Proprioception and self-consciousness (2)
self-conscious knowledge and the rejection of self-presentation
pp. 136-171
in: , The self in question, Berlin, Springer, 2013Abstract
This chapter has two principal aims. The first — in Sections 1 and 2, following the non-sensory treatment of proprioception in Chapter 4 — is to develop and defend a self-conscious knowledge account of bodily identity, in opposition to the almost universal position of materialism about bodily identity, which regards the body as fundamentally a material entity. In the previous chapter, a self-conscious knowledge account was outlined in connection with the alien-hand scenario. This account says that "my body" is the body of which — when conscious — I have self-conscious (proprioceptive) knowledge, and which I can move in a basic sense, that is, not by doing something else. The account is a development of the Lockean view that to experience a limb as mine — to feel it when it is touched, to be conscious of it as hot or cold and as having other "affections", to have sympathy and concern for it — is necessary and sufficient for it to be mine.