Evans’s Generality Constraint has the advantage of precision,

require-
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 233
ment of general recombinability, suggesting that mastery of the concept F
requires being able to think that x is F for arbitrary x, whereas Strawson
is requiring simply the ability to think that x is F for a range of objects.
This difference is not relevant to the following, and for the sake of simplicity,
I shall refer to both Evans and Strawson as defending forms of the
Generality Constraint.
Evans’s Generality Constraint has the advantage of precision, and it is
clear how it might be put to work in support of the Symmetry Thesis. Let
me offer a schematic argument:
1. Self-ascription of psychological states in subject-predicate form is the
paradigm form of psychological self-awareness.
2. Self-ascription of psychological states requires conceptual mastery of
both subject and predicate.
3. The Generality Constraint applied to (2) requires the ability to generalize
both the subject and the predicate.
4. Generalizing the predicate involves the ability to apply that predicate
to arbitrary distinguishable individuals.
5. Since the predicate is a psychological predicate, these arbitrary distinguishable
individuals will include other psychological subjects.
From (5), the Symmetry Thesis follows straightforwardly. Note, moreover,
that it is the strong reading of the Symmetry Thesis that is supported.
The conclusion (5) implies that no psychological predicate can
have only a first-person application.
In evaluating this argument, we need to distinguish clearly between the
following two questions:
(A) If an individual is aware of the existence of other psychological
subjects, does the Generality Constraint require that any individual properly
credited with mastery of a given psychological predicate be able to
apply that psychological predicate to those other subjects?
(B) If an individual is not aware of the existence of other psychological
subjects, does this mean that he cannot satisfy the Generality
Constraint?
These two questions have very different implications for the Symmetry
Thesis. An affirmative answer to the first question leaves open the possibility
that would be denied by an affirmative answer to the second ques-
234 Chapter 9
tion, namely that an individual unaware of the existence of other
psychological subjects might nonetheless have genuine mastery of a psychological
predicate. No defence of the Symmetry Thesis can allow this
to be a genuine possibility. Since the weight of the argument falls on the
Generality Constraint, the Generality Constraint must yield an affirmative
answer not just to (A) but also to (B). Unless this is so, stage (5) in
the Strawson and Evans argument will not go through.
But it is not clear that the Generality Constraint does yield an affirmative
answer to (B). There are ways in which the Generality Constraint
could be satisfied by an individual unaware of the existence of other psychological
subjects. Everything here hinges on how we understand the
concept of an arbitrary distinguishable individual. Recall that we are
dealing here with truth-evaluable subject-predicate sentences. The Generality
Constraint does not prescribe (nor is there any reason why it should)
that thoughts that would show that the constraint was satisfied by a given
subject-predicate thought must have the same truth value as the original
thought. From this one might conclude that there is no need for the range
of distinguishable individuals to include other psychological subjects.
Why is the Generality Constraint not satisfied by a subject’s capacity to
entertain the thought that a given psychological predicate does not apply
to any one of a range of inanimate objects?
It might be objected that this is self-defeating because, simply in virtue
of entertaining the thought that an inanimate object does not have a given
psychological property, one is (mistakenly) treating it as a psychological
subject. This cannot be right, however. A minimal requirement for something
to be a psychological subject is surely that at least some psychological
predicates must be true of it. It is not clear to me that to entertain the
thought that a given psychological predicate does not apply to a given
inanimate object is somehow to commit a category mistake. How, after
all, can it be a category mistake if it is a true thought?
In any case, however, there are other grounds on which one can object
to the Strawson and Evans argument. The basic thought motivating acceptance
of the Generality Constraint is that there is a deep incoherence
in the idea of a predicate that is applicable only on a single occasion: to
a given individual at a given time. Predicates must be multiply instantiable.
That, it seems to me, is the force of Strawson’s claim that “the idea
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 235
of a predicate is correlative with that of a range of distinguishable individuals
of which the predicate can be significantly, though not necessarily
truly affirmed.”2 It is unfortunate, however, that both Evans and Strawson
take a very synchronic view of the satisfaction conditions for their respective
constraints. Had they taken a more diachronic perspective, they
would have recognized that a subject himself can, over time, provide a
range of different occasions on which a predicate may be significantly
affirmed. To appreciate the significance of this, recall some comments that
Strawson makes in the footnote from which I have already quoted: “A
necessary condition of one’s ascribing predicates of a certain class to one
individual, i.e. oneself, is that one should be prepared, or ready, on appropriate
occasions, to ascribe them to other individuals, and hence that one
should have a conception of what those appropriate occasions for ascribing
them would be” (Strawson 1959, 99, n. 1).3 Strawson’s view is that
ascribing predicates to other individuals, or being prepared so to ascribe
them, implicates a conception of the appropriate ascription conditions for
those predicates. Presumably, the argument is completed by noting that
possessing such a conception is a necessary condition of being able to
apply the predicate at all. I can see no reason, however, why a conception of
the appropriate ascription conditions is not equally implicated by ascribing,
or being prepared to ascribe, predicates to oneself at different times.
Combining this with the earlier point provides a compelling counterweight
to the move from (4) to (5) in the Strawson and Evans argument.
Although it is (arguably) the case that mastery of a given psychological
predicate requires the capacity to apply it to arbitrary distinguishable individuals,
it does not follow that these arbitrary distinguishable individuals
must include other psychological subjects. In such a case, therefore,
the Generality Constraint cannot be used to argue that psychological
predicates must have second- and third-person uses, as well as first-person
uses.Without this, though, the Strawson and Evans argument cannot provide
a satisfactory defence of the Symmetry Thesis. Evans writes, “No
judgment will have the content of a psychological self-ascription, unless
the judger can be regarded as ascribing to himself a property which he
can conceive as being satisfied by a being not necessarily himself—a state
of affairs which he will have to conceive as involving a persisting subject
of experience” (Evans 1982, 232). To maintain this, however, we need