Personal identity and self-knowledge

10 Personal identity and self-knowledge In chapter 1, I described the philosophy of mind as being the philosophical study of minded things just insofar as they are minded. And the general term which I introduced to refer to something with a mind was subject of experience – interpreting ‘experience’ here in a broad sense, to include any kind of sensation, perception or thought. I take it that the term ‘sub- ject of experience’ is more extensive than the term ‘person’ – that is, that although all persons are (at least potentially) subjects of experience, not all subjects of experience are per- sons. This is because I think that at least some non-human creatures, such as chimpanzees, are certainly subjects of experience and yet that they may not be persons. It is per- fectly conceivable that there should be non-human persons, but it is open to question whether any actually exist. What, then, is distinctive of persons as opposed to other subjects of experience? Just this, I suggest: persons are selves – that is to say, they are subjects of experience which have the capacity to recognise themselves as being individual subjects of experience. Selves possess reflexive self-knowledge. By ‘reflexive self-knowledge’ I mean, roughly speaking, know- ledge of one’s own identity and conscious mental states – knowledge of who one is and of what one is thinking and feeling. As we shall see, there are some complexities involved in spelling out this notion in a completely satisfactory way, if indeed that can ultimately be achieved. But – again, roughly speaking – having the kind of reflexive self-knowledge which makes one a person goes hand-in-hand with possessing a ‘first-person’ concept of oneself, the linguistic reflection of 264 Personal identity and self-knowledge 265 which resides in an ability to use the word ‘I’ comprehend- ingly to refer to oneself. But what sort of thing does the word ‘I’ refer to, assuming that it does indeed refer to something? What sort of thing am I? In raising this question, of course, we return to some of the issues discussed in chapter 2. There we saw that different philosophers have offered very different answers to this ques- tion, some holding that ‘I’ refers to a certain body – ‘my’ body – some that it refers to something altogether non- physical, such as an immaterial soul or spirit, and some that it refers to something which is a combination of body and soul. Yet another possible answer is that ‘I’ refers to a collec- tion of thoughts and feelings – ‘my’ thoughts and feelings. But it may surprise us that philosophers can disagree so rad- ically about what sort of thing ‘I’ refers to and yet be so certain that it does refer to something. Perhaps we should question that assumption. And even if we accept it, perhaps we should question the assumption that ‘I’ refers to a thing of the same sort or kind whenever it is used to refer to some- thing. Perhaps persons or selves do not constitute a kind of things, all instances of which share the same identity- conditions. Perhaps to be a person or self is to occupy some role or perform some function – a role or function which could be occupied or performed by things of many different kinds. For example, it might be held that being a person is a role which my body occupies now and has occupied for most of my existence, but that for the first few weeks or months of my existence it did not occupy that role. This would imply that, in my case at least, ‘I’ refers to my body, but that there was a time when I (that is, my body) existed but was not (yet) a person. We shall look more closely at this and other possibilities in the course of this chapter. Another set of issues which we should explore concerns our knowledge of our own mental states and their content. How is it that one can seem to have incontestable knowledge of what one is thinking and feeling? Or is our belief that we have such knowledge in fact unfounded? If so, we must still explain the prevalence and tenacity of that belief. However, An introduction to the philosophy of mind266 let us make a start with the phenomenon of self-reference, that is, with the comprehending use of the word ‘I’. THE FIRST PERSON Although children pick up the use of the first-person pro- noun, ‘I’, quite early in the course of their linguistic develop- ment, understanding the semantics of first-person discourse is a surprisingly difficult matter. It is easy enough to say what the linguistic function of the word ‘I’ is, in a way which will satisfy most people: ‘I’ is the word (in English) which every- one uses to refer to him or herself. Every human language appears to have a word or expression equivalent to this. But the difficulty which philosophers have in understanding the meaning of the word ‘I’ arises from the difficulty of spelling out, in a non-circular and illuminating way, what it is to ‘refer to oneself ’ in the special way that is associated with the com- prehending use of the word ‘I’. I deliberately speak here of the comprehending use of the word ‘I’, because, for instance, even a mindless computer might be said to be ‘referring to itself ’ when it displays some such message on its screen as ‘I am ready’. Equally, a parrot could conceivably be taught to utter the words ‘I feel hungry’ whenever it felt hungry, in which case it might be said to be using the word ‘I’ to refer to itself – but this wouldn’t imply that it had a