This paper brings into focus the idea that just as no third-personal way of thinking could capture the self-consciousness of first-person thought, no first- or third- personal way of thinking could capture the especially intimate way we have of relating to each other canonically expressed with our uses of ‘you’. It proposes, motivates and defends the view that second-person speech is canonically expressive of a distinctive way we have of thinking of each other, under a concept that refers de jure (...) to its addressee and whose availability depends on standing in a relation of interpersonal self-consciousness with another. (shrink)

In developing a theory of consciousness, one of the main problems has to do with determining what distinguishes conscious states from non-conscious ones—the delimitation problem. This paper explores the possibility of solving this problem in terms of self-awareness. That self-awareness is essential to understanding the nature of our conscious experience is perhaps the most widely discussed hypothesis in the study of consciousness throughout the history of philosophy. Its plausibility hinges on how the notion of self-awareness is unpacked. The idea that (...) consciousness involves self-awareness has been understood in two different ways: either as awareness of oneself—the subject of experience—or as awareness of the conscious episode itself. In this paper I argue (i) that every experience concerns the subject in a very specific way, involving what I will call ‘perspectival de se representation’, and (ii) that there is no need to appeal to the experience itself in order to characterize the awareness within that experience. The view I articulate explains the subjective nature of experience without over-intellectualizing it, accommodates the phenomenology of experience, and dispels any doubt about the need to find the self in introspection. (shrink)

Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of `selfless' episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is only possible if one was conscious of oneself while undergoing it. (...) Call this the Memory Challenge. This paper argues that the Memory Challenge fails to undermine the credibility to reports of selfless episodes, because it rests on problematic assumptions about episodic memory. The paper further argues that we should distinguish between several kinds of self-representation that may be involved in the process of episodic remembering, and that once we do so, it is no longer mysterious how one could accurately remember and report a selfless episode as an episode that one went through. Thus, we should take reports of this kind seriously, and view them as credible counter-examples to the claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

opinionated review of some of the recent work on the phenomenal unity of consciousness.

I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective state views, not the respective content views. To prepare (...) the ground for my defense, I argue for an understanding of the state view in terms of concept exercise rather than concept possession and provide an overview of versions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism of different strengths. I then argue that conceptualists and nonconceptualists tacitly accept a so-called ‘state-to-content’ principle, show that existing defenses of this principle fail, and provide a new defense of it. It draws on the sources of the nonconceptualism debate, viz. the need to do justice both to the phenomenology of experience and to its epistemological role and to account for the existence of perceptual content and thought content. I argue that epistemological considerations together with considerations from the subject’s perspective support the claim that conceptual thought has conceptual and propositional content, whereas nonconceptual experience has nonconceptual and non-propositional content. (shrink)

Hume famously denied that he could experience the self. Most subsequent philosophers have concurred with this finding. I argue that if the subject is to function as a bearer of experience it must (1) lack sensory qualities in itself to be compatible with bearing sensory qualities and (2) be single so that it can unify experience. I use Douglas Harding’s first-person experiments to investigate the visual gap where one cannot see one’s own head. I argue that this open space conforms (...) to the above criteria and hence is consistent with being the subject. I respond to the objection that this location is merely a lack of visual experience. I argue that this space also encompasses sound and touch properties and hence functions as a bearer for other sensory modalities. These first-person findings provide prima facie support for the view that the subject is a thin bearer of experience. (shrink)

We have good reason to condemn lying more strongly than misleading and to condemn bullshit assertion less harshly than lying but more harshly than misleading. We each have good reason to mislead rather than make bullshit assertions, but to make bullshit assertions rather than lie. This is because these forms of deception damage credibility in different ways. We can trust the misleader to assert only what they believe to be true. We can trust the bullshitter not to assert what they (...) believe to be false. We cannot trust the liar at all. (shrink)

