property F such that S self-ascribes F. Belief is a dyadic relation -- viz., self-ascription -- between a subject and a property. The content of a belief is the property that the subject self-ascribes." He must make some assumption about self-ascription in order to argue that the proposition theory of content is incompatible with physicalism. Although Spencer's reply to Feit here is interesting, namely that the Hume/Heimson problem can be approached by articulating the difference between Hume is identical to Hume and Heimson is identical to Heimson, I wonder if one could argue against Feit's assumptions about self-ascription, and for the idea that self-ascription depends upon ascription to a material object, etc. Hume and Heimson are clearly distinct in these respects, and the distinction between material objects is not incompatible with physicalism.

Wittgenstein and Other Minds

A NDPR review of Soren Overgaard's book... He takes a similar approach to Wittgenstein as I am taking to Strawson and Evans, namely one inspired by Avramides' book "Other Minds." The reviewer, Bettina Bergo, sums it up well: it approaches contemporary debates about the problem of "other minds" (WM 2) as a conceptual and ontological problem -- viz., how we conceive of mind in the first place (before turning to determinations concerning the minds of others)..."

consciousness online

i am commenting on a paper on consciousness at the consciousness online conference... check it out...

"Predicative Minds" by Radu Bogdan

There is a new book coming out by Radu Bogdan that argues that predication is central to mindedness. This text will become pivotal in my work, given that I am focusing on self-consciousness as self-ascription and articulating the form of self-ascription in terms of subject-predicate form. Here's a link to the MIT site for Predicative Minds.

new philosophers' carnival

here.

On Myself and Other, Less Important Subjects

There is a new book coming out in August that defends a version of solipism called "Egocentric Presentism". It's called "On Myself and Other, Less Important Subjects" by Caspar Hare from MIT. Hare also has PDFs of recent papers, both published and forthcoming on his website.

The Program for Consciousness Online

The program for Consciousness Online has been finalized.

Nietzsche Mind Conference

Here's a call for papers on Nietzsche's account of the mind and nature. The conference is called "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature." It's the

17th International Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

It's being held at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, 11th – 13th September 2009.

Here's the description:

This conference seeks for the first time to consider Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind in relation to his philosophical naturalism. We hope to consider papers by Nietzsche experts with a background in analytical or continental philosophy as well as from those working in the fields of philosophy of mind and naturalism with a strong interest in Nietzsche.

Potential topics include:
Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity; Nietzsche and the body; Intentionality; Memory and self; Consciousness and self-consciousness; Nietzsche and biology; Epiphenomenalism; Nietzsche and psychology; Mind-body problem; Art, mind, nature; Awareness, emotion, cognition; Unconsciousness; Perspectivism and the self; Self and otherness; Self-awareness and self-knowledge; Mind as emergent phenomenon; Nietzsche and neuroscience; Nietzsche’s naturalism; Agency and freedom; Mind, world, brain; Intersubjectivity and value; Narrative / non-narrative self.

We invite submissions for 30-minute papers on the above or related topics. Please send an abstract of a maximum of 400 words and a short CV (no longer than one page) via email by 15 March 2009 to

fnsox /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk."

review of the situated self

i never posted a link to my review of J. T. Ismael's book "The Situated Self"...

Consciousness and the Self

There is a conference coming up on consciousness and the self at Cal State at Fullerton.

The 39^th CSU Fullerton Philosophy Symposium

Theme:

Consciousness and the Self

Self-awareness, Self-thought, Self-reference, and Self-knowledge.

Date: April 29-30, 2009

Location: California State University at Fullerton

Speakers

(In alphabetical order)

Alex Byrne. MIT. Title: "Knowing What I Want" [Abstract]

David Chalmers. Australian National University. Title: "Consciousness and Self-Knowledge"

Fred Dretske. Duke University. Title: "I Think I Think, Therefore I Am... I Think" [Abstract]

John Perry. Stanford University. Title: "Thinking and Talking about the Self" [Abstract]

Jesse Prinz. CUNY Graduate Center. Title: "Waiting for the Self" [Abstract]

Eric Schwitzgebel. UC Riverside. Title: "Self-Unconsciousness" [Abstract]

Sydney Shoemaker. Cornell University. Title: "Personhood and Consciousness" [Abstract]

Program

(Designed by Professor Mitch Avila, Department of Philosophy, CSU Fullerton)

Symposium Précis

Background Readings

Sponsored by:

The Philosophy Department of California State University at Fullerton

Dean of College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Vice President of Academic Affairs, The Philosophy Club, The Philosophy Alumni Club, and the Inter Club Council

Faculty Organizers:

JeeLoo Liu, Heather Battaly

Associate Professors

Department of Philosophy

CSU Fullerton

Student Organizing Committee Chairs:

Pamela Chui, President of the Philosophy Club

Mimi Vong, Vice President of the Philosophy Club

Student Organizing Committee Members: Kyle Bova, Farzad Mozafarzadeh

Department of Philosophy

CSU Fullerton

For further information, please contact JeeLoo Liu

Symposium Location:

The Symposium takes place on the campus of California State University, Fullerton. All sessions will be held in the Titan Theater in the Titan Student Union (TSU), except the Thursday afternoon (April 30th) sessions which will be held in the Ontiveros Room of the TSU. See TSU map.

Lodging Information: We will be reserving a block of rooms at Fullerton Marriott and negotiate for a discounted rate. Please let JeeLoo Liu know if you are interested in attending this Symposium so that we can decide how many rooms to reserve for this event. (Maps and Transportation from nearby Airports)

2701 East Nutwood Avenue
Fullerton, California 92831 USA
Phone: 1-714-738-7800
Fax: 1-714-738-0288

Advance Registration Form

Parking Information: The cost of a daily permit is $8.00. Daily permits may be purchased in Lots: A, E, and G during all hours in which permits are required and are valid in all student lots and parking structures. Campus map

Most visitors attending the symposium will want to park in either Lot A, G, or E: Lot A is at the corner of State College and Yorba Linda; Lot G is west of the Arboretum; and Lot E is alongside the 57 Freeway, north of the Marriott Hotel.

You must purchase a parking permit. Permit machines are open all day and can be found in Lots A, E, and G. The cost of a daily permit is $8.00. The yellow permit machines accept one and five dollar bills only. After 6:00pm your permit is valid in all Faculty/Staff lots except Lots F, H and I. A parking map and driving directions can be found at http://parking.fullerton.edu/Maps

New Book: Others in Mind by Philippe Rochat

There is a new book on self-consciousness with particular emphasis on the self-other relationship:
http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521729659

Here is the description on the Cambridge site:

Why are we so prone to guilt and embarrassment? Why do we care so much about how others see us, about our reputation? What are the origins of such afflictions? Philippe Rochat argues that it is because we are members of a species that evolved the unique propensity to reflect upon themselves as an object of thoughts; an object of thoughts that is potentially evaluated by others. But, the argument goes, this propensity comes from a basic fear: the fear of rejection, of being socially "banned" and ostracized. Others in Mind is about self-consciousness, how it originates and how it shapes our lives. Self-consciousness is arguably the most important and revealing of all psychological problem.

I did enjoy reading one of Rochat's essay in the anthology by Zahavi and Grünbaum:

Rochat, P. (2004). The emergence of self awareness as co-awareness in early development. In Zahavi & Grünbaum (Eds.). The strucure and development of self-consciousness (Pp. 1-20). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

positive comments about the CUNY graduate center philosophy program

leiter reports' positive comments about the graduate center's philosophy program

is self-perception a form of self-consciousness?

Premise 1: self-consciousness is immune to error through misidentification.
Premise 2: self-perception is a form of self-consciousness.
Premise 3: self-perception is not immune to error through misidentification.

Should we conclude that self-perception is not a form of self-consciousness
or that self-consciousness is not immune to error through misidentification?

self-consciousness, self-activity and the agency of the thinking subject

‘Since one's becoming human in the world is first and foremost ‘self-activity,’ the process of determining one's existence or in being oneself in every existence, and since, on the other hand, this self-being is only made possible by rendering objectivity passive as a being-with-others and for others, laboring upon objectivity is essentially burdensome.’
— Herbert Marcuse On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics

Self-Consciousness, Self-Activity, and the Agency of the Thinking Subject

‘The consciousness of myself in the representation I is no intuition at all, but a merely intellectual representation of the self-activity of a thinking subject’ (Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason. (1781: B228).[FN 1]

Kant’s notion of ‘the self-activity of the thinking subject’ (Kant 1781: B228)— is an important concept in Kantian philosophy of mind and action, but unfortunately it has not been central in interpretation of Kant’s work. I argue that getting clear about self-activity can help resolve a twofold demand in Kant’s philosophy of mind and action, one interpretive demand and one philosophical demand. The interpretive demand is that Kant creates a bifurcation between the subject of theoretical reason (the thinker) and the subject of practical reason (the agent). The philosophical demand is that Kant’s account of self-consciousness and spontaneity [FN 2] needs an analysis that accounts for both of these central and related concepts.

The interpretive demand is that self-consciousness and spontaneity both play pivotal roles in Kant’s critical philosophy, specifically in the transcendental deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, self-consciousness and spontaneity also play a role in Kant’s practical philosophy, especially since being a rational agent requires being a self-conscious and spontaneous being. However, Kant’s transition from the theoretical subject (the thinker) to practical subject (the agent) present us with a lacuna which makes it seem as if there are two Kantian selves. On the one hand, there is the noumenal self, which is unknown and unknowable, but which is active and whose experience is subject to the categories and the moral laws. On the other hand, there is the phenomenal self, which is passive and whose experience is subject to both the forms of space and time and to natural laws. Kant’s account of the theoretical subject can make it difficult to make sense of how a thinking subject can be a practical subject, since the thinker and the agent inhabit two independent realms. I call this the problem of the bifurcation of the subject. To employ a guiding metaphor, my resolution of this problem attempts to straddle the theoretical/practical bifurcation by focusing on the centrality of the self-activity of the subject.

The philosophical demand is that contemporary philosophy of mind (whether Kantian or not) still awaits a general account of self-consciousness.[FN 3] Further, there has been a resurgence of interest in Kant’s notion of self-consciousness and spontaneity given the recent work of John McDowell (1994, 1994a, 1998). To address the philosophical demand, I argue that self-activity is a pure practical activity that is hypothesized to account for self-consciousness and spontaneity. In order to provide an analysis of self-activity, I account for the agency implicit in the concept in four ways (neither exhaustive nor exclusive): the act-object model: self-consciousness is a spontaneous act; the action model: self-consciousness is an intentional action; the activated capacity model: self-consciousness is an innate concept of self that is activated; the practical activity model: self-consciousness is a type of practical activity. It is suggested that self-activity is a constructive process that constitutes oneself as a subject; self-consciousness and spontaneity are active faculties of synthesizing one’s own representations.

Once I have addressed the interpretative and philosophical demands, I consider two contemporary positions on the relation between self-consciousness and agency: on the one hand, McDowell’s position on self-consciousness, spontaneity and agency, viz., that agency is constitutive of self-consciousness and the self (1994a: Ch. 5; 1998: 141) and on the other hand, Galen Strawson’s position on self-consciousness, spontaneity and agency, viz., that agency is not (entirely) relevant to elucidating self-consciousness and the self (1999: 492–3). I mediate between McDowell and Strawson by focusing on the notion of self-activity.

Before I go any further, I provide some background concerning self-consciousness, spontaneity, and self-activity.

Self-consciousness is usually understood in terms of ‘I’-thoughts. We are not interested in all thoughts, actions or perceptions that an individual might entertain concerning himself, but instead only ‘I’-thoughts— self-conscious thoughts, actions or perceptions. For instance, Oedipus was thinking about himself when he thought that the Slayer of Laius should be killed, but not thinking about himself as himself, or thinking about himself self-consciously, for Oedipus might not realize that he himself was the slayer of Laius.[FN 4] If he were to hold a self-conscious attitude towards himself, then he might think, act and perceive in different ways, namely self-consciously. Self-consciousness is being aware of oneself as oneself through a reflexive mode of presentation.

In Kant’s work, spontaneity may be construed to mean any of the following: (1) if aligned with the understanding, spontaneity is a theoretical concept for thoughts’ active (as opposed to passive) contribution in experience (A51/B75; A68/B93; A126; B130; B132; B150); (2) where aligned with the productive synthesis of the imagination, spontaneity is an active and constructive capacity that generates and aligns representations (B152); (3) where aligned with freedom, spontaneity is robust thought-willing that is tied to the freedom of the will or autonomy (Allison (2004) and Pippin (1987)); (4) where aligned with the reason as a faculty, it means the rational necessitation of thinking (i.e., not being constrained by external empirical factors but by the principles of reason alone).

What exactly is self-activity? Self-activity is a constructive process that is governed by rules or principles of synthesis. Kant suggests, ‘we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves, and that among all representations combination is the only one that is not given through objects but can be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an act of its self-activity’ (B130). Self-activity is a function (as opposed to an affection) that begins with a definite input, e.g., an already synthesized proposition, enacts a procedure, and produces an output.
We might provide the rules or principles that govern the process of self-activity, which might be called self-synthesis. The input rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-activity to occur, the input must be a synthesized representation, a unitary representation— the object— which is a proposition, a fact or state of affairs (which suggests that Kant’s three-fold synthesis is already in operation). The procedural rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-synthesis to occur, the procedure must be a synthesizing activity, which involves the distinguishing and relating of the subject to the proposition, such that it determines ‘I think that P.’ In this sense, Kant’s I-think is the process of distinguishing and relating the subject’s thought that P to the subject and distinguishing and relating the subject to the subject’s thought that P. The output rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-synthesis to occur, the output must represent the experience as the subject’s own, such that ‘P’ is an experience for the subject. ‘I think that P’ determines that ‘P’ appears as the subject’s own experience.[FN 5]

We now turn to the problem of the bifurcation of the subject. I will discuss self-consciousness in terms of the I-think. The key text that I will consider is in the following: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing to me’ (B131-2).[FN 6] One way to approach the problem of the bifurcation of the subject, is to inquire into the logical status of the I-think proposition and ask whether it is analytic or synthetic, and then show how the bifurcation problem makes the argument for the I-think proposition difficult.

If the proposition ‘In order for a representation to be mine, then the I-think must be able to accompany it’ is analytic, then this is because the concept my representation includes the predicate I can think it. That I can think a proposition, therefore, derives from or is explicated from its being a representation that is mine. But, this leaves unexplained what makes it possible that I can think a proposition. And, if the principle were merely analytic, then its truth would be trivial and inconsequential. Thus, the I-think principle is synthetic and depends upon a synthetic activity (A79/B105), which I am suggesting is accounted for in terms of the procedural rule of self-activity. The possibility that I can think a proposition requires that the subject synthesize its thinking with the proposition.

So, if I am right that the synthetic formulation of the principle is prior, then Kant needs to argue that there is a theoretical requirement that we posit or postulate the subject of self-activity. If positing or postulating self-activity as a synthetic activity is what makes self-consciousness possible, what is Kant’s argument for this synthetic activity? The argument is a constructive argument from the I-think proposition in order for a representation to be mine, then the I-think must be able to accompany it to a conclusion about the consequent of that principle the I-think is able to accompany a representation because I posit or postulate the I-think as the self-activity of the thinking subject.

Now that I have made clear what Kant must argue, I want to show that the bifurcation problem of the Kantian subject makes this argument quite difficult for Kant. On the one hand, if the I-think is merely formal or theoretical, then we cannot construe the self-activity of the subject as a process that a material and practical subject undertakes, since a formal or theoretical subject is merely a diaphanous thinker, while a material and practical subject of self-activity needs to be understood in terms of being ‘a substantial presence in the world’ (McDowell (1994)). On the other hand, if the I-think is merely material, then we cannot construe the self-activity of the subject as anything but the upshot of a epiphenomenal process— something that merely happens to a subject— rather than something that a subject undertakes as an expression of its practical rational agency. The Kantian subject straddles this theoretical/practical bifurcation, awaiting a means to bridge the gap.

It might be suggested that if we provide an analysis of self-activity in terms of the basic Kantian taxonomy, then we can make sense of how self-activity resolves this bifurcation without bridging the gap. One place that may offer a theoretical resolution is where Kant suggests, ‘consciousness of itself (apperception) is the simple representation of the I, and if all of the manifold in the subject were given self-actively through that alone, then the inner intuition would be intellectual’ (my italicized emphasis). But, Kant argues that the I-think is not an in intuition, intellectual or empirical (B422-423). Further, he argues that neither is it represented intellectually (B406), however, that if it were represented, then it would be represented as an intellectual intuition.

I take this to suggest that self-activity is something that is posited or postulated to occur as a pure (i.e., non-empirical) practical activity— in more everyday language, self-activity is something that we cannot observe that we do. When we claim there is a process of self-activity, we are making a theoretical claim about a ground of self-consciousness— the consequent of which is empirical self-consciousness, something that we can and do observe. To drive this point home, it should be noticed that self-activity does not fit in the taxonomy of mental states in CPR (A320/B376). Instead, it is a special type of pure practical activity independent of Kant’s taxonomy of the mind.

Further, it should be noticed that the dispositional couching of the I-think— that it ‘must be able to accompany’ as a dispositional addition to the categories— provides evidence for the self-activity interpretation. If self-activity is a constructive process, a skill or ability, then rather than being accounted for in representational terms, it is accounted for in dispositional terms. Self-activity is not something that is thought about, but rather something that is an activity; it is not a descriptive representation, but instead a procedural representation. And, as such an activity, the Kantian subject would exist as a subject by engaging in the self-activity of the thinking subject, what Fichte later called the self-positing of the subject. This suggests that the logical subject of the I-think is an existential category, not a conceptual or intuitional category. But, assuming that self-activity is something that we do, then what type of mental agency is implicit in this activity? I approach this question by considering 4 models of mental agency.

Suppose we take the example, ‘I am thinking about Meteora’ as the self-conscious representation in question. The interpretation of self-consciousness as self-activity suggests that being able to entertain that thought is something that a subject does— in order for a representation to be mine, I have to make it mine. And, the self-activity of the thinking subject is what is posited or postulated as what makes it mine.
The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of an act-object model. The model of mental acts would suggest that when I entertain the thought ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ then the ‘I’ engages in a spontaneous act, such as a judgment that unites the ‘I think’, on the one hand, and the ‘thinking about Meteora,’ on the other hand. The act, then is a discrete performance that determines that a representation (in this case, a thought) is a self-conscious representation. The act itself distinguishes and relates the subject to the thought about Meteora, which is the object and thus allows for self-consciousness. Kant suggests this interpretation when he writes that combination or synthesis is ‘an act of the spontaneity of the power of representation’ (B130). But, this raises two problems for the act-object model, since the concept of an act implies an act of X in two ways.

First, an act of X implies that there are special subjects of mental acts, such as inner agents of thought. Descartes suggests something similar in the Fourth Meditation when we says that thoughts are acts or accidents of a thinking thing. Descartes suggests that we might avoid error by restraining the will, which offers a separable contribution to judgment than the content of thoughts. However, to assimilate Kant to Descartes on this account would be a grave mistake, since such an assimilation would ignore Kant’s injunctions in the Paralogisms against inferring a substantial subject— in this case, a subject of spontaneous acts— from the representation I-think.

Second, an act of X implies that there is an act of doing such and such, e.g., act of attending or focusing upon a mental object, e.g., ‘thinking about Meteora.’ But experiences are not always experienced as objects, unless they are introspected; and Kant’s I-think does not entail introspection, but rather is more basic or primitive. The act-object model entails that the awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own involve a subject which relates the subject— the synthesizer— to the object— the experiential input as a subjective object of attention and focus. However, the Kantian notion of experience does not allow for the idea that experiencings are the intentional objects of subjects of experience. Experiencings are not the objects of experiencers, but instead are the determinations of experiencers. Experience, for Kant, is not something that merely happens in us or to us, but instead, insofar as it is our own, it is something that we engage or enact— experience is something that we do.

