The Nature and Role of First and Second Person Content
Christopher Peacocke · Analysis · 2016
Naomi Eilan’s comments raise some fundamental issues. I hold that for creatures at Level 1 and above, their perceptual states have a first person, de se content. Eilan holds that my position on the de se content of perceptual awareness is incompatible with the position stated by Evans in this passage from The Varieties of Reference : … a subject can know he is in front of a house simply by perceiving a house. Certainly what he perceives comprises no element corresponding to ‘I’ in the judgment ‘I am in front of a house’: he is simply aware of a house. ( Evans 1982 : 232) There is no incompatibility. Evans’s claim is about what the subject perceives. That is a claim about the objects of perception, something concerning the level of reference, rather than the level of intentional content, here understood as the level of the way in which things are given in such a perception. The crucial point in dissipating any sense of incompatibility is that an intentional content (a notion) can feature in the representational content of a perception without the entity to which it refers being an object of that perception. I noted that a subject can know about his spatial relations to objects and events, on the basis of his perceptions, without perceiving himself (36). The point is consistent with some perceptions having a de se intentional representational content.