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 (...) self-representation. In this paper, I claim the opposite. I argue in favor of a theoretical framework inspired by semantic relativism that solves the problem of immune nonconceptual self-representations. In order to do so, I refute an argument against the relativist account which is based on the existence of shared representations. This argument, I contend, rests on a confusion between two conditions to which a relativist may appeal when considering whether a certain mental content is relative to the self: a strong invariance condition and a weak invariance condition. I then argue that even if we acknowledge the existence of shared representations, the weak invariance condition is still satisfied, and consequently the relativist framework can make sense of INSRs. I argue that this weak invariance condition is satisfied by a representational function that self-relativizes certain representations. I then provide an empirical instance of such a function by discussing some of the recent literature on motor representations and the sense of agency. In the last part of the paper, I answer several potential objections. These potential objections lead me to distinguish two fundamental kinds of error relative to the self: error through misidentification and error through misapplication. This distinction allows me to answer a fundamental question raised by the very idea of de facto immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that (...) higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)