Just because we have nothing else to read. Fyi
mike
PRELINGUISTIC SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
Review of Bermudez on Self-Consciousness
Cedric Oliver Evans
4985 Tulane Drive
Baton Rouge
Louisiana, 70808
coevans@email.msn.com
http://www.mental-states.net
ABSTRACT: Bermudez has written a thought-provoking book on
self-consciousness that will stimulate a much more open-minded
attitude to the subject than we have enjoyed to date. His
combination of sophisticated philosophical analysis and imaginative
use of empirical data will be an interdisciplinary model for future
work in the area. Bermudez's argument that language-use is not a
necessary condition for self-consciousness is appealing, but he
does not go far enough when he confines the concept of
self-consciousness to knowledge one has of oneself as an object.
His book leaves openings for a view of oneself as a quintessential
subject.
1. The cardinal assumption of Bermudez's (1998, 1999) approach to
self-consciousness is that it can be studied exclusively from the point
of view of a scientific observer. Even when first-person thoughts are
introduced as examples of self-consciousness, it is other persons'
first-person thoughts he is talking about, and these are introduced in
evidence according to the inferences a scientific observer may draw
from them. To back up his adoption of this assumption, he utilizes
Gareth Evans' (1982) "Generality Constraint," which prohibits a concept
from being limited in principle to one and only one instantiation (thus
ruling out private language; Bermudez 1998, p. 59; henceforth all page
numbers refer to this book, unless otherwise specified). Going hand in
hand with the generality constraint is the "Symmetry Thesis" according
to which "A subject's psychological self-awareness is constitutively
linked to his awareness of other minds" (p. 230) These two conditions,
working together, ensure that the concept of self-consciousness, which
emerges, cannot be solipsistic in nature.
2. The orthodox philosophical presupposition about self-consciousness
is that it is an attribute not available to non-language-using
creatures, whether these be human infants or other species. Bermudez
calls this the "Thought-language Principle" (p. 12-13). His book is an
elaborate attempt to overthrow this principle. He begins by seeking to
refute it with a philosophical argument -- the appeal to a vicious
circle.
3. As ingenious as this approach is, I want to suggest that the
challenge to the thought-language principle does not come primarily
from philosophical problems, or an awareness among philosophers of
problems in the orthodox reading of self-consciousness, but from the
mounting body of scientific evidence that is anomalous from the
perspective of the thought-language principle. I believe that in
reality it is the scientific dog here that is wagging the philosophical
tail, whereas Bermudez's is the opposite point of view. It is notable
that most of the scientific evidence was produced in the 1970s and
1980s, and the philosophical response is occurring in the 1990s. I am
suggesting in effect that philosophers were forced to respond to this
challenge, or become irrelevant. It is admirable that Bermudez has made
a bold and far-reaching attempt to meet the challenge head-on.
4. For Bermudez and other philosophers, the scientific evidence begins
with the work on perception in the 1970s of J. J. Gibson (1979).
Gibson's theory of affordances indicated that an animal's awareness of
its environment is a matter of "taking in" the environment for the
opportunity it affords for satisfying its needs, whether these be a
good place for a lair, a place that may hide a predator, or a spot that
would bear its weight. Relying on inference to the best explanation,
Bermudez sees in this scenario the requirement to recognise in the
animal a primitive form of self-consciousness.
5. In the case of infants lacking language some of the scientific data
Bermudez relies upon are the following (p. 248ff).
a. The reaching-behaviour of 15-week-old infants is adjusted to the
physical distance separating them from the object (Field (1976).
b. This adjustment may be in place as early as two weeks after
birth (Bower 1972.
c. Infants look to where they perceive another individual's gaze to
be directed (Scaife and Bruner 1975).
d. The crucial embedding of object-focused attention in social
contexts begins at about the age of 6 months when infants begin to
switch their gaze back and forth between object and caregiver
(Newson and Newson 1975).
e. Neonates are capable of discriminating their own cries from the
cries of other infants (Sagi and Hoffman 1976).
f. Infants between 12 and 21 days old can successfully imitate
three distinct facial acts -- lip protrusion, mouth opening, and
tongue protrusion (Meltzoff and Moore 1977).
