Thinking and Talking About the Self

[00:00:00] ELLEN GOBLER:
Uh, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Ellen Gobler. I manage the Graduate Council Lectures, and we’re very pleased to have you all here today.

Thank you so much, uh, for your patience in getting everyone seated. As you can see, there’s a great amount of interest. Um, it is now my pleasure to, uh…

Well, first before I do that, again, everybody, check your cell phones. I’m going to do mine right now. Okay.

Off. Thank you. Um, I would now like to introduce Andrew Szeri.

[00:00:35] ANDREW SZERI:
Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Szeri. I’m Dean of the Graduate Division, and, uh, we are pleased, along with the Graduate Council, uh, to present John Perry, this year’s speaker in the Howison Lectures and Philosophy Series.

I’d like to tell you a little bit about how this bequest, uh, came to the university. George Holmes Howison was born in 1834. He went to college in Marietta, Ohio, shortly after the Civil War, and then he moved to St. Louis, where he became a member of the Kant Club of the city’s Philosophical Society.

He had there an opportunity to meet with influential thinkers of his time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, and William James. In 1884, after a six-year professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Howison accepted an offer from the University of California to establish here the Department of Philosophy. This included his appointment as Mills Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity.

In this position, he occupied the university’s first endowed chair. With a strong, outgoing personality, he made philosophy a factor not only in the university, but also in the surrounding community. Howison took great interest in his students and was greatly involved in their lives.

He taught at the university until nineteen oh nine, in other words, one hundred years ago today, uh, and died six years later at the age of eighty-one. Howison gave all his property to the university, and thus created several foundations, including one for a fellowship in philosophy. In 1919, friends and former students of Professor George Holmes Howison established the Howison Lectures in Philosophy at the University of California in his honor.

Now I welcome Professor Jay Wallace, chair of both the Philosophy Department and the Howison Lecture Committee, to the podium to introduce our speaker. Jay?

[00:02:31] JAY WALLACE:
Before I begin my introduction of today’s Howison Lecturer, I’d like to say a few words about the occasion that brings, brings him here today. As Dean Szeri has explained, the Howison Lectures were established by friends of George Holmes Howison to honor his contributions as the founding member of the Department of Philosophy at Berkeley. Those of you who’ve been at Berkeley for some time will know what a rem-remarkable legacy and memorial this lecture series has become.

The list of past Howison lecturers that’s printed in your program includes many of the most important and influential thinkers of the past century, and the large audience that these lectures attract is a testimony to the continuing vitality at our university of the subject that Howison helped to introduce here. As Dean Szeri mentioned, Howison left a substantial legacy to the university, which has underwritten many of our most valuable activities and programs over the years. We are greatly indebted to Professor Howison and to the many other friends whose generosity has done so much to make Berkeley a flourishing and distinctive center for philosophical, uh, research.

I should perhaps add that our capacity for gratitude has not yet been exhausted. Please feel free to get in touch with me in case you feel moved to emulate Professor Howison in supporting the study of philosophy on our campus. It also has a stimulative effect, which was important in these trying economic times.

Our Howison lecturer today is John Perry, who’s one of the most distinguished and influential philosophers on the contemporary scene. Professor Perry received his BA degree from Doane College in 1964 and his PhD in philosophy from Cornell University in 1968. From 1968 to 1974, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In 1974, Perry mo– uh, Professor Perry moved to Stanford University, where he has taught ever since. In 1985, he became the Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford. He now divides his time between Stanford and UC Riverside.

Professor Perry’s many contributions to life at Stanford include several years as chair of the Department of Philosophy, as well as multiple stints as director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information, which he helped to establish in 1983. Professor Perry has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors over the years, including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Jean Nicod Prize, and a Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany. He served as the president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1993 to ’94, and when– was elected to the ama-American Academy of n-Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Professor Perry has made important contributions to central debates in many areas of philosophical research, including the philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, metaphysics, um, the theory of personal identity, and philosophical issues related to cognitive science. Over the past three decades, he’s written nine books and more than one hundred scholarly articles. His first book, A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, offers a high-level introduction to fundamental issues in the philosophy of personal identity.

This is a topic that has continued to occupy him through the years. Other work by Professor Perry includes influential contributions on topics such as indexical language and thought, situation semantics, self-knowledge, and the relation between mind and body. Important examples of his work on these topics are the book Situations and Attitudes, co-authored with Jon Barwise in nineteen eighty-three, and the papers collected in his volume, The Problem of the Essential Indexical from 1993.

His more recent entitles inclu- titles include Dialogue on Good, Evil, and the Existence of God, Reference and Reflexivity, and Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Professor Perry is not only a distinguished philosopher, he’s also an unusually effective and engaging advocate for Philosophy in the public sphere. He’s been an enormously successful teacher of the subject at Stanford,

(laughter)

and his bibliography includes a number of occasional pieces that bring his ferocious philosophical intelligence to bear on the analysis of important topics that have largely been neglected in the philosophical canon. His groundbreaking work on structured procrastination,

(cough)

for instance, shows how productivity can be enhanced if you can convince yourself that what you’re doing is a way of avoiding it, a task that’s even more important and arduous.

(laughter)

His keen intelligence and critical insight are well ill-illustrated by the following brief excerpt from another occasional essay of Professor Perry’s on the academic trough. Here’s a quote, “Being a full professor has a lot to be said for it. You receive a good salary, a big, uh, as big and, and nice an office as your department has available, first choice of class hours, and a lot of other nice perks.”

And there’s also the wisdom and balanced judgment that comes with age. For example, I remember when I was an assistant professor, it seemed absurdly unfair that full professors, in addition to receiving a better salary, also received nicer offices and other perks. But now that I’ve got that wisdom and balanced judgment that comes with age, it all seems perfectly reasonable.

There’s a characteristic wit that comes through in that passage. Perry is, uh, Professor Perry is the founder and co-host of the weekly radio program, Philosophy Talk, a program that’s based in the Bay Area and audaciously modeled on the legendary public radio show, Car Talk.

(laughter)

That’s really setting yourself up, um, to emulate that. On this program, Professor Perry and his co-host, Ken Taylor, engage contemporary thinkers in witty and fast-paced discussions of a wide range of important philosophical issues, including immortality, the value of truth, the basis of morality, and current movies. So far as I know, they haven’t addressed the connections between philosophy and auto repair, but

(coughs)

it’s no doubt on the agenda. We’re delighted that Professor Perry has agreed to make the arduous journey from Stanford up to Berkeley, uh, as this year’s Howison lecturer. In addition to to-today’s talk, he’ll be speaking tomorrow in the philosophy department on freedom and the consequence argument.

That will take place at four ten PM in the Howison Library. His topic for this afternoon is thinking and talking about the self. Please join me in welcoming Professor Perry.

(applause)

[00:09:35] PROFESSOR PERRY:
Thank you, Jay, uh, and thank you, Dean, for the kind introduction. Um, I, I didn’t know the story of Howison. It’s nice.

You have a, such a wonderful university and such a distinguished department with such a fine history. It apparently got off to a very smooth start, unlike Stanford’s. Our first professor of philosophy at Stanford was Arthur Lovejoy.

Uh, he quit in protest a year or two later when Mrs. Stanford, uh, hired so– fired someone from the political science department for a lecture they gave off campus, which provoked the, uh, AAUP to, uh, come into existence. So she had a big, big hand in, in that. And then, uh, then, uh, after, after her untimely murder, which- isn’t known for sure to have been at the behest of the first president- of the campus, uh, and the earthquake, um, uh, we finally got started again some years later.

So count your blessings. Um, she fired the guy, interestingly enough, because he was going around giving talks saying Chinese immigrants should be sent back to China. So when- there’s two sides to almost everything involving Mrs. Stanford.

