SELF‐REFLEXIVE THOUGHTS

1 Are Self-Reflexive Thoughts Possible? What is it, or what would it be, for a thought (or experience) to be self-reflexive —a thought (or experience) that was intrinsically about itself? Derek Parfit once suggested to me an example of the following sort. Alice has insomnia. She has trouble falling asleep and part of the problem is that she worries about it and realizes that her worrying about it tends to keep from falling asleep. It occurs to her that thinking that she will not be able to fall asleep may be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps she even has a thought that might be expressed like this: " I am not going to fall asleep because of my having this very thought. " This thought (perhaps correctly) attributes to itself the property of keeping her awake. Could there be such a self-reflexive thought? Someone might suggest that there could not be such a thought, because the supposition that there could be such a thought leads to contradiction via a version of the liar paradox. 2 Assume there can be self-reflexive thoughts. Then one might have the thought of the form, " This very thought is not true. " That thought would be true if and only if it were not true. But that consequence is self-contradictory. So, there could be no such thought. So, there cannot be self-reflexive thoughts. One obvious objection to this argument is that, even if there could not be a thought attributing falsity to itself, there might be other self-reflexive thoughts. A more basic objection to the argument is that it assumes all instances of the following truth schema are correct. (T) The thought that-φ is true if and only if φ. Kripke (1975) argues that the moral of the liar paradox is in part that (T) does not hold for all cases. Applying one of his points to the case of thought, it seems that if Alice is to have any concept of truth at all, she should be able to have the thought that her friend Harry is currently thinking something that is not true, not realizing that Harry is thinking that she, Alice, is currently thinking something true. It seems absurd to suppose that Alice and Harry could not have those thoughts, and their having those thoughts is 3 incompatible with (T). Assume (T) holds in full generality. Then, Alice's thought is …