g. Nine-month-old infants are capable of recognizing maternal
pointing as a cue for directing their attention (Murphy and and
Messner 1977).
h. Infants as young as 3-days-old seem to prefer their own mother's
voice over the voice of another infant's mother (DeCasper and Fifer
1980).
i. Babies are capable of adapting the speed of their reach to the
speed of the moving object (Von Hofsten 1982).
j. Evidence that infants with a mean age of 45 hours revealed a
clear preference for the face of their mother rather than the face
of a stranger (Field, Woodson, Greenburg, and Cohen 1982).
k. Infants display perspectival sensitivity to the spatial
implications of their changing position (Acredolo, Adams, and
Goodwyn 1984).
l. Two-week-old infants were more likely to stop crying when they
heard the sound of their mother's voice than when they heard the
sound of a female stranger (Bremner 1988).
m. "The most important feature of the new behaviour at 9 months is
its systematically combining interests of the infant in the
physical, privately known reality near him, and his acts of
communication addressed to persons. A deliberately sought sharing
of experiences about events and things is achieved for the first
time" (Trevarthen & Hubley 1978).
6. In the light of this scientific evidence Bermudez concludes:
"Distinguishing self-awareness involves a recognition of oneself as
a perceiver, an agent, and a bearer of reactive attitudes against a
contrast space of other perceivers, agents, and bearers of reactive
attitudes. It can only make sense to speak of the infant's
experience of being a performer in the eyes of the other if the
infant is aware of himself as an agent and of his mother as a
perceiver" (pp. 252-3).
7. In sum, the scientific evidence forces us to push the phenomenon of
self-consciousness back into species that lack language abilities and
back into pre-linguistic stages of human development. We can only do
this by abandoning the Thought-Language Principle.
8. Bermudez takes the approach of developmental psychology to explain
the evolution of fully developed self-consciousness from primitive
forms. He appeals to what he calls "The Acquisition Constraint" which
he describes as follows:
"If a given cognitive capacity is psychologically real, then there
must be an explanation of how it is possible for an individual in
the normal course of human development to acquire that cognitive
capacity" (p. 19).
9. In other words, self-consciousness could not have issued fully
formed from the head of Minerva. The evolutionary path Bermudez maps
out contains three stages. The lowest stage consists of basic
sentience, or "the capacity to feel sensations". The stage above that
is "stimulus-response behaviour". The final stage is "intentional
behaviour". This stage "emerges when the number of stimulus-response
correlations potentially relevant to any given action becomes so great
that the need arises to choose between a range of possible responses to
a given situation" (p. 192).
10. Now it is one thing to abandon the idea that self-consciousness is
a matter of having "I" thoughts (thoughts immune to error through
misidentification), but quite another to give positive content to the
idea of a self-consciousness that is pre-linguistic. To do this
Bermudez draws on the work of the philosopher Christopher Peacocke
(1992) and his concept of a mental state with a nonconceptual content.
According to Bermudez's understanding:
"The general thought is that it is theoretically legitimate to
refer to mental states that represent the world but do not require
the bearer of those mental states to possess the concepts required
to specify how they present the world as being. These are states
with nonconceptual content" (p. 50).
11. Nonconceptual content is representational if it can meet
correctness conditions. Thus if an infant represents its mother as
looking at the object that the infant wanted her to look at, then the
nonconceptual content is representational if indeed the mother is
looking at that object for that reason.
"On this model, correctness of a content is then a matter of
instantiation: the instantiation by the real world around the
perceiver of the spatial type that gives the representational
content in question" (Peacocke 1992, p. 62).
Equipped with the notion of a nonconceptual content, Bermudez draws on
developmental psychology to arrive at abilities that reveal more and
more of the properties of fully developed self-consciousness such as is
found in the "I" thoughts of language users.
12. His first step is to broaden the concept of a nonconceptual content
into that of a nonconceptual point of view. A creature, we learn, does
not have a nonconceptual point of view until it has the ability to
distinguish its experience from permanent features of the environment
which instantiate a given experience. This ability depends on conscious
memory.
"When a creature finds its way back to a particular place that it
then consciously remembers . . . it is emerging from a continuous
present and moving toward possession of a temporally extended point
of view" (Bermudez 1998, p. 177).
