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Philosophy of Mind > Philosophy of Consciousness > Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness

Assistant editor: Anna Lena Weyand (Universität Leipzig)
About this topic
Summary

Self-consciousness is consciousness of oneself as oneself. This is usually thought to distinguish self-consciousness from an awareness of what just happens to be oneself. In the latter, but not the former, case, one can fail to recognise that the object of one's awareness is oneself. We think of individual creatures as self-conscious, but we also think of particular psychological states as being instances of self-consciousness. Such states are often considered to possess certain special features that mark them out from non-self-conscious states. For example, it is plausible to suppose that self-consciousness is manifest in thoughts and other states that have first-person contents – thoughts of the form ‘I am F’ – and such thoughts are immune to certain sorts of error. For example, many claim that self-conscious thoughts have guaranteed reference, they cannot fail to refer. Others claim that, for a certain range of self-conscious thoughts, one cannot know somebody to be F and mistakenly think that it is oneself.

Much of the literature on self-consciousness focuses on how to articulate and account for such special features of first-person thought. A central question is whether self-consciousness is reducible. Further questions include: whether consciousness entails self-consciousness; whether self-consciousness involves an awareness of the self as an object; whether there can be non-conceptual or pre-reflective self-conscious states; whether the existence of self-consciousness poses a serious challenge to certain accounts of the nature of mind.
Key works The historical philosopher with the greatest influence on contemporary debates concerning self-consciousness is Kant, especially the First Critique. Ameriks 1982 and Keller 1998 are historically oriented accounts of Kant’s views in this area; Brook 2001 relates Kant’s views to more recent work.  The semantic peculiarities of first-person contents entered into the contemporary debate through the work of Kaplan 1989, Perry 1979, Castañeda 1966 and Lewis 1979, a central theme of which is the irreducibility of first-person thought. An earlier source is Wittgenstein 1958 who was influential on both Anscombe 1975, who defends the surprising view that “I” is not a referring term and Evans 1982, Ch.7, who offers a functionalist account of self-consciousness.  Shoemaker 1986 defends the claim, associated with Hume, Kant and Sartre, that self-consciousness does not involve an awareness of the self as an object. This claim had previously been rejected by Chisholm 1976 Ch.1.  Sartre 1957 defends the view that consciousness entails a pre-reflective form of self-consciousness. A similar view has recently been defended by Kriegel 2009. Bermúdez 1998 articulates and defends the claim that some non-conceptual states are instances of self-consciousness.  Significant recent discussions of self-consciousness from the perspective of the cognitive sciences include Damasio 1999 and Metzinger 2003.
Introductions Cassam 1994 contains a number of classic papers and a useful introduction. Bermúdez 2007 and Kriegel 2007 are also helpful introductions to some of the central issues.
Related categories
Subcategories:
Self-Consciousness in Psychology* (447)
Immunity to Error through Misidentification (138)
Animal Self-Consciousness* (137)
Functionalism and Self-Consciousness (60)
First-Person Contents* (296)
Self-Consciousness in Experience (444)
Self-Consciousness in Action (200)
Nonconceptual/Prereflective Self-Consciousness (177)
Self-Consciousness, Misc (624)
See also:History/traditions: Self-Consciousness
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  1. The Sense of 1PP-Location Contributes to Shaping the Perceived Self-Location Together with the Sense of Body-Location.Hsu-Chia Huang, Yen-Tung Lee, Wen-Yeo Chen & Caleb Liang - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8 (370):1-12.
    Self-location—the sense of where I am in space—provides an experiential anchor for one's interaction with the environment. In the studies of full-body illusions, many researchers have defined self-location solely in terms of body-location—the subjective feeling of where my body is. Although this view is useful, there is an issue regarding whether it can fully accommodate the role of 1PP-location—the sense of where my first-person perspective is located in space. In this study, we investigate self-location by comparing body-location and 1PP-location: using (...)
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  2. Cotard Syndrome, Self-Awareness, and I-Concepts.Rocco J. Gennaro - 2020 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (1).
    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 (...)
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  3. Fichte on Summons and Self-Consciousness.Michelle Kosch - forthcoming - Mind:fzaa001.
