The Essence of Reparations Afro American self determination and revolutionary democratic struggle in the United States of America 1st Edition Amiri Baraka
In this volume, Geoffrey Madell develops a revised account of the self, making a compelling case for why the ‘simple’ or ‘anti-criterial’ view of personal identity warrants a robust defense. Madell critiques recent discussions of the self for focusing on features which are common to all selves and which therefore fail to capture the uniqueness of each self. In establishing his own view of personal identity, Madell proposes (a) that there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’, (b), that a complete description of the world offered without recourse to indexicals will fail to account for the contingent truth that I am one of the persons described, and (c) that an account of conscious perspectives on the world must take into account what it means for an apparently arbitrary one of these perspectives to be mine. Engaging with contemporary positions on the first person, embodiment, psychological continuity, and other ongoing arguments, Madell contends that there can be no such thing as a criterion of personal identity through time, that no bodily or psychological continuity approach to the issue can succeed, and that personal identity through time must be absolute, not a matter of degree. Madell’s view that the nature of the self is substantively different from that of objects in the world will generate significant discussion and debate among philosophers of mind.
Geoffrey Madell was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and is the author of The Identity of the Self (1981), Mind and Materialism (1988), and Philosophy, Music and Emotion (2002).
Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
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29 Kant and Education
Interpretations and Commentary
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30 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity
Alison Stone
31 Civility in Politics and Education
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32 Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering
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33 Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal
Somogy Varga
34 The Philosophy of Curiosity
Ilhan Inan
35 Self-Realization and Justice
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Julia Maskivker
36 Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality
From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard
John J. Davenport
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38 Morality, Self Knowledge, and Human Suffering An Essay on The Loss of Confidence in the World Josep Corbi
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Simon R. Clarke
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43 Reference and Structure in the Philosophy of Language A Defense of the Russellian Orthodoxy
Arthur Sullivan
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Heimir Geirsson
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Beth Preston
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Ted Nannicelli
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Robert C. Scharff
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58 Realism, Science, and Pragmatism
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64 The Essence of the Self In Defense of the Simple View of Personal Identity
Geoffrey Madell
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The Essence of the Self
In Defense of the Simple View of Personal Identity
By Geoffrey Madell
First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
The right of Geoffrey Madell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Madell, Geoffrey.
The essence of the self : in defense of the simple view of personal identity / by Geoffrey Madell. — 1 [edition]. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 64) Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Self (Philosophy) 2. Identity (Psychology) I. Title.
BD450.M2528 2014 126—dc23 2014027667
ISBN: 978-1-138-82394-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74176-5 (ebk)
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Preface
This book is an attempt to develop and defend a particular view of the nature of the self and of its identity through time. The view I argue for is a version of what has become known as the Simple View. This is not a term I like, partly, I have to admit, because it might suggest that those who argue for it have failed to see the complexities of the issue, but, more particularly, because it suggests that supporters of this position think that all the various experiences of a single person inhere in an underlying substance, a propertyless substratum, simple and unchanging. This has certainly been a target of attack for many thinkers from Kant onwards, and it is a view commonly attributed to Descartes.
In fact this view of the matter was rejected by Descartes, and it is difficult to find anyone who has explicitly argued for it. What seems to me clear is that this misconception has presented a serious obstacle in the way of our achieving a proper understanding of the nature of the self. The so-called Simple View does not rest on this misconception. It is the view that being the same self through time is not to be analysed in terms of physical and/ or psychological continuity, though such continuities are properly taken as evidence of the continuity of the self, but is something which is basic and not further analysable. There are, in other words, no logically constitutive criteria of the identity of the self.
An even more serious failure in current attempts to grasp the essence of the self has been the propensity to produce accounts of the self which are clearly meant to be accounts of the self in general, or to be true of all selves. But an account of consciousness in general, or of conscious perspectives in general, cannot be adequate, since it can give us no idea of what it is for one particular conscious perspective on the world to be one’s own, to be mine or yours, his or hers. Furthermore, while it is a necessary truth that each person has the perspective on the world that he or she has, it is a contingent truth that one particular perspective on the world is mine. That is why I claim that it is of the essence of experiences to be mine or not mine, and that this has profound implications for our understanding of the self. I think this point has been overlooked even by supporters of the so-called Simple View, but it is a point which is absolutely central to my account of the self.
Preface
Finally, it is a familiar claim of the view of the self in question that its identity through time cannot be a matter of degree. This is a claim which, of course, goes back to Reid and Butler. I do not rely on their arguments, but I hope to put this claim on a different, and much sounder, footing.
My aim in this book is to offer a better understanding of the Simple View than has been possible up to now. I prefer to describe it as the view that the identity of the self, both at a time and through time, is strict and unanalysable, but the question of nomenclature is secondary. Eric Olson has used the term anticriterial of this view, and Barry Dainton has called it ‘fundamentalist’. I first tried to develop and defend this view at length in my book The Identity of the Self. 1 I still hold to nearly everything that I said in that book, but, apart from needing to discuss some of the literature on this topic that has appeared since my book, I have changed the emphasis of my discussion considerably and have highlighted aspects of the issue which I then neglected.
NOTE
1. Geoffrey Madell, The Identity of the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
Personal Identity and the First Person
THE MIND–BODY PROBLEM AND THE SELF
Everything about the problem of personal identity stems from the nature of the first person and the clash between the first-person perspective and an objective, third-personal perspective. Most contemporary treatments of the issue have proceeded on the assumption that there is no such clash. One need not question the motivation behind this approach, any more than one needs to question the desire for a monistic view of the relation between mind and body. But, just as it has proved impossible, in my view, to bridge the ‘explanatory gap’ between our understanding of consciousness on the one hand and that of the physical world on the other, so the gap between the first- and the third-person perspectives remains to be bridged. However, while everyone is aware of an apparent explanatory gap between the experiential and the physical, even if the extent of this gap is not appreciated by some, the clash between the first- and the third-person perspectives remains relatively unregarded. There are, of course, huge pressures moving us towards a monistic view of the nature of the person. Yet materialism, or physicalism, in all its variants seems quite clearly to have failed, and I shall spend no time on trying to establish this in general, except where what emerges in the ensuing consideration of the problem of personal identity offers further reason to emphasise this failure.
In spite of this failure, however, it has seemed intolerable to many to have to accept that persons are a conjunction of a physical body and an immaterial mind, if only because there appears to be no escape from the conclusion that these two utterly different types of substance are just found together in a miraculous coexistence. And even if one were tempted to pursue a Humean conception of causality and suggest that all causal connections are in a sense ‘miraculous’ because fundamentally inexplicable and that the posited causal connection between mind and body is no more inexplicable than any other causal connection, huge problems would still remain. Is it just a brute inexplicable fact that mind appeared in the course of evolution at the time that it did? And the same question must arise with regard to the development of each and every embryo. Up to a certain stage, its development can be
Personal Identity and the First Person
explained by the laws of the physical sciences, but at a certain stage something happens which is utterly inexplicable in terms of what has gone before: the appearance of consciousness. When the brain reaches a certain level of complexity in its development, this allows the appearance of something non-physical to appear magically on the scene. And why is it that it is in the brain and in the brain only that we find this mysterious connection between the physical and the immaterial?
These problems with dualism remain, no matter how hard one presses a Humean conception of causality. They force one to the view that an ontological distinction between mind and body is acceptable only if the connection between them can be shown to be a necessary one. But to explain how it is that the mental and the physical belong together as a matter of necessity is something that, it can be argued, has defeated our best efforts, and it may well be that we have here a problem the solution to which is ‘cognitively closed’ to us, as Colin McGinn has suggested.
I ought to make it clear, however, that the fact that there has been, to my mind, no plausible account of how the mental and the physical necessarily belong together does not persuade me in the least to adopt any form of materialism, nor does any other monistic view of this relation that I know of seem acceptable. Let me say that, whatever its problems, dualism, and, indeed, interactionist substance dualism, seems to me far more plausible than any other view of the mind–body relation. The topic lies outside the scope of this book, but I shall say quite a lot in later chapters about the notion of substance and about how a misunderstanding of this concept has stood in the way of a proper understanding of the self.
However, the aim of setting out a convincing monistic account of persons is made vastly more difficult by the fact of the tension between the first- and third-person perspectives. It ought to be clear that the nature of the firstperson perspective must have a great bearing on the mind–body problem itself. We cannot begin to make sense of the nature of conscious states unless we acknowledge that every state of consciousness is either mine or not mine and that a monistic or materialist account of consciousness must somehow account for this. This problem is additional to the problem of explaining how a materialist account of reality can allow for the phenomenal character of experience, which is the problem which has led some thinkers to talk of an ‘explanatory gap’ between the physical and the phenomenal. In any case, this account of the problem for materialism seems to me to be seriously inadequate for reasons other than the one about the place of the first person in a materialist conception of reality.
