Self and others

ABSTRACT

What is the relation between self-knowledge and knowledge of others? And how do we develop an understanding of others and ourselves? In this paper, I will argue that our sense of self is thoroughly social even though self-knowledge is not based on the same kind of evidence as knowledge of others. Moreover, I will suggest that we need to distinguish between different kinds of self- and other-understanding: some are based on procedural knowledge or knowing-how and involve an implicit representation of self or other, while others involve conceptual abilities. I will conclude with some considerations regarding the role of the second-person perspective in structuring the development of the concept of ourselves and others as persons.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-consciousness
• intersubjectivity
• second-person perspective
• normativity
• philosophy
• developmental psychology
• education

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the organisers of the symposium ‘Fascination with the Unknown: The Other’ and would like to thank the participants for their comments and questions. I owe particular thanks to Eva-Maria Engelen, Eva Buddeberg and Anna-Lena Weyand for helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript and to Benjamin Reimann for help with the references and formatting. Parts of this paper (in particular, Section 3) are based on work that has been previously published in Musholt (2012) ‘Self-consciousness and Intersubjectivity,’ Grazer Philosophische Studien and Musholt (2015), Thinking about Oneself (MIT Press), chapter 6.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kristina Musholt is Professor of Cognitive Anthropology in the Department of Philosophy at Leipzig University, PI at the Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development, and a Member of the German Young Academy. She is the author of Thinking about Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self (MIT Press, 2015).

Notes

1 Note that for the purposes of this paper, the terms (self-)consciousness, (self-)awareness, and (self-)knowledge are used interchangeably.

2 Notice that this is not true for all kinds of self-knowledge. For instance, in order to know that I am in need of a haircut, I need to look at myself in the mirror and this does not differ much from looking at you. Notice also that in cases of what Cassam (2015) calls ‘substantial self-knowledge,’ such as the knowledge that I am an introvert, or that moving cities at this point in my life would make me unhappy, or when I am wondering whether or not I would like to have another child, I often rely on ways of establishing self-knowledge that involve observation, inference, testimony, etc. Thus, in many cases, self-knowledge is not distinct from other-knowledge. Nevertheless, the kind of immediate self-knowledge described above is considered to be fundamental by many philosophers, including myself (see, for example, Frank 1991; Shoemaker 1968; Musholt 2015 for further discussion).

3 See Musholt (2015) for a more detailed discussion; also see Baker (2013). I do not mean to imply that beings without a sense of others would be in a position to express themselves linguistically; as we will see below, linguistic ability (and, more generally, conceptual thought) requires intersubjectivity.

4 See Musholt (2012, 2015) for a more detailed discussion.

5 Until recently, imitation of facial gestures was thought to be innate, based on a pioneering study by Meltzoff and Moore (1977) as well as numerous other studies. However, as Oostenbroek et al. (2016) have shown, infant imitation is actually more likely to be a learned rather than an innate behaviour.

6 See Perner, Priewasser, and Roessler (2018) for a discussion of different conceptions of ‘theory of mind’ in cognitive science in combination with recent empirical studies on the development of this ability.

7 This is not to suggest that language does not already come into play and assumes an important role in shaping the child’s developing self-other-understanding much earlier. For one thing, children are embedded in and sensitive to their linguistic community right from the start. For another thing, they begin to express themselves linguistically much before the age of four. Yet it requires a certain level of conceptual and linguistic sophistication to understand the nature and role of mental states (both with respect to their relation to other mental states and to behaviour).

8 A related thought from within the tradition of phenomenology, which is examined in Eva Buddeberg’s contribution (2018), can be found in the work of Levinas. From within a different tradition but in a similar spirit, thinkers such as Habermas regard (linguistic) communication as essentially involving an encounter between mutually acknowledging selves (cf. Engelen 2018; Buddeberg 2018). Obviously, a detailed treatment – which is beyond the scope of this paper – would be required to do justice to these thinkers and to the commonalities and important differences between their approaches.

9 However, see Schilbach et al. (2013) for a recent attempt to adopt a second-person approach in the cognitive sciences.