The Self in Question

Memory, The Body and Self-Consciousness

Andy Hamilton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137290403
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290410
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

A humanistic account of self-consciousness and personal identity, and offering a structural parallel between the epistemology of memory and bodily awareness. It provides a much-needed rapprochement between Analytic and Phenomenological approaches, developing Wittgenstein's insights into "I"-as-subject and self-identification.

1

Self-Consciousness and Its Linguistic Expression

The Introduction raised the question of whether use of “I” is essential to self-consciousness, citing various historical personages who self-consciously self-referred using their own name: Julius Caesar, Henry James, Charles de Gaulle, and Andy Hamilton, among others. Could there be a community of name-users whose linguistic convention generalises this rather egoistic use, in which each speaker uses only their own name to self-refer? Is there any reason other than convenience why the self-referring use of non-indexicals, such as proper names and definite descriptions, could not generally replace “I”? What is the connection between “I” and self-consciousness? These and related questions form the topic of Chapter 1.

The chapter begins by outlining this volume’s two-part elucidation of self-consciousness – in terms of self-reference and the epistemology of self-consciousness. It characterises the Analytic Principle that self-consciousness is a phenomenon expressed by use of a self-referring device with the properties of the first person. It defends a strong interpretation of the Principle, involving what I describe as the conceptual holism of self-consciousness and self-reference, that is, the kind of account of these concepts that is often described as “no-priority”. (The principle is Analytic in being widely accepted in the Analytic Tradition, not in being true purely in virtue of meaning.)

The question of whether self-conscious self-reference has to be indexical self-reference, and its implications for the relation between thought and language, is then pursued. The chapter concludes that although a community of name-users based on the de Gaulle model – who lack an indexical term of self-reference – seems a coherent possibility, the presupposition that its members are self-conscious, and the need to understand name-use in terms of “I”, means that the example proves nothing. “I”-use cannot be analysed in terms of self-reference, independently of the grounds of self-knowledge. So we have to turn to the other part of the two-part account of self-consciousness offered by this volume, which concerns the epistemology of self-consciousness.

Like other writers, I have been using the term “self-consciousness” rather unself-consciously. But a fundamental caution should be entered. Almost all writers, in disputing its constitution, readily suppose that self-consciousness is a well-defined and unified concept – perhaps assuming, with Evans, that it has an “essence”. This assumption should not go unexamined. “Self-consciousness”, in the sense which this volume addresses, is not entirely a philosophical term of art that denotes a theoretical concept. The requirement, characteristic of Analytic philosophy, that philosophical speculation should be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, encourages us to explore its everyday meaning.¹ Pre-philosophical use of the term “self-conscious” implies self-recognition or self-awareness, usually of an unwelcome or embarrassing kind. Self-awareness is insight into oneself which involves understanding how one’s actions appear to others. Hence the compelling Strawsonian requirement, that to be self-conscious is to be able to view oneself as a person among persons.²

In its philosophical sense, however, self-consciousness implies a network of interrelated capacities, involving intelligence, rationality, and intentional agency. How extensive these capacities must be, for a creature to be described as self-conscious, is a matter of judgement; self-conscious behaviour exists on a continuum, and attributions of self-consciousness do not have to be unqualified. As we will see later, intelligence as such is not sufficient: use of tools, for instance, such as a bird dropping nuts from a height in order to crack them open, does not of itself imply self-consciousness. Self-consciousness perhaps admits of degrees across species, as we will later see in connection with chimps. But it does not admit of degrees within species, one would not say that one person had more self-consciousness than another, except perhaps in the everyday sense of being more prone to embarrassment.³

1.1 A two-part elucidation of self-consciousness: self-reference and the grounds of self-knowledge

Analytic philosophers have generally characterised self-consciousness and subjectivity in terms of the first-person pronoun. Elizabeth Anscombe, for instance, writes that “when we speak of self-consciousness we ... mean something manifested by the use of ‘I’”, while Gareth Evans comments that

The essence of self-consciousness is self-reference, that is to say, thinking, by a subject of judgments, about himself, and hence, necessarily, about a subject of judgments.

José Bermúdez holds that the ability to have “I”-thoughts is distinctive of self-consciousness.⁴

A key development in the evolution of the modern concept of self-consciousness was the first-personal turn of Descartes’s Meditations. But a modern understanding of self-consciousness really begins with the “Transcendental Deduction” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.⁵ As we will see in Chapter 3, Kant understands that in self-conscious thought, I think of myself as subject as object. An excellent illustration of the subject-object nature of self-consciousness is found in Merleau-Ponty’s example of touching: “When I press my two hands together, it is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and ‘being touched’”.⁶ But this is a particularly vivid example of an everyday, though hard to grasp, phenomenon.

This notion of reflexivity is largely absent from Descartes’s treatment. In the twentieth century, Analytic philosophers came to regard self-consciousness as a phenomenon expressed by use of a self-referring device with the properties of the first person, notably indexicality. Hence what I call the Analytic Principle, which says that self-consciousness is a capacity manifested through use of a device like “I”, or through behaviour which must be interpreted by using such a device.

