evans on bodily awareness and perceptual self-location

Evans on Bodily Awareness andPerceptual Self-Location

Ignacio Ávila

Abstract: In Chapter 7 of The Varieties of Reference Evans implicitly outlines a viewto the effect that bodily awareness plays no role in perceptual self-location or inthe specification of our perceptual perspective of the world. In this paper Idiscuss this story and offer an alternative proposal. Then I explore someconsequences of this account for our understanding of the elusiveness of the selfin perceptual experience.

1. Introduction

In his discussion of self-knowledge in Chapter Seven of The Varieties of Reference,Gareth Evans describes ‘two ways we have of gaining knowledge of our physicalstates and properties’ (Evans 1982: 220) that in his opinion are modes ofself-knowledge. The first one is bodily awareness. This is the type of awarenesswe have of our own body ‘from the inside’, as when we feel that our legs arecrossed or that we are moving our hands. It contrasts with the type ofexteroceptive awareness we have of our own body when, for example, we seesome of its limbs. Evans includes in bodily awareness aspects like ‘our pro-prioceptive sense, our sense of balance, of heat and cold, and of pressure’ (ibid.).The second form of self-knowledge of our physical states is perceptual self-location. It is a central feature of our normal perceptual experience of the worldthat in experiencing objects and places as standing in spatial relations withrespect to ourselves, our current spatial location with respect to them is alsoimplicitly specified in such experience. Evans explains:

I have in mind the way in which we are able to know our position,orientation, and relation to other objects in the world upon the basis ofour perceptions of the world. Included here are such things as: knowingthat one is in one’s own bedroom by perceiving and recognizing theroom and its contents; knowing that one is moving in a train by seeingthe world slide by; knowing that there is a tree in front of one, or to theright or left, by seeing it; and so on. (ibid.: 222)

Evans claims that these two modes of self-knowledge of our physical states andproperties provide us with ‘the most powerful antidote to a Cartesian conceptionof the self’ (ibid.: 220). Very briefly, for Evans the reason is that bodily awarenessand perceptual self-location give rise to judgements that, like our self-ascriptionsof mental states on the basis of introspection, are immune to error through

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00525.x

European Journal of Philosophy ••:•• ISSN 0966-8373 pp. ••–•• © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

misidentification relative to the first person. A judgement ‘a is F’ is immune toerror through misidentification relative to ‘a’ if it is not epistemically possible forthe subject to know that something is F, but to be wrong in thinking that a isthe thing that is F (Shoemaker 1984). So Evans’s point is that if in normalcircumstances I judge that my legs are crossed on the basis of bodily awareness,then it is not epistemically possible for me to know that someone’s legs arecrossed but to be wrong that it is my legs that are crossed. Similarly, Evans thinksthat when I judge in normal conditions that I am in front of a tree on the basisof my visual experience of a tree in front of me, the judgement about my locationwith respect to the tree is also immune to error through misidentification relativeto the first person. The fact that bodily awareness and perceptual self-locationyield judgements with this type of immunity is of the utmost significance, sincethe immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person istaken to be a crucial mark of self-knowledge. In fact, the knowledge we have ofour own psychological states through introspection also enjoys this type ofimmunity. For this reason, Evans concludes that since our knowledge of ourphysical properties gained through bodily awareness and perceptual self-location is—like our introspective knowledge of our mental states—immune toerror through misidentification relative to the first person, then ‘our conceptionof ourselves is firmly anti-Cartesian: our “I”-Ideas are Ideas of bearers ofphysical no less than mental properties’ (ibid.: 224). Thus, Evans’s antidote toCartesianism is precisely that our own concept of the self is the concept ofsomething that is essentially mental and corporeal.

Most of the discussion about Evans’s account of bodily awareness andperceptual self-location has focused on whether the immunity to error throughmisidentification to which bodily awareness gives rise supports his anti-Cartesian conclusion. However, in this paper I would like to explore anotheraspect of Evans’s proposal that has not received enough attention. I want toexamine the way in which he understands perceptual self-location and ourperceptual perspective of the world at a given time. Evans outlines here anattractive implicit proposal that is worth considering. In general terms, heseems to think that bodily awareness plays no role in delineating our per-ceptual perspective of the world or in specifying our location with respect tothe objects we perceive. And—as we will see—part of the significance of thisview is that for Evans the idea that bodily awareness plays no role in per-ceptual self-location or in our perceptual perspective is at the basis of hisendorsement of the thesis that the self is elusive in our perceptual experienceof the world.

