First-Person Contents

Brian Rotman argues that (one) “mind” and (one) “god” are only conceivable, literally, because of (alphabetic) literacy, which allowed us to designate each of these ghosts as an incorporeal, speaker-independent “I” (or, in the case of infinity, a notional agent that goes on counting forever). I argue that to have a mind is to have the capacity to feel. No one can be sure which organisms feel, hence have minds, but it seems likely that one-celled organisms and plants do not, (...) whereas animals do. So minds originated before humans and before language --hence, a fortiori, before writing, whether alphabetic or ideographic. (shrink)

Doing justice to quantum mechanics calls for a deeper examination of the relations between our experience, its objects, and its subjects than either third-person interpretations or the first-person singular interpretation of the QBist permit. The metaphysical space opened by Bohr's employment of the "Kantian wedge" between the objective world, about which we can communicate, and the world "in itself" allows quantum mechanics to unfold its metaphysical potential. This in turn makes it possible to go a long way towards bridging the (...) epistemological gap between the empirical and transcendental conceptions of reality. (shrink)

This is a grant proposal written as a post-doctoral application for MQRF at Macquarie University in 2009. As I did so much research for it, I have plans to spin it into an article.

The goal of a partial belief is to be accurate, or close to the truth. By appealing to this norm, I seek norms for partial beliefs in self-locating and non-self-locating propositions. My aim is to find norms that are analogous to the Bayesian norms, which, I argue, only apply unproblematically to partial beliefs in non-self-locating propositions. I argue that the goal of a set of partial beliefs is to minimize the expected inaccuracy of those beliefs. However, in the self-locating framework, (...) there are two equally legitimate definitions of expected inaccuracy. And, while each gives rise to the same synchronic norm for partial beliefs, they give rise to different, inconsistent diachronic norms. I conclude that both norms are rationally permissible. En passant, I note that this entails that both Halfer and Thirder solutions to the well-known Sleeping Beauty puzzle are rationally permissible. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new explanation for the paradoxes related to anthropic reasoning. Solutions to the Sleeping Beauty Problem and the Doomsday argument are discussed in detail. The main argument can be summarized as follows: -/- Our thoughts, reasonings and narratives inherently comes from a certain perspective. With each perspective there is a center, or using the term broadly, a self. The natural first-person perspective is most primitive. However we can also think and express from others’ perspectives with a theory (...) of mind. A perspective’s center could be unrelated to the topic of discussion so its de se thoughts need not to be considered, e.g. the perspective of an outside observer. Let’s call these the third-person perspective. First-person reasoning allows primitive self identification as I am inherently unique as the center of the perspective. Whereas from third-person perspective I am not fundamentally special comparing to others so a reference class of observers including me can be defined. It is my contention that reasonings from different perspectives should not mix. Otherwise it could lead to paradoxes even independent of anthropic reasoning. The paradoxes surrounding anthropic reasoning are caused by the aforementioned perspective mix. Regarding the sleeping beauty problem the correct answer should be double halving. Lewisian halving and thirding uses unique reasonings from both first and third-person perspectives. Indexical probabilities such as “the probability that this is the first awakening” or “the probability of me being one of the first 100 billion human beings” also mixes first- and third-person reasonings. Therefore invalid. Readers against perspectivism may disagree with point 1 and suggest we could reason in objective terms without the limit of perspectives. My argument is compatible with this belief. Objective reasoning would be analytically identical to the third-person perspective. My argument would become that objective reasoning and perspective reasonings should not mix. In the following I would continue to use “third-person perspective” but readers can switch that to “objective reasoning” if they wish so. (shrink)

