Campbell, John (2012) - Lichtenberg and the Cogito (12p)

7/28/2019 Campbell, John (2012) - Lichtenberg and the Cogito (12p)

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LICHTENBERG AND THE COGITOJOHN CAMPBELL

Draft paper to be read at the 2012 Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society & the Mind Association.The final version will be published in the third issue of the 2012 Proceedings of the Aristotelian

Society.

AbstractOur use of I, or something like it, is implicated in our self-regarding emotions, inthe concern to survive, and so seems basic to ordinary human life. But why doesthat pattern of use require a referring term? Dont Lichtenbergs formulationsshow how we could have our ordinary pattern of use here without the first person?I argue that what explains our compulsion to regard the first person as a referringterm is our ordinary causal thinking, which requires us to find a persisting objectas the mechanism that underpins the causal structure we naturally ascribe to theself. I thus argue against Peacockes picture, on which its the cogito that explains

ones knowledge of ones own existence.

1. Transmission of Knowledge in the Cogito

Christopher Peacocke is concerned to establish the epistemic interest of the cogito.In particular, he wants to show that the cogito can be used to generate knowledgeof ones own existence: as youd put it, knowledge that I exist. He wants toshow that the transitions in the cogito lead to knowledge, that the cogito isknowledge-yielding. As he explains it, the cogito involves an initial state and twotransitions from it:

First, Descartes engages in(1)a particular conscious thinking;

second, he moves from this conscious event to the judgment(2)I am thinking;

third, from (2) he infers(3)I exist.

(2012, 110)

The idea is that these transitions are not just sound, in that its not metaphysicallypossible to go wrong in making such a transition, but epistemically significant, inthat they explain how knowledge of the conclusion is generated. I dont myself seethat this is how knowledge of ones own existence is generated, and Ill try to setout what I take to be the key questions here. Then Ill look at Peacockes reasonsfor saying that the transitions are not just sound, but epistemically significant.

I think its helpful here to consider a parallel with the case of perceptualdemonstratives. There are two reasons for this. One is that perceptualdemonstratives are easier to understand theoretically than the first person. In someways they have more complexity, but they are not as flat-out confusing as the firstperson. Second, and relatedly, we tend to have perceptual demonstratives at the


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back of our minds as a model for understanding the first person. So its helpful tobe explicit about just where the parallels and contrasts are.

How do we know of the existence of the particular concrete objects we seearound us? Using the model of the cogito, we might suppose that it goessomething like this:

First, you have(1a) a visual perception of the object;

second, you move from this conscious event to the judgment(2a) that man is smoking;

third, from (2a) you infer(3a) that man exists.

Does this kind of reasoning explain how knowledge of the existence of a perceivedobject is established? On first encountering this question, there are two conflictingreactions that I think its natural to have. One is that it gets things round thewrong way to suppose that you know of that mans existing on the basis of yourknowledge that hes smoking. Rather, knowing that he exists is a precondition ofyour knowing that hes smoking. (Similarly, you might argue that knowing ofyour own existence is a precondition of knowing that youre thinking.) The other,conflicting reaction is that it is only on the basis of some properties he seems tohave that you can have singled out a particular man at all. Perhaps smoking isnot the best example of a property that allowed you to single him out in the firstplace, but presumably there are such properties, and isnt your knowledge that hehad them what generates your knowledge of his existence? (Similarly, you mightargue that its your knowledge of your own thinking that allows you to singleyourself out in the first place, so your knowledge of your own existence has to bedependent on your knowledge of your own thinking.)

Now in the case of perceptual demonstratives (and also in the case of the

first person) the first of these reactions seems to me correct, and the secondmistaken. Its true that we have to single out perceived objects on the basis ofproperties we perceive them to have. But it doesnt follow that we must know theobjects to have those properties.