But I digress before I even get started. Because the views on the topics I will discuss are so incredibly plausible, they are likely to be somewhat boring. Uh, and,

and so I’ve, I’ve, uh, uh, uh, laced the talk with, with, with some stories and anecdotes and, uh, uh, from, uh, two interesting characters, Ernst Mach and, uh, Borges. Uh, and so I’m gonna start by reading a very short story by Borges. So I don’t–

This is probably not legal

(thump)

’cause I’m gonna read you the whole story, but the whole story is only A couple of paragraphs. Borges and I. Yeah, it’s not– It’s, I don’t know if it’s fair use or not.

Borges and I by Jorge Luis Borges, eighteen ninety-nine to nineteen eighty-six. The other one, the one called Borges, is w– is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate.

I know of Borges from the mail, and I see his name on the list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, and 18th century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson. He shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.

It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let my s- go- self go on living so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition.

Besides, I am destined to perish definitively, and only some incident of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being.

The stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. Why am I laughing at a great philosopher like Spinoza? Well, I don’t know.

(laughter)

I shall remain in Borges, not in myself, if it is true that I am someone. But I recognize myself less in his books than in many others, or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago, I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but these games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to imagine other things.

Thus, my life is a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

(laughter)

That’s the story. Now, uh, Jean-Luis Bor– uh, Jorge Luis Borges is definitely the author of this short story, the one who wrote it, presumably edited over a period of time, published it, and who was similarly responsible for all the other works we know by Borges. I will call him the author.

Then there are two characters in it. There’s the one the author calls, and I will call Borges, and there’s the other one who I will call the writer, and the writer is referred to in the story in the first person, that is, with the word I in, in the English translation. In this story, the writer and Borges are presented as the same person.

The writer is a famous author named Borges, although he is curiously alienated from this aspect of himself and so writes as if Borges were someone else. But the point of the story would be lost if the writer were not Borges. Borges could have written a story like this about some other author, real or fictional, and I suppose a possible interpretation is that he is doing so, that the fictional author just also happens to be named Borges.

But I don’t think it’s a very plausible interpretation. I’ll assume a more straightforward interpretation. So we have two identities.

The author is the writer, the one referred to with I, and the writer is Borges, the one referred to with Borges. In the story, the writer tells us of a number of relationships that he has to Borges and compares himself to Borges in various ways. These relationships are perfectly reasonable and familiar ones to have to people other than one, but some of them are a bit odd to have to oneself, and some of them are impossible to have to oneself.

So the writer says he knows of Borges from the mail and sees his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. There’s nothing mysterious about one person knowing about another in such ways. I know of Barack Obama through seeing him on television and reading about him in the newspapers.

That’s a reasonable and familiar way to learn about someone else. How about Barack Obama himself? Can he know himself through seeing himself on television or reading about himself in the newspapers?

Presumably, he can and does learn some things about himself in that way. He might learn about a funny expression he makes by seeing himself in the evening news. He might learn what his exact words were at a press conference by reading the transcript the next day in the New York Times.

But the writer makes it sound as if he is only aware of Borges’ very existence through these third-person ways, and that would be rather odd. It would not only be odd, but quite impossible for Borges to survive the writer. Even if all is meant by survival is living on as a literary figure, if Borges lives on in that way, so will the writer.

They’re one and the same person. Other contradictions are only implied: is that the writer likes hourglasses, Stevenson, and the taste of coffee in a less vain and artificial way than Borges does. In following the writer’s thoughts, we must, to a certain extent, pretend that the writer is not Borges.

But if we think of it as just a story about two people, one of whom reads about the other, shares some of his tastes, finds him pompous and annoying, and yet somehow supports him, it loses its point. The interest of the story is the thoughts that the writer has about himself, thoughts that are most naturally expressed in the form of words usually reserved for talking about someone else. The writer is driven to these words not only because of some fugue state in which he has forgotten that he is Borges, but in order to express a certain alienation he feels about what certain aspects of himself and certain achievements of his, uh, how he feels about them, aspects and achievements he can convey by the use of the name Borges.

To understand how Borges’ words work, we must need to, we need to distinguish between two kinds of beliefs, or more generally attitude. But I’ll say just two kinds of beliefs our words can express about ourselves, which I call self-belief and belief about the person you happen to be. Now, to make these distinctions, I shift to the second interesting part of the talk, an anecdote that Ernst Mach tells about himself.

So the, the dean should like this, being a physicist, so. Uh, Mach, in the analysis of sensations early on, tells the following story about himself. “Not long ago,” he writes, “after a trying railway journey by night, when I was very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at the other end,” “What a shabby pedagogue that is that has just entered,” thought I.

It was myself. Opposite me hung a large mirror, mirrors they have in buses and cable cars so that when they’re crowded, the conductors can keep track of everyone. The physiognomy of my class accordingly was better known to me than my own.

Now, Mach acquired a belief at the beginning of the episode that we can imagine him expressing as, one, that man is a shabby pedagogue. By the end of the episode, he has another, which we can imagine him expressing as, “I am a shabby pedagogue.” And just for bookkeeping and to make it easier to compare him with Borges, we’ll imagine that he went on to make an obvious inference and say, “Mach is a shabby pedagogue.”

So we’ve got three ways of expressing something that’s true if and only if a single person, Mach, is a shabby pedagogue. Two expresses self-knowledge or at least self-belief, while one and three really don’t, and yet one and three are, in a perfectly clear sense, a case of Mach knowing something about himself. For example, we think of one as being true because Mach implies that he was in fact a shabby pedagogue.

If Mach’s being a shabby pedagogue is what makes one true, then one was about Mach and expresses the belief about Mach. But one is not an expression of self-belief. One, remember, is that man is a shabby pedagogue.

Self-belief would be, I am a shabby pedagogue. Similar, similar remarks apply to three. I shall say that three and one express beliefs about the person Mach happens to be, while two expresses self-belief.

To get a bit clearer about the distinction, it will be helpful to elaborate a little on Mach’s case and number three. Suppose when he gets off the bus, Mach trips, falls, and hits his head. For a day or two, he has, he has amnesia.

He can’t remember his name or what he does for a living. He reads the newspaper the next morning, and in the gossip column, he encounters a story about a shabby pedagogue seen on the bus the day before. Shabby pedagogue turns out to be famous scientist Ernst Mach, it says.

So Mach comes to have a belief he would express with three. And that belief would be true if and only if the person referred to by the newspaper as Ernst Mach is a shabby pedagogue, and he is that person. So in a sense, he comes to have a belief about himself, but only about the person he happens to be.

Not really a self-belief. But of course, ordinarily, the beliefs Mach expressed with one and expresses the date next day with three would be integrated with the sort of belief he expressed with two, the I expression, the I belief, the self-belief. Ordinarily, the beliefs we pick up about ourselves by looking in a mirror or reading something about ourselves using our own name are quickly added to our stock of self-beliefs.

But the point is this, this really amounts to something. It’s not trivial. Um, it amounts to more than the beliefs in question merely being about us.

We could acquire the beliefs without, in the intuitive way, releasing, realizing that the beliefs we had are beliefs about us. They wouldn’t be self-beliefs. And I’m claiming that when we get back to Borges, this will be a useful distinction, so I’m going to say more about it.

Here’s where the boring part sets in for about 20 minutes, if you’ve got, if you, if like my cell phone, you have a little bowling game on there or something. That’s funny. So this section’s called Information Games.

Uh, let’s start by thinking about the function of beliefs and cognitions in general, then we’ll work our way back to self-beliefs, then we’ll work our way back to Mach, and then we’ll work our way back to Borges. It seems pretty clear that the reason we perceive and form beliefs. The reason we perceive, comma, and form beliefs is to help us guide our actions.

