As mentioned earlier, this presupposes, but is not exhausted by,

or
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 263
alarming. As mentioned earlier, this presupposes, but is not exhausted by,
the infant’s comprehension that both he and his mother are perceivers of
the world. Following the mother’s line of sight or the invisible line that
leads from her pointing fingertip to an object does nothing more than
direct the infant’s attention to a particular object or event. It does not tell
the infant anything about the object. Social referencing, in contrast, is a
way of finding out about things in the world. It is not too fanciful, I think,
to draw a linguistic analogy: whereas joint visual attention is a primitive
analogue of the linguistic act of reference, social referencing is a primitive
analogue of the linguistic act of predication. This means that the effectiveness
of social referencing depends upon the infant’s recognizing that his
mother’s emotional reactions are a guide to the nature of the puzzling
object or event. This is what explains his willingness to tailor his own
emotional reactions to the the emotional reactions that he perceives in his
mother, which in turn presupposes an awareness that both he and his
mother are bearers of reactive attitudes. This, of course, is just distinguishing
self-awareness relative to the category of bearers of reactive
attitudes.
Once more, it is worth making explicit specimens of the general type
of contents that might feature in descriptions and explanations of social
referencing. The infant on the visual cliff looks towards his mother for
guidance. Why? The natural explanation is that the infant has an instrumental
protobelief to the effect that his mother’s reactions will provide an
indication of whether the situation really is as bad as it appears:
(8) The infant recognizes, “Mother is like me and reacts in the same
sort of way to events as I do.”
Something slightly more complex is required to translate this into action—
capturable perhaps by the following pair of contents:
(9) The infant recognizes, “The expression on her face means that she
herself would not go forward.”
(10) The infant intends, “I will do what she would do.”
Again, the combination of (8), (9), and (10) clearly implicates the presence
of distinguishing psychological self-awareness relative to the category
of bearers of reactive attitudes.
264 Chapter 9
9.5 Conclusion
Let me draw the strands of this chapter together. I have been focusing
on psychological self-awareness. It emerged early on in the chapter that
psychological self-awareness needs to be viewed in the context of what I
termed the Symmetry Thesis, namely that a subject’s psychological selfawareness
is constitutively linked with his awareness of other minds. The
neo-Lockean defence of the Symmetry Thesis that I offered led to the
thought that the Symmetry Thesis holds for self-awareness relative to
the psychological categories that define and form the contrast space for
the complex category of psychological subjects. These categories are
those of perceivers, agents, and bearers of reactive attitudes.
The central question tackled in this chapter was whether it is legitimate
to speak of nonconceptual psychological self-awareness in the way that
it has been seen to be legitimate to speak of nonconceptual bodily selfawareness
in previous chapters. As in previous chapters, I suggested that
an answer to this question needed to be constrained by the requirements
of inference to the best and most parsimonious explanation. What is
needed to settle the question is clear evidence of forms of behavior for
which inference to the best explanation requires attributing to nonlinguistic
or prelinguistic creatures precisely such psychological selfawareness.
In the final section of the chapter I showed how such evidence
was to be found in the complex social interactions in which human infants
partake during and after the last quarter of the first year. Joint visual
attention exemplifies distinguishing psychological self-awareness relative
to the category of perceivers. Coordinated joint engagement exemplifies
distinguishing psychological self-awareness relative to the category of
agents. And social referencing exemplifies distinguishing psychological
self-awareness relative to the category of bearers of reactive attitudes.
Thus, with respect to these three core elements in the notion of a psychological
subject, the notion of nonconceptual psychological self-awareness
is indeed legitimate. It remains, however, to see how this can be deployed
to solve the paradox of self-conscious. For this I turn to the next and
final chapter.
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 265
10
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness
The preceding chapters have provided the materials with which to offer a
solution to the paradox of self-consciousness identified in chapter 1. In
this final chapter I will draw together the various strands of the argument
and show how they illuminate the paradox of self-consciousness. The first
step, though, must be to recapitulate the paradox and the various moves
that have been made towards a satisfactory solution to the paradox.
10.1 A Recapitulation
The paradox of self-consciousness as identified in chapter 1 can be presented
as an inconsistency between the following six propositions:
1. The only way to analyze self-consciousness is by analyzing the capacity
to think ‘I’-thoughts.
2. The only way to analyze the capacity to think a particular range of
thoughts is by analyzing the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression
of those thoughts (the Thought-Language Principle).
3. ‘I’-thoughts are canonically expressed by means of the first-person
pronoun.
4. Linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to
think ‘I’-thoughts.
5. A noncircular analysis of self-consciousness is possible.
6. The capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts meets the Acquisition Constraint
(in the paradigmatic way defined in chapter 1).
It is propositions (5) and (6) that create the paradox. If the Thought-
Language Principle is correct, then it does indeed follow that the only way
to analyze the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts is through an analysis of the