    J. G. Fichte held that a form of intersubjectivity—what he called a ‘summons’—is a condition of possibility of self-consciousness. This thesis is widely taken to be one of Fichte’s most influential contributions to the European philosophy of the last two centuries. But what the thesis actually states is far from obvious; and existing interpretations either are poorly supported by the texts or else render the thesis trivial or implausible. I propose a new interpretation, on which Fichte’s claim is that reflective (...)
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  4. Jealousy and the Sense of Self: Unamuno and the Contemporary Philosophy of Emotion.Íngrid Vendrell-Ferran - forthcoming - Philosophy and Literature.
    This paper explores jealousy in Unamuno’s drama El otro. Drawing on contemporary philosophy of emotion, I will argue that for the Spanish author jealousy gives the subject a sense of self. The paper begins by embedding Unamuno’s philosophical anthropology in the context of contemporary emotion theory. It then presents the drama as an investigation into the affective dimension of self-identity. The third section offers an analysis of jealousy as an emotion of self-assessment. The final section discusses how this drama can (...)
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  5. Abhidhamma Studies: Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time.Nyanaponika A. Thera - 1976 - Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society.
    The Abhidhamma, the third great division of early Buddhist teaching, expounds a revolutionary system of philosophical psychology rooted in the twin Buddhist insights of selflessness and dependent origination. In keeping with the liberative thrust of early Buddhism, this system organizes the entire spectrum of human consciousness around the two poles of Buddhist doctrine - bondage and liberation, Samsara and Nirvana - the starting point and the final goal. It thereby maps out, with remarkable rigour and precision, the inner landscape of (...)
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  6. From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness (Part 2).Jun Tani & Jeff White - 2016 - APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 2 (16):29-41.
    We have been left with a big challenge, to articulate consciousness and also to prove it in an artificial agent against a biological standard. After introducing Boltuc’s h-consciousness in the last paper, we briefly reviewed some salient neurology in order to sketch less of a standard than a series of targets for artificial consciousness, “most-consciousness” and “myth-consciousness.” With these targets on the horizon, we began reviewing the research program pursued by Jun Tani and colleagues in the isolation of the formal (...)
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  7. From Biological to Synthetic Neurorobotics Approaches to Understanding the Structure Essential to Consciousness, Part 1.Jeffrey White - 2016 - APA Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 1 (16):13-23.
    Direct neurological and especially imaging-driven investigations into the structures essential to naturally occurring cognitive systems in their development and operation have motivated broadening interest in the potential for artificial consciousness modeled on these systems. This first paper in a series of three begins with a brief review of Boltuc’s (2009) “brain-based” thesis on the prospect of artificial consciousness, focusing on his formulation of h-consciousness. We then explore some of the implications of brain research on the structure of consciousness, finding limitations (...)
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  8. Robinson and Self-Conscious Emotions: Appreciation Beyond (Fellow) Feeling.Irene Martínez Marín - 2019 - Debates in Aesthetics 14 (1):74-94.
    Jenefer Robinson believes that feelings can play an important role in the critical evaluation of artworks. In this paper, I want to put some pressure on two important notions in her theory: emotional understanding and affective empathy. I will do this by focusing on the nature of self-conscious emotions. My strategy will be, firstly, to demonstrate the difficulty that Robinson’s two step theory of emotions has in accommodating higher cognitive emotional responses to art. Secondly, I will discuss how the tight (...)
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  9. Levinas and the Second Personal Structure of Free Will.Kevin Houser - forthcoming - In Michael Fagenblat & Melis Erdur (eds.), Levinas and Analytic Philosophy: Second-Personal Normativity and the Moral Life. Research in Phenomenology Series.
    Many suppose some form of free will is required to make moral responsibility possible. Levinas thinks this is backwards. Freedom does not make moral responsibility possible. Moral responsibility makes freedom possible. Free will is not a condition for morality. Free will is an aspect and expression of our moral condition. Key to Levinas’s argument is his rejection of free-will-individualism: the idea that free will is a power a single being could possess. A “contradiction” extracted from standard accounts, and related troubles (...)
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  10. Consciousness, Origins.Gregory Nixon - 2016 - In Harold L. Miller Jr (ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Theory in Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications. pp. 172-176.
    To explain the origin of anything, we must be clear about that which we are explaining. There seem to be two main meanings for the term consciousness. One might be called open in that it equates consciousness with awareness and experience and considers rudimentary sensations to have evolved at a specific point in the evolution of increasing complexity. But certainly the foundation for such sensation is a physical body. It is unclear, however, exactly what the physical requirements are for a (...)