But it also depends on "basic inductive generalizations at the
nonconceptual level" (p. 184)
13. To get a better grasp of the nonconceptual point of view, Bermudez
provides the example of the acquisition of the representational content
of an individual's body as a body among other bodies (albeit a special
one by virtue of the individual's discovery that he can exercise
intentional control over bodily members, and cannot do this over other
things in the environment). This discovery must be understood in terms
of a representational content of one's own body being a special case.
We can follow his line of thinking from what he calls "the simple
argument" (p. 135).
a. The self is embodied.
b. Somatic proprioception provides perceptions of bodily
properties.
c. Somatic proprioception is a form of self-perception.
d. Therefore, somatic proprioception is a form of
self-consciousness.
14. Quite apart from the merits of "the simple argument", I would like
to draw attention to an inconsistency in Bermudez's standpoint. The
reader will recall that consciousness is approached from the outside --
from the perspective of a scientific observer. And yet the foundational
building block of his theory of self-consciousness is the concept of a
mental state with a nonconceptual content. But how could Bermudez
arrive at the notion of a mental state with a nonconceptual content
from a third person point of view? Surely he could only do so from a
neo-behavioural standpoint such as that of Dennett (1969, p. 118ff).
15. The mental state of neonate or animal is a hidden variable from the
point of view of the scientific observer. But how could such an
observer ascribe the attribute of consciousness to the neonate or the
animal if he did not draw on his own experience of nonconceptual
contents to give meaning to the attribution? It seems to me that
Bermudez's foundational concept crosses the line from the third person
viewpoint to a second person viewpoint (Symmetry Thesis: and if second
person, necessarily first person), and this vitiates his attempt to
stick resolutely with the third person standpoint. Bermudez says that
his explanation of self-consciousness in neonates and animals must be
considered to be an inference to the best explanation. But this "best
explanation" is only appealing to a person who understands what
self-consciousness is from a second person point of view (us -- mother
and me).
16. Fudjack (2000) identifies an ambiguity in the concept of
self-consciousness. We can take 'self-consciousness' to mean
'consciousness with a sense of self' as opposed to 'consciousness of
self'. It is this distinction that is missing from Bermudez's
reflections. Indeed, if we refer to an earlier book edited by Bermudez
with Eilan and Marcel (1995, p. 3) we find that the emphasis is on the
concept of the self as an object. "Self-consciousness is a matter of
representing oneself as an object." This emphasis is continued in
Bermudez's new study. The difficulty is that if no recognition is made
of a consciousness with a sense of self, to what is the nonconceptual
representation of the self being attributed? Clearly there is only one
answer available to Burmudez: the nonconceptual content is attributable
to a body or an organism. Now what happens, in this case, when the body
is not at a given moment experiencing a nonconceptual content of the
appropriate kind, such as somatic proprioception? In that case we are
left with consciousness sans self. Being a primitive self means
enjoying experiences of certain nonconceptual contents. Being a
developed self means enjoying "I" thoughts as expressed in canonical
linguistic form. In both cases we are left with nothing better than a
sophisticated serial theory of the self.
17. If, however, Bermudez had been able to do justice to consciousness
with a sense of self, then he could argue that all cases of
nonconceptual perceptual content would be able to modify that sense of
self and become genuinely revealing of self-consciousness. And the means
for coming up with this idea all lie embedded in Bermudez's book as
follows:
a. Bermudez adopts Peacocke's idea that there are nonconceptual
contents that are not representational in nature (pp. 214-5) [NOTE
1].
b. Bermudez offers the analysis that attention splits the content
of consciousness into background and foreground (pp. 138-9) [NOTE
2].
c. Bermudez mentions with acceptance the view that the content of
consciousness is an integrated sensory field (p. 141) [NOTE 3].
18. If we combine these propositions we come up with a consciousness
that includes a sense of self by containing a nonconceptual
nonrepresentational content, which accompanies every "content" singled
out by attention as a nonrepresentational background. In this scenario
we have a sense of self that is never absent from a consciousness taken
up with a content, and when that content happens to give information
about the self as object, that information is taken up into the sense
of self which adjusts to it. In that sense information about the self
as object can at last become genuine self-consciousness. We thus arrive
at a form of self-consciousness in which the self of which we gain
consciousness is a subject and not an object (see Evans and Fudjack
1976).
