Memory and self-consciousness

immunity to error through misidentification

Andy Hamilton

pp. 409-417

in: Jesper Kallestrup, Duncan Pritchard (eds), The philosophy of Crispin Wright, Synthese 171 (3), 2009.

Abstract

In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein defined a category of uses of “I” which he termed “I”-as-subject, contrasting them with “I”-as-object uses. The hallmark of this category is immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). This article extends Wittgenstein’s characterisation to the case of memory-judgments, discusses the significance of IEM for self-consciousness—developing the idea that having a first-person thought involves thinking about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think of anyone or anything else—and refutes a common objection to the claim that memory-judgments exhibit IEM.

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig