SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS/Bermudez: PSYC Call for Book Reviewers (844 l.)
Stevan Harnad
harnad at coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk
Sun Oct 17 07:56:23 EDT 1999
PSYCOLOQUY CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWERS
Below is the Precis of "The Paradox of Self-Consciousness" by Jose
Luis Bermudez (799 lines). This book has been selected for multiple
review in PSYCOLOQUY. If you wish to submit a formal book review
please write to psyc at pucc.princeton.edu indicating what expertise
you would bring to bear on reviewing the book if you were selected
to review it.
(If you have never reviewed for PSYCOLOQUY or Behavioral & Brain
Sciences before, it would be helpful if you could also append a
copy of your CV to your inquiry.) If you are selected as one of the
reviewers and do not have a copy of the book, you will be sent a
copy of the book directly by the publisher (please let us know if
you have a copy already). Reviews may also be submitted without
invitation, but all reviews will be refereed. The author will reply
to all accepted reviews.
Full Psycoloquy book review instructions at:
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Relevant excerpts:
Psycoloquy reviews are of the book not the Precis. Length should be
about 200 lines [c. 1800 words], with a short abstract (about 50
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AUTHOR'S RATIONALE FOR SOLICITING MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW:
The book offers a novel approach to the study of self-consciousness,
integrating philosophical argument with detailed study of empirical
work from a range of disciplines. It provides a framework for
linking together distinct areas of cognitive science which are
rarely discussed together and discusses some fundamental problems
in the foundations of psychology (such as the nature of concepts
and the possibility of thought without language). I am continuing
to work on some of the central themes of the book and would greatly
benefit from feedback from the biobehavioral and cognitive science
community.
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psycoloquy.99.10.035.self-consciousness.1.bermudez Sun Oct 17 1999
ISSN 1055-0143 (47 paragraphs, 30 references, 799 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
Copyright 1999 Jose Luis Bermudez
THE PARADOX OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS (REPRESENTATION AND MIND)
Precis of Bermudez on Self-Consciousness
[MIT/Bradford, 1998 xiv, 236 pp. ISBN: 0-262-02441-1]
Jose Luis Bermudez
Department of Philosophy
University of Stirling
Stirling FK9 4LA
Scotland
CREA Ecole Polytechnique
1 Rue Descartes
75005 Paris France
jose.bermudez at stir.ac.uk
ABSTRACT: This book addresses two fundamental questions in the
philosophy and psychology of self-consciousness: (1) Can we provide
a noncircular account of full-fledged self-conscious thought and
language in terms of more fundamental capacities? (2) Can we
explain how full-fledged self-conscious thought and language can
arise in the normal course of human development? I argue that a
paradox (the paradox of self-consciousness) arises from the
apparent strict interdependence between self-conscious thought and
linguistic self-reference. Responding to the paradox, I draw on
recent work in empirical psychology and philosophy to cut the tie
between self-conscious thought and linguistic self-reference. The
book studies primitive forms of nonconceptual self-consciousness
manifested in visual perception, somatic proprioception, spatial
reasoning and interpersonal psychological interactions.
KEYWORDS: cognitive maps; concepts; content; ecological self;
navigation; proprioception; self-consciousness; self-reference;
visual perception;
I. INTRODUCTION
1. Philosophy and the neurosciences have an uneasy relationship.
Fruitful engagement is rare in either direction. This is partly the
inevitable result of the division of academic labours. But there is
also a deeper reason. The dominant methodological conception governing
work in the cognitive sciences involves a distinction of levels of
explanation. Marr's theory of vision has often been held up as a model
which the cognitive sciences in general ought to follow mainly, of
course, because it is one of the very few worked out and satisfying
theoretical treatments of a cognitive capacity that cognitive science
has so far produced. As is well-known, Marr's approach to the study of
the visual system is top-down (Marr 1982). He starts with an abstract
specification of the functional tasks that the visual system has to
perform, hypothesises a series of algorithms that could compute these
functional tasks and then speculates about the implementation of those
algorithms at the neural level. Each of the levels of explanation at
which the theory operates is relatively autonomous, although of course
the computational level models the realisation of the functions
identified at the functional level and the implementational level
explains how the functions identified at the computational level are
realized. The resulting theory is, of course, a dazzling achievement.
