Obvious examples are the states of being bruised,

of
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bodily sensation. Obvious examples are the states of being bruised, being
damaged, being tickled, being itchy, being tender, being hot. Most of the
qualitative states featuring in proprioceptive content share the feature of
departing from what one might term bodily equilibrium. One prominent
reason for the body to obtrude on consciousness is that it is in an abnormal
condition of one form or another. This is a respect in which the qualitative
states generally differ from the quantitative ones. The sensation that
a limb is moving in a particular direction or the feeling that one’s legs are
crossed are paradigm quantitative states. Generally, these are not, of
course, departures from bodily equilibrium but rather ways in which one
keeps track of one’s body in its normal operations and activities. Of
course, the states that are the objects of particular proprioceptive contents
can have both qualitative and quantitative features, as when one feels that
one’s bruised ankle is swollen. They can also have several qualitative and/
or quantitative features at once, as when one clasps one’s hands together
and moves them (perhaps to hit a volleyball).
Now any acceptable account of content must explain the correctness
conditions of the relevant content-bearing states. Of course, any given
proprioceptive content will be correct if and only if there is an event taking
place at the appropriate bodily location with the relevant qualitative
and/or quantitative features. This is true but uninformative, however.
What we really need is some indication of the criteria by which one might
recognize whether these correctness conditions are satisfied or not. This
is, of course, an epistemic rather than a constitutive issue. Let me make
some brief comments in this direction.
The key to understanding how the correctness conditions of proprioceptive
content can be applied is the functional role of content-bearing
proprioceptive states with regard to the events that cause them and the
actions to which they give rise. Some of these actions are explicitly directed
towards the body (e.g., scratching an itch). Others are implicitly
directed towards the body (e.g., snatching one’s hand away from a flame).
Others are not body-directed at all (e.g., the role of what I termed quantitative
features in controlling action). In each of these cases, however, it is
possible to employ the concept of an appropriate action to illuminate the
correctness conditions. The correctness conditions for explicitly bodydirected
actions, like scratching itches, are that the action should be
Somatic Proprioception and the Bodily Self 159
appropriate to the disturbance that causes the proprioceptive state. This
requires, of course, that there actually be a disturbance at the bodily location
at which the action is directed (which would satisfy the correctness
condition for the spatial aspect) and that the action be appropriate to the
disturbance there (which would satisfy the correctness condition for the
descriptive aspect). For proprioceptive states that cause implicitly bodydirected
actions, the correctness conditions are similar. One might view
an appropriate action in both of these cases as an action that would tend
to restore bodily equilibrium, for example, by relieving the pain.
The correctness conditions of proprioceptive states that cause nonbody-
directed actions are slightly more complicated in that (unlike bodily
sensations) they are not necessarily linked to isolated and easily identifiable
events taking place in the body. Typically, these are proprioceptive
states reporting what I termed quantitative features, like general limb disposition
and movement. Here, though, we can see how the correctness
conditions might be brought to bear by considering the model sketched
earlier, in which two different types of proprioceptive information (about
initial limb disposition and then feedback about limb movement) are implicated
in paradigm cases of intentional action where a motivational
state and a perceptual state jointly produce an intentional command. The
obvious fact that correctness of the proprioceptive information is a necessary
condition of the success of the intentional action illustrates how one
might recognize whether the correctness conditions are satisfied: the correctness
conditions are satisfied if the relevant perception is true and the
relevant motivational state is satisfied.25
This brief sketch leaves many questions unanswered, but I take it that
the account so far is secure enough for me to bring this discussion of
proprioceptive content to bear on the argument that somatic proprioception
is a genuine form of self-consciousness. In the previous section I distinguished
between broad self-consciousness (awareness of the material
self as a spatially extended and bounded physical object distinctive in its
responsiveness to the will) and narrow self-consciousness (the material
self’s knowledge of its bodily properties as given in proprioceptive
contents of the type I have been discussing). Instances of narrow selfconsciousness
will have contents with both spatial and descriptive dimensions.
The body as a whole features in both of these dimensions of
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content. This is particularly clear in the case of the spatial dimension,
which involves an awareness of the body as an articulated structure of
body parts separated by what I have termed hinges. This implicates an
awareness of the self as spatially extended and bounded. But it also implicates
the second component of broad self-consciousness (awareness of the
bodily self as responsive to the will). This is because awareness of the
hinges is closely bound up with awareness of the body’s possibilities for
action. The body presents itself phenomenologically as segmented into
body parts separated by hinges because those are the natural units for
movement. In the descriptive aspect of proprioceptive content, moreover,
it is once again the body as a whole that features. The content of somatic
proprioception is that the body, at a particular A location and a particular
B location, is in a particular state with certain qualitative and/or quantitative
features. Each such content exemplifies both broad and narrow selfconsciousness.
6.6 Summary
In section 6.2, I offered the simple argument to show that somatic proprioception
is a form of primitive self-consciousness. The crucial claims in
the simple argument were, first, that somatic proprioception is a form of
perception and, second, that as self-perception it is a form of selfconsciousness.
These claims were defended in sections 6.3 and 6.4 respectively.
The soundness of the simple argument shows that somatic proprioception
is a source of what in earlier chapters I described as first-person
contents. Like the first-person perceptual contents discussed in the previous
chapter, these contents are primitive and available more or less from
birth.26 In at least one respect, the contents of somatic proprioception are
richer than the first-person contents of perceptual protobeliefs. As has
emerged from the discussion of the content of somatic proprioception,
they encompass a genuine awareness of the limits and responsiveness to
the will of the embodied self. Somatic proprioception is a source of information
not just about particular properties of the embodied self but also
about the nature of the embodied self itself.
The pick-up of self-specifying information in ecological perception and
the nonconceptual first-person contents of somatic proprioception are the