There are two different roles that properties can play in visual perception ofobjects. They can be used as the basis on which one selects an object to which toattend. And they can figure as the aspects of the attended object that we areaccessing. (I take the terminology here from Huang and Pashler 2007). Suppose,for example, that you are out hunting, and you spot a tiger on the veldt. Then itmay well be that it is on the basis of its color that you have been able to see thething against its background. It doesnt follow that you have attended to the coloritself; all that you are concerned about, after all, is the presence of the tiger, and

classifying its color is of no interest to you. You can use a property as the basis onwhich you identify an object without knowing that the object has that property.This seems obvious if you think about the tigers ability to spot you. The tiger hassome rudimentary color vision, and the whole point of its color vision is to allowthe animal to differentiate objects from their backgrounds; here color vision maybe entirely instrumental for object perception. The animal may have no interestwhatever in color for its own sake, so it may be quite incapable of accessing thecolors of objects.


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It cant even be said that when you identify an object using some suchproperty as color, and form the judgment that it is, say, a tiger, that you aremaking some implicit assumption as to the color of the thing. Even if there issomething unusual about the lighting, or something wrong with your color vision,still, so long as, one way or another, it has managed to differentiate the objectfrom its background, it doesnt matter for your claim to know that the thing is a

tiger. Pointing out that your color vision was unreliable would not undermineyour claim to knowledge that this is a tiger.

So in the case of perceptual demonstratives, it seems to be a mistake tosuppose that knowledge of the properties of the object must underpin your abilityto identify the object in the first place. It does also seem to be true that yourperceptual knowledge of the various properties of the objects depends on anantecedent, implicit assumption of the existence of the thing. When you useperception to access various properties of a single thing, the perceptual techniquesyou are using all operate on the implicit assumption that the thing exists. Thewhole business of keeping track of an object over time, viewing it from differentangles, perhaps through different sense-modalities, depends on an implicitassumption that the thing exists. In the absence of the assumption that the thingexists, the thing could not function to organize the ways in which perception iscollecting information about the world. If you thought that there were, forexample, only a series of random, transient shadows and reflections in front of you,then you could not organize your perceptions so that they could generatepropositional knowledge of a single thing. The visual system is an object-detector.When it has found an object it operates on the assumption that there is a singlething there, in order to determine its characteristics. And you lean on thatassumption of existence when you rely in vision in making propositionaljudgments about the object. Suppose then that we consider again our transitions,from:

(1a) a visual perception of the object; to(2a) that man is smoking; to(3a) that man exists.

If what I have said so far is right, we should not think of knowledge of (3a) asbeing generated on the basis of knowledge of (2a). Although perception of theproperties of the thing may be required to identify it in the first place, it doesntfollow that knowledge of the properties of the thing is required for one to identifyit. So that positive motivation for thinking that knowledge of existence dependson knowledge of properties seems to be mistaken. Moreover, the use of (1a) togenerate the propositional knowledge (2a) already depends on the assumption thatthe object exists. So its difficult to see how (1a) and (2a) could be regarded as

generating knowledge of (3a), the existence of the thing.Lets go back now to the cogito. Can it be regarded as explaining how you

know of your own existence? The picture I would recommend here is thatknowledge of your own existence is already required for the transition from (1)having a particular conscious thought, to (2) knowledge that you are thinking.The argument is that regarding (1) the mere having of a conscious thought, aswarranting (2) the judgment that one is thinking, already presupposes that one


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exists. The transition from (1) to (2) therefore cannot be thought of as groundingor explaining ones knowledge of ones own existence.

I think that resistance to this idea is likely to come from the suspicion thatknowledge of some of ones own properties is going to be needed if one is toidentify the thing, the self, at all. And if thats so, then knowledge of ones ownpsychological properties is a natural starting-point. As Ive just said, though, even

in the case of a perceptual demonstrative, it doesnt seem to be true that knowledgeof the properties of a thing is needed in order for one to identify it. And in anycase, the identification of the self seems to work in a quite different way to theidentification of a perceived object. In the case of identification of the self, there isno need to differentiate the object from its background. One easy way to see thisis to suppose that you do have a perceptual or quasi-perceptual way of delineatingthe self as figure from ground. Suppose you express it by the term, that one. Itwill still make sense to ask the question, But is that one me?. First-personalreference to the self is being achieved by the operation of the token-reflexive rule,that any token of I refers to whoever produced it. The operation of this rule isdifferent to any mode of identification that depends on the self being delineated asfigure from ground.