In particular, the admission that there is an explanatory gap between any description of the physical reality and the phenomenal quality of our sensations is often coupled with what seems to me an extraordinarily blithe assumption that intentionality itself presents no serious problem for the materialist. Intentional states, it is claimed, can be given a functionalist account.1 I find this suggestion wildly optimistic, to put it as mildly as possible. I do
not know what a functional account of such states of thought and emotion as indignation, gratitude, remorse, compassion, acting from a conception of duty, and so on could possibly look like. It is, of course, not enough for the physicalist to claim that a notion such as that of indignation is indeed functional, just insofar as it is defined in terms of some typical input (the perception of what one takes to be an injustice) and a typical output (some form of protest against the perceived injustice). This will clearly not do, because the inputs and outputs look to be themselves irreducibly mentalistic, and I see no possibility of a physical reduction of these terms, which the materialist surely requires. Kim, by contrast, while acknowledging that no one has yet produced full functional definitions of believing, desiring and intending, and that it is ‘perhaps unlikely that we shall have such definitions any time soon’, sees no problem in the idea that such definitions will eventually be produced. This seems to me a pipe dream. The idea that we might eventually be able to describe some highly complex pattern of pathways through the physical world and be satisfied that some such pattern conveys what it is to feel sympathy for someone, or to be indignant about a perceived wrong, is, in my view, simply incredible.
Furthermore, many intentional states have a phenomenal aspect which is essential to them. It is impossible to imagine that one could hive off the phenomenal aspect of a state such as rage, or elation, or remorse and could be left with anything like the same state of consciousness. It is therefore quite mistaken to suppose that the problem presented to physicalism by the phenomenal relates only to the physicalist’s difficulties in providing a materialist account of sensation. What looks to be much the same problem arises in relation to intentional states as well.
These problems for materialism are profound enough, but the problem of how to account for the first person is another daunting problem for the physicalist. Thomas Nagel has highlighted this issue in a number of places. As Nagel has pointed out, it is the case that even the most complete objective description of the world, a description presented without recourse to indexicals or token-reflexives, will miss something out: which of the billions of persons featuring in this description is me? What small segment of the total reality thus described am I? David Chalmers has suggested that, while an explanation of consciousness might yield an explanation of ‘points of view’ in general, it is hard to see how it could explain why one of what are objectively similar points of view should differ from the others in being mine, unless solipsism is true. In the light of this question we may need to posit a ‘primitive indexical fact’, that some particular point of view on the world is mine.2 He is inclined nevertheless to think that this may be a rather ‘thin’ feature of consciousness, compared with the richness of the phenomenal aspect of consciousness.
This suggestion of thinness must surely be questioned. If, as I have said, every experience is either mine or not mine, any materialist attempt to make sense of the phenomenal aspect of conscious states must begin by showing
Personal Identity and the First Person
how Nagel’s challenge can be met. If, as Chalmers suggests, the challenge leads us to posit a primitive indexical fact, it becomes very difficult indeed to see how such an indexical fact can be accommodated within a materialist view of the world. It becomes difficult, in fact, to see how the self can be regarded as simply an object in the public world, whose identity through time is in principle not radically different from the identity of other things in the world. Far from being a thin feature of consciousness, the basic indexical ‘I’, if we are compelled to admit it, carries with it a series of implications for our understanding of personal identity which are dramatic—or so it can be argued. In what follows I shall attempt to set out briefly what these appear to be. I have to acknowledge that my claims will appear to be highly contentious and that they will be rejected by many or even most people who have thought about this issue. In the following chapters, I shall look at possible responses to the claim that we are compelled to posit the primitive indexical fact expressed by the use of the first person, and that the implications of this fundamentally affect our understanding of the self, and I shall examine a range of alternative approaches to the issue of the nature of the self and of personal identity which have been current in the literature and attempt to show that they fail.
THE FIRST PERSON
Here is one way in which the thought that we may have to posit a primitive indexical fact conveyed by the indexical ‘I’ can be approached. There is, as some have openly acknowledged, always a gap between ‘A is f and g ’ and ‘ I am f and g ’. No amount of information conveyed without recourse to indexicals can give the information that, for example, I am the person described in such-and-such a way. The basic thought has been expressed by a number of philosophers. McTaggart argued that the self cannot be known ‘by description’, for unless we are directly aware of ourselves, unless we know ourselves ‘by acquaintance’, we could not know that any particular description applies to us: I could not know of any particular description that it is a description of myself . 3 The same thought is expressed by Shoemaker in his paper ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’:
If the awareness that I am in pain had an explanation analogous to this [i.e., to my perceiving that John has a beard] it would have to be that I ‘perceive’ by ‘inner sense’ something whose ‘observed properties’ identify it as myself . . . But of course in order to identify this self as myself by the possession of this property, I would have to know that I observed it by inner sense, and this self-knowledge, being the ground of my identification of the self, could not itself be grounded on that identification.4
Personal Identity and the First Person 5
But if ‘I’ picks out an object in the public world, then, it might be argued, it ought to be the case that one can indeed know oneself ‘by description’. To know that there is an object in the world which satisfies some specified description would be to know that the object in the world is oneself. After all, as McDowell points out, surely correctly, if we are merel y ‘elements of the objective order of things’, then ‘[o]ne must conceive the states of affairs one represents in one’s “egocentric” thoughts . . . as states of affairs which could be described impersonally, from no particular standpoint’.5 But if this is true, then there cannot be the gap between ‘A is f and g ’ and ‘ I am f and g ’, for the absence of such a gap seems a precondition of our being able to understand ourselves as ‘elements of the objective order of things’.
But there is such a gap. We have to allow the primitive indexical ‘I’ . That means, or so I shall argue, that we have to introduce into our ontology specifically first-person facts, perspectives, and properties. In what follows, I shall draw out what seem to me to be the implications of this. Once we recognise this, we must bid farewell to the idea that our understanding of persons is governed by a conception of human beings as merely a certain sort of object in the world. We also have to face this crucial question about the nature of personal identity: if knowing oneself to have certain properties cannot be a matter of perceiving certain properties whose character identifies them as mine, what is the relation between the self and the properties the self possesses? If there is always a gap between ‘A is f and g ’ and ‘ I am f and g ’, then the relation between myself and the properties I happen to possess looks to be no more than contingent. If we must posit the primitive indexical ‘I’ , the same conclusion is indicated: the relation between what is denoted by that indexical and the properties it possesses looks again to be merely contingent. I am aware of myself as having certain properties, but I do not and cannot identify myself through observing certain properties whose character indicates that they are mine. Of course, I cannot be aware of myself without being aware of myself as conscious and as having some state of consciousness or other, but I do not and cannot infer from the nature of these states of consciousness that they are mine. And I seem able to understand without much difficulty the possibility that I might have had properties radically different from those which I in fact have.
The problem which looms here concerns not only the connection between the self and the properties it possesses at any one time. This looks, I have suggested, to be contingent. The same point, however, also seems to undermine any attempt to establish that there are criteria of personal identity through time. For to suppose that there are criteria of personal identity through time is to suppose that there are certain conditions which constitute what is logically constitutive of being the same person through time. But, again, it is difficult to see how there could be any such condition or criterion if it is the case that there is a gap between ‘there is a person of
Identity and the First Person
such and such a description’, on one hand, and ‘the person thus described is me’, on the other. If there are no such criteria, no conditions the satisfaction of which establishes that the person who meets those conditions is me, then equally there can be no conditions the satisfaction of which establishes that the person who meets those conditions at any point over time is me. That is, it seems to follow that there can be no criteria of personal identity over time. We seem incapable of avoiding the conclusion that being the same person over time is compatible with any amount of discontinuity in terms of bodily or psychological continuity, to name the two standard, suggested criteria of personal identity over time. And we shall see that attempts to establish such criteria in fact reveal themselves to be incoherent in a variety of different ways.
To talk of criteria in the strict sense is to talk of what is logically constitutive of the state of affairs governed by the criterion in question. The criterion of the identity through time of a physical object is the tracing by that object of a continuous path through space and time. Given that the object satisfies this criterion, it follows that the object is indeed one and the same object through time. There is, of course, one qualification to be made. The same continuing piece of clay may be for a shorter period of its existence a statue. Furthermore, the statue may undergo changes which mean that we are no longer able to call it the same statue. Nevertheless, its being the same Michelangelo’s David over time, rather than one of the copies of this statue, is a matter of the continuity in space and time of just that statue. And being the same dining-room chair seems to be straightforwardly a matter of the continuity of that chair through space and time. Whatever refinements have to be introduced here, the important point is that there is no gulf between the claim that an object satisfies the conditions specified in the criterion of identity and the claim that it is the identical object through time. But in the case of personal identity, there is always such a gulf. That is, from the claim that there is a range of experiences of a certain description which is tied together by memory and other psychological factors or by connection to one and the same body, nothing follows about such a range of experiences being mine.
