A4_PHEN-MIND_n7

Michael Pauen
How Naturalism Can Save the Self
So being able to recognize yourself as yourself means being able to recognize the difference between
yourself and someone else, and this ability develops in degrees and it can be investigated with
empirical methods. As we have seen, it starts with recognizing a difference in emotions, which seems
to work already at 9 months, and is followed by recognizing differences in perception. The next step
is recognizing a difference in beliefs, which requires a theory of mind in the stronger sense – a theory
about the other’s mental states and beliefs. The question here is, how can a child understand her
beliefs as her beliefs, and know that someone else might have different beliefs
There are many studies investigating this capacity, of which I will only refer to one: the so-called
Sally-Anne-test, or false belief test, which was introduced in the 1980s (Wimmer & Perner 1983;
Baron-Cohen et al. 1985). Here children are shown a scenario where two characters, Sally and Anne,
are in a room together. Sally places an object, a ball, into a box and then leaves the room; while she
is gone, Anne moves the ball into a different box. The experimenter then asks the child observing
this scene: “When Sally comes back, where will she look for the ball – in the first or the second box”.
The right answer would obviously be the former: Sally still has the belief that the ball is in the first
box, where she left it. However, children up to around 4 years say that she will look in the second box,
because they are not yet able to distinguish between what is really the case and another person’s,
Sally’s, false beliefs. This shows that the ability to recognize your beliefs as your beliefs develops at
about 4 years. Of course, again, this ability develops in stages, and its precursors are instantiated
much earlier. But a very stable finding of this experimental paradigm is that it takes around 46 to 49
months to develop.
The conclusion to take away from this is that recognizing yourself as yourself is not an ability
that you either have or do not have; rather it comes in different degrees: You may be more or less
proficient in this ability which develops at different stages of the ontogenetic development with
regard to emotions, perceptions and beliefs.
I have tried to argue, against skepticism by Dennett, Metzinger and others, that self-awareness is not
a fiction. It does not require reference to a self-object or some kind of property that happens to be
specific for yourself. What it does require is the ability to recognize yourself as yourself, which can be
explained as the ability to distinguish between your own experiences, beliefs, and other features and
the related mental states and features of others. These abilities, particularly perspective taking, are
not mysterious at all. They can be investigated in empirical studies which improve our understanding
of this ability. So there is no reason to doubt that the self exists and naturalism can explain how it
emerges 2 .
2 I would like to thank Laura Schlingloff for revising the manuscript.
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