The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of a type of mental action. Peacocke (2007) suggests that self-consciousness should be construed as a type of mental action. When one thinks ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ then one is trying to think about oneself and one’s experiences. And, since trying is basic to action, self-consciousness should be understood in terms of a special type of mental action. Often, Peacocke suggests, one has a sense of one’s mental action, e.g., when one is trying to solve a logic problem.

The first objection to the action model is that it merely puts off the account of self-consciousness to an account of intentional description. In order to explain how the I-think operates in ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ it does not help to describe the I-think as requiring an independent specification of the intention to I-think. Self-consciousness cannot be understood under an intentional description of an action, because specifying the intention would also involve an I-think, e.g., ‘I am trying to self-consciously think about Meteora’; and thus appeal to intentions would presuppose self-consciousness, not elucidate it.

The second objection suggests that the action model misrepresents the phenomenology, because self-consciousness sometimes seems to merely happen, e.g., when I find myself thinking, ‘I never booked the hotel!’ In this case, I have not tried or intended to think that thought, but instead it merely strikes me as a self-conscious thought. It seems that Peacocke has taken the phenomenology of hard philosophical thinking and applied it to self-conscious thinking.[FN 7]

The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of the activation of a mental capacity, i.e., an innate concept that enables one to become aware of one’s experiences as one’s own. This is sometimes how Kant’s I-think is interpreted, since the categories must be presupposed for experience is sometimes taken to suggest that the pure concepts are innate (in spite of his rejection of the innateness of concepts). If the I-think is affixed to the categories and is couched in dispositional terms (‘must be able to accompany’), then it is inferred, the I-think must be an innate capacity. According to the activated capacity model, when we consider ‘I am thinking about Meteora’, then that the I-think ‘must be able to accompany all of my representations’ suggests that I must have the mental resources— the innate concepts— of the I-think that enables me to entertain such self-conscious thoughts.

However, this inference harbors a confusion. That the I-think requires a dispositional analysis should not be taken to entail that the capacity for self-consciousness is an innate mental capacity. This argument confuses a logical precondition with a genetic precondition, but the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. The inquiry into what makes X possible (in this case, the logic of X or the necessary conditions of self-consciousness) is not always answered by way of the inquiry into what makes the development of X possible (in this case, the genesis of X or the enabling conditions of self-consciousness). It should, however, be granted that there are genetic preconditions of self-consciousness, but the point is that these cannot be assumed to be available as a means to articulate the structure of self-consciousness.

The best model for analyzing self-consciousness is the self-activity of the thinking subject. This view becomes explicit in Fichte’s account of self-positing— ‘the I posits itself, and it exists by virtue of this mere self-positing’ (1964 (I): 96). Self-positing is a type of intransitive self-consciousness— or consciousness of self which does not entail a particular object— that presupposes nothing but a type of activity, i.e., the activity of self-positing. The historical upshot of the interpretation of the I-think as self-activity is that Fichte’s notion of self-positing is already alive in the Kantian notion of self-activity.

This might be taken to suggest that we must be aware of such self-activity in order to posit or postulate it. However, we are not aware of self-activity, but instead, we are aware of the need or requirement of self-activity. Susan Hurley makes this claim when she suggests that Kant’s notion of self-consciousness is the ‘consciousness of the generic requirement of spontaneous synthesizing activity’ (1998: 65). We need to presuppose self-activity in order to account for how our experiences are our own.
I have suggested, then that self-consciousness qua the I-think is the spontaneous activity that accompanies representations which makes them one’s own. In experience one becomes a subject of experience by engaging in self-activity, which involves the practical activity of self-positing oneself as a thinking subject. Such self-activity is neither a static event in a time-series (an act), nor a trying or intending (an action), nor an activation or triggering (an activated capacity), but instead, it is a synthetic procedure which is an activity.

This account of self-consciousness and spontaneity as a type of mental agency raises a further problem, one that has played out in a recent debate between John McDowell (1994a; 1994b; 1998) and Galen Strawson (2003). Instead of discussing their specific positions, I want to gesture towards two positions on spontaneity and illustrate how self-activity can resolve the conflict between such positions.

On the one hand, there is the position that spontaneity is absolute and voluntary. As Pippin suggests, Kant argues for an ‘absolute spontaneity of apperception’(1987: 466), in which the self-active agent of thought is a transcendental and noumenal being whose determinations— whether theoretical, practical and aesthetic— are not relative to any constraint. Further, as McDowell suggests, ‘judging, making up our minds what to think, is something for which we are, in principle responsible— something we freely do, as opposed to something that merely happens in our lives’ (1998: 434). An absolutist/voluntarist about spontaneity would suggest that the judgment of an agent is an absolutely free and voluntary activity in which a subject engages.

On the other hand, there is the position that spontaneity is relative and involuntary. As McDowell suggests in a different context, ‘When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it’ (1994a: 5), and in this sense spontaneity is relative to spontaneity-at-large, or what Sellarsians call the logical space of reasons— the realm of norm-governed linguistic activity. And, as Strawson (2003) argues, ‘most of our thoughts— our thought-contents— just happen...in this sense they are spontaneous or ‘instinctive’, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, ‘involuntary, not due to conscious volition.’ A relativist/involuntarist about spontaneity would suggest that the judgment of an agent is a relative and involuntary happening to which a subject is largely passive.

These two positions place us in an oscillation between two poles of interpretation of spontaneity: on the one hand, the idea that spontaneity is absolute and voluntary and, on the other hand, the idea that spontaneity is relative and involuntary. However, self-activity provides a resolution because if self-consciousness and spontaneity are understood in terms of self-activity, then we can make clear how spontaneity is not absolute and not involuntary, while at the same time allowing for an interpretation of how spontaneity is relative, while nevertheless being voluntary. I provide here an outline of such a view.

If we conceive of self-activity as the mental agency exercised in self-consciousness— self-positing— and account for spontaneity in terms of self-activity, then we can resolve the oscillation between these two positions. The absolutist/voluntarist position makes the inference from spontaneity as a type of absolute agency, to the robust implications that some notions of agency entail. But, there is reason to think that Kant’s notion of spontaneity is not absolute. According to Kant, all practical agents are subject to the moral law, since this is what guides action in general. We act autonomously when we follow the moral law, or act from duty; and we act heteronomously when we do not. A similar analysis can be provided for spontaneity. If we do not act on the principle of practical reason, then we are heteronomous, and we would become what Kant calls an ‘it (the thing) which thinks’ (A346/B404). This might suggest that self-activity is an achievement of practical reason, and is therefore not absolute.[FN 8]

The key passage in Kant’s practical philosophy for understanding the relation between rational laws and freedom is found in the second critique (1788: 5). Transformed to illuminate spontaneity, it might have read: spontaneity is the ratio essendi of the laws of Thought; the laws of thinking are the ratio cognoscendi of spontaneity. We learn to become aware of ourselves through practical engagement within the form of life which initiates us into spontaneity-at-large, or the laws of thought as embodied in the logical space of reasons— the realm of norm-governed linguistic activity. It is only by being constrained by such laws of thought that we become aware of ourselves as relatively spontaneous thinkers.

It might be supposed that if our spontaneity is relative, then it therefore must also be involuntary. However, that our spontaneity is relative does not mean that, as Strawson suggests, our thought is merely born out of ‘our natural inner working’ (2003: 252).[FN 9] Simply because spontaneity is relative does not mean it is relative to the causes beyond our control, for this would make our self-consciousness and spontaneity a mere epiphenomenon. When I think ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ it is not the upshot of a passive inner self, since such a view would suggest that self-conscious thought is generated in what McDowell calls ‘a specially conceived interior realm’ (1994a: 90).

So, if we can construe self-activity as a type of self-positing that is rationally constrained and relative to the space of reasons, then we do not have to be committed to absolutism about spontaneity. But, neither do we have to infer from the idea that spontaneity is relative, that it is therefore involuntary. The freedom of self-consciousness and spontaneity are ultimately a form of rational constraint— the rational constraint upon one’s self-activity.

I have argued that self-activity helps us to resolve the problem of the bifurcation of the Kantian subject by elucidating how self-consciousness and spontaneity are practical activities. I mediated the debate between the absolutist/voluntarist and relativist/involuntarist conceptions of spontaneity. I argued that agency of the thinking subject— the self-activity of the thinking subject— is a pure practical activity of positing or postulating the subject in the world.

FOOTNOTES
[FN 1:] I use the Guyer/Wood translation (1998) of the Critique of Pure Reason. When quoting Kant I use the original publication date and refer to the section with the academy edition numbers.
[FN 2:] Spontaneity is used sometimes to translate Spontaneität; sometimes, Selbsttätigkeit; and other times, von Selbst. Sometimes Kant’s passages suggest that spontaneity means the free willing of actions, and sometimes a more relative spontaneity, i.e., as defined in the OED as ‘occurring without external cause or stimulus.’
[FN 3:] Uriah Kriegel (2008) suggests this in a recent encyclopedia article.
[FN 4:] Cf. Gareth Evans (1982: Ch. 7). For other elucidations of self-consciousness in terms of a reflexive mode of presentation see Casteneda (1999), and Perry (1979).
[FN 5:] Saying ‘appears’ might suggest that the I-think is understood by reflection in inner sense. However, the inner sense hypothesis is misguided because, as Sellars suggests, we gain the I-think not ‘by reflecting on the self as object, but by reflecting on its conceptual activities’ (1971: 11§20), i.e., the central activity of which is self-activity.
[FN 6:] There are other quotes that illuminate Kant’s notions of apperception, the I-think and self-consciousness, but this quote is usually taken to be central to Kant’s account, and I follow this trend. Other central quotes include B138 (the identity version of the I-think) and B422-3 (the I-think footnote).
[FN 7:] From the fact that we do not seem to be intending or trying to self-consciously think should not be taken to suggest that mental action is not involved, but it does rule out a premise that appeals to the sense that we are intending or trying which plays a role in an argument that self-consciousness is a type of mental action.
[FN 8:] It could also be argued that if Kant had a notion of absolute spontaneity in the First Critique, then the problem of making reason practical in the Groundwork and Second Critique would have already been solved.
[FN 9:] Patricia Kitcher (1990: 253) also suggests that Kant’s notion of spontaneity is best understood as relative spontaneity in this way, i.e., that its being relative is its being relative to the context of the mind.


Bibliography

Allison, H. (2004). Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
Cassam, Q. (1994). Self and World. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Casteneda, (1999). The Phenomenologic of the I Ed. J. Hart and T. Kapitan
Evans, G. (1982) The Varieties of Reference Ed. J. McDowell Oxford: Oxford University Press
Fichte, G. (1964). J. G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Ed. Lauth, Jacobs, and Gliwitsky. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.
Hurley, S. (1998) Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Kant, I. (1781). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press (1998)
Kant, I. (1788). Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. M. Gregor and A. Reath Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1998)
Kitcher, P. (1990) Kant’s Transcendental Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Klass, G. (2003). ‘A Framework for Reading Kant on Apperception: Seven Interpretive Questions’ Kant-Studien 94: 80-94
McDowell, J. (1994a). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
McDowell, J. (1994b) ‘Referring to Oneself’ The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson Ed. Hahn Open Court Publishing
McDowell, J. (1998). ‘Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant and Intentionality’ Journal of Philosophy 95: 431-491
Peacocke, C. (2007) ‘Mental Action and Self-Awareness’ Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing 358-376
Perry, J. (1979) ‘The problem of the Essential Indexical’ Nous 13: 3-21
Pippin, R. (1987) ‘Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17(2): 449-476
Sellars, W. (1970). ‘... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks’ Essays in Philosophy and its History Dortrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co (1975) 62–90
Strawson, G. (1999). ‘The self and the SESMET’ Models of the Self Ed. Gallagher, S. and J. Shear Thorverton, UK: Imprint Academic
Strawson, G. (2003). ‘Mental Ballistics or The Involuntariness of spontaneity’ Proc. Arist. Soc. 227-56
Kriegel, U. (2007). ‘Self-Consciousness’ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/self-con.htm [1 May 2008].

george herbert mead

there is a revised version of the stanford article on g. h. mead, a supporter of the Others thesis.

commentary on kriegel on conceptual distinctions and self-consciousness

The basic issue I have with this section of the article is that the distinctions are stipulative and largely mask terminological assumptions rather than do real work in the elucidation of self-consciousness. There is an interesting question about what reason one would have to hold a conceptual distinction that was not at the same time a real distinction.

If we think that there are transcendental arguments, for instance, for a distinction between self-conscious subjects and self-conscious thoughts, but then for empirical reasons we are led to dismiss the possibility of self-conscious thoughts, then shouldn’t we give up the conceptual distinction— shouldn’t we be driven to stop thinking that way? And, if it turns out that a conclusion of a transcendental inference is discovered to be true by different empirical means, then shouldn’t we congratulate ourselves for having concluded something true, but nevertheless recognize that our transcendental argument is no better for it?

Here is Kriegel’s transgression of the principle elucidated above: “When we say “My thought that p is self-conscious” [self-conscious thoughts] and “I am self-conscious,” [self-conscious subjects] the property we ascribe is in all likelihood different.”

But, this is an argument from a conceptual distinction to (at least) a hypothesis of a property distinction. I think in general these inferences are valid, and helpful for inquiry in the emerging science of self-consciousness. But, that Kriegel says that the properties are “a separate matter” seems to rule this inference out. There are two questions (which I find myself asking often when reading Kriegel’s work): (1) What significance does what we say have for what conceptual distinctions are defensible? And (2) are there constraints on what’s admissible as “something we say”?

An answer to the first question embeds an argument. What we say about self-consciousness, or employing the term ‘self-consciousness,’ suggests that certain linguistic distinctions are assumed. Conceptual distinctions can be inferred from the things we say. There are such conceptual distinctions as are evinced by what we say about self-consciousness. This conclusion is innocuous simply because there may be no other way to determine whether conceptual distinctions obtain except by reading them off our utterances. How else would we discover conceptual distinctions?

But, the practice of inferring conceptual distinctions from things we say can be more or less liberal, which brings us to the second question. Unless there is some constraint upon the admissible “something we say,” then we will find our philosophical landscape teeming with an overabundance of conceptual distinctions none of which we can use.

To make this less abstract and metaphilosophical, I want to point out that the claim “my thought that p is self-conscious” is certainly something we can say, but it is likely only something that philosophers would say, and philosophers that are employing a certain theory about what’s admissible as “something we say.” Only theorists that think that thoughts can be self-conscious think that that is something we should say. But, what reason do we have independent of the self-representationalist theory of consciousness and thought to think that? Very little.

comment on transcendental arguments

There is a long history of criticism of transcendental arguments (TAs) in general, i.e., whether or not they are valid and even if they are valid, because of the nature of the assumptions that enter into TAs, what is the extent of the import of the TA conclusions. First, what are transcendental arguments? Transcendental arguments in general are partly (though not entirely) non-empirical (sometimes anti-skeptical) arguments that are concerned with arguing for the necessary conditions of some type of knowledge, language, or thought.

In Kant’s terminology, TAs are concerned to argue for what makes experience in general possible, by arguing for what is necessary for that experience in general. TAs usually begin with a premise which states some fact or state of affairs about our mental life which most would accept. In the context of concern about self-consciousness, that for instance, some being or other is self-conscious or at least appears to be self-conscious. Also, sometimes this general statement about our mental lives is couched in the form of a definition. The argument proceeds by arguing that some other fact or state of affairs (or sets thereof) is a necessary condition of the first.

Historically, the most common context for discussing TAs is in Kant’s argument against the external world skeptic in his “Refutation of Idealism” Note, however, that Kant never used the term ‘Transcendenal Argument’. There are other transcendental arguments, however that are concerned with overturning skepticism of other minds, skepticism about the need for a substance metaphysics, the reality of causation, or the principle of simultaneity. But, TAs are not limited in principle to arguments against skepticism. (Partly, because skepticism is no real threat anyway, in much the same way that the smoke and mirrors of a haunted house is no threat to the continued existence of the objectively ordered world outside the haunted house.) Rather, they may be employed in the service of conclusions that attempt to argue for the theoretical necessity of considering certain conceptions or perceptions given a proper theory or account of some subject matter.

For instance in the philosophy of mind and language, one could interpret Sellars’ arguments in EPM about the dependence of thought upon language, or Putnam’s and Burge’s arguments about the externalist dependence of terms or concepts upon features of our environment or social context, or Davidson’s arguments about the dependence of subjectivity upon intersubjectivity, as types of TAs.

There are a variety of general objections to the use of transcendental arguments, which mostly focus on whether or not such “strong” TAs are effective at overcoming skepticism. I will not rehearse the objections here. Here are some references, however: Rosenberg's "Transcendental Arguments Revisited"; Gram's "Must we revisit Transcendental Arguments?"; Stroud's "Transcendental Arguments"; Harrison's "Transcendental Arguments and Idealism"; and Cassam's "Transcendental Arguments, Transcendental Synthesis, and Transcendental Idealism" and his book Self and World, which is the most recent text to employ mostly trasncendental arguments.

Though all these debates are interesting, but I don't feel like entering a commentary here (Maybe later...). I will merely say what type of TA that I want use. The TA I want to make room for is what I will call a ‘modest world-directed transcendental argument'. I think if Kant were to back a type of transcendental argument, this would be the kind he (or at least Sellars' Kant) would back. The transcendental deduction should be read as attempting to argue for the conceptual legitimacy of a concept or set of concepts for use in the foundations of the metaphysics of any science. Transcendental arguments are modest in the sense that they only inform you about your theoretical commitments to such and such. But, one's theoretical commitments should not be taken, for all their modesty, to fail to be world-directed.

The goal in the context of concern with self-consciousness is to argue for the conceptual legitimacy of a certain concept (or set of concepts). For instance, I am arguing that given various levels of self-consciousness, certain necessary conditions obtain. (1) self-consciousness as self-discrimination requires a self-world distinction; (2) self-consciousness as self-presentation requires an objective perception of the body; (3) self-consciousness as self-synthesis requires agency as a kind of purposive activity; (4) self-consciousness as self-ascription requires psychological others; (5) self-consciousness as self-reference requires linguistic others. The general claim is that there are certain conditions that a proper metaphysics of the science of self-consciousness need to have in play, otherwise such inquiry is illegitimate.

Andrew Brook offers a good quote that sums this position up: “[TAs] reveal the constraints on any such phenomenon occurring, and they reveal what must be true of any possible system in relation to which that phenomenon could occur…transcendental arguments are a way of finding constraints of what the unobservable antecedents could be like” (Brook 1994: 12). So, when we ask "what makes self-consciousness possible?" we are asking what the unobservable antecedents could be like, i.e., we are asking about the logic of the phenomenon in question and determining what makes that phenomenon possible.

abstract for "five kinds of self-consciousness"

Self-consciousness has many faces. I argue in this paper that there are (at least) five kinds of self-consciousness: self-discrimination; self-presentation; self-synthesis; self-ascription; and self-reference. The first kind, self-discrimination is more minimal than the other levels. Self-discrimination is the ability to differentiate between oneself and the world. Self-presentation is the perception of oneself through proprioception, defined as perceiving one’s entire body. Self-synthesis is a type of theoretical self-consciousness that provides for the first-personal character of experience. Self-ascription is the ascription of experiences to oneself as a psychological subject. Self-reference is the reference to oneself with the first person singular pronoun “I.” I argue that generally, each level after self-discrimination becomes increasingly robust, although there are interesting counterexamples to this. I also urge that the most robust level I discuss should not be privileged as the only means to articulate self-consciousness. I provide conceptual and empirical arguments for the distinctness between each kind of self-consciousness. In a closing section, I end with a discussion of the significance of these levels for the development of self-consciousness.

more commentary on Kriegel's article

The next two paragraphs in Kriegel’s article are introductions to later sections. But, I want to lodge some general introductory remarks about these introductory grafs. Both grafs start with the claim that there are “relevant” epistemic and semantic peculiarities for self-consciousness. (“The relevant epistemic peculiarities are mainly those associated with the alleged infallibility and self-intimation of self-consciousness...” “The relevant semantic peculiarities have emerged in recent work in philosophy of language and mind...”) What makes them relevant? Are there other peculiarities that are not relevant? Then, is this a short step to arguing that these are not relevant to self-consciousness? Is there a non-question begging way to sort relevancies? In both the epistemic and semantic case, it will come clear that they are not relevant to self-consciousness.