Human beings who have mastered a natural language are self-conscious creatures: they can think, and indeed speak, about themselves in the first person. This dissertation is about the significance of this capacity: what it is and what difference it makes to our minds. My thesis is that the capacity for self-consciousness is essential to rationality, the thing that sets the minds of rational creatures apart from those of mere brutes. This, I argue, is what Kant was getting at in a (...) famous passage of his Critique of Pure Reason, when he claimed that a representation which could not be “accompanied with the ‘I think’” would be “nothing to me” as a thinking being. I call this claim the Kantian thesis. My dissertation seeks to explain and defend the Kantian thesis, to show how it entails that the advent of self-consciousness brings with it a new kind of mind, and to sketch the implications of this point for a philosophy of mind that seeks to understand the minds of rational creatures. This involves, on the one hand, an investigation of the kinds of capacities that characterize a rational creature, and, on the other hand, an argument connecting reason with self-consciousness. I show that a rational creature, in the interesting sense, is one capable of conceptual representation, and I argue that (1) to represent conceptually is to represent in a way that decouples information from any particular context or purpose, (2) this special form of representation is possible only in a creature that can reflect explicitly on grounds for judging a proposition true, and (3) to have this capacity to reflect explicitly on grounds is necessarily to have the crux of self- consciousness. If this is right, then the representations of a rational creature must differ from those of a nonrational creature not merely in complexity but in kind. The dissertation sketches the implications of this point for various forms of naturalism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind, for debates about how to explain “first person authority,” and for our understanding of the sort of failure of self-consciousness involved in self-deception. (shrink)

James Cargile ABSTRACT: Many languages have a first person singular subject pronoun. Fewer also have a first person singular object pronoun. The term ‘I’ is commonly used to refer to the person using the term. It has a variety of other uses. A normal person is able to refer...

One of the most difficult problems in the foundations of physics is what gives rise to the arrow of time. Since the fundamental dynamical laws of physics are (essentially) symmetric in time, the explanation for time's arrow must come from elsewhere. A promising explanation introduces a special cosmological initial condition, now called the Past Hypothesis: the universe started in a low-entropy state. Unfortunately, in a universe where there are many copies of us (in the distant ''past'' or the distant ''future''), (...) the Past Hypothesis is not enough; we also need to postulate self-locating (de se) probabilities. However, I show that we can similarly use self-locating probabilities to strengthen its rival---the Fluctuation Hypothesis, leading to in-principle empirical underdetermination and radical epistemological skepticism. The underdetermination is robust in the sense that it is not resolved by the usual appeal to 'empirical coherence' or 'simplicity.' That is a serious problem for the vision of providing a completely scientific explanation of time's arrow. (shrink)

Recent debates on phenomenal consciousness have shown renewed interest for the idea that experience generally includes an experience of the self – a self-experience – whatever else it may present the self with. When a subject has an ordinary experience (as of a bouncing red ball, for example), the thought goes, she is not just phenomenally aware of the world as being presented in a certain way (a bouncy, reddish, roundish way in this case); she is also phenomenally aware of (...) the fact that it is presented to her. This supposed phenomenal dimension has been variously called “mineness”, “for-me-ness”, “pre-reflective self-awareness” and “subjective character”, among others. This view, associated with historical figures such as William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, is attracting a new surge of attention at the crossroads of phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and the philosophy of cognitive science, but also intense controversy. This book explores some of the questions running through the ongoing debate on the putative subjective dimension of experience: Does it exist?, the existence question; What is it?, the essence question; What is it for?, the function question; and What else does it explain?, the explanation question. The volume also surveys various domains of human experience, both normal and pathological, where a “sense of self” might be at play, including agency, bodily awareness, introspection, memory, emotions and values, and offers insights into the possible relations between the notions of subjective awareness involved. The first part of the book is devoted to more sceptical or deflationary views about self-experience, and the second, to more robust ones. (shrink)

In language comprehension, 'you' is a de se pronoun, which means that its interpretation is guided by a simple de se rule ('you' = self-ascription by addressee), while the interpretation of other pronouns requires more complicated reasoning. This predicts that 'you' should be easier to process than 'I' or 'he', especially for children. But not all occurrences of 'you' can be correctly interpreted via self-ascription. We consider two cases where 'you' does not indicate self-ascription: interpretation as an eavesdropper and 'you' (...) in direct speech. In our experiment, we compare children’s interpretation of the pronouns 'I', 'you' and 'he', in both direct and indirect reported speech, and in both addressee and eavesdropping situations. We tested 71 five-year-olds, 63 nine-year-olds, and 52 adults in a referent-selection task and found a clear de se effect for children when directly addressed: they performed better with 'you' than with 'I'/'he' in indirect speech, but worse with 'you' than with 'I'/'he' in direct speech. We explain the latter finding in terms of the attraction of the de se interpretation strategy, which leads addressees to automatically self-ascribe 'you' even in a direct speech report. (shrink)