That is, if things go right, we pick up information and perception that tells us what we have to do to act successfully. I mean, there’s a lot of other reasons for believing and perceiving, but, but one suspects that evolutionarily, that was an important part of it. What counts as success, of course, in our actions depends itself on our beliefs, desires, and needs.

So, for example, a chicken sees seeds and similar needs seeds and similar things to survive, and if it hasn’t had any food for a while, it will be hungry and desire to get some. It has eyes that are very good at spotting seeds and the ability to peck at the spot where it sees the seeds. So when it sees the seed, its nervous system changes in a way that causes it to peck, and as a result of this, it pecks at a spot where there is a seed.

If things go right, and it gets nutrition. So information has been picked up by the chicken and guided its perception, not, not in any way that I wanna suggest is too grand or resembles human consciousness. Uh, uh, uh, certainly it’s, it’s the sort of thing that could be done by, uh, robots even some years ago.

Um, but the point is there’s a flow of information into action. The action succeeds in the circumstance that the perception is designed to register. So this is an example of what I call an information game.

In an information game, a system gets information, typically about the world around it, and then uses that information in the sense that it acts in a way that will be successful given the information, that is, given the truth of the perception or belief. What characterizes different information games is the relations between the agent, time, and place where the information is picked up and the agent, time, and place where it is used. The chicken’s game I call the straight-through information game.

The agent, time, and place are pretty much the same for pickup and use. I will now illustrate the straight-through information game. You know, I see that there’s water in the glass, and I drink it.

Now, if I’d seen there was water in the glass, set it there, and, you know, ran off to go to the bathroom the way men of my age often have to do, uh, and came back, that wouldn’t be the straight-through information game because I would have to re-identify it as the same glass, right? Searle might have snuck up and replaced the glass of water with a glass of— Gin.

(laughter)

Champagne. Chablis from his vineyard or something, you know? I might not notice the difference.

Uh, so that, uh… Yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. Okay. So, but people en-engage in far more complex information games than the straight-through information game.

Like many animals, including chickens, I suppose, we can track moving objects and accumulate information about them. I’m really not sure of chickens, but, um, dogs certainly can. But here, here’s a human example.

A thief watches me take money from the ATM. He picks up the information that I have cash on me. Then he tracks me, looking for an opportune moment to mug me and take the money.

As he tracks me, he may accumulate more useful information, where I put the money, how fast and strong I seem to be or not be, whether I am carrying any weapons He accumulates information about the object he’s, uh, tracking, and when he strikes, he uses that accumulation of information gotten at different times and brings it to bear on how he acts. I call a third kind of information detach and recognize. It is of great importance in human life, although probably not uniquely human.

Perhaps rather than tracking me, the thief merely notes some identifying characteristics about me, what I look like, what I am wearing. Later in the day, in a convenient dark, and secluded spot, he recognizes me as the person who took cash from the ATM. He infers that since I had a lot of money then, I still have a significant amount now.

This moti– this information motivates h-his attack. So he picks up information about me at one time, he breaks off his perception of me, that’s what I mean by detached, and then he later uses some of the information he picked up to recognize me, and then the other information he picked up to guide his action. Uh, he recognizes me because of things, uh, uh, uh, like what I look like, but what guides his action is his belief that I have money.

Finally, an even more characteristically human information game, communication. The thief sees me walking from the bank down Hamilton Avenue towards my home. He phones a confederate lurking at the corner of Hamilton and Guinda, and tells him what I look like and that I’m loaded with cash.

This is a kind of a typical Palo Alto example. Uh, I know here in Berkeley- It seems strange to worry about such things.

Uh. The confederate waits until he sees a shabby, gray-haired, tweed-jacketed pedagogue and then mugs me. Information picked up at one time by one person is applied, that is, guides the action of another person at another time.

Communication. In all these information games, we can distinguish between, uh, two roles. Uh, what I will call the source, and with apologies to those who actually know some Latin, the applicandum of an instance of the game.

The source is the object information is picked up about. The applicandum is the object the action motivated and guided by the information is directed at. In all of these stories, I was both the source and the applicandum.

I was the object the original thief picked up information about, and the object that was eventually mugged by one thief or the other. But clearly, things don’t always go as they are supposed to. The source isn’t always the applicandum.

Suppose other gray-haired, tweed-coated, shabby pedagogues who hadn’t been to an ATM, and is in fact quite penniless, makes it to the corner of Gwenda and Hamilton before I do. The second thief may mug this fellow and come up penniless. In this case, I was the source, the other poor fellow was the applicandum.

In the detached and recognized information game, our detached beliefs, the ones not tied to any perception, have two duties. They must allow us to recognize the source, that is, ensure that the source is the applicandum, and re– and provide information about the source, about the source that will motivate action, like mugging. The thug sees what I look like, which will aid in recognition, sees that I have cash, which provides motive for doing something, but of course, either can go wrong.

(chuckles)

Okay. Notions. Next section is called Notions: Files and Buffers.

Embedded deeply in folk psychology and cognitive science is the idea that our beliefs, desires, and the like have a structure, that we have ideas that are somehow involved in many different cognitions. I have beliefs about Stanford, desires involving Stanford, Stanford conjectures about Stanford, emotions that concern Stanford. My idea of Stanford is a common element of all of those.

Similarly, I believe that Harvard is a university, Princeton is a university, MIT is a university, and the University of California at Berkeley remains the greatest university in the world, in spite of the very sorry state of California’s budget, and so on. My idea of the property of being a university is a common element in all of these. My belief that Stanford is a university has a structure.

It involves these two ideas of Stanford and of a university. For my purposes today, a rather crude taxonomy of ideas will suffice. I distinguish between notions, ideas of things like Stanford, and ideas of properties and relations, which I just call ideas, like my idea of a university.

And among notions, I’ll distinguish, and this is the important thing, between buffers and files. A belief involves notions being associated with various ideas and other notions. So the basic picture is this.

Our beliefs and other cognitions provide us with two connected databases which correspond to the attached and detached distinction alluded to in the phrase detach and recognize. Buffers are basically perceptual. They are attached to perceptions, to ways of knowing about the object in question.

They are of the objects we are perceiving, or at least tracking, uh, the objects in our hand, the objects we see, maybe the people we’re talking to on the phone, the one we’re getting perceptual information and input about, and are in that sense attached to. Files are notions we have of objects that are independent of any perceptual relations they may have to us at the moment. As we navigate around the world, we are constantly filling up buffers with information about objects we’re per– we perceive, objects we see and hear, things we pick up and handle, and so forth.

A second database involves files, the results of previous encounters now detached. Links are made between the databases as we recognize the objects of which we have formed buffers, as the very objects of which we have notions. Excuse me.

As we recognize the objects of which we– we have formed buffers as the very objects of which we already had notions or mistakenly think we do. Here’s a striking individual, an intelligent face, a kind demeanor, a strong athletic build. Who could it be?

Sean Connery? John Searle? But what would Sean Connery be doing at my talk?

It must be Searle. So I have this buffer. The perceptual information goes in.

After a while, I sort it out and attach it to one of my files. I had a file of John Searle for, I don’t know, since about 1966, when he, he first read an article by him. He was probably only 40 or 50 then.

And, where is he? So I have to see how, how irritated he’s getting. Oh, there he is.

Uh, so anyway, that, that’s the picture, notions and files. My head’s full of files, and when I go a new place or, or a familiar place, I’m, I’m constantly reattaching the files. That’s how life works, and that allows me to bring all the…

When, when, when I saw Cyril today, I said, “Hi, John.” Right? Why?