This can be made clearer by pointing out that an account of the knowledge of X may not be achieved without an analysis of the consciousness of X, but an account of the consciousness of X can be achieved in the absence of the knowledge of X. For instance, Rosenthal (2005) account of the consciousness of mental states proceeds without an account of the knowledge of mental states.

To turn to the semantic case, an account of the consciousness of X is not necessarily tied to an account of the sense or reference of words or concepts to X. It may be the case that self-consciousness occurs in creatures which do not possess linguistic or conceptual capacities at all. For example, it is likely that non-linguistic animals like dogs are minimally self-conscious in the sense of being able to distinguish between themselves and their treats, balls, and kennels. And, prelinguistic infants, though they do not speak and arguably do not possess self-concepts, possess self-consciousness in the less minimal sense of being capable of perceiving their bodies as their own.

I don’t usually like to make such distinctions by way of saying “that’s an epistemic issue” or “that’s a semantic issue” as I think these categories are merely fictional distinctions encouraged by recent analytic philosophers emphasis on problem areas— such delineations are products of the tradition, not of the phenomena. But, emphasis on the epistemic and the semantic cases keeps us from seeing the phenomena and asking about the logic of self-consciousness, in the sense of what must be the case in order for the phenomena to exist. And, by focusing on self-knowledge (self-K) and self-reference (self-R), we’ve imported conceptions of the logic of self-consciousness into our understanding of self-K and self-R, rather than going directly to the phenomena itself.

Kriegel proceeds to discuss self-knowledge and self-reference in sections below, so I will hold off comments on the substance of these intro paragraphs... Suffice it to say, however, that I think there are two conflations that Kriegel perpetuates rather than treats: (1) the conflation between self-K and self-consciousness; (2) the conflation between self-consciousness and self-R. And, suppose there aren’t epistemic and semantic peculiarities, then if these are true conflations, then we haven’t learned much about self-consciousness, but instead only something negative about self-K and self-R.

a note on Bermudez (1998) and the Others Thesis

There are definitely blindspots in Bermudez’s account of the importance of the Others thesis. Bermudez suggests that what he calls The Symmetry Thesis— a subject’s psychological self-awareness is constitutively linked to his awareness of other minds— cannot be adequately defended. His argument against the Symmetry Thesis depends upon his rejecting Evans’ generality constraint on self-consciousness: if S is self-conscious, then S grasps a first-person thought in subject-predicate form; as such, S needs to able to apply the predicate to other subjects; therefore, awareness of other psychological subjects are necessary. In his argument against Evans’ constraint, Bermudez presupposes a notion of a psychological subject that neither Strawson nor Evans would accept. The notion of a psychological subject needs to be expanded to include a human being or person, which was Strawson’s initial goal. Once this is achieved, then we can defend the Symmetry thesis, and gain support for the Others thesis about self-consciousness.

intercorporeality and intersubjectivity

this conference and CFP might be of interest to those working on self-consciousness:

INTERCORPOREALITY and INTERSUBJECTIVITY

It's being held at the University College Dublin, June 6 & 7. Abstracts due March 15.

beginning of commentary on Kriegel's article

The following serves as a start at a commentary on Kriegel’s article “self-consciousness” from The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. One reason for writing this commentary is personal edification: in writing the following, I hope to come to understand how my view of self-consciousness differs from a fellow philosopher concerned with the topic, a philosopher whose work I greatly respect and admire. Another, more academic reason, is that I find Kriegel’s article (notwithstanding my aforementioned respect and admiration) in many ways wildly indelicate and incorrect. While I think that Kriegel’s article captures the trends of recent work, it seems to me that it does not attempt or succeed to address its question, “what is self-consciousness?”

But, this criticism must come with a disclaimer, since it is likely that encyclopedia articles in philosophy are in the business of articulating what philosophers (usually philosophers other than the article’s author or philosophers other than those in the author’s declared tradition) have thought about a topic. But even if this disclaimer is registered, I still find Kriegel’s tack problematic. My comments on the first sentence should suffice to show what I take the problem—partly methodological and partly substantial— to be.

“Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness, peculiarities which distinguish it from consciousness of things other than oneself.”

As was already expressed in my disclaimer, Kriegel intends to articulate “philosophical work on self-consciousness,” but it should be registered that the work included is rather limited— limited in domain and range. While there is mention of Kant, there is little accurate commentary about Kant’s philosophical work on self-consciousness. There is also nothing said about post-Kantians, the German Idealists, Fichte, Schelling or Hegel.

I don’t like reading German Idealism or Hegel either, but, it seems inappropriate to disqualify such philosophical writing as constituting “philosophical work.” And it is not simply this period of philosophical work that goes missing. There is no articulation of the philosophical work on self-consciousness by Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, Descartes, Dieter Henrich, P.F. Strawson, Robert Nozick, Charles Taylor, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Tyler Burge, Christopher Peacocke, Quassim Cassam, Sebastian Rodl, Dan Zahavi, and others.

I will stop name-dropping as this will simply get annoying. Though Kriegel does refer to some of these figures in the bibliography, his article is not illuminated by their work. Maybe it was a matter of word-limits, space, time; or maybe it was a lack of desire to capture this philosophical work. Whatever the reasons, many of the issues with Kriegel’s article, one of which is its “horse-blinkery” focus, can be traced to not having these figures enter into the conversation.

To return to the quote above and lodge another problem partly related to bibliographic concerns, is Kriegel’s assertion that Philosophical work on self-consciousness has mostly focused on the identification and articulation of specific epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness. Given a weak sampling of philosophers, this is the focus. But, identification and articulation of peculiarities cannot have been the sole focus of all philosophical work, and it really hasn’t been. What of much of modern philosophy following Kant that attempted to ground knowledge on the foundation of self-consciousness? What of the countless books on self and other in the continental tradition? What about Socrates’ basic command “Know thyself!” There are many other reasons to work on self-consciousness and further many other features that its nature likely possesses than is in Kriegel’s philosophy. One issue with focus on peculiarities is that this description of the focus may assume too much about such peculiarities. Do we have reasons independent of the suggestions in philosophical works that Kriegel shepherds to think that such epistemic and semantic peculiarities actually attend self-consciousness? If we did not have reason to think that such peculiarities actually attend self-consciousness, because maybe philosophers inquired into self-consciousness prior to the 20th century without needing to attend to such assumed peculiarities, or maybe we will discover that the appearance of such peculiarities, both epistemic and semantic, arise because of illusions, delusions, category mistakes, or other mistakes in emphasis and inquiry.

It is even more problematic for Kriegel that he is committed to the actuality of such peculiarities because as he says, “these peculiarities must also be explained, or accounted for, in the context of a general theory of self-consciousness. With a handful of exceptions (for example, Bermúdez 1998) current work on self-consciousness does not appear to address the need for a general theory thereof.” But, should these peculiarities not exist, or be merely dialogical vagabonds of the momentary 20th century philosophical landscape— fleeting creatures of a deserted landscape— rather than legitimate denizens of the natural world, then the generation of a general theory of self-consciousness should have developed independent of such undue emphasis on peculiarity. It would be detrimental to Kriegel’s proposal for the genesis of an overall theory: “The first would be to determine which of the alleged epistemic and semantic peculiarities of self-consciousness in fact obtain. The second would be to devise an account of the metaphysical structure, as well as of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the formation, of states of self-consciousness, such that the relevant account would explain, by predicting or “retrodicting” (as C. S. Peirce puts it), the obtaining of just those peculiarities” if it were discovered that such peculiarities were figments of philosophical imagination. And, it would be mere fictional prediction or retrodiction if the general account were required to explain such peculiarities. Instead, why shouldn’t we devise an account of self-consciousness, its nature, its varieties, its structure, its content, its origin, its development, which creatures possess it, which do not, etc. independently of such peculiarities.

One reason to find such ‘peculiarity’ talk problematic also is that the tradition upon which Kriegel emphasizes takes such ‘peculiarity’ talk out of the work of Wittgenstein and assumes that Wittgenstein was attempting to develop a theory of self-consciousness, the subject, the self, the ‘I’ etc., but in actuality, he was diagnosing features of our language, features which do not necessarily tell us anything about the nature of self-consciousness. I will return to this concern below when Kriegel’s specific use of Wittgenstein’s comments about and Shoemaker’s commentary on what has come to be called immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person singular pronoun “I.”

Another reason to find such ‘peculiarity’ talk problematic arises actually from emphasis on Wittgenstein himself. When Wittgenstein talks about the word ‘peculiar’ he discusses how if something is peculiar then it cannot be replaced by anything other than itself. If something is legitimately peculiar, then it seems that it resists existing in any other way, or being explained or being described in any other way. But, this should not be a starting point into the nature of something. This is symptomatic of the 20th century threefold strategy in inquiry in philosophy of mind— (1) find something peculiar, puzzling, mysterious about some phenomenon, e.g., intentionality, consciousness, and in this case, aspects or features of self-consciousness; (2) describe what it is we’ve found to be peculiar, puzzling, or mysterious about such phenomenon; (3) and then assume that we’ve elucidated the nature of the phenomenon. But, this methodology is skewed.

A different context in which this methodology is found is in Colin McGinn’s introduction to “Consciousness and Its Objects” in which he says, “mysterianism makes the best overall sense of the predicament with the mind-body problem” (2). But, just as in Kriegel’s case, we are not concerned merely with elucidating the predicament, the confusion in the philosophical landscape, etc., but with the nature of the phenomenon. It is not necessary to assimilate Kriegel’s emphasis on peculiarity to McGinn’s focus on mysterianism, but I take both views to be symptomatic of a larger problem with the philosophical landscape where inquiry into consciousness and self-consciousness dwells— we take things to be peculiar, puzzling, mysterious because of the philosophical traditions, language, problems, accounts, etc. that we’ve inherited, not because the nature of the phenomena are inherently peculiar, puzzling, or mysterious.

To return to the article, I want to comment on the last phrase of the first sentence: “peculiarities which distinguish it from consciousness of things other than oneself” It’s not clear to me that there are such peculiarities, but if there are not identification and articulation of those peculiarities cannot be the only way to distinguish self-consciousness from “consciousness of things other than oneself.” Also, this simple phrase masks a problem that will accompany us throughout the article, viz., the tendency of philosophers to shift from weaker notions of self-consciousness to stronger notions of self-consciousness, without recognizing it.

Suppose self-consciousness were contrasted solely with consciousness of things other than oneself. Then, there could not be forms of self-consciousness that could be contrasted with consciousness of something that is not a thing other than oneself. But, one might be conscious of something that is not a thing other than oneself, but in a way that that form of consciousness does not constitute self-consciousness. To put it more simply, one might be conscious of what is in fact oneself, while not being self-consciousness per se.

Kriegel’s first sentence, however, seems to rule this out, since it is immediately in the business of contrasting self-consciousness with consciousness of other things, rather than for instance, self-consciousness per se with consciousness of oneself. But, are there really ways of being conscious of oneself, but which do not count as ways of being self-conscious? For example, a cat might be conscious of itself or a part of itself by being conscious of its tail while it chases its tail, but yet it may not be self-conscious per se or it may not exhibit self-consciousness as such. This should not be taken to suggest that self-consciousness must be defined solely in terms of being conscious of oneself as oneself, or de se thought about oneself, or reflexive consciousness of oneself. But, Kriegel should not contrast self-consciousness in this way if it rules out these more robust forms of self-consciousness.

However, maybe “oneself” in this phrase should only be taken to have the meaning of whatever enters into the sense of ‘self’ self-consciousness and the reference of whatever is necessary to posit as the referent of ‘self’ in self-consciousness. For instance, ‘oneself’ as it enters into self-consciousness per se may only involve the connotation “the way of referring to the self that one is conscious of in being self-conscious per se,” and “the self that one is conscious of...” is the referent of ‘oneself’ rather than an independently individuated way of being conscious or independent referent.

Let’s move on to the next sentence:
“After drawing certain fundamental distinctions, and considering the conditions for the very possibility of self-consciousness, this article discusses the nature of those epistemic and semantic peculiarities.”

As I’ve already noted, there are problems with the focus of the article on epistemic and semantic peculiarities. It would be not be meticulous of me to simply assert that there weren’t such peculiarities, or to (as I did above) discuss that some philosophical work is accomplished without attending to such peculiarities, or (worse still) to however modestly predict that such peculiarities will be shown to mask illusions. Instead, I will attempt to exhume the philosophical errors that give rise to the illusion of such peculiarities and attempt to rid them from the philosophical landscape— I will attempt to banish such vagabonds to the desert and starve them of water and food.

contemporary version of the refutation of idealism

The following argument is intended to offer both a contemporary articulation of the refutation of idealism and to offer an argument from self-consciousness as self-discrimination to the intuition version of the objectivity condition. Self-consciousness is the capacity to be aware of oneself as oneself. Self-discrimination is the capacity to distinguish between oneself and the world. Self-discrimination is a minimal form of self-consciousness, minimal in the sense that many creatures (any creature with a sensibility) can possess this form of self-consciousness. The usual formulation of the objectivity condition is in terms of being able to understand, conceive or think of objects as existing independently of one's thought or perception. The goal of the contemporary version of the ROI is to argue for the idea that one merely needs to perceive objects that are as a matter of fact independent of one's thought and perception, which are independent in merely being material objects that impede one's thought, perception and imagination.

The argument from self-discrimination to the intuition version of the objectivity condition comes by way of borrowing the structure, though certainly not the purpose, of Kant’s “The Refutation of Idealism” (ROI). Kant’s argument in ROI begins with the premise that one is conscious of one’s own existence and one’s mental states. The ROI argues for the conclusion that material objects need to exist independently of one. The argument might be put to a different purpose in arguing that certain conditions of self-discrimination are required.

The basic argument of the ROI (tailored to my purposes) is the following. If one is self-conscious, then one is aware of oneself in a space and time. In order to be aware of oneself in a space and time, one needs to process one's "self-orientation", e.g., that certain objects are above, below, to the right of, to the left of, etc. In order to process one's self-orientation, one's must possess a feeling or sense of where one is in general. In order to process a feeling or sense of where one is, to process “I am a being here and now,” one must interact with (at least some) material objects in an objective order structured in space and time.

The following argument is intended to offer an articulation an argument from self-discrimination to the intuition version of the objectivity condition:

(P1) By the definition of self-discrimination, if a creature (C) is capable of self-discrimination, then that C is aware (sentiently, rather than sapiently) of its existence as spatiotemporally determined.

(P2) In order for a creature C to be sentiently aware of its existence as spatiotemporally determined (or in order for it discriminate between itself and the world), C must be sentiently aware of the continuity conditions of perception.

(P3) In order for C to be sentiently aware of the continuity conditions of perception, the continuity conditions cannot be represented by C as being merely conceived (or merely the thought of continuity qua determinings of objects) or being merely intuited (or merely the appearance of continuity qua determinable objects), but instead the continuity conditions must be determinate.

Therefore, (C) in order for a self-discriminating creature C to be sentiently aware of its existence as spatiotemporally determined, C needs to meet the togetherness supposition that there must be determinate continuity conditions of the perception of objects.

Let us consider premise one. It should recognized that the self-discriminating creature needs to possess the capacity to be sentiently aware of the distinction between itself and the world. The creature itself is partly determined by the spatiotemporal outline of its boundaries, in the sense in which a creature’s existence is always brought about by something external to it. To be aware of itself in the sense of being sentiently aware of its spatiotemporal determination might mean that it operates with the following principle, called the principle of impenetrability.
If the self-discriminating creature (the “I” in the minimal sentient sense) inhabits a spatiotemporal region, then it is not the case that any other object (the “not-I” in the minimal sense of possible objects of the creature’s sentience) can inhabit this spatiotemporal region. For example, a creature might walk into a sharp object such as a tree limb and recognize that its body resists being penetrable by the tree limb; alternatively, a creature might attempt to put its finger into a tree trunk and recognize that despite its relentless insistence the trunk resists being pentrated by its finger. If a creature were not capable of being governed by the principle of impenetrability, then that creature would likely not be capable of self-discrimination.

The adoption of the principle of impenetrability suggests that the activity of the creature indicates that it has a self-schema. Kant begins the ROI with the I-think and says that one’s self-consciousness is a “mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence” (B275). In my argument, the I-think is awareness of its own existence in space and time. Instead of beginning with one of Kant’s starting assumptions that self-consciousness involves reflection upon oneself in inner sense or “inner experience” or ‘introspection,’ I substitute the assumption of a creature capable of self-discrimination.

If I were to address the subjective or problematic idealists’ concerns (which Kant’s ROI intends to address), then the former would seem to be a better interpretation, since it is within that context that Kant would be able to marshal agreement from both Descartes and Berkeley. And, neither Descartes nor Berkeley would accept the first premise that the I-think of the self-discriminating creature was determined in space and time. Kant is implicitly arguing against the subjective and problematic idealist’s interpretation of the first premise by arguing that premises follow from the first premise which are incompatible or cannot be coherently maintained with the subjective idealist’s position. However, assuming that Kant was looking for a way to recover from the assumptions of subjective and problematic idealism, rather than accept such assumptions, I offer the first premise as a way of articulating a more minimal account of self-consciousness, independent of the question of whether it offers a refutation of idealism.

In the case of the contemporary ROI, I am suggesting that any minimal account of self-consciousness must account for the spatiotemporal determination of the subject of experience. I am suggesting that any account of self-consciousness or consciousness must begin with the transcendental empiricist point. I find it puzzling that so few accounts do so. Any theory of minimal self-consciousness that is an account of self-discrimination, ought to be at the same time a theory of sentience, though the dependence upon elucidation of sentience must be proved in the following.

Let us consider premise two. What is required for a creature to be sentiently aware of the continuity conditions of perception. The argument for this condition is pivotal for showing that self-discrimination must meet the intuition version of the objectivity condition. What exactly are these continuity conditions of perception that must be available to C to meet the intuition version of the objectivity condition? In order for creatures to discriminate between any two objects, a creature needs to acknowledge the persistence of objects independent of it. Any account of the sentience of a creature must account for how creatures represent the “continuity” of objects.

In A Theory of Sentience, Austen Clark (2000) discusses what is necessary for making discriminations in a way that illuminates the present argument. He writes, “discriminations are typically modeled as continuous functions, and discriminability becomes a matter of the statistical discrimination of two distributions... Perhaps the mere fact that we model discriminability in terms of continuous functions requires us already to endow these space-time regions with some robust form of continuity” (50). I think Clark is correct in his passing analysis of discrimination and the implicit claim of the necessity of “some robust form of continuity.”

The major point for my admittedly Kantian argument is that in order for a self-discriminating creature to distinguish between itself and the world, it needs to be able to map its own representations onto a wider map of representations in general. The match is represented by the continuous functions that represent the creature’s world-schema, which involves representations of the continuity of objects, and by the self-schema. The idea is that there is an implicit requirement of the continuity of objects independent of the subject (either in thought or perception) of the continuity of one’s representations. In order for a creature to have a self-schema it must depend upon a world-schema, and a world-schema that has more than a mere determinability, but determinateness.

