Self-Reference and Self-Awareness (Advances in Consciousness Research)

Self-reference and Self-awareness

Advances in Consciousness Research Advances in Consciousness Research provides a forum for scholars from different scientific disciplines and fields of knowledge who study consciousness in its multifaceted aspects. Thus the Series will include (but not be limited to) the various areas of cognitive science, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, brain science and philosophy. The orientation of the Series is toward developing new interdisciplinary and integrative approaches for the investigation, description and theory of consciousness, as well as the practical consequences of this research for the individual and society. Series A: Theory and Method. Contributions to the development of theory and method in the study of consciousness. Editor Maxim I. Stamenov Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Editorial Board David Chalmers, University of Arizona Gordon G. Globus, University of California at Irvine Ray Jackendoff, Brandeis University Christof Koch, California Institute of Technology Stephen Kosslyn, Harvard University Earl Mac Cormac, Duke University George Mandler, University of California at San Diego John R. Searle, University of California at Berkeley Petra Stoerig, Universität Düsseldorf Francisco Varela, C.R.E.A., Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

Volume 30 Self-reference and Self-awareness Edited by Andrew Brook and Richard C. DeVidi

Self-reference and Self-awareness Edited by

Andrew Brook Richard C. DeVidi Carleton University, Ottawa

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
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Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Self-reference and Self-awareness / edited by Andrew Brook and Richard C. DeVidi. p. cm. (Advances in Consciousness Research, issn 1381–589X ; v. 30) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Self-knowledge, Theory of. 2. Reference (Philosophy) I. Brook, Andrew. II. DeVidi, Richard C. III. Series. BD438.S.S45 2001 126--dc21 isbn 90 272 51509 (Eur.) / 1 58811 0486 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)

2001043495

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

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Section I Great Precursors 2. Kant, self-awareness and self-reference Andrew Brook

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3. Frege and the first person Richard DeVidi

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Section II Classical Contributions 4. ‘He’: A study in the logic of self-consciousness Hector-Neri Castañeda

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5. Self-reference and self-awareness Sydney S. Shoemaker

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6. Self-identification Gareth Evans

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7. The problem of the essential indexical John Perry

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Section III Recent Work 8. The myth of mental indexicals Ruth Garrett Millikan

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9. Thinking about myself Maite Ezcurdia

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10. Introspective misidentification: An I for an I Melinda Hogan and Raymond Martin

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11. First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge Christopher Peacocke

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12. The constructed and the secret self William Seager

247

Bibliography

269

Index of names

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Maxim Stamenov, Series Editor, who invited us to prepare this volume and Bertie Kaal, Editor at John Benjamins Books, who has done a wonderful job of supporting us in the preparation of this volume. We thank the authors and publishers of previously published materials who gave us permission to reprint these works and the authors of the essays commissioned for this volume for entrusting us with their work. The volume has been substantially delayed. This could not be avoided and we apologize to the contributors. Castañeda, H.-N. 1966. ‘He’: A study in the logic of self-consciousness. Ratio 8:130–57 is reprinted with permission. Evans, G. 1982. Self-identity, is Chapter 7 (except for the appendices) of his The Varieties of Reference. J. McDowell, ed., and is reprinted with the kind permission of Oxford University Press. Perry, J. 1979. The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs 13:3–21 is reprinted with the kind permission of Professor John Perry. Shoemaker, S. 1968, Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy 65:555–67 is reprinted with the kind permission of Professor Sydney Shoemaker. Peacocke C. First-person reference, representational independence, and selfknowledge also appears in Wolfgang Kunne, Albert Newen, and Martin Anduschus, eds. Direct Reference, Indexicality, and Propositional Attitudes Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 1997. Millikan, Ruth. 1990. The myth of mental indexicals uses material from her ‘The myth of the essential indexical’. Noûs 24: 723–734 with the kind permission of the editors.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Some intricate, very subtle differences between awareness of self and awareness of other things and the relationship of these differences to some equally intricate features of reference to self using first person pronouns (‘I’, ‘my’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’) and their third person equivalents (for example, ‘he himself ’) have been the subject of a clearly delineated and largely self-contained dialogue within analytical philosophy for about thirty-five years now. The investigation began with seminal papers by Hector-Neri Castañeda (1966, this volume; 1967; 1968), took on important new dimensions in the work of Sidney Shoemaker (1968, this volume;1970) and led to further classical contributions by Perry (1977; 1979, this volume) and Evans (1981; 1982, this volume). It continues to inspire important new work to this day. Shoemaker called his paper ‘Selfreference and self-awareness’. It would be hard to think of a more perfect title for the topics under discussion in this volume, so as well as republishing his seminal paper, we have also gratefully borrowed his title. Three ideas have been central to this dialogue. They are that: 1. Certain uses of ‘I’ and cognates are ineliminable (the idea of the essential indexical)1 2. In certain situations at least, we are immune to error through misidentification of another as oneself (the idea of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first person) 3. When we refer to ourselves using ‘I’ and cognates, often or always it takes place without one identifying anything as oneself via properties that one has ascribed to the thing (the idea of self-reference without identification).

1. Note that we do not refer to ‘I’, etc., as indicators. This may seem a bit odd but whether these pronouns and their cognates are indicators is a matter of debate. For example, one of Castañeda’s three seminal papers is called ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators’. He distinguishes the third person equivalents of first person pronouns such as ‘I’ from indicators. Because they depend on other indicators and/or referring expressions, he says that they are really quasi-indicators. It is an indication of the intricateness and complexity of the recent work on self-reference that even something as basic as this could be a matter for debate.

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These three ideas in various configurations have been central to the whole dialogue, from its creation (or recreation) in the 1960s to the present. Creation or recreation? At the beginning of his 1966 paper, Castañeda says that his topic is “almost brand new”. Though his paper is without question highly original and of first rate importance, Castañeda’s claim is an exaggeration. No idea in philosophy (and precious few anywhere else) is ever constructed entirely from whole cloth. With respect to both self-awareness and selfreference in particular and indicators in general, that Frege was an important precursor is well-known, especially his (1918/19). The Wittgenstein of The Blue and Brown Books was another, as has been clear at least since Shoemaker’s paper. It is less well-known that Kant also discussed some of the peculiarities of self-reference and self-awareness, indeed anticipated claims about them that had to wait ‘til the work we’ve just introduced to get a full articulation. In this collection, we start by exploring two of the great precursors of the recent dialogue on self-reference and self-awareness just mentioned, Kant and Frege. (There is no separate paper on Wittgenstein, the third, for reasons we will give in a moment.) Next, four of the classic contributions just mentioned are reprinted. The final section offers five examples of more recent work and were written for this volume. We will try to say something by way of introducing these papers but there are limitations on how much one can do. Because they are dense and intricately argued, there is no substitute for reading the papers themselves. The papers on Kant and Frege that make up Section I are by the two editors. Andrew Brook argues that Kant not only anticipated but also clearly articulated the phenomenon that Shoemaker calls self-reference without identification, that is to say, that one can refer to oneself, and to refer to oneself as oneself, without (otherwise) identifying oneself. There are also indications that he was aware of something very much like the contemporary notion of the essential indexical. Brook argues, moreover, that, unlike contemporary theorists at least up to Peacocke (this volume), Kant had at least the makings of a theory to explain these peculiar features of self-awareness. His theory also yields insight into which references to oneself are and which are not immune to the error of identifying someone else as oneself (though Kant seems not to have thought of anything like this notion of immunity to error itself). Peacocke also discusses aspects of Kant’s work on awareness of self. Frege was the first to take the ‘linguistic turn’ so characteristic of twentieth century analytical philosophy; Richard DeVidi shows how this new approach to philosophical problems invests the connection between the linguistic act of

Introduction

referring to oneself and awareness of self with considerable significance. Frege’s first faltering steps toward an account of first person reference are generally conceded to be unsuccessful; but the terms in which he sets the problem have been enormously influential on almost all subsequent work in the area. DeVidi argues, against Frege’s critics and his revisionist friends, that Frege’s approach to the theory of meaning requires only a very minor extension to deal with the peculiar features of first person reference quite successfully. We did not commission a separate treatment of Wittgenstein’s contributions to our topics for the following reasons. Wittgenstein’s remarks fall mainly into two groups, the middle period remarks of the Blue and Brown Books (1933–4) and remarks from his final period in works such Philosophical Investigations (1953), Zettel, and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, though there also some relevant but highly compressed remarks in the Tractatus (1921). Shoemaker’s and Evans’ works, both of which had to be part of the volume in any case, discuss the most interesting of Wittgenstein’s middle period remarks so it was not necessary to commission a separate study of them. Wittgenstein’s final period remarks on the use of ‘I’ and related matters, many suggest, deny that when we use ‘I’, etc., in the relevant ways, we are using them referentially at all. Peacocke discusses these notions near the end of his paper. The absence of a separate study of Wittgenstein’s final thoughts on self-awareness may come as a surprise. It reflects the following considerations. First, it is singularly difficult to get a clear, uncontroversial account of what Wittgenstein was trying to show us in his late remarks on first person pronouns, etc. If anything, it is even harder to see what the considerations were that, in his view, supported his remarks. Second, his remarks have persuaded almost no one who is not already strongly drawn to his general approach. For example, not a single contributor to this volume holds that the relevant uses of ‘I’, etc., are nonreferential and a number of them explicitly deny the claim. In short, the ‘non-cognitivist’ approach has had little influence on the work collected in this volume. Section II contains four papers that have achieved the status of classics in work on our topics. The paper that launched the whole recent dialogue was Hector-Neri Castañeda’s famous work, ‘“He”: A study in the logic of selfconsciousness’. In this and other papers on the same topics, Castañeda argues that certain uses of ‘I’ and cognates are ineliminable. In particular, no description, not even one containing (other) indexicals, can be substituted for these uses. This is one of the two great claims that launched the recent discussion. The second was first articulated by Sydney Shoemaker in ‘Self-reference and self-awareness’, the idea of immunity to error through misidentification of

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another as oneself. This immunity goes with another central peculiarity of selfawareness, what Shoemaker calls self-reference without identification. We introduced both ideas earlier. In ‘The essential indexical’, John Perry picks up Castañeda’s claim that nothing can be substituted for certain uses of ‘I’ and cognates and articulates it as the idea of the essential indexical. Building his account on what he needs to know in order to find out that a person making a mess in a store is him, Perry argues that without knowing that some part of a description applies to himself, without therefore knowledge of himself (and as himself), even a complete description of the person who is in fact making the mess need not be enough for him to find out that it is himself. The chapter from Gareth Evans’ 1982 book, ‘Self-identification’, is a massive, sprawling meditation on many aspects of self-reference and selfawareness. One suspects that Evans might have done some more work on it had he lived long enough. At any rate, it resists summarization. Shoemaker’s two themes, self-reference without identification and immunity to error through misidentification, and their relationship to one another play a central role in the chapter. So does an idea that one must have more indexicals than ‘I’ and its cognates available. In particular, one must be able to locate oneself in the objective world (and so be able to use ‘here’) and know when a given time has arrived (and so be able to use ‘now’). In Section III, we turn to more recent work on self-reference and selfawareness. All the papers were prepared for this volume, though one of them, Peacocke’s, was co-published elsewhere (Peacocke 1997) and Millikan’s paper is a revision of her well-known 1990 critique of Perry. One of the first things to notice about these papers is how pervasively they have been influenced by the four classical works of Section II. Every paper of Section III criticizes papers in Section II. Indeed, every one of the former papers makes reference to at least two of the latter papers. One Section III paper, Ezcurdia’s, also criticizes a Section III paper, namely, Millikan’s. Some might suspect that the original authors could handle many of the criticisms laid out in Section III but all five papers raise significant issues and back their claims with considerable force of argument. In fact, it would extraordinarily interesting to set the Section III criticisms against the Section II claims that they aim to criticize and adjudicate the disagreements. Ruth Millikan’s criticism in ‘The myth of mental indexicals’ can be summarized quite succinctly: there is something in reference to self that is essential but it is not anything indexical. Why? The relevant uses of ‘I’ do not have the

Introduction

features central to indexicals. For example, indexicals have no constant reference but ‘I’ as used by a given person always does. Moreover, any element that is indexical in uses of ‘I’ does not yield the information crucial to predicting what the user of ‘I’ will go on to do when, a central element in reference to self. And so on. In short, the element in reference to self that is essential is not an indexical. In ‘Thinking about myself ’, Maite Ezcurdia criticizes two authors who, she says, argue that there need not be any presentation of self when one refers to oneself using ‘I’ and cognates. Mellor is one. Millikan, the Millikan of 1990 and this volume, is the other. Mellor holds that the job that a representation of self is supposed to do is in fact done by context. If that were so, Ezcurdia argues, we would have no way to discriminate between an indexical referring to me and an indexical referring to the place I’m at. Since we can discriminate these things, Mellor must be wrong. In Ezcurdia’s view, Millikan’s emphasis on the relationship between an indexical and a referent specified by the semantic rules for the kind of indexical in question goes with a ‘Millian’ view of indexical reference, in which the semantics of an indexical are exhausted by its naming function and mode of presentation can play no role. Ezcurdia argues that this view leaves Millikan with no way to distinguish between, for example, a use of ‘I’ presenting an object that happens to be myself and a use of ‘I’ presenting what I know to be myself. In ‘Introspective misidentification: an I for an I’, Melinda Hogan and Raymond Martin go after the notion of immunity to error through misidentification. They do so primarily by presenting four putative counter-examples to the view. The counter-examples are all of the form: I am aware of someone having a feeling in the way that I am aware of feelings that I am having but it may in fact not be me who is having them. They consider objections to their counter-examples and reply to the objections. Two of the counter-examples are enmeshed in current controversies about identity of persons over time. In ‘First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge’, Christopher Peacocke isolates a special kind of awareness of self in which one knows something about oneself, e.g., that one is seeing something, when this could not be inferred from anything about how the object of this act is represented. Peacocke calls these representationally independent uses of the first person. (His distinction is subtle and much more interesting than this gloss.) What interests him is that often representationally independent uses of ‘I’ and cognates give one knowledge, knowledge, for example, that it is oneself who is seeing something. He offers what he calls a delta account to explain this,

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according to which a subject having a property is sufficient in the relevant cases for a subject to refer to itself, and specifically, to ascribe the property to itself. He then applies the account to the illusion of a “transcendent subject” that he claims to detect in Kant, Schopenhauer and the early Wittgenstein, perhaps without recognizing that his delta account itself has strongly Kantian elements (see Brook, this volume). He concludes with a critical look at ‘no-ownership’ theories and theories that the relevant uses of ‘I’ and cognates are not referential. Seager’s ‘The constructed and the secret self ’ can be seen as a step toward meeting a need that Evans articulates (1982, 205; this volume, 95). Says Evans, we cannot give a complete account of self-reference and self-awareness without a complete theory of mind, though we can make some progress while we wait for one. Seager’s paper takes some steps toward developing such as general theory of mind. He urges that from the perspective of a representational theory of mind, it is natural to arrive at a dual view of selfhood, i.e., of whatever it is that realizes personhood and carries sameness of personhood across time. He then applies the resulting duality to a wide range of phenomena, all the way from Williams’ puzzle cases about personal identity to such mundane matters as the relative cognitive impenetrability of illusions such as the Müller-Lyer arrowhead illusion and the surprisingly tenacious conflicts between, e.g., our considered values and what we desire that we find in ourselves from time to time, most of us at any rate. Rich in precursors and stimulated by Castañeda’s and Shoemaker’s seminal papers, the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. We hope that this volume conveys something of that richness.

Andrew Brook and Richard DeVidi Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Section I

Great Precursors

Chapter 2

Kant, self-awareness and self-reference Andrew Brook Carleton University, Ottawa

Introduction As is well-known, Castañeda (1966, this volume; 1967), Shoemaker (1968, this volume), Perry (1979, this volume), Evans (1982, this volume) and others urge that awareness of self has peculiar features. It is less well-known that some of these peculiarities were discovered as early as 1781 and the Critique of Pure Reason.1 Two of the key peculiarities are that, 1. In certain kinds of awareness of self, first-person indexicals (I, me, my, mine) cannot be analyzed out in favor of anything else, in particular anything descriptionlike, and that, 2. In such cases, awareness of self is via what Shoemaker calls self-reference without identification. One can be aware of something as oneself without identifying it (or anything) as oneself via properties that one has ascribed to the thing. (2) is often taken to be closely related to another putative peculiarity of awareness of self that Shoemaker calls immunity to error through misidentification (Shoemaker 1970, who claims to have found the core of the idea in Wittgenstein 1933–4: 66–70). This is the idea that in some situations, we cannot become aware of a person by being aware of certain experiences, take that person to be oneself, and be wrong. Certainly this latter idea has become a major preoccupa-

1. I explore the issues in this paper at greater length in Brook 1994: Ch’s 4, 7 and 8. Unless otherwise noted, references to Kant are to the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Akademie pagination using the standard ‘A’ and ‘B’ notation for the first two editions (the only two that Kant prepared himself). A reference to one edition only means that the passage in question appeared only in that edition. Translations start from Norman Kemp Smiths’ 1927 translation and Guyer and Woods’ 1998 translation and have been checked against the original text.

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tion in recent literature on self-reference and self-awareness but whether there is any such immunity and, if there is, how closely it is linked to self-reference without identification are other questions — questions about which we will have something to say, but not until near the end of this paper. One standard argument for (1), that certain indexicals are essential, goes as follows.2 To know that I wrote a certain book a few years ago, it is not enough to know that someone over six feet tall wrote that book, or that someone who teaches philosophy at a particular university wrote that book, or … or … or …, for I could know all these things without knowing that it was me who has these properties (and I could know that it was me who wrote that book and not know that any of these things are properties of me). Nor would it help to add details of a more identifying kind — the person whose office number is 123 in building ABC, the person whose office phone number is … . If I don’t know that that office is my office, that that phone number is my phone number, I could know all these things and still not know that it was me who wrote the book. And viceversa — through bizarre selective amnesia, I could cease to know all such things about myself and yet continue to know that it was me who wrote the book. As Shoemaker puts it, … no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-free description of a person is, … it cannot possibly entail that I am that person [1968: 560; this volume, 86].

What a curious piece of knowledge — if it even is knowledge! The standard argument for (2), that certain references to self do not require descriptive identification, goes as follows: My use of the word ‘I’ as the subject of [statements such as ‘I feel pain’ or ‘I see a canary’] is not due to my having identified as myself something [otherwise recognized] of which I know, or believe, or wish to say, that the predicate of my statement applies to it [1968: 558; this volume, 84].

Whether Kant was aware of (1) is an intriguing question, as we will see. He was clearly aware of (2). Consider this passage: In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject … without noting in it any quality whatsoever — in fact, without knowing anything of it either directly or by inference [1781: A355].

2. Though most often associated with Castañeda and Perry, a version of it can be found even earlier in Nagel (1965).

Kant, self-awareness and self-reference

This “attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts” business is interesting. In the kind of selfawareness in question, one is aware not just of oneself. One is aware of oneself as oneself. One is aware that it is oneself of which one is aware. Put in Fregean terms, one is not just aware of the being who happens to be oneself. One is presented to oneself in a certain way, namely, as oneself (see Ezcurdia, this volume). By “attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts”, Kant seems to have had something like this in mind, something like “using ‘I’ to refer to myself as the subject of my thoughts”. Since, on Kant’s view, it is not just identifying properties but any properties whatsoever that I need not know in order to refer to myself as myself,3 ‘non-ascriptive reference to self ’ might capture what is special about this form of awareness of self better than Shoemaker’s ‘self-reference without identification’ (Brook 1975: 188). But (2) is logically linked to (1). If I am aware of myself as myself without inferring this from anything else that I know about myself, my knowledge that it is myself of whom I am aware has to be independent, at least in some respects, of knowing anything else about myself. I can be aware of myself as myself without being aware of myself as anything except — myself. This shows that (2), of which Kant was clearly aware, requires something like (1). The existence of such a link between (1) and (2) does not establish that Kant was aware of (1), of course, but is still interesting. As we will see, there is some evidence that he was. Moreover, Kant went further with these issues than any contemporary theorist. Unlike theorists of the past few decades, Kant had the makings of a theory to explain (1) and (2). Peacocke (this volume) is the first contemporary theorist to have anything like such a theory. Kant called the mode of reference to self that gives rise to awareness without identification transcendental designation. In Section 1 we will explore this notion to see what exactly it amounts to and how much Kant knew of the kind of reference that we use to achieve it. Section 2 lays out Kant’s understanding of how awareness of oneself as oneself is different from awareness of one’s psychological states (the latter is what Kant usually meant by ‘inner sense’) and oneself as an object among other objects. Section 3 lays out a further key element of Kant’s theory, the notion of what I call the global representation. Kant held that one appears to oneself as a single common subject of a large number of psychological states (1781: A350). The notion of the global representation is closely related to that idea. Section 4 draws the elements of the theory

3. Being myself is not a property of me, i.e., something that I and other things could have in common.

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together and in Section 5 we show how it explains (1) and (2). The theory turns out to have implications for some other things, too, immunity to error through misidentification in particular.

1.

Transcendental designation: The referential base of self-awareness

Kant’s most common way of describing the awareness of self yielded by transcendental designation is this: “… through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given” (B135). If the kind of reference that yields awareness of oneself as oneself, awareness of oneself as subject, is non-ascriptive, then the resulting awareness will not, or certainly need not, present any properties of oneself. If awareness of self as subject is non-ascriptive, the reason, of course, is not that the self is some strange, indefinable being; as Kant brilliantly discerned, it is because of the nature of the acts of reference used to gain this awareness. Kant spoke of this kind of referring only a few times but when he did, he achieved insights into it that have only been rediscovered in the past thirty-five years.4 For Kant’s discoveries about reference to self, the crucial text is the passage on A355 of the first-edition attack on the second Paralogism quoted earlier: in attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject … only transcendentally, without noting in it any quality whatsoever — in fact, without knowing anything of it either directly or by inference.

This doctrine of transcendental designation also appears at B155 of the secondedition Deduction, though not thus labeled. the I that I think is distinct from the I that it … intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition [B155]

4. Transcendental designation, it is worth pointing out, is purely an epistemological phenomenon. Whether Kant also held that something about the mind itself is ‘transcendental’ is an ontological question and another matter altogether. Peacocke (this volume) urges that he held to the ontological thesis, too, but this is none too clear. Indeed, the nature of the thesis itself is none too clear. Presumably Peacocke has in mind something that Kant would have called ‘transcendent’, i.e., beyond experience and the necessary conditions of experience, not what he called ‘transcendental’, i.e. to do with the necessary conditions of experience. Did Kant think that, in addition to the mind of which we are aware in, e.g., acts of transcendental designation, there is another, transcendent mind beyond such awareness? There is little reason to think that he did (Brook 1994,Ch. 4:5). To be sure, he thought that there is a lot about the mind that we cannot know — but here he meant the ordinary mind of self-awareness and introspection, not some second, transcendent entity.

Kant, self-awareness and self-reference

The central notion is the idea that I can refer to myself (presumably, as myself) using ‘I’ without ‘noting … any quality’ in myself. One can refer to oneself in a variety of ways, of course: as the person in the mirror, as the person born on such and such a date in such and such a place, as the first person to do X, and so on, but one way of referring to oneself is special: it does not require identifying or indeed any ascription to oneself. So Kant tells us. Kant does not specifically say that transcendental designation makes me aware of myself as myself but he seems to have had it in mind. Indeed, as we will see a bit later, Kant argued that I must presuppose that it is myself of which I am aware to know some other things about myself.5 Did Kant really discover central features of self-reference without identification or did he merely happen onto something — something that we can identify in retrospect as self-reference without identification — with no more than a vague idea of what he had stumbled upon? Two things make me think that he had some definite idea of what he had uncovered. First, he did not refer to the notion only once or in one way. He marked the basic claim in a number of ways and a number of places. He spoke, as we saw, of uses of ‘I’ that designate “only transcendentally”, “without knowing anything of [the subject]” (A355). But he also said that such uses “denote” but do not “represent” (A382). And, he tells us, even though the referent of ‘I think’ is as ubiquitous in experience as the referent of any categorical concept, it is not like other concepts because “it can have no special designation” (A341=B399). That is to say, presumably, it does not pick out its referent as one kind of object rather than another or as one object rather than another at all. (This last idea will be central in the fourth section.)6 Second, what if Kant’s work also has the basics of the idea that certain indexicals are essential? That would be a good indication that he understood at

5. One can compare what Kant says about reference to self to his doctrine that existence is not a predicate (A598=B626). In the same way that being aware of something’s existence is not to be aware of any quality of it, being aware of oneself as oneself is something over and above being aware of qualities of oneself. In his criticism of Leibniz’s Amphiboly, Kant says much the same thing about space and time — to be aware of space and time is to be aware of something over and above the qualities of space and time (A276=B332; see A281=B337). 6. Note that all the phrases just cited are from no earlier than the Paralogism chapter of the first edition. Kant seems not to have developed his theory of reference to self until he needed it to attack rational psychology. Note, too, that they are all from the first edition. In the second edition, Kant moved his discussion of awareness of oneself as subject to the Transcendental Deduction — and, regrettably, deleted most of the interesting details. A different but equally stripped-down version can be found in “The Psychological Idea,” §46 of the Prolegomena (1783; Ak. IV:333–4).

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least some aspects of reference to self without identification fairly well, because the latter phenomenon requires the former: indexical reference to self could not be essential unless there is a way of doing such acts of reference that is independent of (non-indexical) identification. Whether Kant was aware that, for certain purposes, use of indexicals like ‘I’ is essential is not easy to settle with perfect confidence. Such evidence as there is, however, points to the conclusion that he was. Specifically, Kant argues that awareness of certain things presupposes awareness of oneself as “subject of the categories” in a way quite reminiscent of Shoemaker’s claim that: no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-free description of a person is, … it cannot possibly entail that I am that person [1968: 560; this volume, 86].

Here is what Kant says: The subject of the categories cannot by thinking the categories [i.e. applying them to objects] acquire a concept of itself as an object of the categories. For in order to think them, its pure self-consciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself be presupposed [B422].

This passage is from the extremely obscure second edition version of the Paralogisms chapter but the phrase ‘its pure self-consciousness’ seems to refer to awareness of oneself as oneself, awareness of oneself as subject. If so, what it seems to be saying is something like this: Judgments about oneself, i.e., ascriptions of properties to oneself, ‘presuppose … pure self-consciousness’, i.e., awareness of oneself via an act of ascription-free transcendental designation. We find what may be the same claim in the first edition: “it is … very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object … .” (A402). A second passage, this time from Kant’s introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms, offers similar suggestions. The passage begins with a famous variant on the ‘no manifold’ theme that we saw at the beginning of this section: Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X.

and then goes on: It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation [A346=B404].

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The last clause is what interests us: “any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation”. Kant seems to be saying two things. On the one hand, to know that anything is true of me, I must first know that it is me of whom it is true. That would seem to require some awareness of myself that could not be derived from any knowledge of (what are in fact my) properties. Furthermore (a point that will become vital later), this awareness of myself as myself is not via some independent representation of myself. The only representations involved are representations of the objects of which I am aware. Awareness of self is somehow part of representations of objects. We do not have ‘IchVorstellungen’ of the sort envisioned by Frege or Husserl. In short, these two passages seem to be saying something like this. In order to apply the categories to oneself, i.e., in order to make ‘any judgment upon’ oneself or know oneself as an object, one must already and independently be aware of oneself as subject, i.e., as oneself. But this is nothing less than the core of the idea of the essential indexical. To summarize our results so far. Kant seems to have been aware of two features of reference to self that Shoemaker views as distinctive: 1. Kant was clearly aware of what Shoemaker calls reference to self without identification; in his jargon, we designate the subject “transcendentally, without noting in it any properties whatsoever” (A355); and, 2. There are indications that Kant was also aware of the idea of the essential indexical. In his terms, awareness of properties as properties of oneself presupposes awareness of oneself as subject, as oneself. If so, there is reason to think that Kant did know what he had found when he hit on transcendental designation. Few of Kant’s students have paid much attention to transcendental designation. Doubtless there are many reasons for this. Kant managed to give a clear statement of what he thought about the topic only once in the whole Critique, namely, on A355. Not only is this description exceedingly brief but he dropped both it and the term in the second edition. It is also buried in the middle of an obscure and what many, I think wrongly, take to be a parochial discussion of the simplicity of the soul. Perhaps most importantly, the remarkable insights into the mechanics of reference to and awareness of self that Kant sketched there were lost again with his death, to reappear at the earliest with Wittgenstein (1933–4: 66–70) in his notion of the use of ‘I’ as subject and probably not until Castañeda

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and Shoemaker.7 Indeed, it would have been difficult for anyone to have recognized what Kant had spotted prior to Castañeda’s and Shoemaker’s work. Kant himself lacked the apparatus needed to describe his discoveries adequately.

2. The sources of self-awareness Kant was not merely aware of some of the distinctive features of non-ascriptive self-awareness. Unlike recent theorists prior to Peacocke, he had the makings of a theory to explain them. Kant held that one gains awareness of oneself as oneself, as subject, in a way very different from the way in which one gains awareness not just of external objects but also of one’s own psychological states (and even of oneself when one is an object of one’s own mental states — for example, when one sees oneself in a mirror). He also held that the awareness of self that results is different from awareness of anything else in certain respects, respects that explain the resulting peculiarities. Let us start with how one becomes aware of oneself and what the resulting awareness is like. Kant’s theory of self-awareness compares and contrasts in interesting ways with some contemporary views. We have already seen a parallel between Kant’s views and Peacocke’s. We will return to it. Kant’s views also contrast with some current theories, Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory and Dretske’s displaced perception theory in particular. Since these contrasts bring out some of the originality and power of Kant’s theory, we will look at them, too. Since the distinctions just canvassed are part of Kant’s doctrine of inner sense, we should start with an account of is doctrine of inner sense but we won’t. His doctrine of inner sense is a mess. Here are just a few of the problems. Kant insists that all representational states are in inner sense, including those representing the objects of outer sense (i.e., spatially located objects),8 but he also says that the object of inner sense is the soul, the object of outer sense the

7. Though Shoemaker attributes the core of his treatment to Wittgenstein, one wonders. In his later writings Wittgenstein seems to have maintained that apparently self-referential uses of ‘I’ and cognates in fact are not referential at all. It is hard to tell whether he held the same view in his middle period. Perhaps we could put it this way: Kant anticipated what may be one thread in Wittgenstein’s middle period work; Shoemaker developed the idea that Kant had anticipated, probably without knowing that Kant had worked on it. 8. “Whatever the origins of our representations, whether they are due to the influence of outer things, or are produced through inner causes, whether they arise a priori, or being appearances have an empirical origin, they must all, as modifications of the mind, belong to inner sense.” (A98–9).

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body (including one’s own). He comes close to denying that we can be aware of the denizens of inner sense — they do not represent inner objects and have no manifold of their own. Yet he also says that we can be aware of them — representations can themselves be objects of representations — and that representations can make us aware of themselves. In its role as a form of or means to awareness of self, apperception ought to be part of inner sense. Yet Kant regularly contrasted apperception, a means to awareness of oneself and one’s acts of thinking, with inner sense as a means to awareness of — what? Presumably, particular representations: perceptions, imaginings, memories, etc. Here is a passage from the Anthropology: §24. Inner sense is not pure apperception, consciousness of what we are doing; for this belongs to the power of thinking. It is, rather, consciousness of what we undergo as we are affected by the play of our own thoughts. This consciousness rests on inner intuition, and so on the relation of ideas (as they are either simultaneous or successive). [1798, Ak. VII:161]

And these are just the most obvious problems. As I said, Kant’s doctrine of inner sense is a mess. Nevertheless, the quotation just introduced contains three interesting ideas. The first starts from the distinction between awareness of oneself and awareness in ‘inner intuition’ of ‘what we undergo’, i.e., awareness of our representational states. One of the things that we undergo in inner intuition is representation of oneself. If so, there is an important distinction between “apperceptive” awareness of self and awareness of self in intuitions. As Kant puts it in the secondedition Deduction, … the I that I think is distinct from the I that it, itself, intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am … [B155].9

This distinction between the ‘I that I think’ and the I that this I ‘intuits’ is the distinction between being aware of oneself as subject of all of one’s representational states and being aware of oneself as the object of some of them. The second idea is the suggestion that apperceptive awareness of self is “consciousness of what we are doing” — doing. For Kant, we become aware of objects of representation via apperceptive acts of synthesis tying a manifold of

9. In German, the first part is, “Wie aber das Ich, der Ich denke, von dem Ich, das sich selbst anschauet, unterschieden … .” Kemp Smith translates this, “How the ‘I’ that thinks can be distinct from the ‘I’ that intuits itself …” and inserts some unhelpful emendations.

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intuition into coherent, recognizable, reidentifiable particulars. However, the standard way of becoming aware of an act of representing is quite different from this. We become aware of acts of representing not by receiving intuitions but by doing them: “… synthesis …, as an act, … is conscious to itself, even without sensibility” (B153); “… this representation is an act of spontaneity, that is, it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (B132). Kant tells us that here we do not represent by forming an object. That is not to say that acts of representing are not themselves represented in inner sense; they certainly are. It is just that they are not the object of a representation. We can be aware of acts of representing via intuition, too, of course, but what is special about them is that we can be aware of them just by doing them, just by representing something. Another Kantian way of capturing what he had in mind here would be to distinguish between ‘awareness by doing’ and ‘awareness by having an image’ (for Kant, we are aware of all intentional objects in images [A120] — he even thought that all intentional objects are represented spatially [B154–5, B156, B158–9]). The point he is making is that we do not need to represent acts of representing in images. The passage from B153 cited above makes that clear. Equally, we can be aware of ourselves as subject just by doing acts of representing. When I am aware of myself as the subject of a representation, I am aware of myself as doing the act of representing. One can of course be aware of oneself via intuition, too — by seeing oneself, for example, in a mirror. This is the way in which one becomes aware of one’s size, shape, colour, etc. But when one is aware of oneself as the subject of one’s own representations or agent of one’s acts, it is by being aware of acts of representing by doing them. Here is a passage from later in the Critique where Kant says this very clearly: Man, … who knows the rest of nature solely through the senses, knows himself also through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses [A546=B574].

How does awareness of our own acts of representing and of ourselves as their subject work? The act of representing makes us aware of three things. Consider the sentence: 1. I am looking at the words on the screen in front of me.

Kant’s claim seems to be that the representation of the words on the screen is all the experience I need to be aware not just of the words and the screen but also of the act of seeing them and of who is seeing them, namely, me. A single

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representation can do all three jobs. In Kant’s words, the awareness of the latter two items is given “not indeed in, but with … intuitions” (B161). Let us introduce a term for this function. Let us call an act of representing that can make me aware of its object, itself and myself the representational base of my becoming aware of these items. Almost any representation will do. Imagining Pegasus will do just as well as perceiving external objects such as computer screens. Indeed, representational states which have no apparent object such as pains or feelings of hunger will do just as well. Nor does a representation itself have to be recognized to provide a representational base for self-awareness. Just recognizing the object of a representation is enough for me to be aware that it is me who is aware of it. Having the representational base for recognition of a state is not actually recognizing it, nor indeed myself, but it is to have all the representation I need. This is why, to return to a point made earlier, the basis of awareness of oneself is not some separate Ich-Vorstellung. This theory of self-awareness is remarkably powerful. It rests on an idea that next saw the light of day in any clear form in Peacocke’s delta theory (this volume). In the delta theory, having a property is sufficient in relevant cases for its subject to refer to and ascribe the property to itself — just Kant’s most basic idea. Kant’s theory also neatly avoids some of the problems that afflict other leading current theories of self-awareness. Consider, for example, Rosenthal’s (1991) higher-order thought theory. According to this theory, to be conscious of some representational state, A, one must have another representation (a thought) of which A is the object. For Kant, all we need is A itself. A representation itself has the power to make us aware of it. Rosenthal’s view runs foul of objections such as that lots of creatures conscious of their own states don’t seem to have such complicated thoughts, and that the model readily leads to a regress of thoughts about thoughts about thoughts, and there is little independent reason to postulate such a hierarchy of thoughts. Now of course Rosenthal has answers to such objects — but for what we might call Kant’s same-order model, no such objections arise. Advantage Kant. Or consider Dretske’s (1995) displaced perception view of self-awareness. Here when we are aware of our own representations (and, by extension, ourselves as their subject?), we infer this somehow from what we are representing, that this item is being represented. Hence ‘displaced perception’. This theory runs foul of the objection that we seem to know a lot about our representations that goes well beyond what is being represented in them, e.g., whether they are striking or faint, in one sensible modality or another, perception, memory or

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imagination, and so on and so forth. Despite a superficial resemblance engendered by the idea that representation of an object is all we need for awareness of the representation itself, Kant’s theory is not a displaced perception theory. Indeed, nothing is displaced from the object being represented. Representation of the act of representing and representation of self are distinct activities. It is just that a single representations provide for all three; we do not need a distinct representations for each act. Once again, Kant is safe from objections that face others. Once again, advantage Kant. Now the third idea introduced in the passage quoted earlier. It is this. When one is aware of oneself as subject by doing acts of representing, one is not aware of oneself as an object of representations of any kind. (By ‘object’ I mean intentional object.) Here are some passages: “it is … very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object … .” (A402). “[The representation] ‘I’ is … as little an intuition as it is a concept of any object” (A382). “The proposition, ‘I think’, in so far as it amounts to the assertion, ‘I exist thinking’ … determines the subject (which is then at the same time object) in respect of existence” (B429; second emphasis mine). To be aware of myself as an object requires not only “spontaneity of thought”, that is, acts of transcendental apperception, but also “receptivity of intuition”; that is, it requires “the thought of myself applied to the empirical intuition of myself” (B430–31). Let us spell this idea that awareness of oneself as subject as not awareness of oneself as an object of a representation out a bit. Kant tended to tie awareness of objects very closely to sensibility, to appearances and intuitions (see A104); all awareness of objects seems to be via sensibility. But, as Kant put it, “… synthesis …, as an act, … is conscious to itself, even without sensibility” (B153); being aware of an act of representing by doing it is not being aware of it by receiving intuitions of it. In addition, he says that the “unity of the synthesis of the manifold” (i.e., that we are representing the manifold in a single representation) is given “not indeed in, but with … intuitions”. Since one is aware of oneself as subject by being aware of acts of representing by doing them, not via intuitions in sensibility (B430), it would follow that one is not aware of oneself as a represented object. (On the other hand, Kant does say that the subject is an object, the ‘transcendental’ object of inner sense, at A341 and A361. Because he uses Gegenstand, not Objekt on those occasions, I take him to be talking about objects in a loose way here that does not negate the distinction so carefully drawn in the passages quoted above.) For Kant, this distinction between awareness of self by doing acts of synthesis and awareness of things as objects is of fundamental importance.

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When one is aware of oneself by doing cognitive and perceptual acts, one is aware of oneself as spontaneous, rational, self-legislating, free — as the doer of deeds, not just as a passive receptacle for representations: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination” (B158–159), of “the activity of the self” (B68) (Sellars, 1970–1; Pippin, 1987). To close this section, let me situate Kant vis-à-vis one more strand in recent thought about self-awareness, the so-called noncognitivist approach associated with the later Wittgenstein. Strangely enough, some recent commentators, for example Powell (1990), have taken Kant’s assertion that awareness of self as subject is not intuitional awareness of objects to be an assertion that what seems to be reference to self as subject is not a referential act at all and even that there is nothing there to refer to. The idea is this. If all (noninferential) awareness of things is intuition of objects, then, if uses of ‘I’ are nonintuitional, they are either nonreferential or do not give us awareness of anything or both. I know of nothing in Kant that could support such an interpretation and it is not plausible in its own right. As Shoemaker says, “in making a judgment like ‘I feel pain’ one is aware of [no]thing less than the fact that one does, oneself, feel pain.” (1968: 563; this volume, 90). I think these exotic readings of Kant rest on two mistakes. One is the mistake of thinking that, for Kant, all noninferential awareness is intuitional. The other is the mistake of confusing non-ascriptive reference with absence of reference. To summarize this section: According to Kant, we have two ways of becoming aware of ourselves — by working intuitions up into intentional objects and by being aware of acts of representing and of oneself as their subject by doing them. The former makes us aware of represented objects, the latter makes us aware of ourselves as the subject and agent of the act of representing. This distinction anchors Kant’s theory of the peculiarities of awareness of oneself as subject. Before we can lay out that theory, we need to add one further element.

3. The global representation So far we have focused on individual representations. For Kant, however, the representations that serve as the representational base of awareness of oneself as subject are usually much ‘bigger’ than that, i.e., contain multiple objects and often multiple representations of them tied together into what Kant called ‘general experience’.

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When we speak of different experiences, we can refer only to the various perceptions, all of which, as such, belong to one and the same general experience. This thoroughgoing synthetic unity of perceptions is indeed the form of experience; it is nothing else than the synthetic unity of appearances in accordance with concepts [A110].

Call this general experience a global representation. When I am aware of many objects and/or representations of them as the single object of a global representation, the latter representation is all the representation I need to be aware not just of the global object but also of the global representation itself (the ‘one consciousness’ and the various individual representations that I have of these objects), and of myself as not just the subject of individual representations but as the common subject of all the constituent representations. One can be aware of more than one act and object of representing. However, to become aware of any such acts and/or objects is to integrate them with the acts and objects of representation of which one is already aware. At any one time, there will be one largest act of representing. That is one’s current global representation. In short, the global representation is the home of the unity of consciousness, a unity that has both a synchronic and a diachronic dimension.10 According to the last paragraph, each of us could have only one global representation at one time. If so, to use a phrase of Wittgenstein’s, a global representation has no neighbour; there will not be other, simultaneous global representations of which one is aware by having them from which to distinguish any one of them. This uniqueness will become important when we draw out Kant’s theory of the peculiarities of awareness of self in Section 4. How do global representations serve as the representational base of awareness of self as subject? Here, stated with less than pellucid clarity, is Kant’s account: the mind could never think its identity in the manifoldness of its representations … if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its act, whereby it subordinates all [the manifold] … to a transcendental unity … [A108].

Kant seems to mean that what allows me to become aware of my identity as the common subject of my various representations is that I can be aware of the single, unified and unifying acts of representing by which I combine the objects of these representations, and sometimes also the representations themselves,

10. It is notoriously difficult to elucidate the kind of unity involved (Brook 1994, Ch. II:5). However, noticing that it has both synchronic and diachronic dimensions can help us sort out where immunity to error through misidentification could occur and where it could not, as we will see later.

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into a single object of a global representation. Kant called these acts transcendental apperception. I think he was expressing the same idea when he said in the second edition that I am aware of myself as the single common subject of a certain group of experiences by being aware of “the identity of the consciousness in … conjoined … representations” (B133). Put differently, Kant thought that synthesis into global objects is a necessary condition of awareness of self as common subject. Without objects of representation being tied together as a single complex object of a single representation, one might be aware of the subject of an individual representation but one could not be aware of the subject of one such representation as the subject of other such representations. Rather, I should have “as many-coloured and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious …” (B134) — as are in fact had by me, for I would not, of course, be aware that it was me. It takes a global representation to serve as the representational base of awareness of self as common subject.11 Is a global act of unifying representation also sufficient for being aware of oneself as subject? No; despite many claims to the contrary, notably by Strawson (1966), Kant was clear that one could represent objects without being aware of oneself (A113; A117fn.; B132). If one can have representations of which one is not aware, as was suggested earlier, one could have global representations of which one was not aware — for example, if one’s attention was totally focused on the complex scene being represented. Even if each global representation is the full representational base of self-awareness, a direction of attention or some cognitive apparatus necessary for taking advantage of the available representational opportunities might be missing.12 (Something like this might explain why nonhuman animals are not aware of themselves as subjects.) To summarize. One’s global representation is the representational base of being aware of objects, of the representation itself, and of oneself as the common subject of one’s representations. We turn now to the theory of the peculiarities of self-awareness that can be built on this base. All the pieces of it are to be found in Kant.

11. Discussions with Richard DeVidi saved me from some errors here. 12. Kant was aware of attention but discussed it only once in the first Critique (B156 fn.).

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4. Why awareness of self is as it is The basic idea behind the theory whose pieces can be found in Kant is fairly simple. When the medium of awareness of oneself is the doing of acts of representing, the medium imposes sharp constraints on what the resulting awareness can be like. These constraints account for the peculiarities of awareness of self as subject identified at the beginning of this paper. That Kant spotted distinctive features of “reference to self without identification” is remarkable enough. That he had the makings of a theory to explain some of them is even more remarkable. As we saw in Section 2, the special awareness that we have of ourselves as subject is not the only form of awareness of self that we have but it is different from intuitional awareness of oneself as an object and the differences can explain some of the peculiarities of self-awareness. This theory is neither easy to spot nor simple to unravel. Kant never laid it out completely, indeed he only hints at some of its most important features. Thus any reconstruction of it is bound to be speculative. The key component of the theory, not surprisingly, is the global representation. If A355 is the crucial text for Kant’s view of awareness of self as subject and the kind of reference that yields it, A108 is the crucial text for the theory of why those things are as they are. Between them these two pages contain the core of Kant’s whole picture of self-awareness. Regrettably, they could not be more obscure. One can be aware of oneself by seeing oneself in a mirror, by acts and states of inner sense such as feelings, thoughts, etc., being objects of representations, by inferring things about oneself from other things of which one is aware, by being aware of oneself through perceptions of one’s body, behaviour, etc. in outer sense (A347), and perhaps in other ways. In all these cases, one would be aware of oneself as the object of a representation. To be aware of myself as an object, I need a representation devoted to that (intentional) object, a representation of which I rather than something else am the object. Now return to the earlier claim that any representation that I am having can be the representational base of awareness of self as subject, no matter what its object is.13 If that is right, then all representations of which I am aware by having them present the same subject to me, namely, me, and in the same way, as me. A fortiori, the single common subject of a global representation

13. Even some representations that might be somebody else’s by some other criterion seem to provide that possibility. This will complicate the business of immunity to error through misidentification when we get to it.

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is presented to itself as the same subject throughout this global representation. If so, when one is aware of oneself as oneself, as subject, this awareness is not experience-dividing, to use a term of Bennett’s — “i.e., [statements expressing it have] no direct implications of the form ‘I shall experience C rather than D’” (Bennett, 1974: 80). In a statement such as 1. I am looking at the words on the screen in front of me, the verb expression or the object expression may divide experience but the subject expression does not. In this, awareness of self as subject is unlike all other awareness. Why is this kind of awareness of self not experience-dividing? As Kant puts it, “if I want to observe the mere ‘I’ in the change of all representations, I have no other correlatum to use in my comparisons except again myself” (A366; cf. A346=B404, B422). That is to say, I could not compare this ‘I’ to or contrast it with what is presented in any representation I am having in which it does not appear. To use Wittgenstein’s phrase once more, awareness of oneself as subject has no neighbour. In no representation of which I am aware by having it does the subject appear differently from how it appears in any other.14 If so, I could not distinguish the self presented in one such representation from the self presented in any other such representation. We can now explain why, when one appears to oneself as oneself, one is not appearing as the object of a representation. A representation is individuated, differentiated from other representations, by its object. But no representation of mine is made different from any other representation of mine by the fact that it makes me aware of myself as its subject. To represent something as an object is to place it vis-à-vis other objects, and usually to ascribe properties to it. If so, to appear in a representation as subject is not to appear as an object of any kind, just as Kant said (A342=B400). (Interesting enough, Shoemaker says something similar [1968: 564; this volume, 90]). The basis in theory for Kant’s insistence that one’s awareness of oneself as subject is not via “noting qualities” of oneself can be put this way. We can distinguish the subject from all objects (A342=B400). What we cannot do is compare it to, contrast it with, one object rather than another. If so, awareness of self as subject does not distinguish me from or identify me with anything of

14. An obscure remark in the attack on the third Paralogism may be based on the same idea: “in the apperception, time is represented… only in me” (A362). Part of what Kant may have meant here is that all my representations that locate something in time or are themselves located in time will also represent myself.

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which I am aware as an object, anything in “the world”. Something of great interest follows: so far as anything my awareness of myself as subject could tell me, I could be any object or any compilation of objects or any succession of objects whatsoever. Not by accident are these exactly the topics of the first three Paralogisms. One of the mistakes of rational psychology is precisely to take the simplicity (lack of manifoldness) in the unified representation of self to be a representation of simplicity and unity. Kant, of course, insists that awareness of self as subject tells us nothing about what the self is like (A355; B156).

5. Putting the theory to work Let us now put the idea of the representational base and the observations we have just made about awareness of self as subject to work on some of the peculiarities of awareness of self as subject discussed at the beginning of the paper. First, (2), self-reference without identification. Two questions. First, how is self-reference with identification possible? It is possible because one always appears to oneself in the same way in awareness of oneself as the subject of representations of which one is aware by having them. Thus, to recognize oneself as subject does not differentiate the entity thus recognized from anything else presented as subject. If a representation does not thus differentiate, does not divide experience, then one does not need to ascribe properties to it in order to achieve reference, indeed unique reference, to it. If representation can be without ascription in this way, then it is possible that, as Kant put it, “through the ‘I’, as simple representation, nothing manifold is given” (B135), that there is a way of referring to oneself that cannot be “accompanied by any further representation” (B132), in which ‘I’ can only ‘denote’, not ‘represent’ (A382), can designate “only transcendentally” (A355), that can “have no special designation” (A341/2=B399). This awareness is a ‘bare consciousness’ (A346=B404; B158) that is not knowledge (B157). Second question. Must self-reference take place without identification? It must. If I appear to myself in the same way in every representation of which I am aware by having it, awareness of self as subject is not just possible without ascription; it cannot involve ascription. Ascribing properties would produce just the differentiations that are not there in awareness of self as subject. Now, if self-awareness requires reference to self, and if self-awareness takes place with no ascription, then reference to self must take place without identification. If so, we have explained (2), self-reference without identification.

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And also (1), the essential indexical. The idea of the essential indexical is that to make references to self via ascribing properties, one must be able to make references to self that do not ascribe properties. What alternative to ascriptive reference is there? So far as I know, only indexical reference. If so, indexical reference is essential to awareness of oneself as subject. Castañeda (1966) seems to hold that this feature of awareness of self as subject is simply a brute fact of self-awareness and cannot be further explained. Had Kant ever have thought about the issue, I conclude, he would have disagreed. However, this does not explain everything that needs to be explained. Castañeda and Shoemaker argue not only that indexical references to oneself are essential, but that in them one must refer to oneself as oneself (or cognate). Does Kant have anything to explain this final feature of indexical reference to self? Not that I know of. The materials that Kant left us can help with some other things, however. First, an element of his account shows that indexical reference using ‘I’ or cognates is essential in a narrower range of cases than Castañeda and Perry thought. They claim that from knowledge of properties by themselves, one could not know that the properties were one’s own unless one already knew of oneself and as oneself. Notice that the way in which one is aware of the property is not specified here. If we become aware of certain properties in a certain way, the claim does not hold. Consider feeling a pain and becoming aware of it by feeling it. When I am aware of a pain by feeling it, I know or certainly can know that it is a pain of mine. Yet we described the pain non-token-reflexively (‘the person involved is aware of the pain by feeling it’.) If so, the claim that indexical reference is essential holds in a narrower range of cases than has been thought. Indexical reference is essential only in those situations in which how one is aware of a state or event does not settle who has that state or event. Roughly, how one is aware of a state or event settles ownership for psychological states where there are two or more ways of becoming aware of them, namely, by having them and by observing and inferring them in various ways and one is aware of the state by having it. The element in Kant’s account that makes this narrowing possible is, of course, his distinction between awareness of a state by having it and awareness of it as the object of a representation. This distinction, between awareness by having an experience and being aware in other ways, can also be put to work to explain — and again to limit — Shoemaker’s notion of immunity to error. This, as we said, is the idea that certain judgments are “immune to error through misidentification with respect to the first person” (1970: 269–70; see 1968: 556). What Shoemaker meant, as

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we saw at the beginning of this essay, is that in some situations we cannot become aware of a person by being aware of certain experiences, take that person to be oneself, and be wrong. To take the most plausible kind of example, I could not be aware of seeing a scene, decide that it is me seeing it, and be wrong. Shoemaker introduced the notion in the context of past-tense memory judgments but if it ever obtains, it obtains most clearly in the present. (We will consider the past in a moment.) Kant’s account suggests that if I am ever immune to error in identifying a person as myself, it could only be when I am aware of the person in question by having the experiences or doing the actions via which I am picking out the person. Clearly there is no such immunity when I am aware even of myself on any other basis, e.g., by looking in a mirror, seeing a body part, or hearing someone discussed. Indeed, there may be no such immunity even in some cases where I am aware of experiences or actions by having or doing them. Suppose that one could be aware of a feeling by feeling it when this feeling, as judged by any other criterion, is someone else’s. Feeling a feeling is one criterion for a feeling being one’s own but it is not the only one. Perhaps changes in the feeling are causally dependent on another’s body, the feeling has as its object a scene represented from the perspective of another person, another person (or at any rate another body) can report on the feeling in exactly the way that I can, and so on. If application of the various criteria for who is having that feeling produced a mixed result of this sort, then Shoemaker would not be obviously right to hold that we are immune to error through misidentification with respect to the first person even about some experiences and actions of which we are aware by having or doing them.15 Nor does such a split seem impossible. One could imagine wiring that let one feel a feeling, perceive a scene, etc., where these feelings and perceptions were in every other respect associated with another person. They were seen through the other’s eyes, the other person can report having and feeling them in exactly the same way and on the basis of exactly the same kind of experience as I can, and so forth. Simply being aware of a perception, feeling, etc., by having it does not render the question of whose perception or feeling it is trivial.

15. Powell (1990) raises some doubts about whether such immunity is unique to first-personal reference, referring to Evans’ similar thoughts (1982; this volume). He also challenges Anscombe’s appeal to this immunity as a reason to think that uses of ‘I’, etc., are non-referential. Strangely, in the end he himself opts for a non-referentialist reading of Kant.

Kant, self-awareness and self-reference

Still further, if immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first person obtains at all, it obtains only of states, feelings, actions, etc., that one is currently undergoing. There is no immunity with respect to things that I remember having or doing. When I remember some thought or feeling or action from the point of view of thinking or feeling or doing it, I will “automatically assume” (Parfit 1970: 15) that it is me who thought or felt or did it; I will be in the same situation as if it were me that I am aware of. Yet, if traces of autobiographical memories (more exactly, autobiographical q-memories) can be transferred from person to person in certain ways, this need not be true. Suppose that I (q-)remember seeing the scene from the top of Mt. Robson. I will ‘automatically assume’ that it was me who saw that scene. Yet I have never been on top of Mt. Robson. Sally has, however, and memory-traces set up in her when she saw that scene have been transferred to me. If so, it is Sally that I am remembering seeing it, not me. I take it to be me because I remember the scene from the point of view from which she saw it but it is still her that I am (q-) remembering. If this analysis is right, there is no immunity to error through misidentification in autobiographical (q-)memory.16 The ur-phenomenon for Kant is the manifoldlessness of the self as it appears to itself. Interestingly, this lack of qualitative manifold appears even phenomenologically. One can easily observe in oneself that having a representation gives one information about that representation (what type of representation it is, how it was formed, what we are representing by it, etc.) but it merely presents oneself as subject of it. True, the self is presented as me and this might be a mode of presentation of a sort (Ezcurdia, this volume) but it is at best an extremely stripped down mode of presentation. Beyond this ‘information’ that the thing presented is me, the representation tells me nothing about myself. This barrenness in one’s awareness of oneself as subject was perhaps one of the things that led Hume to think that no subject is to be found in self-awareness at all. To summarize. Kant seems to have anticipated the idea of the essential indexical. He unquestionably anticipated the idea of reference to self without identification. And he sketched a most interesting theory of why it must be so. The theory is based on his claim that having a representation, any representation, is the representational base for awareness of self as subject. It seems unlikely

16. Evans (1982: 238; this volume, 124–5) disagrees. He thinks that some autobiographical memories are immune to error through misidentification with respect to the first person. It seems to me that he runs two notions together, namely, awareness of self without identification and immunity to error through misidentification. They need to be kept separate.

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that anything like immunity to error through misidentification would ever have occurred to him — but his theory can help us limit and think more clearly about this notion, too. Not a bad record for someone writing over 200 years ago! Nor have we exhausted Kant’s contribution to our understanding of selfawareness, not by any means. For example, his distinction between awareness of self as subject via doing acts of apperceptive synthesis and awareness of one’s psychological states via representations in inner sense is very much like the distinction Evans (1982, 224–35; this volume, 113–22) draws between nonidentificatory awareness of self and introspection. Again and also like Evans, Kant was interested in how awareness of oneself as subject and awareness of oneself as object among other objects connect. For example, how can we know that the thing of which we are aware as subject is one of the things of which we are aware as object (B155)? These issues deserves their own unhurried treatment; I have discussed some of them elsewhere (Brook, 1994). I hope that I have shown here that Kant anticipated some of the most important ideas on selfreference and self-awareness of the past thirty-five years.

Chapter 3

Frege and the first person Richard DeVidi Carleton University, Ottawa

I From the outset, the workings of language have been a central concern of analytical philosophy. This is not to say that all parts of speech have been judged equally worthy of attention. One category of expression that suffered relative neglect, especially before the mid-1960’s, is indexicals — words such as ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘now’, ‘then’, ‘you’, and ‘I’ — terms the reference of which depends on the context in which they are uttered.1 Perhaps it was tempting to think of indexicals as Russell once thought of verb tense: as a ‘vulgarity’ of ordinary language we could well do without.2 Like sentences containing tensed verbs, sentences containing indexicals can vary in truth-value depending on the circumstances in which they are uttered. From Frege to Quine, philosophers interested in the regimentation of language in the service of science have cast a wary eye on the features of natural language that introduce such apparent ambiguity. However, developments in the 1960’s made it impossible to continue treating indexicals as an easily dismissed byproduct of the pliancy of natural language. The key moments were the publication of influential papers by Hector-Neri Castañeda (this volume) and Sydney Shoemaker (this volume). Quite independently of each other, and approaching the issue from different directions, Castañeda and Shoemaker arrived at surprisingly similar insights into the peculiar features of the first person pronoun (I and its cognates), features

1. This characterization of indexicals is not a definition. A full definition would distinguish indexicals from, for example, anaphoric uses of pronouns: the word ‘she’ in ‘Daria knew she deserved a better fate’ is not an indexical. Its reference is determined by the proper name that precedes it. On the other hand, ‘she’ accompanied by a pointing gesture in ‘She is the dean of arts’, is an indexical. In short, the context in question is not the sentence, or even the discourse of which the indexical is a part. 2. The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, David Pears, ed. 1985: 117).

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that set it apart from other singular terms (see the Introduction and Brook, this volume). For instance, an utterance of ‘I’ cannot fail to refer. The sentence I subscribe to Alberta Report

may be false, but not because the word ‘I’ fails to refer. Contrast this with the sentence Hermes Trismegistus subscribes to Alberta Report,

which is false, not because the legendary Egyptian magus has failed to mail away for a subscription, but because the name ‘Hermes Trismegistus’ fails to refer. Secondly, Castañeda and Shoemaker pointed out that ‘I’ is immune to error through misidentification of the referent. For example, I might report that Conrad Black is a sweet-tempered fellow

by becoming confused about exactly who I was speaking with on an occasion when I met a number of people. On the other hand, if I say I am an accomplished pianist

I utter a falsehood, but not because I am mistaken in who I am talking about. Finally, Castañeda and Shoemaker point out that ‘I’ cannot always be eliminated in favour of a proper name or a description. If I tell you that Red wine goes to my head

I may well deny that red wine goes to RD’s head, or that red wine goes to the father of Alex and Natalie’s head, while continuing to allow the truth of my utterance — especially after a few glasses of red wine. This shows that the indexical sentence is not synonymous with the sentences formed by replacing ‘my’ with a name or description. These insights are not without precedent. In the period between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein seems to have had at least an inkling of the peculiar properties of the first person pronoun (see The Blue Book, pp. 66–70). On the strength of the features pointed out above, one might infer that the first person pronoun has a ‘stickier’ relationship to its referent than do other singular terms. What underlies the apparently special connection between ‘I’ and its referent? Some have invoked The Blue Book in arguing that the answer to this question is — nothing. In ‘The First Person’, for instance, Elizabeth Anscombe argues that the special properties of ‘I’ only go to show that it is not a referring expression at all, but merely a grammatical

Frege and the first person

placeholder, like ‘it’ in ‘It is raining’. To suppose otherwise, in her opinion, would be to suppose that there is some special epistemic connection between the person who utters the word ‘I’ and the referent of the word. Anscombe’s position has attracted few adherents: obviously, the conclusion that the first person pronoun is not, despite all appearances, a referring expression is hard to swallow no matter how much one might dislike Cartesianism with respect to self-knowledge. Given that ‘now’ and ‘here’ share many of the peculiarities of ‘I’, and that Anscombe makes no similar move to deny that ‘now’ ever picks out a time, nor that ‘here’ ever picks out a place, it is hard to quell the suspicion that her conclusion is ad hoc. An even earlier precedent for the insights of the 1960’s is to be found in Gottlob Frege’s ‘The Thought’ (1918/19), published a little more than a decade before Wittgenstein gave the lectures that were the basis for The Blue Book. Wittgenstein knew Frege personally — he visited Frege at his home during the Great War — and seems to have been well-acquainted with his writings. However, the doctrine set out in ‘The Thought’ could not be further from the view Anscombe teased out of Wittgenstein’s work. Frege takes for granted that the first person pronoun is a referring expression, and ascribes to it ‘a special and primitive sense’ unlike the sense of any other expression. The view Frege expresses in ‘The Thought’ is an innovation over earlier views he held on the topic. According to classical views on propositions, it is recognized that sentences may be context dependent, but this is held to show only that the propositional content of a sentence may vary from context to context. Different utterances of ‘Yesterday was Colville’s birthday’ have different truth values, but this is because the sentence is used to express different timeless propositions on different occasions, and not because it expresses a proposition whose truth value may vary from occasion to occasion. Frege apparently wishes to employ his notion of a thought in similar fashion. In ‘The Thought’, he says of the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’: If someone wants to say today what he expressed yesterday using the word ‘today’, he will replace this word with ‘yesterday’. Although the thought is the same its verbal expression must be different in order that the change of sense which would otherwise be effected by the differing times of utterance may be cancelled out. The case is the same with words like ‘here’ and ‘there’ (Frege 1918/19: 64).

Frege made a similar point in the manuscript ‘Logik’, written in the 1890’s. But there, the suggestion was that the same thought one person could express using

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‘I’ — for example, ‘I am cold’ — could be expressed by another person ‘using a name to designate the one who feels cold’ (Hermes et al. 1979: 135). However, with respect to sentences involving ‘I’, Frege appears to have changed his mind by the time he wrote ‘The Thought’. Immediately after stating the doctrine for ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’ which corresponds to his remarks concerning ‘I’ in the earlier work, he says that ‘the occurrence of the word “I” in a sentence gives rise to some further questions’ (Frege 1918/19: 65). Among the considerations he has in mind is the suggestion that certain thoughts involving ‘I’ are incommunicable. Just before this, however, Frege points out that a thought expressed with ‘I’ cannot be identical with a thought expressed using a proper name. The example Frege uses to illustrate this point involves one Dr. Gustav Lauben; we are to suppose that both Leo Peter and Rudolf Lingens attach the same sense to the name ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben’, so that for each, the sentence ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben was wounded’ will express the same thought. Moreover, both Peter and Lingens are present when Lauben says, ‘I have been wounded’; again, both grasp the same thought. However, Lingens does not know that it was Dr. Lauben who said this. So when Peter says at some later time, ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben was wounded’, Lingens cannot know that the same affair is in question. Therefore, Frege says, ‘the thought which Leo Peter expresses is not the same as that which Dr. Lauben expressed’ (Frege 1918/19: 65). Frege does not quite get to, but perhaps deserves some credit for anticipating, Castañeda’s (1966, this volume; 1967) celebrated discovery of the ineliminability of indexicals: a sentence containing certain types of indexicals, including the first person pronoun, cannot be paraphrased by a sentence with a coreferential proper name (or indexical-free description) replacing the indexical, and yet retain the same content. In any case, by 1918, Frege seems to have realized that his earlier view is not correct; however, the issue becomes bound up with the notion that thoughts expressed using ‘I’ are in some sense private, that they can only properly speaking be grasped by the person who entertains or utters them. Frege says of Lauben’s utterance of the sentence ‘I have been wounded’ that … everyone is presented to himself in a special and primitive way, in which he is presented to no-one else. So, when Dr. Lauben has the thought that he was wounded, he will probably be basing it on this primitive way in which he is presented to himself. And only Dr. Lauben himself can grasp thoughts specified in this way. But now he may want to communicate with others. He cannot communicate a thought he alone can grasp (Frege 1918/19: 66).

