Preface

1
The Paradox of Self-Consciousness
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness as a cognitive state or,
more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example
of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things I know about myself.
I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational
animal with two legs. I know many of my properties and much of what
is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things
about my past: things I have done and places I have been, as well as people
I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not
instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to make plans
for the future—to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of
goals, desires, and ambitions. I am also capable of a certain type of moral
reflection, tied to moral self-understanding and moral self-evaluation. I
can pursue questions like, What sort of person am I? Am I the sort of
person that I want to be? Am I the sort of person that I ought to be?
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can
do all of these things. But what do they have in common? Are some more
important than others? Are they all necessary? Could I lack some and still
be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of
many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy
of psychology. In reflecting on them, however, we have to start from
a paradox that besets philosophical reflection on self-consciousness. This
paradox emerges when we consider what might seem to be the obvious
thread that ties the various manifestations of self-consciousness together.
I call it the paradox of self-consciousness. It is a paradox that raises the
question of how self-consciousness is even possible. Some preparatory
work is required before it can be appreciated, however.
1.1 ‘I’-Thoughts
Confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states
listed above, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that
they all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only
have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only
have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The
same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral selfunderstanding.
These are all ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these
self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts
about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human
being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking
that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate
myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral
agency. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to
myself and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am
also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about
other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those
concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to
this ability as the ability to entertain ‘I’-thoughts. I shall follow this
convention.
What is an ‘I’-thought? Obviously, an ‘I’-thought is a thought that involves
self-reference. I can think an ‘I’-thought only by thinking about
myself. Equally obviously, though, this cannot be all that there is to say
on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve self-reference but are not
‘I’-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to get a parking ticket
in central Cambridge deserves everything he gets. Unbeknownst to me,
the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my
thought self-referring, but it does not make it an ‘I’-thought. Why not?
The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to
get a parking ticket in central Cambridge. If A is that unfortunate person,
then there is a true identity statement of the form I 5 A, but I do not
know that this identity holds. Because I do not know that this identity
holds, I cannot be ascribed the thought that I will deserve everything I
get. And so I am not thinking a genuine ‘I’-thought, because one cannot
think a genuine ‘I’-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about
2 Chapter 1
oneself. So it is natural to conclude that ‘I’-thoughts involve a distinctive
type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic
expression is the first-person pronoun ‘I’, because one cannot use
the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about
oneself.
We can tighten this up a bit. When we say that a given thought has a
natural linguistic expression, we are also saying something about how it
is appropriate to characterize the content of that thought. We are saying
something about what is being thought. This I term (without prejudice)
a propositional content. A propositional content is given by the sentence
that follows the ‘that’ clause in reporting a thought, a belief, or any propositional
attitude. The proposal, then, is that ‘I’-thoughts are all and only
the thoughts whose propositional contents constitutively involve the firstperson
pronoun.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be
specified in two ways. They can be specified directly or indirectly. An example
of a direct specification of content is (1):
(1) J. L. B. believes the proposition that he would naturally express by
saying, ‘I will be the next person to receive a parking ticket in central
Cambridge’.
A direct specification of content involves specifying what I would say in
oratio recta, if I were explicitly to express what I believe. In contrast, an
indirect specification of content proceeds in oratio obliqua. The model
here is reported speech. So the same content indirectly specified would
be (2):
(2) J. L. B. believes that he will be the next person to receive a parking
ticket in central Cambridge.
Proposition (2), however, can also be used as a report of the belief that
would be directly specified as follows:
(3) J. L. B. believes the proposition that he would naturally express by
saying, ‘J. L. B. will be the next person to receive a parking ticket in
central Cambridge’.
Nonetheless, (1) and (3) are not equivalent. This is easily seen. J. L. B.
could be suffering from an attack of amnesia and struggling to remember
his own name. So even though a kindly soul has just put it to him that
The Paradox of Self-Consciousness 3
J. L. B. will be the next person to get a parking ticket in central Cambridge
and he believes that kindly soul, he fails to realize that he is J. L. B.
Because of this, (1) is not a correct report of his belief, although (3) is.
Nonetheless, as it stands, (2) is a correct indirect report of both (1) and
(3). This creates a problem, because only (1) is a genuine ‘I’-thought, according
to the suggested criterion of having a content that constitutively
involves the first-person pronoun, and yet there appears to be no way of
capturing the distinction between (1) and (3) at the level of an indirect
specification of content.
This problem can be solved with a device due to Hector-Neri Castan˜ eda
(1966, 1969). Castan˜ eda distinguishes between two different roles that
the pronoun ‘he’ can play in oratio obliqua clauses. On the one hand, ‘he’
can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e.
the person named just before the clause in oratio obliqua) would have
expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation, Castan˜ eda
holds that ‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator. He suggests that when
‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it be written as ‘he*’. Others have
described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun (Anscombe 1975). When
‘he’ is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in
such a way that the person named just before the clause in oratio obliqua
need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, then, we
can disambiguate between (2) employed as an indirect version of (1) and
(2) employed as an indirect version of (3) by distinguishing between (2.1)
and (2).
(2.1) J. L. B. believes that he* will be the next person to receive a
parking ticket in central Cambridge.
Proposition (2.1) is an example of the indirect reflexive, while (2) is not.
So, we can tie up the definition of an ‘I’-thought as follows.
Definition An ‘I’-thought is a thought whose content can only be specified
directly by means of the first person pronoun ‘I’ or indirectly by
means of the indirect reflexive pronoun ‘he*’.
It was suggested earlier that all the cognitive states under consideration
presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only what they
all have in common. It is also what underlies them all. We can now see in
more detail what this suggestion amounts to.

good reason is that individual body parts are paradigmatically identified

Another
Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self 155
good reason is that individual body parts are paradigmatically identified
in terms of hinges. The forearm, for example, is the volume between the
elbow and the wrist. The palm of the hand is the volume bounded by the
wrist and the knuckles. The calf is the volume of leg that falls between
the knee and the ankle. Using hinges provides a nonarbitrary way of segmenting
the body that accords pretty closely with how we classify body
parts in everyday thought and speech.
Let me start by explaining how the hinges can be deployed to determine
any given A location. A particular bodily A location is specified relative
to the hinges that bound the body part within which it is located. A particular
point in the forearm is specified relative to the elbow and the wrist.
It is the point that lies on the surface of the skin at such and such a distance
and direction from the wrist and such and such a distance and direction
from the elbow.23 This mode of determining A locations secures the
defining feature of an A location, which is that a given point in a given
body part will have the same A location irrespective of how the body as
a whole moves or of how the relevant body part moves relative to other
body parts. The A location of a given point in a given body part will
remain constant in both those movements, because neither of those movements
brings about any changes in its distance and direction from the
relevant hinges. Note, however, that this holds true only if the fixed points
are restricted to those hinges that bound the relevant body part. If the number
of fixed points were expanded to include nonbounding hinges, this
would have the undesirable consequence that the A location would vary.
I turn now to the more complicated issue of B location. The first point
to observe is that it is individual A locations that have particular B locations.
This is clear from situations (1) and (2) described above, in which
a pain retains a constant A location in two different B locations. In each
situation what has the relevant B location is the pain that is A-located at
a particular point in the sole of my foot. It is not the pain simpliciter that
in (2) is B-located just above and to the left of my left knee and down and
slightly left of my left shoulder, but the pain in the sole of my foot. This
provides an important clue as to how the account of B location ought to
proceed. If what has a given B location is an A location and A locations
are identified within given body parts (relative to the hinges that bound
those body parts), then it seems we can map an A location onto a B loca-
156 Chapter 6
tion if we can plot the location of the given body part. How might this
be done?
Body parts have been defined as body segments bounded by hinges.
These hinges afford a range of movements in three dimensions (with some
hinges, like the shoulder, affording a greater range of movements than
others, like the elbow). A hinge such as the wrist allows the hand to be
positioned in one of a range of orientations relative to the lower arm. The
basic idea in mapping A locations onto B locations is to specify what
orientation the body part is in relative to the hinge. Take a point in the
center of the palm of the hand. That point has its A location relative to
the hinges that bound the palm of the hand, while its B location is given
by the orientation of the palm of the hand relative to the wrist. Of course,
this is not enough to fix a unique B location, for it fails to register the
changing B location of a point in the center of the palm of my hand as I
keep my hand in the same orientation relative to my wrist but raise it
above my head. Accommodating such changes in B locations is possible
only if the orientation of the relevant body part is relativized more widely.
In the example of the point in the palm of the hand, the orientation of
the wrist needs to be fixed relative to the elbow, and the orientation of
the elbow relative to the shoulder. That would provide a unique B location
within the arm and would also specify the location of the arm relative
to the torso.
The general model, then, for the identification of B locations is as follows.
A particular constant A location is determined relative to the hinges
that bound the body part in which it falls. That A location will either fall
within the (relatively) immoveable torso, or it will fall within a moveable
limb. If it falls within the (relatively) immoveable torso, then its B location
will also be fixed relative to the hinges that bound the torso (neck, shoulders,
and leg sockets). If, however, that A location falls within a moveable
limb, then its B location will be fixed recursively relative to the hinges
that lie between it and the immoveable torso. This enables any given B
location to be calibrated with any other. Suppose that I want to scratch
an itch in my left arm with the tip of the middle finger of my right hand.
Both A locations have B locations recursively specified as above. Each of
those recursive specifications will relativize the B location to the respective
shoulder. Thus, all that is needed for those B locations to be fixed
Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self 157
relative to each other (and hence for me to locate the itch in my arm with
the middle finger of my right hand) is a specification of the position of
each shoulder relative to the other.
This account remains faithful to the phenomenology of bodily experience.
An important part of the phenomenology of bodily experience is,
as several writers have stressed, that bodily sensations such as pain are
presented not only as being at a particular point relative to other parts of
the body but also as located within a particular body part (Martin 1993,
Brewer 1993). This is captured very clearly by the distinction between
and interdependence of A locations and B locations.24 A bodily sensation
has a particular B location (relative to the body as a whole) only insofar
as it has a particular A location (within a particular body part), because B
locations are fixed on the basis of A locations. Moreover, the interrelation
between A locations and B locations captures the further phenomenological
point that body parts are perceived as belonging to the body as a
whole (Martin 1995). But explaining properly why this is so brings us to
what I have termed the descriptive dimension of proprioceptive content.
Earlier I contrasted characterizing the nature of a proprioperceived
event within the body (the descriptive dimension) with specifying where
that event is in the body (the spatial dimension). The first question to be
asked of the descriptive dimension of proprioceptive content concerns the
nature of the proprioperceived event. What is the direct object of proprioception?
The answer to this question can be read off from the understanding
that we now have of the spatial dimension of proprioceptive content.
The direct object of proprioception is the state of the body at a particular
location. In terms of A location and B location, this means that the direct
object of proprioception will be the state of the body at a particular location
in a given body part, which is itself located relative to the rest of the
body. Note one consequence of this, to which I will return at the end of
this section. The body as a whole features in the descriptive dimension of
proprioceptive content, just as it does in the spatial dimension.
The descriptive aspect of proprioceptive content is that the body at a
particular location is in a particular state. But what sort of state? It may
be helpful to consider the range of bodily states that feature in proprioceptive
content under the familiar headings of ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’.
The qualitative states are those familiar from the phenomenology of

