Remedies for Vertigo

Abstract

General agreement with Carlos Pereda’s approach to the issues surrounding the so-called “first person perspective” is qualified in three respects. First, it is suggested that consciousness of one’s own identity as persisting in time is a language-independent capacity, and that philosophical discussions of self-consciousness would gain in perspicuousness by taking that explicitly into account. Second, a qualm is expressed about the significance of arguments from inconceivability, specifically as they feature in Pereda’s discussion of what he describes as three sorts of “vertiginous reasoning” prompted by philosophical perplexity about the self. Third, it is suggested that the view of personal identity as being at least in part a construction (as in what is often called “narrativism”) is an inescapable consequence of the acknowledgment that the intentional content of an action is essentially description-relative.