We do know of our own existence, and there is therefore a question as tohow we do know of our own existence. I am saying that the cogito does notanswer the question, it does not explain how it is that one knows of ones ownexistence. Peacocke makes two points which he says are enough to explain whythe transitions in the cogito lead to knowledge:

(a) Its in the nature of the concept thinking that anyone who has it takes theirown conscious thinking as conclusive reason for self-applying the concept.

(b) if someone judges a content on grounds that are, as a matter of the natureof one or more concepts in the content, conclusive grounds for judging thecontent, then the content so judged is knowledge.

(2012, 120-121)

The trouble with these principles is that they do not allow us to distinguish thecase in which the possession of knowledge is explained by a transition that is, thecase in which engaging in a transition is what generates the knowledge from thecase in which having engaged in the transition is merely sufficient for one to havethe knowledge, because the knowledge is a precondition of ones having been ableto regard the transition as warranted. Consider the idea that its in the nature ofthe concept of thinking that one who has it should be able to self-ascribe thoughts.That seems quite plausible, if we assume that the person who has the concept ofthinking also has the concept of the self, the concept they would express using I,or something similar. But that possession of the concept of the self may already

require that one knows of ones own existence. So if you engage in the transitionsof the cogito, we can be confident that you know of your own existence. But thatis not the same thing as saying that the cogito explains how that you know of yourown existence.

Another way to put the same point is this. Suppose you are genuinely open-minded about your own existence. And then you are struck by a consciousthought. Its hard to see how you could regard yourself as having the right tomove from that to I am thinking. At best, you might say something like, I am


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thinking, if there is any such person. Or better, one might use the kind offormulation proposed by Lichtenberg: there is thinking (Lichtenberg 1990, 168).But from such a step, you evidently couldnt get to the conclusion of the cogito, thejudgment that you yourself exist.

I think that Peacockes response to this is, in effect, that the intermediateposition envisaged by Lichtenberg isnt available. Either one doesnt have the

concept thinking at all, in which case one obviously cant use formulations likethere is thinking. Or else one does have the concept thinking, in which case onemust have the capacity to self-ascribe thoughts using the first person. Even if thisresponse is correct, of course, it doesnt rescue the claim of the cogito to explainhow one knows of ones own existence. It only shows that the situation is evenworse than Lichtenberg envisaged: if one is in the position of trying to groundknowledge of ones own existence, then one cant even recognize thinking whenone does it. But the postulated dependence of the concept of thinking on the firstperson seems worth looking at further.

2. Use vs. Reference for the First Person

I want to look at this question in a slightly broader context. There are two aspectsto our ordinary understanding of the first person, and the puzzle is to understandthe relation between them. One aspect, and much the most striking, is the patternof use that we make of the first person. By this I mean the inferences, and moregenerally, the transitions in thought that we make that involve the first person. Sopatterns of use will include the ways in which you make first-person judgmentsabout your own location on the basis of perception, and the ways in which you acton the basis of first-person judgments and intentions. But it includes a lot more,much of what we regard as most distinctively human about our ways of thinking.It includes your ways of thinking about your own past and future, and the way in

which the first person is embedded in many of our most basic concerns and desires,all the self-regarding emotions such as pride or shame, and the concern to survive.The second aspect of our ordinary understanding of the first person is that

we take it to be a referring term. As its sometimes put, having a first-personperspective on the world depends on grasping the possibility of there being a third-person perspective on one. More prosaically, we might say that an understandingof the first person depends on understanding the possibility of there beinginformative identities involving the first person.

