Search

In this thesis, I aim to explore the development of Hume's theory of the self through time. I begin with his scepticism concerning the self in book 1 of the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), expressing his idea that we are simply a bundle of experiences and there is no such thing as the self that we can introspect and identify. I then plot his route to the discovery of the self in book 2 via the passions. I explore his mechanism of sympathy and the role this plays in the mutual construction of pride and the self as well as the double relation of ideas and impressions. Additionally, I suggest that Hume was a narrative theorist, as he placed importance on our whole lives - on our past, present and future, rather than on single, unified acts. I highlight the social nature of the Humean self and show its ability to evolve with the changing times. I find the introduction of social media and the new ways in which we communicate are compatible with Hume's account. We are still able to apply his mechanisms of human nature to the kind of feedback we receive from this wider social sphere. A Humean, sympathetic being feels pride from the positive reactions of others and encapsulates individual instances into a narrative that highlights the emotions. The social self is created by this changing communication platform; moving away from face to face interaction, I will show that the Hume's account of the self is able to survive such change and we should acknowledge its adaptability. I thus detail how Hume's sympathetic mechanisms and the double relation of ideas and impressions relate to the kind of social interactions we have in the online sphere. To my knowledge this is the first study that considers Hume's account of the self in this context.

In this thesis, I provide an account of a certain form of interpersonal self-consciousness and its role in human social life. In Part One, I argue that (i) the feeling of self-consciousness before another’s gaze, (ii) the special form of interpersonal connection constitutive of eye contact and (iii) the form of mutual openness involved in joint attention cannot be understood either as being reducible to the ontologically antecedent psychological states of each individual (as suggested by ‘The Reductive Approach’), nor in terms of an irreducible second person relation (as suggested by ‘The Second Person Approach’). Instead, I outline and defend a ‘Transactional Approach’ according to which, when I feel self-conscious before another’s gaze I am conscious of myself as being acted upon by the other through their gaze (Chapter One). This provides the basis for an account of eye contact as a ‘mutual transaction’ (Chapter Two) and an account of joint attention (Chapter Three). This account of joint attention, in turn, provides a basis for understanding the Aristotelian idea that human social life is distinctive in the way it is characterised by a special form of co-consciousness. In Part Two, this approach is developed to provide an account of humiliation (Chapter Four) and shame (Chapter Five). These emotions tend to be understood in terms of The Reductive Approach. However, in each instance I argue that The Reductive Approach faces serious difficulties in making sense of them and their proper place in human social life. The Transactional Approach, on the other hand, is shown to have the resources to provide a more plausible account of these emotions.

This thesis offers a phenomenological study of self-awareness. I argue that, in its most basic form, self-experience consists of two aspects: affectivity and temporality. I then demonstrate that self-awareness can be primarily either affective or temporal. However, in both of its forms, self-experience remains continuous and unitary. I then suggest that continuous and unitary self-awareness is incompatible with experiences of novelty. I argue that in order to accommodate the new, self-experience must become discontinuous and dislodged. I show that the form of self-awareness can be modified by concrete experiences. I then demonstrate that the experience of responsibility for the other produces a new form of self-awareness - one which is neither continuous nor unitary. Consequently, responsibility, by precipitating the emergence of a new form of self-experience, opens subjectivity to new experiences. In fact, the experience of radical novelty consists of a rediscovery of the other in a responsible attitude. I conclude by arguing that, in contrast to the discontinuous and dislodged subjectivity, the continuous and unitary form of self-awareness is incompatible with responsibility and thus with ethics. The distinction between the forms of self-experience incongruent and congruent with ethics, in turn, allows me to suggest an ethical hierarchy of self-awareness: discontinuous and dislodged self-experience is ethically better than its continuous and unitary counterparts. Subjective life, therefore, oscillates between better and worse forms of self-awareness.

This thesis argues that we have a distinctive way of knowing why we have our attitudes and perform actions. It is often thought that we have no special access of this sort, even if we have privileged access to other facts about ourselves, like what attitudes we hold. I argue that this orthodoxy fails. Rather, we do have a privileged first-person access to a key explanation of our attitudes and actions – the reasons for which we hold/perform them (i.e. our motivating reasons). In providing an account of this, I draw on insights from cognitive science and appeal to both the personal level, where we can talk of the subject herself, and that of low-level processing. I argue that at the low level, self-knowledge indeed resembles other-knowledge. But regarding how the subject herself learns of her motivating reasons, I argue that we use a ‘transparency method’. We learn of what our reason is for believing p, say, by considering what justifies believing p. We look out into the world and consider the good reasons in favour of having that belief. This then allows us to self-ascribe our motivating reason. The final substantive chapter builds on the foregoing to argue that self-knowledge of motivating reasons is distinctive in a further, perhaps surprising, way. Our motivating reasons self-intimate – if we have a motivating reason, then necessarily we will be in a position to know that we have it. Indeed, this is the case even though we can hold attitudes that we are not in a position to know that we hold. Therefore, self-knowledge of motivating reasons not only differs significantly from other-knowledge, but from self-knowledge of attitudes as well.