Clearly it is not use of the English word “I” that is essential, on this view, but grasp of the first person as a grammatical category, whether expressed as pronoun or verbal inflection. The Analytic Principle involves two claims. It asserts the conceptual claim that self-consciousness must be understood as a phenomenon expressed by use of a self-referring device with the properties of the first person. It also implies the methodological claim that understanding of the first person is the route to understanding of self-consciousness. This first chapter is concerned to defend these claims against critics who fail fully to acknowledge their significance.

The Analytic Principle has the merit of anchoring an elusive phenomenon in concrete linguistic practice concerning “I”, and is a guiding assumption of this monograph. But it must not be understood too narrowly, as writers such as Anscombe perhaps do. Understanding “I”, and hence self-consciousness, does not merely involve grasping its role as a device of self-reference; it also involves grasping the grounds of self-knowledge. Or rather, in grasping its role as a device of self-reference, one must also understand the grounds of self-knowledge. Thus Evans comments that although the essence of self-consciousness is self-reference, “our self-conscious thoughts about ourselves also rest upon various ways we have of gaining knowledge of ourselves as physical things”.⁷ First-person thoughts involve thinking about oneself in a way in which one cannot think about anything or anyone else.

Self-conscious or first-person thought – thought in which the first-person figures as grammatical subject – therefore requires a two-part elucidation. The first part concerns the self-reference principle: that thoughts or utterances with “I” as the subject-term refer to the thinker or speaker. The second concerns the epistemology of self-consciousness, expressed in the following platitude:

Distinctness Principle: To have “I”-thoughts is to think about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think about anyone or anything else.

A common way of expressing this principle has been to say that “I”-thoughts involve self-conscious self-reference. That was Anscombe’s view, and it captures the essential fact that thoughts of type (B) involve something more than thoughts of type (A):⁸

(A)Hamilton is about to be bitten by a poisonous snake (where I do not realise that I am Hamilton).

(B)I am about to be bitten by a poisonous snake.

Thoughts (A) and (B) have the same person as object, but dramatically different behavioural consequences; only if the subject has thought (B) will they take avoiding action. Drawing a contrast between these types of thought focuses attention on the action-determining role of “I”, and shows that “I”-thoughts are necessary for intentional action in any full sense.⁹

However, the contrast between (A) and (B) thoughts does not bring out the full implications of distinctness. In one sense, subject (B) thinks about itself in a distinctive way in which it does not think of others; subject (A), in contrast, thinks about itself in the same kind of way as that in which it thinks of others. But a full understanding of the epistemology of self-consciousness involves an important subclass of “I”-thoughts, those that exhibit immunity to error through misidentification. This category was illustrated in the Introduction by the example of personal memory-judgements. This topic, and the epistemology of self-consciousness in general, are discussed in subsequent chapters; the present chapter addresses self-reference.

1.2 Self-consciousness and conceptual holisms

Analytic philosophers have been hostile to the idea of in breaking circles of concepts. Bermúdez, for instance, is concerned about how language-learners penetrate the circle of “I”-use and “I”-thoughts, as grasp of the first-person pronoun seems to require prior first-person knowledge: “Any theory that tries to elucidate the capacity to think first-person thoughts through linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun will be circular, because the explanandum is part of the explanans ... ”.¹⁰ Reflexive self-reference by means of “I” presupposes the capacity to think thoughts with first-person contents, he believes; it therefore cannot explain that capacity. For Bermúdez, self-consciousness is paradoxical, since if the abilities which underlie self-conscious thought can be explained only in terms of each other, their acquisition becomes inexplicable: how could young children “bootstrap themselves into self-conscious thought”?¹¹ His worry seems to be this: what allows creatures to acquire the complex of capacities associated with self-consciousness, including the ability to self-refer? His view seems to be that if creatures’ experience of their own bodily selves and the world around them is entirely “third-personal”, it becomes mysterious how they could develop the capacity self-consciously to self-refer. He thus postulates a fundamental or primitive level of self-conscious or “self-specifying” thought allegedly abstracted from the first person. Though he recognises that the human case is paradigm, Bermúdez holds that primitive self-consciousness is a genuine phenomenon defined in evolutionary terms, and not just a way of speaking.¹²

Bermúdez’s concern arises from a general Analytic worry about circularity that probably originates with Quine’s critique in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” of the analytic-synthetic distinction as viciously circular.¹³ Quine complains that the logical positivists distinguish “analytic” and “universally true”, without properly explaining that distinction. He argues that accounts of the analytic-synthetic distinction have proved either unsatisfactory or circular, typically trading on notions such as meaning and synonymy that are as much in need of explanation as analy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Self-Consciousness and Its Linguistic Expression
• 2  Memory and Self-Consciousness (1): Immunity to Error through Misidentification and the Critique of Quasi-Memory
• 3  Memory and Self-Consciousness (2): The Conceptual Holism of Memory and Personal Identity, and the Unity of Consciousness
• 4  Proprioception and Self-Consciousness (1): Proprioception as Direct, Immediate Knowledge of the Body
• 5  Proprioception and Self-Consciousness (2): Self-Conscious Knowledge and the Rejection of Self-Presentation
• 6  Self-Identification and Self-Reference
• 7  Humanism and Animal Self-Consciousness
• Bibliography
• Index