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Kant and the Significance of Self-Consciousness

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Kant and the Significance of Self-Consciousness KANT AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS by Matthew Brendan Boyle B.A., Social Studies and Philosophy, Harvard University, 1994 B.Phil., Philosophy, Oxford University, 1996 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2005 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Matthew Brendan Boyle It was defended on August 30, 2005 and approved by Robert Brandom, Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy Stephen Engstrom, Associate Professor of Philosophy Michael Thompson, Associate Professor of Philosophy James Conant, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago Dissertation Director: John McDowell, University Professor of Philosophy ii KANT AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS Matthew Boyle, Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh, 2005 Human beings who have mastered a natural language are self-conscious creatures: they can think, and indeed speak, about themselves in the first person. This dissertation is about the significance of this capacity: what it is and what difference it makes to our minds. My thesis is that the capacity for self-consciousness is essential to rationality, the thing that sets the minds of rational creatures apart from those of mere brutes. This, I argue, is what Kant was getting at in a famous passage of his Critique of Pure Reason, when he claimed that a representation which could not be “accompanied with the ‘I think’” would be “nothing to me” as a thinking being. I call this claim the Kantian thesis. My dissertation seeks to explain and defend the Kantian thesis, to show how it entails that the advent of self-consciousness brings with it a new kind of mind, and to sketch the implications of this point for a philosophy of mind that seeks to understand the minds of rational creatures. This involves, on the one hand, an investigation of the kinds of capacities that characterize a rational creature, and, on the other hand, an argument connecting reason with self-consciousness. I show that a rational creature, in the interesting sense, is one capable of conceptual representation, and I argue that (1) to represent conceptually is to represent in a way that decouples information from any particular context or purpose, (2) this special form of representation is possible only in a creature that can reflect explicitly on grounds for judging a proposition true, and (3) to have this capacity to reflect explicitly on grounds is necessarily to have the crux of self- consciousness. If this is right, then the representations of a rational creature must differ from those of a nonrational creature not merely in complexity but in kind. The dissertation sketches the implications of this point for various forms of naturalism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind, for debates about how to explain “first person authority,” and for our understanding of the sort of failure of self-consciousness involved in self-deception. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ........................................................................................................................................................ vi INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................................................1 1. Rationality as an aspect of human nature ...................................................................................... 2 2. The contemporary relevance of Kant’s position ........................................................................ 15 3. Overview of the coming chapters ............................................................................................... 23 I. THE KANTIAN THESIS .................................................................................................................. 25 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 25 2. Interpreting Kant’s requirement ................................................................................................... 29 3. The intuitive argument ................................................................................................................... 49 4. Difficulties for the intuitive argument ......................................................................................... 56 5. A look ahead .................................................................................................................................... 59 II. KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF, AND GROUNDS FOR BELIEF .................................................... 61 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 61 2. Being presented with a reason ...................................................................................................... 63 3. Inferential knowledge, perceptual knowledge, and reliabilism ................................................ 66 4. Belief and grounds for belief ........................................................................................................ 69 5. Principle (P) and the nature of belief ........................................................................................... 76 6. Justifying perceptual beliefs .......................................................................................................... 80 7. Conclusion: The state of the argument ....................................................................................... 82 III. REASON, JUDGMENT, AND SPONTANEITY ......................................................................... 86 1. Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 86 2. Rational and nonrational creatures .............................................................................................. 89 iv 3. Rationality and the power of judgment ....................................................................................... 97 4. Conclusion: Open questions ....................................................................................................... 112 IV. REASON, OBJECTIVITY, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS ................................................. 114 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 114 2. The rationality route ..................................................................................................................... 117 3. The objectivity route .................................................................................................................... 124 4. Kant on concepts and apperception .......................................................................................... 133 V. TWO KINDS OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE .................................................................................... 148 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 148 2. Moran on self-knowledge and agency ....................................................................................... 152 3. An assumption underlying criticisms of Moran ....................................................................... 159 4. Finkelstein on self-knowledge and expression ......................................................................... 162 5. Judgment, reasons, and self-knowledge .................................................................................... 169 6. Conclusion: Two kinds of self-knowledge ............................................................................... 179 VI. FAILURES OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE ........................................................................................ 186 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 186 2. Two challenges for an account of self-deception .................................................................... 192 3. Davidson on deception and division ......................................................................................... 196 4. Johnston on intentionalism and rational causation ................................................................. 198 5. Belief, reasons for belief, and consciousness ........................................................................... 201 6. Making sense of mental division ................................................................................................ 208 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................ 213 v PREFACE That this dissertation exists at all reflects the kindness of many people. A dissertation is of course a poor sort of response to that kindness and all that it has meant to me. Nevertheless, to whatever extent I’ve managed, in the pages that follow, really to try to get to the bottom of things – wherever I’ve cared less about vindicating some view of mine than about understanding what’s true – I owe the moral resources for that effort to the people named below. I’m more grateful to them than a preface can express, but I will at least say who
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