The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, I present what I takeis Evans’s story about perceptual self-location and our perceptual perspective ofthe world. In Section 3 I discuss that story and offer an alternative proposal inwhich bodily awareness is a crucial factor for perceptual self-location and ourperceptual perspective. In Section 4 I explore some consequences of acknow-ledging the role bodily awareness plays here for our understanding of theelusiveness of the self in perceptual experience.

Ignacio Ávila2

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

2. Evans’s Implicit Story

In this section I want to lay out a story about perceptual self-location and thespecification of our perceptual perspective of the world in which bodily aware-ness plays no role. It seems to me that this story is somehow implicit in someremarks by Evans, but perhaps it can be a matter of dispute whether he reallyendorsed this picture. At any rate, I am more interested in the story for its ownsake than in the exegetical issue of whether Evans actually held the view that Iextract from some of his claims.1

As we have seen, Evans claims that bodily awareness and perceptual self-location are modes of self-knowledge of our physical states and properties thathave a powerful anti-Cartesian dimension. Evans does not explain in detailwhich types of physical properties and states of our selves are known througheach mode of knowledge. However, he seems to think that these modes ofknowledge are independent from each other. Moreover, he also seems to thinkthat the type of physical properties of our selves that are known through bodilyawareness is different from the type of physical states we know throughperceptual self-location. At least, this is the view that comes out when we puttogether two ideas to which Evans is committed.

In the first place, Evans holds that bodily awareness gives us knowledge ofourselves as being physical objects. This involves two closely related aspects. Onthe one hand, Evans thinks that bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness—that is, he thinks that through bodily awareness we know something about theself. On the other hand, Evans thinks that bodily awareness presents our bodyas being a physical object. It is precisely because of the conjunction of these twoaspects that Evans can reach the idea that bodily awareness undercuts theCartesian conception of the self as a purely disembodied mind and supports aconcept of the self as a bearer of physical as well as mental properties.

In the second place, Evans endorses the idea that the self is elusive in ourperceptual experience of the surrounding world. He claims several times that inexperiencing the surrounding world there is no awareness of the perceivingsubject. Evans’s claims about the elusiveness of the self in perceptual experiencetake place in the context of his discussion of Hume’s very famous remark to theeffect that in introspection one never encounters something like the self.Although Evans rejects ‘the background of perceptual metaphor in which Humecasts his point’, he concedes that ‘there is something in Hume’s point’ and thatthis becomes ‘even stronger when the metaphor is dispensed with’ (Evans 1982:231). At this stage, Evans writes:

What we are aware of, when we know that we see a tree, is nothing buta tree. In fact, we only have to be aware of some state of the world in orderto be in a position to make an assertion about ourselves. (ibid.: 231)

Nothing more than the original state of awareness—awareness, simply,of a tree—is called for on the side of awareness, for a subject to gainknowledge of himself thereby. (ibid.: 231–2)

Evans on Bodily Awareness and Perceptual Self-Location 3


In these passages, Evans seems to suggest that in phenomenological terms theself does not show up in our perceptual experience of the world. This viewcannot be understood, though, as the idea that the self is not specified in anysense at all in perceptual experience. On the contrary, in Evans’s proposal theelusiveness of the self must leave a place in perceptual experience for animplicit and non-presentational specification of the location of the self withrespect to the experienced objects. Otherwise, it would make no sense at all totalk about the self-locating character of our perceptual experience of the world,or to claim that we only need to be aware of the world to gain knowledgeabout ourselves.2 So Evans’s task here is to explain the way in which thesubject’s location can be specified in perceptual experience, even if the selfremains, as it were, presentationally silent in it. I will come back to this issueat the end of this section.

Now, if—as Evans holds—bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness andthe self is elusive in our perceptual experience of the world, then it follows fromthese claims that in Evans’s implicit story our perceptual perspective about thesurrounding world at a given time is independent of our bodily awareness. Ofcourse, this does not mean that in being perceptually aware of the world wecannot be simultaneously aware of our body. Evans’s view is just that bodilyawareness plays no role in the fact that we experience the surrounding world asstanding in spatial relations with respect to ourselves. The reason for this viewis that if bodily awareness played a role in our perceptual perspective of theworld, then there would be a conflict between Evans’s claims about bodilyawareness and his claims about the elusiveness of the self. Recall that for himbodily awareness is a mode of awareness in which the subject is presented asbeing a physical object, whereas the elusiveness of the self is the idea that theperceiving subject is not given in our perceptual experience of the world. So,if bodily awareness played a role in shaping our perceptual perspective ofthe world, then the self would be given through bodily awareness in suchexperience of the world and hence there would be no place for the elusivenessof the self in it.

