Representação e Ceticismo

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This paper is a defense of the old orthodox view that self-consciousness requires self-concepts. We will try to persuade the reader that intelligent beings lacking self-concepts are not self-conscious. The alleged cases of primitive nonconceptual self-consciousness are better understood as ancestors in the developmental prehistory of genuine self-consciousness. We distinguish three levels of subject-involvement. In the first, the representational content of experiences is subject-free and the being is merely concerned rather self-referred by its own experiences. We call this view self-concernment without self-representation. In the second level, the being is self-aware in the sense that it is the object of its own attention. The key feature of this level is what psychologists call "objectivation." Self-awareness is not genuine self-consciousness, however, in the sense of being conscious of oneself as the subject of representations. We therefore call this level self-awareness without self-consciousness. The emerging picture is this: selves are not just the subjects of representations. Their metaphysical nature lies in their capacity to represent themselves as the subjects of their own representations.

This essay aims to expose the metaphysical underpinnings of enactivism. While enactivism relies heavily on rejecting the traditional mind-body problem by excluding the familiar thought experiments that favor phenomenal dualism, the crucial point that is overlooked is instead the brain-body problem, specifically the crucial interaction between the brain and the bodily limbs in their embodied activities of perception and cognition. If enactivism is correct, differences in sensory experience necessarily entail differences in embodied activity—this is the metaphysical core of enactivism, which we think is entirely wrong. We will argue that a physical or biological body ("Körper") is configured or shaped into a perceptually living body ("Leib") by brain patterns and not by embodied activity or by the so-called sensorimotor contingencies. Undoubtedly, embodied actions influence sensory perception. However, since variations in embodied actions do not necessarily lead to variations in sensory experience, they are not metaphysically constitutive of these experiences (supervenience claim).

My aim is to defend a peculiar epistemic version of the particularity thesis, which results from a sui generis combination of what I call the ‘singular relational view’ and what I call the ‘relativistic content view.’ Particulars are not represented as part of putative singular content. Instead, we are perceptually acquainted with them in the relevant sense that experience puts us in direct perceptual contact with them. And the content of experience is best modelled as a propositional function, that is, the content of a complex predicate that is true or false only relative to some circumstances of evaluation.

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