It is, to my mind, a curious fact that this issue about whether there are logically adequate criteria of personhood, either at a time or across time, is no longer seen to be crucial to our understanding of persons, and I am puzzled as to why this should be. One possible explanation is the thought that, while no description of a range of experiences and of the connections between them can entail that the person thus described is mine, being a person (any person) through time surely requires that the experiences of that person are indeed connected as required by one or other of the usually suggested criteria of personal identity: bodily or psychological continuity. The thought here is that there are persistence conditions for being a member of the natural kind ‘human being’, but in stating these we are not stating logically constitutive criteria for being this or that token of the natural kind;
Personal Identity and the First Person 7
indeed, we are leaving that question aside altogether. But, as I have tried to suggest, the gulf between ‘A is f ’ and ‘I am f ’ threatens this claim. For at every point in such a putative connected series of experiences, I can ask whether the fact that there is a certain experience of such-and-such a nature, connected to other experiences in such-and-such a way, allows one to infer that the experience in question is mine.
Some will still be disposed to argue that the line of argument I have just developed embraces a fundamental error. The objection runs as follows. The gap between ‘A is f ’ and ‘I am f ’ cannot mean that there are no criteria for our persistence conditions. What matters is that I am necessarily an f , a token of some particular natural kind, a human being, or an animal. And there are, of course, persistence conditions for this kind, as there are for every kind. So the irreducibility of ‘I am f to ‘A is f ’ cannot undermine the claim that I am necessarily a member of a kind which has certain properties essentially and which has certain persistence conditions.
I have already said something about why this sort of response will not do, but I think the issue needs to be looked at in more detail. The essential question is, ‘What is it for states of consciousness, whether they occur at the same time or whether they occur over time, to be the conscious states of a single self?’ The central concern is with the nature of conscious states themselves, and of their possible connections to other such states, from the point of view of the experiencing subject. The focus of attention is, and must be, that of the nature of the phenomenal self, as Barry Dainton has termed it.6 Anyone who holds to a standard ‘natural kind’ view of the person, such as the presently favoured view of animalism, is therefore obliged to show how the phenomenal feature of one’s ownership of states of consciousness, and of their connection in the one self, is necessarily dependent on our being tokens of a natural kind of some sort: an animal, let’s say. I do not believe that any such demonstration is possible, and in my view those who have argued for animalism have shown no awareness of the nature of this problem. Not only is there no way of showing that the connection of experiences in the one self is necessarily dependent on our being tokens of some natural kind, but it should also be clear that the provision of a possible argument to this end would not succeed in showing how one could ascribe experiences to oneself without establishing that these experiences are indeed experiences of a token of a natural kind. But, just as there are no features one can perceive ‘by inner sense’ which identify what one perceives to be one’s own experience, so there are no such features which identify one’s experiences as belonging to a token of a favoured natural kind.
Here is another way of putting this crucial point. What the insights of Nagel and Chalmers bring into focus is the existence of a primitive indexical fact expressed through the use of the first person, or, to put in Nagel’s terms, the contingent truth that some tiny sub-segment of the what exists
Identity and the First Person
is uniquely myself, GM. Now if what we are concerned with is a primitive indexical fact or property, then there must be a question as to whether there could possibly be criteria for the presence of that unique property, the property of being mine, or me. If the claim is that the very existence of such a property must rest on the possessor of that property being a token of the natural kind human being or animal, we need an argument which shows this. I do not believe that any such argument is possible. I think it will become increasingly apparent that the belief that we can still hold on to one or other of the usual criteria of personal identity, or of persistence through time, rests primarily on the failure to take on board that our central concern should be with the uniqueness or primitiveness of the indexical fact or property, that of being me or mine. The failure to see the gap between ‘A is f´ and ‘I am f ’ as constituting a threat to the claim that we are tokens of a natural kind such as ‘human being’ or ‘animal’ seems to me to be a really major mistake in contemporary discussions of the self, and I shall be returning to this question in later chapters.
This point leads directly on to the topic of the imagination and what the imagination might be taken to show about the nature of the self. It certainly seems possible to imagine oneself persisting in time in a way which breaches what are taken to be the normal criteria of personal identity through time. It seems easy, for example, to imagine oneself persisting after exchanging bodies, as many speculations from Locke’s onwards seem to indicate. It seems just as easy to imagine persisting as the same person through quite radical psychological changes, including a loss of memory, and speculations to support the intelligibility of this are common in the literature.
Two other aspects of the impact of the first-person perspective on the problem of personal identity ought to be mentioned. First, it seems clear that the identity of objects in the world is standardly not an all-ornothing affair but a matter of degree. Buildings, nations, clouds, and so on change over time. And the question, ‘Is this the same object?’ can only be answered with the response, ‘In some respects it is, but in other respects it is not’. Identity over time is a matter of degree. But the firstperson perspective we have on the nature of our own identity seems to preclude the suggestion that our identity is a matter of degree. I cannot, for example, make sense of the idea that there is some future pain which is in part mine and in part not. Any future pain, any pain whether past, present, or future, must be either mine or not mine. One cannot, it can be argued, make sense of the suggestion that there is some future consciousness, an assembly of experiences of various thoughts, which are partly mine and partly not mine. The first-person perspective seems to demand that we think of our own identity through time as strict, all-or-nothing, and not a matter of degree.
The other clash between first and third-person viewpoints concerns what is known as the necessity-of-origin thesis. It can be allowed that the
Personal Identity and the First Person 9 origin of an object is crucial to the issue of its identity. This coin, minted in 1982, might have had very different properties from its actual ones, perhaps being cleaner, or misshapen, but it could not have been minted in any other year. If I imagine that the coin in my hand was minted in 1985, all I am imagining is that I might have had a coin in my hand different from the actual. The origin of an object seems essential to its identity as the particular object it is, in the way in which other of its properties are not. But this seems not to be true of persons, contrary to what some philosophers have supposed. I can easily imagine that I was born a year or two earlier or later than I in fact was, and from the viewpoint of the first-person perspective it is impossible to make sense of the suggestion that, although I can imagine myself possessing different qualities from my actual, and although I can imagine the story of my life being very different from the reality, I cannot coherently imagine that story starting at any time other than that of my actual birth. What could it be like, imagining for myself a very different life history, to come across such a block to the process of imagining?
THE CRUCIAL FEATURES OF THE FIRST PERSON
No account of personal identity or of the nature of the self can possibly be right unless it can make sense of the aspects of the issue which I have tried to emphasise. I list them here, and make a few comments about each.
1. The fact that there is always a gap between ‘X is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’. This gap makes it difficult to see how there could be logically constitutive criteria of personal identity through time, since there must always be a gap between a claim such as ‘a range of experiences X is linked together in a specified way’ and the assertion ‘those experiences are mine’. I have suggested earlier that it is a mistake to suppose that this gap is innocuous. I call this the Criterial Gap Issue.
2. The fact that no account of conscious perspective or conscious awareness in general can be adequate, since it leaves quite unclear how one can grasp the truth that one of these conscious perspectives is one’s own, hence the need to recognise what Chalmers called a ‘primitive indexical fact’ that one conscious perspective is mine. I call this the Uniqueness Issue.
3. The fact that no description of the world expressed without indexicals or token-reflexives can include the contingent truth that some tiny segment of that reality is me, GM. There is no such unaccounted for contingent truth which is left out of a complete description of the physical world. All refrigerators monitor their own temperature, and a complete description of all the refrigerators in the world and their self-monitoring capacity will leave nothing out. But something
Personal Identity and the First Person is missed from such a description if it purports to include a description of all the conscious beings in the world. This is Nagel’s point, of course, and I call it the Contingent Truth Issue.
4. The failure to acknowledge this contingent truth, or that one conscious perspective is uniquely mine, means that the self-ascription of experiences becomes impossible to understand. For if all that is presented is some account of the self, or of what unites experiences in the one self, we cannot understand what it could be to ascribe any experience, or group of experiences, to oneself. We cannot grasp what this could be, since what is presented is an account of the self in general, something common to all selves, or a property common to all members of the relevant class. I call this the SelfAscription Issue.
These points are all clearly related to each other and may even be regarded as different ways of putting the same fundamental point. But there ought to be no question that no account of the self can possibly be right if it does not put these points at the very centre of the analysis of the self, and draws out the implications of these points for such an analysis.
