Afterword: Looking Ahead

My principal reason for revisiting and combining the essays in this volume was that they all converge on and develop a small number of basic themes. In the introduction, I try to bring those themes out and explain how the individual essays contribute to developing them. However, the process of editing the essays and thinking about how they connect together had a consequence that I probably should have foreseen. It made very clear where more work needs to be done. For that reason, I was very pleased when the referees for this volume suggested that I write an afterword identifying some of the challenges (and, hopefully, opportunities) that lie ahead in this area. I welcome being able at least to identify some of the gaps and problems that remain, even if I am not in a position at the moment to fill and solve them. But since this enterprise may seem a little self-indulgent, I will strive for brevity....

Bodily Awareness and Self-Consciousness

We are embodied, and we are aware of our bodies ‘from the inside’ through different forms of bodily awareness. But what is the relation between these two facts? Are these forms of bodily awareness types of self-consciousness, on a par, say, with introspection? In this paper I argue that bodily awareness is a basic form of self-consciousness, through which perceiving agents are directly conscious of the bodily self. The first two sections clarify the nature of bodily awareness. Sections III to V I explore how bodily awareness functions as a form of self-consciousness and how this is connected to the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first person pronoun. In section IV I consider, and remain unconvinced by, an argument to the effect that bodily awareness cannot have first person content (and hence cannot count as a form of self-consciousness). Finally, section V sketches out an account of the spatial content of bodily awareness and explores the particular type of awareness of the bodily self that it provides.

Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Cognitive Science

Taking as point of departure a paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) that appears to block philosophical elucidation of self-consciousness, this paper illustrates how highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich foundation of nonconceptual forms of self-awareness. Attention is paid in particular to the primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions. The study of these primitive forms of self-consciousness is an interdisciplinary enterprise and the paper considers a range of points of contact where philosophical work can illuminate work in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa.

The Elusiveness Thesis, Immunity to Error through Misidentification, and Privileged Access

Two ideas have played a prominent role in philosophical discussions of self-knowledge. The first is the idea that we enjoy introspective ways of finding out about ourselves are fundamentally different from our ways of finding out about ordinary physical objects and other psychological subjects. The second is the idea (Hume’s elusiveness thesis) that when we find out about our own properties through introspection we are not acquainted with any object whose properties they are. It is natural to think that these two ideas are related – and, in particular, that it is (at least partly) because we do not encounter the self as an object in introspection that the knowledge of the self gained through introspection is epistemically privileged. This paper explores this idea in the context of awareness of one’s own body in proprioception and in ordinary perceptual awareness.

The Sources of Self-Consciousness

We can think about the sources of self-consciousness in either a genetic or an epistemic sense. That is, we can think either about the origins of the capacity to think self-conscious thoughts or about the warrant that we have for our self-conscious judgments. These two sets of questions are independent but related. This paper explores the role that the genetic dimension of self-consciousness plays in understanding the epistemology of self-consciousness. I will take as my foil a recent account of some key features of the epistemic dimension of a particular type of self-conscious judgment – the account offered by Christopher Peacocke in his book Being Known (Peacocke 1999). Working through the example of how the bodily self is represented in visual perception shows how the primitive foundations from which self-consciousness emerges in the course of cognitive development are also the foundation for the epistemic status of full-fledged self-conscious thoughts.

The Bodily Self, Commonsense Psychology, and the Springs of Action

Philosophers and cognitive scientists typically take the springs of action to be beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes, with the general idea being that action is caused by desires (or comparable pro-attitudes), guided by belief (or comparable information states). This dominant way of thinking about the springs of action goes hand in hand with the idea that we navigate the social world by tacitly applying a conceptual understanding of how beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes work. This paper puts pressure on both guiding ideas. First, it points toward ways of thinking about the springs of action that do not engage the propositional attitudes. There often seems to be a lack of fit between our best models of the representations that generate behavior and the model of representation built into propositional attitude psychology. Evidence for this lack of fit comes from range of sources, from neural network modeling to detailed studies of action control and perceptual processing. Second, and correlatively, I explore tools for achieving social understanding and social coordination that bypass the propositional attitudes. These range from direct perception of emotions to game-theoretic heuristics (such as TIT-FOR-TAT in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma) and what AI theorists terms scripts and frames.