Such determinateness is necessary, because a self-discriminating creature needs to model relations between itself and the world upon other relations between objects. If there were no permanent and persistence in these relations, i.e., if these relations between objects were potentially arbitrary, then the self-discriminating creature would have no means to differentiate itself. Kant’s argument in the first analogy suggests something similar; by saying that “the substratum must be encountered” (A181/B225) he is suggesting that there must be a material definiteness to one’s interaction with objects. He argues that there must be a “real in the appearance” (A181/B225) that remains (in the sense of being permanent and persistent), otherwise it could not be dependably encountered.

It should be recognized that Kant notes (A183/B226nd) that he has not proved that the subject possesses continuity conditions by simply proving that perceptions do. He admits that arguing from the possibility of perception to the necessity of persistence does not prove that the “I think,” which is thinking its own existence, rather than (strictly speaking) perceiving it, is proved to possess the spatiotemporal permanence and persistence in the sense in which the objects of perception are proved. The Refutation of Idealism, however, picks up where the argument of the First Analogy left off and attempts to accomplish that task.

Comparably, I am arguing that since self-discrimination is discrimination (though of a special variety) by definition, and any variety of discrimination depends on continuity functions that map objects onto other objects, self-discrimination depends on the ability to map objects onto other objects. For example, in order for a creature to discriminate between edible and poisonous berries, it must be able to represent the differences between these berries at different places and times. In this sense, it needs to be able to represent an edible berry E at ST coordinate X, Y, Z, T and a poisonous berry P at ST coordinate X*, Y*, Z*, T*. But, it must also be able to represent itself over those spaces and times.

If C could not discriminate between E and P (or some similar difference in the world), then C could not discriminate itself, and since discriminating between E and P requires representing continuity conditions (because it must represent the aspects and features of the difference between edible and poisonous over space and time), discriminating between itself and the world requires representing continuity conditions of E and P as independent of itself and of itself as independent of E and P. Therefore self-discrimination must meet a set of continuity conditions, which is expressed in the argument for the intuition version of the objectivity condition. The argument is not that any self-discriminating creature must be able to represent a difference between edible things and poisonous things, but in general in order for a creature to self-discriminate, it must be able to represent an objective world, which requires that it perceive that there are continuity conditions of objects, objects with properties at spaces and times. What is required in meeting such continuity conditions of objects as the objects of one’s sensibility?

Meeting the spatial continuity condition requires being able to notice that objects are (sometimes) contiguous with other objects. For instance, that an edible berry is usually next to a certain type of stem or leaf. Also, meeting the spatial continuity condition requires being able to notice that objects are (sometimes) not contiguous with other objects. For instance, that though a poisonous berry is usually on a bush with thorns, it may sometimes be present on the ground or in the grass, because the wind has blown it off the bush.

Meeting the temporal continuity condition requires being able to notice that objects are (sometimes) contemporaneous with other objects. For instance, that the last moment that one noticed the features of the edible berry persists in this moment, such that the creature does not have to continuously check for the features that indicate the berry is edible. Also, meeting the temporal continuity condition requires being able to notice that objects are (sometimes) not contemporaneous with other objects. For instance, that yesterday, the creature noticed that there were poisonous berries on the way to the watering pond, and today, at a different time, the same objects obtain.

The intuition version of the objectivity condition specifies a spatiotemporal structure of the aspects and features of experience such that an intuition has an implicit content both of the spatiotemporal location of objects in the sensibility of the organism, but also of the spatiotemporal location of the creature possessing that receptivity. In order to meet these basic continuity conditions of self-discrimination, one needs to have sentient awareness that is provided by the receptivity of a creature. The more general premise for the idea that motivates the sentient account is that in order for a creature to discriminate itself, it needs to be able to discriminate in general.

The receptivity of the self-discriminating creature must represent the continuity conditions of the objects of perception in its environment. How does such a form or structure of sensibility that represents objects with properties in specific spaces and times meet the objectivity condition? It would seem that in order to meet the objectivity condition, such a creature would need to perceive something unperceived. In the sense in which perceiving something unperceived is simply recognizing and acknowledging the continuity conditions of objects, self-discrimination requires finding oneself in this spatiotemporal manifold by becoming capable of tracing out a path through that manifold, a path with a degree of continuity that fits a creature having a sensibility.

Premise three suggests that these continuity conditions (both of the objects independent of oneself and of oneself as a self-discriminated creature) must not be merely conceived (or merely thought of as continuous determinings of objects) nor merely intuited (or merely an appearance of continuity as determinable objects) by C, but instead the continuity conditions must be determinate. It is not sufficient that a creature merely think that objects exist continuously independent of itself; nor is it sufficient that it merely appear to a creature that objects exist continuously independent of itself.

To defend premise three, I suppose the negation of the premise in two versions. The first version is the version in which mere determinings are sufficient (and determinateness is not necessary) and call this “the concept version.” The second version is the version in which mere determinables are sufficient (and determinateness is not necessary) and call this “the intuition version.” The goal is the proof that the continuity conditions must be determinate or “the togetherness version.”

The concept version suggests that a creature only needs to be able to think about objects possessing continuity conditions, not that such objects actually must possess them. In one respect, the concept version of premise 3 is too weak and in another (and different) respect, it is too strong. The concept version is too weak, because it proves only that insofar as C entertains perceptions, then C merely needs to think about the continuity of the objects of perception. So, if the requirement is only thinking about continuity, then C might be completely in error about what its experience represents.

In the ROI, Kant writes, “the necessity of existence can thus never be cognized from concepts but rather always only from the connection with that which is perceived, in accordance with the general laws of experience” (A227/B279). Even if perceivers are always merely inferring from effects to causes that there must be a determinate object in perception, then it is not sufficient for these inferrings to amount to merely thoughts, ideas, conceptions or notions of continuity conditions. For example, it is not sufficient that a creature merely infer that a edible berry is present. Instead, such inferences from experience must be valid material inferences, inferences from the material conditions of one’s experience. A creature’s perceptual experience must have an implicit causal content, which represents that there are relations between material objects and the sensation of such material objects.

For example, a creature that perceives that the edible berries are independent of the creature, must also represent that its perceptual experience is caused by such objects, rather than that the experience is a matter of its mere thought about edible berries. One might induce a creature to have obsessive (and utterly false) thoughts about edible berries in a patch of poisonous ones, and ask in that context, whether thought about edible berries is sufficient. It should be clear that it is not. There must be a proven and reliable relationship between the objects at spaces and times and the dispositions of the creature to represent those objects.
Suppose that the intuition version of premise 3 were sufficient.

The intuition version is superior in the sense that at least we are operating in the domain and range of concern that could make possible meeting continuity conditions, i.e., a concern for intuitive awareness. However, without determinateness of the perception of objects independent of one, there is no way to make sure that a creature’s perceptions are not mere appearances of the continuity of objects. The mere appearance of continuity needs to be based upon (at some point or other) the object of the senses that makes possible meeting the continuity condition. Mere appearance of continuity is not sufficient. Instead, a creature must represent that material objects possess determinate continuity conditions. For example, if the properties of edible berries merely appeared to be present, rather than were actually present, then the creature might mistake poisonous berries for edible ones.

Therefore, C must detect determinate continuity conditions. Otherwise, these continuity conditions would only be in C in the sense of being only of or for the awareness of C. To relate the argument to determinate continuity conditions to the requirements of self-discrimination, if the concept supposition were correct, then C could not self-discriminate, since C would only be able to discriminate between its thoughts about itself and its thoughts about the world. If the intuition supposition were correct, then C could not self-discriminate, since C would not be able to differentiate between the alterations/changes of objects as such and the alterations/changes of its perceptions of objects. Therefore, the togetherness supposition is justified, that in order for a creature to be capable of self-discrimination, it must represent determinate continuity conditions of the objects of perception.

comments on Brandom's Woodbridge Lecture One

I had initially intended to comment on all of Brandom’s Woodbridge Lectures, but alas, my dissertation writing is more important, and Brandom’s lectures have now registered in “the development of the concept,” and so as pieces of that history, they remain forever available. But, as I’ve reflected upon Brandom’s lectures (partly inspired to mull them over by other bloggers’ advertisements, for which I am grateful), I’ve begun to realize that the topics in Brandom’s lectures and my current dissertation writing are not that far apart (though they are in many respects different, the salient difference being that Brandom’s lectures are part of the aforementioned “development of the concept” whereas my writing is really just taking up space on my hard drive, or in my ever-patient and helpful advisor’s briefcase).

I’m going to try to make clear how my project is similar and different to Brandom’s project (though with the requisite tinge of modesty in the presence of a philosophical mastermind), by focusing on the topic of my dissertation— the necessary conditions of self-consciousness. The overall difference might be captured by describing what I take to be necessary (and maybe sufficient) for self-consciousness and the self, in light of what Brandom’s Kant takes to be necessary (and sufficient) for self-consciousness as the original synthetic unity of apperception.

As I said in my initial post, Brandom does not think that experience is necessary, saying frequently, “‘experience’ isn’t one of my words” (Articulating Reasons, the Locke Lectures’ comments, and myriad other places..., including (so I hear) in response to questions about the Woodbridge lectures...). I’d like to argue that in discussing self-consciousness, Brandom needs ‘experience’ to be one of his words. To “descend” from vocabulary-vocabulary to natural (though philosophical) vocabulary, I want to argue that it is a necessary condition of self-consciousness that a creature possesses experience— experience is (one of) the “that-without-which-not”s of any account of self-consciousness.

So, far however, we might be in agreement if both Brandom (even though he doesn’t want to say it) and I mean by ‘experience’ something like “spontaneity-at-large in operation.” But, I want to argue, experience (insofar as it enters as a necessary component in the possession conditions for self-consciousness) requires more than merely spontaneity-at-large in operation. It also requires a catalogue of other features which Brandom lists as irrelevant to his purpose in these lectures. In the end of lecture one, he writes:

“Among the topics I did not find it necessary so much as to mention are: intuition, sensibility, receptivity, the fact that concepts without intuitions are empty, space and time, conditions of the possibility of experience, synthetic truths known a priori, the distinction between phenomena and noumena, transcendental idealism, the Copernican revolution…and a lot more. One might well think that these topics are somewhat important to Kant; certainly they loom large in his own telling of his story.
Of course they are important. There is a lot more going on, even just in his theoretical philosophy, than I have adverted to. For instance, Kant is the first philosopher to try to think through the consequences of moving from Aristotelian principles of identity and individuation of empirical objects, in terms of substance and accident, to Newtonian ones, which appeal instead to spatiotemporal location... Those considerations are interwoven with a line of thought about sensibility and receptivity and neither are in any obvious way necessarily connected to the story about representational purport that I have told here. That there is nonetheless a deep connection, indeed a necessary harmony, between them is what the transcendental deduction aims to explain and to show.
But the fact that one of Kant’s central preoccupations is synthesizing these two thoughts about content—one, as Kant seems to have thought of it, having to do with the form of the metaconcept conceptual content, and the other having to do with its content—does not at all mean that it is not possible to dissect from the results of his synthesis one of the constellations of commitments he is concerned to integrate into a larger whole. There is an internal coherence to the line of thought about concepts (judging, hence apperception and understanding) that I have been laying out. And we can consider it in abstraction from the other elements with which Kant combines it. Indeed, we must distinguish it if we are to ask the potentially interesting philosophical question of whether you get a better story about intentionality, semantics, and representation with or without the considerations concerning sensibility that he is concerned to integrate with those I have indicated. And I think we must discern the train of thought I have picked out here in order to address the historically interesting question of how to understand the paths that lead from Kant’s to Hegel’s most interesting ideas.”

Start with that last point about the path from Kant through German Idealism to Hegel. Suppose that there are myriad philosophical mistakes in critical Kantian philosophy along that path, does this mean that the “historically interesting question” need face up to those mistakes in this Kantian aftermath? (“What mistakes?” Mistakes in interpreting Kant’s notion of ‘representation’ are sufficiently prevalent...)
To again return to an element in the title, Brandom wants to compose a “semantic sonata” (by which he may have meant only that it has three parts), but, the sonata’s main feature (though this is debated) is that it is played as if in one key, though it may have other movements in different keys. The point to be made is that if we are playing in the Kantian key, then the “monotonality” (or monotonity) in the Critique of Pure Reason needs to be maintained both in understanding Kant (in order to get the whole picture), and in reconstructing the path from Kant to Hegel, and more importantly (for my purposes) figuring out what we must say about the logic or semantics of self-consciousness.

Let’s return to the top of the above quote... Brandom suggests that considerations of experience in general (focusing on the content of receptivity, i.e., intuitions (or perceptions) structured in space and time as deliverances from one’s sensibility) are “not in any obvious way necessarily connected to the story about representational purport that I have told here” (28). Now I am faced with the task that we need experience (stress ‘receptivity’) to provide an account of representational purport, because I want to argue that any Kantian account of self-consciousness needs an account of the receptivity of the objects of the senses, but Brandom’s interest in this lecture is to discuss representational purport. For Brandom, the synthetic unity of apperception is not strictly speaking, something that we attribute or ascribe to a creature; instead, synthesizing a unity of apperception is something that one must do in order to meet the task responsibilities one takes up in judging that such and such is the case (Lect1; 11).

So, let’s rewind to something else Brandom says, in order that I may show why I Brandom needs to say something he doesn’t want to say. [The argument might be expressed in the following way: Brandom doesn’t want to say the family of concepts ‘a,’ ‘b,’ or ‘c.’ The absence of ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ creates a lacuna y in a Kantian view of self-consciousness. ‘X’ fills y, X is discovered by abstracting from ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ what is necessary for y. In order to discuss self-consciousness, Brandom needs to say ‘X’...]
In comparing the transition from the semantic tasks in Descartes and Kant, Brandom suggests the following: “Where Descartes’ semantic concerns center on the nature of representational success, Kant addresses more fundamental questions about the nature of representational purport. What is it, he wants to know, for our ideas so much as to seem to be about something? What is it for us to take or treat them as, for them to show up to us as, representings, in the sense of something that answers for its correctness to what thereby counts as being represented? [fn: Already in the letter to Herz of 1772, Kant says: “I noticed that I still lacked something essential, something that in my long metaphysical studies I, as well as others, had failed to pay attention to and that, in fact, constitutes the key to the whole secret of hitherto still obscure metaphysics. I asked myself: What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call ‘representation’ to the object?”] This issue is the core around which cluster the other elements of Kant’s concern with what he calls ‘objectivity.’” (3)

First, the question of what the semantic tasks are cannot be determined solely by what philosophers such as Descartes take the semantic tasks to be. Just as the philosophers before Descartes may have been wrong about analysis of resemblance being central, and Descartes may have been wrong about success being the main “concern”, Brandom’s Kant may be wrong about purport being a central semantic task. I’m as skeptical as the next guy (if that “next guy” is Rorty) that investing in the analysis of the concept of “representation” provides any philosophical dividends (though that doesn’t mean interesting historical work cannot be done in reconstructing the mistaken moves in assessment of the concept).

But, there is a problem in the way that Brandom plays the sonata in the Kantian tone. The issue might be illustrated by asking: (1) does assessment of representational purport (RP) require assessment of representational success (RS)? and (2) does representational success (RS) require assessment of assessment of representational purport (RP)? I think Brandom is correct about (2), and to that extent I agree that the normative (construed broadly) is necessary in any assessment of representational success. In the context of considerations of a Kantian view of self-consciousness, all this means is that the constitutive norms of rationality, i.e., social upbringing, attunement to linguistic rule-following, giving and asking for reasons, etc. are relevant for a robust view of self-consciousness. The contemporary torch-bearer for such a view is no-doubt Sebastian Rodl, in his book “Self-Consciousness”.

Brandom may be right about the path from Descartes to Kant, but the implication that we should provide a negative answer to (1) is an error that shows us how Brandom’s assessment of the path from Kant to Hegel has made his sonata go off key. Why should we think that just because a robust view of self-consciousness must involve deeper considerations of normativity than Descartes allowed, that there is no room for a Kantian view of self-consciousness and representational purport that involves consideration of success. The way that Brandom tells the story Kant’s notion of theoretical reason and practical reason requires an account of self-consciousness which singles out the locus of responsibility for the judgments made in either context— “the mark of who is responsible for the judgment” (Lect1; 9).

But, when we ask the everyday and ordinary question, “Well, who is responsible for the judgment?” the answer that Brandom’s Kant has available is extremely formal and thin. The answer we have available is “the thinker” or “the agent” or “the evaluator,” (or even worse, “the representer” in general) but nothing more. This may be a product of a misunderstanding of the “I-think” in general as something which can accompany representations, in sense in which Brandom’s Kant means it— were one to want to mark the locus of responsibility for judgment (theoretical, practical or aesthetic), then one can use the I-think. Without getting mired in Kant interpretation, I would rather read B132: “[representations must yet be in accord with the condition under which alone they MUST stand together in a universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not throughout belong to me.” This is to say that the claim that representational purport depends upon self-consciousness can be read as requiring a necessary dispositional relation between the I-think and the representation, not merely a normative possibility.

At B136n, Kant connects the notions of space and time to the synthetic unity of apperception in a way favorable to this interpretation and the ultimate point I’m making against Brandom:

“Space and time and all their parts are intuitions, thus individual representations along with the manifold that they contain in themselves (see the Transcendental Aesthetic), thus they are not mere concepts by means of which the same consciousness is contained many representations, but rather are many representations that are contained in one and in the consciousness of it; they are thus found to be composite, and consequently the unity of consciousness, as synthetic and yet as original, is to be found in them. This singularity of theirs is important in its application (see §25)”.

Section §25 of the Transcendental Deduction is central to understanding the synthetic unity of apperception and in general to understanding what type of unity is required for self-consciousness in its non-robust forms. Kant also writes in “the I-think footnote” that the I-think “expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e., a perception (hence it proves that sensation, which consequently belongs to sensibility, grounds this existential proposition [“I-think”]), but it precedes the experience that is to determine the object of perception” (B423n).

This might be interpreted to suggest that there is a prior notion of original unity that is required in order for a creature to be self-conscious. But, Brandom’s picture leaves us blind to this interpretation. What might the Kantian argument be for the necessity of this construal of self-consciousness. Basically, that any account of the original synthetic unity of apperception must also be an account of the sentience of that creature. Brandom is correct to point out that “it is an original synthetic unity of apperception because what makes an act or episode a judging in the first place is just its being subject to the normative demand that it be integrated into such a systematically unified whole, and awareness in the sense of apperception (a matter of sapience, rather than mere sentience) is judgment (apperceiving is judging)” (Lect1: 13).

But, the apperception that Brandom calls original should not be taken to rule out that sentience is involved. In one sense of “transcendental”— as whatever is necessary for some empirical representation— we might interpret the transcendental unity of apperception as requiring that there is a structure of the sentience of the creature such that its representations are its own. This does not mean that this is sufficient for synthetic unity of apperception, but instead that it is necessary. If a creature is to be self-conscious (even in the robust sense), then its experience must be its experience, i.e., it must be experience for that creature. If it were not experience for a creature, it would either not be experience at all or be experience of some other creature.

To return to a concession I made above, the constitutive norms of rationality, i.e., social upbringing, attunement to linguistic rule-following, giving and asking for reasons, etc. are relevant for a robust view of self-consciousness, but some minimal account of sentience is necessary to account for each of these. For how could a social creature recognize and acknowledge its social relations except insofar as it can (also among other things) be touched? How can a creature become attuned to the rules that govern language games without (also among other things) being able to recognize and acknowledge the material properties of the language? How can a creature enter the space of reasons unless that creature can (also among other things) be caressed with the hand of approval and spanked with the reed of disapproval?