The key question is, what is the relation between these two aspects of yourunderstanding of the first person, your grasp of the pattern of use and yourknowledge of the reference of the sign? A Lichtenbergean approach gives us a wayof posing the question quite sharply. Couldnt there be a language in which there

is has a similar pattern of use to that we have for the first person, but theres norelated referring term? So, for example, I could make present-tense psychologicaljudgments like, there is toothache, in the same way that I currently make first-person judgments like I have toothache. As we ordinarily use it, I seems to be areferring term. The natural question raised by Lichtenbergs challenge is why onecouldnt have a way of reporting ones own thoughts that did not require the useof a referring term.


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In Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein recommended using Lichtenbergeanformulations to replace the first person in reports of immediate experience. Hesaid,

We could adopt the following way of representing matters: if I, L.W., havetoothache, then that is expressed by means of the proposition There is

toothache.(Philosophical Remarks, 58)

It would be possible to do this and still use proper names to ascribe psychologicalstates to other people, and that seems to be what Wittgenstein had in mind.Although he doesnt put it this way, the simplest way of getting the effect would beto say, N.N. has toothache if in the same psychological state as L.W. when there istoothache. Now when discussing Lichtenberg, Peacocke emphasizes the need forreports of psychological state to be relativized. But what Wittgensteins exampleshows is that you can have relativization, and indeed relativization to persons,without first-personal reference. You can make the distinction between N.N. hastoothache, and there is toothache. You use formulations of the form, there is. only in reporting the states of one particular person, namely yourself. But itdoesnt follow that you are referring to that person. An analogy might be helpful.Its possible to talk about the time of day without so much as having theconception of a time zone. You can talk about morning, noon and night, forexample, or particular numerically identified times, such as 5 oclock, without everhaving realized that there are time zones other than your own. When you specifythe time of day at which something happened, you are specifying the time relativealways to some particular time-zone, namely, the one you occupy. It doesntfollow that you are referring to that time-zone. You can, of course, learn abouttime-zones. And when you do that, you can refer to those time-zones and specifytimes relative to them. But you can still keep in play your original language, in

which you talk about times without making reference to any time-zone at all. Infact, thats what most of us do.I said that there are two aspects to our understanding of the first person.

One is the distinctive pattern of use. The other is our understanding of the firstperson as a referring term. Now on the face of it, we could have all of ourordinary pattern of use in the Lichtenbergean language, without having the firstperson as a referring term.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that the use of the first person isessential to our ordinary thinking. Recall Perrys example. Pushing a supermarkettrolley around a supermarket, you realize that some shopper is pouring sugar ontothe floor. It takes a while to realize that its not someone else who is doing this.You express your realization by saying, I am making a mess. This is intended to

exhibit the indispensability of the first person (Perry 1993). But wouldnt it havebeen possible to report this by using a Lichtenbergean There is making a mess?When one ascribes making a mess to other people, one does so using a propername or other referring term. Otherwise, one says simply, There is making amess, and this has all the usual consequences, whatever they are, for ones sense ofresponsibility for the action, willingness to clear it up and so on.

Tyler Burge extended Perrys point to the psychological. To bring out theparallel, suppose you find some philosophical argument scribbled on a piece of


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paper. You read it through and realize that the writer is seriously confused, theposition endorsed is actually contradictory. You wonder if you should track downthe author and clear up this confusion. You do have a choice about this. But thenthe alleged indispensability of the first person shows up when you ask how toexpress the moment of realization, when it strikes you that the writing is your ownand does indeed express your own long-held beliefs. Then you think, I am the one

who is confused. In the light of this first-personal realization, you have no optionbut to begin to sort out your thinking, to clear things up.

Burges argument is that a full understanding of thought and reasonrequires not just that you be able to register the occurrence of thinking andevaluate it critically, but that you should be able to recognize those cases in whichit is rationally immediate that your evaluation of the thinking enjoins shaping itin accord with the rational evaluation (1998, 257). And it is for this purpose,he thinks, that the first person is essential (257-258).