Evans’s implicit commitment to the idea that our perceptual perspective of theworld is independent of our bodily awareness is also brought out by a perplexitythat he raises. After claiming that we only need to experience the world for being‘in a position to make an assertion about ourselves’, Evans asks:

How can it be that we can have knowledge of a state of affairs whichinvolves a substantial and persisting self, simply by being aware of(still worse, by merely appearing to be aware of) a state of the world?(ibid.: 231)3

Confronted with this perplexity, Evans immediately concedes that ‘we cannotget something for nothing’, meaning that we cannot get the substantial andpersisting self from its presentational absence in our perceptual experience ofthe world. So the point is that if bodily awareness played a role in thespecification of our perceptual perspective, then Evans would not have the

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problem of getting something for nothing—at least not in the way he puts it.In bodily awareness being a form of self-awareness and playing a role indelineating our perceptual perspective of the world, there would be a sensein which the subject is given in our perceptual experience of the world fromthe start, and hence there would be no elusiveness of the self. In conclusion,if we put together Evans’s view that bodily awareness yields knowledge ofthe subject as a physical object and his view that the self is elusive inour perceptual experience of the world, what we get is precisely the ideathat bodily awareness plays no role in our perceptual perspective of theworld.

Evans holds a similar view regarding the specification of the subject’s locationwith respect to the objects she perceives. He points to a ‘parallel’ betweenperceptual self-location and the elusiveness of the self:

A subject can know that he is in front of a house simply by perceiving ahouse. Certainly what he perceives comprises no element correspondingto ‘I’ in the judgement ‘I am in front of a house’: he is simply aware ofa house. (ibid.: 232)4

Once again, we have a situation in which if bodily awareness—as Evansconceives it—played a role in perceptual self-location, then this awareness wouldintroduce in perceptual experience an element corresponding to ‘I’ in thesubject’s judgement about her location with respect to the house. This suggeststhat in Evans’s implicit story the specification of the subject’s location withrespect to the objects she perceives is also independent of bodily awareness. Thepicture Evans seems to have in mind is that the subject’s location is implicitlyspecified in perceptual experience only in virtue of a triangulation back from theegocentric way objects are perceived. Nothing else is needed. So the fact that Iperceive at a certain distance a lamp to the right, a table to the left, a door infront and so on, is all that is required for an implicit specification of my currentlocation with respect to these objects. Evans’s point, then, is that our bodilyawareness is not relevant for perceptual self-location. The egocentric vectors withwhich it is triangulated back from the experienced objects to our current locationdo all the self-locating work.

This view on perceptual self-location is unsurprising given Evans’s accountof our perceptual perspective. After all, the perspectival and the self-locatingcharacters of perceptual experience are different sides of the same coin. The factthat we experience objects as standing in egocentric spatial relations withrespect to ourselves (perspectival character) has a correlate in the fact that byexperiencing objects in that way our spatial relation with those objects isautomatically specified too (self-locating character). So if bodily awareness playsno role in our perceptual perspective of the world, it is reasonable to think thatit plays no role in perceptual self-location either.

It is a consequence of Evans’s implicit story that—as I pointed out at thebeginning of this section—the type of physical properties and states we gainknowledge of through bodily awareness is different from the type of physical



