Jose Luis Bermudez

Galen Strawson's keynote paper offers us one way of modelling the self, one that starts from the phenomenology of the sense of self and derives from that metaphysical conclusions about the nature of the self. Strawson is surely correct to hold that phenomenological considerations cannot be ignored in thinking about the metaphysics of the self. I am not as convinced as he is, however, that phenomenology is the royal road to metaphysics. What I want to sketch out in this short paper is another approach to the metaphysics of the self, one that is driven by reductivist concerns. As far as I can see it is an open question whether there are any global points of disagreement between us

A theory of nonlinguistic thought is incomplete without an account of nonlinguistic reasoning and the norms of rationality by which such reasoning is governed. This chapter tries to show how an account of nonlinguistic rationality emerges when we pose the question: What could count as evidence that a nonlinguistic creature is behaving rationally? There are several different forms of evidence that can come into play here. At the most sophisticated level, a creature is behaving rationally when it is sensitive to the consequences of different courses of action, but there are types of rationality that do not involve such consequence-sensitivity. Different forms of rationality are appropriate to different types of explanation, and this chapter draws a distinction between level 1 rationality and level 2 rationality that maps onto the distinction between explanations of the type proposed by the minimalist and explanations that make use of belief-desire psychology.

This chapter provides an argument that intentional ascent requires semantic ascent, on the grounds that intentional ascent requires the ability “to hold a thought in mind” in a way that can only be done if the thought is linguistically vehicled. It tries to explain that there is an important class of thoughts that is in principle unavailable to nonlinguistic creatures. It also explores how language can function as a cognitive tool. Many of these functions do not actually require a full-fledged language. If language is to have a distinctive, unique, and essential cognitive function, so that the difference between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is qualitative rather than merely quantitative, then it should be investigated further. The chapter takes into account many aspects of language where language functions as a cognitive tool: memory augmentation; environmental simplification; coordination; transcending path-dependent learning; control loops; and data manipulation and representation.

This chapter considers a deflationary or minimalist construal of the nature of nonlinguistic thought that might be deployed to finesse the apparent need to attribute thoughts to creatures that are not language-users. The aim of the minimalist proposal is to show that thinking behavior in nonlinguistic creatures can be understood in nonpropositional and perceptual terms, rather than through the attribution of propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires. In opposition to this the book suggest that there are important types of nonlinguistic thought that cannot be accommodated in the manner proposed by the minimalists. The requirements of psychological explanation often demand that we attribute to nonlinguistic creatures thoughts that are structured, represent the world in a highly determinate way, and reflect the particular mode of presentation under which the creature apprehends its environment.

This chapter examines two theories related to the human character. It explores the differing responses to the questions of psychological explanations of the behavior of nonlinguistic creatures given by the two approaches to the nature of thought outlined earlier, and shows how neither can provide a fully satisfying account of thinking without words. They are Ferge's conception of thoughts as the senses of sentences and Fodor's language of thought hypothesis to the effect that thinking should be understood in terms of the operation of sentence-like formulae in an internal language of thought. Both approaches start off from a single basic assumption, which is that the nature of thought can best be analyzed through the nature of language, but each approach takes a very different view of the essence of language. The chapter reveals Ferge's greater interest in mathematical thoughts than in those expressible by means of a natural language.

Forms of thinking that involve thinking about thought are only available to creatures participating in a public language. Thoughts can only be the objects of further thoughts if they have suitable vehicle and the only suitable vehicle is public language sentences. These language-dependent cognitive abilities range from second-order reflection on one's own beliefs and desires and the capacity to attribute thoughts to others to the ability to entertain tensed thoughts and to deploy logical concepts. Many of these language-dependent cognitive abilities, however, have primitive analogues that do not involve intentional ascent and hence are available at the nonlinguistic level. This chapter considers the practical implications this has for the scope and limits of nonlinguistic thought. The chapter explores the question: what types of thinking are in principle unavailable to nonlinguistic creatures? There are two types of intentional ascent, which might be termed explicit and implicit intentional ascent respectively.