But there are hidden implications in taking it as a general paradigm
for cognitive science. Taking it as a paradigm makes it natural to
think, for example, that the place of philosophy is at the functional
level and, correspondingly, that the place of cognitive neuroscience is
at the implementational level. The result, of course, is that the two
disciplines are effectively insulated from each other by the
intervening computational level of explanation.
2. There is an obvious problem, however, with generalizing Marr's
approach. The problem is that the distinction of levels of explanation
really makes sense only where one can identify a clear functional task
or set of tasks that need to be carried out. But it is not clear that
this can be done outside the restricted domain of encapsulated modules
such as the early visual system, the language-parsing system or the
face recognition system. Fodor, the most articulate defender of this
methodological approach, has clearly appreciated this, and drawn the
drastic conclusion that cognitive science cannot hope to shed any light
on the so-called central processes of cognition. A more sensible lesson
to draw, I think, is that outside this restricted domain a more
interactive conception of the relation between the levels of
explanation is appropriate. There must be constraints on theorizing at
the functional and computational levels. On the top-down approach these
constraints emerge from clearly defined functional tasks. But where
there are no such functional tasks explanation cannot be purely
top-down. There must be constraints and programmatic suggestions moving
in both directions.
3. The difficulty in putting this programme into practice is
identifying the points of contact between neuroscientific concerns and,
for example, philosophical concerns. In this prcis of my book The
Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Bermdez 1998) I identify some of the key
areas where neuroscientific and philosophical issues intersect in the
study of self-consciousness, a form of cognition about as far as it is
possible to get from the encapsulated modules where top-down analyses
can be so profitably applied.
II. THE PARADOX OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
4. In thinking about self-consciousness we need to start with the
phenomenon of first-person thought. Most, if not all, of the higher
forms of self-consciousness presuppose our capacity to think about
ourselves. Consider, for example, self-knowledge, the capacity for
moral self- evaluation and ability to construct a narrative of our
past. Although much of what we think when we think about ourselves
involves concepts and descriptions also available to us in our thoughts
about other people and other objects, our thoughts about ourselves also
involve an ability that we cannot put to work in thinking about other
people and things - namely, the ability to apply those concepts and
descriptions uniquely to ourselves. I shall follow convention in
referring to this as the capacity to entertain 'I'-thoughts.
5. 'I'-thoughts of course involve self-reference, but it is
self-reference of a distinctive kind. Consider the following two ways
in which I might entertain thoughts that refer to myself:
(1) JLB thinks: JLB is about to be attacked by a poisonous spider
(2)JLB thinks: I am about to be attacked by a poisonous spider
It is clear that these are very different thoughts, even though they
are both thoughts about the same person, namely me. Even if I am
suffering a temporary attack of amnesia that has led me to forget my
own name I can think the first thought with equanimity. Not so the
second.
6. This property of I-thoughts is sometimes described as their immunity
to error through misidentification, where this means (roughly) that one
cannot think an 'I'-thought without knowing that it is in fact about
oneself (Shoemaker 1968, Evans 1982). This feature of 'I'-thoughts is
closely tied to the well-known linguistic property of the first-person
pronoun, namely, that the first-person pronoun I always refers to the
person uttering it.
7. Putting these two properties together suggests the following
deflationary account of self- consciousness: (A) Once we have an
account of what it is to be capable of thinking 'I'-thoughts we will
have explained everything that is distinctive about self-consciousness.
(B) Once we have an account of what it is to be capable of thinking
thoughts that are immune to error through misidentification we will
have explained everything that is distinctive about the capacity to
think 'I'-thoughts. (C) Once we have explained what it is to master the
semantics of the first person pronoun (e.g. via mastery of some
version of the token-reflexive rule that a given utterance of I always
refers to the person uttering it), we will have explained everything
that is distinctive about the capacity to think thoughts that are
immune to error through misidentification.
