A very interesting
publication comes to enrich the already voluminous and important series
(Advances in Consciousness Research) that John Benjamins Publishers and Maxim
I. Stamenov (as its General Editor) have launched with success. Its topic is at
the forefront of philosophical research into consciousness and, as all ¨state
of the art¨ works, the book contains both interesting and controversial
contributions to the philosophical understanding of the topic.

Let us first discuss briefly
some of the less controversial aspects and definitely the advantages of reading
and studying the book. First of all, it is a collection of articles which not
only is of significant variation and modes of approach (of course all within
the broadly defined perspective of Analytical Philosophy), but it also contains
the classical now and pioneering studies of Hector-Neri Castaneda, Sydney
Shoemaker, Gareth Evans and John Perry. Second, it discusses in detail some of
the philosophical roots to the ideas that the great classical studies discuss
(notably Kant and Frege). Third, the quality of the papers in their majority is
high and demand serious philosophical attention.

In what follows however, allow me to pinpoint some
of the problems that the reader should have in mind when he/she reads the
otherwise valuable contributions contained in the book. I shall not refer to
the classical contributions (Castaneda, Shoemaker, Evans and Perry) at all,
since I consider it futile: they have launched the discussion of the topic and
it is the job now of a historian of philosophy to assess their historical
value.

I will start with the papers
of the two editors of the book: Andrew Brook’s “Kant, self-awareness and
self-reference” and Richard DeVidi’s “Frege and the first person”.

Brook maintains that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (and
particularly the two editions Kant prepared himself) contains the roots of two
of the main characteristics of self-awareness: a) In certain kinds of self-awareness,
first-person indexicals (I, me, etc.) cannot be analyzed out in favor of
anything descriptionlike, and b) in such cases, self-awareness is via what
Shoemaker calls self-reference without identification (one can be aware of
himself not through properties that one ascribes to something he observes). He
also maintains that Kant “went further with these issues than any contemporary
theorist” and that “Kant had the making of the theory to explain” these two
main characteristics (p.11). According to Brook, Kant’s notion of transcendental designation refers
directly to Shoemaker’s self-reference without identification (ibid) and he
proceeds to develop this issue. He relates this issue to the significant
Kantian differentiation of “inner sense” and “sense of oneself as an object
among other objects”. Brook also discusses what he calls “global
representation”, i.e., one appears to oneself as a single common subject of a
large number of psychological states. Brook’s paper is rigorous in style and content
and contains many insights to difficult for interpretation Kantian passages.
However, a question which he leaves selectively unanswered troubles the careful
reader: why there is no reference to Husserlian interpretations on both
Descartes and Kant which would further support and enlighten his arguments?
Good examples of this are his discussion of “pure self-consciousness” (p. 14),
the distinction between the Kantian “inner sense” and “inner intuition” (p.17),
the Cartesian and Husserlian support to Kant against the arguments of the sort
of Rosenthal (p.19) and Dretske (pp.19-20), his dealing with a possible
objection to his discussion of the question of self-reference taking place
without identification (p.26).

DeVidi’s article more or
less moves in the same parameters putting forward some interesting analyses of
important insights from Frege’s work (most notably his “The Thought” 1918/9),
noting the differences of interpretation between Perry’s and Evans’ discussion
of Frege’s insights and advancing an interesting distinction between the ‘type”
and the “token” of an expression, as a Fregean last resort to save the notion
of sense, when it comes to the use of indexicals; it however, pays less than
the required attention to Frege’s discussion in Wittgenstein’s middle and late
work and Garrett’s, Wright’s and McDowell’s interpretations of it (for example,
there is no discussion of the private language argument in connection to
incommunicable contents, see C. Wright, B. Smith and C. Macdonald, eds, Knowing our own minds, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998 and Brian Garrett, Personal
identity and self-consciousness, London: Routledge, 1998).

Ruth Millikan’s “The myth of
the mental indexicals” (an also “classical” contributor in the area) enlarges
upon one of her most known theses in relation to the topic: “The so-called
‘essential indexicals’ in thought are indeed essential, but they are not
indexical. It is not their semantics that distinguishes them but their
function, their psychological role”. Now, Millikan’s insights would be
acceptable (at least some of them) if they did not have two serious
pre-suppositions built in them: a) a physicalist or a quasi-physicalist theory
of mind (see for example her claim that if I am deluded about which body I
control and thus about which body this “I” refers to then the problem is
neurological, p. 174), b) a general hostility to Shoemaker’s insights and a
disregard to Castaneda’s very important distinction between indicators and
quasi-indicators pp.175-177 and p.1, Footnote 1).

Maite Ezcurdia’s “Thinking
about myself” elaborates further upon some of the insights Millikan presented
and criticizes both Mellor’s “no-mental representation view” and Millikan’s
attack on presentation as mediation between mental presentation of oneself and
what it represents, proposing a modified mode of presentation view. Ezcurdia’s
argument, even though essentially right in pointing out the short-comings of
both Millikan and Mellor, proposes a presentation model which is both far too
cumbersome to imagine and far too complicated to be right: she claims that for
“self-thoughts to vindicate both the self-knowledge and self-locating features,
they must present the subject as herself, as that subject which she knows how
to move”, i.e., she claims that this knowledge has to do with a mode of
presentation of oneself to oneself. Here of course the obvious question is why
this knowledge has to be representational? She does not further on consider
whether this is knowledge of some sort after all. If the very question of
whether this “inner sense” or “feeling” or “knowledge” is knowledge in the
proper sense of the term is left unanswered, how could one go further to the
question whether this “knowledge” is representational or not?