Obvious examples are the states of being bruised,

of
158 Chapter 6
bodily sensation. Obvious examples are the states of being bruised, being
damaged, being tickled, being itchy, being tender, being hot. Most of the
qualitative states featuring in proprioceptive content share the feature of
departing from what one might term bodily equilibrium. One prominent
reason for the body to obtrude on consciousness is that it is in an abnormal
condition of one form or another. This is a respect in which the qualitative
states generally differ from the quantitative ones. The sensation that
a limb is moving in a particular direction or the feeling that one’s legs are
crossed are paradigm quantitative states. Generally, these are not, of
course, departures from bodily equilibrium but rather ways in which one
keeps track of one’s body in its normal operations and activities. Of
course, the states that are the objects of particular proprioceptive contents
can have both qualitative and quantitative features, as when one feels that
one’s bruised ankle is swollen. They can also have several qualitative and/
or quantitative features at once, as when one clasps one’s hands together
and moves them (perhaps to hit a volleyball).
Now any acceptable account of content must explain the correctness
conditions of the relevant content-bearing states. Of course, any given
proprioceptive content will be correct if and only if there is an event taking
place at the appropriate bodily location with the relevant qualitative
and/or quantitative features. This is true but uninformative, however.
What we really need is some indication of the criteria by which one might
recognize whether these correctness conditions are satisfied or not. This
is, of course, an epistemic rather than a constitutive issue. Let me make
some brief comments in this direction.
The key to understanding how the correctness conditions of proprioceptive
content can be applied is the functional role of content-bearing
proprioceptive states with regard to the events that cause them and the
actions to which they give rise. Some of these actions are explicitly directed
towards the body (e.g., scratching an itch). Others are implicitly
directed towards the body (e.g., snatching one’s hand away from a flame).
Others are not body-directed at all (e.g., the role of what I termed quantitative
features in controlling action). In each of these cases, however, it is
possible to employ the concept of an appropriate action to illuminate the
correctness conditions. The correctness conditions for explicitly bodydirected
actions, like scratching itches, are that the action should be
Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self 159
appropriate to the disturbance that causes the proprioceptive state. This
requires, of course, that there actually be a disturbance at the bodily location
at which the action is directed (which would satisfy the correctness
condition for the spatial aspect) and that the action be appropriate to the
disturbance there (which would satisfy the correctness condition for the
descriptive aspect). For proprioceptive states that cause implicitly bodydirected
actions, the correctness conditions are similar. One might view
an appropriate action in both of these cases as an action that would tend
to restore bodily equilibrium, for example, by relieving the pain.
The correctness conditions of proprioceptive states that cause nonbody-
directed actions are slightly more complicated in that (unlike bodily
sensations) they are not necessarily linked to isolated and easily identifiable
events taking place in the body. Typically, these are proprioceptive
states reporting what I termed quantitative features, like general limb disposition
and movement. Here, though, we can see how the correctness
conditions might be brought to bear by considering the model sketched
earlier, in which two different types of proprioceptive information (about
initial limb disposition and then feedback about limb movement) are implicated
in paradigm cases of intentional action where a motivational
state and a perceptual state jointly produce an intentional command. The
obvious fact that correctness of the proprioceptive information is a necessary
condition of the success of the intentional action illustrates how one
might recognize whether the correctness conditions are satisfied: the correctness
conditions are satisfied if the relevant perception is true and the
relevant motivational state is satisfied.25
This brief sketch leaves many questions unanswered, but I take it that
the account so far is secure enough for me to bring this discussion of
proprioceptive content to bear on the argument that somatic proprioception
is a genuine form of self-consciousness. In the previous section I distinguished
between broad self-consciousness (awareness of the material
self as a spatially extended and bounded physical object distinctive in its
responsiveness to the will) and narrow self-consciousness (the material
self’s knowledge of its bodily properties as given in proprioceptive
contents of the type I have been discussing). Instances of narrow selfconsciousness
will have contents with both spatial and descriptive dimensions.
The body as a whole features in both of these dimensions of
160 Chapter 6
content. This is particularly clear in the case of the spatial dimension,
which involves an awareness of the body as an articulated structure of
body parts separated by what I have termed hinges. This implicates an
awareness of the self as spatially extended and bounded. But it also implicates
the second component of broad self-consciousness (awareness of the
bodily self as responsive to the will). This is because awareness of the
hinges is closely bound up with awareness of the body’s possibilities for
action. The body presents itself phenomenologically as segmented into
body parts separated by hinges because those are the natural units for
movement. In the descriptive aspect of proprioceptive content, moreover,
it is once again the body as a whole that features. The content of somatic
proprioception is that the body, at a particular A location and a particular
B location, is in a particular state with certain qualitative and/or quantitative
features. Each such content exemplifies both broad and narrow selfconsciousness.
6.6 Summary
In section 6.2, I offered the simple argument to show that somatic proprioception
is a form of primitive self-consciousness. The crucial claims in
the simple argument were, first, that somatic proprioception is a form of
perception and, second, that as self-perception it is a form of selfconsciousness.
These claims were defended in sections 6.3 and 6.4 respectively.
The soundness of the simple argument shows that somatic proprioception
is a source of what in earlier chapters I described as first-person
contents. Like the first-person perceptual contents discussed in the previous
chapter, these contents are primitive and available more or less from
birth.26 In at least one respect, the contents of somatic proprioception are
richer than the first-person contents of perceptual protobeliefs. As has
emerged from the discussion of the content of somatic proprioception,
they encompass a genuine awareness of the limits and responsiveness to
the will of the embodied self. Somatic proprioception is a source of information
not just about particular properties of the embodied self but also
about the nature of the embodied self itself.
The pick-up of self-specifying information in ecological perception and
the nonconceptual first-person contents of somatic proprioception are the

