This book has many virtues. Despite its somewhat daunting title, it is very readable, largely because for the most part it is beautifully written. It makes use of a mass of empirical information from cognitive and developmental psychology, something still too rare in philosophy of mind. It attempts to build a completely naturalistic picture of how full-blown adult self-consciousness could be the product of simpler forms of awareness of self, e.g., the ability to discriminate between what is in fact oneself and what is not. It does so in the service of a solution to a properly philosophical problem, namely, a possible deep tension buried in the view of self-consciousness currently most popular among philosophers. And finally, it sustains a single complex argument from beginning to end.

Along the way, the book discusses some fundamental issues in the foundations of psychology and the philosophy of mind such as the nature of concepts and the possibility of thought without language. Anyone with an interest in current philosophical and empirical work on awareness of self and related topics should get a copy.

The Project

José Bermúdez has summarized his project as follows (1999):

This book addresses two fundamental questions in the philosophy and psychology of self­consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of full­fledged self­conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how full­fledged self­conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? I argue that a paradox (the paradox of self­consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self­conscious thought and linguistic self­reference. Responding to the paradox, I draw on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy to cut the tie between self­conscious thought and linguistic self­reference. The book studies primitive forms of nonconceptual self­consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions.

Perhaps the tension is not exactly a paradox, Bermudez’s claim notwithstanding, because there is not, strictly speaking, any element of contradiction or self-refutation in it, but it is something pretty serious. Let’s see how it develops and what it looks like more specifically.

First Bermúdez lays out what he calls a deflationary theory of self-consciousness, at the center of which are what have come to be called ‘I’­thoughts. ‘I’­thoughts involve a distinctive kind of self­reference. Modifying Bermudez’s own example, consider:

I think: (1) The person AB is about to be attacked by a poisonous spider

I think: (2) I am about to be attacked by a poisonous spider

Even though (1) and (2) are both thoughts about the same person, namely me, these are quite different thoughts. Roughly, I could truly think (1) of AB without knowing that AB is me, and, on the other hand, I could truly think (2) of myself, knowing that it is myself to whom I am referring, even if I do not know or have ceased to know that I am AB. As Shoemaker (1968) has put it, I can refer to myself, refer to myself as myself knowing that it is myself (the subject of my experiences) to whom I am referring, without identifying myself under concepts; I can refer to myself without knowing identifying facts about myself. (Shoemaker calls this reference to self without identification. It is different from, though related to, his better known notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first person. We will return to the distinction.) It is thoughts like (2) that are called ‘I’-thoughts. What makes them special is that one cannot use ‘I’ and other first person pronouns in this way “without knowing that one is thinking about oneself” (1998, 3). Following Castañeda, when reference is made to an ‘I’-thought in the third person, indirect discourse, Bermúdez marks the third person pronoun with an ‘*’ (as in ‘AB said that he* was about to be attacked by a poisonous spider’).

The core claim of Bermudez’s deflationary account is that the ability to have ‘I’-thoughts is so central to self-consciousness of the kind that adult human beings have that elucidation of this ability is all that is required to elucidate what is distinctive about self-consciousness (1998, 295). This is actually a stronger claim than he needs. To get his problem going, all he needs is that the ability to think ‘I’-thoughts is necessary for the kind of self-consciousness that adult human beings have. It is natural to think that full-blown self-consciousness distinctively involves other things, too, but Bermúdez can remain entirely neutral on this further issue. So let us leave the deflationary theory and focus on ‘I’-thoughts themselves.

If thinking ‘I’-thoughts is necessary for self-consciousness of a certain kind, then part of an account of self-consciousness of that kind will be an account of our capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts. Here is how Bermudez’s tension arises. On a certain widely accepted assumption about the relationship of thought and language (Bermúdez calls it the Thought-Language Principle), the way to gain an understanding of the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts is via an analysis of the first-person pronouns used in them (plus perhaps other things but that does not matter). However, mastery of first-person pronouns (‘I’, ‘me’, ‘myself’, ‘my’) requires, it would seem, the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts (1999, 24). We have a nice tight little circle.

In fact, according to Bermúdez, we have two nice tight little circles. The first is an explanatory circle, in which to explain either side of the circle, we need the other side. The second is a capacity circle, in which we need either capacity to account for our ability to acquire the other. The second circle is independently serious because it makes our acquisition of these reciprocal capacities a complete mystery. (This violates what Bermúdez calls the Acquisition Constraint: If a capacity exists, there must be an explanation of how a normal human being could acquire that capacity in the course of normal human development [1998, 19].)

Note that no circle involving use of pronouns and ability to think thoughts of a certain kind arises for thoughts like (1). No use of pronouns is involved. That is why Bermúdez distinguishes thoughts like (2) from thoughts like (1).

Bermudez’s response to the circle is to go after the Thought-Language Principle and specifically the idea that the way to understand the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts is via an analysis of the first-person pronouns used in them. He wants to show that we can gain a full understanding of our capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts without appealing to our ability to use first-person pronouns by appealing instead to the capacities behind simpler kinds of self-consciousness, capacities that do not use first-person pronouns or, perhaps, language at all, and building up a picture of the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts out of these simpler capacities.