Because I knew his name. How did I know his name? I mean, in a, in a maybe, you know, in a better world, we’d just all have our names right here.

But, but here I have to remember his name. That is, I have to take the detached file and get it hooked up with my perceptual buffer, which is also my action buffer. I know how to say to someone that I see, “Hi, John.”

Um, I’m gonna shift to an-another friend of mine named David Israel. Some of you know him, uh, just because, uh, uh, uh, that’s, uh, I had I had some examples worked out with regard to David Israel, who doesn’t seem to have shown up at the talk, for goodness’ sakes, even though Berkeley is his, uh, alma mater. So, so I, I know a lot about Israel.

I see Israel on the street. I say, “Hi, David.” Uh, I, I know he used to be obsessed with Lisp.

He’s going to Washington, D.C., hobnobbing with the DARPA bigwigs, listening to Dick Cheney remember the old days when he was Secretary of Defense, and Al Gore was inventing the internets. So this is a paragraph I wrote a while ago. Information is kind of piped up from, from my buffer to my notion, and from my notion piped down to my buffer or downloaded or uploaded, whatever we want to say.

Um, one piece of, one, one, one piece of, f- one final piece of information. Now, now Searle is now occupying what I call an epistemic role in my life. I know that thrills him.

Uh, that is, I am actually seeing him, which is the way you can pick up information about people, right? Not a lot at this distance, but, uh, you know, I can see he’s uh, he’s even older and grayer than last time I saw him. Um, he’s in front of me.

Being in front of is a relation that is an epistemically information-providing relation. It’s also a pragmatic relation. That is, I could take action on Searle if I wanted to.

I could run over and kiss him on the forehead or s- I don’t particularly intend to do that, but I could do that. There is a way of doing it.

Now, David Kaplan, who I don’t think is in the audience, he’s not in an epistemic, pragmatic relation to me. I might desire to kiss David on the forehead right now more than anything in the world, I can’t do anything about it. There’s no way to just, from anywhere in the world, kiss David Kaplan in the forehead.

You have to be in a pragmatic relation, a relation that affords kissing on the forehead. Uh, let’s see. So an epistemic role is one such that when an object plays it in my life, there’s a way of picking up information about that object.

I can find out more about the person in front of me by looking at him or her. I can find out more about the person I’m talking to by asking them questions. I can find out more about the object I’m handling by holding it up where I can see it, and so forth.

The pragmatic role is one such that when an object plays it in my life, I can do things with it or to it. I can throw, throw the object I’m holding. I can hit the person in front of me, or shake hands with them, or startle him by doing something unexpected, like kissing them on the forehead.

Suppose that for some time I’ve wanted to find out the color of John Searle’s eyes. I have a notion of John Searle. This means he plays a role in my life.

He’s an object I have at some point perceived or otherwise gained information. I’ve formed a notion of him. But that role at present, that role just being someone I have a file of, isn’t epistemic or pragmatic.

Then here’s a person in front of me, someone situated vis-à-vis me that I can find out the color of his eyes and tell him how much I admire intentionality even after all these years. But of course,

(laughter)

even if he is John Searle, I won’t do these things if, if, if I don’t recognize him, if I continue to think that it’s Sean Connery instead. In a way, and this is an important point, detached knowledge is inevitably partial. It’s an important point because detached knowledge seems to have become the philosophical ideal of knowledge.

But it shouldn’t be, because it’s partial. The view from nowhere is a partial view. It’s not a deeper, more proun– found view than the view from somewhere.

In a way, detached knowledge is inevitably partial. It doesn’t afford any action. By itself, it is of no help to us at all, at least in any very practical way.

If I have a notion of David Israel, I can think of him. Maybe I can enjoy making up scenarios on which he figures. Imagine David Israel explaining the structure of Lisp to George Bush, for example.

But I wrote a short play about that. Uh, but nothing very practical. To do something to David Israel or with David Israel, you have to get into some relevant epistemic pragmatic relationship with him.

The utility of detached knowledge is in its potential to augment the knowledge and object we are perceiving, or at least in a position to act on, has. Related to this is the concept of know-how. We know how to do things involving objects to achieve effects conditional on what the objects are like.

I know how to shake hands or startle or irritate or or find out more about the object in front of me or to my right or in the next room. I know a lot about David Kaplan, but I don’t know how to shake hands with him or startle him or irritate him, except insofar as I can get into some epistemic pragmatic relation with him. That is, I know how to shake hands with people who play a certain role in my life as opposed to knowing how to shake hands with people per se, or eo ipso, or ibid, or whatever the right phrase is.

Okay, now we’re headed back to our target, s-self-belief. With all this in mind, let’s return to Mach. The first thing to observe is that Mach does play a very important role in his own life, the role we call self.

One’s neighbor is the person who stands in the relation living next door to one. One’s mother is the person who stands in the relation of female parent of to one. These are important roles.

But oneself is the person who stands in the relation being identical with to one, and it’s an even more important role. Identity is an epistemic and pragmatic relation. There are certain ways of knowing about the person who is oneself that don’t work for anyone else.

There are certain ways of doing things to and with yourself that don’t work for anyone else. There is a way of finding out if one’s vest is linty that each person can use to find out about themselves that doesn’t work for anyone else. When he gets to number two and says, “Ah, I am the shabby pedagogue,” he turns his head down, he says, “My God.”

Then there’s a way of getting lint off yourself that doesn’t work with anyone else, uh, particularly… Well, never mind. I mean-

(laughter)

as, as, as, as,

(cough)

as university employees, we’ve all gone through sexual harassment training, and we know you just can’t go around doing that to other people with impunity, uh, um, even if they’re very, very linty. Um,

(laughter and coughing)

methods for finding out whether a person has a property are what, uh, I mean, some methods for finding out whether a person has a property are what I call normally self-informative. That is, normally, if you find out a person has a property using that method, the person you’re finding out about is yourself. Just as normally, if you find out a person by opening your eyes while looking straight ahead, the person you’re finding out about is the person in front of you, right?

(coughs)

Uh, the method we imagine Mach using to see if there’s lint on his vest is like this. Philosophers can invent examples where the person whose v-vest he sees in this way is not himself. Perhaps his eyes have been, unknown to him, remounted at the top of his head, so that when he bends down, he sees the vest of the person in front of him instead of his own.

Um, and so finds out in the way one normally finds out about the lintiness of one’s own vest that that person’s vent is linty. Arguably, some methods are not just normally, but necessarily self-informative, as one’s method for finding out one’s own desires, or whether one is in pain, or whether one likes the taste of a certain wine. Now, my suggestion about self-belief is this: We each have what I call a self-buffer.

This is the repository of information picked up in normally informative ways, and it is also the motivator of actions done in normally self-affecting or self-involving ways. Self-belief is belief involving these buffers, which we can call self-notions. Um, if I was trying to give an analysis of self-belief instead of merely make the distinction to work back to Borges, I would bring in a third kind of self-knowledge, what we call primitive self-knowledge, which doesn’t involve any notion at all.

But, uh, I won’t. Just in case you were nervous about that, I thought I’d tell you. On the other hand, we have files of ourselves too.

Suppose the day Mach got on the bus was his first day of classes. Earlier in the day, he looked at the time schedule to see when his introductory physics course met and in what lecture hall. He looks for his name in the same way he might look for someone else’s name if he wanted to attend their lecture, say a lecture by a colleague or visitor, or in the same way that someone else might look for his name to get to his class on time.

When he sees that he has been assigned to teach a course that meets at eleven a.m. in lecture hall seven, he picks up infrish– information about himself in the same way he would pick up information about anyone else.