In this thesis I propose an account of knowledge of one's own mental states. My goal is set on a unified transparency account of self-knowledge. It is unified, because the proposal will account for the generation of beliefs about mental states of all types, regardless of whether they are propositional, non-propositional, experiential or non-experiential. My account will thereby be applicable to knowledge of any mental state, from beliefs and desires to fears, hopes, and sensations such as pain. Moreover, it will be a transparency account because it holds on to Gareth Evans's (1982) observation that self-ascribing mental states is done by attending outwards instead of inwards. There is a sense in which we attend to the world when we find out whether we believe something, and my proposal aims to capture this intuition. The core idea I am exploring is the following: generally, when one produces a first-order mental state, one also forms a corresponding, dispositional second-order belief about that state. Both attitudes share elements of their production, which ensures reliability while retaining fallibility. For instance, when you form a belief 'there is a red car' by perceiving a red car, you also generate the dispositional belief 'I believe that there is a red car,' if everything goes right. I argue that almost all features that make self-knowledge special can be explained with this basic idea. The assumption that the production of a first-order mental state and a second-order belief about the state go hand in hand has surprising explanatory power. Moreover, there are at least no obvious reasons why the assumption should be ruled out. The upshot will be a view that we should take seriously as a contender for an explanation of self-knowledge. I will not be able to conclusively show that it is the best explanation, but I argue that it is one worth thinking about. The thesis is structured in three parts. The first part (chapters 1-3) focuses on the phenomenon of self-knowledge and the transparency idea. These chapters serve as the setup for my later proposed view. Chapter 1 and 2 discuss what exactly we want to explain when we say that we aim to explain self-knowledge. I thereby provide an overview of the conceptual landscape of self-knowledge and argue that we should understand the peculiarity of self-knowledge in terms of features of belief and belief-formation. Moreover, I commit myself to the view that the peculiarity has something to do with our cognitive access to mental states and relate that to the goal of a unified account of self-knowledge. Chapter 3 discusses how we ought to understand the other qualification of my goal: a transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide an overview of transparency accounts in the literature and lay out the path to avoid common problems of transparency accounts. In the second part (chapters 4 and 5) I propose the single process model of self-knowledge as a unified, transparency account of self-knowledge. I provide the core principles of the view and show how it explains the features of self-knowledge I aim to explain. Chapter 4 focuses on attitudes, both propositional and non-propositional. Chapter 5 expands the view to phenomenal states, such as being in pain. The third part (chapters 6 and 7) connects the epistemological discussion of the single process model to research on cognition. Chapter 6 proposes a cognitive story of predictive processing that is compatible with the single process model. I thereby discuss the plausibility of the predictive processing idea and its empirical support. I provide a predictive processing story of self-knowledge that fits with the single process model of self-knowledge. In chapter 7 I discuss extended mental states. Clark & Chalmers (1998) propose that at least some mental states, such as beliefs, can be extended to external devices. Given that my aim is a unified account, I ought to say something about knowledge of these extended beliefs. I argue that they cannot be known by the same processes as non-extended mental states because beliefs about extended beliefs show different features than beliefs about our non-extended states that we formed by introspection. Hence, even if my view cannot account for them this is not a problem, because they are not formed by genuine introspection. Instead, we come to know extended mental states by a distinct process that we might call extended introspection. Finally, chapter 8 provides a brief conclusion of the thesis for and points out some placed that require further development. The account is promising as an explanation of self-belief and self-knowledge, but whether it is correct also depends on future research outside the scope of philosophy.

This thesis explores the discursive environment in which the ‘interdisciplinary self’ is constructed. Interdisciplinarity is part of research policy agendas across the globe; however, there are competing and contrasting discourses about its value. On the one hand, interdisciplinarity is meant to foster innovation and to address contemporary world problems; on the other hand, it represents an intellectual and a professional risk for those who engage in it. Interdisciplinarity has become a research topic in itself, but scholars have not engaged with contemporary literature on ‘the self’ and on expertise. This limits our understanding of the individuals who engage in interdisciplinary research and how they deal with their intellectual and professional challenges. This thesis aims to fill this gap by reviewing literature on expertise and analysing 27 semi-structured interviews with researchers and administrators from a large research-oriented British university. The analysis draws on an approach that focuses on how ‘the self’ is constructed in discourse and biographical narrative, taking up but also resisting widely established meanings (e.g. what is an expert, what is worthwhile professionally, etc.). The analysis identifies in particular four ‘ideological dilemmas’ that the interviewees struggle with in their arguments about their background, their skills, and the value of their careers; namely the dilemmas of ‘openness and rigour’, ‘individualism and collectivism’, ‘disciplinary tolerance and expert prejudice’, and ‘effort and reward’. These dilemmas suggest that the ‘interdisciplinary self’ is performatively and discursively constructed in a rhetorical context in which no position can remain untroubled. Therefore associating interdisciplinary individuals with idealised traits, personalities and ‘virtues’ is not so adequate. It is suggested that ‘interdisciplinary expertise’ consists of the skills of managing these dilemmas, which may be partially but not permanently solved.

