Persons: A Study in Philosophical Psychology

Just try, in areal case, to doubt someone else's pain or fear' -Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ' ''So you are saying that the word 'pain ' really means crying?" On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it' -Ibid. It is, I believe, a little-noticed fact that all psychological knowledge is erected upon a foundation of first-person, present-tense self-descriptions, felicitously named 'avowals' by Gilbert Ryle. The word 'avowals' is extremely apt because such assertions are not ordinary descriptions of states of affairs; they are semi-performative in nature,' falling somewhere in between the pure performatives brought to light by Austin, such as 'I promise', 'I do thee wed ' and ' I dub thee Sir Lancelot', and physical self-descriptions such as 'I weigh ISO pounds", I intend to show that psychology cannot be a theoretical science like biology because its data are 'subjective reports' or avowals, and all apparently more objective psychological knowledge is built upon these data, thus sharing their subjectivity. Secondarily, I hope to shed new light on how and why the human animal has free will, despite the correct He gelian-Marxist claim that the individual is a nexus of social relationships. My general argument for the logical dependence of all psychological knowled ge on avowals is this: There are no purely mental objects, states, events or proce sses, as Wittgenstein, Sartre and Ryle have sufficiently argued (further arguments are offered later, in Chapter 5). Consequently it cannot be the job of psychological statements to refer to and describe and nomologically explain such non-entities. Insofar as psychological statements refer to anything, they must refer (but indirectly and vaguely) to bodily states and processes or tendencies to such. The primary job of such statements is not referential or descriptive; it is to interpret and evaluate the states of agents, the actions toward which they incline, and the circumstances that determine the moral or practical significance of such states and actions. I want to suggest that the origin of evaluations of circumstances, states and actions is to be found in the normative judgments of the agent as expressed in his avowals. Without this foundation in avowals, I shall Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Conceptual Dualism....Pages 1-12 Authority and Freedom to Avow....Pages 13-27 Cause and Reason....Pages 28-47 Motivation....Pages 48-61 The Incoherence of Determinism....Pages 62-73 Person and Self....Pages 74-93 Self-Deception and Akrasia....Pages 94-109 Self and Community....Pages 110-118 Back Matter....Pages 119-137