The first-person perspective

Abstract

Some would say that the philosophy of mind without the first-person perspective, or the first-person point of view, is like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Others would say that it is like Hamlet without the King of Denmark, or like Othello without Iago. I say both. I think of myself as a friend of the first-person perspective. Some would say that I am too friendly to it, for I hold views about first-person access and first-person authority that many would regard as unacceptably “Cartesian.” I certainly think that it is essential to a philosophical understanding of the mental that we appreciate that there is a. first person perspective on it, a distinctive way mental states present themselves to the subjects whose states they are, and that an essential part of the philosophical task is to give an account of mind which makes intelligible the perspective mental subjects have on their own mental lives. And I do not think, as I think some do, that the right theory about all this will be primarily an “error theory.” But I also think that the first-person perspective is sometimes rightly cast as the villain in the piece. It is not only the denigrators of introspection that assign it this role. Kant did so in the Paralogisms, seeing our vantage on our selves as the source of transcendental illusions about the substantiality of the self. And Wittgenstein's “private language argument” can be seen as another attempt to show how the first-person perspective can mislead us about the nature of mind.