Immunity, thought insertion, and the first-person concept
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Immunity, thought insertion, and the first-person concept Michele Palmira1,2
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper I aim to illuminate the significance of thought insertion for debates about the first-person concept. My starting point is the often-voiced contention that thought insertion might challenge the thesis that introspection-based self-ascriptions of psychological properties are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. In the first part of the paper I explain what a thought insertion-based counterexample to this immunity thesis should be like. I then argue that various thought insertion-involving scenarios do not give rise to successful counterexamples to the immunity of the target class of self-ascriptions. In the second part of the paper I turn to defend a Metasemantic Explanation of why the immunity thesis holds. The Metasemantic Explanation rests on a referencefixing story about the mental ‘I’ whose key contention is that introspective impressions play an essential role in fixing its reference. It is part of my argument in favour of the proposed reference-fixing story, as well as of the Metasemantic Explanation, that they respect the paradigmatic features of self-ascriptions of inserted thoughts. Keywords Immunity to error through misidentification First-person concept Thought insertion Introspection Acquaintance Token-reflexivity Warrant Transmission failure Metasemantic explanation
& Michele Palmira [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, c/ Montalegre 6-8, office #4067, 08001 Barcelona, Spain
2
BIAP/LOGOS Research Group, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
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M. Palmira
1 Introduction In the Blue Book (1958), Ludwig Wittgenstein maintains that any introspectionbased self-ascription of occurrent mental properties, such as ‘I am thinking that it is raining’, is such that I cannot be mistaken that it is I who am instantiating the relevant mental property. To use Sidney Shoemaker’s (1968) influential label, this class of self-ascriptions is immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person concept. Since then, philosophers of mind have widely taken immunity to error through misidentification as one of the most beneficial entry points to the central questions of the nature and representation of the self. At the dawn of the literature on immunity to error through misidentification, Anscombe (1975) and Shoemaker (1968) joined Wittgenstein in maintaining that any introspection-based self-ascription of occurrent mental properties is immune to error through misidentification. (Call this The Introspective Immunity Thesis.) Despite such a distinguished roster of early endorsers and its apparent obviousness, however, The Introspective Immunity Thesis is no longer regarded as sacrosanct. Several philosophers (see e.g. Campbell 1999; Cappelen and Dever 2013; Garcı´aCarpintero 2018; Hu 2017; Recanati 2007; Salje 2016) have indeed taken thought insertion—a delusion associated
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