The weakness of Brandom’s Kant is found in his tendency to place scare quotes around ‘affection,’ and other sensibility terms, like ‘force,’ ‘repelling,’ etc. Brandom simply takes up residence in the notion of material inference and supposes (Lect1: 24) that such judgeable items possess “determinate conceptual contents.” But, why should we have to suppose merely the availability of the “raw materials”? We should do the hard work within the Kantian framework of assessing the raw materials of judging, i.e. of how representational purport might (also among other things) depend upon representation success in the sense that a creature that looks needs to be a creature that sees, a creature that listens needs to be a creature that hears, etc.

But, when Brandom says, “[considerations of what it is to be semantically in touch with — to be able to represent— objects conceived in terms of spatiotemporal structure] are interwoven with a line of thought about sensibility and receptivity and neither are in any obvious way necessarily connected to the story about representational purport that I have told here” (Lect1: 28), it should not be taken as an indication that the Kantian notion of representation purport can (or must?) be accomplished in the absence of those considerations. And, Brandom cannot take the lack of obviousness or the success of the transcendental deduction as assumptions that allow him to ignore fundamental Kantian insights.

Just as Kant rejected the Wolffian metaphysics in a vacuum inspired by Leibniz, there is good reason to think that Kant would have rejected Brandom’s “internal coherence to the line of thought about concepts” (Lect1: 28) as intentionality in a vacuum, or “the deserted island account of intentionality,” or maybe “intentionality as frictionless spinning in the void” (to adopt a phrase closer to home).

species-relative perspectivalism

Often, when philosophers discuss consciousness, they discuss “what it’s like to consciously experience X.” What does one actually mean when one says, “What it’s like to think or perceive X”? One way of understanding what it’s like is in terms of the subjective point of view, i.e., what it is for one to experience such and such. Now, what it is like for one might be taken to suggest that it is like some way or other for one individual or for one in the sense of a type of subjective point of view. If the former, then this suggests that an individual could operate with a private language for their experience, but Wittgenstein showed this is absurd, so not the former. If the latter, then what is the question about what it’s like asking. Maybe when someone says, “what it’s like” we should just assume their talking about a type of subjective point of view. One way of capturing the intuitions that support the definitions of consciousness as “what it’s like” to undergo some state or activity is through a sensible form of what I will call species-relative perspectivalism. Species-relative perspectivalism is the view that to have a first-person perspective depends upon having a type of perspective. For after all, how could one have a perspective, a subjective take, etc. without being a sentient being possessing sensory organs located in space and time, etc. To have a type of perspective can only be achieved by being a type of organism, i.e., a species. Now, when the question comes up, “What is it like to be x?” we can answer “whatever it is like to be x as S” where S is a species. In this sense, then, a first person perspective depends upon grasping something about the type of species that one is, likely some facts about one’s receptivity or sensibility. This captures the reality of the first person perspective, while not leaving it mysterious what ‘what it’s like’ means.

introduction to comments on Brandom's woodbridge lectures

I begin with the title: “Animating Ideas of Idealism:
A Semantic Sonata in Kant and Hegel.” I hope there is a non-hackneyed way to comment on this title. I think that a title should tell you a lot about what the author intends, what his or her purpose is. What is it for a set of ideas to be animating? The OED defines ‘to animate’ as “To give life to, make alive or active,” or more specifically, “To breathe life into, endow with life, give life to or sustain in life, quicken, vivify.”
There is an ambiguity in this verb between ideas which are animating in themselves and ideas which Brandom is animating. When I first read this title, I had hoped I would get an answer to this question, “How can these ideas of idealism be brought to life in the sense of how can they be part and parcel of the lives of human beings?” I don’t think this is a strange thing to think Brandom could provide, given his other work— Tales of the Mighty Dead, Making it Explicit, Articulating Reasons, etc.— but I didn’t get an answer to this question, and I think Brandom’s lectures positively rule out providing an answer.

In order to be up front, I will expose my qualifications and biases at the get-go. I have a “once-through” understanding of Making it Explicit, meaning I have read it through, but focused on the initial framework chapters in Part One and the application chapters that focused on perception and action and the chapter on Ascribing Propositional Attitudes, with special emphasis on the role of “I”. I’ve also read Part One of Tales of the Mighty Dead and focuses on his last essay on Sellars “The Centrality of Sellars’s Two-Ply account of Observation”, of which I’ve developed a critique that systematically exposes Brandom’s interpretation of Sellars as problematic.

The problem centers around comments in the Study Guide to EPM, a note in Articulating Reasons, and Brandom’s article “No Experience Necessary,” and basically argues that Brandom should not say this,

“I do not say that we need— either in epistemology or, more important, in semantics— to appeal to any intermediaries between perceptable facts and reports of them that are noninferentially elicited by the exercise of reliable differential responsive dispositions. There are, of course, many causal intermediaries, since the noninferential observation report is a propositionally contentful commitment to the acknowledgement of which stands at the end of a whole causal chain of reliably covarying events, including a cascade of neurophysiological ones. But I do not see that any of these has any particular conceptual or (therefore) cognitive or semantic significance. The strongest argument to the contrary, for the point of view presented in this work, are those presented by my colleague John McDowell in Mind and World” (Articulating Reasons, 206n7).

Brandom thinks that no experience is necessary; McDowell thinks that experience is necessary. Sellars according to Brandom thinks that no experience is necessary; Sellars according to McDowell thinks that experience is necessary. Kant according to Brandom thinks that no experience is necessary; Kant according to McDowell thinks that experience is necessary. This is rather annoying, repetitive and reductive, but I want to begin with these observations in mind.

Also, I need to expose my bias towards McDowell’s take on intentionality or what makes empirical content possible, towards a way of reading Sellars which is neither McDowell’s nor Brandom’s, but more inclusive of Sellars’ stereoscopic realism, and towards a reading of Kant that, as far as these lectures provide me with Brandom’s understanding is very different from Brandom’s.

[Another brief comment about contemporary history: In 1997, McDowell gave the Woodbridge Lectures called “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant and Intentionality.” Can Brandom’s lectures be read as an answer to McDowell’s Woodbridge Lectures? Well, no, because it systematically ignores their import...]

Another starting point that needs to be made is that I am generally in tow with the kind of philosophy that Brandom (and others like him) engage in— the blend of history of philosophy with contemporary philosophical problems/concerns. There are two general objections which I will rehearse in abstracto, but which will not be engaged in the more specific critiques.

Scholars of the history of philosophy, especially of Kant and Hegel, might object in many places: “Kant didn’t say that!” or “Hegel didn’t think that!” But, it should be noticed that this objection has purchase only if it is Brandom’s intention to engage in the history of philosophy. This is not his purpose. Like McDowell (and Sellars before them), he is a covetous borrower of historical ideas, where such particular borrowing does not commit Brandom or others to sign onto the entire ouevre of the historical philosopher. But, there is a better and worse way to accomplish covetous borrowing (in which I too engage).

Sellars does a better job than Brandom at animating historical ideas without mortifying them. He writes as if this were posted near at his desk: "Philosophy is a continuing dialogue with one's contemporaries, living and dead, and if one fails to see oneself in one's respondent and one's respondent in oneself, there is confrontation but no dialogue" -- Wilfrid Sellars "Philosophy and its History.” But, I think Sellars often just reproduces or photocopies the problems that are implicit in the thinker’s ideas.

And, I think McDowell does a better job than Brandom at animating historical ideas without making it seem like his commentaries are assembled for a purpose. McDowell assembles reminders to recover from historical muddles not to perpetuate a justification for a program. This can be bothersome since McDowell’s appeals to historical ideas seem sometimes to commit him to ideas which he wants to eschew (e.g., Kant’s “commitment” to things-in-themselves or Aristotle's scientistic naturalism). And, it can seem also that, given McDowell’s quietism, there are no contemporary accounts or theories with which to engage. One seems to straddle two ridges: (1) a conversation with (sometimes) stale rehashing of historical ideas as reminders and (2) a quietistic vacuum couched in philosophical discourse where particular problems once caused anxiety.

And, the other objection to Brandom's work might be that he doesn’t enter the conversation with figures that do actual honest-to-goodness work in semantics, intentionality, philosophy of representation, old-fashioned philosophy of mind, etc— it’s as if Brandom is playing with himself in his own philosophical playground (or cementary) and ignoring the rest of the class. However, I think Brandom’s work is most effective when it shows that much of this “professional playground" philosophy of language is missing the point (taking semantic contents such as meaning or reference as self-standing entities, and attempting to motivate the need to theorize about such reified "units of account") by construing the semantic tasks in a way that make them inaccessible to the real tasks— understanding linguistic practices. That’s why while reading Part One of Making it Explicit, if you really ingest the sea-change that it brings about in the sailing the seas of language, then you will find this objection to be misguided.

With these comments on the table, I will proceed in my next post to discuss Lecture One...

Robert Brandom Woodbridge Lectures 2007

Brandom's Woodbridge Lectures "Animating Ideas of Idealism" are available here. I've read the first and once I am finished with the others, I will comment on how they animate my concerns about self-consciousness.

Tyler Burge Dewey Lectures

Dewey Lectures (December 3-6, 2007)

Tyler Burge, UCLA "Self and Self-Understanding" Lecture One: "Some Origins of Self" December 3rd 2007, 6:15-8:00 PM, Heyman Center Common Room, Reception to Follow Lecture Two: "Self and Constitutive Norms" December 4th 2007, 6:15-8:00 PM, Heyman Center Common Room Lecture Three: "Self-Understanding" December 5th 2007, 6:15-8:00 PM, Heyman Center Common Room

frege's solution to the paradox

Both Perry’s and Evans’s accounts introduce baleful psychologistic idioms. Both views keep the subject thinking thoughts that are irremediably subjective. A new account should make sure that the self-referential content expressed by I-thoughts is not psychologistic. An account of Fregean I-thoughts should avoid falling into what might be called (following Hurley (2002: Ch. 2)) the Myth of the Giving. The myth is that individuals provide themselves with self-consciousness, either through entertaining essential indexical beliefs or being presented to oneself through modes of self-presentation.
Frege’s distinction between Ideas and Thoughts is relevant to specifying a solution to the FPST paradox. For Frege, ideas are individual mental items, whereas Thoughts are objective thinkable contents. An individual has a thinking process going on within her head when he is thinking. As a state of thinking, that state is incommunicable. But an individual never has a Fregean Thought going on within his head. Such Thoughts only exist mind-independently in linguistic communities. This motivates Frege to introduce the notion of The Third Realm: “thoughts are neither things of the outer world nor ideas [the inner world]. A third realm must be recognized” (1956: 302). The motivation for this is to suggest that the truth-values of thoughts have an objective specification.
The new account supports the view that there are two types of Fregean Thought. There is first person thought, that we might call object-relative self-conscious thought and there is other object-relative thought. Frege’s comments in “The Thought” suggest that there is a distinction between two distinct kinds of thoughts. I-thoughts are not, however in principle subjective, because Frege has accounted for the specification of such I-thoughts through a synthetic procedure.
Such a synthetic procedure can we outlined as an abstract process or procedural rule. Such a rule can be specified in third-person terms and serves a formal condition upon the utterances of I-thoughts. As Frege points out in the Grundgesetze (§32), when outlining his notion of sense and reference, there are conditions upon thought and reference. Such conditions are ideal procedures for determining the reference of words. Frege points out that I-thoughts presuppose “knowledge of certain accompanying conditions of utterance” (1956: 296) and that the speaker that uses ‘I’ “makes the associated conditions of his utterance serve for the expression of his thought” (1956: 298).
The resources for outlining such conditions might rely on demonstrations: using the “pointing of fingers, hand movements, glances” (1956: 296). We should not interpret the associated conditions of utterance as either descriptive senses or modes of presentations that the thinker or speaker utilizes to determine the reference. Instead, Frege’s remarks suggest that we should introduce a formal rule that constrains or governs reference of I-thoughts. What Frege is outlining in “the Thought” is the idea that there is an ineliminable condition of thought in general.
Thinking (in general) presupposes self-conscious thought. Anyone who believes, as Frege did that the pure indexical ‘I’ was ineliminable or not reducible to any other indexicals is merely suggesting that self-conscious thought is basic to thinking. Tokenings of such self-conscious thoughts, i.e., I-Thought-tokens would be subjective; but I-thoughts as such are objective, since they are basic to self-conscious thought.
Most of the solution for this Fregean account requires dissolution, because the new account requires making sense of how there are object-relative I-thoughts. There is a biological fact that there are certain beings that are self-conscious beings. There is a state of being self-conscious as a biological category. To enter that state of affairs, one needs to meet certain conditions: being able to engage in a practice of self-referential activity. Once we allow for such states of affairs, we can understand how objective I-thoughts are essentially incomplete. One needs to be able to take oneself as an object distinct from the world and go through the process of self-reference, relying on whatever resources are available.
Grasping an I-thought makes a person capable of becoming a vehicle of his or her thought. If one has the resources to grasp I-thoughts, then they have the capacity to go through a process of self-reference. They have ability to outline the conditions of the utterance of “I” (however, vaguely). On this dispositional view, one may not have the ability to speak, but yet still have an ability to outline the conditions for the utterance of “I.”
Both Perry and Evans make the mistake of supposing that “the special and primitive way in which everyone is presented to oneself” should be read either as a psychological state (Perry’s essential indexical belief) or as a psychological mode (Evans’s mode of self-presentation). When Frege talks about a ‘particular’ way one is presented to oneself, he could be suggesting either a transitive or intransitive construal of particular.
The transitive use of ‘particular’ suggests that “I-thoughts” involve some intentionality or possess representational properties. If this were the case, then such contents would submit to another description (both Perry and Evans attempt such a description). However, the intransitive use of ‘particular’ suggests that there is a way of referring to oneself that does not submit to further description. This intransitive referring to oneself is a capacity that might be had apart from the possession of any ability to further describe or attribute mental states to oneself.
The new account suggests that Frege’s position is best understood as a non-psychological condition that is specific to the expression of I-thoughts. The different types of thought are not feature of individual psychology, but rather a feature of individuals’ apprehending objective thoughts about themselves. The I-Thought that one grasps merely serves to determine that the creature becomes self-conscious.

Evans’ Account: A Difference of Modes of Presentation

Evans’ account relies upon a difference in modes of presentation to resolve the FPST paradox. When Jones utters an I-thought Jones relies upon information states. When we express I-thoughts we are expressing non-conceptual states that are generated by “several distinguishable capacities: our proprioceptive sense, our sense of balance, of heat and cold, and of pressure” (1982: 220). These self-specifying contents provide us with a representation of ourselves that are similar to the demonstrative “that person here” that is “exactly correlative” with mental self-reference: “the same capacity underlies understanding of both” (1982: 201n31).
Each person has a dispositional relationship to these demonstratively specified information states. Every self-conscious individual has a particular acquaintance relation to himself. Evans calls this relation, “relation R1.” R1 is specified in the following way: “S is thinking of S’ at t because R1 (S, S’, t)” (1981: 298). We have a triadic intentional relation to ourselves over time.
Evans’ suggests that other accounts (e.g., Perry’s) that rely on the semantic role of ‘I’ in language picture “self-conscious thought [as dependent] upon the interior exploitation of the conventional meaning of certain public linguistic devices, which is surely neither necessary nor sufficient for it” (1981: 302). Evans suggests that Perry gets things the wrong way around. So, what is the right way around? Evans’ opposite view by contraposition implies that there is an interior private language that enables an individual to achieve self-conscious thought.
Evans’ also replaces Frege’s notion of sense with “thinking about X,” such that the sense that determines the reference of “I” is specified by the intentional relationship to oneself. But “thinking about oneself” is too general to account for self-reference. Evans does not outline the exact specification of the self-concept that is required. This suggests that Evans has in mind the notion of a self-conception, i.e., whatever informational states happen to be given through inner sense. Evans (1982) makes the mistake of assimilating a self-Concept (the “I” of I-Thoughts) to a self-Idea, which is specified via a sensation-based mode of presentation. This goes against the Fregean distinction in “The Thought” between an Idea and a Thought.
Also, Evans view does not relate the self-specifying states in “x think” to the thought of other human beings or the environment. Evans’ does not explain how Jones self-Idea relates to other people’s interactions or descriptions concerning Jones. Evans suggests that the self-Idea is gained by an informational system which specifies the spatio-temporal position of the individual. If this is so, then when others make claims about Jones, they are not referring to what Jones is referring. As such, it is difficult to make out how Evans’ notion of I-thoughts could be anything but irremediably subjective.
Evans also faces the problem of explaining how non-conceptual contents that specify Jones’ self-Idea come to have the structure of conceptualized objective Thoughts about Jones. In order for Jones to make the transition (inference?) from non-conceptual contents to conceptual contents, Jones needs to structure a representation with “I think” in the subject place. Evans’ notion of non-conceptual contents qua information states do not possess structure. To make sense of the eventual structure of I-thoughts (e.g., subject-object structure), such structure must be presupposed to explain the transition from non-conceptual contents to conceptual contents. If Evans admits that there is a constituent structure to non-conceptual contents, then it becomes clear that such contents need to be minimally conceptual.
Evans’ account also must lead to a regress, since we are left wondering how non-conceptual contents that specify a self-Idea get their reference. We cannot merely assume that such contents are primitive. That would suggest that one is merely born thinking about oneself, or at least that one’s self-consciousness bubbles-up from below. That simply generates the FPST paradox in the inner realm.

Perry’s Account of FPST Paradox: A Difference of Senses

Perry’s account relies on the introduction of a difference of senses to resolve the FPST paradox. Perry (1977; 1979) takes “The Thought” to be an expression of the inadequacy of the Fregean notions of Sinn and Gedanken to account for demonstratives, specifically first person reference. After considering three Fregean solutions to the FPST paradox, Perry outlines his own solution. He suggests that Frege should make a distinction between Sinn and Gedanke— between “entertaining a sense and apprehending a thought” (1977: 493).
Perry thinks that if Jones entertains a sense of “I” when thinking “I am wearing a wig,” then he will grasp a thought about himself. Perry thinks that Jones does this by exploiting the “role” that “I” plays in the public language.
Kaplan (1975) suggests a similar position by discussing a first person character of utterances. Neither notion of a role or character seem very helpful in understanding the semantics of I-thoughts. We are ultimately concerned with the reference of “I” in order to assess the sentences (or mental tokenings of sentences) involving “I.” As Devitt (MS) suggests that there is a causal role of “I” in thought, but this causal role does not explain how the reference of “I” is fixed.
The sense that is associated with the essential indexical “I”-type role allows the individual employing “I” to complete the incomplete sense. Completing the sense involves entertaining a “self-locating belief.” Perry attempts to explain the difference between I-thoughts and objective Thoughts by involving a special self-referential sense. The self-referential sense gets no other specification other than an appeal to the role that the self-referential sense plays in allowing Jones to recognize that he is wearing a wig.
One problem with Perry’s view is his interpretation of the Fregean notion of Sinn. Perry was wrong to assimilate Sinn and Gedanke in his criticism of Frege’s attempts at resolution of the FPST paradox. Following Dummett’s (1973) work on Frege’s philosophy of logic and language, Evans (1982) and McDowell (1984; 1986) have effectively shown that Frege might have held a notion of de re sense and a notion of object-relative singular thought that could resolve the FPST paradox. He suggests that certain senses, e.g., senses involved in expressions of “I-thoughts” embed incomplete descriptions. The interpretation of Frege’s notion of Sinn as descriptive is usually motivated by appeal to a footnote in “On Sense and Reference.” The historical source of this mistaken interpretation can be traced to Carnap’s Meaning and Necessity (1947: §4–9). According to Perry, the senses that are entertained in the case of the use of “I” are essentially incomplete. To complete the I-thought sense, we need a further sense, a “missing conceptual ingredient: a sense for which I am the reference, or a complex of properties I alone have, or a singular term that refers to no one but me” (1979: 171). Perry commits an error of confusing a descriptive sense with an object. Perry rules out the possibility that Frege might have held that objects complete I-thoughts (actual subjects rather than senses that describe subjects) (Perry (1977: 496)).
One also might criticize Perry’s view by suggesting that beliefs are really dispositions to entertain a thought. Thus, entertaining essentially indexical belief states amounts to entertaining an essentially indexical thought. If Jones thinks a self-locating thought, and such thoughts are merely I-thoughts in new clothes. Perry has not explained anything. Perry suggests, “having a self-locating belief does not consist in believing a Fregean thought” (1977: 492). We do not have good reason to reject this possibility (as I noted above). And we have less reason to accept the existence of essentially indexical beliefs.
Perry is just introducing psychological idioms without reason; his view is not as “metaphysically benign” as he suggests. Perry’s account leads to a regress, since he never explains how essentially indexical belief states get their reference. We cannot merely assume that such states primitively specify the individuals they are about. Is one merely born having beliefs about oneself in an essentially indexical way? Perry does not explain how one actually refers to or is able to refer to oneself. Instead, he introduces a special type of belief state that leaves us without an explanation.

frege on the first person

Frege (1956) suggests that first person singular thought is different from other types of singular thought: “the same utterance containing the word “I” will express different thoughts in the mouths of different men, of which some may be true, others false” (1956: 296). When Jones says to someone, (1) “I am wearing a wig” rather than (2) “Jones is wearing a wig,” then the “I” in (1) allows for a real distinction. The distinction is between a sentence that is true (or false) relative to whom the first person singular pronoun “I” refers and a sentence that is true (or false) relative to the third person name “Jones.”
In his Logic, Frege considers whether “I” might be reduced to third person names or nominal descriptions but in “The Thought,” Frege denies this possibility. Sentences involving the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ cannot be reduced to sentences involving names. But at which level of the Fregean notions— sense (Sinn), reference (Bedeutung), thought (Gedanke), modes of presentation (Art des Gegebenseins) or interpersonal communication (Kommunikation)— should the distinction made?
If we make the distinction at the level of thought, then a paradox Frege’s view of thought generates a paradox, call it, The Paradox of First Person Singular Thought (the FPST paradox). First person thoughts are private, incommunicable or relative to the first person singular pronoun. Frege’s major goal in “The Thought,” however, is to provide a theory of Thoughts (der Gedanken) in which Thoughts possess objective truth-values. Further, in ordinary communication, we use sentences with the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ to express and communicate first person thoughts that possess such objective truth-values. For example, “I am wearing a wig” is true or false depending on whom utters it. But, we can derive the paradoxical conclusion: we communicate Thoughts that are incommunicable.
Some thinkers (e.g., Perry (1977)) take Frege’s view to be that Thoughts are generally accessible. Frege has suggested that “I-thoughts” are not accessible by claiming that they are “incommunicable.” Perry misunderstands Frege’s view here. Frege never writes that all Thoughts are actually communicable or sharable, but that Thoughts have potentially objective truth-values. Frege’s concern is to rule out that thoughts are irremediably subjective. For Frege, there is never in principle a thought that does not have an objective truth-value.
Frege might describe the Jones scenario above: “He cannot communicate a thought he alone can grasp. Therefore, if he now says ‘[I am wearing a wig],’ he must use the ‘I’ in a sense which can be grasped by others, perhaps in the sense of ‘he who is speaking to you at this moment,’ by doing which he makes the associated conditions of his utterance serve for the expression of his thought” (1956: 298).
Any Fregean semantics needs to resolve the paradox and simultaneously elucidate Frege’s account of the special role of “I.” Such a view cannot fail to adhere to what I will call Frege’s principle: “always separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” (1950: x). After criticizing two attempts, I outline a picture of the type of view that we need to attribute to Frege to help him resolve (dissolve) the FPST paradox.

the importance of kant

i want to make a claim that at first will seem unreasonable, but i think is worth defending: while not all philosophy is clearly about kant or clearly arises from Kant, no good philosophy can be done without kant (Kant qua sine qua non). in the twentieth century, we saw the rise (and fall) of three western philosophical traditions: continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and cognitive science. each of these traditions (more or less) arise from Kant, meaning it is hard to make sense of how these traditions could have existed had Kant not penned his works. assuming that these traditions have had sufficient failures enough to put them into question, i would argue it is time to return to Kant. if anyone doubts this, i would urge you to challenge my claim: Kant qua sine qua non.

online videos of philosophy lectures

Some very interesting links to lectures and conferences on philosophy and cognitive science:
http://broodsphilosophy.wordpress.com/2006/06/15/online-videos-of-philosophical-lectures/

self-consciousness and conceptual ascent

Self-consciousness has the conceptual content of being aware of oneself as oneself. There a certainly different accounts of self-consciousness. In a famous example by John Perry, an absented-minded professor is pushing a shopping cart around a supermarket. He notices that there is a thin trail of sugar on the floor, and says, “That idiot is making a mess.” Suddenly, the professor realizes that it is he himself that is spilling the sugar, and says, “I am making a mess.” In the first statement, Perry is in fact referring of himself. However, simply being aware of oneself is not sufficient. In the latter statement, Perry is referring to himself as himself. It is this reflexive relation, being aware of oneself as such, that is necessary for self-consciousness.
Most discussions of self-consciousness fail to explicate fully what this reflexive relation implies: (1) the content must be a conceptual content; (2) the ‘as oneself’ in the definition requires elucidation:

(a) as discriminated from the world (self-discrimination);
(b) as presented in experience (self-presentation);
(c) as located in a spatiotemporal matrix or field (self-location);
(d) as one’s body (bodily self-perception);
(e) as a unified or synthesized locus of consciousness (self-synthesis);
(f) as the subject of ascription of properties (self-ascription);
(g) as reflexively referred to (self-reference);
(h) as the mental object of introspection (mental self-perception);
(i) as a self-conception (self-conception).

Each of these definitions commit one to “conceptual ascent” since each have the form or structure of awareness of something as X. If one is aware of something as X, then it is necessary that that awareness is conceptual. Conceptual ascent suggests that the content of self-consciousness involves the use of concepts. A concept is a rule for determining that an element of thought refers to an object. So, self-consciousness requires conceptual ascent.

a series of questions...

what is self-discrimination? why is it a form of self-consciousness? what creatures are capable of self-discrimination? is it merely self/not-self discrimination? is it a biological notion or something more? if it were merely a biological notion, then does it imply others? even if it were something more, would it imply others? does self-discrimination imply that one has to discriminate between two objects, similar to discriminating between circles and squares? is self-discrimination transitive or intransitive? does this even matter? what reason do we have to think that if it is intransitive that all creatures possess self-discrimination? what does one discriminate oneself as? merely a subject or as an object? if so, then what object does one discriminate? one’s body? one’s mental self? oneself as a subject? if not, then what is self-discrimination? what is involved in a subject’s distinguishing between itself and the world? what are the properties of this world? does it have to be ordered? does it have to be populated by physical or material objects? does this involve experience? what type of experience? does experience require self-discrimination? suppose self-discrimination is a subject’s distinguishing itself from the world, does this require thinking of oneself as a subject of experience? what would that mean? would that mean that one was experiencing an objective world? so, does self-discrimination have to meet the objectivity condition? what is this objectivity condition? that objects persist despite one’s existence, one’s subjective point of view, one’s experience at all? what is kant’s position on self-discrimination? are there any passages in kant’s CPR that evince the distinction between oneself and the world? what role does the I-think play in this department? does the I-think determine the difference between a representation being mine in the sense of being one’s own and a representation being not mine in the sense of the world’s? how is the concept of ownership related to self-discrimination? what does it mean for one to have an experience as of an objectively existing world? is that the only pole that is available as an other? is there only a transcendental other in the sense of an independently existing world that is opposed to oneself? how does this relate to the appearance/reality distinction? what is the appearance/reality distinction for kant? is appearance/reality the same as phenomena/noumena or appearance/thing in itself? how do these map onto each other? what is transcendental idealism’s take on self-discrimination? if self-discriminating is an active undertaking, then what how does that fit with an interpretation of transcendental idealism? how is transcendental idealism or the appearance/reality distinction related fundamentally to the notion of self-consciousness as self-discrimination? suppose there is no appearance/reality distinction, is there still self-d? what are some cases/examples for kant? what is the most minimal form of self-discrimination? what is the least complex objective world? is there a thing-in-itself or noumenal world which is so basic that determines that one can differentiate oneself from that object or set of objects? what is Kant’s actual objectivity condition? suppose we interpret Kant via the Prauss interpretation, then does this mean that one only experiences objects as if they were independent of oneself, rather than actually independent of oneself? what is Kant’s position on the necessity of others? in what way does his argument about the dependence of self-discrimination on the A/R distinction require others? does it at all? what is Strawson’s interpretation of the relation between self-d and A/R distinction? is Strawson’s argument valid and sound? what is the direction of necessary and sufficient conditions? does it parallel Kant’s? is it the correct direction of dependence? how does strawson conceive of self-discrimination? is self-ascription essential to it? does Strawson capture properly the distinction between appearance and reality? how does Strawson’s discussion of appearance/reality relate to the objectivity condition? does the objectivity condition involve awareness of others? why does Strawson think that others are involved at any point, and why might he be motivated to argue for this at the level of self-discrimination? why does self-discrimination entail the objectivity constraint, but not others? what is part and parcel of the experience of independently existing objects, but without the engagement with others? what is Cassam’s interpretation of self-consciousness as self-discrimination? how does it relate to Kant’s and Strawson’s conceptions? what is the relation between the objectivity argument and the unity argument? how does Cassam’s objectivity argument, both in their concept version and intuition version fail? what makes the concept version reparable, given an adequate notion of the transcendental/empirical distinction? what does Cassam say about the distinction between appearance/reality? does this distinction suggest any requirement of the existence of others? if so, why? if not, why not? how are each of these concerns really implicitly an argument against Kant? couldn’t the question “where are others?” be brought in as a criticism? could Cassam’s arguments be interpreted as saying that Kant’s tendency to discuss the subject as if it were merely a logical form or a transcendental structure obscures a real possibility? are none of these questions helpful?

Frege on the condition of Thought

One goal of mine is to develop an interpretation of Frege's account of first person thought. My interpretation supports the view that there are two types of Fregean Thought (rather than two types of belief, senses, or modes of presentation). There is first person thought, that we might call object-relative self-conscious thought and there is other object-relative thought. Frege’s comments in “The Thought” suggest that there is a distinction between two distinct kinds of thoughts. I-thoughts are not, however in principle subjective, because Frege has accounted for the specification of such I-thoughts through a synthetic procedure. Such a synthetic procedure can be outlined as an abstract process or procedural rule, which might be compared to the synthetic rules of Kant's schematism. Such a rule can be specified in third-person terms and serves a formal condition upon the utterances of I-thoughts. As Frege points out in the Grundgesetze (§32), when outlining his notion of sense and reference, there are conditions upon thought and reference. Such conditions are ideal procedures for determining the reference of words. Frege points out that I-thoughts presuppose “knowledge of certain accompanying conditions of utterance” (1956: 296) and that the speaker that uses ‘I’ “makes the associated conditions of his utterance serve for the expression of his thought” (1956: 298). The resources for outlining such conditions might rely on demonstrations: using the “pointing of fingers, hand movements, glances” (1956: 296). We should not interpret the associated conditions of utterance as either descriptive senses or modes of presentations that the thinker or speaker utilizes to determine the reference. Instead, Frege’s remarks suggest that we should introduce a formal rule that constrains or governs reference of I-thoughts. What Frege is outlining in “the Thought” is the idea that there is an ineliminable condition of thought in general.

mcdowell's sellarsian priorities about self-consciousness

In a footnote in Lecture 3 of Mind and World, McDowell admits that awareness (consciousness) implies self-consciousness. All awareness is self-reflective thinking, thinking about what one is thinking. This implies that consciousness is always consciousness that such and such is the case for one. That means that intentionality is cashed out in terms of concept-world relations that are in some sense prior to mind-world relations and “S is consciousness of x” relations. It might be useful to compare this to Sellars’ strategy.

nozick and rocks

Nozick discusses the special feature of self-consciousness as reflexive self-reference. Why do we think this feature is special? At first blush, we might look around and discover that we are after all in public surrounded by human beings or other non-human animals that are aware of themselves in this way. In that sense, self-consciousness grips philosophers and scientists as difficult slogging, but infants, and maybe robots and frogs seem to have a go at self-consciousness. So, what is the problem? It is not a problem either of conceiving of how this is possible, in the sense of conceivable. What we are mostly concerned with is how it is possible that we are self-conscious given that earth, minerals and rocks do not seem to be self-conscious. One less than obvious reason is that these don’t seem to hang out in social groups, though they certainly hang out together. But, that a rock sits next to another rock, doesn’t mean that they are sitting. They are a pile of rocks, rather than a group of rocks. So, maybe that is the difficulty: self-consciousness doesn't emerge from a pile of rocks, but yet it emerges in babies and maybe robots and frogs.

could the concept of self be a dispositional concept

nozick suggests in parenthesis that the capacity to refer to oneself is the part of the essence of the self is interesting as the capacity is merely a disposition or a dispositional state, but presumably the essence of something is the essential or non-accidental or intrinsic property of the thing. be aware that capacity can be minimally read so that it becomes uninformative. it is interesting that RN leaves it open that the essence then is merely a dispositional thing...

nozick on insurmountable how-possible questions

The first “how-possible question” about the self suggests that a weighty-most number of things do not stand in a self-relation that involves awareness or consciousness of themselves. Suppose 'consciousness' and 'awareness' mean the same. Are most things not conscious of themselves? We should say that anything X stands in at least one self-relation, i.e., the self-relation of being self-identical, unless identity is not best-understood in terms of self-relation. But, this self-relation is not determined by consciousness. Assuming that self-relation is criterial, by which I mean the specification of the relation involves specifying a criterion or symptom of the relation, e.g., for a chair to be self-related would involve some set of conditions that determined the self-relation, partly individuation and partly contiguity/continuation, that specified the self-relation. But, if identity is supposed to enable us to specify self-consciousness, and it requires a criterion, then because self-consciousness is criterionless ascription, or as Brook calls it "non-ascriptive reference to self," we’ve gone the wrong way. But, suppose it is not criterionless, then to what does one appeal to ensure that one has the criterion applied correctly. What are some exceptions to the idea that most things do not bear a self-relation that is “peculiarly intimate”? The question might be phrased: is there something unusual or mysterious about such self-relations? Plotinus’ thought provides an exception, since “The One” involves a self-relation which is absolute and the model for identity, and not merely for identity but for every object worth its salt. Leibniz’ thought is an exception here, as every thing, i.e., monad has an intrinsic self-relation (and other-relation). But, we would not want to presuppose that any of these philosophical theories are correct, or can serve as more than merely apparent counterexamples or reminders. But, we also simply need to show that we do not necessarily need to get too worked up about the mystery of the self-relation that is posited to explain self-consciousness. Unless that is the only way to answer such how possible questions, we might not want to endorse theories that begin with a false insurmountability, or a how-possible question that stacks the odds against answering the question such that it appears actually impossible. We should not investigate self-consciousness with the assumption that it is in principle impossible to conceive of how it is possible.

nozick on the self

Nozick’s first question is “What is a self?" or "How is a self possible?” There is a comment about self-closeness or the sense of immediacy of the relationship to oneself. I wonder if it is a sense or because we say “itself as itself,” we read off the reflexive construction the idea that we must be immediate to ourselves. What does it mean for us to have a “sense” of immediacy. Nozick says that “the self stands in a peculiarly intimate relationship to itself”: “intimate” does not suggest an intentional relation is presupposed, meaning that by simply thinking of ourselves we are in touch with or bear upon ourselves immediately. But, when I am intimate with my wife without always being intrinsically related to her. And, I do not have to care for myself in the sense of keep track of myself in the way that I must care for my dog (whom I am related to, though not intrinsically) at the dog park. But, Nozick seems to at least be taking it as a default position that we are close to ourselves in a way which provides knowledge: “How is such knowledge possible?” But, we might ask, how does Nozick in this very first paragraph find an obstacle to this knowledge? Is it an obstacle to self-knowledge, the idea of self-consciousness, or the self?

Sellars' Thinking Subject

Now that I have outlined and defended Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s notion of the thinking subject, I would like to discuss Sellars’ view of the thinking subject. It is my contention that Sellars was influenced by Kant’s view of the thinking subject as the transcendental subject of thought-activity. Given this contention and the corresponding extension of Kant’s notion of practical activity of judging as basic to the meta-structure of the categories (the I-think is the vehicle of such content (B406)), we might consider Sellars’ view of the thinking subject as modeled on the talking subject. This will require narrating a further myth for Sellars. The extended Myth of Jones considers the acquisition of a concept of the I-think and self-consciousness.
We begin by asking the question: How did our Rylean ancestors recognize and acknowledge each other as creatures that talk and think? Before they can do so, according to Sellars, they need to master the differential response dispositions to apply concepts to objects in their experience (1956: §35). The first prerequisite seems to be their recognition of persons and the corresponding acquisition of the concept of a person. Following this stage, the Ryleans would utilize subjunctive conditionals that enable them to describe the regularity of pairings of certain creatures and their verbal and non-verbal behavior. This is why Sellars points out that subjunctive conditionals are “especially” important (§48).
During this initial Rylean phase, the proto-I-think is merely a talking subject— a thing that talks and acts intelligently. We might imagine that our Rylean ancestors initially infer the existence of persons from observing others using names (or descriptions) that are reliably correlated with their respective actions. Also, names and descriptions of individuals (“the name game”) could also come along with semantical discourse (1956: §49), as marks of that which performs the specific “overt verbal performances” (1956: §49).
It may be that the material conditions of the Ryleans determine that there is a regular connection between the “grunts and groans of the cave” (1956: §63) and the things making the grunting and groaning. The resources that the Ryleans already have in place, i.e., of persons engaging in speech acts and intelligent action, enables the eventual analogical extension from the talker to the thinker.
Such an extension would depend upon the ordinary discourse that is already in place, the discourse in which the Ryleans use “we” and “I” to demarcate themselves as speakers (both in the species sense and the individual sense). That discourse could be extended to the use of “we” and “I” to demarcate themselves as thinkers. What does Jones contribute to the story that enables the Ryleans to begin not only to talk about their individual sense contents and thought contents, but also about themselves as thinking subjects?
We do need to presuppose that certain materials already exist prior to the Ryleans’ transition to abilities to self-ascribe thought contents. They need to acquire a self-concept and not just a self-conception. They already (in an important sense) have a self-conception— a notion of themselves as a type of creature that talks and intelligently behaves.
While the Jonesian theory of thoughts is coming into vogue, Jones’ also finds himself needing to utilize a special term for gathering thoughts attributed to singular individuals. The attribution is at first done transcendentally, i.e., at the level of marking a personal expression of a thought. And, eventually, the Ryleans catch on and then such a practice would eventually lead to self-indexing. Need it have?
There would be reasons for this to occur. Once there are two Gilberts, then the name-language game creates ambiguities and there is motivation to introduce a singular representation to mark individuals in the abstract. And, once first-person contents become second-nature, then the Ryleans lose the need to have a robust name or description for themselves, since ‘I’ marks the locus of thought-activity in general. There is only the need for a general accompaniment to the thoughts that the Ryleans express.
When Jones makes his first theoretical posits, we can assume that he posits a thinking subject along with the posits of thought-contents and sense-contents. The subject of action in general (speech action and intelligent non-verbal behavior) then becomes the singular subject— a thinker or representer that is being expressed (merely as a vehicle of the content) through overt verbal and non-verbal (intelligent) behavior. Again, following Kant, Sellars thinks that this does not rule out that such a subject is not a system of various modes of thinking, or ultimately the diachronic identity of a series of modes of such a system (1969: 236-240; 1962: 37).
It should be clear then that the language game of self-attribution of experiences presupposes that one can play the game of other-attribution first (and other language games in general). Jones is the first to initiate such an other-attribution game. Also, the language game of self-attribution presupposes that one be acknowledged through other-attribution. This is the only ground upon which one can be recognized and belong to the group of individuals that already say “we.” The path to acquiring the self-concept begins here.
If this is so, then the fact-stating role of “I” develops first through Jones’ attributions using ‘you’ (1956, §59). In that case Jones’ allows the Ryleans to “encounters themselves” (1962: 6), first through Jones’ making them humans-in-the-world. As Sellars outlines in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” he thinks that human beings become human beings only by reflecting on themselves. If this is so, then the Ryleans only become human beings through Jones’ making them into human beings, through Jones’ initial attributions. Jones’ attributions of “you” become assimilated by the Ryleans, and Jones contrasts his own attributions with first-person singular attributions. The reporting role of “I” then gets started: “what began as a language with a purely theoretical use has gained a reporting role” (1956: §59).
On this picture (and it is a picture), self-attributive mentalistic discourse gets its authority from the thoroughly third-person practice of post-Jonesian thought-attribution. Once we begin to describe such a practice, then we recognize that such an “essentially intersubjective” (1956: §59) realm brings with it the need to temper the authority of claims made within such a practice— first-person claims are always already third-person claims. This is not merely because first personal claims embed folk theories of what a thinking subject or person is, but also because all individuals’ theories are products of the social practice of attributing this or that type of thinking subject to individuals. This could be Sellars’ model for theorizing about the movement from the talking subject to the thinking subject. Now we see if we can use a myth to kill a myth.

