Egocentric thought and self-representation

Programme :

 James Higginbotham ; Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Southern California : Rules of Use
 Joëlle Proust, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris ; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary, Anthropology, Leipzig

Three ways of thinking de se

 François Recanati, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris

Implicit and explicit de se thoughts

 Jérôme Dokic, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris,EHESS, Paris Metacognition of the first person
 Philippe Schlenker, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS, Paris ; Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles

To be announced

 Alexandre Billon, Institut Jean-Nicod, CNRS, Paris/ CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris ; Marie Guillot, Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris, EHESS, Paris : Could first-per­so­nal thoughts be self-refe­ren­tial ?

General Argument

The aim of the confe­rence is to shed light on the com­plex rela­tion­ship bet­ween the salient epis­te­mic pro­per­ties of ego­logy - or what we may call, after Lewis 1979, ’de se thoughts’ - and the puta­tive exis­tence and nature of an under­lying self-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal struc­ture.

Egocentric thoughts, like those expres­sed by a sub­ject when she decla­res « I wish a woman could win the elec­tion » or « I see a canary », can be conve­niently sin­gled out in terms of their spe­ci­fic epis­te­mic pro­per­ties. These thoughts are repu­ted to be invul­ne­ra­ble to cer­tain forms of error : they dis­play what Shoemaker has famously called « immu­nity to error through misi­den­ti­fi­ca­tion », as well as, in core cases, immu­nity to error through misas­crip­tion of pro­per­ties. Other remar­ka­ble epis­te­mic fea­tu­res of I-thoughts include their appa­rent ground­less­ness, or exemp­tion from the need of an epis­te­mic jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, the pri­vi­lege of first-per­so­nal access to such thoughts, and the sub­se­quent autho­rity atta­ched to first-per­so­nal reports on them.

Traditionally, the phi­lo­so­phy of mind has explo­red two anta­go­nist paths to account for these pecu­lia­ri­ties. The diver­gence bet­ween these two options rests on the stance taken up on the ques­tion as to whe­ther such de se contents involve self-repre­sen­ta­tion, in the two-fold sense of self-refe­rence (a repre­sen­ta­tion of the sub­ject in her own thoughts) and token-reflexi­vity (a repre­sen­ta­tion of occur­rent thoughts, in part or in tota­lity, within their own content).

The first option stems from a posi­tive answer to this ques­tion. According to a number of authors, who appeal to a plau­si­ble prin­ci­ple of iso­mor­phism bet­ween I-thoughts and first-per­so­nal utte­ran­ces, the well-docu­men­ted asym­me­try bet­ween first- and third-per­so­nal mental states is due to the pecu­liar way in which a sub­ject is repre­sen­ted in her own thoughts in the first case. In view of avoi­ding posi­ting a direct acquain­tance with one’s own self, or alter­na­ti­vely a sui gene­ris « mode of pre­sen­ta­tion » through which the thin­ker, and she only, could refer to her­self, a number of phi­lo­so­phers have recently pro­po­sed to cons­true type-ego­cen­tric thoughts as invol­ving a token-reflexive struc­ture, whe­reby the thin­ker is indi­rectly repre­sen­ted in her own (occur­ring) thoughts through the spe­ci­fic rela­tion she has with these token-thoughts, whose repre­sen­ta­tion contri­bute a cons­ti­tuent to their own content. Contemporary accounts per­tai­ning to this stra­tegy include J. Perry’s arti­cles from the 1990s, recent sug­ges­tions from M. Garcia-Carpintero, as well as J. Higginbotham’s 2003 arti­cle « Remembering, Imagining, and the First Person », which argues that a token-, or rather event-reflexive struc­ture, gover­ned by com­plex ana­pho­ric rela­tions, may under­lie and explain the pecu­liar seman­tic and epis­te­mic beha­vior of I-thoughts, at least in cases where they are embed­ded within the scope of higher-order atti­tu­des.

