A Review of Jose Luis Bermudez's The Paradox of Self-Consciousness.
Tim Kenyon
Department of Philosophy
University of Waterloo
Waterloo Ontario
Canada N2K 3M6
tkenyon@watarts.uwaterloo.ca
Copyright (c) Tim Kenyon 2000
PSYCHE 6(13), October 2000
Previously Held: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche-6-13-kenyon.html
KEYWORDS: self-consciousness, nonconceptual content, self-awareness, concepts.
REVIEW OF: Jose Luis Bermudez (1998). The Paradox of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-02441-1.
xv + 338pp. US#18.00 pbk.
The paradox that Jose Luis Bermudez is concerned to defuse comprises the
following propositions, each of which is either widely held or defended
by prominent writers, and which are inconsistent as a set.
- The only way to analyze self-consciousness is by analyzing the
capacity to think 'I'-thoughts.
- The only way to analyze the capacity to think a particular range of
thoughts is by analyzing the capacity for the canonical linguistic
expression of those thoughts (the Thought-Language principle).
- 'I'-thoughts are canonically expressed by means of the first-person
pronoun.
- Linguistic mastery of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity
to think 'I'-thoughts.
- A non-circular analysis of self-consciousness is possible.
- The capacity to think 'I'-thoughts meets the Acquisition Constraint
(i.e., there must be an explanation of how humans normally acquire this
capacity).
Bermudez's book is a lucid and relatively accessible discussion of these
propositions (especially 1, 2, and 4), their implications, and their
interrelations.
The problem may not be immediately apparent upon examining this set of
statements. But its essence is this: jointly, these propositions set
such demanding criteria for the correct ascription of the capacity to
think 'I'-thoughts that there is no way to explain how an agent not
already possessing this capacity could come to develop it. This could
have been set up as the difficulty, rather than including Proposition 5
and making the issue one of overall inconsistency. And indeed, not all
of the other five propositions contributing to the problem are analyzed
in depth. Propositions 3 and 6 are almost accepted at face value,
presumably on the two reasonable assumptions that there are only so many
hours in the day, and that the audience at whom the book is targetted
accept these statements as plausible.
Accordingly, Bermudez focuses mainly upon the notion of nonconceptual
content. If nonconceptual content is both real and significant in human
cognition, then Proposition 4 is open to doubt, if not falsified
outright, and so we have independent grounds to reject it - resolving
the inconsistency and the paradox. Much of the book is devoted to
discharging the antecedent of this claim; Bermudez marshalls empirical
evidence from a range of sources in order to provide independent grounds
for identifying Proposition 4 as the problem. He does not reject
Proposition 4 tout court, but portrays it as depending upon a
"classical" conception of content with two components: a "Conceptual-
Requirement Principle" and a "Priority Principle". The former holds
that ascriptions of content to an agent are constrained by the agent's
conceptual repertoire, while the latter holds that an agent must possess
language in order to have genuine concepts. Bermudez does not dispute
the Conceptual-Requirement Principle, but characterizes the Priority
Principle as untenable in the face of evidence supporting the notion of
nonconceptual content.
That evidence is culled primarily from three sources: (i) dishabituation
experiments on pre-linguistic infants, which identify nascent abilities
to distinguish self from (m)other or pick up on basic purposiveness;
(ii) primitive self-conceptions arising from proprioception and visual
bodily monitoring; and (iii) proto-concepts of selfhood underlying
spatial awareness and navigation. Indeed, throughout the book Bermudez
synthesizes results from various psychologists and philosophers,
explaining and extending the ideas with confidence. For example, the
work of John Campbell on spatial awareness, and that of Christopher
Peacocke on concepts and content, is deeply influential on Bermudez's
view, and his outline of the relevant aspects of their views is very
clear and direct. (Especially in comparison with some of the original
presentations of these ideas.) Similarly, in Chapter Five Bermudez
discusses J.J. Gibson's theory of ecological optics, canvassing it for
elements supporting a primitive non-linguistic concept of self that will
enable him to break out of the problematic circularity identified above.
