The Self and Self-Knowledge

by Annalisa Coliva (editor)

A team of leading experts investigate a range of philosophical issues to do with the self and self-knowledge. Self and Self-Knowledge focuses on two main how to account for I-thoughts and the consequences that doing so would have for our notion of the self; and how to explain subjects' ability to know the kind of psychological states they enjoy, which characteristically issues in psychological self-ascriptions.

The first section of the volume consists of essays that, by appealing to different considerations which range from the normative to the phenomenological, offer an assessment of the animalist conception of the self. The second section presents an examination as well as a defence of the new epistemic paradigm, largely associated with recent work by Christopher Peacocke, according to which knowledge of our own mental states and actions should be based on an awareness of them and of our attempts to bring them about. The last section explores a range of different perspectives--from neo-expressivism to constitutivism--in order to assess the view that self-knowledge is more robust than any other form of knowledge. While the contributors differ in their specific philosophical positions, they all share the view that careful philosophical analysis is needed before scientific research can be fruitfully brought to bear on the issues at hand. These thought-provoking essays provide such an analysis
and greatly deepen our understanding of these central aspects of our mentality.

Genres: Philosophy

298 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 2012

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are three clusters of papers in this anthology. The first treats the issue of what the self might be, which is supposedly known in cases we intuitively make sense of in terms of self-knowledge. The second treats responses to Peacocke’s groundbreaking account of transparency. The third is more of a smattering, including Snowden’s take-down of expressivist/neo-Wittgensteinian accounts of self-knowledge, and Bilgrami’s survey into the ethical character of self-knowledge.

Let me summarize the papers I found most interesting.

The introductory essay by Coliva was helpful, but I also worry certain of her ways of taxonomizing positions on self-knowledge are misleading. Coliva lumps Shoemaker’s and Wright’s accounts together as both following under a “constitutive” approach to understanding self-knowledge. But their two accounts are quite different. Wright (although I should read more of him) appears to think that when we know our beliefs, for example, this higher-order awareness partially constitutes the first-order belief in a sense that goes beyond mere conceptual entailment relations. It’s almost a sort of causal sense of constitution, related to the notions of partially creating or re-shaping something there. In contrast, Shoemaker’s account, from my understanding, centers on the conceptual entailment sense of the notion of constitution.

Coliva rightly points out that an issue that constitutive accounts face is how to explain the intuition that the first- and second-order beliefs can exist separately. She thinks that Peacocke’s and Moran’s accounts both address this by foregrounding how a first-order belief provides you reason to self-ascribe it. I found this interesting; I’ve always thought Moran’s account is very different from Peacocke’s, but it does seem the two are unified with regards to the general-level claim that a self-ascription (i.e., second-order belief) can be made for reasons which are not identical to the first-order belief itself. The first-order belief, for Moran, I think, provides you reason for figuring out what you really believe, where the endpoint of this “theoretical deliberation” is a self-ascription of a certain belief; and so the reasons found in this process are given to you by both the original first-order belief and by various things that you bring forth in your deliberative activity. In contrast, for Peacocke, it is just the occurrence of the judgment, under which the first-order is manifest, itself which provides reason for you to make a mental transition into a second-order judgment.

In “Conscious Events and Self-Ascriptions: Comments on Heal and O’Brien,” Peacocke addresses the challenges Heal and O’Brien raise to his account (which can be located in his paper, not found in this anthology, “Conscious attitudes and the occupation of attention”). To summarize briefly on that: Peacocke argues for his position on first-person knowledge of belief that I sketched out above. Key to his argument is his assumption that his view of how observational concepts figure into perception and judgment alike (which follows from his variety of conceptual role semantics) can serve as a model which neatly extends to the case of the concept of belief. For example, it should not be all that controversial to think that we possess some discrete concept “red” which can be instantiated in red color properties in perceptual experience, as well as in our judgments about our perceptual experience, which mentions these properties. What “red” means tends not to significantly vary, when we think it is instantiated, across various experiences and judgments.

Heal thinks that there are many counterexamples to Peacocke’s proposed rule that whenever you consciously have a certain mental attitude (with a certain content) and also have the concept of that attitude, you’ll be able to rationally transition (without engaging in inference) to the judgment that you have that attitude with that content. These counterexamples would be located in the neighborhood of emotions. For example, Heal points to how a man could fear authority figures, consciously have this fear (e.g., notice his sweating and trembling around such figures), and yet fail to be able to self-ascribe this fear.

Peacocke thinks these are not counterexamples. The heart of his argument is to appeal to a distinction between experiencing conscious manifestations of an emotion, on the one hand, and to experience that emotion consciously itself, on the other hand. If the man in Heal’s example consciously experienced his fear (as opposed to only its manifestations, e.g., certain physiological symptoms), then the antecedent of Peacocke’s proposed rule would be satisfied, and yield the correct prediction, in effect, that the consequent holds (e.g., the man can now self-ascribe his fear).