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  11. Existential Abuse of Readers in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies.Syed Ismyl Mahmood Rizvi - 2015 - LANGUAGE FORUM 41 (1-2):157-172.
    Malone Dies marks the point where Samuel Beckett foremost turns to “metaphysical destruction” of “untrue self,” and Derrida’s critique of the notion of “self-presence” of the subject. In this article, I examine Beckett’s literary absurdities to his readers’ concerns of “abuse” through them. For this investigation Malone Dies posits a stream of conflicting “linguistic nihilism” to the concerns of deconstructing “untrue self,” arguably, which will reflect how abuse of Beckettian readers is stimulated. In this context, abuse is specific forms of (...)
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  12. Minimal Sartre: Diagonalization and Pure Reflection.John Bova - 2018 - Open Philosophy 1:360-379.
    These remarks take up the reflexive problematics of Being and Nothingness and related texts from a metalogical perspective. A mutually illuminating translation is posited between, on the one hand, Sartre’s theory of pure reflection, the linchpin of the works of Sartre’s early period and the site of their greatest difficulties, and, on the other hand, the quasi-formalism of diagonalization, the engine of the classical theorems of Cantor, Godel, Tarski, Turing, etc. Surprisingly, the dialectic of mathematical logic from its inception through (...)
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  13. Descartes and Hume on I-Thoughts.Luca Forgione - 2018 - Thémata: Revista de Filosofía 57:211-228.
    Self-consciousness can be understood as the ability to think I-thou-ghts which can be described as thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’. Self-consciousness possesses two specific correlated features: the first regards the fact that it is grounded on a first-person perspective, whereas the second concerns the fact that it should be considered a consciousness of the self as subject rather than a consciousness of the self as object. The aim of this paper is to analyse a few considerations about Descartes and Hume’s (...)
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  14. "Self-Knowledge and the Science of the Soul in Buridan's Quaestiones De Anima".Susan Brower-Toland - 2017 - In Gyula Klima (ed.), Questions on the Soul by John Buridan and Others: A Companion to John Buridan's Philosophy of Mind.
    Buridan holds that the proper subject of psychology (i.e., the science undertaken in Aristotle’s De Anima) is the soul, its powers, and characteristic functions. But, on his view, the science of psychology should not be understood as including the body nor even the soul-body composite as its proper subject. Rather its subject is just “the soul in itself and its powers and functions insofar as they stand on the side of the soul". Buridan takes it as obvious that, even thus (...)
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  15. Experiencia, Autoconciencia y Voluntad. La conceptualización de la subjetividad en el primer periodo (1911-1923) de la filosofía de Nishida Kitarô.Montserrat Crespin Perales - 2013 - Dissertation, Universitat de Barcelona
    Resumen: La investigación se ciñe en el análisis del primer periodo de producción filosófica del filósofo japonés NISHIDA Kitarô (1870-1945) y, con tal motivo, se ciñe al estudio de tres de sus obras: Estudio sobre el Bien (1911), Intuición y Reflexión en la Autoconciencia (1917) y Arte y Moral (1923). Con ello, se trata de responder a la necesidad de presentar una aproximación factible y plausible cuyo objetivo es arrojar luz sobre las consecuencias que resultan del enfoque psicologista y voluntarista (...)
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  16. Self-Consciousness and "Split" Brains: The Minds' I.Elizabeth Schechter - 2018 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Elizabeth Schechter explores the implications of the experience of people who have had the pathway between the two hemispheres of their brain severed, and argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. But each split-brain subject is still one of us.
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  17. "The Paradox of Self-Consciousness" by José Luis Burmùdez. [REVIEW]Tim Crane - 2001 - Philosophical Review 1 (4):624.
    What José Luis Bermúdez calls the paradox of self-consciousness is essentially the conflict between two claims: (1) The capacity to use first-personal referential devices like “I” must be explained in terms of the capacity to think first-person thoughts. (2) The only way to explain the capacity for having a certain kind of thought is by explaining the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression of thoughts of that kind. (Bermúdez calls this the “Thought-Language Principle”.) The conflict between (1) and (2) is (...)