This chapter outlines the different types of question posed by the forms of psychological explanations of the behavior of nonlinguistic creatures given in various parts of the cognitive and behavioral sciences. Due to the cognitive turn in the behavioral and cognitive sciences in the modern age, high-level cognitive abilities are being investigated in an ever-increasing number of species and at earliest stages of human development. This chapter explores the development in the scientific study of human characteristics and animal behavior. The new discipline of cognitive ethology is essential in the study of the mental states of animals and of how those mental states manifest themselves in behavior. The three areas of cognitive ethology, developmental, psychological, and cognitive archaeology are becoming ever more closely integrated. Research into animal cognition is now employing the dishabituation paradigm.

Reasoning and rationality are, of course, correlative notions, and this chapter pursues the question of the forms of inference available at the nonlinguistic level. This chapter provides the psychological explanation by exploring how the notion of practical reasoning might be applied at the nonlinguistic level. It also explores the idea that practical reasoning should be understood in decision-theorem terms. The decision-theoretic model is not required for the explanation of behaviors that are rational either in the level 1 or the level 2 sense. Certain forms of practical reasoning, however, are available at the nonlinguistic level. The chapter also shows how it is possible to identity at the nonlinguistic level certain very basic forms of protological thinking. These basic forms of protological thinking include what is termed as protonegation and protoconditional reasoning.

This chapter explains how a theorist might fix an ontology in a way that will allow the theorist to determine what objects a particular non-language-using creature is capable of thinking about—or, in other words, that will elucidate how the creature “carves up” its world into bounded individuals. Among other issues, it explores a version of successful semantics based on the idea that the content of a belief is its utility condition and the content of a desire its satisfaction-condition. Existing versions of success semantics generate a significant problem of indeterminacy. Success semantics originated with some fleeting comments by Frank Ramsey about the beliefs of a chicken in his 1927 article ‘Facts and Propositions’. He commented that the chicken's belief that a certain type of caterpillar is poisonous should be equated with the chicken's abstaining from eating such caterpillars on account of unpleasant experiences connected with them.

This chapter explores how a semantics can be provided for nonlinguistic thoughts in a way that both does justice to philosophical constraints on acceptable theories of content and provides the ethologist or developmental psychologist with a workable method of assigning content to the beliefs and desires of nonlinguistic creatures. The utility condition of a belief is a state of affairs construable in purely extensional terms. Determining an ontology can be no more than the first stage in resolving the problem of indeterminacy. A single state of affairs can be apprehended by a creature in many different ways, and in order to explain how its representations of the environment cause it to behave in the way it does, one can specify not simply the state of affairs it is representing but also how it apprehends that state of affairs.

Essays on the role of the body in self-consciousness, showing that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness. These essays explore how the rich and sophisticated forms of self-consciousness with which we are most familiar—as philosophers, psychologists, and as ordinary, reflective individuals—depend on a complex underpinning that has been largely invisible to students of the self and self-consciousness. José Luis Bermúdez, extending the insights of his groundbreaking 1998 book, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness, argues that full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness is built on a rich foundation of primitive, nonconceptual self-consciousness, and that these more primitive forms of self-consciousness persist in ways that frame self-conscious thought. They extend throughout the animal kingdom, and some are present in newborn human infants. Bermúdez makes the case that these primitive forms of self-awareness can indeed be described as forms of self-consciousness, arguing that they share certain structural and epistemological features with full-fledged, linguistic self-consciousness. He offers accounts of certain important classes of states of nonconceptual content, including the self-specifying dimension of visual perception and the content of bodily awareness, considering how they represent the self. And he explores the general role of nonconceptual self-consciousness in our cognitive and affective lives, examining in several essays the relation between nonconceptual awareness of our bodies and what has been called our “sense of ownership” for our own bodies.

The essays in this volume investigate the norms of reason--the standards which contribute to determining whether beliefs, inferences, and actions are rational. Nine philosophers and two psychologists discuss what kinds of things these norms are, how they can be situated within the natural world, and what role they play in the psychological explanation of belief and action. Current work in the theory of rationality is subject to very diverse influences ranging from experimental and theoretical psychology, through philosophy of logic and language, to metaethics and the theory of practical reasoning; this range is well represented here.

