causal relation that can be understood without a full-fledged

a
288 Chapter 10
causal relation that can be understood without a full-fledged understanding
of full-fledged causation.4
The causal relation of bringing-it-about-that is integral to the notion
of a nonconceptual point of view and to the self-consciousness that it
implicates. Possession of a nonconceptual point of view involves an
awareness of the self as acting upon and being acted upon by the spatial
environment, and this, of course, depends crucially on understanding
both the general notion of one’s bringing it about that a certain effect
occurs (without which intentional action would be impossible) and the
general notion of things being brought about in virtue of, for example,
interactions between objects (without which it would be impossible to
make predictions about the future other than those based on the most
simple correlations of features). Of course, there is a distinction to be
made between physical causation and psychological causation. The causal
relation of bringing-it-about-that implicated in a nonconceptual point of
view is a physical notion, while the type of bringing-it-about-that involved
in understanding the operation of the Gricean mechanism is clearly psychological.
So if the intention in (c9) is to be available at the nonconceptual
level, there must be warrant for attributing a grasp of the
psychological bringing-it-about-that relation to prelinguistic creatures.
Not every form of psychological bringing-it-about-that will be sufficient
to underwrite comprehension of the Gricean mechanism. Awareness
of oneself as an agent presumably involves a comprehension that one’s
intentions can be effective in bringing about changes in the world, and
this is obviously a form of psychological bringing-it-about-that. Nonetheless,
it is important to distinguish between what might be termed mindto-
world bringing-it-about-that and mind-to-mind bringing-it-aboutthat.
It is the second of these that is required. Comprehension of the
Gricean mechanism requires understanding that one’s manifest intentions
can be efficacious in bringing about changes in the mental states of others.
Such an understanding is, of course, available at the nonconceptual level,
as emerged during my discussion of psychological self-consciousness in
the previous chapter. Both coordinated joint engagement and joint visual
attention depend on both participants comprehending the possibility of
mind-to-mind bringing-it-about-that. Here is one example of a protobelief
that might feature in the explanation of canonical instances of joint
visual attention:
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 289
(7) The infant recognises, “Mother will look where I am looking if I
look back and forth from her to it.”
This instrumental protobelief is a recognition of mind-to-mind bringingit-
about-that. The infant recognizes that his looking back and forth from
his mother to the object will bring it about that she looks where he is
looking.
Once the comprehension of mind-to-mind bringing-it-about-that at the
nonconceptual level is granted, the legitimacy of clause (c9) in the communicative
intention governing use of the first-person pronoun swiftly follows.
Clause (c9) comprises the following intention:
c9. that the awareness in (b) should bring it about that a’s attention be
drawn to him*
This can be broken down into three elements—specifically, a relation of
mind-to-mind bringing-it-about-that between a’s awareness of the utterer’s
intention that a’s attention be drawn to him* and a’s awareness actually
being drawn to him. All three elements have now been accommodated
at the nonconceptual level, so there is no obstacle to the thought that their
combination in (c9) can be accommodated at the nonconceptual level.
Is this sufficient to solve the problem of explanatory circularity that is
one of the two planks of the paradox of self-consciousness? The problem
of explanatory circularity derives from the fact that the capacity for selfconscious
thought is presupposed in a satisfactory account of mastery of
the first-person pronoun. This appears to render circular the project of
elucidating the capacity for self-conscious thought through mastery
of the first-person pronoun. We are now in a position, however, to see
why the circularity here is apparent rather than real. A communicationtheoretic
account of the requirements on mastery of the first-person pronoun
does indeed involve, in addition to mastery of the token-reflexive
rule, three intentions with first-person contents. A real and vicious circularity
would arise only if the first-person thoughts implicated in mastery
of the first-person pronoun themselves implicate mastery of the firstperson
pronoun. What has emerged, however, is that these first-person
thoughts are of a kind that can be nonconceptual in a way that makes
them logically independent of mastery of the first-person pronoun. They
can be used to explain the requirements on linguistic mastery of the first-
290 Chapter 10
person pronoun without themselves presupposing linguistic mastery of
the first person. I take it that this is sufficient to solve the problem of
explanatory circularity. It also holds considerable promise for solving the
problem of capacity circularity, which I take up in the next section of
the book.
10.3 Solving the Problem of Capacity Circularity
The problem of capacity circularity arose in chapter 1 in the context of a
constraint on the psychological reality of cognitive abilities that I termed
the Acquisition Constraint:
The Acquisition Constraint If a given cognitive capacity is psychologically
real, then there must be an explanation of how it is possible for an
individual in the normal course of human development to acquire that
cognitive capacity.
The Acquisition Constraint is not a very strong constraint. It does not
require that any account be provided of how the cognitive ability in question
is actually acquired. Nor in fact does it require that any such account
be epistemically available. What it does provide is a negative test. If, for
any designated cognitive ability, there are good reasons to think that it
cannot be acquired in the normal course of human development, then its
psychological reality is cast in doubt.
Of course, the force of the Acquisition Constraint depends upon how
the notion of acquisition is to be understood. After all, one way in which
the Acquisition Constraint could be satisfied for a given cognitive capacity
would be if it turned out that the emergence of that cognitive capacity
was due to the maturation of an innate module. One might be forgiven
for feeling that this makes the Acquisition Constraint too weak a tool.
With this apparently catch-all way of potentially satisfying the Acquisition
Constraint, how could anything fail to meet it? But what makes matters
slightly simpler here is that it is often part of our understanding of a
given psychological capacity that it should have been acquired in a certain
way. So when we ask whether a given cognitive capacity is psychologically
real, the specification of that cognitive ability will often include an outline
conception of how it is acquired. This is certainly the case with the mul-