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The Situated Self
J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world? Ismael is an original and creative thinker who tries to understand our problematic concepts about the self and how they are related to our use of language in particular.
- GenresPhilosophy
260 pages, Hardcover
First published January 4, 2006
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About the author
Jenann Ismael
6 books25 followersJenann Ismael is Professor of Philosophy at the Columbia University. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of physics, metaphysics, philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind.
She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Templeton, the National Humanities Center, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).
She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Templeton, the National Humanities Center, and Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS).
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December 7, 2024
It really is that good. Some of my notes:
Ismael takes up Putnam’s challenge (in “Models and Reality”), namely: how do we hook up our psychological representations to the things in the world without using those representations in the first place? She suggests an answer using ‘fixed points’, e.g. ‘You are here’ signs on maps. The map represents structural relations between things in the world, but it also includes points that get mapped unto themselves, and therefore “don’t represent a first-order feature of the domain”. Fixed points like these will be available to all representations falling within their own representational scope; typically indeed, maps with ‘You are here’ signs are within the building or infrastructure they map. “The defining feature of such representations is precisely that one-one mappings onto the space they represent possess fixed points, and once the fixed points are identified, they provide a kind of internal frame of reference that can be used by the system to calibrate its contents against the external environment.” (28-9). What happens when you self-locate by putting the red dot somewhere on your map of your surroundings is you load your indexical (indeed, proprioceptive) knowledge of where you are (answer: ‘here’), which is internal, into your objective (architectural) knowledge of where you are (in a different, external sense). From there on, I ‘know where I am’ in a sense that contrasts with being lost, as Ismael nicely puts it (30). A centred map “is more informative than an uncentred map not because it contains more information, but because it makes the information in an uncentred map available for navigation”; it doesn’t have additional semantic content, it has an additional pragmatic role.
But one might object: How do you know that the ‘You are here’ sign, the red dot, is correct? Maybe it points to a location ten feet away from your/its own (this often happens in google maps, when the internet connection is lagging, and you appear at some distance from your assigned point of departure). Part of the answer seems to shift the focus from the understanding of self-situating as interpretation to “[a] kind of rigging” Ismael calls “coordination” (31). An interpretation uses conventions, and it is a mental act: the legend under the map provides an interpretation of the map. But interpretation is unfit to deal with the non-conventional, the natural, the things in the world. What we do with them is coordinate them, not to, but in a map (=a representation), so that, as a result, they yield information. When you’re lost, you don’t need to interpret your map, you need to coordinate it with your landscape. We don’t interpret our thought; we coordinate it to the world.
For all these reasons, Ismael prefers to ditch the internal/external distinction in favor of the semantic/architectural one.
The Knowledge Argument for Dualism (Jackson): Ismael differentiates between concept and property. Reasoning goes from concept to concept: learning that Dretske is a philosopher is linking concepts in this way. But what happens when Mary sees color for the first time (what she ‘learns’) is that she rewires her cognitive architecture: she learns what she should apply her color concepts to; she activates recognition capacities that lay dormant, and recognition is not a linking of concept to concept, but more akin to self-localization both on, and thanks to a map (ch. 8). The extension of architectural coordination to the intersubjective realm (ch. 9) is more complicated (inverted spectrum). What Ismael thinks happens is loss of information on the way from indexical thought to public language, due to greater invariance requirements in the domain of speech. As a result, phenomenal profile can’t factor into linguistic meaning (126), but it’s an uneliminable part of “the process that supports its application. If I couldn’t recognize a reddish experience when I had one, I couldn’t recognize a red thing when I saw one.” (127; first emphasis added). Still, a bit like Perry, and unlike Chalmers, Nagel, and some others, Ismael insists that an essential theory of indexicality need not embrace dualism or non-physicalism. Here is the crucial passage from §10.6:
“‘I’ is not a singular term. It can act as a convenient proxy for one in a fixed context by an abuse of notation, but intersubstitution across contexts of precisely the sort needed to establish the general claim of modal separability from objective particulars is invalid. There is no continuant reidentified across these imaginative transformations of first‐person perspective. They involve contextual shifts that block the existential generalization to a thing with the full complement of ascribable modal properties.”
