The Self and its Guises

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The Self and its Guises Hector-Neri Castaneda Noûs, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1983 A. P. A. Western Division Meetings. (Mar., 1983), pp. 60-62. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%28198303%2917%3A1%3C60%3ATSAIG%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.

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T h e Self and Its Guises (ABSTRACT)

INDIANA UNIVERSITY

WHEN IN DOUBT [ A B O U T A PHENOMENON]

-COMPLICATE! [ T H E DATA]

0. In this abstract I can do only two things. First, I deploy a most important semantic and ontological datum about the self and about singular reference in general, which is at once an interesting problem for a combination of Kant's view of the unity of consciousness and Frege's senselreferent view of meaning. Second, I offer a partial list of theses about the self for which I want to provide some evidence. This list contains some suggestions of Guise Theory, hence perhaps a very small background bibliogrpahy may be a useful complement to the list of theses. However, the oral discussion at the meeting will not presuppose having read the items mentioned. 1. DATA

A. Kant. He described the unity of consciousness by saying that an I think must be capable of accompanying all my representations. This is true for everybody, of course. T h e 'my' in question is variable ranging over first-person references, whoever can make them. One way of interpreting this (perhaps misinterpreting Kant's intent, but this does not matter) is to construe it as pointing to the principle that: (1-00) Every utterance expressing a thought (whether believed or not) is in principle and at bottom subordinated to an implicit1 think that (or, even, to an I say that). A crucial consequence of (1-00) is this: (I-OR) Every statement lies implicitly, or explicitly, in oratio obliqua (indirect speech), and the only true or genuine

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T H E SELF A N D ITS GUISES

oratio recta (direct speech) is the unspoken I think-this is Kant, I wish to add-or, rather, I think here now. B. Frege. T o resolve the Paradox of Reference, as is wellknown, Frege introduced the thesis of the double semantic connection between a singular term and the objects in the world. A term, e.g., 'The present Queen of England,' has a (primary) sense and, sometimes, a (primary) referent. Frege also introduced the thesis that a singular term in oratio obliqua refers to its (primary) sense. He apparently postulates higher and higher senses and referents in order to account for iterated embedding of indirect-speech constructions in indirect-speech constructions. But we shall ignore this third thesis here. C. C-Kant-Frege. Combining the Kantian tenets (1-00) with Frege's first two theses, we obtain the C-Kant-Frege view. An immediate consequence of the combination is that the Fregean primary referents vanish, except for the referent of the singular term 'I' (and, as I want to argue,the terms 'here' and 'now') in the unspoken single genuine oratio recta "I think [here now]." This has momentous consequences for the subject of experience. T h e character of beirig unspoken is part (but only part) of what Kant, I believe, referred to when he spoke of the transcendental self. Another consequence of the C-Kant-Frege (without Frege's third thesis for iterated embedding) is that all singular terms other than 'I' and 'here' and 'now') refer to Frege's primary senses. T h e C-Kant-Frege view puts the semantics of singular reference in a new light by promoting, at least initially, Frege's primary senses to the only denotata of singular terms. It provides a unified semantics by allocating to a singular term (assuming univocity) exactly the same referent, whether the term appears in indirect speech or in (apparent) direct speech. T h e view also presents a new ontology by eliminating Frege's primary referents, except for the unspoken I, or 1's. 2. THESES

Here I provide evidence for the following - theses: (1) A self (conveived as the referent of an indexical use of the first-person pronoun) is not a whole person or total chunk of reality we believe to have infinitely many properties; (2) a self is a thin "slice" of such a chunk; (3) it is a "slice" (hereafter called an I-guise) that consists of being a subject of an experience (whether perceptual o r one involving non-perceptual thinking); (4) secondary I-guises are potential subjects of experience; ( 5 ) an actual I-guise is a present, presented-to and self-presented subject; (6)its identification with past or future selves, all of which may be said to constitute the subjective aspect of a person, is not strict

identity; (7) since the time of an experience is a specious present (referred to indexically as now), within which sub-experiences have their own now's, overlapping experiences belong to overlapping I-guises; (8)this temporal and experiential overlap of the I-guises is the fundamental ground of both of the synchronic unity of consciousness and the diachronic unity or identification of I-guises and, ultimately, of persons; (9) purely physical objects are systems of physical guises; (10) one unifying and simplifying view (which is an integral part of Guise Theory) is the thesis that one and the same relation glues all guises together, whether physical or mental, or I-guises, in one synchronic chunk of the world with infinitely many properties, and it is called consubstantiation: this is a strong thorough-going, but non-reductionist contingent-identity theory of the mental and the physical, but one built on a definite view of contingent identity. 3. THEORY

Guise Theory is the development of both the semantics of natural language and the ontology introduced in Section 1 through the combined Kant-Frege view. It has been put forward in [2] and [3] and is discussed in the other essays in the ensuing bibliography: REFERENCES

[ l ] Robert Adams and Hector-Neri Castaiieda, "Knowledge and Self' in [a]. [ 2 ] Hector-Neri Castaiieda, "Thinking and the Structure of the World," Philosophia 4(1974): 3-40. "Perception, Belief, and the Structure of Physical Objects and Conscious[ 3 ] , ness," Synthese 35(1977): 285-351. Responses to 5 , 6 , 7 in [ a ] . [ 4 ] , [ 5 ] Romane Clark, "Predication Theory: Guised and Disguised" in [a]. [ 6 ] John Perry, "Castaiieda on He and I" in [a]. [ 7 ] Alvin Plantinga, "Guise Theory" in [ a ] . [8] James Tomberlin (ed.),Agent, Language, and the Structure of the World (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983).