Frege and the first person

This passage stands out as the only place in all of Frege’s writings where he speaks of incommunicable thoughts and senses. Frege’s remarks on indexicals in general are few and far between. The views expressed in the unpublished logic and in ‘The Thought’ are the only writings we have in which Frege directly addresses this category of expression after he made the distinction between sense and reference in 1891. ‘The Thought’ is the only place in which Frege demonstrates an awareness that first person reference requires special treatment. While the short passage in ‘The Thought’ is arguably quite prescient, subsequent writers have often found it both odd and striking. Some have taken the passage to be a clear and deeply revealing mistake. Others have claimed to find in it the key to developing a workable version of the theory of sense and reference. Whether as intellectual ancestor or as whipping boy, Frege became the interlocutor of choice for many of the philosophers who pursued the work initiated by Castañeda and Shoemaker. In short, Frege’s brief remarks on the first person have become grist for more than one philosophical mill. For instance, John Perry (1977) finds Frege’s remarks in ‘The Thought’ to be both uncharacteristic and philosophically unattractive. Perry takes them to mark Frege’s realization of fundamental difficulties in his theory of thought and sense. On the other hand, Gareth Evans (1981; 1982, this volume) sees great merit in the same passage, and takes it to point the way to a more general understanding of Frege’s theory of thought and sense. In Perry’s opinion, ‘Frege was led to his doctrine of incommunicable senses as a result of some appreciation of the difficulties his account of demonstratives faces, for these come quickly to the surface when we think about “I”,’ (Perry 1977: 474).3 On the other hand, Evans takes the emphasis on the ‘the way in which [the referent of ‘I’] is presented to himself’ as providing the prototype for a general theory of sense. Perry’s criticism of Frege, and the theory he advances to account for the first person pronoun and other indexicals, have been influential particularly in America. Since the 1970’s, the judgment of the majority has gone against Frege, and Perry’s work has played an important role in this development. Evans’

3. ‘Indexicals’ is the most commonly used term for the context sensitive expressions under discussion, although other authors have used other terms. Some writers use the term ‘demonstratives’ to refer to the entire class of expressions. This is a tendency to which, for example, Perry has succumbed. In my opinion, this is poor usage, as the term ‘demonstratives’ is best reserved for the pronouns ‘this’ and ‘that’ which differ from other indexicals in generally requiring supplementation by a pointing gesture (a demonstration) if their reference is to be unambiguous.

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work, too, has been influential; by bringing to light new possibilities for neoFregean approaches to the philosophy of language, Evans’ work has served as a counterweight to Perry. Evidently, Perry and Evans disagree over the merits of Frege’s remarks on the first person pronoun. This disagreement is partly, but only partly, a matter of divergent interpretations of Frege’s philosophy. There are also deep divergences over what would count as an adequate account of thought and language, divergences that come out quite clearly in their respective treatments of the first person pronoun. My aim in this paper is to show: first, that despite Perry, it is possible to frame a Fregean account of our use of ‘I’; and second, that a Fregean account of first person reference need not, and should not, follow Evans’ model. Along the way, I shall try to settle the outstanding exegetical issues between Perry’s and Evans’ competing interpretations of Frege.

II Everyone agrees that by uttering the words ‘I am cold’ a speaker may say something and that what she says may be true or false. But an account of this fact that is consistent with Fregean principles must say more: such an account must hold that by uttering the words ‘I am cold’, the speaker expresses a Fregean thought, and a thought is supposed to have an absolute truth value — that is, its truth is not relative to where, when, or by whom it is uttered. A thought is supposed to be the sense of a sentence, composed of the senses of the constituent parts of that sentence. The sense of an expression is supposed to be identified with its meaning. Sense is also supposed to be the ‘mode of presentation’ of the reference, that is, it is supposed to determine what the reference of an expression is. Finally, sense is supposed to account for the difference in cognitive value between coreferential expressions. What is not objectionable to Perry is Frege’s basic notion of a thought. Perry accepts the explanatory necessity of abstract complexes which serve as the meanings of sentences and the objects of mental acts; however, Perry generally prefers the term ‘proposition’ to Frege’s term ‘thought’. He also accepts a compositional view of propositions which is based on a syntactic analysis ultimately owing to Frege. Finally, Perry agrees that propositions are truth bearers, and that their truth values do not vary from time to time, person to person, or place to place. What is objectionable, according to Perry, is that Frege demands too much

Frege and the first person

of his notion of sense: Frege’s single notion of sense cannot simultaneously be mode of presentation, cognitive significance, and thought constituent. The mistake involved in assimilating truth conditions to mode of presentation and cognitive significance is said to become apparent when we turn our attention to indexicals (e.g., ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘yesterday’, etc.). Perry sets out the problem in the following way. According to Frege’s compositional view of thoughts, the sense of the proper name ‘2’ and the sense of the concept expression ‘ξ is a prime number’ combine to form the thought that 2 is a prime number. The sentence ‘2 is a prime number’ is the complete expression of a thought. Now consider the sentences (1) Russia and Canada quarrelled when Nemtsanov defected,

and (2) Russia and Canada quarrelled today.4

On the Fregean analysis, the clause ‘Russia and Canada quarrelled’, which is arrived at by removing the time specification from (1) or (2), is to be viewed as a concept expression. The clause stands in need of an object name (for a definite time) in order to become the expression of a thought. Similarly, the sense it expresses stands in need of the sense of an object name in order to become a complete thought. By specifying a time, the expression ‘when Nemtsanov defected’ completes the sense of sentence (1). Presumably, ‘today’ must do the same for sentence (2). But suppose ‘Russia and Canada quarrelled today’ expresses something true on August 1 but false on August 2. If ‘today’ has the same sense on August 1 and on August 2, then the sense of ‘Russia and Canada quarrelled today’ must be the same on both days. But then the sense of the sentence must be incomplete, since Frege denies that a complete thought could change in truth value from one day to the next. Since Frege also seems to believe that we can get from an utterance of a sentence such as ‘Russia and Canada quarrelled today’ to a thought (Frege 1918/19: 64), the indexical must provide a completing sense. The same considerations arise in the case of the first person pronoun. Assume that an utterance of ‘I am cold’ on a particular occasion expresses a

4. The example is Perry’s (1977: 477–479), although it appears to be adapted from an example involving Prussia and Austria in ‘On Sense and Reference’ (Frege 1892: 42n 14, 49). In a number of places Frege quite explicitly states his view that certain sentences of natural language which lack, for example, a time indication, do not express a thought (see Frege 1884: § 46; Hermes et al.1979: 135).

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Fregean thought. Now, identity of truth-value is a necessary condition on the identity of Fregean thoughts. But when Bob and Marie each utter the sentence ‘I am cold’, the thoughts expressed may differ in truth value. Since Frege denies that a complete thought could change in truth value depending on who expresses it, the sense of the sentence must be incomplete. If so, the utterance of the word ‘I’ must contribute a sense that completes the concept expression ‘ξ is cold’. Perry argues that no such completing sense is to be found but that one is not required either. Perry assumes that the appropriate completing sense ‘would have to be intimately related to the sense of a unique description5 of the value [i.e., the referent] of the demonstrative in the context of utterance,’ (Perry 1977: 485). He offers a number of hypothetical cases which, given this assumption, provide compelling reason to reject the Fregean theory of indexicals. Consider, for instance, the case of Hume and Heimson (1977: 487–488, 491–494):6 suppose that on a particular day in 1775, David Hume says, ‘I am David Hume.’ Suppose also that Heimson says, ‘I am David Hume.’ Finally, let us suppose that Heimson is Hume’s twin earth counterpart. Now the sentence that Hume and Heimson both utter, ‘I am David Hume’, has the same Fregean sense on both occasions, where that sense is understood as a purely qualitative definite description. But the thoughts expressed must be different, because they have different truth values. Hume’s is true, Heimson’s false. The moral we are to draw from this example is that the Fregean sense is not sufficient to determine which thought is expressed. Of course, this objection to descriptive senses in the context of the first person pronoun does not apply only to ‘I’. The same argument can be made with respect to proper names. However, the case of Lingens lost in the library7 does depend on properties particular to indexicals. Perry asks us to imagine Lingens, an amnesiac lost on the fifth floor of the Stanford library. He has before him the biography of one Rudolf Lingens, a description as complete as you like — e.g., to the point that Lingens is said to have amnesia and is lost on the fifth floor of the Stanford library. Lingens might read through the entire biography without ever realizing,

5. Perry takes it that the description involved must be purely qualitative; that is, it must not involve any proper names or indexicals. 6. I adapt Perry’s cases freely. 7. Perry’s case of the aircraft carrier (1977: 483) offers a similar objection involving the demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’. The locus classicus for objections of this kind — that is, cases designed to make it plausible that, for any description ‘the F’, and any general quality ‘G’, I could believe that the F is G but fail to believe that I am G, even if I am the F — is Castañeda’s case of the editor of Soul (1966: 134–135; this volume, ).

Frege and the first person

‘I am Lingens.’ However much Lingens may know about Lingens, he can always be unaware of the fact that he is Lingens: the question ‘Am I Lingens?’ can always be raised. With ‘I’, a question of this kind can always be raised, however complete the description might be. Hence, an indexical utterance of the word ‘I’ is not replaceable with a definite description.8 A further objection, originally raised in Perry’s 1977 paper,9 is developed at length in ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’ (Perry 1979; this volume). Here, the objection involves a hypothetical case in which there is an agent whose behaviour seems impossible to explain or predict in a way consistent with the Fregean theory of sense. Consider, for example, the belief I might come to have if I come to believe that I am inadvertently making a mess in a supermarket by spilling sugar out of my cart (Perry 1979: 3; this volume, xxx). If I come to believe that I am making a mess, my belief seems to contain an essential indexical element. This is shown by the fact that no paraphrase of my belief into nonindexical terms will capture exactly the belief that I am making a mess. I might circle the aisles following the trail of spilled sugar, trying to catch up with the person who is making a mess; but until I realize that I am making a mess, I will not take appropriate action. Not only is the first person pronoun used to express knowledge that is not reducible to non-indexical propositional knowledge, the knowledge it is used to express is essential to action. Perry quite rightly takes these cases to constitute a devastating, even a decisive blow against the possibility of a Fregean account (so understood) of indexicals. So long as sense is understood as something that it must be possible to specify with a purely qualitative definite description, it cannot carry out all of the roles which Frege assigned to it. No such completing sense is to be found. To see why Perry thinks no such completing sense is necessary, let’s consider again Bob and Marie and their utterances of ‘I am cold’. The predicate employed by the speaker in each case is evidently the same; hence, the subject term must be responsible for the difference. However, the subject term Bob uses to express his thought is the same as the subject term Marie uses to express hers. It is not that the words accidentally sound the same; the first word of each utterance has the same linguistic meaning, viz., that the referent of an utterance of ‘I’ is the author of that utterance. As we have

8. This is not in principle true of names; see Evans’ discussion (this volume) of names introduced with a definition, e.g., “‘Julius’ is the inventor, whoever that might be, of the zipper.” 9. In ‘Frege on Demonstratives’, Perry’s cases of the bear about to attack and of the meeting at noon offer the same kind of objection (Perry 1977: 494).

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sameness of linguistic meaning in the presence of variation in referent, linguistic meaning cannot, at least in the case of ‘I’, be identified with Fregean sense. Perry’s solution to this problem involves rejecting the idea that a Fregean sense is required at all in the case of indexicals. When Bob says ‘I am cold’, there seems to be no need to ascribe to the pronoun ‘I’ a sense that can be grasped and that determines its reference on that occasion of its use. It is enough to know the meaning of the pronoun in the language and to have heard the utterance. Moreover, each utterance of ‘I am cold’ is to be regarded as expressing, not a thought as Frege conceived it, but a thought in which the component corresponding to ‘I’ is its subject, i.e., something like a proposition as Russell thought of it. Perry suggests that the passage from ‘The Thought’ quoted earlier, in which Frege departs from his own doctrine that thoughts are essentially public, a ‘common store’ which is transmitted from person to person and generation to generation, is a reaction to problems of the kind raised by his hypothetical cases. These problems, he says, … turned on the failure to find a suitable description for the value of the demonstrative, whose sense would complete the sense of the sentence in just the right way. If the sense we are looking for is private and incommunicable, it is no wonder the search was in vain. [Perry 1977: 489]

If Perry is right to interpret him in this way, Frege is guilty of a rather crude attempt at dodging the problem idexicals pose for his theory: if the description associated with ‘I’ is incommunicable, Frege can hardly be expected to produce it. However, as Perry remarks, a private description provides no real advance over public ones with respect to solving the problem of indexicals. Nor can whatever threadbare plausibility the view may draw from various other philosophers’ doctrines concerning the privacy of ‘the subject of thought’ withstand its extension to other indexicals. Similar considerations apply in the cases of ‘now’ and ‘here’, but who would want to claim that these words have special, primitive, incommunicable senses?

III The obvious response for a Fregean faced with the objections raised by Perry is to deny that the Fregean sense of an expression must be given by, mean the same as, or be expressible in terms of a definite description. Others may have

Frege and the first person

subscribed to such a view,10 but nothing in what Frege says requires that sense must be understood in this way.11 Indeed, the same passage that Perry takes to be a tacit admission of failure to find a thought-completing description in the case of ‘I’ is sometimes cited as evidence in support of an understanding of Frege according to which he denied that the sense of a singular term can always be expressed with a definite description.12 If Frege is not a descriptivist, a main premise of Perry’s argument is false. This is not yet to show that Perry’s conclusion is false. Unlike proper names, an indexical has associated with it a simple descriptive rule, which, in a given context of utterance, determines what an utterance of that indexical refers to. Moreover, when we have stated the rule we have stated the conventional significance — the meaning — of that indexical. But such a meaning rule is not a Fregean sense. The defender of Frege must give up, at least in the case of indexicals, the identification of sense and conventional significance. Now, there is no question that, for example, ‘I’ has a significance that does not vary from one speaker to the next, that is known to all competent speakers, and that governs linguistic communication. It is incumbent upon the Fregean to explain why Perry is wrong to suppose that, at least in the case of indexicals, the notion of sense is superfluous. Such an explanation must begin with a distinction Frege himself did not emphasize, namely, the distinction between a linguistic expression regarded as a type, and a particular token of that expression. Suppose you return from a trip to find a message on your answering machine, which consists entirely of an unrecognizably garbled voice uttering the sentence ‘I am having a great time, call me when you get back.’ If you are a competent speaker of English, you will understand the sentence recorded on the machine; if asked, you could, for example, paraphrase it, construct a scenario in which it might be uttered, etc. To understand the sentence in this way — as a type — and to grasp the contribution

10. Carnap, for example, held that the contribution a singular term makes to the proposition containing it is a descriptive individual concept, construed as an amalgamation of properties (Carnap 1947: §§ 4–9). 11. The chief text, for those who would attribute such a view to Frege, draws on a footnote to ‘On Sense and Reference’ (Frege 1892: 27n). The passage does show that Frege sometimes cited definite descriptions as embodying the senses of proper names. But there is no passage in Frege’s writings which advances the thesis that the sense of a proper name can always be so expressed. 12. Frege’s foremost interpreter, Michael Dummett, has long campaigned against the view that Frege held a description theory of names. See, for example, Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973: 97–98, 110–111). The objections which Dummett there raises against the descriptivist reading of Frege are independent of the issue of indexicality.

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which its constituent, indexical singular terms contribute to its meaning, it is sufficient to exercise knowledge of the conventional significance of the indexicals. Under these circumstances, it would make no sense to ask who spoke the sentence, where ‘here’ is, or even who is being addressed. However, when you receive the message, what you are really interested in is how you are to understand this particular utterance of the sentence — the token sentence. But to understand the particular utterance, while it is perhaps necessary, it is hardly sufficient to understand the conventional significance of the singular terms involved. To understand the utterance, more than a grasp of the conventional significance of the indexicals is required, for these do not by themselves provide enough for one who grasps them to determine who left the message or where ‘here’ is. Indeed, anyone who allows that an indexical sentence can be used to express something which is true or false — whether it is called a statement, a proposition, or a thought — must allow that the particular utterance has a significance, a kind of meaning, distinct from its significance as a type expression. And the contribution the indexical makes to the expression of the thought (statement, or proposition) must itself be a kind of meaning. It is this point that commits Perry to holding that the reference of an indexical — the contribution it makes to a proposition it is used to express — is a kind of meaning. The same point also establishes that there is, contra Perry, theoretical space for Fregean sense in an account of indexicals. The meaning of an indexical expression considered as a type expression, what Perry calls its role, is not sufficient to account for the meaning of particular, token utterances of the expression. What is missing, in the case of the answering machine message, is the means to identify the one who uttered it. ‘I’ cannot have failed to refer to the person (whoever it was) who uttered the sentence. However, it is clearly possible for the person who heard the message to fail to understand just what was said.

IV At the beginning of the previous section I mentioned that Frege’s remarks on ‘I’ have been cited in support of a non-descriptivist interpretation of his theory of sense. One such interpretation has been advanced by Gareth Evans. Frege, in the passage at issue, explains the use of ‘I’ in terms of ‘a special and primitive way’ in which ‘everyone is presented to himself ’ and in which he is given to no

Frege and the first person

one else (1918/19: 66). Evans takes this to underwrite a reading of Frege according to which the metaphorical language of ‘modes of presentation’ is to be replaced with more literal talk of ‘ways of thinking’, that to grasp the sense of an expression is to think of its reference in a certain way (Evans 1982: 16).13 What Frege says about incommunicable thoughts does little to discount it. Indeed, it seems quite natural to say that the way I think of myself is different from the way anyone else thinks of me, and that if it is this way of thinking that is a constituent of thoughts I have about myself, it is no wonder that no one else can think them. That this conception of thoughts is uppermost in Frege’s mind when he makes his remarks about ‘I’ is borne out by the two paragraphs which precede it. In these paragraphs, Frege gives an example intended to show that different thoughts may be obtained from the same sentence, even a sentence which is apparently unambiguous and which contains no indexical words. Frege gives us the case of Dr. Gustav Lauben, whom Leo Peter identifies by his present occupation and residence, but whom Herbert Garner identifies by his date and place of birth. According to Frege, this entails that each of them expresses a different thought when he says ‘Dr. Gustav Lauben has been wounded’. Frege goes so far as to say that in this case, ‘Herbert Garner and Leo Peter do not speak the same language’ (Frege 1918/19: 65). The picture of sense which Frege gives in this case is one in which the senses of proper names vary, strictly speaking, from speaker to speaker, and where there is no community-wide sense but only a community-wide reference, and in general, names are peculiar to idiolects. Here, Frege views the sense that a speaker attaches to a singular term as constituting the manner in which its reference is given to him, that is, his means of identifying it or picking it out. In accordance with this, Evans wishes to include in an account of the sense of the first person pronoun a description of how a subject thinks of himself. Perry also acknowledges the need for ‘ways of thinking’. For example, when Bob says ‘I am cold’, on Perry’s account Bob himself is a constituent of the proposition expressed. Some way of distinguishing Bob’s epistemic state from Marie’s when she says, of Bob, ‘He is cold’ is required, for each expresses the same proposition. Perry holds that Bob’s way of

13. Evans appears to give little weight to Frege’s oft-expressed antipsychologism concerning sense. In Evans’ view, the sole purpose of introducing the notion of sense was to account for certain notions we employ in ‘ordinary propositional attitude psychology,’ including cognitive value, knowledge, thought, understanding, and so forth (Evans 1982: 13, 18, 19, 24).

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thinking the proposition is distinguished from Marie’s in that he thinks it by entertaining the meaning in the language, the conventional significance, of ‘I’. Evans rejects this proposal, on the grounds that it makes no acknowledgment of the need to explain what it is to think of a person as oneself. He dismisses as ‘neither necessary nor sufficient’ the suggestion that ‘self-conscious thought depends upon the inner exploitation of certain public linguistic devices.’ In The Varieties of Reference, Evans provides a framework for reference in which reference to self must be incorporated. Evans considers Frege to have developed the first systematic theory of language, and presents his own account of reference as a development, with criticisms and emendations, of a Fregean model. Evans’ framework is informed by his adherence to two fundamental principles. The first of these he calls Russell’s Principle: that in order to refer to an object one must know which object it is, and to know this is to be able to distinguish that object from all others. The second principle is the Generality Constraint, according to which an understanding of a thought ‘a is F
’ presupposes an understanding of what it is for other objects to be F, and for a to instantiate other properties.14 Evidently, it is Russell’s Principle that is at the basis of Evans’ criticism of Perry. Evans equates the identifying knowledge spoken of in the principle with Fregean sense. For Evans, there are no utterances of singular terms that do not carry a Fregean sense, understood as the way in which the object is presented by that use of the term, and it is an illusion to believe, as Perry does, that there are uses of a term that serve only to introduce the bare referent of the term. Some terms — definite descriptions and names introduced by a stipulation — have descriptive senses. But all other terms, including most names and all indexicals, are said to be Russellian singular terms, in that they refer without the mediation of a descriptive sense. Evans says that ‘in order to understand a referring expression used in this way, the hearer must link up the utterance with some information in his possession,’ (Evans 1982: 305). In the case of the first person pronoun, Evans holds that my capacity to think of myself as ‘I’ is based upon my capacity to identify myself as an object of a certain kind. Evans is not a Cartesian: he does not base first person reference on a special awareness of some internal self, directly apprehended. Rather,

14. The Generality Constraint accords well with Frege’s Context Principle and his views on the compositionality of thoughts. Russell’s Principle, in particular its attribution to Frege, has been the source of some controversy. Evans takes it to imply the existence of the object referred to; but Frege clearly allows, in ‘On Sense and Reference’ and in many other places, that there are terms that have sense but lack a reference.

Frege and the first person

he treats it as securing reference to an external object, a person, on the basis of information about that object. What underwrites first person reference is the various ways I have of gaining knowledge of myself as a spatiotemporal object that is an element of the objective order, on the basis of our outer perception, and also, Evans says, through a general capacity to perceive our own bodies, although this can be broken down into several distinguishable capacities: our proprioceptive sense, our sense of balance, of heat and cold, and of pressure (1982: 220).

Together these different ways I have of knowing myself enable me to identify myself and distinguish myself from all other objects.

V There is something wrong with Frege’s account of the first person that Evans does not acknowledge. Frege maintains that, when, for example, Dr. Gustav Lauben thinks to himself ‘I have been wounded’, his thought is one which no one but he can grasp. If, however, he says out loud to someone else, say Leo Peter, ‘I have been wounded’, the mode of presentation in which he is presented to himself will be one which is available to other people to grasp. Following Dummett (1981: 123) let’s call these two uses of ‘I’ the use of ‘I’ in soliloquy and the use of ‘I’ in communication. As Dummett points out, it is quite implausible to suppose that the word ‘I’ expresses a different sense when used to say to oneself, ‘I have been wounded’, and when the same words are directed at someone else. Suppose Lauben tells Peter of the events in which he was involved, and in the course of the telling he says, ‘At that moment I said to myself, “I have been wounded”.’ The reported utterance must have employed the ‘I’ of soliloquy; but those who hear the story will have no difficulty knowing what thought Lauben had. How can they know this? Evidently, the hearer’s way of thinking of Lauben cannot be just the same as the way in which he thinks of himself. But if Lauben expresses a mode of presentation that is distinct from the mode of presentation that is part of the thought Peter understands, the rule that the mode of presentation is a constituent of the thought that is expressed and grasped would seem to be called into question. Neither Frege nor Evans shows any willingness to give up this principle. Instead, they grasp the nettle and hold that Peter does not, strictly speaking, understand what Lauben said, for only Lauben can grasp

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the private and incommunicable sense of his own utterance of ‘I’. Perry is quite right to point out that the notion of an incommunicable sense is out of character with the rest of Frege’s views on language. Throughout his writings, from the Grundlagen (1884) up to and including ‘The Thought’, Frege inveighed against ‘psychologism’. Frege maintained an extremely sharp distinction between the subjective and the objective, and harshly criticized views that identified the content of an assertion with anything subjective, that is, with the contents of the mind. His chief objection to such views is that such contents are incommunicable. Even in ‘The Thought’ Frege emphasizes that it will not do to first explain what it is for a single individual to attach a particular sense to an expression — for example, the Pythagorean theorem (cf. Frege 1918/19: 68) — and then state what it is for her to be correct in doing so, as far as the language spoken by the community is concerned. To maintain that thoughts are communicable, what is required is an explanation of what it is for a word to have a certain sense in the common language, and an explanation of what it is for an individual speaker to understand it rightly or wrongly. This view is in some tension with the claim that ‘I’ thoughts are incommunicable. Whether the doctrine of incommunicable senses is a lapse or a settled view that requires emendation, Frege himself provides the resources for an alternative account of the matter. When Frege requires a non-metaphorical — and non-psychologistic — account of sense, he appeals to the notion of a condition, something like an ideal procedure for determining its reference. Although Grundgesetze, vol. I §32 (Frege 1893), is the only passage in which Frege uses the word ‘condition’, he expounds the very same conception in numerous places. On this conception, the aim of a theory of sense will be to specify the knowledge a speaker or hearer must have, in virtue of her command of the language, if communication is to be possible. There is no reason to think that the thought processes of the individual must play a primary role in such an account, rather than, say, the practices of the community. In order to know what thought Lauben expresses when he says ‘I have been wounded’, whether to himself or others, no more is required (apart from knowledge of the predicate) than knowledge of the conventional significance of ‘I’ plus knowledge of the relevant features of the context, for example, who uttered it. Knowledge of the conventional significance of ‘I’ does not, by itself, constitute the grasping of a Fregean sense. At most, it can yield an understanding of the sentence in which it occurs as a type, which is not the same as understanding the sentence as a token utterance . To grasp the thought expressed by a sentence in which the first person pronoun occurs, one must also recognize the particular person who

Frege and the first person

utters it — whether oneself or someone else — where ‘recognize’ connotes no more than a bare recognition that that person made the utterance. That is all that our knowledge of the public language demands.

VI Had Frege recognized the distinction between speaker’s meaning and linguistic meaning, perhaps he would not have had recourse to incommunicable senses. This distinction is most obviously required in order to explain individual speakers’ imperfect knowledge of their language. It is also required to account for the connections which a speaker makes between a name and its bearer which he does not suppose to underlie its use in the language and which are not of a kind to do so. If we are concerned with the precise content of a belief that someone expresses by means of a sentence, it is the individual’s understanding of the words that determines this — not the meaning of the sentence in the common language. Once the distinction between speaker’s meaning and linguistic meaning is made, it becomes possible to recognize two components in the explanation of the understanding, by a speaker or hearer, of a thought expression involving the first person pronoun. A thought, considered as the content of a belief, cannot be identified with the sense of a sentence of the common language, but rather is to be identified with the subject’s personal understanding of it. Evans’ appeal to self awareness is not necessary to account for the former; but it may, and is certainly intended to play a role in the explanation of the latter. To conclude, I will say a few words about why, even considered as part of a theory of beliefs, Evans’ account of first person reference is suspect. Evans rejected Perry’s suggestion that the conventional significance of ‘I’ plays any role in self conscious thought as neither necessary nor sufficient. He emphasizes instead one’s capacity to exploit the various ways one has of gaining information about oneself, both through outer perception and through our proprioceptive sense, sense of balance, and so forth, in order to refer to oneself. Evans is not unaware that such an account, which models first person reference on perceptual demonstrative reference, is vulnerable to certain standard objections (Evans 1982: 215–216; this volume, 105). ‘I’ has certain peculiar features: one’s use of ‘I’ is immune to reference failure and to failure through misidentification of the referent. Moreover, competent use of ‘I’ can survive both the total loss of beliefs about oneself, for example, one’s nature, history, and spatiotemporal

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location, and even the acquisition of massively false beliefs about oneself. It seems that self-conscious thought cannot depend upon information supplied by perception of one’s environment and body, for it can go on in the absence of such things. In response to this objection, Evans maintains that it is necessary that the subject at least ‘be disposed to have such thinking controlled by information which may become available to him in each of the relevant ways’ (1982:215–216; this volume, 105). Any attempt at showing that such an epistemological underpinning is not essential to first person thought is therefore subject to the response that it has confused the possibility of a non-activated disposition with no disposition at all. While the appeal to dispositions provides Evans with a tidy response to a serious objection, it is less than evident that giving such dispositions the role Evans demands of them can be motivated independently of the need to defend the general view. In particular, it is not clear how the fact that one is disposed to have his thinking controlled by information which may become available could explain how it is that one succeeds in identifying himself when no such information is available. The fact that I am disposed to have my thinking controlled by information received from an oncoming baseball does little to help me identify it when my eyes are closed. Let’s suppose, contra Evans, that the indexical rule governing ‘I’ does play a role in self conscious thought. The indexical rule by itself seems sufficient to explain why competent use of ‘I’ is guaranteed against failure through misidentification or reference failure, and why it can survive both the loss of beliefs about oneself or the acquisition of massively false beliefs about oneself. The indexical rule can, without appeal to non-activated dispositions, account for the first person pronoun’s propensity to stick to the subject. To say this is not to claim to have obviated the need for an account of the various avenues through which we attain information about ourselves — a complete account of self consciousness would require it. But if our concern is first person reference, as expressed publicly or as it occurs in thought, the indexical rule seems to leave these ways in which one attains information about oneself on a par with the ways in which one recognizes any other speaker.

Section II

Classical Contributions

Chapter 4

‘He’ A study in the logic of self-consciousness* Hector-Neri Castañeda University of Indiana

Introduction The word ‘he’ is a device for talking about persons, beings who enjoy, even indulge in, self-awareness. The word ‘he’ and the phrase ‘he himself ’ are sometimes used to refer to the entity known, thought of, by the person who knows, thinks of, himself. We say, e.g., “He believes (knows, says, argues, claims) that he (himself) is healthy (rich, tall, heavy, Napoleon, a victim).” This use of ‘he’ (to be called the S-use of ‘he’) as a pointer to the object of someone’s self-knowledge, self-belief, self-conjecture, is the main topic of this study.1

* This essay was concluded while the author was doing research supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. G.S. 828. [Editors’ note: With some misgivings, we have strictly retained the original wording, punctuation and use of quotation marks except when it is clearly in error.] 1. The main topic of this essay is almost brand new. My first glimpse of its complexity occurred when I was trying to formulate what I called “Meaning postulates of ‘pain’” in ‘The Private Language Arguments’ in C. Rollins (ed.) Knowledge and Experience (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). But I am deeply indebted to Jaakko Hintikka for having fully awakened me to this topic. For my critical review of his Knowledge and Belief (Cornell University Press, 1962) for The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 1964), I had to study his formal treatment of statements expressed in sentences of the form “The man who is in fact a knows that he is a.” Hintikka points out (p. 159) that “Ka(a=a)” is not a symbolization of that sentence form. He proposes to symbolize it as “($x)(Ka(x=a))” (p. 159). This symbolization is satisfactory inasmuch as Hintikka has, very ingeniously, taken the free but bindable individual variables occurring in contexts of the form ‘Ka( … )’ to range over objects or persons known to a. Thus, ‘($x)(Ka(x=a))’ can be read as ‘There is a person known to a such that a knows that such a person is a.’ There is, surely, a sense of ‘knowing a person’ in which for a to know the person who is in fact is a is to know himself. Yet Hintikka’s very reading makes his calculus inadequate to handle several important statements. It cannot handle, e.g., contingent statements expressed in sentences of the form ‘There is an object such that a does not know that it exists.’ Here the individual variable ‘it’ occurs free in the clause ‘such that a does not know that it exists.’ Hence, by Hintikka’s reading, that ‘it’ must refer to an object known to a, such statements would be self-contradictory. For another difficulty let ‘a’ stand for ‘The Editor of Soul.’

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My purpose here is to provide an exhaustive discussion of, and a rigorous treatment of the logic of, the S-used third-person pronoun. My major contentions are: (a) that the S-uses of ‘he’ are quite different from the other uses of the third-person pronoun; (b) that the S-uses of ‘he’ constitute the employment of a unique logical category, which is not analyzable in terms of any other type of referring mechanism (i.e., the other uses of ‘he’, other personal pronouns, proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions); (c) that in each sentence containing tokens of the S-used ‘he’ there is at least one such token which is not analyzable, but there may be other tokens which are analyzable in terms of an unanalyzable token of the S-used ‘he’; (d) that the complex logic of the S-used ‘he’ is governed by the principles (H*), (H*1)–(H*3), whose formulation is a high point of the paper; (e) that the first-person pronoun is also an unanalyzable category, even though some tokens of ‘I’ can be analyzed in terms of some unanalyzable token of ‘I’, in accordance with principle (P); (f) that the widely accepted rule of detachment ‘From “x knows that p” one is allowed to infer that p’ breaks down when the statement that p is expressible in a sentence containing an S-used ‘he’; (g) that a valid substitute for the above rule is (K*). The results of this investigation have important consequences for the philosophy of mind, which will be discussed in a separate paper. In yet another paper I will defend theses parallel to (a)–(g) for the case of expressions like ‘then’ and ‘there’ when used in oratio obliqua, for instance, in “At place P and time t x believed that it was then raining there”.

Suppose now that Smith has never seen his image or pictures in photographs, mirrors, ponds, etc. Suppose that at time t Smith does not know that he has been appointed the Editor of Soul and that at t he comes to know that the man whose photograph lies on a certain table is the new Editor of Soul, without Smith realizing that he himself is the man in the photograph. In this situation, “There is a person such that the Editor of Soul knows that that person is the Editor of Soul, without the Editor knowing that he himself is that person” is true. This statement cannot, however, be symbolized in Hintikka’s calculus. The obvious candidate ‘($x)(Ka(x=a)&~Ka(x=a))’ is strictly a formal contradiction. What is needed is something like ‘($xa)(Ka(x=a)&~Ka(x=himself)),’ where the expression ‘himself ’ has ‘a’ as its logical antecedent. This is precisely the initial insight into the peculiar syncategorematic character of the pronoun ‘he*’ that led to the claims and principles put forward in Sections 4 and 5 below. Hintikka’s calculus (together with his ingenious reading of free variables) is, furthermore, inadequate to handle the complexities of the pronoun ‘he*’. See footnote 15 below. Some time after I had finished this paper I came across P. T. Geach’s “On Belief About Oneself,” Analysis, vol. 18 (1957), pp. 23–4. Here Geach formulates three important things. First, “a=b and b believes that b is Φ” entails “a believes that b is Φ”. Second, “a=b and b believes that b is Φ” does not entail “a believes that a is Φ”. Third, “a=b and b believes that he himself is Φ” does entail “a believes that he himself is Φ”. Thus, Geach should be credited (as far as I know) with having posed the problem of the logic of the pronoun ‘he*’ for the first time. My greatest debt is to P. T. Geach who saved me from several errors and suggested objections and corrections.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

1.

The ‘he’ of self-consciousness

Let us, first, demarcate our field of enquiry. We want to study the uses of ‘he (him, his)’ and ‘she (her, hers)’ in which the pronoun refers to the object of a person’s knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, assertions, about himself. We shall, for simplicity, speak of the ‘he’ of self-consciousness, or of the S-use of ‘he’, or of the pronoun ‘he*’. We shall put an asterisk after a form of the third-person pronoun to indicate that it exemplifies an S-use. The ‘he*’ pronoun appears, for instance, in sentences like ‘Arthur believes that he* is happy’ and ‘Mary claims that she* knows that Paul loves her*’. For simplicity we shall concentrate our discussion mainly on statements about cognitive attitudes or acts, but our investigation also applies to linguistic acts which attribute a self-reference to someone. We shall speak of cognitive verbs to refer to verbs expressing cognitive acts or attitudes or dispositions (‘think,’ ‘believe,’ ‘know,’ ‘suppose,’ ‘infer’) as well as to linguistic acts of the assertive or quasi-assertive kind (‘claim,’ ‘hold,’ ‘state,’ ‘say,’ ‘deny,’ ‘argue,’ etc.) It is only a linguistic freak that ‘he’ in the sense of ‘he*’ looks exactly like the third-person pronoun ‘he’, which occurs, for instance, in ‘Arthur came, but he knew nobody he saw; he left early.’ This can be seen simply by glancing at the other uses of the third-person pronoun. But before taking this glance we shall introduce other simplifying conventions. 1. Single quotes will be used to form names of sentences or expressions. 2. Indentation of, as well as double quotes around, a sentence will be employed to form a name of some statement that has, or could have, been made by means of a normal utterance (in normal contexts and with its ordinary meaning) of a token of the sentence indented, or quoted. We shall assume that the name so produced names the same statement throughout the present investigation, but we shall assume nothing about the method for picking out the statement in question. 3. Numerals prefixed to indented sentences will sometimes refer to the indented sentence and sometimes to the statement formulated with that sentence; the context will make clear which one is meant. 4. We shall sometimes speak of ‘he’ (or ‘I’) as short for ‘a pronominal expression used to formulate third-person (or first-person) reference.’ 5. We shall use ‘tokenn’ and ‘token in the narrow sense’ to refer to each of the tokens of each form of a pronoun or verb; e.g., the tokensn of ‘I’ are not, but

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contrast with, the tokens, of ‘me’; similarly, a tokenn of ‘runs’ is not, but contrasts with, a tokenn of ‘run’ or ‘ran’. 6. We shall call all tokensn of a pronoun or verb, regardless of inflection, tokensw, or tokens in the wider sense of the pronoun in question. Thus, each tokenn of ‘I’, each tokenn of ‘me’, each tokenn of ‘my’, each tokenn of ‘mine’, and each tokenn of ‘myself ’ are all tokensw of the pronoun ‘I (me, my, mine, myself)’ or simply, ‘I’. It seems that, aside from its S-uses, the pronoun ‘he (him, his, she, her, hers)’ is normally used in a way that falls in one or other of the following categories: A.The third-person pronoun is sometimes a proxy for the ostensive demonstrative description ‘that (this) man’ or ‘that (this) woman’. This is probably the case when someone says, e.g., “Look, he is dragging her”. The pronoun is sometimes a proxy for a quasi-ostensive demonstrative description. This is the case, for instance, when a person sees a picture (photograph, bust, replica) of another person and asserts, e.g., “She is beautiful!” Here the uttered tokenn of ‘she’ simply stands for the description ‘the woman whose picture (photograph, bust, replica) this is’. B.‘He’ is perhaps used sometimes as an (ostensive) demonstrative pronoun, i.e., as a substitute for no definite description, but merely to point to a person singled out from the remaining objects present in one’s current experience. In this use the third-person pronoun is merely a colorful proxy for ‘this (that)’. C.‘He’ is used sometimes as a mere part of a universal quantifier, as, e.g., when one says “He who marries young…” The pronoun ‘he’ is also used as a mere variable bound by a universal, or existential, quantifier to which it refers back. Examples of these uses are, respectively, found in normal utterances of sentences of the form ‘Anyone who marries young is such that he…’ and ‘Somebody came when I was out and he returned my book’. D.The third-person pronoun is frequently employed as a relative pronoun, i.e., as a proxy for a name or description which precedes or follows it. An example is furnished by the assertion “If Arthur comes late, he (i.e., Arthur) will call.” Clearly, this statement is the same as the statement that one would make, in the same circumstances, by asserting “If Arthur comes late, Arthur will call” or by asserting “If he (Arthur) comes late, Arthur will call.” E.‘He’ is, perhaps occasionally, a proxy for the definite ostensive description ‘that (this) body’. This would be the case if the sentence ‘He weighs 185

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

pounds’, for instance, were used to formulate the statement “That (this) body [pointing to the body of some person] weighs 185 pounds.” F.‘He’ is often employed as a place-holder for some unspecified description which refers to a previously mentioned object. This is typical of constructions in oratio obliqua, i.e., clauses subordinated to cognitive verbs in the sense characterized above. Examples are “Paul said (believes, knows) of (someone who in point of fact is2) Mary that she is happy.” These statements must be distinguished from the statements “Paul said (believes, knows) that Mary is happy.” The former are (nearly) the same as the statements: “There is a property Φ such that Mary is the only person who is Φ and Paul said (believes, knows) that the only person who is Φ is happy.” The most characteristic pattern of the (F)-‘he’ is ‘… believes (knows, thinks, asserts, holds) of y that… he (she) …’, as just illustrated. But Helen Cartwright3 has furnished an example which deviates from this pattern, viz., “Paul saw Mary and believes that she is happy.” G.The pronoun ‘he’ is often used to indicate what Russell called the larger scope of a description. For instance, “If the author of Principia Mathematica remembers it, he will write to you about it” is analyzable (as Russell thought) as, or merely presupposes (as Strawson wants it), “There is just one author of Principia Mathematica such that: if he remembers it, he will write you about it” (where the new occurrences of ‘he’ are variables of quantification). On the other hand, “If the author of Principia Mathematica remembers it, the author of Principia Mathematica will write you about it” seems to be analyzable as, or to presuppose, “If there is just one author of Principia Mathematica and he remembers it, then there is just one author of Principia Mathematica and he will write you about it” (where again the new occurrences of ‘he’ are variables of quantification). Here we are not claiming that these six uses of ‘he’ are really all distinct and non-overlapping. We are simply not interested in examining them for their own

2. This parenthetical clause was inserted on the suggestion of Professor Wilfrid Sellars. I hope that it makes it clear that I do not claim that the sentence ‘Paul believes of Mary that she is happy’ is never used in ordinary speech to make the same statement that is more properly made with the sentence ‘Paul believes that Mary is happy’. I claim only that the former sometimes is used, or can at any rate be used to make a statement such that (1) it does not imply that the proposition Paul takes to be true is “Mary is happy”, and (2) it implies that Paul takes as true some proposition of the form “Z is happy”, where ‘Z’ stands for some way he uses to refer to a certain person, who happens to be Mary. 3. At the October 13th, 1964 Wayne State University Colloquium, at which the earlier version of this paper was discussed.

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sakes. We want to show only that they are quite different from the S-uses of ‘he’. Suppose that a man called Privatus informs his friend Gaskon that (1) The Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire.

It is immediately clear that Privatus’ use of ‘he himself ’ or of ‘he*’ is not a quantifier or a variable referring back to a quantifier. Hence, Privatus’ use of ‘he*’ is not an instance of use (C). But as P. T. Geach pointed out to me, ‘he*’ can also be an instance of use (C). It plays this role in “Someone thinks that he* is a genius.” It is extremely doubtful that the Editor of Soul or Privatus or Gaskon think of a mere body as a millionaire. But even if they all did, we may suppose that in this case they all think of persons. Thus, Privatus’ use of ‘he*’ is not a proxy for ‘this (that) body’. We can, thus, disregard uses (C) and (E) entirely. The tokenn of ‘he*’ in (1) is not a proxy for ‘the Editor of Soul
’. If it were statement (1) would be the same statement as: (2) The Editor of Soul knows that the Editor of Soul is a millionaire.

But (2) is not the same statement as (1). For (1) does not entail (2). The Editor of Soul may know that he himself is a millionaire while failing to know that he himself is the Editor of Soul, because, say, he believes that the Editor of Soul is poverty-stricken Richard Penniless. Indeed, (2) also fails to entail (1). To see this suppose that on January 15, 1965, the man just appointed to the Editorship of Soul does not yet know of his appointment, and that he has read a probated will by which an eccentric businessman bequeathed several millions to the man who happens to be the Editor of Soul on that day. Thus, Privatus’ use of ‘he himself ’ or ‘he*’ just cannot be a proxy for ‘the Editor of Soul
’. Clearly, the same considerations apply to any name or description that replaces ‘the Editor of Soul
’ as well as to any tokenw of ‘he*’. Hence we conclude that a use of a tokenw of ‘he*’ is not an instance of use (D). We can discuss uses (A) and (B) together. If ‘he*’ were used demonstratively meaning ‘this (that) man’ or simply ‘this (that)’, the demonstrative reference would have to be made by the speaker. But Privatus can truly and correctly say to Gaskon “The Editor of Soul knows (believes, thinks) that he* is a millionaire”, even when the Editor of Soul is wholly outside Privatus’ and Gaskon’s experience, e.g., when the Editor is locked up alone inside a spaceship traveling near the end of the Milky Way. Hence, the pronoun ‘he*’ is not simply the strictly third-person pronoun ‘he’ used demonstratively.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

Use (F) of ‘he’ does resemble the use of ‘he*’ in important respects. For simplicity we shall speak of the (F)-‘he’ to refer to the tokens of ‘he’ which are instances of use (F). To start with, the (F)-‘he’ and ‘he*’ can appear only in a construction having a clause in oratio obliqua. In the second place, each token of ‘he*’ or of the (F)-‘he’ must have an antecedent description or name or pronoun, which determines to whom the token refers. Thirdly, in neither case is the token in question a proxy for its antecedent. Clearly, (3) Paul believes of (someone who is in point of fact) Mary that she is happy

is not the same statement as (4) Paul believes that Mary is happy.

Likewise, the statement: (5) Mary believes that she* is happy

is not the same as (6) Mary believes that Mary is happy.

Yet there are crucial differences between ‘he*’ and the (F)-‘he’. In the first place, (4) and “Mary exists” together entail (3); but neither (5) and “Mary exists” together entail (6), nor (6) and “Mary exists” together entail (5). In the second place, the (F)-‘he’ can always be analyzed away, while ‘he*’ can never be analyzed away, as we shall establish in Sections 2 and 4 below. Consider (3) again. Clearly (3) entails that what Paul believes is expressible in a sentence of the form “Z is happy”, where ‘Z’ stands for some unspecified way of referring to Mary that Paul employs. (Obviously, the way in question may very well be the name ‘Mary’ itself.) If Paul were to express his belief, he would employ some name or demonstrative or description referring to Mary. But (3) does not decide this point. Statement (3) is merely the statement that for some person Paul refers to as Z, Paul believes that Z is happy, while we refer to that person as Mary. This matter of referring to someone as Z, or as Mary, or as the man next door, is a murky business which we shall not clarify in this paper. Here we shall take the concept way of univocally referring to X as Z as primitive. We do not commit ourselves here to any of the following natural ways of analyzing this concept. Way 1: We abandon the idea of a universe of discourse constituted by particulars, and make our variables of quantification range over guises (or guised particulars, i.e., particulars qua satisfying some condition). Then we

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analyze, e.g., (3) as “There is a guise, call it x, such that x= (the guise) Mary, and (the guise) Paul believes that x is happy.” Way 2: We keep our individual variables ranging over particulars qua particulars, but analyze ‘ways of referring’ in terms of Russellian descriptions. Then, (3), for instance, becomes analyzed as “There is a property Φ such that just Mary is Φ and Paul believes that the only thing which is Φ is happy.” Way 3: With Frege we distinguish sense and denotation for names, demonstratives, etc., and introduce variables ranging over individual senses; we form a term denoting a particular by underscoring an expression denoting an individual sense. Then (3) can be analyzed as “There is an individual sense Z such that Z=Mary and Paul believes that Z is happy.”4 Likewise, we shall not analyze here the perplexing phrases ‘believes (knows, thinks, says, etc.) that Z is…’ where ‘Z’ is a variable. It makes no difference at this juncture whether ‘Z’ is a variable ranging over particulars, guises, or individual senses. The natural temptation is to analyze such phrases in terms of quantification over propositions or statements. For instance, “Paul believes that Z is happy” would be treated as an abbreviation of “There is a proposition which is the object of Paul’s belief and which is constituted by the entity Z (whatever it may be, individual sense, guise, or whatnot) as subject and the property happiness as predicate.” Other philosophers and logicians would prefer an analysis in terms of sentences. But in this essay we do not have to decide this issue. The problems we are dealing with in this essay are essentially independent of one’s ultimate views on reference to particulars and on the role of variables inside cognitive contexts. We want here to formulate an analysis of the (F)-‘he’ as well as partial analyzes of some special uses of ‘I’ and of ‘he*’ in terms of our primitive ‘ways of univocally referring to X as Z’. We grant, of course, that our analyses are rightly regarded as incomplete inasmuch as our present primitive needs to be analyzed. Let ‘Φ(heY)’ be a sentence containing one of or more tokensw of the (F)‘he’, which refer to a person Y; let ‘Φ(Z)’ be the result of replacing each of these tokensw by tokensw of ‘Z’; let ‘E’ stand for any of the cognitive verbs (in the sense explained above). Then:

4. I am indebted to Edmund Gettier and Wilfrid Sellars for pointing out the need for saying something about my primitive way of referring so that it would not be wholly obscure. I hope that with this promissory note I may be allowed to continue using an apparent quantification over ways of referring. Sellars was very helpful in emphasizing the need for mentioning way 3.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

(P) A statement of the form “X E’s of Y that Φ (heY)” is the same statement as the corresponding one (i.e., the one that has the same variables standing for the same terms where these terms have the same references and meanings and logical positions) (i) “There is a way of referring univocally to Y as Z and X E’s that Z is Φ(Z)”, or alternatively, the statement corresponding in the same way, (ii) “There is a way of referring univocally to Y as Z, which is different from each of the ways of referring to Y as W1, W2,…, as Wn, and X E’s that Φ(Z)”, where for each ‘Wi’ the clause represented by ‘Φ(heY)’ contains some sub-clause of the form ‘(…=Wi)’.

Alternative (ii) is included in principle (P) in order to meet a counter example proposed by Nuel Belnap and developed by Charles Chihara against alternatives (i).5 The counter-example is this: consider the case of Jaakko Hintikka6 and Nuel Belnap7 who believe that every statement of the form “a=a” is (analytically) true. Suppose that, say, Hintikka believes that the morning star = the morning star and that he has no other belief about the morning star. Since the morning star is in fact identical with the evening star, there is a way of referring univocally to the evening star as Z and Hintikka believes that Z is identical with the morning star. Yet it would be false in ordinary language that Hintikka believes of (some object which in point of fact is) the evening star that it is identical with the morning star. It seems to me that this case conforms to alternative (ii). On the other hand, there are people8 who would say in the case of Hintikka as just described that Hintikka does believe of something, which is in point of fact identical with the evening star, that it is identical with the morning star. For these persons alternative (i) suffices. Now, my central point here is that the (F)-‘he’ is fully analyzable along the lines of principle (P). Whether alternative (i) suffices or whether other alternatives besides (i) and (ii) are required is immaterial here. Alternative (ii) merely introduces conditions on the way of referring to an entity that is attributed to a person. And I can easily conceive of ordinary statements expressed through sentences with tokensw of the (F)-‘he’ in which other restrictions on a way of

5. During the discussion of the earlier version of the paper at the University of Pittsburgh Philosophy Colloquium, on November 20, 1964. 6. See J. Hintikka, “Toward a Theory of Definite Descriptions,” Analysis (Oxford), Vol. 19 (1958), pp. 78–95. 7. See Belnap’s review of Hintikka’s article mentioned in footnote 6 in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, vol. 25 (1960), pp. 88–9. 8. For example, Wilfrid Sellars and Bruce Aune during the discussion mentioned in footnote 5.

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referring to an entity are implicit. Yet my primary contention stands unaffected: The (F)-‘he’ can be analyzed away. To sum up, the S-uses of ‘he’ are logically different from the uses (A)–(F) of the third-person pronoun.

2. ‘He*’, descriptions, names, and demonstrative reference We have seen that when Privatus asserts “The Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire”, Privatus’ tokenw of ‘he*’ is not a proxy for the description ‘The Editor of Soul
’. More generally, Privatus’ tokenw of ‘he*’ is not replaceable by any other description or name of the Editor of Soul (or of any other person or things), which does not include another tokenw of ‘he*’.9 Suppose that ‘the person Φ’ is a definite description, with no tokensw of ‘he*’, of the Editor of Soul. Clearly the statement “The Editor of Soul believes that the person Φ is a millionaire” does not entail “The Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire.” Since there are no tokensw of ‘he*’ in ‘The Editor of Soul believes that the person Φ is a millionaire’, this sentence does not make an assertion of selfbelief. The same holds for names. But more importantly, when Privatus asserts “The Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire”, Privatus does not attribute to the Editor the possession of any way of referring to himself aside from his ability to use the pronoun ‘I’ or his ability to be conscious of himself. The latter ability is the only way of referring to himself that Privatus must attribute to the Editor for his statement to be true. Hence, the statement “The Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire” does not entail any statement of the form “The Editor of Soul believes that Φ is a millionaire”, where ‘Φ’ stands for a name or description not containing tokensw, of ‘he*’. It is also apparent that Privatus’ token of ‘he*’ is not a proxy for a tokenw of ‘I’ or ‘You’. On the one hand, Privatus’ statement “The Editor of Soul believes that I am a millionaire” is obviously quite different from his statement “The Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire.” On the other hand, Privatus’ statement “The Editor of Soul believes that you are a millionaire” does not entail, and a fortiori is different from, his statement “The Editor of Soul believes that he*

9. I am indebted to Richard Cartwright for the following example of a description that can replace a tokenw of ‘he*’: ‘the person (or entity) identical with himself*’. Clearly, there is an infinite chain of descriptions generated from this: ‘the entity identical with the entity identical with … the entity identical with himself*’.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

is a millionaire,” even if Privatus uses the word ‘you’ to talk and refer to the Editor of Soul. The latter may simply be ignorant that he* is the Editor of Soul. Now, all the above considerations apply to any tokenw of ‘he’ regardless of what name or description happens to be its logical and grammatical antecedent. Thus, we conclude that the pronoun ‘he*’ is never replaceable by a name or a description not containing tokensw of ‘he*’. This suggests that ‘he*’ is a purely referential word. But demonstrative pronouns seem to be purely referential: they, it is often said, seize the objects they refer to directly, without attributing to these objects any feature or characteristic relation. They have denotation, but not sense, it is said; they, indeed, seem like the closest approximation to the logician’s ideal of logical names. One is tempted to think that, although ‘he*’ is not always a demonstrative pronoun, nevertheless it must be analyzed, or understood, in terms of the demonstrative uses, (A) and (B), of ‘he’. In particular it might be thought that the analysis of ‘he*’ could be worked out of four related prongs: i.

‘he*’ in sentences of the form ‘X E’s (e.g., believes, knows, thinks) that he* is Φ’, used assertively, corresponds to some use of the demonstrative ‘he’ by the person X; ii. if one asserts “X believes (knows, thinks) that he is Φ” [or “X believes (knows, thinks) of him that he is Φ”] and uses ‘he’ [or ‘him’] demonstratively to refer to the person X, then one has asserted “X believes (knows, thinks) that he* is Φ”; iii. if one asserts truly “X believes (knows, thinks) that he is Φ” using ‘he’ demonstratively to refer to the person X and the person X is in a position to take one’s use of ‘he’ as a demonstrative use, then X believes (knows, thinks) that he* is Φ; iv. if a person X asserts “he is Φ”, using ‘he’ purely demonstratively to refer to X, then X believes that he* is Φ. Claim (i) is false. To begin with, it is not uncommon that a man, say Privatus, asserts truly something like “The Editor of Soul believes (claims, knows) that he* is a millionaire”, in spite of the fact that the Editor of Soul may have never expressed his belief through any sentence so that he has never used the word ‘he’ demonstratively in a sentence that would have to correspond to Privatus’ use of ‘he*’. Nevertheless, suppose that the Editor of Soul has just asserted what, according to Privatus, he believes (claims, knows). Most likely he said “I am a millionaire.” Thus, Privatus’ use of ‘he*’ may correspond to the Editor of Soul’s use of ‘I’, and need not correspond to this Editor’s use of the

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demonstrative ‘he’. That it can never correspond to a demonstrative use of ‘he’ will be established with the refutation of (iv). Claim (ii) is also false. Suppose that Privatus says to Gaskon: (7) The Editor of Soul believes of him [using this word purely demonstratively, with a pointing to the Editor of Soul, as a proxy for ‘this’] that he is a millionaire.

[Here the occurrence of ‘he’ is an instance of use (F).] By asserting (7) Privatus does not tell Gaskon what exactly it is that the Editor of Soul believes to be the case, i.e., the proposition or statement that the Editor takes to be true. Privatus just informs Gaskon that under some way or other of referring to the man he is pointing to, the Editor of Soul believes that man to be a millionaire. Hence, the truth of (7) does not require that the Editor of Soul thinks of the man Privatus is pointing to as the same as he* (the Editor himself). Thus, (7) may be true because the Editor believes, e.g., that a man with a unique scar on his back is a millionaire and this man happens to be the one Privatus is pointing to. But the Editor of Soul need not realize that he* is the man with the unique scar, or that he* is a millionaire. He may not even know of Privatus’ statement. Suppose that Privatus says to Gaskon: (8) The Editor of Soul believes that he (using this word purely demonstratively, with a pointing to the Editor of Soul) is a millionaire.

Suppose now: (a) that Privatus has never before seen the Editor of Soul and that he cannot recognize him, (b) that Privatus knows of the Editor’s belief because he has just talked with him on the telephone, (c) that the Editor informed Privatus that a man with a unique scar on his forehead is a millionaire, (d) that such a man is the one Privatus is pointing to when he asserts (8), and (e) that Privatus does not know that the Editor is the man with that unique scar. Clearly, from (a)–(e) it follows that Privatus’ statement (8) is not the same as his statement “The Editor of Soul believes that he*is a millionaire.” Claim (iii) is equally false, in spite of its greater plausibility. Consider once again Privatus’ statement (8) to Gaskon. As above, suppose (a)–(e). However, suppose now: (f) that the Editor of Soul is near Privatus and overhears his statement (8), and (g) that the Editor is in a position to identify the man Privatus is pointing to. In short, the Editor is in a position to take Privatus’ demonstrative use of ‘he’ as a demonstrative use of ‘he’. Can the Editor fail to realize that he* is the one being pointed to by Privatus? It seems to me that he can. This is very unlikely, I grant, but not impossible. For suppose (h) that

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

Privatus knows that the man he talked to on the telephone is the new Editor of Soul, while this man does not know of his* own appointment yet, and (i) that there is a set of mirrors arranged with the right kind of angulation, so that the Editor of Soul sees, in a mirror, Privatus pointing to the man with the unique scar. Suppose further, as we may, (j) that the Editor does not realize that he* is seeing himself* in the mirror, so that when he himself points to the man with the unique scar (by pointing to his own mirror image), he may say “He is a millionaire”, without realizing that he is pointing to himself* (or his* own mirror image). Thus, Privatus’ assertion of (8) may be both true and understood by the Editor of Soul without the Editor of Soul believing that he* is a millionaire. Hence, (a)–(j) yield the falsity of claim (iii). It might be replied that in the preceding fantasy Privatus uses ‘he’ demonstratively to refer to the Editor of Soul, while this Editor uses ‘he’ demonstratively to refer to his mirror image, so that the Editor does not really take Privatus’ use of ‘he’ in exactly the same way, i.e., to refer exactly to the same entity. This reply is unsound. No doubt, the Editor of Soul points to his mirror image, but only because in this case he is primarily pointing to the Editor of Soul. Surely he is not referring to a mirror image, but to the man he sees, even if he only sees the man indirectly via the mirror image. (Ordinary usage is against the reply. We do say things like: “The sheriff saw the outlaw in the mirror and shot first.”) At any rate, it is only an empirical, though perhaps physiologically necessary, fact that one sees the physical world from the top of one’s nose as the focus of the perspective one finds in one’s visual perceptions. We can easily imagine a universe in which one’s focus of perspective is located several feet away from one’s nose. We can also imagine this focus changing from time to time, according, perhaps, to certain happenings in one’s brain. In such a universe one’s focus of perspective might be on the left of one’s body, say at one moment, and later it might be in front with one’s own body among the objects one sees. Of course, one would know that a certain body is one*’s body in the usual way, namely, by feeling kinesthetic sensations, pains, itches, etc., in that body. But at moments in which all his bodily sensations were non-existing, or dull and he were not attending to them, one identical twin, for instance, would sometimes be momentarily in doubt as to which of two similar bodies was his*. He could get out of his doubt, for instance, by walking or trying to grab something: the body in which he felt the sensations of effort, pressure, etc. would be his body. Now, in a world of this sort nothing need impede Privatus, Gaskon, and the other people talking with them from being very similar to the

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Editor of Soul in both bodily and vestiary appearance. Let us call all this (k). Here again we may suppose (a)–(h) as the background of facts behind Privatus’ statement (8). Suppose (l) that while asleep, the Editor has been carried to a chair near Privatus, so that his body is surrounded by very similar bodies. Suppose (m) that the Editor and Privatus both know that the unique mark on the forehead of the new millionaire is to be produced suddenly as a remote effect of some drug, or food, or drink. Thus, we may imagine (n) that the Editor wakes up at the very moment the mark appears, (o) that he and Privatus both see the mark at once and (p) that Privatus points to the body with the mark, in order to point to the person whose body it is and says to Gaskon “The Editor of Soul believes that he is a millionaire.” Now if (q) the Editor of Soul dies of a heart attack before he has any kinesthetic sensation through which he can identify the body pointed to by Privatus as his*, he will never come to believe that he* is a millionaire. Thus, (a)–(h), and (k)–(q) establish the falsity of claim (iii). The two situations that yield the falsity of claim (iii) also yield the falsity of claim (iv). In the first situation, the Editor of Soul may see his body (via his mirror image) and say “He is a millionaire” without realizing at the time that he is pointing to himself through pointing to his body (via his mirror image). In the second situation, the Editor may say “He is a millionaire” on seeing the mark on his forehead, and if he does not point and is not aware of any bodily sensation at that very moment, he may die, by (q), without realizing that he was talking of himself. The crucial weapon in the refutation of claim (iii) is the fact, which philosophers (especially Hume and Kant) have known all along, that there is no object of experience that one could perceive as the self that is doing the perceiving. However it is that one identifies an object of experience as oneself, whenever one does, one identifies an object in experience with a thing which is not part of the experience, and this thing is the one to which the person in question will refer by ‘I’ (or its translation in other languages), and another person will refer to by ‘he*’, or ‘he himself ’ in the special S-use. Carl Ginet has proposed10 an ingenious analysis of ‘he*’ in terms of the pronoun ‘I’, which seems to preserve the directly referring role of ‘he*’ by dumping it, so to speak, on the demonstrative reference of the first-person pronoun. Ginet writes:

10. In his comments on this paper when it was presented at the meeting of the Michigan Academy in March 1965.

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for any sentence of the form “X believes that he* is H” [there is] a corresponding sentence that contains no form of “he*” but that would in most circumstances make the same statement. The corresponding sentence that will do the job, I suggest, is the one of the form “X believes (to be true) the proposition that X would express if X were to say, ‘I am H’” or, perhaps more clearly, “If X were to say ‘I am H’ he would express what he (X) believes.”

This suggestion looks very plausible at first sight. But it faces some serious difficulties. Merely saying ‘I am H’ does not guarantee that any proposition is expressed. We must, then, construe Ginet’s “saying ‘I am H’” as something like “assertively uttering ‘I am H’ and nothing else.” But this does not suffice. For one can express many different propositions by assertively uttering ‘I am H’. What Ginet’s formula lacks is a precise specification of the proposition that X believes when he believes that he* is H. That is to say, Ginet’s ‘saying “I am H”’ must be understood as “assertively uttering ‘I am H’ and nothing else, when the sentence ‘I am H’ means what it normally means.” But the analysis requires that we unpack the clause ‘what it normally means’. Evidently, when this is done we are going to come out with something like “assertively uttering ‘I am H’ and nothing else, when the word ‘I’ is used by X to refer to himself.” Thus, this analysis of ‘h*’ in terms of ‘I’ is at bottom circular. On the other hand, suppose that Ginet’s formula is sufficient to specify propositions without circularity. Then there is the crucial trouble, pointed out to me by Robert S. Sleigh, that the subjunctive proposition “If X were to say ‘I am H’ he would express a true proposition” is true if X is a truth-telling person, even if in fact X does not believe that he is H. The analysis is, then, too broad. There is also the fact that “X believes that he* is H” does not entail that there are any sentences or that ‘I am H’ is a sentence in some language, or that ‘I’ is a word. But Ginet’s analysans does require that ‘I am H’ be a sentence and ‘I’ be a word in some language. In sum, the S-uses of ‘he’ or ‘he himself ’, that is, the use of the pronoun ‘he*’ cannot be analyzed in terms of the demonstrative references of the strictly thirdperson pronoun ‘he’. The only demonstrative reference of ‘he*’ is bound up with that pertaining to the first-person pronoun ‘I’. 3. ‘I’ In order to analyze in detail the connection between a use of ‘he*’ and an implicit use of ‘I’, we need some grasp of the logic of ‘I’. For our purpose it

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suffices here to discuss just a few of the most general features of the logic of ‘I’. We consider first the use of ‘I’ in oratio recta, i.e., in clauses which are neither subordinated to cognitive verbs (in the sense we gave this term in section I) nor enclosed within quotation marks.11 This use of ‘I’ is characterized by the following properties. I. Like all other demonstratively used pronouns, be they called demonstratives, be they called personal pronouns, ‘I’ has a referential priority over all names and descriptions of objects. A name, or a description, correctly used may fail to refer to the object to which it purports to refer because there may be not one, but many objects which have the name in question, or the properties mentioned in description. A demonstrative, however, cannot fail to refer because of a multiplicity of candidates for reference. Once the demonstrative is correctly tendered, there is for its user at most one candidate reference by it. II. The pronoun ‘I’ has an ontological priority over all names and descriptions. A correct use of ‘I’ cannot fail to refer to the object it purports to refer. Some philosophers would argue that every demonstratively used pronoun has this priority over all names and descriptions. They could claim that if a token of a demonstrative is correctly used in oratio recta, of necessity, the token in question would succeed in referring to something in the speaker’s current experience. They would argue that even in the case of a delusion, if, e.g., a man honestly asserts “That is a dog”, his token of ‘that’ successfully picks out a complex of sense-data, or a region of physical (or psychological) space, or a set of features, or what not. Here, however, we do not have to go into this matter. Whether ‘I’ alone or all demonstratively used pronouns have this ontological priority is of no consequence for the present investigation. What matters to us here is that ‘I’ does have this priority over names and descriptions. III. The pronoun ‘I’ and all descriptions and, to a certain extent, names have an epistemological priority over all the other demonstratively used pronouns. In order to keep knowledge or belief, or in order merely to rethink, of the objects originally apprehended by means of demonstratives one must reformulate one’s knowledge or belief, or thought, of those objects. One must replace each purely demonstrative reference by a reference in terms of descriptions or names, or in

11. Here I am not regarding modal contexts as oratio obliqua. For our discussion of ‘I’ and ‘he*’ there is no difference between, e.g., “X loves me” or “It is possible that X loves me.” In neither case is there an appearance of attributing to X a first-personal way of referring to another person, as there is, e.g., in “Peter believes that I love him.”

