Kristina Musholt

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we clarify the notion of immunity to error through misidentification with respect to the first-person pronoun (IEM). In particular, we set out to dispel the view that for a judgment to be IEM it must contain a token of a certain class of predicates. Rather, the importance of the IEM status of certain judgments is that it teaches us about privileged ways of coming to know about ourselves. We then turn to examine how perception, as a state with nonconceptual content, can give rise to judgments that are IEM. On one view, the ‘inheritance model’ of immunity, perception gives rise to such judgments because perception itself is IEM. We argue that this model is misguided, and, instead, suggest and elucidate an alternative view: perception gives rise to judgments that are IEM by virtue of containing implicitly self-related or self-concerning information.

In recent years, phenomenologically informed philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists have attempted to import philosophical notions associated with the self into the empirical study of pathological experience. In particular, so-called ipseity disturbances have been put forward as generative of symptoms of schizophrenia, and several attempts have been made to operationalize and measure kinds and degrees of ipseity disturbances in schizophrenia. However, we find that this work faces challenges caused by the fact that the notion of ipseity is used ambiguously, both in the philosophical and in the empirical discussion, and the methods employed to operationalize ipseity often portray a rather different understanding of the notion from that found in the literature that is cited as providing the philosophical foundation for the studies in question. In particular, according to the definitions found in the philosophical literature, while being phenomenologically available, the self is not represented in ipseity. However, when it comes to the empirical study of ipseity and its disturbances, the object of investigation is often a kind of explicit self-representation. As a result, it is unclear whether different researchers are really talking about the same thing. Future progress in this area will require more careful conceptual distinctions; the present article aims to contribute to this task.

Es gibt einen zunehmenden Trend innerhalb der psychiatrischen Forschung, die Psychiatrie in die Neurowissenschaften zu integrieren beziehungsweise Modelle für psychopathologische Störungen an biologisch-medizinischen Krankheitsmodellen zu orientieren. Dieser Entwicklung liegt ein allgemeiner Trend des Versuchs einer Reduktion psychologischer und philosophischer Kategorien auf neurobiologische Kategorien zugrunde. Letztere werden oft als wissenschaftlicher oder objektiver betrachtet. Dieser Trend beruht jedoch — sowohl in seiner grundsätzlichen Ausrichtung als auch im Hinblick auf spezifisch psychopathologische Phänomene — auf irrtümlichen Annahmen. Die Psychiatrie ist notwendigerweise zwischen Normativität und Naturalismus anzusiedeln; psychopathologische Störungen — wie auch psychologische Kategorien allgemein — lassen sich nicht auf solche aus der Neurobiologie reduzieren. Dies soll nicht bedeuten, dass die Neurowissenschaften nicht auch einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Psychiatrie leisten können. Dies kann aber nur geschehen, wenn sie angemessen mit Erkenntnissen aus der Psychologie, der Philosophie und anderen Wissenschaften integriert wird werden. Ziel dieses Beitrages ist es, diese These am Beispiel des Begriffs des Selbst und seiner Störungen zu belegen.

In this book, Kristina Musholt offers a novel theory of self-consciousness, understood as the ability to think about oneself. Traditionally, self-consciousness has been central to many philosophical theories. More recently, it has become the focus of empirical investigation in psychology and neuroscience. Musholt draws both on philosophical considerations and on insights from the empirical sciences to offer a new account of self-consciousness—the ability to think about ourselves that is at the core of what makes us human. Examining theories of nonconceptual content developed in recent work in the philosophy of cognition, Musholt proposes a model for the gradual transition from self-related information implicit in the nonconceptual content of perception and other forms of experience to the explicit representation of the self in conceptual thought. A crucial part of this model is an analysis of the relationship between self-consciousness and intersubjectivity. Self-consciousness and awareness of others, Musholt argues, are two sides of the same coin. After surveying the philosophical problem of self-consciousness, the notion of nonconceptual content, and various proposals for the existence of nonconceptual self-consciousness, Musholt argues for a non-self-representationalist theory, according to which the self is not part of the representational content of perception and bodily awareness but part of the mode of presentation. She distinguishes between implicitly self-related information and explicit self-representation, and describes the transitions from the former to the latter as arising from a complex process of self–other differentiation. By this account, both self-consciousness and intersubjectivity develop in parallel.