Siguiendo la aproximación de C. Peacocke, desarrollaré una explicación del autoconocimiento psicológico en términos de los estados y contenidos involucrados en la transición desde un estado mental consciente a un juicio de orden superior. Ahora bien, parece que la mera conciencia de un estado mental no representa explícitamente o hace manifiesto de algún modo al sujeto de ese estado, en cuyo caso esto plantea una objeción à la Lichtenberg a la explicación de Peacocke. Tras adoptar una teoría auto-representacional del carácter (...) subjetivo de la experiencia, argumentaré que la representación mediante la cual una experiencia consciente se representa a sí misma como sí misma tiene un contenido de se implícito. Es así una explicación que excluye una objeción à la Lichtenberg porque el uso de la primera persona en un juicio de orden superior resulta ser dependiente de contenido. (shrink)

Recent philosophical developments on personal indexicals reveal a disagreement between those who defend and those who deny the existence of a distinctive class of second person thoughts. In this piece, I tackle this controversy by highlighting two crucial constraints based on paradigmatic felicitous singular uses of the second person pronoun. On the one hand, the Addressing Constraint is brought out by the awareness and action capabilities displayed in successfully addressing another. On the other hand, the Merging Constraint arises, among other (...) things, from the fact that ‘I’/‘you’-exchanges ground intersubjective disagreement. Once these constraints are fully in view, I go on to show that they pose a challenging dilemma for any account of the second person and that the chasm between friends and foes of the distinctness of second person thought is better seen as endorsements of one of the horns of the dilemma. In reaction to this, I outline a way of accommodating both constraints in terms of ‘perspectives’, i.e. ways of thinking of a reference that do not individuate a thought. On the recommended approach, the second person perspective is cognitively distinctive but does not itself signal the existence of a distinctive second person type of thought. By contrast, a single type of thought about selves expressible with personal indexicals—the self-thought type—can be shown to comprise the third, the second and, perhaps surprisingly, the first person perspective. Unlike other perspectival approaches, the here proposed analysis relies on an elucidation of perspectives in terms of specific information on which a thinker draws made available by a concept-individuating reference rule. (shrink)

In the light of partial understanding, we examine the thesis that concepts are individuated in terms of possession conditions and show that adherents face a fatal dilemma: Either concept-individuating possession conditions include cases of partially understood concepts or not. If yes, possession conditions do not individuate concepts. If no, the thesis is too restricted and lacks a minimally satisfactory level of generalization.

Concept-individuating reference rules offer a well-known route for the explanation of immunity to error through misidentification in judgments involving first person or de se thought. However, the ‘outright’ version of this account—one that sanctions a one-to-one correspondence between the reference-fixing rule and immunity—cannot do justice to the unassailable ground-relativity of the target phenomenon. In this paper, I outline a version of the reference-rule account that circumvents this problem. I state a reference rule for the de se concept that makes space (...) for different non-reference-fixing ways of thinking or perspectives, yielding different grounds for judgment. The proposal and its ramifications, I argue, shed light on the variety of ways in which this kind of immunity has been proved to be present—and indeed absent—in de se thought. (shrink)

Subjects suffering from extreme peripheral deafferentation can recruit vision to perform a significant range of basic physical actions with limbs they can’t proprioceptively feel. Self-ascriptions of deafferented action – just as deafferented action itself – fundamentally depend, therefore, on visual information of limb position and movement. But what’s the significance of this result for the concept of self patently at work in these self-ascriptions? In this paper, I argue that these cases show that bodily awareness grounding employment of the self-concept (...) in self-ascriptions of action can be fundamentally third-personal and concern a body that is not presented as one’s own, but as an object among others. (shrink)

Consider the Unshareability View, namely, the view that first person thought or self-thought—thought as typically expressed via the first person pronoun—is not shareable from subject to subject. In this article, I show that a significant number of Fregean and non-Fregean commentators of Frege have taken the Unshareability View to be the default Fregean position, rehearse Frege’s chief claims about self-thought and suggest that their combination entails the Unshareability View only on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between way (...) of thinking and thought-individuating cognitive value, outline an account of self-thought that rejects the assumption and keeps intact all of Frege’s chief claims, and respond to a number of worries to the effect that this proposal yields undesirable results from the point of view of the individuation of self-thought at the level of cognitive value. (shrink)