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  18. The Realization of a Self-Conscious Aneural Machine.Joey Lawsin - forthcoming
    The rationale of this paper is to introduce fresh untold concepts that would allow researchers to draw the correct inferences in the realization of a conscious machine. The discoveries of these new concepts, which rooted originally from the derivations of the author's works on (i) Origin of Information, (ii) Acquisition of Information, (iii) Information Materialization, and (iv) Non-Mental Nature of Consciousness, are basically the foundations that alternatively defines the meaning of what it is to be alive or with life. The (...)
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  19. Ambiguities in the Psychiatric Use of the Concepts of the Person: An Analysis.Markus Heinimaa - 2000 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 7 (2):125-136.
    The recent discussion in scientific psychiatry has paid increasing attention to the role of concepts of the person in psychiatric discourse. What are the uses of concepts of the person, such as self or person, in psychiatric discourse? Does describing these uses clarify the significance of conceptual and empirical elements in conceptions of mental illness? I try to answer these questions in a philosophically informed textual analysis of one representative psychiatric article. I conclude that concepts of the person are used (...)
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  20. Unity of Agency and Volition: Some Personal Reflections.Scott E. Weiner - 2003 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (4):369-372.
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Immunity to Error through Misidentification
  1. Immunity, Thought Insertion, and the First-Person Concept.Michele Palmira - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies:1-28.
    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 (...)
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  2. Somatoparaphrenia, Anosognosia, and Higher-Order Thoughts.Rocco J. Gennaro - 2015 - In Disturbed Consciousness: New Essays on Psychopathology and Theories of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 55-74.
    Somatoparaphrenia is a pathology of self characterized by the sense of alienaton from parts of one’s body. It is usually construed as a kind of delusional disorder caused by extensive right hemisphere lesions. Lesions in the temporoparietal junction are common in somatoparaphrenia but deep cortical regions (for example, the posterior insula) and subcortical regions (for example, the basal ganglia) are also sometimes implicated (Valler and Ronschi 2009). Patients are often described as feeling that a limb belongs to another person and (...)
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  3. The Mind's "I". [REVIEW]Colin McLear - 2019 - European Journal of Philosophy 27 (1):255-265.
    Critical notice of Béatrice Longuenesse's book *I, Me, Mine*.
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  4. Arithmetic Judgements, First-Person Judgements and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.Michele Palmira - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (1):155-172.
    The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune to error through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity to error through misidentification. The lessons are: First, the so-called Simple Account (...)
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  5. Kant and the Problem of Self-Knowledge.Luca Forgione - 2018 - New York, Stati Uniti: Routledge.
    This book addresses the problem of self-knowledge in Kant’s philosophy. As Kant writes in his major works of the critical period, it is due to the simple and empty representation ‘I think’ that the subject’s capacity for self-consciousness enables the subject to represent its own mental dimension. This book articulates Kant’s theory of self-knowledge on the basis of the following three philosophical problems: 1) a semantic problem regarding the type of reference of the representation ‘I’; 2) an epistemic problem regarding (...)
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  6. Perception, Nonconceptual Content, and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.Kristina Musholt & Arnon Cahen - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (7):703-723.
    The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we clarify the notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first-person pronoun. In particular, we set out to dispel the view that for a judgment to be IEM it must contain a token of a certain class of predicates. Rather, the importance of the IEM status of certain judgments is that it teaches us about privileged ways of coming to know about ourselves. We then turn to examine how (...)
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  7. Immunity to Error Through Misidentification: New Essays, by Simon Prosser and François Recanati : Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Pp. X + 294, $47.95. [REVIEW]S. G. Williams - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):209-210.
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  8. The First-Person Plural and Immunity to Error.Joel Smith - 2018 - Disputatio 10 (49):141-167.
    I argue for the view that some we-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) relative to the first-person plural pronoun. To prepare the ground for this argument I defend an account of the semantics of ‘we’ and note the variety of different uses of that term. I go on to defend the IEM of a certain range of we-thoughts against a number of objections.
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  9. Possibilities of Misidentification.Lauren Ashwell - 2018 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 25 (3):161-164.
    We seem to have a special, seemingly direct, relationship to our own thoughts that we do not have to the thoughts of others; I can become aware of my thoughts in a way that I cannot become aware of yours: through introspection. Those who have delusions of thought-insertion, however, claim not only to be aware of another's thoughts, but to have another's thoughts in their own mind. These thoughts, of course, cannot actually be someone else's thoughts. However, if we take (...)
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  10. De Se Thoughts and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.Manuel García-Carpintero - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3311-3333.
    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 (...)
