1 Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Cognitive Science

Philosophy and the cognitive sciences have an uneasy relationship.1 Fruitful engagement is rare in either direction.2 This is partly the inevitable result of the division of academic labors. But there is also a deeper reason. The dominant methodological conception governing work in the cognitive sciences involves a distinction of levels of explanation (see the papers in Bermúdez and Elton 2000). Marr’s theory of vision has often been held up as a model that the cognitive sciences in general ought to follow—mainly 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 computational tasks that the visual system has to perform, hypothesizes a series of algorithms that could carry out these computational 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 the algorithmic level models the realization of the functions identified at the computational level and the implementational level explains how the functions identified at the algorithmic level are realized. The resulting theory is 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 computational 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 algorithmic level of explanation.

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 computational 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 computational and algorithmic levels. On the top-down approach these constraints emerge from clearly defined computational tasks. But where there are no such computational tasks explanation cannot be purely top down. There must be constraints and programmatic suggestions moving in both directions (Bermúdez 1995a,b, 2000).

The difficulty in putting this program into practice is identifying the points of contact between philosophical concerns and, say, neuroscientific concerns. What I want to do in this paper is to identify some of the areas where cognitive scientific 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.3

1 The Paradox of Self-Consciousness

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.

“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:

It is clear that these are very different thoughts, even though they are both thoughts about the same person, namely me. 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.

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. The guaranteed reference of “I” does not secure the immunity to error through misidentification of the thoughts expressed through “I”-sentences, because many “I”-sentences express thoughts that lack the immunity property. The connection between the immunity property and guaranteed reference is more subtle. When we have a sentence of the form “I am F” expressing a thought that is immune to error through misidentification, the fact that the sentence is about me is not fixed by any form of identification. So (one might reasonably think) all that there is available to fix the reference of “I” is the reference rule governing the first-person pronoun.

Combining the immunity to error through misidentification of “I”-thoughts with the guaranteed reference of the first-person pronoun suggests the following deflationary account of self-consciousness:

The problem with the deflationary view that I explored in my book The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Bermúdez 1998) 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.

2 Escaping the Paradox of Self-Consciousness

The strategy that I developed in The Paradox of Self-Consciousness for escaping the paradox involves making a clear distinction between (a) those forms of full-fledged self-consciousness that 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 that 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 just identified.

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 (Hurley 1998). 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, recognizing this builds a bridge between philosophical interests and neuroscientific ones.4

Pursuing this strategy involves rejecting what might be termed the classical view of content. In particular, it involves rejecting the following thesis:

The Conceptual Requirement Principle The range of contents that it is permissible to attribute to a creature is directly determined by the concepts that creature possesses.

Roughly speaking, it is because concepts are language dependent and yet there exist strong reasons for ascribing thought-contents to nonlinguistic creatures that we have to accept the existence of nonconceptual contents (Bermúdez 1994, 1995c, 1998). A nonconceptual content is one that can be ascribed to a thinker without that thinker having to possess the concepts required to specify that content. I defend the claim (which I term the Priority Principle) that concepts can only be possessed by language-users. Nonlinguistic thoughts can only be thoughts with nonconceptual content, because concepts are essentially linguistic phenomena.

The constitutive connection between concepts and language is a function of the conditions on the individuation of concepts—which in turn are conditions on what it is to possess or grasp a concept. Any acceptable account of what it is to possess a concept will have to include certain specifications of circumstances in which it is appropriate to apply that concept. But this is not all. Concepts form part of, and are individuated by their role in, the contents of propositional attitudes. Part of what it is to possess a given concept is that one should be able to recognize that certain circumstances give one good reasons to take particular propositional attitudes to contents containing that concept. Moreover, concept mastery is also evidenced in dispositions to make and to accept as legitimate or justified certain inferential transitions between judgments.

