the paradox of self-consciousness - josé bermúdez

[...]... account reveals the correct approach for solving the paradox of self-consciousness The second section shows how a successful response to the paradox of selfconsciousness must reject what I call the classical view of content In the final section I set the agenda for the rest of the book 2.1 The Functionalist Account of Self-Reference The circularity problems at the root of the paradox of self-consciousness. .. self-conscious thoughts in terms of mastery of the first- The Paradox of Self-Consciousness 17 person pronoun) will end up being viciously circular because mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun involves the capacity to think first-person thoughts This has no implications for the question Anscombe addresses of whether the token-reflexive rule yields an adequate account of the semantics of the. .. paradox of self-consciousness The remainder of the book is devoted to the twofold task of, first, motivating the rejection of the Thought-Language Principle and, second, showing how the paradox of self-consciousness can be solved once the Thought-Language Principle is abandoned 2 The Form of a Solution One possible reaction to the paradox of self-consciousness as outlined in the previous chapter is that... mastery of the first-person pronoun presupposes the first-person contents characteristic of self-consciousness The first dependence relation opens up the possibility of what I termed the deflationary theory of self-consciousness, while the second dependence relation threatens to make any such theory circular The functionalist theory of self-reference takes issue with the first dependence claim It argues that there... thoughts with the first-person contents characteristic of self-consciousness and the capacity to understand and use the first-person pronoun The first dependence claim is that the first-person contents characteristic of self-consciousness can be understood only in terms of their canonical linguistic expression with the first-person pronoun and hence that they presuppose mastery of the first-person pronoun The second... analyzing the capacity for the canonical linguistic expression of those thoughts (the Thought-Language Principle) 3 ‘I’-thoughts are canonically expressed by means of the first-person pronoun 4 Mastery of the first-person pronoun requires the capacity to think ‘I’-thoughts 5 A noncircular account of self-consciousness is possible 6 Mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun meets the Acquisition... view, mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun is the single most important explanandum in a theory of self-consciousness. 5 One immediate question that might be put to a defender of the deflationary theory is how mastery of the semantics of the first-person pronoun can make sense of the distinction between first-person contents that are immune to error through misidentification and first-person contents... himself in the appropriate way Since the constancy -of- sense thesis means that the distinctive features cannot lie in the relevant predicates, we soon arrive at the deflationary theory Despite these two powerful motivations for it, the deflationary theory runs into two very serious problems that together constitute what I term the paradox of self-consciousness In the following section I will bring these problems... explained through the first-person of direct speech, which is, of course, ‘I’.8 This circularity appears damaging to the deflationary account of self-consciousness Re- The Paradox of Self-Consciousness 15 call that I characterized a first-person content as one that can be specified directly only by means of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ or indirectly only by means of the indirect reflexive ‘he*’ If, as the deflationary... to provide the foundation for an account of the semantics of the first-person pronoun If this is right, then the circularity at the heart of the paradox of self-consciousness can be avoided 28 Chapter 2 In the first section of this chapter I examine the functionalist account of self-reference as a possible strategy I will argue that, although it is not ultimately successful, attention to the functionalist . understandings of the rela- tion between linguistic self-reference and self-conscious thought. I de- velop what I term the paradox of self-consciousness in chapter 1. The core of the paradox is the apparent. 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. stress how the deflationary theory of self- consciousness, and indeed any theory of self-consciousness that accords a serious role in self-consciousness to mastery of the semantics of the first-person