The trouble with that line of thought is this. Suppose we acknowledge thata full understanding of what thought is does demand that one recognize thedistinction between cases in which ones evaluation of the thinking has immediateconsequences for ones ongoing engagement with that thinking, and cases in whichengagement is optional. We as yet have no explanation of why this distinction hasto be marked by means of a referring term, such as I. Burge merely remarks thatwe do in fact mark this distinction with the use of I, and that I does in fact seemto be a referring term (258-259). In the absence of an explanation for why it hasto be a referring term that fills this role, the possibility is open that it could beLichtenbergean formulations themselves that have this special role, connecting theevaluation of thinking with an immediate rational demand to engage with thethinking itself so as to shape it in line with the evaluation. In a Lichtenbergeanlanguage you could reflect on your thoughts and conclude, for example, there isconfusion, which would have all the usual consequences, whatever they are, forones sense of responsibility over the confusion, ones attempting to clarify thought,

and so on.This point applies quite generally. Consider, for example, the self-regarding emotions, such as pride or shame. If you behaved badly, shouting atthat child on the bus, for example, you might think, there was shouting at thatchild, and as a consequence, feel all the shame you would now experience onthinking, I shouted at that child. If you did particularly well, behavinghandsomely to the person who beat you at something, for instance, you mightthink, there was losing gallantly, and feel the sense of pride you would now feelon thinking, I lost gallantly. Or bitter resentment, or whatever.

On this picture, the pattern of use associated with the there is locutionis the same as the pattern of use associated with the first person, only there is noreference to an object with there is .. In the case of the first person, we have

that pattern of use, and we also have reference to a particular object. But these areindependent aspects of our understanding of the first person.

The point of raising this position is not to present it as a philosophical result,but to consider the challenge it presents. If you dont believe this position, theproblem is to explain why not. I think thats really the problem raised byLichtenbergs comment. What does the pattern of use of the first person have todo with its role as a referring term?


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So far, Ive been putting the point in modal terms: it would be possible tohave the pattern of use that we associate with I associated instead with there is,so that we could have the pattern of use without singular reference. In the end,though, the key question here is not a modal one. The key question is aboutexplanation, about what explains what. Even if you have a strong intuition thatits not, in the end, possible to have the pattern of use without first-personal

reference, the question is, why is that? What work does the reference of the termdo in generating the pattern of use for the term? Is there, for example, some wayin which your use of I has to be grounded in your knowledge of the reference ofthe term?

3. The Self as a Thing

Someone once said to a friend of mine, You cant really believe that when you die,thats it, you dont exist any longer. No-one really thinks that. I think it is worthreflecting on what is going on when people make such remarks. There arecertainly many people who do think like that, who find the idea that I will survivephysical death, absolutely compelling. Similarly, there are people who find absurdthe idea that they came into existence only with their physical birth. For thesepeople, its compelling that I existed before I was born. Now when people makethese remarks, one analysis of what is going on is that in introspection, they findthemselves confronted with what appears to be a sempiternal soul, and that this iswhat grounds those claims to continuing existence. But I dont think thats apersuasive analysis; Hume was surely right that there is no such encounter inintrospection (1739/1978, I.iv.vi.). The situation seems to be rather that for thesepeople, the compulsion to believe in surviving physical death is not grounded inanything else. If they believe in an immortal non-physical soul, it is because theyare looking for an object that meets that condition of survival, can find no suitable

physical object, and so conclude that the thing must be immaterial. The use thatthey are making of the first person is not grounded in their knowledge of itsreference. Rather, the use comes first, and it guides the attempt to find the thingthe term refers to.

I mention these cases because it seems reasonably clear what is going on inthem. But I want to suggest that this is in fact the general case with our use of thefirst person. Most of us do, like Descartes, have a compelling yen to think, I exist,but that is not grounded in knowledge of the reference of the term. Our yen tojudge I exist is simply one member of a larger family: our core use of the firstperson including, for example, the complex weave of self-regarding emotions thatwe have, including pride and shame and the concern to survive. This wholepattern of use is not grounded in our knowledge of reference. It is fundamental to

human life, but it is not rationally supported by something else.In Derek Parfits writings on the self we do find a serious attempt to ground

the pattern of use for I in the identification of a thing as its referent. Parfit saysthat most of us are non-reductionists about the self, that we believe that ourcontinued existence is a deep further fact, distinct from physical and psychologicalcontinuity (Parfit 1984, 281). Parfit says that belief in a Cartesian Ego is the best-known version of this view (275). According to Parfit, taking I to refer to aCartesian Ego is a ground for our ordinary pattern of use for I, our immersion in