(cough)

Or suppose I need to call my own cell phone ’cause I’ve misplaced it, and, uh, I want it to ring so I can find it. Total hypothetical example. I don’t remember my number, so I look in my wife’s address book that has my cell phone number in it.

I find out about my own cell phone number in the same way I’d find out about somebody else’s cell phone number. In these sorts of cases, there is no use of normally self-informative methods, even though we’re finding out about ourselves. We find out information about ourselves in the same way we find out information about others.

When Mach saw what time his class meant, the belief he picked up was about Mach, the person he happens to be. It will be integrated with his self-notion, with all the information he picks up about himself in normally self-informative ways. This is good because this information has to, uh, ha-has, has to motivate him to use so– normally self-motivated actions, like walking, to get to the class.

Um, mm, mm, mm. This is what didn’t happen the next day when he read the paper and learned that the famous physicist Ernst Mach was a shabby pedagogue. He acquired a belief.

The belief was about himself, but he didn’t acquire it with a normally self-informative method, and he didn’t integrate it into that repository for all the beliefs acquired in that way, and therefore, it wasn’t a self-belief, even though it was a belief about himself, about the person he happened to be. When he learned that what time his class met and where, Mach had the job of getting himself to the lecture hall at the right time. It is essential for this to happen that he get this information into his self-notion, for it is the information in one’s self-notion that guides one’s actions.

Mach knows how to get Mach someplace by a certain time because he knows how to get himself to a certain place by a certain time. There is no formula for getting a certain person, Freud or Mach or Wittgenstein, say, to lecture hall seven at 11:00 a.m. What we know how to do is to get ourselves to a certain place.

Uh, a place whose role in our lives we can identify, the lecture hall upstairs, say, at a time whose role in our lives we can identify an hour from now, say. So far then… Excuse me while I…

(clears throat)

So far then, the idea is that we have self-notions which are buffers in the sense that if they’re tied to epistemic pra– and pragmatic relations, and a role, the self-role, that a certain important individual plays in our lives. And we also have files of ourselves or the person we happen to be that contain information such as our names and possibly our Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, addresses, office numbers, and the like, that connect with publicly accessible sources of information from which we can gather information about ourselves in the same way that others gather data about us.

(coughs)

A brief aside, we can also use these files to produce effects on ourselves in ways that are not normally self-affecting. Hume, frustrated with the reception of his treatise, wrote an anonymous and rather favorable review of it. H- hoping the positive review would have a favorable effect on his book, in the same way a review, review of someone else’s book might have fa- a review of someone else’s book might favorably affect his fortunes.

Or perhaps I break into the dean’s office… Oh, sorry about this. Break into the dean’s office late one night, hack into his computer, look up my name, and add a few zeros to my salary.

And then, in a fit of altruism, do the same for Ken Taylor. So I affect my own salary and Taylor’s salary in the same way. But to return to the picture, we each have a self-notion, a buffer, and a file of ourselves.

And clearly they are linked, or they may just be different aspects of the same. You know, you can think of them as two manila folders with a rubber band around them, or as one manila folder that has different kinds of information in it. Uh, they’re, they’re linked.

Most of us know who we are. There are exceptions like Mach after he bumped his head. One might even be wrong about who he is.

Some people think they’re a Napoleon.

(laughter)

I admire John Searle a lot. I often fantasize about being him and approaching life and philosophy with the intelligence, confidence, and energy that he does. Yes, this is actually sort of true, you know?

You know, uh, uh, who, who would it be like to have so much confidence and energy all the time? Ah. Well, anyway, um, now maybe as I slip into senility, these fantasies will give way to delusion-

And I’ll come to believe I am John Searle and start showing up for lectures he’s scheduled to give. Or, or the graduate students in the Stanford Lounge will be s- arguing about whether Searle is a closet dualist or not. And I’ll say, “I am not a closet dualist,” and explain why.

But most of us have it right about who we are, And herein lies a great difference between self-notions and other buffers. Self-notions don’t need to be detached. I can accumulate information about the person I’m looking at as I track him through the seminar or through the party.

I don’t know why I’m tracking him through a seminar. But when I change my glance or, or, or the party ends, the information in my buffer needs to be detached, either uploaded into a preexisting file of the person if I recognize her or used as a basis for a new file. But I don’t have to do that with my self-notion and my John Perry file.

There’s only one person that ever has the relation of identity to me. There’s only one person I can ever know about using those normally self-informative methods. There’s only one person I can ever act on using these normally self-affecting methods.

So if I get it right in the first place, it doesn’t ever have to change. Once you have the connection right, it’s good for life. Now, the self-notion is not unique in that respect.

I have a buffer for the planet I live on, the one I find out by looking around. So far, I’ve never had to detach and recognize. It’s just always the same one, Earth.

And I, I have a file for the universe I’m in, and I’ve certainly never had to detach that. And I have a, have a file for the possible world I’m in. Uh, uh, and even a name for it, the actual world.

As if Ken Taylor says, “If anything is immune to error through a misidentification, it’s the actual world.” But we’re not interested in those deep topics. We’re interested in I. Okay, so now we’ve worked our way from Borges to Mach to information games, uh, to, to roles and epistemic relations and pragmatic relations, and then back to self-notions and the self or the identity as an epistemic and pragmatic relation.

And, uh, uh, now we’re going back to Borges. So remember, we’ve got, we’ve got, we’ve got, uh, uh, the, the, the writer, uh, who identifies himself with I. We’ve got Borges, that is the person the writer identifies with as Borges, and then we’ve got Borges himself who wrote the whole thing.

They’re all three the same, but different ways of thinking of them. The writer refers to himself in two ways, in the third person and in the first, with Borges, the, the name Borges, and with the pronoun I. He manages thereby to convey somewhat different thoughts to us.

With Borges, he conveys thoughts about himself tied to his public persona and information that he has or could pick up in third-personal ways. With the first person, he manages to convey thoughts about himself tied to information he gets in self-informative or first personal ways. That’s, at least that’s my hypothesis of what’s going on.

What is the connection between the grammatical categories of the first and third person, and the distinction between self-belief and belief about the person one happens to be? Why do, why do the writer’s two different ways of referring to himself express different thoughts and dif– have different effects on us the way that they do, even though they refer to the same person? The two ways of referring to himself allow the writer to say things like, “I know of Borges from the mail,” which is different from saying, “I know of I from the mail,” or, “Borges knows of Borges from the mail.”

He’s saying something different. “I know of Borges from the mail. I try to free myself from him.”

He can say these things without seeming to imply the rather odd, “I know myself from the mail,” or, “I try to s-free myself from myself.” Although the last two are consequences of the first two, given the fact that we know without, and without which, the story would have no point, that Borges is the writer. So the first statement means and conveys something quite different than I know of myself from the mail.

I know of Borges from the mail is one thing, I know of myself from the mail is the other. Um, even though these sentences from the author’s pen seem to have, in some sense, the same truth conditions. Since Borges is the writer, the first statement is true if Borges knows of Borges through the mail, and the writer knows of the writer through the mail.

The second is true if Borges tries to free Borges from Borges, and the writer tries to free the writer from the writer. But we do not draw these implications, but find some less wooden meaning that conveys something about the writer’s thoughts and how he is alienated from aspects of himself. A familiar concept of the truth conditions of a statement is simply that it is what has to hold of the things referred to in the statement, the subject matter.

Uh,

(cough)

it is simply what has to hold of the things referred to in the statement, the subject matter, for the statement to be true. I’ll call this the subject matter truth conditions. Um, since the truth conditions are the same, but what is conveyed is different, what is conveyed cannot depend on or depend only on the subject matter truth conditions.