8. The problem with the deflationary view is that first-person
self-reference is itself dependent upon 'I'-thoughts in a way that
creates two forms of vicious circularity which collectively I term the
paradox of self-consciousness The first type of circularity
(explanatory circularity), arises because the capacity for
self-conscious thought must be presupposed in any satisfactory account
of mastery of the first person pronoun. I cannot refer to myself as the
producer of a given token of 'I' without, for example, knowing that I
intend to refer to myself - which is itself a self-conscious thought of
the type that we are trying to explain. The second type of circularity
(capacity circularity) arises because this interdependence rules out
the possibility of explaining how the capacity either for
self-conscious thought or for linguistic mastery of the first person
pronoun arises in the normal course of human development. It does not
seem possible to meet the following constraint: The Acquisition
Constraint If a given psychological capacity is psychologically real
then there must be an explanation of how it is possible for an
individual in the normal course of human development to acquire that
capacity. Neither self-conscious thought nor linguistic mastery of the
first person pronoun is innate, and yet each presupposes the other in a
way that seems to imply that neither can be acquired unless the other
capacity is already in place.
III. ESCAPING THE PARADOX OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
9. The strategy that I employ in the book to escape the paradox of
self-consciousness involves making a clear distinction between (a)
those forms of full-fledged self-consciousness which presuppose mastery
of the first person concept and linguistic mastery of the first person
pronoun, and (b) those forms of primitive or nonconceptual
self-consciousness which do not require any such linguistic or
conceptual mastery. It is these nonconceptual forms of
self-consciousness that allow us to escape both the types of
circularity Ive just identified. I identified such nonconceptual forms
of self-awareness in four domains:
(1) perceptual experience
(2) somatic proprioception (bodily self-awareness)
(3) self-world dualism in spatial reasoning
(4) psychological interaction
10. The basic result is that the domain of self-consciousness is far
wider than it has been held to be by philosophers. Self-consciousness
has often been thought to be the highest form of human cognition, and
many philosophers, famous and not so famous, have correspondingly
thought that a philosophical account of self-consciousness would be the
Archimedean point for a satisfactory account of human thought. But the
premise is flawed. Self-consciousness is something we share with
prelinguistic infants and with many members of the animal kingdom. The
highly conceptual forms of self-consciousness emerge from a rich
foundation of nonconceptual forms of self- awareness. As I will try to
bring out, recognising this builds a bridge between philosophical
interests and neuroscientific ones.
IV. THE SELF OF ECOLOGICAL OPTICS
11. One of J. J. Gibsons great insights in the study of visual
perception was that the very structure of visual perception contains
propriospecific information about the self, as well as exterospecific
information about the distal environment (Gibson 1979). Visual
perception involves self-perception at the same time as it involves
perception of the world. This is the most primitive form of
nonconceptual self-awareness, the foundation on which all other forms
of self-awareness are built.
12. Gibson stresses certain peculiarities of the phenomenology of the
field of vision. Notable among these is the fact that the field of
vision is bounded. Vision reveals only a portion of the world to the
perceiver at any given time (roughly half in the human case, due to the
frontal position of the eyes). The boundedness of the field of vision
is part of what is seen, and the field of vision is bounded in a way
quite unlike the way in which spaces are bounded within the field of
vision. The self appears in perception as the boundary of the visual
field a moveable boundary that is responsive to the will.
13. The boundedness of the visual field is not the only way in which
the self becomes manifest in visual perception. The field of vision
contains other objects that hide, or occlude, the environment. These
objects are, of course, various parts of the body. The nose is a
particularly obvious example, so distinctively present in just about
every visual experience. The cheekbones, and perhaps the eyebrows,
occupy a slightly less dominant position in the field of vision. And so
too, to a still lesser extent, do the bodily extremities, hands, arms,
feet and legs. They protrude into the field of vision from below in a
way that occludes the environment, and yet which differs from the way
in which one non-bodily physical object in the field of vision might
occlude another. They are, as Gibson points out, quite peculiar
objects. All objects, bodily and non-bodily, can present a range of
solid angles in the field of vision (where by a solid angle is meant an
angle with its apex at the eye and its base at some perceived object),
and the size of those angles will of course vary according to the
distance of the object from the point of observation. The further away
the object is, the smaller the angle will be. This gives rise to a
clear, and phenomenologically very salient, difference between bodily
and non-bodily physical objects. The solid angles subtended by
occluding body-parts cannot be reduced below a certain minimum.