The plausibility of the Priority Principle emerges from the constraints on being able to appreciate rational grounds for certain inferences.5 It is certainly true that it is possible to be justified (or warranted) in making a certain inferential transition without being able to provide a justification (or warrant) for that inferential transition. It is a familiar epistemological point, after all, that there is a difference between being justified in holding a belief and justifying that belief. What does not seem to be true is that it is possible to distinguish between justified and unjustified inferential transition in the case of a subject who is not capable of providing any justifications at all for any inferential transitions. But providing justifications is a paradigmatically linguistic activity. This is so for two reasons. First, providing justifications is a matter of identifying and articulating the reasons for a given classification, inference, or judgment. It is a paradigmatically social, and consequently linguistic, activity. Second, mere sensitivity to the truth of inferential transitions involving a given concept is not enough for possession of that concept. Rational sensitivity is required, and rational sensitivity comes only with language mastery. This is so because critical reflection on one’s own thinking requires intentional ascent. That is, critical reflection requires being able to take one’s own thoughts as objects of thought, and we have no understanding of how this can take place except where the thoughts in question have a linguistic vehicle (Bermúdez 2003).

If the Priority Principle is true, so that there can be no concepts without language, it follows that, if we have good reason to ascribe content-bearing psychological states to nonlinguistic creatures, then the contents of those states will be nonconceptual. The attribution of representational states with nonconceptual content to nonlinguistic creatures is an instance of inference to the best explanation. As such it is subject to the constraints associated with inference to the best explanation—that is, constraints of simplicity, explanatory power, and parsimony. In particular, it is only to be entered into when simpler explanations that do not appeal to representational states are demonstrably inadequate. I take it as a viable working hypothesis, strongly supported by work in contemporary cognitive ethology and developmental psychology, that we do need to give psychological explanations of the behavior of nonlinguistic creatures—and consequently that there are psychological states with nonconceptual content.

Nonetheless, many philosophers would be prepared to countenance the possibility of nonconceptual content without accepting that there might be nonconceptual first person contents or “I”-thoughts. If the theory of nonconceptual content is to solve the paradox of self-consciousness, the possibility of nonconceptual first-person contents, and hence the possibility of nonconceptual self-consciousness, must be independently motivated. This requires identifying forms of behavior in prelinguistic or nonlinguistic creatures for which inference to the best understanding or explanation demands the ascription of states with nonconceptual first-person contents. I carry out this strategy in four domains:

3 The Self of Ecological Optics

3.1

One of J. J. Gibson’s 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 incorporates a first-person perspective in the information it picks up about the world. This is the basis of nonconceptual self-awareness, the foundation on which all forms of self-awareness are built.

In his book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Gibson 1966), Gibson identifies what he calls the “fallacy of ascribing proprioception to proprioceptors.” This is the fallacy (he claims) of making a sharp distinction between outwardly directed exteroceptors (i.e., the five senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing) and inwardly directed proprioceptors (i.e., receptors in muscles, joints, and the inner ear providing information about bodily position and movement) and interoceptors (receptors in the visceral organs providing information about homeostatic states such as hunger and thirst). On the view that Gibson is attacking, information about the self can come only from proprioceptors and interoceptors. The job of the exteroceptors is solely to provide information about the external world.

On Gibson’s view, each of the exteroceptive senses brings with it a distinctive type of proprioception. Here are some representative passages for touch and hearing.

Cutaneous proprioception “The skin is action-sensitive whenever the individual makes contact with something, or grasps or clings to it, or makes contact with himself” (Gibson 1966, 37).

Auditory proprioception “The organ registers any sounds made by action, as in walking, eating, vocalizing, or speaking, and by tool-using, as in hammering, typing, or music-making” (Gibson 1966, 37).

Vision, though, is the principal source of propriospecific information. Gibson studies visual proprioception in insightful detail in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Gibson 1979).

What is particularly significant in Gibson’s analysis of visual proprioception (as compared to cutaneous or auditory proprioception) is his bold suggestion that visual perception involves direct perception of the self. Here is a representative passage:

When a point of observation is occupied, there is also optical information to specify the observer himself, and this information cannot be shared by other observers. For the body of the animal who is observing temporarily conceals some portion of the environment in a way that is unique to that animal. I call this information propriospecific as distinguished from exterospecific, meaning that it specifies the self as distinguished from the environment. (Gibson 1979, 104)

His analysis of visual proprioception begins with the concept of a field of view. This is the solid angle of ambient light that can be registered by the visual system. Gibson emphasizes that the field of view is bounded in a way that is perceptibly manifest. He evocatively comments: “Ask yourself what it is you see hiding the surroundings as you look out upon the world—not darkness surely, not air, not nothing, but the ego!” (Gibson 1979, 105). He illustrates this with an updated version of a famous diagram drawn by Ernst Mach with the title “The visual ego.”