Marko Jurjako’s article “Self-deception and the selectivity problem” (Jurjako 2013) offers a very interesting discussion of intentionalist approaches to self-deception and in particular the selectivity objection to anti-intentionalism raised in Bermúdez 1997 and 2000. This note responds to Jurjako’s claim that intentionalist models of self-deception face their own version of the selectivity problem, offering an account of how intentions are formed that can explain the selectivity of self-deception, even in the “common or garden” cases that Jurjako emphasizes.

Recent Descartes scholarship has revised the traditional view of the Cartesian project as one of strictly deductive rationalism. This revision has particularly stressed the role of science in Descartes’ thought. The revisionist conception of Descartes also downplays the significance of the sceptical arguments offered in the First Meditation, seeing them as tools for ‘turning the mind away from the senses’ in the interest of Cartesian science, rather than as reflecting genuinely epistemological concerns. This paper takes issue with this aspect of the revisionist reading of Descartes. It argues that seeing scepticism as critically important for Descartes is independent of interpreting him as a canonical rationalist. In fact, it is precisely Descartes’ scientific thought and practice which make scepticism such a problem for him.

My topic in this paper is social understanding. By this I mean the cognitive skills underlying social behaviour and social coordination. Normal, encultured, non-autistic and non-brain-damaged human beings are capable of an impressive degree of social coordination. We navigate the social world with a level of skill and dexterity fully comparable to that which we manifest in navigating the physical world. In neither sphere, one might think, would it be a trivial matter to identify the various competences which underly this impressive level of performance. Nonetheless, at least as far as interpersonal interactions are concerned, philosophers show a rare degree of unanimity. What grounds our success in these interactions is supposed to be our common mastery of folk psychology

Recent work on Descartes has drastically revised the traditional conception of Descartes as a paradigmatic rationalist and foundationalist. The traditional picture, familar from histories of philosophy and introductory lectures, is of a solitary meditator dedicated to the pursuit of certainty in a unified science via a rigourous process of logical deduction from indubitable first principles. But the Descartes that has emerged from recent studies strikes a more subtle balance between metaphysics, physics, epistemology and the philosophy of science. There is much to be praised in this revaluation, but a dangerous amount of over-compensation has gone on, particularly in the reinterpretation of the role of sceptical doubt in Descartes' thought. This reinterpretion plays down the epistemological reasons for worrying about scepticism, suggesting that Cartesian physics is what ultimately drives the introduction of scepticism in the First Meditation.

Frames and framing make one dimension of a decision problem particularly salient. In the simplest case, framesprimeresponses (as in, e.g., the Asian disease paradigm, where the gain frame primes risk-aversion and the loss frame primes risk-seeking). But in more complicated situations frames can function reflectively, by making salient particular reason-giving aspects of a thing, outcome, or action. For Shakespeare's Macbeth, for example, his feudal commitments are salient in one frame, while downplayed in another in favor of his personal ambition. The role of frames in reasoning can give rise torational framing effects. Macbeth can prefer fulfilling his feudal duty to murdering the king, while also preferring bravely taking the throne to fulfilling his feudal duty, knowing full well that bravely taking the throne just is murdering the king. Such patterns ofquasi-cyclicalpreferences can be correct and appropriate from the normative perspective of how one ought to reason. The paper explores three less dramatic types of rational framing effects: (1) Consciously framing and reframing long-term goals and short-term temptations can be important tools for self-control. (2) In the prototypical social interactions modeled by game theory, allowing for rational framing effects solves longstanding problems, such as the equilibrium selection problem and explaining the appeal of non-equilibrium solutions (e.g., the cooperative solution in the Prisoner's Dilemma). (3) Processes for resolving interpersonal conflicts and breaking discursive deadlock, because they involve internalizing multiple and incompatible ways of framing actions and outcomes, in effect create rational framing effects.