The objective of the current paper is to provide a critical analysis of Dretske's defense of the naturalistic version of the privileged accessibility thesis. Dretske construed that the justificatory condition of privileged accessibility neither relies on the appeal to perspectival ontology of phenomenal subjectivity nor on the functionalistic notion of accessibility. He has reformulated introspection (which justifies the non-inferentiality of the knowledge of one's own mental facts in an internalist view) as a displaced perception for the defense of naturalistic privileged (...) accessibility. Both internalist and externalist have been approved the plausibility of first-person authority argument through privileged accessibility; however, their disagreement lies on the justificatory condition of privileged accessibility. Internalist hold the view that the justificatory warrant for privileged accessibility is grounded on phenomenal subjectivity. In contrast to the internalist view, externalists uphold the view that the justificatory condition for privileged accessibility lies outside the domain of phenomenal subjectivity. As a proponent of naturalistic content externalism, Dretske defends the view that subject's privileged accessibility is not due to having access to the particular representational state (hence, they have the privilege of getting sensory representational information) and the awareness of mental fact rather the awareness of the whole representational mechanism. Having the knowledge of a particular representational state through privileged access is not the sufficient condition for the accuracy of knowledge about one’s own mental facts. The justificatory warrant lies external to the subject. Even though Dretske’s naturalistic representation is not plausible enough while dealing with the reduction of phenomenal qualities of experience, however, provides a new roadmap to compatibilists for the defense of privileged accessibility and has a major impact on transparency theorists. (shrink)

This chapter provides a critical overview of various influential accounts of de se attitudes including those proposed by Frege, Lewis and Perry. It also addresses the charge that there is nothing distinctive about de se attitudes. The second half outlines a widely accepted and influential model of communication and various complications that arise in applying this model to the communication of de se thoughts. The final section provides an overview of the papers in this volume.

Medical well-regarded policy recommendations for patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) are almost exclusively relied on behavioural examination and evaluation of higher-order cognition, and largely disregard the patients’ self. This is so because practically establishing the presence of self-awareness or Selfhood is even more challenging than evaluating the presence of consciousness. At the same time, establishing the potential (actual physical possibility) of Selfhood in DoC patients is crucialy important from clinical, ethical, and moral standpoints because Selfhood is the most central (...) and private evidence of being an independent and free agent that unites intention, embodiment, executive functions, attention, general intelligence, emotions and other components within the intra-subjective frame (first-person givenness). The importance of Selfhood is supported further by the observation that rebooting of self-awareness is the first step to recovery after brain damage. It seems that complex experiential Selfhood can be plausibly conceptualized within the Operational Architectonics (OA) of brain-mind functioning and reliably measured by quantitative electroencephalogram (qEEG) operational synchrony. (shrink)

While there is still a limited understanding of the Selfhood phenomenon, an emerging consensus is that the experiential Selfhood refers to a sense of the undergoing experience in its implicit first-person mode of givenness that is immediately and tacitly given as “mine”. It is also evident that there are phenomenological disruptions within self-consciousness ranging from normal everyday short-lived dissociative episodes to pathological, intense and prolonged forms of dissociative experience classified as depersonalization disorder (DD). In the present study we explored the (...) neurophenomenology of Selfhood (using the recently introduced neurophysiological three-dimensional construct model of experiential Selfhood, Fingelkurts et al., 2020) in a newly diagnosed and untreated 29-year-old female who suffers from DD. According to the triad model of Selfhood, three major components of Selfhood (phenomenal first-person agency – “Self”, embodiment – “Me”, and reflection/narration – “I”) are related to three operational modules (OMs) of the self-referential brain network (reliably estimated by electroencephalogram operational synchrony analysis). We have found that subject with DD exhibited a strong enhancement of functional integrity of the brain Self-module, a moderate decrease in the functional integrity of Me-module, and a pronounced decrease in the functional integrity of I-module, – all of which were associated with severity of specific DD symptoms. (shrink)