Perceived body-parts are, according to Gibson, 'subjective objects' in
the content of visual perception.
14. But these self-specifying structural invariants provide only a
fraction of the self-specifying information available in visual
perception.
15. The mass of constantly changing visual information generated by the
subjects motion poses an immense challenge to the perceptual systems.
How can the visual experiences generated by motion be decoded so that
subjects perceive that they are moving through the world? Gibsons
notion of visual kinesthesis is his answer to this traditional problem.
Whereas many theorists have assumed that motion perception can only be
explained by the hypothesis of mechanisms which parse cues in the
neutral sensations into information about movement and information
about static objects, the crucial idea behind visual kinesthesis is
that the patterns of flow in the optic array and the relations between
the variant and invariant features make available information about the
movement of the perceiver, as well as about the environment.
16. As an example of such a visually kinesthetic invariant, consider
that the optical flow in any field of vision starts from a centre, that
is itself stationary. This stationary centre specifies the point that
is being approached, when the perceiver is moving. The aiming point of
locomotion is at the vanishing point of optical flow.
17. Striking experiments have brought out the significance of visual
kinesthesis. In the so-called moving-room experiments, subjects are
placed on the solid floors of rooms whose walls and ceilings can be
made to glide over a solid and immoveable floor (Lishman and Lee
1973). If experimental subjects are prevented from seeing their feet
and the floor is hidden, then moving the walls backwards and forwards
on the sagittal plane creates in the subjects the illusion that they
are moving back and forth. This provides strong support for the thesis
that the movement of the perceiver can be detected purely visually,
since visual specification of movement seems to be all that is
available. An even more striking illustration emerges when young
children are placed in the moving room, because they actually sway and
lose their balance (Lee and Aronson 1975).
18. The theory of ecological optics identifies a third form of
self-specifying information existing in the field of vision. This is
due to the direct perception of a class of higher-order invariants
which Gibson terms affordances. It is in the theory of affordances that
we find the most sustained development of the ecological view that the
fundamentals of perceptual experience are dictated by the organism's
need to navigate and act in its environment. The uncontroversial
premise from which the theory of affordances starts is that objects and
surfaces in the environment have properties relevant to the abilities
of particular animals, in virtue of which they allow different animals
to act and react in different ways.
19. According to Gibson, information specifying affordances is
available in the structure of light to be picked up by the creature as
it moves around the world. The possibilities which the environment
affords are not learnt through experience, and nor are they inferred.
They are directly perceived as higher-order invariants. And of course,
the perception of affordances is a form of self-perception - or, at
least, a way in which self-specifying information is perceived. The
whole notion of an affordance is that of environmental information
about ones own possibilities for action and reaction.
20. Recognising the existence of the ecological self, as it has come to
be known (Neisser 1988), is the first step in resolving the paradox of
self-consciousness. It removes the need to explain how infants can
bootstrap themselves into the first-person perspective. The evidence is
overwhelming that nonconceptual first person contents are available
more or less from the beginning of life. Illustrations are to be found
in:
(1) neonatal distress crying (Martin and Clark 1982)
(2) neonatal imitation (Meltzoff and Moore 1977)
(3) infant reaching behaviour (Field 1976, Von Hofsten 1982)
(4) visual kinesthesis (Lee and Aronson 1984, Butterworth and
Hicks 1977, Pope 1984)
Let me turn now to some more bottom-level concerns.
21. When we move to considering the neural underpinnings of this form
of self-specifying information in visual perception we move into an
area that has been fairly closely studied by neuroscientists and
experimental psychologists. Particularly relevant here is the proposal,
currently under much discussion, that there are two distinct cortical
pathways in the human visual system, each carrying distinct types of
information (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982, Goodale and Milner 1992).