There is a a relationship between the Thought-Language Principle and the distinction between thoughts like (1) and thoughts like (2). Not only does the circle not arise for thoughts like (1); it would be more plausible to hold that our capacity to refer to beings who may in fact be ourselves can be understood as an extension of simpler, nonlinguist capacities than that our capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts. It seem far less likely that we will be able to explain the central capacity in thoughts like (1), namely, the ability to refer to ourselves knowing that it is ourselves to whom we are referring, in terms of anything nonlinguistic. In short, thoughts like (1) are the hard case for Bermudez’s kind of account.

To find the simpler kinds of self-consciousness out of which to build full-blown capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts, Bermúdez examines four domains: perceptual experience and Gibson’s account of it (Chapter 5), somatic proprioception and awareness of one’s own body (Chapter 6), point of view and spatial reasoning at and over time (Chapters 7 and 8), and awareness of one’s own and others’ psychological states (Chapter 9). In each of these, Bermúdez claims to find one or more forms of consciousness of self. The former two are synchronic and involve relatively simple kinds of self-consciousness. The latter are diachronic and the self-consciousness is more complex. What is distinctive about all four of them is that they are nonconceptual (i.e., the creature involved need not have the concepts required to specify the contents of the act of awareness [1998, 49]). If so, then all four are nonlinguistic and therefore not dependent on the capacity to use anything linguistic such as first-person pronouns.

In the final chapter (Chapter 10), Bermúdez puts these various forms of simple consciousness of self to work to try to break the two circles. What he wants is an account of ‘I’- thoughts that does not require that the thinker of those thought have mastered first-person pronouns. We would then be free to use the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts in an account of what it is to have mastery of first-person pronouns.

Bermudez’s strategy in Chapter 10 is straightforward. First he gives an account of the requirements for using first-person pronouns where the user knows that she is referring to herself. This account is a variation on the well-known Gricean communication-intention approach and consists of a complex pattern of ‘I’-thoughts. Then he argues that we can give an account of this pattern of ‘I’-thoughts without invoking the capacity to use first-person pronouns. The pattern of ‘I’-thoughts is this:

An utterer u utters ‘I’ to refer to himself* [see above for this use of ‘*’] if and only if u utters ‘I’ in full comprehension of the token-reflexive rule that tokens of ‘I’ refer to their producer and with the tripartite intention

a. that some audience a should have their attention drawn to him*,

b. that a should be aware of his* intention that a‘s attention should be drawn to him*,

c. that the awareness mentioned in (b) should be part of the explanation for a‘s attention being drawn to him. [1998, 283]

There does not seem to be any risk that to know the token-reflexive rule, a user of ‘I’ must have the capacity to use first-person pronouns, so Bermúdez focuses on (a) – (c). At least (a) and (b) involve ‘I’-thoughts (the ‘*’ means that the utterer must know that the person to whom ‘him’ refers is himself). And the question is, can we give an account in which they can be satisfied without the utterer having to use first person pronouns?

To work, Bermudez’s account has to go through for all three clauses. I will focus on clause (a) but let me say a quick word about how he approaches (b) and (c). About (b), oversimplifying a bit, Bermúdez argues that prelinguistic infants interacting with their mothers have the ability to form the appropriate kind of intention and to know that they have such an intention (or at any rate that attribution of such complex intentions and knowledge is the best explanation of the behaviour we observe). No capacity to use first-person pronouns is required. Similarly with respect to the kind of ‘bringing-it-about’ at the heart of (c). In fact, it is not clear that (c) involves an ‘I’-thought at all. If so, the problem does not even arise for it.

There are questions that could be asked about these two clauses and the accounts of them. For example, in (b), must a be aware of his intention that a‘s attention should be drawn to him or is it enough that he have the intention? I will let them pass. I want to focus on clause (a), the requirement that the speaker intend that some audience a should have their attention drawn to him* (i.e., the person he knows to be himself) by his use of ‘I’. Bermudez argues that it can be satisfied without the utterer having the capacity to use first person pronouns.

Indeed, says Bermúdez, clause (a) could be satisfied without attributing a capacity to use first-person pronouns in at least two ways.

One way … would be through an intention to draw an audience’s attention to the material self as revealed in proprioceptive self-consciousness. Another way would be through an intention to draw an audience’s attention to the material self as a spatial element moving within, acting upon, and being acted upon by, the spatial environment [1998, 284]

Proprioceptive self-consciousness and awareness of “the material self as a spatial element moving within, acting upon, and being acted upon by, the spatial environment” are two of the forms of nonconceptual self-awareness that Bermúdez has delineated in earlier chapters.

To read the rest of this review, click here.

References

Bennett, J. 1974. Kant’s Dialectic Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bermúdez, J. 1998. The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / A Bradford Book

Bermúdez, J. 1999. Precis of (1998). Psycholoquy 10(35). Http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.035

Brook, A. 1994. Kant and the Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press

Castañeda, Hector-N. 1966. ‘He’: A study in the logic of self-consciousness. Ratio 8, pp.130-57

Kant, I. 1781/87. Critique of Pure Reason. P. Guyer and A. Wood, trans. and eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (cited as Axxx for the first edition of 1781and Bxxx for the second of 1787)

Nagel, T. 1965. Physicalism. Philosophical Review 74, 339-56

Perry, J.1979. The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs 13, pp.3-21 (Reprinted in The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays)

Shoemaker, Sydney. 1968. Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy 65, pp. 555-67

Wittgenstein, L. 1933-4. Blue and Brown Books. Rush Rhees, ed. Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1958

 

Andrew Brook is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University. He is also currently Vice-President of the Canadian Philosophical Association

Categories: Philosophical