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self-regarding emotions, the concern to survive, and so on. But things changewhen you move to a reductionist view, on which continued existence just involvesphysical and psychological continuity. Then there is still a difference between mylife and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer.I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about thelives of others. (281). Now this contrast seems to me overdrawn. It is true that

when you identify the self third-personally, as a mere collection of brain, body,experiences, and causal relations between them, then the question: Why careparticularly about that? seems forceful. But exactly the same is true if you identifya Cartesian Ego third-personally, as merely one unit of ghostly stuff among many.The question, Why care particularly about that? is equally forceful in this case.

The fact is that for ordinary humans, our ordinary pattern of use for I hasa visceral grip on us, and that grip is not grounded in knowledge of what the termstands for. Thats not to say that there cant be variation among people, or changein a single person across time, in exactly how I figures in ones thinking andreasoning. But this kind of variation and change, while it can certainly be aresponse to reflection, is in a sense intra-mural. It is a matter of weighing andbalancing the various conflicting forces that are all there already in our ordinaryuse of the first person.

There is then a question as to why we should think of the first person as areferring term at all. Should we not just take the pattern of use, and let go the ideathat there is reference here? I think that we actually do, in our ordinary thinking,have quite a serious commitment to the idea that I refers, even though ourknowledge of reference is not what grounds our use of I. Let me first remark thatour pattern of use of the first person is heavily invested in the idea that the self iscausally significant. We think of the later self as causally depending on the earlierself. We think of memories as causally dependent on earlier perceptions andactions. We think of the later physical condition of the self as causally dependenton its earlier condition and activities. If we summarize the total later

characteristics of the self as Y, and the total earlier characteristics of the self as X,then we can say that X causes Y. But this is only the beginning of the ways inwhich we think of the self as causally significant. Other ways in which we think ofthe self as causally significant are displayed by the sense of responsibility for onesactions highlighted by Perry, or the capacity for shaping of ones own reasoningdiscussed by Burge. Or again, a psychological engagement with the social worlddemands the idea of oneself as causally engaged with other people, acting on themand responding to them. I suggest that our ordinary thinking about I as areferring term involves an application to this special network of causal relations anidea that we ordinarily have about causation quite generally. I want to spend alittle time laying out this point about the framework of our ordinary thinkingabout causation, and then return to the special case of persons.

One aspect of our ordinary notion of causation has to do with what makesa difference to what. For X to be a cause of Y is, roughly, for it to be the case thathad something happened to make a difference to X, there would have been adifference in Y (cf. Woodward 2003 for a worked-out development of this idea).Randomized controlled trials, to determine whether, for example, chlorine in thewater supply prevents tooth decay, illustrate this way of thinking about causation.The trials establish the truth of counterfactuals about what would happen werechlorine to be put into the water supply. There is, however, another strand in our


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thinking about causation. If youre told that chlorine in the water supply doesmake a difference to dental health, a natural question is, Whats the mechanism?.It is not easy, and perhaps not possible, to give a fully general analysis of thenotion of a mechanism. But there are some prototypical cases of mechanisms.The very simplest case of a mechanism is the continued existence of a singlephysical object. We think of concrete objects as the prototypical mechanisms by

which causal influence is transmitted over time, and we think of the movement ofconcrete objects as the prototypical mechanism by which causal influence istransmitted from place to place. Suppose that you have two oil heaters, one atplace A and the other at place B. You switch on the one at place A, and theres nochange in the temperature of the air at A. There is, however, a rise in thetemperature in the air at B. Suppose we establish through repeated trials that thisis not just a correlation, switching the thing on at place A always makes adifference to the temperature at B. This is a puzzling phenomenon, and needssome further explanation. As Ive described it so far, we have here some kind ofaction at a distance that calls out for further explanation. In contrast, consider thecase in which you have a heater at place A. You switch it on, and move it to placeB. There is now a rise in temperature at place B. There is nothing puzzling aboutthis. The movement of the heater itself is the mechanism by which causal influencewas transmitted from A to B. This is a simple example, but it illustrates thepervasive idea that when X makes a difference to Y, there must be somemechanism by which it does it, and that in the simplest cases, that mechanism is asingle concrete object. Concrete objects are the prototypical mechanisms for thetransmission of causal influence.