defending sellars' view

Pippin is mostly concerned with the notion of spontaneity in Sellars’ Kant and its relevance for a theory of transcendental thinking. Pippin argues that Sellars’ view that Kant’s I-think is a thinking system is too empirical. He suggests that if we elucidate Kant’s notion of transcendental spontaneity, then the I-think-qua-system “cannot ‘really’ be a causal system” (1987: 451). Pippin suggests that “thinking is not a kind of sensibility (contra both, say, Locke and Leibniz), but it cannot be said to owe its occurring to sensibility, and is therefore ‘spontaneous’” (464). His argument is that if spontaneity is voluntary, then both Sellars “relative spontaneity” view and his notion of “noumenal science” cannot be a correct interpretation of Kant’s I-think. Pippin argues that Sellars interpretation of the ‘I-think’ as relatively spontaneous will not do, since Kant argues for “absolute spontaneity in apperception” (466).
The problem with Pippin’s interpretation is that his “spontaneity condition” presupposes that spontaneity itself is non-relative, rather than arguing directly for the view that spontaneity is absolute. Kant never outlines spontaneity as being absolute, but merely as pure, i.e., rather than empirical. In section §3, I faulted Sellars for replicating Kant’s difficulties in the movement from assessment of speculative freedom to his assessment of practical freedom. But, that such a hurdle faced Kant (and Sellars) is sufficient to show that Pippin’s view cannot be correct. Pippin thinks that judgment necessarily involves absolute spontaneity, rather than (as Sellars argues) thought-activity always already involves a thinker in an intersubjective network of thinkers. Also, even if Pippin could assume the spontaneity of thought, that would not imply absolute spontaneity of action.
Kitcher’s (1990) account of the I-think and apperception is inspired by Sellars’ view. Kitcher claims that Sellars was first to point out that Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception involves an abstract account of the unity of the mind. Kitcher suggests that Sellars’ view of the I-think is phenomenal, and that it must be correct, “whatever the fallout of this view” (140; 257n55). This cannot be Sellars’ position or correct, as should be clear from above. Sellars’ account of I-think can be understood without the phenomenal characterization and I did criticize the phenomenal elements of Sellars view in §3 above.
Also, Kitcher fails to recognize that if we keep in mind the projects of Kant’s second and third critiques, especially the role of consciousness in providing us with spontaneity, then we should not be lead to the pessimistic view that since the I of apperception cannot find a home in the noumenal realm (or else it cannot guide a practical judging subject) or in the phenomenal realm (or else it cannot be free), then we should settle for the latter and surrender our freedom. After all, Sellars’ view of relative spontaneity (tailored with the caveat above), is still spontaneity, i.e., not a product of the external mechanisms of sensibility.
Kitcher also faults Sellars for not further developing the connection between the I-think of the Paralogisms and transcendental apperception. Sellars can also be criticized (as I mentioned above) for his oversight of the distinction between analytic and synthetic unity of apperception and its relation to a parallel structure in the I-think. Kitcher thinks that Sellars is too hasty in assuming that Kant simply recognized “that mental terms like “thought” are functional” (266n21). Kitcher wants to suggest that Kant’s reflecting on the necessary conditions of thought leads him to a view of the self as a contentually connected unity (1984: 144-145; 1990: Ch. 5), and that this recognition leads to a view of “thought” as functional. But, what Kitcher does not adequately recognize is the relation between the forms of judgment and categories (which is pivotal to Sellars’ interpretation). She does not see how the form of the judgment “I think” presupposes a vehicle of the content, not just an abstracted connection between the I-think in each act of thought.
Brook (1994) discusses what the subject is aware of in being aware of itself. He suggests that Kant thinks that I am aware of “my mind as it is, the noumenal substrate of myself and my representations” and attributes this view to Sellars, saying that Sellars thought that “one is immediately aware of oneself as one is” (248). Brooks attributes to Kant the view that the thinking subject is a “global representation which the mind is” (248). Brooks criticizes Sellars for not paying “attention to the implications of transcendental designation— the difference between awareness via acts of apperception and awareness via intuition-based representations...” (248).
It is true that Sellars does not approach the key quote about designation in Kant’s CPR: “the subject of inherence is designated only transcendentally through the I that is appended to thoughts, without noting the least property of it, or cognizing or knowing anything at all about it” (A355). But, Sellars takes the import of the Paralogisms to be that Kant has left it an open question what “I” designates, suggesting that it may be a system or even “a neurophysiological system” (1969: 240). Sellars is aligned with Kant in leaving the question open, but a good interpretation stresses that the I-think qua vehicle of the categories has a singular noumenal (i.e., theoretical) designation while maintaining that singular designation does not exclude reference to a plurality of objects or processes which determine that reference.
Sellars is correct, because it does not follow that accepting the singularity of acts of apperception entails the singularity or unitary nature of the eventual material conditions for such acts. However, Brooks’ notion of a “global representation” suggests that the representation is singular. This is not helpful, since it is not clear that Kant would have taken the I-think to be in the domain of the taxonomy of representations (A320), since Kant explicitly rejects that it is either an intuition (B422n) or a concept (A341/B399).
Kant was crafting a notion of a logical subject apart from this taxonomy of representations. There is good reason to think that the thinking subject would not be represented at all, but would merely be a subject— the logical subject is an existential category, not a conceptual category.

comments on Sellars on the I-think

Sellars’ view of the Kantian I-think is a strong interpretation because it stresses the primacy of the practical in Kant’s system by elucidating the I-think in terms of spontaneity. The thinking subject is ultimately a practical thinker, rather than a thinker discovered by theoretical inquiry— the logical subject is the practical subject of thought-activity.
There are other reasons to support this interpretation. One is the (much-overlooked) comment that Kant makes in CPR about the power of judgment: “although the understanding is certainly capable of being instructed and equipped through rules, the power of judgment is a special talent that cannot be taught but only practiced” (A133/B172). It is then the application of concepts that is most relevant to understanding thought-activity, i.e., the actuality of understanding, rather than the description of its faculties.
Another argument for the primacy of the practical in interpreting the “I-think” can be motivated by considering the role the unity of reason of the second and third critique. Kant dispenses with the “I-think” in favor of discussing the fact of reason or the unity of reason. As Sellars points out (6§6n1) Kant took the Paralogisms (and especially the Refutation of Idealism) to be an effective transformation of the “I-think” into a practical agent of judgment.
This is generally in line with Kant’s insistence that we should limit speculation about theoretical reason to make room for actual uses of reason, i.e., thought and action in the practical realm. In CPrR, Kant suggests that the fact of reason is basic: we find ourselves as beings whom act intelligently and rationally. If we assume these platitudes about people engaged in thought-activity as part of the manifest image, then our interpretation of the thinking subject will be analogous to or an extension of the picture of the subject performing various acts, verbal or non-verbal in the practical realm. I now turn to some difficulties with Sellars’ interpretation.
One difficulty with Sellars’ view is that though he relates the “I-think” to the unity of apperception, Sellars does not discuss the significant difference between synthetic unity and analytic unity of the “I.” I am more inclined to read Kant in line with Strawson’s (1966: 89) arguments for synthetic objectivity conditions being prior to the subject’s becoming self-conscious. Kant argues for the objectivity of nature that is unified in its presentation to us (A116). This grounds a more proximal unity, i.e., the body in outer sense (B415). The body, then is the objective condition for a micro-unity, the ‘I-think’ which is the grounds for the subject that appears in inner sense.
Sellars’ does not see the import of the Strawsonian construal of the objectivity constraint upon thought about the world. It is not merely the unity of the body in outer sense, but objective unity as such, that makes us privilege a unitary posit of a singular subject. Once we recognize why Kant privileges the synthetic conditions on thought, then there is only a methodological dualism of the subject. There is merely an instrumental distinction between synthetic conditions on a thinker, what is required for one to actually think, for thinking to become an actuality (i.e., Bildung or upbringing); and analytic requirements, what is required to think about thinking.
On Sellars’s view, the legitimation or deduction of the I-think would have to be justified through an assessment of the accounts of first-personal statements about inner sense appearings of the noumenal self. But the synthetic unity of apperception is not the same thing as the object of affection (even, of double affection) in inner sense. As I mentioned above, Sellars posits “a thinker” or “a representer” in the place of transcendental unity.
Once we see this emphasis in Sellars’ Kant, then we can understand Sellars’ reasons for relying upon abstraction to outline a notion of unity. I do not think that Kant held an abstraction view of the self or the unity of self. Any abstraction would have to be a theoretical abstraction from X. Since abstraction enables us to outline concepts (discussed in the Schematism), the thinking subject would have to be prior to such abstraction. It could not be that we abstract in inner sense a notion of the thinking subject. Also, Kant negatively assesses the resources of inner sense and introspection. He suggests that inner sense is not either necessary or sufficient to provide us with a noumenal subject of thought (B150-156).
Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s notion of the subject turns the conscious subject into a subject which is involved in attending (25§66) or “noticing” (1968: 10§24) ourselves thinking. But, if we take the distinction between inner sense and apperception as seriously as Kant repeatedly suggests (B152-159), then it becomes clear that the notion of the thinking subject cannot be seen as abstracted in inner sense, but must be rather seen as a condition or ground of inner sense.
Another more general trouble with Sellars’ article is that he replicates Kant’s difficulties in making the spontaneity of reason practical, which are exhibited in The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals §3. Sellars makes the Kantian subject into a representer that would be the object of an individualistic psychology, rather than presenting a unitary view of the practical subject, as an agent of thought and action. Sellars’ notion of relative spontaneity is related to this problem. If Sellars had related the notion of spontaneity to productive imagination, then he might have obviated the problem of leaving the subject as a mental thing engaging in “diaphanous acts,” rather than engaging in a practical activity of thinking. In the next post, I turn to further comments and criticisms of Sellars’ interpretation by Pippin, Kitcher and Brook.

sellars on the I-think

According to Sellars, rational psychology wrongly asks the question, “what sort of being is an I?” (5§3) . Transcendental psychology, however can be studied, provided we focus on necessary conditions— we should stick to a minimal characterization of the I that thinks. Kant rightly pointed out that rational psychology looks into the nature of the necessary condition for thought. Instead, transcendental psychology should inquire into the logic (in the Kantian sense) of “I.”
Sellars outlines the role of the “I” as an “unrestricted principle in the philosophy of mind” (7§7). He suggests that it unifies the manifold without implying that representations are had in or possessed by a subject. Sellars has historically, been the key figure to argue that the I-think of Kant’s Paralogisms (A341-405/B399-432) is the “I” of apperception in Kant’s Deductions (especially §15-§27, B129-B169).
Once we understand that the world is collected under a number of forms, that the veridical (objective) representation of the world is made possible by the forms of sensibility (space and time) and understanding (the judgments and categories), then we can more easily reflect upon the significance of the “I” as the locus of judgmental activity (predominantly, the locus of assertion). As Kant points out, the “I-think” has to be “assigned to” (A341/B399) the categories without altering them.
Acts of thinking are best understood under the banner of judgment-activity, or “thought-activities,” which involve a singular and basic synthesis of all the forms of thought-activity under the categories (in the case of introspection in inner sense) and the über-category— the synthetic unity of apperception.
Sellars rejects the claim that is often made by Kant interpreters that Kant held an empty subject view of the ‘I.’ Such a view is usually motivated by appeal to the passage in the Paralogisms in which Kant says that the I-think is “an empty representation I, of which one cannot even say that it is a concept” (A345-6/B404). Sellars’ reasons for rejecting this interpretation derive from the suggestion that Kant cannot be arguing that there is an empty “bare particular” ‘I’ which is determined by its ascriptions or by its attributive predications. Kant could not hold the view that attributes or accidents inhere in a particular representation ‘I,’ since he warns against using the category of substance in this way in the First Analogy. Also, just because the I-think never receives a determinate content, that does not mean that the I-think is either illegitimate or empty.
Instead, Sellars suggests: “the conceptual burden of the “proposition ‘I-think’” is carried by the verb ‘to think’” (9§14). This generally aligns Sellars with the tradition of Kant interpreters (for instance, Cassirer and Heidegger) that give bride of place to the logical function of judgments in Kant’s deduction. Kant begins the deduction with the structure of judgments (A80/B106). Sellars suggests that Kant read such judgments off the structure of actual linguistic statements in a public language. With this in view, we can see how I-think or the activity of thinking might be understood in terms of speech acts employing the verb “to think”.
Sellars suggests that the proposition “I-think” only yields ‘a thinker.’ The thinker in Kant should be construed as the that-which-represents, or ‘a representer’ (10§16). Sellars does not agree with the Strawsonian interpreters that suggest that Kant thought that the person was the grounds for a possible thinking subject. Instead, Sellars points out that for Kant, “in the world of appearance, the I which thinks is not, as such, identical with the I which runs” (10§18). Sellars suggests that Kant’s account is dualistic, but not Cartesian. Kant’s position is not Cartesian because Kant does not attempt to infer the properties of mind qua substance from the concept “I-think.”
Rather than self-intimating their significance (as Descartes assumes), propositions involving “I-think” involve a synthesis with other concepts. This requires actual real-time thinking to have occurred. For Kant, there are no propositions with the “I-think” in the subject position that do not rely on synthetic thought-activity.
Kant saw the categories as “concepts of functional roles of mental activity” (11§20). Sellars suggests that the concept of ‘I’ is formed by abstraction, but not “by reflecting on the self as object, but by reflecting on its conceptual activities” (11§20) and as such, Kant is the first to suggest that we could give a functional characterization of mental activities. The common sense framework might not have the resources to offer such a characterization, but empirical science might, in the materialist spirit. In empirical engagement (appearances in inner sense) we recognize an identity between the thinking subject and the body. Sellars would like to suggest that Kant could consider the embodied subject as “the substratum of all change” (B225) or possessing a temporal character.
Instead, Sellars suggests that Kant “opts for a dualistic model” (18§41) of the empirical self. On the one hand, there is the empirical self that is passive to itself (the phenomenal self). On the other hand, there is the transcendental self (the noumenal self), which is neither active upon itself nor passive to itself. According to Sellars, Kant held that “the mind both “affects” and “is affected by” itself” (19§43). This suggests the way in which the “I-think” is not parallel to the “I-run” since the I-think is transcendental and the I-run is phenomenal.
Sellars warns us, however, not to take inner perception to be assimilated to inner sensation, as this would create a notion of consciousness as perception of mental states. Inner sense might still have a type of perceptual character, since the empirical self is represented as caused and passive to its states. Sellars points out that “the idea that the state of a system is determined by a preceding state of the system is not the same as the idea of a state which the system is caused to have, i.e., a state with respect to which the system is passive” (20§47). A prior state may cause a posterior state, but the prior state is not foreign or alien to the thinker, but derives from the thinker in-itself.
Sellars thinks that Kant would have thought that inner sense was passive in light of the perceptual model of introspection. Sellars suggests that inner sense provides us with the notion of mental activity. Kant does consider “the activity of the self” (B68) to be a type of thought-activity. Sellars suggests two views: (1) Kant is an epiphenomenalist: the body causes the mind to be in states of self-awareness, but rejects this view, since mental activity appears active, while in natural fact it is passive; or (2) Kant’s notion of spontaneity is relevant to understanding the thinking subject. Sellars supports the latter view.
Sellars points out that Kant suggests that inner sense is passive and pure apperception “gives us a non-passive awareness of the mind as active” (23§56). The thinker that is attended to in inner sense is involved in “an activity of searching, a direction of attention in which the mind affects itself” (25§66).
We experience ourselves as spontaneous, but it is only “a relative spontaneity, a spontaneity “set in motion” by “foreign causes”” (23§57). Thus, Sellars thinks that Kant might have posited a theoretical mechanism that is set in motion by alien causes, but itself not prey to all causes. After all, Sellars points out some causes are ipso facto not foreign, otherwise they would not be causes relative to ourselves, i.e., they would not be causes of the noumenal self.
Sellars considers whether there is anything more than a relative spontaneity of the noumenal mechanism of the self. He rejects this possibility because “the noumenal subject of thoughts is a thinker, not a bare substratum” (25§66). Sellars then also considers whether the practical subject can be construed as a relatively spontaneous mechanism (26§71).
For Kant, in the case of the practical self, the moral law is what guides action. We act autonomously when we follow the moral law, or act from duty; and we act heteronomously when we do not. What about the spontaneity or autonomy of thought-activities? Sellars suggests that if we do not act on the principle of practical reason, then we are heteronomous, and become an “it (the thing) which thinks” (30§85). If this is so, then thought-activity is an achievement of practical reason, not absolute, natural or innate.
We are taught the laws of thought in the practical realm. It is only by being constrained by the laws of thought that we become aware of ourselves as potentially spontaneous thinkers. Ultimately, for Kant in CPR, freedom is merely assumed in our thought and action. We never actually discover it, because if we looked about for the spatio-temporal location of freedom, we would find nothing.

historical predecessors

Here are some predecessor arguments for the Others thesis and show why these figures are particularly relevant for assessing self-consciousness. They offer interesting historical and contemporary arguments for the Others thesis.

J. G. Fichte serves as the best model for the Others thesis since his view can be characterized as accepting the threefold conclusion that I will outline below. Fichte outlines his definition of self-consciousness in terms of reflexive self-reference. This first arises historically in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. Another benefit of discussing Fichte is that he also recognizes the significance of action for self-consciousness, since he conceives of self-consciousness as a type of activity. Further, in The Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte articulates the first transcendental argument for the Others thesis. As such, Fichte is a natural ally in my assessment of self-consciousness and the Others thesis.

