Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• In which conditions can a person be constituted and recognize herself as herself?
• What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person? Several answers have been explored by philosophers, - having an individual body, and individual brain, having specific introspective access to one's thoughts. They all turned out to be non-starters. A major reason why they do not work, is that they fail to account in a non-circular way for the fact that a person is inherently both a stable and a changing entity; an entity, furthermore, who knows herself as herself. If the essence of a person is to be an historical object, a “continuant”, it follows that the only ability through which a person can be revealed to herself is memory. Locke gives us the following indication:
• As far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action, so far it is the same personal self. (Essay, II, XXVII, 10)
• Now this identity between a consciousness that “repeats” a past action and the consciousness that accomplished it involves an interesting semantic property. To reach knowledge of oneself as oneself, more than a simple factual identification to an “I then” with an “I now” is required. What is further needed is that the “I” is recognized as the same by himself across these two cases. Let us take for example a memory in which I recall that I visited the Versailles castle. It is not sufficient that the I in “I recall” and the I in “I visited the Versailles castle” happen to refer to the same person. I must in addition know that both tokens of “I” refer to one and the same person, me. Contrast this with the use of the third-person pronoun in the 2 following sentence: “John thinks about his father; he remembers the day when he died”. The first “he” refers to John, the second refers to his father. There is no coreference in the sentence.
• One might think that in the case of “I”, two tokens must necessarily co-refer when they are thought by the same thinker. That it is not necessarily the case, can be seen if you take, for example, two messages of your computer: “I need help”, “I found three answers to your query”. These two instances of “I” clearly do not need to include conscious co-reference: the message is conveyed to you even though your computer has no specific self-representation constituting the unitary framework for the two usages. What applies to the computer may also apply to usages of the first-person pronoun in language-instructed apes, in young children or in patients with neurological disorders. Hector-Neri Castaneda called “quasi-indexical usage”, noted “I*”, the application of the first-person pronoun when there is a recognition of the co-reference between the two tokens of “I” in such contexts as reported above (“oblique contexts”). In I* cases, the subject who forms the belief and the subject to whom a property is attributed (in the belief) are recognized as identical. Without such a capacity to refer through a designator that relates reflexively two contexts with an I-tag, as in “I believe that I did it, that I saw it,” etc., one might acquire types of information that in fact (or implicitly) are about myself, but fail to know explicitly that it is about myself that they are.
• It is thus clear that instantaneous types of self-awareness as can be offered in perceiving or acting cannot suffice to give us access to a self as identical to him/herself over time. As an invariant, a self cannot be reached in a single snapshot. This epistemological claim is related to a corresponding metaphysical claim: a person cannot exist aside from a historical process, such that a sequence of cognitive states allow this or that personal identity to emerge. To be a person, one needs minimally to be conscious of two different things and to bring these two contents together in the same present conscious experience. This kind of co-consciousness involves more than lining up various attributions to myself (for example, "I remember that I visited Versailles Castle; I am now looking at the picture I then took"). It requires a capacity to recognize the identity between the “I” as a conscious subject and the” I” as the topic of a report, a memory, etc.
• If one now decides to offer an account of persons in terms of individual memory, two things have to be done. One consists in examining whether selves are bona fide entities, and, if they are, in showing what they consist in. The other is to explain how one gets access to the self one is, or is supposed to be - without involving any circular reference to a previously introduced self. It is worth briefly recalling Locke’s own claim that conscious memory of prior perception and action constitutes personal identity, and show why it fails to provide the kind of non-circular account we are after. In Locke's “simple memory theory” (as we will call it), being a person simply depends on the continuity of memories that an individual can bring to her consciousness. Even if we don’t recall all the facts of our past lives, memories do overlap, which delineates the extension of a continuing person.