first-person concept of itself, as appears to be required for the compre- hending use of the word ‘I’. The difficulty that I am alluding to can perhaps best be brought out by comparing the comprehending use of the word ‘I’ to refer to oneself with the comprehending use of various other singular terms to refer to oneself. I can, for instance, use my personal name, ‘Jonathan Lowe’, to refer to myself. Equally, I can use certain definite descriptions to refer to myself, such as ‘the author of this book’ or ‘the person seated in this chair’. However, it is a curious feature of the word ‘I’ that it seems to be guaranteed to refer to a quite specific person on any occasion of its use, in such a way that the person using it cannot mistake which person it refers Personal identity and self-knowledge 267 to – namely, him or herself. No such feature attaches to other ways of referring to ourselves. I might forget that I am Jona- than Lowe or come to doubt whether I am the author of this book, but I cannot doubt that I am I. This might be dismissed as a trivial matter, like the fact that I cannot doubt that Jonathan Lowe is Jonathan Lowe. But that would be too quick and superficial a response. That this is no trivial matter can be brought out by considering the following kind of example. Suppose that, upon entering a strange house and walking along a corridor, I see a human figure approaching me and form the following judgement: ‘That person looks suspicious’. Then I suddenly realise that the person in question is myself, seen reflected in a mirror at the end of the corridor. Although, in one sense, I knew to whom I was referring in using the demonstrative phrase ‘that person’ – namely, the person who appeared to be approaching me – there is clearly another sense in which I did not know to whom I was refer- ring, since I was unwittingly referring to myself. Clearly, then, when I ‘refer to myself ’ in the way involved in this example, I do not refer to myself in the way I do when I use the word ‘I’ – for in the latter case there is no similar possibil- ity of my failing to know to whom I am referring. This feature of the use of the word ‘I’ is closely linked with the fact that certain first-person judgements exhibit what is sometimes called ‘immunity to error through misidentifica- tion’. 1 It is perfectly possible to make a mistaken first-person judgement, of the form ‘I am F’, just as it is possible to make a mistaken third-person judgement, of the form ‘S is F’. How- ever, whereas ‘S is F’ can be mistaken in either of two differ- ent ways, certain judgements of the form ‘I am F’ can appar- ently be mistaken in only one way. Compare, for example, 1 The expression ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ is due to Sydney Shoemaker: see his ‘Self-Reference and Self- Awareness’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968), pp. 555–67, reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and in Quassim Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The inspiration for this notion comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein: see The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), pp. 66ff. See also Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Refer- ence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 179–91. An introduction to the philosophy of mind268 the two judgements ‘John feels angry’ and ‘I feel angry’. In making the first judgement, I might be mistaken either about what John feels or about who feels angry. On the one hand, perhaps John really feels jealous rather than angry. On the other hand, perhaps it is not John who feels angry, but another person whom I have mistaken for John. But now con- sider the second judgement, ‘I feel angry’. Here, too, it is possible for me to be mistaken about what I feel – maybe I think I feel angry when really what I feel is jealousy. How- ever, what doesn’t seem to make sense, in this case, is that I should be mistaken not about what is felt but about who feels it. It doesn’t seem to make sense that I should mistake another person’s anger for my own. But not all first-person judgements have this property of immunity to error through misidentification: the only ones that do, it seems, involve the attribution to oneself of some conscious psychological state. Consider, for instance, the judgement ‘I am touching the table with my hand’, made on the basis of what I can see and feel. It is conceivable, if unlikely, that it is not in fact my hand that is touching the table, but the very similar hand of the person sitting next to me – and that what I can really feel is my hand touching another nearby object. In that case, I am mistaken about who is touching the table, in a way in which I could not be mistaken about who is feeling angry when I make the judgement ‘I feel angry’. Some philosophers seem to think that, when the word ‘I’ is used as it is in making the judgement ‘I feel angry’, it cannot really be functioning as a referring-expression at all, precisely because mistaken reference is apparently ruled out in such cases. 2 They take the view that a genuine act of refer- ence to something can occur only if the possibility of mistake or failure exists: as they might put it, where there is no pos- sibility of failure, there is no possibility of success either. 2 For doubts about whether ‘I’ is a referring expression, see G. E. M. Anscombe, ‘The First Person’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1975), reprinted in G. E. M. Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). For discussion, see Andy Hamilton, ‘Anscomb- ian and Cartesian Scepticism’, Philosophical Quarterly 41 (1991), pp. 39–54. Personal identity and self-knowledge 269 Hence, they regard the word ‘I’ in such contexts as no more having a referential function than the word ‘it’ has such a function in a statement such as ‘It is raining’. So what, then, is the function of the word ‘I’ in such contexts, according to these philosophers? Here they are less clear, but they tend to say that sentences like ‘I feel angry’ are used, in reality, not so much to express judgements, which could be true or false, as to make avowals. On this view, to say ‘I feel angry’ is to express one’s feelings, rather than to express a judgement about what one is feeling. Such an ‘avowal’ is regarded as a verbal expression of emotion, comparable with such non- verbal ‘expressions’ of emotion as angry looks and gestures. 3 However, most philosophers would, I think, be unper- suaded by this doctrine, not least because they would not subscribe to the principle that any genuine act of reference must leave room for the possibility of error. Furthermore, they would regard it as being inherently implausible to sup- pose that the same word, ‘I’, could have two radically differ- ent functions. For that the word ‘I’ has a referential function in many contexts of its use seems hardly disputable. How, then, would these philosophers explain why the word ‘I’ seems incapable of reference-failure? Some of them may attribute this quite simply to its being a so-called token- reflexive expression, akin to such expressions as ‘here’ and ‘now’. Just as any utterance of the word ‘here’ standardly refers to the place at which the word is uttered and any utter- ance of the word ‘now’ standardly refers to the time at which the word is uttered, so, on this account, any utterance of the word ‘I’ standardly refers to the person who is uttering it. Thus, the semantic rule governing the use of the word ‘I’ precludes the possibility of someone mistakenly using the word ‘I’ to refer to anyone other than him or herself. 4 How- 3 In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says at one point: ‘When I say ‘‘I am in pain’’, I do not point to a person who is in pain .Idon’t name any person. Just as I don’t name anyone when I groan with pain. Though someone else sees who is in pain from the groaning.’ See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi- gations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 404. 4 For more on token-reflexivity and the comparison between ‘I’ and ‘now’, see D. H. Mellor, ‘I and Now’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 89 (1989), pp. 79–94, An introduction to the philosophy of mind270 ever, although it is important to recognise the token-reflexive character of the word ‘I’, it does not appear that appeal to this alone can explain all the distinctive features of first- person reference which we have been examining. This is because one cannot capture what is special about the compre- hending use of the word ‘I’ to refer to oneself merely by citing the semantic rule that any utterance of the word ‘I’ stand- ardly refers to the person uttering it. For that rule imposes no requirement that the person – or, indeed, thing – uttering the word ‘I’ should have a first-person conception of itself as a self-aware subject of experience: and yet the compre- hending use of the word ‘I’ to refer to oneself does require this. I have to confess that I know of no wholly satisfactory way of providing a non-circular analysis of the concept of self- reference which is peculiar to the comprehending use of the word ‘I’. An ability to think of oneself as oneself and to attribute to oneself, thought of in this way, various conscious thoughts and feelings seems to be one which is primitive and irredu- cible, in the sense that one cannot model this ability on any other more general ability to think of particular objects and attribute properties to them. At some stage in a normal child’s intellectual development, it acquires this special abil- ity, but how it achieves this must remain something of a mys- tery so long as we have no way of characterising the ability in question save in its own terms. 5 PERSONS AND CRITERIA OF IDENTITY Given that the word ‘I’ is guaranteed a reference, on every occasion of its comprehending use, to what sort of thing does reprinted in his Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also the papers in part I of Palle Yourgrau (ed.), Demonstratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and John Campbell, Past, Space, and Self (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), ch. 3 and ch. 4. 