Martin Francisco Fricke

My thesis tests a novel definition of consciousness by applying it to theories of self-consciousness. This definition attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of consciousness from those of knowledge, belief, awareness, and perception by describing it as the noticing of objects and the registering of facts in thought. My investigation of self-consciousness is phenomenological in that it leaves aside questions as to whether selves exist or what their nature is and just examines what the contents of self-consciousness are. The main question, throughout the thesis, is whether there are any contents that necessarily enter self-consciousness understood as consciousness associated with meaningful use of the first personal pronoun. My answer to this question is that there are not. This answer is reached after the discussion of a range of prominent theories that have emanated from Kant. All these theories have in common that they can be phenomenologically clarified with the help of my description of consciousness. Kant’s own views of “empirical self-consciousness” are phenomenologically relatively modest; but what he says about “transcendental self-consciousness”, incorporating a priori consciousness of one’s identity, cannot be phenomenologically supported. Similar restrictions apply to Fichte’s theory, which develops the notion of transcendental self-consciousness, explicating it as consciousness of “this very consciousness”. Strawsonian theories of self-consciousness (P.F. Strawson, G. Evans, Q. Cassam) claim that self-consciousness requires some awareness of oneself as a spatiotemporally located physical object. I argue that such a claim cannot be phenomenologically substantiated. The Strawsonian theories rely on a questionable “discrimination requirement”; but even if it is assumed that they are justified in claiming that, as self-conscious beings, we have to know, believe, perceive or be aware that we are physical objects, it still does not follow that we have to be conscious, in my sense, of ourselves as such objects. There is no particular type of object that is necessarily noticed and no particular type of fact that is necessarily registered in thought by a person who can meaningfully use the first personal pronoun. In the last part of the thesis, some of the results of the earlier chapters are applied to the problem of how to explain first person authority and an explanation which is compatible with those results is suggested.

In "Individuals", Peter Strawson talks about identifying, discriminating and picking out particular objects, regarding discriminating and picking out as ways of identifying. I object that, strictly speaking, identification means to say of two things that they are the same. In contrast, discriminating an object from all others can be done by just ascribing some predicate to it that does not apply to the others. Picking out an object does not even seem to require to distinguish it from all others. The object picked is distinct in that it is the picked one, but it is not clear - even in the context of sensorily picking out - that I have to be aware of this in order to do the picking.

What is the relation between first person authority and knowledge of one’s own actions? On one view, it is because we know the reasons for which we act that we know what we do and, analogously, it is because we know the reasons for which we avow a belief that we know what we believe. Carlos Moya (2006) attributes some such theory to Richard Moran (2001) and criticises it on the grounds of circularity. In this paper, I examine the view attributed to Moran. I rebut the charge of circularity, but also reject the theory as an adequate interpretation of Moran.

Self-knowledge presents a challenge for naturalistic theories of mind. Peter Carruthers’s (2011) approach to this challenge is Rylean: He argues that we know our own propositional attitudes because we (unconsciously) interpret ourselves, just as we have to interpret others in order to know theirs’. An alternative approach, opposed by Carruthers, is to argue that we do have a special access to our own beliefs, but that this is a natural consequence of our reasoning capacity. This is the approach of transparency theories of self-knowledge, neatly encapsulated in Byrne’s epistemic rule (BEL): If p, believe that you believe that p (Byrne 2005). In this paper, I examine an objection to Carruthers’s theory in order to see whether it opens up space for a transparency theory of self-knowledge: Is it not the case that in order to interpret someone I have to have some direct access to what I believe (cf. Friedman and Petrashek 2009)?

In this paper, I reconstruct Davidson’s explanation of first person authority and criticize it in three main points: (1) The status of the theory is unclear, given that it is phenomenologically inadequate. (2) The theory explains only that part of the phenomenon of first person authority which is due to the fact that no two speakers speak exactly the same idiolect. But first person authority might be a more far-reaching phenomenon than this. (3) Davidson’s argument depends on the claim that “not getting one’s words wrong” is the same as “knowing what one’s words mean”. I argue that the two are not the same. In conclusion, I sketch some alternatives to Davidson’s account. I argue that the most promising one attempts to explain first person authority by examining how we acquire second-order beliefs. A well-known remark of Evans’s proves useful for such an account.

This paper examines theories of first person authority proposed by Dorit Bar-On (2004), Crispin Wright (1989a) and Sydney Shoemaker (1988). What all three accounts have in common is that they attempt to explain first person authority by reference to the way our language works. Bar-On claims that in our language self-ascriptions of mental states are regarded as expressive of those states; Wright says that in our language such self-ascriptions are treated as true by default; and Shoemaker suggests that they might arise from our capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances. I argue that Bar-On’s expressivism and Wright’s constitutive theory suffer from a similar problem: They fail to explain how it is possible for us to instantiate the language structures that supposedly bring about first person authority. Shoemaker’s account does not suffer from this problem. But it is unclear whether the capacity to avoid Moore-paradoxical utterances really yields self-knowledge. Also, it might be that self-knowledge explains why we have this capacity rather than vice versa.

En este pequeño texto, resumo brevemente tres experimentos psicológicos que Peter Carruthers (2010) cita como evidencia para la tesis según la cual no tenemos un acceso introspectivo y exclusivo de la primera persona a nuestras actitudes proposicionales, sino sólo uno interpretativo. Si Carruthers tiene razón, sólo conocemos nuestras creencias, intenciones y otras actitudes a través de un proceso inconsciente de interpretación de nuestro propio comportamiento y, por ende, de la misma manera en que conocemos las mentes de otras personas. Esta exposición tiene el propósito de mostrar la utilidad y necesidad de acercarse al problema del autoconocimiento desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria.

In The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans describes the acquisition of beliefs about one’s beliefs in the following way: ‘I get myself in a position to answer the question whether I believe that p by putting into operation whatever procedure I have for answering the question whether p.’ In this paper I argue that Evans’s remark can be used to explain first person authority if it is supplemented with the following consideration: Holding on to the content of a belief and ‘prefixing’ it with ‘I believe that’ is as easy as it is to hold on to the contents of one’s thoughts when making an inference. We do not, usually, have the problem, in going, for example, from ‘p’ and ‘q’ to ‘p and q’, that one of our thought contents gets corrupted. Self-ascription of belief by way of Evans’s procedure is based on the same capacity to retain and re-deploy thought contents and therefore should enjoy a similar degree of authority. However, is Evans’s description exhaustive of all authoritative self-ascription of belief? Christopher Peacocke has suggested that in addition to Evans’s procedure there are two more relevant ways of self-ascribing belief. I argue that both methods can be subsumed under Evans’s procedure.