Consider now the various causal patterns in which the self is implicated: insocial causation, interaction with ones environment, and the transmission ofcausal influence over time. We could think of the self as a difference-makingcausal structure, entirely defined by patterns of counterfactual dependence. But Ithink thats not usually how we think of the reference of I. We think of the

person as one of the prototypical mechanisms that sustain these counterfactualstructures. I said that the usual pattern of use of the first person, with itsarticulation as a social, environmentally engaged, temporally extended difference-making structure has a visceral grip on us. But so too does the idea that there mustbe a single concrete thing that is the mechanism sustaining that structure. Thatsthe source of the idea that there must be a non-physical soul. Its not that we aresomehow subject to the illusion that we are, in some perceptual or quasi-perceptual way, encountering such a thing. Ordinary introspection does notprovide any illusion of an encounter with a non-physical soul. The source of theidea is elsewhere. Im suggesting that it is provided by (a) the ordinary pattern ofuse of the first person, which includes, amongst many other self-regardingemotions, the compelling impulse to suppose not only that we currently exist but

that we can survive physical death, and (b) the demand that the person be regardedas a single concrete object sustaining this difference-making structure. There seemsto be no physical object that could sustain that role, so we are driven to supposethat it must be a non-physical thing, the soul. Of course, many people now findthis hypothesis of a non-physical soul incredible, but that really presents a problem.We now have to resist the natural idea that one can survive physical death, and wedo have to find a physical object that can be regarded as the concrete objectconstituting the mechanism that sustains the difference-making structure. There is


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no guarantee that we will be able to find such a thing, though the human animal isnot a bad candidate.

On the picture I am recommending, there is an insight in the cogito, namelythat there is a distinctive tie between the self-ascription of psychological states andones knowledge of the self. The connection is that what differentiates the selffrom other concrete objects is that we think of the self as the enduring mechanism

that sustains a number of difference-making patterns that involve psychological,and not only physical states. But that is all. We cannot regard knowledge of onesown psychological states as somehow grounding ones knowledge of ones ownexistence, because it is only ones knowledge of ones own existence that allowsone to regard ones own psychological states as providing a warrant for theirascription to oneself. Rather, the yen to ascribe existence to oneself is simply oneamong many aspects of the pattern of use of the first person that humans findcompelling. We do regard ourselves as taking on a commitment with this patternof use, namely, to find a single concrete object that can sustain that causalstructure. This is, I have suggested, an aspect of our more general causal reasoning.And there is no a priori guarantee that there is such a thing.


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REFERENCES

Burge, Tyler. 1998. Reason and the First Person. In Wright, Crispin, Barry C.Smith and Cynthia Macdonald (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Huang, Liqiang and Harold Pashler. 2007. A Boolean Map Theory of VisualAttention. Psychological Review 114, 599-631.

Hume, David. 1739/1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Lichtenberg, George Christoph. 1990. Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale,London and New York: Penguin Classics.

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Peacocke, Christopher. 2012. Descartes Defended. Proceedings of theAristotelian Society Supplementay Volume LXXXVI, 109-125.

Perry, John. 1993. The Problem of the Essential Indexical. In The Problem ofthe Essential Indexical and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1975. Philosophical Remarks. Edited by Rush Rhees;translated by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White. Oxford: Blackwell.

Woodward, James. 2003. Making Things Happen: A Theory of CausalExplanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Campbell, John (2012) - Lichtenberg and the Cogito (12p)