Points of View

the
Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self 161
most primitive forms of self-consciousness. One implication of this is that
it widens the scope of what might be termed the first-person perspective
far beyond the domain of humans, and even the higher mammals. This is
particularly significant for any philosopher who shares the plausible view
that self-consciousness, even in its primitive forms, carries with it a degree
of moral significance. A further implication more relevant to present concerns
is that the first-person nonconceptual contents of ecological perception
and somatic proprioception are the basic building blocks from which
the full-fledged self-consciousness associated with mastery of the firstperson
pronoun will eventually emerge, and hence are the raw material
from which to construct both an account of how the acquisition constraint
can be met for full-fledged self-conscious thought and a noncircular
explanation of the conditions of mastery of the first-person pronoun.
162 Chapter 6
7
Points of View
The previous two chapters have shown how somatic proprioception and
the structure of exteroceptive perceptual experience can be a source of
nonconceptual first-person contents from the very beginning of life. This
is an important start in dissolving the paradox of self-consciousness, because
it disproves the central assumption generating the paradox, namely,
that it is incoherent to ascribe thoughts with first-person content to an
individual who is not capable of employing the first-person pronoun to
achieve reflexive self-reference. But it is just a start, and what is required
now is an understanding of how we get from the primitive first-person
contents implicated in perceptual experience at the ecological level and
in somatic proprioception to the various high-level forms of first-person
thought that involve reflexive self-reference. How do we build up from
the pick-up of self-specifying information to full-fledged self-consciousness?
One promising strategy here is to identify certain fundamental dimensions
of self-consciousness that neither the perceptual pick-up of selfspecifying
information nor the degree of self-awareness yielded by somatic
proprioception can do justice to, and then to consider how such
basic-level information pick-up needs to be augmented if those dimensions
of self-consciousness are to come into play.
7.1 Conceptual Points of View and Nonconceptual Points of View
The previous chapter showed how somatic proprioception offers an
awareness of the body as a spatially extended and bounded object that is
responsive to the will. A major part of the significance of this is that it
offers the subject a way of registering the distinction between self and
nonself. It does this by marking the boundaries of the self. The boundaries
of the self emerge in somatic proprioception both as the limits of the
will and as the limits of felt feedback about the disposition and movement
of body parts. Crucial to this emergence is the sense of touch, which,
because it is simultaneously proprioceptive and exteroceptive, provides
an interface between the self and the nonself. As was also pointed out in
the previous chapter, registering the distinction between self and nonself
is a very primitive form of self-awareness. This is because self-awareness
has a very significant contrastive dimension. A central way of considering
a creature’s degree of self-awareness is in terms of its capacity to distinguish
itself from its environment, and no creature would be able to distinguish
itself from its environment if it did not have a minimal degree
of self-awareness to begin with. But once that minimal degree of selfawareness
is in place, the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies
the capacity to distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportionate
to the richness of the awareness of the environment from
which the self is being distinguished. There is, of course, very little such
richness in somatic proprioception, which, although it has an exteroceptive
dimension, provides relatively little information about the organization
and structure of the world. The world that manifests itself in somatic
proprioception is a world of surfaces, textures, and resistances—primitive
indeed in comparison with the causally structured world of physical
objects. And the form of self-awareness that emerges from somatic proprioception
is correspondingly primitive.
Thus, to make progress beyond the minimal registering of the distinction
between self and nonself that comes with somatic proprioception, we
need to consider the subject’s awareness of its environment. Philosophers
discussing self-awareness often place a lot of weight upon metaphors of
‘perspective’ and ‘point of view’. The point of these metaphors is to capture
certain characteristic aspects of how the environment is disclosed to
self-conscious subjects, as opposed to how it is disclosed to impartial scientific
investigation. There is more at stake here than a simple metaphorical
restatement of traditional and rather vague distinctions between
subjectivity and objectivity. The metaphors themselves put a distinctive
spin on the notion of subjectivity involved. In particular, they bring out
the centrality of spatiality in understanding self-conscious thought, be-

Having a distinctive perspective or point of view on the

be-
164 Chapter 7
cause the most obvious way of understanding how the environment can
be apprehended from a particular perspective or point of view is in spatial
terms. Having a distinctive perspective or point of view on the environment
is something that a self-conscious subject does at least partly in
virtue of occupying a particular spatial position. Of course, though, as I
stressed in my discussion of Gibson’s ecological optics, it is a mistake to
view this in an atomistic way. It is only in the experimental laboratory
that cognition takes place from a fixed spatial point. Perspectives and
points of view move through the world, retaining continuity through
change. The real challenge is understanding what this sort of perspectival
movement involves.
Kant is the philosopher who has had the clearest grip on the relation
between self-awareness and awareness of the environment, and the whole
of the Transcendental Analytic in the Critique of Pure Reason can be
viewed as a sustained working out of the interdependence between them.
To go into the details of Kant’s treatment, although fascinating, would
take us into murky waters far from the matter at hand. I propose to use
P. F. Strawson’s (1966) discussion of Kant’s transcendental deduction of
the categories as the philosophical point of departure. Strawson felicitously
uses the notion of a point of view and places it at the very heart
of Kant’s treatment of the interdependence between self-awareness and
awareness of the environment.
To appreciate what is going on here, we need to step back a little.
Strawson’s Kant is concerned with the structure of self-conscious experience.
What, he asks, are the necessary conditions that must be fulfilled
for self-conscious experience to be a genuine possibility? What must hold
for a series of thoughts and experiences to belong to a single, unitary selfconscious
subject? He begins thus:
It is a shining fact about such a series of experiences, whether self-ascribed or
not, that its members collectively build up or yield, though not all of them contribute
to, a picture of an unified objective world through which the experiences
themselves constitute a single, subjective, experiential route, one among other
possible subjective routes through the same objective world. (Strawson 1966, 104)
According to Strawson this “shining fact” is the key to understanding the
conditions that Kant places upon the possibility of genuinely selfconscious
experience. The central condition is that a subject’s experiences
Points of View 165
must “determine a distinction between the subjective route of his experiences
and the objective world through which it is a route” (Strawson
1966, 104). And it is this, of course, that Strawson terms the subject’s
point of view on the world. He explains:
A series of experiences satisfying the Kantian provision has a certain double aspect.
On the one hand it cumulatively builds up a picture of the world in which
objects and happenings (with their particular characteristics) are presented as possessing
an objective order, an order which is logically independent of any particular
experiential route through the world. On the other hand it possesses its own
order as a series of experiences of objects. If we thought of such a series of experiences
as continuously articulated in a series of detailed judgements, then, taking
their order and content together, those judgements would be such as to yield, on
the one hand, a (potential) description of an objective world and on the other
the chart of the course of a single subjective experience of that world (Strawson
1966, 105).
Strawson’s fleshes out the notion of a point of view in a way that draws
together two distinct (sets of) conceptual capacities: the capacity for selfascription
of experiences and the capacity to grasp the objectivity of the
world.
Let us take a further step back and ask why Strawson’s Kant thinks that
these two sets of conceptual abilities need to be brought together. The first
point is that the question of the possibility of self-conscious experience is
inextricably bound up with the question of the possibility of any form of
experience. Strawson brings this out by considering the hypothesis that
there might be an experience whose objects were sense data: “red, round
patches, brown oblongs, flashes, whistles, tickling sensations, smells”
(Strawson 1966, 99). This would not count as anything recognizable as
experience, he maintains, because it would not permit any distinction to
be drawn between a subject’s experiences and the objects of which they
are experiences. In such a case, the esse (being) of the putative “objects
of experience” would be their percipi (being perceived). There would be
no distinction between the order of experiences and the order of the “objects
of experience,” and this, according to Strawson, effectively means
that we cannot talk either about objects of experience or about a subject
of experience, and hence we cannot talk about experience at all.
Strawson’s central claim is that no creature can count as a subject of
experience unless it is capable of drawing certain very basic distinctions
between its experiences and the objects of which they are experiences.
166 Chapter 7
Experience that reflects a temporally extended point of view on the world
will ipso facto permit these basic distinctions to be drawn in virtue of
possessing the “double aspect” outlined in the passage quoted earlier.
The matter can be further clarified through the concept of a nonsolipsistic
consciousness, which Strawson introduces in Individuals. There he
refers to “the consciousness of a being who has a use for the distinction
between himself and his states on the one hand, and something not himself
or a state of himself, of which he has experience, on the other”
(Strawson 1959, 69). The notion of a point of view elucidates what any
creature’s experience must be like for it to count as nonsolipsistic in this
sense.
Nonetheless, Strawson’s conception of a point of view needs some modification
before it can be fitted into the current framework. As Strawson
understands the matter (unsurprisingly, given his Kantian inspiration),
experience reflecting the double aspect required for the development of
a point of view is available only to creatures who have mastered both
the sophisticated conceptual skills involved in being able to ascribe experiences
to themselves and the basic concepts required for understanding
the objectivity of the world. Although he does not offer an explicit argument
for why the notion of a point of view must be defined in that way, I
think the following captures his position:
1. Genuine nonsolipsistic consciousness requires the capacity to distinguish
one’s experiences from the objects experienced.
2. That requires the capacity to identify one’s experiences as one’s
experiences.
3. Identifying one’s experiences as one’s experiences is a form of selfascription.
4. The self-ascription of experiences requires reflexive self-reference.
The discussion of nonconceptual first-person contents in the preceding
two chapters, however, should have generated a certain suspicion of this
line of argument. The previous chapter in particular showed that nonsolipsistic
experience both can and does exist in the absence of the sort of
conceptual skills that Strawson takes (without argument) to be necessary
for it. A creature who, in virtue of somatic proprioception, can register
the distinction between self and nonself has clearly arrived at a form of
nonsolipsistic consciousness.

