Cogito, Ergo Sum

Más allá de los datos y los textos conocidos de RENATO DESCARTES: ¿Qué se oculta detrás de su sistema? ¿Hasta dónde llega su atrevimiento? ¿Cuáles fueron los aportes relevantes en la última etapa de su vida? Una mirada al pensamiento se atreve a todo, pero que sabe cuáles son las condiciones y las restricciones del siglo XVII.

Shaun Gallagher has actively looked into the possibility that psychopathologies involving “thought insertion” might supply a counterexample to the Cartesian principle according to which one can always recognize one’s own thoughts as one’s own. Animated by a general distrust of a priori demonstrations, Gallagher is convinced that pitting clinical cases against philosophical arguments is a worthwhile endeavor. There is no doubt that, if true, a falsification of the immunity to error through misidentification would entail drastic revisions in how we conceive the boundary between self and other. However, I argue that (1) the idea of unearthing an exception to the Cartesian thesis is, on further reflection, not a realistic prospect and that (2) this casts doubt on the attempt to conjoin first-person phenomenology and third-person cognitive science in the service of philosophical debates.

Since the demise of logical positivism accusations of talking nonsense in philosophy have mainly been made by Wittgensteinians.  But some of these latter are as free with words like 'nonsense', 'senseless' and 'meaningless' as any logical positivist.  One such is Rupert Read, who is prepared to write off the whole of metaphysics as nonsense.  Condemnations of this sort have in recent years largely been ignored by other philosophers, which is surprising in view of their apparent importance.  It is equally surprising that the evident problems with accusations of talking nonsense have been largely ignored by those who are still prepared to make them.

According to the virtual self theory (VST), selves are merely virtual entities. On this view, our self-representations do not refer to any concrete object and the self is a merely intentional entity. This contemporary version of the 'no-self' theory is driven by a number of psychological and philosophical considerations indicating that our representations of the self are pervasively inaccurate. I present two problems for VST. First, the case for VST fails to rule out a more moderate position according to which the self exists but is systematically misrepresented by us. This position regards the self as a real entity that has illusory appearances, rather than as a hallucinated entity that has a merely intentional existence. Second, I suggest that this 'illusion model' of self-misrepresentation is preferable to VST. Advocates of VST must acknowledge the existence of an entity—typically the brain—that is the bearer of our misrepresenta-tions of the self. I argue that, other things being equal, we should regard the bearer of our self-representations as the self, even if that entity diverges dramatically from the way we represent the self to be. So by acknowledging the existence of a bearer of self-representations, advocates of VST are in a poor position to deny the existence of the self. I conclude that VST not only fails to rule out the illusion model, but that we have prima facie reason to prefer the illusion model to VST.