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

terms of the demonstrative ‘I’. If Privatus asserts “This is blue”, perhaps with a pointing, he seems both to single out an object in his experience and to attribute to it nothing but blueness. Let this be as it may. The crucial thing, however, is that later on, when the object is no longer in his presence, the pronoun ‘this’ has to yield to a name or description of the object Privatus called ‘this’. Demonstratives are necessarily eliminable for their users. The only exception is the demonstrative ‘I’. Nobody can at all keep knowledge or belief of whatever information about himself he receives, unless he manages to replace every single reference to himself in terms of descriptions or names, or in terms of other demonstratives (like ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘this’), by a reference in terms of ‘I (me, my, mine, myself)’. This does not mean, of course, that whenever, e.g., Privatus hears “Privatus is Φ,” he is to perform a physically, or psychologically, distinguishable act of translation: “That is, I am Φ.” The point is a logical one. Privatus cannot remember, or merely consider later on, that he* is Φ, unless he remembers, or considers, what he would formulate by saying “I am Φ” or “Privatus is Φ and I am Privatus.” At least the statements of identity “I am Privatus” or “I am the one who …” must include an ineliminable use of ‘I’ for Privatus. If he only entertains or thinks the statements, without actually making any assertion, we shall speak of his making an implicit use of ‘I’. IV. But the epistemological priority of the demonstrative ‘I’ is only partial. Everybody else must replace a person’s references to himself in terms of ‘I (me, my, mine, myself)’ by references in terms of some description or name of the person in question. These are all trivial features of ‘I’, names, descriptions and the other demonstrative pronouns. But they have some important consequences. For instance, even though a demonstrative seems merely to denote an object, it has a sense for its user, which consists in its being a place-holder for some description or other, to which, by (III), it must yield. Some philosophers may be tempted to claim that every demonstrative has as its sense a set of descriptions, namely, the descriptions to which it can, or must, yield in future references to the same entity the demonstrative denotes. They may be tempted to this claim by the natural principle that every statement can be repeated, i.e., reasserted or at least re-thought. Thus, if Privatus says “This is Φ” he can be supposed to be capable of making this very same statement any time he wishes to. But since when the objects of his experience have changed, he can no longer call ‘this’ the same object he called ‘this’ before, he must employ some description, and this description, one is tempted to think, is

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part of the sense of his original tokenw of ‘this’. This seems an extreme view which we need neither attack nor defend here. Indeed, we need not even take issue here with the weaker view that the sense of a tokenw of a demonstrative is given by some descriptions pinpointing the object as one experienced at the time or place it was referred to demonstratively. Descriptions of this type are, e.g., “The cow I saw yesterday” and “The man I touched just a little while ago.” The view in question need not object to the sense of a tokenw of a demonstrative being given in terms of other tokenw of the same or other demonstratives. This view does not have to include the thesis that demonstratives can be analyzed away in terms of descriptions. Let us move on to oratio obliqua. In the case of tokensw of the pronoun ‘I’ occurring in clauses subordinated to cognitive verbs (in the sense of ‘cognitive verb’ explained in section I), we must distinguish two types. I-i.There are (F)-uses of ‘I’. These are found in statements of the form “X believes (thinks, knows, asserts, argues, etc.) of me that I (me, my, mine, myself)…”, here the second tokenw of ‘I’ is characterized both by having a logical and grammatical antecedent, which is a tokenn of ‘me’, and by being a placeholder for some unspecified description or name of the person to whom ‘me’ refers. I-ii.There are directly self-referring uses of ‘I’. These are found in statements of the form “X believes (thinks, knows, argues, etc.) that … I (me, my, mine, myself) …”, where (at least some) tokensw of ‘I’ have no grammatical or logical antecedent, and, thus, refer directly to the speaker, instead of referring to the person referred to by a first-person antecedent. Let us consider type (I-i). By analogy with the (F)-uses of ‘he’ we may expect the (F)-uses of ‘I’ to be eliminable for the speaker in essentially the same way. This is in fact what happens. But in the case of ‘I’ there is a new reason to suspect that an (F)-tokenw must be eliminable. By (IV) above, nobody can refer to another person by means of ‘I’. Thus, when someone, call him Y, asserts (or thinks), e.g., “X believes of me that I am Φ”, the tokenw of ‘I’ here cannot represent in and by itself the sort or reference to Y that the person X can make.12 It must, perforce, stand for some way of referring to Y that is available

12. I am indebted to Norman Kretzmann for the following teasing use of ‘I’ which looks like a counterexample to this claim. Suppose that there is a play about Privatus and that Privatus is in the audience. Suppose further that the actor representing Privatus is losing his moustache and that Privatus referring to the actor says “I am losing my moustache.”

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

to X. In general, let ‘E’ stand for a cognitive verb; let ‘Φ(I)’ stand for a sentence containing some (F)-tokensw T of ‘I’ whose antecedent is a tokenn of ‘me’ not occurring in ‘Φ(I)’, and let ‘Φ(Z)’ be obtained by replacing in ‘Φ(I)’ every tokenw T by a tokenw of ‘Z’. Then: (P¢) A statement of the form “X E’s of me that Φ(I)” is the same as the statement of the corresponding form “There is a way of referring to a certain person as Z, I am that person and X E’s that Φ(Z).”

Suppose, for example, that Privatus asserts: (3) Paul believes of Mary that she is happy.

Here Privatus’ tokenn of ‘she’ is an instance of the (F)-use of ‘he’. Suppose further that Mary wants to say about herself* what Privatus has said about her. She will say: (9) Paul believes of me that I am happy.

Here Mary’s second tokenw of ‘I’ corresponds to Privatus’ tokenn of ‘she’. It is an instance of the (F)-use of ‘I’. It is at bottom not an authentic first-person use of ‘I’. Its first-person role is wholly derivative: it consists merely in having as its logical and grammatical antecedent Mary’s tokenn of the authentically firstperson ‘me’. ‘I’ in ‘that I am happy’ does not refer by itself to the speaker. Just as (3) does not ascribe to Paul the belief that Mary is happy, likewise (9) does not ascribe to Paul the belief that “I (Mary) am happy” is true. When Mary utters (9), her tokenn of ‘I’ functions simply as a place-holder for some unspecified name or description which refers to the person referred to by Mary’s tokenn of ‘me’. This is the complete analysis of this (F)-use of ‘I’. Hence Mary’s (F)-used tokenn of ‘I’ is eliminable for Mary by principle (P¢). Mary’s statement (9) is the statement she would have made had she said: (9a) There is a way of referring univocally to a certain person as Z, I am that person, and Paul believes that Z is happy.

For contrast, note that Mary’s token of ‘me’ in (9) is not in oratio obliqua. Mary cannot eliminate this tokenw of ‘I’ from (9) : it reappears in (9a) in the clause ‘I am that person’. Let us proceed to type (I-ii). The main features of a use of ‘I’ of type (I-ii) are determined by (III) and (IV). In the first place, since by (III) a person’s uses of ‘I’ in oratio recta are for him ineliminable, these uses are also ineliminable when they are preceded by a cognitive prefix of the form ‘I (believe, know,

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think, claim, argue, asserted, etc.)’. The person who is said to do the believing (knowing, thinking, arguing, asserting, etc.) must make genuine self-references by means of ‘I’. In the second place, by (IV) a person must replace somebody else’s, say Y’s, uses of ‘I’ by descriptions. Hence, every tokenw of ‘I’ in a clause subordinated to a prefix of the form ‘X believes (knows, thinks, says, etc.)’, where ‘X’ is not the pronoun ‘I’, can only be a place-holder for a way of referring to Y which is available to X. To simplify let us define a cognitive prefix as a clause containing a cognitive verb and ending in ‘that’.13 For instance, ‘While staring at Mary, in the kitchen, John told Irene that he would love her forever’ has as its cognitive prefix ‘while staring at Mary, in the kitchen, John told Irene that’. Thus, we have that: V. If a tokenw of ‘I’ of type (I-ii) occurs oratio obliqua immediately subordinated to a cognitive prefix containing a tokenw of ‘I’, then the former is eliminable for the person it refers to if the latter is also eliminable for the same person. VI. A tokenw of ‘I’ of type (I-ii) is eliminable for the person it refers to, provided that the oratio obliqua in which it occurs is subordinated to a cognitive prefix containing no tokensw of ‘I’. That (VI) cannot be strengthened to a statement about a sufficient and necessary condition was shown to me by Geach. In “I believe that I am a millionaire, and Gaskon believes that he* is a millionaire” the second tokenw of ‘I’ is eliminable, even though subordinated to an ineliminable tokenw of ‘I’, inasmuch as the statement is, as Geach pointed out, equivalent to “Each of two persons, Gaskon and me, believes that he* is a millionaire.” Since in this case a tokenw of ‘I’ is eliminable for a tokenw of ‘he*’ we shall distinguish it from strict eliminability which consists in being eliminable, salva propositione, by something other than tokens of the S-pronoun ‘he’, whatever these may be. Thus, strict eliminability implies eliminability simpliciter. Similarly, for ‘he*’ strict eliminability is eliminability in terms other than tokensw of ‘I’. Concerning the elimination procedure we must note that there are two cases of tokensw of ‘I’ eliminable for their users: (a) tokensw which are not subordinated to cognitive prefixes with eliminable tokensw of ‘I’, and (b) tokensw which are subordinated to cognitive prefixes with eliminable tokensw of ‘I’. The procedure of elimination for case (b) involves the procedure for case

13. This shift from cognitive verb to cognitive prefixes was required to meet an objection of Geach’s to principle (P≤) below.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

(a). Suppose, for instance, that Privatus asserts “Jones believes that I know that I am happy.” The first token of ‘I’ is a place-holder for some description or name of Privatus known to Jones; let it be ‘Z’. But the second token of ‘I’ is not a place-holder for ‘Z’. For Privatus has not asserted something like “There is a way of referring to me as Z, and Jones believes that Z knows that Z is happy.” Surely, the man known to Jones as Z may fail to know himself* as Z, and this is something which Jones may be expected to know, and Privatus may also know that Jones knows it. But, more importantly, Privatus’ statement makes the claim that Jones ascribes self-knowledge to Privatus, i.e., a knowledge in terms of the purely referential first-person way. Privatus’ assertion is, at bottom, “There is a way of univocally referring to a person as Z, I am Z, Jones can identify Z in the relevant respect, and Jones believes that Z knows that he* is happy.” The main point is that the elimination of tokens of ‘I’ in oratio obliqua, is in case (b), to be made in terms of fresh tokens of ‘he*’. Let us formulate the general principle of elimination for cases (a) and (b) at once. Let ‘E’ stand for a cognitive verb; let ‘Φ(I)’ stand for a sentence or clause containing tokensw of ‘I’ which are not subordinated to any cognitive verb in ‘Φ(I)’; let ‘Φ(Z)’ stand for the result obtained from ‘Φ(I)’ by: (1) replacing all tokensw of ‘I’ not subordinated to any cognitive verb in ‘Φ(I)’ by tokens of Z, (2) replacing all tokensw of ‘I’ subordinated in ‘Φ(I)’ only to cognitive prefixes containing tokensw of ‘I’ by tokensw of ‘he*’ whose antecedent is Z, and (3) by replacing nothing else. Then: (P≤) A statement of the form of “X E’s that Φ(I)” is the same as the corresponding statement of the form “There is a way of referring to a certain person as Z, X can identify Z (in the relevant respect, or knows who Z is), I am Z, and X E’s that Φ(Z).”

There is a serious obscurity about (P≤), namely, the obscurity surrounding the notion of identification. What counts as identifying a person is something that cries out for analysis. However, this analysis lies too far afield from us here. All we can say at this juncture is that there seem to be different criteria for identifying a person, depending on the circumstances of the persons involved, in particular the circumstances linking the identifier and the identified person. Thus, suppose that a certain crime has been committed. In this case in order to know who the criminal is, a detective must be able to know at least how to bring the criminal to jail or to court. On the other hand, for a high-school student to know who the President of the United States is he needs only to be able to answer certain questions that his teacher may put to him.

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Consider Mary’s statement: (10) Paul believes that I am happy.

Clearly, the reference to Mary by means of ‘I’ is one that Paul just cannot make (assuming ordinary meanings, of course). By (III) and (IV), whatever Paul believes of Mary, he has to believe it by thinking that a certain person Z is happy. The claim that Z is (the same as) Mary is one that Paul need not make, nor is it one that Mary’s statement (10) attributes to him. Indeed, the claim that Mary is Z is one that Mary herself need, or does, not make when she asserts (10). Thus, we have to analyze (10) very much in the same way that we analyze statements made by means of sentences containing tokens of the (F)-‘he’. But not quite. Mary’s statement (10) is not identical with her statement (9), “Paul believes of me that I am happy”; hence, we are not to analyze (10) as (9a) above. The difference between (9) and (10) is very intriguing. But we do not have to dwell upon it here. We need note only that it lies in the claim, made by (10) but not by (9), that Paul’s way of referring to Mary as Z enables him to pick out, or identify, Mary as the person whom he believes to be happy. This is precisely what principle (P≤) asserts. Now, by (V)–(VI) a tokenw T of ‘I’ subordinated to a cognitive verb whose subject is not a token of ‘I’ is eliminable for the person referred to by the tokenw T, even if T is subordinated to a cognitive verb whose subject is another tokenw T¢ of ‘I’. For example, suppose that Privatus asserts: (11) I believe that the Editor of Soul knows that Mary believes that I am a millionaire.

Here the first tokenn of ‘I’ is in oratio recta, and by (III) it is ineliminable for Privatus. The second tokenn of ‘I’ is, by (VI), eliminable even for Privatus. By applying (P≤) to (11) Privatus could eliminate the latter tokenn of ‘I’ in favour of a new tokenw of ‘I’ that would be subordinated to the prefix ‘I believe that’. Hence, this new tokenn would also be ineliminable for Privatus, by (V). But all these tokensw of ‘I’ would be eliminable for Privatus if he were to subordinate (11) or its equivalent, by (P≤), to a prefix of the form ‘X E’s that’. Yet, again, the eliminable tokensw of ‘I’ would give rise to ineliminable tokensw of ‘I’ by virtue of (P≤). The whole thing is simply that the only ineliminable tokens of ‘I’ for the user of ‘I’ are (1) those occurring in oratio recta and (2) those in oratio obliqua subordinated only to prefixes of the form ‘I E that’.

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

4. ‘He*’ and ‘I’ We must now discuss the eliminability of tokensw of ‘I’ for a person who, instead of making them, hears them. By (IV) above, the tokensw of ‘I’ in oratio recta are necessarily eliminable for anyone who does not make them. But the tokensw of ‘I’ in oratio obliqua that are ineliminable for the person whom the tokensw refer to are not, for another person, eliminable in terms of descriptions or names of the former persons. For instance, suppose that Privatus asserts “I believe that I am a millionaire.” For everybody else Privatus’ first tokenn of ‘I’ must yield to some description or name of Privatus, e.g., ‘Privatus’. But his second tokenn of ‘I’ must be replaced by a tokenw ‘he*’. His statement would yield for us the statement “Privatus believes that he* is a millionaire.” In general, the precise correspondence between ‘he*’ and ‘I’ is simply this: (H*) A use of ‘I’ in oratio obliqua that is ineliminable for the person it refers to, who uses it, corresponds to, in the sense that it must yield to, another person’s ineliminable use of ‘he*’ in oratio obliqua.

At this juncture the question arises: Can the pronoun ‘he*’ appear in oratio recta? It might seem obvious that the answer to this question is in the affirmative. There are in fact three general considerations which might at first sight seem to support an affirmative answer. First, when a person formulates what he believes (knows, thinks, etc.) he says ‘I…,’ and other persons say ‘He…’; second, in a sentence of the form ‘X believes (knows, thinks, says, etc.) that he* …’ the person X is precisely the one ‘he*’ refers to; third, what one knows is true, thus if X knows that he* is Φ, it seems, simpliciter, that he* is Φ. To be sure, when a person X hears Y say “I am Φ”, X will understand what he heard as “He is Φ”. But from this it does not follow this token of ‘he’ is a token of ‘he*’. Indeed, there is a good reason for suspecting that here we do not have a token of ‘he*’. X’s token of ‘he’ must be a demonstrative if it is to refer to Y univocally and without describing him. But we saw in Section 2 that the pronoun ‘he*’ is not demonstrative. Thus, the first reason for the claim that ‘he*’ appears in oratio recta provides, rather, evidence against this claim. Doubtless, in the sentence ‘X believes that he* is Φ’ the token of ‘he*’ does refer to the person X. This suggests both that we could have statements of the form “he* is X” and that whoever believed or asserted “X believes (knows, thinks, says, etc.) that he* is Φ” should certainly know the truth of the corresponding statement “he* is X”. It would seem, then, that tokens of ‘he*’ can appear in oratio recta. However, if there were complete statements of the form

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“he* is X”, these statements could be known to be true by the person X himself. But suppose that X, who does not know that he* is X, does assert (or just thinks, for that matter) “X believes (knows, thinks, says, etc.) that he* is X”. That is, X could come to know that he* is X simply by thinking that the man X has some property or other. For instance, the heaviest man of Europe could come to know that he* weighs more than anybody else without resorting at all to scales and comparison of weights! This absurdity arises simply from allowing the tokensw of ‘he*’ to function as independent symbols, i.e., as referring devices in their own right, without the need of a grammatical and logical antecedent. Hence, we must conclude that there are no complete statements of the form “he* is X”. That is, a sentence containing a tokenw of ‘he*’ can, given ordinary meanings, formulate a statement only if the tokenw in question has an antecedent in the same sentence. Let us turn now to the third reason for supposing that ‘he*’ can appear in oratio recta. Doubtlessly, the following principle is true: (K) A statement of the form “X knows that …” entails that the statement denoted by the sentence filling the blank ‘…’ is true.

Thus, the statement “The Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire” entails that the statement (or proposition) denoted by the clause ‘he* is a millionaire’ is true. But (K) must be distinguished from two rules of inference, which seem to follow immediately from (K). They are: (K.1) From a statement of the form “X knows that p” you may infer the corresponding statement that p. (K.2) If a sentence of the form ‘X knows that p’ formulates a statement you accept, then you may detach the sentence (or clause) S represented by ‘p’ and use S by itself to make the statement which S formulates as part of the larger sentence ‘X knows that p’ provided that S contains no tokensw of either first or second-person pronouns.

Clearly neither principle (K) nor rule (K.1) says anything about the kind of sentence through which the proposition p is to be formulated. Only (K.2), of the three, establishes a condition about sentences that could support the claim that tokensw of ‘he*’ can appear, correctly, in oratio recta. But I want to argue that rule (K.2) is invalid: it leads to contradictions. Moreover, I want to argue that rule (K.1) is also in need of revision. Let us consider (K.2) first. It is a fact that in ordinary life one often draws, or can draw anyway, valid inferences like:

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

(11) The Editor of Soul knows that he himself [i.e., he*] is a millionaire.

hence, (12) He is a millionaire.

This inference seems validated by (K.2). One feels tempted to say that the token of ‘he’ in (12) is simply an instance of the pronoun ‘he*’ which appears in (11). Indeed, since the above inference is valid, the token of ‘he’ in any token of sentence (12) is a token of ‘he*’ if and only if the above inference is validated by (K.2). If the inference is validated by (K.2), then (12) contains an independent use of ‘he*’ in oratio recta. The validity of the inference “(11), hence (12)” does not, of course, depend at all on who draws it. Thus, the role of (K.2) and the character of the token of ‘he’ in (12) remain unaltered if Privatus draws the inference, even though (13) It is not the case that Privatus believes that he* is a millionaire.

Suppose further that Privatus believes that (11) and draws out loud, or in writing, the inference from (11) to (12). Clearly, while drawing the inference Privatus believes both the premise and the conclusion to be true. Make now the assumption that the occurrence of ‘he’ in (12) is an instance of ‘he*’. Then while drawing the inference from (11) and (12), Privatus believes that both (11) the Editor of Soul knows that he himself is a millionaire and (12) he* is a millionaire. But then the latter ‘he*’ refers back to ‘Privatus’, so that we can infer that Privatus believes that he* is a millionaire. Since this result contradicts (13), the assumption is false. The use of ‘he’ in (12), as part of the inference from (11), is the same regardless of whether or not the Editor of Soul believes (or knows) that he* is the Editor of Soul. Hence, we may conclude that in no case is the token of ‘he’ in (12) a token of ‘he*’. This being the case, the inference “(11), hence (12)” is not validated by rule (K.2). Evidently, the same arguments apply to any statement of the form “X E’s that Φ(he*).” Thus, we may regard as established that: (H*1) The pronoun ‘he*’ is strictly a subordinate pronoun: it is by itself an incomplete, or syncategorematic, symbol, and every sentence or clause containing a tokenw of ‘he*’ which is not in oratio obliqua, is also an incomplete or syncategorematic sentence or clause.

Let us return to the inference “(11), hence (12)”. The inference is palpably valid. But what kind of ‘he’ is, then, the one appearing in (12)? It seems to me that (12) has a token of ‘he’ which is an instance of use (D), i.e., a relative

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pronoun which is here a proxy for the definite description ‘The Editor of Soul
’. In other words, the conclusion of the inference “(11), hence (12)” is the statement “(He=) The Editor of Soul is a millionaire.” But then, the inference “(11), hence (12)” is not validated by rule (K.1)! By the arguments of Section 2 above, the tokenw of ‘he*’ in (11) does not have a sense that can be given by any other use of the third-person pronoun, or any name, or any definite description. Thus, the question arises: Is there a way at all of formulating the proposition which, by (11), the Editor of Soul knows to be true, so that we can apply rule (K.1) to (11)? The proposition that the Editor of Soul knows to be true, if (11) is true, is one which the Editor can formulate by saying: “I am a millionaire.” But even though the Editor of Soul would not be inferring a false conclusion from a true premise, the inference “The Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire, hence I am a millionaire” is even for him not validated by an application of rule (K.1). On the other hand, the inference “I am the Editor of Soul, the Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire, hence I am a millionaire” is valid, but it is, obviously, not validated by rule (K.1).14 There is just one other referring expression that has to be considered: the pronoun ‘you’. Let us assume that any of us can formulate the statement that, according to (11), the Editor of Soul knows to be true by uttering the sentence “You are a millionaire.” But the inference “The Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire, hence you are a millionaire” is not valid, and, a fortiori, not an application of rule (K.1). On the other hand, “The Editor of Soul knows that he* is a millionaire, and you are the Editor of Soul, hence, you are a millionaire” is a valid reference, but it is not validated by (K.1). [Ed. note: The original has ‘reference’ but the context seems to demand ‘inference’.] Actually, I doubt very much that it is always possible to formulate the very same proposition denoted by a clause of the form ‘he*’ is Φ in oratio obliqua by means of the corresponding oratio recta sentence of the form ‘You are Φ’. Consider, for instance, the statement “Just before his death Caesar thought that he* was to be crowned king.” It seems to me that the statement “Caesar, you were to be crowned king” is not precisely the one Caesar thought to be true. For one thing, the latter

14. I am very grateful to both Richard Cartwright and Robert Sleigh, Jr. for having impressed upon me during the discussion mentioned above in footnote 3 the need for distinguishing between principles (K.l) and (K.2). They also pointed out some errors in my confused discussion of (K.l) and (K.2), e.g., that I had not discussed the case of ‘you’, as I do below in this version. However, neither Cartwright nor Sleigh are responsible for the present formulation of (K.1) or (K.2).

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

statement entails or implies or presupposes that somebody is talking to Caesar, while the statement (or proposition) that Caesar thought to be true does not carry that implication or presupposition or entailment. At any rate, even if the proposition that, by (11), the Editor of Soul knows to be true can be formulated by sentences in oratio recta containing the pronoun ‘you’, we have seen that rule (K.1) cannot apply to (11). Obviously, similar considerations hold for any other third-person statement ascribing selfconsciousness to someone. Hence (H*2) The generally accepted rule (K.1) is invalid: it fails for statements expressible in sentences containing tokensw of ‘he*’.

(H*2) raises a serious task, namely, that of formulating a set of true principles which are to replace the widely accepted (K.1). By (H*) and by (V) and (VI) of Section 3, we should expect the tokensw of ‘he*’ that are ineliminable in a sentence S to become eliminable when S is concatenated to a prefix of the form ‘X thinks (believes, knows, says, etc.)’. As we shall see in the sequel, this is precisely the case even when the occurrence of ‘X’ in this prefix-form stands for another token of the expression which is the antecedent of a tokensw of ‘he*’ in S. To say it at once, the principle governing the ineliminability of ‘he*’ is: (H*3) A tokenw T of ‘he*’ is strictly ineliminable for its user in two types of cases, and only in these two types of cases: (1) T occurs in an oratio obliqua subordinated to just one cognitive prefix containing the antecedent of T; (2) T occurs in an oratio obliqua subordinated to n + 1 cognitive prefixes such that the very first one, from the left, has the antecedent A of T, and the other n verbs have tokensw of ‘he*’ whose antecedent is also A.

By (H*3) the following tokensw of ‘he*’ are ineliminable for their users: “Privatus believes that he* is happy”, and “Alexander believed that he* knew that he* once thought that he* was a god.” (H*3) separates the tokensw of ‘he*’ that are eliminable for their users from those which are not; but it does not furnish the elimination procedures. By (H*)–(H*3), these procedures are similar to those employed for the elimination of ‘I’, but there is the important difference already noted in Section 3 that many a tokenw of ‘I’ has to be eliminated in favor of a tokenw of ‘he*’. We shall discuss the general principles for the elimination of ‘he*’ by considering some simple examples with ‘he*’. As in the case of ‘I’, there are two cases: (a) some tokenw of ‘he*’ are eliminable from a subordinate clause at the cost of introducing another tokenw of ‘he*’ in the

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main clause, and (b) some tokenw of ‘he*’ are eliminable in the sense that they are replaced by tokenw of ‘he*’ in the very same subordinate clause, but with a different antecedent. A simple example of case (a) is this. Suppose that Privatus asserts: (14) The Editor of Soul believes that the Editor of Soul believes that he* is a millionaire.

It is not evident what exactly it is that Privatus has asserted. His utterance has an interesting ambiguity. Imagine the Editor of Soul himself making the same, or very similar, statement. He has a choice between (15) I believe that the Editor of Soul believes that I am a millionaire,

and (16) I believe that the Editor of Soul believes that he* is millionaire.

Of course, he can also say: (17) I believe that I believe that I am a millionaire.

What interests us now is the contrast between (15) and (16). The occurrence of ‘he*’ in (16) stands for an occurrence of ‘I’, as it were, two steps removed: it stands for a tokenw of ‘I’ that the Editor of Soul mentioned by the Editor of Soul could produce to say “I am millionaire.” Thus, in the case of (14), we must distinguish two cases. On the one hand, the tokenw of ‘he*’ occurring in (14) may have as its antecedent the second occurrence, from it to the left, of the phrase ‘the Editor of Soul
’. This is the syntax of the sentence that Privatus meant to utter, if he meant to make the statement, (18), below analogous to the Editor of Soul’s statement (15). On the other hand, the occurrence of ‘he*’ in (14) may have as its antecedent the first occurrence, from it to the left, of ‘the Editor of Soul
’. This is the syntax of the sentence Privatus meant to utter, if he meant to make the statement, (19) below, analogous to (16). Let us affix numerals to a tokenw of ‘he*’, in such a way that we can determine which expression is the antecedent of the tokenw in question by counting, to the left of it, the cognitive verbs to which it is subordinated. Thus, our two interpretations of (14) can be written as follows: (18) The Editor of Soul believes that the Editor of Soul believes that he*2 is a millionaire;

A study in the logic of self-consciousness

(19) The Editor of Soul believes that the Editor of Soul believes that he*1 is a millionaire.15

By principle (P≤) above, the second occurrence of ‘I’ in (15) is eliminable. Hence, by (H*) the tokenw of ‘he*’ in (18) should also be eliminable in a similar way. Thus, (18) is the same as the statement: (18a) The Editor of Soul believes that there is a way of univocally referring to a certain person as Z, that he* is Z, and that the Editor of Soul both can identify Z in the relevant respect and believes that Z is a millionaire.

On the other hand, by (H*3), neither (19) nor (18a) has occurrences of ‘he*’ that are eliminable for their users. Note, incidentally, that a first cousin of (18), ‘The Editor of Soul believes that the Editor of Soul believes of him*1 that he is a millionaire’ also has an ineliminable occurrence of ‘he*’: the antecedent of ‘him*1’ is the very first occurrence of ‘the Editor of Soul
’ (the last tokenn of ‘he’ is an instance of the (F)-use). An example of case (b) appears in (20) The Editor of Soul believes that Privatus believes that he*2 knows that he*3 is the Editor of Soul.

Given our convention on subscripts, the two tokensw of ‘he*’ in (20) have ‘the Editor of Soul
’ as their antecedent. Statement (20) is the same as the statement (20a) The Editor of Soul believes: that there is a way of referring to a certain person as Z, that he*1 is Z, and that Privatus can both identify Z in the relevant respect and believes that Z knows that he*1 is the Editor of Soul.

By our convention, in (20a) the first occurrence of ‘he*1’ has ‘the Editor of Soul
’ as antecedent, while the second occurrence has ‘Z’ as antecedent. By (H*3) neither occurrence is eliminable for the speaker.

15. The distinction between (18) and (19) cannot be formulated in Hintikka’s calculus mentioned in footnote 1. There is nothing in this calculus that corresponds to the criss-crossing references mirrored by our subscript notation. Yet the possibility of criss-crossing is central to the pronoun ‘he*’.

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Chapter 5

Self-reference and self-awareness* Sydney S. Shoemaker Cornell University

If we consider the logical powers of first-person statements and the role played by the first-person pronoun in communication, nothing seems clearer than that in all first-person statements, including “avowals,” the word ‘I’ functions as a singular term or singular referring expression. Statements expressed by the sentence “I feel pain” have it in common with those expressed by sentences like “He feels pain” and “Jones feels pain” that they contradict the proposition “Nobody feels pain” and entail the proposition “Someone feels pain.” In these and other ways “I feel pain” behaves logically as a value of the propositional function “X feels pain.” Moreover, in all first-person statements, including “psychological” or “experience” statements, the word ‘I’ serves the function of identifying for the audience the subject to which the predicate of the statement must apply if the statement is to be true (what it indicates, of course, is that the subject is the speaker, the maker of the statement). And this is precisely the function of a referring expression. Yet philosophers have often found the referring role of ‘I’ perplexing, and some have been led to hold that in at least some of its uses it is not a referring expression at all. Thus Wittgenstein reportedly held at one time that “I have toothache” and “He has toothache” are not values of a common propositional function, that in “I have toothache” the word ‘I’ does not “denote a possessor,” and that “Just as no (physical) eye is involved in seeing, so no Ego is involved in thinking or in having toothache.” He is also reported to have viewed with approval Lichtenberg’s saying that instead of “I think” we ought to say “It

* Presented in an APA symposium on Self and Reference, December 28, 1968; see Michael Woods, ‘Reference and Self-identification,’ The Journal of Philosophy, LXV, 19 (Oct. 3, 1968): 568–578. In writing this paper I had the advantage of having read, or heard, unpublished papers on its topic by Norman Malcolm and Keith Gunderson. I am also grateful to Hector-Neri Castañeda, Harry Frankfurt, and Margaret Wilson for helpful comments and criticisms.

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thinks” (with ‘it’ used as it is in “It is snowing”).1 At apparently the opposite extreme from this, yet stemming from much the same sources, is the view that ‘I’ refers to a “transcendental ego,” an entity that is in principle inaccessible to sense experience. In this paper I shall try to diagnose the source of, and to dispel, some of the mysteriousness which surrounds the use of the word ‘I’ and which underlies the perennial attractiveness of such unacceptable views about the self and self-reference.

I In the Blue Book Wittgenstein distinguished “two different uses of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’),” which he calls “the use as object” and “the use as subject.” As examples of the first of these he gives such sentences as “My arm is broken” and “I have grown six inches.” As examples of the second he gives “I see so and so,” “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” and “I have toothache.” He goes on to say: “One can point to the differences between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involved the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it: the possibility of an error has been provided for… On the other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have tooth-ache. To ask ‘are you sure it is you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical.”2 It is important to see that the distinction Wittgenstein is drawing here is not the controversial distinction between ‘corrigible’ and ‘incorrigible’ first-person statements. It is easy to overlook this, for Wittgenstein’s examples of “the use as subject” are mostly statements that many philosophers have held to be incorrigible. But Wittgenstein’s point is not that these statements are totally immune to error, though he may have believed this to be true of some of them, but is rather that they are immune to a certain sort of error: they are immune to error due to a misrecognition of a person, or, as I shall put it, they are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns. It is the use of ‘I’ in such statements, i.e., its use “as subject,” that philosophers have found puzzling.

1. See G. E. Moore, ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33,’ Philosophical Papers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1959): 306–310. 2. The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Oxford, 1958): 66–67.

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If I say “I am bleeding,” it can happen that what I say is false even though I am giving expression to the knowledge that a certain person is bleeding; it may be that I do see a bleeding arm or leg, but that because my body is tangled up with that of someone (e.g., we are wrestling) or because I am seeing my identical twin or double in a mirror, I am mistaken in thinking the person who is bleeding to be myself. Such statements are subject to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns, where to say that a statement ‘a is Φ’ is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that the following is possible: the speaker knows some particular thing to be Φ, but makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is Φ’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be Φ is what ‘a’ refers to. The statement “I feel pain” is not subject to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’: it cannot happen that I am mistaken in saying “I feel pain” because, although I do know of someone that feels pain, I am mistaken in thinking that person to be myself. But this is also true of first-person statements that are clearly not incorrigible; I can be mistaken in saying “I see a canary,” since I can be mistaken in thinking that what I see is a canary or (in the case of hallucination) that there is anything at all that I see, but it cannot happen I that I am mistaken in saying this because I have misidentified as myself the person I know to see a canary. And whereas the statement “My arm is moving” is subject to error through misidentification, the statement “I am waving my arm” is not. First-person statements that are immune to error through misidentification in the sense just defined, those in which ‘I’ is used “as subject,” could be said to have “absolute immunity” to error through misidentification. A statement like “I am facing a table” does not have this sort of immunity, for we can imagine circumstances in which someone might make this statement on the basis of having misidentified someone else (e.g., the person he sees in a mirror) as himself. But there will be no possibility of such a misidentification if one makes this statement on the basis of seeing a table in front of one in the ordinary way (without aid of mirrors, etc.); let us say that when made in this way the statement has “circumstantial immunity” to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’. It would appear that, when a self-ascription is circumstantially immune to error through misidentification, this is always because the speaker knows or believes it to be true as a consequence of some other self-ascription, which the speaker knows or is entitled to believe, that is absolutely immune to error through misidentification; e.g., in the circumstances just imagined the proposition “I am facing a table” would be known or believed as a consequence of the

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proposition “I see a table in the center of my field of vision.”3 If I say “I feel pain” or “I see a canary,” I may be identifying for someone else the person of whom I am saying that he feels pain or sees a canary. But there is also a sense in which my reference does not involve an identification. My use of the word ‘I’ as the subject of my statement is not due to my having identified as myself something of which I know, or believe, or wish to say, that the predicate of my statement applies to it. But to say that self-reference in these cases does not involve identification does not adequately capture what is peculiar to it, for these first-person statements are not alone in involving reference without identification. Consider two cases in which I might say “This is red.” Suppose that I am selling neckties, that a customer wants a red necktie, and that I believe I have put a particular red silk necktie on a shelf of the showcase that is visible to the customer but not to me. Putting my hand on a necktie on that shelf, and feeling it to be silk, I might say “This one is red.” Here it could be said that I have identified, correctly or incorrectly, the object I refer to in saying ‘this’ as the object I ‘have in mind,’ i.e., as the object of which I wish to say that it is red. We can contrast this with a case in which I simply point to a necktie that I see and say “This is red.” In the latter case there is, in the present sense, no identification and hence no possibility of misidentification. In the first case I intend to refer to a certain red necktie I believe to be on the shelf, but the there is also a sense in which I intend to refer, and do refer, to the necktie actually on the shelf, and there is a possibility of a disparity between my intended reference and my actual reference. But there can be no such disparity in the second case. In this case my intention is simply to refer to one (a specific one) of the objects I see, and in such a case the speaker’s intention determines what the reference of his demonstrative pronoun is and that reference cannot be other than what he intends it to be. But now let us compare this sort of reference without identification with that which occurs in first-person statements. The rules governing the use of a demonstrative like ‘this’ do not by themselves determine what its reference is on any given occasion of its use; this is determined, as we have noted, by the

3. A qualification is needed here. Someone who lacks the concept of seeing and the concept of a field of vision and who, therefore, is in one sense incapable of believing that he sees a table in the center of his field of vision, might nevertheless make (and be entitled to make) the statement “I am facing a table” in the circumstances imagined, i.e., when it is in fact true of him that he sees a table in the center of his field of vision. For our present purposes we can perhaps stretch the notion of being entitled to believe that p to cover the case of someone who lacks the concepts needed to express ‘p’ but who would be entitled to believe that p if only he had these concepts.

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speaker’s intentions. When a man says “This is red,” there are generally any number of things to which he could be referring without misusing the word ‘this’, and there is of course no requirement that different tokens of ‘this’ in a man’s discourse should all refer to the same thing. This permits the reference of ‘this’ on a particular occasion to be fixed by the speaker’s intention to say of a particular thing that it is red, i.e., fixed in such a way that it can refer to nothing other than that thing and, consequently, in such a way that his statement “This is red” does involve an identification. But we cannot explain in this way the reference without identification that occurs in first-person statements. One can choose whether or not to use the word ‘I’, but the rules governing the use of this word determine once and for all what its reference is to be on any given occasion its use, namely, that its reference is to the speaker, and leaves no latitude to the speaker’s intentions in the determination of its reference. There are other important differences between ‘I’ and demonstratives like ‘this’. Although there are cases in which the reference of a demonstrative cannot be other than what the speaker intends it to be, there is in even these cases the logical possibility of failure of reference; it may happen, e.g., in cases of hallucination, that there simply is no object to which a speaker can truly be said to be referring in saying “This is red.” But there is, as Descartes’ ‘cogito argument’ brings out, no such possibility of failure of reference in the use of the word ‘I’. Again, if I retain in my memory an item of knowledge which at the time of its acquisition I could have expressed by saying “This is red” and if I wish at a later time to express that knowledge, it will not do for me simply to utter the pasttense version of the sentence that originally expressed it. In the expression of my memory knowledge the word ‘this’ will typically give way to a description of some kind, e.g., ‘the thing that was in front of me’, or ‘the thing I was looking at’. I may of course say at a later time “This was red,” pointing to something then in front of me, but this statement will involve an identification and will be subject to error through misidentification. But the appropriate way of expressing the retained (memory) knowledge that at the time of its acquisition was expressed by the sentence “I see a canary” is to utter the past-tense version of that sentence, namely, “I saw a canary.” This, if said on the basis of memory, does not involve an identification and is not subject to error through misidentification.4

4. See Hector-Neri Castañeda’s paper ‘“He”: A Study in the Logic of Self-consciousness,’ Ratio, VIII, 2 (December 1966): 145, [this volume, xxx] for a closely related point. I have discussed the immunity to error through misidentification of first-person memory statements in my forthcoming paper ‘Persons and Their Pasts.’ See also ch. IV of my book Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell, 1963).

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I think that many philosophers have assumed that where self-reference does not involve identification it must involve the sort of demonstrative reference that occurs when one says “This is red” of something one sees. If one makes this assumption, but then notices that ‘I’ is no more a demonstrative pronoun than it is a name or ‘disguised description,’ one will quite naturally conclude that in its use “as subject” the word ‘I’ is not a referring expression at all, or as Wittgenstein put it, that it does not “denote a possessor.”

II Philosophers who have reflected on the “use as subject” of the first-person pronouns have often been inclined to say such things as that one cannot be an object to oneself, that one’s self is not one of the things one can find or encounter in the world. The most commonly drawn conclusion, of course, is that one’s self, what one “calls ‘I’,” cannot be any of the physical or material things one finds in the world. But as is well known to readers of Hume and Kant, among others, it is also widely denied that any immaterial object of experience could be the subject of thought and experience. These views lead naturally to the conclusion that ‘I’ does not refer, that there is no self, or that the self is somehow not “in the world.” In the Blue Book (op. cit.: 74) Wittgenstein observed that in “I feel pains” we “can’t substitute for ‘I’ a description of a body.” And Thomas Nagel has recently pointed out, in effect, that there is no description at all which is free of tokenreflexive expressions and which can be substituted for ‘I’; no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-free description of a person is, and whether or not it is couched in physicalistic terms, it cannot possibly entail that I am that person.5 Inspired by these considerations, someone might reason as follows: “Nothing that I find in the world can be myself (or Self), for there is nothing that I could observe or establish concerning any object I find in the world from which I could conclude that it is myself.” This would clearly be a very bad argument, for even if its premise were true it would not establish that I cannot find what is in fact myself in the world; it would only establish that if I found

5. See Nagel’s ‘Physicalism,’ Philosophical Review LXXIV, 3 (July 1965): 353–355. Since the above was written it has come to my attention that Castañeda has argued, very persuasively, that there is no description, not even one containing indexicals (other, presumably, than the firstperson pronouns themselves), that can be substituted for ‘I’. See his ‘“He,”’ [1966; this volume] and his ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators,’ American Philosophical Quarterly, IV, 2 (April 1967): 87 and 95.

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what is myself in the world I could not know that it was myself that I had found. But it does not even establish that, for its premise is false. It is true that there is no token-reflexive-free description of any person from which it would follow that that person is myself, but there is no reason why, in establishing whether someone is myself, I should be limited to facts about him that can be described without the use of token-reflexive expressions. In our world there seldom occurs anything that it would be natural to describe as “finding oneself in the world” or “being an object to oneself.” It is relatively seldom that we observe ourselves in the ways in which we observe others. But we can easily imagine a world full of reflecting surfaces, in which most seeing involves the intervention of one or more mirrors between what sees and what is seen. And one can perhaps imagine a world in which light rays follow curved paths, or a non-Euclidean world in which light rays following ‘straight’ paths sometimes return to their point of origin. In such worlds one could be, visually at least, an object to oneself in the way in which others are objects to one. It is clear that there would be no guarantee, in such a world, that, when observing oneself, one would know that it was oneself one was observing. But it is also clear that there would be no reason in principle why one should not find this out. Presumably one could find it out in much the way in which, in our world, one finds that it is oneself one is seeing in a mirror. But while there can occur something that is describable as “finding oneself in the world” or “being an object to oneself,” it is not and could not be on the basis of this that one makes the first-person statements in which ‘I’ is used “as subject.” It is clear, to begin with, that not every self-ascription could be grounded on an identification of a presented object as oneself. Identifying something as oneself would have to involve either (a) finding something to be true of it that one independently knows to be true of oneself, i.e., something that identifies it as oneself, or (b) finding that it stands to oneself in some relationship (e.g., being in the same place as) in which only oneself could stand to one. In either case it would involve possessing self-knowledge — the knowledge that one has a certain identifying feature, or the knowledge that one stands in a certain relationship to the presented object — which could not itself be grounded on the identification in question. This self-knowledge might in some cases be grounded on some other identification, but the supposition that every item of self-knowledge rests on an identification leads to a vicious infinite regress. But in any case, and this is perhaps the most important point, the identification of a presented object as oneself would have to go together with the possibility of misidentification, and it is precisely the absence of this

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possibility that characterizes the use of ‘I’ that concerns us. I think that this is one of the main sources of the mistaken opinion that one cannot be an object to oneself, which in turn is a source of the view that ‘I’ does not refer. One feels that if one ever encounters the referent of ‘I’ in experience, this ought to occur on those occasions on which one’s right to say ‘I’ is most secure, and that nothing that is not an object to one on those occasions can be its referent at all. I have just said that identification necessarily goes together with the possibility of misidentification. It is clear enough why this is so in the case of the identification as oneself of a flesh-and-blood person who is observed by means of ordinary sense perception, but it may be questioned whether an identification of a self as oneself would be subject to error if selves were conceived as introspectible immaterial substances. And even if my ‘self ’ is a flesh-and-blood person, why shouldn’t it be accessible to me (itself) in a way in which it is not accessible to others, so that in knowing that what is presented to me is presented in this special way — from the inside, as it were — I would know that it can be nothing other than myself? Now there is a perfectly good sense in which my self is accessible to me in a way in which it is not to others. There are predicates which I apply to others, and which others apply to me, on the basis of observations of behavior, but which I do not ascribe to myself on this basis, and these predicates are precisely those the self-ascription of which is immune to error through misidentification. I see nothing wrong with describing the self-ascription of such predicates as manifestations of self-knowledge or self-awareness. But it is plainly not the occurrence of self-awareness in this sense that has been denied by those philosophers who have denied that one is an object to oneself; e.g., it is not what Hume denied when he said: “I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”6 What those philosophers have wanted to deny, and rightly so, is that this self-awareness is to be explained in a certain way. They have wanted to deny that there is an experiencing or perceiving of one’s self that explains one’s awareness that one is, for example, in pain in a way analogous to that in which one’s sense perception of John explains one’s knowledge that John has a beard. An essential part of the explanation of my perceptual awareness that John has a beard is the fact that the observed properties of the man I perceive, together with other things I know, are sufficient to identify him for me as John. If the awareness that I am in pain

6. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1888): 252.

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had an explanation analogous to this, it would have to be that I “perceive,” by “inner sense,” something whose “observed properties” identify it to me as myself. And if the supposition that the perception is by “inner sense” is supposed to preclude the possibility of misidentification, presumably this must be because it guarantees that the perceived self would have a property, namely, the property of being an object of my inner sense, which no self other than myself could (logically) have and by which I could infallibly identify it as myself. But of course, in order to identify a self as myself by its possession of this property, I would have to know that I observe it by inner sense, and this self-knowledge, being the ground of my identification of the self as myself, could not itself be grounded on that identification. Yet if it were possible in this one case for my self-knowledge not to be grounded on an identification of a self as myself, there seems to be no reason at all why this should not be possible in other cases, e.g., in the case of my knowledge that I feel pain or my knowledge that I see a canary. Thus the supposition that there is observation by inner sense of oneself — where this is something that is supposed to explain, and therefore cannot be simply equated with, the ability to self-ascribe those predicates whose selfascription is immune to error through misidentification — is at best a superfluous hypothesis: it explains nothing that cannot be just as easily, and more economically, explained without it. Yet despite these considerations, it can seem puzzling that self-awareness, of the sort we are concerned with, does not involve being presented to oneself as an object. I cannot see the redness of a thing without seeing the thing that is red, and it would seem that it should be equally impossible to be aware of a state of oneself without being aware of that which has that state, i.e., oneself. It may seem to follow from the view I have been advancing that one is aware of the predicates of self-ascriptions, or aware of the instantiation of these predicates, without being aware of their subject, i.e., that in which they are instantiated. Thus we have Hume’s view, that one observes “perceptions” but not anything that has them, and the view that one sometimes finds in discussions of Descartes’ Cogito, that one seems, mysteriously, to be aware of thoughts, or of thinking, but not of that which thinks. If this strikes one as impossible, and if one is nevertheless persuaded that what is called “self-awareness” does not involve being aware of oneself as an object, it may seem that the only possible conclusion is that, when used in first-person statements, the expressions ‘feel pain’, ‘am angry’, ‘see a tree’, etc., are pseudo-predicates, like ‘is raining’, and that, in its use as subject, the word ‘I’ is a pseudo-subject, like the ‘it’ in “It is raining.” I think that the main source of trouble here is a tendency to think of

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awareness as a kind of perception, i.e., to think of it on the model of senseperception. I have been denying that self-awareness involves any sort of perception of oneself, but this should not be taken to mean that in making a judgment like “I feel pain” one is aware of anything less than the fact that one does, oneself, feel pain; in being aware that one feels pain one is, tautologically, aware, not simply that the attribute feel(s) pain is instantiated, but that it is instantiated in oneself. What makes the matter seem puzzling, I think, is that one starts off by trying to construe self-awareness on the model of the observational knowledge that a perceived thing has a certain sensory property, and fails to abandon this model, or to abandon it completely and consistently, when one becomes persuaded that self-awareness does not involve any sort of perception of one’s self, i.e., does not involve what I have called “being presented to oneself as an object.” One tries to construe one’s knowledge of the instantiation of the attribute ascribed in a self-ascription on the model of a case in which one sees or otherwise observes the instantiation of a sensory attribute, like redness, while at the same time denying that one perceives that in which the attribute is instantiated. And this, of course, leads to incoherence. The way out of this incoherence is to abandon completely, not just in part, the perceptual model of self-knowledge. What perhaps makes it difficult to abandon the perceptual model is the fact that it can seem to be implied by the very vocabulary we use to express certain psychological predicates. Thus, for example, we speak of a person as feeling a pain in his back or an itch on his nose, and there is an almost irresistible temptation to construe the cases thus described as cases of someone perceiving a particular of a certain sort — a private, mental, object. But even if we do so construe them, this does not really support the perceptual model. The attribute self-ascribed in the statement “I feel a pain” is that of feeling or having a pain, not that of being a pain or of being painful. And whether or not we construe ‘feel’ as a perceptual verb and allow that I can be said to feel something to be a pain, I can hardly be described as feeling anything to have the attribute of feeling a pain or as feeling this attribute to be instantiated. Our language may suggest that pains are perceived, but it does not suggest — and it seems to me clearly not to be true — that one perceives the feeling or the ‘having’ of one’s pains.

III If one finds it puzzling that there can be the sort of self-reference that occurs in the use “as subject” of the first-person pronouns, i.e., that there can be self-

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ascriptions that are absolutely immune to error through misidentification and are not based on self-observation, one should reflect on the fact that if this were not possible there would be much else, and much that we take for granted, that would also not be possible. The question of how it is possible that there should be such self-reference is equivalent to the question of how it is possible that there should be predicates, or attributes, the self-ascription of which is immune to error through misidentification. And this question seems to me to be at the root of the larger question of how it is possible that there should be psychological attributes, or, what is almost though not quite the same thing, the question of how it is possible that there should be what Strawson has called “P-predicates.” It has often been held to be one of the defining features of the realm of the mental, or the psychological, that each person knows of his own mental or psychological states in a way in which no other person could know of them. We can put what is true in this by saying that there is an important and central class of psychological predicates, let us call them “P*-predicates,” each of which can be known to be instantiated in such a way that knowing it to be instantiated in that way is equivalent to knowing it to be instantiated in oneself.7 There are psychological predicates that are not P*predicates — e.g., “is highly intelligent.” But I think that those which are not P*-predicates are classified as psychological predicates only because they are related in certain ways to those which are; e.g., they are predicable only of things of which some P*-predicates are also predicable, and many of them ascribe dispositions that manifest themselves in the having of P*-predicates.8 If this is right, the question of how it is possible that there should be psychological predicates turns essentially on the question of how it is possible that there should be P*-predicates, and this is the same as the question of how it is

7. A more explicit formulation is this: Φ is a P*-predicate if and only if there is a way w of knowing Φ to be instantiated such that, necessarily, S knows Φ to be instantiated in way w if and only if S knows that he himself is Φ. It is a consequence of this that, although self-ascriptions of P*-predicates need not be incorrigible and although it is not necessarily the case that if a P*-predicate applies to a person that person knows that it applies to him, it is necessarily the case that if a person knows that a P*-predicate applies to him he knows that it applies to him in the “special way” appropriate to that predicate (which does not preclude that he should also be in a position to know that it applies to him in other ways, i.e., ways in which others might know that it applies to him). Thus if one construes ‘feeling pain’ as the “special way” in which a person knows that he is in pain and holds that it is possible for a person to be in pain and know that he is in pain (e.g., on the basis of his behavior) without feeling pain, one should hold that the predicate of ‘is (am) in pain’ is not a P*-predicate and that its self-ascription is not immune to error through misidentification. But I can see no reason for holding this view. 8. Strawson makes closely related points about what he refers to as “some important classes of P-predicates”; see his Individuals (New York: Doubleday, 1959):104–107.

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possible that there should be predicates the self-ascription of which is absolutely immune to error through misidentification. There is another question that seems to me to turn essentially on this question, namely, the question of how it is possible that there should be a firstperson pronoun at all; i.e., how it is possible that people should be able to employ a referring expression whose meaning is given by the rule that it refers to the person who uses it. There, I think, is an important sense in which the “use as subject” of the first-person pronouns is more fundamental than their “use as object.” It is possible to imagine a people who speak a primitive language containing a first-person pronoun but no P*-predicates — let us suppose that the only predicates in this language, and thus the only predicates self-ascribed by its speakers, are what Strawson calls “M-predicates,” i.e., predicates that do not “imply the possession of consciousness on the part of that to which they are ascribed” (105). As I have already noted, it is possible for there to be selfascriptions involving self-identification only if there are some self-ascriptions that do not involve self-identification. Now there are M-predicates, e.g., “is facing a table,” which can in some circumstances be self-ascribed without identification. But in order to describe the circumstances in which such selfascriptions could occur and in order to formulate the grounds of such selfascriptions, it would be necessary to employ predicates, P*-predicates, that could not be expressed in our imaginary language. A speaker of this language would have to learn to self-ascribe such M-predicates as ‘is facing a table’ under just those circumstances in which he would be entitled to self-ascribe certain P*-predicates, e.g., ‘sees a table in the center of one’s field of vision’, if only he had these P*-predicates in his vocabulary. And if he can be taught to self-ascribe an M-predicate in this way, thus showing that he can discriminate between cases in which a certain P*-predicate applies to him and cases in which it does not, there would seem to be no reason in principle why he could not be taught to self-ascribe the P*-predicate itself. I think we can say that anyone who can self-ascribe any predicate whatever thereby shows that he is potentially capable of self-ascribing some P*-predicates, and that if he is presently incapable of doing so this is due simply to a correctable lack in his vocabulary or his stock of concepts. Something similar can be said of other sorts of reference. It is a condition of someone’s being able to make a demonstrative reference, of the sort that does not involve identification, that he should in some way perceive the object referred to. Anyone who can correctly employ referring expressions of the form ‘this so and so’ thereby shows that he is potentially capable of self-

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ascribing P*-predicates of the form ‘perceives a so and so’. There is another way of indicating the priority I am claiming for the use “as subject” of ‘I’ over its use “as object.” The clearest cases of the use “as object” are those in which the predicate self-ascribed is an M-predicate. Now where ‘Φ’ is an M-predicate, to say that I am Φ is to say that my body is Φ. And if asked what it means to call a body “my body” I could say something like this: “My body is the body from whose eyes I see, the body whose mouth emits sounds when I speak, the body whose arm goes up when I raise my arm, the body that has something pressing against it when I feel pressure, so on.” All the uses of ‘I’ that occur in this explanation of the meaning of the phrase ‘my body’, which in turn can be used to explicate the use “as object” of the first-person pronouns in the self-ascription of M-predicates, are themselves uses “as subject”. To put this in another way, M-predicates are mine in virtue of being connected in a certain way with P*-predicates that are mine.9 There is, I think, a tendency to find the use “as subject” of ‘I’ mysterious and to think that it is perhaps not reference at all, because it cannot be assimilated to other sorts of reference, e.g., to the use “as object” of ‘I’ or to demonstrative reference, the latter being taken as paradigms of unproblematic reference. This tendency ought not to survive the realization that these other sorts of reference are possible only because this sort of self-reference, that involving the use “as subject” of ‘I’, is possible. There is, I think, an important sense in which each person’s system of reference has that person himself as its anchoring point, and it is important for an understanding of the notion of reference, and also for an understanding of the notion of the mental, that we understand why and how this is so.

9. In ‘Physicalism’ (op. cit.) Thomas Nagel mentions this view, that “My physical states are only derivatively mine, since they are states of a body which is mine in virtue of being related in the appropriate way to my psychological states,” as a source of the view that the subject of psychological states cannot be the body. The reasoning is that since the psychological states “are mine in an original, and not merely derivative, sense,” their subject “cannot be the body which is derivatively mine.” I think that the answer to this is that it is only under a certain description, namely, qua subject of certain M-predicates, that my body is “derivatively mine,” and that this is compatible with it, that same thing, being “nonderivatively mine” under some other description, e.g., “subject of my thoughts and experiences”. I should mention that Nagel does not endorse the reasoning that I am here rejecting.

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Chapter 6

Self-identification* Gareth Evans University of Oxford

1.

Introductory

I approach the subject-matter of the present chapter with some trepidation. ‘I’-thoughts give rise to the most challenging philosophical questions, which have exercised the most considerable philosophers, including Descartes, Kant, and Wittgenstein, and I have no illusion that I am able to answer these questions. (For one thing, there can be no complete understanding of self-identification without an understanding of the self-ascription of mental predicates; and no adequate understanding of the self-ascription of mental predicates without an account of the significance of those predicates — in short, without an account of the mind.) However, there are reasons why a work on the general theory of reference cannot simply ignore the problems of self-identification, even if it does not purport to give a definitive answer to them. It cannot be assumed that this mode of identification, which is anyway known to give rise to difficult questions, can be fitted into whatever general framework has been constructed for understanding thoughts about particular objects. And while it would be presumptuous to look for much in the way of dividends in the understanding of the general philosophical problems of the self, it is not presumptuous to examine self- identification in the hope that light will be cast upon the modes of identification which we have been considering, and that some of the ideas thrown up in the course of the previous chapter may have application. For, despite considerable differences, ‘I’-thoughts are thoughts of the same general character as ‘here’ thoughts and ‘this’-thoughts.

* This chapter reproduces Chapter Seven of Evans 1982 in its entirety, except for four short appendices at the end of the original.

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Let me begin by explaining very generally what I take this similarity to consist in. When we are interested in ‘I’-thoughts, we are interested in thoughts which might typically be expressed with the use of the first-person pronoun.1 We are not interested in all thoughts which a subject may have ‘about himself ’, for presumably a person may think about someone who is in fact himself without realizing that he is doing so. Oedipus was thinking about Oedipus, that is to say, himself, when he thought that the slayer of Laius should be killed; but Oedipus was not thinking about himself ‘self-consciously’ (this is just a label for the kind of thinking which interests us), because he did not realize that he was the slayer of Laius.2 What is it for Oedipus to realize that he is the slayer of Laius? One thing seems clear: it is not to realize that the Φ is the slayer of Laius, for any descriptive concept Φ. It is not to realize that the son of Jocasta is the slayer of Laius, or that the man who answered the riddle of the Sphinx is the slayer of Laius, because Oedipus might realize these things without realizing that he is the slayer of Laius (not knowing that, or having forgotten that, he is the son of Jocasta or the man who answered the Sphinx’s riddle); and he might realize that he is the slayer of Laius without realizing these things, for the same reason. (This is too short an argument on a difficult point, but it has been considerably filled out in the literature, and will be substantiated in the course of this chapter.)3 There seem to be at least two indispensable consequences which we should expect from such a realization. In the first place, Oedipus must appreciate the relevance, to propositions of the form ‘The slayer of Laius is F
’, of the various special ways he has (as every person does) of gaining knowledge about himself. Secondly, Oedipus must realize how to act upon propositions of the form ‘The

1. Though it seems to me to be completely inessential that there should exist such a device in the subject’s language. 2. However, in order to avoid unnecessary prolixity, I shall use phrases like ‘think of oneself ’ and ‘Idea of oneself ’ in the ‘intensional’ rather than the ‘extensional’ sense, so that they are equivalent to ‘think of oneself self-consciously’ and ‘self-conscious Idea of oneself ’. 3. See, e.g., Hector-Neri Castañeda, ‘“He”: a Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness’, Ratio 8 (1966), 130–157 [this volume, xxx]; and ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators’, American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967), 85–100. The point needs making with some care. Descriptions like ‘the person in front of this’, or ‘the person here now,’, might seem to yield counterexamples. But it would be pointless to object on this score. Counting these as counterexamples would require a priority of ‘this’ and ‘here’ over ‘I’, which is indefensible, as will become obvious. (In any case the definition of ‘I’ in terms of ‘here’ would be hopeless: one can think of onself while hurtling through space, and consequently unable to secure a grip on anything for one’s ‘here’-thoughts: see Evans 1982, §6.3.)

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slayer of Laius is F
’. For example, if Oedipus believes that they are looking for the slayer of Laius, and if he does not wish to be apprehended, then he should make himself scarce.4 That is to say, the Idea which one has of oneself involves the same kinds of elements as we discerned in the case of, say, ‘here’ (Evans 1982, §6.3): an element involving sensitivity of thoughts to certain information, and an element involving the way in which thoughts are manifested in action. Such an analysis would certainly explain the widely recognized irreducibility of self-conscious thoughts to thoughts involving definite descriptions: for no descriptive thoughts could guarantee the existence of these special dispositions. Of course, it must be recognized immediately that there are crucial differences. We clearly do have ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves, and ‘I’-thoughts are thoughts which are controlled, or are disposed to be controlled, by information gained in these ways. But the ways in which we are sensitive to the states of ourselves are both more varied and more complex than the sensitivity to places that underlies our ‘here’-Ideas. One quite unprecedented feature is the way in which ‘I’-thoughts depend upon the knowledge we have in memory of our past states (see §5). And an even more important difference lies in the fact that the essence of ‘I’ is self-reference. This means that ‘I’-thoughts are thoughts in which a subject of thought and action is thinking about himself — i.e. about a subject of thought and action. It is true that I manifest selfconscious thought, like ‘here’-thought, in action; but I manifest it, not in knowing which object to act upon, but in acting. (I do not move myself; I myself move.) Equally, I do not merely have knowledge of myself, as I might have knowledge of a place: I have knowledge of myself as someone who has knowledge and who makes judgements, including those judgements I make about myself. Nevertheless, despite these important differences, the ingredients are sufficiently familiar for us to believe that we might get to know our way about. It is worth clearing away, at this early stage, a curious idea, expressed in different ways by Geach and by Strawson, to the effect that the interest of ‘I’ is

4. This element in an account of ‘I’ is stressed in much recent work: e.g. John Perry, ‘Frege on Demonstratives’, The Philosophical Review 86:474–97, and ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Nous 13 (1979): 3–21 [this volume]; David Lewis, ‘Attitudes De Dicto and De Se’, Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513–543. Neglect, in this work, of the other element produces a strangely one-sided effect — ‘strangely’, because the other element is just as striking, and clearly parallel, and also because the dominant conception of the identification of empirical content concentrates exclusively on the input or evidential side of things. This chapter will partly redress the balance by rather neglecting the action component.

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exclusively the interest of a communicative device — that is, in effect, that there are no Ideas corresponding to the pronoun and available to be exercised in thinking. According to Geach,5 Descartes in his solitary meditations had no need of ‘I’ in such judgements as ‘I’m getting into an awful muddle’; he could have judged ‘This is really a dreadful muddle!’ Similarly, Strawson6 suggests that it is right to speak of self-ascription, for instance of pain, only because one tells others that one is in pain; otherwise one’s judgement can simply be ‘There is a pain’. Both these philosophers are preoccupied with the fact that there is no need for me to tell myself who it is who is getting into a muddle, or who is in pain. But there is a mistake here. Reference, as a communicative phenomenon, involves getting an audience to think of the right object (the intended object). Obviously, thinking of an object does not consist in getting oneself to think of the right object (the intended object). But surely this cannot show that there is no such thing as thinking of an object, in a certain way, outside of communicative contexts. Indispensable though those familiar ingredients (an information component and an action component) are in any account of the Ideas we have of ourselves, our previous reflections (Chapter 6) have made it sufficiently clear that they cannot constitute an exhaustive account of our ‘I’-Ideas. So long as we focus upon judgements which a person might make about himself upon the basis of the relevant ways of gaining knowledge, the inadequacy may not strike us. A subject’s knowledge of what it is for the thought ‘I am in pain’ to be true may appear to be exhausted by his capacity to decide, simply upon the basis of how he feels, whether or not it is true — and similarly in the case of all the other ways of gaining knowledge about ourselves. However, our view of ourselves is not Idealistic: we are perfectly capable of grasping propositions about ourselves which we are quite incapable of deciding, or even offering grounds for. I can grasp the thought that I was breast-fed, for example, or that I was unhappy on my first birthday, or that I tossed and turned in my sleep last night, or that I shall be dragged unconscious through the streets of Chicago, or that I shall die. In other words, our thinking about ourselves conforms to the Generality Constraint.7 And this means that one’s Idea of oneself must also comprise, over

5. Mental Acts, Ch 26. 6. Individuals, pp. 99–100. 7. This thought is diametrically opposed to a line of thought of Wittgenstein’s, in which he encouraged us to look at first-person psychological statements in a way that brought out their similarity to groans of pain — i.e. precisely to think of them as unstructured responses to situations. (He was well aware that

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and above the information-link and the action link, a knowledge of what it would be for an identity of the form I = δt to be true, where δt is a fundamental identification of a person: an identification of a person which — unlike one’s ‘I’ identification — is of a kind which could be available to someone else. Only if this is so can one’s general understanding of what it is for a person to satisfy the predicates ‘ξ is dead’, ‘ξ is breast-fed’, ‘ξ is unhappy’, etc. be coupled with one’s Idea of oneself to yield an understanding of what it would be for oneself to satisfy these predicates. (The tenses in the various examples will be taken care of by our knowledge of what it is for δt = δ¢t¢ to be true, when t π t¢
; i.e. by our grasp of the identity-conditions of persons over time: cf. Evans 1982, §4.3.) My insistence that ‘I’-Ideas be recognized to conform to the Generality Constraint is correlative with Strawson’s parallel insistence that the Ideas (or concepts) of properties of consciousness obey a similar constraint: namely (to put it in my terms) that anyone who has a grasp of the concept of being F must be able to understand what it is for an arbitrary proposition of the form a is F to be true (where a is an Idea which he possesses of an object).8 The Generality Constraint requires us to see the thought that a is F as lying at the intersection of two series of thoughts: the thoughts that a is F, that a is G, that a is H,…, on the one hand, and the thoughts that a is F, that b is F, that c is F,…, on the other. Strawson has explored the consequences of one kind of generality, and I am exploring the consequences of the other. It is vital to remember this feature of our thought about ourselves. ‘I’-thoughts are not, as is sometimes suggested, restricted to thoughts about states of affairs ‘from the point of view of the subject’. Nor can the thoughts I have been discussing be hived off from genuine self-conscious thought, for example by suggesting that by ‘I will die’, I mean that Gareth Evans will die. Not at all; there is just as much of a gap between the knowledge that Gareth Evans will die and the self-conscious realization that I will die as there is between any thought to the effect that the Φ is F and the self-conscious thought that I am F. It is not wholly inaccurate to say that I grasp such an eventuality by thinking of myself in the way that I think of others; this is just another way of saying that the fundamental level of thought about persons is involved. But it is of course essential that I am aware that the person of whom I am so thinking is myself
; certainly I must have in mind what it is for δ is dead to be true, for

this would enable him not to think about certain issues.) See Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, Oxford, 1953): §§404–406. 8. See Individuals, p. 99.