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  11. Galen Strawson, The Subject of Experience (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). [REVIEW]Lorenzo Greco - 2018 - Rivista di Filosofia 109 (2):345-347.
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  12. Wittgenstein on Solipsism in the 1930s: Private Pains, Private Languages, and Two Uses of ‘I’.Tim Button - 2018 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82:205-229.
    In the early-to-mid 1930s, Wittgenstein investigated solipsism via the philosophy of language. In this paper, I want to reopen Wittgenstein's ‘grammatical’ examination of solipsism.Wittgenstein begins by considering the thesis that only I can feel my pains. Whilst this thesis may tempt us towards solipsism, Wittgenstein points out that this temptation rests on a grammatical confusion concerning the phrase ‘my pains’. In §1, I unpack and vindicate his thinking.After discussing ‘my pains’, Wittgenstein makes his now famous suggestion that the word ‘I’ (...)
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  13. Being Origins: The Way We Think About Ourselves.Florian Wüstholz - 2018 - Dissertation, Universität Freiburg
    De se thinking has several characteristic features which aren’t present in all instances of thinking about yourself but are at least potentially realised. As such, any feasible account needs to explain the potential for these features. Neither the two-dimensional accounts—stemming from the idea that mental states can be characterised using the notion of a proposition—nor the property theory—claiming that we self-ascribe a property in thinking—do full justice to the phenomenon at hand. Instead, we have to take the concept of primitive (...)
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  14. De Se Beliefs, Self-Ascription, and Primitiveness.Florian L. Wüstholz - 2017 - Disputatio 9 (46):401-422.
    De se beliefs typically pose a problem for propositional theories of content. The Property Theory of content tries to overcome the problem of de se beliefs by taking properties to be the objects of our beliefs. I argue that the concept of self-ascription plays a crucial role in the Property Theory while being virtually unexplained. I then offer different possibilities of illuminating that concept and argue that the most common ones are either circular, question-begging, or epistemically problematic. Finally, I argue (...)
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  15. What Am I and What Am I Doing?Rachael Wiseman - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (10):536-550.
    There is a deep connection between Anscombe’s argument that ‘I’ is not a referring expression and Intention’s account of practical knowledge and knowledge without observation. The assumption that the so-called “no-reference thesis” can be resisted while the account of action set out in her book INTENTION is embraced is based on a misunderstanding of the argument of “The First Person” and the status of its conclusion; removing that misunderstanding helps to illuminate the concept of practical knowledge and brings into view (...)
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  16. Basic Self‐Awareness.Alexandre Billon - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (3):732-763.
    Basic self-awareness is the kind of self-awareness reflected in our standard use of the first-person. Patients suffering from severe forms of depersonalization often feel reluctant to use the first-person and can even, in delusional cases, avoid it altogether, systematically referring to themselves in the third-person. Even though it has been neglected since then, depersonalization has been extensively studied, more than a century ago, and used as probe for understanding the nature and the causal mechanisms of basic self-awareness. In this paper, (...)
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  17. Fallibilism, Demonstrative Thoughts and Russellian Propositions.André Leclerc - 2001 - Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology 5 (1-2):43-54.
    Russellian or singular propositions are very useful in semantics to specify "what has been said" by a literal and serious utterance of a sentence containing a proper name, an indexical or a demonstrative, or for modeling demonstrative thoughts. I3ased on an example given by S. Guttenplan, I construct a case showing that if our only option for modeling demonstrative thoughts is a singular proposition à la Russell, we run the risk of admitting infallible empirical beliefs. I defend the principle of (...)
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  18. The Structure of I-Thoughts. Kant and Wittgenstein on the Genesis of Cartesian Self.Luca Forgione - 2019 - Paradigmi. Rivista di Critica Filosofica 3:535-548.
    The analysis of the structure of the I-thoughts is intertwined with several epistemic and metaphysical questions. The aim of this paper is to highlight that the absence of an identification component does not imply that the “I" doesn’t perform a referential function, nor that it necessarily involves a specific metaphysical thesis on the nature of the self-conscious subject. Particularly, as far as the Cartesian illusion concerning the thinking subject’s immaterial nature is concerned, Kant and Wittgenstein seem to share the same (...)
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  19. Self-Consciousness.Joel Smith - 2017 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    -/- 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 (...)
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  20. Three Questions About Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.Giovanni Merlo - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (3):603-623.