11306_001_fig_001.jpg

In addition to the oval boundaries of the field of view, Gibson identifies a range of bodily parts that function as occluding edges, hiding regions of the environment. The nearest are the eye sockets, eyebrows, nose, and cheekbones. And then come the bodily extremities—arms, legs, hands, and feet. These are not occluding edges, but they behave in a very distinctive way that leads Gibson to refer to them as “subjective objects” (Gibson 1979, 113). A solid angle is an angle with its base at a perceived object and its apex at the eye. All objects can present a range of solid angles in the field of view, but the bodily extremities are distinctive in that the solid angles they subtend cannot be reduced beyond a certain minimum.

A second type of propriospecific information in field of view is information about movement derived from patterns of optic flow (and nonflow) as perspective changes relative to an invariant structure. Invariants in the optic array include the contrast between earth and sky at the horizon, and the texture of the earth. Optic flow starts from a center in the field of view that is itself stationary. This point is the aiming point of locomotion—we steer, according to Gibson, by keeping the focus of optic flow on the destination, so that the solid angle it subtends expands to its maximum. He comments:

The moving self and the unmoving world are reciprocal aspects of the same perception. … One experiences a rigid world and a flowing array. The optical flow of the ambient array is almost never perceived as motion; it is simply experienced as kinesthesis, that is egolocomotion. (Gibson 1979, 115)

Unlike the kinesthetic information derived from proprioceptors in muscles and joints, visual kinesthesis works equally well for passive motion. An illustration comes from “moving room” experiments where subjects placed on the stationary floors of rooms with walls and ceilings that move backward and forward on the saggital plane report that they feel the sensation of moving (Lishman and Lee 1973).

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 that 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 basic 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.

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 that the environment affords are not learned 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 one’s own possibilities for action and reaction.

Recognizing the existence of the “ecological self,” as it has come to be known (Neisser 1988, 1999), 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:

Developing this notion of the ecological self allows a more nuanced view of infant self-consciousness in particular, and infant cognition in general. Reacting against traditional ideas of the infant mind as a tabula rasa, many contemporary theorists have proposed that even very young infants are “little scientists,” tacitly deploying the principles of a theory of mind that is basically continuous with that used by older children and adults (see, e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997). Ecological self-consciousness offers a middle path between these two extremes, pointing to a clear sense in which infants (and nonlinguistic creatures in general) can be described as genuinely self-aware in ways that are shared by language-using creatures—while at the same time making clear how primitive this form of self-awareness is relative to full-fledged linguistic self-consciousness.

Let me turn now to considering some of the implications of this type of nonconceptual self-consciousness for the cognitive science of vision.

3.2

The neural underpinnings of this form of self-specifying information in visual perception have 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 and the ventral 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 visuomotor information about the “extrinsic” properties of objects (their spatial position, orientation, height, and so forth) and recognitional information about the “intrinsic” properties of objects (their color, shape, and so on).

Perhaps the crucial question to be asked from a philosophical point of view of the ‘two-pathways hypothesis’ is how it maps onto the phenomenology of perception. Milner and Goodale have taken the extreme view that perception for the online control of action is dependent upon the “dorsal stream,” the neural pathway from the striate cortex to the posterior parietal cortex. On their view, perceptually governed action controlled by information in the dorsal stream is typically not accompanied by conscious awareness.6 Unlike the information subserving perceptual identification, the self-specifying and relational information required for action is picked up nonconsciously. It seems to me, however, that this hypothesis gives a very skewed perspective on the phenomenology of perception, one that ignores Gibson’s insights into the interdependence of propriospecific and exterospecific information in visual perception. Let us suppose that the action-based self-specifying information that Gibson discusses at the phenomenological level in terms of affordances and invariants in optical flow is carried in the dorsal stream (McCarthy 1993)—even though there is a sense in which the basic concept of an affordance seems to straddle the distinction between “where” and “what,” or between “recognition” and “pragmatic.” Then Goodale and Milner’s interpretation of the phenomenological significance of the two processing pathways clearly has the consequence that we do not consciously perceive the spatial relations in which we stand to objects, or the possibilities for action and reaction that they afford. But this cannot be correct, given Gibson’s insightful analysis of visual proprioception.

