The Paradox of Self-Consciousness by Jose Luis Bermudez, MIND-POWER
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Preface
The phenomenon of self-consciousness provides one of the enduring
themes of philosophy. Many philosophers from the great to the insignifi-
cant have thought that a philosophical account of self-consciousness
would be an Archimedean point upon which the whole of philosophy
might stand. This book has no such pretensions. My concern is solely
with understanding the internal articulation of the phenomenon of self-
consciousness. In fact, my concern is primarily with those forms of self-
consciousness that are more primitive, both logically and ontogenetically,
than the conceptual and linguistic forms of self-consciousness to which
philosophers have traditionally devoted their attention.
My concern with these primitive forms of self-consciousness stems
from a paradox that strikes hard at traditional understandings of the rela-
tion between linguistic self-reference and self-conscious thought. I de-
velop what I term the
paradox of self-consciousness
in chapter 1. The
core of the paradox is the apparent strict interdependence between self-
conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. This paradox is insoluble,
I argue in chapter 2, if it is assumed that the conceptual and linguistic
forms of self-consciousness are the only forms. In chapters 3 and 4, I set
out a framework for thinking about the intentional explanation of behav-
ior that allows truly ascribing content-bearing representational states to
creatures who lack both conceptual abilities and linguistic abilities. Chap-
ters 5 through 9 are devoted to showing that among those content-
bearing representational states, there are several types that properly count
as forms of primitive self-consciousness. Finally, in chapter 10, I show
how a recognition of the existence and nature of these forms of primitive
self-consciousness can be used to solve the paradox of self-consciousness.
xii
Preface
The perspective from which this book is written is
philosophical natu-
ralism.
I take it, for example, that philosophical accounts of concepts
must accord not just with what is involved in the fully-fledged mastery of
a concept but also with how it is possible for a thinker to acquire that
concept in the normal course of cognitive development. The distinction
between logical issues about concepts and psychological issues about con-
cepts is, of course, a real one, but to my mind it does not provide a clear
demarcation between the areas of competence of two separate disciplines,
or of two distinct levels of explanation. Throughout this book I make free
use of empirical work from various areas in scientific psychology in mak-
ing philosophical points. I hope that the book as a whole may serve as an
indirect argument for the utility of this approach.
Acknowledgments
This book was conceived and written during my tenure (1993–1996) of
a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, hosted initially by
the University of Cambridge and subsequently by the University of Stir-
ling. I am extremely grateful to the academy for making it possible for
me to spend three years unencumbered by teaching and administrative
commitments. I also owe a very great debt to my colleagues at the Univer-
sity of Stirling for encouraging my research, most particularly by allowing
me seven months leave to complete this book before taking up my teach-
ing duties. Peter Sullivan read a complete draft of the text with great care
and is responsible for numerous improvements. While at Stirling I have
benefited enormously from daily discussions on the philosophy of mind
with Alan Millar.
I first began thinking about some of the issues in this book during the
academic year 1992/1993, when I was a member of the Spatial Represen-
tation Project at King’s College, Cambridge. Discussions during the proj-
ect with Bill Brewer, Naomi Eilan, and Anthony Marcel were very helpful.
As will be apparent from the text, I have been greatly inspired by the
writings of John Campbell and Christopher Peacocke, who were also
associated with the project. An intermittent correspondence with Susan
Hurley over the last few years has helped me to sharpen many thoughts,
and I am extremely grateful for the care and rigour with which she read
a penultimate draft of the manuscript as well as for the opportunity to
learn from her own unpublished writings.
A version of chapter 1 was delivered to the Sapientia Colloquium at
Dartmouth College, where I was a visiting scholar in the summer of 1996.
Chapters 3 and 4 draw heavily on my paper “Nonconceptual Content:
xiv
Acknowledgments
From Perceptual Experience to Subpersonal Computational States”
(1995e). Chapter 7 is based on “Ecological Perception and the Notion of
a Nonconceptual Point of View,” my contribution to
The Body and the
Self
(MIT Press, 1995), which I edited with Anthony Marcel and Naomi
Eilan. Section 6.1 is drawn from the coauthored Introduction to that
work.
It has been a pleasure to work once again with the MIT Press. Amy
Brand has seen the project through with tact and forbearance. I am partic-
ularly grateful to her for securing the services of an excellent but sadly
anonymous reviewer who made more useful suggestions than any author
deserves. The final text has been greatly improved by the copyediting
skills of Alan Thwaits.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]