Self-consciousness, I-structures, and physiology

pp. 118-145

in: Manfred Spitzer, Brendan A. Maher (eds), Philosophy and psychopathology, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

Here I continue Persons, Egos, and I's: Their Sameness Relations (Castañeda 1988a), presented at the 1988 Freiburg conference on Psychopathology and Philosophy (cf. Spitzer et al. 1988). That paper tackles basic ontological and semantic questions: What does one strictly refer to, that is, thinks, by means of the first-person pronoun? What sort of entity that thinking referent is? How does what a person calls "I" relate to that person? To gain a better understanding of these questions we subsumed the problem of first-person reference under the general case of indexical reference. We found that the I's—like the now's, the here's, the this's and that's—are irreducible fleeting subjective individuals, existing only as contents of experiences. They constitute the framework of the experience they belong to. Their ontology is exhaustively epistemological. They exist merely to make present to the experiencing person objective referents with which they are the same in an appropriate representational sense. That this sameness is not literal self-identity is of the utmost importance: the ontology of the fleeting I's can ground neither an empirical theory of a particular embodiment of consciousness nor a metaphysical doctrine about an immortal soul.