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arbitrary δ, but I must also have in mind what it is for δ = I to be true. My thought about myself does satisfy the Generality Constraint; and this is because I can make sense of identifying a person, conceived from the standpoint of an objective view of the world, as myself.9 It has been suggested that we do not in fact understand what it is for such an identity to be true. Thomas Nagel has written: I can conceive impersonally my house burning down, and the individual T. N. standing before it, feeling hot and miserable, and looking hot and miserable to bystanders … If I add to all this the premiss that I am T.N., I will imagine feeling hot and miserable,.seeing the sympathetic bystanders, etc.; but this is not to imagine anything happening differently.10

Earlier he wrote: The addition of this premiss makes a great difference in how [the] world is conceived, but no difference in what is conceived to be the case.11

It is upon this basis that Nagel suggests the existence of an unbridgeable gulf between subjective and objective — between, as I should put it, propositions about persons and objects formulated at the fundamental level of thought, and propositions formulated with such Ideas as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘this’. Nagel envisages the universe considered sub specie aeternitas, and then wonders how to incorporate into that model the fact that such-and-such a person is me. Since this identification does not seem to make any difference to the model — nothing is differently conceived — Nagel suggests that we cannot really understand what it is for such an identity-proposition to be true. But in fact I have already implicitly explained what is involved in grasping such an identity-proposition — in knowing what it is for such an identityproposition to be true. It seems to me clear that as we conceive of persons, they are distinguished from one another by fundamental grounds of difference of the same kind as those which distinguish other physical things, and that a fundamental identification of a person involves a consideration of him as the person

9. Even if we consider cases in which the subject is normally in a position to that he satisfies a predicate, we do not take an Idealistic view of such judgements. There remains a gap — the ever-present possibility of error — between evidence and conclusion. The idea that I can identify myself with a person objectively conceived is often mis-expressed, e.g., in terms of the idea that I realize that I am an object to others (also an object of outer sense, as Kant says: Critique of Pure Reason, B415). This misleadingly imports an ideal verificationist construal of the point. (See Evans 1982, §§4.2, 6.3.) 10. The Possibility of Altruism (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1970),: 103. 11. Ibid.

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occupying such-and-such a spatio-temporal location.12 Consequently, to know what it is for δt = I to be true, for arbitrary δt,, is to know what is involved in locating oneself in a spatio-temporal map of the world.13 (See Evans 1982, §6.3.) Such an identity-proposition need not make any difference to how the spatio-temporal map of the world is conceived, but it will make a great difference to how the subject’s immediate environment is conceived. (Nagel was looking for the impact in the wrong place.) It is true that we cannot state in non-indexical terms what it is for the identity-proposition to be true; but why should we suppose that everything that is true can be represented in that way? Nagel may conclude that propositions like I am δt are not objectively true — true from the standpoint of eternity. I should not feel obliged to quarrel with this, since it is indeed true that such a proposition is capable of being grasped only by the person who can formulate it; so if ‘objective’ means ‘graspable by anyone’, such identifications are indeed not objectively true. Nagel’s suggestion — that we do not really understand what it is for us to be identical with objects conceived to be parts of the objective spatio-temporal framework — surely must be wrong. Were it correct, our thinking about ourselves could not conform to the Generality Constraint. We would then have to suppose that we have an Idealist conception of the self.14 Conversely, just as our thoughts about ourselves require the intelligibility of this link with the world thought of ‘objectively’, so our ‘objective’ thought about the world also requires the intelligibility of this link. For no one can be credited with an ‘objective’ model of the world if he does not grasp that he is modeling the world he is in — that he has a location somewhere in the model, as do the things that he can see. Nothing can be a cognitive map unless it can he used as a map — unless the world as perceived, and the world as mapped, can be identified. For this reason, I think that the gulf between the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ modes of thought which Nagel tries to set up is spurious. Each is indispensably bound up with the other. Despite the important differences, then, between ‘I’ and ‘this’ and ‘here’, the general structure of our account of these Ideas is the same. In particular, a

12. I stress that I am speaking of our ordinary scheme of thought. There are other conceptions — e.g., conceptions of control systems or information stores — which might serve some of our purposes, and which would involve different fundamental grounds of difference. 13. (See §4.) 14. This would be the same as saying that ‘I’ does not refer to anything. (This would be a reason for the extraordinary conclusion of G.E.M.Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., Mind and Language, pp. 45–65.

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subject’s self-conscious thought about himself must be informed (or must at least he liable to be informed) by information which the subject may gain of himself in each of a range of ways of gaining knowledge of himself; and at the same time the subject must know which object it is of which he thus has, or is capable of having, knowledge. Now even if it is commonly agreed that there is a connection between thinking of oneself self-consciously and thinking in ways that are liable to be informed by certain kinds of evidence or information about oneself which one is capable of acquiring,15 there is widespread misunderstanding about what kinds of evidence or information they are. For it is widely believed that selfconscious thought is exclusively thought informed by the knowledge that one may have about one’s own mental life. I shall show that this is quite incorrect. It is true, as I said earlier, that the essence of self-consciousness is selfreference, that is to say, thinking, by a subject of judgements, about himself, and hence, necessarily, about a subject of judgements. (This means that we shall not have an adequate model of self-consciousness until our model provides for the thought, by a subject, of his own judgements. Without that, no matter how much it mimicked our own use of ‘I’, the model would always be open to a sceptical challenge: how can it be guaranteed that the subject is referring to himself?) It follows that in a self-conscious thought, the subject must think of an object in a way that permits it to be characterized as the subject of that very thought. But it certainly does not follow that he must think of himself as the author of that very thought — if, indeed, such a thing is intelligible; nor, more generally, that he must think of himself exclusively as an author of judgements, or even as a possessor of a mental life. On the contrary, we shall see that our self-conscious thoughts about ourselves also rest upon various ways we have of gaining knowledge of ourselves as physical things. If there is to be a division between the mental and the physical, it is a division which is spanned by the Ideas we have of ourselves. Before moving on to an elaboration of the ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves on which our ‘I’-thoughts depend, I want to give a warning about a danger inherent in all reflections about self-consciousness. Up to this point, we have been able to take the subject of thought, and his

15. “Just as I cannot know what form the evidence of a fire will take unless I know whether the fire is past, present, or future, so I cannot know what to expect in the way of evidence that one of the persons in a group has been poisoned unless I know whether it is I or someone else.” Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism, p. 103.

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identity, for granted. We have been able to say such things as ‘The subject is disposed to treat this or that state of information as germane to such-and-such a thought’. For instance, we might have said that the subject’s knowledge of what it is for such-and-such a future-tense proposition to be true depends on his ability to tell, later, whether or not it is true. Now there is no harm in continuing this way of proceeding when we come to consider self-identification: indeed it is unavoidable. But we must realize what we are doing. We are building the subject’s identity over time into the description of his situation. This may make it appear that he has an infallible knowledge of what is involved in this identity; but the appearance is nothing but an artefact of our way of describing the situation.16 Let me give two connected examples of the kind of mistake I wish to warn against. G.E.M. Anscombe, in her fascinating paper on ‘I’-thoughts,17 observes that it is not possible for the subject to identify different things by the various ‘I’-identifications he makes over time. It is not possible for there to be an ‘unnoticed substitution’, so that he thinks that he is identifying the same thing, when in fact he is not doing so. This corresponds to nothing in the case of repeated identifications of objects other than the subject himself, and such a logical guarantee of correctness makes Miss Anscombe suspicious; it is one of the reasons she gives for her extraordinary conclusion that self-conscious thought is not thought about an object at all — that the self is not an object. But, of course, the ‘logical guarantee’ is simply produced by Miss Anscombe’s way of describing the situation, in terms of one and the same subject having thoughts at various times. It is a simple tautology that, if it is correct to describe the situation thus, the self-identifications are all identifications of the same self, and hence it cannot be a reason for anything.18 In the second example, the mistake seems to give a subject an infallible knowledge of what it is for a state of affairs to concern his own future. Pursuing the style of description which served us adequately in the discussion of the subject’s grasp of future tense propositions about other objects, we might say something like this: the subject’s knowledge of what is involved in a future state

16. I think Kant may have had this phenomenon in mind, as much as anything which depends specially upon memory, when he spoke, in the Third Paralogism, of the “logical identity of the ‘I’” (Critique of Pure Reason, A363). 17. ‘The First Person’, op. cit. 18. There are phenomena (having to do with memory) which are superficially similar to the spurious one that Miss Anscombe describes: see §5.

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of affairs concerning himself can depend upon his ability, when the time comes, to decide whether or not the state of affairs obtains. We might say: certainly, when time t comes, he will know whether or not the hypothesis that he expressed earlier by ‘I’ll be in pain at t’ was or was not correct, just by whether or not he is in pain at t
; so all he has to envisage, when he envisages the future state of affairs of his being in pain, is a future pain. What more could possibly he involved? For this certainly seems to be a foolproof method for verifying the prediction. It is not possible for the subject to have got hold of the wrong person at time t. Now, I do not mean to deny that there is something correct about this, as a description of the subject’s envisagings about his own future.19 But what is suspicious is the complete adequacy we have built into his conception by our way of describing it. Of course it is not possible for the subject to have got hold of the wrong person — as the case is described, there is a logical guarantee of adequacy. But this is, again, an artefact of our way of describing the situation: it certainly does not show that, just by envisaging future situations, a subject has a complete and clear conception of what it is for a future state of affairs to involve himself. The ‘method of verification’ has a presupposition. Of course we must not say (using the ordinary vocabulary): it presupposes that the subject remains the same over time. But it presupposes that the subject who exists at t and ‘remembers’ the hypothesis expressed earlier is the person who made the hypothesis, and hence is the person whom it concerns. And this is something of which he can have no genuine logical guarantee. Forewarned against these errors, in what follows I shall continue to use the ordinary vocabulary.

2. Immunity to error through misidentification If an analogy is to be sought between self-identification and one of the modes of identification we considered in the last chapter, it is ‘here’ rather than ‘this’ which provides the closer parallel. Just as it is not necessary, if a subject is to be thinking about a place as ‘here’, that he actually have any information deriving

19. My point is not to deny that there is such a thing as criterionless self-ascription of anticipated properties. (I think this is simply the other side of the same coin as criterionless self-ascription of remembered properties, for which see §5.) But I do want to deny that this is a matter of a logical guarantee of an identity assumption.

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from it, so it seems not to be necessary, if a subject is to think about himself self-consciously, that he actually have any information about himself. A subject may be amnesiac and anaesthetized, and his senses may be prevented from functioning; yet he may still be able to think about himself, wondering, for example, why he is not receiving information in the usual ways.20 But it would be as wrong to conclude from this that self-consciousness can be explained without reference to the various ways that subjects have of gaining knowledge about themselves, as we decided it would be to draw the parallel conclusion about ‘here’ (see Evans 1982, §6.3). It is essential, if a subject is to be thinking about himself self-consciously, that he be disposed to have such thinking controlled by information which may become available to him in each of the relevant ways. Or, at least, so I shall argue.21 So to argue is to claim that each of these ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves gives rise to judgements which exhibit the phenomenon I called in the last chapter ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (see Evans 1982, §6.6). And certainly there seem to be indications that this phenomenon does arise. To take the stock kind of example, when the first component is expressive of knowledge which the subject has about his own states, available to him in the normal way, and not taken by him to be knowledge which he has gained, or may have gained, in any other way,22 the utterance ‘Someone seems to see something red, but is it I who seem to see something red?’ does not appear to make sense. But the phenomenon appears to be more widespread than the stock examples. For example, it seems equally not to make sense for a subject to utter ‘Someone’s legs are crossed, but is it I whose legs are crossed?’, when the first component is expressive of knowledge which the subject has gained about the position of his limbs, available to him in the normal way. Unfortunately, many philosophers give the quite mistaken impression that it is only our knowledge of our satisfaction of mental properties which gives rise

20. See Anscombe,’The First Person’: 57–58. This is another basis on which she attempts to found her extraordinary conclusion. See n. 21 below. 21. It is not surprising that ‘I’ follows the model of ‘here’ rather than ‘this’. The explanation is somewhat similar to the explanation for ‘here’ (see Evans 1982, §6.3). A subject does not need to have information actually available to him in any of the relevant ways in order to know that there is just one object to which he is thus dispositionally related. (This undermines Miss Anscombe’s argument about the anaesthetized man, that since no object presented to him, there is no room for him to use a demonstrative expression referring to himself.) 22. See Evans 1982, §6.6 for an explanation of the need for this qualification (which I shall drop in future).

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to judgements exhibiting immunity to error through misidentification.23 This is tantamount to the claim that self-conscious thought rests only upon the knowledge we have of ourselves as mental or spiritual beings. And this in turn generates the unfortunate, and quite inaccurate, impression that in thinking of oneself self-consciously, one is paradigmatically thinking about oneself as the bearer of mental properties, or as a mind — so that our ‘I’-thoughts leave it open, as a possibility, that we are perhaps nothing but a mind. In order to eradicate this impression, we must go back to its source: a remarkable passage of Wittgenstein’s where the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification is noticed for the first time. Now the idea that the real I lives in my body is connected with the peculiar grammar of the word ‘I’, and the misunderstandings this grammar is liable to give rise to. There are two different cases in the use of the word ‘I’ (or ‘my’) which I might call ‘the use as object’ and ‘the use as subject’. Examples of the first kind of use are these: ‘My arm is broken’,’I have grown six inches’, ‘I have a bump on my forehead’, ‘The wind blows my hair about’. Examples of the second kind are: ‘I see so and so’, ‘I hear so and so’, ‘I try to lift my arm’, ‘I think it will rain’, ‘I have a toothache’. One can point to the difference between these two categories by saying: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it: The possibility of an error has been provided for … It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine, when really it is my neighbour’s. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask ‘are you sure that it’s you who have pains?’ would be nonsensical … And now this way of stating our idea suggests itself that it is impossible that in making the statement ‘I have a toothache’ I should have mistaken another person for myself as it is to moan with pain by mistake, having mistaken someone else for me. To say, ‘I have pain’ is no more a statement about a particular person than moaning is. ‘But surely the word “I” in the mouth of a man refers to the man who says it; it points to himself …’. But it was quite superfluous to point to himself.24

23. See Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: 164–165: both of his examples relate to mental self-ascription. See also Shoemaker, ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ [this volume]. Shoemaker does note that there are other kinds of statement that exhibit this immunity, e.g., ‘I am facing a table’ (cf. §3 below); but he argues that their possession of the property is only derivative, in virtue of the involvement of the psychological judgement ‘There is a table in my field of vision’: see p. 557. 24. The Blue and Brown Books [1933–4]: 66–67.

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It is worth briefly observing, first, that where there is immunity to error through misidentification, Wittgenstein draws the conclusion that the word ‘I’ is not being used to refer to (talk about) a particular object (a person). This seems to be just a mistake. For we have seen (Evans 1982, §6.6) that immunity to error through misidentification is a straightforward consequence of demonstrative identification; it will exist whenever a subject’s Idea of an object depends upon his ways of gaining knowledge about it. And demonstrative identification is, precisely, a way in which a thought can concern (be about) an object.25 The word ‘identify’ can do us a disservice here. In one sense, anyone who thinks about an object identifies that object (in thought): this is the sense involved in the use I have just made of the phrase ‘demonstrative identification’. It is quite another matter, as we saw, in effect, in Evans 1982, §6.6, for the thought to involve an identification component — for the thought to be identification-dependent. There is a danger of moving from the fact that there is no identification in the latter sense (that no criteria of recognition are brought to bear, and so forth) to the conclusion that there is no identification in the former sense. I am not sure that Wittgenstein altogether avoids this danger. But this conclusion is not our present concern, but rather, Wittgenstein’s treatment of examples like ‘The wind is blowing my hair’. For it was this treatment which gave rise to the widespread belief that the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification, which is so central to the notion of self-consciousness, does not extend to self-ascriptions of physical properties. But of course it does. There is a way of knowing that the property of ξ
’s hair being blown by the wind is currently instantiated, such that when the first component expresses knowledge gained in this way, the utterance ‘The wind is blowing someone’s hair, but is it my hair that the wind is blowing?’ will not make sense. Wittgenstein’s discussion does not take sufficient account of the fact that the property of being immune to error through misidentification is not one

25. One can perhaps imagine why Wittgenstein drew the conclusion. The information one seems to be presented with is simply that such-and-such a property is instantiated; there does not appear to be anything in the information to tell one which object instantiates the property (as there might be if the recognizable appearance of an object was also presented). So if one was talking about a particular object (person) one would be going beyond the information given. But we saw that in the case of demonstrative identification this conclusion will not follow if the subject can be credited with a knowledge of which object the information concerns; which he would nave, in that case, by virtue of being able to locate it. Now we have not yet enquired into the question in what out knowledge of which person we are consists. But it seems reasonable to suppose that we have such knowledge; and in the context of that supposition, the point about the content of the information by itself goes only a very short distance. (See, further, §4 below).

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which applies to propositions simpliciter, but one which applies only to judgements made upon this or that basis. Once we appreciate this relativity to a basis, which arguably must be taken into account in the case of mental self-ascription as well, the fact that there are cases involving the self-ascription of physical predicates in which ‘the possibility of error has been provided for’ will be seen not to impugn the fact that there are cases in which it just as clearly has not. It may be suggested that Wittgenstein is concerned with a different notion: that his question is not whether there is a way of knowing that one instantiates some property which generates immunity to error through misidentification in my sense, but whether there is a way of knowing it which does not. (Only if this last is not so will we have immunity to error through misidentification in the strong sense with which, according to this suggestion, Wittgenstein is concerned.) After all, it may be said, it is the possibility of discovering that what is in fact one’s own arm is bent, without knowing that it is one’s own, to which he appeals. But, first, the evidence that this is Wittgenstein’s concern is uncertain. The relevant direct statement is The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it: ‘The possibility of an error has been provided for.’

And this statement simply cannot be correctly used to mark off a category of propositions identified solely in terms of the predicate involved, independently of the question how one comes to know that the predicate is instantiated. Secondly, one cannot make this sort of absolute claim of immunity to error through misidentification for mental self-ascriptions either — at least not selfascriptions of the kind Wittgenstein chooses, which includes ‘I see so-and-so’ and ‘I hear so-and-so’. Consider a case in which I have reason to believe that my factual information may be misleading; it feels as if I am touching a piece of cloth, and my relevant visual information is restricted to seeing, in a mirror, a large number of hands reaching out and touching nothing, and one hand touching a piece of cloth. Here it makes sense for me to say ‘Someone is feeling a piece of cloth, but is it I?’ (One cannot produce this kind of case for mental predicates whose self-ascription is absolutely incorrigible. But what is the interest of this fact?) Thirdly, the stronger notion is in any case much less interesting. It is highly important that our ‘I’-Ideas are such that judgements controlled by certain ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves as physical and spatial things are immune to

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error through misidentification: that the hearing of the relevant information on ‘I’-thoughts rests upon no argument, or identification, but is simply constitutive of our having an ‘I’-Idea. (The fact that these ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves must enter into the informational component of a functional characterization of our ‘I’-Ideas — of what it is to think of oneself self-consciously — is the most powerful antidote to a Cartesian conception of the self.) Our task now is to investigate more precisely the way we have of gaining knowledge of ourselves upon which our ‘I’-thoughts depend. In the next two sections, I shall consider the bases of physical and mental self-knowledge; although, as we shall see, they can be separated only artificially.

3. Bodily self-ascription I shall discuss two ways we have of gaining knowledge of our physical states and properties, both of which give rise to the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. In the first place, we have what might be described as a general capacity to perceive our own bodies, although this can be broken down into several distinguishable capacities: our proprioceptive sense, our sense of balance, of heat and cold, and of pressure.26 Each of these modes of perception appears to give rise to judgements which are immune to error through misidentification. None of the following utterances appears to make sense when the first component expresses knowledge gained in the appropriate way: ‘Someone’s legs are crossed, but is it my legs that are crossed?’; ‘Someone is hot and sticky, but is it I who am hot and sticky?’; ‘Someone is being pushed, but is it I who am being pushed?’ There just does not appear to be a gap between the subject’s having information (or appearing to have information), in the appropriate way, that the property of being F is instantiated, and his having information (or appearing to have information) that he is F
; for him to have, or to appear to have, the information that the property is instantiated just is for it to appear to him that he is F.

26. I do not include in this list perceptual knowledge of the physical self based upon executing certain characteristic movements, e.g., looking down, or feeling one’s body with the sort of motions one uses in washing oneself. But actually I am not at all persuaded that judgements so based ought not to appear on the list, because I am not at all persuaded that they depend upon an identification component.

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If we attempt to impose some articulation in these cases, seeing I am F as based on b is F and I am b , then we run into considerable difficulties (of a kind with which we are now familiar: see Evans 1982, §6.6). The articulation might be recommended on the basis of the possibility of a deviant causal chain, linking the subject’s brain appropriately with someone else’s body, in such a way that he is in fact registering information from that other body. As before (Evans 1982, §6.6), I claim that this possibility merely shows the possibility of an error; it does not show that ordinary judgements of the kind in question are identification-dependent. In the first place, we cannot think of the kinaesthetic and proprioceptive system as gaining knowledge of truths about the condition of a body which leaves the question of the identity of the body open. If the subject does not know that he has his legs bent (say) on this basis (because he is in the situation described), then he does not know anything on this basis. (To judge that someone has his legs bent would be a wild shot in the dark.)27 In the second place, there are problems about the Ideas that would be involved in the supposed identification component. The supposed Idea b could be adequate only if it involved identification by description, on the lines of ‘the body from which I hereby have information’. Such an Idea would certainly be involved in one’s thinking if one knew one was in the abnormal situation described; but it is surely too sophisticated to be discerned as an element in the normal case of judgements of the kind we are considering. And, to turn to the other side of the supposed identification component: if our Ideas of ourselves were such as to leave room for such an identification component that is, if they did not have the legitimacy of this kind of physical self-ascription, without need for argument or identification, built in at the foundation — then it is quite unclear how they could ever allow for the identification of the self as a physical thing at all.28 The second way of gaining knowledge of our physical properties has an importance in our thought about ourselves which it is difficult to exaggerate.29

27. It would not be a wild shot in the dark if the subject had been told that he was linked up appropriately with someone else’s body. But then he would be in the position of knowing that the information was not being received in the normal way. Cf. Evans 1982, §6.6. 28. [See § 4] 29. It is a symptom of the importance of this mode of self-knowledge to our conception of ourselves that it, or some shadow of it, is preserved in even the most metaphysical accounts of the self, in which the self is regarded as the origin of the perceptual field, or as a point of view on the world. See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1921]: 5.6–5.641; and ‘Wittgenstein’s Notes for Lectures on “Private

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(We have already touched on it at several points: see Evans 1982, §§6.3, 6.6.) I have in mind the way in which we are able to know our position, orientation, and relation to other objects in the world upon the basis of our perceptions of the world. Included here are such things as: knowing that one is in one’s own bedroom by perceiving and recognizing the room and its contents; knowing that one is moving in a train by seeing the world slide by; knowing that there is a tree in front of one, or to the right or left, by seeing it; and so on. Once again, none of the following utterances appears to make sense when the first component expresses knowledge gained in this way: ‘Someone is in my bedroom, but is it I?’; ‘Someone is moving, but is it I?’; ‘Someone is standing in front of a tree, but is it I?’ The explanation of the importance of this way of gaining knowledge is not hard to find. Any thinker who has an idea of an objective spatial world — an idea of a world of objects and phenomena which can be perceived but which are not dependent on being perceived for their existence — must be able to think of his perception of the world as being simultaneously due to his position in the world, and to the condition of the world at that position.30 The very idea of a perceivable, objective, spatial world brings with it the idea of the subject as being in the world, with the course of his perceptions due to his changing position in the world and to the more or less stable way the world is. The idea that there is an objective world and the idea that the subject is somewhere cannot be separated, and where he is is given by what he can perceive. For the purposes of an almost entirely arbitrary, though traditional, distinction between the mental and the physical, we are leaving such self-ascriptions as ‘I am seeing a tree’ until the next section; but in fact they constitute an indispensable part of the little theory which is required for the idea of an objective spatial world. ‘I perceive such-and-such, such-and-such holds at p; so (probably) I am at p’; ‘I perceive such-and-such, I am at p, so such-and-such holds at p’; ‘I am at p, such-and-such does not hold at p, so I can’t really be perceiving such-and-such, even though it appears that I am’; ‘I was at p a moment ago, so I can only have got as far as p’, so I should expect to perceive such-and-such’. These arguments exploit principles connecting the subject’s position, the course of his perceptions, and the speed and continuity of his movement through space; and the child must learn to trip round and round those principles, so that he comes to

Experience” and “Sense Data”’ [1935?]: 271–320, at p. 299: “But I am in a favoured position. I am the centre of the world.” 30. See ‘Things Without the Mind’ for more on this.

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think effortlessly in these ways.31 In §1 I suggested that our knowledge of what it is for I am δt to be true, where δt is a fundamental identification of a person (conceived of therefore, as an element of the objective spatial order), consists in our knowledge of what it is for us to be located at a position in space. In Evans 1982, §6.3 I argued that this in turn can be regarded as consisting in a practical capacity to locate ourselves in space by means of exactly the kinds of patterns of reasoning that I have just described. It is this capacity which enables us to make sense of the idea that we ourselves are elements in the objective order; and this is what is required for our thoughts about ourselves to conform to the Generality Constraint (Evans 1982, §4.3, §1). Now if this is right, we can see that the perception-based judgements about our position and our relations to other things which we are discussing must be identification-free.32 If we try to regard them as identification-dependent, we shall run into the same difficulties as before. First, there is no knowing about the position, orientation, etc., of some physical object in the ways in question, in such a way that it is left an open question which object it is. And second, there is the familiar problem about the supposed identification component. The object in question could be identified only by description, as the object about whose position, orientation, etc., information is being obtained in the ways in question; such an Idea would indeed be adequate, and might be used in circumstances which were abnormal or taken to be abnormal, but hardly figures in the normal case. And if we try to give an account of the Idea the subject has of himself, leaving it an open question whether the object whose position and relations can be known about in this way is the subject, it becomes quite problematic how the subject could ever make sense of the thought that he is located somewhere.33 The considerations of this section tell against the common idea that our conception of ourselves ‘from the first-person perspective’ is a conception of a

31. Do we really have to go any further than this in order to answer Strawson’s questions (Individuals, p. 93): “(1) Why are one’s states of consciousness ascribed to anything at all? And (2) Why are they ascribed to the very same thing as certain corporeal characteristics, a certain physical situation, etc.?” 32. It is difficult enough to make sense of the Cartesian position, in which this is not regarded as a way of gaining knowledge about oneself at all (only about something which one ‘has’). But I confess to finding myself utterly defeated by the suggestion that while this is a way of gaining knowledge of oneself, it is one which exploits an identification. 33. It was precisely for this reason that I argue (Evans 1982, §6.3) that ‘here’ should not be regarded as defined in terms of ‘I’ (as if ‘I’ had a priority). In fact ‘I’ and ‘here’ are exactly correlative: the same capacity underlies understanding of both, namely knowledge of what it is for I am at p to be true.

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thinking, feeling, and perceiving thing, and not necessarily of a physical thing located in space. The theoretical significance of immunity to error through misidentification is that it shows that evidence of certain kinds bears on thoughts involving ‘I’-Ideas directly and immediately. It is a fact about ‘I’-Ideas of objects that evidence of these kinds pertains to thoughts about those objects. (The immediate bearing of such evidence would have to be part of a functional characterization of what it is to have an ‘I’-Idea.) Thus the cases of immunity to error through misidentification that we have considered in this section reveal that our conception of ourselves is firmly anti-Cartesian: our ‘I’-Ideas are Ideas of bearers of physical no less than mental properties.

4. Mental self-ascription My discussion of the ways in which we have knowledge of our own mental states will be extremely incomplete. My purpose is simply to bring to mind some of the main features of this kind of self-knowledge, so that we can have at least a rough idea of how it can be incorporated into our Idea of ourselves. In fact, I shall concentrate upon the ways we have of knowing what we believe and what we experience, for I believe that if we get these right, we shall have a good model of self-knowledge (or introspection) to follow in other cases. In particular, I shall quite avoid the idea of this kind of self-knowledge as a form of perception — mysterious in being incapable of delivering inaccurate results. Wittgenstein is reported to have said in an Oxford discussion: If a man says to me, looking at the sky, ‘I think it is going to rain, therefore I exist’, I do not understand him.34

The contribution is certainly gnomic; but I think Wittgenstein was trying to undermine the temptation to adopt a Cartesian position, by forcing us to look more closely at the nature of our knowledge of our own mental properties, and, in particular, by forcing us to abandon the idea that it always involves an inward glance at the states and doings of something to which only the person himself has access. The crucial point is the one I have italicized: in making a selfascription of belief, one’s eyes are, so to speak, or occasionally literally, directed outward — upon the world. If someone asks me ‘Do you think there is going to

34. Christopher Coope, Peter Geach, Timothy Ports, and Roger White, eds., A Wittgensteinian Workbook (Blackwell, Oxford, 1971): 21. (My emphasis.)

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be a third world war?’, I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena as I would attend to if I were answering the question ‘Will there be a third world war?’ I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p. (There is no question of my applying a procedure for determining beliefs to something, and hence no question of my possibly applying the procedure to the wrong thing.) If a judging subject applies this procedure, then necessarily he will gain knowledge of one of his own mental states: even the most determined sceptic cannot find here a gap in which to insert his knife. We can encapsulate this procedure for answering questions about what one believes in the following simple rule: whenever you are in a position to assert that p, you are ipso facto in a position to assert ‘I believe that p’. But it seems pretty clear that mastery of this procedure cannot constitute a full understanding of the content of the judgement ‘I believe that p’.35 Understanding of the content of the judgement must involve possession of the psychological concept expressed by ‘ξ believes that p’, which the subject must conceive as capable of being instantiated otherwise than by himself.36 Involvement of this concept in the judgement would be manifested by an appreciation of the fact that the kinds of evidence which he is prepared to recognize as relevant to the ascription of the predicate to others bear also upon the truth of his claim, and a willingness to recognize, as relevant to the ascription of the predicate to others, evidence of their having executed the same procedure — making a judgement as to whether p — which underlies his own self-ascription. Without this background, we might say, we secure no genuine ‘I think’ (‘think that p’) to accompany his thought (‘p’): the ‘I think’ which accompanies all his thoughts is purely formal. But adding the background makes no difference to the method of self-ascription: in particular, we continue to have no need for the idea of the inward glance.

35. ‘I believe that p’ admits of a distinction between internal and external negation. ‘It is not the case that I believe that p’ can be the of an open mind. This enables us to express one side of the central notion of objectivity — the idea that truth transcends my knowledge or belief: it may be that p, it may be that not-p; I do not know, and have to be withdrawn in the circumstance that it is not the case that p. Such a state of affairs — expressible in the past tense by ‘I believed that p, but it was not the case that p’ — cannot be believed to obtain currently, but its possibility makes sense. This is the other side of the idea of objectivity: although I believe that p, it may be the case that not-p. In short, learning the difference between ‘I believe that p’ and ‘p’ involves learning the different ways in which the two sentences embed under various operators: crucially negation, modality, and the past tense. 36. And by himself at other times.

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The self-ascription of perceptual experiences follows a different model, one we can understand only if we begin by considering the ordinary situation in which a subject is perceiving the world and making judgements about it. In general, we may regard a perceptual experience as an informational state of the subject: it has a certain content — the world is represented a certain way — and hence it permits of a non-derivative classification as true or false. For an internal state to be so regarded, it must have appropriate connections with behaviour — it must have a certain motive force upon the actions or the subject. This motive force can be countermanded, in the case of more sophisticated organisms (concept-exercising and reasoning organisms), by judgements based upon other considerations. In the case of such organisms, the internal states which have a content by virtue of their phylogenetically more ancient connections with the motor system also serve as input to the concept-exercising and reasoning system. Judgements are then based upon (reliably caused by) these internal states; when this is the case we can speak of the information being ‘accessible’ to the subject, and, indeed, of the existence of conscious experience. The informational states which a subject acquires through perception are non-conceptual, or non-conceptualized. Judgements based upon such states necessarily involve conceptualization: in moving from a perceptual experience to a judgement about the world (usually expressible in some verbal form), one will be exercising basic conceptual skills.37 But this formulation (in terms of moving from an experience to a judgement) must not be allowed to obscure the general picture. Although the subject’s judgements are based upon his experience (i.e. upon the unconceptualized information available to him), his judgements are not about the informational state. The process of conceptualization or judgement takes the subject from his being in one kind of informational state (with a content of a certain kind, namely, non-conceptual content) to his being in another kind of cognitive state (with a content of a different kind, namely, conceptual content). So when the subject wishes to make absolutely sure that his judgement is correct, he gazes again at the world (thereby producing, or reproducing, an informational state in himself), he does not in any sense gaze at, or concentrate upon, his internal state. His internal state cannot in any sense become an object to him. (He is in it.) However, a subject can gain knowledge of his internal informational states in a very simple way: by re-using precisely those skills of conceptualization that

37. For the difference between non-conceptual and conceptual states, cf. Evans 1982, §§5.2, 6.3.

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he uses to make judgements about the world. Here is how he can do it. He goes through exactly the same procedure as he would go through if he were trying to make a judgement about how it is at this place now, but excluding any knowledge he has of an extraneous kind. (That is, he seeks to determine what he would judge if he did not have such extraneous information.)38 The result will necessarily be closely correlated with the content of the informational state which he is in at that time. Now he may prefix this result with the operator ‘It seems to me as though …’. This is a way of producing in himself, and giving expression to, a cognitive state whose content is systematically dependent upon the content of the informational state, and the systematic dependence is a basis for him to claim knowledge of the informational state. But in no sense has that state become an object to him: there is nothing that constitutes ‘perceiving that state’. What this means is that there is no informational state which stands to the internal state as that internal state stands to the state of the world. Once again, describing this procedure cannot constitute a complete account of what it is to have this capacity for self-knowledge. The subject who genuinely has this capacity for self-knowledge must understand the content of his judgement ‘It seems to me as though p’, and his understanding of it must determine it to have a content different from that of the judgement ‘Possibly p’, or ‘Going by appearances, p’. This requires a background of a sort analogous to that mentioned above in connection with self-ascription of belief. As my allusion in that context will have suggested, I believe we may have here an interpretation of Kant’s remark about the transcendental ‘I think’ which accompanies all our perceptions.39 Without the background, we have at most a formal ‘I think’; it yields nothing until embedded within a satisfactory theory.40 The procedure I have described does not produce infallible knowledge of the informational state, for mistakes of the kind that occur when the subject makes judgements about the world can also produce inaccuracies when the same procedure is reused for this different purpose. For example, consider a case in which a subject sees ten points of light arranged in a circle, but reports that there are eleven points of light arranged in a circle, because he has made a

38. For ‘extraneous’, see Dummett, ‘What is a Theory of Meaning?’ (II): 95. Obviously the subject can engage in this procedure when he believes his perceptual information is illusory; the rule then obliges him to pretend or suppose that it is not, and ask himself what he would say or judge in that case. 39. Critique of Pure Reason, B 131–2. 40. The point is that ‘I think’ (or ‘it seems to me’) acquires structure (‘ξ thinks’ or ‘it seems to ξ’, with ‘I’ in the argument-place) only when it is related to (at least possible) other exemplifications of the same predicate.

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mistake in counting, forgetting where he began. Such a mistake can clearly occur again when the subject re-uses the procedure in order to gain knowledge of his internal state: his report ‘I seem to see eleven points of light arranged in a circle’ is just wrong. However, when the subject conceptualizes his experience in terms of some very elementary concept, such as a simple colour concept like ‘red’, it is not easy to make sense of his making a mistake. Concentrating upon this kind of case, and feeling extremely suspicious of the idea of a judgement which is about something distinct from itself, yet which cannot be wrong, some philosophers have adopted the contention that the existence of an internal informational state is constituted by the subject’s disposition to make certain judgements. But this is both extremely implausible in itself and quite unnecessary. The proposal is implausible, because it is not the case that we simply find ourselves with a yen to apply some concept — a conviction that it has application in the immediate vicinity. Nothing could more falsify the facts of the situation. Further, no account of what it is to be in a non-conceptual informational state can be given in terms of dispositions to exercise concepts unless those concepts are assumed to be endlessly fine-grained; and does this make sense? Do we really understand the proposal that we have as many colour concepts as there are shades of colour that we can sensibly discriminate? The proposal is unnecessary for the following reason. Logically infallible knowledge does indicate that the state judged about and the judgement are not (as Hume would have said) distinct existences. But there are two ways in which this can be acknowledged. Either the state can be regarded as constituted by dispositions to make certain judgements — and this, as we have seen, is not very plausible; or, alternatively, the judgement’s being a judgement with a certain content can be regarded as constituted by its being a response to that state. And on reflection, the latter is far the more plausible option: such infallibility as there is arises because we regard it as a necessary condition for the subject to possess these simple observational concepts that he be disposed to apply them when he has certain experiences. This sort of infallibility is rather limited and uninteresting. And it is of a quite different kind from that which arises in the case of the self-ascription of belief. However, in an important respect these two ways of gaining self-knowledge are similar: namely that neither conforms to the description ‘looking within’. In the case we have just been describing, the subject’s concentration, as with selfascription of belief, is on the outside world: how does he, or would he, judge it to be? The cases are different in that in this case there is something (namely an internal, informational state of the subject), distinct from his judgement, to

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which his judgement aims to be faithful. But it is something necessarily approached in the roundabout way I have described. We have taken account, then, of the following two facts. First, in a state of information on the basis of which a subject may ascribe to himself an experience as of seeing, say, a tree, what he observes (if anything) is only the tree, not his own informational state. (But let me remind you that the procedure I have described, of re-using the conceptual skills which one uses in order to make judgements about the world, is not by itself enough for the capacity to ascribe experiences to oneself.) Second, any informational state in which the subject has information about the world is ipso facto a state in which he has information about himself; of the kind we are discussing, available to him. It is of the utmost importance to appreciate that in order to understand the self-ascription of experience we need to postulate no special faculty of inner sense or internal self-scanning.41 Not all our reports of experience have the character we have been considering, because not all our characterizations of internal informational states describe them in terms of their content. Although ‘It feels to me as though thousands of little pins are lightly touching my skin’ and ‘It feels to me as though my legs are crossed’ are reports of the same kind as those we have been considering, ‘I feel a pain in my foot’ and ‘I feel an itch in my foot’ are not. But once we have the general framework of bodily perception and bodily sensations (understood as informational states, which may be illusory, whose content concerns the body and its states and positions), then it is perhaps not too difficult to fit these in. There is no reason why an informational state should have only informational properties. Thus we can say that when a subject feels an itch, he perceives (or appears to perceive) a part of his body in a way which makes him very much want to scratch, and when he is in pain, he perceives (or appears to perceive) a part of his body in a way which is awful. (One thing that can be said for this approach is that it does explain why pains and itches are necessarily felt in a particular part of the body.) The features of these modes of self-knowledge have given rise to certain illusions about the self. Hume said: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade,

41. There is a faculty of internal self-scanning: namely bodily perception (see §3).

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love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.42

Now in fact we have totally rejected the background of perceptual metaphor in which Hume casts his point, and in particular we have invoked nothing that could be construed as stumbling on perceptions; those inner states of the subject that we spoke of cannot intelligibly be regarded as objects of his internal gaze. However, there is something in Hume’s point; indeed, in a manner of speaking, it becomes even stronger when the metaphor is dispensed with. For what we are aware of, when we know that we see a tree, is nothing but a tree. In fact, we only have to be aware of some state of the world in order to be in a position to make an assertion about ourselves. Now this might raise the following perplexity. How can it be that we can have knowledge of a state of affairs which involves a substantial and persisting self, simply by being aware of (still worse, by merely appearing to be aware of) a state of the world?43 We must agree that we cannot get something for nothing. So the anxiety will be lessened only by showing how the accounting is done — where the idea of the persisting empirical self comes from. Nothing more than the original state of awareness — awareness, simply, of a tree — is called for on the side of awareness, for a subject to gain knowledge of himself thereby. But certainly something more than the sheer awareness is called for: the perceptual state must occur in the context of certain kinds of knowledge and understanding on the part of the subject. (Otherwise, we might say as before, the ‘I think’ which accompanies the subject’s perceptions is purely formal, or empty.) No judgement will have the content of a psychological self-ascription, unless the judger can he regarded as ascribing to himself a property which he can conceive as being satisfied by a being not necessarily himself — a state of affairs which he will have to conceive as involving a persisting subject of experience. He can know that a state of affairs of the relevant type obtains simply by being aware of a tree, but he must conceive the state of affairs that he then knows to obtain as a state of affairs of precisely that type. And this means that he must conceive of

42. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, chapter VI: 239 in the Everyman edition (Dent, London. 1911). 43. See G. E. Moore. ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33’ (III), Mind lxiv (1955): 1–27, at p. 13: “… and he said of what he called ‘visual sensations’ generally, and in particular of what he called ‘the visual field, that “the idea of a person doesn’t enter into the description of it, just as a [physical] eye doesn’t enter into the description of what is seen.” (See n. 25 above.)

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himself, the subject to whom the property is ascribed, as a being of the kind which he envisages when he simply envisages someone seeing a tree — that is to say, a persisting subject of experience, located in space and time.44 We see, then, that the two applications of the Generality Constraint — one imposing the requirement of generality upon the concept — ξ sees a tree, and the other imposing a generality upon the Idea ‘I’ — work together, forcing the subject to think of himself as an element of the objective order. There is a parallel for this situation. For we want to allow, equally, that a subject can know that he is in front of a house simply by perceiving a house. Certainly what he perceives comprises no element corresponding to ‘I’ in the judgement ‘I am in front of a house’: he is simply aware of a house. But if we are to interpret a judgement made upon this basis as having the content ‘I am in front of a house’, we must have reason to suppose that the subject regards himself as recognizing the existence of a state of affairs of precisely the same kind as obtains when, for instance, a car is in front of a house. So what he envisages, or judges, certainly comprises two elements spatially related, although what he sees does not. (This only goes to show that it is not a good idea, in attempting to determine the content of a person’s judgement, to examine nothing but the content of the perceptions which can legitimately give rise to it.) Presumably it goes without saying that both the ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves that I have discussed in this section give rise to judgements which are immune to error through misidentification. When the first component expresses knowledge gained in one of these ways, it does not make sense for the subject to utter ‘Someone believes that p, but is it I who believe that p?’, or ‘It seems to someone that there’s something red in front of him, but does it seem to me that there is something red in front of me?’ We have reached, I hope, a point upon which everyone can agree: someone who understands a term as referring to himself must be disposed to regard, as relevant to the truth or falsity of certain utterances involving that term, the occurrence of certain experiences which he is in a position immediately to recognize. It would appear that nothing is easier than to test for the existence of this disposition: we can stimulate the subject in various ways, and see how his evaluation of the relevant sentences is affected. I have tried to explain why the sheer existence of this disposition does not by itself guarantee that the

44. For the fact that certain judgements about the self can be identification-free, combined with the claim that links with empirical criteria of personal identity are nevertheless not severed in the case of such judgements, see Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, p. 165.

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subject has an adequate Idea of himself, but it is clearly an indispensable element in any such Idea. However, it needs to be treated with the greatest care, for mis-statements and misunderstandings of this element provide a strong pressure towards solipsism. A subject’s knowledge of what is in question when, for example, he is in pain, or when he sees a tree, can seem to be very similar to his knowledge of what is in question when an observable state of the world obtains. When an eclipse of the sun occurs, he might say, such-and-such experiences are to be expected; and he knows which they are — he can manifest this knowledge by his performance in suitable tests. Equally, he might say, when he is in pain, such-and-such experiences are to be expected; and he knows which ones they are. There is certainly a difference between his being in pain and anyone else’s being in pain; and this difference is one which he can detect, just as he can detect the difference between an eclipse of the sun and an eclipse of the moon. Now we might think of the solipsist as someone who attempts to use this asymmetry in order to state, at least to his own satisfaction, what he means by ‘I’. Rather as one might differentiate the sun from the moon by saying that the sun is that object an eclipse of which makes it reasonable to expect such-andsuch experiences, whereas the moon is that object an eclipse of which makes it reasonable to expect such-and-such different experiences, the solipsist thinks he can say: I am that object such that when it is in pain something frightful is to be expected. Consider a pair of different observable possibilities: say a certain armchair being red and it being green. A suitably equipped subject can tell the difference between these states of affairs, because of the difference in the way they appear. And this is how the solipsist construes the asymmetry from which he starts. He supposes that he can adopt the same impersonal style of description in characterizing the asymmetry he is concerned with — speaking of what kind of experiences are to be expected. Now we can say that a green armchair and a red armchair can be distinguished by a difference in the way they appear (by a difference in the experiences which are to be expected), because we are speaking of what may be expected by any observer (or at least any normal observer). But that is exactly not the kind of difference with which the solipsist is concerned. What he can legitimately say is only this: ‘I can tell the difference between a state of affairs involving myself and a state of affairs involving someone else by the difference in the ways in which they appear to me’
; thus he can say ‘When I am in pain, something frightful happens to me’. Of course, no one in his right mind would want to say that, because it is tautological. And the solipsist’s error

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lies precisely in his desire to extract something informative (non-tautological) about his use of ‘I’ from the asymmetry. He is of course right that there is something substantial which must have been learned by someone who uses the first-person pronoun properly, and that it is manifested in his responding differently to the kind of differences from which the solipsist begins. But this knowledge is practical
: it cannot be transformed into a substantial account of what the subject means by ‘I’. It is the solipsist’s attempt to transform it into something substantial that yields his desire to say “by ‘I’ I mean the person such that, when he is in pain, something frightful is to be expected”.45 And the project of wringing something substantial out of the difference is obviously ruined when the impersonal mode of description is replaced by the appropriate relativized description, yielding a tautology.

5. Memory Memory is not a way of gaining knowledge but a faculty of retaining knowledge; so this next section is not parallel to the last two. As I remarked earlier (§1 ), the relation of memory to ‘I’-thinking introduces quite novel elements, over and above the sort of feature involved in ‘here’-Ideas and ‘this’-Ideas. Let me make a preliminary identification of the point I have in mind, to begin fixing ideas, by reference to language. (This formulation will not in fact stand much scrutiny.) We might say: if a subject remembers, at time t¢, being in a position at time I to assert ‘I am F
’, then he is in a position, without further information, to assert ‘I was F (at t
)’. (Hence if he is in a position at t¢ to assert ‘I am now G
’, he is in a position to assert ‘Something was F (at t
) and is now G
’.) There is no such simple rule relating memory to ‘here’, ‘this’, or ‘now’. It is better to put the point in terms of how a person’s belief system is organized to take account of the passage of time: a subject which David Kaplan has called ‘cognitive dynamics’.46 (This allows us to eliminate any appearance that the subject arrives at the past-tense judgement by some inference, the premiss of which is that he was in a position to make such-and-such a

45. Incidentally, although it is sentience that the solipsist denies to others, it is not at all essential that his definition of ‘I’ be restricted to the attempt to extract something substantial from our capacities for mental self-ascription. He might just as well have said: I am the person such that, when his legs are bent, this is felt: or: I am the person such that, when he moves, changes of such-and-such a kind are to be observed. The solipsist need not be a dualist. 46. In ‘Demonstratives’, Kaplan 1989b.

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judgement; which would require us to raise the question of the structure and nature of the premiss.) It is a precondition of rationality that information acquired at one time should be available to the subject later: hence, given that in a rational creature information (and misinformation) generates beliefs, that beliefs should persist. (And the capacity to retain information is memory.) If we take a belief state, as I think we should, to be a disposition to have certain thoughts or to make certain judgements, then we can say that any rational being must have a cognitive system which brings it about that the dispositions to make judgements he has at one time should be systematically dependent on the dispositions to make judgements he had at earlier times. (There being, presumably, a single persisting structural feature of the nervous system underlying both sets of dispositions.) Persistence of belief does not always, or indeed even usually, involve persistence of a disposition to make the same judgements (if judgements are individuated simply in terms of the forms of words which would express them). For instance, the persistence of a belief that I would have manifested at some time by the judgement ‘John is now angry’ involves the disposition to judge later not that John is now angry but that John was then angry.47 There is indeed no general guarantee that a belief will persist. Suppose I perceive an object and judge ‘This is F
’, and then lose track of it. There is no guarantee that there will be available to me a past-tense demonstrative Idea (see Evans 1982, §5.5), enabling me to judge ‘That was F
’. (If such an Idea is available to me, it will need to draw on conceptual material not present in the original demonstrative identification.) When a subject keeps track of a place as he moves (or does not move), or keeps track of an object as he or it moves (or not), I think we should regard the slightly varying forms of the judgements he is disposed to make as manifestations of a single persisting belief (a continuing acceptance of the same thought). Success here certainly depends upon a skill (the ability to keep track). But thinking a thought inevitably takes time, and this kind of skill must be seen as generally underlying demonstrative judgements. I cannot see the later members of a series of judgements ‘It’s Φ here’, ‘It’s Φ there’, …, made while one moves about, keeping track of the place at which one has ascertained that it is Φ, as based upon an identification. Similarly with times, and series of judgements like

47. Why call it the persistence of the same belief? Because no new evidence is needed to sustain it.

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‘It is Φ now’, ‘It was Φ a moment ago’, ‘It was Φ a while back’,…48 Now, if we consider ‘I’ in this context, we see that the cognitive dynamics of ‘I’-Ideas are peculiarly simple. We can isolate the cognitive dynamics of ‘I’-Ideas in particular by considering tenseless predicates: if a subject has, at time t, a belief which he might manifest in judging ‘I am F
’ (where ‘ξ is F
’ is tenseless), then the tendency of belief to persist means that there is a non-negligible probability (depending on the gap between t and t¢
) of his still having, at a later time t¢, the disposition to judge ‘I am F
’. If we now introduce the consideration of tenses (etc.), we introduce other aspects of cognitive dynamics: combined with the aspect we have hitherto isolated, this yields (for instance): if a subject has at t a belief which he might then manifest in judging ‘I am now F
’, then there is a non-negligible probability of his having, at a later time t¢, a disposition to judge ‘I was previously F
’. The later manifestation of the belief still employs ‘I’ (contrast the need to shift from ‘here’ to ‘there’ as one moves but keeps track of a place, or from ‘now’ to ‘then’ as one keeps track of a time receding into the past); and, so far as the ‘I’-Idea is concerned, the later dispositions to judge flow out of the earlier dispositions to judge, without the need for any skill or care (not to lose track of something) on the part of the subject. We can put this point by using, once again, the terminology of immunity to error through misidentification: a past-tense judgement, ‘I was F
’, is not based upon a pair of propositions, That person was F and I am that person (where ‘that person’ captures an identification of an object with respect to a past time).49 It would be a mistake to think that this holds only when the disposition to make the past-tense judgement ‘I was F
’ manifests the persistence of a belief originally acquired in one of the special ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves discussed in §3 and §4. For even when there is an articulation underlying the formation of the original belief, it remains the case that the unthinking operation of cognitive dynamics will yield a subsequent disposition to make a suitable past-tense judgement, without there being any need for an identification component in the process whereby the dispositions to make judgements flow into one another. We need, therefore, a more sophisticated notion of immunity

48. [See Evans 1982, §1 of the Appendix to Chapter 6.] 49. An identification of an object (an Idea, a) is an identification with respect to the present if it follows from the truth of a is F that it is now the case that ($x)(x is F
), no matter what is substituted for ‘F’. An identification is an identification with respect to the past if there is no such general implication. (Of course ‘That man is now F
’ has the implication even if ‘That man’ is a past-tense demonstrative; but the same identification can figure in judgements that do not have the implication, e.g. ‘That man was F’.)

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to error through misidentification than before: one which can highlight the absence of an identification of a certain kind, or at a certain point in the process that issues in a judgement, rather than the absence of any identification at all. This feature of ‘I’-Ideas means that they span past and present in a novel way.50 (A ‘this’-Idea will typically span a period of time: Evans 1982, §§6.1, 6.4. But its doing so rests upon the exercise of a skill on the subject’s part. Moreover, the time span of an ‘I’-Idea may be quite extensive.) An ‘I’-Idea gives rise to thoughts dependent upon information received over a period of time. (This opens up a new possibility of ill-groundedness: see Evans 1982, §5.4. Whether or not a subject essaying the employment in thought of such an Idea is in fact thinking of anything depends upon whether there is just one thing which is both what the relevant previous beliefs, now retained, were about and what his current self-oriented ways of gaining knowledge concern. (See §7).51 It is possible to regard this feature of ‘I’-Ideas as part of the informational component of a functional characterization. A possessor of an ‘I’-Idea has a capacity to ascribe past-tense properties to himself on a special basis: namely the memory of the basis appropriate for an earlier present-tense judgement. This brings out a similarity with the informational components we have already encountered. But we must be careful not to lose sight of the fact that memory is not a way of gaining knowledge. So far in this section we have been exclusively concerned with the retention of belief. Thus we might consider a subject who forms the belief that a tree is burning, on the basis of perceptual information he is receiving. We have seen how, by perceiving the world, the subject is ipso facto put in a position to gain various pieces of knowledge about himself: being in a position to assert ‘A tree is now burning’, he would also be in a position to assert ‘I am facing a tree that is burning’, ‘I see a tree that is burning’, more weakly ‘I seem to see a tree that is burning’, etc.52 Suppose he forms self-conscious beliefs of this latter kind; then, just as the belief initially expressible by ‘A tree is now burning’ may persist

50. And expectation will bring in the future. (See §1.) 51. If there is really no identification involved in the past-tense judgements we are considering, then in such a judgement, ‘I was F
’, we cannot think of the ‘I’-Idea as effecting a purely present-tense identification of its object (so that in the event of a serious mismatch of the subject’s apparent memories with his own past, we could say that he has, perfectly determinately, a particular object in view, but has a wholly inaccurate conception of its past). The identification is not exclusively present-tense: while it is true that ‘I was F
’ entails ‘There is now something which was F
’, it is no less true that ‘I am F
’ entails ‘There was something which is now F’. 52. See §3, §4.

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to a later time, at which it needs to be expressed by, say, ‘A tree was burning last night’, so the self-conscious beliefs formed on the basis of the same original informational state may persist, needing to be expressed as ‘I was facing a tree that was burning’, etc. We should take note, however, of the possibility of cases in which the operation of memory takes place purely at the level of the informational system. In this sort of case, what memory ensures is the subject’s possession of a non-conceptual informational state, whose content corresponds in a certain respect with that of some earlier informational state of the subject (a perceptual state); although its content differs from that of the antecedent perceptual state in that, if the subject is in the memory state, it seems to him that suchand-such was the case. (That is, memory states, even of this kind, are not freefloating images whose reference to the past is read into them by reasoning on the part of the subject).53 Now just as the non-conceptual informational states involved in perception put a subject in a position to acquire present-tense self-knowledge by the exercise of his conceptual capacities, so these non-conceptual informational states put a subject in a position to acquire past-tense self-knowledge by the exercise of his conceptual capacities. A subject can form beliefs which he would express by ‘I was facing a tree that was burning last night’, etc., in this way, on the basis of a non-conceptual memory state, without needing to have had the disposition to make the corresponding present-tense judgements (without having had the beliefs) at the time of the original perception. This sort of memory is extremely important. It is frequently said that memory provides us, in the first instance, with information about our past experiences; but this is certainly quite wrong about the kind of operation of memory that I have just described: we no more have, in memory, information which is primarily about our past experiences than we have, in perception, information which is primarily about our present experiences. Just as perception must be regarded as a capacity for gaining information about the world, so memory must be regarded as a capacity for retaining information about the world. The truism about perception is not upset by the fact that there are occasions on which we are in a perceptual state without gaining information

53. How there can be such informational states, with a content which concerns the past and frequently more or less specific past times, and how the behaviour of the subject must be dependent upon such states for such a content to be ascribed to them these are different questions, which it is fortunately not necessary, for my current purposes, to answer.

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about the world — for example, when we hallucinate. In the same way, the parallel truism about memory should not be upset by the fact that there are occasions on which we use our memories without being in a position to make any knowledgeable past-tense judgements about the world — as when we remember a hallucination. In the first case we gain misinformation about the world; in the second case we retain misinformation about the world. (Of course, when the information we retain was originally derived from our own bodies, then the memory state can be said to be primarily about ourselves: for example, I may remember in this way that I was pushed and pulled last night. But obviously this is a special case.)54 This kind of operation of memory — in which a self-conscious past-tense judgement is based upon a non-conceptual memory state involving information about some past state of the world, in a way analogous to that in which a self-conscious present-tense judgement might have been based on the nonconceptual perceptual state whose informational content has been retained by the memory (even though no self-conscious present-tense judgement was so based) — seems to exemplify the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. When the first component expresses knowledge which the subject has gained (and does not suppose he has not gained, or may not have gained) in this way, it does not appear to make sense for him to say ‘Someone saw a tree burning last night, but was it I?’, or ‘Someone was in front of a tree last night, but was it I?’, or ‘Someone was pushed and pulled last night, but was it I?’ Shoemaker, however, has recently argued that this is not so: the appearance that judgements about oneself based on memory are identification-free is claimed to arise from the trivial linguistic fact that we would not describe a person whose information about the past was not originally acquired by himself as remembering.55 But it is not true that the apparent identification-freedom in question is a mere appearance, wholly due to this linguistic phenomenon. It is true that Strawson rather lays himself open to the accusation of trading on the linguistic phenomenon, when he tries to illustrate the identification-freedom in question by considering the deviance of the utterance ‘I distinctly remember that inner

54. Remembering an episode in this way is frequently described as remembering it ‘from the inside’. One remembers an episode involving oneself ‘from the inside’ if one retains information of a character such that if one were to possess its ‘present tense’ counterpart now, one would thereby be enabled to make the various first-person judgements one’s capacity to make which at the time was constitutive of one’s involvement in the episode. 55. See ‘Persons and Their Pasts’.

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experience occurring, but did it occur to me?’56 But the claim can be made, as I made it above, without explicitly using the notion of remembering in the first component (‘Someone was F’, not ‘I remember that someone was F’), and hence without any necessary reliance on linguistic restrictions imposed by the concept of remembering. Shoemaker’s argument that memory judgements about oneself are identification-dependent, and hence not immune to error through misidentification, is this. We can imagine a case in which a subject’s apparent memories are causally derived, not from past informational states of his own, but from someone else’s past informational states. In such a situation the subject would have information about past states of the world, and, carried upon the back of that information, information about past states of some observer of the world; but he would not have information about past states of his own, but rather information about the past states of the person from whom his apparent memories causally derive.57 Such a situation would arise if a perfect duplicate of a person (including his brain) were made: in this case the new person would appear to remember all the events which the original could remember — and appear, moreover, to remember them ‘from the inside’. We could not legitimately speak of the subject’s remembering a tree burning, or of his remembering seeing a tree burning, or his remembering being pummeled; this is because of the restriction built into the term ‘remember’, on which we have just been commenting. So Shoemaker introduces the term ‘quasiremembering’, explained in such a way that we can say that the subject quasiremembers the tree burning and quasi-remembers seeing the tree burn. Given that quasi-remembering (q-remembering) is a possible situation, it would appear that a subject might grasp that it is a possible situation, and even believe, perhaps for good reason, that he is in it. Such a subject would seem to be able to utter, perfectly significantly, ‘Someone stood in front of a burning tree, but it was not I’ — even when the first component expresses information which he has in his memory.58 And a second subject might genuinely have reason to doubt whether this was his situation, so that he might say ‘Someone watched a tree burning, but was it I?’ being unsure, for example, how long ago the event occurred, and so whether it occurred after the time at which he started

56. The Bounds of Sense, p. 165. 57. Similarly for the ‘retention’ of beliefs (the operation of memory considered at the beginning of this section). 58. Here ‘memory’ includes q-remembering.

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his independent existence. This argument is of a kind with which we are already familiar, and we have seen that it fails to establish its conclusion. (See Evans 1982, §6.6 on places, and §3 on physical self-ascription.) The argument presents us with a case in which information apparently possessed about an object in a certain way — the normal way — can underlie a judgement about an object which is based upon an identification. But it certainly does not follow from this that judgements about an object, based upon this way of possessing information about it, must be based upon an identification. And it seems to me that we cannot regard the ordinary memory judgements which we make about ourselves as articulable into the two components, ‘That man was in front of a burning tree’ and ‘I am that man’. The argument against the present suggestion parallels the argument I offered against a similar suggestion in the case of ‘here’ (Evans 1982, §6.6). In that case, I argued that it is not intelligible to challenge the direct relevance to ‘here’-judgements of perceptual information acquired in the normal way — on pain of not having an adequate ‘here’-Idea of a place, or at least not one which is recognizably like the one we have, to sustain the challenge. For I argued that what enables us to credit a thinker with an adequate knowledge of which place is in question in his ‘here’-judgements is his capacity to identify his whereabouts in the spatial framework. This depends upon his capacity to use his perceptions, and the changing course of his perceptions, to determine his position; and this in turn depends upon a willingness to allow current (normal) perceptions to bear upon the question how things stand here (where he is). There is a similar difficulty in the present case about the nature of the ‘I’-Idea that would figure in the supposed identification component. I have suggested (see §3) that in general a subject’s possession of an adequate Idea of himself depends upon the same capacity that underlies his ability to use ‘here’-Ideas — the capacity to determine his position in the objective order. But this capacity depends no more upon current perception than upon a subject’s willingness to use his memory, in order to bring information about the course of his past (though usually recent) perceptions to bear upon the question of his past position, and thereby upon the question of his current position. Selflocation cannot in general be a momentary thing. For one thing, places are not always immediately recognizable. For another, self-location crucially depends upon the axiom that the subject moves continuously through space; and that axiom can be brought to bear upon particular questions of location only if the subject has the capacity to retain information about his previous perceptions,

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and to use that information in making judgements about his past, and thereby his present, position. If we imagine a subject who cannot retain information for more than a few seconds, or, equally, a subject who refuses to argue from such retained information as he possesses to propositions about his past position, then we have imagined a subject who just does not have the practical capacity to locate himself in space. Furthermore, there is an equal difficulty with the other term of the identity. We are supposed to be able to regard the normal situation in which a subject judges that he was F as being the result of two judgements, one of them being that he is the same person as … — but as who? We must see the judgement ‘I was seeing a tree burn’ as resting on the judgements ‘That man was seeing a tree burn’ and ‘I am that man’ — but now what Idea of a man is represented by ‘that man’? We know that the sheer existence of an information-link does not suffice for an adequate Idea. As before, we might consider an Idea that is adequate by virtue of involving a description: that man is identified as the man whose past informational states are causally responsible for these apparent memories. Now it is perfectly all right to ascribe such an adequate Idea to a person who has been apprised of his situation (or who has anyway been brought, perhaps falsely, to think of his situation) as being that of a duplicate. But it is surely far-fetched in the extreme to suppose that such an Idea is generally involved in our past-tense self-ascriptions. There is another reason for being dissatisfied with the picture which emerges when we think of judgements about one’s past, based upon memory, as identification-dependent. The picture requires us to be able to think of memory as a way of having knowledge of an object which leaves its identity (in particular, its identity with the subject) an open question. It will be agreed that the normal subject will have knowledge of his own past, but this will be seen as the result of two pieces of knowledge, expressible as ‘That man was F
’ and ‘I am that man’; and it must be the case that the subject could have knowledge of the truth of the first component, independently of the truth of the second component. But it does not appear to me to be possible to think of memory as an ‘identityneutral’ way of having knowledge of the past states of a person. (And this is not the result of some trivial linguistic truth about what we would call ‘memory’.) Suppose we surgically ‘transfer the memories’ from the brain of subject S¢ to the brain of a subject S, and suppose S does not know that this has happened. S will, of course, make judgements about his past in the normal way. But suppose that he discovers that he was not F, and he was not G, … — that in general his memory cannot be relied upon as an accurate record of his past.

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Suppose that, fantastically, he then retreats to making general past-tense judgements: ‘Someone was F, and was G …’. These judgements could not possibly constitute knowledge. Even to be intelligible in putting them forward, S would have to offer what had actually happened, or something very like it, as a hypothesis; but he could not possibly be said to know that it was true. It would be a sheer guess. Consequently he could not be said to know anything based on it. (We must remember that it is not sufficient for knowledge that a true belief be causally dependent on the facts which render it true.) And if S cannot know the truth of these general judgements, he certainly cannot be said to know the truth of the supposed judgements ‘That man was F
’, etc., which are stronger than they are.59 So the theory does not fit the facts. Memory is not a way of possessing knowledge about an object of a kind which leaves open the question of the identity of that object. If a subject has, in virtue of the operations of his memory, knowledge of the past states of a subject, then that subject is himself. Of course, it is possible for memory to serve as the basis for a different way of having knowledge about the past; if a subject knows that his apparent memories are systematically correlated with the past states of some other object (via being systematically correlated with its memories), then he can infer from the existence of a present apparent memory to the past state of that object. But it surely cannot be suggested that this is the normal operation of memory — that we infer, via a general belief about the correlation between our present apparent memories and our past states, from the present apparent memories to those past states. There is here a fundamental asymmetry between two ways of gaining knowledge of the past: the one depends upon a general belief, but the other, being underwritten by evolution, does not. Indeed, I should be prepared to argue that if one attempted to arrive at past-tense judgements only in the inferential way (in the absence, that is, of a capacity for direct memory), one would not be equipped to understand the conclusions of the supposed inferences. We have found, therefore, no compelling reason for giving up the view that our Ideas of ourselves do not permit a gap to open up between knowing, in virtue of the operation of memory, that someone saw a tree burning, and knowing that it was oneself who saw a tree burning. For a subject to have information (or misinformation) in this way, to the effect that someone saw a tree, just is for the subject to have information (or misinformation) to the effect

59. This argument should be capable of being recast in terms of the subject’s having knowledge of states of the world, e.g., that a tree was burning.