The distinction between the information carried by the dorsal
(infero-temporal) and the ventral (occipito-temporal) pathways
respectively has been conceptualized in different ways. Mishkin and
Ungerleider see it as a distinction between information about the
spatial relations in which an object might stand to the perceiver and
information that allows the recognition of objects. Goodale and Milner,
in contrast, take the distinction to be between recognitional
information about the intrinsic properties of objects (eg their colour,
shape and so on) and visuo-motor information about the extrinsic
properties of objects (eg their spatial position, orientation, height
and so forth).
22. It has been suggested that the action-based self-specifying
information that Gibson discusses at the phenomenological level in
terms of affordances and invariants in optical flow seems to be carried
in the ventral stream (McCarthy 1993). It is far from clear to me,
however, that Gibsons insights into the blend of propriospecific and
exterospecific information in visual perception fits at all neatly into
the proposed distinction of pathways, whether as construed by Mishkin
and Ungerleider or by Goodale and Milner at least, if we assume that
those processing distinctions are supposed to mark a distinction at the
level of conscious phenomenology. The basic concept of an affordance
seems to straddle the distinction between where and what, or between
recognition and pragmatic. Interestingly, this scepticism about the
phenomenological significance of the two cortical pathways is supported
by recent work which suggests that the two visual pathways actually
collaborate in the control of action (Jeannerod 1997).
V. SOMATIC PROPRIOCEPTION AND THE BODILY SELF
23. Gibson's insights into the structure of visual perception were
partly vitiated by his insistence on downplaying the importance of
somatically derived information about the self. Visual kinesthesis and
the perceptual invariants stressed by Gibson are adequate for
distinguishing self-movement from movement of the environment, but they
are unable to distinguish passive self-movement from active
self-movement. They can inform the subject of his movement relative to
the environment, but (crudely speaking) they do not tell him whether or
not he is moving under his own steam. A different form of
self-awareness is required at this point the bodily self-awareness of
proprioception.
24. One particularly vivid illustration of the importance of these forms
of proprioceptive information comes from the documented cases of
complete deafferentation patients who have effectively lost all bodily
sensation, either from below the neck in the case of Jonathan Coles
patient IW or from below the jaw in Jacques Paillards patient GL (Cole
and Paillard 1995). Although IW, unlike GL, can walk, everything he
does has to be performed under visual control. Without visual feedback
he is incapable of orienting himself and acting. So much so that he
sleeps with the light on - if he woke up in the dark he would have no
idea where his body was and would never be able to find the light
switch. It is interesting, furthermore, to watch a video of him
walking. His head is bent forward and pointing downwards so that he can
keep his legs and feet in sight constantly.
25. There is a popular sense of self-conscious on which IW seems to be
more self-conscious than we are, for the simple reason that everything
he does requires his full attention. But this is not the sense of
self-consciousness in which I am interested. What is striking about
deafferented subjects is how the subjective sense of the body as a
bounded spatial entity responsive to the will collapses in the absence
of somatic proprioception and can only be partially reestablished with
great artificiality and great difficulty. IW and GL are self-conscious
in the popular sense precisely because they fail to be self-conscious
in a more primitive and fundamental sense.
26. What is this more primitive and fundamental form of
self-consciousness that we derive from somatic proprioception? It seems
to me to have a tripartite structure. In exploring this it will be
useful to start with a list of the principal types of proprioceptive
information and their physiological sources. The following is taken
from the general introduction to Bermdez, Marcel and Eilan 1995:
Information about pressure, temperature and friction from receptors
on the skin and beneath its surface.
Information about the state of joints from receptors in the joints,
some sensitive to static position, some to dynamic information.
Information about balance and posture from the vestibular system in
the inner ear; the head/trunk dispositional system; and information
from pressure on any parts of the body that might be in contact
with a gravity-resisting surface.
Information about bodily disposition and volume obtained from
skin-stretch. Information about nutritional and other homeostatic
states from receptors in the internal organs.
Information about muscular fatigue from receptors in the muscles.
