The Paradox of Self-Consciousness

Abstract

In this book, José Luis Bermúdez addresses two fundamental problems in the philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide a noncircular account of fully fledged self-conscious thought and language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we explain how fully fledged self-conscious thought and language can arise in the normal course of human development? Bermúdez argues that a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The paradox renders circular all theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. It seems to follow from the paradox of self-consciousness that no such account or explanation can be given. Drawing on recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy, the author argues that any explanation of fully fledged self-consciousness that answers these two questions requires attention to primitive forms of self-consciousness that are prelinguistic and preconceptual. Such primitive forms of self-consciousness are to be found in somatic proprioception, the structure of exteroceptive perception, and prelinguistic forms of social interaction. The author uses these primitive forms of self-consciousness to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness and to show how the two questions can be given an affirmative answer. Bradford Books imprint

The roots of self-awareness

“…What follows is a paraphrase of the much longer arguments to the same effect given by O'Shaugnessy (1980) ch. 6, and bears some resemblance to the arguments given by Bermúdez (1998) ch. 6, who largely recapitulates O'Shaugnessy.…”

“…Yet, one cannot characterize self-consciousness except in terms of the ability to think a certain class of thoughts -namely, those canonically expressed with the use of the linguistic pronoun "I". Thus, self-consciousness apparently presupposes mastery of the first person pronoun (Bermúdez 1998). Unlike our puzzle of essential prehension, Bermúdez' paradox turns on the assumption that all thoughts (and thus by consequence "I"-thoughts) are necessarily expressible in language.…”

“…For the sake of the argument, let us assume that the full range of techniques which can be brought to bear on the general perceptual problem of parsing sensory information into objects -for instance, the principles of cohesion, contact, continuity, solidity, etc. (Spelke 1990;Bermúdez 1998) -can also be brought to bear on the problem of identifying JP-B4's body, which is, after all, also an object that JP-B4 could perceive. Thus, we take it as a given that JP-B4 can form a representation of its own body as one object among many, but what allows it to mark this particular body as its own?…”

Selves: subpersonal, immersed, and participating

“…Indeed, by engaging the mindbody problem, the nature of subjectivity, and problem of self-knowledge in the two central parts of the book (II and III), Ganeri takes these challenges very seriously. On the one hand, there are current views that take the self to be defined by a sense of embodied agency (as put forward, among others, by Bermudez (1998), Cassam (1997, and Legrand (2007Legrand ( , 2011), as well as thicker views of the self as constitutive of our capacity to entertain self-narratives or manifest social agency. On the other hand, there are the influential Buddhist theories of mind with their sophisticated nonegological accounts of experience.…”

The case for proprioception

“…When I use the word "proprioception," following Jose Bermudez (1998) and Shaun Gallagher (2003), I will refer to the intracorporal tracking of somatic location and limb position. That is, proprioception accounts for one's ability to detect limb position and bodily posture from the inside.…”