The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to
Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

"Against Cognitive Descriptivism: Self-Ascription, Identification, and the Subject Principle"
James Dow
CUNY

In this paper, I consider the question, “What makes possible the identification of the subject of self-ascription? When I think, “I am seeing a goat,” how do I come to identify myself as the subject seeing the goat? I challenge the Humean answer to this question, which suggests that the identification of the subject is based upon the content of one’s perceptions or experiences solely. I call the principle that guides the Humean answer ‘the predicate principle’: in order to identify the subject of self-ascription, it is sufficient to consider the content of the experiential predicates alone. The Humean view about self-identification is a kind of piecemeal cognitive descriptivism, under which the subject is described over time by the various contingent cognitive contents. I argue that this view is problematic by providing 3 objections: (1) the paralogism objection: the Humean view wrongly infers from the idea of (P) a subject of psychological predicates to (Q) a psychological subject; (2) the functional unity objection: the predicate principle rules out accounting for the functional unity of the subject; (3) the lived embodiment objection: the predicate principle denies the centrality of the lived embodiment of the organism. Instead, I defend what I call the ‘subject principle’ of self-ascription. Relying on arguments of two defenders of that principle, P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans, I argue that self-identification depends upon registering the centrality of the concept of the person. I argue that once the subject principle is made clear, an account of self-identification comes into view that depends upon the lived position of the organism. I close by discussing how my account of self-ascription is compatible with Alva Noe’s biological account of the subject (2009) and with recent empirical work on self-ascription.