Information about general fatigue from cerebral systems sensitive
to blood composition.
Information about bodily disturbances derived from nociceptors.
27. At the simplest level, somatic proprioception is a form of
self-consciousness simply in virtue of providing information about the
embodied self. This is not particularly interesting, although it is
worth noting that proprioception gives information about the embodied
self that is immune to error through misidentification in the sense
discussed earlier. It cannot be the case that one receives
proprioceptive information without being aware that the information
concerns ones own body.
28. More importantly, somatic proprioceptive information provides a
way, perhaps the most primitive way, of registering the boundary
between self and non-self. To appreciate this we need to note that
there is an important variation among these somatic information systems
vary along several dimensions. Some provide information solely about
the body (eg. the systems providing information about general fatigue
and nutrition). The vestibular system, in contrast, is concerned with
bodily balance and hence with the relation between the body and the
environment. Other systems can be deployed to yield information either
about the body or about the environment. Receptors in the hand
sensitive to skin stretch, for example, can provide information about
the hand's shape and disposition at a time, or about the shape of small
objects. Similarly, receptors in joints and muscles can yield
information about how the relevant limbs are distributed in space, or,
through haptic exploration, about the contours and shape of large
objects.
29. These latter information systems, underpinning the sense of touch,
yield a direct sense of the limits of the body and hence of the limits
of the self. This is one step further in the development of what might
be termed self-world dualism than comes with the self-specifying
information in visual perception. The self of visual perception, the
ecological self, is schematic and geometrical. Its properties are
purely spatial, defined by patterns in the optical flow. It is only in
virtue of the sense of touch that the body is experienced as a solid
and bounded entity in the world.
30. It is known that a somatotopic map of the surface of the body
exists in the somatosensory cortex, and it is natural to think that
this plays a key role in subserving the registration of the boundary
between self and non-self. Some confirmation confirmation for this will
be found in the fascinating work that has been done by V. S.
Ramachandran (1994) on somatosensory remapping to explain the
well-documented phenomenon of referred sensations in amputees
experiencing phantom limbs. The felt boundaries of the body can change
as the area in the Penfield homunculus that formerly received input
from the amputated limb is invaded by sensory input from nearby areas.
31. The final feature of proprioceptive self-awareness extends this
sense of the body as an object. Through feedback from kinesthesia,
joint-position sense and the vestibular system we become aware of the
body as an object responsive to the will. Proprioception gives us a
sense, not just of the embodied self as spatially extended and bounded,
but also as a potentiality for action.
32. In this context it might be helpful to point to the role of
proprioceptively derived information in the construction of the
cross-modal egocentric space within which action takes place. It is
well- known that lesions to the posterior parietal cortex produce
spatial deficits in primates, human and non-human, and the inference
frequently drawn is that the posterior parietal cortex is the brain
area where the representation of space is computed. Recent
neurophysiological work based on recordings from single neurons has
suggested that the distinctive contribution of the posterior parietal
cortex is the integration of information from various modalities to
generate coordinate systems. Information about visual stimuli is
initially transmitted in retinal coordinates. Calibrating this with
information about eye position yields head-centred coordinates and
further calibration with proprioceptively-derived information yields a
body-centred frame of reference. The distal targets of reaching
movements are encoded on this modality-free frame of reference, as are
motor commands.
VI. POINTS OF VIEW
33. The nonconceptual first person contents implicated in somatic
proprioception and the pick-up of self-specifying information in visual
perception provide very primitive forms of nonconceptual
self-consciousness, albeit ones that can plausibly be viewed as in
place from birth or shortly afterwards. A solution to the paradox of
self-consciousness, however, requires showing how we can get from these
primitive forms of self-consciousness to the fully-fledged
self-consciousness that comes with linguistic mastery of the first
person pronoun. This progression will have to be both logical (in a way
that will solve the problem of explanatory circularity) and ontogenetic
(in a way that will solve the problem of capacity circularity).
