Chapter 1

Chapter 1
1. Pears 1988, vol. 2, chapter 10, is an illuminating discussion of the background
to Wittgenstein’s thinking about the self in The Blue and Brown Books.
2. This is still not quite right. A further technical problem is noted in Evans 1982,
pp. 189–191, but need not detain us here.
3. A more involved argument for a similar conclusion can be found in Noonan
1979.
4. Compare Shoemaker 1968, 9–10. He amends his view in 1970, nn. 3 and 5.
His claim in the latter work is that one can make self-reference immune to error
through misidentification with names and definite descriptions, provided that in
using them the speaker intends to refer to himself. This is a valid point, but a
circumscribed one, since it seems that intending to refer to oneself via a name or
definite description can only be done if certain further thoughts are presupposed,
and those further thoughts will be first-personal and involve identifying oneself
as the referent of that name or definite description.
5. What I am calling the deflationary account of self-consciousness has not been
adopted as such in the literature. It is, however, suggested in Shoemaker 1968,
subject to the qualifications in n. 4 above.
6. It will be clear from what follows that these problems are not peculiar to the
deflationary theory. On the contrary, as I will bring out at the end of the chapter,
they fall naturally out of a set of assumptions that are intuitively highly plausible.
I am focusing on the deflationary theory here because the paradox of selfconsciousness
is best appreciated within the confines of a theory of selfconsciousness
and the deflationary theory is relatively straightforward to expound,
as well as having a certain intuitive plausibility. Although this book will
offer a solution to the paradox of self-consciousness, this solution is not intended
to rehabilitate the deflationary theory. I shall return to the deflationary theory in
section 10.4.
7. It is natural to relativize specifications of the token-reflexive rule to the present
tense. This clearly holds for linguistic utterances of ‘I’. It does not hold for written
inscriptions, however. Adequately specifying the temporal dimension of selfreference
will doubtless require some ingenuity. For present purposes, however,
the various rough-and-ready formulations I offer will suffice.
8. For a stimulating discussion of how such an explanation might be derived, see
Altham 1979. The thought that the token-reflexive rule cannot give the meaning
of ‘I’ as a result of the interdependence between the indirect reflexive pronoun
and the first-person pronoun has been emphasised by Anscombe (1975, 47–48).
Anscombe puts this to work in support of her eccentric claim that the first-person
pronoun is not a referring expression. As far as this claim is concerned, I am fully
in agreement with the careful and perceptive criticisms to be found in Taschek
1985. It should be noted that Taschek has no quarrel with Anscombe’s point
about the circularity of the token-reflexive rule as an explanation of the semantical
role of ‘I’ (1985, 640). I do quarrel with it, however. See pp. 16–17.
9. This is the formulation favoured by Campbell (1994, 102). I have discussed
Campbell’s use of this rule in Bermu´ dez 1995a.
10. Compare Nozick 1981, 79–84.
11. All that my argument requires at this point is that such knowledge should be
a necessary condition for mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun.
In chapter 10, where I give a full account of how such mastery is to be understood,
it will emerge that it is not a sufficient condition.
12. See Peacocke 1979 for a discussion of several such local holisms. Grice and
Strawson (1956) defend what they see as a local holism in the theory of meaning
against what is effectively a charge of explanatory circularity in Quine 1951. Hurley,
forthcoming, is a sustained examination of the local holism formed by perception
and action.
13. I discuss the question of how philosophy and psychology might profitably
interact in Bermu´ dez 1995d and criticize some of the grounds for which philosophers
try to keep them apart in Bermu´ dez 1995b.
14. The sense of ‘module’ here is importantly different from that pioneered in
Fodor 1983. Among their other defining characteristics, Fodor’s modules operate
at the input-output level, are informationally encapsulated, and are domainspecific.
None of these features hold of the modules proposed to explain how
language mastery and understanding of other minds meet the acquisition constraint.
See Karmiloff-Smith 1992 and Segal 1996 for further discussion.
15. The linguistic arguments in favor of the nativist theory are reviewed in Pinker
1979. For a recent and philosophically driven presentation of Chomsky’s view,
see Chomsky 1995. For further philosophical discussion, see the essays in
George 1989.
16. The debate was opened in the context of chimpanzees in Premack andWoodruff
1978. The idea that the psychological abilities that emerge between the ages
of 3 and 4 years should be explained in terms of a theory-of-mind module
(ToMM) was suggested in Leslie 1987 and has recently been vigourously argued
in Baron-Cohen 1993. Baron-Cohen also suggests a possible ontogenesis for
300 Notes to Pages 14–22
ToMM in terms of more primitive modules, such as the eye-direction-detector
module (EDDM) and the shared-attention module (SAM). Karmiloff-Smith 1992
provides a sustained critique of such extreme nativist theories, both in the area of
children’s theory of mind and in the area of language acquisition.
Chapter 2
1. The account I favor does not actually speak of the contents of belief as composed
of concepts. Rather, it maintains that belief contents (and the contents of
propositional attitudes in general) are conceptual, where a conceptual content is
one that cannot be ascribed to a creature unless that creature possesses the concepts
involved in specifying that content. See chapter 3.
2. Perry 1979 provides the classic discussion of the relation between first-person
thoughts and action.
3. And indeed, the account that I shall give below is a broadly functional account.
4. As I shall stress in chapter 4, there are different degrees of structure associated
with different types of representations. I shall defend there the view that all genuine
representation of the world involves a minimal degree of structure. This needs
to be kept firmly distinguished, however, from the view that all genuine representations
involve the sort of structure to be found in natural languages. It is certainly
not true that all genuine representations permit the sort of universal and generalized
recombinability characteristic of natural language. That view would be hard
to maintain in conjunction with a rejection of the thought-language principle.
Chapter 3
1. The original impetus came from Evans 1982. It is important to note, though,
that Evans’s understanding of nonconceptual content is distinctive. He holds that
it applies to perceptual-information states, which do not become conscious perceptual
experiences until they are engaged with a concept-applying and reasoning
system (1982, 226–227).
2. This view doesn’t follow from the preceding, since I have said nothing to rule
out the possibility that perceptual beliefs might have nonconceptual contents.
3. I take it that there are comparable normative dimensions for the propositional
attitudes other than belief.
4. This is what I tried to capture by including the Conceptual-Requirement Principle
as part of the classical view of content.
5. There seem, however, to be possible versions of developmental explanation
that are compatible with denying the Autonomy Principle. For example, it could
be argued that, although in general nonconceptual and conceptual contents form
a holism, there are certain conceptual contents that develop out of nonconceptual
contents.