Can subjects genuinely possess concepts they do not understand fully? A simple argument can show that, on the assumption that possession conditions are taken to fully individuate concepts, this question must be answered in the negative. In this paper, I examine this negative answer as possibly articulated within Christopher Peacocke’s seminal theory. I then discuss four central lines of attack to the view that possession of concepts requires full understanding. I conclude that theorists should acknowledge the existence of indefinitely many (...) cases of genuine concept possession for partially understood concepts and therefore face the determination challenge, namely, the challenge of fully determining concept individuation from concept possession conditions of partially understood concepts. (shrink)

Actions are uncontroversially public. However, the prevailing model of explanation in the debate about the de se seems to conflict with this fact by proposing agent-specific explanations that yield agent-specific types of action—i.e. types of action that no two agents can instantiate. Remarkably, this point affects both proponents and critics of the de se. In this paper, I present this kind of problem, characterise the proper level of analysis for action explanation compatible with the publicity of action—i.e. the agent-bound level—and (...) suggest that acknowledgement of this level highlights two important amendments of contemporary views. First, sceptics must accept that, when explanation is attitude-involving, the attitudes mentioned in the explanation of action must refer to the agent. Secondly, and perhaps more surprisingly, proponents of the de se should seek for accounts of de se attitudes that are not confined to a specific agent and are, therefore, sharable across agents. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine the claim that self-consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self-conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best-known arguments relevant to self-consciousness's significance take the indirect route. I examine them and argue that in various ways they depend on unwarranted (...) assumptions about self-consciousness's functional significance, and once these assumptions are undermined, motivation for these arguments dissipates. I then consider the direct route to self-consciousness's significance, which depends on claims that self-consciousness has intrinsic value or final value. I argue what intrinsic or final value self-consciousness possesses is not enough to generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate which of the main conditions proposed in the moral responsibility literature are the ones that spell trouble for the idea that Artificial Intelligence Systems could ever be full-fledged responsible agents. After arguing that the standard construals of the control and epistemic conditions don’t impose any in-principle barrier to AISs being responsible agents, I identify the requirement that responsible agents must be aware of their own actions as the main locus of resistance to attribute that kind (...) of agency to AISs. This is because this type of awareness is thought to involve first-person or de se representations, which, in turn, are usually assumed to involve some form of consciousness. I clarify what this widespread assumption involves and conclude that the possibility of AISs’ moral responsibility hinges on what the correct theory of de se representations ultimately turns out to be. (shrink)

Higher-order thought theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain (...) the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I then argue that various thought insertion-involving scenarios do not give (...) rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a reference-fixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. (shrink)

Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.

In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states of consciousness induced by classical psychedelics, such as psilocybin and LSD, whose effects are mainly mediated by agonism of serotonin receptors. Few attempts have been made (...) at bridging these two domains of inquiry, despite intriguing evidence of overlap between the phenomenology and neurophysiology of meditation practice and psychedelic states. In particular, many contemplative traditions explicitly aim at dissolving the sense of self by eliciting altered states of consciousness through meditation, while classical psychedelics are known to produce significant disruptions of self-consciousness, a phenomenon known as drug-induced ego dissolution. In this article, we discuss available evidence regarding convergences and differences between phenomenological and neurophysiological data on meditation practice and psychedelic drug-induced states, with a particular emphasis on alterations of self-experience. While both meditation and psychedelics may disrupt self-consciousness and underlying neural processes, we emphasize that neither meditation nor psychedelic states can be conceived as simple, uniform categories. Moreover, we suggest that there are important phenomenological differences even between conscious states described as experiences of self-loss. As a result, we propose that self-consciousness may be best construed as a multidimensional construct, and that “self-loss,” far from being an unequivocal phenomenon, can take several forms. Indeed, various aspects of self-consciousness, including narrative aspects linked to autobiographical memory, self-related thoughts and mental time travel, and embodied aspects rooted in multisensory processes, may be differently affected by psychedelics and meditation practices. Finally, we consider long-term outcomes of experiences of self-loss induced by meditation and psychedelics on individual traits and prosocial behavior. We call for caution regarding the problematic conflation of temporary states of self-loss with “selflessness” as a behavioral or social trait, although there is preliminary evidence that correlations between short-term experiences of self-loss and long-term trait alterations may exist. (shrink)