Findings from neuroimaging are increasingly being cited in policy debates to strengthen the case for early identification of, and intervention with, children at risk of maltreatment and poor outcomes. While agreeing that neuroscientific research into the risks of maltreatment is a very valuable and exciting area of study, this article challenges the confidence with which these findings are used in policy discussions. It critically discusses the reliability and validity of the relevant findings and the contribution they can currently make to our understanding of the causes and consequences of maltreatment. In addition, it is argued that this type of evidence, which is new in policy debates, is often being used in ways that are problematic. Many participants in the relevant policy debates seem to subscribe either to an implicit version of dualism about the relationship between the mind and the body, or to reductionism — the view that the mental can be reduced to the physical. Such assumptions threaten the way we think about human agency and moral responsibility but it is argued that they are misguided for conceptual reasons. It is concluded that neuroscience has the potential to contribute to our understanding of the causes and effects of maltreatment but cannot do so in isolation from the social sciences.

It is a widely accepted assumption within the philosophy of mind and psychology that our ability for complex social interaction is based on the mastery of a common folk psychology, that is to say that social cognition consists in reasoning about the mental states of others in order to predict and explain their behavior. This, in turn, requires the possession of mental-state concepts, such as the concepts belief and desire. In recent years, this standard conception of social cognition has been called into question by proponents of so-called ‘direct-perception’ approaches to social cognition and by those who argue that the ‘received view’ implies a degree of computational complexity that is implausible. In response, it has been argued that these attacks on the classical view of social cognition have no bite at the subpersonal level of explanation, and that it is the latter which is at issue in the debate in question. In this paper, I critically examine this response by considering in more detail the distinction between personal and subpersonal level explanations. There are two main ways in which the distinction has been developed. I will argue that on either of these, the response proposed by defenders of the received view is unconvincing. This shows that the dispute between the standard conception and alternative approaches to mindreading is a dispute concerning personal-level explanations - what is at stake in the debate between proponents of the classical view of social cognition and their critics is how we, as persons, navigate our social world. I will conclude by proposing a pluralistic approach to social cognition, which is better able to do justice to the multi-faceted nature of our social interactions as well as being able to account for recent empirical findings regarding the social cognitive abilities of young infants.

Self-consciousness can be defined as the ability to think 'I'-thoughts. Recently, it has been suggested that self-consciousness in this sense can (and should) be accounted for in terms of nonconceptual forms of self-representation. Here, I will argue that while theories of nonconceptual self-consciousness do provide us with important insights regarding the essential genetic and epistemic features of self-conscious thought, they can only deliver part of the full story that is required to understand the phenomenon of self-consciousness. I will provide two arguments to this effect, drawing on insights from the philosophy of language and on structural differences between conceptual and nonconceptual forms of representation. Both arguments rest on the intuition that while self-consciousness requires explicit self-representation, nonconceptual content can at best provide implicit self-related information. I will conclude that in order to explain the emergence of self-conscious thought out of more basic forms of representations one has to explain the transition between implicit self-related information and explicit self-representation.

In recent years there has been increasing evidence that an area in the brain called the cortical midline structures is implicated in what has been termed self-related processing. This article will discuss recent evidence for the relation between CMS and self-consciousness in light of several important philosophical distinctions. First, we should distinguish between being a self and being aware of being a self. While the former consists in having a first-person perspective on the world, the latter requires the ability to explicitly represent one's own perspective as such. Further, we should distinguish between being aware of oneself "as subject" and being aware of oneself "as object." The focus of existing studies investigating the relation between CMS and self has been predominantly on the ability to think about oneself, while the more basic aspects involved in being a self have been neglected. However, it is important to widen the scope of the cognitive neuroscience to include the latter, not least because this might have important implications for a better understanding of disorders of the self, such as those involved in schizophrenia. In order to do so, cognitive neuroscience should work together with philosophy, including phenomenology. Second, we need to distinguish between personal and subpersonal level explanations. It will be argued that although it is important to respect this distinction, in principle, some subpersonal facts can enter into constitutive conditions of personal-level phenomena. However, in order for this to be possible, one needs both careful conceptual analysis and knowledge about relevant cognitive mechanisms.