Ismael (ch. 12) distinguishes between self-consciousness, which is the formal property of a medium with the ability to take its contents as reflexive objects, and consciousness, which is a qualitative property of some (but not all: see AI) self-conscious media. This entails a distinction between the development of reflexivity (via language), i.e. of self-consciousness, and the development of consciousness. Therefore, according to Ismael, the question “Why do we make representations of the world?” points to the emergence of reflexivity, and is different from Dretske’s (1995) question about the emergence/utility of conscious experience.
Ismael takes up Putnam’s challenge (in “Models and Reality”), namely: how do we hook up our psychological representations to the things in the world without using those representations in the first place? She suggests an answer using ‘fixed points’, e.g. ‘You are here’ signs on maps. The map represents structural relations between things in the world, but it also includes points that get mapped unto themselves, and therefore “don’t represent a first-order feature of the domain”. Fixed points like these will be available to all representations falling within their own representational scope; typically indeed, maps with ‘You are here’ signs are within the building or infrastructure they map. “The defining feature of such representations is precisely that one-one mappings onto the space they represent possess fixed points, and once the fixed points are identified, they provide a kind of internal frame of reference that can be used by the system to calibrate its contents against the external environment.” (28-9). What happens when you self-locate by putting the red dot somewhere on your map of your surroundings is you load your indexical (indeed, proprioceptive) knowledge of where you are (answer: ‘here’), which is internal, into your objective (architectural) knowledge of where you are (in a different, external sense). From there on, I ‘know where I am’ in a sense that contrasts with being lost, as Ismael nicely puts it (30). A centred map “is more informative than an uncentred map not because it contains more information, but because it makes the information in an uncentred map available for navigation”; it doesn’t have additional semantic content, it has an additional pragmatic role.
But one might object: How do you know that the ‘You are here’ sign, the red dot, is correct? Maybe it points to a location ten feet away from your/its own (this often happens in google maps, when the internet connection is lagging, and you appear at some distance from your assigned point of departure). Part of the answer seems to shift the focus from the understanding of self-situating as interpretation to “[a] kind of rigging” Ismael calls “coordination” (31). An interpretation uses conventions, and it is a mental act: the legend under the map provides an interpretation of the map. But interpretation is unfit to deal with the non-conventional, the natural, the things in the world. What we do with them is coordinate them, not to, but in a map (=a representation), so that, as a result, they yield information. When you’re lost, you don’t need to interpret your map, you need to coordinate it with your landscape. We don’t interpret our thought; we coordinate it to the world.
For all these reasons, Ismael prefers to ditch the internal/external distinction in favor of the semantic/architectural one.
The Knowledge Argument for Dualism (Jackson): Ismael differentiates between concept and property. Reasoning goes from concept to concept: learning that Dretske is a philosopher is linking concepts in this way. But what happens when Mary sees color for the first time (what she ‘learns’) is that she rewires her cognitive architecture: she learns what she should apply her color concepts to; she activates recognition capacities that lay dormant, and recognition is not a linking of concept to concept, but more akin to self-localization both on, and thanks to a map (ch. 8). The extension of architectural coordination to the intersubjective realm (ch. 9) is more complicated (inverted spectrum). What Ismael thinks happens is loss of information on the way from indexical thought to public language, due to greater invariance requirements in the domain of speech. As a result, phenomenal profile can’t factor into linguistic meaning (126), but it’s an uneliminable part of “the process that supports its application. If I couldn’t recognize a reddish experience when I had one, I couldn’t recognize a red thing when I saw one.” (127; first emphasis added). Still, a bit like Perry, and unlike Chalmers, Nagel, and some others, Ismael insists that an essential theory of indexicality need not embrace dualism or non-physicalism. Here is the crucial passage from §10.6:
“‘I’ is not a singular term. It can act as a convenient proxy for one in a fixed context by an abuse of notation, but intersubstitution across contexts of precisely the sort needed to establish the general claim of modal separability from objective particulars is invalid. There is no continuant reidentified across these imaginative transformations of first‐person perspective. They involve contextual shifts that block the existential generalization to a thing with the full complement of ascribable modal properties.”
Ismael (ch. 12) distinguishes between self-consciousness, which is the formal property of a medium with the ability to take its contents as reflexive objects, and consciousness, which is a qualitative property of some (but not all: see AI) self-conscious media. This entails a distinction between the development of reflexivity (via language), i.e. of self-consciousness, and the development of consciousness. Therefore, according to Ismael, the question “Why do we make representations of the world?” points to the emergence of reflexivity, and is different from Dretske’s (1995) question about the emergence/utility of conscious experience.
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