This study investigates eight case reports of spontaneously emerging, brief episodes of vivid altered states of Selfhood (ASoSs) that occurred during mental exercise in six long-term meditators by using a neurophenomenological electroencephalography (EEG) approach. In agreement with the neurophenomenological methodology, first-person reports were used to identify such spontaneous ASoSs and to guide the neural analysis, which involved the estimation of three operational modules of the brain self-referential network (measured by EEG operational synchrony). The result of such analysis demonstrated that the (...) documented ASoSs had unique neurophenomenological profiles, where several aspects or components of Selfhood (measured neurophysiologically and phenomenologically) are affected and expressed differently, but still in agreement with the neurophysiological three-dimensional construct model of the complex experiential Selfhood proposed in our earlier work (Fingelkurts et al. in Conscious Cogn, 2020). (shrink)

Among the virtues of relationist approaches to Frege’s puzzle is that they put us in a position to outline structural features of the puzzle that were only implicit in earlier work. In particular, they allow us to frame questions about the relation between the explanatory roles of sense and sameness of sense. In this paper, I distinguish a number of positions about that relation which have not been clearly distinguished. This has a few pay-offs. It allows us to shed light (...) on recent controversies about the ‘essential indexical’, and it also allows us to see what’s at stake between relationists and their opponents. When we see what’s at stake, we can see that we have reason to adopt an account of cognitive significance that incorporates elements of both relationist and Fregean approaches. (shrink)

Is the fact that our universe contains fine-tuned life evidence that we live in a multiverse? Ian Hacking and Roger White influentially argue that it is not. We approach this question through a systematic framework for self-locating epistemology. As it turns out, leading approaches to self-locating evidence agree that the fact that our own universe contains fine-tuned life indeed confirms the existence of a multiverse. This convergence is no accident: we present two theorems showing that, in this setting, any updating (...) rule that satisfies a few reasonable conditions will have the same feature. The conclusion that fine-tuned life provides evidence for a multiverse is hard to escape. (shrink)

Many authors claim that being conscious constitutively involves being self-conscious, or conscious of oneself. This claim appears to be threatened by reports of `selfless' episodes, or conscious episodes lacking self-consciousness, recently described in a number of pathological and nonpathological conditions. However, the credibility of these reports has in turn been challenged on the following grounds: remembering and reporting a past conscious episode as an episode that one went through is only possible if one was conscious of oneself while undergoing it. (...) Call this the Memory Challenge. This paper argues that the Memory Challenge fails to undermine the credibility to reports of selfless episodes, because it rests on problematic assumptions about episodic memory. The paper further argues that we should distinguish between several kinds of self-representation that may be involved in the process of episodic remembering, and that once we do so, it is no longer mysterious how one could accurately remember and report a selfless episode as an episode that one went through. Thus, we should take reports of this kind seriously, and view them as credible counter-examples to the claim that consciousness constitutively involves self-consciousness. (shrink)

According to some philosophers, the mind enjoys a form of presence to itself. That is to say, in addition to being aware of whatever objects it is aware of, it is also (co-presently) aware of itself. This paper explores the proposal that we should think about this kind of experiential-presence in terms of a form of non-intentional awareness. Various candidates for the relevant form of awareness, as constituting supposed non-intentional experiential-presence, are considered and are shown to encounter significant problems. The (...) fact that a plausible account of the non-intentional awareness which experience putatively has of itself cannot be framed with reference to such forms of awareness is grounds for scepticism concerning the cogency of non-intentional experiential presence. (shrink)

Tradition has it that first-person thought is somehow special. It is also commonplace to maintain that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. Following Annalisa Coliva and, more recently, Santiago Echeverri, I take the specialness claim to be the claim that thinking a first-person thought comes with a certain guarantee of its pattern of reference. Echeverri maintains that such a guarantee is explained by a (...) fairly flatfooted interpretation of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue, however, that the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule are fulfilled only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the rule. That gloss is unpacked in terms of the subject’s ability to be acquainted with the phenomenal character of their thoughts. (shrink)