According to the virtual self theory, selves are merely virtual entities. On this view, our self-representations do not refer to any concrete object and the self is a merely intentional entity. This contemporary version of the ‘no-self’ theory is driven by a number of psychological and philosophical considerations indicating that our representations of the self are pervasively inaccurate. I present two problems for VST. First, the case for VST fails to rule out a more moderate position according to which the (...) self exists but is systematically misrepresented by us. This position regards the self as a real entity that has illusory appearances, rather than as a hallucinated entity that has a merely intentional existence. Second, I suggest that this ‘illusion model’ of self-misrepresentation is preferable to VST. Advocates of VST must acknowledge the existence of an entity—typically the brain—that is the bearer of our misrepresentations of the self. I argue that, other things being equal, we should regard the bearer of our self-representations as the self, even if that entity diverges dramatically from the way we represent the self to be. So by acknowledging the existence of a bearer of self-representations, advocates of VST are in a poor position to deny the existence of the self. I conclude that VST not only fails to rule out the illusion model, but that we have prima facie reason to prefer the illusion model to VST. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to raise a few questions about Bayne s mereological account of the unity of consciousness. In Section 1, I raise a few clarificatory questions about the account and the thesis that consciousness is necessarily unified. In Sections 2 and 3, I offer an alternative view of unity of consciousness and contrast it with Bayne's view. I call this view the connectivity account. These sections prepare the ground for the main question of this article: why (...) should we prefer Bayne's mereological view to the connectivity view? (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 709-724, June 2022.

I reconstruct early Yogācāra theory of no-self based on works by Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. I introduce the idea of the cognitive schema (CS) of the self, a conception borrowed from the developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget. A fundamental CS is a psychological function that guides the formation of perceptions. I propose that Manas can be understood in terms of being the CS of the self, a psychological mechanism from which perceptions of external objects are formed. In addition, I argue that non-imaginative (...) wisdom can be regarded as an experience during which the CS of the self does not function, such that one only possesses pure sensations without perceptions of external objects. After the repeated experience of non-imaginative wisdom, the CS of the self is changed to the purified CS of no-self. It still supports interactions with the external world, but in a way that does not allow the four afflictions (self-delusion, self-belief, self-conceit, and self-love) to arise. (shrink)

It’s a familiar fact that there is something it is like to see red, eat chocolate or feel pain. More recently philosophers have insisted that in addition to this objectual phenomenology there is something it is like for me to eat chocolate, and this for-me-ness is no less there than the chocolatishness. Recognizing this subjective feature of consciousness helps shape certain theories of consciousness, introspection and the self. Though it does this heavy philosophical work, and it is supposed to be (...) relatively obvious to anyone who introspects, it is rather difficult to see just what this phenomenal me-ness is supposed to be; indeed, many philosophers deny it exists. In this paper we try to provide a clear sense of what phenomenal me-ness involves, and then then consider some arguments for the existence of phenomenal me-ness experience as well as some accounts of what gives rise to it. In the end, we argue that the plausible senses of me-ness are a good deal thinner than what often seems to be claimed. (shrink)

The indexical word “I” has traditionally been assumed to be an overt analogue to the concept of self, and the best model for understanding it. This approach, I argue, overlooks the essential role of cognitive phenomenology in the mastery of the concept of self. I suggest that a better model is to be found in a different kind of representation: phenomenal concepts or more generally phenomenally grounded concepts. I start with what I take to be the defining feature of the (...) concept of self, namely its “super-reflexivity”: to use this concept is not just to think of oneself, but to think of oneself as the thinker of the present thought. I call this familiar observation the “Thinker Intuition”. I review some shortcomings of the indexical model of the concept of self, which is the classical account of the Thinker Intuition. I go on to propose a different account, the “phenomenal model”, according to which the concept of self is a phenomenally grounded concept, anchored in a generic kind of cognitive phenomenolog... (shrink)

