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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] file:///D|/The%20Character%20of%20Mind%20-%20An%20Introduction%20to%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Mind.htm standard causal chains: it is precisely because we cannot raise this as a problem for a full causal analysis of the introspective relation that the claim of causal connection begins to look conceptually trivial-it looks too easy. Let us try to imagine a case in which a particular pain causes an act of introspective awareness as of a pain but the awareness is not in fact a case of introspecting that pain. The difficulty here seems to be, to put it shortly, that we cannot make sense of introspective hallucinations: that is, any awareness as of a pain must take a pain as object--but then we will not be able to devise a case in which a pain causes an act of introspective awareness which act is not of that pain. The only possibility would be one pain causing an awareness of another pain, but this is impossible to make sense of. Causal connections between acts of mind and its contents cannot fail to be cases of introspection; so introspective acquaintance does not, in this respect, parallel what we find in the case of perception of external objects. The relation of introspection has the look of something primitive and unanalysable--more so than perception. Still, this difference does not require us to give up the thesis that the two species of acquaintance have the same basic structure of general content directed to particular object. If introspective awareness is problematic, how much more so is self-awareness. We shall return to the self in Chapter 9, but some comments must now be ventured regarding acquaintance with the self, thought these will, to some extent, presuppose a certain conception of the nature of the self, to be elaborated upon when the time comes. To have self-acquaintance is to be aware of that which is referred to by 'I', as when one makes a judgement of the form 'I am thus-and-so.' As one may be aware of one's visual experience as of the setting sun and make a judgement about that experience, so one may be aware of oneself as having an experience as of the setting sun and make a judgement about the self which has that experience- expressed as 'I am having an experience etc.' Here again it seems that we have to do with a basic dyadic relation, this time between the subject and himself, on the foundation of which a self-ascriptive judgement may be made. The question, then, is whether this act of self-awareness parallels the acts of perception and introspection. But before we attempt to answer this question, we should note some connections between acquaintance with the self and acquaintance with the contents of the mind: for it is very plausible that a creature has the former sort of acquaintance if and only if it has the latter. -65- file:///D|/The%20Character%20of%20Mind%20-...on%20to%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Mind.htm (69 of 175) [11.07.2007 13:54:08] file:///D|/The%20Character%20of%20Mind%20-%20An%20Introduction%20to%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Mind.htm That is to say, if a creature is aware of its own experiences, then it is aware of them as its experiences; and if it is aware of itself, then it must also be introspectively aware of its states of mind. When you are aware of your experience as of the setting sun, you are aware of the experience as your experience as of the setting sun; and when you make a self-ascriptive judgement you must in that very act be aware of the contents of your own mind. Self-acquaintance and introspective acquaintance thus seem to be interdependent. It stands otherwise with perceptual acquaintance: this seems to require neither of the other two sorts of acquaintance. Consider unreflective animals, their awareness perpetually glued on to the external world for fear of what will befall them: they are certainly aware of objects in their environment, but have not the luxury of thoughts about their own mental states and selves (if indeed they have selves: we return to this in Chapter 9). Not for nothing is introspective awareness commonly described as self-consciousness: the self is not in fact its proper object, but it is true that there is no introspective awareness of mental states without awareness of their subject. With respect to whether self-acquaintance mirrors perceptual acquaintance in its structure, three questions are apposite: Do we have experience of the self? Does the act of self-awareness have general representational content? Is the self causally responsible for acts of acquaintance with it? There is one conception of the self on which the answer to each question is affirmative: this is the view that the self may be identified with the body. For if the self is the body, then it must be true that we perceive the self, since we perceive the body; and if self-acquaintance is just a kind of sense perception, then it will have the characteristics of perceptual acquaintance simply by virtue of being a special case of it. We are acquainted with the body by way of vision, touch, smell etc., and by the internal senses of proprioception and kinaesthesia; on the body view of the self these senses are what make us aware of the referent of 'I'. When these senses are turned on the body (as the last two are by definition) we have experiences with a certain general content, and these experiences are caused by states of the body. Plainly, the acceptability of this view of self-acquaintance depends upon the acceptability of the view of the self it is premised on--a view we will later find unacceptable; but we can do something now to discredit the view by considering whether self-acquaintance does in fact depend upon bodily acquaintance. Two sorts of possibility, the second more extreme than the first, -66- file:///D|/The%20Character%20of%20Mind%20-...on%20to%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Mind.htm (70 of 175) [11.07.2007 13:54:08] file:///D|/The%20Character%20of%20Mind%20-%20An%20Introduction%20to%20the%20Philosophy%20of%20Mind.htm show that it does not. The first is the case of a person whose experiences as of his body being thus-and-so are wholly hallucinatory: he might be the subject of an experiment in which all input from his senses is occluded and his brain stimulated by the experimenter to produce a phenomenological simulacrum of body perception. It appears evident that this person could still be self-aware and make judgements about himself; but this would not be mediated by acquaintance with his body, since, by hypothesis, he has no such acquaintance. The second case involves imagining that the sensory input is again occluded but no phenomenological simulacrum is produced: there is just a phenomenological blank where before there was a rich phenomenal field. Since this person would still enjoy conscious states not of the kind resulting from perception-headaches, visual images, thoughts etc.--he could still be self-aware; so self-awareness does not depend even on seeming perceptions of one's body. These two sorts of case show that awareness of the self is not constituted by awareness of the body. These considerations also refute a weaker version of the thesis that self- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |