The present paper critically reconstructs Honneth’s recognition-theoretical conception of justice modelled on the formation of intact personal identity or self-realization. It looks into the status of using psychological evidence as a basis for a theory of justice, and whether or not such an approach of justice fails the publicity criterion.The claim is that although Honneth’s thesis is potentially susceptible to the charge of psychologization of injustice as Fraser alleges, the idea that recognition impacts on the formation or malformation (...) of personal identity should not be denied a critical role in a theory of justice. Doing so prevents a faceless or subject-less discourse of injustice.The paper also argues that recognitive justice founded on very specific moral-psychological assumptions passes the test of publicity. The challenge is how to establish the necessary conditions that enable victims of misrecognition to have a language and name their experience of suffering publicly. (shrink)

The artificial neural network is employed to study children’s psychological emotion recognition to fully reflect the psychological status of preschool children and promote the healthy growth of preschool children. Specifically, the ANN model is used to construct the human physiological signal measurement platform and emotion recognition platform to measure the human physiological signals in different psychological and emotional states. Finally, the parameter values are analyzed on the emotion recognition platform to identify the children’s psychological and emotional states (...) accurately. The experimental results demonstrate that the recognition ability of children aged 4–6 to recognize the three basic emotions of happiness, calm, and fear increases with age. Besides, there are significant age differences in children’s recognition of happiness, calm, and fear. In addition, the effect of 4-year-old children on the theory of mind tasks is less than that of 5- to 6-year-old children, which may be related to more complex cognitive processes. Preschool children are experiencing a stage of rapid emotional development. If children cannot be guided to reasonably identify and deal with emotions at this stage, their education level and social ability development will be significantly affected. Therefore, this study has significant reference value for preschool children’s emotional recognition and guidance and can promote children’s emotional processing and mental health. (shrink)

According to the author, psychology of religion should be the study of the personal experiences, tensions, conflicts and resolutions to conflict within a specific, clearly identified religion. The author opposes philosophical-psychological preconceptions which tend to eliminate the proper psychological reality of dynamic conflicts . With Freud, Evan-Pritchard and Needham, he affirms the historical dimension of civilizations and religions, and elaborates its consequences. He examines in this context work by Maslow on extrinsic and intrinsic religion and by Rokeach on mental-psychological (...) dogmatism. He stresses the largely preconscious motivations and processes that are at play in the personal interests and defense mechanisms operating in the various forms of belief and unbelief and in their changes. This preconscious reality is the psychological one par excellence and is the appropriate object for subtle psychological investigations. (shrink)

Nancy Fraser has challenged the view that issues of identity are more central to political and social reform than attention to economic disparities. Fraser proposes a status model of recognition that treats recognition as a question of justice, rather than as a question of self-realization. In addition to appealing to the deontological, she also draws on folk paradigms and addresses them in a manner that reflects a sympathy with pragmatism. This article highlights difficulties that Fraser faces by incorporating (...) the deontological in a model that has affinities to pragmatism. (shrink)

A number of well-known Hegel-inspired theorists have recently defended a distinctive type of social freedom that, while bearing some resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous description of positive freedom, takes its bearings from a theory of social recognition rather than a theory of moral self-determination. Berlin himself argued that recognition-based theories of freedom are really not about freedom at all but about solidarity, More strongly, he argued that recognition-based theories of freedom, like most accounts of solidarity, oppose what (...) Kant originally understood to be the essence of positive freedom, namely the setting of volitional ends in accordance with an individual’s exercise of his or her own reason, apart from social authority. In this chapter I argue that recognition might describe an essential social condition of positive freedom, or moral autonomy, as Kant and Berlin understand that term, but only with qualification: Only if recognition doesn’t imply a strong state of social solidarity, understood as a psychological state of identifying with, viz., feeling totally at home with and completely affirmed by, one’s society, and instead assumes only a weak form of democratic civic solidarity, can it function as a category of social freedom, and then only in the narrow sense of political freedom. To the degree that the different institutionalized forms of recognition in modern democracies compete with each other, social freedom will presuppose a second-order recognition of society’s affirmation of their freedom by those whose identities are invested in these forms, to wit: that such forms are or can be sufficiently harmonized with each other by means of judicious government policies and constitutional safeguards. Recognition that one is not overly dominated by a given social role or social expectation in living one’s life can enable one to become rationally reconciled to society and its primary recognition orders in a way that can be socially freedom-affirming. Detached in this way from any positive solidarity with society, recognition-based social freedom cum recognition of non-domination might also be conceived as a species of negative social freedom. I conclude that rational reconciliation remains at best an imperfectly achievable goal in modern societies marked by basic constitutional and institutional tensions. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical analysis of the notion of selfhood that underlies identity politics. It offers a unique theory of the self that combines previous scholarly work on recognition and the phenomenology of space. The politics of identity occupy the centre of a contested terrain. Marginalised and oppressed peoples continue to seek the transformation of our shared social world and our political institutions required for their lives to be liveable. Public criticism and academic treatments of identity politics often (...) take a disparaging view that treats it as subordinate to more general political questions about justice and the organisation of society and its institutions. This book argues that these polemics ignore the numerous ways in which all politics is concerned with matters of selfhood and identity. Through a rereading of Hegel's account of recognition as an ongoing and dynamic process that constitutes the self, it presents selves-and the categories of identity that qualify these selves-as fundamentally conditioned by the environments in which they appear before themselves and others. It also argues that we do the work of identity in public spaces-particularly digital spaces-and that these spaces shape what identities we can assume and what those identities mean. Contemporary social media technologies facilitate the production of particular forms of selfhood through the combined logics of the interface, the profile, and the post. The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Digital Spaces will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in a wide range of disciplines including political philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of technology, sociology, political theory, and critical theory. It will also appeal to anyone with an interest in contemporary identity politics, whether as a matter of study or lived experience. (shrink)

To advance the task of designing robots capable of performing collective tasks with humans, studies in human–robot interaction often turn to psychology, philosophy of mind and neuroscience for inspiration. In the same vein, this chapter explores how the notion of recognition and commitment can help confront some of the current problems in addressing robot-human interaction in joint tasks. First, we argue that joint actions require mutual recognition, which cannot be established without the attribution and maintenance of commitments. (...) Second, we argue that commitments require affective states such as social motivations or shared emotions. Finally, we conclude by assessing three possible proposals for how social robotics could implement an architecture of commitments by taking such an affective components into consideration. (shrink)

Recognition theorists have claimed that a culturally egalitarian societal environment is a crucial social basis of a sense of self-worth. In doing so they have often drawn on noncogntivist social-psychological theorizing. This paper argues that this theorizing does not support the recognition theorist's position. It is argued that attachment theory, together with recent empirical evidence, support a more limited vision of self-worth's social bases according to which associational ties, basic rights and liberties, and economic and educational opportunity are (...) what really matter. (shrink)

Intentionalism is a research program that seeks to explain facts about meaning and communication in psychological terms, with our capacity for intention recognition playing a starring role. My aim here is to recommend a methodological reorientation in this program. Instead of a focus on intuitive counterexamples to proposals about necessary-and-sufficient conditions, we should aim to investigate the psychological mechanisms whose activities and interactions explain our capacity to communicate. Taking this methodologi- cal reorientation to heart, I sketch a theory of (...) the cognitive architecture underlying language use that I have defended elsewhere. I then show how this theory can be used to give an account of non-communicative language use—a phenomenon that has long posed a challenge to intentionalism. (shrink)

This study reviews research about the recognition of one’s own face and discusses scientific techniques to investigate differences in brain activation when looking at familiar faces compared to unfamiliar ones. Our analysis highlights how people do not possess a perception of their own face that corresponds precisely to reality, and how the awareness of one’s face can also be modulated by means of the enfacement illusion. This illusion allows one to maintain a sense of self at the expense of (...) a precise discrimination of self-face. The internal dynamics of different brain processes, associated with the construction of bodily identity and the sense of self and capable of integrating signals from different sensory channels, particularly visual and tactile, create a mirror-mask effect. According to this effect, the self-face reflected by a mirror becomes a mask for the self, which has the features of the subject’s face, but nonetheless does not correspond perfectly to its characteristics. This poses interesting questions about the nature and construction of one’s self, as self-face reflections allow the mind to mediate between analogue and virtual reality, between past and future events, between memories and plans of action and, most importantly, between beliefs about our identities. (shrink)

The concept of recognition (Anerkennung in German) has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the „recognitive attitudes‟ of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More (...) exactly, it explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground (at least among the most intelligent animals currently known to exist), then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

Recently, following the social and subjective consequences of the neoliberal wave, there seems to be a renewed interest in work as occupying a central place in social and subjective life. For the first time in decades, both sociologists and critical theorists once more again regard work as a major constituent of the subject’s identity and thus as an appropriate object of analysis for those engaged in critique of the social pathologies. The aim of this article is to present a succinct (...) analysis of Axel Honneth’s thoughts on the concept of work and to propose an approach granting it a more substantial role in social theory. To this end, this article will embark upon a reappraisal of the importance of the material and psychological dimensions of the subject’s interactions in the world of work. It aims to demonstrate that the normative demands associated with these dimensions are, like the normative demands of recognition, immanent and universal. In other words, it will argue that the normative ideals related to individuals’ bodily and psychic life (in the workplace and beyond) are not necessarily utopian in the negative sense (abstract and unrealistic). If this is indeed the case, theorists could take these normative demands for emancipation as a guide to analyzing the sociological, political and moral implications of the transition from the ‘Fordist’ to the ‘post-Fordist’ organization of labor. (shrink)

Early Confucian “moral psychology” developed in the context of undoing reactive emotions in order to promote relationships of reciprocal recognition. Early Confucian texts diagnose the pervasiveness of reactive emotions under specific social conditions and respond with the ethical-psychological mandate to counter them in self-cultivation. Undoing negative affects is a basic element of becoming ethically noble, while the ignoble person is fixated on limited self-interested concerns and feelings of being unrecognized. Western ethical theory typically accepts equality and symmetry as (...) conditions of disentangling resentment; yet this task requires the asymmetrical recognition of others. Confucian ethics integrates a nuanced and realistic moral psychology with the normatively oriented project of self-cultivation necessary for dismantling complex negative emotions in promoting a condition of humane benevolence that is oriented toward others and achieved through self-cultivation. (shrink)

People recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races. The “contact” hypothesis suggests that this “other‐race effect” occurs as a result of the greater experience we have with own‐ versus other‐race faces. The computational mechanisms that may underlie different versions of the contact hypothesis were explored in this study. We replicated the other‐race effect with human participants and evaluated four classes of computational face recognition algorithms for the presence of an other‐race effect. Consistent with (...) the predictions of a developmental contact hypothesis, “experience‐based models” demonstrated an other‐race effect only when the representational system was developed through experience that warped the perceptual space in a way that was sensitive to the overall structure of the model's experience with faces of different races. When the model's representation relied on a feature set optimized to encode the information in the learned faces, experience‐based algorithms recognized minority‐race faces more accurately than majority‐race faces. The results suggest a developmental learning process that warps the perceptual space to enhance the encoding of distinctions relevant for own‐race faces. This feature space limits the quality of face representations for other‐race faces. (shrink)