In recent debates on phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made, after Levine (2001) and Kriegel (2009), between the “qualitative character” of an experience, i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject (e.g. blueish or sweetish or pleasant), and its “subjective character”, i.e. the fact that there is anything at all that it feels like to her. I argue that much discussion of subjective character is affected by a conflation between three different notions. I start by disentangling the three (...) notions in question, under the labels of “for-me-ness”, “me-ness” and “mineness”. Next, I argue that these notions are not equivalent; in particular, there is no conceptual implication from for-me-ness to me-ishness or mineness. Empirical considerations based on clinical cases additionally suggest that the three notions may also correspond to different properties (although the claim of conceptual non-equivalence does not depend on this further point). The aim is clarificatory, cautionary but also critical: I examine four existing arguments from subjective character that are fuelled by an undifferentiated use of the three notions, and find them to be flawed for this reason. (shrink)

David Hunter has recently argued that Donald Davidson and Elizabeth Anscombe were in basic agreement about practical knowledge. In this reply, it is my contention that Hunter’s fascinating claim may not be satisfactorily warranted. To throw light on why, a more careful consideration of the role of the notion of practical knowledge in Anscombe’s approach to intentional action is undertaken. The result indicates a possible need to distinguish between what is called ‘practical knowledge’ and ‘ knowledge of what one is (...) doing’, and shows that Hunter’s claim concerning the closeness of Anscombe to Davidson only has plausibility for knowledge of what one is doing. Contrary to an interesting suggestion by Hunter, the paper argues that it is hard to see how Davidson’s position can benefit substantially from making use of the notion of knowledge of what one is doing. (shrink)

Various psychopathologies of self-awareness, such as somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion in schizophrenia, might seem to threaten the viability of the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness since it requires a HOT about one’s own mental state to accompany every conscious state. The HOT theory of consciousness says that what makes a mental state a conscious mental state is that there is a HOT to the effect that “I am in mental state M.” I have argued in previous work that a (...) HOT theorist can adequately respond to this concern with respect to somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion. There is also Cotard syndrome which is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which people hold the delusional belief that they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their blood or internal organs. In this paper, I argue that HOT theory has nothing to fear from it either and can consistently account for what happens in such unusual cases. I analyze Cotard syndrome in light of my previous discussion of somatoparaphrenia and thought insertion, and argue that HOT theory can provide a somewhat analogous account without the worry of inconsistency. It is crucial to recognize that there are multiple “self-concepts” and levels of HOTs which can help to provide a more nuanced explanation. With regard to the connection between consciousness and self-consciousness, it is proposed that Cotard patients are indeed capable of having some “I-thoughts” about their bodies and mental states. (shrink)

Inspired by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’ – first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se – call for special treatment: we need to abandon one of two traditional assumptions on the contents needed to provide rationalizing explanations, their shareability or their absoluteness. Their arguments have been very influential; one might take them as establishing a new ‘effect’ – new philosophical evidence in need of being accounted for. This is (...) questioned by the skeptical arguments in recent work by Cappelen & Dever and Magidor, along lines that a few discrepant voices had already announced earlier. Skeptics content that the evidence does not really call for revising traditional theories of content. I will discuss their challenges – first and foremost, concerning action explanations – aiming to make the case that the ‘De Se effect’ is no illusion: de se attitudes require us to revise one of the two tenets of traditional views. (shrink)

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I (...) raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

I’ll organize my replies around four topics: mind wandering and phenomenal selfhood, transformation versus enactive emergence, agency versus ownership, and finally the importance of doing philosophy of mind from a cross-cultural perspective.

ABSTRACTEpisodic memory is the ability to revisit events in one's personal past, to relive them as if one travelled back in mental time. It has widely been assumed that such an ability imposes a metaphysical requirement on selves. Buddhist philosophers, however, deny the requirement and therefore seek to provide accounts of episodic memory that are metaphysically parsimonious. The idea that the memory perspective is a centred field of experience whose phenomenal constituents are simulacra of an earlier field of experience, yet (...) attended to in a way that presents them as happening again, is, I suggest, a better one than that the memory perspective consists in taking as object-aspect the subject-aspect of the earlier experience, or the idea that it consists in labelling a representation of the earlier experience with an I-tag. (shrink)

Fine's replies to critics, in a symposium on his book The Limits of Abstraction.