properties and states we gain knowledge of through perceptual self-location.Through bodily awareness we gain knowledge of our physical properties,but we do not gain knowledge of our current location with respect to thesurrounding objects. And we do not gain this knowledge because we need theother senses to perceive them. By contrast, through perceptual self-locationwe gain knowledge of our current location with respect to the objects weperceive, but we do not gain knowledge of our physical properties as bodilybeings (at least not beyond the fact of being at a specific spatial location). Andwe do not gain this knowledge because, according to Evans, perceptual self-location is independent from bodily awareness. As a result, the knowledge wegain through perceptual self-location is a knowledge of our self qua spatiallylocated geometrical point of view about the world we inhabit. This point of viewis geometrical in the sense that perceptual self-location only yields a specifi-cation of the spatial location from which the surrounding world is presented tothe subject, without giving a further specification of the subject’s body cur-rently occupying that location (that is, the subject’s body is not represented inperceptual self-location). In this respect, we can say that so far as perceptualself-location is concerned, and precisely in virtue of its independence frombodily awareness, the perceiving subject could be bodiless or be given as such.Correlatively, notice that for Evans the self is not elusive in bodily awarenessbut is presented as having physical properties, while in perceptual self-locationit keeps its presentational silence. And here we find Evans’s answer to thequestion about the way in which the location of the self is specified inperceptual experience even if the self does not show up in it. The reason whythe self is perceptually elusive is precisely that the knowledge we gain throughperceptual self-location is just knowledge of the self qua spatially locatedgeometrical point of view. It is this pure geometricality, so to speak, thataccounts for the elusiveness of the self. In Evans’s implicit story, the fact thatthe self is perceptually specified in this way—as a spatially located geometricalpoint of view—is, then, what makes room for its elusiveness.

Accordingly, Evans’s antidote to Cartesianism moves along two fronts. Withthe appeal to bodily awareness as a mode of knowledge of the physicalproperties of our selves, Evans intends to demolish the Cartesian conception ofthe self as a purely mental being; and with the appeal to perceptual self-location as a mode of knowledge of our location with respect to other objectsin the world, he intends to undermine the conception of the self as a meta-physical subject outside the objective world while allowing the elusiveness ofthe self.5 And it is noteworthy that Evans’s attack to both conceptions revolvesaround the idea that the ways in which we know about our physical propertiesand our location in the world are independent. In Evans’s implicit story in astrict sense we do not have a single experiential route for knowing about ourphysical properties as bodily selves and about our spatial location as perceiv-ing subjects. In a word, in his proposal there is not a single experiential routethat presents us at once both as physical objects and as spatially locatedperceiving subjects.

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3. Towards an Alternative Picture

Is it right to think—as Evans’s implicit story suggests—that bodily awarenessplays no role in the delineation of our perceptual perspective of the world or inthe specification of our current location with respect to the objects we perceive?In this section I shall argue that we cannot overlook the important role thatcertain forms of bodily awareness play here.

To begin with, on Earth our sense of balance in the gravitational field is acrucial phenomenological factor for the specification of our perceptual perspec-tive. Consider my experience of a room. When I am upright, I see that the flooris in the lower part of the room and the ceiling in the upper part. But myexperience is different when I am upside down. However, this difference doesnot consist in that, in being upside down, I experience the floor as being in theupper part of the room and the ceiling as being in the lower part. In being upsidedown, I still experience the floor as being in the lower part of the room andthe ceiling in the upper part. In this situation it is not part of my perceptualexperience that objects themselves are—as it were—upside down. Rather whatis part of my experience in this case is precisely the unusual way in which I amoriented with respect to the gravitational field. So, what makes the difference inmy perceptual perspective of the floor and the ceiling when I am upright andwhen I am upside down is not the place in which they appear to be located(which is the same), but that in both cases I am aware through my sense ofbalance of the way in which I am oriented in the gravitational field. Our senseof balance in that field plays, then, a crucial role in the specification of ourperceptual perspective. Things are different, of course, for astronauts in outerspace. But this hardly changes the dependence of our perceptual perspective onour sense of balance in our most natural environment.

Consider a different situation. When I am aligned with respect to the gravi-tational field—let us say sitting down or standing up—and looking straightahead, I see the wall as being in front. But when I am lying down on my bed andlooking straight ahead, the ceiling appears as being above and not in front.Although in both cases I am looking straight ahead to the surrounding envi-ronment, the spatial relation specified in each case is different. And once again,part of what makes the difference is our sense of balance in the gravitationalfield. Looking straight ahead specifies a different spatial relation with respect tothe perceived objects depending on our awareness of the way in which we areoriented in that field.6 Differences in our sense of balance determine, then,differences in the perceptual specification of our spatial relations with respect tothe objects we are experiencing. And so long as Evans conceives our sense ofbalance as a particular form of bodily awareness, we have here an illustrationof the role of bodily awareness in the specification of our perceptual perspectiveof the world.

