epistemological links are provided by information channels,

The
Notes to Pages 141–147 307
epistemological links are provided by information channels, one of which is what
I have been terming somatic proprioception. Evans identifies the relevant information
channels as all and only those channels that give rise to judgments immune
to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. There are
certain features of Evans’s position that sharply distinguish it from mine, however.
The first is that he denies that genuine self-awareness is available in the absence
of mastery of the first-person pronoun. Moreover, and this is perhaps part
of the explanation for this denial, he thinks that states of the somatic proprioceptive
system (and indeed information-carrying states generally) do not qualify as
experiences until conceptual and reasoning abilities are brought to bear upon
them. Against this I am arguing that somatic proprioception (as opposed to judgments
based on proprioceptive information channels) is itself a source of selfawareness.
As will be made clear in section 6.5, I find it perfectly intelligible, and
indeed necessary, to talk of proprioceptive experiences in the absence of conceptual
and reasoning abilities, and it is these experiences (not the first-person
judgments that might or might not be based on them) that are the sources of
self-awareness.
17. Ramachandran suggests that the referral of sensations should be explained
through what he terms the “remapping hypothesis,” namely that the area in the
somatosensory cortex originally responsible for processing sensory information
from the amputated limb becomes reorganized and sensitive to sensory information
from parts of the body originally processed by adjacent areas of the somatosensory
cortex. It is well known that adjacent areas in the somatosensory cortex
do not represent adjacent body parts. This explains why there are well-defined
distributions of points on the body surface that yield referred sensations in amputated
limbs.
18. See the essays in Prigatano and Schacter 1991 for further discussion.
19. See the papers cited in n. 11 for further discussion.
20. A form of this proposal is to be found in Peacocke 1992, chap. 3.
21. Nothing hangs on the vocabulary of pains, or other bodily sensations, existing
at particular places. I am not assuming that there are such things as pains
that are the objects of somatic proprioception, as will become clear in my account
of the descriptive aspect of proprioceptive content.
22. I shall henceforth use ‘moveable’ in this limited sense. The sense in which the
torso is immoveable is similarly restricted. Of course, I can move my torso by
leaning forward or by turning at the waist, but the range of movement is very
limited.
23. Strictly speaking, of course, one of these specifications will be sufficient to
fix the location. This doesn’t mean, however, that only one specification need feature
in the frame of reference. Compare the situation of twenty ships moving in
convoy flanked by four tugs, which keep the same position relative to each other.
The fact that the location of any given ship can be fixed by its distance and direction
from any one of the tugs is compatible with all four tugs’ constituting the
frame of reference.
308 Notes to Pages 151–156
24. Certain documented phenomena prima facie seem hard to reconcile with the
description of the phenomenology of bodily experience just made, and hence with
the account of the spatial content of proprioception that I have been offering.
Some subjects have reported feeling sensations in space or even in the bodies of
others (Shapiro, Fink, and Bender 1952; Be´ke´sy 1967). See Martin 1993 for an
interesting discussion. Can phenomena like this be accommodated in terms of A
locations and B locations? Clearly, they cannot have A locations, in the sense of
being experienced as being located in identifiable body parts (unlike, for example,
pains that are felt in phantom limbs). But they might plausibly be ascribed B
locations. As Martin notes, exosomesthetic sensations tend to be felt in extensions
of the body, albeit indeterminate ones. This suggests that it might make
sense to attribute to them a B location based upon their coordinates relative to the
nearest hinges. Of course, this would be radically different from the ascriptions of
ordinary B locations, but this might be seen as reflecting the bizarre phenomenology
of the situation.
25. Let me stress that these are not intended to be constitutive accounts. The
proposal is not that actions, or even dispositions to act, constitute proprioceptive
content in that the correctness conditions are given by the success or failure of the
relevant actions. That would have the unacceptable consequence that states with
proprioceptive content would in principle be unavailable to a paraplegic. The representational
states that cause the relevant actions are what have correctness conditions,
and those correctness conditions are bodily events. The actions provide
illustrations of how one might recognize when and if the correctness conditions
are satisfied.
26. In fact, they may even be available before birth. See the evidence discussed in
Gallagher 1996.
Chapter 7
1. Note, moreover, that ‘object*’ qualifies as a count term rather than a mass
term.
2. The point is that certain terms that we employ as count terms to individuate
particular objects can have a more primitive deployment as mass terms. As Campbell
puts the point, “There may be a use of ‘tiger’ as a mass term which is prior
to its use as a count noun. This use of ‘Tiger!’ would be merely a response to the
presence of tigerhood, by someone who might be quite incapable of making the
distinction between one tiger and two being present, or having the idea of its
being the same tiger again as was here previously” (1993, 65).
3. This primitive form of place recognition falls significantly short of the capacity
to identify places in a way that would reflect a more general understanding of
space. In the next chapter I discuss how primitive place recognition might be built
up into this more sophisticated way of thinking about space.
4. This is just one aspect of a more general distinction between conscious and
nonconscious information processing that can be observed in various neuro-