I can be aware of myself, and thereby come to know things about myself, in a variety of different ways. But is there some special way in which I—and only I—can learn about myself? Can I become aware of myself by introspecting? Do I somehow show up in my own conscious experiences? David Hume and most contemporary philosophers say no. They deny that the self shows up in experience. However, in this paper I appeal to research on schizophrenia—on thought insertion, (...) in particular—to argue that Hume and his follows are wrong: The self does, in fact, show up in experience. (shrink)

I am aware that this hand is my own. But is the sense of ownership of my hand manifested to me in a more primitive form than judgements? On the deflationary view recently defended by Martin and Bermúdez in their works, the sense of bodily ownership has no counterpart at the experiential level. Here I present a series of cases that the deflationary account cannot easily accommodate, including belief-independent illusions of ownership and experiences of disownership despite the presence of bodily (...) sensations. I conclude that there is some kind of non-conceptual intuitive awareness of ownership. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to bring out exactly what makes first-personal contents special, by showing that they perform a distinctive cognitive function. Namely, they are stopping points of inquiry. First, I articulate this idea and then I use it to clear the ground from a troublesome conflation. That is, the conflation of this particular function all first-person thoughts have with the property of immunity to error through misidentification, which only some I-thoughts enjoy. Afterward, I show the implications of (...) this idea for a theory of first-person content and of immunity to error though misidentification. I then make some comparisons with Pryor’s notion of wh-misidentification and immunity thereof and with Cappelen and Dever’s position on immunity to error through misidentification and show why they are defective. (shrink)

Philosophy is a reflective activity. So perhaps it is unsurprising that many philosophers have claimed that reflection plays an important role in shaping and even improving our philosophical thinking. This hypothesis seems plausible given that training in philosophy has correlated with better performance on tests of reflection and reflective reasoning has correlated with demonstrably better judgments in a variety of domains. This article reviews the hypothesized roles of reflection in philosophical thinking as well as the empirical evidence for these roles. (...) This reveals that although there are fairly reliable links between reflection and philosophical judgment among both laypeople and philosophers, the role of reflection in philosophical thinking may nonetheless depend in part on other factors, some of which have yet to be determined. So progress in research on reflection in philosophy may require further innovation in experimental methods and psychometric validation of philosophical measures. (shrink)

Debates about bodily ownership and psychological ownership have typically proceeded independently of each other. This paper explores the relation between them, with particular reference to how each is illuminated by psychopathology. I propose a general framework for studying ownership that is applicable both to bodily ownership and psychological ownership. The framework proposes studying ownership by starting with explicit judgments of ownership and then exploring the bases for those judgments. Section 3 discusses John Campbell’s account of ψ-ownership in the light of (...) that general framework, emphasizing in particular his fractionation of ψ-ownership into two dissociable components. Section 4 briefly presents an account of φ-ownership that I have developed in more detail elsewhere. Section 5 explores the suggestion, originating with Alexandre Billon, that there needs to be an integrated account of φ-ownership and ψ-ownership because depersonalization disorders typically involve breakdowns of both φ-ownership and ψ-ownership. The argument from depersonalization is not compelling, but Section 6 proposes a different way of reaching the same conclusion. Section 7 shows how reflecting on agency and practical reasoning offers a common thread between the models of φ-ownership and ψ-ownership discussed earlier in the paper. (shrink)

This article is a response to commentaries by Chris Hill, Farid Masrour and Robert van Gulick on "The Unity of Consciousness" . Topics covered in the discussion include the phenomenal unity relation, the respect in which the unity of consciousness is a necessary feature of consciousness, and challenges to the idea that the self might be a merely virtual entity.

The claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness has a long philosophical history, and has received renewed support in recent years. My aim in this paper is to argue that this surprisingly enduring idea is misleading at best, and insufficiently supported at worst. I start by offering an elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish two notions of self-consciousness: consciousness of oneself and consciousness of one’s experience. While “self-consciousness” is (...) often taken to refer to the former notion, the most common variant of the constitutive claim, on which I focus here, targets the latter. This claim can be further interpreted in two ways: on a deflationary reading, it falls within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on an inflationary reading, it points to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary reading of the constitutive claim is plausible, but should be formulated without using a term as polysemous and suggestive as “self-consciousness”; by contrast, the inflationary reading is not adequately supported, and ultimately rests on contentious intuitions about phenomenology. I conclude that we should abandon the idea that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness. (shrink)