This is not intended, of course, as a critique of the two-pathways hypothesis construed as a claim about how information is processed in different neural pathways—although it would be unwise to ignore the recent work suggesting that the two visual pathways actually collaborate in the control of action (Jeannerod 1997).7 The point is rather that a proper understanding of the role of perceptual experience as a form of self-consciousness can, and should, constrain how we interpret such claims at the level of conscious phenomenology.

4 Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self

4.1

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.8

A 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 Cole’s patient IW or from below the jaw in Jacques Paillard’s 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 downward so that he can keep his legs and feet in sight constantly.

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.

4.2

What is this more primitive and fundamental form of self-consciousness that we derive from somatic proprioception?

(1) 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 one’s own body.

(2) More importantly, somatic proprioceptive information provides a way of registering the boundary between self and nonself. To appreciate this we need to note that there is an important variation among the information systems that provide information about the body. Some provide information solely about the body (e.g., 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.

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 that 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 optic 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.

(3) 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 of the embodied self not just as spatially extended and bounded, but also as a potentiality for action.

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 nonhuman, 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 (Andersen 1995). Information about visual stimuli is initially transmitted in retinal coordinates. Calibrating this with information about eye position yields head-centered coordinates and further calibration with proprioceptively derived information yields a body-centered frame of reference. The distal targets of reaching movements are encoded on this modality-free frame of reference, as are motor commands.9

At the same time, cognitive science has yielded great insights into the different information systems and channels subserving somatic proprioception, as well as the neural mechanisms supporting representation of the body. Directly relevant to self-consciousness, robust experimental paradigms have emerged for studying the structure of bodily experience, particularly the experience of ownership (what it is to experience one’s body as one’s own). The first such paradigm was the rubber hand illusion, first demonstrated by Botvinick and Cohen (1998). This was subsequently extended to generate illusions of ownership at the level of the body as a whole (for reviews see Tsakiris 2010, Serino et al. 2013, and Kilteni et al. 2015). This research has operationalized aspects of bodily experience that had previously been explored either from a purely theoretical perspective or as they are distorted in neurological disorders such as unilateral spatial neglect.10

5 Points of View

5.1

The nonconceptual first-person contents implicated in somatic proprioception and the pickup 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 afterward. A solution to the paradox of self-consciousness, however, requires showing how we can get from these primitive forms of self-consciousness to the full-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 that, 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.

The dimension along which forms of self-consciousness must be compared is the richness of the conception of the self that they provide. Nonetheless, and as we have seen in the case of somatic proprioception, a crucial element in any form of self-consciousness is the way it makes it possible for the self-conscious subject to distinguish between self and environment. 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 pickup of self-specifying information in exteroceptive perception, a relatively impoverished conception of the self is 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 that also endures over time.

To capture this diachronic form of self–world dualism we can employ the notion of a nonconceptual point of view (Bermúdez 1995b, reprinted as chapter 2 in this volume). 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 involves two principal components—a nonsolipsistic component and a spatial awareness component.

  1. The nonsolipsistic 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.
  2. 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 spatially, but also of the perceiver’s own spatial location in the world as a moving perceiver and agent.

That a creature possesses such an integrated representation of the environment is manifested in three central cognitive/navigational capacities:

Powerful evidence from both ethology and developmental psychology indicates that these central cognitive/navigational capacities are present in both nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures (Bermúdez 1998, §8.4).

5.2

This conception of a nonconceptual point of view provides a counterbalance to important work on animal representations of space and their neurophysiological coding. Chapters 5 and 6 of Gallistel’s The Organization of Learning defend the thesis that all animals from insects upward 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-centered (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 account 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-centered representation of vantage points and angles of view that combines with current perceptual experience of the environment to yield an earth-centered cognitive map.

Without, of course, wishing to challenge Gallistel’s 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 criticizing have previously located at the level of the cognitive map.

6 Psychological Self-Awareness

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.

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.

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 individual’s gaze to an object in which they are interested (Leung and Rheingold 1981; Stern 1985). In (b), for example, the infant tries to make the mother recognize 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.

Psychological self-awareness as an agent is manifested in the collaborative activities that infants engage in with their caregivers (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.

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 behavior by investigating and being guided by the emotional reactions of others to a particular situation. The infant’s 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.

7 Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness

The four types of primitive or nonconceptual self-awareness provide the materials for resolving the paradox of self-consciousness. The problem of explanatory circularity can be blunted by giving an account of what it is to have mastery of the first-person pronoun that shows how the relevant first-person thoughts implicated in such mastery can be understood at the nonconceptual level.

