Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy by Eugen Fischer;Mark Curtis;

Author:Eugen Fischer;Mark Curtis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation (Grant no. 89434: Finding Perspective: Determining the embodiment of perspectival experience) to AA and MRL. We would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer and the editors for insightful comments and suggestions.

1 We take a little poetic licence here, as Louis XIV is actually credited with the statement ‘L’etat c’est moi’ (the state is me) rather than ‘Je suis l’etat’ (I am the state).

2 For exposition of these claims in Descartes’ (1642/1984) 2nd and 6th meditations, as well as other writings, see Wilson (1978, Chs 2 and 6).

3 Accordingly, flexibility might not be unique to our use of the self-concept, but a more general feature of our conception of entities to which we attribute psychological properties, such as persons (cf. Perry 1978), animals (Clark 2003) and even groups (List and Pettit 2011).

4 Evans claim, it should be noted, is that these perceptually based self-ascriptions are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. Here Evans is following the common practice of taking immunity to error of this kind as a guide to an account of self-consciousness. For a discussion of Evans strategy on these terms, see Brewer (1995, 291–297).

5 This is characteristic of the descriptive approach to metaphysics, the aim of which in this case would be to lay bare the core components that any individual’s self-conception must possess in order that she might have the capacities for thought the she does (cf. Strawson 1959/2003, especially Ch 3).

6 It is not clear that Descartes is right on this point: I might conceive of myself as divisible in the sense that, for example, a guillotine could conceivably ‘divide’ me into a head and torso. But I might also think that were that to happen, I would stop existing, and that I am therefore indivisible in this respect.

7 It is also noteworthy that while, for instance, the rubber hand illusion typically fails for ‘non-corporeal’ objects, such as a block of wood (Tsakiris et al. 2010), it does not seem to itself depend upon similarity between the rubber hand and the participant’s actual hand (Longo et al. 2009). Moreover, recent work has demonstrated that similar paradigms can be used to illicit the illusion of having a sixth finger (Newport et al. 2016) or as many as four hands (Chen et al. 2018). We welcome the trend towards probing the boundaries of illusions such as these, not least because they might reveal the extent to which our self-ascriptions can be flexible.

8 We adapted a version of a task developed by Howard and Templeton (1966), originally designed for locating the point of projection of binocular vision. The task required subjects to manually align a visually presented rod along the horizontal plane such that the near end pointed ‘directly at himself’. We adapted this task, requiring subjects to align a rod along a sagittal plane, with individual trials split equally between two directions of rotation (upwards or downwards). See Alsmith and Longo (2014) for further details.

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