We can keep the essential thrust of Strawson’s position by reformulating

consciousness.
Points of View 167
We can keep the essential thrust of Strawson’s position by reformulating
it as follows. Taking the central distinction to be between subjective experience
and what that subjective experience is experience of allows us to
capture the crucial feature missing in the hypothesized purely sensedatum
experience without immediately demanding any relevant conceptual
capacities on the part of the subject. Using this as the central notion,
we can reformulate the original characterization: having a temporally extended
point of view on the world involves taking a particular route
through space-time in such a way that one’s perception of the world is
informed by an awareness that one is taking such a route, where such an
awareness requires being able to distinguish over time between subjective
experience and what it is experience of. For obvious reasons I term this a
nonconceptual point of view.
7.2 Self-Specifying Information and the Notion of a Nonconceptual
Point of View
Once the notion of a point of view has been formulated so that no relevant
conceptual requirements are built into it, one might naturally think
that the analysis of perceptual experience and somatic proprioception in
chapters 5 and 6 already shows us how to make sense of the notion of a
nonconceptual point of view. No special argument is needed to show that
it is possible to have a nonconceptual point of view, it might be suggested,
because such a nonconceptual point of view is built into our experience
of the world from the very beginning. Much of the self-specifying information
picked up in perceptual experience is information about the spatiotemporal
route that one is taking through the world. This is, of course,
particularly apparent in kinesthetic experience, both visual and proprioceptive.
It might thus seem that one does in fact have a continuous awareness
of oneself taking a particular route through the world that does not
require the exercise of any conceptual abilities, in virtue of having a constant
flow of information about oneself as a physical object moving
through the world. The suggestion is that the ecological coperception of
self and environment, together with the proprioceptively derived distinction
between self and nonself, is all that is needed for experience from a
nonconceptual point of view. This suggestion is a very natural one. But it
168 Chapter 7
is misplaced, and seeing why it is misplaced is an important first step in
the project of moving from basic-level information pick-up to full selfconsciousness.
We need to begin by exploring in more detail why a point of view has
been described as temporally extended. Is it the nonconceptual point of
view itself that is temporally extended, or simply the lifespan of the creature
that has the point of view? The issue can be focused with a thought
experiment. Suppose that we imagine a creature whose experience takes
place completely within a continuous present and lacks any sense of past
or future. The hypothesis is that every experience that this creature has
is completely novel. Could such a creature have experience reflecting a
nonconceptual point of view? If the answer is affirmative, then it follows
that a nonconceptual point of view has to be temporally extended only
in the limited sense that it is enjoyed by creatures who move through the
world over time. If negative, we will have to look for a new sense of temporal
extension.
Reflection on this thought experiment leads, I think, to the conclusion
that the capacity to make the basic distinctions at the heart of the notion
of a nonconceptual point of view would be absent in the case under discussion.
A creature whose experience takes place completely within a
continuous present cannot draw the fundamental nonsolipsistic distinction
between its experience and what it is experience of. A minimal requirement
on being able to make such a distinction is that what is being
experienced should be grasped as existing independently of any particular
experience of it. What we are trying to avoid, it will be remembered, is a
situation in which the esse of the putative “objects of experience” is their
percipi, and this requires “a component of recognition or judgement
which is not simply identical with, or wholly absorbed by, the particular
item which is recognised, which forms the topic of the judgement”
(Strawson 1966, 100). There must be recognition that the object of experience
has an existence transcending the particular occasion on which it
is apprehended. At the most basic level, such a grasp of independent existence
itself involves an understanding that what is being experienced at
the moment either has existed in the past or will exist in the future, that
it has an existence transcending the present moment. By definition, however,
a creature that experiences only a continuous present cannot have
any such understanding.
Points of View 169
There is a possible confusion here that it is important to clear up. The
distinction between self and nonself that has been seen to be present in
somatic proprioception is emphatically not equivalent to the distinction
between experience and what it is experience of that is currently at issue.
What could potentially confuse matters is that both distinctions appear
to qualify as instances of what Strawson terms nonsolipsistic consciousness.
A nonsolipsistic consciousness is “the consciousness of a being who
has a use for the distinction between himself and his states on the one
hand, and something not himself or a state of himself, of which he has
experience, on the other” (Strawson 1959, 69). A creature who, in virtue
of somatic proprioception, has a grasp of the boundaries and limits of the
self, and hence of the distinction between self and other, can be described
as “having a use for the distinction between himself and his states, on the
one hand, and something not himself or a state of himself on the other.”
The same holds for a creature who has grasped the distinction between
experience and what it is experience of. But it would be a mistake to think
that a grasp of the first distinction would automatically bring with it a
grasp of the second. The distinction between self and nonself has nothing
to do with the concept of experience. Moreover, there is an important
difference in the respective temporal dimensions of the two distinctions.
The distinction between self and nonself is available purely synchronically.
It does not require taking into account times other than the present,
unlike the distinction between experience and what it is experience of.
That second distinction is diachronic, as will emerge shortly.
The important question as far as this second distinction is concerned,
therefore, seems to be this: What form must experience take if it is to
incorporate an awareness that what is being experienced does not exist
only when it is being experienced? And in particular, what must the temporal
form of any such experience be? Clearly, such an awareness would
be incorporated in the experience of any creature that had a grasp of the
basic temporal concepts of past, present, and future, but we are looking
for something at a more primitive nonconceptual level. What I would
suggest is that certain basic recognitional capacities offer the right sort of
escape from the continuous present without demanding conceptual mastery.
Consider the act of recognizing a particular object. Because such an
act involves drawing a connection between current experience of an ob-

Of course, not all such acts of recognition will involve an awareness

ob-
170 Chapter 7
ject and a previous experience of it, it brings with it an awareness that
what is being experienced has an existence transcending the present moment.
Of course, not all such acts of recognition will involve an awareness
that what is being experienced exists independently of being experienced.
Reference to a previous experience can occur in the absence of any awareness
that the object of experience exists unperceived, as is the case, for
example, when a particular sensation or subjective feeling is recognized.
It is certainly possible to recognize an experience as one previously experienced
without any grasp of the distinction between experience and what
it is experience of. Clearly, the recognitional capacities must be exercised
on something extraneous to the experiences themselves. But what?
Physical objects are obvious candidates, and any creature that could
recognize physical objects would have experience that involves drawing
the right sort of distinctions. However, one might wonder whether the
distinctions could be drawn at a level of experience that does not involve
objects, and in fact it is hard to see how there could be such a thing as a
nonconceptual point of view if the distinctions could not be drawn at a
more primitive level. Strawson (following Kant) is surely right to assume
that a full understanding of the nature of objects comes only with a core
set of conceptual abilities. It is important, then, that there should be
“things” that can be recognized but that are not physical objects, but
what are they? One natural suggestion to make here would be that such
“things” are places. The thought here is that the fundamentally spatial
nature of the experienced world provides the most basic material for the
exercise of basic recognitional capacities. The experience of creatures
who cannot manipulate concepts in the manner required to think about
an objective spatial world of mind-independent objects can nonetheless
reflect the spatiality of their lived environment in terms of the primitive
capacity to think about places.
There is an obvious problem, though, that this proposal has to deal
with. The identification of places and the identification of objects seem
so inextricably bound together that it is not clear how there can be reidentification
of places without thought about objects. The connection between
objects and places has been thought to hold in both directions. It
is certainly clear that the criteria of identity for any given material object
involve spatiotemporal continuity, and that if I want to establish whether
Points of View 171
an object at one time is identical with another object at another time,
then one of the criteria that has to be satisfied is that they should either
be at the same place or that there should be a plausible spatial route between
the two places that they occupy. But many have also argued that
the interdependence holds also in the opposite direction, that the criteria
of identity for places necessarily depend on the criteria of identity for
objects (Strawson 1959, Quinton 1973). It is important, however, to be
clear on what the terms of the debate are here. One question that might
be asked here is whether we, as concept-exercising and language-using
creatures, could have anything like the understanding of space and spatial
relations that we actually do have without having the capacity to think
about objects and to employ those thoughts about objects in identifying
places and their relations. But what is relevant here is the more general
question of whether any capacity for place reidentification could be available
to creatures who lack the capacity to think in terms of enduring material
objects occupying spatial positions (Campbell 1993).
The problem arises, of course, because places themselves cannot be recognised
simpliciter. They must be recognised in terms of what occupies
them. So, to rebut the objection that there cannot be place reidentification
without object reidentification, it will be necessary to offer an alternative
account of the possible occupants that could make place reidentification
possible. It seems to me that, far from material objects being the only
such occupants, there are (at least) two distinct alternatives.
One alternative has already been discussed at some length in chapter
3, where I noted that recent work in developmental psychology strongly
supports the view that young infants parse their visual perceptions into
bounded segments, about whose behavior they have certain expectations,
which expectations nonetheless do not qualify as the perception of objects
(still less as involving mastery of the concept of an object). I suggested
in the final section of chapter 4 that by defining the concept of an
object* we could capture at a nonconceptual level how the perceived array
can be parsed into spatially extended segments that are more primitive
than objects. Drawing on this, I find it natural to propose that objects*
could have an important role to play in place reidentification.
We can make a start on the second alternative by noting the view that
there are levels of language use that do not involve identifying reference to
172 Chapter 7
particular objects (Strawson 1959, Campbell 1993). What is often termed
“feature-placing” discourse characterizes the world in terms of features
in a manner notably different from the more familiar subject-predicate
discourse. Whereas subject-predicate discourse depends upon identifying
reference to material particulars, and these are then ascribed qualities or
properties (which are sortal universals, appropriate for identifying and
classifying material particulars), feature-placing discourse deploys universal
terms that are not sortal universals and that are not predicated of
material particulars. ‘It is raining’ is a case in point, as is ‘There is food’.
In neither of these cases is there a particular thing of which certain properties
are predicated, nor are the universal terms involved the sort of terms
that can be used to classify particulars. Quine’s distinction between mass
terms and count terms is very much to the point here (1960, sections
19–20). Mass terms are terms that refer cumulatively to general types of
stuff, like water, wood, or rain. Any bit of wood is wood, as is any collection
of bits of woods, and the question of how many is not an appropriate
one to ask once the presence of wood has been identified. In contrast,
count terms must be provided in order for things to be counted and numbered.
They pick out particular things.1 We can understand featureplacing
discourse as a form of language use that operates at the level of
mass terms and has no count terms, with the important proviso that the
range of available mass terms in such feature-placing discourse is not restricted
to those terms that function as mass terms in our own far more
complex language.2
This notion of primitive feature-placing discourse can be modified to
help us understand how place reidentification might take place without
thought about objects. Let us assume a fairly primitive creature that nonetheless
possesses the capacity to recognize features, such as warmth or
food. Let us assume, moreover, that such a creature can navigate its way
around the environment in a manner that is not entirely stimulus-driven
(according to the criteria discussed in chapter 4). In navigating its way
around the environment, it returns to particular places, and this can be
made comprehensible in terms of certain features (warmth, food, water,
etc.) that exist at those places and that it is appropriate to describe the
creature as detecting. Such a situation it is compelling to describe as
one in which spatial behaviour is driven by information about features