19. One interesting consequence of this position is that it puts the
self within consciousness in the position of a nonconceptual
non-representational content. This would be a content minus correctness
conditions. It would therefore be a self that is immune to error
through misidentification, which is just what we would predict of a
subject of consciousness. In this connection Peacocke's nonconceptual,
non-representational content, translates into properties that a self
has in virtue of what it is like to be that self (Peacocke 1983, p.
5).
20. Once we have made a place for a sense of self we are in a better
position to handle what Bermudez calls the spatial awareness component
of a nonconceptual point of view. Bermudez places his main emphasis for
reaching the conclusion that infants and animals possess
self-consciousness on evidence drawn from perception studies. This is
evident from the following, which reveals the fine-grain nature of much
of his analysis. The spatial awareness component of primitive
self-consciousness requires (p. 220):
a. awareness that one is navigating through the environment, which
requires
b. a degree of understanding of the nature of space, which requires
c. a grasp of the distinction between the spatial relations that
hold between places and the spatial relations that hold between
things, which is manifested in navigational behaviour that
d. satisfies the following two minimal conditions: (i) not being
reducible to particular sequences of bodily movements, (ii) not
being driven by sensitivity to features of the environment that
merely covary with spatial features of the environment;
e. and implicates the following three cognitive capacities: (i)
the capacity to think about different routes to the same place,
(ii) the capacity to keep track of changes in spatial relations
between things caused by one's own movements relative to those
things, (iii) the capacity to think about places independently of
the objects or features located at those places.
21. With the idea of the sense of self as a nonconceptual
nonrepresentational background content to the foreground content of
consciousness, we can make of 20a-20e implicit features of the self,
and not explicit representational contents as we must in Bermudez's
model. We can say that 20a- 20e are components of the implicit context
for actions and events that are focally singled out in spatial
orientation. 20a- 20e are encapsulated in the self, and the self does
not rely upon explicitly summoning up these contents in order for it to
successfully "navigate through its world". In part at least, the
function of the background self is that of providing the spatial
context for such navigation.
NOTES
[1] Bermudez acknowledges "what Peacocke calls sensational properties,
that is, the nonrepresentational properties that an experience has in
virtue of what it is like to have that experience."
[2] The following is a direct quote from Martin (1995) by Bermudez
(1998 p. 138):
"An attention shift is all that is required for the properties of
the limb doing the exploring to become the focus of attention, and
this does not involve a complete change in the structure and
content of awareness. Relevant here is some form of the
distinction between focal awareness and peripheral awareness, in
particular, the possibility of awareness of something even though
one is not attending to it. This idea is most familiar from
vision, where it seems clear that items that the boundaries of the
visual field are consciously registered, even though they are not
being attended to. Peripheral awareness seems to require at the
least the following. First, items in peripheral awareness can
generally be brought into focal awareness, either by moving the
body into an appropriate perceptual relation to an object (by
turning one's head, for example) or by focusing on one element in a
complicated perceptual experience (as when one tries just to listen
to the violins in a symphony), Second, instances of peripheral
awareness can have implications for action and reaction without
bringing focal awareness to bear, as when one flinches from
something seen out of the corner of the eye... Even when the
attention is fixed firmly on the proprioceptive dimension of
tactile awareness, the exteroceptive dimension remains
phenomenologically salient in background awareness."
[3] Bermudez (p. 141) quotes Ayers (1991, p. 187):
"Our perceptions of the world," says Bermudez, "form what Michael
Ayers has described as an integrated sensory field. He captures
the phenomenology of the situation as follows." "A judgement which
links the objects of different senses may itself be, and very often
is, an immediate perceptual judgement, directly grounded on the
deliverance of sense. This it is not normally a result of
inference, habitual association or the like (although in a few
peculiar cases of disorientation some form of inference may be to
the point) that I judge the object I feel with my hand to be the
object I see. Quite simply I perceive it as the same: the
identity enters into the intentional content of sensation, and of
my total sensory 'field',"
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