Consider the following plausible account of the communicative intent governing intentional self-reference by means of the first-person pronoun.

An utterer U utters “I” to refer to himself* iff U utters “I” in full comprehension of the token-reflexive rule that tokens of “I” refer to their producer and with the tripartite intention:

Each of the three clauses of the tripartite intention is a first-person thought, in virtue of the presence in each of them of the indirect reflexive pronoun he* (which, following Castañeda [1966] and others, I am using to capture in oratione obliqua what would be said using “I” in oratione recta). Each of the first-person thoughts (i)–(iii) can be understood at the nonconceptual level.

The first clause in the tripartite intention is that the utterer should utter a token of “I” with the intention that some audience should have their attention drawn to himself*. There are two key components here. The first component is that the utterer should intend to draw another’s attention to something. That this is possible at the nonconceptual level is clearly shown by the discussion of joint selective visual attention. The second component is that the utterer should be aware of himself* as a possible object of another’s attention. This is largely a matter of physical self-consciousness. The materials here are provided by proprioceptive self-consciousness and the various forms of bodily self-consciousness implicated in possession of a nonconceptual point of view.

Moving on to the second clause, the requirement here is that the utterer of “I” should intend that his audience recognize his* intention to draw their attention to him*. This is a reflexive awareness of the intention in the first clause. The real issue it raises is one about how iterated psychological states can feature in the content of intentions. This occurs whenever there is recognition of another’s intention that one should do something. Recognitional states like these play a crucial role in the cooperative games and projects that are so important in infancy after the last quarter of the first year. An important source of infants’ pleasure and enjoyment is their recognition that they have successfully performed what their mothers intended them to—and this implicates an embedding of a first-person content within a first-order iteration.

In the third clause the utterer of “I” needs to understand how the satisfaction of the first clause can causally bring about the satisfaction of the second clause. The causal relation of bringing-it-about-that is integral to the notion of a nonconceptual point of view and to the self-awareness that it implicates. Possession of a nonconceptual point of view involves an awareness of the self as acting upon and being acted upon by the spatial environment. Certainly, there is a distinction to be made between physical causation and psychological causation, but both coordinated joint engagement and joint visual attention involve a comprehension that one’s intentions can be effective in bringing about changes in the mental states of others.

This resolution of the problem of explanatory circularity also shows how we may resolve the problem of capacity circularity. The solution is similar in general form to the solution to the problem of explanatory circularity. Suppose we read the above specification of the communicative intent governing the correct use of the first-person pronoun as offering conditions on learning the proper use of the token reflexive rule—as opposed to an intention that must be satisfied on any occasion of successful communication. If that suggestion is accepted then the solution to the problem of explanatory circularity gives, first, a clear specification of a set of first-person thoughts that must be grasped by anybody who successfully learns the first-person pronoun and, second, an illustration of how those first-person thoughts are of a kind that can be nonconceptual. Of course, a detailed ontogenetic story needs to be told about how the nonconceptual first-person contents implicated in mastery of the first-person pronoun can emerge from the basis of ecological and bodily self-awareness, but there is no longer a principled reason for thinking that no such story can be forthcoming.

8 Conclusion

Let me 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 computational, algorithmic and implementational levels of explanation. As I suggested, this approach really seems applicable only where there are clearly defined identifiable, computational tasks, and consequently it 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 I’ve tried to sketch out is an alternative approach, one where the distinction of levels of explanation does not correspond to a division of explanatory labor. I have 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. I hope I have done enough to give the sense of a genuine alternative to the mainstream methodology of cognitive science.

Acknowledgments

The original version of this essay was presented at the UNAM Centro de Neurobiología in Querétaro, Mexico; at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon; at the International Workshop on Self and Self-Consciousness, organized by the Seminar für Logik und Grundlagenforschung at the University of Bonn; and at the Conference on Consciousness and Art, organized by Erik Myin at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. I am grateful to audiences on those occasions for valuable comments. Work on the essay, and attendance at those meetings, was made possible by a visiting appointment at CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and a European Research Fellowship from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Caledonian Research Foundation. I am very grateful to my colleagues at Stirling for allowing me to take a year’s leave of absence. Many thanks also to Erik Myin for careful and useful comments on previous versions of this essay.

Notes

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