Abstract
What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—Independence and Epistemic Authority”, I review reasons for being dissatisfied with materialist introspectionism as a way out of the dilemma. In section 3, “Constitutivism”, I outline two constitutivist alternatives to materialist introspectionism. In section 4, “A Neo-Expressivist View”, I offer my neo-expressivist view (defended in Bar-On, Speaking my mind: Expression and self-knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004), according to which the distinctive status of mental self-ascriptions is to be explained by appeal to the expressive character of acts of issuing them (in speech or in thought). This view, I argue, allows us to stay clear of eliminativism without committing to Cartesian substance dualism, thereby offering a viable way of slipping between the horns of Rorty’s dilemma.
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Notes
As I shall use the term, avowals can be made in speech or in thought. I can say or think in the distinctive first-person way “I am sick and tired of this mess”.
I here borrow a phrase from Wright (1995).
Rorty (1970a) focuses on absolute incorrigibility, since he thinks that infallibility and indubitability (as well as privacy) are not feasible candidates for marks of the mental.
I will return to Self-Intimation later on. As will become clear, I’m using Rorty’s dilemma as a foil for making vivid a certain explanatory challenge: to offer a genuine explanation of so-called first-person authority, while staying clear of Cartesian dualism, consistently with materialist ontology.
See Davidson (1984), where the phrase “first-person authority” is apparently first coined.
I discuss other examples of sincere but false avowals of sensations in (2004), pp. 329–335, 394–396. I thus disagree with Wright that avowals of sensations (‘phenomenal’ avowals) differ from attitudinal avowals in being ‘strongly authoritative’ (see Wright 1998, p. 14).
The closely related (but still separate) ethical noncognitivist claim is that ethical sentences never express cognitive, truth-evaluable beliefs or judgments.
Just as one can issue a genuine self-report using the first-person “I” (as in saying or thinking “I’m depressed”, based on what your therapist has convinced you of), one can express a present mental state using a self-ascription that doesn’t use “I” (as when a parent says to a child: “Daddy would like you to eat now”).
(Wright 1998, p. 41). The discussion here follows closely my discussion in (Bar-On 2004, pp. 347–350, 410–412). For other discussions of the default view, see Boghossian (1989), McDowell (1998), Fricker (1998), Bilgrami (1998), and Moran (2001). Zimmerman (2006) describes it as ‘anti-realist constitutivism’ and contrasts it with Shomeaker’s ‘realist constitutivism’.
Shoemaker (1996) suggests that self-belief is part of the ‘functional profile’ of (at least some) mental states. This functionalist characterization is closer to the constitutivism that Shoemaker prefers over the more causal (even if lawlike) generalization that, in creatures like us, “one’s being in a certain mental state produces in one … the belief that one is in that mental state” (225).
In response to the objection that the constitutivist strategy is too restrictive, Bilgrami (2006) advocates admitting from the start that Self-Intimation fails in many cases of putative mentality (e.g., higher animals and infants), but treating these as cases in which the relevant subject simply fails to be in a genuinely mental (=Mental) state. (For a brief discussion of Bilgrami’s strategy, see Bar-On (2007); a proper treatment will have to await another occasion.) It’s not clear how this strategy will fare any better in connection with Rorty’s dilemma. Rorty himself also separates a subcategory of the properly mental states within the broader category of the psychological; see his (1970a). However, his category of the mental covers many types of states that Bilgrami and other constitutivists would exclude from their preferred Mental states.
To clarify, I will not be concerned to deny that there’s a species of first-person authority associated with a certain subset of our avowals that is best captured by a constitutivist account. However, such an account will leave the broader phenomenon untouched, and it will remain to be seen whether a materialist could accommodate it.
Compare Wright (1988), p. 30. An anonymous referee has pointed out that E. Tugendhat proposes a combination of epistemic asymmetry and semantic continuity in Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (English translation: Cambridge, Mass/London: MIT Press, 1986).
There is a "thin" sense in which I do identify myself as the subject of the ascription. It may be useful here to distinguish between the referential notion of identifying (a semantic notion) and the recognitional notion of identifying (an epistemic notion). Compare Evans (1982), p. 218.
Evans (1982), pp. 220, 222.
I am using the phrase “intentional content” to cover both intentional object (e.g. “I’m afraid of the dog”) and propositional content (e.g. “I’m hoping that it won’t rain today”).
I say this to rule out general inductive evidence I may have for thinking that I am in some mental state or other. (Thanks to Sydney Shoemaker, Jim Pryor, and Ram Neta.).
When ascribing mental states to others, I do typically have such independent reasons. Noticing that you’re scared of something, I may need to figure out what it is you are scared of, and conjecture that it’s the dog. But I can sensibly wonder whether it is the cat instead, even as I continue to be convinced you’re scared of something. (Under special circumstances, I may also wonder what I am scared of—but not, I’d argue, when I’m simply avowing being scared of x.).
The immunity to error through misidentification of proprioceptive reports has to do with our possessing special mechanisms for obtaining information concerning our own bodies. See Evans (1982), Chap. 7.
In (2004), Chap. 6, I motivate neo-expressivism first by considering thought avowals, such as “I am thinking that there’s water in the glass”, understood as a self-ascription of a presently entertained thought. I argue that their self-verifying character (see Burge 1988) is to be explained by the fact that the avower is articulating the very content she assigns to her thought. I then offer a neo-expressivist construal of this idea and extend it to the assignment of content to other mental states, as well as to the mental state component.
Rosalind Hursthouse (1991) provides examples of expressive acts precisely to undermine the received dogma that only behavior backed up by a Davidsonian belief-desire pair can be regarded as intentional. See also Green (2007). The key point is that just because avowals have semantically articulate, self-ascriptive products they need not have belief-desire pairs as their reasons.
See Sellars (1969), pp. 506–527, where he also mentions expressing in the causal sense, which I here set aside.
Some gestures and other non-verbal expressions are governed by socio-cultural conventions, but the conventions do not assign semantic content; instead they set up a (‘pragmatic’) connection between making the gesture (e.g., tipping one’s hat) and being in the relevant state, or having the relevant attitude, sentiment, etc. (e.g. feeling respect). On the other hand, an animal’s alarm call may be thought to have semantic content—representing, e.g., threat from above. Still, unlike an avowal, it cannot be plausibly taken to express in the semantic sense a proposition about the relevant mental state of the animal issuing the call.
Such continuities can be exploited in trying to understand how so-called nonnatural meaning could arise in a world where natural meaning is to be found. (See Bar-On and Green, Expression, communication, and meaning (in progress)).
For more on this, see Bar-On (2004), pp. 410ff.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Matthew Boyle and Ted Parent, as well as two anonymous referees, for helpful comments on earlier drafts and to Ted Parent for much-appreciated editorial work. Earlier incarnations of the paper were presented at the “First-Person Authority” conference in Duisburg, Germany (Sept 2007), the Auburn University Colloquium (Oct 2007), and the “Self-Knowledge and the Self” conference in London, England (May 2008); I thank the audiences at these talks for helpful discussions. I have also benefited from written and oral exchanges with Quassim Cassam, Eric Marcus, Ram Neta, Jim Pryor, Sidney Shoemaker, and Keith Simmons.
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Bar-On, D. First-Person Authority: Dualism, Constitutivism, and Neo-Expressivism. Erkenn 71, 53–71 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9173-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9173-y