So we can make sense of place reidentification in terms either of the

features
Points of View 173
holding at places. This in turn opens the way to the thought that we can
understand some forms of place reidentification in terms of feature
reidentification.
So we can make sense of place reidentification in terms either of the
notion of an object* or that of feature reidentification, or of course in
terms of both. This answers the worry that place reidentification depends
on object reidentification by showing that at least a primitive form of
place recognition can be prior to object identification.3 But there is an
important dimension not yet discussed. We can draw a broad distinction
between two types of memory. There are, on the one hand, instances
of memory in which past experiences influence present experience but
without any sense on the part of the subject of having had the relevant
past experiences and, on the other, instances in which past experiences
not only influence present experience but also the subject is in some
sense aware of having had those past experiences. In the former case
what licenses talk of memory is the fact that a subject (or an animal or
even a plant) can respond differentially to a stimulus as a function of
prior exposure to that stimulus or to similar stimuli. This is not to deny
that such a memory can be extremely complex. Quite the contrary, it
seems to be central to the acquisition of any skill, even the most developed.
The “differential response” does not have to be simple or repetitive.
Nonetheless, we can draw a contrast between memory at this level and
the various forms of memory that do involve an awareness of having had
the relevant past experiences, as, for example, when a memory image
comes into one’s mind or one successfully recalls what one did the previous
day. Clearly, there are many levels of such memory (which I shall term
‘conscious memory’), of which autobiographical memory is probably the
most sophisticated. One thing that these forms of conscious or explicit
memory all have in common, however, is that previous experience is consciously
registered, rather than unconsciously influencing present
experience.4
This distinction of forms of memories is a crude one, not least because
such terms as ‘conscious’ and ‘explicit’ are so hazy, but it can be illustrated
through some striking experimental work carried out with amnesic
patients (Schacter, McAndrews, and Moscovitch 1988). As is well
known, amnesia is an inability to remember recent experiences (even from
174 Chapter 7
the very recent past) and to learn various types of information, and it
results from selective brain damage that leaves perceptual, linguistic, and
intellectual skills untouched. Memory deficits in amnesic patients have
traditionally been studied using techniques designed to elicit explicit
memories. So, for example, amnesic patients might be instructed to think
back to a learning episode and either recall information from that episode
or say whether a presented item had previously been encountered in the
learning episode. On tests like these, amnesic patients perform very badly.
What is interesting, though, is that the very same patients who perform
badly on these tests of recall and recognition can perform successfully
(sometimes as successfully as normal subjects) on tests that do not require
thinking back to specific episodes or consciously bringing to mind earlier
experiences. The acquisition of skills is a case in point, and there is considerable
experimental evidence showing that amnesic patients can acquire
both motor and intellectual skills over a series of learning episodes
even though they cannot explicitly remember any of the learning episodes.
A striking example is the densely amnesic patient who learned how
to use a personal computer over numerous sessions, despite declaring at
the beginning of each session that he had never used a computer before
(Glisky, Schacter, and Tulving 1986). In addition to this sort of capacity
to learn over a succession of episodes, amnesics have performed well on
single-episode learning tasks (such as completing previously shown words
when given 3-letter cues). Experiments like these in amnesic patients
clearly reveal the difference between conscious and nonconscious memory,
but similar dissociations can be observed in normal subjects, as when
performance on indirect tasks reveals the effects of prior events that are
not remembered.
Nonetheless, the distinction of forms of memories is not yet as clear as
it needs to be, since the distinguishing feature of conscious memories, as
so far defined, is that they issue in verbal reports, which is of limited use
at the nonconceptual level. To sharpen the distinction further it is helpful
to recall that memory is a causal notion (Martin and Deutscher 1966).
This holds both of conscious and unconscious memory, although, of
course, in different ways. At a very general level, the notion of memory
has the following core role to play in the explanation of behavior: we need
to appeal to the operations of memory to explain a creature’s current
Points of View 175
behavior where we cannot fully explain that behavior without assuming
that it is being being causally affected by previous experiences and/or
thoughts (henceforth, ‘experiences/thoughts’). But the satisfaction of this
core condition counts as an instance of conscious memory if and only
if the previous experiences/thoughts are causally efficacious through the
medium of occurrent experiences/thoughts that refer back to those previous
experiences/thoughts. In the case of unconscious memory, in contrast,
this further requirement is not satisfied.
Note that there are two ways in which the further requirement for conscious
memory could fail to be satisfied. First, it could be the case that
there are no distinctive occurrent experiences/thoughts. Of course, this
would not mean that there are no occurrent experiences/thoughts at all.
Rather, this case arises when a creature’s occurrent experiences/thoughts
are precisely those that it would have had if the previous experiences/
thoughts had not been causally efficacious. As an example, consider
Glisky’s amnesic patient encountering his computer at the beginning of
his tenth lesson (which, of course, he thinks is his first). Despite the effects
of the previous nine lessons, the patient has more or less the same experiences/
thoughts that he had when he first encountered the computer. No
distinctive experiences/thoughts are caused by his previous encounters
with the computer. Nonetheless, those previous encounters could be causally
efficacious if, for example, the patient’s first action was to switch on
the computer and take hold of the mouse. A second way of failing the
further requirement would occur if, although the subject in question did
have distinctive occurrent experiences/thoughts caused in the appropriate
way, those experiences/thoughts do not refer back to the previous experiences
and/or thoughts that caused them. One common way in which this
occurs is when perceptual discriminative capacities have been sharpened
through long experience. Here a creature’s occurrent perceptions could
be significantly altered by previous experiences/thoughts without there
being any reference back to the experiences/thoughts that are causally
responsible for the increased discrimination manifest in its occurrent
perceptions.
It is important to recognize that neither form of potential failure can be
present if we are plausibly to maintain the presence of conscious memory.
Conscious memory requires more than that past experience/thoughts