What is the relationship between Frege’s puzzle and the puzzle of the de se? An increasingly influential view claims that the de se puzzle is merely an instance of Frege’s puzzle and that the idea that de se attitudes pose a distinctive theoretical challenge rests on a myth. Here we argue that this view is misguided. There are important differences between the two puzzles. First, unlike Frege puzzle cases, de se puzzle cases involve unshareable Fregean senses. Second, unlike Frege puzzle (...) cases, de se puzzle cases cannot be resolved by objective information alone. Further, there seem to be pure cases of each puzzle: instances of the de se puzzle which do not have a Fregean structure, and instances of Frege’s puzzle, which do not involve de se attitudes. We conclude that the two puzzles are fundamentally different and that the traditional theory of attitudes needs to be amended. (shrink)

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about Moore-paradoxical assertions or beliefs. This article considers a few ways the data surrounding Moore's paradox might be marshaled to support rational (...) requirements to know one's beliefs, and finds that none succeed. (shrink)

For years, Robert B. Brandom has been working on a book on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Earlier versions of its chapters were available for scrutiny at Brandom’s website. But the book itself is...

A traditional view holds that the self-concept is essentially indexical. In a highly influential article, Ruth Millikan famously held that the self-concept should be understood as a Millian name with a sui generis functional role. This article presents a novel explanatory argument against the Millian view and in favor of the indexical view. The argument starts from a characterization of the self-concept as a device of information integration. It then shows that the indexical view yields a better explanation of the (...) integration function than the Millian view. The resulting account can rebut Millikan’s objections and it has broader implications for the debate on the essential indexical. (shrink)

In recent work, Sarah Robins, Gerardo Viera and Steven James have provided some insightful objections to the ideas offered in my book, Memory: A Self-Referential Account. In this paper, I put forward some responses to those objections. Robins challenges the idea that being a memory could be a matter of having a particular functional role within the subject’s cognitive economy. Viera challenges the idea that the content of a memory could explain some of its phenomenological properties. And James challenges the (...) idea that our memories could be immune to error through misidentification. All three commentators are targeting, not tangential aspects of, but fundamental assumptions in the account of memory proposed in the book. For that reason, modifying some of those assumptions would amount to proposing a whole different account of memory. I hope to show, however, that such a radical move is not necessary. For there are possible responses to the objections from all three commentators which are available within the constraints of the account proposed in the book. (shrink)

Davidson has attempted to offer his own solution to the problem of self-knowledge, but there has been no consensus between his commentators on what this solution is. Many have claimed that Davidson’s account stems from his remarks on disquotational specifications of self-ascriptions of meaning and mental content, the account which I will call the “Disquotational Explanation”. It has also been claimed that Davidson’s account rather rests on his version of content externalism, which I will call the “Externalist Explanation”. I will (...) argue that not only are these explanations of self-knowledge implausible, but Davidson himself has already rejected them. Thus, neither can be attributed to Davidson as his suggested account of self-knowledge. I will then introduce and support what I take to be Davidson’s official and independent account of self-knowledge, that is, his “Transcendental Explanation”. I will defend this view against certain potential objections and finally against the objections made by William Child. (shrink)

According to the Self-Location Thesis, certain types of visual experiences have self-locating and so first-person, spatial contents. Such self-locating contents are typically specified in relational egocentric terms. So understood, visual experiences provide support for the claim that there is a kind of self-consciousness found in experiential states. This paper critically examines the Self-Location Thesis with respect to dynamic-reflexive visual experiences, which involve the movement of an object toward the location of the perceiving subject. The main aim of this paper is (...) to offer an alternative interpretation of these cases which resists attributing them self-locating content, arguing for a replacement of the de se component with a non-conceptual equivalent of the indexical ‘here’. In its final section, the paper also considers an extension of the h-replacement account to cases of visual kinesthesis. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a heated debate on how to accommodate John Perry's observations about the essentiality of indexicality into our models of linguistic communication. This article is an attempt at providing a new perspective on this issue. I argue that we should jettison two elements taken for granted by the views I present, and criticize, here: no centring, uncentring, recentring and multicentring. These elements are: (1) taking the asserted content to be a part of the communication process (...) and (2) assumptions that the indexical belief of the speaker, when successfully communicated, must be acquired by the hearer as indexical, too. The theory of indexical communication that I propose here is laid out in the mental files framework and devoid of the two aforementioned elements. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate which of the main conditions proposed in the moral responsibility literature are the ones that spell trouble for the idea that Artificial Intelligence Systems could ever be full-fledged responsible agents. After arguing that the standard construals of the control and epistemic conditions don’t impose any in-principle barrier to AISs being responsible agents, I identify the requirement that responsible agents must be aware of their own actions as the main locus of resistance to attribute that kind (...) of agency to AISs. This is because this type of awareness is thought to involve first-person or de se representations, which, in turn, are usually assumed to involve some form of consciousness. I clarify what this widespread assumption involves and conclude that the possibility of AISs’ moral responsibility hinges on what the correct theory of de se representations ultimately turns out to be. (shrink)

