Abstract
Recently, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have argued that the Real Self accounts of moral responsibility or autonomy are under pressure because they rely on a questionable conception of self-knowledge of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. In fact, they defend, as a plausible assumption, the claim that transparent self-knowledge of propositional attitudes is incompatible with mounting evidence in the cognitive sciences. In this chapter, we respond to this line of argument. We describe the types of self-knowledge that might plausibly be involved, as psychological prerequisites, in the processes of identification and integration that lead to the constitution of the real self of an agent. We argue that these forms of self-knowledge do not require the type of transparent knowledge of propositional attitudes that, according to King and Carruthers, is incompatible with the results of contemporary cognitive science.
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Notes
- 1.
One of the most important advocates of this view is Harry Frankfurt, who advanced a famous version of this position in Frankfurt 1971. For further refinements of his view, see several of his essays that are collected in Frankfurt 1988b. Another influential advocate of the position is Gary Watson, see Watson 1982a and Watson 2004.
- 2.
- 3.
For elaborations of the notion of identification along these lines, see Moran 2002.
- 4.
Some authors characterize this difference with a distinction concerning the sensed sources of the actions that might be at the basis of minimal conception of a phenomenological self. The sense of ownership is the sense that the agent is causing or generating the action or mental process. The sense of agency is the sense that the agent is the one who is causing or generating an action. On this distinction, see Gallagher 2000. However, although the sense of agency might be a prerequisite for the real self, we are going to argue that processes involving explicit reasoning must be involved as well. Probably, these processes would fall under what Shaun Gallagher and others call the “narrative self”.
- 5.
- 6.
For a systematic treatment and defense of the global broadcast hypothesis, see Baars 1988.
- 7.
- 8.
Neil Levy, in Levy 2012, offers a quite similar line of argument to defend the consistency of Real Self views with the hypothesis that there are no conscious propositional attitudes. However, he maintains that self-ascription of propositional attitudes is enabled by our being conscious of their propositional content. We think that this is too strong a requirement that, in any case, is not compatible with King and Carruthers’s position. We are instead exploiting the central thesis in the ISA theory that the same mindreading faculty operates in self-attributions and in attributions of mental states to others.
- 9.
For a discussion of current experimental literature on confabulated decisions, intentions, and judgements and how it relates to the ISA theory, see Carruthers 2011, pp. 339–345.
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Marko Jurjako for reading and commenting on previous versions of this chapter. We presented and discussed some of the ideas in this chapter at the conference Contemporary Philosophical Issues: Society, Agency and Knowledge, Rijeka (Croatia), 24-25/05/2016, many thanks to the organizers and participants. The Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) funds our research that is a part of the project: Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO), grant n. 8071.
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Malatesti, L., Čeč, F. (2018). Identification and Self-Knowledge. In: Pedrini, P., Kirsch, J. (eds) Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 96. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98646-3_10
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