I find this response puzzling. Circularity objections to Byrne’s account (found in his book Self-Knowledge and Transparency) come to mind here. It seems that all Peacocke is really saying is that once you’ve already formed a judgment about your emotion, then you can then move on and simply say out loud what you’ve judged. Peacocke’s account hides this implication at its core because he believes he has tools to resist it. Namely, he has a theory of conceptual role semantics on which a given concept can be instantiated in perceptual experience and in judgment alike. In effect, a perceptual experience can include certain conceptual content (loosely speaking; more precisely, that content would be systematically linked to conceptual content which is associated with a reasoning system) which is akin to that which is found in judgment. So on this picture, you could be said to consciously experience your fear, without forming the judgment yet that you’re afraid.

I can’t do justice here to an intuition I have regarding whether this conceptual role semantics works for concepts like fear (or any concept that does not amount to an observational or logical predicate, even). I’m working on that. Assuming that this intuition can amount to a solid position, then Peacocke’s account here might be revealed to in effect require that for the antecedent of his rule to be fulfilled, one has already made a judgment about one’s fear, so that the conditional would look like a tautology. To expand on this thought, I’d like to do some more thinking on what’s distinctive of so-called concepts of fear, beauty, forgiveness, and the like which makes the phenomena we track by use of these terms significantly different than the phenomena we track by use of observational and logical predicates. The phenomena of the former category seem to be partially constituted by our subjective experience itself, which is responsive to our volition—or at least in a certain qualified sense which still would not hold of observational and logical phenomena.

In “How to think about phenomenal self-knowledge,” Snowdon addresses accounts like Wright’s and Bar-On’s, which are inspired by a thought in The Philosophical Investigations concerning that when we speak of what we know about our beliefs and desires, the force of our speech does not match up well to that of assertions or declarations. Rather, this should be understood as an “avowal,” an expressive act, which can have an aim such as to show your feeling of conviction to others, or to indicate that you’re self-aware of your potential fallibility, that it’s a belief in particular. Moreover, supposedly self-ascriptions of belief and desire do not involve any identification of yourself; the mention of the first-person in such ascriptions is supposed to based in a certain mode of thought itself, as opposed to any cognitive movement from locating an object (your own personage) to identifying this object in a certain way (as yourself).

Snowdon points out that the very notion of “avowal,” as a type of speech act is technical. It’s unclear how it should be defined. It doesn’t occur so frequently in everyday language. It doesn’t look like there is such a category we in fact track which we always regard as authoritative and non-inferential. Moreover, a thinker like Wright assumes that there are two categories of avowals, phenomenal and attitudinal ones, and his arguments treat those. Wright has not addressed the possibility that there are further relevant categories, which could be understood in terms of avowals, and which are not subject to his arguments. Snowdon’s key argument proceeds by his showing that there are many counterexamples to Wright’s claim that avowals arise spontaneously and without identification. Often, in order to know what’s going down in your experience (i.e., the purported case of phenomenal avowals), we need to uptake something which is beyond the occurrence of the experience itself (so avowals aren’t boundless). For example, when a subject encounters a picture of 12 spots and is asked how many spots they believe are there, the subject can’t determine this without counting. If the picture had only 3 spots instead, the subject would then be able to give expression to their belief without reliance on this additional bit of cognizing. When we fail to uptake this information external to our experience, we end up self-ascribing something which is overtly false; avowals aren’t incorrigible.

This paper was incisive and compelling. It raises an issue for me, however, that it can be unclear to say what’s “contained” in a given perceptual experience vs. is contributed by cognition. This is because “perceptual experience” can be ambiguous; it could sometimes be used roughly co-extensively with “contribution to subjective experience based in strictly your sensory organs,” but other times rather with “what appears to you independently of your occurrent volition or will, something which feels automatic.” Under the second sense of perceptual experience, it seems that many subtle or implicit cognitions go on in you, as an experience unfolds, and these integrally contribute to what you can later recollect from your experience. (Compare to the debate over “cognitive penetration,” which sometimes seems hopeless and senseless…)

Maybe Wright is right to think that these sorts of contributions are not rational or inferentially based in a certain sense; and what you end up reporting on will accurately capture what you were actually experiencing. Once you reach out for the further means, such as counting, as in Snowdon’s example, maybe this should be rendered as a matter of your transforming what you’re experiencing, so that when you report on a certain number, this will be accurate; and when you fail to count and report in a different way, that would also be accurate, relative to a different experience prior to being transformed by your act of counting. I’d like to think about these issues more.

There were more chapters I liked, but I'm running out of space...

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty good anthology. Several of the earlier chapters are quite good. The later chapters--the ones on self-knowledge--are less strong, and they focus on a narrow subset of views on the topic (i.e., constitutive and expressivist accounts).