Clearly, this requires that there be forms of self- consciousness
which, while still counting as nonconceptual, are nonetheless more
developed than those yielded by somatic proprioception and the
structure of exteroceptive perception and, moreover, that it be
comprehensible how these more developed forms of nonconceptual self-
consciousness should have 'emerged' out of basic nonconceptual
self-consciousness.
34. The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be
compared is the richness of the conception of the self which they
provide. Nonetheless, a crucial element in any form of self-
consciousness is the way in which it makes possible for the
self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment what
many developmental psychologists term self-world dualism. In this sense
self-consciousness is essentially a contrastive notion. One implication
of this is that a proper understanding of the richness of the
conception of the self which a given form of self- consciousness
provides requires taking into account the richness of the conception of
the environment with which it is contrasted. In the case both of
somatic proprioception and of the pick- up of self-specifying
information in exteroceptive perception, there is a relatively
impoverished conception of the self associated with a comparably
impoverished conception of the environment. One prominent limitation is
that both are synchronic rather than diachronic. The distinction
between self and environment that they offer is a distinction that is
effective at a time but not over time. The contrast between
propriospecific and exterospecific invariants in visual perception, for
example, provides a way in which a creature can distinguish between
itself and the world at any given moment, but this is not the same as a
conception of oneself as an enduring thing distinguishable over time
from an environment which also endures over time.
35. To capture this diachronic form of self-world dualism I introduced
the notion of a nonconceptual point of view. Having a nonconceptual
point of view on the world involves taking a particular route through
the environment in such a way that one's perception of the world is
informed by an awareness that one is taking such a route. This
diachronic awareness that one is taking a particular route through the
environment turned out to involve two principal components a
non-solipsistic component and a spatial awareness component.
36. The non-solipsistic component is a subject's capacity to draw a
distinction between his experiences and what those experiences are
experiences of, and hence his ability to grasp that an object exists at
times other than those at which it is experienced. This requires the
exercise of recognitional abilities involving conscious memory and can
be most primitively manifested in the feature-based recognition of
places. This is the beginning of an understanding of the world as an
articulated, structured entity.
37. The spatial awareness component of a nonconceptual point of view
can be glossed in terms of possession of an integrated representation
of the environment over time an understanding not just of how the
articulated components of the external world fit together spatial, but
also of the perceivers own spatial location in the world as a moving
perceiver and agent.
38. That a creature possesses such an integrated representation of the
environment is manifested in three central cognitive/navigational
capacities:
The capacity to think about different routes to the same place
The capacity to keep track of changes in spatial relations between
objects caused by its own movements relative to those objects
The capacity to think about places independently of the objects or
features located at those places.
Powerful evidence from both ethology and developmental psychology
indicates that these central cognitive/navigational capacities are
present in both nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures.
39. This conception of a nonconceptual point of view provides a
counterbalance to some important recent work on animal representations
of space and their neurophysiological coding. Chapters 5 and 6 of
Gallistels The Organization of Learning defend the thesis that all
animals from insects upwards deploy cognitive maps with the same formal
characteristics in navigating around the environment. Gallistel argues
that the cognitive maps that control movement in animals all preserve
the same set of geometric relations within a system of earth-centred
(geocentric) coordinates. These relations are metric relations. The
distinctive feature of a metric geometry is that it preserves all the
geometric relations between the points in the coordinate system.
Gallistel's thesis is that, although the cognitive maps of lower
animals have far fewer places on them, they record the same geometrical
relations between those points as humans and other higher animals.
Moreover, he offers a uniform acount of how such metric cognitive maps
are constructed in the animal kingdom. Dead reckoning (the process of
keeping track of changes in velocity over time) yields an earth-centred
representation of vantage points and angles of view which combines with
current perceptual experience of the environment to yield an
earth-centred cognitive map.
40. Without, of course, wishing to challenge Gallistels central thesis
that all animal cognitive maps from insects up preserve geometric
relations, it nonetheless seems wrong to draw the conclusion that all
animals represent space in the same way. Just as important as how
animals represent spatial relations between objects is how they
represent their own position within the object-space thus defined. And
it is here, in what we should think of as not just their awareness of
space but also their awareness of themselves as spatially located
entities, that we see the major variations and the scale of gradations
that the theorists whom Gallistel is criticising have previously
located at the level of the cognitive map.