But our sense of balance is not the only form of bodily awareness that makesa contribution to our perceptual perspective of the world. Our sense of bodyposture is crucial too. Christopher Peacocke, for instance, observes:



Looking straight ahead at Buckingham Palace is one experience. It isanother to look at the palace with one’s face still toward it but with one’sbody turned toward a point on the right. In this second case the palaceis experienced as being off to one side from the direction of straightahead, even if the view remains exactly the same as in the first case.(Peacocke 1992: 62)

Suppose that in these two cases the subject is aware of having the sameorientation in the gravitational field. Peacocke’s point is that even though thevisual scene is the same in both cases, the perceptual perspective is different.Clearly enough, the difference in the specification of the perceptual perspectiveis not given by a difference in the way in which the palace is presented since inboth cases the view is exactly the same. What is making the difference here isthat the subject’s sense of body posture is different in each case. Peacocke’sexample offers, then, a clear illustration of the role of our sense of body posturein our perceptual perspective of the world.

Of course, not every alteration in our sense of body posture yields a differencein our perceptual perspective. If I am aware that I am shaking my left hand, thisvariation in my postural awareness does not make a difference in my visualexperience of the palace. So it would be interesting to have some systematic wayof distinguishing the variations in our sense of body posture that make adifference in our perceptual perspective from those that do not. Unfortunately,I cannot pursue this issue here since I would need a substantive account of thespatial content of bodily awareness that would surely lead me far away from mytopic in this paper. For my purpose of illustrating—against Evans’s implicitstory—that some forms of bodily awareness are crucial factors in our perceptualperspective of the world, it is enough to realize that some variations in our senseof body posture play a significant role there, even if I leave open the questionabout which specific types of variations.

It may be asked why sub-personal information about the current state of thebody given by the vestibular system and the receptors of the joints is not enoughfor the specification of the perceptual perspective, but—as I am suggesting—awareness of body posture and of orientation in the gravitational field is alsorequired. After all, it is quite a slippery issue whether we are really aware of ourbody when we are perceptually attending to the surrounding world. In normalsituations we certainly do not attend to the gravitational force or to our bodyposture in the same way as we attend to an object in our vicinity. Neither are wepropioceptively aware of all the phenomenologically distinguishable parts of ourbody at once. And the phenomenology of bodily awareness by itself does notsettle this issue of whether in perceiving the world we are also aware of ourbody, because—as Brian O’Shaughnessy observes—‘proprioception is attentivelyrecessive in a high degree [and] takes a back seat in consciousness almost all thetime’ (O’Shaughnessy 2002: 628). Even so, I think that some awareness—however recessive it may be—of body posture and orientation in the gravita-tional field is required for our perceptual perspective of the world. The reason

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for this is that thinking that our sense of balance and body posture do not havea seat in perceptual consciousness makes it very hard to see which are thephenomenological elements that are making the phenomenological differencesbetween perceptual perspectives that—like the cases I have considered—areclearly different.7

So far we have seen that—contrary to Evans’s implicit story—some forms ofbodily awareness are crucial factors in our perceptual perspective of the world.I want to consider now whether these forms of bodily awareness are also insome sense essential to the specification of our current location with respect tothe objects we experience. Evans’s implicit story is that bodily awareness playsno role in perceptual self-location. As we have seen, he thinks that the subject’slocation is implicitly read off the egocentric way in which objects are presented.There is a clear sense in which Evans is right in thinking that bodily awarenessis not perceptually self-locating. Through bodily awareness we are aware of theboundaries of our body and the spatial relations between some of its parts, butbodily awareness by itself cannot give us a sense of our current location withrespect to other objects. We need the other senses to know how we are locatedwith respect to the objects around us. So the question here is whether bodilyawareness can still play a role in specifying perceptual self-location even if itdoes not give by itself a sense of our current location with respect to other objectsin the world.