That is, if I like coffee and Borges likes coffee can con-convey different thoughts to us, but their subject matter truth conditions are the same, namely that this guy Borges likes coffee. There’s got to be more to these thoughts and sentences than that. Clearly, there’s some difference that is made by the difference between the first person I and the name Borges, even though they both refer to Borges.

We can borrow Frege’s term for the difference between the two co-referring expressions. They are associated with different modes of presentation. The terms Borges and the first person I, written by Borges, both refer to Borges, but the way they do so, And so the way they present Borges to us is different.

What allows the sentences to convey quite different thoughts, even though the only difference between them consists of which co-referring term is used? What is this difference? Those of us old enough to remember General de Gaulle, or Bob Dole, for that matter, will, will re– in the case of General de Gaulle, will recall his curious habit of referring to himself in the third person.

I don’t suppose he did this all the time, but let’s imagine that he did. So you’re sitting at a dinner party with de Gaulle, whom we all suppose is speaking English, much as we’ve been ignoring the fact that Borges wrote in Spanish. So de Gaulle says, “De Gaulle would like some salt.”

So you pass him the salt. You see the deep connection with John’s work on, on, uh, performatives and, and speech acts. There definitely is a deep connection, but I digress.

Why does it sound so pompous when de Gaulle says this, as opposed to just saying, “I would like the salt”? The reason I suggest lies in the difference between the way names work and the way pronouns like I work. There are simple conventions that allow us to refer to persons with names.

To use my favorite example, the name David Kaplan, which is a way of referring to the famous logician, is a way of referring to the famous logician David Kaplan. The same name… It’s my favorite example because he denies this because he thinks you individuate names by their bearers, but that’s really not germane to today, so I won’t say any more about it.

The same name is also a way of referring to a professor in Stanford’s medical school.

[00:55:12] JOHN PERRY:
Two different conventions established at different times by different parents that allow us to refer to two different people with the name David Kaplan. And there are lots of other David Kaplans in the world. There are more than a thousand David Kaplans in California.

See, you don’t know either, so nobody’s really…

(laughter)

Still, we can usually figure out which conventions are being exploited, which David Kaplan is being talked about. Suppose you were at a dinner party with David Kaplan. He’s too far from the salt to reach it, and so are you, but you are next to someone who can, and you have discerned that Kaplan would like the salt because of his baleful look in the direction of the salt cellar after his first bite of steak.

“David Kaplan would like the salt,” you say to the fellow next to you. This doesn’t sound pompous, but note that it presumes that the person you are talking to knows which of the individuals around the table is named David Kaplan. You had an alternative way of getting the salt passed to Kaplan.

You could have pointed to Kaplan and said, “He would like the salt.” Which way you said it would depend on what you felt you could assume about your addressee’s knowledge. That is, the two ways of referring to Kaplan make different cognitive demands on the listener.

Using Kaplan’s name doesn’t sound pompous because you aren’t assuming everyone knows your name. This is what de Gaulle did, and this accounts, I suggest, for it sounding pompous, although in his case, the assumption was no doubt correct. So when we plan our utterances and assess the effect they have and what people might learn from them and what they need to know to understand them, it’s not just the subject matter, truth conditions, who we’re talking about and what we’re saying about them, that we exploit and need to worry about.

The effect of our utterances and the thoughts they express depend on how we refer to things, not just on the things we refer to. When Borges refers to himself with I, we think of him in one way, as the writer of the words we are reading. To think of Borges as the writer is to think of him as the one whose thoughts are being expressed in the words we read, that is, his current thoughts, the ones that guided the pen as he wrote or the fingers as he typed.

The name Borges, written by Borges or anyone else, refers to him in virtue of conventions known by all who know him or know of him. So in using the first person and referring to his own name, Borges makes different cognitive demands on the reader, and we react to those different demands by interpreting the thoughts he wishes to convey differently. He, in effect, asks us to bracket the knowledge we don’t need to use in understanding the reference of his words.

When he uses the first person, we bracket the facts we know through information we’ve accessed via the name Borges. When he uses Borges, we bracket the facts we know in virtue of the user of the name being the referent of that name. So he invents two different characters.

One is the writer who is telling us about his relation to the other, Borges, a well-known author. These facts about language and about the difference between names and pronouns, and especially I, are a special case of the general differences between role-based and detached systems of information and action we considered above. I is a self-affecting way of referring to a person.

It is a way anyone has of referring to himself, and it doesn’t depend on knowledge of one’s own name any more than eating the sandwich in front of one depends on knowing one’s own name. Borges is a detached way of referring to Borges. Anyone can refer to Borges in that way, whatever the role he plays in their lives, and whether or not they and– and whether or not they know who plays that role.

I don’t know what I meant by that, but that’s what it says. So a first interpretation. We now have enough materials for a first pass at an interpretation of the story that Borges gave us.

The author is the writer and has the thoughts the writer is depicted as having. The writer and the author both like maps, hourglasses, typography, and Stevenson in a way the writer is depicted as liking them. The characteristics attributed to Borges by the writer, liking these things in a vain way, for example, are not the ones the au-author actually has.

They are the ones he would have if the things attributed to him by the press, critics, publicists were correct. The works of the author, together with the writings of critics and the like, have created a public concept, a persona of the author that is not accurate. And yet the author is constantly exposed to it in the same way that everyone else is and cannot avoid it.

The key to this pool of accurate, semi-accurate, and a– inaccurate depictions is of the author is his name, Borges. And so this name is used to create a character in the story. We can pretend that the concept correctly describes someone real, towards which the writer feels considerable annoyance.

When the writer tries to do things and write things that don’t conform to the public persona, these things are simply absorbed into the public persona, interpreted in its light, changing it, but not making it accurate. He appreciat-he appreciates this concept of himself, the inaccurate one, is what will live on along with his literature. Only by being the person that this concept inaccurately portrays will he continue to be known to survive.

Thus, the penultimate sentences. Years ago, I tried to free myself from him and went into the mythologies of the suburbs, to the games with time and infinity. But these games belong to Borges now, and I shall have to imagine other things.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion or to him. But unfortunately, the end of the story, if taken seriously, belies this interpretation. He says, “I do not know which of us has written this page.”

If the character Borges is simply the author’s personification for a literary effect of an inaccurate concept of the writer, how could there be any possibility of Borges having written the page that didn’t involve the writer writing the page? How are we to interpret that last sentence? It seems to open the door for a somewhat different interpretation of the story.

The writer and Borges are both real, both agents, different aspects of selves of the author. So it makes some sense to attribute agency to one and not the other for some things, and the other and not the one for others. But what sense can we make of such multiple selves and bifurcated agency within a single person?

Well, I’ll say a little bit about that, and then I’ll be done. So this section is called Borges’s selves. I think selves are basically just people seen as playing the role of the same person as the subject of some verb, the agent of some activity, the thinker of some thought, the possessor of some emotion, and so forth.

My neighbor is just a person, thought of as playing the role of the one who lives next to me. My father is just a person who plays the role of being the mar- male parent of, relative to me. Neighbor and father are role words, role wor– role words, and so is self.

On this conception of selves, there’s only one self per person, and the person himself or herself is it. Still, we often use phrases like the true self or the authentic self. Uh, last year or so, Mel Gibson, arrested for drunk driving, made a number of anti-Semitic remarks to the police, uh, person who was arresting him.

People debate, was that Gibson’s true self emerging in the uninhibited state produced by his drunkenness? Or is this true self the one that emerged when he sobered up, and with all of his cognitive faculties functioning, was ashamed of what he had said? Without taking sides on the real Mel Gibson, or even committing myself to the idea that some selves are more authentic than others, I want to see what ma– sense we can make of the idea of one person having multiple selves.