VII. PSYCHOLOGICAL SELF-AWARENESS
41. Possession of a nonconceptual point of view manifests an awareness
of the self as a spatial element moving within, acting upon and being
acted upon by the spatial environment. This is far richer than anything
available through either somatic proprioception or the self-specifying
information available in exteroceptive perception. Nonetheless, like
these very primitive forms of self-consciousness, a nonconceptual point
of view is largely awareness of the material self as a bearer of
physical properties. This limitation raises the question of whether
there can be a similarly nonconceptual awareness of the material self
as a bearer of psychological properties.
42. There appear to be three central psychological properties defining
the core of the concept of a psychological subject the property of
being a perceiver, the property of being an agent, and the property of
being a bearer of reactive attitudes. Research on the social cognition
of infants shows that there are compelling grounds for attributing to
prelinguistic infants in the final quarter of the first year awareness
of themselves as bearers of all three of these properties.
43. Psychological self-awareness as a perceiver is manifested in the
phenomenon of joint selective visual attention, where infants (a)
attend to objects as a function of where they perceive the attention of
others to be directed (Scaife and Bruner 1975, Bruner 1975), and (b)
direct another individuals gaze to an object in which they are
interested (Leung and Reinhold 1981, Stern 1985). In (b), for example,
the infant tries to make the mother recognise that he, as a perceiver,
is looking at a particular object, with the eventual aim that her
recognition that this is what he is trying to do will cause the mother
to look in the same direction.
44. Psychological self-awareness as an agent is manifested in the
collaborative activities that infants engage in with their care-givers
(coordinated joint engagement). Longitudinal studies (e.g. Trevarthen
and Hubley 1978) show infants not just taking pleasure in their own
agency (in the way that many infants show pleasure in the simple
ability to bring about changes in the world, like moving a mobile), but
also taking pleasure in successfully carrying out an intention - a form
of pleasure possible only for creatures aware of themselves as agents.
When, as it frequently is, the intention successfully carried out is a
joint intention, the pleasure shared with the other participants
reflects an awareness that they too are agents.
45. Psychological self-awareness as a bearer of reactive attitudes is
apparent in what developmental psychologists call social referencing
(Klinnert et al. 1983). This occurs when infants regulate their own
behaviour by investigating and being guided by the emotional reactions
of others to a particular situation. The infants willingness to tailor
his own emotional reactions to those of his mother presuppose an
awareness that both he and she are bearers of reactive attitudes.
VIII. CONCLUSION
46. The four types of primitive or nonconceptual self-awareness provide
the materials for resolving the paradox of self-consciousness. On the
one hand, the problem of capacity circularity can be blunted by showing
how it is conceivable that the capacity for full-fledged, conceptual
self- consciousness could emerge from the basis of the primitive forms
of self-consciousness discussed. On the other, the problem of
explanatory circularity can be solved by giving an account of what it
is to have mastery of the first-person pronoun that shows how the
first-person thoughts involved can be understood at the nonconceptual
level.
47. Instead of going into the details of how either of these goals can
be achieved, I would like to return to the methodological reflections
with which I began. I sketched out what I take to be a dominant
approach to the methodology of cognitive science the top-down approach
that clearly distinguishes the functional, computational and
implementational levels of explanation. As I suggested, this approach
really seems applicable only where there are clearly defined
identifiable, functional tasks, and consequently is only going to work
for peripheral rather than central cognitive processes. The corollary,
as Fodor has clearly seen, is that we can expect little illumination of
central processes from the cognitive sciences. What Ive tried to sketch
out is an alternative approach, one where the distinction of levels of
explanation does not correspond to a division of explanatory labour.
Ive explored how attending to a particular philosophical puzzle about
self- consciousness, perhaps the paradigm central cognitive process,
brings out the importance of forms of self-consciousness that look as
if they can only be understood by a more interactive collaboration
between disciplines whose spheres of competence are so clearly
separated on the conventional view.
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