Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
"... for a criticism of Nagel... see" Perry?
I don't think of it as a criticism, but rather an analysis. The lasr line (or two) of the chapter is a particularly nice way to end the analysis I think. And if anyone (@Usual Suspect, @Soupie maybe) still doubts WIIAMANSE I recommend Perry. Quite entertaining too.!
Beliw: Text I have noted for my own benefit ... read it should you wish not to read it all:
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As I write this, I see a specific hand guides a specific pen across a specific page at a specific time and place. The hand belongs to John Perry---JP for short---one among the billions of persons who exist. I have a rather special relationship to JP, one which I can express by saying "I am JP." He is the one and only one among all the persons who ever have existed or will exist, who happens to be me. It is natural to take the special relationship to be identity; there is just one thing, one entity, one metaphysical unit, that is both the person I call "me" and the person I am calling "JP." We are the same not only in this possible world but in every possible world that one could describe or imagine, for there is only one thing to imaginatively project into different circumstances. So it seems that I am necessarily JP, and could be no other person.
...the thought "I am John Perry" is true when I think it, but false
when you do. But...I am John Perry. This is some sort of fact; if not an objective fact, then what kind of fact is it?
[Criticism maybe?]
I like Nagel's suggested sense for philosophical uses of "I," but not his suggestion of a new reference. I think of myself as saving Nagel's insight from his metaphysics.ii
We can imagine there is a sort of pattern-matching with attributes of the newly presented objects and objects about which one already has information. When there are enough important matches, the two are identified. The problem is rather with what recognition means; the sense of identity, and in particular, the sense of self, of identity with the person doing the
identifying. What possible worlds does this identification exclude? What fact about the world does it represent? What fact is it, the grasping of which constitutes recognition?
According to Nagel, for each person there is an objective self, which is contingently related to that person. So for TN there is an objective self, we can call it "OSTN." And for me there is one, we can call it "OSJP." These objective selves have no specific location in space and time, but they do have a special though contingent relationship to the body of the person whose objective self they are. When one has the philosophical thought, "I am TN" or "I am JP," the "I" has the sense "the subject of this objective representation," and stands for one's objective self. It is very difficult to see how the postulation of objective selves provides any solution whatsoever to the original problem. Part of that problem was to find what to add to our objective representation of the world, to correspond to the fact that TN discovers, when he discovers that he is TN. Now we can add our objective selves to the representation, and it doesn't seem to help at all
Are there then somehow different facts corresponding to the two formulations, "the subject of ICJP is JP" and "the subject of this impersonal conception is JP" ?
There are. But to find them, and put Nagel's insight into a place where we can say why it works, we need to get less profound for a while.
Notions are ideas we have of things, and self-notions are ones that are tied to the epistemic and pragmatic methods tied to identity. The self-notion is the repository of information picked up in self-informative ways, and the motivator of self-effecting actions. I said that my self-knowledge involves my self-notion, and is to be distinguished from mere knowledge of the person I happen to be. When I was sitting on the curb reading John Perry's business card, I had knowledge about John Perry, the person I happened to be. Self-recognition consisted in linking that idea of John Perry with my self-notion; I came to believe not only that John Perry worked at Stanford, but that I did. Before the episode of self-recognition I believed the proposition that John Perry worked at Stanford, and this is what I believed after the episode. But I believed it in a different way. Call my self-notion selfJP . My later belief can be true only if selfJP belongs to someone who works at Stanford. That is the reflexive content of my belief, and it is this that changed when I recognized who I was.
What then is the sense of identity, of self, in this kind of situation? It is the complex of epistemic and pragmatic relationships that are most closely and firmly tied to the self-buffer.
The core of our self-concepts, our sense of identity, our sense for "I," is as the knower of facts about objects that are playing agent-relative roles with respect to us, and the agent of actions that are done agent-relative ways. I am the possessor and controller of these hands; the subject of these sensations; the maker of these movements; the sufferer of these pains; and so forth. Since only we can attend to our own inner sensations and thoughts, and only we can see our bodies and things around us from our perspective, it is natural to use the demonstrative "this" to express the aspects of our self-concept.
My view of our self-concepts is something like a cluster version of Russell's hidden description theory of the self, in that I think we have a cluster of things in our self-concept, which are weighted in their importance to us. The most important and inseparable from us are the things in our own mental life that we can attend to and think of with an internally directed "this." In spite of this similarity with hidden description and cluster theories, however, my view is quite different on the crucial matters of reference and truth. My self-notion is a notion of me because it is my self-notion; that is, (a) it is a self-notion, one whose informational role is as the repository of information gotten in normally self- informative ways, and that motivates normally self-directed actions; (b) it is mine. It is of me even if it is full of false stuff. My self-concept or self-file, the notion together with the ideas associated with it, is of me because the notion is of me, not because I am uniquely denoted, or denoted at all, by the combination of ideas.
[@smcder on multiple personality disorder search:] "This isn't a problem for the my account for two reasons. First, unlike Russell, I'm not trying to build up a hierarchical account of our knowledge with self-knowledge somewhere near the bottom. I'm as sure that I am the only person having my sensations as I am that I am the only person with my body and brain...."
The picture is this. There is a certain way of believing things, that involves the self-notion. It is a species of attached beliefs, beliefs that involve the kinds of notions I call buffers, that are tied to epistemic/pragmatic relations. What is special about these notions, and the beliefs that contain them, is the way they work, the way they are connected to our perceptual and motor systems. So the beliefs that involve these notions will have subject-matter content, but also they will have a different information handling role, and hence a different causal role, than other beliefs with the same content.
Since I am John Perry, there is just one person, one thing, one metaphysical being, that is both John Perry and I. When I take John Perry and myself to another possible world, I take only one thing. So I can't very well manage to find a possible world in which I am there, and he is not, or I am there, and he is there, but I am not he. Identity is a necessary relation; if a and b are one in any world, they are not two in any world.
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