This thesis develops a theory of self-knowledge of beliefs that suggests that when the same resources employed to identify other people’s beliefs are applied to oneself then non-interpretive and non-inferential self-knowledge of beliefs results. Like many other accounts, the proposal is based on the transparency of beliefs, i.e. the phenomenon that we can determine whether we believe p by determining whether p. However, it is superior to extant accounts of this kind because it makes the transparency of beliefs intelligible without presupposing any representation of one’s own mind. The account does so by proposing that the transparency of beliefs relies on a combination of practical and theoretical reasoning that, as soon as it has been executed once, remains subsequently implicit or unarticulated in the transition from the result of one’s determining whether p to one’s self-ascription of a belief about p. The transition at issue then leads to non-inferential self-knowledge. I argue that this account of selfknowledge, the implicit dual-reasoning (IDR) theory, is not threatened by the psychological data often taken to undermine the existence of non-interpretive and noninferential self-knowledge of attitudes and can be integrated with a well-supported interpretation-based account of self-knowledge of attitudes in general. On the resulting hybrid view, self-knowledge of attitudes is typically interpretive but beliefs retrievable in conscious thinking remain knowable non-inferentially. Toward the end, I supplement this view with an account of the function of self-knowledge of beliefs. The overall theory of self-knowledge that emerges from the thesis supports a hitherto unexplored picture of the relation between the nature of self-knowledge of beliefs and the nature of other-knowledge of them. It suggests that the existence of transparency-based, noninferential self-knowledge of beliefs is grounded in the prima facie entirely unrelated fact that other people’s beliefs are opaque, i.e. only interpretively accessible, to us.

The philosophical tradition has long understood subjectivity solely in reference to the self's place within the world and the powers of intentional transcendence which open it. Nowhere is this presupposition more apparent than in the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Despite the precise differences among their respective philosophies of transcendence, each understands the self as little else than that which opens the exteriority of a world and is thereby exhausted and determined by it. Against this prevailing assumption that the self is a 'being-in-the-world', I contend that the essence of subjectivity instead consists in the unworldly interiority of life's affective self-revelation. The studies that follow accordingly investigate five related aspects of subjectivity: the irreducibility of the self's individuality to society; the blow of vanity that reveals this inwardness; the resultant life that marshals and in turn deploys it; the power of the work of art to express it; and finally the promise of immortality that sustains it.

The notion that we are essentially conscious beings has a good deal of intuitive appeal, but also gives rise to a number of philosophical problems. As a result of its appeal, and in conjunction with a growing dissatisfaction with reductive accounts of consciousness, a number of experiential accounts of personal identity have been introduced into the relatively recent literature. These accounts offer various analyses of the relationship between consciousness and selfhood in an attempt to overcome the problems faced by adopting such a position. I argue that a correct appreciation of the nature of inner awareness, and experience more generally, entails that the experiential approach is indeed justifiable. Specifically, I argue that the relationship between an experience and its subject necessitates the view that selves are constituted by episodes of consciousness. I then evaluate a number of theories of temporal consciousness and argue that the most promising kind of account has implications concerning our persistence conditions. Subsequently, I argue for a radical account of our nature by defending the resulting ontological claim: selves are streams of consciousness.

In this thesis, I assess the prospects for reconciling content-externalism and crucial guiding intuitions about self-knowledge within two different frameworks, respectively. The first framework belongs to the prominent contemporary externalist, Tyler Burge. The second framework is built from central strands of thought in Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work. I argue that a tension between the basic externalist intuition and crucial guiding intuitions about self-knowledge arises within a Burgean framework which does not arise within a Wittgensteinian framework. I show that given Burge's views about the individuation of mental content, switching a subject slowly between two relevantly dissimilar contexts can undermine knowledgeability of her epistemic reasons. I argue that this is a troubling result, given Burge's views about the sorts of things that epistemic reasons are. On Burge's view, epistemic reasons are rational relations between mental states. If slow-switching can undermine knowledgeability of one's epistemic reasons, then it can undermine knowledgeability of the rational relations between mental states. But the thought that the knowledgeability of the rational relations between mental states might be sensitive to changes in one's context in this way seems at odds with our intuitive picture of self-knowledge. I argue that this tension does not arise within a Wittgensteinian framework because there is evidence that Wittgenstein rejects certain of the claims about the individuation of mental content which generate the tension in Burge's case. The thesis examines the substantive similarities and differences between the Burgean and Wittgensteinian frameworks more generally. In doing so, it maps two contrasting ways in which the basic content-externalist intuition might be elaborated.