This is a post by Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona).

Consider simple subject-predicate claims about ourselves such as “I once was in Athens”, made on the basis of watching what I take to be a photograph of myself in Athens. The claim might be wrong for all kind of reasons; say, that the photo has been tampered with, and it is not Athens what it shows. Now, developing suggestions by Wittgenstein, S. Shoemaker advanced a notion that he labeled Immunity to Error through Misidentification, to contrast the relatively low epistemic standing of a self-ascription like this with most of the more standard cases in which we refer to and make judgments about ourselves. Following Wittgenstein, he isolated a particular form of mistake that can obtain in the previous example: the predicate is indeed true of someone pictured in Athens, but the person in question is not me. I have wrongly identified him in the photo as myself. Self-claims made based on such “external” knowledge sources like pictures, mirrors, or the testimony of our parents and friends are vulnerable to that kind of self-identification mistake – confusing us with others.

In contrast, think of a case in which the source of my judgment is a personal (or, as psychologists say, “episodic”) memory of myself in Athens. Personal or episodic memories contrast with so-called “semantic” memories. Unlike semantic memories of mine (as when I say that I remember that the Second World War started in 1939), my personal memories start sometimes in the 1960s. When correct, they are based on my own perceptual experiences and somehow reproduce features of them. I can feel their distance to the present; personal memories of what I did yesterday feel closer to me that those of Paul McCartney playing Let It Be at the piano when it was first released, while semantic memories of events in the late 1950s don’t feel in any way closer than those of the First World War. Now, like the photo, memory experiences might be illusory. However, they intuitively cannot give rise to the sort of mistake described above. It cannot be that, while the impression of being in Athens correctly derives from the perceptual experience of someone there, it is not my own experience that it comes from. This is what Shoemaker called the Immunity to Error through Misidentification (IEM) of subject-predicate judgments made on certain specific epistemic sources – in this example, personal memory. The same applies to the judgment I have a toothache, when based on a painful experience at my teeth I am feeling, as opposed to a scan of what I take to be my pain fibers simultaneously firing while my teeth are anesthetized. Perhaps I am wrong in that it is not pain that I am experiencing, but rather an unpleasant itch; but it doesn’t seem to make sense to think that, while the painful experience underlying the introspective judgment does come from a paining subject, I have misidentified him as myself – as it does when my judgment is not based on a painful experience of mine, but on a brain scan.

Shoemaker also claimed that, while in a pain-introspection case there is absolutely no possible world in which the specific sort of mistake described above occurs (as he put it, introspection delivers logically IEM judgments), this is not so in the case of personal memories. In that case, under very unusual circumstances (in “remote” possible worlds, as this is usually metaphorically put), episodic memory experiences might ground judgments that are vulnerable to that sort of mistake – they ground merely de facto IEM, as he put it. His reason was that, in weird science-fiction cases that as a matter of fact don’t obtain in our world but might actually obtain, apparent “personal” memories might in fact come from the experiences of someone else. Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner entertains one such case, when Rachael tells Deckard, “I remember [music] lessons, but I don’t know if it is me or Tyrell’s niece” – Deckard has just told her that her private memories were “implants” from those of Tyrell’s niece.

Now, Gareth Evans and others after him questioned Shoemaker’s arguments, by pointing out a significant weakness in them. In response, in a recent paper I defend Shoemaker’s view that personal memory experience only supports de facto IEM judgments, without relying on the weird situations that the debate featured, which opened them to Evans’ complaint. Instead, I depend on the fact – well-established in recent research – that some of our episodic memories are “observer” experiences in which we place ourselves in the perceived situation, seen from a perhaps unoccupied perspective that need not be ours – in contrast with the more common “field” memories, in which we recall the scene placing ourselves at the origin of perspective the way we do in ordinary perception. I show there how observer memories might lead to the sort of mistake that denies memory judgments the logically IEM status, without falling prey to Evans’ argument. In a companion piece I make a related argument about some of our introspective claims – concerning mental acts like making a judgment or a decision – this time on the basis of a new detailed analysis of cases of “thought insertion” relatively common in schizophrenic patients, who declare that some of those acts they introspect are in fact not “theirs”, ascribing them to someone else. Not all self-ascriptions based on introspection are however vulnerable to errors of misidentification; in a third recent paper on these issues, I show that judgments based on introspecting our current conscious feelings such as ‘I am in pain’ still preserve the “logically IEM” status, and provide true fundamental bases for self-identification and self-reference.

Why is this philosophically important? IEM is a concept introduced by philosophers, but the description I made at the outset is easy to grasp on the basis of our folk grasp of our concepts of ourselves and our knowledge of the mental attitudes we self-ascribe. It is thus not unreasonable to think that it provides a genuine, distinguishing epistemic mark of a basic form of self-awareness. It makes thus sense to look for a philosophical account of IEM that adequately explains it, and then to explore the philosophical significance of the mental states it separates. Based on the accounts of IEM they provide, philosophers like Evans are eager to think of the self-reference involved in claims based on episodic memories (and also those based on proprioception, such as whether we are seated or standing) as having the epistemic status of being logically IEM, as much as judgments such as ‘I am in pain’ that are based on introspection of painful feelings, because of the anti-Cartesian intimations that this has. For it suggests that we fundamentally know ourselves as embodied objects with an extended temporal history, as much and as well as we may know ourselves as beings currently thinking our private conscious mental states. My results oppose these hopes. I nonetheless share Evans’s anti-Cartesian stance; my conclusion is only that Cartesian considerations cannot be so easily dismissed, and it has to be defended on other grounds.

Articles referenced:
• ‘The Real Guarantee in De Se Thought: How to Characterize It’, Philosophical Quarterly 2024, DOI: 10.1093/pq/pqae133.
• ‘Memory-based reference and immunity to error through misidentification’, Synthese 2024, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-024-04664-2.
• ‘Is Conscious Thought Immune to Error through Misidentification?’, Philosophical Psychology 2024, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2024.2351535.

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Manuel García-Carpintero is a Professor (Catedrático) at the University of Barcelona. He got his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 1988 and has taught there since then; he is also an invited professor at the University of Lisbon. He works on the philosophy of language and mind, and related epistemological and metaphysical issues. A book putting together recent work on fiction, “Truth and Reference in the Making of Fiction”, will be published by Cambridge UP in the next few months. He is currently completing another book under contract with OUP on the nature of speech acts in general and assertion in particular, entitled “Tell Me What You Know”.