I think that bodily awareness does play an important but indirect role inperceptual self-location. This has to do with the fact that bodily awarenessyields knowledge of the specific values of the egocentric vectors structuringour current perceptual perspective of the world. As we have seen in thephenomenological situations described before, in looking straight ahead to anobject the assignment of the specific values ‘in front’, ‘above’ or ‘to the right’ tothe perceived location of the object varies depending on our sense of balancein the gravitational field and the relevant variations in our sense of bodyposture. My point, then, is that the knowledge we gain through bodily aware-ness about the specific values of the egocentric vectors structuring our per-ceptual experience of the world is crucial for perceptual self-location. This isbecause the egocentric vectors used to triangulate our current location withrespect to the experienced objects are precisely those vectors whose specificvalues we know through our sense of balance and body posture. Thus, it isbecause bodily awareness yields knowledge of the specific values of theegocentric vectors structuring our perceptual experience of the world that, byusing these vectors to locate objects around us, our location with respect tothem is also automatically specified. We have, then, a rough picture of the wayin which bodily awareness contributes to perceptual self-location despite thefact that it cannot directly give a sense of our location with respect to otherobjects in the world.

Perhaps I can make this point more vivid from a slightly different angle. If—asEvans’s implicit story goes—our current location in the world is perceptuallyspecified only by triangulating back from the surrounding objects we perceive,



then the most we get is a disordered set of scattered locations of body parts ata given time. So, for instance, the triangulation back from the seen objects givesus the current location of our eyes (and, partly, of our head) in the world, thetriangulation back from the felt ground gives us the location of our feet on it, andthe triangulation back from the touched objects gives us the location of ourhands. The problem with this picture is that, without the organizing role of oursense of balance and body posture, there are many mutually incongruentpossible assignments of values to the egocentric vectors employed in specifyingthe current locations of those body parts. Without the relevant forms of bodilyawareness, there will be nothing in our perceptual experience of BuckinghamPalace to tell us that the palace is to the right rather than in front when we seeit with our head turned to the right and, as a result, our current location withrespect to it will be equally undetermined. Thus, in claiming that bodilyawareness plays no role in perceptual self-location, Evans is removing thecognitive ground that gives a highly congruent assignment of values to theegocentric vectors structuring our perceptual experience of the world. Andwithout this congruent assignment, it is hard to see in which sense we can stillhave something like perceptual self-location.

As a consequence, we must make some amendments to Evans’s remarks,quoted in the previous section, that ‘a subject can know that he is in front of ahouse simply by perceiving a house’, and that in having this experience ‘he issimply aware of the house’ (Evans 1982: 232). It is true that Evans’s primaryinterest with these remarks is to illustrate his thesis of the elusiveness of the self,and in this respect I have no objection. However, to the extent in which Evansalso seems to think that bodily awareness plays no role in perceptual self-location, these remarks must be qualified. The house appears as being in frontof me and not as being above or below me in part because I have a sense ofbalance and body posture. So it is not strictly true that—as Evans suggests—wecan know that we are in front of a house simply by perceiving the house. Toknow this we also need to know that we are upright instead of upside down orlying down, and that our head is aligned with respect to our trunk instead ofbeing turned to one or another side, and so on. Likewise, it is not strictly truethat—as Evans also claims—in knowing that we are in front of the house, we aresimply aware of the house. We must also have the types of bodily awarenessI am mentioning.

To sum up, in this section I have argued that—contrary to Evans’s implicitstory—some forms of bodily awareness are crucial factors for our perceptualperspective of the world. I have also held that we cannot overlook the role ofthese forms of bodily awareness for perceptual self-location. It is true that—asEvans’s implicit story suggests—bodily awareness is not self-locating on itsown. It is also true that our location with respect to the perceived objects isimplicitly read off the egocentric way in which we perceive them. But if myargument in this section is right, this does not mean that we can get perceptualself-location independently of our sense of balance and body posture. Thus,in overlooking the role of these forms of bodily awareness for perceptual

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self-location, Evans’s implicit story is—to put it in a dramatic way—a storyabout the self-locating character, if any, of the perceptual experience of acreature which is like a floating eye with no awareness of the gravitationalfield.

4. Bodily Awareness and the Elusiveness of the Self

We saw in the second section that in Evans’s implicit story there is a linkbetween his view on the elusiveness of the self and the idea that bodilyawareness plays no role in perceptual self-location or in our perceptual perspec-tive of the world. In arguing—as I have done—that bodily awareness does playan important role here we must rethink, then, the possible relations between therole played by bodily awareness in this context and the elusiveness of the self.As I see it, this issue revolves around these claims:

(1) Bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness.(2) Certain forms of bodily awareness are crucial for perceptual self-location and

for our perceptual perspective of the world.(3) The self is elusive in our perceptual experience of the world.