This discussion could easily serve as part of a general introduction to
Gibson's theory and its continued relevance to psychology and
philosophy.
The book's main argument is strong, though there are doubts to be
raised. The argument hinges on a collection of empirical results in
psychology, so the strength of those empirical results is a matter of
importance. Some of this evidence, as mentioned, relies upon
release-from-habituation results used in testing infants, a method
employed with some caution due to its congeniality to over-
interpretation. In fact, those finding the Priority Thesis plausible
will incline toward this general challenge to Bermudez's empirical
evidence, namely, that the linguistic richness of our descriptions of
"self-conceptual" behaviour in non-linguistic animals and prelinguistic
humans inevitably overdescribes the internal capacities implicated in
the behaviour. This is a concern to which Bermudez is sensitive,
warning that '[t]he fact that the infant regulates his behavior in
conformity with his mother's responses does not license the conclusion
that he is thinking about either himself or his mother in any particular
way' (p. 253). The empirical arguments for nonconceptual content are
all balance-of-evidence in character, leaving room to disagree
reasonably by offering a psychologically deflationary account of the
relevant phenomena.
Bermudez also considers studies in the phylogeny of language in making
the case for nonconceptual content (pp. 76-9). But the scant evidence
that this area yields is shakier still, and does not find the author on
his most familiar ground. That Bermudez motivates the move from
developmental to phylogenetic considerations by citing the chestnut
"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is one indication of this short
section's rather marginal status.
This much is just to say that the main argument is likely to engender
debate. Bermudez's discussion is not, however, completely free of
more substantial difficulties: one notices in particular its
relatively narrow focus. For a book on self-consciousness, this one
has very little to say about our sense of ourselves as selves.
Another concern arises from the missing figures who have played large
roles in the recent history of this and related issues. Simon
Baron-Cohen's work on autism is naturally suited for discussion in
Chapter Nine (on the relation between awareness of self and awareness
of others) and was notable by its absence. Donald Davidson's
influential paper 'Thought and Talk' seems relevant, but goes
unmentioned, as do the views of Peter Carruthers, whose work was
recently the focus of much commentary in this journal. William Lycan,
Daniel Dennett, Owen Flanagan, David Rosenthal -- the problem seems
either more serious or more geographical as one considers a list of
prominent recent theorists on consciousness whose work presumably has
some bearing on the question of self-consciousness, and who do
not get even as far as Bermudez's bibliography.
Why expect that these theorists would be relevant? A very natural
approach, if one wants to explain self-consciousness, is to ask what
consciousness itself is, and then see if an answer to the more specific
question falls out of one's account. Or, if we want to know how a
subject could come to have an 'I'-thought, we might intuitively begin by
noting some features of what it is to have a thought simpliciter, and
then ask what more specific orientation of that capacity would generate
an 'I'-thought. Neither approach is prima facie committed to a notion
of non-conceptual content. At a finer grain, Bermudez seems to endorse
this line of reasoning: he argues that an explanation of deliberate
self-reference ought to be based on Grice's intention-theoretic account
of communication, 'on the entirely reasonable assumption that an account
of the intention to refer linguistically to oneself can be derived only
from an account of communicative intent in general' (p. 277). That no
similar approach to self-consciousness in general is mentioned places
the work somewhere on the borderline between excessively narrow in scope
and forgivably programmatic. The book could hardly have been so tightly
argued had its scope been much broader.
Jose Bermudez has assembled some powerful and fascinating evidence
against the thesis that language is prior to, or constitutive of,
thought. He has furthermore presented the case in favour of
nonconceptual content in what must be its canonical form to date. This
is an important book for anyone interested in the notion of
nonconceptual content or the developmental psychology of the self. I
expect that future discussions of these issues will have to place
themselves relative to this one.
