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Abstract
There is a consensus among philosophers that some “I”-thoughts are immune to error through misidentification. In some recent papers, this property has been formulated in the following deflationist way: an “I”-thought is immune to error through misidentification when it can misrepresent the mental or bodily property self-ascribed but cannot misrepresent the subject (if any) possessing that property. However, it has been put forward that the range of mental and bodily states that are immune in that limited sense cannot include nonconceptual forms of self-representation. In this paper, I claim the opposite. I argue in favor of a theoretical framework inspired by semantic relativism that solves the problem of immune nonconceptual self-representations. In order to do so, I refute an argument against the relativist account which is based on the existence of shared representations. This argument, I contend, rests on a confusion between two conditions to which a relativist may appeal when considering whether a certain mental content is relative to the self: a strong invariance condition and a weak invariance condition. I then argue that even if we acknowledge the existence of shared representations, the weak invariance condition is still satisfied, and consequently the relativist framework can make sense of INSRs. I argue that this weak invariance condition is satisfied by a representational function that self-relativizes certain representations. I then provide an empirical instance of such a function by discussing some of the recent literature on motor representations and the sense of agency. In the last part of the paper, I answer several potential objections. These potential objections lead me to distinguish two fundamental kinds of error relative to the self: error through misidentification and error through misapplication. This distinction allows me to answer a fundamental question raised by the very idea of de facto immunity to error through misidentification.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and critical discussion on an earlier draft, I would like to thank François Recanati, Frédérique de Vignemont, Jim Pryor, Roblin Meeks, Béatrice Longuenesse and Michael Murez.
Notes
1. This deflationist notion is used by Meeks (Citation2006): “A state that is immune to error through misidentification cannot, obviously, who-misrepresent.” It is also used by Musholt (Citation2011): “So while a self-conscious thought that is immune to error through misidentification can misrepresent the property that is being ascribed, it cannot misrepresent the subject purportedly possessing that property.” As will be clear, these definitions are inadequate unless we distinguish two types of representational error (see section 8).
2. I borrow the term “basic-immunity” from Musholt (Citation2011).
3. I will also use the adjectival form of B-IEM, B-immune, for mental states possessing the B-IEM property.
4. See, for instance, Bermúdez (Citation1998) and Peacocke (Citation2002).
5. This paradox stresses the circularity of the theories that define self-consciousness in terms of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun (Bermúdez, Citation1998, p. 19).
6. Consequently, these representations do not have genuine truth conditions, but rather have correctness conditions which could be fixed with reference to their normal function (which can be determined by evolutionary considerations) (Millikan, Citation1984).
7. This notion will have to be refined on the basis of the distinction between two levels of content, explicit and implicit (see section 8).
8. See also Musholt (Citation2011) for a similar argument.
9. In zoology, sessility is a characteristic of animals that are not able to move about.
10. The notion of unarticulated constituents is, in some respects, different from the notion of parameters of evaluation (see section 4). But these differences are not directly relevant to the issue I address in this paper.
11. Recanati (Citation2007) and Cummins (Citation1996) use different terms to capture the concerning relation. According to Recanati, the content of the representation is relativized to a parameter of evaluation. According to Cummins, the representational content is applied to a representational target. I do think that these different formulations are equivalent (see section 8).
12. This is just a loose way of talking. I am not committed to the view that there are ways of gaining information from the inside and ways of gaining information from the outside in isolation from each other.
13. Once again, this formulation is incorrect as it stands. It will be refined in what follows.
14. However, Goldman seems to seriously consider the hypothesis according to which “a first-person indexical would appear as part of the ‘character’ of the thought, in David Kaplan’s sense” (Goldman, Citation2009). This idea is very close to the position I defend in this paper (see section 6).
15. However, this definition is controversial and the notion of shared representations is still in need of conceptual clarification. See de Vignemont and Haggard (Citation2008).
16. See, for example, Jacob (Citation2008).
17. Meeks does not distinguish between B-IEM and standard IEM as I do in this paper.
18. This thesis concerns only our weather thoughts based on firsthand experience (when I look outside and see rain). In some particular circumstances, even if the place is not articulated in the sentence “It’s raining,” it does not mean that the content of the thought expressed is relativized to a place. According to Perry, an example of such a situation is when, in phone communication, I have the intention to talk to someone about the nonlocal weather (see Perry, Citation1986, p. 211).
19. In this paper I do not differentiate “circumstance of evaluation” and “situation of evaluation”. Recanati used the former (Recanati, Citation2007); I use the latter.
20. This means the role of a given representation in the cognitive system, more precisely its relation to sensory stimulation, other mental states, and behavior.
21. This term comes from Clapin (Citation2002), Cummins (Citation2010), and Ramsey (Citation2007). In a nutshell, the representational function of a given representation is how this representation serves in the cognitive architecture: “the use to which it is put” (Herschbach, Citation2012, p. 497). See section 8 for a discussion of that concept within Cummins’ theory of error. In the present paper, I consider the role to be equivalent to a representational function, and the relativization function to be an instance of a representational function.
22. See section 8 for the same idea couched in cognitive terms.
23. This idea does not conflict with the recent literature, according to which remembering is a constructive activity (for instance, Loftus & Pickrell, Citation1995; Wade, Garry, Don Read, & Lindsay, Citation2002). Indeed, we should distinguish between two questions. (i) Where does the explicit content of a memory representation come from (from perceptual traces or from a narrative/constructive process)? (ii) Which mechanism underpins the subsequent self-ascription of the memory representations? The literature on false memories or “honest” lies (Conway & Loveday, Citation2015) is relevant to answering the first question, whereas my main concern is the second question (I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for having stressed this point).
24. An external guarantee means that what a given state (like a weather thought) concerns is determined by the thinker’s environment, without any cognitive discrimination by the subject between the situation concerned and other possible situations (Perry, Citation1986, 1993, p. 216).
25. This idea is close to the notion of context defended by Chastain: “memory images, the components of one’s visual field, thoughts, and so on. Each of these is an element in what I will call a context, and it is by virtue of referential connections between their elements and particular things in the world that contexts are anchored down to the things and situations which they are about” (Citation1975, p. 195).
26. It is a case of identification-freedom (Evans, Citation1982, section 7.3).
27. The notion of implicit representation is far from being the object of a consensus in the philosophical community. It has been defended by various authors (see Clapin, Citation2002; Dennett, Citation1978; Haugeland, Citation1991; Kirsch, Citation1990) but thoroughly criticized by others (Ramsey, Citation2007).
28. Deviant circumstances include, for instance, delusions of control (Frith, Citation1992). See section 8.
29. Pragmatic representations are one way to understand shared motor representations (see section 4).
30. For a computational model of this idea, see Hindriks and colleagues (Citation2007).
31. The justification of that distinction is the following: “The content of r [a token representation] has to be independent of the way a system happens to use r, for error is using r to represent t [the target] even though r does not represent t. If using r to represent t makes r a representation of t, there can be no error.” (Cummins, Citation1996, p. 86).