In my view, the upshot of this survey of the first-person perspective’s impact on the issue of personal identity is that we are led to a view of the nature of the self and of its identity very different from the view we can take of the identity of other objects in the world. It is a view which sees the identity of the self to be essentially unanalysable, an identity not governed by the commonly suggested criteria of psychological or bodily continuity. The identity of the self through time is also absolute, all or nothing, not a matter of degree. And the origin of the self cannot belong to its essence. There is a huge tension between the way we think of objects in the world, ‘elements of the objective order of things’, and the way we seem compelled to think of persons. This book is an attempt to explore that tension.
There is, however, no denying that many people will see grounds for rejecting outright the account of the self which seems to be emerging from what I have said, and that for a fundamental reason. To suggest, as I appear to have done, that there are no criteria of the identity of the self over time, and no criteria which have to be satisfied for a state of consciousness to be mine at any one time, leaves one with a sort of freefloating ‘I’. On one hand, every attempt to establish criteria for the identity of the self, to tie it logically to some such condition as the continuity of the body or of psychological continuity, or its identity to the notion of origin, seems to break down. But to accept this is to give credence to the idea of the self as an entity which, purely as a matter of chance, alights on a certain set of properties in history but might equally have alighted on any other set. This presents a dilemma of awesome proportions, and we
Personal Identity and the First Person 11
must eventually confront it. I don’t in the least want to underemphasise the scale of this problem. At this stage I simply want to say that we do indeed have a dilemma. On one hand, I claim, we have to accept the notion of a primitive indexical fact, picked out by the indexical ‘I’, and it is hugely difficult to see what sort of criterial connection there can be between what is picked out by this indexical and any objective factor such as bodily or psychological continuity. On the other hand, to admit failure in establishing such a connection appears to confront one with the idea of the magically free-floating ‘I’.
One writer has put an aspect of the question in this way:
Why do I live now, in this special period of history? Why am I me, born in this family, in this place of the world? I was taught that there were many other possibilities: being any person, at any time, or even just not being at all. And yet here I am, in front of you. Me, not you, here, not there, now, not then . . . What is the reason, if any, of this inescapable singularity? Does the fact that we all live through this mystery alleviate it in any way?7
I suggest that an absolutely fundamental failure in contemporary discussions of personal identity has been the failure even to acknowledge the force of this sort of thought, and of the four points I made earlier. Part of this failure shows itself in a series of unsuccessful attempts to reject the notion of a primitive indexical fact expressed by using the first person. In the next chapter I examine these attempts.
NOTES
1. See, for example, Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 101. Kim has argued this also in his later Physicalism, or Something Near Enough and, more fully, in the latest edition of his Philosophy of Mind (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2011). I cannot go into the details of his argument here, but I find these later attempts to sustain the idea of a functional/physical reduction of intentional states no more convincing than the earlier attempt.
2. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 84.
3. J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), chap. 36.
4. Sydney Shoemaker, ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’, Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968): 562.
5. Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, ed. J. McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 264.
6. Barry Dainton, The Phenomenal Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2008.
7. The writer is the philosopher of science Michel Bitbol, as quoted in Nicholas Humphrey, Soul Dust (London: Quercus, 2011), 151–52.
12
Personal Identity and the First Person
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Dainton, Barry. The Phenomenal Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference, edited by J. McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Humphrey, N-icholas. Soul Dust. London: Quercus, 202. Kim, Jaegwon. Mind in a Physical World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. McTaggart, J.M.E. The Nature of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. Shoemaker, Sydney. ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’. Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 555–567.
The First Person 2
In the previous chapter I outlined the view of the nature of the self which is imposed on us if we take the first person perspective seriously. Yet most thinkers who have written on this topic have underestimated this impact, in many cases quite radically. And many thinkers will consider the case I developed in the previous chapter to be simply misconceived. I hope I have acknowledged sufficiently the force of this reaction, but I do think that those who respond in this way owe us an account of the first person which, perhaps, avoids altogether the need to posit ‘I’ as a ‘primitive indexical’, to use Chalmers’s term. For it is this conception of the first person which seems to open up the possibility that any objective setting for ‘I’ is merely contingent. This issue is also raised by Thomas Nagel with his claim that the most complete objective description of the world seems to leave something unsaid: the fact that some tiny sub-segment of the reality I have described is me, GM. This is a contingent truth. Another way of making the point is to say that there is one particular self which is uniquely myself. That is why the gap between ‘A is f and g’ and ‘I am f and g’ is of fundamental importance. As I said at the end of the previous chapter, no account of the self can possibly succeed unless it acknowledges these points. Nevertheless, it is the case that most thinkers who have written on the nature of the self and of personal identity have failed to understand what the impact of a proper understanding of the first person has on the issue of personal identity, and I shall now begin to try to show this.
‘I’ AND OTHER INDEXICALS
I can start with what looks to be a simple misconception, though it is one which has been expressed in the writings of some very well-known philosophers. It is that there is no puzzle about the gap between ‘A is f ’ and ‘I am f ’, since there is just the same gap between any non-indexical statement and an indexical statement which one wants to link with it. Just as there is always a gap between ‘A is f´ and ‘I am f ’, so there is a gap between, say, ‘Room 3.16 has two computers’ and ‘this room has two computers’, or between ‘On the
table there is a vase’ and ‘here we have a vase’, or between ‘the message is to be read at 10.30, and ‘the message is to be read now’, and so on. No amount of information conveyed without the recourse to indexicals can enable us to conclude that ‘George is here’, or that ‘this is the one’, or that ‘we should go now’. Peacocke has claimed that what all this shows is the irreducibility of indexical reference as such, rather than the irreducibility of the first person.1
This approach totally fails to illuminate the issue. First of all, it is difficult, on this view, to understand why there should be the acknowledged gap between the non-indexical and the indexical assertion at all. After all, if what we are dealing with are ‘elements of the objective order of things’, it is difficult to see why the indexical assertion should not be simply replaced by the corresponding non-indexical assertion. The very existence of indexicals, token-reflexives, or demonstratives is something that requires explanation. Second, on reflection, it seems obvious that other indexicals are not innocently on a par with ‘I’; they are parasitic on ‘I’. ‘Here’ is where I am, ‘this’ is what I am indicating, ‘now’ is the time of my thought, ‘there’ is some point distant from me, and so on. It is therefore totally misguided to argue that the gap between ‘A is f ’ and ‘I am f ’ is innocuously on a par with the gap between ‘A is green’ and ‘this is green’ and to construe this latter as something quite innocent.
The idea that the irreducibility of ‘I’ reflects no more than a general irreducibility of indexical utterance to non-indexical utterance is, on reflection, a very odd one. The system of indexicals must have a centre, one might think, and that centre is the first person, ‘I’. The idea that we have a range of indexical utterances, each of which is mysteriously irreducible to non-indexical utterances, is, to my mind, quite unacceptable. The other indexicals obviously centre on the first person, and it is a central feature of that indexical that it is irreducible; other indexicals have only a derivative irreducibility.
Moreover, there is a crucial difference between ‘I’ and other indexicals which was well brought out by Castañeda.2 All demonstratives, with the exception of ‘I’, are eliminable for their users, and must be so eliminated if the information or belief expressed in the original statement featuring the demonstrative is to be retained or returned to later. For example, if I say, ‘This is the best book I have read for a long time’, I shall not be able to return to this topic in the future in the absence of the book in question unless I replace the demonstrative this with (in this case) a proper name, the title of the book, or a descriptive term for the book. This is true of all demonstratives except I, where the situation is precisely reversed. For no one can keep hold of all the expressions of belief or statements of information about himself which he receives from other people unless he manages to replace every single reference to himself in terms of descriptions or names, or in terms of other demonstratives (such as you or he) by a reference which features the first person. For example, if someone says, ‘I find his piano-playing very annoying’, I can’t take this as a reference to myself, and, in particular, I can’t hold on to this expression of opinion in a way which would enable me
The First Person 15 to return to this distressing topic later unless I replace his with my and, in this case, replace the first-person pronoun, which does not refer to me, with a name. For all these reasons, then, the claim that the first person is innocuously on a par with other indexicals must be rejected.