De se attitudes seem to play a special role in action and cognition. This raises a challenge to the traditional way in which mental attitudes have been understood. In this chapter, we review the case for thinking that de se attitudes require special theoretical treatment and discuss various ways in which the traditional theory can be modified to accommodate de se attitudes.

Recent philosophical developments on personal indexicals reveal a disagreement between those who defend and those who deny the existence of a distinctive class of second person thoughts. In this piece, I tackle this controversy by highlighting two crucial constraints based on paradigmatic felicitous singular uses of the second person pronoun. On the one hand, the Addressing Constraint is brought out by the awareness and action capabilities displayed in successfully addressing another. On the other hand, the Merging Constraint arises, among other (...) things, from the fact that ‘I’/‘you’-exchanges ground intersubjective disagreement. Once these constraints are fully in view, I go on to show that they pose a challenging dilemma for any account of the second person and that the chasm between friends and foes of the distinctness of second person thought is better seen as endorsements of one of the horns of the dilemma. In reaction to this, I outline a way of accommodating both constraints in terms of ‘perspectives’, i.e. ways of thinking of a reference that do not individuate a thought. On the recommended approach, the second person perspective is cognitively distinctive but does not itself signal the existence of a distinctive second person type of thought. By contrast, a single type of thought about selves expressible with personal indexicals—the self-thought type—can be shown to comprise the third, the second and, perhaps surprisingly, the first person perspective. Unlike other perspectival approaches, the here proposed analysis relies on an elucidation of perspectives in terms of specific information on which a thinker draws made available by a concept-individuating reference rule. (shrink)

Concept-individuating reference rules offer a well-known route for the explanation of immunity to error through misidentification in judgments involving first person or de se thought. However, the ‘outright’ version of this account—one that sanctions a one-to-one correspondence between the reference-fixing rule and immunity—cannot do justice to the unassailable ground-relativity of the target phenomenon. In this paper, I outline a version of the reference-rule account that circumvents this problem. I state a reference rule for the de se concept that makes space (...) for different non-reference-fixing ways of thinking or perspectives, yielding different grounds for judgment. The proposal and its ramifications, I argue, shed light on the variety of ways in which this kind of immunity has been proved to be present—and indeed absent—in de se thought. (shrink)

Donald Davidson famously offered an explanation of “first-person authority”. However, he described first-person authority differently across different works—sometimes referring to the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions of their current mental states, and sometimes referring to the direct self-knowledge that agents often have of said states. First, I show that a standard Davidsonian explanation of first-person authority can at best, and with some modification, explain the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions. I then develop two Davidsonian accounts of direct self-knowledge—one accounting for (...) its function and another accounting for its source—pushing back in the process against deflationary and quietist rejoinders to these projects. Finally, I relate my Davidsonian accounts of direct self-knowledge back to the modified Davidsonian account of the presumptive truth of agents’ self-ascriptions. (shrink)

Several authors have discussed and defended what is sometimes called the Asymmetry Thesis in social epistemology: that while reliance on testimony is essentially incontrovertible in epistemology, it is uniquely problematic for moral knowledge. This conclusion results, I argue, from considering the wrong sort of moral testimony: namely, ‘third-personal’ rather than ‘first-personal’ testimony. First-personal moral testimony is an inescapable part of the constitution of legitimate moral norms, and its role cannot be deflated as a form of mere information to be taken (...) up in private deliberation. The consequences of this argument for forms of hypothetical contractualism, in particular, are profound. (shrink)