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that he saw a tree. For a subject to have an apparent memory of a tree burning is for it to seem to him that a tree burned, and by the same token, for it to seem to him that he saw a tree burn. As Shoemaker said in an earlier work: I do not express my memory of eating eggs for breakfast by saying ‘I had eggs for breakfast’ because I think that it is convenient, or advisable, that such memories be expressed in this way; I do so because my memory is, precisely, a memory that I had eggs for breakfast.60

Shoemaker’s later work has made it seem to some philosophers that this must be wrong. Derek Parfit, for instance, has written: When I seem to remember an experience, I do indeed seem to remember having it. But it cannot be a part of what I seem to remember about this experience that I, the person who now seems to remember it, am the person who had this experience. That I am is something I automatically assume. (My apparent memories sometimes come to me simply as the belief that I had a certain experience.) But it is something that I am justified in assuming only because I do not in fact have q-memories of other people’s experiences.61

But our earlier reflections enable us to see what is wrong with this passage: namely that it assumes that the identification which ‘I’ effects (for me now) is an exclusively present-tense identification. (Notice the gloss on ‘I’: ‘the person who now seems to remember [the experience]’.) Whereas we saw at the beginning of this section that it is of the essence of an ‘I’-Idea that it effects an identification which spans past and present.62 Since I think many philosophers would dispute the conclusion I have reached, it may be worth saying a word about why they might do so. Some of them have been influenced by an observation by Bernard Williams about the imagination.63 To imagine being in the West Indies (as opposed to imagining someone being in the West Indies) presumably involves producing in oneself informational states of roughly the kind which might underlie the first-person judgement ‘I am in the West Indies’: visual impressions of palm

60. Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1963): 33–34. 61. ‘Personal Identity’, Philosophical Review lxxx (1971): 3–27, at p. 15. 62. This has a connection with the idea that memory suffices for personal identity. My judgement (or seeming judgement) ‘I was F
’, made on the basis of apparent memory, can go wrong only in certain ways. Either there is no past state of affairs of which the apparent memory constitutes information (no one was — relevantly — F
); or the object involved in the sate of affairs was indeed myself; or, finally, I do not exist. (This last possibility will seem paradoxical; but see §6.) 63. ‘Imagination and the Self ’, in Problems of the Self (CUP, Cambridge, 1973): 26–45.

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trees and steel bands; auditory impressions of the band’s music intermingling with the breaking of the waves; perhaps suitable kinaesthetic impressions of lying on a beach with the hot sand under one’s body. Now Williams argues that imagining being in the West Indies, in this way, is not necessarily to imagine that one is in the West Indies, or to imagine oneself being in the West Indies. I think this is correct: it does not follow, from the fact that a certain piece of imagining involves certain states of information which would, if they actually occurred, warrant the judgement that p, that the piece of imagining can be described as imagining that p. (I think this can be seen from the fact that it may be just as wrong to describe the subject as imagining that the place he occupies — here — is in the West Indies, even though the same imagined states of information would, if actual, warrant the judgement that here is in the West Indies.) So there is a difference between what might be described as imagining being in the West Indies (from the inside), and imagining one’s being in the West Indies; and I think this has encouraged some philosophers to think there is a similar gap between remembering, or seeming to remember, being in the West Indies (from the inside) and remembering, or seeming to remember, one’s being in the West Indies. Williams’s observation does preclude anyone from mounting a purely grammatical argument for the identity of these informational states; but it cannot show their distinctness. After all, imagining a tree is not necessarily imagining a tree here, even though seeming to see a tree is, necessarily, seeming to see a tree here. Williams’s point tells us something important about the imagination, but I do not see that it shows us anything about memory. An equivocation on the term ‘quasi-memory’ (‘q-memory’) provides another reason why philosophers have not accepted the equation I have suggested. The notion of q-memory was originally introduced in this way (making it perfectly intelligible): a subject q-remembers an event e if and only if (i) he has an apparent memory of such an event, and (ii) that apparent memory in fact embodies information deriving from the perception of that event by a person who is not necessarily himself. Given the notion thus introduced, we are able to say that a subject q-remembers an event that he did not witness, and in consequence that he q-remembers witnessing an event, being in front of a tree, etc., when he did not witness the event, was not in front of a tree, etc. (Of course introducing such a definition leaves the question of the content of memory states quite untouched; it can still be right to say, as I have, that an apparent memory of Φ-ing is necessarily an apparent memory of oneself Φ-ing.) But now it is somehow supposed that the intelligibility of the notion of q-memory,

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thus introduced, demonstrates the possibility of a faculty which is both like our memory in giving subjects knowledge of the past, and unlike it in that the content of the memory states in no way encroaches upon the question of whose past is concerned. The informational states of a q-memory faculty announce themselves, so to speak, as merely q-memories, so that it seems to the subject that someone or other Φ-ed without its in any way seeming to him that he Φ-ed. Obviously this is a fallacy. I can introduce the term ‘q-perceive’, in such a way that a subject can be said to q-perceive a tree provided that he seems to see a tree as a causal result of a process which takes that tree as input, whether or not that tree is where the subject is disposed to locate it either in space or in time. But, by this purely linguistic manoeuvre, I have not shown the intelligibility of a faculty of q-perception: one which involves informational states whose content is simply of the existence, somewhere in space and time, of such-andsuch a kind of thing. The manoeuvre does not show the possibility of its perceptually seeming to the subject that there is a tree without its seeming to him that there is a tree where he is.

6. The possibility of reference failure It seems to me to be a corollary of the reflections in this chapter that our ordinary thoughts about ourselves are liable to many different kinds of failings, and that the Cartesian assumption that such thoughts are always guaranteed to have an object cannot be sustained. I have emphasized that a subject’s Idea of himself does not require him to have a current conception of himself; what is required, in the exceptional circumstances in which the various avenues of self-knowledge are blocked, is that the subject be disposed to accept any information accessible in those ways as germane to the thoughts we regard as manifesting self-consciousness. But in the normal situation, of course, these dispositions are exercised, and he has an evolving conception of himself, embodying information derived in the various ways, and partly retained in memory, which informs his thoughts about himself. As with other thoughts which are information-based, there is a presupposition that there is just one thing from which the various elements of the conception derive. Now it appears relatively easy to elaborate examples in which this presupposition is not true. The ‘memory-transfer’ case we discussed in §5 provides a simple example of this kind: provided that the subject was ignorant of the

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situation, he would bring both present-tense physical and psychological information and past-tense physical and psychological information to bear upon his self-conscious reflections, and there would be no one thing from which both kinds of information derived. The subject would be in a muddle, rather as can happen when a subject uses a demonstrative in connection with two information-links (via different sense-modalities).64 Of course the subject could be apprised of the situation and draw in his horns, inhibiting the temptation to make past-tense self-ascriptions upon the basis of his apparent memories. But the fact that a more guarded mode of thought can have an object in this situation certainly does not establish that his original thought did.65 A similar kind of situation would arise if the subject received kinaesthetic information from a body other than that at the origin of his egocentric space; or if the subject’s actions were in fact manifested in a body distinct from the body which he perceives and from which he perceives. A more alarming kind of situation would arise if there were in fact no body which could be regarded as the subject’s body. Consider, for example, the perennial nightmare: the idea that a human brain might exist, from birth, in a vat, subjected by clever scientists to a complex series of hallucinations (including kinaesthetic hallucinations), of a kind which would enable the brain to develop normal cognitive faculties. (I shall pretend that I am convinced that this speculation is fully intelligible.) Here we have a case where a considerable element of the subject’s conception of himself, both present and past, derives from nothing. In all his physical self-ascriptions, there is simply nothing from which his information derives. When he thinks he is moving, or that his legs are bent, there is nothing of whose physical condition he is, even inaccurately, informed. In this case, unlike the others, there does not appear to me to be anything to which the subject can intelligibly retreat. For if the subject were apprised of the facts, he would have to abandon the Idea of himself as the occupant of a position in space, determinable upon the basis of the course of his perceptions. He would have to attempt to think of himself as nowhere. And this means that he has lost the essential basis of his knowing which element in the objective order he is. He would not, therefore, have an adequate Idea of himself.

64. Suppose one uses the expression ‘this cup’ when one is seeing a cup and feeling a cup (in fact, though one does not know it, two cups). 65. In considering this case, we must guard against being tugged in the direction of a purely linguistic or communicative interpretation of the subject’s ‘I’, correlative with someone else’s ‘you’ addressed to him. See below.

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It may be conceded that, if a subject is to have an adequate Idea of himself, he must be able to make sense of his identity with an element of the objective order; but objected that in this case there is a perfectly good such element, namely a brain, with which the subject, in this nightmarish situation, can identify himself. But can we make sense of a self-conscious conception of himself on the part of the subject, which makes such an identification possible — which permits him to understand, and possibly accept, ‘I am a brain’? The subject is to think ‘Somewhere in the world there is a small parcel of grey matter, wrinkled, moist, and soft, about three inches high, and that is me.’ I think that we can feel a resistance to this identification, of the same kind which Nagel, and others, wrongly supposed to arise upon the contemplation of our identity with a particular living animal in the world (see §1). For this is unlike the ordinary case. There is nothing in this subject’s self-conception which speaks for this identity. In the ordinary case, a subject will be able to make such judgements as ‘I am sitting on a bench in a park facing a round pond, with my legs slightly bent’; and it is these elements of one’s self-conception — as intimate as any others — that allow the identification of oneself with a human being, located at such-and-such a position in space and time, to get a grip. But obviously the physical side of the conception of himself which our unfortunate subject possesses does not encourage any identification of himself with a brain; and anyway, we are now considering a case in which such elements are extruded from the subject’s conception of himself, being, as he now realizes, without any foundation in fact. So the identification is, so to speak, wholly theoretical, and it remains quite obscure what mode of thinking about himself renders it even thinkable. Many people will regard the remarks I have made about this case as quite unintelligible. For I have spoken of the subject thinking … and wondering …, while at the same time I have denied that his ‘I’-thoughts-whether revised or unrevised-have an object. Surely (people will object) this is unintelligible, for if there is a subject, thinking ‘I’-thoughts, then his ‘I’-thoughts will concern himself. But why is it thought that self-identification, or thoughts about oneself, are as simple as this — so that, whenever there is a subject, then there is at least one thing he can unproblematically think about, namely, himself? This idea comes, I think, from a false analogy with the functioning of ‘I’ as a communicative device.66 For it seems perfectly true that provided there is a

66. Encouraged, perhaps, by the following train of thought: having allowed ‘I’-thoughts to the anaesthetized amnesiac, we suppose that all self-conscious thoughts involve no more than his ‘I’-thoughts do — that we may exclude from the basis of our own self-conscious thoughts all the actual

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speaker, he can refer to himself, using the device of self-reference ‘I’. (If such a device does not exist in the language, it can be introduced unproblematically.) But what this means is that it is always possible for an audience to think of the referent of a token of such a device as the person who uttered that token. That is, the audience identifies the referent, in the first instance, by description, as the utterer of certain sounds (or the producer of a certain inscription) — even if the notion of ‘uttering’ is sufficiently sophisticated to allow the utterer to be regarded as possibly distinct from the person from whose lips the words issue.67 To attempt to apply the analogy, we should have to suppose that selfreference in thought is achieved because we think of ourselves (at any time) as the thinker of this thought, or possibly, as the subject of these experiences. In fact, we already have a considerable amount of evidence that we do not actually think of ourselves in this way: the suggestion neglects the way in which our Ideas of ourselves rest upon various avenues of self-knowledge whose bearing upon ‘I’-thoughts cannot be regarded as underwritten by any identification. But nor is it clear that the suggestion describes a possible way in which anyone could think of himself. We have proceeded too far for us to allow such demonstratives as are here invoked — this thought, these experiences — to pass without scrutiny. For this is the point at which the analogy with the interpretation of ‘I’ in speech must break down. It is perfectly intelligible for someone to identify certain words demonstratively — to have a perfectly clear understanding of which words are in question — without having any idea of their author, or even of whether any such person, or just one such person, exists. Hence he can know which person is in question in his interpretation of ‘I’, for, knowing which sounds are in question, he knows what it is to identify a person as their author. But the analogy does not work, precisely because it is not possible to have an adequate Idea of certain pains or thoughts independently of an adequate conception of the person whose thoughts or pains they are. Mental events are distinguished from one another, and from all other things, by reference to the distinctness of the person to, or in, whom they occur. So the sheer demonstrative element — what we might attempt to regard as an information-link — cannot by itself constitute an adequate Idea of such things. A subject can gaze

information that we take ourselves to have of ourselves, thereby excluding the multiplicity of information-links that gives rise to the possibility of ill-groundedness. But it is really not obvious that the supposition is correct. Is it supposed that the Idea I associate with the name ‘Gareth Evans’ is one which would genuinely permit it to be a discovery that I am Gareth Evans? 67. See Anscombe, ‘The First Person’: 60.

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inwardly with all the intensity he can muster, and repeat to himself ‘this pain’, ‘this pain’, as he concentrates upon his pain, but he will not thereby be able to know which pain is in question unless this provides him with a basis for identifying the pain with a pain conceived as an element in the objective order — which means a pain conceived as the pain of this or that person in the objective order. Consequently, he cannot have an adequate Idea of these mental events unless he knows to which person they are happening. So he cannot identify himself by reference to them.68 I do not see, then, that it is absurd to suppose that there might be a subject of thought who is not in a position to identify himself, and whose attempts at self-identification fail to net any object at all. I have used an extreme case to make this point, rather than the more familiar kind of fantasy, in which a brain which was once the controlling organ of a human being is extracted from the body and kept alive in vitro, because I am less clear about whether the subject in the more familiar case should be said to have no adequate Idea of himself. In order to see why this is open to question, we must reflect a moment about the situation of a man who is paralysed, and who has lost the use of his senses. Now, terrible though this situation must be, we need not automatically think that the subject has lost the capacity to make sense of an identification of himself with an element in the objective order; we might want to say that he retains knowledge of how to make such an identification, even though practically it is now beyond him. We might be willing to make such a statement because we are willing to accept the conditional judgement that, if the normal use of his body and of his senses were restored to him, he could locate himself. (Similarly, even though his knowledge of the right-hand side rests upon dispositions which he cannot now manifest, we might be prepared to allow that he has a perfectly determinate side of himself in mind.) It is certainly less clear, but it is at least arguable, that the same kind of thing should be said of a disembodied brain. Being one of us, the victim would of course think of himself as somewhere; he would think ‘I could find out where I am, if only this damned darkness would lift’. And perhaps the dispositions remaining to the subject — dispositions which could be exercised only if he were re-embodied — might be thought to allow us to say that he had a quite definite

68. His situation is rather like that of someone who can perceive certain things but has no idea of where they are. But notice that the let-out available for that subject is not available for this one: he cannot think of the thoughts or pains as ‘the pains of which I currently have information’ or ‘the pains which are causally responsible for these informational states’ (which informational states?).

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place in mind as the one he occupied: a place which would in fact be the position (or close to the position) of his brain; and it might be thought that this provides a basis, if only a slender basis, for an identification of himself with his brain. If this is so, it rests upon a contingent fact about our construction, namely that the control centre of the human animal is located within it. It seems possible to envisage organisms whose control centre is outside the body, and connected to it by communication links capable of spanning a considerable distance.69 An organism of this kind could have an Idea of itself like our own, but if it did, it would be unable to cope with the situation that would arise when the control centre survived the destruction of the body it controlled. Thinking like us, the subject could of course have to regard itself as somewhere, but in this case it would not make any sense to identify a particular place in the world as the place it thought of as here. The place occupied by the control centre is certainly not the subject’s here; and even if we counterfactually suppose the control centre re-equipped with a body, there is no particular place where that body would have to be. Because its ‘here’ picks out no place, there is no bit of matter, no persisting thing, which the subject’s Idea of itself permits us to regard as what it identifies as itself. Here, then, we have a very clear situation in which a subject of thought could not think of itself as ‘I’; its ‘I’ — its habitual mode of thought about itself is simply inadequate for this situation. (It forces the subject to think in ways which are no longer appropriate.)70 This case helps us to see that the reason we do not find the ‘disembodied brain in a vat’ case very disturbing, conceptually, is that the brain is also the last remaining part of the subject’s body. (The case is often presented as a limiting case of amputation.) A tiny foothold is thus provided for the idea that the subject is where the brain is, and hence for the idea that the brain is what the subject is.

7. Conclusions The preceding reflections constitute only the most preliminary approach to this difficult subject, but I shall try to draw the threads together by stating some tentative conclusions.

69. I have to confess that it is difficult to understand how such beings could have evolved naturally. But perhaps we can think entirely of artificially produced specimens. 70. If we can think of this subject, it is with the aid of newer and more sophisticated machinery; not by thinking ourselves into his situation.

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1. Our self-conscious thoughts about ourselves are irreducible to any other mode of thought; in particular, they cannot be regarded as involving the identification of an object by any description. Self-conscious thought about oneself is thought informed, or at least liable to be informed, by information which the subject has (or can normally acquire) about himself in a variety of different ways. There is always a gap between grasping that the Φ is F, and grasping that I am F — there is always room for the realization that I am the Φ because there is no description Φ such that grasping that the Φ is F guarantees the subject’s realization of the bearing of the information which he has, or is in a position to acquire, in these various ways, upon the proposition that the Φ is F. (There is just as much of a gap between the subject’s grasp of ‘The Φ is F
’ and of ‘I am F
’ when he is amnesiac, anaesthetized, and without the use of his senses as there is when he currently has a conception of himself acquired in these various ways.) Furthermore, the way in which the subject knows which object is in question — his grasp of what it is for an identity-proposition of the form I am δt to be true — cannot be reduced to knowledge of what it is for δt = the Φ to be true. The only plausible candidate for an instance of ‘the Φ
’ that would falsify these claims is ‘the person here’. But this produces the quite misleading impression that there is some priority of ‘here’ over ‘I’, whereas one’s ‘I’-Idea and one’s ‘here’-Ideas are really two sides of a single capacity, each wholly dependent upon the other. Both ‘I’-thoughts and ‘here’-thoughts are ways in which the subject’s capacity to locate himself in the objective spatial order is exploited. (See Evans 1982, §6.3.) 2. Despite recent philosophical claims to the contrary, our thoughts about ourselves are about objects — elements of reality. We are, and can make sense of ourselves as, elements of the objective order of things. Our thinking about ourselves conforms to the Generality Constraint — we are able to conceive of endless states of affairs involving ourselves, and what we conceive is not necessarily what it is like for us, or what it will be like for us, to be aware of, or be in a position to know the existence of, such a state of affairs. Therefore we are not Idealists about ourselves, and this means that we can and must think of ourselves as elements of the objective order. All the peculiarities we have noticed about ‘I’-thoughts are consistent with, and, indeed, at points encourage, the idea that there is a living human being which those thoughts concern.

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3. Our thoughts about ourselves are in no way hospitable to Cartesianism. Our customary use of ‘I’ simply spans the gap between the mental and the physical, and is no more intimately connected with one aspect of our selfconception than the other. 4. The Ideas we have of ourselves, like almost all Ideas we have, rest upon certain empirical presuppositions, and are simply inappropriate to certain describable situations in which these presuppositions are false.

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Chapter 7

The problem of the essential indexical John Perry Stanford University

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back up the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a mess. And I was right. But I did not believe that I was making a mess. That seems to be something I came to believe. And when I came to believe that, I stopped following the trail around the counter and rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to explain my change in behavior. My aim in this paper is to make a key point about the characterization of this change, and of beliefs in general. At first, characterizing the change seems easy. My beliefs changed, didn’t they, in that I came to have a new one, namely, that I am making a mess. But things are not so simple. The reason they are not is the importance of the word ‘I’ in my expression of what I came to believe. When we replace it with other designations of me, we no longer have an explanation of my behavior and so, it seems, no longer an attribution of the same belief. It seems to be an essential indexical. But without such a replacement, all we have to identify the belief is the sentence ‘I am making a mess.’ But that sentence by itself does not seem to identify the crucial belief, for if someone else had said it, they would have expressed a different belief, a false one. I argue that the essential indexical poses a problem for various otherwise plausible accounts of belief. I first argue that it is a problem for the view that belief is a relation between subjects and propositions conceived as bearers of truth and falsity. The problem is not solved merely by replacing or supplementing this with a notion of de re belief. Nor is it solved by moving to a

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notion of a proposition that, rather than true or false absolutely is only true or false at an index or in a context (at a time, for a speaker, say). Its solution requires us to make a sharp distinction between objects of belief and belief states, and to realize that the connection between them is not so intimate as might have been supposed.

Locating Beliefs I want to introduce two more examples. In the first, a professor, who desires to attend the department meeting on time and believes correctly that it begins at noon, sits motionless in his office at that time. Suddenly, he begins to move. What explains his action? A change in belief. He believed all along that the department meeting starts at noon; he came to believe, as he would have put it, that it starts now. The author of the book Hiker’s Guide to the Desolation Wilderness stands in the wilderness beside Gilmore Lake, looking at the Mt. Tallac trail as it leaves the lake and climbs the mountain. He desires to leave the wilderness. He believes that the best way out from Gilmore Lake is to follow the Mt. Tallac trail up the mountain to Cathedral Peaks trail, on to the Floating Island trail, emerging at Spring Creek Tract Road. But he does not move. He is lost. He is not sure whether he is standing beside Gilmore Lake, looking at Mt. Tallac, or beside Clyde Lake looking at Jack’s Peak, or beside Eagle Lake looking at one of the Maggie peaks. Then he begins to move along the Mt. Tallac trail. If asked, he would have explained the crucial change in his beliefs this way: ‘I came to believe that this is the Mt. Tallac trail and that is Gilmore Lake.’ In these three cases, the subjects in explaining their actions would use indexicals to characterize certain beliefs they came to have. These indexicals are essential, in that replacement of them by other terms destroys the force of the explanation, or at least requires certain assumptions to be made to preserve it. Suppose I had said, in the manner of de Gaulle, ‘I came to believe that John Perry is making a mess.’ I would no longer have explained why I stopped and looked in my own cart. To explain that, I would have to add, ‘and I believe that I am John Perry,’ bringing in the indexical again. After all, suppose I had really given my explanation in the manner of de Gaulle, and said ‘I came to believe that de Gaulle is making a mess.’ That would not have explained my stopping at all. But it really would have explained it every bit as much as ‘I came to believe John Perry is making a mess.’ For if I added ‘and I believe that I am de

The problem of the essential indexical

Gaulle,’ the explanations would be on par. The only reason ‘I came to believe John Perry is making a mess’ seems to explain my action is our natural assumption that I did believe I was John Perry and did not believe I was de Gaulle. So replacing the indexical ‘I’ with another term designating the same person really does, as claimed, destroy the explanation. Similarly, our professor, as he sets off down the hall, might say ‘I believe the meeting starts at noon.’ In accepting the former as an explanation, we would be assuming he believes it is now noon. If he believed it was now 5 P. M., he would not have explained his departure by citing his belief that the meeting starts at noon, unless he was a member of a department with very long meetings. After all, he believed that the meeting started at noon all along, so that belief can hardly explain a change in his behavior. Basically similar remarks apply to the lost author. I shall use the term ‘locating beliefs’ to refer to one’s beliefs about where one is, when it is, and who one is. Such beliefs seem essentially indexical. Imagine two lost campers who trust the same guidebook but disagree about where they are. If we were to try to characterize the beliefs of these campers without the use of indexicals, it would seem impossible to bring out this disagreement. If, for example, we characterized their beliefs by the set of ‘eternal sentences’ drawn from the guidebook they would mark ‘true,’ there is no reason to suppose that the sets would differ. They could mark all of the same sentences ‘true,’ and still disagree in their locating beliefs. It seems that there has to be some indexical element in the characterization of their beliefs to bring out this disagreement. But as we shall see, there is no room for this indexical element in the traditional way of looking at belief, and even when its necessity is recognized, it is not easy to see how to fit it in.

The Doctrine of Propositions I shall first consider how the problem appears to a traditional way of thinking of belief. The doctrines I describe were held by Frege, but I shall put them in a way that does not incorporate his terminology or the details of his view. This traditional way, which I call the ‘doctrine of propositions,’ has three main tenets. The first is that belief is a relation between a subject and an object, the latter being denoted, in a canonical belief report, by a that-clause. So ‘Carter believes that Atlanta is the capital of Georgia’ reports that a certain relation, believing, obtains between Carter and a certain object — at least in a suitably

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wide sense of the object — that Atlanta is the capital of Georgia. These objects are called propositions. The second and the third tenets concern such objects. The second is that they have a truth-value in an absolute sense, as opposed to merely being true for a person or at a time. The third has to do with how we individuate them. It is necessary, for that S and that S´ to be the same, that they have the same truthvalue. But it is not sufficient, for that the sea is salty and that milk is white are not the same proposition. It is necessary that they have the same truth condition, in the sense that they attribute to the same objects the same relation. But this also is not sufficient, for that Atlanta is the capital of Georgia and that Atlanta is the capital of the largest state east of the Mississippi are not the same proposition. Carter, it seems, might believe the first but not the second. Propositions must not only have the same truth-value and concern the same objects and relations, but also involve the same concepts. For Frege, this meant that if that S = that S’, S and S’ must have the same sense. Others might eschew senses in favor of properties and relations, yet others take concepts to be just words, so that sameness of propositions is just sameness of sentences. What these approaches have in common is the insistence that propositions must be individuated in a more ‘fine-grained’ way than is provided by truth-value or the notion of truth conditions employed above.

The Problem It is clear that the essential indexical is a problem for the doctrine of propositions. What answer can it give to the question, ‘What did I come to believe when I straightened up the sugar?’ The sentence ‘I am making a mess’ does not identify a proposition. For this sentence is not true or false absolutely, but only as said by one person or another; had another shopper said it when I did, he would have been wrong. So the sentence by which I identify what I came to believe does not identify, by itself, a proposition. There is 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. To identify the proposition I came to believe, the advocate of the doctrine of propositions must identify this missing conceptual ingredient. An advocate of the doctrine of propositions, his attention drawn to indexicals, might take this attitude towards them: they are communicative shortcuts. Just before I straightened up the sack I must have come to believe some

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propositions with the structure α is making a mess, where α is some concept that I alone ‘fit’ (to pick a phrase neutral among the different notions of a concept). When I say ‘I believe I am making a mess,’ my hearers know that I believe some such proposition of this form; which one in particular is not important for the purposes at hand. If this is correct, we should be able to identify the proposition I came to believe, even if doing so is not necessary for ordinary communicative purposes. But then the doctrine of propositions is in trouble, for any candidate will fall prey to the problems mentioned above. If that α is making a mess is what I came to believe, then ‘I came to believe that A is making a mess,’ where A expressed α, should be an even better explanation than the original, where I used ‘I’ as a communicative shortcut. But, as we saw, any such explanation will be defective, working only on the assumption that I believed that I was α. To this it might be replied that though there may be no replacement for ‘I’ that generally preserves explanatory force, all that needs to be claimed is that there is such a replacement on each occasion. The picture is this. On each occasion that I use ‘I,’ there is some concept I have in mind that fits me uniquely, and which is the missing conceptual ingredient in the proposition that remains incompletely identified when I characterize my beliefs. The concept I use to think of myself is not necessarily the same each time I do so, and of course I must use a different one than others do, since it must fit me and not them. Because there is no general way of replacing the ‘I’ with a term that gets at the missing ingredient, the challenge to do so in response to a particular example is temporarily embarrassing. But the doctrine of propositions does not require a general answer. This strategy does not work for two reasons. First, even if I was thinking of myself as, say, the only bearded philosopher in a Safeway store west of the Mississippi, the fact that I came to believe that the only such philosopher was making a mess explains my action only on the assumption that I believed that I was the only such philosopher, which brings in the indexical again. Second, in order to provide me with an appropriate proposition as the object of belief, the missing conceptual ingredient will have to fit me. Suppose I was thinking of myself in the way described, but that I was not bearded and was not in a Safeway store — I had forgotten that I had shaved and gone to the A&P instead. Then the proposition supplied by this strategy would be false, while what I came to believe, that I was making a mess, was true. This strategy assumes that whenever I have a belief I would characterize by using a sentence with an indexical d,

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I believe that … d …

that there is some conceptual ingredient c, such that it is also true that, I believe that d is c

and that, on this second point, I am right. But there is no reason to believe this would always be so. Each time I say ‘I believe it is now time to rake the leaves,’ I need not have some concept that uniquely fits the time at which I speak. From the point of view of the doctrine of propositions, belief reports such as ‘I believe that I am making a mess’ are deficient, for there is a missing conceptual ingredient. From the point of view of locating beliefs, there is something lacking in the propositions offered by the doctrine, a missing indexical ingredient. The problem of the essential indexical reveals that something is badly wrong with the traditional doctrine of propositions. But the traditional doctrine has its competitors anyway, in response to philosophical pressures from other directions. Perhaps attention to these alternative or supplementary models of belief will provide a solution to our problem.

De Re Belief One development in the philosophy of belief seems quite promising in this respect. It involves qualifying the third tenet of the doctrine of propositions, to allow a sort of proposition individuated by an object or sequence of objects, and a part of a proposition of the earlier sort. The motivation for this qualification or supplementation comes from a type of belief report, which gives rise to the same problem, that of the missing conceptual ingredient, as does the problem of the essential indexical. The third tenet of the doctrine of propositions is motivated by the failure of substitutivity of coreferential terms within the that-clause following ‘believes.’ But there seems to be a sort of belief report, or a way of understanding some belief reports, that allows such substitution, and such successful substitution becomes a problem for a theory designed to explain its failure. For suppose Patrick believes that, as he would put it, the dean is wise. Patrick does not know Frank, much less know that he lives next to the dean, and yet I might in certain circumstances say ‘Patrick believes Frank’s neighbor is wise.’ Or I might say ‘There is someone whom Patrick believes to be wise,’ and later on identify that

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someone as ‘Frank’s neighbor.’ The legitimacy of this cannot be understood on the unqualified doctrine of propositions; I seem to have gone from one proposition, that the dean of the school is wise, to another, that Frank’s neighbor is wise; but the fact that Patrick believes the first seems to be no reason he should believe the second. And the quantification into the belief report seems to make no sense at all on the doctrine of propositions, for the report does not relate Patrick to an individual known variously as ‘the dean’ and ‘Frank’s neighbor,’ but only with a concept expressed by the first of these terms. The problem here is just that of a missing conceptual ingredient. It looked in the original report as if Patrick was being said to stand in the relation of a belief to a certain proposition, a part of which was a conceptual ingredient expressed by the words ‘the dean.’ But if I am permitted to exchange those words for others, ‘Frank’s neighbor,’ which are not conceptually equivalent, then apparently the initial part of the proposition he was credited with belief in was not the conceptual ingredient identified by ‘the dean’ after all. So what proposition was it Patrick was originally credited with belief in? And ‘There is someone such that Patrick believes that he is wise’ seems to credit Patrick with belief in a proposition, without telling us which one. For after the ‘believes’ we have only ‘he is wise,’ where the ‘he’ does not give us an appropriate conceptual ingredient, but functions as a variable ranging over individuals. We do seem in some circumstances to allow such substitutivity, and make ready sense of quantification into belief reports. So the doctrine of propositions must be qualified. We can look upon this sort of belief as involving a relation to a new sort of proposition, consisting of an object or sequence of objects and a conceptual ingredient, a part of a proposition of the original kind, or what we might call an ‘open proposition.’ This sort of belief and this kind of proposition we call ‘de re,’ the sort of belief and the sort of proposition that fits the original doctrine, ‘de dicto.’ Taken this way, we analyze ‘Patrick believes that the dean of the school is wise,’ as reporting a relation between Patrick and a proposition consisting of a certain person variously describable as ‘the dean’ and ‘Frank’s neighbor’ and something, that x is wise, which would yield a proposition with the addition of an appropriate conceptual ingredient. Since the dean himself, and not just a concept expressed by the words ‘the dean’ is involved, substitution holds and quantification makes sense. Here, as in the case of the essential indexical, we were faced with a missing conceptual ingredient. Perhaps, then, this modification of the third tenet will solve the earlier problem as well. But it will not. Even if we suppose — as I think we should — that when I said ‘I believe that I am making a mess’ I was reporting a

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de re belief, our problem will remain. One problem emerges when we look at accounts that have been offered of the conditions under which a person has a de re belief. The most influential treatments of de re belief have tried to explain it in terms of de dicto belief or something like it. Some terminological regimentation is helpful here. Let us couch reports of de re belief in terms ‘X believes of a that he is so and so,’ reserving the simpler ‘X believes that a is so and so’ for de dicto belief. The simplest account of de re belief in terms of de dicto belief is this: X believes of y that he is so and so

just in case there is a concept α such that α fits y and X believes that α is so and so.

Now it is clear that if this is our analysis of de re belief, the problem of the essential indexical is still with us. For we are faced with the same problem we had before. I can believe that I am making a mess, even if there is no concept α such that I alone fit α and I believe that α is making a mess. Since I do not have any de dicto belief of the sort, on this account I do not have a de re belief of the right sort either. So, even allowing de re belief, we still do not have an account of the belief I acquired. Now this simple account of de re belief has not won many adherents, because it is commonly held that de re belief is a more interesting notion than it allows. This proposal trivializes it. Suppose Nixon is the next President. Since I believe that the next President will be the next President, I would on this proposal believe of Nixon that he is the next President, even though I am thoroughly convinced that Nixon will not be the next President.1 To get a more interesting or useful notion of de re belief, philosophers have suggested that there are limitations on the conceptual ingredient involved in the de dicto belief that yields the de re belief. Kaplan, for example, requires not only that there be some α such that I believe that α will be the next President and that α denotes Nixon, for me to believe of Nixon that he will be the next President, but also that α be a vivid name of Nixon for me (1969, 225ff). Hintikka requires that α denote the same individual in every possible world compatible with what I believe (1967, 40ff). Each of these philosophers explains these notions in such a way that in the circumstances imagined, I would not believe of Nixon that he is the next President. 1. For the classic discussion of these problems, see Quine (1966).

The problem of the essential indexical

However well these proposals deal with other phenomena connected with de re belief, they cannot help with the problem of the essential indexical. They tighten the requirements laid down by the original proposal, but those were apparently already too restrictive. If in order to believe that I am making a mess I need not have any conceptual ingredient α that fits me, a fortiori I am not required to have one that is a vivid name of myself for me, or one that picks out the same individual in every possible world compatible with what I believe. Perhaps this simply shows that the approach of explaining de re belief in terms of de dicto belief is incorrect. I think it does show that. But even so, the problem remains. Suppose we do not insist on an account of de re belief in terms of de dicto belief, but merely suppose that whenever we ascribe a belief, and cannot find a suitable complete proposition to serve as the object because of a missing conceptual ingredient, we are dealing with de re belief. Then we will ascribe a de re belief to me in the supermarket, I believed of John Perry that he was making a mess. But it will not be my having such a de re belief that explains my action. Suppose there were mirrors at either end of the counter so that as I pushed my cart down the aisle in pursuit I saw myself in the mirror. I take what I see to be the reflection of the messy shopper going up the aisle on the other side, not realizing that what I am really seeing is a reflection of a reflection of myself. I point and say, truly, ‘I believe that he is making a mess.’ In trying to find a suitable proposition for me to believe, we would be faced with the same sorts of problems we had with my earlier report, in which I used ‘I’ instead of ‘he.’ We would not be able to eliminate an indexical element in the term referring to me. So here we have de re belief; I believe of John Perry that he is making a mess. But then that I believe of John Perry that he is making a mess does not explain my stopping; in the imagined circumstances I would accelerate, as would the shopper I was trying to catch. But then, even granting that when I say ‘I believe that I am making a mess’ I attribute to myself a certain de re belief, the belief of John Perry that he is making a mess, our problem remains. If we look at it with the notion of a locating belief in mind, the failure of the introduction of de re belief to solve our problems is not surprising. De re propositions remain nonindexical. Propositions individuated in part by objects remain as insensitive to what is essential in locating beliefs as those individuated wholly by concepts. Saying that I believed of John Perry that he was making a mess leaves out the crucial change, that I came to think of the messy shopper not merely as the shopper with the torn sack, or the man in the mirror, but as me.

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Relativized Propositions It seems that to deal with essential indexicality we must somehow incorporate the indexical element into what is believed, the object of belief. If we do so, we come up against the second tenet of the doctrine of propositions, that such objects are true or false absolutely. But the tools for abandoning this tenet have been provided in recent treatments of the semantics of modality, tense, and indexicality. So this seems a promising direction. In possible-worlds semantics for necessity and possibility we have the notion of truth at a world. In a way this does not involve a new notion of a proposition and in a way it does. When Frege insisted that his ‘thoughts’ were true or false absolutely, he did not mean that they had the same truth-value in all possible worlds. Had he used a possible worlds framework, he would have had their truth-values vary from world to world, and simply insisted on a determinate truth-value in each world and in particular in the actual world. In a way, then, taking propositions to be functions from possible worlds to truthvalues is just a way of looking at the old notion of a proposition. Still, this way of looking at it invites generalization that takes us away from the old notion. From a technical point of view, the essential idea is that a proposition is, or is represented by, a function from an index to a truth-value; when we get away from modality, this same technical idea may be useful, though something other than possible worlds are taken as indices. To deal with temporal operators, we can use the notion of truth at a time. Here the indices will be times, and our propositions will be functions from times to truth-values. For example, that Elizabeth is Queen of England is a proposition true in 1960 but not in 1940. Hence ‘At some time or other Elizabeth is Queen of England’ is true, simpliciter.2 Now consider “I am making a mess.’ Rather than thinking of this as partially identifying an absolutely true proposition, with the ‘I’ showing the place of the missing conceptual ingredient, why not think of it as completely identifying a newfangled proposition, that is true or false only at a person? More precisely, it is one that is true or false at a time and a person, since though true when I said it, it has since occasionally been false. If we ignore possibility and necessity, it seems that regarding propositions as functions to truth-values from indices that are pairs of persons and times will

2. See Montague (1974), especially ‘Pragmatics’, and Scott (1970).

The problem of the essential indexical

do the trick, and that so doing will allow us to exploit relations between elements within the indices to formulate rules that bring out differences between indexicals. ‘I am tired now’ is true at the pair consisting of the person a and the time t if and only if a is tired at t, while ‘You will be tired’ is true at the same index if and only if the addressee of a at t is tired at some time later than t. Does this way of looking at the matter solve the problem of the essential indexical? I say ‘I believe that I am making a mess.’ On our amended doctrine of propositions, this ascribes a relation between me and that I am making a mess, which is a function from indices to truth- values. The belief report seems to completely specify the relativized proposition involved; there is no missing conceptual ingredient. So the problem must be solved. But it is not. I believed that a certain proposition, that I am making a mess was true — true for me. So belief that this proposition was true for me then does not differentiate me from some other shopper, who believes that I am making a mess was true for John Perry. So this belief cannot be what explains my stopping and searching my cart for the torn sack. Once we have adopted these newfangled propositions, which are only true at times for persons, we have to admit also that we believe them as true for persons at times, and not absolutely. And then our problem returns. Clearly an important distinction must be made. All believing is done by persons at times, or so we may suppose. But the time of belief and the person doing the believing cannot be generally identified with the person and time relative to which the propositions believed is held true. You now believe that that I am making a mess was true for me, then, but you certainly do not believe it is true for you now, unless you are reading this in a supermarket. Let us call you and now the context of belief, and me and then the context of evaluation. The context of belief may be the same as the context of evaluation, but need not be. Now the mere fact that I believed that proposition that I am making a mess to be true for someone at some time did not explain my stopping the cart. You believe so now, and doubtless have no more desire to mess up supermarkets than I did. But you are not bending over to straighten up a sack of sugar. The fact that I believed this proposition true for Perry at the time he was in the supermarket does not explain my behavior either. For so did the other shopper. And you also now believe this proposition was true for Perry at the time he was in the supermarket. The important difference seems to be that for me the context of belief was just the context of evaluation, but for the other shopper it was not and for you it is not. But this does not do the trick either.

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Consider our tardy professor. He is doing research on indexicals, and has written on the board ‘My meeting starts now.’ He believes that the proposition expressed by this sentence is true at noon for him. He has believed so for hours, and at noon the context of belief comes to be the context of evaluation. These facts give us no reason to expect him to move. Or suppose I think to myself that the person making the mess should say so. Turning my attention to the proposition, I certainly believe that I am making a mess is true for the person who ought to be saying it (or the person in the mirror, or the person at the end of the trail of sugar) at that time. The context of evaluation is just the context of belief. But there is no reason to suppose I would stop my cart. One supposes that in these cases the problem is that the context of belief is not believed to be the context of evaluation. But formulating the required belief will simply bring up the problem of the essential indexical again. Clearly and correctly we want the tardy professor, when he finally sees he must be off to the meeting, to be ready to say ‘I believe that the time at which it is true that the meeting starts now is now.’ On the present proposal, we analyze the belief he thereby ascribes to himself as belief in the proposition that the time at which it is true that the meeting starts now is now. But he certainly can believe at noon that this whole proposition is true at noon, without being ready to say ‘It is starting now’ and leave. We do not yet have a solution to the problem of the essential indexical.

Limited Accessibility One may take all that has been said so far as an argument for the existence of a special class of propositions, propositions of limited accessibility. For what have we really shown? All attempts to find a formula of the form ‘A is making a mess,’ with which any of us at any time could express what I believed, have failed. But one might argue that we can hardly suppose that there was not anything that I believed; surely I believed just that proposition which I expressed, on that occasion, with the words ‘I am making a mess.’ That we cannot find a sentence that always expresses this proposition when said by anyone does not show that it does not exist. Rather it should lead us to the conclusion that there is a class of propositions that can only be expressed in special circumstances. In particular, only I could express the proposition I expressed when I said ‘I am making a mess.’ Others can see, perhaps by

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analogy with their own case, that there is a proposition that I express, but it is in a sense inaccessible to them. Similarly, at noon on the day of the meeting, we could all express the proposition the tardy professor expressed with the words ‘The meeting starts now.’ But once that time has passed, the proposition becomes inaccessible. We can still identify it as the proposition that was expressed by those words at that time. But we cannot express it with those words any longer, for with each passing moment they express a different proposition. And we can find no other words to express it. The advocate of such a stock of propositions of limited accessibility may not need to bring in special propositions accessible only at certain places. For it is plausible to suppose that other indexicals can be eliminated in favor of ‘I’ and ‘now.’ Perhaps ‘That is Gilmore Lake’ just comes to ‘What I see now in front of me is Gilmore Lake.’ But elimination of either ‘I’ or ‘now’ in favor of the other seems impossible. Such a theory of propositions of limited accessibility seems acceptable, even attractive, to some philosophers.3 Its acceptability or attractiveness will depend on other parts of one’s metaphysics; if one finds plausible reasons elsewhere for believing in a universe that has, in addition to our common world, myriads of private perspectives, the idea of propositions of limited accessibility will fit right in.4 I have no knock-down argument against such propositions, or the metaphysical schemes that find room for them. But I believe only in a common actual world. And I do not think the phenomenon of essential indexicality forces me to abandon this view.

The Obvious Solution? Let us return to the device of the true/false exam. Suppose the lost author had been given such an exam before and after he figured out where he was. Would we expect any differences in his answers? Not so long as the statements contained no indexicals. ‘Mt. Tallac is higher than either of the Maggie Peaks’ would have been marked the same way before and after, the same way he would have marked it at home in Berkeley. His mark on that sentence would tell us

3. Frege seems to accept something like it, as necessary for dealing with ‘I’ (1918). 4. See Castañeda (1977), especially section II.

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nothing about where he thought he was. But if the exam were to contain such sentences as ‘That is Gilmore Lake in front of me,’ we would expect a dramatic change, from ‘False’ or ‘Unsure’ to ‘True.’ Imagine such an exam given to various lost campers in different parts of the Wilderness. We could classify the campers by their answers, and such a classification would be valuable for prediction and explanation. Of all the campers who marked ‘This is Gilmore Lake’ with ‘True,’ we would say they believed that they were at Gilmore Lake. And we should expect them to act accordingly; if they possessed the standard guidebook and wished to leave the Wilderness, we might expect what is, given one way of looking at it, the same behavior: taking the path up the mountain above the shallow end of the lake before them. Now consider all the good-hearted people who have ever been in a supermarket, noticed sugar on the floor, and been ready to say ‘I am making a mess.’ They all have something important in common, something that leads us to expect their next action to be that of looking into their grocery carts in search of the torn sack. Or consider all the responsible professors who have ever uttered ‘The department meeting is starting now.’ They too have something important in common; they are in a state that will lead those just down the hall to go to the meeting, those across campus to curse and feel guilty, those on leave to smile. What the members within these various groups have in common is not what they believe. There is no de dicto proposition that all the campers or shoppers or professors believe. And there is no person whom all the shoppers believe to be making a mess, no lake all the campers believe to be Gilmore Lake, and no time at which all the professors believe their meetings to be starting. We are clearly classifying the shoppers, campers, and professors into groups corresponding to what we have been calling ‘relativized propositions’ — abstract objects corresponding to sentences containing indexicals. But what members of each group have in common, which makes the groups significant, is not belief that a certain relativized proposition is true. Such belief, as we saw, is belief that such a proposition is true at some context of evaluation. Now all of the shoppers believe that that I am making a mess is true at some context of evaluation or other, but so does everyone else who has ever given it a moment’s thought. And similar remarks apply to the campers and the professors. If believing the same relativized proposition is not what the members of each of the groups have in common with one another, why is it being used as a principle of classification? I propose we look at things in this way. The shoppers, for example, are all in a certain belief state, a state that, given normal desires and

The problem of the essential indexical

other belief states they can be expected to be in, will lead each of them to examine his cart. But although they are all in the same belief state (not the same total belief state, of course), they do not all have the same belief (believe the same thing, have the relation of belief to the same object). We use sentences with indexicals or relativized propositions to individuate belief states, for the purposes of classifying believers in ways useful for explanation and prediction. That is, belief states individuated in this way enter into our commonsense theory about human behavior and more sophisticated theories emerging from it. We expect all good-hearted people in the state that leads them to say ‘I am making a mess’ to examine their grocery carts, no matter what belief they have in virtue of being in that state. That we individuate belief states in this way doubtless has something to do with the fact that one criterion for being in the states we postulate — at least for articulate, sincere adults — is being disposed to utter the indexical sentence in question. A good philosophy of mind should explain this in detail; my aim is merely to get clear about what it is that needs explaining. The proposal, then, is that there is not an identity, or even an isomorphic correspondence, but only a systematic relationship between the belief states one is in and what one thereby believes. The opposite assumption, that belief states should be classified by propositions believed, seems to be built right into traditional philosophies of belief. Given this assumption, whenever we have believers in the same belief state, we must expect to find a proposition they all believe, and differences in belief state lead us to expect a difference in proposition believed. The bulk of this paper consisted in following such leads to nowhere (or to propositions of limited accessibility). Consider a believer whose belief states are characterized by a structure of sentences with indexicals or relativized propositions (those marked ‘true’ in a very comprehensive exam, if we are dealing with an articulate, sincere adult). This structure, together with the context of belief — the time and identity of the speaker — will yield a structure of de re propositions. The sequence of objects will consist of the values that the indexicals take in the context. The open propositions will be those yielded by the relativized proposition when shorn of its indexical elements. These are what the person believes, in virtue of being in the states he is in, when and where he is in them.5

5. This two-tiered structure of belief states and propositions was suggested by David Kaplan’s system of characters and contents (1979). While Kaplan’s motivations for the distinction were basically semantical, it seems to me that the present considerations also supply an epistemological motivation for it. (See also

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This latter structure is important, and classifications of believers by what they believe are appropriate for many purposes. For example, usually, when a believer moves from context to context, his belief states adjust to preserve beliefs held. As time passes, I go from the state corresponding to ‘The meeting will begin’ to the one corresponding to ‘The meeting is beginning’ and finally to ‘The meeting has begun.’ All along I believe of noon that it is when the meeting begins. But I believe it in different ways. And to these different ways of believing the same thing, different actions are appropriate: preparation, movement, apology. Of course, if the change of context is not noted, the adjustment of belief states will not occur, and a wholesale change from believing truly to believing falsely may occur. This is what happened to Rip van Winkle. He awakes in the same belief states he fell asleep in twenty years earlier, unadjusted to the dramatic change in context, and so with a whole new set of beliefs, such as that he is a young man, mostly false. We have here a metaphysically benign form of limited accessibility. Anyone at any time can have access to any proposition. But not in any way. Anyone can believe of John Perry that he is making a mess. And anyone can be in the belief state classified by the sentence ‘I am making a mess.’ But only I can have that belief by being in that state. There is room in this scheme for de dicto propositions, for the characterization of one’s belief states may include sentences without any indexical element. If there are any, they could appear on the exam. For this part of the structure, the hypothesis of perfect correspondence would be correct. A more radical proposal would do away with objects of belief entirely. We would think of belief as a system of relations of various degrees between persons and other objects. Rather than saying I believed in the de re proposition consisting of me and the open proposition, x is making a mess, we would say that I stand in the relation, believing to be making a mess, to myself. There are many ways to stand in this relation to myself, that is, a variety of belief states I might be in. And these would be classified by sentences with indexicals. On this view, de dicto belief, already demoted from its central place in the philosophy of belief, might be seen as merely an illusion, engendered by the implicit nature of much indexicality. To say that belief states must be distinguished from objects of belief, cannot be individuated in terms of them, and are what is crucial for the explanation of

Kaplan 1989b.)

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action, is not to give a full-fledged account of belief, or even a sketchy one. Similarly, to say that we must distinguish the object seen from the state of the seeing subject, and that the latter is crucial for the explanation of action guided by vision, is not to offer a full-fledged account of vision. But just as the arguments from illusion and perceptual relativity teach us that no philosophy of perception can be plausible that is not cognizant of this last distinction, the problem of the essential indexical should teach us that no philosophy of belief can be plausible that does not take account of the first.6

6. Versions of this paper were read at philosophy department colloquia at UCLA, Claremont Graduate School, and Stanford University, to the Washington State University at Bellingham Philosophy Conference, and to the Meeting of Alberta Philosophy Departments. I am indebted to philosophers participating in these colloquia for many helpful criticisms and comments. I owe a special debt to Michael Bratman and Dagfinn Føllesdal for detailed comments on the penultimate version. Most of the ideas in this paper were developed while I held a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and was on sabbatical leave from Stanford University, and I thank both for their support.

Section III

Recent Work

Chapter 8

The myth of mental indexicals* Ruth Garrett Millikan University of Connecticut

Thesis: 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.

A strong contemporary current runs to the effect that the ability of an agent to project knowledge of the world into relevant action in the world depends on the ability to think indexical thoughts. For example, if I wish to get to Boston, it may be helpful to know that the 8:25 train goes there. But I cannot put this knowledge to use unless I also come to know, at some point, that there [a place indexed via perception] is the 8:25 train. Similarly, should my life be endangered by an approaching bear, it might help me to know it. But it will not be enough for me to know of this danger to me under some impersonal description of me, such as ‘the person sitting in Bruno’s favorite berry patch’ or even under the name ‘Ruth Millikan,’ unless I further know that I am the person in Bruno’s favorite berry patch or that I am Ruth Millikan (I might not know, for example, should I be amnesiac). But this kind of thought — there is the 8:25; I am Ruth Millikan — is, it is supposed, indexical. Thus Dennett, summing up the literature, remarks, “lndexicality of sentences appears to be the linguistic counterpart of that relativity to a subjective point of view that is a hallmark of mental states” (Dennett 1987: 132).1 He clarifies, using a (ubiquitous) quota-

* With the kind permission of the editors of Nous, this is a revised and expanded version of 1990: ‘The Myth of the Essential Indexical’ Nous 24.5: 723–734. The substantive additions are mainly toward the end of the essay. 1. Dennett cites Castañeda 1966, this volume; 1967; 1968; Perry 1977; 1979, this volume; Kaplan 1989b; and Lewis 1979. Another clear example is McGinn 1983. There are also clear gestures toward such a thesis, alas, in my 1984.

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tion in which Perry remarks, “When you and I have beliefs under the common character of ‘A bear is about to attack me’ we behave similarly, … [whereas] when you and I both apprehend that I am about to be attacked by a bear we behave differently” (Perry 1977: 494). That is, our behaviors hinge not so much on the objects of our thoughts, on their propositional contents, as on what Kaplan calls the ‘character,’ in this case the indexical type, of our thoughts. Kaplan too identifies “the context sensitivity of character” with what he calls “the context sensitivity of mental states” and remarks, “Dare I call it ego orientation?” (Kaplan 1989b: 531). No, he should not dare. For it is not indexical thoughts that serve to orient an agent in his world. A picture that holds us captive portrays the index as a pointing finger, showing the direction of its referent from here, so that we may act from here regarding it. Internalized, the pointing finger is a pointing thought, guiding action towards its object. But, I will argue, first, it is not true for the general case that the relation an indexical or the interpreter of an indexical bears to the indexical’s referent is a relation that needs to be taken account of during action. Second, conversely, it is not true for the general case that those relations of self to world that one must take into account in order to act in the world are relations of the sort that an indexical or the interpreter of an indexical bears to the indexical’s referent. Third, it is no part of the job of an indexical token to signify the relation either of itself to its referent or of its interpreter to its referent. Fourth, conversely, inner signs that do signify relations between agent and world as needed for action are not as such indexical. Finally, if an agent employs a mental term to represent herself, this in principle cannot be a mental indexical: there can be no thought that has the (Kaplan-style) character of ‘I.’ Nor are there thoughts with the character of either ‘here’ or ‘now.’ It is not just that for indexicals there is no simple Fregean correspondence between possible sentence meanings and possible thought types. The whole genre of indexicals is simply missing from thought. An indexical sign has no constant referent, no referent qua sign type. Tokens of an indexical type have referents when they are situated in appropriate contexts. An appropriate context contains something bearing a designated relation to the indexical token, which something is thereby that token’s referent (e.g., a person, an object) or is thereby that variant in world affairs that the token indexes (e.g., a time, a place, a property). This designated relation for a

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given indexical type I call its indexical adapting relation.2 The indexical adapting relation for ‘I,’ for example, is being the producer of the token; for ‘you’ it is being the addressee of the sentence containing the token; for ‘here,’ being a position near the origination point of the token; for demonstratives, being suitably related in any of various conventional ways to, say, a gesture accompanying the token, to other words bearing certain relations to the token; and so forth.3 Thus the meaning of an indexical type can be thought of as expressed by a function from token context to token referent. Kaplan (1989b) calls this function (or close enough) the ‘character’ of the indexical type. It is a thought’s ‘character’ in this sense — I shall say ‘karacter’ — that is taken by Kaplan and many others to connect directly with action, with behavior. “We use the manner of presentation, the character, to individuate psychological states, in explaining and predicting action” (Kaplan 1989b: 532). First let us examine the relation of the referent of an indexical token to the token’s interpreter: is this relation relevant to action? If there were such things as mental indexicals, the mental indexical token would be inside the interpreter. Let us begin instead with the easier case of public-language indexicals, where the full structure of the relation of interpreter to indexed referent is out in the open. For public-language indexicals, it is evident that there are actually two relations to be considered. First, there is the relation the indexical token bears to its referent as dictated by the karacter of the sign: this is the ‘indexical adapting relation’ for the sign. Second, there is the relation the interpreter bears to the indexical token. Different interpreters may, of course, bear quite different relations to the same indexical token, hence to its referent. Should a public indexical serve to alert or accommodate its interpreter to the relation of its referent to the interpreter, it is clear that the interpreter would have to sum two prior relations to find this relation: the interpreter’s relation to the token plus the token’s relation to the referent. The same structure is still there, though less evidently, when the relation of interpreter to sign remains constant, the sign remaining inside the interpreter. The first thing to notice is that this pair of relations does not as such or necessarily yield a sum relevant to action. I’ll give two examples of failure to sum in a relevant way. These should be enough to make the general point. The

2. The reason for this terminology is explained in my 1984: chs. 2 and 10. Notice also that I am not using ‘context’ quite in Kaplan’s recommended way. 3. For a discussion of the various kinds of indexicals and their adapting relations, see my 1984: ch. 10.

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first occurs when the indexical adapting relation is being a (certain sort of) cause of the indexical token. The second occurs when the referent or variant indexed by the indexical token is a type or kind rather than a particular. Suppose that you receive an undated postcard from Barcelona signed by Alvin that says, “I am leaving for a few days in Rome.” You know what the referent’s, Alvin’s, relation to the indexical token ‘I’ is: the referent wrote it, he was its cause; that’s what makes him the referent. And you know what your relation to that token of ‘I’ is: you have it in your hand. But this yields no clue concerning your relation to the referent, to Alvin. At least, it yields no clue concerning any salient relation, any relation you are likely to need to take account of in order to act regarding Alvin. The given relation of you to the token plus the given relation of the token to its referent has, as it were, no vector sum. Nor does it help to move the sign that indexes its cause to the inside of the interpreter. Suppose that it were true that your thought-tokens ‘Iris Murdoch’ were indexical tokens, referring (as do tokens of public language ‘I’) to their salient cause, which was in this case the cause, Murdoch herself, of the first ancestor token of ‘Iris Murdoch’ produced at Murdoch’s baptismal ceremony. (I am not recommending this theory of thoughts of Murdoch.) Thinking this (supposedly) indexical thought, even if it involved understanding the nature of this indexical adapting relation between thought and referent exactly, would not reveal to you any salient relation you presently bore to Murdoch. It would not help you to take action towards Murdoch. Taking what is perhaps a more plausible case, consider the popular theory that percepts are mental indexicals referring to their salient causes. The fact that the perceiver contains the percept plus the fact that the percept was caused by the perceived, by the referent, does not sum to a determinate usable relation between perceiver and perceived. Think of seeing an object through a set of trick mirrors. You perceive the object alright, but you perceive it as in a different spatial relation to you than it in fact bears. The bare fact that the object perceived equals what causes your percept does not mean you can locate it, that you grasp its relation to you as needed for action. It is not true in general then that the indexical adapting relation for an indexical sign is one that it helps to take into account when engaging in action toward the referents of its tokens. Indexicality as such seems to have nothing to do with orientation for action. On the other hand, a veridical percept generally does show some relation or relations between the perceiver and the perceived that it might be necessary or useful for the perceiver to take into account during action toward the perceived.

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Specifically, there are usually (mathematical-style) transformations of the percept that would correspond systematically to transformations of the spatial relation of perceiver to perceived. For example, one sees how far and in what direction one is from an object. But these relations are not determined by adding the fact that the percept is inside the perceiver to the fact that the perceived is a cause of the percept; it is not a resultant of those facts. The spatial relation is independently shown in the percept. Because percepts often do show certain relations to the self of the objects perceived and because you often do need to take those relations into account in order to act, perception is often essential for action. But this has nothing to do with indexicality in perception. Possibly the percept that shows relations is also indexical (I think not — see note 8 below, and also my 1997) but showing relations would not make it indexical nor would being indexical make it represent any relations. (Relations shown in my percepts are, of course, relations to me. Soon I will raise the question whether, in order to show a relation to me, the percept must index me or my place, but that is a separate question.) The irrelevance of indexical adapting relations to action shows up especially clearly when what is indexed is a type or kind: that color, that word type, that species, that metal, and so forth. Similarly, if quotation marks are indexicals (Davidson 1979, My 1984: ch. 13) or if intentional contexts (‘believes that….’ ‘wishes to…,’ etc.) are indexicals (Davidson 1968, My 1984: ch. 13, Boër and Lycan 1986), these must index types rather than tokens. Conceivably, in these cases the indexical token brings the interpreter into some sort of non-vectorsum relation to the type that is indexed. But how would a grasp of this relation help the interpreter to act in relation to the indexed type? There does not seem to be anything about indexical adapting relations per se that makes them especially relevant to action. Conversely, the sorts of relations between self and world that an agent must take into account are not relations that adapt any indexicals. To act, I must, of course, take account of the nature and disposition of things in my world relative to my powers of action. The example we all think of first is taking account of my spatial relations to the things I would act on, for I must act on them from my place in relation to them. (Notice that this is contingent: with the power of telekinesis, I might not need to take account of these relations.) An important way of knowing the places of things to be acted on relative to me is through perception. But if the perceptual representations of these spatial relations are easy to confuse with indexicals, most action-relevant relations that one must take account of certainly are not. Consider, for example, my grasp of the size and weight of things I would act on

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relative to my size and strength, of various distances relative to my reaching powers, climbing powers, leaping, throwing, walking, running, and shouting powers, and so forth. Nor is it true that all action is based on perception. I need not perceive my arm in order intentionally to raise it, or perceive my eyelid in order intentionally to blink it, and if I should come to know that the trigger releasing the catch to the door of my jail cell is directly under my left index finger (say, the kindly guard tells me), I don’t need to perceive anything at all in order to act so as to free myself. I need only know how to depress my left index finger. Indexicality certainly is not ‘the linguistic counterpart of that relativity to a subjective point of view that is a hallmark of mental states,’ then — at least not in so far as the subjective point of view is the point of view needed for action. It is not indexicals that orient me in my world for action. This is apparent also from the fact that the indexical adapting relation for an indexical is not a relation that is expressed or shown by the indexical. Suppose that the relation that an indexical bears to its referent should turn out to be relevant to action. Still, it is not the job of an indexical to tell of or to display this relation between itself and its referent. The karacter of the indexical does not correspond to any part of its propositional content. Instead, to interpret an indexical, one must have prior knowledge of which item it is that bears the relevant adapting relation to the indexical token. One must know this independently and prior to successfully interpreting the indexical. One must already know both that this referent exists and that it is appropriately related to the indexical token. One does not find this out by interpreting the indexical; one needs already to know it in order to interpret the indexical. For example, a token of ‘I’ does not tell me who the originator of that token is, that it is, say, Alvin, nor even that it has an originator and that this is relevant. Rather, if I am to understand a token of ‘I,’ I must already know who the speaker is and that knowing this is relevant. That is why Alvin had to sign his postcard, and why I had to learn English to understand what it said. Similarly, a token of ‘here’ does not tell me where it is. To understand ‘here,’ I must independently know what place the token is in, or was in when originated. A ‘here’ shouted in the dark is of no use to a person with one deaf ear who cannot localize sounds. Similarly, turning an example of Perry’s on its side, suppose that a postcard arrives with illegible postmark, return address, and signature saying, “I am having a good time now.” Perry says that the “truth conditions” of this inscription are, merely, that “the person who wrote the postcard was having a good time at the time he or she wrote it” (1988: 9). But the ‘truth conditions,’

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understood this way, express only the reader’s knowledge of the karacter, rather than expressing any of the propositional content, of the inscription. By analogy Perry should say that the sentence ‘John has brown hair’ has as ‘truth conditions’ that whatever person named ‘John’ it is being used to denote has brown hair. But this is to confuse knowing how to find out what it means with knowing how to find out whether it is true. It is to confuse pre-semantics with semantics. It is not part of the job of a sentence to tell you what does or would make it meaningful. The content of ‘I am having a good time’ concerns only its actual writer and time and place of writing. Clearly, in order to get to that content it would be necessary to know who wrote it, when, and where. If the interpreter lacks this knowledge, none of the intended message gets through. Nor, of course, does the message contain that information. Exactly the same principle applies to the most paradigmatic of indexicals: ‘that’ accompanied by a pointing finger. The pointing finger is understood only if what it points at is visible or otherwise independently identifiable. Or suppose it is the job of ‘that’ to point out a direction, ‘that way.’ The interpreter must have a clear view of the surroundings so as to see in what direction the finger points. The interpreter must be able independently to identify that direction, not necessarily with a name (‘east, west’) but, say, via an ability to track it, to know what it would be to continue following that selfsame direction, as opposed to turning away from it. To know what an indexical points to, to identify the indexed, requires that one have a prior route to thinking of that object, a route other than via the indexical token, and that one grasp this prior route as arriving at the same object as bears the (priorly known) indexical adapting relation to the indexical token. Indexicals do not tell what they point at. It is their interpreters that do the telling. Indexicals do not tell what is in their contexts. The context of an indexical is what determines its content. Nor should we be confused by the fact that it is often possible to use a sign to obtain information that it is not the function of the sign to convey. For example, you can use any public language sign as evidence that there existed a person, who spoke a certain language, at its point of origin — like footprints in the sand. Similarly, you could use Perry’s partly illegible postcard as evidence that there existed a person who wrote the postcard and who was having a good time at that time. You could reach this conclusion, as Perry has suggested, by making the assumption that the sentence on the postcard is true. If the postcard had said, ‘I will meet … in Rome,’ the blank filled in with an illegible name, on the same assumption you could infer that someone had at some time planned to meet someone else in Rome, and so forth. But it was not the purpose of the

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postcard to convey this general proposition. Its purpose was to tell about, say, Alvin. Similarly, from a pointing finger accompanied by the sentence ‘This is a carpenter ant’, you may gather that close to the end of the finger is a carpenter ant, even though you cannot see it from there. But that is not what the speaker aims to impart. The speaker intends you to see what is a carpenter ant. Nor should we be confused by the fact that sentences whose public meanings are indexical can also intentionally be turned to nonindexical purposes by individual users. Consider an anonymous threat over the telephone, ‘I’ll see that you die,’ or the child who says, ‘This is what you are getting for Christmas,’ while coyly holding it behind her back. These are indexical sentence types, but they are not serving indexical purposes. They are not functioning in a normal way.4 All of these uses of language are possible. But what defines the indexical use of a sign is that its context is used by the interpreter to determine the content, to determine the referent, not talked about in the content. A representation that told of its own relation to something else would not be indexical but selfreferential, and it would be its content, not its karacter, that told of the relation.5 Similarly, an inner representation that told or showed the relation of itself to the world would not on that account be indexical. Still, wouldn’t a representation telling of something’s relation to me that was crucial for action, say the spatial relation of something to me, have to represent me, and wouldn’t any representation of me used in this way have to be indexical? Colin McGinn says, “All the [essential] indexicals are linked with I, and the I mode of presentation is subjective in character because it comprises the special perspective a person has on himself. Very roughly, we can say that to think of something indexically is to think of it in relation to me, as I am presented to myself in self-consciousness” (1983: 17). It will not be enough, a substantial literature agrees, that an agent entertain representations the content of which concerns the relation of herself to the world. That might be done by the use of relation terms along with an inner Millian name that the agent has for herself, or along with any description that happens to catch her uniquely.6 What is required is that the agent recognize any such name or description as a name for

4. That is, they are not serving their stabilizing functions. See my 1984: chs. 3 and 4. 5. I accept Kaplan’s remarks on Reichenbach’s confusion of indexicality with self-reference as definitive, a confusion embodied in Reichenbach’s term ‘token reflexive.’ See Kaplan 1989b: 519–520. 6. By a ‘Millian name’ I mean one about the semantics of which nothing can be said beyond that it is a name with such and such a referent. The semantics of mental names of this sort, their psychological possibility, and how they get their referents are discussed in my 1984; 1993, ch. 4; 1994 and especially 1998a, 1998b.

