tiple cognitive capacities implicated in language mastery,

mul-
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 291
tiple cognitive capacities implicated in language mastery. We understand
these cognitive capacities to have been acquired through a process of
learning, a process that typically starts in the second year of life and continues
for several years afterwards. This conception of how language is
acquired is so deeply embedded in our understanding of language that
the question of how the various cognitive capacities implicated in language
use meet the Acquisition Constraint is the question of how they are
learned. And should it turn out that one or more of these capacities cannot
be learned then, although it might of course meet the Acquisition
Constraint in some other way, it seems fair to say that the capacity as we
understand it is not psychologically real.
In chapter 1, I gave the following more-detailed account of how, for the
purposes of this book, the Acquisition Constraint was canonically to be
understood. Every individual has an innate set of cognitive capacities that
he possesses at birth. Let me call that set S0. At any given time t after
birth, an individual will have a particular set of cognitive capacities. Let
me call this set St. Now consider a given cognitive capacity c putatively in
St. Suppose that for any time t 2 n the following two conditions are satisfied.
First, it is conceivable how c could have emerged from capacities
present in St2n. Second, it is conceivable how the capacities present in St2n
could have emerged from the capacities present in S0. By it being conceivable
that one capacity could emerge from a given set of capacities, I mean
that it is intelligible that the individual in question could deploy the cognitive
capacities it already has to acquire the new capacity. If these conditions
are satisfied, then we have a paradigm case of learning.
If mastery of the first-person pronoun is to meet the Acquisition Constraint
(at least on this canonical construal), then clearly there must be
some time t when St includes the capacity for linguistic mastery of the
first-person pronoun, and a corresponding time t 2 n when St2n does not
include that capacity but includes other capacities on the basis of which
it is intelligible that an individual could acquire the capacity for linguistic
mastery of the first-person pronoun. This creates an apparent circularity,
because any such St2n will have to contain the capacity to think thoughts
with first-person contents, and it is natural to think that the capacity to
think thoughts with first-person contents cannot exist in the absence of
the capacity for linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun.
292 Chapter 10
Can the problem of capacity circularity be dealt with in a way that
shows how the Acquisition Constraint can be canonically met by linguistic
mastery of the first-person pronoun? The solution to this problem is
similar in general form to the solution to the problem of explanatory circularity
discussed in the previous section. The apparent vicious circularity
is removed by showing that the first-person contents implicated in the
complex communicative intention governing mastery of the first-person
pronoun can be understood at the nonconceptual level, and hence independently
of linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun. In the terms
used above, although it is true that the capacities present in St2n do indeed
include the capacity to think certain thoughts with first-person contents,
this does not mean that the capacities in St2n must also include linguistic
mastery of the first-person pronoun, because the crucial thoughts involved
in learning how to use the first-person pronoun can be nonconceptual
and hence independent of language mastery. This emerges
particularly clearly if the neo-Gricean specification of the communicative
intent governing the correct use of the first-person pronoun is read, as I
suggested in section 10.2, as offering conditions on learning the proper
use of the token-reflexive rule. If that suggestion is accepted, then we
have, first, a clear specification of a set of first-person thoughts that must
be grasped by anybody who successfully learns the first-person pronoun
and, second, an illustration of how those first-person thoughts can be
nonconceptual. This is sufficient, I think, to remove the threat posed by
capacity circularity, because it dispels the idea that the first-person
thoughts required for the acquisition of mastery of the first-person pronoun
could not exist unless mastery of the first-person pronoun was already
in play.
I have made various suggestions about how the sophisticated but nonetheless
nonconceptual first-person contents required to explain mastery
of the first-person pronoun emerge from the primitive first-person contents
in an individual’s innate endowment. Some of these suggestions are
best viewed as selective rational reconstructions of how this process might
take place. One example would be the discussion at the end of chapter 8
of how an integrated representation of the spatial environment might
emerge from the propriospecific information present in the structure of
visual perception. I suggested there that the calibration of what Gibson
Solving the Paradox of Self-Consciousness 293
calls affordances through recognition of affordance symmetries, affordance
transitivities, and affordance identities could bridge the gap
between the perception of individual spatial relations and the construction
of an integrated representation of the environment. I certainly do
not claim that the rational reconstructions I have offered are complete or
anything near it. Nor do I claim that the various suggestions I have made
about how certain cognitive abilities might conceivably emerge from others
must feature in a true account of this emergence. What I do claim to
have done, however, is to have dispelled worries that there are principled
reasons for thinking that no such account will be forthcoming.
10.4 The Way Forward
The principal aim of this book has been to offer a solution to the paradox
of self-consciousness by illuminating the various different forms of nonconceptual
self-consciousness that are both logically and ontogenetically
more primitive than the higher forms of self-consciousness that are more
usually the focus of philosophical debate. What philosophers tend to
think of as the unitary phenomenon of self-consciousness has a complex
and multilayered structure, which is all too often neglected not least
because so much of it lies concealed beneath the surface of language. I
have tried to compensate by exposing the nonconceptual foundations
on which the structure rests. A full account of the structure of selfconsciousness,
however, will need to illuminate those higher, conceptual
forms of self-consciousness to which I have devoted little attention in this
book. Let me end this book with a few programmatic comments about
the form that I believe such an account will take and about how it might
emerge from some of the points that I have made in this book.
In chapter 1, I considered what I termed the deflationary theory of selfconsciousness.
The starting point of the deflationary theory is the thought
that an explanation of everything that is distinctive about self-consciousness
will emerge out of an account of what it is for a subject to be
capable of thinking about himself. The conceptual forms of selfconsciousness—
specimens of which are the abilities to entertain autobiographical
memories, to make plans for the future, and to formulate
second-order desires (desires about desires that one should have)—can all