Kristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self” (MIT Press, 2015)
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What is the central problem of self‑conscious thought that the book addresses?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talese, Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophy. Today's interview is with Christina Mussel, professor of cognitive anthropology in the Department of Philosophy at Leipzig University. Her new book, Thinking About One's Self from Non-Conceptual Content to the Concept of a Self, is just out from the MIT Press. When Descartes famously concluded, I think, therefore I am,
He took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-conscious thought? We aren't born with it, and while we may not be the only creatures that can think thoughts about ourselves, this ability does not seem to be very widespread. For starters, to be able to think of oneself, it seems one must first possess a concept of the self, of what the I refers to. In thinking about oneself, Mussel provides a naturalistic account of how self-conscious thought develops, how we may move from possessing implicitly self-referential information to having explicit self-representation, and how an entity that may think using non-conceptual resources can develop concepts that refer to items in the world, including, in particular, to oneself.
Ms. Holt defends what she calls a no-self view, in which the self is not an object that we refer to, but instead a mode of presentation, and that the development of a self-concept is driven by social relationships and the need for intersubjective information. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Christina Musselt. Yeah, hello. Hello, welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Hi, thank you so much for inviting
me. So I'm looking forward to talking about your new book, Thinking About One's Self, from non-conceptual content to the concept of a self. And you give what you call a no-self view, which itself sounds a little bit... contradictory, but
you
do explain it, and we'll get into that. But before we begin getting into the book itself, maybe you could tell us a bit about yourself and your background. I mean, you're a philosopher of... a professor of cognitive anthropology in a philosophy department, but your PhD and your background is in philosophy and cognitive science. So maybe you could say a bit about... about your background and how you came to write this book.
Yeah. So it depends a little bit on how far back you want to go. But I suppose I was always kind of interested in philosophy on the one hand since I was a teenager, but also in biology and neuroscience, cognitive science for a long time.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central problem of self‑conscious thought that the book addresses?
0:00–7:55
2
How does Kristina Musholt explain the transition from implicit self‑referential information to explicit self‑representation?
7:55–17:33
3
Why does Musholt reject the traditional subject‑object model and propose a ‘no‑self’ view?
17:33–25:54
4
What role do non‑conceptual contents and ‘knowledge‑how’ play in early self‑awareness?
25:54–34:30
5
How does social interaction and scaffolding drive the development of a self‑concept?
34:30–42:15
6
What is the representational re‑description process and how does it relate to the balance‑beam experiments with children?
42:15–49:48
7
How do children’s emerging theory of mind and joint attention contribute to self‑consciousness?
49:48–57:02
8
What open questions does Musholt identify about character traits, different kinds of self‑knowledge, and future research directions?
57:02–1:04:52
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