Background: Clinical and experimental findings have suggested that insomnia is associated with altered emotion processing, such as facial emotion recognition and impairments in executive functions. However, the results still appear non-consensual and have recently been presented by a few number of studies. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to investigate whether patients with Insomnia disorder will present alterations in recognition of facial emotions and that such alterations will be related to Executive Functions and that Insomnia Disorder (...) patients will exhibit a lower Executive Functions performance when compared to normal controls individuals. Method: A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with insomnia disorder and 15 control participants took part in the present cross-sectional study. They completed questionnaires covering socio-demographic data, a sleep and mood evaluation, and a cognitive assessment. Moreover, they underwent a computerized Facial Emotional Recognition test, consisting of facial emotion labeling and facial emotion matching. Results: Individuals with insomnia presented a lower recognition of facial expressions of fear and sadness in comparison to control volunteers. Perceptual Organization Index was found to be statistically significant lower in the insomnia group compared to the control group. There was a statistically significant association between facial recognition emotional and cognitive processes of in executive functions performance, especially in processes related to the inhibitory control, planning capacity, problem solving and cognitive flexibility in insomnia group. Conclusions: Insomnia disorder impairs the facial emotion recognition of the fear and sadness. Insomniacs with impairment in the facial emotion recognition had impaired performance of executive functions. There is a negative impact on processes related to cognitive-emotional capacity than on processes related to social-emotional recognition. Keywords: insomnia, facial emotional recognition, sleep deprivation, cognition, executive functions. (shrink)

The present work aims at developing a scale for the assessment of a construct that we called “physical–digital integration”, which refers to the tendency of some individuals not to perceive a clear differentiation between feelings and perceptions that pertain to the physical or digital environment. The construct is articulated in four facets: identity, social relationships, time–space perception, and sensory perception. Data from a sample of 369 participants were collected to evaluate factor structure (unidimensional model, bifactor model, correlated four-factor model), internal (...) consistency (Cronbach’s _α_, McDonald’s _ω_), and correlations of the physical–digital integration scale with other measures. Results showed that the scale is valid and internally consistent, and that both the total score and the scores at its four subscales are worthy of consideration. The physical–digital integration scores were found to be differently associated with digital and non-digital behaviors, individuals’ ability to read emotions in the facial expressions of others, and indicators of psychosocial functioning (anxiety, depression, and satisfaction with social relationships). The paper proposes a new measure whose scores are associated with several variables that may have relevant consequences at both individual and social levels. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the 'recognitive attitudes' of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it explores (...) the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground, then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

People whose person-making capacities or status are diminished or who lack them altogether are mostly ignored in mainstream theories of recognition. This entry clarifies the conceptual landscape around and some of the key questions about recognition in relation to these people. The concept of personhood is analyzed into three different sub-concepts – juridical, moral and psychological – and the connection of these to recognition on relevant concepts of recognition is discussed.

In this paper I discuss the recent attempt of Axel Honneth of establishing a robust notion of progress through reference to recognitive structures. I claim that two strategies can be found in his writings for founding such a claim. On the one hand he tries to found the notion of progress on how differentiated the recognitive structures are. On the other hand he tries to found it on certain empirically revealed anthropological and psychological constants. I argue that both strategies fail. (...) The differentiation-strategy is too open, the psychological strategy is too narrow.I discuss in what sense Honneth’s reflections on the importance of recognitive structures still may be of value in critical discussions. Even though it may be granted that a certain notion of progress is inevitable in critical discussions, it does not follow that it has to be a robust notion. I suggest that recognitive structures may serve as a universal reference point that can be used to locate disagreement (recognitive structures are always at play), rather than a robust universal starting point that can be used solve disagreement (it is not given that we agree upon which recognitive structures should be furthered). (shrink)

