O problema da gênese da autoconsciência

Abstract

The postulation of non-conceptual, primitive forms of self-consciousness has two main motivations. In the field of the psychological empirical research, the existence of a non-conceptual self-awareness seems to be the natural consequence of the rejection of Piaget s and Freud s traditional view of the early infancy as a self/non-self undifferentiated environment, and in the field of philosophical activity such postulation seems to be the solution to the alleged circle/regress in the structure of reflexive self-reference. The present thesis is an assessment of this widespread claim. The first part of the work is addressed to a philosophical assessment of the very idea of a primitive, non-conceptual form of self-consciousness. The general criticism takes the following form: the alleged primitive, non-conceptual forms of self-consciousness fail completely to meet the two widely accepted constraints on any reasonable account of self-consciousness. The first constraint states that the distinctive semantic feature of any form of self-consciousness (irrespective of its complexity) is the knowingly self-reference, while the second states that the distinctive semantic feature of the most basic forms of self-consciousness is the so-called immunity to error through misidentification. The second part of the thesis is devoted to the assessment of the empirical findings of the new psychological approach to self-consciousness. The general criticism takes here the following form: guided by the ambiguous term self or selfhood , and of ambiguous phrases like sense of self or self-notion , contemporary psychologists incur into a non-sequitur: they attempt to infer the existence of primitive forms of self-consciousness from the simple existence of a subject in the early infancy. Based on the principle to the best inference, I show that the alleged primitive forms of self-consciousness are better understood as different stages of cognitive development of the subject. The upshot is that the very idea of a primitive, non-conceptual self-conscious is a serious misunderstanding