    It has been observed that, unlike other kinds of singular judgments, mental self-ascriptions are immune to error through misidentification: they may go wrong, but not as a result of mistaking someone else’s mental states for one’s own. Although recent years have witnessed increasing interest in this phenomenon, three basic questions about it remain without a satisfactory answer: what is exactly an error through misidentification? What does immunity to such errors consist in? And what does it take to explain the fact (...)
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  21. Facing the Mirror: A Relativist Account of Immune Nonconceptual Self-Representations.Jérémie Lafraire - 2017 - Philosophical Psychology 30 (1-2):140-160.
    There is a consensus among philosophers that some “I”-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. In some recent papers, this property has been formulated in the following deflationist way: an “I”-thought is immune to error through misidentification when it can misrepresent the mental or bodily property self-ascribed but cannot misrepresent the subject possessing that property. However, it has been put forward that the range of mental and bodily states that are immune in that limited sense cannot include nonconceptual forms of (...)
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  22. Somatoparaphrenia, the Body Swap Illusion, and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.Shao-Pu Kang - 2016 - Journal of Philosophy 113 (9):463-471.
    Sydney Shoemaker argues that a certain class of self-ascriptions is immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns. In their “Self-Consciousness and Immunity,” Timothy Lane and Caleb Liang question Shoemaker’s view. Lang and Liang present a clinical case and an experiment and argue that they are counterexamples to Shoemaker’s view. This paper is a response to Lane and Liang’s challenge. I identify the desiderata that a counterexample to Shoemaker’s view must meet and show that somatoparaphrenia and the Body (...)
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  23. Immunity to Error Through Misidentification and Non-Attributive Self-Reference.Lougheed Ted - unknown
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  24. Sprache Und der Soziale Ort des Selbstbewusstseins.Bastian Reichardt - 2017 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 71 (1):50-69.
    Are persons rational because they are self-conscious or are they self-conscious because they are rational? Wittgenstein's remarks on the grammatical peculiarities of first-person expressions are not only a criticism of the conception of a Cartesian Ego but also give rise to systematical extensions which help to answer our question. The distinction between subject- and object-usage of ,,I” – which is made in the ,,Blue Book” – enables Wittgenstein to conceive of sentences like ,,I am in pain” as non-referential expressions. With (...)
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  25. How Primitive is Self-Consciousness?: Autonomous Nonconceptual Content and Immunity to Error Through Misidentification.R. Meeks Roblin - unknown
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  26. Stopping Points: ‘I’, Immunity and the Real Guarantee.Annalisa Coliva - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (3):233-252.
    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 (...)
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  27. Subjective Misidentification and Thought Insertion.Matthew Parrott - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (1):39-64.
    This essay presents a new account of thought insertion. Prevailing views in both philosophy and cognitive science tend to characterize the experience of thought insertion as missing or lacking some element, such as a ‘sense of agency’, found in ordinary first-person awareness of one's own thoughts. By contrast, I propose that, rather than lacking something, experiences of thought insertion have an additional feature not present in ordinary conscious experiences of one's own thoughts. More specifically, I claim that the structure of (...)
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  28. Self-Consciousness and the Double Immunity.Andrea Christofidou - 2000 - Philosophy 75 (4):539-569.
    It is accepted that first-person thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. I argue that there is also immunity to error through misascription, failure to recognise which has resulted in mistaken claims that first-person thoughts involving the self-ascription of bodily states are, at best, circumstantially immune to error through misidentification relative to ‘I’ and, at worst, subject to error. Central to my thesis is that, first, ‘I’ is immune to error through misidentification absolutely, and that if there is any problem (...)
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  29. Immunity to Error Through Misidentification and the Meaning of a Referring Term.Campbell John - 1999 - Philosophical Topics 26 (1-2):89-104.
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  30. Evans on Identification-Freedom.Rick Grush - 2007 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (4):605-617.
    Gareth Evans’ account of Identifi cation-freedom (IF), which he devel- ops in Chapters 6 and 7 of The Varieties of Reference (henceforth VR) is almost universally misunderstood.1 Howell is guilty of this same mis- understanding, and as a result claims to have mounted a criticism of Evans, when in fact he has not. I will take the occasion of Howell’s oth- erwise insightful article to clarify Evans’ position. Note that the bulk of Howell’s analysis is targeted at the phenomenon known (...)
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