Perhaps no philosopher has so fully explored the nature and conditions of historical understanding as Wilhelm Dilthey. His work, conceived overall as a Critique of Historical Reason and developed through his well-known theory of the human studies, provides concepts and methods still fruitful for those concerned with analyzing the human condition. Despite the increasing recognition of Dilthey's contributions, relati vely few of his writings have as yet appeared in English translation. It is therefore both timely and useful to have (...) available here two works drawn from different phases in the development of his philosophy. The "Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology" (1894), now translated into English for the first time, sets forth Dilthey's programma tic and methodological viewpoints through a descriptive psychology, while "The Understanding of Other Persons and Their Expressions of Life" (ca. 1910) is representative of his later hermeneutic approach to historical understanding. DESCRIPTIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMAN STUDIES Dilthey presented the first mature statement of his theory of the human studies in volume one of his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Studies), published in 1883. He argued there that for the proper study of man and history we must eschew the metaphysical speculation of the absolute idealists while at the same time avoiding the scientistic reduction of positivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of LanguageJuliet Mitchell (bio)Definitions of trauma abound within the psychoanalytic discipline. My own definition is going to be simple. A trauma, whether physical or psychical, must create a breach in a protective covering of such severity that it cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms by which we deal with pain or loss. The severity of the breach is such that even (...) if the incident is expected, the experience cannot be foretold. We cannot thus make use of anxiety as a preparatory signal. The death of a sick relative, the amputation of a diseased limb may be consciously known about in advance, but if they are to be described as traumatic then the foreknowledge was useless. In trauma we are untimely ripped.Whether it is as childhood seduction, infantile abuse, shell shock, or war violence, or as a preoccupation with the place of neoteny and the trials of human birth, trauma is continually posited as the hypothetical “origin” of psychic states. However, although “trauma” is crucial to psychoanalytic theory, trauma in itself is not really the focus of its analysis. Freud proposed a “biological bedrock” on which psychic states were formed, but this bedrock was not the object of psychoanalytic inquiry. I suggest that what emerges as a motif in the many retheorizings of psychoanalysis time and again, as another “bedrock,” is trauma. One might call it an “experiential bedrock.” As with biology, it is crucial—but as the area of another mode of inquiry. Psychoanalysis is equipped to contribute to the understanding of the reaction to trauma, not to the trauma itself.In a colloquial context we tend to look from the perspective of the observer and label a range of difficult or tragic occurrences “traumatic.” Instead, I want to define trauma from the perspective of the person who experiences it. This means both that the same event will not always be traumatic for different people, and that the experience of different events, if they are experienced as trauma, will be the same whatever the event and whoever the sufferer. It was essentially for this reason that Freud eventually disagreed with the rich findings of Otto Rank, who proposed the trauma of birth as the origin of mankind’s neurosis. Trauma is the great equalizer. What differentiates us, since we were all born? Furthermore, what appears to be the trauma from the observer’s perspective may, from the viewpoint of the psychic response of the recipient, only be the catalyst that brings to the surface an experience which, were it not for this later event, might not in itself have been traumatic (or vice versa). Even so extreme an experience as the Holocaust may not breach the defenses of a particular individual. The catalytic event in the present triggers an earlier occurrence which becomes traumatic only by virtue of its retrospectively endowed meaning.Probably all animate matter can be traumatized; it would seem likely that the response to the breach in the human defensive system takes place at a generalizable psychosocial level. Recognition and language are interactional social processes; without another person neither a psyche nor language is possible. Object relations analysts, notably D. W. Winnicott, whom Max Hernandez addresses in his paper in this issue, have devoted their work to aspects of the psyche, Lacanians to language. To me the fields are interdependent and gain from being looked at together, both in their practice and in the theories that can [End Page 121] be applied to them. When we have a physical trauma it is common for an immediate aftereffect to be some uncertainty about words; even the ability to spell correctly can temporarily disappear. There are undoubtedly physiological explanations for this. But I shall argue that there are psychological parallels. Every patient whom I would regard as having had some relevant form of trauma had a specific relationship to language, and it is this that concerns me. In addition, Max Hernandez describes the breach in the defenses caused by the anal rape of a patient when he was a young boy. But neither the patient’s symptom nor his complaint on coming to a therapist for treatment pertains to... (shrink)

