Preface

1
The Paradox of Self-Consciousness
It is very natural to think of self-consciousness as a cognitive state or,
more accurately, as a set of cognitive states. Self-knowledge is an example
of such a cognitive state. There are plenty of things I know about myself.
I know the sort of thing I am: a human being, a warm-blooded rational
animal with two legs. I know many of my properties and much of what
is happening to me, at both physical and mental levels. I also know things
about my past: things I have done and places I have been, as well as people
I have met. But I have many self-conscious cognitive states that are not
instances of knowledge. For example, I have the capacity to make plans
for the future—to weigh up possible courses of action in the light of
goals, desires, and ambitions. I am also capable of a certain type of moral
reflection, tied to moral self-understanding and moral self-evaluation. I
can pursue questions like, What sort of person am I? Am I the sort of
person that I want to be? Am I the sort of person that I ought to be?
When I say that I am a self-conscious creature, I am saying that I can
do all of these things. But what do they have in common? Are some more
important than others? Are they all necessary? Could I lack some and still
be self-conscious? These are central questions that take us to the heart of
many issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy
of psychology. In reflecting on them, however, we have to start from
a paradox that besets philosophical reflection on self-consciousness. This
paradox emerges when we consider what might seem to be the obvious
thread that ties the various manifestations of self-consciousness together.
I call it the paradox of self-consciousness. It is a paradox that raises the
question of how self-consciousness is even possible. Some preparatory
work is required before it can be appreciated, however.
1.1 ‘I’-Thoughts
Confronted with the range of putatively self-conscious cognitive states
listed above, one might naturally assume that there is a single ability that
they all presuppose. This is my ability to think about myself. I can only
have knowledge about myself if I have beliefs about myself, and I can only
have beliefs about myself if I can entertain thoughts about myself. The
same can be said for autobiographical memories and moral selfunderstanding.
These are all ways of thinking about myself.
Of course, much of what I think when I think about myself in these
self-conscious ways is also available to me to employ in my thoughts
about other people and other objects. My knowledge that I am a human
being deploys certain conceptual abilities that I can also deploy in thinking
that you are a human being. The same holds when I congratulate
myself for satisfying the exacting moral standards of autonomous moral
agency. This involves concepts and descriptions that can apply equally to
myself and to others. On the other hand, when I think about myself, I am
also putting to work an ability that I cannot put to work in thinking about
other people and other objects. This is precisely the ability to apply those
concepts and descriptions to myself. It has become common to refer to
this ability as the ability to entertain ‘I’-thoughts. I shall follow this
convention.
What is an ‘I’-thought? Obviously, an ‘I’-thought is a thought that involves
self-reference. I can think an ‘I’-thought only by thinking about
myself. Equally obviously, though, this cannot be all that there is to say
on the subject. I can think thoughts that involve self-reference but are not
‘I’-thoughts. Suppose I think that the next person to get a parking ticket
in central Cambridge deserves everything he gets. Unbeknownst to me,
the very next recipient of a parking ticket will be me. This makes my
thought self-referring, but it does not make it an ‘I’-thought. Why not?
The answer is simply that I do not know that I will be the next person to
get a parking ticket in central Cambridge. If A is that unfortunate person,
then there is a true identity statement of the form I 5 A, but I do not
know that this identity holds. Because I do not know that this identity
holds, I cannot be ascribed the thought that I will deserve everything I
get. And so I am not thinking a genuine ‘I’-thought, because one cannot
think a genuine ‘I’-thought if one is ignorant that one is thinking about
2 Chapter 1
oneself. So it is natural to conclude that ‘I’-thoughts involve a distinctive
type of self-reference. This is the sort of self-reference whose natural linguistic
expression is the first-person pronoun ‘I’, because one cannot use
the first-person pronoun without knowing that one is thinking about
oneself.
We can tighten this up a bit. When we say that a given thought has a
natural linguistic expression, we are also saying something about how it
is appropriate to characterize the content of that thought. We are saying
something about what is being thought. This I term (without prejudice)
a propositional content. A propositional content is given by the sentence
that follows the ‘that’ clause in reporting a thought, a belief, or any propositional
attitude. The proposal, then, is that ‘I’-thoughts are all and only
the thoughts whose propositional contents constitutively involve the firstperson
pronoun.
This is still not quite right, however, because thought contents can be
specified in two ways. They can be specified directly or indirectly. An example
of a direct specification of content is (1):
(1) J. L. B. believes the proposition that he would naturally express by
saying, ‘I will be the next person to receive a parking ticket in central
Cambridge’.
A direct specification of content involves specifying what I would say in
oratio recta, if I were explicitly to express what I believe. In contrast, an
indirect specification of content proceeds in oratio obliqua. The model
here is reported speech. So the same content indirectly specified would
be (2):
(2) J. L. B. believes that he will be the next person to receive a parking
ticket in central Cambridge.
Proposition (2), however, can also be used as a report of the belief that
would be directly specified as follows:
(3) J. L. B. believes the proposition that he would naturally express by
saying, ‘J. L. B. will be the next person to receive a parking ticket in
central Cambridge’.
Nonetheless, (1) and (3) are not equivalent. This is easily seen. J. L. B.
could be suffering from an attack of amnesia and struggling to remember
his own name. So even though a kindly soul has just put it to him that
The Paradox of Self-Consciousness 3
J. L. B. will be the next person to get a parking ticket in central Cambridge
and he believes that kindly soul, he fails to realize that he is J. L. B.
Because of this, (1) is not a correct report of his belief, although (3) is.
Nonetheless, as it stands, (2) is a correct indirect report of both (1) and
(3). This creates a problem, because only (1) is a genuine ‘I’-thought, according
to the suggested criterion of having a content that constitutively
involves the first-person pronoun, and yet there appears to be no way of
capturing the distinction between (1) and (3) at the level of an indirect
specification of content.
This problem can be solved with a device due to Hector-Neri Castan˜ eda
(1966, 1969). Castan˜ eda distinguishes between two different roles that
the pronoun ‘he’ can play in oratio obliqua clauses. On the one hand, ‘he’
can be employed in a proposition that the antecedent of the pronoun (i.e.
the person named just before the clause in oratio obliqua) would have
expressed using the first-person pronoun. In such a situation, Castan˜ eda
holds that ‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator. He suggests that when
‘he’ is functioning as a quasi-indicator, it be written as ‘he*’. Others have
described this as the indirect reflexive pronoun (Anscombe 1975). When
‘he’ is functioning as an ordinary indicator, it picks out an individual in
such a way that the person named just before the clause in oratio obliqua
need not realize the identity of himself with that person. Clearly, then, we
can disambiguate between (2) employed as an indirect version of (1) and
(2) employed as an indirect version of (3) by distinguishing between (2.1)
and (2).
(2.1) J. L. B. believes that he* will be the next person to receive a
parking ticket in central Cambridge.
Proposition (2.1) is an example of the indirect reflexive, while (2) is not.
So, we can tie up the definition of an ‘I’-thought as follows.
Definition An ‘I’-thought is a thought whose content can only be specified
directly by means of the first person pronoun ‘I’ or indirectly by
means of the indirect reflexive pronoun ‘he*’.
It was suggested earlier that all the cognitive states under consideration
presuppose the ability to think about oneself. This is not only what they
all have in common. It is also what underlies them all. We can now see in
more detail what this suggestion amounts to.