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herself, that she identify its content with that of her inner term ‘I.’ Only when she grasps that the person so positioned in the world is ‘I’ can she act from a knowledge of that position. And this grasp requires thinking an indexical thought. Now it is trivial that if I am to react in a special and different way to the knowledge that I, RM, am positioned so in the world, a way quite unlike how I would react knowing anyone else was positioned so in the world, then my inner way of representing RM must bear a very special and unique relation to my dispositions to act. But what does that have to do with indexicality? My inner way of representing RM is obviously not just an ordinary name in my mental vocabulary. It hooks up with my know-hows, with my abilities and dispositions to act, in a rather special way. Conceivably, I might also have ordinary mental names for RM, or mental descriptions, that didn’t hook up with these knowhows, because I didn’t recognize them as having the same content as this special RM representation, just as I might think ‘Cicero’ and then ‘Tully’ without knowing these were thoughts of the same person. My way of representing RM is indeed special. Let us call it ‘RM’s active self-thought’ or ‘@RM,’ for it represents a person whom I know, as thought of that way, how to manipulate directly; I know how to effect her behavior. But in order to know how to manage this person, why would I need to think indexical thoughts? What has know-how to do with indexicality?7 An indexical term is one whose referent varies with context, being identified, for each token, by the fact that it is what bears a certain relation, the indexical’s adapting relation, to the token. Applying this principle to indexicals in thought, a thought would be indexical if its context determined its referent, and if there were normal procedures for identifying this referent, that is, for determining with what prior or independent thought tokens it coincided in content, procedures depending on the fact that the referent bore the indexical adapting relation to the token. That is, these procedures would work only because the referent bore the adapting relation to the token. Determining for a thought token with what other thought tokens it coincides in content is determining, paradigmatically, which other term tokens it can be paired with to serve jointly as a middle term during inference. (Determining this correctly is best thought of as an ability or know-how rather than as knowledge that.) To illustrate, if there were such things as Millian names in a language of thought,

7. I give accounts of abilities or ‘know-hows,’ calling them ‘competencies,’ in my 1993: ch. 11; 1994. Abilities express biological purposes and, as such, are very different from mere causal dispositions.

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an obvious procedure for identifying the referent of a mental Millian name token would be to pair it with other tokens of the same mental type. But the procedure for pairing a mental indexical token with other tokens having the same referent would have to be routed via the context of the token — as I know who is tired when Alvin says ‘I am tired’ through an independent identification of the person who has produced this token of ‘I.’ Otherwise, the mental term would not be functioning indexically.8 Is that the sort of way that my mental term ‘@RM,’ the term that bears that quite unique and special relation to my dispositions to act, hooks up with its referent, hooks up with me? Do I succeed in identifying the content of various tokens of my mental ‘@RM,’ that is, do I succeed in reidentifying myself, only because I grasp for each token of ‘@RM’ independently that it bears a certain

8. In the earlier version of this essay (‘The Myth of the Essential Indexical’), I offered the following as an example of indexicality in perception, but I now think that I was mistaken: It is plausible that in perception the percept is about, refers to, its cause, that is, to the cause of the percept token. What the (veridical) percept token shows is certain properties of this cause plus, often, the spatial relation of that cause to the perceiving subject. But the percept is not about the generality that there exists a something of a certain character so related to the perceiver; it does not, as it were, translate with an existential quantifier. Rather, it is about, it is a percept of, its particular cause. This particular aboutness is expressed through the ability that the normal perceiver has to track the particular referent with eyes, head, and, if necessary, feet in order to accumulate more information about it. This process involves identifying or, what is the same, reidentifying the tracked object, for it involves using a series of percepts of it, of the same thing, conjointly (compare the function of a middle term) so as to extract information presumed to be about just one thing, about one particular individual. And the method of determining that these various percepts belong together as percepts of the same — the method of tracking — is routed through the fact that the perceived was the cause of the percept. It was the cause of the percept in accordance with a certain way of causing normal for that kind of perception, and it will accordingly cause later percepts in a traceable pattern, other percepts with the same referent. I no longer think that the cause of a percept functions qua cause to determine any part of its intentional content. The confusion arises because the only verbs of perception that we have are ‘success’ or ‘achievement’ verbs, such as ‘see,’ ‘hear’ and ‘perceive,’ parallel to ‘remember,’ ‘know’ and ‘realize’ in the realm of conception. Just as you do not ‘remember’ it if it did not happen, you do not ‘see’ or ‘perceive’ it if it did not cause your perception. In the realm of conception, however, we have non-success verbs like ‘believe’ and ‘think,’ making us easily aware that the intentional object of conception is not always its actual source. For example, the object of belief may not be what is actually being remembered. I might believe that Aunt Nellie once took me to the movies yet actually be remembering Aunt Alice’s doing so. Suppose we invent a verb ‘to visage’ for the perceptual realm to parallel the conceptual verb ‘to believe.’ Then we have a way of saying that I may sometimes visage things that are not the actual causes of my perceptions. I might visage Aunt Nellie in the distance when it is actually Aunt Alice I am seeing. Compatibly, just as we can say ‘I remembered it wrongly,’ we can say ‘I saw it wrongly.’ The intentional object of a perception is what is visaged, and this is not always what actually causes the perception. The percept is not an indexical representation of its cause.

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adapting relation to me? Isn’t it more reasonable that my mental ‘@RM’ is simply a mental proper name? I take different tokens of ‘@RM’ to refer to the same not because of their individual contexts, not as a result of some relation each of these tokens independently bears to me, but simply because they are tokens of the same type. If the thought ‘@RM’ were indexical in my system of mental representation, then its referent would have to be identified via its context. Correlatively, its referent would have to shift in accordance with context. And what sort of context would that be? Perhaps we are supposing the relevant context to be the mind ‘@RM’ appears in. (Devitt: ‘The reference of “I” is determined by the head it is in’ [1984: 400].) Are we supposing, then, that in my language of thought, in my inner system of representation, tokens of ‘@RM’ might appear in your head so that I must check whose head ‘@RM’ appears in before identifying its content? Or are we supposing, perhaps, that my mental language is some sort of universal language, one selfsame language that all people speak in their heads, so that rather than ‘@RM,’ I must think ‘I,’ the self-name in universal Mentalese? But even if this were the case (maybe Jerry Fodor thinks that it is), in what sense would the self name be indexical? Certainly there would be no interpreter for whom it would be indexical. Or is the claim that it would be indexical for God, or for an intrusive mind or brain reader? But the language of thought, if there is such, is not God’s language, nor brain-reader language, but the thinker’s language. God might read tokens of the universal self name, tokens of mental ‘I,’ indexically, determining the reference of each by first noting whose head it was in. Similarly, I might ‘read a chameleon’s back’ descriptively, as a natural sign telling what color the chameleon has been sitting on, although the chameleon’s color has no descriptive meaning for the chameleon. The universal self name would not be an indexical for the selves who named themselves with it, and when read by someone else, it could function only as a natural sign, not as a sign in the language of thought. So my mental ‘I,’ my ‘@RM,’ is not an indexical. More reasonable (though, I will soon argue, probably still incorrect) would be to take it as a (Millian) name for me; your ‘I,’ which may well have quite a different mental shape, as a (Millian) name for you. But supposing this to be so, there is still the question why using the public indexical ‘I’ seems to express this mental name in a way that using one’s name or a description of oneself does not. If I say to you ‘I was born in Philadelphia’, I express to you that the very agent whose presence you are now in was born in Philadelphia, whereas if I say ‘Ruth Millikan was born

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in Philadelphia’, you will not understand that it concerns the person present unless you happen to know my name. And it also seems true that I might say ‘Ruth Millikan was born in Philadelphia’ without knowing I was Ruth Millikan, whereas saying ‘I was born in Philadelphia’ shows that I believe of the very bearer of my active self name,‘@RM,’ that she was born in Philadelphia. And yet this is not quite accurate. What is true is that for me to say anything at all is for me literally to put words in the mouth of this body, so that if we grant that I understand English and also understand which body it is I control, we must also grant that I realize that any ‘I’ that I intentionally produce will refer to the controller of this body. Is it possible to be deluded about which body I control so that I might say ‘I was born in Philadelphia’ expecting the words to emerge out of someone else’s mouth? If not, that would be an empirical fact about the impossibility of certain kinds of neurological damage or disturbance. The psychological literature shows that a great many mental disturbances that seem inconceivable in fact are occasionally realized. A more interesting question is how to understand that a name for myself might be ‘active.’ A way to begin, I believe, is with the notion of a ‘pushmipullyu representation’ or ‘PPR’ (Millikan 1996). A PPR is a representation that is fact stating and directive at the same time, or better, is undifferentiated as between these two modes. The simplest examples are found in nature. The beaver’s tail splash tells that there is danger and also tells other beavers to dive under. The dance of the honey bee tells where there is nectar and also tells other bees where to go. I have argued that human intentions are inner PPRs, representing future facts about oneself that may need to be considered in further planning and at the same time guiding action towards realization of those very facts (1996). One’s active self name, then, is the PPR name for oneself that occurs in the inner representations that are one’s intentions. But this is still not quite right, as I think. I suspect that the self is not routinely represented at all either in one’s expectation about one’s future or in one’s intentions to act. Notice that in soliloquy there is no explicit reference to the self: ‘To be, or not to be;’ ‘And now to bed.’ Also, when A hands to B a form that is to direct B’s intentions, no explicit reference is made to B’s self: ‘Close the door, please;’ ‘Be quick now.’ Similarly, when I see or otherwise perceive the spatial relation of an object to myself, often I need not perceive any portion of myself in order to act with regard to it. For example, to walk towards the church at the end of the square, I need not perceive my legs or any other part of myself. And yet, I have said, my spatial relations to other things are an important part of what is represented in perception. How can this be?

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Once again, bee dances (Of course! What else?) are the key. What a bee dance shows is the direction, relative to hive and sun, in which there is nectar. But there are no variables in the bee dance that show the hive, or the sun, or that it is nectar that is being represented. For example, there is no aspect of the bee dance that, if varied or replaced, would show the relation of nectar to hive and moon, or the relation of danger to hive and sun. Similarly, the visual percept shows the spatial disposition of other objects relative to where I am, but there is no variable in it that might be replaced to show the spatial dispositions of these objects relative to any other spatial point of view. I can imagine and I can conceive from spatial points of view I do not currently occupy, but I cannot perceive from other points of view. That is of the nature of perceptual representation, designed, in the first instance, to guide action. Similarly, my intentions are not designed to guide anyone’s actions but my own. Hence they have no need explicitly to represent me. I do not have to take into account variations in whose head a token of ‘@RM’ appears, nor variations in whose action it is supposed to guide. But, once again, this inarticulateness in how the self is represented has nothing to do with indexicality. But we have not disposed yet of quite all of the myths. What about mental indexicals corresponding to ‘here’ and ‘now’? Corresponding to ‘here’ are thoughts of things understood as being close to me. Thus ‘here’ does not express an indexical thought but merely a thought of an impure relational property. Thoughts of impure relations, whether the relata are explicitly represented or not, are not, as such, indexical. Being more careful, however, what we express with ‘here’ are thoughts of things understood to be close to me now. Perry tells us, “it is plausible to suppose that other indexicals can be eliminated in favor of ‘I’ and ‘now’….. But elimination of either ‘I’ or ‘now’ in favor of the other seems impossible.” I have tried to show how to eliminate the mental indexical ‘I’. Can we also eliminate ‘now’? Using Perry’s example, if the absent minded professor intends to go to the department meeting and knows that is starts at noon, even though it is in fact noon, the professor may not move towards the meeting for he may not realize that it is noon now. Whatever is a mental correlate of ‘now,’ like the mental correlate of ‘I,’ appears also to be, as such, an element in PPRs. From ‘I am going to the meeting at noon’ coupled with ‘It is now noon’ is derived the thought ‘I am now going to the meeting.’ And like a bee dance, the thought ‘I am now going to the meeting’ serves both to represent what is happening and to cause it to happen. That accounts for the action-producing characteristic of the thought. Considering this thought in so far as it represents to its thinker

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both when and who is going, we have also eliminated the indexicality of the part showing who. We did this by pointing out that the context of whatever part shows the who is constant for a given thinker. The same thinker does not think in this way of a variety of who’s. But in whatever way the thinker thinks of when he is going, surely the same thinker does think of many different whens. Moreover, which when a thinker is thinking of in this way surely changes with the time of the thought. Doesn’t it follow that the thought must be indexical? Surprisingly, no. Consider a scale drawing of a building where one centimeter represents one meter. Compare a scale drawing of a small insect where one centimeter represents one millimeter. Now consider a scale drawing of a cross-stitch pattern where one centimeter represents one centimeter. Surely none of these representations contain indexicals. On the last drawing, one centimeter does indeed represents one centimeter, but it does not index itself, nor it is ‘token reflexive.’ Similarly, children’s marking pens are colored on the outside to indicate the color on the inside, red on the outside standing for red on the inside, blue standing for blue, and so forth. Or perhaps the colors on the inside are a shade lighter than the ones on the outside. Another example is the relative places of dots on a map which show the relative places of cities on the earth’s surface, geometrical relations on the map indicating the same geometrical relations on the earth. This kind of representational system bears a strong resemblance to systems exhibiting compositionality, possible transformations (mathematical sense) of the representation corresponding systematically to possible transformations of the represented. One centimeter longer corresponds to one meter longer, or to one millimeter longer, or to one centimeter longer; one shade redder corresponds to one shade redder, twice as far from represents twice as far from, three dots in an isosceles triangle represents three cities in an isosceles triangle, and so forth. Surely there is no hint of indexicality here. Now consider the beaver’s danger signal. It is not indexical, but the place of the splash represents the place of the danger and the time of the splash represents the time of the danger. Similarly, the absent minded professor’s thought that now is the time of the meeting represents the time of the meeting with the time of the thought. It is not indexical. The professor need not have any independent hold on the relation of the thought to the time of the meeting — as one would need an independent hold on who it was that wrote ‘I am having a good time’ — in order fully to appreciate his thought that the meeting is now. If he has mistaken the time and, having discovered this, sometime later

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again thinks that the meeting is now, he does not think the same indexical thought type in another context. He thinks a different thought altogether. Similarly, if the cartographer corrects himself by moving the dot for Chicago to a different location, he does not use the same indexical representation type in a different context. He uses a different representation altogether though, of course, one from the same representational system.

Chapter 9

Thinking about myself Maite Ezcurdia Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Frege held that upon having a self-thought — a thought or belief expressed in public language by a subject with ‘I’ — a subject is presented to herself in a particular and primitive way in which she is presented to no other.1 Taking ‘mode of presentation’ loosely, we may include under Frege’s suggestion other views. All of these accept, quite generally and roughly, that when one has a selfthought2 one thinks of oneself as one’s self, that is, as a subject which is one’s own, which — so to speak — one knows how to move.3 Disagreements arise on the issue of what this mode of presentation amounts to. Some hold that it is a particular sense (Frege, 1918) or concept given by a certain mode of identification (Evans, 1982, this volume; Peacocke, 1983), whereas others think it is a way of believing or role (Perry, 1979; this volume) or a non-communicable mode of presentation (Récanati, 1993). I shall group all these accounts together under the label the mode-of-presentation view. Recently two further proposals about what is involved in having an ‘I’-thought have emerged: they deny an ‘I’-thought involves anything like a mode of presentation of thinking of oneself as one’s self. The first proposal is

1. See Frege, 1918. 2. I am taking ‘thoughts’ here in a non-Fregean way, hence not to mean Fregean propositions. I take ‘thoughts’ to refer to psychological states, like believing, doubting, etc. 3. On the Fregean approach one might take this as a primitive mode of presentation, but one may also want to reduce this mode of thinking to other modes of thinking like thinking of oneself as this person. (For arguments against some candidates that reduce it see Burge, 1998.) Although I think that the selfmode-of-presentation is non-reducible, I shall not argue for this here. The phrase ‘the subject one knows how to move’ (which I use throughout) is meant to include the knowledge that a subject has of herself as a subject not only of movement or action, but also of thought and perception. Such knowledge may be characterised as a know-how and as a knowing what it is like. I use the phrase for want of an adequate short expression that involves action, thought and perception.

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the no-mental-representation view and is held primarily by Mellor (1988).4 The view is that upon having a self-thought a subject does not have mode of presentation or mental representation of herself; all she has is an object, namely, herself. The second proposal is the Millian view and has been put forth by Millikan.5 The view is that although on having a self-thought one does have a mental representation of oneself, there is no mode of presentation mediating between that representation and what it represents. The view is essentially that there are different mental counterparts for ‘I’, each behaving as a Millian name for the subject in whose head each occurs.6 I think these more recent views are mistaken, and that the mode-ofpresentation view is essentially right. Self-thoughts do require a subject to think of herself under a particular mode of presentation, viz., as her own self. In paving the way for an argument in favour of this, I shall argue against the other views. I begin by saying what a theory of self-thoughts must account for in order to show how it is that both the no-representation and the Millian views fail to do this. My conclusion will be threefold: that the mode-of-presentation line of thought is essentially correct, that the mental representation which is a counterpart for ‘I’ is very likely indexical like the public language ‘I’, and that the mode of presentation of the mental counterpart for ‘I’ need not be the same as the one involved in the semantic rule or character of the public language ‘I’.

I There are two features of self-thoughts that distinguish them from what I shall call ‘name-thoughts’, viz., thoughts reported in public language with the use of names for the subject.

4. Perry (1986) holds this view for what he calls “basic beliefs”. His view is that in the case of basic beliefs context suffices for determining or fixing the object of belief, so that no mental representation of that object is necessary. The argument I shall be presenting against Mellor will also count against Perry’s account of basic beliefs, though I shall not spell this out here. 5. See Millikan, 1990, revised version this volume. The view discussed here is from the 1990 version. Given Fodor’s recent general account of modes of presentation as mental representations — Mentalese expressions — whose semantics is given solely in terms of reference, he might be interpreted as an advocate of this view. (For some hints towards this see Fodor, 1994, and for the full view see Fodor, 1998. But contrast it with Fodor, 1987.) 6. There is a sense in which both these views agree with Frege’s claim that upon having thoughts about myself I am thinking of myself in a primitive way in which no one else can think of me. On the norepresentation view, the only person who does not need to have a representation in order to think about me is me, whereas others do need representations of me. On the Millian view, the only subject who can think about me through a Millian mental representation, through an active self-name (as Millikan calls it), is me.

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a.The self-knowledge feature: self-thoughts may suffice for knowledge about oneself whereas name-thoughts do not.7 b.The self-locating feature: self-thoughts, in particular, self-beliefs, are necessary for a subject to be motivated into action because they locate the subject for the subject whereas name-thoughts do not. a.In attributing to myself the property of thinking, I may think of (or refer to) myself in two sorts of ways either by thinking (1) or by thinking (2). (1) Maite is thinking.8 (2) I am thinking.

Both are attributions to myself of a certain property, but only my believing (2) suffices for knowledge. Only my same act of thinking (2) suffices as justification or warrant for my knowing it to be true. This is not so with my thinking (1). For I may have forgotten that I am Maite. Thus, my thinking (1) does not suffice as justification for my knowing that it is true — though it does suffice for making it true. This is because whereas in my having a name-thought I can believe the object of thought is someone different from me, my having a selfthought ensures that I recognize or realize which is the object of the thought, that I recognize or realize that that thought is about me.9

7. Self-knowledge as discussed by Burge (1988 and 1996) includes attributions of thoughts to ourselves like knowing that I am thinking that water is liquid. Here I present only attributions of properties (like that of thinking), and not of full thoughts, which a subject makes to herself. However, the feature of selfknowledge should be extendable to the cases considered by Burge. 8. (1) to (6) can be taken to be either utterances by me or sentences relative to contexts of use in which I am the producer and which report the contents of my thoughts at the time and place of having them. I shall sometimes speak as if utterances, tokens or occurrences of public language indexical-types are what do the referring and as if tokens or occurrences of Mentalese indexical-types do the referring (where occurrences are just indexical-types relative to contexts of use). In the case of public language indexicals, Kaplan (1977: 522–3; 1989b: 584) argued that, for the sake of a formal semantic account, we need occurrences or syntactical types relative to contexts of use to be the bearers of reference. Recently, García-Carpintero (1998) has challenged this view in favour of the view that in the case of public language indexical utterances or events (and hence tokens) are the bearers of reference. I shall not take a stand here on what the bearers of reference actually are, nor shall I address to what extent Kaplan’s or Garcia-Carpintero’s considerations apply in the case of Mentalese indexicals (if there are any). These are topics for another paper. 9. Notice that the point here is not that self-thoughts are guaranteed a res whereas name-thoughts are not. For the distinction I am drawing is not between self-thoughts and any thought whose content is adequately reported in public language with the use of a name, but rather between self-thoughts and my own name-thoughts. In this case both are guaranteed an object of thought. (See Rovane, 1987, and Anscombe, 1975, for a discussion of the general distinction between thoughts whose content is reported with the use of a name and self-thoughts, or more precisely, between utterances containing a name and

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b.Suppose that I believe the content expressed by (3), a sentence produced today at 6:30pm. (3) Maite must start reading her paper here and now.

Suppose further that I begin reading my paper. Does my believing (3) give me a reason to do so? Since I may not know that I am Maite, (3) alone could not give me a reason to act. I must have another belief. I must believe in addition that I am Maite. Thus, a self-thought is needed for my believing (3) to give me a reason to act. Contrast this with my believing the content expressed by (4), a sentence uttered by me today at 6:30pm. (4) I must start reading my paper here and now.

My believing (4), that I must start reading my paper here and now, does not require that I know that Maite and I are the same person. My believing the content expressed by (4) suffices for my having a reason to act here and now.10 The reason is that my self-belief locates me in a way in which my name-belief does not locate me, though the contents of both beliefs have the same truth-conditions. Any account of self-thoughts must rescue these two features. The challenge for the no-representation and the Millian views is whether they can do so. It is tempting to think that the locating feature of self-thoughts suffices for showing that the mode-of-presentation view is essentially right, and that the no-representation and Millian views are wrong. However, this temptation must be resisted. Perry’s (1979; this volume) argument for the indispensability of indexical beliefs for actions might be mistakenly taken to show this. Perry argues that beliefs reported with certain indexicals are essential for intentional actions, because they report beliefs which locate certain objects or variants for the subject. The beliefs in question locate the subject, the present time and the present place for the subject, and are reported in public language with the use

‘I’-utterances.) 10. Strictly speaking my self-belief (4) does not suffice for giving me a reason to act since other mental states like desires are necessary. The difference between my believing (3) and (4) can be brought out more precisely in the following way. There is some set S of mental states (desires, beliefs, etc.) which I have such that (i) it alone does not suffice for giving me a reason to begin reading my paper, (ii) together with my self-belief (4) it does suffice for giving me a reason to begin reading my paper, and (iii) together with my belief (3) it does not suffice for giving me a reason to start reading my paper. For my believing (3) and the set S to jointly give me a reason to act, I need the belief that I am Maite.

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of ‘I’, ‘now’ and ‘here’.11 According to Perry, the fact that such beliefs are necessary for having a reason to act depends not on what they are beliefs about, but rather on the ways in which the objects of beliefs (the subject, time and place) are believed or presented. For example, in the case of ‘I’-thoughts Perry believes that for me to locate myself, I need to locate a subject as me, as the subject whom I know how to move. So according to Perry, for me to locate me in the way essential for having a reason to act, it is necessary that I be presented with myself as myself, as a self which is my own or as the subject I know how to move. Although Perry is right in thinking that ‘I’-beliefs locate me in a way that is necessary for my having a reason to act and are reported in public language with the use of ‘I’, no argument has yet been given for thinking that for those beliefs to serve that task they must involve a mode of presentation of the subject as herself, or as the subject of thought, action and perception whom she herself knows how to move. Hence, Perry’s argument as it stands cannot be taken to rule out the Millian and no-representation views.

II Advocates of the no-representation view take it that there need not be a mental representation for ‘I’ because context guarantees the object the thought is about. Context is believed to fix or determine what the thought is about. It is this contextual guarantee for the case of self-thoughts which I shall be questioning here, in particular the contextual guarantee suggested by Mellor. Mellor believes that when thinking about an object or variant one only needs a mental representation of it as a causal substitute or surrogate for it. When I believe that my neighbour’s car is red, I must have a mental representation of that car for my belief to have the causal powers it has over my other mental states and actions concerning that car. My neighbour’s car is at some spatio-temporal distance from me so it is precluded from causing me to act or form other mental states (beliefs, desires, etc) that concern it. This is why, on Mellor’s view, I require a mental representation of that car when I think about it. Nevertheless, Mellor believes this does not happen with self-beliefs: I do not need a mental representation of myself for my self-beliefs to have the causal

11. Not all ‘here’-thoughts are thus indispensable. Utterances in which ‘here’ occurs demonstratively — for example, when pointing to a map in uttering ‘We are here’ — do not express contents of thoughts which are thus essential for action.

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powers they have in making me act or have other mental states about me. There is, according to Mellor, sufficient spatio-temporal contiguity between a selfbelief and its res to guarantee that self-beliefs are able to causally interact with respect to its res, viz., the subject who has that belief.12 This contiguity he calls causal contiguity.13 Mellor intends causal contiguity to do two things. To fix or determine the res of self-beliefs, and to ensure that such beliefs have the causal powers they have insofar as the only person they can cause to act with respect to herself is the subject for she is both the subject who has that belief and the res of the belief. If causal contiguity were to do this then we would have an account of self-thoughts that would vindicate their self-knowledge and self-locating features. My believing (2) would just entail that my belief is about me and not about any other subject for I would be the only object my belief would be causally contiguous with. In having no representation for anyone else but just having me, I would be compelled to recognize that it was me that the belief was about. Hence, it appears that no mental representation is required for my believing (2) to constitute self-knowledge. Furthermore, if I directly figure in a self-belief, I could not fail to locate myself upon having a self-belief. Thus, the self-locating feature would also appear to be rescued. However, these are just appearances. There are basically two problems with Mellor’s no-representation view. (A) It is incomplete insofar as it falls short of accounting for the difference between self-beliefs and name-beliefs in a way that shows that whilst self-beliefs suffice

12. There is another reason why Mellor might want to accept the no-representation view: if there are beliefs which involve a self mode of presentation then there are subjective beliefs; and given that beliefs cause other mental states and/or actions and that for Mellor facts are the causal relata, then there are subjective facts. But Mellor denies that there are such facts on pain of contradiction. (See Mellor 1981, Chapter 6, and 1988.) Thus he must deny that there are any subjective beliefs, hence any beliefs which involve a self mode of presentation. 13. Putting the matter a bit crudely, Mellor suggests that when I have an ‘I’-belief, I do not need a representation of myself. I need only myself: I represent me. Subjective beliefs […] need no causal surrogates, no internal representations of the agents […] they refer to. And that’s why they pose no problems of reference: the relation of reference in subjective beliefs is simply that of identity. [Mellor, 1988: 90] This opens up the logical possibility of two views: the no-representation view and another which holds that I do have a representation of myself but that representation is just me, the object it represents. Is there a substantial difference between these? It seems not. The objections that follow will apply to either of these, though I shall frame them against the no-representation view only. Just as context will not guarantee that I am the res of my self-beliefs, it will not guarantee that I am the representation involved in self-beliefs.

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for self-knowledge and self-location, name-beliefs don’t. But even when the norepresentation theorist could adequately complete his account to bring out this difference, he would still be faced with a second insuperable problem. (B) Causal contiguity alone cannot fix or determine that my self-thoughts are about me, for there are too many entities (objects or variants — times, places, etc) with which I am causally contiguous. A. If causal contiguity is what secures the object of a self-belief, then why is it necessary to have a mental representation when I have a name-belief? Why is it necessary that I have a mental representation that corresponds to the public language ‘Maite’ given that there is causal contiguity between my belief and the object of my belief (i.e., enough spatio-temporal contiguity for me to act upon the object of my belief)? If (as some assume) the only semantic role of a name is to refer to the object which it names such that its only contribution at the level of thought is its referent, then given that there is spatio-temporal contiguity between a name-belief and the object named it should follow that there is no need for a mental representation that corresponds to the name. Because I can fail to realize that a name-thought is about me, Mellor must assume that I do need a mental representation when I have a name-thought in contrast with my self-thoughts. But if this is so, then Mellor’s claim that causal contiguity suffices for supposing that there is no need for a mental representation of the object of thought must be wrong. There must be some other reason for supposing that self-thoughts do not require a representation whilst name-thoughts of oneself do. There must be something my self-thoughts do that my name-thoughts do not do or vice versa. There are two lines that one could adopt here. One could reject the view that a name’s sole contribution at the level of thought is its referent or one could show that the causal contiguity of name-beliefs with their res is different from the one involved in ‘I’-beliefs. One way to distinguish the causal contiguity of self-beliefs from that of name-beliefs would be to say that in having ‘I’-beliefs I am causally contiguous with myself as myself whereas I am not thus causally contiguous with myself upon having ‘Maite’-beliefs. But this already appeals to a mode of presentation of myself, hence this response is not available to Mellor.14 The line he may adopt is the first one: to give an account of the

14. There is a reading of Mellor under which for him what distinguishes self-thoughts from namethoughts is their functional/causal roles, the way in which they affect behaviour. This difference in functional roles is not taken by Mellor to be a difference in content: “beliefs are distinguished from one another not only by their contents but by how they affect behaviour” (Mellor, 1988: 85). Nonetheless,

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role of names such that they require a mental representation or a mode of presentation in the subject which makes it possible for her not to know that she is the object of her name-beliefs, so that they fail to locate her for herself. In this case Mellor must identify the other semantic or psychological contribution of names to thoughts which requires that there be mental representations as counterparts for them. But until Mellor can distinguish appropriately selfthoughts from name-thoughts, his account remains incomplete. What emerges from this discussion is that causal contiguity in not enough to allow us to do without a mental representation. More is needed. This becomes more evident when we try to distinguish ‘I’-beliefs from ‘now’-beliefs. B. Given that there is causal contiguity between the present time and a ‘now’-belief — that is, between the time at which a subject has a belief and that belief which is reported in public language at the time of having it with ‘now’ — Mellor takes it that when an individual has a ‘now’ - thought there is no need for her to have a mental representation of the present time. In an analogous way in which I just figure in my self-thoughts, the time at which I have a ‘now’-thought just figures in that thought. But if this is so, how are we to distinguish ‘I’-beliefs from ‘now’-beliefs? How am I to distinguish my belief about the present time to the effect that it is C from one about myself to the effect that I am C? One way would be via the concept C itself. If C is a concept that is not satisfiable by times but only by subjects or is satisfiable only by times but not by subjects, then C would dictate or fix the intentional object of the belief. Suppose that I believe that a is in pain, where ‘a’ is just a place-holder for either myself or the present time. The concept of being in pain would determine that my belief is about me and not about the present time, for only subjects can be in pain (times can’t) and I am the only subject with which I am causally contiguous. However, this would already entail that I recognize myself in a certain way, that I think of myself, if not as a self, at least as a sentient being. Thus, the no-representation theorist cannot accept this answer. He cannot allow the predicated concept that figures in a belief to be what determines the intentional object of the belief. He needs a different account.

this might still amount to a difference in modes of presentation. The suggestion is that for Mellor there is a difference between the way I am causally contiguous with myself upon having a self-thought from the way I am causally contiguous with myself upon having name-thoughts. But, as said before, the difference in these two ways of being causally contiguous with myself can be read as there being two different modes of presenting or representing myself, and hence as entailing either a mode of presentation or a Millian account.

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Suppose that there is a concept F which could be satisfied by both a subject and a time, and that a subject S attributes F to herself. Were S not to have a mode of presentation or a representation of herself or the present time, then there would be no way of telling to what she was attributing F, to the present time or to herself. But ex hypothesi there was no indeterminacy in S
’s attribution: S was attributing F to herself. Thus, S must have a way of distinguishing between the present time and herself, and that must be either through a mental representation or a mode of presentation or both. Take the concept being hot. I can believe that I am hot and I can also believe that it is hot now. These beliefs are different. I may well believe that I am hot because I have too many clothes on or because I have a temperature without thereby believing that it is hot now. I may also believe that it is hot now upon looking at the weather report without believing that I am hot since I’ve just come out of the pool. Suppose then that I believe (5). (5) It is hot now.

How would my believing (5) differ from my believing (6) on the no-representation view? (6) I am hot.15

The no-representation theorist has no way of explaining why my belief is about a time and not about myself. For him, the belief expressed with (5) is hopelessly indeterminate. The indeterminacy lies between (5) expressing my belief that it is hot now and it expressing my belief that I am hot. But ex hypothesi, there is no such indeterminacy. My belief is about a time and not about myself. Insofar as both I and the present time are causally contiguous with my beliefs, the norepresentation theorist is committed to attributing an indeterminacy in both my ‘I’ and my ‘now’-beliefs which is not there. Causal contiguity cannot then be what secures, fixes or determines the intentional object of a self-belief, and

15. I intend the predicates in (5) and (6) to express the same concept of being hot and not for one to express the concept of being hot whilst the other the concept of feeling hot. My believing (6) may well differ from my believing that I feel hot when I have a high temperature and, nonetheless, feel cold. The no-representation theorist might want to argue that the predicates in (5) and (6) cannot express the same concept because the concept of being hot, as opposed to that of feeling hot, is inappropriately applied to me for it can only appropriately apply to my body. However, as suggested above, the no-representation theorist cannot argue from the inappropriateness or appropriateness of a concept for this already suggests that I have a conception of myself, a mode of presentation of myself, as the appropriate or inappropriate object to which the concept may be applied. In this case the mode of presentation in question is (an undesirable) one of presenting me as different from my body .

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hence an account of self-thoughts that relies solely on it cannot vindicate their self-knowledge or self-locating features. Still the no-representation theorist could rejoin thus: “But you have supposed that being hot is a monadic concept or property, that is, a concept or property that applies to a single entity, when it is not. Rather it is dyadic property/relation or concept, in particular it is a concept that applies to certain entities relative to a time. (In public language ‘being hot’ is a two-place predicate.) Thus, the belief which you reported with (6) is a belief that you are hot relative to a time, namely, the time at which you have the belief. Hence, a more appropriate report of the content of your belief at the time you had it would have been your uttering (6¢). (6¢) I am hot now.

And the belief which you reported with (5) is really a belief that a place is hot relative to the time of the belief. The pronoun in (5) should be taken as a noun phrase referring to a place, and not as a pleonastic element.16 Hence, there is no indeterminacy concerning the object of your belief when you believe (5) or (6). In the latter case, your belief is about yourself and the present time, whereas in the former case it is about a place and the present time.” There are two things to say about this rejoinder. The first is that the rejoinder is allowed to say that in order to have a complete thought-content, the concept being hot requires that there be two things which are related. But what it is not allowed to do is to restrict which sort of thing is the one that it is relating, because that would already require the subject who has the belief to recognize that the relata are the right sort of thing, and hence to recognize them as something. It would require me to recognize myself as the right sort of thing, as the sort of thing which can be hot. And this, as we saw before, is something that the no-representation theorist cannot accept. The second is that even if we grant that being hot is a dyadic concept the indeterminacy in the intentional objects of self-beliefs returns. If there is any place that I am thinking about when believing (5) it is the one referred to by ‘here’ when produced by me upon having that belief.17 I could then report my belief (5) thus:

16. That is, not as a noun phrase which makes no semantic contribution to the uttered sentence and merely appears because English requires each of its sentences to have a formal subject. 17. ‘Here’ is being used in (5) as a pure indexical, i.e., in a non-demonstrative way. See footnote 11 above.

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(5¢) *Here is hot now.

(Or more grammatically — though notice that the ‘it’ remains: (5≤) It is hot now here.)

Thus, my belief would be about the place that I am at when I believe (5) or (5¢). But that place, just as the time of my belief, is also causally contiguous with my belief. At the time of believing (5¢) I am spatio-temporally contiguous with the place I occupy, with what ‘here’ in (5¢) refers to. And given that such a belief can only cause me to act from that place, then — following Mellor’s line of thought — there need not be a mental representation for that place. The present place, the current time and the subject of a belief are all causally contiguous with that belief. The time of the belief is the time at which the subject has that belief, and the place of the belief is just the place where the subject is located when she has that belief. Thus, there should be no need for the subject to have a mental representation in order to think of herself, of the time at which she has the thought or of the place she is at when having that thought. Although Mellor does not explicitly acknowledge that the place which the subject occupies at the time of belief is also causally contiguous with the belief, this is certainly so. But this opens a further source of indeterminacy about the res of a belief. Granting that being hot is a dyadic concept relating a time and something else, how is the no-representation theorist to distinguish my believing (5¢) from my believing (6¢)? The no-representation view would still have to acknowledge an indeterminacy in my believing (5¢), in whether it is about me or the place I am at. And notice that in being unable to do away with the indeterminacy, it is unable to account for the causal powers of the beliefs in question, for why they are ones that concern me and not the place I am at or vice versa. Thus, in being unable to avoid an indeterminacy in the res of selfbeliefs, the no-representation theorist is unable to rescue the self-locating and self-knowledge features of self-thoughts. Consequently, it is unable to give a true account of what is involved in self-thoughts. The source of the problem lies in the assumption that in having a ‘now’, ‘I’ or ‘here’-thought, context — whether it be restricted by causal contiguity or something else — fixes or determines the res (object or variant) of my thought. Contexts (even those that select only causally contiguous features) involve many entities, so the subject must have a way of discerning one amongst them for her to have a thought about one of those elements. Context alone cannot ensure that my ‘I’-thoughts are about myself, and not about the present time or

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the place I am at when having such thoughts. I need something more: a mental representation or a mode of presentation can do the job. A mental representation may be such that it serves only to represent a certain feature of a context, and a mode of presentation may just present a particular feature of a given context. If the mode of presentation in having ‘I’-thoughts is one that presents a subject as me, as myself, then there is no possibility that it present the present time or the place I occupy.

III Given that the Millian view accepts that there are some mental representations for subjects, others for present times and others for current places, it does not face the indeterminacy problem which the no-representation view faces. The view is that upon having a self-thought a subject thinks of herself with a mental representation which is a Millian name for that subject, that is, with no mode of presentation mediating between the name and the subject. This claim makes sense only if we assume that mental representations behave in a way similar to public language expressions. It is under the assumption of a language of thought that Millikan questions whether the mental counterparts for ‘I’ could be indexical and argues in favour of their Millian status. Roughly, Mentalese is a rule-governed system of language-like representations with physical shapelike properties as well as syntactic and semantic properties. It is under the assumption that Mentalese is sufficiently like public languages that it makes sense to speak of indexical and Millian mental representations, of mental terms whose reference may vary relative to a context and of mental terms which are mere tags for their objects of reference. Let us then assume a language of thought of this sort even if only for the sake of argument. Let us call the mental counterpart(s) for ‘I’ self-representation(s). On the Millian view, each subject has her own self-representation, her own counterpart for ‘I’, which differs from other subjects’ self-representations insofar as each is a Millian name. Each self-representation is meant to ‘hook up’ with the corresponding subject’s dispositions to act, think and perceive, in a way that vindicates the self-locating feature. Whereas ‘I’ is an indexical term which does involve a mode of presentation, its Mentalese counterparts, according to the Millian, are not indexical and do not involve any mode of presentation. Millikan’s own strategy in favour of the Millian view is to argue that selfrepresentations are not indexical so that they could not have the sort of mode

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of presentation which indexicals have, and then to propose that self-representations are Millian names.18 A term is indexical if and only if it varies in reference with a relevant variation in the context in which it is used and it does so in virtue of its semantic rule or character. What determines the relevant variation in contexts is the semantic rule for the indexical. The rule for ‘I’ determines that relative to a particular context of use it refer to the producer or utterer, so two contexts will be relevantly different if and only if the producers or utterers in them are different. The semantic rules of indexicals involve modes of presentation of their referents which figure in or just constitute such rules. The rule for ‘I’ determines that it refer in a given context of use to the producer under a certain mode of presentation. That mode of presentation may just be one which presents its referent as the speaker or utterer (Barwise and Perry, 1981; Récanati 1993), as herself (Rovane, 1987) or simply as the producer (see V below).19

18. It is difficult to see what Millikan’s reasons are, but I think what follows is a fair reconstruction of them. The presentation in the main text assumes as little as possible of Millikan’s views of language and thought as biological categories. For those interested in her theoretical framework, the main text should be read paying close attention to footnotes 19, 21 and 22. 19. Although Millikan does mention an indexical’s character, she frames her discussion explicitly in terms of an indexical sign’s adapting relation. The latter is a relation which has as its domain persons, objects, times, places or properties, and indexical signs as its range. It maps entities like persons, objects, times, places or properties onto indexical tokens, and it achieves this in virtue of the semantic rule of indexicals. It is in virtue of the indexical adapting relation for a sign that times, places, objects, people and properties get to be the referents of token indexicals. Tokens of an indexical type have referents when they are situated in appropriate contexts. An appropriate context contains something bearing a designated relation to the indexical token, which something is, thereby, that token’s referent (e.g., a person, an object), or is, thereby, that variant in world affairs that the token indexes (e.g., a time, a place, a property). This designated relation for a given indexical type I call its indexical adapting relation. The indexical adapting relation for ‘I’, for example, is being the producer of the token … . [Millikan 1990: 725; this volume, 168–9] An indexical adapting relation can be seen, roughly, as that relation which an object or variant bears to an indexical token when such a sign functions according to what it was ‘designed’ to do or, more precisely, according to its relational proper function. The object or variant in such cases becomes the indexical token’s adaptor, and the indexical is thus said to be for the moment adapted and to have an adapted proper function or what Millikan called “an adapted sense” (Millikan, 1984). (For a detailed discussion of this see Millikan, 1984, Chapters 2 and 10.) Because it is through the semantic rules or character of indexicals that indexical adapting relations achieve the relevant mapping of referents onto indexical tokens, because I believe that arguments in favour of the Millian position should stand or fall independently of Millikan’s controversial project of explaining language and thought in terms of biological categories, and for the sake of simplicity, I shall speak only of the semantic rules of indexicals. In section IV we shall see more clearly to what extent a variant of the Millian position is plausible only under an account of thought in essentially biological terms.

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According to Millikan, self-representations are not indexical because (i) they cannot vary in reference in the way that indexicals do, and because (ii) the users of those self-representations do not identify their referents indexically. To show (i), Millikan implicitly assumes that indexicals must satisfy what I call the indexical ability requirement, whilst to show (ii), she explicitly assumes what I call the epistemological requirement. i. How could a self-representation occur in relevantly different contexts such that it vary in reference? It is certainly possible that the same physical sign-shape be instantiated in both your and in my head, and that it refer to me when it is produced in my head and to you when produced in your head. But this does not suffice to show that the tokens produced in you and those in me are tokens of the same indexical sign.20 One reason for saying this might be that it would not have been shown yet that our different syntactical tokens had obtained their referents in the same sort of way, that they had obtained their different referents via the same semantic rule. But this is not the reason given by Millikan. Millikan thinks that a term is indexical only if it satisfies the indexical ability requirement
: if T is an indexical term then a user of the language should be able to use T indexically, that is, she must be able to produce and/or interpret T as having different referents in relevantly different contexts. So even if the syntactical form of all occurrences of self-representations were identical, for Millikan this would not count as evidence that my and your self-representations were occurrences of an indexical term, not — at least — until one showed that a thinker could produce and/or interpret one of those selfrepresentations to refer to something other than herself. But according to her, no one could produce a token of her own self-representation to refer to anything other than herself, nor could a thinker interpret self-representations as varying in reference, not — at least — within the language of that selfrepresentation, within the language of thought. According to Millikan, the only way I could envisage myself producing a self-representation to refer to you would be by producing it in your head, but I certainly can’t do that. I can only produce tokens of Mentalese in my head. And the same goes for everyone else. Thus, on her view, no thinker could produce a self-representation to refer to someone else. But even if a subject could not produce a self-representation indexically, could she interpret it

20. As noted in footnote 8 above, I shall sometimes speak both as if tokens and as if Mentalese indexicaltypes relative to contexts of use are what do the referring. I do not take either side of the debate.

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indexically? Given that Millikan does not think that being of the same syntactical type is evidence that a term is indexical, there is no harm in supposing that the syntactical form ‘ME’ is the form of all self-representations. Let us indicate this by subscripting it with ‘U’ thus ‘MEU’, keeping ‘ME’ for token self-representations (no matter whose self-representations they are). According to Millikan, no thinker could interpret ‘MEU’ indexically for no thinker has immediate access to Mentalese expressions produced by others. God or a brain-reader might be able to interpret instances of ‘MEU’ as referring to different subjects when they occurred in different heads, identifying different subjects as the referents of ‘MEU’ in relevantly different contexts. But the fact that a term can be used indexically by someone whose language is not the original language of that term is no indication that the term in the original language is indexical. Upon interpreting different occurrences of self-representations as having different referents, God and the brain-reader are not doing so from within the language of thought, but rather outside it. According to Millikan, they take the different occurrences of ‘MEU’ as evidence that they are signs for the subjects in whose head they occur in the same way in which one would take footprints to be evidence of someone’s having been there.21 Self-representations are terms in thinkers’ language of thought, so if no thinker can either interpret or produce that term indexically, i.e., to refer to different selves, then on Millikan’s view ‘MEU’ cannot be indexical. Even if evolution had ensured that every thinker used tokens of the syntactic type ‘MEU’ as their self-representations, this would still not make ‘MEU’ an indexical term. ii. Millikan thinks that if a term T is indexical then the subject who uses T meaningfully must first identify or know the context C in which it is used, hence identify or know the different elements of C, so that she can then

21. The syntactical shape interpreted by God and/or the brain reader would be functioning more as a natural sign which they interpret as signs for the subjects in whose head they appear. To this effect Millikan writes: […] the language of thought, if there is such, is not God’s language nor the brain-reader’s language but the thinker’s language. God might read tokens of the universal self-[representation], tokens of the mental ‘I’, indexically, determining the reference of each by first noticing whose head it was in. Similarly, I might ‘read a chameleon’s back’ descriptively, as a natural sign telling what colour the chameleon has been sitting on, although the chameleon’s colour has no descriptive meaning for the chameleon. The universal self-[representation] [i.e., ‘MEU’] would not be an indexical for the selves who named themselves with it, and when read by someone else it would function only as a natural sign, not as a sign in the language of thought. [Millikan, 1990: 732; this volume, 177]

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identify one of those elements as the referent of T in C via T
’s semantic rule. This is the epistemological requirement.22 If ‘MEU’ were indexical, then, in the light of the epistemological requirement, I would have to know the context, and in particular the head in which a token of ‘MEU’ occurs, before I could identify its referent in that context. Prior to my being able to think of myself with my self-representation I would have to have some other way of identifying myself, I would need to have some other identificatory knowledge of myself. But I do not usually identify the context in which my self-representation occurs. From this Millikan concludes that subjects do not satisfy the epistemological requirement with respect to self-representations, and hence that such representations are not indexical. There are three objections against Millikan’s view. Two (A and B) are directed against the arguments objecting to the indexicality of self-representations and so against the motivation for the Millian view; whilst the third ( viz., C) is directed against the view itself. (A) The epistemological ability requirement on which (ii) is based is not a requirement for a term to be indexical. (B) Even if the indexical ability requirement turns out to be a requirement for a term to be indexical, it is unclear that users of self-representations do not satisfy it. (C) Finally, in order to satisfy the self-locating and self-knowledge features of self-thoughts, the Millian supposes that self-representations have a particular kind of psychological role. However, in order to fulfil that psychological role, self-representations must present the subject in a particular way, under a particular mode of presentation. A. Although self-representations fail to satisfy the epistemological requirement that Millikan assumes for indexicals, this does not establish that self-representations are not indexical. For it is not true that the public language ‘I’, which is an indexical term, satisfies it, and so that it is indeed a requirement for a term to be indexical. In order to meaningfully utter ‘I’ or to interpret a meaningful utterance of it, it must be the case — according to Millikan — that I know the

22. Millikan says: To interpret an indexical, one must have prior knowledge of, one must already know independently and ahead of time, what item bears the indexical’s adapting relation to the indexical token. One must already know that it exists and how it is related to the token, hence to the interpreter. One does not find this out by interpreting the indexical; one needs already to know it in order to interpret the indexical. [Millikan, 1990: 727–8; this volume, 172] The way she motivates this is via an appeal to the way in which we interpret others use of indexicals. But she intends this to apply to producers too: they must have a way of identifying the context before they can meaningfully produce an indexical.

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context in which it occurs, and that via this knowledge and the semantic rule for ‘I’ I identify which of the elements in the context is the referent. But it is not true that when I use ‘I’ to refer to myself I must first identify the context in which that ‘I’ occurs. There are cases where I may have no other way of identifying the context in which ‘I’ occurs, for example when I am amnesiac and paralysed, and yet I still meaningfully ask: What happened to me?, Where am I? or Who am I?23 In this case I have no way of identifying the contexts of my utterances prior to my uttering them. Thus, in order to meaningfully utter ‘I’ I need not identify the context first in order to know to whom it is referring. This does not entail, however, that the public language ‘I’ is nonindexical since the semantic rule of ‘I’ still allows it to change reference with a relevant difference in context. Hence, the fact that one need not go via the context first in order to identify the referent of a self-representation does not show that it is not indexical.24 Thus, the epistemological requirement, if a requirement at all, is not one for a term to be indexical. B. In contrast with the epistemological requirement, the indexical ‘I’ does appear to satisfy the indexical ability requirement. It is true that in the same way in which I cannot produce a self-representation to refer to anyone or anything

23. Granted that if I can utter this then I am not completely paralysed. It is enough if I am paralysed to the extent of only being able to utter those words. Someone in an Evans-like spirit might want to deny that in these cases I do refer to me with ‘I’ by arguing that I may fail to have discriminating knowledge of myself, that I may fail to locate myself. But notice that this would entail that I fail to have a thought about myself (in Evans’s terminology: an Idea of myself). So even if I failed to refer to myself with ‘I’ in this situation, an analogy between my self-representation and my use of ‘I’ would still hold. According to this, I can use ‘I’ appropriately only if I am able to have discriminating knowledge of myself. The fact that I fail to have such knowledge of myself not only entails that I fail to have a self-thought but also that I fail to refer to me with ‘I’. (Although Evans himself considers cases in which there is failure of reference (Evans, 1982: 249–255; this volume, 134–139), he would not intend the cases outlined above to be ones where there is failure of reference or of thought (Evans, 1982: 215–220; this volume, 104–9). Recently O’Brien (1995a) has argued that these cases cannot be accommodated within Evans’s general theory of reference as ones where the subject is successful in having a self-thought.) 24. Other counterexamples to the epistemological requirement are our mental representations of ‘now’ and ‘here’. I may have a ‘now’-thought or a ‘here’-thought about a certain time and a certain place without being able to identify or think of (and hence know) the relevant time or place in any other way (perhaps because I have just been woken up and I am paralysed and amnesiac). Thus, I may have such thoughts without being able to identify in advance the context in which they occur. In these cases, the only way I can identify a certain place or time is by having those ‘here’- and ‘now’-thoughts, thus I cannot identify those places and times as anything else. But in spite of this, my ‘now’- and my ‘here’-thoughts, my ‘now’ and ‘here’ mental representations, are indexical for they do differ in reference with a relevant difference in context. (Millikan, surprisingly, claims that ‘here’-thoughts are not indexical on the basis that they fail to satisfy the epistemological requirement (1990: 731), but such thoughts are ones that do clearly vary in reference!)

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else but myself, I cannot produce ‘I’ to refer to anyone but myself. However, in virtue of being a user of English, I can interpret ‘I’ as referring to someone else when others produce it. Thus, on Millikan’s view in satisfying the indexical ability requirement ‘I’ is indexical, but ‘MEU’ is not. As with the epistemological requirement, it is unclear that the indexical ability requirement is a requirement for a term to be indexical. We said that a term is indexical if and only if it varies in reference with a relevant variation in context according to the semantic rule of the term. From this nothing follows concerning our practical abilities for producing or interpreting it indexically. More argument is needed, and certainly Millikan (1984) has some to offer. We shall consider them briefly in IV. But even if she were right about the indexical ability requirement, she is not right in thinking that it could never be satisfied by a thinker. We can envisage a situation in which I could interpret someone else’s self-representation as referring to herself, and hence a situation in which the proposed disanalogy between selfrepresentations and indexicals like ‘I’ fails. Suppose that Mary’s brain and my brain were wired up in a way such that I could receive Mary’s own Mentalese sentences. In order to avoid confusing the Mentalese sentences coming from Mary from those coming from me, they would be displayed in a particular area of my mind/brain allocated to Mary’s thoughts under my Mentalese phrase ‘Mary’s thoughts’ as heading. So when I received Mary’s Mentalese sentence ‘ME is tired’, it would come under the area of Mary’s thoughts and I would not confuse it with mine. Given where that Mentalese sentence occurred, I would interpret that token of ‘MEU’ as referring to Mary, i.e., to someone else and not to me. Because it is possible that I interpret ‘MEU’ indexically, sometimes referring to me and sometimes to Mary, within the same language of thought, the indexical ability requirement is satisfied contrary to what Millikan supposes. C. Arguments (A) and (B) have left open the possibility that ‘MEU’ is indexical. In order to show that it is one would need to show that all its instances are of the same semantic type, in particular, that they pick out their referents in the same way, by applying the same semantic rule. However, in order to show that the Millian position is wrong and the mode-of-presentation view correct, we do not need to go as far as showing that self-representations are indexical. All we need to show is that they involve a mode of presentation of the subjects which they represent. This we can do by looking at self-representations’ psychological roles. If my self-representation is to enable my self-thoughts to have the selflocating feature, then it must have the psychological role of hooking up with the

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dispositions to act, think and perceive, of the person whom (so to speak) I know how to move. But notice that every self-representation must have the same kind of psychological (or causal-functional) role relative to the subject in whose head each occurs, viz., the psychological role of hooking up with the dispositions to act, think and perceive of the subject whom she knows how to move. There is then a kind of psychological role which all self-representations share. Given this sameness in psychological role, we can say that when a token of ‘MEU’ is produced in me it locates me in the same sort of way as other tokens of it when produced in others locate them. There are essentially two ways in which we could specify the psychological role which all self-representations share: via (X) or via (ME), where ‘herself ’ is neutral over gender and the index ‘x’ indicates an anaphoric relation with the previous ‘x’. (X) For all x, each token of ‘MEU’ in x presents x. (ME) For all x, each token of ‘MEU’ in x presents herselfx.

Whereas (ME) specifies a psychological role that presents each subject as herself, that is, under a mode of presentation, (X) does not. Would (X) suffice for specifying the psychological role of ‘MEU’ in a way that brings out the difference between self-beliefs and name-beliefs? I think not. Take my ‘Maite’-thoughts. These would have the psychological role of presenting me, and this role would be an instance of (X), but they are not thoughts which hook up with my dispositions to act such that they locate me in a way that suffices to give me a reason to act, or with my dispositions to think (to judge or believe) such that it suffices for self-knowledge.25 The reason is mainly that (X) leaves out an important fact about self-thoughts of which the self-knowledge and selflocating features are manifestations, namely, that such thoughts involve a selfconscious element. (X) specifies a psychological role in which a representation presents a subject, but not one in which the subject realizes that the object being represented is herself. It is this self-conscious element what makes my mere believing that I am thinking constitute knowledge. It is the self-realization that the person who should start reading her paper here and now is myself that makes me act accordingly here and now. Thus, if our account of self-representations is to capture the self-locating and self-knowledge features, then the

25. If (X) were to accurately specify the psychological role of self-representations, then there would be no way of distinguishing name-thoughts of mine like (1) from self-thoughts like (2), and hence the selfknowledge feature of self-thoughts would not be vindicated.

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accurate specification of their psychological role will have to show that they hook up with the right dispositions, namely, with the dispositions to act, think and perceive of the subject whom she herself knows how to move.26 (ME) does this by claiming that a self-representation presents a subject as herself. But it does so at a cost: at the cost of presenting the subject under a certain mode of presentation. There may well be other candidates which may serve to specify the psychological role of self-representations. But whatever those candidates may be, they must show the self-conscious aspect involved in self-representations. And to show the requisite awareness which a subject has of herself, they will require to show that the subject is presented to herself in a way in which — as Frege put it — no other is presented to her. This is just what the mode of presentation view suggests and is contrary to what the Millian account supposes.

IV What we have said so far suffices for showing that both the Millian and the norepresentation views are mistaken, and that the mode-of-presentation view is in general correct. But we have not yet said enough to show that self-representations are indexical. We could have a version of the Millian view re-emerging: the Millian* version. This version would not oppose the mode of presentation view insofar as it would accept that there is a mode of presentation associated with each self-representation (something our original Millian account denied), but it would say that despite a self-representation having a mode of presentation, all it does semantically is to refer to or represent a self. The Millian* account would say that the modes of presentation accompanying self-representations are only psychologically relevant, not semantically relevant. Semantically, selfrepresentations are Millian names.27 28 Put another way, the Millian* view would hold that although there is a conception (mode of presentation) associated with the self-concept (self-representation), it is not semantically constitutive of it.

26. See footnote 3. 27. So far I have said nothing against Millikan’s general point that what it is about ‘now’, ‘here’ and ‘I’thoughts that is necessary to motivate us into action is their psychological roles and not so much whether they are or not indexical. I agree with her on this point. What I challenge is the idea that such thoughts are not also indexical, and that in the case of self-representations there is no corresponding mode of presentation. 28. Both the Millian and the Millian* accounts would agree on this last point.

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We said above that in order to show that self-representations are not Millian names, but rather that they are different occurrences of the same indexical, we needed to show that all self-representations were of the same semantic type, that they all shared the same semantic rule, and thereby referred in the same way. From the discussion of self-representations’ psychological roles, we know that they all involve the same kind of mode of presentation, that they all present different selves in the same manner. We now need to show that this kind of mode of presentation is involved in the semantic rule of MEU, in particular, that the way of presenting different selves constitutes or is part of the way in which each ME refers to each self. What we need to show then is that the semantic rule for ‘MEU’ is (ME¢) and not (X¢), that is, that the mode of presentation involved in the psychological role is semantically relevant for determining the different referents of ‘MEU’. (ME¢) For all x, each token of ‘MEU’ in x refers to herselfx. (X¢) For all x, each token of ‘MEU’ in x refers to x. The issue lies in the way in which self-representations get their reference. It is natural to say that self-representations get their reference in virtue of the psychological role they play in the subject’s psyche, i.e., in virtue of their presenting something as one’s self. This entails that the mode of presentation involved in their psychological role already figures in the semantic rule of selfrepresentations. Hence, (ME¢) and not (X¢) must give us the correct specification of the semantic rule of self-representations or the self-representation-type. And notice that such a rule determines that the self-representation-type is indexical, that is, that if it is tokened in relevantly different contexts, then its referents are different. The relevant difference in context is just the difference of self in which ‘MEU’ is tokened. To suppose that the psychological role of self-representations is semantically relevant does not entail a confusion of presemantic conditions with semantic conditions. A particular act of baptism, for example, may have been a presemantic condition for a public language name to refer but it is not a semantic condition for it to refer. Or a description can serve to fix the referent of such a name, yet it is not part of the semantic condition or semantic rule of that name. But the reason why this is so is twofold: (a) there are numerous acts of baptism and reference-fixing descriptions which could have served to fix the referent of the name whilst the referent (and in general the semantics) of the name remained the same, and (b) once the act of baptism has taken place or the description fixed a reference they are (so to speak) left in the past. After fixing

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the reference via a description or baptism, the description and the baptism cease to play a role in determining the referent of the name. Nevertheless, neither (a) nor (b) are true of the psychological role of a self-representation. There are not numerous psychological roles which my self-representation could have on pain of ceasing to be a representation of me that rescued the self-locating and selfknowledge features. Thus (a) is not satisfied. Furthermore, my self-representation continues to play a role in hooking up with me in a certain way, and it is this way which determines that it hooks up with me and not with some other entity (not with time, for example). Hence, the psychological role of my selfrepresentation plays a constant role in determining the referent of my selfrepresentation. If my self-representation failed to hook up with my dispositions, with the subject I know how to move, then not only would it lose its psychological role, it would lose its referent too. For how could it refer to me? Why should it? Given the initial act of baptism, if the name ‘Maite’ is a Millian name, it continues to be my name even if it fails to play the psychological role in me which it plays right now. But in virtue of what would my self-representation ‘ME’ (if it survives) continue to be a representation of me if it were to lose its psychological role? (ME¢) must then be the semantic rule for all self-representations, for the self-representation type. And given (ME¢), it would seem that the self-representation type ‘MEU’ just is an indexical term, a term whose tokens differ in reference with a difference in context. Before considering an objection to my account of the semantics of ‘MEU’, let me summarize what I think happens with self-representations. The role which my self-representation has in my psyche is to hook up with the dispositions to act, think and perceive, of the person I know how to move; and it is in virtue of this role that my self-representation can refer only to me. It refers to me because of and in the way in which I am presented by its psychological role, namely, as the person I know how to move. A self-representation of any other person has a similar role in that person’s psyche for that person. In her, her selfrepresentation refers to her and to no one else. It refers to her as that person’s self. Thus any other person’s self-representation has the same kind of psychological role as my own self-representation. The psychological roles of different self-representations of different persons all have the role of hooking up with the dispositions to act, think and perceive, of each of those persons in a certain way — as the self or person each knows how to move. Thus, self-representations present different selves in the same way, they present each self as her own self to each subject. And this mode of presentation constitutes the way in which the reference of each self-representation is determined, it constitutes the semantic

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rule for the self-representation type. If so, the representation is indexical.29 Someone might object to my account by claiming that I am committing myself to a particular view of how mental representations get to be meaningful, viz., to the view that the semantics of mental representations are determined by those representations’ psychological roles (or causal-functional role). However, I am not committing myself to that much. All I am committing myself to is to the view that the semantics of certain kinds of mental representations are, at least partly, determined by their psychological role. I do not take a stand either on whether the reference of a Mentalese term is in general determined by what typically causes such tokens or by its causal-functional (psychological) role. The reference of any Mentalese term may be obtained in terms of what typically causes it, but this is not to say that this exhausts the semantics of that term. In some cases, like the Mentalese terms for ‘cat’, ‘dog’, ‘water’, it may be so. But not in the case of the Mentalese counterparts for ‘now’, ‘here’, other indexical Mentalese terms, and self-representations. In the case of the mental representations for ‘now’ and ‘here’, though their reference may vary with a variation in context, we could say that what typically causes them are certain times and certain places, and so that they get their reference (partly) in virtue of what typically causes them. However, this does not exhaust their semantics, for their semantics is not exhausted by what they refer to. They refer to times and places in a special way, viz., as the present time and as the current place. And what determines this way of referring to them is just those terms’ psychological (or causal-functional) role. Thus, even if we thought that in general Mentalese terms get their semantics through what typically cause them, we would have to accept that the semantics of certain Mentalese terms is not exhausted by what typically causes them. What I have said above can be seen as an argument for the claim that the self-representation-type should be taken as a case where semantics is not exhausted by what typically causes it, but is also given by the way in which what typically causes it is presented.

29. The way in which the semantic rule of the self-representation is interpreted will depend on the general view we may hold about thought. We may, for example, think along neo-Fregean lines that the token mode of presentation of myself that determines its referent is a sense and so is constitutive of the content of my self-thoughts. We may deny this and adopt instead a two-factor theory of content, where the semantic rule is what semantically determines the content of the thought but it is not part of that content, where the content of the thought is just its truth-conditions. In this case the semantic rule would amount to what Fodor (1987) calls “narrow content”, to a function from contexts to broad content.

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What is true, nonetheless, is that in claiming that certain mental representations get their semantics at least partly in virtue of their psychological role I am committing myself to the claim that the semantics of such representations is not determined by their biological functions, as Millikan supposes. Were they to be thus determined, then the Millian* view (though not the Millian view) would be right. Very roughly, according to Millikan, a term’s semantics is given by its proper function, by the function that it was designed to carry out. On her view, a proper function F of a device D with a trait C is that which C has in the past caused and its having caused F is what explains why D-type devices have proliferated. If biological functions are what determine the semantics of mental representations, then prima facie a self-representation’s proper function is not that it be indexical. The mechanisms that have aided in its proliferation are not ones where it varies in reference with a variation in context because they are not ones where the users of self-representations have produced or interpreted them as varying in reference (the indexical ability requirement).30 What has aided in the proliferation of self-representations is their serving the psychological role specified by (ME), i.e., the psychological role responsible for securing the selflocating and self-knowledge features for the selves of which they are representations. Thus, under this account of the semantics of thought, self-representations are not indexical, and the Millian* view is right. To argue against a biological account of the semantics of mental representations is no easy task. I shall not attempt it here. All I shall say is that the Millian* view is right only if a particular and controversial account of how thoughtrepresentations get their semantics is right. In contrast, the view I am espousing does not depend on such an account nor on any particular view of how Mentalese terms in general get their semantics.