The question of whether object recognition is orientation-invariant or orientation-dependent was investigated using a repetition blindness (RB) paradigm. In RB, the second occurrence of a repeated stimulus is less likely to be reported, compared to the occurrence of a different stimulus, if it occurs within a short time of the first presentation. This failure is usually interpreted as a difficulty in assigning two separate episodic tokens to the same visual type. Thus, RB can provide useful information about which representations (...) are treated as the same by the visual system. Two experiments tested whether RB occurs for repeated objects that were either in identical orientations, or differed by 30, 60, 90, or 180°. Significant RB was found for all orientation differences, consistent with the existence of orientation-invariant object representations. However, under some circumstances, RB was reduced or even eliminated when the repeated object was rotated by 180°, suggesting easier individuation of the repeated objects in this case. A third experiment confirmed that the upside-down orientation is processed more easily than other rotated orientations. The results indicate that, although object identity can be determined independently of orientation, orientation plays an important role in establishing distinct episodic representations of a repeated object, thus enabling one to report them as separate events. (shrink)

Abstract The view that mirror self-recognition (MSR) is a definitive demonstration of self-awareness is far from universally accepted, and those who do support the view need a more robust argument than the mere assumption that self-recognition implies a self-concept (e.g. Gallup in Socioecology and Psychology of Primates, Mouton, Hague, 1975 ; Gallup and Suarez in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol 3, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1986 ). In this paper I offer a new argument in favour of the (...) view that MSR shows self-awareness by examining the nature of the mirror image itself. I argue, using the results of ‘symbol-mindedness’ experiments by Deloache (Trends Cogn Sci 8(2):66–70, 2004) , that where self-recognition exists, the mirror image must be functioning as a symbol from the perspective of the subject and the subject must therefore be ‘symbol-minded’ and hence concept possessing. Further to this, according to the Concept Possession Hypothesis of Self-Consciousness (Savanah in Conscious Cogn 2011 ), concept possession alone is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of self-awareness. Thus MSR as a demonstration of symbol-mindedness implies the existence of self-awareness. I begin by defending the ‘mark test’ protocol as a robust methodology for determining self-recognition. Then follows a critical examination of the extreme views both for and against the interpretation of MSR as an indication of self-awareness: although the non-mentalistic interpretation of MSR is unconvincing, the argument presented by Gallup is also inadequate. I then present the symbol-mindedness argument to fill in the gaps in the Gallup approach. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s10539-012-9318-2 Authors Stephane Savanah, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867. (shrink)

The view that mirror self-recognition (MSR) is a definitive demonstration of self-awareness is far from universally accepted, and those who do support the view need a more robust argument than the mere assumption that self-recognition implies a self-concept (e.g. Gallup in Socioecology and Psychology of Primates, Mouton, Hague, 1975 ; Gallup and Suarez in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol 3, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1986 ). In this paper I offer a new argument in favour of the view (...) that MSR shows self-awareness by examining the nature of the mirror image itself. I argue, using the results of ‘symbol-mindedness’ experiments by Deloache (Trends Cogn Sci 8(2):66–70, 2004) , that where self-recognition exists, the mirror image must be functioning as a symbol from the perspective of the subject and the subject must therefore be ‘symbol-minded’ and hence concept possessing. Further to this, according to the Concept Possession Hypothesis of Self-Consciousness (Savanah in Conscious Cogn 2011 ), concept possession alone is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of self-awareness. Thus MSR as a demonstration of symbol-mindedness implies the existence of self-awareness. I begin by defending the ‘mark test’ protocol as a robust methodology for determining self-recognition. Then follows a critical examination of the extreme views both for and against the interpretation of MSR as an indication of self-awareness: although the non-mentalistic interpretation of MSR is unconvincing, the argument presented by Gallup is also inadequate. I then present the symbol-mindedness argument to fill in the gaps in the Gallup approach. (shrink)