One who thinks that the essential work can indeed be carried by the indexical ‘this’ is Derek Parfit. In response to the way I put the case for ‘I’ as the fundamental indexical in The Identity of the Self, 3 he writes,
Madell . . . suggests that what makes my experiences mine is not that they are had by a particular subject, me, but that they have the property of being mine. On this view, the topography of mental space is given by the existence of a very large number of different properties, one for each person who ever lives. I agree with Madell that I and he could have two simultaneous experiences that were qualitatively identical, but were straightforwardly distinct. But this need not be because one of the experiences has the unique property of being mine, and the other has unique property of being Madell’s. It could simply be because one of these experiences is this experience, occurring in this particular mental life, and the other is that experience, occurring in that other particular mental life . . . My claim is that, since I can use the self-referring use of ‘this’, I do not need to use ‘mine’.4
I think this response misses the point. What it shows is that we can use the word this on some occasions in a self-referring sense. So we may, but it should be clear that when we do we understand it to pick out an experience which we could also pick out as ‘mine’. That is what it means to say that the sense of ‘this’ in such contexts is self-referring. Normally, the word this can be used to refer to whatever I choose to indicate—this word, this colour, this thought, or whatever. The fact that the word can be used to in a self-referring sense means only that in that sense our use of it is governed by our understanding of the role of the first person indexical. It does not show that this role does not have the fundamental place in our understanding that I have claimed it must have. To take a similar suggestion, the fact that Frankenstein’s assistant in the Universal Studio’s film of this story referred to himself by using his name, Igor, does not show that the role of the firstperson indexical can be replaced by simply using proper names. It shows only that we can use a proper name as a first-person device.
There is a further fundamental problem with Parfit’s treatment of this point, a problem which will be apparent with some of the other proposals about the nature of the first person which I shall consider in the following. Parfit correctly says that in my view, ‘the topography of mental space is given by a very large number of different properties, one for each person who ever lives’ and goes on to suggest that because we can use the selfreferring use of this, we do not need to accept this view of the matter. But this is precisely the mistake which Chalmers highlighted in his discussion
of the matter which I mentioned in the first chapter. What Parfit has done is simply to give an account of how self-reference can be achieved, viz., by using the word this rather than the word mine. But even if we allow this to go through, it is surely obvious that it focuses on a feature which is common to all self-referrers, for it is obviously the case that every selfreferrer can use the word this in this restricted way. Since this is so, the proposal says nothing about how the truth that one of these self-referrers is uniquely me could be acknowledged. As I have said, we shall find this same failure in a number of other responses to this issue. In my view a fundamental failure of so much of the recent discussion of the nature of the self and its identity through time has been the failure to acknowledge the uniqueness of the referent of ‘I’, a failure which makes it impossible to understand how reference to oneself as the unique referent of the first person that one is could possibly be achieved. I shall probably find myself returning to this point repeatedly in what follows. Parfit’s proposal, then, fails to accommodate the uniqueness of one’s own self (the Uniqueness Issue) and of what it could be to ascribe experiences to one particular self, oneself (the Self-Ascription Issue).
INDEXICALS AND PROPER NAMES
The next misconceived suggestion is that the failure of the first person to be replaced by a description is quite innocent, for Kripke has taught us that the same is true of proper names in general.5 The name Aristotle cannot be replaced by a description such as ‘ancient philosopher, author of De Anima and many other works’. But that does not stand in the way of our recognising that Aristotle is in fact an ancient philosopher, who has certain properties, and has some of them essentially. He is not someone who happens to have been born in the ancient world but someone who could have been born in the medieval one, for instance.
I think it would be very surprising indeed if the status of the first-person indexical could be treated in this way, and it should be clear that the proposal cannot work. It will not work because the particular considerations that underlie Kripke’s claim about the impossibility of replacing names by descriptions have no application to the case of the relation of ‘I’ to a description. Kripke’s approach rests essentially on the consideration that there is a causal chain of reference which runs from the initial baptism of a certain person as ‘Aristotle’ to the use of that name in the mouth of some individual in the present day. The name is passed on link by link to its present user or users. It is possible that the person originally named Aristotle was not a philosopher at all, but that nevertheless the name has been passed on from user to user, and in the course of time the use of the name has become linked with the belief that its bearer was a philosopher. This is why it should be clear that the name Aristotle does not stand proxy for a description. In any
The First Person 17 case, the name may be properly used without the user’s knowing much, if anything, about the actual properties of Aristotle.
Now it should be obvious that any attempt to make use of Kripke’s line on proper names to show that the fact that ‘I’ similarly does not stand proxy for a description is innocuous must be misguided. Kripke’s claim that the proper name does not stand proxy for a description depends on the notion of an historical chain of reference, the name being passed from link to link. There is a history of how the name reached one and ‘it is by following such a history that one gets to the reference’.6 And, as I’ve pointed out, it may be that if one traced this history one would discover that the properties of the referent are different from what one supposed them to be. But it is absurd to suppose that the referent of ‘I’ is discovered by tracing some history of how the name reached one and just as absurd to suppose that, in tracing such a chain, I might discover that my actual properties are different from those I took myself to have, even that ‘I’ actually does not even name a human being at all. There was no ‘initial baptism’, followed by the name being passed from one user to the next.
Furthermore, Kripke allows that there are some cases where it is pretty obvious that the referent of a name is indeed something taken to be the bearer of a certain set of uniquely identifying properties, for example, Jack the Ripper and, conceivably, Hesperus and Alpha Centauri.7 In these cases there is no gap between the name and the description. Jack the Ripper cannot be a name whose referent is to be discovered by tracing the historical chain of communication back to an initial baptism, since no one knows who Jack the Ripper is. The term stands as a proxy for a certain description: the man who murdered a number of prostitutes in a particularly unpleasant way in Victorian London. In all the cases mentioned, the names of indicated objects stand proxy for a description. But the first person never stands proxy for a description; there is always a gap between ‘A is f and ‘ I am f ’ .
There is one possible source of confusion that I ought perhaps to clear up. It is, of course, true that the mere description of the object does not entail ‘this object is named “Hesperus”’. The fact that an object of a certain description bears a certain name is not entailed by that description. In this sense there is always a gap between a description of an object’s properties, on one hand, and the assertion that it has the name that it has, on the other. So much is obvious. But when Nagel points out that no description of the world, no matter how complete, can indicate which small segment of that world I am, he is not pointing out that the fact that some such segment bears the name I is not included in that description. The gap between ‘A is f ’ and I am f ’ is clearly not like this at all. This should be obvious if one includes in the total description of all the individual people in the world in Nagel’s example the names that they have been given. This still leaves the something that the most complete description leaves out: in Nagel’s account of this point, it is that ‘I am TN’.8
Finally, Kripke points out that, although there may be a causal chain from our use of the term Santa Claus to a certain historical saint, children using this term obviously do not refer to that saint. Santa Claus is the individual who zooms around on a sledge drawn by reindeers, giving presents to children, rather than a particular historical saint. The referent of the name Santa Claus has changed over time. But there is no possibility of discovering that the referent of ‘I’ has changed. In total, the attempt to suggest that the fact that ‘I’ does not stand proxy for any description can be explained in the way that Kripke shows that proper names do not stand proxy for some description is totally misguided.
It is also clear that the suggestion under consideration, like so many discussions of the first person, fails to acknowledge the crucial uniqueness of the referent of ‘I’. If the gap between ‘A is f ’ and ‘I am f ’ were on a par with the gap between a proper name and a description, this, of course, would be true for every use of the first person. Once again, the crucial truth that the referent of ‘I’ in a tiny percentage of the uses of this pronoun is, uniquely, oneself would not be acknowledged.
NAGEL ON THE ESSENCE OF THE SELF
There is another attempt to use the ideas of Kripke, and of Putnam, to throw light on the first person, one which has been suggested, surprisingly, by Nagel. He argues that the real essence of the self may be hidden from us in something like the way that the real essence of natural kinds may be hidden from us.9 Nagel admits, however, that there doesn’t appear to anything like the same real possibility of discovering the real essence of the self, as we have discovered the real essence of, say, gold, but the basic point that there is a real essence of the self which is now hidden from us explains the gap between any present description and ‘I’.
It seems to me that there is no chance of this suggestion being correct. For one thing, even if such a real essence could be discovered, the gap between a full description of that essence and the indexical ‘I’ would remain. That is, the problem cannot be that we remain ignorant of some general essence of the self. For even if we were to imagine that we have found such an essence, it will presumably be something possessed by all selves and would leave untouched the central issue: what it is for some particular entity, possessing the putative essence, to be uniquely me. Indeed, I find it rather puzzling that, having identified a problem which centres on the uniqueness of ‘I’, Nagel should suggest a response which posits what is clearly a general feature: some sort of essence, common to all selves.10 By contrast, I want to say that the essence of the self is nothing other than the essence of experiences, and it is of the essence of experiences that they are mine or not mine, uniquely mine or uniquely the experience of another self. Furthermore, the essence of the self isn’t something which needs to be
The First Person 19 discovered, as was the essence of gold or water; it is something which lies on the surface.