This paper is a new defense of the old orthodox view that self-consciousness requires self-concepts. My defense relies on two crucial constraints. The first is what I call Bermúdez’s Constraint, that is, the view that any attribution of content must account for the intentional behavior of the subject that reflects her own way of understanding the world. The second is the well-known Generality Constraint of Evans, which is also termed the recombinability constraint. The claim I want to support in this (...) paper is the following: Since whether and to what extent we can attribute to non-linguistic creatures and prelinguistic infants genuine knowing self-reference or de se contents is an open empirical question, the proponents of the nonconceptual self-consciousness face a dilemma. If we are convinced that the available empirical evidence is overwhelming, I argue--based on Evans’s Generality Constraint--that these self-representations are nothing but primitive prelinguistic self-concepts. However, if we are convinced that the available empirical evidence is not persuasive, I maintain--relying on Bermudez’s Constraint--that we do better by assuming that the subject is not self-represented. The content of her experiences and thoughts are best modeled as simple selfless propositional functions that are true or false relative to the subject of these experiences and thoughts. I refer to this as self-concernment without self-reference. Thus, against the recent ingenious work of Peacocke, I claim that there is no compelling reason for postulating nonconceptual middle level self-representation, between self-concernment and conceptual self-reference. However, as I hope to make clear, my claim is quite different from those of other recent oppositions to the idea of nonconceptual self-consciousness. According to the thesis of self-concernment without self-reference, the contents of experiences and thoughts are selfless propositional functions, true or false relative to the bearer of the respective mental states. (shrink)

_(MA thesis)_ Immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) describes a sort of immunity against such a situation that the thinker wrongly identifies something as other things. Philosophers consider it as being especially relevant to first-person or de se judgments. Many philosophers seem to advance IEM as an alternative to a Cartesian method of defining first-person privilege and of circumscribing the first-person perspective. However, as more and more representative instances are substantiated as being vulnerable to error through misidentification, it is thus (...) necessary to offer an account sufficient to explain IEM. Then, there are roughly two approaches in the literature: the identification-freedom approach and the metasemantic approach. The former is characterised by the claim that the presence of IEM is always explained by the absence of an identificatory-component in the thought's grounds. The latter is more heterogeneous than the former. Nevertheless, it can be roughly described by their focus on explaining the IEM of de se thoughts based on an account of how the reference of de se thoughts is fixed, rather than just on the grounds of particular de se thoughts. However, there are still some problems with the existing accounts. More specifically, some problems from the indexical thoughts put at risk Recanati's appeal, which is viewed as a representative of the metasematic approach. Nonetheless, I think these problems can be resolved competently by pointing out the fact that there are three levels of reflection in introspection. Thoughts produced by the first level of reflection (first-level thoughts, hereafter) correspond to Recanati's implicit thoughts; Third-level thoughts are Recanati's explicit thoughts (whether it is made explicit by an extra reflective act, as Recanati puts it). However, second-level thoughts, which include a sort of aboutness in their content, could explain the subject appearing in indexical statements with IEM, guaranteeing IEM of these thoughts in the meanwhile. (shrink)

It is common to hold that our conscious experiences at a single moment are often unified. But when consciousness is unified, what are the fundamental facts in virtue of which it is unified? On some accounts of the unity of consciousness, the most fundamental fact that grounds unity is a form of singularity or oneness. These accounts are similar to Newtonian views of space according to which the most fundamental fact that grounds relations of co-spatiality between various points (or regions) (...) of a space is the fact that these points (or regions) are parts of the same single space. In this paper, I sketch and defend an alternative account of unity of consciousness. Very roughly, the view holds that experiences are unified when they are connected in the right way. In this respect, the view is analogous to Leibnizian views of space according to which the oneness of space emerges from certain conditions over spatial relations. The Leibnizian alternative has significant implications for our understanding of the metaphysics of conscious experience, the cognitive architecture of the mind and our assessment of the conditions under which unity of consciousness breaks. (shrink)

-/- Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves (...) as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such. -/- A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves. (shrink)