Points of View 177

causally affect present experiences/thoughts. It requires that they do so in
a way that makes them recognized as past experience/thoughts. The grasp
of a primitive notion of the past is built into the ascription conditions of
conscious memory: to attribute conscious memory is ipso facto to attribute
a grasp of times other than and prior to the present.
So, the distinction is between, on the one hand, the processing of retained
information derived from past experience and, on the other, the
registration of past experience as past experience in conscious awareness.
When we apply this distinction to the matter in hand, our working notion
of a point of view demands that conscious memory be involved in the
recognitional abilities at the heart of having a point of view upon the
world. Reflect on the case of a creature, perhaps a swallow, that is perfectly
capable of performing complicated feats of navigation (like finding
its way back to its nest or to the warmer climes where it spends the winter)
but that nonetheless has no conscious memories of repeatedly encountered
features or objects* at particular places. Such a creature is clearly
sensitive to certain facts about the places, features, or objects* in question,
because those facts determine behavior. Moreover, it is quite possible
that its occurrent experiences should be causally affected by its
previous encounters with those places, features, or objects*. Nonetheless,
it is important to recognize that we are applying the concept of reidentification
here in a restricted sense. In the case of a creature capable
only of nonconscious memory, that creature’s capacity to reidentify a
place is exhausted by its capacity to find its way back to that place.
But when we consider place reidentification that involves the operations
of conscious memory, the situation becomes fundamentally different.
When a creature finds its way back to a particular place that it then
consciously remembers (or when it consciously remembers an object* or
feature at a place to which it has found its way back), it is emerging from
a continuous present and moving toward possession of a temporally extended
point of view. This is so for two reasons. First, consciously to
remember a particular place, object*, or feature is to be aware of having
been at that place or encountered that object* or feature before. A creature
who can remember having been somewhere before has the beginning
of an awareness of movement through space over time. And that in
turn is the beginning (and certainly a necessary, although not sufficient,
Points of View 177
condition) of being able to draw what Strawson terms the distinction between
the subjective route of one’s experiences and the world through
which it is a route. Second, recall that part of the significance of the notion
of a point of view is that it provides a sense of self-world dualism
richer than the minimal registering of the distinction between self and
nonself that emerges from somatic proprioception. As I mentioned earlier,
the richness of the self-awareness that accompanies the capacity to
distinguish the self from the environment is directly proportionate to the
richness of the awareness of the environment from which the self is being
distinguished. And what is significant about place reidentification that
involves conscious memory is that it makes possible a richer form of
awareness of the environment. Without conscious memory, no creature
would be able to conceive of their environment as composed of items
that have an existence transcending the present moment. What conscious
memory offers is the possibility of conceiving of objects as having existed
in the past.
These two reasons for why place reidentification involving conscious
memory is so central here depend on how conscious memory implicates
a form of temporal orientation toward the past. There are, of course, different
types and degrees of temporal orientation toward the past, and
one question that arises is, what type of understanding of the past does
conscious memory contribute to the acquisition of a nonconceptual point
of view upon the world? An important distinction in this area has been
made by John Campbell (1994, section 2.1). Campbell distinguishes between
what he terms temporal orientation with respect to phase (henceforth
phasal orientation) and temporal orientation with respect to
particular time (henceforth particular orientation). He illustrates the distinction
as follows:
Consider an animal that hibernates. Through the part of the year for which it is
awake, it regulates its activity depending on the season. Such an animal certainly
has a use for temporal orientation. It can recognize that it is late spring, perhaps
by keeping track of how long it has been since winter, and realize that soon it will
be summer. But it may not have the conception of the seasons as particular times;
it may be incapable of differentiating between the autumn of one year and the
autumn of another. It simply has no use for the conception of a particular autumn,
as opposed to the general idea of the season. So while the animal is capable
of orientation with respect to phases, it is not capable of orientation with respect
to particular times. (Campbell 1994, 38)
178 Chapter 7
At issue here is the capacity to think about event tokens, as opposed to the
capacity to think about event types. Phasal orientation does not involve
distinguishing between event types and event tokens. Phasal orientation
is concerned simply with where one is on a given temporal cycle and does
not provide the resources for thinking about the relations, temporal or
otherwise, between that temporal cycle and another. In a particular orientation,
in contrast, event tokens are discriminated by means of a temporal
frame of reference that places all event tokens within a single linear series
ordered by the relations of temporal priority and temporal simultaneity.
Does the work to which I am putting the concept of conscious memory
require a phasal orientation or a particular orientation toward the past?
Conscious memory offers the beginning of both an awareness of movement
through space over time and an awareness that the environment is
composed of items that have an existence transcending the present moment.
Temporal orientation toward the past is at the heart of both of
these forms of awareness. There seems no good reason to think that phasal
orientation will not be sufficient here. The creature described by
Campbell in the passage just quoted has both an awareness of movement
through space over time and an awareness that the environment is composed
of items whose existence transcends the present moment, despite
its inability to orient itself toward particular times. Although place reidentification
involves reidentifying a particular place, it does not follow that
if reidentification is to involve conscious memory, then the memory in
question must be a memory of having previously encountered that place
at a particular time. A memory of having previously encountered the
place at a particular stage in a temporal cycle would be quite sufficient.
Certainly, a conscious memory of having previously encountered a particular
place is a memory of a particular happening or event that occurred
at a particular time. But it does not follow that the memory must refer to
a particular time within a temporal frame of reference, as associated with
the particular orientation toward the past. This is tied up with the fact
that memory is a causal notion. The causal dimension of memory is captured
particularly clearly in the influential and widely accepted account
of memory offered by Martin and Deutscher (1966), which I will use
to illustrate the point. The core of the account is given by the following
three conditions:

A remembers a particular event or thing f if and only if

conditions:
Points of View 179
A remembers a particular event or thing f if and only if
i. within certain limits of accuracy he represents f as having been encountered
in the past;
ii. if f was public, he observed f; if f was private, then it was “his”;
iii. his past experience of f was (causally) operative in producing a state
or succession of states that ultimately produced his representation of f.
(Martin and Deutscher 1966, 166)
I take this to be a relatively uncontroversial theory of memory. Conditions
(i) to (iii) can be satisfied whether or not f is located by A within a temporal
frame of reference associated with the particular orientation toward
the past. If A is capable only of phasal orientation toward the past, then
it follows, of course, that he is not capable of representing the temporal
difference between f in temporal phase P and f9 in temporal phase P9,
and hence the particular times at which they occur. But if A currently
represents f and his current representation is causally derived from his
experience of f, then, given that f is a particular event occurring at a
particular time, it follows from conditions (i) to (iii) that A is enjoying a
memory of a particular event that occurred at a particular time.
It might be objected, though, that A is not properly described as representing
f in the situation described. Let us assume that two particular
events f and f9 within temporal cycles P and P9 are phenomenologically
indistinguishable for A. If this were the case, then a subject would only
be able to distinguish them by referring them to different points in a single
temporal series that includes both P and P9, and this, ex hypothesi, is
something that A cannot do. In such a case, the objection runs, A cannot
be properly described as representing f rather than f9, and hence would
not satisfy condition (i). The point of the causal theory, however, is that
whether A is representing f or f9 is determined by the causal history of
A’s current representation. It is, of course, perfectly possible that there is
no single determinate causal history, and that A is really representing a
generic f-type event or object in a manner causally traceable to the conjunction
of its experiences of f, f9, f0, . . . . But itwould be a mistake to
think that this is all that A can properly be described as doing. Memory
is best analyzed as a form of perception, and it cannot generally be a
requirement upon perceiving a particular f that one be able to distinguish
that f from any other f-type event or object that might have been causally
responsible for one’s current perception.
180 Chapter 7
This is a good moment to comment on some potential ambiguities in
the concept of episodic memory. Campbell defines ‘episodic memory’ so
that it counts as an instance of the particular orientation: “I will be interpreting
‘episodic memory’ to mean memory of a past happening conceived
as having a particular past time at which it took place” (Campbell
1994, 40). I have no objection to this stipulation. But it is important to
bear in mind that many psychologists operate with a simple binary
distinction between memory of things happening and memory for facts
and skills (semantic and procedural memory). If memory is classified
in this binary way, then accepting Campbell’s definition will have the
consequence that all memories of things happening will count as instances
of particular orientation toward the past. This is an unwelcome
conclusion, because it makes analytically true a claim that is controversial
and in any case (as I have just argued) false. It would be helpful to enrich
the vocabulary here by distinguishing the class of autobiographical memories
within the more inclusive class of episodic memories.5 Autobiographical
memories are those memories of particular events that are
temporally indexed so that they fit within a linear, autobiographical frame
of reference.
Let me take stock. I have used the notion of a temporally extended
point of view to characterize the structure of experience in a creature
capable of making a rudimentary distinction between its experiences and
what those experiences are experiences of. When we looked more deeply
at this idea, it emerged that the capacity to make such a distinction is
available only to creatures who are capable of exercising certain basic
recognitional abilities: the interlocking abilities to recognize places and
features. Moreover, these recognitional abilities must involve the exercise
of explicit or conscious memory. Putting the matter like this, however,
brings out into the open two important problems that need to be confronted.
The first is a practical problem. It is relatively straightforward to
establish the presence of explicit or conscious memory in language-using
subjects, since their subjective reports are usually a reliable source. But
when we are dealing with nonlinguistic animals, all we have to go on are
observable facts about differential responses to stimuli as a function of
previous exposure. How can we decide whether to explain these responses
in terms of implicit or explicit memory? The second problem is
Points of View 181
theoretical, and more radical. It emerges because we are looking for
cognitive abilities that it makes sense to ascribe to non-concept-using
creatures, like young infants and many animals. But many philosophers
are skeptical about the very possibility of nonconceptual recognitional
abilities. At the very least, then, this skepticism must be set to rest.
To begin with the skeptical worry, one reason for thinking that the notion
of nonconceptual recognition does not make sense is the thought that
recognition is essentially an activity of classification that involves relating
objects of experience under concepts. There is, I think, a simple reply to
this. If there were no nonconceptual recognition, then it would be impossible
to see how any concepts could ever be acquired. Whatever detailed
theory of concept acquisition we adopt, it is obviously true that the acquisition
of observational and perceptual concepts takes place on the basis
of perceived resemblances between items.6 But there can be no perceived
resemblances without basic recognitional abilities. Recognition is the
most fundamental step in categorization and classification, and it is correspondingly
absurd to make it depend on more sophisticated cognitive
abilities.7 But in contrast to the very clear sense we have of what it is to
classify things under concepts, we have very little understanding of what
nonconceptual recognition might consist in at the level of conscious or
explicit phenomenal experience (i.e., when we are dealing with recognitional
abilities that cannot be understood solely in terms of nonconscious
information processing). There are three points that it is worth making in
this context.
First, it is a mistake to hold that there can be no organized experience
without the experience of conceptually classifiable particulars. On the
contrary, we have already looked at two ways in which experience can be
organized without the application of concepts. The first emerged in my
first discussion of nonconceptual content in chapter 3, where I noted that
infants seem to be capable of parsing their experience into bounded segments
that support certain basic expectations. This is a clear example of
experience being organized without the application of concepts. Comparable
types of organization emerged earlier in this section with featureplacing
modes of thought. Of course, neither of these types of experience
can count as experience of particular items, if ‘particular items’ is read to
mean ‘enduring material objects’, but that would be a question-begging
reading.