One oddity of Nagel’s treatment is that in The View from Nowhere he makes his suggestion about the essence of the self before he expounds the point that a complete description of the world would seem to leave out the vital truth that ‘I am TN’. In the fourth chapter of this book, Nagel confronts this issue and the thought that one’s own appearance in the world appears to be utterly arbitrary. Now, as I said at the end of the first chapter, I do not want to underestimate the nature of these issues, in fact quite the opposite. Nevertheless, I find Nagel’s attempt to respond to these problems unsatisfactory. He puts what he sees to be the dilemma that
if the world as a whole really doesn’t have a particular point of view, how can one of its inhabitants have the special property of being me? I seem to have on my hands a fact about the world, or about TN, which both must exist (for how things are would be incomplete without it) and cannot exist (for how things are cannot include it.)11
I don’t find the suggestion that there is such a dilemma convincing. The right approach, to my mind, is to reject Nagel’s claim that ‘[t]he world cannot contain irreducibly first-person facts’ and to accept Chalmers’s suggestion that there may indeed be such a ‘primitive indexical fact’ as being me and that this is a feature of the world. Be that as it may, none of this fits at all easily with Nagel’s claim that there is an essence of the self on a par with the essence of such natural kinds as gold or water. There is no such essence common to all selves; each self is uniquely mine, yours, or that of other conscious beings. That is its essence, and it is not something which waits to be discovered. As I said earlier, it lies on the surface.
‘I’ AND THE CONNECTION WITH ACTION
I turn now to another clearly unsuccessful attempt to defuse the problem. It is the suggestion that what picks out some particular case as pertaining to me is the connection with action. The answer to the question, ‘What makes a belief a belief about oneself?’ lies in the distinctive role the belief plays in the determination of action. This claim is made by Shoemaker, who goes on to support it with the following assertion: ‘If I am the long-lost son of X, learning that the long-lost son of X can collect a fortune by presenting himself in Cleveland will not send me towards Cleveland unless I know, or believe that I am the long lost son of X’.12 Indeed, it won’t, but this fails entirely to show that what it is for such a belief to be a belief about oneself simply consists in its role in the determination of action. To be begin with, it is obvious that there are many first-person beliefs which are not linked in any direct way with action. I believe that I am older than I was a year ago,
but there is nothing I can do about it, and no action could possibly issue from this belief. And even if such beliefs may in some imaginable circumstance lead one to act in a certain way, it would be absurd to suggest that one must wait on one’s behaviour in this hypothetical circumstance before one is able to recognise the belief as a belief about oneself.
But the more fundamental, and surely obvious, point is that it is because I believe something to be true of me that I act in a certain way. My accepting that a certain belief is a belief about myself cannot therefore consist in its moving me to action, for I may cite the fact that, as I believe, a certain proposition is true of myself as a reason for my action. Furthermore, I may remind myself when, say, going off to Cleveland that the reason I am doing this is that I believe that there is a fortune waiting for me when get there, but it makes no sense to suggest that what makes this belief a belief about myself is that it issues in a further course of action.
Moreover, the sort of analysis we are considering once again fails to provide any answer to the question, ‘What is it for one of all the countless people who have given utterance to a first-person proposition and acted in the light of it to be me?’ It is surely hardly necessary to emphasise that this treatment of the issue, in addition to being mistaken in the ways I have suggested, once again focuses on a feature which, if it obtains at all, obtains for all self-conscious beings. It highlights the supposed link between selfreference and action, and thus fails to make clear what it is to recognise some particular instance of this link as one which obtains in one’s own case. It cannot be right to answer the question, ‘What makes a belief a belief about oneself?’ by highlighting a feature which is not unique to oneself but is common to all self-referrers. Once again, the Uniqueness Objection Issue comes into play. There is, in short, a failure on many counts on the part of this suggestion to grasp the nature of the central issues here. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how Shoemaker could have made a suggestion which so clearly fails to throw any light on the use of the first person. But it is clear that Shoemaker does consider the question, ‘What makes a belief a belief about oneself?’ and claims that the most important thing about such beliefs, ‘conceptually speaking, is the distinctive role they play in the determination of action’. This is an altogether puzzling line of argument, one which fails to accommodate any of the four crucial points I outlined in the first chapter and which confronts additional difficulties of its own.
LYCAN AND BAKER ON THE FIRST PERSON
Next, I want to consider a different, but equally misconceived, approach developed by W. G. Lycan. He has argued that there is no more to the supposed mystery of the self than the fact that self-reference is irreducible to third-person reference. There is, Lycan says, no mysterious extra fact I know when I know that I weigh twelve stone, nothing over and above what
The First Person 21 you know when we learn that G.M. weighs twelve stone. Nevertheless, the first person has a unique function, in that only I can use the word I to refer to myself. This is the functional role of the first person. But nothing extra is referred to which is not picked out in the equivalent third-person utterance. It is just that it is referred to in a special way: for each self there is the special mode of reference, which is self-reference. As Lycan puts it, ‘[t]wo schemes of interpretation are in play, a functional or computational scheme that distinguishes my knowledge of my own weight from your knowledge of my weight . . . and a referential or truth-conditional scheme that does not distinguish them at all’.13
This sort of approach is echoed much more recently by Lynne Rudder Baker. Consider this passage:
From a first person perspective, I have the ability to think of myself in a unique way, but there is no funny object that is myself as-myself; there is no entity other than the person who I am. . . . When I say ‘I wonder whether I’ll be happy in five years’, I refer twice to myself—to the person, Lynne Baker, in her embodied concreteness. When I attribute first-person reference to myself by means of ‘I*’, what I refer to is no different from what you refer to by means of ‘Lynne Baker’. What is special about my use of ‘I*’ is that I can conceive of that person in a way that you cannot, from ‘the inside’, so to speak.14
But this does not meet Nagel’s concerns at all, for a reason I have already outlined in considering Parfit’s response to this issue. Nagel’s question is, ‘What can it be for some segment of the world, a world of which a complete description can be given, to be me?’ Of course, it is true that I has the unique function that Lycan and Baker identify: only I can use the word I to refer to myself. But that is not a point which shows that Nagel’s concern is misplaced. There are billions of human beings in the world, the vast majority of whom use what appear to be devices of self-reference of various sorts: pointing to themselves, and using some version of the first person. Let us suppose that it is true of every one of these billions of self-referrers that ‘two schemes of interpretation’ come in to play; that is, the truth I convey in saying ‘I weigh twelve stone’ is also conveyed by someone saying ‘G.M. weighs twelve stone’. But all this, if it is true, is true for all self-referrers. The question that arises is, which of these billions of apparent self-referrers is me? Indeed, unless we have some conception of that, the very notion of conscious self-reference, referring to myself, cannot be grounded. This is surely the point that David Chalmers highlighted, in pointing out that, while an explanation of consciousness might yield an explanation of ‘points of view’ in general, no such general account will tell us what it is for some apparently arbitrary point of view to be mine. It is a fundamental misconception to suppose that Nagel’s point, which centres on the claim that the most comprehensive objective description of the world will not accommodate the
truth that some tiny segment of that reality has the unique property of being me, can be dissolved by homing on a feature which is universal: the fact that, with regard to each self-referrer, the self-regarding attitude differs functionally from other attitudes directed upon the very same state of affairs. This, of course, is the Uniqueness Issue yet again.
To be sure, some sorts of physical objects can be said to monitor themselves. Refrigerators monitor their own temperature, and it is true of each refrigerator that only that refrigerator can monitor its own temperature. But refrigerators are not conscious beings. Once we have described the world of refrigerators, and their self-monitoring capacity, our description is complete. That is not true of the world of self-conscious beings. The fullest possible description leaves something unaccounted for: one of these self-aware beings is me. Lycan’s claim that once we have seen that I has the unique function that only I can use it to refer to myself we have dissolved the problem Nagel has identified is therefore quite misguided. Every refrigerator monitors its own temperature, and every self-aware person can refer to himself or to herself. A description of all the refrigerators that there are, and of their self-monitoring function, leaves nothing out, but a description of all the persons there are and of their ability to be aware of and to refer to themselves does leave something out: the contingent truth that one of these self-aware beings is me.
