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Notes
There is further discussion of reflective self-consciousness and perspectival self-consciousness, and of some constitutive and evidential issues surrounding the mirror test, in Peacocke (2010). That paper also contains a more explicit characterization of perspectival self-consciousness. I should add that on my view, first person content is found both in conceptual content and in non-conceptual content. For further discussion, see my paper ‘Subjects and Consciousness’ (Peacocke 2012).
The simplification consists in the fact that I am referring to the first person type; what you are employing in your thought is an instance of that type. More on this below.
A few sentences back, I wrote “near-enough accurate”, because it should also be added that the sincere saying “He sees me” must be suitably based on the subject’s own visual experience, rather than knowledge from inference or testimony.
When (9) holds, what you are aware of is a state of affairs in which the other has an awareness with a content:
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(i)
That person sees that I see him.
How should this be regimented in neo-Fregean terms? Let <…> be the sense of…; let [self] be the first person type of sense. [self] x is the instance of the first person type usable only by x to think of himself. ^ is predicational combination in the realm of senses. (The looseness in these characterizations can easily be amended by anyone who takes notice of it.) This is the terminology and apparatus of Peacocke (1981). We can then regiment the content expressed by (i) in neo-Fregean terms thus, as thought by the other: for some mode of presentation m, the mode of presentation m under which that person sees me,
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(ii)
Sees-that (that person, <see>^m^[self]that person).
When you are aware that (ii) is the content of the other’s awareness, the condition for ascriptive interpersonal self-consciousness is met. That is so because the content (ii), which specifies the content of the other’s awareness, of which you are aware, is one that attributes to you use of the first person. This is a more formal way of explicating how Third Level embedding conditions imply ascriptive interpersonal self-consciousness.
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(i)
Heck also says that the claim is obvious, and writes, “I don’t really know how to argue for this claim”. Presumably what has to be argued for is the eliminability claim in the text above, a claim that can be made increasingly plausible as explanation of uses of “you” in terms of other concepts come to seem generalizable across examples. Sebastian Rödl, in his book Self-Consciousness (2007, p. 187), legitimately complains against Heck’s remark that “you” can be analyzed as “That person to whom I am speaking”; but that point does not establish an ineliminability thesis.
These are not the only points I would want to make about Rödl’s final chapter ‘The Second Person’. Since I have been critical on his treatment of “you”, let me also emphasize that there is much interesting and important material in the earlier chapters of his book.
For further discussion, see the Appendix to Peacocke (2005).
My thanks to Michael Martin for setting me straight on this.
Thus Rödl, Self-Consciousness, p. 187: “thought about another self-conscious subject is a thought whose linguistic expression requires use of a second-person pronoun”. In Rödl’s terminology, a self-conscious subject is simply a subject capable of first person thought. Rödl uses the terminology mentioned at the start of this paper.
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Acknowledgments
This paper originated in one of my summer seminars at University College London; it was further developed for one of my Kohut Lectures at the University of Chicago early in 2011, and for one of David Chalmers’ Consciousness Project Meetings at NYU in the fall of 2011. I thank Jonathan Lear for discussion in Chicago, and Ned Block and David Chalmers, and other members of the discussion group, for comments at NYU. A version was also presented to the Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium in May 2012, the fortieth in that now famous series. At Oberlin I learned from the exemplary, insightful prepared commentary of Michael Martin; I note in the text one correction I have made in the light of his comments. I thank also Fred Dretske for illuminating discussion at the same occasion. A more recent version of this material was presented at the Workshop on the Self, organized by Natalie Sebanz and Hong Yu Wong at the Central European University in Budapest in the summer of 2012. That occasion too resulted in revisions. I am particularly grateful for conversations in Budapest with the developmental psychologist Philippe Rochat.
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Appendix
Appendix
Suppose we have a case in which you are interpersonally self-conscious with respect to me, CP. In such an example, you are aware that CP attributes to you a first person thought, say that you are F. I continue to use the neo-Fregean notation of note 5 above. The first person thought you would have to have for this attribution to be correct is one you could express by saying “I’m F”. In the neo-Fregean notation, an attribution of this content to your thinking would be regimented:
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(A) Think (you, [self]you^<is F>).
When you are interpersonally self-conscious with respect to me, CP, you are aware that I (CP) am attributing thinking specified in (A) to you. For this to be true, it has to be that:
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(B) Thinks (CP, <Think>^[that person]NN^[[self]]that person^<<is F>>).
Here we have the double embedding shown by the double square brackets, the canonical sense of the first person sense, [self]NN, that is employed by you. Finally, since you are aware that (B) holds, we have the triple embedding as correct: in neo-Fregean notation,
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(C) Aware-that (you, <Thinks>^[that person]CP^<<Thinks>>^[self]NN^[[[self]]]NN^<<<is F>>>.
Enthusiasts for this sort of issue will realize that I have here made the occurrence of ‘[self]NN’ transparent, which it is in such attributions. From your being aware that I think that you think that you yourself are F, it does follow that: you are aware of someone x (viz. yourself) of whom you are aware that I think of that person x that he thinks himself to be F.)
All this is involved in the formal representation of the fact that in interpersonal self-consciousness, you are aware of me as treating you as self-representing.
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Peacocke, C. Interpersonal self-consciousness. Philos Stud 170, 1–24 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0175-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0175-x