Ort: Online via Zoom
Zeit: 18:00 – 19:30 Uhr

Prof. Dr. Kristina Musholt (Kognitive Anthropologie, Geisteswissenschaftliches Zentrum, Universität Leipzig)

Learning to think about oneself: From quasi-predicates to spatially grounded ‘I’-thoughts

Self-consciousness is often understood in terms of the ability to think about oneself, that is in terms of the ability to think ‘I’-thoughts (e.g. Musholt 2015). Traditional analyses of self-consciousness often link the ability to think ‘I’-thoughts to advanced linguistic competence and cognitive abilities, leading to an explanatory paradox concerning the development of this ability (Bermúdez 1998; 2017). This talk (based on joint work with Frauke Hildebrandt) will challenge this assumption by adopting a developmental and listener-oriented perspective. I will argue that children initially understand ‘I’ not as a singular term but as a quasi-predicate learned through associative processes, making it cognitively easier to acquire than spatial indexicals (‘here’ and ‘there’). I will further propose that the full-fledged ability to think about oneself is mediated by the acquisition of an understanding of a shared, intersubjective space, which is established through dialogical interactions that allow children to understand spatial indexicals as terms that can be systematically substituted for one another, and hence as terms for singular reference. The aim of the analysis is to propose a new developmental account of spatial and self-referential understanding (thereby offering a solution to the paradox of self-consciousness) as well as to reveal cognitive and logical dependencies among different indexical terms. 

Zoom-Link bitte erfragen bei: pina(at)fh-potsdam.de