This is Nagel’s point, and, as I pointed out previously, Chalmers makes the clearly related claim that, while an understanding of consciousness might give one a grasp of perspective in general, it will not give one an understanding of what it is for one of these perspectives to be a perspectives on the world to be mine.15 In fact, one can have no understanding of what a conscious perspective on anything by anyone could be unless one understands what it is for a perspective to be my perspective. The unique feature of I, that only I can use the first person to refer to myself, is not a feature which allows us to dissolve or set aside Nagel’s question. On the contrary, the claim presupposes that one does indeed have an understanding of what it is for some apparently arbitrary self-referrer to be oneself. Unless one had a conception of what it is for one of the billions of self-referrers there are in the world to be me, one could not refer knowingly to oneself, and thus, one can have no conception of what a conscious self-aware perspective on the world could be. Contrast the case of conscious self-awareness with what we can say about television cameras, say (to use a different example). Each camera has its own perspective on the world, but even if we suppose that some of these cameras are able to monitor their own perspective on the world, it would be absurd to suggest that, having described the world of television cameras in exhaustive detail, we have failed to grasp some central contingent truth about any particular camera. That is, while we are forced to admit that a complete description of all the conscious beings in the world produced without recourse to indexicals would fail to embrace the contingent truth that one of these conscious beings is me, there is no such contingent truth about any camera. Each camera has the perspective
The First Person 23 on the world that it has; this is a necessary truth, and all that there is to be said. But the notion of conscious perspectives, as opposed to the perspectives of TV cameras, cannot be understood unless one understands the possibility that one of a range of perspectives might be one’s own. That is why the idea that one might grasp the notion of conscious perspectives in general before one has the idea of one’s own perspective makes no sense. To repeat, it is the contingent truth that some self is, uniquely, myself that needs to be grasped if one is to have an idea of a self-conscious subject at all. Lycan’s suggestion that it is a sufficient rebuttal of Nagel to focus on a feature which is common to all self-referrers therefore completely misunderstands the force of Nagel’s point. And, if I am right, this is a mistake Nagel also makes in claiming that the challenge is to look for some essence of the self. No such essence, common to all selves, can possibly bear on the issue of what it is for one such self to be me. Once again, and perhaps wearisomely, I have to insist that the basic mistake in this and other responses to the question of the nature of the self has been the failure to acknowledge the uniqueness of the referent of ‘I’.
Let me now return to Lycan’s claim that, as he puts it, ‘there is no extra fact, and particularly not an “intrinsically perspectival” fact, that is known, believed, or whatever. I know that I myself weigh 180 pounds, while you now only that WGL—as you represent him—weighs 180 pounds; but it is the same fact that we both know’.16 Baker, as I have pointed out, makes exactly the same claim. I hope it is clear from the discussion so far that this cannot be right. I see these two ways of referring (self-reference, and reference by others) occurring all the time, but there is, pace Lycan and Baker, an ‘extra fact’ that I know with regard to one particular class of such referrings and that is that they pick out myself. And every self-aware person also knows the ‘extra fact’ that some acts of self-reference are acts of referring to themselves I have suggested that Lycan and Baker share an approach to the issue of the nature of the first person which cannot be right, because it focuses on a feature of the self which is common to all selves, and indeed to any self-monitoring artefact, and therefore makes it impossible to recognise an arbitrary one of the relevant class to be, uniquely, oneself. Elsewhere, however, Baker seems to focus on just this point. She makes use of the notion of haecceity, or individual essence. She says, for example, that
[a]n exemplification of the first-person perspective is like a haecceity, or individual essence. The first-person perspective is not a qualitative property, and my exemplification of it is unique to me. (my italics)17
This looks more promising, but a number of questions about this suggestion can be raised. First, it is not at all clear whether it is only selves which have haecceities or whether everything, or every token of a substance, has its own haecceity. If the latter is the case, then the notion does nothing to illuminate the essential difference between selves and other objects, that, while everything is identical to itself, only an arbitrary one of all the selves that
there are is, uniquely, me. That is, there must be a difference between objects, even self-monitoring objects such as computers and refrigerators, and selves. If individual computers and refrigerators also have their own haecceity, then the notion does nothing to explicate the essential uniqueness of each self, a uniqueness which nothing but selves can have. If, however, reference to the idea of haecceity is indeed meant to illuminate this essential uniqueness, then I suggest that it is surplus to requirements. There is a self which is, uniquely, myself, and that is all that needs to be said. However, since Baker asserts that there is no such ‘funny thing’ as ‘myself-as myself ’, it is not clear that the notion of haecceity can be used to convey the special uniqueness of the self.
LYCAN AND BÖER ON SELF-REFERENCE
Lycan’s position is not to deny that I is ineliminable, but to argue that its ineliminability consists only in the fact that first-person words have a special role: self-reference. This, I have argued, cannot dissolve the problem. In an earlier piece, however, he and Stephen Böer seem to argue that I is not uniquely ineliminable at all.18 They argue that Castañeda’s claim that ‘John says that he is in danger’ cannot be replaced by ‘John says that a person of such-and-such a description is in danger’ shows nothing about the special status of the self-reflexive he (represented by Castaneda as ‘he*) or of I. I may, to be sure, say that I believe that man to be in danger without realising that that man is myself, because I’m deceived by a mirror image, but equally I may be deceived by a mirror image into supposing that there are two people, Van and Wilfred, and believe that Van is in danger, not knowing that Van is just a mirror image of Wilfred. So Van is not replaceable by Wilfred, just as I is not replaceable by ‘person of such-and-such description’. Nothing about this shows that ‘I’, or ‘he*, is uniquely irreducible or irreplaceable.
But this will not do. I have before me what seem to be two sets of properties, the Van-set and the Wilfred-set. The following question might occur to me: Are there really two sets—two people, in fact—or is the one merely a reflection of the other? No such question arises in relation to I. I do not wonder whether what appear to be two sets of properties might be one and the same. I wonder whether I, that person I am aware of as myself, an awareness which may even survive loss of awareness of any physical properties, as Anscombe accepts,19 am the person who possesses certain physical properties, in this case, the properties depicted in the mirror image.
The argument for the claim that I is ineliminable, which Böer and Lycan attack, is, as I have indicated, one which was well set out by Castañeda many years ago. The only sentence which can be regarded as equivalent in content to the sentence ‘John says, “I am in danger”’ is the corresponding oratio obliqua sentence ‘John says that he is in danger’, and Castañeda argues in detail that the pronoun he in this sort of context is not reducible or replaceable in any way.20 This seems to me exactly right. By contrast,
Lycan and Böer’s attempt to undermine this argument was unsuccessful, and Lycan’s and Baker’s more recent attempts to show that the irreducibility of I is innocuous is also unsuccessful.
HUGH MELLOR ON ‘I’
Another philosopher who has argued that there can be no such special property as being mine, or being me, is Hugh Mellor.21 There can be no such property, any more than there can be the property ‘now’, he claims. If there were such a property, then every time would have to be both now and not now: now when it is true that now it is 10:15, and not now when it is false that it is 10:15, and so for every time. Similarly for ‘I’. ‘I am JFK’ is true when spoken by JFK but false when spoken by anyone else. So everyone is both ‘I’ and not ‘I’, which no one can possibly be. But this argument is confused. It is not that everyone is both ‘I’ and not ‘I’ but, rather, that everyone is the unique ‘I’ that he is, and not another one. There is not the outrageous breach of the law of noncontradiction suggested by Mellor. The argument rests, yet again, on a total failure to acknowledge the central point, that one person is uniquely me. As Mellor presents the argument, what his opponents posit is some general property which, absurdly, everyone both has and lacks. There is, of course, no such property. But there is the property, which I have, of being uniquely me, and which all my experiences have, of being uniquely mine. As Husserl put it, ‘[t]he word “I” names a different person from case to case, and does so by way of an ever altering meaning’, and Husserl adds the ‘[e]ach man has his own “I”-presentation and with it his own individual notion of “I”, and this is why the word’s meaning differs from person to person’.22
Nor does Mellor’s point about ‘now’ succeed. ‘Now’ is parasitic on ‘I’, at least to the extent that ‘now’ is when ‘I’ speak or think. At the moment when I speak, the time is now, and all other times are not now. But it cannot be the case that all times have the mysterious general property of being both now and not now, any more than it is the case that everyone has the mysterious and contradictory general property of being both ‘I’ and not ‘I’. If I use the word now, that moment is a unique now, relativised to that use and that moment, and if I use the word I, I refer to this unique user of the first person. Everyone is the unique ‘I’ that he or she is, but in saying this, I am not referring to some general property which everyone mysteriously both has and does not have.
MCGINN ON INDEXICAL PROPERTIES AND SECONDARY QUALITIES
Colin McGinn discussed the self in his book The Character of Mind.23 He ends by saying that we seem driven ‘to the conclusion that the self should be conceived as a simple mental substance whose identity over time is primitive
and irreducible’. I think this is exactly right. However, his treatment of the topic of indexical thought in his book The Subjective View is difficult to reconcile with this, and seems to go seriously awry. In this book McGinn argues that indexical thought belongs with the ascription of secondary qualities, in the sense that in neither mode of thought do we gain access to how the world is. Rather, in both cases we are concerned with how the world is represented to one, with the nature of the subjective grid we impose on reality. ‘We might say’, he says, ‘that in representing the world as having secondary qualities and indexical properties the mind imposes a subjective “grid” upon its apprehension of things, a grid governed by its own internally determined principles and reflective of what is objectively present in the world.’24
The idea that indexical properties and secondary qualities are on a par is surely highly questionable. One does, at least, have some idea of what it could mean to say that our experience of the world as possessing the usual range of secondary qualities is a matter of how the world appears to one rather than a matter of how the world is. But on the face of it, it is unintelligible to say that my possession of a first person perspective—my proneness to ascribe certain states of consciousness to myself—is a matter of how reality appears to me rather than something pertaining to anything in reality as such. If I see the world in a certain way, then the fact that the world seen in this way is apprehended by me cannot be part of the content of that apprehension. If I impose a subjective grid on the world, then it is objectively the case that I do so. That the world is apprehended by me in a certain way cannot be part of what I apprehend. If I impose a subjective grid on the world, that the grid is imposed by me cannot be part of what is thus imposed. The suggestion that indexical properties belong in the same basket as secondary qualities seems wholly misconceived.