V I have argued that both the no-representation and the Millian views fail as accounts of self-thoughts. I have also argued that for self-thoughts to vindicate both the self-knowledge and self-locating features, they must present the subject

30. The need for the indexical ability requirement as a requirement for indexical terms on Millikan’s view would lie then in finding out what historically its proper function has been, and hence in what has aided in the proliferation of indexical signs. An indexical sign has proliferated just because it has been used (produced or interpreted) indexically, as referring to different objects or variants; therefore, its (relational) proper function is to vary in reference with a variation in context.

Thinking about myself 203

as herself, as that subject which she knows how to move. Thus, the mode of presentation approach is essentially right. Furthermore, I have argued that it is plausible to assume that the Mentalese term for oneself is indexical, insofar as it is plausible to assume that it has a semantic rule that allows it to vary in reference with a relevant variation in context. It is thus tempting to think that the semantic rule for that term, the way it refers to subjects, is the same as the way in which the public language ‘I’ refers to subjects. It is tempting to think that (ME¢) not only gives us the semantic rule for ‘MEU’ but also for ‘I’. But this need not be so. Consider this. Is it necessary for anyone to interpret a token of ‘I’ as referring to something that is a self? I am not sure that our intuitions are really clear on this point. Some might think that we are committed to thinking that any specification of the semantic rule for ‘I’ presupposes that what it refers to is a subject.31 For even if we take the rule in question to be one which states that a token of ‘I’ refer to the speaker or the utterer of it, we are already committed to the view that the referents are subjects, are beings who can engage in intentional actions like speaking or uttering. But I think there is a neutral specification of the semantic rule of ‘I’, and that until our intuitions are clear on whether all tokens of ‘I’ must refer to selves, to persons, we will do best to adopt it. If we say that the semantic rule for ‘I’ is that a token of it refer to the producer of the token, we are not thereby committed to subjects or selves being the producers of the tokens. We would take on no commitments as to the nature of the producer of the tokens. This rule also seems to fare well when interpreting people’s tokens of ‘I’. As O’Brien (1995b) has suggested, in interpreting a subject’s token of ‘I’, I bring to bear additional information, viz., that the producer in this case is a subject. In general, we interpret tokens of ‘I’ as being produced by and hence referring to people, to selves, because most of the occurrences of ‘I’ we are exposed to are produced by subjects. Thus, although the self-representation-type may be indexical like the public language ‘I’, its semantic rule is different from the semantic rule for ‘I’.32

31. For example, O’Brien, 1995b, and Rovane, 1987. 32. For a suggestion of an account of the relation between self-thoughts and uses of ‘I’ which are governed by the rule being-the-speaker-of, see O’Brien, 1995b. I think that if such an account does end up working for when the semantic rule is being-the-speaker-of, it will also work for being-the-producerof. Thanks to audiences at Birmingham, Granada, King’s College London, Mexico and ST Andrews who listened and commented on previous versions´of the present paper. I am grateful in particular to Tyler Burge, Fraser MacBride, Lucy O’Brien and Gianfranco Soldati for comments and discussion.

Chapter 10

Introspective misidentification An I for an I Melinda Hogan and Raymond Martin University of British Columbia / University of Maryland

Distinguish four discoveries one might make by introspecting: first, that a mental state has certain features, say, that an emotion is pleasurable. Second, that a mental state with certain features is tokened at the present moment, say, that a pleasurable emotion is now occurring. Third, that a mental state with certain features is tokened at the present moment in a self — that a pleasurable emotion that is occurring now is someone’s. Fourth, that a mental state with certain features is tokened at the present moment in one’s own self — that a pleasurable emotion that is occurring now and that is someone’s, is one’s own. Is it possible that by introspecting a person should make any of the first three of these discoveries without also making the fourth? Some philosophers hold that it is not possible. They hold that any introspectively-based judgement of the form ‘I am E’ is immune to error through misidentification of the possessor of the property E. We call this the no-misidentification view. Some who hold this view maintain that this kind of immunity to error shows that introspection is not a form of perception.1 We shall present several counter-examples to the no-misidentification view. The examples are of situations in which one could have introspective access to a property’s occurring, think that this property is a property of oneself, and either be wrong about this or else fail to have conclusive reasons for it. In the first three examples, the protagonist is wrong in thinking that the property is a property of himself because the property in question is a property of someone

1. Wittgenstein is a case in point. He holds that this kind of immunity to error shows that introspection is not a form of perception in which one is aware of oneself as the object of introspective awareness, and that judgments based on introspection are not about a particular person (Wittgenstein 1933–4: 66–67). See also Gareth Evans’ (1982, this volume) discussion of the issue.

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else. In the last example, the protagonist fails to have conclusive reasons for thinking that the property is a property of himself either because the property could be a property of someone else or because it could be a property of no one, that is, of no person or self. The no-misidentification view leaves it open that introspectively-based judgments can be mistaken in ways other than that the possessor of the property introspected has been misidentified. There are at least two sorts of situations in which mistaken judgments could arise. First, one could confuse the mental property that is discovered in introspection with another property. For instance, one could falsely judge, ‘I want to be fair’, where one’s mistake was to confuse a vengeful desire with a desire to do what is fair. On the no-misidentification view one could not falsely judge, ‘I want to be fair’, where one’s mistake consisted in taking the possessor of the desire to be oneself. So, on the nomisidentification view, one can make a mistake about what the mental property is but not about who or what has the property. Second, one could falsely characterize the possessor of a mental property, and thus, in a different sense of ‘who?’, get it wrong about who has the property. For instance, one could think to oneself, ‘I, the Mayor of Toronto, am presently having a titillating emotion ‘ and be mistaken in thinking that the person who is titillated is Mayor of Toronto. To concede that in this way one could falsely characterize the possessor of the mental property, however, is different from conceding that in forming a first-person judgment based on introspection one could fail to identify the possessor of the property. The Mayor-thought (among other things) supplies an answer to the question, ‘who? ‘ in a sense of ‘who? ‘ that asks for a further characterization of the object in question once it has been identified (picked out). (Who is that masked man?) The type of judgment that is thought to be immune to error through misidentification supplies an answer to the question ‘who?’ in a sense of ‘who?’ that asks for an object that will fit a given characterization to be identified (picked out) in the first place. (Whose turn is it to do the dishes?) We assume that the possibility of mistakes in identifying the object perceived is a constant feature of all perception. So if introspection is a kind of perception in which the object perceived is the possessor of the property of which one is introspectively aware, then when one makes an introspectivelybased judgment ordinarily it would be possible to misidentify the possessor of that property. For instance, when, based on visual perception, one judges that one’s arm is sunburned, one can get it right about the sunburn but wrong about whose arm it is. An analogous mistake in a judgment based on introspection

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would be for one to judge that it is oneself who is hungry or nervous when really it is someone else.2 Even if introspection were a kind of perception, introspectively based judgments still might be immune to error through misidentification. For instance, for some physiolopgical reason, introspection might provide information only about the introspector, that is, the one who forms the introspectivelybased judgment, ‘I am E’. Similarly, in the case of visual perception, a person may be physically restrained so that he can see only himself. However, those who hold the no-misidentification view for the reasons we are here considering will think that this sort of guarantee against error is the wrong sort of guarantee. In introspectively-based judgments, they will say, the reason one does not make a mistake about who or what has the property of which one is introspectively aware is not that God puts blinders on introspectors so as to ensure that one’s introspective gaze is necessarily fixed only upon oneself; this cannot be the reason since the self is not the object of introspective awareness. So if there were a guarantee against misidentification of the sort that those who for such reasons hold the no-misidentification view say that there is, what would it consist in? It is hard to say. To our knowledge, no proponent of the no-misidentification view has ever explained what it would consist in, unless it is just this: that if a property is discovered by introspection, then merely because it is discovered by introspection (and not, say, because introspection yields information only about oneself or for any other reason), one is correct in judging that the property belongs to oneself. Sometimes it is suggested, vaguely, that this is ensured by ‘a rule of language’. The question, then, is whether there is any such guarantee. We do not think that there is. In support of our view, we shall now present four counterexamples to the no-misidentification view. They illustrate different ways in which information about mental states might be structured. To save space, we shall present these examples briskly and without the usual stage-setting. There will be ways of further specifying the examples so that they do not support our view. Our claim is that there are also straightforward ways of specifying them so that they do.

2. Surprisingly, Michael Ayers seems to deny the possibility of both of these kinds of mistake: “It could be argued that, if my body were so presented, then I could be aware of the disposition of a body and yet be mistaken as to which body was the object of my awareness, which is absurd. In fact, of course, the impossibility of misidentifying which body I am peculiarly aware of gives no grounds for denying that I have a particular sensory awareness of my own body. We do have bodily sensations such as (most spectacularly) pain, and we cannot intelligibly wonder whether the body so presented is our own or someone else’s.” [Ayers 1991: 288]

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Example 1. John is telepathic. If through introspection he is aware of the occurrence of mental properties, then in the absence of contextual clues, he is in a position to infer only that someone has the properties, not that they are his own. John is also a hardened egoist. He has never had a sympathetic feeling for another person. In fact, because of how he is constituted psychologically he is incapable of having a sympathetic feeling. But he does not know that. On the occasion in question John discovers through introspection that someone is having a sympathetic feeling. The ordinarily reliable contextual clues are present but this time they lead him astray. He judges that it is himself who is having the sympathetic feeling — actually it is someone else. Consider an analog: Machines M and N are at a coarse-grained level of analysis functionally isomorphic to creatures with minds. M is hooked up to machine N in such a way that M can detect changes of state in N. M can also detect changes in itself. Certain changes of state occurring in N are what it is for N to have the ‘mental’ property E. But it is only in the context of N’s internal organization, not M’s, that these changes of state would be occurrences of E. In the past N but not M has had E. As it happens, M is incapable of having E. This information is not available to M. On the occasion in question M detects N’s having E but does not register the information that it is N that has E. Instead M prints out, ‘For the first time, I am having E
!’ In so doing, M misidentifies the possessor of E. Objection: If M is not merely serving as N’s mouthpiece, then either M is not detecting N’s ‘mental’ properties in such a way that the detection amounts to introspection or else N’s ‘mental’ properties must also be M’s, and so M is correct in judging ‘I am E
’. Hence, M makes no mistake (unless in judging ‘I am E’, M implicitly ‘assumes’ that M is the only one who is E, or who is experiencing that particular token of E
). There is an analogous problem in the case of the telepathy example. Reply: First, why assume that if a mental property is detected in such a way that the detection amounts to introspection, then the introspector must be among those who possess it? So far as we are aware, there is no evidence about how people process information that supports the view that anything like this assumption is required to explain either how introspection works or how it differs from other forms of information-gathering. Second, whatever distinction one might plausibly draw between introspection and other sorts of information-gathering, it still has to be shown that one’s merely introspecting a mental property is sufficient for one’s possessing it. It is not. The introspector’s possession of the property must be compatible with his

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possession of whatever other properties he possesses. Failure to satisfy this condition could keep M from possessing E regardless of how he came upon the information that E was occurring. Example 2. First, the proto-example. Paul is super-macho. He has never acknowledged even to himself that he has ever felt fear. Eventually, through psychotherapy, he discovers that when he gets angry in a certain way then almost certainly he is afraid. As a consequence of this discovery he acquires the ability to discover through introspection that he is afraid by discovering through introspection that he is angry. Now the example itself. Change the proto-example so that what Paul learns in psychotherapy is that when he gets angry in the relevant way then almost certainly either he is afraid or his daughter is afraid. Subsequently, when Paul learns through introspection that he is angry he has hunches about whether it is himself or his daughter who is afraid. These hunches, while generally reliable, are, occasionally mistaken. Paul is unaware that his hunches are ever mistaken. On one occasion he learns introspectively that either he or his daughter is afraid and, under the influence of one of his hunches, he then takes himself to be the one who is afraid. He gets it wrong. It was his daughter. Objection: Paul is not really introspecting since his access to the information that fear is occurring is indirect. Reply: The distinction between direct and indirect needs to be explained. It may come to this: that Paul knows that fear is occurring by knowing that anger is occurring, whereas he does not know that anger is occurring by knowing that fear is occurring; rather, he just knows it. But the problem with this account of the direct/indirect distinction is that one knows that anger is occurring by knowing lots of other things, for instance, by knowing what anger is. So even Paul’s introspective awareness of anger is indirect. Even if the distinction between direct and indirect were tenable, for the objection to work some reason would have to be given why direct access is required for introspection. Example 3. Sam’s brain is removed from his head and divided into functionally equivalent halves, each capable of sustaining his full psychology. Each of these halves is then transplanted into its own brainless body, which except for being brainless is qualitatively identical to Sam’s body just prior to the surgery and, hence, also qualitatively identical to the other brainless body. Once Sam’s brain is removed (and just prior to its being transplanted), his body is destroyed. One of the survivors of the operation thinks that he is the only survivor. So, he thinks that he is Sam. He quasi-remembers having become aware

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just before the operation, and through introspection, that he felt nervous. He believes that it was himself who felt nervous. He is wrong. It was Sam.3 Objection 1
: An assumption of the example is that the person who quasiremembers is not Sam. Some philosophers would disagree.4 Reply: Granted. So this example is for those who think that the person who quasi-remembers is not Sam.5 Objection 2
: The quasi-rememberer is not attempting to base his identification of the person who was nervous on observed similarities between himself and Sam or on anything like a perceptual tracking of a self over time. Hence, his identification is not based on the sort of evidence on which ordinary perceptual identifications are based. The only thing that would count against the nomisidentification view would be attempted and failed identifications that are based on that sort of evidence. Such misidentifications would be ones that mischaracterize the possessor. So, even though the quasi-rememberer refers to himself when he judges that he felt nervous, and even though he was not the one who felt nervous, this is not a genuine case of introspective misidentification. Generally, in the case of the identifications we make in connection with our own memories, the fact that “our… knowledge of the world supports a presumption that ‘fission’ and the like do not in fact occur” (Shoemaker 1986: 131) is what entitles us to identify with the person whose experiences we remember (and so take ourselves to be that person). We do not use our memories to compare observed similarities between selves at different times or to perceptually track selves. We simply have the experience of remembering (or quasiremembering) the introspecting of a mental property and thereby identify with, and identify, the possessor of the introspected mental property. Reply. First, for the point at issue, it is not enough that our knowledge of the world supports a presumption that fission and the like do not occur (and thus gives us grounds to identify with the person whose experiences we remember). Unless our knowledge also supports the presumption that fission is physically (and not just technologically) impossible, it leaves it an open question whether fission might someday occur, hence, also open whether in a fission situation, in

3. This sort of example and the replies to it which we distinguish will be familiar to those who are aware of the post-1960’s debate over personal identity and what matters in survival. See, for example, Parfit 1971, Perry 1972, Lewis 1976, Parfit 1976, Lewis 1983, Parfit 1984, Shoemaker 1984, Sosa 1990, Rovane 1990, Unger 1991. 4. Unless he has changed his mind, David Lewis would disagree (Lewis 1976). 5. Unless they have changed their minds, Parfit, Shoemaker, Unger, and Sosa would think that the person who quasi-remembers is not Sam. See note 3.

Introspective misidentification

forming a judgment based on introspection, misidentification of the possessor of the mental property is possible. The reply to the counterexample in effect changes the no-misidentification view to the claim that provided fission cases do not occur, judgments based on introspection are immune to error through misidentification. Second, the objector to the example changes the no-misidentification view in another way as well. The objector changes it to the view that misidentification that comes about in certain ways is impossible, whereas the original (and more interesting) view is that misidentification per se is impossible. The objector claims that in introspection one employs no observed similarities to identify the possessor of a given mental property. But even if the objector were right about this, that would not show that this example is not a counterexample. The no-misidentification view is not the view that in introspection one employs no observed similarities to identify the possessor of the introspected property, but rather the view that one cannot in judgments based on introspection make a mistake about the possessor of the property introspected. On the assumption that the fission-descendant in the example is not Sam but nevertheless learns through introspection that Sam was nervous just before the operation, the example is designed to show, and does show, that in introspection one can make a mistake about the possessor of the property introspected. It is because the example shows this that it is a counterexample to the nomisidentification view. To be a counterexample, the example does not also have to show that in introspection one employs observed similarities to make a judgment about the possessor of a mental property. In fact, the objection involves a confusion between two senses of ‘who?’. The objector’s suggestion is, first, that it is a background condition for an introspectively based judgment’s being reliable that fission is not occurring, and second that since what would otherwise be a misidentification (after all, the fission-descendant does get it wrong) is not due to the introspector’s mischaracterizing the possessor of the mental property (e.g. as one who did not undergo fission), the example is not really one of misidentification after all: since the introspector does not mischaracterize, he does not misidentify. But the relevant sense of ‘who?’ in the question ‘Who was nervous?’ is the one that merely asks for the possessor of the property of having been nervous to be picked out whether or not this is accomplished by having an accurate characterization. And in the counter-example the wrong person is picked out as the one who was nervous. Third, there is nothing that prevents a quasi-rememberer or for that matter

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even an ordinary rememberer from basing his identification on observed similarities between selves (or person-stages) observed at different times. Imagine, for instance, that, contrary to the original example, the fissiondescendant knows or believes that he may not be the only survivor. But he also quasi-remembers mental states, other than that of being nervous, that Sam had just before the operation. And he takes these to be just like mental states that, based on current introspection, he thinks are typical of him. So, he infers (recklessly) on the basis of observed similarities between selves observed at different times that he must be Sam. He gets it wrong. Example 4. George went to the hospital for an operation during which he was mistakenly given a curare-like drug for an anaesthetic. As a consequence, throughout the operation, although he experienced intense pain, he was paralyzed physically and unable to protest. In addition, his organism was paralyzed cognitively in ways that affected its ability to process sensory information in making decisions. On learning after his recovery that the curare-like drug was mistakenly used, George decided to sue the hospital. At the trial, George foolishly admitted that although he can now remember the experiencing of the pain, so far as he knows, once the operation was completed he suffered no physical or psychological scars from that experience of pain’s having occurred; for instance his memory of the pain is not now and, so far as he or anyone knows, never was distressful to him. In exploiting this admission, a lawyer representing the hospital claimed that although a mistake was made as a consequence of which George’s organism experienced pain, so far as anyone knows George was unharmed. The reason for this, the lawyer claimed, is that while the pain may or may not have been experienced by a self, the experience of the pain is (and always was) so unintegrated with the rest of George physically and psychologically that George did not experience it. Hence George deserves no compensation. Objection: Someone felt the pain and since George remembers having felt it, George is the only candidate. So, George felt the pain. Reply: The dispute is over the question whether painful states of the organism that endured the pain were George’s psychological states. One way in which they could fail to have been George’s is that the organism at the time it endured the pain was not a person (or self) at all. Another way is that the organism was a person but was so thinly connected to George’s normal self that it was not George. A third way is that the organism was George but its experiences of pain — particularly its experiences of the pain’s hurtfulness — were so unintegrated with the rest of George’s psychology that they could count as states

Introspective misidentification

of the organism but not as states of George. We do not claim that it is clear that the pain was not George’s. Our point is that in the light of these alternative possibilities it is not clear that it was. In asserting that George remembers having felt the pain, the objector begs the question. What George remembers now is the occurrence of pain, or the experiencing of the pain. But from his remembering the occurrence of pain, or the experiencing of pain, it does not follow that he remembers that he felt pain. For there to be adequate grounds for the no-misidentification view, it cannot be perfectly sensible for some fully informed and fully rational person to doubt whether the pain was George’s. But imagine that one of the jurors is philosophically sophisticated, as sensible and as rational as can be, and understands perfectly whatever is known about the physical and psychological details of the case. It is easy to imagine also that she does not think that the evidence shows conclusively that the pain was George’s. We do not say that this judgment of hers is the only sensible response to this case. But surely it is a perfectly sensible response nonetheless. If the no-misidentification view were true, it should not be.

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Chapter 11

First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge* Christopher Peacocke University of Oxford

My aim here is to identify a certain distinctive feature of some first-person thoughts, and to discuss its explanation and its significance. The challenge of providing a good account of the nature of first-person thought has drawn forth some of the most justly celebrated and dazzling contributions of philosophy. I think that some of these contributions are dazzling not only in the intensity of the light they cast, but also in their having made it hard to see the true nature of this feature. The feature has often been mischaracterized in one way or another, and theories have been built on these mischaracterizations. Sometimes an appreciation that an earlier characterization is defective has been replaced by a new mischaracterization. Before I go any further, I had better say what I think the feature is.

1.

Representational independence

Consider first the everyday case in which a person forms a belief with the content ‘I am in front of a door’, and does so for the reason that he sees a door ahead of him. His visual experience represents him as bearing a certain spatial relation to the door. This is so even if he cannot see or otherwise experience his

* I have been helped by discussions at the meeting on Direct Reference and Indexicals in March 1994 at the Zentrum für interdisziplinaire Forschung of the University of Bielefield; at the Karlovy-Vary 1994 conference on reference; and at my seminar in New York University in 1996. Comments from John Campbell, Paul Horwich, Thomas Nagel, Derek Parfit, John Perry, Stephen Schiffer, Paul Snowdon, Timothy Williamson, Crispin Wright, and Eddy Zemach have been particularly helpful. The later stages of the preparation of this material for publication were carried out while I held a Personal Research Professorship funded by the Leverhulme Trust, whose support I very gratefully acknowledge.

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own body on this particular occasion — taking his experience at face value, he would judge that he is in front of a door. Whether or not he perceives his own body on this particular occasion, the way the visual experience represents the world as being is one which justifies acceptance of the first-person content endorsed in his belief ‘I am in front of a door’. (We assume he possesses the concepts in the content of this belief.) More generally, when a person forms a perceptual belief ‘I am F’, he does so because his experience itself has the content ‘I am F’, or has some content which justifies the content ‘I am F’. This point would be agreed by theorists who otherwise disagree about what philosophical theory is to be given of an experience’s having a first-person content. I will return to that last point. We can more generally consider examples in which the thinker’s reason for making his judgment ‘I am F’ is his being in some state which represents a certain content C as correct. In the class of examples I want to consider, the content C may, but need not, be the same as the content ‘I am F’. Some theorists believe that perceptual states have nonconceptual contents which are distinct in kind from the contents which feature in beliefs (Evans 1982, this volume; Peacocke 1992). What I have to say is orthogonal to that issue. In the class of examples on which I want to focus, it will be the case that the content C, even if it is distinct from the content ‘I am F’, is still one from which it is rational to move to the content ‘I am F’. In our opening example, it is a perceptual experience which is the contentpossessing state which gives a reason for forming the first-person belief. But the general property I specified can be present in cases in which the reason-giving state is not an experience (and still not a belief either). If you are sitting at your desk in the night, and a power cut turns out all lighting, you may still in the dark be able to keep track of your movements relative to the room you are in. You may walk across the room, and then form the belief ‘I am in front of a door’. You have a faculty which allows you to keep track of your location, and the exercise of the faculty on this occasion results in its seeming to you that you are in front of the door. This seeming is not a perceptual experience. Nor is it to be identified with a belief. You may know that your tracking faculty misfunctions in a specific way. In those circumstances, your judgments may overrule the deliverances of your inaccurate faculty, and you may form the belief that the door is probably two feet to the left of you. When, however, you are in the dark and you are taking the spatial faculty’s deliverances at their face value, your reason for forming your belief ‘I am in front of the door’ is a beliefindependent state, and one which represents it as being the case that you are in

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front of the door. We can say that a use of the first person, in a particular belief ‘I am F’, is representationally dependent if 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 uses of ‘I’ in the two beliefs ‘I am in front of the door’ in each of our two opening examples, based on visual perception in the one case and the deliverances of the spatial faculty on the other, are both representationally dependent uses. In the usual case of knowledge of one’s bodily and spatial properties resulting from perception, clause (iii) will be fulfilled because in such cases the subject is taking the content of the representational state at face value. The characterization (i)–(iii) says what it is for a use of the first person in thought to be representationally dependent. We could similarly give a characterization of what it is for an utterance, on a particular occasion, of the firstperson pronoun to be representationally dependent. The second clause, that it is the content C which makes reasonable the judgment ‘I am F’, is crucial to the notion of representational dependence. What is required is that the content C is one which (if indeed it is not the very content ‘I am F’ itself) can be certified as standing in some justificational relation to the first-person content ‘I am F’, without any need to mention the kind of mental state of which it is the content. We can assess the transition from the content C to ‘I am F’ in abstraction from mental states of which they may be the contents. That one truth-evaluable content can stand in justificational relations to another is something which is a presupposition of such disciplines as logic, probability theory and confirmation theory. For the notions of nonconceptual representational content that have been introduced in the more recent literature, similar theories of justificational relations, both amongst themselves, and in relation to other contents, could also be developed. A representationally dependent use of the first person is so-called in part because the thinker is in a state which represents the content C as correct, and the content represented as correct is one which stands in such a justificational relation to the content of the belief ‘I am F’. From the standpoint of someone engaged in giving an account of mastery and understanding, representationally dependent uses form a theoretical natural

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kind. For these uses, there is the possibility of giving a partial account of mastery of these uses by describing the rational sensitivity of certain beliefs involving them to the content of the representational states with the justifying content. Representational dependence is not a notion which is definitionally restricted to the first person. Quite generally for any mode of presentation m, we can say that a use of m, in a particular belief ‘m is F
’, is representationally dependent if there is a content C having the properties which result from clauses (i)–(iii) above by substituting ‘m’ for ‘I’. That is, the content C must be the content of one of the thinker’s current representational mental states; it must in itself make reasonable judgment of the content ‘m is F
’; and the thinker must form the belief ‘m is F
’ because he is accepting the content C of that representational mental state. A use of a perceptual-demonstrative such as ‘that car’, in an ordinary perceptual-demonstrative belief like ‘That car is travelling fast’, is representationally dependent. A 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 set of mental states with those contents which collectively meet the conditions (i)–(iii). Representational independence is the crucial notion which I want to put to work in this paper. The uses of the first person in beliefs with the following contents can, in appropriate circumstances, be representationally independent: I see the phone is on the table. I remember attending the birthday party. I remember that Russell was born in 1872. I am beginning to dream. I fear that the motion will not be carried.

To say that such uses are representationally independent is not to say that the beliefs in question are not held for reasons. On the contrary, the thinker’s reason for believing ‘I see the phone is on the table’ is his visual experience as of the phone’s being there. It is arguable that there are also reasons in the other cases on this list. What matters for a representationally independent use of the first person is, rather, the nature of the reason, and its relation to the content of the belief in question. When a person predicates the complex concept sees the phone to be on the table

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of himself, it is not the content of the reason-giving experience, viz., that the phone is on the table, that makes rational a predication of seeing of himself. It does of course contribute to the rationality of attributing a particular content to the seeing. But the concept of seeing does not feature in the content of the experience which represents the phone as being on the table (nor does any nonconceptual analogue of the notion of seeing feature in it). If we consider just the relation between the representational contents of the experience and the judgment themselves, and how their correctness requires the things and properties to which they refer to be, then we should say this: the content The phone is on the table.

does not in itself support the content I see the phone is on the table.

It is true that a thinker might reflect on the conditions for his own use of a perceptual-demonstrative such as ‘that phone’ to be a correct use. He might reflect on these conditions, and infer from them, together with the correctness of his use of it on this particular occasion, that he must be seeing the phone. But clearly an ordinary, nonphilosophical person’s knowledge that he sees the phone to be on the table is not reached via any such philosophical route. The ordinary person’s self-ascription of the experience rests on the occurrence of the experience itself, rather than any philosophical reflection about conditions of use of demonstratives. The normal case of psychological self-ascription contrasts, then, with the representationally dependent cases with which we started. When the content ‘I am in front of a door’ is believed on the basis of perceptual experience, the contents of the experience and of the belief based upon it are not merely confirming, they are identical, if we allow perceptions to have a first-person conceptual component. Even if we do not, whatever notion of nonconceptual representational content is endorsed, it will not have much plausibility unless the content attributed to an experience when one is in front of the door is regarded at least as justifying the content ‘I am in front of a door’. Still, it may be objected 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, instances of which can justify ‘I am in front of a door’. A more primitive content C0 may for instance be one which does not involve the possessor of a state with content C0 thinking of himself as

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a persisting material object. Such a primitive content C0 might be captured very roughly by the content of an utterance ‘There’s a door in front of this point’, where the demonstrative ‘this point’ refers to the point from which the subject seems to be perceiving. When such contents are recognized, an objector may say, then in the case which I have classified as representationally dependent, both of the following points hold. First, the contents C0 and ‘I am in front of a door’ are distinct, as the content of the visual experience of seeing (which does not itself involve seeing) is distinct from the content of the judgment ‘I see the phone is on the table’. Second, the objector may say, in both the representationally independent and the representationally dependent cases, there is a basis for the resulting judgment. In both kinds of case, we have causal and rational dependence of the final belief upon the occurrence of the visual experience, and in both cases, the causation involves reasons. In both kinds of case, the subject’s reason for his final belief is the occurrence of the justifying experience. So what, the objector asks, is the distinction? I reply that even when contents such as C0 are acknowledged, there remains a distinction between the cases. In the representationally dependent cases, we can split the explanation of the subject’s final acceptance of ‘I am in front of a door’ into two components. There is, first, his endorsement of the more primitive content C0 of his experience or other representational state. Second, there is the transition from C0 to the content ‘I am in front of a door’. This latter transition is ratifiable as legitimate independently of any endorsement of the initial content. (Similarly, in the different case of inference, we can ratify a transition from premises to conclusion as valid regardless of whether the thinker accepts the premises or not). The thinker’s willingness to make this legitimate transition is an essential part of the explanation of his final belief. It is crucial to the distinction I am advocating that the transition is one from a content, something evaluable as correct or incorrect. The transition from the objector’s content C0 to ‘I am in front of a door’ is also of this kind. By contrast, in the representationally independent case, there are not two corresponding components in the explanation of the final acceptance of ‘I see the phone is on the table’. There is in the normal case of psychological self-ascription no transition from one content to a second content, ‘I see the phone is on the table’. Nor indeed in the general case need there be endorsement of the content of the representational reason-giving state. The justificational relations which hold between contents may depend upon a subject’s situation and history. There may not be a necessary relation between the correctness of ‘There is a door in front of this point’ and ‘I — a continuant,

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material person — am in front of this door’. But for a person many aspects of whose thought depend upon his embodiment, and who has reasonably used such forms of thought in the past, there will be an entitlement to make that transition between contents. The fact that justification or entitlement can depend upon contingent facts about the thinker does not destroy the distinction between representationally dependent and independent uses of the first person. Four salient points about representationally independent uses of the first person emerge even from the introductory materials and distinctions we have before us so far. i. Representational independence of a use of the first person is to be distinguished from immunity to error through misidentification, the phenomenon defined in the discussions of first-person thought in Wittgenstein (1933–4), Shoemaker (1968, this volume), and Evans (1982, this volume). To reactivate our memory traces about this distinction, I quote Shoemaker’s characterization: to say that a statement ‘a is Φ” is subject to error through misidentification relative to the term ‘a’ means that the following is possible: the speaker knows some particular thing to be Φ, but makes the mistake of asserting ‘a is Φ’ because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be Φ is what ‘a’ refers to [Shoemaker 1968: 557; this volume, 83].

Actually, this formulation would include the quite irrelevant case in which the thinker makes an error because he fails to understand the term ‘a’ correctly. So let us transform this definition to one concerning the level of thought, by replacing ‘asserting’ and ‘statement’ by ‘believing’ and ‘belief ’. The kind of mistake in question would then be that of believing that the thing he knows to be Φ is identical with a. The variables are now used for modes of presentation, or thought-constituents. As the connoisseurs of this literature will remember, Shoemaker also draws two further distinctions within beliefs which are immune to error through misidentification. One is the distinction between the circumstantially immune, and the absolutely immune. A judgment is circumstantially immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person if it is immune to such misidentification errors when made on a certain basis (Shoemaker 1968: 557, this volume, 83). When made on some other basis, it may be subject to errors of identification. The other distinction is that between de facto immunity to error through misidentification and stronger forms of immunity. A judgment ‘I once played in a concert’ made on the basis of a memory, from the inside, as of playing an instrument in a concert, has only de facto immunity. In a world in

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which people have apparent, and appropriately causally related, memories of others’ experiences, there would be no such immunity (Shoemaker 1970). Shoemaker himself, and later Evans in The Varieties of Reference, made a convincing case that the belief ‘I am in front of a door’, when judged on the basis of an experience of being in front of a door, is immune to error through misidentification. This is an example of Shoemaker’s ‘circumstantial’ and de facto immunity: Belief in such a content is immune when made on the basis of perceptual experience, in the circumstances of the actual world. Yet this was our paradigm, initial example of a representationally dependent use in thought of the first person. So such immunity to error through misidentification of a firstperson belief is not sufficient for it to be representationally independent. A converse proposition is, though, very plausible, and supported by the account I will offer below. This is the proposition that all representationally independent uses of the first person in which the first-person belief is knowledge are also uses which are immune to error through misidentification. Certainly, a representationally independent use cannot be based on an identityelimination inference from the contents of two other mental states. Such an inferential transition would require that the contents of the reason-giving states give reasons for his first-person belief, and that is contrary to the definition of representational independence. When we have rather more in front of us, I will return to address the question of whether absolute, ‘logical’ immunity to error through misidentification is sufficient for representational independence. I believe it is not sufficient. ii. Is infallibility at least necessary for representational independence? Our list of contents which, believed in suitable circumstances, involve representationally independent uses of the first person included contents of the form ‘I remember that p’ and ‘I see that p’. A thinker is not infallible about these contents. It may be objected that such contents should not be on the list anyway. It may be said that in judging these fallible contents, the thinker takes for granted or presupposes the first-person content that he is perceiving properly (in the relevant modality), or the first-person content that his memory is functioning properly. I agree that these are taken for granted; but that does not imply that the examples should be excluded from the list of representationally independent uses. If the use of the first person in ‘I see that p’ is representationally dependent, by what content C is it justified? Perhaps the proposal is that it is justified jointly by ‘I have an experience as of its being the case that p’ and ‘I am perceiving properly’. Here the former content, ‘I have an experience…’ would have to

First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge 223

be the content of a belief. This raises the following question. Can it ever be that a seeing justifies the one who sees in self-ascribing a seeing? Or is it always the case that what is justified is, in the first instance, only a self-ascription of an experience, from which one must infer, with the additional information that one is perceiving properly, that one is also genuinely seeing? It looks as if the latter will have to be the position of the person who insists that knowledgeable representationally independent uses of the first person must be infallible. But the position is highly problematic. In particular, it is difficult to square with a plausible view of ordinary perceptual knowledge. There would be widespread agreement that ordinary perceptual knowledge, while justified by perceptual experience, does not have to result from inference from the thinker’s current experiences. A seeing can, in suitable circumstances, justify the thinker’s belief ‘That tree has leaves’. Why can it not, in the same circumstances, equally justify the thinker’s belief ‘I see that tree has leaves’? It seems that any doubt that it can would equally spill over into a doubt as to whether noninferential perceptual knowledge is possible either. It would clearly take us far afield to pursue this here. We can, though, note the prima facie plausibility of this conditional: If noninferential perceptual knowledge of the world is possible, then so also must be knowledgeable, representationally independent uses of ‘I see that p’. If this is right, then infallibility is not necessary for representational independence. iii. To say that a use of the first person is representationally independent is not in any way to imply that it does not refer. The characterization of a use as representationally independent has to do with the absence of a certain kind of reason for forming the belief in which the first-person way of thinking is employed. The conclusion that representationally independent uses do not refer would follow if it were a necessary condition for a use of the first person to refer that the thinker’s reasons for accepting it be of the kind characterized in the definition of representational dependence. But I cannot see any reason for believing that, and many against. One reason against is that forms of reasoning involving the first person, and whose validity requires that the first person refers, seem valid regardless of whether the use of the first person in a premise is representationally dependent or not. Nor in my judgment do we have any satisfactory model for the semantic evaluation of first-person thoughts which does not employ the notion of reference. Representationally independent uses of the first person, like all other uses, conform to the principle that they refer to the thinker of the thought in which they occur. I will return later in this paper to nonreferential treatments of the first person.

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iv. When a mental state provides a reason for a belief involving a representationally independent use of the first person, the content of that state cannot fully explain what makes the first-person belief rational (when it is so). This much is a consequence of the very definition of a representationally independent use. It follows that to find an account of mastery and understanding of these uses we must look elsewhere. The phenomenon that I want to highlight is not just that there are true beliefs which contain representationally independent uses of the first person. That contents of the sort listed in the examples above of representationally independent uses of the first person are on occasion true is not obviously something which should by itself prompt a search for a philosophical theory. The mere truth of these contents does not depend upon the uses of the first person being representationally independent. They will have the truth values they do regardless of how they come to be believed. The phenomenon I want to highlight is rather the fact that beliefs containing representationally independent uses of the first person can, in suitable circumstances, be knowledge. What explains this fact?

2. Delta theories I now turn to consider a class of theories which aim to explain how beliefs involving representationally independent uses of the first person can amount to knowledge. Theories in this class differ from one another in the way in which they elaborate important aspects of the explanation, but the broad structure of the answer they give is common to all of them. According to these approaches, when a person self-ascribes an experience (say), it is the occurrence of the experience itself which is part of the person’s reason for making a judgment whose content contains the concept of experience. That it is an experience he judges himself to be having is rationally explained in part by the fact that he is having an experience. The case contrasts with a representationally dependent example, in which the content judged does not go beyond what is justified by the content of the experience. Under this treatment of the representationally independent case, the thinker’s reason for making his judgment that he has an experience of a certain kind is not some thought to the effect that the experience occurs, the experience as thought of under a certain Fregean Sinn. Any such thought is part of the explanandum, not the explanans. The explanans is just the occurrence of the

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experience itself to its subject. No thought or representation of himself as the subject of the experience enters his reasons for his judgment. I think this is what is right in Shoemaker’s remark that “When one is introspectively aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires, one is not presented to oneself as a fleshand-blood person, and one does not seem to be presented to oneself as an object at all” (Shoemaker 1984: 102). There is no reason to object to the formulation that the thinker judges the content because he has the experience, for this explanans does not involve any thought or conception of himself as having the experience in the statement of his reason for making the judgment. It is worth noting that in that minimal sense, we can equally truly say of an observational judgment about the external world that the thinker makes it because he has an experience of a certain sort. But when a thinker makes an observational judgment, his reasons for making it do not need to include some thought to the effect that he has a certain type of experience. Now the occurrence of an experience, or of any other particular conscious state, can give an immediate reason for forming a belief (or doing anything else) only to the subject who has the experience or conscious state. Suppose a person has a visual experience as of the phone being on the table, and that the occurrence of this experience is his reason for forming the belief ‘I have an experience as of the phone being on the table’. Then the owner of the experience will be the same as the subject referred to in the first-person component of the belief. The situation can be diagrammed as shown in Figure 1. Because of the shape of this diagram, I call accounts of the general kind I have been outlining delta accounts. Delta accounts may differ over how it is that conscious mental state or event of type ψ and content p

judgment ‘I ψ that p’

coconsciousness relation

relation of ownership by

relation of reference

the subject Figure 1.

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a conscious state can provide a reason for forming a belief, notably over conscious beliefs and other propositional attitudes, which have been found far more problematic than the self-ascription of experiences. I will return to these matters; our present concern is with the explanation offered by delta accounts of the representationally independent phenomena in question. Why is a first-person belief formed in the way described in a delta account also a true belief? The explanation must involve the following elements: the fact that when a belief is formed in this way, the owner of the conscious state will be the reference of the first-person component of the self-ascription; and some explanation of why the person is right about the kind of mental state it is which he has. The explanation of the correctness of the belief formed does not need to involve the correctness of the first-person content of some other representational state. It may do so if the attitude in question is factive, as with selfascriptions of genuine perception, knowledge, or memory (and in those cases it must involve more, too). But it is only because these attitudes are (at least) factive that these elements must be involved in the explanation of correctness of those particular kinds of self-ascription. They will not, for instance, be present in accounts of the correctness of self-ascriptions of belief or experience. This contrasts sharply with the explanation to be given of why a representationally dependent first-person belief based on perception is true. It would be impossible to explain why judging ‘I’m in front of a door’ on the basis of a perception with that first-person content (or whatever justifies it) yields a true belief, in the ordinary circumstances in which it does, without alluding to the correctness of the first-person representational content of the perceptual experience (or to the correctness of that content’s nonconceptual ground). A corresponding point holds for first-person beliefs formed as a result of use of the faculty we mentioned for keeping track of location in the dark, and for any other method of reaching representationally dependent first-person beliefs. We need, though, an explanation not just of truth but of the status of the resultant beliefs as knowledge, when they are formed in the way described by a delta account. Delta accounts have the resources to meet this demand, and to do so in a way which goes beyond mere reliability requirements, to meet the demand for justification and rationality. Consider a thinker who makes the transition from a conscious state or event of type ψ with content p to the belief ‘I ψ that p,’ where his reason for forming the belief is the occurrence of this very conscious state or event. It is an a priori truth that any use of the first-person concept in thought refers to the thinker of the thought. So we can conclude on a priori grounds that when the first-person belief about his mental state is

First-person reference, representational independence, and self-knowledge 227

formed for these reasons, it will be true. That is, from facts about the nature of the first-person concept, we can infer that transitions of this sort, when made for the specified reasons, will lead to true beliefs. This is somewhat analogous to the way in which we can infer from the nature of the logical concepts involved, and the way their semantic values are fixed, that certain logical transitions are valid. In both the delta case and the logical case, what underwrites the rationality of the transitions, and what would be mentioned in a full account of why they are justified, goes well beyond what is involved in mere de facto reliability. This is part of the way in which a delta-theorist can discharge the obligation to show that the relevant self-ascriptive beliefs are knowledge, but it is not meant to imply that we do not equally have justification and knowledge in the representationally dependent cases too. We do. The point is rather that an account of how the status of knowledge is achieved in the representationally dependent cases will be rather different. It must, in the representationally dependent cases, involve an account of how the thinker is justified in taking the content of the initial state at face value. It will also not involve the same kind of pivotal and special role of the a priori principle that any use of ‘I’ in thought refers to its thinker, in the way that there is such a special role in the treatment just outlined of justification for the representationally independent cases. Any delta account must be filled out with a detailed theory in the philosophy of mind and epistemology of how conscious states justify self-ascriptions. It would take us too far from representational independence to pursue this thoroughly here. But I do want to indicate a few aspects of the location of such a position in the space of possible positions, in a way intended to indicate that the idea is not a total nonstarter. Delta accounts are not required to assimilate conscious occurrent propositional attitudes to the different category of sensations and perceptual representational states. Conscious occurrent attitudes form a category of conscious states in their own right. A delta account is committed only to the modest view that a conscious occurrent propositional attitude is something which can give a thinker a reason for forming another attitude. To deny this would be to count ordinary conscious inference as impossible. In conscious inference, a thinker’s acceptance of certain premises is part of the cause and reason for his acceptance of a certain conclusion. Rational thought involves one’s new judgments being sensitive to which contents one already accepts. In a self-ascription of an attitude involving a representationally independent use of the first person, we have sensitivity not just to the content of the conscious attitudes one already possesses, but to which attitudes they are. Indeed

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conscious practical reasoning already involves some primitive sensitivity to the distinction between one’s own beliefs, one’s desires, and one’s intentions. These should be relatively uncontroversial truths, and acknowledging them cannot involve assimilating conscious attitudes to the sensational or to the perceptual. According to the delta accounts, a thinker’s reason for judging (for instance) ‘I remember attending the party’ can be his prior conscious apparent personal memory of attending the party. The transition this involves from an event with a certain content that p to one with a corresponding content ‘I remember doing so-and-so’ should not be construed as an inference from the memory to the self-ascription, any more than the transition from a perceptual experience to a belief should be construed as inferential. Rather, there is a rational sensitivity to the distinction between those of one’s states which are memories, and those which are not, a sensitivity which is already employed in ordinary first level conscious thought and practical inference. This preexistent sensitivity is exploited by someone who has the concept of memory, and selfascribes personal memories in the manner given in a delta account. Similar remarks apply to other conscious attitudes. In short, the required theory in the philosophy of mind will treat the knowledge expressed in representationally independent psychological selfascriptions neither on a perceptual model, nor an inferential model, but as a third kind of case with its own distinctive characteristics. Further discussion of these issues can be found in Peacocke (1997b). Two disclaimers should be made on behalf of delta accounts. There is indeed a sense in which a delta account explains how a representationally independent ‘I think’ is capable of accompanying any of a thinker’s conscious states. But a delta account cannot amount to an elucidation of the relations of ownership or of co-consciousness. On the contrary, delta accounts simply presuppose those relations. The most that can be said is that if a delta account is correct, a good explication of these relations must leave room for it. The other disclaimer is that the delta account offers no positive support for ‘no ownership’ theories of mental states. A misconstrual of the phenomenon of representationally independent uses might encourage no-ownership theorists, but it would take a misconstrual to do it. The phenomena as identified so far are at the level of sense, not reference. A delta account explains the status as knowledge of representationally independent beliefs while agreeing that conscious states are owned. So if anything, delta accounts are rather in the first instance ammunition for the opponent of the no-ownership theorist. These highly distinctive phenomena can be explained without resort to a no-ownership account.

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The no-ownership theorist may in fact enter these discussions as an objector to what has so far been said. If the no-ownership theorist is right in thinking that there is some important respect in which experiences and other conscious events are not owned, then clearly there is a need to say much more about the transition from a conscious event itself to a thought in which some mental property is self-ascribed. If the self-ascription is taken straightforwardly, as involving reference to a subject, the no-ownership theorist may worry that the transition is unsound. He may say that delta accounts give a good explanation of why some beliefs containing representationally independent uses of the first-person amount to knowledge, if it is taken for granted that conscious states have to have subjects. If there are subjects of conscious states, the thinker of the self-ascription must, for a priori reasons, be the same as the subject of the mental event providing his reason for the self-ascription. But this justification of an identity presupposes the existence of such a subject, and this is precisely what the no-ownership theorist questions. There is certainly an issue to be addressed here, and I will return to it in Section 5. First we need to understand representational independence and its consequences better.

3. Representational independence outside the first person? It is not obvious that the abstract structure exhibited by a delta account is restricted to judgments involving the first person. We can hope to learn more about the phenomenon of representational independence by considering whether the phenomenon extends beyond the first person. The natural place to look is among the other indexical modes of presentation. The abstract structure of a delta account involves three relations and three terms. One term is an event of a certain kind, or a state of affairs, and the second is a judgment made rational by the first term. For each of these two terms, there are two different relations, corresponding to the lower sides of the inverted delta, in which they stand to the same thing, corresponding to the third, lowest node of the inverted delta. There is also a third relation between the first two terms. This triangular structure seems to be instantiated if we take, for instance, a particular event — say, a particular political demonstration — as the first term; a perceptual demonstrative judgment ‘That demonstration is happening now’ as the second term; and the time t of the event as the third term. The corresponding relations are given in Figure 2 below. We could set up a similar example for a spatial judgment ‘That demonstration is happening

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the judgment ‘that demonstration is happening now’

the event (the political demonstration) cotemporality relation

has as its temporal reference

occurs at

the time t

Figure 2.

here’, if the spatial demonstrative is sufficiently broadly understood. But I will concentrate on the temporal example, since similar points will apply to the spatial case. The temporal diagram instantiates the same structure as that for the firstperson case, but does the situation it depicts really result in a belief which is not merely knowledge, but also involves a representationally independent use of ‘now’? A problem surfaces at the top left-hand vertex of the temporal diagram. It is not just the event of the demonstration itself, it is rather the thinker’s perception of the event, which is his reason for making the present-tense judgment. But when we bring in the perception of the event, we must remember that the perceptual experience itself has a present-tense content. It represents to the perceiver the event as occurring then — at the time of the experience. It is because this is so that if we introduce a large time lag in the production of someone’s experiences, he is subject to a perceptual illusion. When there is a large time lag, it looks as if things are occurring now to the subject of the experience, when in fact they are not. This present-tense component of perceptual experience undermines any claim of the use of the present-tense constituent in the judgment ‘That demonstration is occurring now’ to be representationally independent. In making this judgment, the thinker is simply endorsing part of the present-tense content of his perceptual experience. So this use of ‘now’ is after all representationally dependent. We can envisage a subject for whom not only are there huge time delays in the operation of the perceptual mechanism, but who also knows this to be his situation. When this subject has an experience of representational kind T, he can still use the temporal demonstratives [thatT time] of the sort I discussed in

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Sense and Content (Peacocke 1983). This demonstrative refers to the time of occurrence of the events perceived, regardless of whether this time is identical with the time of occurrence of the perceptual experience. But I do not see how these circumstances will yield us a representationally independent use of a temporal demonstrative which also results in knowledge. There are two kinds of case to consider. First, suppose a thinker who uses this special temporal demonstrative happens to believe that, on this particular occasion, [thatT time] is in fact now. If he forms the belief ‘That event is happening now’ in these complex circumstances, it will rest on the identity belief ‘[thatT time] = now’. The resulting belief will not be representationally independent, for it will rest in part on a rational inference, one of whose premises contains the present-tense mode of presentation. In the second case, we can consider the same person who knows of the real possibility of massive delay, and suppose he judges the content ‘That demonstration is happening at [thatT time]’. Is this use of [thatT time] representationally independent? No, for in these circumstances, the perceptual experience does still represent the demonstration as occurring at [thatT time]. The position is structurally just the same as it is for the presenttense component ‘now’ in the normal situation. An important difference between these temporal cases, then, and the firstperson representationally independent uses is that when an experience, or some other conscious state, gives a thinker a reason for forming a belief, we do not — and for many independent reasons must not — regard the thinker as presented with that state or event only through perception. The relation between a thinker’s judgments about some of his mental states and the states themselves differs in this respect from the relation between a thinker’s judgments about external states of affairs and those states of affairs themselves. This does not mean that representationally independent temporal indexicals cannot be involved in knowledge. On the contrary, when for example an experience is knowledgeably self-ascribed, and the use of the first person is representationally independent, the resulting judgment has a present-tense content: ‘I have such-and-such kind of experience now’. This use of ‘now’ is representationally independent. But there do not seem to be autonomous examples wholly underived from the mental cases. Certainly, the existence of structural delta-like diagrams like that above for the temporal case is not by itself sufficient to show that there are knowledgeable representationally independent uses outside the mental realm. It begins to look as if two generalizations about representational independence are true. First, if a property is knowledgeably self-ascribed with a repre-

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sentationally independent use of the first person, the property is either a psychological property or is inferred from such a self-ascription of a psychological property. Descartes’s use of ‘I’ in ‘I exist’, as the conclusion of the cogito argument, is a knowledgeable self-ascription of a nonpsychological property, but it manifestly meets the condition of having been inferred from such a selfascription of a psychological property, viz., that of thinking (in Descartes’s rather general sense). Psychological self-ascriptions seem to have an explanatorily prior role within the class of knowledgeable, representationally independent self-ascriptions. If this conjecture is true, it would be a vindication of the common intuition that there is a close connection between some mental phenomena and a certain distinctive use of the first person. The second general conjecture, given the earlier reflections about representationally independent uses of other concepts, is that any knowledgeable, representationally independent use of a concept will be in a content which is either a psychological self-ascription or is soundly inferred from one. I have concentrated on knowledgeable, representationally independent uses of the first person in beliefs of a particular kind, viz., those which result from self-ascription of a psychological state or event which is rationally based upon an occurrence of a conscious state or event of the very same kind as is selfascribed. This is mainly because I think that such examples have been the most influential historically. I do not, however, want to leave the impression that all knowledgeable, representationally independent uses are of this kind. Evans, for instance, mentions an ascent-procedure for the self-ascription of belief: the procedure of judging ‘I believe that p’ if, putting into operation whatever procedure he has for judging whether p, the subject comes to the conclusion that p (1982: 225; this volume, 114). Self-ascriptions of belief reached by this procedure will be knowledgeable, the use of the first person in them will be representationally independent; and it can be true that the self-ascription is made for reasons (though of course these will be reasons for thinking the world is a certain way). But it is also true that in these cases we can give the analogue of a delta-account. We do not, though, need to appeal here to the relation of coconsciousness which labels the horizontal line in our diagram. The very nature of the ascent procedure ensures that the referent of ‘I’ in beliefs selfascribed by means of the procedure is the same as the person who has the belief self-ascribed.

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4. An illusion and its source The writings of Kant, Schopenhauer, and the early Wittgenstein contain the claim that there is a ‘transcendental’ or ‘metaphysical’ subject of experience and thought. This transcendental subject is said to be distinct from the ordinary person who has the experiences and thoughts. I want to argue that the notion of a transcendental subject of experience results from an unjustified and incorrect projection from the realm of sense to the realm of reference. There is a genuinely distinctive representationally independent use of the first-person concept. It does not follow that such representationally independent uses of ‘I’ refer to a distinctive kind of thing, something not referred to in representationally dependent uses of the first person. The transcendental subject in Kant’s thought, to remind ourselves, is not what is denied in Kant’s critique of ‘rational psychology’. Rational psychology was said by Kant to have used unsound arguments for such properties as the simplicity and immortality of the soul, but the critique given of rational psychology does not involve denying the existence of the transcendental subject of experience. On the contrary, Kant’s critique is written from the standpoint of one who endorses the existence of the transcendental subject but disputes that the rational psychologist’s methods are legitimate means of coming to know anything about it. It is also quite clear from the text elsewhere that Kant endorses the existence of the transcendental subject: ‘I have knowledge that what is substantial in me is the transcendental subject’ (Kant 1781/7, B426–7; see also A355, footnote A478–9/B506–7, and A492/BS20). In any case, even if its existence were not explicitly endorsed, transcendental idealism could hardly be formulated without commitment to its existence. Now suppose someone thinks that representationally independent, knowledgeable uses of the first person do refer but holds also that they refer to something which can be known about only in knowledge involving representationally independent uses of the first person. What might one expect such a person to hold about the entity to which he takes such uses of ‘I’ to refer? I suggest that he would hold just about what Kant in fact held of the transcendental subject. Kant wrote of the transcendental subject that It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has already made use of its

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representation. And the reason why this inconvenience is inseparably bound up with it, is that consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation in general [A346 = B404].

This is a brilliant but difficult passage. I think that we can understand it better using the distinctions and theses I have proposed. I suggested that all knowledgeable self-ascriptions which involve a representationally independent use of the first person rest ultimately on psychological self-ascriptions containing representationally independent uses of the first person. So if the idea of a transcendental subject of experience has its origins in the phenomenon of representational independence, it is understandable that one who believes in such a subject should say that it ‘is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates’. It is true that in this passage Kant mentions only thoughts, and not the other conscious states which can also be ascribed in representationally independent uses. But in other passages, ‘thoughts, feeling, desire, or resolution’ are all included as what Kant would call ‘predicates of inner sense, representations and thought’ (A358, A359). This suggests that Kant would have been quite happy, if pressed, to replace ‘known only through its thoughts’ in the displayed passage by ‘known only through its thoughts and other conscious states’. The account of representationally independent use I have been giving also allows us to see a ground in that phenomenon for the claim Kant makes in the second part of the displayed passage. This is the claim that the reason why the transcendental subject can be known only through its thoughts is that consciousness in itself is not a representation distinguishing a particular object, but a form of representation in general. Precisely what distinguishes a representationally independent use of ‘I’ when a thinker knowledgeably thinks ‘I am F’ is that the thinker’s reason for self-applying the predicate F is not that one of his conscious states has the content ‘I am F’ — his reason is not given by a ‘representation distinguishing a particular object’ as F. It is rather the occurrence of a certain kind of conscious state itself which is his reason for making the judgment. It is the kind of state he is in, ‘a form of representation in general’ which gives his reason for the particular psychological predication which is being made in thought. This general diagnosis of the inclination to postulate a transcendental subject of experience also bears upon Kant’s view that the categories are inapplicable to this postulated subject. Kant wrote:

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The subject of the categories cannot by thinking the categories acquire a concept of itself as an object of the categories. For in order to think them, its pure selfconsciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself be presupposed [B422].

What is true is that in judging knowledgeably ‘I am thinking about such-andsuch object as having so-and-so properties (involving the categories)’, or even ‘I am thinking about the categories’, the use of ‘I’ is representationally independent. In such knowledge, the subject is not thought of in a way which makes it manifest that it is subject to the categories. Equally, it is also true that any knowledge of a content ‘m is F
’, where F involves one of the categories, and where this knowledge is based on the perception that m is F, will be representationally dependent in respect of the use of the singular concept m. It obviously does not follow that what a representationally independent use of ‘I’ refers to is something which is not subject to the categories. The slide from truths about the level of uses of the first-person concept, to very questionable claims about the level of reference, is particularly striking in such phrases as this: the transcendental subject of all inner appearances, which is not itself appearance and consequently not given as object, and in which none of the categories … meet with the conditions required for their application [footnote A478–9 = B506–7].

From the fact that in certain self-ascriptions the reference of ‘I’ is not then given as an object, it does not follow that it is not subject to the categories. On the present diagnosis, the critique of Kant’s notion of the transcendental subject would at certain points be close to Kant’s own highly effective critique of rational psychology. Kant wrote that ‘the simplicity of the representation of a subject is not eo ipso knowledge of the simplicity of the subject’ (A355). Equally, to employ in knowledge a representation of a subject which does not represent it as located in the spatiotemporal world is not eo ipso to have knowledge that the subject is not located in the spatiotemporal world. In effect, by appealing to a transcendental subject, Kant is saying that an exotic metaphysics can help to explain a genuine epistemological phenomenon: the existence of knowledgeable, representationally independent uses of the first person. It was a deep insight that these uses exist. It was also an insight that, here as elsewhere, the epistemology and the metaphysics of the first person must be integrated. Nonetheless, Kant’s proposed solution makes things worse. Presumably we must attribute his departure from the standards he rightly applied against the rational psychologist in part to his prior acceptance of

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transcendental idealism. The views of the early Wittgenstein on what he called ‘the metaphysical subject’ (Wittgenstein 1921: 5.641) were clearly somewhat different from those of Kant, and it is certainly an interesting question what exactly they were. But because the texts are so brief, this would have to involve exegetical speculation and hypothesis that would take us too far from our main present concerns. I turn instead to address this question: What is the most fundamental explanation of the dual temptations either to suppose that in some of its uses, ‘I’ does not refer at all, or that it refers to something extraordinary, something other than a person? In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein’s later self famously explained the temptation as resulting from a misconstrual of the genuine phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification of certain first-person judgments (Wittgenstein 1933–4: 67). This explanation was illuminatingly elaborated by Shoemaker; and further investigated by Evans. Immunity to error through misidentification is a necessary part of the explanation; but I want to argue that it is not the full explanation, nor is it fundamental. Suppose a thinker makes a perceptual-demonstrative judgment ‘that [perceptually given] F is G’, and in doing so applies an observational concept, on the basis of his current experience, to an object presented in the same experience. When such a judgment comes to be made in that way, it is immune to error through misidentification relative to the demonstrative component ‘that F’. The judgment does not rest on any identity belief ‘that F is identical with such-and-such’, and so there is no room for error resulting from the falsity of such a belief. Such immunity from error through misidentification does not in these cases involve any temptation to regard the object demonstratively thought about as ‘not in the spatiotemporal world’ — on the contrary. So the source of any temptation in the first-person case cannot be immunity to error through misidentification alone. Something else must be involved. Is the explanation then the combination of immunity to error through misidentification with the infallibility of the judgment made, given the reasons for which it is made? We already know this combination cannot be a necessary condition for the illusion to arise, if it be granted that self-attributions of memory and knowledge give rise to it, for those attributions are not infallible. The combination of immunity to error through misidentification and infallibility is also not sufficient for this kind of illusion either. Consider the judgment ‘This pain is acute’, where the thinker’s reason for making the judgment is the acuteness of the pain he experiences. This is both immune to error through

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misidentification relative to the demonstrative component ‘this pain’, and it is infallible if anything is. But there is not the same strength, or kind, of temptation that there has been in the first-person case to suppose that ‘this pain’ does not refer, or refers to something extraordinary. The same example shows that adding a third requirement to the explanation, to the effect that in the circumstances the term in question is guaranteed to have reference, is also not yet enough. One feature differentiating those self-ascriptions which have led to problematic claims about the first person from these most recent cases is this. In the recent cases, a certain experience, either sensation or perception, is required for the demonstrative component ‘that F’ — the perceptual demonstrative — or ‘this pain’ to become available to the thinker. But in the former cases, there is no experience, neither perception nor sensation, whose presence is required before the first-person becomes available for such uses in thought. When a person makes a judgment of the form ‘I am in mental state M’, and does so for the reason that he is in the conscious mental state M, it is not that mental state M which makes available the first-person component of his thought. It could not be, since the very same first-person component is employed in the different circumstances when he knowledgeably judges ‘I am not in mental state M’. This characteristic differentiates the first person from both perceptual demonstratives and demonstrative thought about one’s own sensations. We can label this characteristic by saying that ‘I’, unlike these other demonstratives, is experientially independent. Uses of ‘I’ in certain knowledgeable present-tense psychological selfascriptions have then at least these three characteristics in the circumstances in which they are made: i. they have guaranteed reference; ii. they are immune to misidentification errors; and iii. they are experientially independent. Even with this threefold combination, however, it is hard to believe we have reached the source of the illusion that in some of its uses, ‘I’ either does not refer, or refers to something extraordinary. Properties (i) and (iii) on this list, i.e. guaranteed reference and experiential independence, are present in any use of the first person in thought, in whatever circumstances and with whatever predicate the first person is combined. As we noted, the second property on this list is present, at least in the form of what Shoemaker calls ‘circumstantial’ immunity, for such perceptually based spatial thoughts as ‘I am in front of a door’, and these thoughts, par excellence, locate one in the objective order. It is

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not as if, when we confine our attention to the circumstances in which such spatial thoughts are immune to error through misidentification, we are more tempted by the illusion — we are not. In any case, it is not particularly transparent why the combination of properties (i) to (iii) should lead to this particular syndrome of illusions about the first person. I suggest that a better explanation of the illusion is one which makes essential reference to the fact that uses of the first person which produce the illusion are representationally independent. There is no pull towards the illusions in uses of the first person in judgments which are representationally dependent, and whose justifying mental states have a representational content which clearly represents the subject as an item in the objective spatio-temporal order. As we just noted, there is no such pull even if the resulting judgment is circumstantially immune to error through misidentification. In knowledge which involves a representationally independent use of the first person, on the other hand, the subject’s reason for making the judgment is not one which involves the exercise of the conception of himself as located in the objective order. He must of course be an element in the objective order, for many an incoherence would result from the supposition that he is not. It may also be arguable that he must have some conception of himself as located in the objective order. Nonetheless, no such conception is actually exercised by the thinker when he makes a knowledgeable, representationally independent judgment about himself, and a delta account makes clear how this is possible.

5. Is self-knowledge subjectless? I turn now to the task postponed at the end of Section 2. This is the task of constructing an account which simultaneously meets two desiderata. It addresses the objection we imagined coming from the theorist who holds that conscious mental events are fundamentally subjectless. It also gives an evaluation of the transition from the occurrence of a conscious event or state to the corresponding self-ascription. The account must have at least three strands. It will have to have a metaphysical strand if it is to address the claims of the no-subject theorist. It will have to have an epistemological strand, in its assessment of whether the transitions from psychological states to their self-ascription are justified transitions. Finally the account will have to draw on part of a theory of content for thought and language, for a theory of content is what is needed to explain

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any links there may be between the metaphysics and the issue of justification. We can distinguish at least three different kinds of account of the transition from a conscious state to its self-ascription. 1. According to accounts of the first kind, the transition from a psychological state to its self-ascription is justified, but at some fundamental level, there is no genuine reference made with ‘I’ in thought or language in the self-ascription. In this latter respect, positions of the first kind are in agreement with the view expressed in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks, when he wrote One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word ‘I’, particularly when it is used in representing immediate experience, as in ‘I can see a red patch’…. It would be instructive to replace this way of speaking by another in which immediate experience would be represented without using the personal pronoun; for then we’d be able to see that the previous representation wasn’t essential to the facts…. We could adopt the following way of representing matters: if I, L. W., have toothache, then that is expressed by means of the proposition ‘There is toothache’…. It’s evident that this way of speaking is equivalent to ours when it comes to questions of intelligibility and freedom from ambiguity [Wittgenstein 1975: §§57–8].

Of course, the later Wittgenstein would almost certainly not be happy with a conception of conscious events under which they can be reasons for a thinker’s doing something, including forming a belief. Positions of this first general kind are adopting only the quoted idea of the first person as nonreferential, and need not be accepting either the middle or the later Wittgenstein’s views on experience. 2. Positions of the second kind hold that the function of the first person in thought and language is indeed to make reference. For just this reason, the second position continues, the transition from the occurrence of a conscious event to a corresponding self-ascription is not justified. This is precisely the stance of Lichtenberg’s criticism of Descartes’s cogito, that Descartes was entitled only to the premise ‘There is thinking going on’. 3. While accounts of kind (1) aim to validate the relevant transitions to a selfascription by reducing the content of the self-ascription, accounts of kind (2) do not reduce it. Accounts of both of these first two kinds are implicitly taking it that one cannot simultaneously have both the correctness of the transition and take it that the function of ‘I’ is to refer. The third species of position rejects this implicit assumption which is common to the first two positions.