Melinda Horgan’s and Raymond
Martin’s “Introspective misidentification: An I for an I” investigates further
the claim that introspection is not a form of perception which is implicit in
the no-misidentification view or the idea of immunity to error through
misidentification with respect to the first person. Their discussion is based
on the use of imaginary examples, which, in my opinion, do not much help their
argument due to their sheer impossibility: simply try to imagine a telepathic,
who is also a hardened egoist, who is also incapable of sympathy, or a
super-macho who undergoes psychotherapy to believe that either he or his
daughter is afraid and then chooses the wrong answer to the question who is
afraid at the time that he is afraid!

Christopher Peacocke’s
“First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge”
enlarges upon what Peacocke calls “delta accounts” of the representationally
independent uses of the first person. Now, Peacocke’s use of representational
independence and his “delta accounts” are important additions in the debate
over the nature of self-awareness and self-reference and are actually a
theoretical pre-requisite for many papers contained in the book (with a very
good example Escurdia’s paper). They are however, far too cumbersome for the
uninitiated and far too technical and complicated to exist in our usual daily
self-seferences: Representationally dependent use of the first person in a
particular belief “I am F” is the use that meets the following three
conditions: I) there is a content C which is the content of one of the
thinker’s current mental states, a state which represents C as correct, II) the
content C either is, or justifies, the content “I am F”; and III) the thinker
forms the belief “I am F” by taking the mental state mentioned in (I) at face
value, in respect of its content C. The representationally independent use of
the first person in a belief “I am F” is one meeting this condition: the person
who has the belief is in a state which is his reason for forming the belief, but
the conditions (I-III) are not met, nor is there a set of contents and a set of
mental states with those contents which collectively meet the conditions
(I-III). Peacocke, using this distinction, classifies the examples “I see the
phone is on the table”, “I remember attending the birthday party” and “I fear
that the motion will not be carried” as representationally independent. He
attempts to answer the obvious criticism that the distinction between
representationally dependent and independent cases falls apart when we
recognize a level of nonconceptual representational content of experience or
perhaps a more primitive kind of conceptual content (which he names C-o) by
employing the following argument: When in C-o, the possessor of a state does
not think of himself as a persisting material object (pp.219-220). Here Peacock
finds that even in this case however, the fact still remains that in the
representationally dependent cases we have two components: First, the subject’s
endorsement of the more primitive content C-o of his experience or other
representational state. Second, there is the transition from C-o to the content
¨I am in front of a door¨. According to Peacocke ¨this later transition is
ratifiable as legitimate independently of any endorsement of the initial
content¨. Thus, for Peacocke, while in the representationally dependent cases
we have these two components, in the representationally independent we do not:
¨There is in the normal case of psychological selfascription no transition from
one content to a second content…¨ (p.220). What really puzzles the reader
however, is not this quite arbitrary analysis of C-o and the materialism which
its employs (see above the talk about the persistence of ¨material¨ object). It
is the further claim that in C-o which is the representational independent case
we can have ¨knowledge¨ of sorts (p.224). To explain this he brings forward the
¨delta accounts¨ theory which shows how the subject relates to the
representational dependent and independent uses (a triangular or delta
account).  Now, this account of
self-reference and self-awareness is too far from daily experience (the
relation to Kantian intuitions in the later part of Peacocke’s article makes
the whole thing worse). Just consider what Peacocke actually means by
¨knowledge¨ in relation to what he has in mind when he talked earlier about the
C-o: what he says comes close to a contradiction (if knowledge is indeed
involved in C-o, then what sort of C-o is it?). According to many, most notably
Wittgenstein ¨one says ¨I know¨ when one is ready to give compelling grounds¨.
What kind of knowledge is it that Peacocke is using here after all?

This issue perhaps is
enlightened by William Seager’s ¨The constructed and the secret self¨. There
Seager maintains that we have two selves (both of which are located in the
brain, the obvious self in the ¨higher¨ and the secret in the ¨lower¨), and
that their distinction is based on whether they are constructed or not. Seager
tries to prove his claim by both using Dretske’s intuitions and by drawing
evidence from psychological reports which claim that children and animals are
incapable of introspection. Now, here the obvious questions (unanswered by
Seager) have to do with the very ¨psychologism¨ that permeates Seager’s paper,
and many psychological reports contrary to Seager’s.

By the end of the book, the
reader can guess what Andrew Brook and Richard DeVidi had in mind when they put
together the articles and started editing the book. The high level of
philosophical argumentation and technicality of concept-building disappoints
the reader because of the purpose to which these are put. The collection leaves
the reader feeling that it is trying to push materialism and
biological-evolutionary physicalism through the back door, carefully omitting
all references to opinions and intuitions different than the promoted dogma.

© 2002 Constantinos Athanasopoulos

Dr.Constantinos
Athanasopoulos has a Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow (on the topic of
The Metaphysics of Intentionality in the Philosophy of Language and Mind of
Sartre and Wittgenstein). He has also studied philosophy, psychology and
religion at Brandon U., Canada, and Moral Philosophy at the University of St.
Andrews. His many research interests include metaphysics, philosophy of mind
and language, Continental and Analytic, and Medieval and Byzantine Philosophy,
moral psychology, ethics, environmental philosophy and ethics, political
philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of psychology and
psychiatry.  Parallel to job-hunting his
other hobbies include Byzantine Music, Orthodox Theology and going to the
movies.

Categories: Philosophical