What I will suggest uses the concept of a motivating cognitive complex. We begin with the film– familiar idea that actions are motivated by beliefs and desires. If I intentionally do A, there will be some combination of beliefs and desires that plays two important roles in my doing A.

First, the beliefs and desires are what cau– the beliefs and desires are what caused me to do A. Second, the contents of the beliefs and desires rationalize, in a relatively weak sense of rationalize, my doing A. Um,

(coughs)

now, it’s, it’s clear you can have different motivating complexes affecting what you’re doing at different times, different roles you play kind of take over, uh, your life. But it, it can also– the, the competition can, can be synchronic as well as diachronic. Consider getting out of bed.

One motivating complex has control of my thought processes. They rationally go over what is best for me to do and determine that it would be a really good idea to move my arms and legs and torso in such a way as to bring it about that I get out of bed. But nothing happens.

On my diagnosis, the cognitive complex that controls my deliberation doesn’t control my torso. That’s controlled by another live reason, one that says, “Good to stay in bed.” “Don’t move,” right?

Or procrastination, but I won’t go into that.

(coughs)

So, um, as a child, I was imbued with many opinions that in retrospect I don’t accept. Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, I was taught by my father and grandfather that Roosevelt was a demon, as were most Democrats, that there was nothing innately special– something innately special about Nebraska football, that the supposed superiority of places like Harvard and Yale over our local university was a matter of snobism of wealthy patricians. Well, I think all of these cognitive structures, though they no longer represent my true beliefs or even really beliefs at all, still live a shadowy half-life in the recesses of the darker regions of my psyche.

When tired and annoyed during those parts of my life spent with people of a certain patrician caste who don’t know or care where Nebraska is, the kind of people you meet who think that Chicago is halfway between New York and San Francisco and, and, and kind of have never completely unfolded a map of the US to discover Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota.

(gasp)

It, it, when, when, when you’re at a bar with people like this, late at night, these subterranean near-beliefs briefly seize control of my thoughts, although not usually my mouth.

(laughter)

Perhaps if I were as drunk as Mel Gibson was, I would find myself

(laughter)

complaining about Roosevelt and the New Deal and Democrats.

(laughter)

And I don’t know, I mean, I, I was at a department meeting once, and of course, not all of you have ever been Nancy Cartwright’s colleague, but, uh,

(gasp)

I, I found myself

(laughter)

saying rude things to Nancy Cartwright

(gasp)

while my consciousness was totally in the control of a much saner individual saying, “Shut up, you fool.” So it happens. So maybe motivating complexes may be embedded in larger structures of belief about oneself and one’s situation, desires and aspirations, intentions and plans.

They do not form a coherent whole. And different control– different complexes seize control of different ways of acting in various situations and moods. Borges in this story is not simply, on the second interpretation, a personification of an inaccurate public persona, but one part of a not totally coherent and integrated self-concept, self-notion.

In certain moods, the author is Borges, the public persona coincides. In certain moods, the author is Borges. The public persona coincides with a subset of the author’s psyche that has control.

At such times, the author really does become a bit of an actor, a poseur, writing and publishing things, giving interviews and talks that strike him in other moods as alien and pompous, though not without interest and value. Perhaps in productive authorial moods, the self-conception, the one who’s in control when he talks, walks in the streets of Buenos Aires, anonymous, unaffected, unmotivated by larger ambitions, can control only an inner voice that says things like, “You’re being a pompous ass,” or some more sophisticated Borgesian inversion of such a thought. So interpreted, there is in some res- reasonable sense two selves corresponding to the two characters in the story, corresponding to two self-conceptions, two overlapping but differently significant complexes of desires, ambitions, and intentions, both belonging in some way to the same self-notion that Borges finds within himself, change and e-energy and ambition ebb and flow.

If so, the answer to the question posed by the last sentence would probably be Borges. The writer may have originally had the thoughts the story tells us about, but somebody had to write them down, edit them, polish them, and arrange for them to be published, or we never would have seen them. This seems like the sort of thing that Borges, and not the writer, would take the time and effort to do.

That is, it’s the sort of thing that the author, under the influence of his authorial cognitive complex, would do. Thank you.

(applause)

(cough)

[01:07:46] JAY WALLACE:
So we have, uh, we have time for a few questions. I’ll, I’ll, um, I’ll call on people and… But John, yeah, will answer the questions.

[01:07:54] JOHN PERRY:
I’ll stand here.

(laughter)

[01:07:55] JAY WALLACE:
Division of labor.

(cough)

[01:07:58] ELLEN GOBLER:
Uh, you’ll need to use this microphone because it goes through the cameras and the taping.

[01:08:05] JOHN PERRY:
I tell you, it’s so plausible. Everybody’s just saying, “Wow, that was right.”

[01:08:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Why don’t you apply your structures to the old injunction, “Know thyself”?

[01:08:15] JOHN PERRY:
Know thyself. Uh, well, who said that? Plato?

No. Socrates? One of those guys.

Uh, I, I think it’s a good i- It’s a good idea, know thyself. It’s just not as easy as you might think.

Okay. Um… uh- I mean, it sounds trivial, know thyself, but it’s not trivial.

Why isn’t it trivial? Well, we’re complicated things. I have a feeling you expect me to say something deep and profound, but that’ll take a while.

[01:08:48] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Just one. Yes.

(laughter)

[01:08:49] JOHN PERRY:
Yes. Uh, uh, I think I know myself pretty well, and it hasn’t been that thrilling an experience actually.

(laughter)

I, I, I find, I find thinking about abstract issues, fictional characters, and dead philosophers much more interesting than thinking about myself. Well, what can you say? Somebody clear it back.

[01:09:17] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. Um, yeah, why don’t we start in the back? Okay. And work our way.

[01:09:27] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi. Um, I’m very interested in the, in the very first sentence of the story, right? “The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.”

And it– that sentence seems to suggest that there’s some sort of idea that the I is somehow the active- Right w-what’s really active here. And and talking about Borges, he– and that gets picked up later with the idea that I, I give things over to him.

So I wonder, is it right to think that there’s, in a sense, two personas here that are sort of on equal footing, as opposed to pushing towards some idea that the true I is somehow active in a way? I mean, that notion of I as being active seems i-implicit in the story, but it, it didn’t seem to me to play a role in how you were thinking about I. Well, I– so I was wondering if you had any thoughts.

[01:10:21] JOHN PERRY:
So there’s this, there’s this, uh, you know, subject, object, agent, patient, uh, uh, I, me thing that actually goes better with the first interpretation than the second. Uh, uh, uh, G.H. Mead had this, this, uh, distinction between the I and the me, and the me is kind of the reflection in your own self-concept of what other people think of you. And, and, and, and, and so that in a way is, is, is something that happens to you.

You don’t do it, it happens to you. And, and you can see that as one thing that seems to be going on in the story. But, but, um, and, and that was my theory of the story for the long ti- for a long time.

I mean, the last part that took the extra seven minutes, so I didn’t quit after fifty minutes the way I should have, uh, just kept nagging at me because of that last sentence. But then when you bring that in, you kind of lose the con-contrast you just mentioned. So maybe I don’t have it all right after all.

[01:11:30] JAY WALLACE:
Okay, question.

[01:11:32] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, I, I pretty much buy into the second interpretation and find it very plausible that,

(laughter)

um, you know, the story is about these, non-totally integrated elements of self-conception. But what’s interesting to me is if that’s what the story’s about, why is that issue so entertaining and creative and humorous to us? Because that seems to be what, you know, the story is doing to we as readers, to us as readers.

