Abstract
Shaun Gallagher has actively looked into the possibility that psychopathologies involving “thought insertion” might supply a counterexample to the Cartesian principle according to which one can always recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own. Animated by a general distrust of a priori demonstrations, Gallagher is convinced that pitting clinical cases against philosophical arguments is a worthwhile endeavor. There is no doubt that, if true, a falsification of the immunity to error through misidentification would entail drastic revisions in how we conceive the boundary between self and other. However, I argue that (1) the idea of unearthing an exception to the Cartesian thesis is, on further reflection, not a realistic prospect and that (2) this casts doubt on the attempt to conjoin first-person phenomenology and third-person cognitive science in the service of philosophical debates.
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Notes
In the Meditations, this idea is gleaned partly by way of introspection, but is buttressed by ample rational argumentation (see Frankfurt 1970).
The issue of how (i.e., when and to what) to apply the first-person pronoun is of obvious relevance to the philosophy of language—as witnessed by L. Wittgenstein’s influential remarks on the matter (1958, pp. 66–67), but it bears on the study of the mind as well. In fact, some theorists have argued that the very ability to conceive of oneself as oneself “is signaled by the linguistic ability to attribute (as well as to make) first-person reference to oneself” (Baker 2000, p. 68).
Interestingly, this plasticity was noticed by Merleau-Ponty in the course of his own phenomenological investigations: “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it” ([1945] 1974, p. 143).
Gallagher (2006, p. 199) reports on experiments conducted by Nielsen (1963) and Franck et al. (2001) that show how discrepancies in feedback which last beyond 150 ms begin to dissipate the phenomenological feel of the control as im-mediate. One virtually unnoticed implication of such studies is that, if the sense of agency is inversely proportionate to the delay, then the lower limit of such a temporal gradation (which marks no discrepancy) would have to entail an absolute agentive involvement in an hic et nunc event. If so, then this calls into question the centrality of an outflowing–inflowing dynamic, insofar as an “instantaneous feedback” bereft of any sequentiality is no feedback at all. See Champagne (forthcoming) for the methodological consequences of this important (but otherwise unexplored) idea.
That is not to say that something so disclosed in its artificiality suddenly falls outside the purview of one’s volitional control; after all, a NASA engineer would remain very much in charge of a robotic surrogate even if her commands were conveyed under exaggerated temporal parameters (say, by regular mail).
It has long been recognized that schizophrenia can lead to social dysfunctions (Lysaker et al. 2005). If what has just been said is correct, then suffering from a severe dislocation in what does and does not appear under one’s willful control also robs one of a pivotal epistemological compass (Waldenfels 2004). In conformity with the account given by Blakemore (2000), fecund dealings with one’s environment would seem to require that one’s first-person phenomenology include relatively tranquil zones free of the sense of surprise, so that truly novel events may better capture one’s attention and trigger further inquiry (Schwartz et al. 2005, p. 102). By contrast, the mind of a schizophrenic is ostensibly cluttered with a needlessly high degree of foreignness that hinders (or even precludes) the attainment of an objective worldview (Gallagher 2009a, p. 256).
This distinction between impairment and outright lack, though plainly crucial for diagnosis and treatment, is rarely made.
Note that the alterity of brute encounters with the non-ego is not limited to another person (it encompasses, among other things, ringing telephones).
Gallagher (2007b) often writes as if the mere fact that something is of a second-order propels it to a conscious level amenable to introspection and declarative reporting. While some self-constitution theorists make this same assumption (e.g., Graham and Stephens 1994; Stephens and Graham 2000), it is unwarranted. What makes something “higher” than another is a matter of its relative logical role, not some intrinsic psychologistic property (see Champagne 2009, pp. 558–559).
There is definitely something to be said for the idea that “participatory sense making” (Gallagher 2009b, pp. 301–304) is a potent contributing factor. Bayne and Pacherie are correct, however, to hold that “[a]gentive self-awareness undoubtedly contains narrative elements, but it is not narrative all the way down” (2007, p. 489). For an account (explicitly related to the work of Bayne and Gallagher) which seeks to explain in a principled way why narrative confabulation could never be all there is to agency, see Champagne (forthcoming).
The considerations of parsimony gestured at in Gallagher’s criticism and elsewhere (2004c, p. 8) might have conceivably adjudicated the stalemate between modular and phenomenological elucidations. By such a standard, however, Gallagher’s recent suggestion that victims of delusions are “not necessarily mistaken” and might in fact enter into “multiple realities” (2009a, pp. 251, 254–262) would make the former explanatory candidate win hands down.
It is worth noting that the very same argument can be marshaled—not just to criticize Churchland’s arid ontology—but to undermine Gallagher’s onerous suggestion that schizophrenics might live in “multiple realities” (2009a). For if one jettisons the objective gauge in comparison with which delusional states are defined, then, by the same logic, the states in question can no longer be characterized as “delusional.”
To be sure, this sort of argument does lend indirect support to those, like Thomas Nagel, who insist that “in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced” (1974, p. 445). In fact, Gallagher has no qualms about countenancing a more challenging metaphysical outlook, if that is what phenomenological inquiry recommends: “And if what there is includes such things that cannot be reduced to computational processes or the subpersonal activation of neurons, or cannot be quantified, or objectified without loss [...] then to turn away from them and to deny their actuality is in fact being unscientific” (2007a, pp. 311–312; the same claim is made in his 2004b, p. 173). So, although strategic reasons compel Gallagher to avoid endorsing the rich ontology urged by existential phenomenology (see Kelly and Wrathall 1996), he is definitely a fellow traveler.
Parnas is bolder still: “Only continental phenomenology, despite its internal divisions and terminological difficulties, offers a well-developed methodology for studying first-person experience” (2000, p. 119).
Even though he also championed a bridging of disciplines (see Dreyfus and Hall 1982), Hubert Dreyfus’ better-known work (e.g., his 1979) remains a good example of how not to construe the relation between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, according to Gallagher: “[W]hen phenomenologists have seriously engaged the project of the cognitive sciences, rather than pursuing a positive rapprochement with this project, they have been satisfied in drawing critical lines that identify its limitations” (Gallagher and Varela 2001, p. 17).
A widespread distinction proposed by Campbell (1999a; 2002) and taken up by Gallagher might lead some to reply that the immunity to error pertains only to “sense of agency,” not “sense of ownership.” Bortolotti and Broome (2009) have recently adduced reasons for dismissing this gloss, and their criticisms definitely merit attention in their own right (although one might question whether it is truly an advance to swap the spatial analogy of ownership for a “legal” one). But, the present context does not even require that one take a stand on the ownership/agency distinction. Since the starting claim (enunciated by Campbell and entertained by Gallagher) pertained to immunity to error through misidentification as such, it suffices to show that ownership falls under that Cartesian thesis to show that the claim of falsification is itself falsified.
Note that it is not the “Cogito ergo sum”—the idea that one could somehow deduce the existence of reality from the prior certainty of one’s consciousness—that still stands. Rather, it is the (more limited) present-tense immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun that still stands. Both tenets admittedly originate in Descartes (Shoemaker 1968, p. 559); but nothing I have said in this paper supports grand speculations about substance dualism, wide-scale deception, Godly benevolence, pineal glands, mechanistic animals, and the like.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank David Jopling, Kristin Andrews, Craig Roxborough, Joshua Mugg, Michael Braund, and anonymous reviewers from this journal for helpful feedback (the usual caveats apply). The continued support of York University’s Department of Philosophy is also gratefully acknowledged.
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Champagne, M. Can “I” prevent you from entering my mind?. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 145–162 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9196-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9196-0