Ownership and the Space of the Body

In the last 20 years, a robust experimental paradigm has emerged for studying the structure of bodily experience, focusing primarily on what it is to experience one’s body as one’s own. The initial impetus came from the rubber hand illusion (RHI) first demonstrated by Botvinick and Cohen, subsequently extended by various researchers to generate illusions of ownership at the level of the body as a whole. This paper identifies some problems with how ownership is discussed in the context of bodily illusions, and then shows how those problems can be addressed through a model of the experienced space of the body. Section 1 briefly reviews the bodily illusions literature and its significance for cognitive science and philosophy. Section 2 expresses reservations with the concept of ownership in terms of which the RHI and other illusions are standardly framed. I offer three hypotheses for the source of our putative “sense of ownership”. The main body of the paper focuses on the third hypothesis, which is that judgments of ownership are grounded in the distinctive way that we experience the space of the body.

Ecological Perception and the Notion of a Nonconceptual Point of View

One of the attractions of Gibson’s concept of ecological perception is that it seems to provide a basic awareness of the bodily self that can serve as the core of a comprehensive account of full-fledged self-consciousness in thought and action. On the ecological understanding of perception, sensitivity to self-specifying information is built into the very structure of perception in such a way that, as Gibson famously put it, all perception involves co-perception of the (bodily) self and the environment. This paper shows how Gibson’s ecological account is not itself sufficient for self-awareness, even of a primitive form, but suggests what needs to be added to it in order to yield the basic awareness of the bodily self that I term possessing a nonconceptual point of view.

Bodily Ownership, Psychological Ownership, and Psychopathology

Debates about bodily ownership and psychological ownership have typically proceeded independently of each other. This paper explores the relation between them, with particular reference to how each is illuminated by psychopathology. I propose a general framework for studying ownership that is applicable both to bodily ownership (φ‎-ownership) and psychological ownership (ψ‎-ownership). The framework proposes studying ownership by starting with explicit judgments of ownership and then exploring the bases for those judgments. Section 3 discusses John Campbell’s account of ψ‎-ownership in the light of that general framework, emphasizing in particular his fractionation (inspired by schizophrenic delusions) of ψ‎-ownership into two dissociable components. Section 4 briefly presents an account of φ‎-ownership that I have developed in more detail elsewhere. Section 5 explores the suggestion, originating with Alexandre Billon, that there needs to be an integrated account of φ‎-ownership and ψ‎-ownership because depersonalization disorders typically involve breakdowns of both φ‎-ownership and ψ‎-ownership. The argument from depersonalization is not compelling, but section 6 proposes a different way of reaching the same conclusion. Section 7 shows how reflecting on agency and practical reasoning offers a common thread between the models of φ‎-ownership and ψ‎-ownership discussed earlier in the paper.

Bodily Ownership, Bodily Awareness, and Knowledge without Observation

Fredérique de Vignemont has argued that there is a positive quale of bodily ownership. She thinks that tactile and other forms of somatosensory phenomenology incorporate a distinctive feeling of myness and takes issue with my defense in Bermúdez of a deflationary approach to bodily ownership. That paper proposed an argument deriving from Elizabeth Anscombe’s various discussions of what she terms knowledge without observation. De Vignemont is not convinced and appeals to the Rubber Hand Illusion to undercut my appeal to Anscombe. Section 1 of this article restates the case against the putative quale of ownership. Section 2 explains why de Vignemonts’ objections miss the mark. Section 3 discusses in more detail how to draw a principled distinction between bodily awareness and ordinary perceptual awareness.