[01:12:01] JOHN PERRY:
You know, why do we find it engaging and amusing? Yeah. Um, well, I suppose it’s a combination of seeing a little bit of it ourselves in it, and at the same time, not seeing it as a problem we particularly have.

(laughter)

Uh, you know, uh, uh,

(cough)

we, we all do have this, um, this me. I mean, uh,

(cough)

uh, w-w-we all, we all have, uh, uh, you know, a part of ourselves that’s formed by the perceptions of others. Particularly if you have children, you know? y-

y- you spend a lot of your life… I mean, walking up Telegraph Avenue, uh, uh, reminded me of the ’60s for some reason.

And I, I went through the ’60s, you know, uh, protesting the war and marching up Telegraph Avenue and, and wearing strange costumes and growing a beard, but I already had three kids, so I couldn’t take drugs. I felt so deprived, right?

(laughter)

So, so that was a case in which kind of, you know, your, your, your, your conception of yourself as a, as a person that, you know, has certain, what it was Bradley said, my station and its duties, right?

(laughter)

It wasn’t quite like that, but, um, uh, it, it, it’s something that takes over your life at a certain point and, and affects you in certain ways

(coughing)

and then at other times, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re quite different. So we all see ourselves in having that contrast, and we all kind of think that, wow, if, uh, it

(coughing)

(laughter)

it, it’s like, um, you know, it’s like these, these baseball stars and, uh, movie actors that complain about all the attention they get. And you think, “Gosh, if I was getting billions of dollars a year, I could put up with this.” It’s, ah, poor Boris, he’s, he’s so famous that people write articles about him and, and, and, and, and he has to worry about his public persona and what happens to it.

It breaks my heart. I don’t know, uh, why is it, why is it engaging and humorous? One, one nice thing about it is it’s very short.

So it’s the shortest short story I know of.

[01:14:10] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Do you think there’s some… Do you think there’s some, um, kind of interplay of, uh, competing values in a personality that at some times, you know, you may be vain, and you hate to admit it, but so you kind of blame it on the public persona, and that’s what the stories are playing with?

[01:14:27] JOHN PERRY:
Well, yeah, that that that could be that That the two interpretations kind of come together at that point. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s clear this public persona weren’t somewhat accurate to an aspect of Borges that at times motivates him. He wouldn’t be Borges.

He wouldn’t be famous. He wouldn’t have done all the hard work to write all those stories, right? Uh, like this one, as I say at the end.

I mean, it’s one thing to have these thoughts. It wasn’t, so to speak, Borges that had the thoughts, it was the writer, the guy who was saying what a– But, but then Borges took over and said, “Hmm,” I get a story out of that.

Dust it up a little here, make the language a little better, talk to my agent. I wonder if I could get interviewed and, you know… So, yes, complex.

Of course, Borges is pretty complex. I mean, frankly, I’m just an analytic philosopher. I’m way over my head with this one.

I just couldn’t resist writing about a story that had to do with the I and the, and the proper names.

[01:15:24] JAY WALLACE:
We have a time for a couple more questions.

[01:15:29] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, at, at the beginning of y- the remarks that you identified as the boring remarks, which weren’t at all boring.

[01:15:36] JOHN PERRY:
Thank you.

[01:15:37] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, you said, uh, we form beliefs to help us, uh, guide actions. But that al- That already begs a number of questions about the self. It assumes the self is somehow essential or prior to actions, and I’m wondering how that assumption affects everything you’ve said about the self.

[01:15:58] JOHN PERRY:
Yes. Well, I, that-that’s where I had this little, uh, uh, uh, safety valve. I said, “Oh, by the way, if I was giving an analysis of the self, I would have a lot to say about this.”

So, so, so, so I don’t, I don’t think the self and the way we ordinarily think about the self, uh, uh, does precede action. I mean, I think we see this same, Uh, uh, lately I’ve been in a reading group, uh, with some students on the work of Ruth Millikan. Uh, and I’ve always found her works extremely irritating.

Uh, uh, p- particularly the one that, that, that accuses me of, of, of believing in the myth of the essential indexical. Uh, because she kind of, she’s marching to the beat of a different drummer than I’m listening to.

[01:16:37] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Use the mic please.

(cough)

[01:16:39] JOHN PERRY:
But, but now that my students have forced me to get into it, it’s really interesting stuff. And s-so she has this idea that kind of the basic unit of meaning is really way down there at, at the cellular level. Uh, reminds me a little of a, of an old essay of John Dewey’s about, uh, stimulus response arc as the, as the focus of everything.

And it is this idea of information, affect, result. That’s, that’s the birth of meaning, the birth of action, the birth of perception. It’s all way below the level of anything that we would think of as a self.

It’s, it’s a, it’s a cell, it’s a unit. Um, and, and I think that, that we really have three kinds of self-knowledge. We have, we have what I call, uh, self-belief or self-knowledge expressed with the word “I.” We have knowledge about the person we happen to be, but, but, but underlying both of those is just knowledge from a perspective.

Uh, and, and that’s the, the kind of, of… That is,

(clears throat)

you’re in a state. You don’t– You, you perhaps don’t have any representation of yourself at all, not an “I,” not an internal notion.

The unity that in humans comes with, with the self-notion, uh, comes in this form of thought just with the, the whole conception of the world. The world is conceived from a

(clears throat)

certain perspective. Uh, and I think this is basic to human thought, uh, and these other things are developments of it, and it’s when we develop these other things that kind of come in tandem, uh, the idea to think of yourself objectively and the idea to translate that into an I thought, which then feeds into this basic way of thinking of the world from a perspective, um, uh, that, that, that, that’s the basis of it all. So if I, if I could spell all that out, I think you’d have another question, but maybe, maybe, yeah.

Uh, uh, I, I think the way I present it here does leave that question. You, you’ve got, you’ve got the self-notion, but, but, but is– it’s not really required for this basic kind of self-informative information. In other words, a, a frog has normally self-informative ways of perceiving the world.

Uh, it, it perceives, uh, when it, when it perceives a fly, it perceives it as a certain distance and direction from it. Uh, and that’s why it flicks its tongue out in that distance and direction. But tha-those distinctions I made in describing its thought have no presence in its thought.

In other words, I’m from the outside explaining the success conditions of its thought, and I need to bring the frog into that, and that’s why I say it has knowledge of itself. But it has, doesn’t have knowledge that involves necessarily a representation of itself. So there’s a lot of issues there, and you’re absolutely right.

[01:19:35] JAY WALLACE:
So, we’ll take one more question. Um, yes.

[01:19:42] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, thank– Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but I was trying to hear more about perhaps self-criticism, which seems to be very strong in both of these pieces. You know, the, the vanity in the Borges piece and the what a shabby pedagogue. So it seems like that bifurcation comes from some sort of s- looking at or, you know, criticism from either external or internal pressures.

Um.

[01:20:05] JOHN PERRY:
Well, that, that’s a very interesting point. One I don’t say much about, and I don’t have much to say about, but it seems extremely interesting, and is to what extent is the whole idea of self-criticism? Maybe this relates back to the know thyself.

That is, of having a conception, having a distinction between the way you are, uh, and the way you think you ought to be. Uh, is, is that a kind of a thought you could have if you didn’t have both of these ways of thinking about yourself, Uh, self-belief and belief about the person you happen to be? Probably not.

Good topic to explore. But I don’t have much to say about it beyond that. How about you?

Got an idea there?

[01:20:46] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I don’t have my mic.

[01:20:48] JOHN PERRY:
Yeah.

[01:20:51] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. A reminder that Professor Perry will be speaking, uh, tomorrow at 4:10 in the Harrison Library on, uh, the consequence argument and free will. Um, and but let’s bring today’s session to a close by thanking you very much for a very stimulating talk.

(applause and cheering)