Descartes discarded? Introspective self-awareness and the problems of transparency and compositionality

Abstract

What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Various proposed analyses of direct and indirect quotation are discussed and tested regarding their applicability to thought. It is concluded that, on the assumption of compositionality, the inner self is only insofar accessible to awareness as it has an accessible phonological (or otherwise subsymbolic) structure, as apparently only inner speech does.

Introduction

“I am aware that I exist; I ask who is that I of which I am aware”.¹ When René Descartes poses this question right after his seminal cogito argument of the Second Meditation, he raises the issue of self-awareness. He does not question the existence of such a self. The existence of the self, rather, is asserted in advance. His question is also not one about the epistemic status of the process of self-awareness: Is it knowledge that we have or not? The Latin original indicates that Descartes, indeed, takes it to be knowledge.² No, what Descartes asks is: What has the self to be like such that reflexive awareness of it is possible? It is thus presupposed that the essential property of the self is an epistemic property, viz. being the object of reflexive awareness.

Descartes’s own answer is twofold. The negative part consists in the claim that the object of self-awareness in the intended sense is not the body. The positive part is rather indirect: “that which is doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing, refusing, imagining, and experiencing.”³ Descartes, so we may justly read, identifies the object of self-awareness with the subject of mental states and he thereby individuates the self as the unity that carries mental contents. This would make self-awareness a case of introspective self-awareness or awareness of an inner self.

The idea of an inner self contrasts with the idea of a bodily self. The latter can be regarded as the object of perceptual or doxastic attitudes turned towards one’s own body. These make up the so-called body image. The bodily self can also be regarded as given by a body schema: a collection of motor programs or habits that enable and constrain movement and the maintenance of posture (Gallagher, 2005). It is yet an open question whether and to which extent body image and body schema are intertwined. Experiments known as the rubber hand illusion and the out-of-body illusion induce an illusionary body schema – either a mislocation or a partial or global misidentification of one’s own body – on the basis of visual and tactile stimulation alone (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998, Lenggenhager et al., 2007). This indicates that body image and body schema may in fact be more closely related to each other than the conceptual differentiation suggests.

An essentially diachronic view to be distinguished from the notions of the inner and the bodily self is the proposal of a narrative self. It has been suggested to conceive of it is as an abstraction from an autobiographical narrative process that brings together hitherto only minimally coherent pieces of behavior “enhanced by an illusion of greater unity” (Dennett, 1992, see also Ricoeur, 1992).

The present paper takes up Descartes’s original question regarding the nature of the object of introspective self-awareness and asks whether Descartes’s idea of an inner self as a unitary carrier of mental contents can be upheld or whether it has to be discarded. In the latter case the self would very likely reduce to nothing but the bodily self or would have to be replaced by the quasi fictional idea of a narrative self. I would like to stress that metaphysical questions regarding the legacy of a res cogitans as a substance ontologically independent from the physical world are important in their own right, but will not be of concern to us here. The idea that a carrier of mental contents be the object of self-awareness does per se not contradict physicalism, as the various contemporary naturalistic accounts of mental content seem to show (see Greenberg, 2005, for review).

Instead, we will discuss Descartes’s legacy by invoking two principles that have been moving ever closer into the center of the debate in the philosophy of mind over the past two decades: the principle of the phenomenal transparency of experience and the principle of the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. Experience is said to be phenomenally transparent just in case having an experience of certain objects, events or situations is for the subject just as if the objects, events, or situations were present (see the following section for elaboration). By saying that a conceptual representation is semantically compositional we mean that the content of a complex concept is a structure-dependent function solely of the contents of the parts of the concept (see below).

The two principles cover two aspects – the conceptual and the phenomenal – that are somewhat heterogeneously distributed over the class of mental states. There are mental states like beliefs, desires, recollections, or expectations that are often regarded as conceptual – these will be called thoughts in the course of the paper. There are mental states like perceptions, hallucinations, and proprioceptions that are widely regarded as phenomenal – they will subsequently be discussed under the label of experience. There may also be mental states that have both a conceptual and a phenomenal aspect: many emotions are eventual candidates here. One may even hold that seemingly phenomenal states after some scrutiny reduce to conceptual states.

Even though the transparency of experience and the compositionality of conceptual content regard two different aspects in the class of mental states, they, from a more abstract point of view, are somewhat akin because they both deny any particular role that access to the intrinsic properties of the vehicles of mental content might have in the determination of content. As we will see later on, this is the main reason why the idea of introspective self-awareness is so difficult to accommodate for if the two principles hold.

Given the main mutually non-exclusive, but probably exhaustive dichotomy in the class of mental states – experiences with phenomenal qualities on the one hand and thoughts with a conceptual structure on the other hand – there are altogether three ways to account for introspective self-awareness: (i) It can be construed as a phenomenon completely in the domain of experience, such that the introspective and the introspected states are experiences. For that case will we show that introspective self-awareness is empty if experience is phenomenally transparent. (ii) Introspective self-awareness can be analyzed fully in the domain of thought. In that case we will argue that introspective self-awareness is best conceived of as a mental analogue of direct quotation. Provided that thought is compositional, we will then show that the inner self must have a cognitively accessible subsymbolic structure which is very likely akin to the phonological structure of natural language. Thus mental states would have to be linguistically structured thoughts in order to be introspected. The inner self would reduce to a stream of inner speech. (iii) Introspective self-awareness is a hybrid phenomenon crossing the domains of thought and experience: it would thus either be a non-conceptual experience directed towards a non-phenomenal thought or a non-phenomenal thought representing a non-conceptual experience. Since this is a rather hypothetical option and to my knowledge nobody has ever tried to analyze introspective self-awareness this way, I will spare a discussion of this option due to space limits. The paper concludes with the conditional claim that if experience is phenomenally transparent and thought is semantically compositional, then introspective self-awareness is either empty or reduces to a representation of inner speech.

Although I will focus more on an explication than on a detailed justification of the conjunctive antecedent of the conditional in this paper, I expect that only few philosophers will be ready to reject the if-clause of the conditional tout court. Whereas compositionality is almost unanimously accepted as a constraint on thought, the situation with regard to the phenomenal transparency of experience, I concede, is more complex. Here the main question is whether perception and eventually other experiential states are regarded as having conceptual or non-conceptual content. If experiences were construed as conceptual (see, e.g., McDowell, 1996), they would count as instances of thought in the sense of this paper. The compositionality conjunct of the antecedent would apply and the truth of the conditional would make its consequent unavoidable even if one were to deny the phenomenal transparency of experience. Only for non-conceptualist views of experience the transparency conjunct is essential to establish the consequent. Note, however, that most non-conceptualists, prominently Dretske, 2003a, Dretske, 2003b), do endorse the transparency thesis or related claims (e.g., direct realism). So even if the main claim of this paper is limited to a conditional, the foregoing remarks illustrate that logical space leaves remarkably little room to avoid the antecedent of the conditional and hence its consequent.