The second option, whose origin could be traced back to Wittgenstein 1953 and Anscombe 1975, consists in an endea­vor to explain the epis­te­mic pecu­lia­ri­ties of I-thoughts by the absence of self-repre­sen­ta­tion. As Perry 1993/2000 states it, one’s basic know­ledge of one­self can be consi­de­red as « intrin­si­cally sel­fless ». According to accounts that are sym­pa­the­tic to this view, the content of fun­da­men­tal I-thoughts, like those invol­ved in per­cep­tion and action, is a neu­tral pro­po­si­tion which concerns, ins­tead of being about, the thin­ker. The latter’s iden­tity being, so to speak, the default value of the point of origin defi­ning the orien­ta­tion of the per­cep­tual fra­me­work, it impo­ses such a strong archi­tec­tu­ral cons­traint on one’s mental life that repre­sen­ting one­self would be, in many cases, redun­dant and need­lessly costly in terms of cog­ni­tive invest­ment. On the other hand, if there is, in one’s most pri­mi­tive ego­cen­tric mental states at least, no self-repre­sen­ta­tion, hence no need to iden­tify one­self as such in order to pick one­self out cor­rectly, then there is a for­tiori no room for any misi­den­ti­fi­ca­tion. All the other, rela­ted epis­te­mic pri­vi­le­ges of the first-person pers­pec­tive can then be taken to follow from this basic assump­tion. Contemporary uses of this intui­tion include, in the phi­lo­so­phy of cog­ni­tion, contex­tua­list treat­ments of ego­cen­tri­city in the theo­re­ti­cal fra­me­work of embo­died and situa­ted cog­ni­tion, as recently advo­ca­ted, among others, by J. Dokic’s 2003 and for­th­co­ming papers. In the phi­lo­so­phy of mind and lan­guage, simi­lar consi­de­ra­tions could be argua­bly attri­bu­ted to F. Recanati in his for­th­co­ming book on pers­pec­ti­val thought. Setting his account of first-per­so­nal contents within the fra­me­work of a mode­rate seman­tic rela­ti­vism, Recanati ana­ly­zes the content of core cases of I-thoughts in the light of a dis­tinc­tion bet­ween two dis­tinct com­po­nents, a context-sen­si­tive pro­po­si­tio­nal struc­ture, which he calls the ’lekton’, and a wide context which pro­vi­des a clus­ter of points of eva­lua­tion in addi­tion to the world para­me­ter, inclu­ding a sub­ject, rela­tive to which the lekton is truth-eva­lua­ted.

Faced with the alter­na­tive of explai­ning the pecu­lia­ri­ties of de se thoughts by invo­king either the nature and struc­ture of an under­lying self-repre­sen­ta­tion, or the radi­cal absence of such a mecha­nism, one may want to weigh up the advan­ta­ges and dif­fi­culties invol­ved by each side of the dilemma.

Contextualist theo­ries are sup­por­ted by plau­si­ble consi­de­ra­tions of cog­ni­tive eco­nomy, since they dis­pense with posi­ting com­plex repre­sen­ta­tions behind ego­cen­tric mental states. However, one of the chal­len­ges to such theo­ries lies in the ques­tion as to whe­ther they can give a convin­cing account of the rela­tion­ship bet­ween basic, pri­mi­tive ego­cen­tric thoughts, like those invol­ved in per­cep­tion and action, and more com­plex I-thoughts to which we give verbal expres­sion using expli­cit mar­kers of the first person – e.g. first-per­so­nal reports of embed­ded atti­tu­des like (1) « I remem­ber wishing you were dead » - and which unques­tio­na­bly involve self-repre­sen­ta­tion. The latter share with basic ego­cen­tric mental states all the epis­te­mic pecu­lia­ri­ties that single out de se thoughts, but it is dif­fi­cult to see how the contex­tua­list expla­na­tion could be gene­ra­li­zed to their more com­plex seman­tic beha­vior. In par­ti­cu­lar, the ana­pho­ric struc­ture of an exam­ple like (1), in which the elided sub­ject of the gerun­dive clause has to be inter­pre­ted as refer­ring back to the same indi­vi­dual as the sub­ject of the embed­ding verb, seems to require the prior intro­duc­tion of a marker of dis­course cor­res­pon­ding to the said sub­ject, hence a self-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal under­lying struc­ture.

Self-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal theo­ries may seem, prima facie, more apt to give a uni­fied account of the epis­te­mic pecu­lia­ri­ties atta­ched to de se thoughts, but they can also be addres­sed a number of objec­tions. S. Predelli 2006 has thus poin­ted out that they are expo­sed to the risk of an uncontrol­led onto­lo­gi­cal pro­li­fe­ra­tion. Moreover, self-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal theo­ries must jus­tify the addi­tio­nal cog­ni­tive cost their com­plexity invol­ves, and demons­trate their com­pa­ti­bi­lity with the pre­sence of meta­cog­ni­tio­nal, hence ego­cen­tric mental states in ani­mals and yound chil­dren. As Proust for­th­co­ming convin­cin­gly shows, there are prin­ci­pled rea­sons to think that meta­cog­ni­tion, espe­cially in the most pri­mi­tive cases, does not rest on self-direc­ted meta­re­pre­sen­ta­tio­nal capa­ci­ties. Could self-repre­sen­ta­tio­nal theo­ries of de se thought account for the fact that even sys­tems lacking the capa­city to repre­sent them­sel­ves expli­citly show self-direc­ted meta­cog­ni­tio­nal apti­tu­des ?

References

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