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Positions of the third kind agree with the second position that the function of the first person is to refer, but they agree with the first position that the transition is justified. Accounts which are of this third kind subdivide into those which we can classify as concessive to the no-subject theorist and those which are nonconcessive. The concessive accounts agree that conscious mental events are fundamentally subjectless but aim to construct a referent for the first person from materials available at that allegedly subjectless level, and in such a way that the transition is justified. The nonconcessive accounts deny the existence of any subjectless level, and aim to say why the transition is justified without presupposing the existence of any such subjectless level. I will be advocating a nonconcessive form of this third kind of position. The very idea of a conscious state or event involves the existence of a subject of the state or event. A conscious state, as Nagel (1979) said, is one such that there is something it is like to be in that state; and this must mean something it is like for the subject. Reference to the subject of conscious states is essential in elucidating what it is for them to be conscious. The subject here cannot be dismissed as a mere intentional object. It is not just as if there is something it is like for the subject — there really is something it is like for the subject, when enjoying a conscious state. It is not at all easy to see how to give an account of what it is for a state to be conscious in a wholly impersonal fashion. Bernard Williams has emphasized that from the holding of the two ‘impersonal’ conditions that there is a thinking that p and there is a thinking that q, it does not follow that there is a thinking that p and q (Williams 1978: 95–101). For someone who accepts the link just stated between consciousness and the existence of subject, this gap is just what one would expect. For there to be a conscious thinking that p is for there to be a conscious state or event such that there’s something it’s like for its subject; and for there to be a conscious thinking that q is for there to be a conscious state or event such that there’s something it’s like for its subject. It does not follow that these are the same subject, and so does not follow that there is a conscious thinking that p and q. If the consciousness of a state has to be elucidated in terms which require the existence of a subject of that state, certain kinds of reductionism about subjects will be undercut. For certain reductionists about the subject of experience and thought, conscious events and states are supposed to be the very building blocks in terms of which the existence of subjects is analysed. If consciousness itself has to be elucidated in terms which already require the existence of a subject, the materials drawn on by the reduction would be presupposing what the reduction purports to elucidate.

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In response to this objection, the reductionist may pursue certain analogies. An academic society, or a club, may, and perhaps must, be involved in events of such a kind that only a society or club could be involved in them. This would hold for the admission of new members, changing its rules, and any other case of taking action as a society or club. This evidently does not rule out the possibility of an ontological reductionist’s attitude to these societies and clubs as sets of persons related to one another in complex ways. Yet structurally, this situation is very different from the challenge which the connection between consciousness and subjects poses for certain kinds of reductionist. The persons in terms of whom the reductionist wants to explain the existence of societies and clubs are not themselves plausibly analysed in terms of their relations to societies and clubs. These reflections may have a very Cartesian feel about them. Indeed, if they are correct, they support Descartes on two points. First, Descartes did, just from his enjoyment of conscious states, have a right to the premise of the cogito. Second, the transition he made from the premise to the conclusion ‘I exist’ was a sound transition. But the reflections so far obviously do not license all of Descartes’s conclusions about the nature of the referent of the first person. The nature of the subject whose existence is entailed by the occurrence of conscious states is rather something for further investigation. Some conclusions can be drawn, though, just from the austere description of the subject as the enjoyer of conscious states. a.If the subject is capable of remembering its own earlier states, it must be something capable of persisting through time. This follows just from the fact that correctness of a memory requires that the subject of the memory state — that is, the one who is remembering — be identical with the one who in the memory is represented, from the first-person viewpoint, as having been thusand-so. Since the subject who has current experiences is identical with the subject who remembers, it follows that the subject who experiences must be capable of persisting through time. This subject must have the required complex capacities for memory storage, retrieval, and temporal representation. b.Some conscious states can give a subject reasons for making spatial judgments about itself, such as ‘I am underneath this tree’. In suitable circumstances, the judgments so made amount to knowledge. When they are knowledge, it follows that the subject of experience must have a spatial location in the world. When the spatial judgment is knowledge, the perceptual experience which makes it rational does not merely support a weaker conclusion of the form ‘Something

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bearing such-and-such relation to me is underneath this tree’. It supports a firstperson content which locates the subject itself in the spatial world. c.It is the same subject who both experiences and acts (indeed some forms of thinking are actions). Since the subject of conscious states is also identical with the subject who acts, the conscious subject who is also an agent must have the complex of causal powers required for attempts and for actions based on reasons. d.There will be constitutive links between certain types of contents featuring in the mental states a subject may enjoy, and the subject’s environmentally individuated relations and capacities. This is the general thrust of externalist developments in the philosophy of mind and language. In the theses (a)–(d) we have the starting point for an investigation which proceeds from relatively Cartesian data about the properties of the subject of experience, and by way of various constitutive principles about those properties, draws substantial conclusions about the nature of the subject of experience. There is a great deal more to be said about all of (a)–(d), in particular about the idea of a person as a persisting object in the world. Further pursuit of the investigation may also illuminate the issue of why there is an internal connection between consciousness and the existence of subjects. At this late stage of the paper, however, instead of pursuing that project, I confine myself to the bearing of these reflections upon the transition from a conscious state to its selfascription, and upon the kinds of position (1)–(3) distinguished above. These reflections seem to me to support the nonconcessive form of the third of the three kinds of position distinguished, that is, the position according to which the transition in question is justified, and there is genuine reference with the use of the first person in these self-ascriptions. The transition is justified in part because if these reflections are correct, conscious states already involve the existence of a subject of the conscious states. The nonconcessive form of the position is supported because there is no subjectless level of conscious phenomena from which a constructed reference for the first person might be built up. Lastly, that it is the subject of conscious states to which the first-person refers, when used in the self-ascriptions, follows from two other truths we noted. One of the truths was the a priori principle of the theory of reference and content, and it states that any use of the first person in thought refers to the thinker of the thought. The other truth is that the subject of conscious states and experiences which give immediate, non-inferential reasons for self-ascrip-

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tions is the thinker. From this totality of principles it follows that any use of the first person in a self-ascription of a conscious state rationally made because such a conscious state occurs must be a use which refers to the subject of the conscious state. This is a fuller account of why the transition is justified. We might conceive of an objector who complains that though the considerations to date show there must be a subject of conscious states, the first person in thought and language does not refer to it. Given the reasoning we have employed to reach our conclusion, this objector will have to deny either that the first person in thought refers to the thinker of the thought, or that the subject of conscious states is also the thinker. Neither of these options is attractive. The same considerations tell equally against positions of the first kind, the positions which agree that the transition is justified but say that there is no genuine reference made with ‘I’. The arguments have already been given, but it is worth reflecting on how they get a grip against the positive proposal that is likely to accompany positions of the first kind. Defenders of the first kind of position will be tempted by apparently subjectless formulations, such as the principle that a particular thought, on a particular occasion, with the content ‘I am in pain’ is true just in case there is a pain coconscious with that thought. Since coconsciousness presupposes consciousness, and that according to the present reflections presupposes a subject, the objection would be that this is indeed only apparently a subjectless formulation. What is required for such a particular thought ‘I am in pain’ to be true involves the existence of a subject of the pain. These points are all on the side of the truth condition of ‘I am in pain’. They enter again when we consider the justification of the transition to a thought ‘I am in pain’, for it must involve the occurrence of the pain, and this, according to these reflections, must involve a subject, the same subject as the thinker of the thought. These points are entirely consistent with the recognition of some genuinely feature-placing thoughts or sentences. It is indeed true that one can no more make sense of the possibility of rain without a location than one can of pain without a subject. The truth of this observation should not lead one to construe the ‘it’ in ‘It is raining’ as making reference to a place. The reference to a place is rather provided for by words and phrases following ‘It’s raining’, like ‘here’, ‘in Oxford’. It is this position which also accepts quantifiers, as in ‘It’s raining everywhere in Europe’. The metaphysical truth that there is no rain without its location is entirely consistent with treating these phrases, rather than the grammatical subject, as the referential devices. In psychological self-attributions, by contrast, it is the grammatical subject which occupies the slot that can

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equally be filled with other singular terms and with quantifiers.1 The second kind of position on the transition was the Lichtenbergian stance that ‘I’-thoughts are true only if ‘I’ refers, and the transition is unjustified. It is equally undermined by the considerations I have offered. From the standpoint I have been developing in this paper, it is natural to suspect that the Lichtenbergian position results from an illegitimate slide. There are two different relations in which a thinker may stand to a given mental state which provides the reason for a particular thinker’s psychological self-ascription. For the thinker who is in the conscious state, that state can give a reason for judgments and other actions without his having to identify the owner of the state in advance at all (not even in a first-personal way), and without his having to think about the relations in which he stands to it. All the same, the state is his, it can provide reasons for him only because it is so, and it will commonly be thought of as possessed by a particular thinker when other people think about the state. It may also be thought about in indirect ways which differ even more from the way in which it is given to its owner. The nonsequitur is to move from these very different agreed relations in which its owner and other thinkers stand to a given conscious state, to the conclusion that there are two different states of affairs here, ‘one more substantial than the other,’ in Williams’s phrase (1978: 95) — one of them involving a thinker, and the other not. An appreciation of the way in which a subject’s conscious states do not themselves involve his thought of himself as having them should not be pumped up into the claim that a conscious state could occur without irreducibly having an owner. The delta accounts of Section 2 above themselves show how the transition from simply being in a conscious state to the judgment that one is in it is warranted, and they do so without commitment to any level of unowned thoughts and mental states. The positions (1)–(3) are all at least in part about the level of reference. However not every writer who has insisted upon the ‘subjectless’ character of certain psychological self-ascriptions has been making a claim about the level of reference. Some have been making claims primarily about the level of sense. The claim has been that in the first-person self-ascription, no concept of oneself is or need be deployed, or perhaps no concept of a certain kind, or again no concept that involves thinking of oneself as one object among potentially many others. Perry (1990: 1993) develops one such position. Such theorists need not

1. For further pertinent grammatical considerations toward the same conclusions as those reached in this paper, see Katz (1987).

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have any quarrel with the theses of this paper. It is open to at least some of them to accept a delta account. Their claims about concepts should not, though, be seen as simply orthogonal to the direction of this paper. A psychological selfascription made for the reason that the thinker is in a certain conscious state requires the thinker to have the concept of the psychological state in question. It is a substantive and important philosophical question, and one of pertinence also to psychology, what kind of thing a person must think of himself as being if he is to be able to ascribe psychological states to himself. It is not at all clear that a positive account of mastery of psychological notions can leave any room for ‘no-concept’ treatments of the first-person element in psychological selfascriptions. The issue should be on our agenda.

Chapter 12

The constructed and the secret self William Seager Scarborough College, University of Toronto

In a justly famous article, Bernard Williams (1970) opposes two decisively different descriptions of what seem to be identical situations. The first description is that of the science fictional case of ‘swapping selves’: we are to imagine a machine that can somehow extract information about the physical bases of memories, character traits, intellectual and creative abilities, etc. from a human brain and then ‘transfer’ these to another brain (presumably by reconfiguring it to encode the information retrieved from the first brain). Thus the machine could also exchange all mental characteristics between two brains. To make the thought experiment vivid, Williams imagines that a pair of persons, A and B, must choose — and they must choose selfishly and before the exchange — between either receiving a million dollars (Williams’s example is actually $100,000, but we must allow for inflation) or being severely tortured, where these choices come into effect after the operation. But A and B can only choose who receives these outcomes by pointing to the present body of either A or B. Thus if A thinks that he will be transferred to B’s present body, he will do well to choose that his own present body be the one that will be tortured and that the person who will inhabit B’s present body shall be the one to receive the million dollars. Of course, B’s situation is the same as A’s, but reversed. The other description is less hopeful. Here, A is told that he shall be tortured tomorrow, but only after a series of preliminary indignities are inflicted upon him. He shall have his memories erased, his character, abilities, etc. effaced, followed by the implantation in his brain of a set of false memories, a false character, etc. Then he shall be mercilessly tortured. The point is that, leaving aside tendentious talk of ‘transferring the self ’, or question begging accounts of who shall be tortured, both descriptions can be seen to describe the same set of events. On the other hand, it seems unquestionable that after the operation there is a fact of the matter about who is who. Either A is still in the A-body, or he is in the B-body (or perhaps, if unlikely, he

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is nowhere, having been destroyed by the operation). Reflection on this thought experiment provides strong grounds for the former disjunct if we antecedently subscribe to some form of materialism by which one’s memories, character, abilities, personality traits, etc. all depend upon the brain.1 After all, we allow that memories can fade, be manipulated or altered and that one’s character can be radically changed, and we know that such alterations can occur as the result of physical changes in the brain.2 It seems a good principle that when a range of some object’s properties depends upon an underlying substrate then the identity of the object goes with the identity of the substrate rather than with the properties themselves. Such a principle is not universally valid; there are certainly entities whose identities consist in their ‘structure’ no matter what substrate supports them. But we don’t think that personal identity is like that. The Toronto Blue Jays could be dis-incorporated, utterly eliminated from the major leagues and then be reconstituted as the same team, even though with different players, different coaches and playing in a different stadium (though I guess it has to be in Toronto). That cannot happen to me, though I can be resurrected, if the very same relevant substrate is brought back into being. If we take this view of personal identity and reject dualism then we should identify persons with their bodies (or, better, their brains). And yet, of course, the science fiction cases retain a certain attractiveness. Is this attraction merely an illusion, encouraged by the long years of extreme ignorance about the physical substrate of the self and a variety of influential religious doctrines that exploited it? I think it is a kind of illusion, but one that it is productive to examine. The dual facts that we allow for survival across severe alteration of memory and personality, and yet are also willing to entertain the possibility of identity-transfer suggests that we have an idea of a self somehow intermediate between the self composed of memory and character and the self constituted by the substrate. Such an intermediate self could be shuttled from substrate to substrate, thus

1. The situation is more complex for a dualist. It is possible, I guess, that a non-material self could jump from one body to another (as many have believed in one way or another), and so it is possible that our imagined brain operation could facilitate such jumps (though why it should have such a remarkable, extra-physical effect is another question). But notice that we are arguing over the nature of the substrate here, so the principle to be enunciated below remains valid for dualist or materialist. 2. I mention two famous and extreme cases. In 1848, Phineas Gage had a three foot bar of iron pass through his brain as the result of an accidental explosion. Gage survived but his character was severely altered, completely destroying his old life (see Damasio 1994 for this as well as many other examples). A terrible case of induced amnesia resulted from an operation on ‘HM’ in 1953. The operation, designed to relieve epilepsy (which to some extent it did), involved removal of much of HM’s hippocampus and obliterated HM’s ability to lay down any new memories (see Schacter 1996).

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allowing for transference of self, but it could also remain the same despite changes in the more superficial personal qualities of memory and character. I think this idea is less confused than it appears. In fact, a version of it is a natural outgrowth of a representational theory of the mind, which almost demands that we allow for different ‘sorts’ of selves. The function of the mind is to help us survive and flourish in the world and it does this in large measure with the help of representations of that world. When we think about what to do, we plot the outcomes of possible actions, whose perceived relevance is gauged relative to our present beliefs about the state of the world, and whose envisaged outcomes depend upon these beliefs as well as beliefs about how the world will change because of these actions. The very possibility of such an activity depends upon our being able to form representations of the way the world is, and the way the world will be after our actions, as well as our being able to appreciate the differences between these representations. It is difficult not to embrace a representational model of the mind which also allows for representations at much less sophisticated cognitive levels than conscious planning. And it is tempting to assert that what marked the emergence of mind and consciousness was exactly the ability to represent the world coupled to the ‘ability’ to behave in accordance with the representation rather than in more direct response to the world itself. We tend to think that animals have minds because they do things that lend themselves to a representationalist explanation (or, as philosophers say, explanations based upon the ascription of intentional mental states). Why is the dog barking up that tree? Because it thinks the squirrel is still there (though we have seen the squirrel depart). The dog’s representation of the world has diverged from reality, but its behaviour is governed by how it represents the world, not the world. Similarly, machines are more ‘intelligent’ the more they act according to representations of the world, the less they simply respond (even in complex ways) to the world. AI researchers have explicitly copied our intuitive ideas about the representational mind in their model of action. Since this model is very simple, it is a worthy metaphor for mind and the problems it highlights turn out to be very deep. Let’s outline the model, for every feature of it is ripe with philosophical fruit. The model is based on the notion of ‘generate and search’: generate a space of possibilities and search for the ones that are useful. The space of possibilities are the ‘worlds’ that the system can reach via its actions; usefulness is measured relative to the system’s goals. Here is a picture:

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G

Worlds at t2

The Worlds at t1 The Possible Actions The World Now

Figure 1.

This is the ‘game tree’ of life. Relative to the current representation of the world, certain actions are possible now, which generate representations of possible worlds whose nature depends upon the actions and the presumed current state of the world. The system can get to the worlds, or at least thinks it can get to the worlds, that it can generate by its actions. The action selected is the one that leads to a goal-world (marked with the ‘G’ in the diagram). You will recognise that this is exactly how you play tic-tac-toe. The diagram tends to imply that the deliberation process is computationally intensive, but the model is more accommodating than appearances suggest. Is it likely that a centre-fielder computes the trajectory of a fly ball from data gathered as the ball is hit, produces a game tree of movements and selects in advance a path through the tree that ends with a world in which the ball is in his glove? Hardly. It has been noticed that when the ball is coming down towards the fielder, he will be where the ball ends up if he moves so that the ball always appears to be coming straight toward him (neither drifting up or down, right or left in the visual field). Performing this feat does not seem to require any computation of Newtonian trajectories. But the process of keeping the ball centred, as it were, in the visual field can be modelled by our picture of deliberation. We need only suppose there is a representation of whether the ball is drifting, and the direction of the drift. The relevant actions are those that reduce the drift, and we have a short loop connecting goal worlds to the representation of the real world. Nonetheless, this model of thought and action raises very difficult questions. That it has revealed how serious these problems are and also introduced new problems are virtues of the model (see Dennett 1984). For example, any finite system has a necessarily limited representational capacity, which means that its representations are incomplete. Even Borges’ (1954) famous conceit of the map drawn at 1:1 scale must suffer from severe

The constructed and the secret self

incompleteness. Incompleteness entails selection, immediately raising a host of significant problems about the ways that such selection can be made. In the abstract, these problems are easy to solve: represent those aspects of the world that are relevant to the job the representation is supposed to do. In practice, it has turned out to be almost impossible to find a general resolution of these issues. It may be that the constellation of problems of relevance, of which the notorious Frame Problem is one prominent example, are insoluble from within the paradigm of computational cognitive science and artificial intelligence (for an argument to this effect see Horgan and Tienson 1996). I have no solution to offer but I would like to point out that the ‘paradigmshift’ towards connectionism which is often urged in the face of the problems of relevance does not by itself undermine the representational theory of mind. It is true that some champions of connectionism, usually from the group that favours the so-called dynamical systems approach to cognition, have an antirepresentationalist agenda (for an introduction to the dynamical systems view of cognition, see van Gelder 1995). However, it seems clear that the problems of relevance are problems of representational ‘updating’ and need not be construed as problems with the representational approach itself, nor even with the general ‘game tree’ model of cognition. It is only if we regard classical computational mechanisms as the only method by which the internal representation can be updated that the problems of relevance arise as a problem for the representational approach. But there is no need to make this assumption. In general, a dynamical systems approach models cognition as a set of interacting variables, perhaps thought of as exerting ‘forces’ on one another that can typically be described in a set of differential equations. The representation can be regarded as the ‘position’ of the system in an abstract space and trajectories through this space can be seen as representational updating. It is an exciting possibility — though no more than a possibility — that cognition (or at least certain elements of cognition) can be modelled in this way and that the ‘cognitive forces’ at work updating the system’s representation could solve the problems of relevance, complexity and combinatorial explosion that beset the computational approach. Such a view of cognition would remain within the camp of the representational theory of mind.3 Furthermore, it appears evident that the mind does employ representations

3. For an example of the dynamical systems approach to cognition that illustrates how it can be integrated with a representational theory of mind, see the work on ‘decision field theory’ by Townsend and Busemeyer (1995).

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in cognition and that, short of endorsing a radical eliminativism, any naturalized understanding of the intentional mental states will both use and account for representational states. When you plan your day, for example, you actively construct and compare a variety of representations of the world as it may be at various times in the future, which depend upon how the world is represented to be now as well on how you think the world will change depending upon your projected actions. These representations can be false, but they cannot seriously be thought to be non-existent. Much of your consciousness consists in the apprehension of the significance (both in the representational and ‘affective’ sense) of these representations, along with, though much more rarely, an apprehension of the representations themselves. There must be as well a neural implementation of these processes of apprehension, and it is very hard to see how these implementations could fail to have representational functions (though how they get these functions is another and much vexed question). But anything with a representational function is a representation. Be that as it may, it is the nature of the self from an assumed perspective of a representational theory of mind that I want to focus on here. In particular, I want to explore the way that ‘dual’ conceptions of the self naturally emerge from a representational approach to the mind. For reasons that will appear, I label the two conceptions of the self the ‘secret self ’ and the ‘constructed self ’. Let’s consider the former first. If a system is going to successfully manoeuver through the world by use of the game tree model adumbrated above, it will require a representation of itself. Of course, this is not to say that all systems that deploy representations in the modulation of their behaviour will perforce contain a self-representation. All sorts of simple control devices — from thermostats to houseflies — regulate their behaviour on the basis of more or less sophisticated representations of the world with no need for a self-representation. But more complex systems that generate representations of the future and various ‘paths’ (which are sequences of representations) to those represented futures and which must compare their current representation of the world with these paths need to know about themselves: where they are, and will be, in the world, what properties they are currently possessed of (and how these will change via time and action), what objects they can interact with throughout these paths towards the future and so on. Self-knowledge is self-representation. Just as in general the possibility of illusion is like a sign: ‘representations at work’ so too self-illusion is a sign of self-representation and it is all too evident that cognizers can suffer from a

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variety of illusions about themselves.4 There is, however, a ‘core’ self-representation which is very special. It is needed to account for certain peculiarities of what is called indexical knowledge as well as the relation between such knowledge and non-indexical knowledge, action and perception. The notion of indexical knowledge arises from the appreciation that even exhaustive knowledge of the ‘objective facts’ will not necessarily lead to any knowledge about oneself as such. This can be best explicated by a rather fanciful example (which I borrow from John Perry 1979, this volume). Imagine that you are in the ultimate library; every fact about the world can be found within its books. Despite this, if you lack indexical knowledge, the library will not reveal to you such mundane facts as who you are, where you are and what time it is. Suppose your name is X. You read in the book before you that X is in the ultimate library. But you, lacking indexical knowledge, don’t know that you are X. Another book says that X is reading in the ultimate library at 2:30 pm on December 23rd 1998, but since you don’t know that you are X, you can’t decode this to discover what time it is right now. Arguably, unless you already possess some indexical knowledge, you cannot deduce any such knowledge even from the complete data base of the ultimate library. Perhaps this seems an implausibly strong claim. After all, as you browse in the ultimate library you might come across a book which reads ‘X is reading book Y and X is the only person reading book Y and there is only one copy of Y in the ultimate library (and, by the way, there is only one ultimate library and that is the only place where Y can be found)’. You flip to the cover and notice that you are holding book Y, and hence you discover that you are X.5 However, in order to make this inference you do need one antecedent piece of indexical knowledge: I, myself, am holding book Y. Of course, it is not hard, normally, to get this sort of indexical knowledge. It is an interesting question, though, just how such indexical knowledge is generated. I propose that the answer is that there exists a special self-representation (or a self-representational sub-system within the overall cognitive economy) whose

4. It is possible that some illusions about the self are actually beneficial. Generally speaking, people think that they are rather nicer, smarter, more attractive and leading more worthwhile lives than they really are, but this illusion might improve their lives. In this case, clear headedness might only increase the suicide rate. 5. Note that you will never find a sentence saying ‘X is reading this book’ for that is a piece of indexical knowledge. Maps that can’t move (such as the ones in shopping malls) exploit the fact that their immobility renders one item of indexical knowledge unusually secure: you are here (with an ‘x’ to mark the spot).

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function is to transform incoming information into indexical knowledge. This representation is not distinguished by its carrying any information about the self. If this self-representation was individuated by the way it represented the self, it would not be the locus of indexical knowledge, for the way it represents the self could then be expressed in non-indexical terms. No list of facts about myself, such as ‘Seager lives in Canada’, ‘Seager has three children’ etc. could reveal to me that I am Seager. The self-representation I am positing is primitive and information free. Its distinctive role is to embody indexical knowledge, not by explicitly encoding the information but rather by the way it integrates perception and action with the information already within the system. Suppose that someone shouts “Seager’s pants are on fire”. I hear this interesting piece of news and my internal representation is appropriately updated, perhaps by the addition of the following item: there is an x, x’s name is ‘Seager’ and x’s pants are on fire.6 But I won’t be motivated to do anything about this unless this information is somehow connected to me, to my concerns. This is the job of the special representation of the self. If, for example, I know that I am Seager, then getting the information that Seager’s pants are on fire will lead to the conclusion that my pants are on fire. And if I know that my pants are on fire, you can be sure I’ll do something about it. (Motivation can arise in a variety of ways but it always depends on the linkage to the self that indexical knowledge provides; in the example just given, if I don’t think I am Seager but do think that I am near Seager, I will still be motivated to act — or should be motivated at least — but now my action will be to try to help Seager in some way.) Logically, we can think of indexical knowledge as working in a perfectly standard way. The posited self-representation can be thought of as a kind of name which functions in inference like any other term, so the inference from ‘Seager’s pants are on fire’ to ‘my pants are on fire’ proceeds by substituting *self* for ‘Seager’ as licensed by the indexical knowledge that I am Seager (as in

6. I am not assuming that the internal representation is literally composed of sentences in mock predicate logic. I have no idea how our representational machinery is structured; probably it exploits a huge number of distinct modes of representation. I use the sentence format for ease of presentation only. Within this perspective it is natural to regard the self-representation as a kind of name, but one that has a unique function as described above. There are advantages to looking at it this way, notably ease of comprehension and explication. But we are not forced to adopt a ‘language of thought’ conception of cognition to endorse the idea of a special sort of self-representation. The posited self-representation is distinctive in the way it links together knowledge, perception and action, and this function could be carried out by a wide variety of representational systems. And it seems that in any complex cognitive system such a function must be carried out.

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‘Seager’s pants are on fire’, ‘*self* = Seager’, therefore, ‘*self*’s pants are on fire’). It is possible to develop a formal logic in which such self-representations function appropriately as a model of indexical knowledge (see Seager 1990). What we should focus on here however is the special features of the selfrepresentation which suits it to the job of encoding indexical knowledge. These features are the ‘direct’ link between the self-representation and both perception and action. If I represent myself as in danger I will act; if I represent Seager being in danger then whether I act or not depends upon whether I know that I am Seager. The self-representation is, so to speak, the ground-floor representation which links me to the world. But I need have no access to this representation and in fact I have no direct access to it. I had to posit its existence. There is something of a paradox here. Insofar as I can consciously represent my self-representation to myself it becomes a bearer of information about myself which may or may not be linked to perception and action. It becomes a name for myself like any other which must itself by linked to the self-representation before I would be motivated to do anything with respect to its conscious representation. This paradox arises because there is nothing to the self-representation except its links to action, perception and other knowledge. It can be thought about only by creating a representation of it, which is not identical to it. Nonetheless, I think the possession of this kind of self-representation is necessary for us to have any sort of fundamental sense of self, for it is what unifies our awareness of the world.7 Our consciousness of the world is unified in the sense that, for everything that we are aware of, we are aware of those things relative to ourselves, as things that we, ourselves, perceive in one way or another and that we can act ‘towards’.8 It is rather crude to say that so far as I am aware the world is exhaustively catalogued as the things that matter more or less to me, but it is not altogether inaccurate. I think this is Wittgenstein’s point when he says: “what brings the self into philosophy is the fact that ‘the world is my world’” (1921: 5.641). There also seem to be connections between this idea and Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception. If we regard Kant’s I think (which can accompany all other representations) as a gesture towards what I have been calling indexical knowledge, the similarity is striking (see Brook 1994,

7. Thus I think that simpler creatures that interact with the world without having a self-representation — the sort of creature considered briefly above — cannot develop a sense of self. Of course, much more than possession of the kind of primitive self-representation posited here is needed for a sense of self. What more is required will be discussed below. 8. Here perception must be taken to include remembering and imagining, and action must include ‘thinking about’.

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especially ch. 4, for more detailed links between Kant’s philosophy and this way of looking at self-representation). A representation is mine if it is possible for it to be linked to the self-representation, and anything which I am aware of either via perception or action must meet this condition or be capable of meeting this condition. Consider once more the example of the burning pants. What I can ‘notice’ about the situation is whatever about it that can forge links to my selfrepresentation. Although I am in fact Seager, I can’t be aware that my pants are on fire just by knowing that Seager’s pants are on fire unless I know that I am Seager. It is always through the link to the self-representation that I become aware of features of the world around me. The peculiar ‘position’ of the self-representation is expressed in another remark of Wittgenstein’s: “the subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world” (1921: 5.633). Thinking of Wittgenstein’s ‘subject’ as our posited self-representation, it is a limit in the sense that nothing unrelated to it can ever enter the world as perceived or conceived. In another sense, it might be thought of as the centre of my world, utterly invisible because everything is seen from its vantage point.9 This special self-representation is what I called above the secret self, for it is invisible to the subject and we know it only through postulation. Yet of course we know much about ourselves. But this is a different self, which I call the constructed self. There are two fundamental assessments of the world that the secret-self must be responsible for: what is happening, and how does it matter to me. The latter is far more important than the former, for the only things that I really need to know about are the things that might matter to me. It is tempting to speculate that the secret-self trades in speed, so is satisfied with rough assessments of truth and quick judgements of value. Given this speculation it is further tempting to locate the secret-self in the ‘lower’ brain, in the so-called limbic system, perhaps, for one more definite possibility, the perceptual and motor pathways that run through the amygdala, for which there is abundant evidence of rough, quick and decisive ‘assessment’ of truth and value (see Ledoux 1996, ch. 6, for some fascinating data on fear conditioning and the distinction between the operation of the ‘thalamo-amygdala’ pathways and the ‘cortico-amygdala’ pathways). One last speculation would then stress the

9. A better metaphor which rather nicely combines both the idea of centre and limit might be an adaptation of the old mystical view of God. The subject is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.

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significance of the relation between the ‘old-low’ brain and the ‘new-high’ brain, perhaps going so far as to locate the systems responsible for the constructed self (see below) within the latter even as we locate the secret-self systems within the former. It can also be pointed out that by their nature there could in fact be many secret selves within any subject. These would be distinct centres of awareness, possibly quite disjoint from one another (though nothing prevents the constructed selves — to be discussed below — which will be associated with these secret selves from knowing about the other constructed selves). These secret selves would be distinguished primarily by what they ‘regard’ as true and valuable (see below for the central significance of these notions for both kinds of selves), but they might also differ in the sorts or amount of cognitive resources available to them (e.g. memories, skills, etc.). Let us ask how we know about ourselves, our mental selves that is (not our bodies), our thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams as well as the memories that anchor us to our lives. It is correct but facile to reply that we know ourselves by introspection. We then have to wonder how introspection works. The answer to this explains why we should call the self we know by introspection the constructed self and reveals the relation between the two selves. What is in my opinion the best theory of introspection has recently been developed by Fred Dretske (1995, ch. 2). His theory is incomplete however, and I want both to review it and extend it to a more general theory of introspection. Dretske’s idea is that introspection is a form of what he calls ‘displaced perception’ which is simply learning about one thing by perceiving something else. An example he uses is learning that the postman has arrived by perception of the dog’s barking. To get such knowledge one must hear the dog and one must also know what the dog’s barking signifies. Introspective knowledge of our own perceptual states similarly requires that we perceive but also that we know that perceiving is a mental act. All knowledge — at least all declarative knowledge such as introspection delivers — is conceptual and so requires an appropriate field of concepts for its formulation. In the case of introspective knowledge, what concepts would these be? Since introspective knowledge is knowledge of the mind, they must be mentalistic concepts, concepts of mental states. So introspective knowledge requires the field of concepts that taken together form our notion of the mind. I don’t think it does any harm to use the familiar label of folk psychology for this body of concepts along with their associated grounds for application. I know that I am perceiving red, when I am perceiving red, because I can apply the concept of perceiving red to my perception of red.

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I don’t need to perceive my perceiving (as certain internal scanner theories of introspection have maintained, see for example Armstrong 1968) to make this application any more than I need to perceive my perceiving of a barking dog to apply the concept of ‘barking dog’ to that object. Of course, I do need to be perceiving red to make the introspective application of the concept ‘perceiving red.’ In fact, I have to be consciously perceiving, for if I was not conscious of the colour I would have no ground for asserting my introspective knowledge claim (nothing, as it were, to apply my concept to for, as Kant famously said, concepts without intuitions are empty). Without consciousness there is no evidence on which to ground the introspective knowledge claim. We can, I suppose, still imagine bizarre science fiction cases where I come to know that I am, somehow, unconsciously perceiving red, but this knowledge would not be introspective knowledge just because there is no conscious mental state to provide the grounds for any introspective knowledge. The point can be made in a partial definition of introspection as self-knowledge of a mental state on the basis of one’s state of consciousness engaging one’s mentalistic conceptual machinery. Although my conscious states provide what can be called ‘evidence’ for my judgements of introspection, it would be misleading to say that I infer from my state of consciousness to an introspective judgement about that state of consciousness. For this would imply that I already know what my state of consciousness is, which would be to say that I have already introspected. If I infer from anything here, it is from the way the world is presented to me (something I know without introspection). It requires additional conceptual equipment to go from the presentation to the knowledge that the world is being presented to me. I need the concept of ‘conscious presentation’, which is not needed just for the world to be presented to me. So, when Dretske talks of ‘displaced perception’ as a model for introspection we should not think of the displacement as involving a move from an awareness of a mental state to a secondary awareness of that state (or yet another mental state), but rather as a move from an awareness of a non-mental state (or object, scene, bodily condition, etc.) to the awareness of the mental state of being aware of that non-mental thing.10

10. I suppose we could allow that there are some mental states that can be perceived in some way independent of introspection. I myself can see little need for this, but if one wanted to assert that feelings (of pain, fear, anger, etc.) were perceptions of mental entities the model could accommodate that desire. These perceptions would not be introspections for they would not be awarenesses of the mental as such (obviously one can feel angry without having any introspective knowledge that one is angry, or is feeling angry). I think it is preferable to regard sensations as a kind of perception of the body which we are aware

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If we think in terms of inference, we require at least two beliefs: the input to and the output of the inference. If the input of the inference was something like the belief ‘I am aware of a tiger in front of me’ we would have implicitly appealed to introspective knowledge for we are claiming that I already know about my awareness of the tiger. The account offered would thus be circular. We should instead insist that the input belief is ‘a tiger is in front of me’ and the output belief is ‘I am aware of a tiger before me’. Think of children. At an early age they can form the belief that a tiger is in front of them; it takes more conceptual sophistication for them to know that they are aware (or are visually aware) of a tiger in front of them. Such increased sophistication is very important for it allows children to entertain the possibility that they might be having nothing more than the mere visual experience as of a tiger in front of them and that others might have a divergent experience of the world. The ability to comprehend the epistemic distance between the world and the experience of the world is not some kind of benighted proto-Cartesianism; it is a vital step towards self-consciousness and an awareness of one’s own identity. The key to understanding this position on introspection is always to bear in mind that when we perceive we do not perceive a perceptual state but rather we perceive what the perceptual state represents. Seeing a tiger involves a representation of a tiger but it does not involve seeing that representation. Thought is the same; when we think, we are aware — in the first instance at least — of the thought’s content, not of the thought itself. To adapt a remark of Dretske’s (1995: 100–101), mental representations are the things we are conscious with, not the things we are conscious of. Although it is venerable, the idea that we are really aware of our mental states instead of being aware of what they represent is as confused as the idea that we can only talk about words because we have to use words whenever we talk. ‘Talking about X’ involves the use of words but it does not require that we talk about those words in order to talk about X. Just so, seeing a tiger demands the use of representations (of tigers) but it does not require that we see those representations. The fact that perception can be illusory or hallucinatory is of no more significance than the fact that we can utter falsehoods. Obviously, there is no reason at all to think that the sentence

of as we are aware of the rest of the world (though via distinctive sensory channels). Thus, for example, the sensations of anger involve an awareness of events in the body, as well as strong awareness of value and dis-value (a vitally important component of consciousness which will be discussed below). An awareness of anger as such requires the level of conceptual sophistication which permits introspection. Even many adults are sometimes in states where they have the feelings of anger but don’t know that they are angry (and similarly for other emotions).

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‘tigers live on the moon’ is really about its own words just because it is false. The theory is not, then, that one infers from a knowledge of one’s state of consciousness to introspective conclusions about that state, though Dretske’s examples sometimes unfortunately tend to suggest such an inferential model.11 The ‘evidence’ needed for introspective knowledge of our own perceptual states is simply our own conscious perception of the world, not a consciousness of that consciousness. One can, however, suffer perceptual delusions, illusions and hallucinations. Perceptual consciousness remains throughout all of these, and may be indistinguishable from veridical perception, and so introspective knowledge of our own perceptual states also remains possible, though such knowledge will inherit the illusory aspect. Thus my introspective claim that I am perceiving a horse can be in error no less than my perceptual claim that there is a horse in front of me, but I can weaken my introspective claim (e.g., in philosopher’s jargon, to something like ‘I am in a horse-perceiving-like perceptual state’) just as I can weaken my perceptual claim (e.g. to ‘there seems to be a horse in front of me’). But my introspective judgement arises in both sorts of case not via conscious inference but rather through the application of the appropriate mentalistic concepts (and, of course, the application of a concept is not itself a conscious act which itself requires some kind of reflective deliberation — such a view leads to an obvious vicious regress).12 Once I’ve got the concept of ‘perceiving a horse’ I can apply it to the state of perceiving a horse — that is what ‘having a concept’ is — and the ‘input’ to this application is the conscious perception of the horse (not a perception of the perception of the horse). On this model, the evident fact that animals and children (at least very young children) are incapable of introspection is neatly explained by their lack of the proper field of mentalistic concepts, the lack of a ‘theory’ of the mind. They consciously perceive the world, but don’t know that that is what they are doing and it is this lack of conceptual machinery that precludes introspection. Their inability to introspect does not stem from a lack of some special internal scanner within their brains (as Armstrong and perhaps Churchland would appear to be forced to aver, see Armstrong 1968, Churchland 1985), nor is it, as

11. This causes Dretske some difficulty when he tries to explain how introspective knowledge is more ‘direct’ or ‘secure’ than other sorts of knowledge (see Dretske 1995: 60
ff.). I will discuss this a little more below. 12. It remains entirely possible that the sub-personal story of concept application will be one of inference-like cognitive processes that marshal evidence and ‘test’ hypotheses, but the subject is completely unaware of these putative operations. The conceptually informed world is ‘delivered’ to us without any conscious effort on our part.

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Ryle would have it (see 1949, ch. 6), that they cannot perceive their own behaviour nor ‘hear’ what they say to themselves (children talk to themselves long before they can introspect). To the extent that the conceptual system that makes up our theory of the mind is a relatively late acquisition, to that extent introspective knowledge will itself be a late acquisition. There is evidence that, in all its fullness, the theory of mind is acquired pretty late, typically after age four (see Perner 1991, Gopnik 1993). It is also perhaps worth mentioning that the lack of introspective abilities will not preclude children from making perceptual judgements, for these depend upon a field of concepts which apply to the world, not to the mind itself — and these concepts come first and early. Note also that if the ‘theory of mind’ is not only a late developmental event but a late cultural acquisition then we can infer that early hominids were incapable of introspection, and hence were entirely un-self-conscious. The infamous speculations of Julian Jaynes (1976) can be fitted into this model of introspection in interesting ways. To see Jaynes as claiming that it is selfconsciousness rather than consciousness itself that is a recent, indeed very recent, development, and even a recent invention, is to make his views rather more plausible than they otherwise appear. It is fascinating to speculate that people began, for example, talking to themselves before they knew what they were doing, so they had no way of understanding what was happening to them (Jaynes argues that such people would have assigned such voices to third parties; they were the ‘voices of the gods’).13 Dretske’s account, as he presents it, is restricted to introspective knowledge of perceptual states but this is only a small province within the realm of selfknowledge. What I want to do now is extend the account to cover other phenomenal states as well as intentional mental states. The case of other phenomenal states requires only a trivial extension. Introspective knowledge of, for example, our own pains requires what we might call first-order consciousness of the pain (which exists in animals no less than ourselves),14 plus the

13. An anecdote about my own daughter perhaps bears this out. When she was three she often complained about not being able to sleep. When we asked her about this she gave the strange explanation that her ‘ears were talking to her’. I believe that she was talking to herself but didn’t as yet have the notion of such an activity and so could not understand what was going on, and was rather naturally upset by it. 14. It is important to bear in mind that feeling a pain is not a matter of introspection. Feeling a pain is to be thought of as analogous to seeing a horse (in fact, I believe that feeling a pain is a kind of perception, a perception of the body by a highly specialized sensory system). The phrase ‘feel a pain’ suggests an awareness of a mental state, but there is no awareness of a pain as a mental state as such; we are just aware of the terrible feeling.

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knowledge that this sort of thing is a pain, or the explicitly second-order knowledge I am in a state that hurts or something along these lines — the exact extent of knowledge of the mind required to underwrite introspective knowledge is of course somewhat vague. Since the phenomenal states provide, by definition, a range of characteristic conscious experience, the displaced consciousness model can straightforwardly apply to them. It is the extension to intentional mental states which is more problematic. It will be achieved by an extension of the realm of the perceptible. What I mean can perhaps best be illustrated by an example. Suppose I write down a list of simple sums, like, 2+7=9, 12+3=15, 8+5=14, etc. I could ask someone to put a check-mark beside the ones that were true and this would be a trivial task so long as my subject knew a little about simple arithmetic. It would not be a task demanding introspection. But I could instead ask my subject to check off the sums which he believed to be true. This would be no less trivial so long as my subject understood just a little bit about what beliefs were (as well as simple arithmetic). What the subject must minimally understand is an elementary principle of folk psychology, which I can write in a distinctly non-elementary form as: the object of belief qua belief is the true. The second of my tasks involves introspection, albeit at a rather primitive level. But seeing that 2+7=9 is correct, or is true, is not in itself an act of introspection any more than is seeing that a zebra is striped. To see what is true, we need to investigate the world, not ourselves.15 This investigation can occur in the imagination, or via memory, so there is an appropriate internal source for the evidence needed to provide the full range of introspective knowledge of our own belief states. When we ‘look’ inside ourselves we don’t see beliefs lined up along our mental hallways, but we can discover truths there and if we do discover a truth we have at exactly the same time trapped a belief. Most things are less certain than elementary sums and so we may wonder about our own beliefs insofar as we wonder what is true, and thus we may be unsure about our own beliefs. The other basic category of intentional states is desire. The general sort of evidence needed for introspective knowledge here is value. The picture needed for the account of introspection I am urging requires that when we look around the world, we not only see objects with their various perceptible properties, but we also perceive a field of values. Is it true that the objects around us come

15. Except, pedantry insists, when we ourselves are the object of the search for knowledge; this will not always be the search for introspective knowledge.

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graded in their value to us as they enter consciousness? I think even a little reflection upon experience shows that it is, although this is a multifarious value which is constantly changing in response to all sorts of changes within ourselves. We can use a variant of the arithmetic example to show this. Suppose we replace our list of simple sums with a tray of various small items: some nails, old dry leaves and some sweets and we now ask a hungry subject to pick out the good ones, or the ones that are good to eat. Any subject, over the age of roughly 1.5, could accomplish this. Some (slightly) more sophisticated subjects could be asked to pick out the ones they desire to eat. The first task does not require any introspection, or self-knowledge to be successfully carried out. The second one, as I mean it to be interpreted, is a task involving introspection. (It does require some interpretation since we would normally use the phrase ‘pick out the ones you want’ to specify the first task rather than the second — a significant fact that actually supports the view of introspection I am putting forth.)16 One can consult one’s own desires about a field of objects before one selects, but this is simply to gauge the objects’ values from the point of view of ascribing desires to oneself, just as taking up a point of view in which one talks of one’s own beliefs is to gauge the truthfulness of a variety of propositions (or whatever the abstract object of belief is taken to be).17 There are, of course, a myriad of intentional states beyond belief and desire. But it may be that they can mostly be defined in terms of belief and desire, or are just various forms of belief and desire. For example, wishing for p is, more or less, to desire p and to believe that p is unlikely to be (or come) true (for a nice attempt to define a large range of emotions basically in terms of belief and desire, see Descartes, 1649). For the really complex interweaving of high level intentional states, the theory I am offering admittedly begins to give out but there a self-interpretation theory like Ryle’s seems more reasonable. When

16. This slight difficulty of interpretation also occurs in perceptual contexts. We often ask for information about the world in explicitly mentalistic terms. For example, if we want to know if a zebra is in the room we can ask: do you see a zebra. This is not meant to be a request for an introspective search of our informant’s perceptual states, but simply a way of asking if a zebra is visible (it is, of course, by way of such modes of speech that the theory of mind which grounds introspection is passed on to our children). 17. Moore’s ‘paradox’, that it is somehow senseless for me to say ‘p is true but I don’t believe it,’ even though a lot of other people say this of me all the time, is grist for the mill of this account of introspection. On other views of introspection, such as the internal scanner view, Moore’s paradox is somewhat troubling for it would seem that I ought to be able to scan my belief states independently of assessing the truth of any proposition and so I could, one might think, quite easily discover that I don’t believe something which I can see, so to speak, to be true. The impossibility of this must be given a rather ad hoc explanation in an inner scanner theory.

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Mary is trying to decide if she really does love John, she must engage in more than the mere assessment of truth and value. But these two fundamental assessments remain at the core of her self-knowledge. If, for example, she imagines life with John, or goes over the way he acts in a variety of situations, she is assessing truth and value within the imaginary or remembered scenes. I suggest that there are three classes of ‘elementary acts of mind’ or consciousness which are required to underwrite this view of introspection. Since we can be in error about the ‘external significance’ of all three, I will describe them in terms of seemings. They are: phenomenal seemings (which encompasses both our conscious perceptual states and all our ‘feelings’, including pains and other bodily sensations), truth seemings and value seemings. Each one provides a route to introspective knowledge about our own mental states, not via any sort of direct or privileged access but simply by way of the application of mentalistic concepts (drawn from our ‘theory’ of mental states) to these seeming. Knowing about the mind, I can that I am in a perceptual state of seeing red when I look at, say, the Canadian flag; knowing about the mind, I can know that I am in pain when I feel the twinge; knowing about the mind, I can know that I believe that 2 + 2 = 4 when I understand the truth of this sum; knowing about the mind, I can know that I desire a chocolate when I sense the goodness (relative to the purpose of eating) of the candy before me. To the extent that the three elementary acts are indeed constituents of consciousness, we have a reasonable ground for the extension of Dretske’s view to the whole of our mental lives. And it does seem to me evident that we are or can be conscious of perceptual properties, truth and value. Dretske (1995: 60
ff.) worries that this view of introspection makes introspective knowledge a species of inferential knowledge, the indirectness of which would to many be objectionably implausible. Dretske seems to believe that the fact that non-veridical perceptions can ground introspective knowledge no less than veridical ones ‘neutralizes the objection’ (p. 60). He goes on to say that: “if this is inferential knowledge, it is a strange case of inference: the premises do not have to be true to establish the conclusion” (p. 61). This is a strange way to put the point. Surely the ‘premises’ here are the seemings I have noted above and, of course, it is true that I seem to see red even when my perception is nonveridical. We are not really more directly aware of our own mental states than we are aware of the world around us, but within the realm of introspective knowledge we have usually already taken back the epistemic commitment to the veridicality of the perceptual state; at least we are not interested in its veridicality but rather in the perceptual state itself.

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The appearance of a direct introspective awareness of our own mental states is to be primarily explained by the fact that the ‘inference’ from how the world is presented to us to claims about our own mental states is not (or not usually) dependent upon a conscious deliberation but is rather simply the sub-personal application of the mentalistic concepts to their appropriate objects. It is like vision itself — when I see a computer keyboard in front of me I do not ‘infer’ to the keyboard from an ‘appearance as of a keyboard’ plus assumptions about the reality of the external world and all the causal relations that link me to it. The concept just springs into my mind and I see the keyboard as a keyboard. Similarly, when I feel a pain I don’t have to think about whether I am experiencing a pain; it just springs into my mind that I am. There are also three features of introspection and consciousness that conspire to enhance the sense of directness in introspection. The first is that we can confuse consciousness with introspection. There is no introspection involved in being conscious of the elementary seemings that make up the ‘field’ of the mind but, since we, as sophisticated beings in possession of the concept of mind, are aware that we are aware, it can seem that we are directly apprehending our own minds. One can take up a detached view of one’s experience and view it as experience — everything then becomes introspectible since one is regarding everything one is aware of as a manifestation of mind. Then the introspective move from world to mind ‘disappears’ in rather the same way that a constant background noise can disappear from consciousness, simply because it is so ubiquitous. The second feature that makes introspection seem so direct is that we tend to mix together our mental states with the state of the world in our speech; we use the phrase ‘I believe …’ to report the truth of something (and vice versa); we use the phrase ‘I see …’ to report that something is before us, and similarly we conflate desire with goodness. We come to see the world through our theory of the mind and we are encouraged in this tendency (see note 16 above).18 But the third and most important feature is just that the theory of the mind we use to make introspective judgments is second nature to

18. A word of warning. Philosophers have often confused consciousness with introspection. For example, Locke defines consciousness as “the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind” (1690, bk. 2, ch. 1: 115) and more recently Armstrong echoes this with “consciousness … is simply awareness of our own state of mind” (1968: 94). Introspection is entirely distinct from consciousness however. Introspection depends upon consciousness but consciousness does not depend upon introspection or the possession of the ability to introspect. I appealed to consciousness in the so-called elementary acts of mind which feed evidence to our introspective abilities, which are grounded in our knowledge of a theory of mind. But obviously I did not explain consciousness itself. And there is no prospect of explaining consciousness by explaining introspection or self-knowledge.

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us. We are thoroughly trained in its application from a very early age. We completely and naturally absorb the elementary principles that we believe what is true, want what is good and are seeing what is visible to us. Into the gap between the thing and the application of a concept to the thing error can creep. A rustling movement in the bush can prompt the firm conviction that a tiger is approaching; here the gap is wide and error is frequent. How can we measure the gap between experiencing a pain and noting that it is a pain that I feel? In one sense (much remarked upon recently) the gap can be as large as we like, for we can imagine that the subject does not properly ‘grasp’ the concept of pain. This should be uncontroversial. In another sense however the gap can shrink to almost nothing, for introspective knowledge can avail itself of the conceptual resource of demonstrative reference. If I feel a strange sensation, I can always introspect it as a ‘something which is happening (to me)’. To entertain the suggestion that I don’t understand the concepts involved in such a minimal introspective view is to come very close to undermining thought itself. Our important self-knowledge is introspective knowledge. It is knowledge about our own beliefs and desires, our pain and joys and most important of all our own memories. To see these as our own, or part of our selves, we must understand what a mind is that it can contain such wonders, and we must learn to recognise them so as to reflect upon them as defining parts of ourselves. I believe that long before we could introspect we felt pain and joy, we could think and plan (though introspection lets us feel more keenly, and sometimes to think and plan more clearly). At some point in the distant past, the concepts which make up the overarching concept of mind must have been invented, as all concepts must be invented.19 Probably it was not a sudden invention but a slow accretion of ideas (there is after all some evidence that certain non-human animals, higher primates in particular, have some kind of idea of self and some sense of their fellows’ mental states (see Humphrey 1984, Cherney and Seyfarth 1990; for a skeptical account, see Heyes 1994). Surely, there was no inventor of folk psychology but there might have been (see Sellars’s [1956] myth of Jones). The concept of mind was constructed and we learned to apply its many subconcepts, just as we constructed and learned to apply so many other concepts. The interlocking notions of belief, desire, and feeling are the most precious

19. It is perhaps conceivable that some concepts are innate, and have been generated by evolution. But it is not very plausible; concepts have social and normative dimensions that seem foreign to purely evolutionary processes. Categories can be evolutionarily implanted, and can do some of the jobs that concepts do, but nothing as rich as our theory of mind could be reduced to categorization.

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legacy we have from our remote ancestors, as crucial today as, perhaps, 50,000 years ago (or whenever they were invented — possibly much more recently). The self that we know through introspection is a construct. This does not follow from the fact that the concept of mind is a construct. Every concept is a construct, and a social construct if you like, but that does not make the things to which the concepts apply constructs (still less social constructs). The concept of a quasar is of recent construction but quasars are not. When we introspect we find mental states, and these are not constructs. But the idea of self has strange powers, for we, being first conscious and second self-conscious beings, can construct ourselves in its image. Quasars cannot do this; they are stuck with being what they are. We, in complete distinction from perhaps everything else in the world, can make ourselves into something for which we had only the image. What is important to the self? Memories are perhaps the most critical element of selfhood. We treasure our memories, we build systems of external aids to their retention, and we integrate our memories into our own sense of ourselves (we are taught to do so). We also transform our memories in more or less subtle ways. One way we transform them — by selection, distortion, deand over-emphasis — functions to re-form our own lives (or our images of our lives) into coherent narrative structures (see Dennett 1992, Bruner 1991). Ian Hacking has emphasised that conscious beings have the peculiar power of being able to make themselves into exemplars of some theoretical picture of consciousness or personhood (see Hacking 1995). It is in this strong sense that one’s self is a construct, constructed both by oneself continually through life (though usually pretty well set fairly early on) and by the surrounding people (no doubt most notably one’s parents) as they exist within a culture that has its own stake in what constitutes a proper self and its own power to bring such selves into being. But always lurking under the constructed self is the unconstructed secret self, continually monitoring every event for personal significance, ceaselessly linking incoming information to oneself. The secret self is nothing in itself and is vastly influenced by the constructed self (since the construction will influence one’s own assessment of value and significance). Such influence is far from complete control, however. The assessments of the secret self have some independence, which appears at many levels of cognition. At a fairly low level, in illusions such as the Müller-Lyer, our senses tell us that one line is longer than the other, and though we know that it is not so we still see one line as longer. At much higher levels, we can tell ourselves that we believe a proposition but know that we do not; we can insist to ourselves that something is

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valueless while knowing that we still desire it. Such conflicts reveal a connection to the secret self, for the values of objects are gauged in relation to myself and my own concerns; they are thus linked to the basic self-representation which underlies the consciousness of value. More abstract assessments of value involve much more sophisticated and self-conscious appreciation of the structure of the world and my place in it, and this is the home of the constructed self. I think that we have some sense of ourselves as a ‘centre’ of perception, truth and value which retains some independence from the self we know by introspection. This centre remains through changes in memory and personality, for without the secret self we are utterly disengaged from the world and could neither act in the world nor even be aware of it. The independence of the secret self gives some currency to the idea of a self separate from the constructed self which could, conceivably, be transferred from body to body without the transfer of the memories, capacities and personality traits characteristic of the constructed self. Such an idea I think helps explain the intuitive appeal of the science fiction cases that began this essay. The idea is however spurious, for the secret self has no identity which could persist apart from the bodily mechanisms which underlie the links between perception and action. There is no way a secret self could be transferred from one body to another; everyone’s secret self is equivalently empty of any traits that could mark it as belonging to one person rather than another. On the other hand, the constructed self could be transferred, but only in the sense of duplicating its structures in another. So in the end we should agree with Williams’s final assessment that the identity of persons is the identity of their bodies, while appreciating the ground for the intuition that there is somehow something — a kind of self — underneath the constructed self. Paradoxically, the secret self is at once the source of everything that is mine in experience, but bears absolutely no relation to anything that makes me distinctively me. For what makes me me is the constructed self.

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Index of names

A Anscombe, E., 28 n.15, 32–33, 101 n.14, 103, 105 n.20, 137 n.67, 181 n. 9 Armstrong, D., 258, 260, 265 n.18 Aune, B., 59 n.8 Ayers, M., 207 n.2

Descartes, R., 85, 89, 95, 98, 232, 239, 241, 263 DeVidi, R., 2–3, 23 n.11 Devitt, M., 173 Dretske, F., 16, 19–20, 257–261, 264 Dummett, M., 41 n.12, 45, 116 n.38

B Barwise, J., 191 Belnap, N., 59 Bennett, J., 25 Boër, S., 167 Borges, J., 250 Bratman, M., 159 n.6 Brook, A., 2, 32, 255–256 Bruner, J., 267 Burge, T., 179 n.3, 181 n.7, 203 n.32 Busemeyer, J., 251 n.3

E Evans, G., 1, 3, 4, 9, 28 n.15, 29 n.16, 30, 35–36, 39 n.8, 42–45, 47–48, 179, 195 n.23, 205 n.1, 216, 221–222, 236 Ezcurdia, M., 4, 5, 11, 29

C Campbell, J., 215n. Carnap, R., 41 n.10 Cartwright, H., 55 Cartwright, R., 60 n.9, 76 n.14 Castañeda, H-N., 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 10 n.2, 15–16, 27, 31–32, 34–35, 38 n. 7, 81n, 85 n.4, 86 n.5, 96 n.3, 155 n.4, 163 n.1 Cheney, D. L., 266 Chihara, C., 59 Churchland, P., 260 D Damasio, A., 248 n.2 Davidson, D., 167 Dennett, D., 163, 250, 267

F Fodor, J., 173, 180 n.5, 201 n.29 Frllesdal, D., 159 n.6 Frankfurt, H., 81n. Frege, G., 2–3, 15, 31–48, 58, 145, 152, 155 n.3, 179, 180 n.6, 198 G Gage, P., 248 n.2 Garcia-Carpintero, M. 181 n.8 Geach, P. T., 52 n.1, 56, 70, 97–98 Gettier, E., 58 n.4 Ginet, C., 64–65 Gopnik, A., 261 Gunderson, K., 81n. Guyer, P., 9 n.1 H Hacking, I., 267 Heyes, C. M., 266 Hintikka, J., 51 n.1, 59, 79 n.15, 150 Hogan, M., 5 Horgan, T., 251

276 Index of names

Horwich, P., 215n. Hume, D., 38, 64, 86, 88, 89, 117–119 Humphrey, N., 266 Husserl, E., 15 J Jaynes, J., 261 K Kant, I., 2, 6, 9–30, 64, 86, 95, 100 n.9, 103 n.16, 116, 233–236, 255–256, 258 Kaplan, D., 122, 150, 157 n.5, 163 n.1, 164–165, 170 n.5, 181 n.8 Katz, J., 244 n.1 Kemp Smith, N., 9 n.1, 17 n.9 Kretzmann, N., 68 n.12 L Leibniz, G. W., 13 n.5 Lewis, D., 97 n.4, 163 n.1, 210 n.3 Lichtenberg, G. C., 239 Locke, J., 265 n.18 Lycan, W., 167 M MacBride, F., 203 n.32 Malcolm, N., 81n. Martin, R., 5 McGinn, C., 163 n.1, 170 Mellor, D., 5, 180, 183–186, 189 Millikan, R. G., 4–5, 180, 190–196, 198 n.27, 202 Montague, R., 152 n.2 Moore, G. E., 82 n.1, 119 n.43, 263 n.17 N Nagel, T., 10 n. 2, 86 n.5, 93 n.9, 100–101, 102 n.15, 136, 215n., 240 O O’Brien, L. F., 195 n.23, 203 P Parfit, D., 29, 132, 210 n.3, 215n.

Peacocke, C., 2, 3, 4, 5–6, 11, 12 n.4, 16, 19, 179 Perry, J., 1, 4, 8, 10 n.2, 27, 35–42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 97 n.4, 163 n.1, 164, 168–169, 175, 179, 180 n.4, 182–183, 191, 210 n.3, 215n., 244, 253 Perner, J., 261 Pippin, R., 21 Powell, C. T., 21, 28 n.15 Q Quine, W. V. O., 31, 150 n.1 R Récanati, F., 179, 191 Reichenbach, H., 170 n.5 Rosenthal, D., 16, 19 Rovane, C., 181 n.9, 191, 203 n.31 Russell, B., 31, 40, 55 Ryle, G., 261, 263 S Schachter, D., 248 n.2 Schiffer, S., 215n. Schopenhauer, A., 6, 233 Scott, D., 152 n.2 Seager, W., 6 Sellars, W., 21, 55 n.2, 58 n.4, 59 n.8, 266 Seyfarth, R. M., 266 Shoemaker, S., 1, 2, 3–4, 6, 9, 10–11, 14–16, 16 n.7, 21, 25, 27–28, 31–32, 35, 128, 132, 210, 221–222, 225, 236–237 Sleigh, R. S., 65, 76n.14 Snowdon, P., 215n. Soldati, G., 203 n.32 Sosa, E., 210 n.3 Strawson, P. F., 23, 55, 91–92, 97–98, 99, 106 n.23, 112 n.31, 120 n.44, 127–128 T Tienson, J., 251 Townsend, J., 251 n.3

Index of names 277

U Unger, P., 210 n.3 V Van Gelder, T., 251 W Williams, B., 6, 132–133, 240, 244, 247, 268 Williamson, T., 215n. Wilson, M., 81n.

Wittgenstein, L., 2, 3, 6, 15, 16 n.7, 21, 22, 25, 32, 81–82, 86, 95, 98 n.7, 106–108, 110 n.29, 113, 205 n.1, 221, 233, 236, 239, 255–256 Wood, A., 9 n.1 Woods, M., 81n. Wright, C., 215n. Z Zemach, E., 215n.

In the series ADVANCES IN CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH (AiCR) the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled for publication: 1. GLOBUS, Gordon G.: The Postmodern Brain. 1995. 2. ELLIS, Ralph D.: Questioning Consciousness. The interplay of imagery, cognition, and emotion in the human brain. 1995. 3. JIBU, Mari and Kunio YASUE: Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness. An introduction. 1995. 4. HARDCASTLE, Valerie Gray: Locating Consciousness. 1995. 5. STUBENBERG, Leopold: Consciousness and Qualia. 1998. 6. GENNARO, Rocco J.: Consciousness and Self-Consciousness. A defense of the higher-order thought theory of consciousness. 1996. 7. MAC CORMAC, Earl and Maxim I. STAMENOV (eds): Fractals of Brain, Fractals of Mind. In search of a symmetry bond. 1996. 8. GROSSENBACHER, Peter G. (ed.): Finding Consciousness in the Brain. A neurocognitive approach. 2001. 9. Ó NUALLÁIN, Seán, Paul MC KEVITT and Eoghan MAC AOGÁIN (eds): Two Sciences of Mind. Readings in cognitive science and consciousness. 1997. 10. NEWTON, Natika: Foundations of Understanding. 1996. 11. PYLKKÖ, Pauli: The Aconceptual Mind. Heideggerian themes in holistic naturalism. 1998. 12. STAMENOV, Maxim I. (ed.): Language Structure, Discourse and the Access to Consciousness. 1997. 13. VELMANS, Max (ed.): Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness. Methodologies and Maps. 2000. 14. SHEETS-JOHNSTONE, Maxine: The Primacy of Movement. 1999. 15. CHALLIS, Bradford H. and Boris M. VELICHKOVSKY (eds.): Stratification in Cognition and Consciousness. 1999. 16. ELLIS, Ralph D. and Natika NEWTON (eds.): The Caldron of Consciousness. Motivation, affect and self-organization – An anthology. 2000. 17. HUTTO, Daniel D.: The Presence of Mind. 1999. 18. PALMER, Gary B. and Debra J. OCCHI (eds.): Languages of Sentiment. Cultural constructions of emotional substrates. 1999. 19. DAUTENHAHN, Kerstin (ed.): Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology. 2000. 20. KUNZENDORF, Robert G. and Benjamin WALLACE (eds.): Individual Differences in Conscious Experience. 2000. 21. HUTTO, Daniel D.: Beyond Physicalism. 2000. 22. ROSSETTI, Yves and Antti REVONSUO (eds.): Beyond Dissociation. Interaction between dissociated implicit and explicit processing. 2000. 23. ZAHAVI, Dan (ed.): Exploring the Self. Philosophical and psychopathological perspectives on self-experience. 2000. 24. ROVEE-COLLIER, Carolyn, Harlene HAYNE and Michael COLOMBO: The Development of Implicit and Explicit Memory. 2000. 25. BACHMANN, Talis: Microgenetic Approach to the Conscious Mind. 2000. 26. Ó NUALLÁIN, Seán (ed.): Spatial Cognition. Selected papers from Mind III, Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society of Ireland, 1998. 2000. 27. McMILLAN, John and Grant R. GILLETT: Consciousness and Intentionality. 2001.

28. ZACHAR, Peter: Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry. A philosophical analysis. 2000. 29. VAN LOOCKE, Philip (ed.): The Physical Nature of Consciousness. 2001. 30. BROOK, Andrew and Richard C. DeVIDI (eds.): Self-reference and Self-awareness. 2001. 31. RAKOVER, Sam S. and Baruch CAHLON: Face Recognition. Cognitive and computational processes. 2001. 32. VITIELLO, Giuseppe: My Double Unveiled. The dissipative quantum model of the brain. 2001. 33. YASUE, Kunio, Mari JIBU and Tarcisio DELLA SENTA (eds.): No Matter, Never Mind. Proceedings of Toward a Science of Consciousness: Fundamental Approaches, Tokyo, 1999. 2001. 34. FETZER, James H.(ed.): Consciousness Evolving. n.y.p. 35. Mc KEVITT, Paul, Seán Ó NUALLÁIN and Conn Mulvihill (eds.): Language, Vision, and Music. Selected papers from the 8th International Workshop on the Cognitive Science of Natural Language Processing, Galway, 1999. n.y.p. 36. PERRY, Elaine, Heather ASHTON and Allan YOUNG (eds.): Neurochemistry of Consciousness. Neurotransmitters in mind. 2001. 37. PYLKKÄNEN, Paavo and Tere VADÉN (eds.): Dimensions of Conscious Experience. 2001. 38. SALZARULO, Piero and Gianluca FICCA (eds.): Awakening and Sleep-Wake Cycle Across Development. n.y.p. 39. BARTSCH, Renate: Consciousness Emerging. The dynamics of perception, imagination, action, memory, thought, and language. n.y.p. 40. MANDLER, George: Consciousness Recovered. Psychological functions and origins of conscious thought. n.y.p. 41. ALBERTAZZI, Liliana (ed.): Unfolding Perceptual Continua. n.y.p.