5 For wide-ranging further discussion of the concept and development of self- consciousness, from both philosophical and psychological perspectives, see Jose´ Luis Bermu ´ dez, Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan (eds.), The Body and the Self Personal identity and self-knowledge 271 it refer when it is so used? The quick answer would be that it refers to a particular person or self. But, as I have been using the terms ‘person’ and ‘self ’, this is effectively just true by definition and so not especially revealing – for I have charac- terised a person as being a subject of experience which has a first-person concept of itself. We have not yet established that either persons, or subjects of experience more generally, constitute a distinct sort or kind of things in the way, say, that stars, oak trees and chairs all constitute distinct kinds of things. The instances of a genuine sort or kind must at least share the same identity-conditions, enabling us to count such instances and trace their careers over time. If someone asks me how many oak trees there are in a certain wood at a certain time, I know, at least in principle, how to discover the answer to that question, because I know what makes one oak tree numerically distinct from another at a given moment of time – namely, the fact that it occupies a distinct and separate region of space of a shape apt to accommodate just one oak tree. Likewise, if someone asks me whether the oak tree now growing in a certain part of the wood is the same oak tree as the one which was growing there forty years ago, I know, at least in principle, how to discover the answer to this question, because I understand the persistence-conditions of oak trees – that is, I understand what sorts of changes an oak tree can and cannot undergo if it is to survive over time. For instance, I know that oak trees can survive transplantation and hence that it would be rash to assume that this oak tree is identical with a previously encountered one merely because it has the right sort of age and is growing in the same place. The question that we must ask now is whether subjects of experience, and more specifically persons, do indeed constitute a genuine kind of things, all instances of which share the same identity-conditions, enabling us to count persons and trace their careers over time. On the face of it, the answer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). See also Jose´ Luis Bermu ´ dez, The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). An introduction to the philosophy of mind272 to this question is clearly ‘Yes’. We seem to assume that we can count persons at least as easily as we can count oak trees and that persons have persistence-conditions determining what sorts of changes they can and cannot undergo if they are to survive over time. It may be that we are a little unclear about what to say in certain borderline cases, but the same is true as regards oak trees, which we none the less consider to constitute a genuine and indeed natural kind of things. So what are the principles which govern how we count per- sons and trace their careers over time? What we are looking for, here, is what many philosophers would call a criterion of personal identity. 6 The general form which a criterion of iden- tity for things of a kind K takes is this: (C k )Ifx and y are things of kind K, then x is identical with y if and only if x and y stand in the relation R k to one another. So the question that we must try to answer is this: how do a person P 1 and a person P 2 have to be related to one another if P 1 is to be identical with P 2 ? The problem has two aspects – one concerning the identity of persons at a time (‘synchronic’ identity) and the other concerning the identity of persons over time (‘diachronic’ identity) – the second of which is usually regarded as the more difficult. Clearly, there are many trivial and uninformative answers to the question that has just been raised. It would be true, but only trivially so, to say that P 1 and P 2 must be related by identity if they are to be identical with one another. What is sought is a non-trivial and inform- ative answer to the question in hand. More generally, the relation R k mentioned in a criterion of identity of the form of (C k ) must not be the relation of identity itself, nor any relation which can only be stated in terms which involve or presuppose the identity of things of kind K. 6 For more on the general notion of a criterion of identity, see my ‘What Is a Criterion of Identity?’, Philosophical Quarterly 39 (1989), pp. 1–21, reprinted in Harold W. Noonan (ed.), Identity (Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1993) and my ‘Objects and Criteria of Identity’, in Bob Hale and Crispin Wright (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Personal identity and self-knowledge 273 Some philosophers have maintained that persons have a bodily criterion of identity. For instance, some have main- tained that a person P 1 and a person P 2 are identical, either at a time or over time, if and only if P 1 and P 2 have the same body. Against this, it may be pointed out that persons can survive the loss of many parts of their bodies. However, this is not a decisive consideration, since it is equally plausible to say that a person’s body can survive the loss of many of its parts. A more compelling objection, if it can be sustained, would be that different persons can share the same body – as is sometimes alleged to happen in cases of so-called multiple personality syndrome – or that one person can swap bodies with another. 