A second point is that there seems room for an unanalyzable feeling of

reading.
182 Chapter 7
A second point is that there seems room for an unanalyzable feeling of
familiarity as a basic building block for cognition. The notion of familiarity
is at the heart of the theory of memory that Russell offered in The
Analysis of Mind, and it has by and large not received good press among
philosophers (Russell 1921, Pears 1975). According to Russell, the feeling
of familiarity integral to the content of memory images gives rise to the
belief that the image refers to the past. One significant, perhaps conclusive,
difficulty for this theory is describing the feeling of familiarity in a
way that clearly distinguishes it from the belief to which it is supposed to
give rise, and the result has been a general distrust of appealing to feelings
of familiarity in the context of memory. But this general distrust must be
mistaken. An enormous part of learning, and hence of cognition as a
whole, depends upon grasping that one event is similar to another, that
something is the same as something else, and at the most basic level, it is
hard to see how this could ever be apprehended without some sort of
feeling of familiarity. Learning depends on the appreciation of similarity,
as Quine has noted on many occasions, and familiarity is just an appreciated
similarity. This is certainly not compromised by granting the anti-
Russellian point that, in the case of belief-forming and language-using
creatures, this feeling of familiarity is not clearly distinguishable from beliefs
about the pastness of the remembered event to which it gives rise,
since we are interested in familiarity as experienced by creatures incapable
of entertaining beliefs about the pastness of past events.
Third, there is a close relation among recognitional abilities, features,
and basic inductive generalizations. When an animal recognizes a particular
place through recognizing a particular feature, that feature will, of
course, be something in which it has a direct interest and that is directly
relevant to its behavior. Recognizing a given feature is closely bound up
with recognizing possibilities for action relative to that feature, and when
this is performed over a period of time, it is appropriate to speak of the
formation of a basic inductive generalization about what to expect at a
particular place. The induction is generated by the experience of repeated
conjunctions (which is itself presumably underwritten by feelings of familiarity).
This gives us a further important element in nonconceptual
recognition, because the expectancies to which such inductive generalizations
give rise are presumably part of what it is like to recognize a place
in terms of a feature.
Points of View 183
These basic inductive generalizations are to be distinguished from
the instrumental protobeliefs discussed in chapter 5. Those instrumental
protobeliefs, involved in explaining the simplest and most basic forms of
intentional activity, were elucidated in terms of present-tense expectancies
about the behavior of objects in the environment. They do not count as
instances of conscious memory. In fact, they fail to satisfy the criteria for
conscious memory in the second of the two ways identified earlier. Although
instrumental protobeliefs have, of course, been produced by past
experiences, they contain no reference back to the past experiences causally
responsible for those effects.
There is room for a strong claim about the connection between recognitional
abilities and basic inductive generalizations at the nonconceptual
level. There is a very important question about how memories can have
have implications for current behavior. Jonathan Bennett has posed the
question and solved it (note, though, that his terminology is rather different
from mine):
Non-linguistic behaviour is essentially a manipulation of a present environment,
and the immediately relevant beliefs must be ones about the present. If an item of
behaviour of this kind is also to show that the agent has a certain belief about the
past, this must presumably be because the attribution of the past belief helps to
explain the present one. But that requires that the two be somehow linked by the
agent, and I do not see how they can be linked except through a general belief.
(Bennett 1976, 104)
It is through the medium of basic inductive generalizations that a creature
can bring its conscious memories to bear upon current behavior. Here is
Bennett’s illustration:
Suppose that a chases a victim v up a tree, guards the foot of the tree for a while,
and then climbs up after v. We could discover that a climbs the tree because he
believes that v is in the tree. Can that belief be explained as arising from the belief
that v was earlier in the tree? Only, I suggest, if a is also credited with the linking
belief that v-like animals leave trees only by climbing down them (or that v-like
animals never fly, or some such). (Bennett 1976, 105)
In his earlier book Rationality Bennett argued that the interdependence
of basic inductive generalizations and conscious memories (in my terms)
meant that neither could be ascribed to nonlinguistic creatures. Only linguistic
creatures, he claimed, could manifest these two cognitive abilities
separately. Only in language can one manifest a conscious memory with-
184 Chapter 7
out a related inductive generalization, and vice versa. This yields his
restriction of these abilities to language users when coupled with the assumption
that a creature that cannot manifest two different types of cognitive
ability separately cannot properly be credited with either of them.8
As Bennett subsequently realized, however, the fact that basic inductive
generalizations and conscious memories always coexist in the explanation
of behavior if they feature in it at all does not mean that they cannot be
separated out on behavioral grounds. Suppose that we are faced with a
particular piece of behavior that appears to demand explanation in terms
of a conscious memory of a particular place and a concomitant inductive
generalization. Different inductive generalizations dictate different forms
of behavior in different circumstances. By examining what a creature does
in different circumstances, we can work out which inductive generalizations
are governing its behavior and apply this back to the original behavior.
Similarly, a given conscious memory of a place may, in conjunction
with different inductive generalizations, dictate identifiable forms of behavior
relative to that place. By comparing different candidate conscious
memories with different candidate inductive generalizations, it should
be possible in principle to narrow the field down to a single memorygeneralization
pair.
This interdependence of conscious memories and basic inductive generalizations
is very significant in dealing with the practical problem identified
earlier: how are we to establish the presence of explicit or conscious
memory in nonlinguistic creatures, given the importance of verbal reports
in deciding what memories to ascribe to linguistic creatures? Let me set
the scene by describing two sets of experiments in the animal learning
literature. The first is a set of experiments on monkeys (rhesus and pigtailed
macaques) carried out by Gaffan (1977). Monkeys were trained to
watch a screen on which 25 colored slides were presented twice at random
during a testing session. The monkeys were tested for their capacity
to detect whether a given slide was being presented for the first or second
time during a training session. Pressing a lever during the second presentation
of a slide was rewarded with a sugar pellet, but pressing the lever
during the first presentation was not. The two rhesus monkeys tested were
able (after training) to discriminate with 90 percent accuracy between
first and second presentation, although an average of 9 slides intervened
between the two presentations.

