psychological disorders,

neuro-
Notes to Pages 158–174 309
psychological disorders, such as blindsight and prosopagnosia, as well as in
associative-priming experiments on normal patients. A general survey of the neuropsychological
issues will be found in Schacter, McAndrews, and Moscovitch
1988. For associative priming, see Marcel 1983.
5. Campbell himself makes such a distinction (1994, 236).
6. For some recent discussions of psychological theories of concept acquisition,
and in particular the turn away from prototype theories, see the essays collected
in Neisser 1987.
7. Compare Price 1953, chap. 2. It is also, I think, Kant’s view that primitive
recognition is at the root of all cognition. This seems to me to be the upshot of
the discussion of the threefold synthesis in the transcendental deduction of the
categories (see Kant 1781/1964, A98–A110).
8. Bennett does not offer an argument in support of this assumption, but it could
be defended along the following lines. Only if the two cognitive abilities could be
separately manifested would it be possible to come up with a determinate answer
to the question of which particular ability is implicated in a given situation.
9. There are some difficulties in disentangling Gibson’s defensible points from his
untenable diatribes against information-processing accounts of perception (Fodor
and Pylyshyn 1981). It is clear that what Gibson notes about “direct perception”
does not mean that there is no processing at all going on, although that appeared
to be his own view. Some explanation needs to be given at the neurophysiological
and other subpersonal levels of how the organism can be sensitive to perceptual
invariants. Useful suggestions for how Gibson’s insights can be accommodated
within a more traditional information-processing theory will be found in McCarthy
1993.
10. This would be a weak sense of what has come to be known in the literature
as phenomenal consciousness, as opposed to access consciousness. See the Introduction
to Davies and Humphreys 1993 for an explanation of the distinction.
11. This is one of the points at which ontogeny and phylogeny come apart, since
there is a pressing need to give an explanation of why and, more importantly, how
the capacity to feel sensations should have emerged during evolution.
Chapter 8
1. See Peacocke 1992, 90–92. This argument is offered in opposition to the Autonomy
Principle, discussed in chapter 3 above. My 1994 essay argues that this
argument cannot be satisfactorily deployed against the Autonomy Principle. Peacocke
replies to this argument in 1994.
2. There is further discussion of Campbell’s book in my 1995a and 1997 essays.
3. Note that this means that Peacocke’s original notion of perspectival sensitivity
would not be applicable here.
310 Notes to Pages 181–215
Chapter 9
1. I am describing predicates as having a first-person application when the subject
using them is capable of understanding that they can apply to himself. Similarly
with second- and third-person predicates. By extension, therefore, a
predicate will have only a first-person application when the subject using it is
capable only of understanding that it applies to himself.
2. This is very relevant to some of the points made against Evans’s development
of the Generality Constraint in an acute paper by Charles Travis (1994). Travis
objects that satisfying Evans’s Generality Constraint for a and F is not a necessary
condition of being able to think the thought that a is F, because thinking the
thought that a is F requires a degree of context sensitivity that a subject may not
have for the thought that b is F. This point is well taken. Nonetheless, it doesn’t
affect the more general point about the unacceptability of uniquely instantiable
predicates that inspires Evans and Strawson.
3. A source of confusion is that although Strawson makes these points in discussing
an objection to his own position, they are claims that he endorses. The
passage continues “but not necessarily that one should do so on any occasion”—
it is this continuation that Strawson has qualms about.
4. See Wiggins 1980 for an extended discussion and Mackie 1976, 160–161, for
a more concise one.
5. Nagel 1971 has been very influential in this respect.
6. I am assuming, for simplicity’s sake, that x and y are both perceptually present
to the subject.
7. Of course, if (as I shall argue) the relevant categories can be apprehended and
applied by nonlinguistic and prelinguistic creatures, then the weak and strong
readings of the Symmetry Thesis will need to be reformulated.
8. Note that I am not claiming that the instantiation of any one of these psychological
categories on its own provides strong prima facie evidence for the presence
of a psychological subject. Nor am I ruling out the possibility that a subset of
these psychological categories might provide strong prima facie evidence.
9. See pp. 221–223.
10. It is purely for convenience of exposition that I am treating perception and
action as separate strands. It seems clear that at every level of analysis, from the
neuronal upward, perception and action are inextricably linked. See the essays in
Hurley, 1998, for a sustained defense of the noninstrumental interdependence of
perception and action. She develops a picture of man and other animals as
complex-, dynamic-feedback systems structured by feedback loops that run from
action to perception, as well as from perception to action.
11. I am assuming here the soundness of the argument provided in section 3.3
for the Priority Principle, so that evidence of distinguishing psychological selfawareness
in nonlinguistic or prelinguistic creatures will ipso facto count as
Notes to Pages 230–248 311
evidence for the possibility of distinguishing psychological self-awareness at the
nonconceptual level.
12. I should note at this point that the current account replaces what I said about
infant’s awareness of their own agency in Bermu´ dez 1995c.
13. I now think that an interpretation along these lines is most appropriate for
the experimental data discussed in my 1995c paper.
14. In chapter 4 and Bermu´ dez 1996, I suggested that neonatal imitation behavior
involved a pick-up of self-specifying information, and hence representations
with first-person contents. Nothing that I said implies that those first-person contents
implicated a form of psychological self-awareness. On the contrary, the
properties picked up are purely physical.
Chapter 10
1. In the following I will use ‘utterance’ in a broad sense on which inscriptions
on pieces of paper and computer disks count as utterances. By the same token, I
shall use ‘utterer’ in such a way that one can qualify as an utterer with one’s vocal
cords cut.
2. I take it that failing the false-belief task is not prima facie evidence that the
subject cannot comprehend the possibility of himself representing the world in a
way other than it is.
3. See chapter 3.
4. I will hyphenate ‘bringing-it-about-that’ as a reminder that it is functioning as
a sort of technical term.