Another supporter of the Others thesis is George Herbert Mead. In an article called “The Social Self” and his posthumously published book Mind, Self and Society, Mead argues that awareness of others is necessary for the development of self-consciousness and a self. He holds that self-consciousness involves an ability to refer to oneself as an object. Reference to oneself as an object presupposes an ability to be aware of objects in general. Being aware of objects in general is necessarily a social affair. Such awareness of objects involves “experiential transactions with other individuals in an organized social environment” (Mind, Self and Society; 225). Awareness of oneself can only develop by way of an individual inhabiting an attitude towards oneself from the perspective of another. Given that consciousness of self as an object is a social act, self-consciousness presupposes the awareness of others. Self-consciousness cannot develop except within the social structures and processes of human intersubjectivity.

Donald Davidson is another supporter of the Others thesis. Davidson argues in several articles that there is a dependence of the emergence of thought upon language, that thought cannot be ontologically prior to language, but that both must be understood in terms of the other. According to Davidson, possessing propositional attitudes, beliefs, desires and thoughts requires having the ability to use language. Davidson provides similar arguments for specifically self-conscious thought. The emergence of self-conscious thought itself would be impossible without the three poles of triangulation— the subject, the object and the other. Davidson’s concept of triangulation provides an axis around which the deep interdependence between the following turns: thought about an object, thought about oneself and thought about an other. As such, Davidson is a supporter of the Others thesis, as he argues that self-consciousness requires the capacity to be significantly aware of others.

bodily/mental self-awareness

‘Self-consciousness' might be defined as having the capacity to reliably distinguish between oneself and the world.
However, we should maintain a distinction between differentially responding to a stimulus or the world and psychologically responding to a stimulus or the world. It seems like we can extend a dispositional definition to bacteria, since they do not entertain psychological states, it seems we should withhold this attribution of self-consciousness to bacteria.
Now, there is a difference between its being a necessary condition of self-consciousness that the creature entertain psychological states and the object of one’s consciousness being a psychological state. After all, it is likely that certain non-human animals and infants prior to their possessing full-fledged thought, will nonetheless have self-consciousness in the sense of awareness of one’s body. And, presumably, non-human animals and maybe infants (though the latter is harder to argue) do not seem to have linguistically articulated thoughts.
There are studies on an infants capacity to react to a moving room that show, however, that infants are aware of their own bodies. Infants are placed on a stationary floor, seated or standing, and the walls and ceilings are moved. At early stages in infancy a child responds to the walls and ceilings movement by swaying or compensating or falling. One might suggest that these infants have bodily self-awareness or what has been called ecological self-awareness. But, again, it seems like there is a difference between responding differentially to one’s environment and having a psychological awareness of oneself.
It is often at this stage that philosophers employ a distinction between two types of self-consciousness— bodily self-consciousness and mental self-consciousness.
But, I don't think this distinction can be made good. One reason is that all self-consciousness is mental in the sense that consciousness is a product of mental states of the organism, so even bodily self-consciousness is mental. Another reason that this distinction cannot be made to work is because one way of understanding ‘mental self-consciousness’ is in terms of consciousness of one’s own mind or one’s self, but this is so general as to not be very helpful. For what are the individuation conditions of a mind or self?
Rather than making such a distinction between bodily self-consciousness and mental self-consciousness, I would argue that though there are organisms which have the capacity to entertain psychological states, such as non-human animals and pre-linguistic infants, we may get by with merely attributing non-psychological states to the infant that explains their reaction to the moving room— as such eco-location or ecological awareness may simply be a matter of differential response to stimuli.

comments on the developmental paradigm

the developmental paradigm
The accepted framework discussion of the development of self-awareness is Gibson (1979) and Neisser’s (1993) paradigm of five different selves. According to developmental psychologists, there are five different selves— the ecological self; the interpersonal self; the conceptual self; the temporally extended self; and the private self.
The ecological self (present prior to birth) is, roughly, the self that is concerned with spatial orientation and internal and external bodily movements. The ecological self is the ground for the primitive awareness of the body and spatial awareness. It is the person as an active agent in her environment. The classic example for explaining this phase is the moving room paradigm. The moving room paradigm shows that children (and adults) specify their environment relative to their spatial positions.
The interpersonal self (9 months-2 years) is the same person but considered from two different points of view. The interpersonal self is capable of perceiving the other perceiving herself. The classic examples of the manifestation of this phase of the self are: joint attention, social referencing and imitation of faces.
I am mostly concerned with whether or not a concept of self is required for interpersonal awareness. I will show that having a perceptual point of view does not commit one to a self-concept.
According to the developmental model, the conceptual self (2 years) is the stage at which the self-concept develops. It is the stage when the person subscribes to beliefs and assumptions about themselves and self-ascribes such beliefs. This stage may be the beginning of conceptual thinking. The concept we are especially concerned with is the self-concept, not with conceptual thinking in general. I think that these two issues are separate. This is so partly because of the concept of a concept.
If one believes that a subject’s interpersonal acknowledgments of norms are definitive of a concept C, i.e., are constitutive of the subject’s concept C, then the same may extend to the case where the concept C is the self-concept. I would stress, however, that the norms bear on the subject differently in the case of the self-concept. It should be noted that recognition of norms of action are different from recognition of norms of conceptual-linguistic behavior. We are practical beings before we are saying- or thinking-beings.
How a child uses the concept may not be as relevant to its need to track its own behavior in terms of adult’s evaluations, positive or negative. Also, at the conceptual stage, the child (because of its proximal relationship to itself) already has the underpinnings for the self-concept, at the level of images or schemata.
The child’s interaction with itself in the first two phases of self provide causal and non-conceptual representations, it is argued by some thinkers. But the child may not have the corresponding conceptual resources to acquire the concept nor does it particularly need to.
The temporally-extended self (3-4 years) is the stage of development when the child engages in narrative about herself. It is the stage when the child begins to recall prior experience, tell stories, and make predictions about her future course. This is the grounds for the metaphysical thesis that the self is a “center of narrative gravity” (Dennett 1991: 418).
The private self (4-6 years) is the self that takes her experiences to be all their own, i.e., her experiences define who she is in a particular way. Notice the following: ontogenetically, the first self is not the private self or the subjective “what it is like for one” type of self that “subjectivists” like to discuss. Also, some developmental psychologists, e.g., Neisser stress that the private self does not develop in everyone, almost only in introverts and Cartesians or religious folk that believe in the existence of souls.
My question is: what is the relation between the interpersonal and conceptual phases. But, a few words about the relationship between the ecological phase and the interpersonal phase, as this will become pivotal later.
First, it should be clear that recognition of an environment or scenario requires a minimal representation of a point of view (Bermudez, 1995: 158). But, this does not require an explicit representation of the self-concept. It is likely that at the ecological level, the specifications for such indexical processes are fairly brute-causal, i.e., non-representational. It is also likely that since the child has not represented itself in its environment it is only minimally conscious.
At the stage of the interpersonal self, it does not seem necessary to explain most of the data on interpersonal awareness to attribute an explicitly represented self. At all stages, even the ecological stage there is minimal self-referential processing. It is for that reason that Meltzoff and Moore (1983) have said that neonates have a concept of self.
But, the requirement here is a distinction between [self] and other. This does not require a self-concept, but merely a difference in representation of [point of view] as specified by the content of the representation— in the case of ecological perception, a spatial point of view; in the case of interpersonal perception, a social point of view, or procedural schema provided by the other. This is where the Others Thesis gets its empirical support.

review of Rodl's Self-Consciousness

Beatrice Longuenesse gives a review of Rodl's book here:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=10904
i've not finished reading the book. but, when I do, i'll follow up on Prof. Longuenesse's review.

in the mind

Kant begins the Logic with the following phrase: “our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts)...” (A50/B74). But, what does “in the mind” mean here? The term Kant uses is das Gemüt which means a material life-principle that does not imply that it is a substance, mental or bodily, although it is a more closely connected to the body (Today, it might mean “heart,” “breast,” or “temper”). My hypothesis is that it might be best to not use "in the mind" and speak rather of Gemüt-“functions”. This way we don't have to be committed to the functions being in a mind. Receptivity is the ability, capacity, or function in the “mind” for receiving representations; by itself receptivity only provides a manifold of representations in intuition; it is a passive Gemut-function. Spontaneity is the ability, capacity, or function in the “mind” for “producing representations from itself” (A51/B75); by itself spontaneity only provides rules and principles for the use of concepts; it is the active Gemut-function. As Kant stresses, receptivity and spontaneity are not separable: “receptivity can only make knowledge possible when combined with spontaneity” (A97). Receptivity needs spontaneity to produce a transcendental object. Spontaneity needs receptivity for the material input or impressions in sensation. To speak of Gemut-functions then also allows us to say that there is no mind as separable from some other object or set of objects.

rodl's initial definition of self-consciousness

The initial definition that Rodl employs is rather unclear and even if it can be made more precise, probably false: “self-consciousness is the nature of a subject that manifests itself in her thinking thoughts whose linguistic expression requires use of the first person pronoun, “I.”
The phrase “the nature of a subject that manifests itself” assumes that (1) there is a subject; (2) there is a nature of a subject; (3) the subject is the same as its manifestation. It is at least questionable that there is a subject, unless he means simply the logical subject or the subject of thoughts. It is also unclear how ‘nature’ is being used here, since it could mean anything. For instance, to say X is the nature of Y is to explain Y in terms of X, but the way Rodl discusses self-consciousness, it seems he is identifying self-consciousness with what follows the copula.
Assuming this sentence is a definition, self-consciousness is then defined as the nature of that subject in its manifestation to itself. A question arises: “Is the subject identical with its manifestation?” Rodl seems to suggest that there is no gap between what we are as subjects and how we appear or are manifest to ourselves as subjects. In the very first definition of self-consciousness, there are hints of self-givenness. I will see if the myth of self-givenness can be foist on Rodl’s notion. The myth of self-givenness is that self-consciousness is given to the organism at birth, that an organism is self-conscious as soon as it begins to breathe.
The historical narrator of this myth is Descartes when he replies to Arnauld: “I do not doubt that the mind begins to think as soon as it is implanted in the body of an infant, and that it is immediately aware of its thoughts, though it may not remember them.” In contemporary thought, the narrators of this myth are the supporters of the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness or non-conceptual self-consciousness. Gallagher (2006), Zahavi (1999, 2005), and Bermudez (1998) are all supporters of self-givenness, each of which suggests that some form of self-consciousness is given.
Another issue that is apparent in this def. is the phrase “in her thinking thoughts,” since it is unclear what exactly is privileged: the thinking of the thoughts or the thoughts themselves.
Take the former: Why is the nature of self-consciousness manifest in the thinking of first person thoughts? It isn’t to me, despite my thinking first-person thoughts often and my incessant reflection upon the nature of self-consciousness.
Take the latter: Why is the nature of self-consciousness manifest in the first-person thoughts themselves. One might think very many first-person thoughts in their life and never have any intuitions about the nature of self-consciousness.
Another troubling feature of this definition is the use of ‘requires’ since it is unclear what states or processes require “the use of the first person pronoun, “I”” apart from those states and processes that are attributed to one using “I.” Further, people often attribute self-consciousness to creatures that either could never have the facility to use “I” or have yet to develop that facility.
Rodl also is too vague in discussing “linguistic expression” since it is unclear the assumption that he bases this claim on can be defended, i.e., that there is a specific form of linguistic expression that is involved in the use of “I” Shouldn’t we leave it an open question whether first-person discourse can be reduced to other types of meaning or reference?

rodl's new book

i just received Sebastian Rodl's new book on self-consciousness titled "self-consciousness". here are the links for the book and Rodl:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/067402494X
http://www.pitt.edu/~philosop/people/rodl.html
check back tomorrow for responses to the preface and first chapter...

on the concept of an object

The term 'object' obviously has diverse natural language and philosophical uses. The question of how we use this term is pivotal for inquiry into the nature of self-consciousness. In the OED, there are 12 definitions, none of which is especially interesting except the philosophical definition. The philosophical definition of ‘object’ in the OED:
“Philos. A thing which is perceived, thought of, known, etc.; spec. a thing which is external to or distinct from the apprehending mind, subject, or self. Opposed to SUBJECT n. 9. Cf. OBJECTIVE n. 1. the central natural language use of ‘object’ is something that is presented to the senses”
It seems that ‘object’ came to possess a wider meaning as it moved into anything that is apprehended, as in an ‘object of thought’. I would suggest that when we hone in on the concept of an object, we don’t want to lose the contrast between an object which is sensed and the object of sense. Similarly, in the case of thought, we might want to deny the need to preserve this distinction, since it is likely a weaker contrast in the case of thought. The key is relating the concept of an object of thought to the concept of an object which is sensed...
Also, we might talk about Russell’s definition in Principia, object of thought is the same as ‘term,’ ‘unit,’ ‘individual,’ and ‘entity.’ These terms have two necessary conditions: some form of unity or oneness and some type of being or sense.
Given that this is the case, a term (or its family of concepts) makes it strangely capable of referring to a concept or thought itself (which leads to various paradoxes, some of which are replicated in the self-consciousness literature...).
There is also the idea implicit in the reliance on the notion of a term to delineate an object that whatever can be talked about by a reasonably unified (e.g., ‘das fenster’ is unified, while ‘Hf fs $$X’ is not) and sensible term (in contrast with a non-sensible term (though this is likely to be defined question-beggingly)) is an object.
LW argues that an object is a formal concept, since it is expressed in formal logic with ‘x.’ The principle upon which this ascent into formality rests, is that any concept which can be represented formally is not an empirical concept. The real question is, “What links the object-concept employed in strict and philosophical use to the common sense or folk use of object.” There seem to be two rigidifying modes of making the folk notion of object come out rigidified.
One mode is to fix the object-concept to the concept of reference. Another mode is to fix the object-concept to predication. I want to achieve a mix of both...
P.F. Strawson suggests that “Anything whatever can be introduced into discussion by means of a singular, definitely identifying substantival expression...Anything whatever can be identifyingly referred to; anything whatever can appear as a logical subject, an ‘individual’” But, this doesn’t seem to help because plural expressions enable reference to objects too. There may be plural expressions that denote sets or classes, and some suggest that sets or classes can equally count as objects.
This is why Evans and McDowell’s notion of “singular thought” seems however to imply that the problem is more real (meaning, not really strictly a matter of rigidification) that the plural syntax translated into singular semantics suggests, since there is a difference between having articulable identity conditions and the knowing-which constraint on singular thought.
So, one way to get clear about how we can fix the concept of an object is through fixing demonstrations to a “knowing-which” requirement. A “knowing-which” requirement is ingested with so much epistemic baggage by thinkers (i.e., the tripartite JTB conception creeps in and makes the requirement robust) and this has made progress slow in this court.
But when we hone in on the ability to demonstrate then we can realize that this ability to demonstrate x is necessary/sufficient for knowing-which and satisfies the conditions upon being an object. In this case, singular thought is tied to demonstrative empirical reference.

new article by kriegel

uriah kriegel recently published an article about self-consciousness in the internet encyclopedia of philosophy.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/self-con.htm

i was happy to discover that i disagreed with almost all of his conclusions, except that there is a legitimate need for an account or theory of self-consciousness. this week, i will detail the issues with the entry. my biggest issue is that kriegel assumes that the peculiarity analyses tells us something about self-consciousness. Here is my proposal:

Peculiarity analyses of self-consciousness claim that self-consciousness is peculiar in some epistemic or semantic sense.
One might account for self-consciousness in terms of epistemic peculiarity by suggesting that by merely entertaining the thought “I have a headache,” the content of that thought is true (infallibility claim) or the content of that thought is justified (incorrigibility claim).
These sort of Cartesian views of the epistemic peculiarities of self-consciousness can be shown to be misguided for empirical reasons. There is good evidence to suggest that we often misrepresent, confabulate or even invent mental states. As such, it does not seem reasonable to think that such expressions of our awareness of our mental states will automatically inform us about self-consciousness.
There are other reasons to think that the epistemic peculiarity analyses are problematic. Analyses of epistemic peculiarities do not help us to understand self-consciousness, since such analyses presuppose that an understanding of self-consciousness is already in place, e.g., in assessing whether our intuitions about cases meet the conditions of self-knowledge. Though I think that the question of self-knowledge is important, I do not think that it is methodologically prior to the question concerning the nature of self-consciousness. I would argue that epistemic peculiarities cannot be comprehended until we understand the nature of self-consciousness.
Another strategy of assessing self-consciousness analyzes self-consciousness in terms of semantic peculiarity. There are two classic semantic peculiarity analyses: appeals to immunity to error through misidentification (IETM) and the irreducibility of essential indexicals or de se thoughts. Both of these types of analyses presuppose that we can intuitively grasp a special property that the examples intend to highlight.
It might seem like analyses of IETM or essentially indexical reference enables us to discover semantic peculiarities of the subject use of the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ or of the irreducibility of de se beliefs, and thus special properties of self-consciousness. I would argue, however, that the interpretations of the key examples in this tradition sometimes presuppose that we have some prior understanding of self-consciousness.
These analyses, no doubt, highlight features of our experience that are important— the important place that avowals play in expressing mental states or the importance of de se beliefs for action and practical reasoning. However, the examples seem to suppose that we merely intuit the nature of self-consciousness. I would argue that it is unclear that we can simply read off hand-waving at examples as if it is transparent what such uroboric gestures mean.
I would argue that the epistemic and semantic peculiarity analyses are question-begging. They are question-begging because they presuppose an understanding of the nature of self-consciousness rather than articulate properties, either epistemic or semantic, that are peculiar to self-consciousness.

wiki articles

Since I'm working on my first chapter this morning in earnest, I just wanted to point out how weak are the following entries on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-consciousness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28philosophy%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_arguments

In the upcoming months, I will be revising and discussing revisions on wikipedia to try to make these entries more rigorous.

cassam on "conceiving of itself"

When I was reading Cassam's "Self and World" I noticed an interesting mistake. At page 9, Cassam quotes McDowell: "While acknowledging the depth and importance of the Strawsonian contribution to our understanding of the nature of self-consciousness, it will be argued that there are serious difficulties with the idea that a self-conscious subject must, as John McDowell puts it, 'conceive of itself, the subject of its experience, as a bodily element in objective reality-- as a bodily presence in the world'(1994: 103)" (Cassam's italics; my bold). Cassam misquotes McDowell here, as it should read, "conceive itself" rather than "conceive of itself." There are occasions in philosophical works where it does not matter, because for instance it's "just a matter of speaking." But, this matters because I would argue there is a difference between "conceiving of itself" and "conceiving itself." The former suggests that there is something "the itself" there that is conceived of and logically prior to the conception; the latter does not have this implication, and could (and should) be read to suggest that the conceiving "brings into being" the subject or self. It is more likely that the latter is what McDowell has in mind.
Further, I would suggest that there is good reason to interpret McDowell's "conceiving itself" in line with the Fichtean idea of “the I posits itself as self-positing.” (This was suggested to me by Gabriel Gottlieb and Bubner's article "Bildung and Second Nature"). While McDowell does refer to Fichte in a passing footnote, he does not adequately position his critique of the Kantian subject as the noumenal self within German Idealism and post-Kantian philosophy. Hopefully, McDowell will extend that project...

is the self an object?

Some thinkers suggest that the self is not an object (Kant, Schopenhauer, Husserl, Wittgenstein). I think there are good reasons to suggest that the questions of whether or not the self is an object are misguided. I would suggest that we focus on self-consciousness as awareness of oneself as oneself, then ask, "What is the self that enters into the elucidation of the locution 'self-' in self-consciousness?" When we do this, we recognize that the conditions that make self-consciousness possible require the self as an object, since it is necessary that a creature is a material object or embodied at least in order for it to be self-conscious.

blog goal

The goal of this blog is to inquire into the nature of self-consciousness. My hope is that I will engender a discussion about what self-consciousness is, how it exists, and what its function is. I will focus mostly on what I take to be a necessary condition of self-consciousness-- awareness of others-- though other conditions will be discussed.