Contrast Gaffan’s experiments with the superficially more complicated

presentations.
Points of View 185
Contrast Gaffan’s experiments with the superficially more complicated
memory experiments performed by Davis and Fitts (1976) on rhesus
monkeys and pig-tailed macaques. In these experiments, pictures pasted
onto boards were used to cover wells in which food rewards could be
placed. The monkeys were presented with a sample picture, which they
pushed off the well to discover whether the sample was rewarded or not.
After a short delay, two pictures were presented simultaneously: one the
sample and the other completely novel. If the sample had originally been
rewarded it was rewarded again, while if the well under the sample had
originally been empty, then the novel picture was rewarded. The monkeys
mastered this principle.
In some ways this second set of experiments seems to involve more
complicated memory operations than the previously described experiments.
The animals are being asked to remember not just whether a picture
has been presented before but also whether it was rewarded or not.
This is a two-way classification. On the other hand, however, there is correspondingly
less reason to hypothesize that conscious recognition and
familiarity are driving the behavior in the experimental situation. Mastering
the principle can be explained in terms of the direct reinforcement
of associations. The first such association is the straightforward association
between the sample and the reward. The second is the association
between an unrewarded sample and the novel picture. To revert back to
the original characterization of conscious memory, it does not seem necessary
in explaining what is going on to appeal to more than the causal
efficacy of previous experience on present behavior. But there does not
seem to be a similar explanation of what is going on in Gaffan’s recognition
experiments. That is because the relevant association there involves
familiarity and recognition. It is an association between rewards and the
familiarity of a presented image. Successful performance in the Gaffan
experiments rests upon successful mastery of a basic inductive generalization
along the lines of ‘Pressing a lever when something seen before is seen
again leads to a reward’ in conjunction with specific individual conscious
memories of the form ‘This has been seen before’. Specific individual conscious
memories are required to learn this basic inductive generalization.
I offer Gaffan’s experiments as a clear example of behavior that demonstrably
requires explanation in terms of conscious memories.
186 Chapter 7
Let me relate this back to the concept of a nonconceptual point of view.
The conclusion so far is that any creature who has a temporally extended
point of view on the world must possess conscious recognitional abilities.
This enables us to return to the issue with which this chapter began. We
set out to identify certain fundamental dimensions of self-consciousness
to which the perceptual pick-up of self-specifying information cannot do
justice, and then to consider how basic-level information pick-up needs
to be augmented if those dimensions of self-consciousness are to come
into play. I put forward the notion of a nonconceptual point of view as
just such a fundamental dimension of self-consciousness, and I suggested
at the beginning of this section that the perceptual pick-up of selfspecifying
information might be sufficient for experience to reflect a point
of view on the world. We are now in a position, though, to see why it
cannot be sufficient.
On the ecological view, perception is fundamentally a process of extracting
and abstracting invariants from the flowing optical array. Organisms
perceive an environment that has both persisting surfaces and
changing surfaces, and the interplay between them allows the organism
to pick up the sort of information that specifies, for example, visual kinesthesis.
The key to how that information is picked up is the idea of direct
perception. The mistake made by existing theories of perception, according
to Gibson, is construing the process of perception in terms of a
hierarchical processing of sensory inputs, with various cognitive processes
employed to organize and categorize sensations. A crucial element of this
serial processing is bringing memories to bear upon present experience.
As emphasised in chapter 5, Gibson rejects this whole picture of perception.
Accepting that present experience is partly a function of past experience,
he firmly denies that this sensitivity to past experience is generated
by processing memories and sensations together. His alternative account
rests on the idea that the senses as perceptual systems become more sensitive
over time to particular forms of information as a function of prior
exposure.9 Although Gibson was rather polemical about what he termed
“the muddle of memory,” it would seem that his account seems to involve
no more than a differential response to stimuli as a function of past
experience. Gibson’s position seems to be that conscious recognition is
not implicated in ecological perception, although it might or might not
develop out of such ecological perception. It is perfectly possible for a
Points of View 187
creature to have experience at the ecological level without any conscious
recognitional capacities at all. If, then, a capacity for conscious place recognition
is a necessary condition of having experience that involves a temporally
extended point of view, then it seems that the dual structure of
experience involved in the ecological coperception of self and environment
must be significantly enriched before yielding a point of view.
The point, of course, is not that this creates any problem for the basic
idea of ecological perception; rather, it is that the materials offered by
Gibson’s own account need to be supplemented if they are to be employed
in the theoretical project under discussion, and it is perfectly possible that
Gibson’s concepts of information pick-up and direct “resonance” to information
in the ambient environment could have a crucial role to play in
such an extension of the basic way in which ecological perception is sensitive
to past experience (as they are, for example, in the account of perception
and memory developed in Neisser 1976). Gibson’s account alone
cannot do all the work it was earlier suggested it might be able to do,
because the capacity for conscious place recognition needs to be added
onto the ecological coperception of self and environment.
7.3 Three Intersecting Distinctions and the Acquisition Constraint
In chapter 5, I argued that the pick-up of self-specifying information in
perceptual experience was a source of nonconceptual first-person contents.
In chapter 6, I argued the same for somatic proprioception. I also
suggested that these are the most primitive types of first-person contents—
the building blocks from which we can construct a principled account
of both the nature and the acquisition of self-consciousness. One
obvious question that this raises is, are we committed to the view that
any creature whose perceptual experience is a source of nonconceptual
first-person contents ipso facto counts as self-conscious? This would, in
the eyes of most theorists, be a reductio ad absurdum of the position under
discussion. My discussion of the notion of a nonconceptual point of
view in this chapter has offered a way to avoid this conclusion. We now
have the conceptual machinery to impose a division within the class of
creatures whose perceptual experience supports nonconceptual firstperson
contents. This division divides those creatures that have a nonconceptual
point of view on the world from those creatures that do not. This

Still, several important issues remain to be discussed.

This
188 Chapter 7
distinction can be employed to mark a significant substantive sense of
self-consciousness.
Still, several important issues remain to be discussed. First, more needs
to be said about the notion of a nonconceptual point of view. The discussion
in this chapter has been devoted principally to establishing conscious
place recognition as a necessary condition for possession of a nonconceptual
point of view, and it should be obvious that it is far from a sufficient
condition. In the next chapter I will discuss in more detail how the capacity
for conscious place recognition is put to work to provide a nonconceptual
point of view on the world. A second set of issues emerges when we
ask how the distinction stressed in this chapter maps onto certain other
distinctions, one of which has already been discussed. In particular, something
needs to be said about how the distinction between conscious place
recognition and nonconscious place recognition relates, first, to the distinction
between conscious and nonconscious creatures and, second, to
the distinction discussed in chapter 4 between behavior that supports an
intentional interpretation and behavior that does not. A third point that
needs to be discussed is how the conclusions of this chapter mesh with
the Acquisition Constraint, which governs the overall project of showing
how full-fledged self-consciousness can be built up from the pick-up of
self-specifying information in perceptual experience.
Describing the type of memory implicated in experience reflecting a
nonconceptual point of view as conscious memory can make it tempting
to think that all and only creatures capable of conscious place recognition
are conscious. This is certainly suggested by the contrast drawn between
conscious place recognition and unconsciously generated differential responses
due to prior exposure to stimuli. Nonetheless, there is nothing
incoherent about the idea that a creature inhabiting what I termed the
continuous present could have conscious experiences. Of course, it could
not have conscious experiences if we stipulate, as Strawson does, that
conscious experiences are available only to creatures with a point of view
on the world. But there are no good grounds for making this stipulation.
Perceptual experiences with first-person nonconceptual contents derived
from the pick-up of self-specifying information can be entertained by
creatures who lack a point of view on the world in virtue of lacking conscious
recognitional abilities. I can think of no non-question-begging
reason to deny that these are experiences. And in any case, even someone
Points of View 189
determined to deny that such states could count as experiences in some
rich and as yet unspecified sense of the word would nonetheless have to
accept that such a creature could still be conscious in virtue of having
sensations.10
We should not assume that only creatures possessed of the appropriate
conscious recognitional capacities can behave in ways that demand intentional
explanation. The operational criteria for the appropriateness of intentional
explanation discussed in chapter 4 neither make any reference
to, nor imply the existence of, conscious recognitional abilities. These criteria
derive from the basic thought that representational perceptual states
are intermediaries between sensory input and behavioral output to which
appeal needs to be made when there is no invariant connection between
input and output. There is no reason to think that a creature moving
around the world and acting on the basis of self-specifying information
in the various ways described by Gibson could not be capable of behavior
that is plastic and flexible enough to require intentional explanation. And
if the behavior is suitably plastic and flexible, then, as discussed in chapter
5, the first-person nonconceptual contents derivable from the pick-up of
self-specifying information are particularly well suited to capture the contents
of perceptual protobeliefs in way that explains their direct relevance
to action. Intentional explanation can enter into the picture prior to the
emergence of the conscious recognitional abilities necessary for possession
of a point of view on the world.
This point can be brought home by reflecting on the strong pressures
to concede that at least some instrumentally conditioned behavior is intentional
(Russell 1980, Dickinson 1988). Instrumental conditioning certainly
does not require conscious recognitional capacities, being perfectly
explicable on Gibsonian lines in terms of increasing perceptual sensitivity
to a particular affordance. All that instrumental conditioning requires is
consciousness in the very weak sense of sentience, since reinforcement
depends on the capacity to feel sensations. It is reasonable, I think, to
hold that the capacity for intentional behavior is restricted to creatures
that are conscious in the weak sense of being able to feel sensations. But
the converse does not hold. Creatures whose behavior is not intentional
can be perfectly capable of feeling sensations. This is presumably what
makes possible the various types of instrumental conditioning that do not
result in intentional behavior.
190 Chapter 7
The conclusion to draw, then, is that that we are dealing here with three
intersecting distinctions, rather than three different ways of describing the
same distinction. None of the three distinctions map cleanly on to any of
the others. Nonetheless, it does seem that these three distinctions give us
a hierarchy of cognitive abilities, ordered according to the relations of
dependence among these abilities. Basic consciousness is clearly the most
primitive of the three abilities. It is presupposed by both the others, while
itself presupposing neither of them. In fact, it is very plausible to think
that it is innate (Gazzaniga 1995). Next comes the capacity for intentional
behavior, which requires consciousness in the weak sense of sentience
but is independent of the conscious recognitional abilities that we
have seen to be necessary conditions for possession of a nonconceptual
point of view. It is perfectly possible, as I have stressed, for the first-person
nonconceptual contents yielded by the pick-up of self-specifying information
to occur at this level. Subject to the conditions discussed in this chapter,
such contents can interact with the highest of the three cognitive
abilities, which is the capacity to entertain conscious recognitional abilities
of the sort discussed in this chapter.
It seems reasonable to think that the categorization of these three factors
in terms of their degrees of primitiveness provides useful clues to
answering the more general developmental question of how the capacity
for conscious recognition can arise, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
It will be remembered that the following constraint was suggested
as a means of ensuring that an articulated theory of self-consciousness
is suitably sensitive to the developmental progression from first-person
perceptual contents to first-person thought:
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 development to acquire that
capacity.
The application of the acquisition constraint to the present case is
straightforward. We have a modest hierarchy of three stages, intended to
capture relations of logical dependence. But how plausible is this hierarchy
in developmental terms? Do the abilities associated with each level
provide sufficient resources for the acquisition of the abilities associated
with higher levels? The first level is basic sentience. This really presents