Let me move on to a third strand in the notion of a psychological

not
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 245
being sufficiently skillful or to their being blocked in some way or to the
environment not actually being the way it was perceived and expected to
be. A subject will be aware of himself as an agent to the extent that he is
capable of recognizing and distinguishing these various factors and possibilities.
Again, we are dealing with something that is a matter of degree
and that will have an unavoidably vague dimension.
Let me move on to a third strand in the notion of a psychological subject.
Psychological subjects do not simply perceive the world and act upon
it. There are psychological reactions to the world that are not exhausted
by perception and action (although such reactions do, of course, have
implications for perception and action). I refer here to moods, emotions,
feelings of happiness and unhappiness, which I shall collectively term the
reactive psychological states. It is hard to envisage any recognizable psychological
life in the absence of such phenomena. Any sentient creature
is capable of the subjective valences of pleasure and pain that qualify as
the most basic forms of psychological phenomena of this type, and nothing
that is not sentient could count as a psychological subject. As an argument
for this, consider the following. A necessary condition of being a
psychological subject is that a creature should be capable of acting intentionally.
Intentional action is constitutively motivated by desires and beliefs
(or protodesires and protobeliefs), and no nonsentient creature can
have a desire. Desires are not themselves reactive states, but it is hard to
see how desires could arise in the absence of reactive psychological states.
It follows from this that any individual who is to count as a self-aware
psychological subject must be aware of himself as having reactive psychological
states, or as bearing reactive psychological attitudes to the world.
In addition to this a priori argument for the thesis that psychological
subjects are essentially capable of reactive psychological states, a further
set of reasons emerges when one reflects on the functions that emotions
and other reactive psychological states serve in maintaining the organism.
Some of these functions are physiological. For example, emotional states
play a vital role in eliciting autonomic and endocrine responses. The emotion
of fear generates changes in heart rate and release of adrenalin. Some
byproducts of reactions are psychological, such as the role that emotions
play in the storing and triggering of episodic memories. Others are social,
the role of emotions in promoting social bonding being an obvious ex-
246 Chapter 9
ample. It is certainly arguable that no creature lacking these functions
would have the behavioral flexibility and cognitive sophistication to count
as a psychological subject. As Edmund Rolls (1990, 1995) has stressed,
emotional states provide a computationally simple way of integrating sensory
input with motor output. The sensory system need transmit only
the valence to the appropriate action-generating systems, rather than a
full representation of the state of affairs that gave rise to the valence. The
emotion of fear is a basic and clear example. There are obvious adaptive
advantages in avoidance and flight responses being triggered as quickly
as possible. Combining these functional considerations with the a priori
suggestions yields a compelling case for seeing the capacity for reactive
attitudes as essential to psychological subjects.
So the central psychological categories in terms of which the category
of psychological subjects should be understood are the categories of perceivers,
agents, and bearers of reactive psychological states. I offer the
following as the core of the notion of a self-aware psychological subject:
(PS2) Psychological subjects with a perspective on the world are aware
of themselves as perceivers, as agents, and as having reactive psychological
states.
As mentioned earlier it is relatively unimportant whether these turn out
to be jointly sufficient or even severally necessary. All of the concepts involved
here are complex and vague in ways that make it extremely unlikely
that they will each always have determinate criteria of identity. My
claim is simply that when we encounter a subject aware of himself as a
perceiver, as an agent, and as having psychological states, we have strong
prima facie evidence that we are dealing with a self-aware psychological
subject.
9.4 The Emergence of Psychological Self-Awareness in Social
Interactions
Let me now bring the various strands of this chapter to bear on the issue
of psychological self-awareness. According to the weak version of the
Symmetry Thesis that has been defended, there is a constitutive link between
psychological self-awareness and awareness of other minds. This
Psychological Self-Awareness: Self and Others 247
link holds because a subject’s recognition that he is distinct from the environment
in virtue of being a psychological subject depends on his ability
to identify himself as a psychological subject within a contrast space of
other psychological subjects. This self-identification as a psychological
subject will take place relative to the set of categories that define the core
of the concept of a psychological subject. So a suitably self-aware subject
will be capable of distinguishing himself as a perceiver within a contrast
space of perceivers, as an agent within a contrast space of agents, and as
a bearer of reactive attitudes within a contrast space of other bearers of
reactive attitudes. It follows from this that the best place to look for primitive
forms of psychological self-awareness is in social interactions. This
offers a clear way to proceed that will settle the question of whether psychological
self-awareness can exist in a nonconceptual form that is independent
of language mastery. In line with the methodology I have been
following throughout the book, what would settle the matter would be
social interactions involving prelinguistic or nonlinguistic subjects for
which inference to the best explanation requires ascribing the appropriate
form of distinguishing self-awareness to a nonlinguistic or prelinguistic
subject.11
Here, as at various points in earlier chapters, we will need to look at
empirical work if we are properly to identify and to understand the potential
explananda. No doubt there are various areas of ethology and psychology
that might be highly relevant here. What I want to concentrate
on, however, is an impressive body of developmental results concerning
the interactions between infants and their parents during the first year of
the infants’ lives. There is a concensus of opinion among researchers from
a range of different traditions that at about the age of 9 months human
infants undergo a social-cognitive revolution. This is a revolution that
takes place in several dimensions. One significant point that has been
stressed, particularly by Piaget and his followers, is that at 9 months infants
become capable of new ways of acting upon objects. At about 9
months (the beginning of Piaget’s stage IV) infants start to search for hidden
objects and are able to solve the problem of reaching an object placed
out of reach on a cloth that is itself within reach: by pulling the cloth
toward them until they can grasp the object (Piaget 1954). This development
in the perception and representation of objects is not, however,