Memory and Self-Consciousness (1): Immunity to Error through Misidentification and the Critique of Quasi-Memory

Abstract

As argued in Chapter 1, understanding “I” involves grasping both its role as a device of self-reference and the grounds of self-knowledge. When I think of myself self-consciously, I do so in a way that contrasts with thinking about myself non-self-consciously — as the examples of (A)-thoughts showed. However, there is a sub-category of “I”-thoughts that involves a distinctive way of thinking about myself, one in which I cannot think of others — a way involving distinctively self-conscious forms of self-knowledge, hence the heading “epistemology of self-consciousness” to label this issue. The kind of “I”-thoughts in question are those which are immune to error through misidentification (IEM), and they exhibit the Distinctness Principle: that to have “I”-thoughts is to think about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think about anyone or anything else in a direct way. Wittgenstein was the first to recognise the category of IEM, but Shoemaker coined the phrase “immunity to error through misidentification” and articulated the phenomenon, while Evans gave the most developed account of it to date.¹ Other “I”-thoughts, in contrast, involve thinking of oneself in the same way as one thinks of others.