Self-locating beliefs cause a problem for conditionalization. Miriam Schoenfield offers a solution: that on learning E, agents should update on the fact that they learned E. However, Schoenfield is not explicit about whether the fact that they learned E is self-locating. I will argue that if the fact that they learned E is self-locating then the original problem has not been addressed, and if the fact that they learned E is not self-locating then the theory generates implausible verdicts which Schoenfield (...) explicitly rejects. (shrink)

The epistemology of self-locating belief concerns itself with how rational agents ought to respond to certain kinds of indexical information. I argue that those who endorse the thesis of Time-Slice Rationality ought to endorse a particular view about the epistemology of self-locating belief, according to which ‘essentially indexical’ information is never evidentially relevant to non-indexical matters. I close by offering some independent motivations for endorsing Time-Slice Rationality in the context of the epistemology of self-locating belief.

In this paper, I deal with implicit indirect reports. First of all, I discuss implicit indirect reports involving the first person. Then, I prove that in some cases second person reports are implicit indirect reports involving a de se attribution. Next, I draw analogies with implicit indirect reports involving the third person. I establish some similarities at the level of free enrichment through which the explicature is obtained and I propose that the explicature is syntactically active, given that it sanctions (...) anaphora. (shrink)

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...) one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

Review of The First Person in Cognition and Morality by Béatrice Longuenesse, formulating how Freud’s genealogy of the moral imperative is compatible with Kant’s investigation of the justificatory structure of a priori cognition and moral reasoning.

There has been debate between those who maintain that indexical expressions are not essential and those who maintain that such indexicals cannot be dispensed with without an important loss of content. This version of the essentialist view holds that thoughts must also have indexical elements. Indexical thoughts appear to be in tension with the computational theory of mind. In this case we have the following inconsistent triad: De se thoughts are essential. De se thoughts are indexical, they have a character. (...) Computations can only take the syntactic type into account, they cannot take tokens into account. If is correct, then it seems we cannot make sense of a thought which uses a character such that its referent could vary from tokening to tokening. I argue that need not cause a problem, while maintaining the CTM. I claim that computations need not be sensitive to the features of a tokened symbol in the way that character demands. This job may be performed by a non‐modular part of the mind. Resolving the triad in this way provides a reason to accept that indexicals in thought are possible. (shrink)

Kant points to two forms of self-consciousness: the inner sense (empirical apperception) grounded in a sensory form of self-awareness and transcendental apperception. The aim of this paper is to show that a sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness, which contains a pre-reflective self-consciousness as its first level, is provided by the notion of transcendental apperception. The necessity for a pre-reflective self-consciousness has been pointed out in phenomenological literature. According to this account, every self-ascription of any property implies a more fundamental form (...) of self-consciousness, i.e., a kind of immediate familiarity with oneself. This pre-reflective self-consciousness is a non-relational and non-identificational form of self-consciousness and concerns an immediate acquaintance of the subject with itself. In the specific terms of transcendentalism every thought contains an implicit reference to a first-personal “givenness” or a sense of “mineness” that articulates a non-relational and non-identificational form of a pre-reflective model of self-consciousness. (shrink)

David Lewis argues that believing something is self‐ascribing a property rather than holding true a proposition. But what is self‐ascription? Is it some new mysterious primitive? Is Lewis saying that every belief you have is about you? Several recent authors have suggested that, in the light of these questions, Lewis's theory should be rejected, despite its enormous influence. But this neglects the fact that Lewis makes two relevant proposals about belief: one about belief de se , another about belief de (...) re . It is the second that prompts these questions but the first that is central to his theory. (shrink)

This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe as changes in one’s de (...) se beliefs. To solve this problem, the paper defends the possibility of overlapping people, and addresses a number of objections to this idea. (shrink)

Subjects have various ways of thinking about themselves. Here are three examples: a subject can think of herself under an appropriate description (the hiker), d.

This paper defends Lewis’ influential treatment of de se attitudes from recent criticism to the effect that a key explanatory notion—self-ascription—goes unexplained. It is shown that Lewis’ treatment can be reconstructed in a way which provides clear responses. This sheds light on the explanatory ambitions of those engaged in Lewis’ project.

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 (...) rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a reference-fixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. (shrink)