7 The latter possibility is suggested by the seem- ingly feasible but as yet unattempted procedure of whole- brain transplantation, whereby the brain of one person is transplanted into the skull of another and vice versa. In the light of this apparent possibility, some philosophers are inclined to judge that it is sameness of brain, rather than sameness of body, which makes for personal identity. How- ever, such a position would appear to be unstable, for the following reason (even setting aside any problem raised by cases of multiple personality syndrome, in which the same brain appears to be shared by two different people). Clearly, the reason why we are inclined to judge that a double brain- transplant operation would constitute a swapping of bodies between two people rather than a swapping of their brains is that we suppose all the vitally important aspects of human personality to be grounded in features of the brain – in par- ticular, we suppose a person’s memories and temperament to be grounded in features of his or her brain. But this sug- gests that what we really take to determine a person’s identity are these aspects of human personality and, consequently, that we should deem it possible, at least in principle, for a person to acquire a new brain, provided that the new brain 7 For a discussion of the implications of multiple personality syndrome, see Kathleen V. Wilkes, Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), ch. 4. [...]... see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp 204ff Personal identity and self-knowledge 275 However, even this more plausible version of a psychological criterion of personal identity is subject to an apparently devastating objection For if we suppose that the aspects of human personality which are relevant to personal identity, such as temperament and memory, are grounded... Reasons and Persons, ch 12 and ch 13 Personal identity and self-knowledge 277 logical, which is wholly satisfactory, in the sense that its verdicts involve no clash with our intuitive beliefs concerning the nature of personal identity and its moral and emotional significance Some philosophers may be inclined to draw the conclusion that our intuitive beliefs concerning personal identity are confused or... that 15 The notion of ‘quasi-memory’ is due to Sydney Shoemaker: see his ‘Persons and their Pasts’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1970), pp 269–85, reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind The notion is adopted by Derek Parfit: see his Personal Identity and his Reasons and Persons, pp 220ff Personal identity and self-knowledge 281 was in fact done by someone else, provided that one is related... relevant to questions of personal identity A personal memory is the 12 13 For criticism of the appeal to thought experiments in philosophical discussions of personal identity, see Wilkes, Real People, ch 1 I develop my own views about personal identity more fully in my Kinds of Being: A Study of Individuation, Identity and the Logic of Sortal Terms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), ch 7 and in my Subjects of... thoughts and feelings? We have to distinguish between a subject of thought and feelings – something that thinks and feels – and something, such as the brain, whose activity renders possible and sustains a subject’s thoughts and feelings Now, the animalist may readily concede that it is not my brain that has thoughts and feelings, because he wants to say that it is I who have thoughts and feelings and that... also has thoughts and feelings But this means that we can turn Personal identity and self-knowledge 287 the animalist’s own objection against himself For now he appears to be committed to the view that both my whole body and my brain have thoughts and feelings, that is, once again, that there are two distinct things having the same or exactly similar thoughts and feelings at one and the same time In... aspects of human personality which were grounded by the old one.8 We have been led, by a couple of plausible steps, from a bodily criterion of personal identity, via a brain criterion, to a psychological criterion of personal identity According to simple versions of the latter type of criterion, a person P1 and a person P2 are identical, either at a time or over time, if and only if P1 and P2 share certain... Terms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), ch 7 and in my Subjects of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch 2 For more on personal identity quite generally, see Harold W Noonan, Personal Identity (London: Routledge, 1989) and Brian Garrett, Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1998) 278 An introduction to the philosophy of mind remembrance of some past experience... temperament and memories But this seems to be incompatible with the suggested psychological criterion of personal identity, which implies that persons who share the same temperament and memories are identical What we seem to be faced with here is a case of personal fission – the splitting of one person, P1, into two distinct persons, P2 and P3 The logical laws of identity preclude us from saying that P2 and. .. possessed at the earlier of those two times.9 8 9 For further discussion of the implications for personal identity of braintransplantation and related procedures, see Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self -Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), pp 22ff and Bernard Williams, ‘The Self and the Future’, Philosophical Review 79 (1970), pp 161–80, reprinted in his Problems of the Self . more on personal identity quite generally, see Harold W. Noonan, Personal Identity (London: Routledge, 1989) and Brian Garrett, Personal Identity and Self-Consciousness. is adopted by Derek Parfit: see his Personal Identity and his Reasons and Persons, pp. 220ff. Personal identity and self-knowledge 281 was in fact done