of whether there can be a similarly nonconceptual awareness

question
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 273
of whether there can be a similarly nonconceptual awareness of the material
self as a bearer of psychological properties. This question was the
subject of chapter 9. In approaching the possibility of nonconceptual psychological
self-consciousness, I was guided by the thought that there
might be a constitutive link between a subject’s psychological selfconsciousness
and his awareness of other minds (the Symmetry Thesis).
In the first part of the chapter I defended a weak version of the Symmetry
Thesis, according to which there are some psychological categories that
a subject cannot apply to himself without also being able to apply them
to other psychological subjects. These psychological categories form the
core of the notion of a psychological subject. This is so 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,
and this self-identification as a psychological subject takes place relative
to a set of categories that collectively define the core of the concept of a
psychological subject.
There appear to be three central psychological categories defining the
core of the concept of a psychological subject: the category of perceivers,
the category of agents, and the category of bearers of reactive attitudes.
This, in conjunction with the Symmetry Thesis, offers a clear way of answering
the question of whether psychological self-consciousness can exist
in a form that is nonconceptual and independent of linguistic mastery.
In line with the methodology I adopted previously in this book, what
would settle the matter would be social interactions involving prelinguistic
or nonlinguistic subjects for which inference to the best explanation
requires assuming that those subjects are applying the relevant psychological
categories to themselves and to others. In the final section of the chapter
I looked at various experimental paradigms of research on the social
cognition of infants and showed that there are compelling grounds for
attributing to prelinguistic infants in the final quarter of the first year
distinguishing psychological self-consciousness relative to the three key
categories.
The situation at the moment, therefore, is that four different forms of
primitive nonconceptual self-consciousness have been identified and
shown to be psychologically real. With this we have the materials for a
274 Chapter 10
solution to the paradox of self-consciousness. The next and final stage is
to show how these materials can be used to circumvent the paradox of
self-consciousness.
10.2 Nonconceptual Self-Consciousness and Explanatory Circularity
What is responsible for explanatory circularity is the fact that an adequate
explanation of what linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun
consists in involves ascribing to the person who has mastered the firstperson
pronoun certain first-person thoughts that, by the Thought-
Language Principle, are themselves comprehensible only by ascribing to
the language-user mastery of the first-person pronoun. The first stage in
resolving this aspect of the paradox of self-consciousness is to get clear
on precisely what those first-person thoughts are.
The initial argument in chapter 1 was that a grasp of the token-reflexive
rule governing the reference of the first-person pronoun cannot be sufficient
to explain mastery of the first-person pronoun. A minimal requirement
upon proper and genuine employment of the first-person pronoun
is that the person who employs a token of the first-person pronoun so as
to secure genuine and proper self-reference should know that he is the
producer of the token in question. This minimal requirement must be
reflected in an account of mastery of the first-person pronoun. A natural
question at this point is whether this minimal requirement is also (in conjunction,
of course, with a suitable grasp of the token-reflexive rule) sufficient
for linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. More precisely,
given that an account of what it is to have mastery of the first-person
pronoun will need to specify the conditions holding on genuine and
proper employment of the first-person pronoun, does such an account
need to specify any conditions other than mastery of the token-reflexive
rule and a knowledge that one is the producer of the relevant token of ‘I’?
Brief reflection shows that these conditions cannot be sufficient. There
are straightforward counterexamples in which a language-user produces
a token of ‘I’ in full understanding of the token-reflexive rule, whereby
every token of ‘I’ refers to the person who produces it, and in the full
knowledge that he himself is the producer of that token, while nonetheless
failing to refer to himself. One such counterexample is provided by
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 275
the use of language in fiction. An actor uttering a soliliquy satisfies both
conditions but does not refer to himself. Fiction is a difficult case, however,
since it is arguable that no genuine and proper reference takes place
in fictional discourse. Fortunately, there are two further, straightforward
counterexamples that do not depend on any peculiarities of fictional situations.
When I dictate a letter to a secretary who writes down at the end
of the letter the words ‘I look forward to hearing from you’, she does so
fully comprehending both the token-reflexive rule that the relevant token
of ‘I’ refers to whoever utters or inscribes it and the fact that she is writing
down that token. But she is obviously not referring to herself, nor, of
course, does she take herself to be referring to herself. The same is true
of the simultaneous interpreter who translates my words into French
without placing them in oratio obliqua. These are all cases where someone
knowingly produces a token of ‘I’ (or ‘je’) in full comprehension of
the token-reflexive rule, and yet it is clear that they neither refer to themselves
nor take themselves to be referring to themselves.
Evidently, then, more is required for proper use of the first-person pronoun
than knowingly producing a token of ‘I’ in full comprehension of
the token-reflexive rule. A natural suggestion here would be that what is
missing in the examples just given is an intention on the part of the language
users to use the token of ‘I’ that they knowingly produce to refer
to themselves. Perhaps the reason that neither the secretary nor the interpreter
take themselves to be referring to themselves is that they know that
they do not intend to refer to themselves. There is an important difference
between knowingly producing a token of ‘I’ that would, in certain circumstances,
refer to oneself and producing a token of ‘I’ knowing that one is
intending to refer to oneself. An ostensibly competing explanation would
be that the token-reflexive rule does not apply to either the secretary or
the translator because neither of them produces the respective token of ‘I’
in the relevant sense of ‘produces’. Indeed, it is highly plausible that there
is more to producing a token of ‘I’ than simply uttering or inscribing it.
Yet in spelling out what the production of a token of ‘I’ involves over and
above uttering it or inscribing it, it is natural to advert to the intention to
utter or inscribe that token of ‘I’ with the intention to refer to oneself.
Let me start by trying to get a proper understanding of what is involved
in the phenomenon of intentional self-reference by means of the first-