Furthermore, if indexicality were an aspect of a subjective grid we project on to the world, it is quite unclear how we can rule out the suggestion that it is merely contingently the case that the person who is looked on as ‘I’ is so looked on. Why, if being ‘I’ is not an objective fact, but a matter of how the world appears, should the world appear to me in just this way, with the indexical property projected onto just that person rather than onto any other? Indeed, the parallel with secondary qualities for which McGinn argues implies precisely this pretty absurd parallel. In the case of secondary qualities McGinn clearly accepts that it is merely contingently the case that the physical world appears to have the distribution of, say, colours that it does. The very notion of secondary qualities as some sort of projection onto the world clearly carries with it the implication that it is merely contingent that the projection is at it is. Beings very different from us may well see the world quite differently. But this notion, that the subjective grid we project on to the world is contingent in its nature, clearly makes no sense if we try to apply it to indexicality. The assumption underlying McGinn’s treatment is, in Nagel’s words, that the world cannot contain any irreducibly first-person facts. This is the belief which needs to be abandoned.
The parallel between indexical properties and secondary qualities which McGinn attempts to draw cannot exist. It makes sense to suggest that secondary qualities are a sort of subjective projection onto the world. But it can make no sense to suggest that when I impose this subjective grip onto the world I myself am part of what is projected. Furthermore, while it makes sense to suggest that this object, which I now see as green, might, in some possible world, be seen as white, it makes no sense to suggest that the object which is one yard away from me, and which I pick out as the object here, might, in some possible world, still be one yard away from me but not here at all. Indexical properties and secondary qualities simply do not belong together.
None of the discussions of the nature of the first person that I have just examined meets any of the essential requirements I listed towards the end of the first chapter. They all fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of what is picked out by the pronoun I, and the fact that it is a contingent truth that one tiny segment of reality is one’s own self, and thus make it impossible to understand what it could be to ascribe experiences to oneself. All of them give accounts of the first person, and of the self, which apply to all members of the relevant class (selves), and in doing so make it impossible to understand the special role of the first person. I now want to examine two recent treatments of the self, both of which, in my view, are open to the same line of attack. They both misinterpret the nature and significance of the first person.
GALEN STRAWSON ON THE SELF
First, let us look at Galen Strawson’s view that the self is a short-term entity, or, as he puts it, a single experience is identical to a subject of experience, and the subject is identical to the content of the experience. That is, taking e to be the experience, s to be the subject, and c to be the content of the experience, we have the equation, e = s = c, which he calls the Experience/Subject/Content Identity Thesis. 25 I think Strawson is led to this view because he sees, rightly, that the idea that the experience is owned by some ontologically distinct entity called the self won’t do. I also agree with him that the belief that Descartes held the view that experiences inhere some underlying substance, conceived of as being ontologically distinct from the experiences which belong to it, betrays a major misunderstanding of Descartes’s position, and I shall develop this point more fully in the next chapter. However, having rejected this position, Strawson sees no other option but to identify the self with the experience of the moment, and this carries in its train the implication that the particular self and its experience cannot be separated from the content of that experience. It also carries the (somewhat alarming) implication that the self’s duration in time is very short, lasting no longer than the duration of the particular experience. This must follow for Strawson, since there is no underlying substance to which successive experiences belong, or in which they inhere, and which remains unchanged
through a succession of different experiences. This is how Strawson sets out his position:
To say that experiences may be considered as separately existent, and may exist separately, is in no way to suggest—incoherently—that they can exist without involving a subject. It is, to repeat, a necessary truth . . . that an experience involves a subject of experience—that an experiencing involves an experiencer in some ineliminable sense . . . If experiences do not exist separately in the way imagined, all that follows is that there are as many subjects of experiences as there are numerically distinct experiences. It’s not: no self or subject in any sense at all. It’s just: no persisting self or subject in any sense at all—let alone a substantially simple, substantially immutable subject. (my italics)26
I have two objections. The first is that Strawson’s position seems to make it impossible to recognise what is obviously possible, and that is that at this moment the content of my present state of consciousness might have been very different—I might have been doing something completely different, for example. So the self cannot equate to the content of the experience. What prevents Strawson from seeing this is the failure to recognise what I want to insist is the essential point, and that is that it is of the essence of experiences that they are mine or not mine. This essence, I want to claim, is independent of the content of the experience. Given this, one can accept, not only that I might have been having a quite different experience from the one that I am now having, but also that successive experiences in time of a quite different content from each other may nevertheless be experiences of the same self—that is, they belong to the same self simply in virtue of all being mine. Strawson clearly supposes that the only way we could conceive of the possibility that I might have had a different experience from the one I am now having is to accept the idea that experiences inhere in some ontologically distinct entity or soul-substance, a conception which he, rightly, rejects. And this is to fail to grasp the essential point that experiences themselves are mine or not mine, and that their being so is independent of the content of those experiences. Strawson’s failure to acknowledge this essential point thus compels him to reject two beliefs which would seem self-evidently true to most people: first, that the content of one’s present experience might have been quite different from the actual and, second, that successive experiences, even of a quite different character, can be the experiences of the same self. My second objection to Strawson’s position centres on the question of whether it allows him to recognise that there may be any number of qualitatively identical experiences, of which only one is mine. The problem is obvious: if the self is simply identical to the content of the experience, then experiences having the same content and occurring at the same time would seem to be inescapably experiences of the same self. But, of the thousands of short, stabbing pains which are being experienced at this moment, only
The First Person 29 one is mine. Now Strawson acknowledges that there can indeed be two or more experiences which are exactly similar to each other but which remain numerically distinct nonetheless. What I am quite unclear about, however, is how he secures the conclusion that they are indeed numerically distinct. Some have argued that this numerical distinctness can only be secured by bringing the body into the picture. I shall argue in the next chapter that this suggestion is quite unsuccessful, although I am not at all sure how far Strawson would endorse this suggestion. I simply make the preliminary point here that from the fact that an experience is tied to a certain body identified by a certain set of physical coordinates, nothing follows about whether that experience is mine or not mine (the Criterial Gap Issue). Now if Strawson does not take this line, we must again ask what it is in virtue of which just one of an indefinitely large number of qualitatively identical experiences is mine. Here are these qualitatively identical short stabbing pains scattered around the place like confetti. One of them is mine. Is that experience mine in virtue of the satisfaction of some condition or criterion? It is difficult to see how that can be, since there will always be a gap between the assertion that an experience meets certain objective conditions and the assertion that the experience is mine. Something, as Nagel pointed out, must be accepted as ‘originally and underivatively’ mine, and this must surely be experience itself.
If this is the case, then two points seem to follow. First, the only way of securing the conclusion that a number of qualitatively identical experiences are nevertheless numerically distinct is to say they are distinct just in virtue of the fact that one of them is mine, one is yours, one is his, and so on. And this is to recognise what I hold is the absolutely essential point, that it is of the essence of experiences to be mine or not mine. Second, if it is of the essence of experiences that they are mine or not mine, it does not follow that for an experience to be essentially mine it must have just the content that it has and no other, nor does it follow that successive experiences with quite different content cannot all be mine.
I want to say a bit more about the specific point that Strawson’s identification of the subject with the experience of the moment makes it impossible for him to accept that experiences at different times can be experiences of the same self. The claim that what I imagine to be my thought of five minutes ago cannot be a thought of the same self as this present self is, to put it mildly, hugely counter-intuitive. In reply to an imagined objector who says that when he says, ‘I am conscious and I was conscious yesterday’, the I clearly refers to the same self (proposition P), Strawson says that
[i]t is quite plain to me that that the ‘I’ who is conscious now was just not there yesterday. Still, someone who is sympathetic to my view who nevertheless wanted [P] to be true could embrace a ‘counterpart semantics’ for past and future sentences; the second ‘I’ would be evaluated in terms of there being a counterpart of me that existed and was conscious.27