Claims (1) and (2), taken together, are in conflict with claim (3). So the challengeis to decide which one of these claims must be abandoned. We have seen thatin Evans’s implicit story (1) and (3) are endorsed while (2) is denied. But I haveargued too that (2) must be kept. We must reconsider, then, our attitude towards(1) and (3).

A possible proposal is to accept (1) and (2) while denying (3). This view canbe seen as a suggestive reinforcement of Evans’s original antidote to Cartesia-nism. The idea in this proposal is that, in admitting that some forms of bodilyawareness are crucial for perceptual self-location and the perceptual perspective,the elusiveness of the self goes away. This is because—as Evans holds—bodilyawareness is a form of self-awareness in which we are presented as physicalobjects to ourselves. And if, in addition, bodily awareness is crucial for percep-tual self-location and the perceptual perspective, then in experiencing thesurrounding objects the subject will also show up in that experience. Thus, inthis proposal Evans’s original antidote to Cartesianism will also be a firmantidote to the elusiveness of the self.

Unfortunately, this proposal faces some of the problems raised in the literatureon Evans’s original antidote to Cartesianism. For example, though not directlyconcerned with Evans’s view, Michael Martin has brought out what seems to bea fundamental difference between bodily awareness and self-awareness. Accord-ing to Martin, whereas it is part of the concept of the first person that when thesubject uses it in self-conscious thought ‘it is a priori that she will be thinkingabout herself’ (Martin 1995: 283), we do not have this a priori guarantee in thecase of bodily awareness. In Martin’s words:



If a thinker thinks about whatever she is aware of through bodilyawareness, she is guaranteed to be thinking solely of one object.However, which object bodily awareness presents is not determinedsolely by phenomenological considerations. Rather, some account needsto be given of what ties the content of bodily awareness to a particularobject. This further account does not seem to be one that we can providepurely a priori. (ibid.)

For his part, Peacocke has also suggested that the reason why judgementsbased on bodily awareness are immune to error through misidentificationrelative to the first person is not that—as Evans thinks—bodily awarenesscontributes ‘to the individuation of the first-person way of thinking’, but ratherthat ‘for any spatial, material, or any other present-tensed non-psychologicalconcept F, I am F is true if My body is F is true’ (Peacocke 2008: 98). Thus,according to Peacocke, the immunity to error through misidentification of ajudgement like ‘my legs are crossed’ is given not because bodily awareness isa mode of self-awareness in itself, but because in the circumstances of theexample I know that the propositions ‘the legs of this body are crossed’ and‘this body is mine’ are true.8

Martin’s and Peacocke’s remarks come together at one point. The reason whyin normal circumstances I know that the proposition ‘this body is mine’ is trueon the basis of bodily awareness has to do with the link Martin is asking forbetween the fact that bodily awareness is awareness solely of one object and thefact that this particular object is my body. Indeed, if bodily awareness were toprovide information about objects other than my body, I would lose myentitlement to the proposition ‘this body is mine’, and hence my judgementsbased on bodily awareness would be open to error of misidentification. But ifthe only object of bodily awareness is my body, there seems to be no room forthis type of mistake. In that case, either my judgements based on bodilyawareness constitute knowledge of my body or they do not constitute know-ledge at all.

The general upshot of this line of thought is that the immunity to errorthrough misidentification yielded by bodily awareness does not entail—as Evansthinks—that bodily awareness is a mode of self-awareness in a strict sense. Onthe contrary, the above remarks by Peacocke and Martin suggest that theimmunity to error through misidentification of judgements based on bodilyawareness is in fact concealing essential differences between bodily awarenessand self-awareness. These differences have to do with the type of a priorireferential guarantee that we have in self-awareness but not in bodily awareness,and with the type of explanatory ground for the immunity to error throughmisidentification of judgements based on bodily awareness. And given theseessential differences between bodily awareness and self-awareness, we cannotmove from the immunity to error through misidentification to which bodilyawareness gives rise to the conclusion that bodily awareness is a form ofself-awareness in a strict sense.9 But without this move, it is clear that the

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anti-Cartesian conclusion Evans wants to draw from bodily awareness isblocked. And, in turn, this undermines the proposal to avoid the elusiveness ofthe self by keeping claims (1) and (2). Without the idea that bodily awareness isa form of self-awareness in a strict sense, we cannot argue that the role of bodilyawareness in perceptual self-location and in our perceptual perspective of theworld implies the rejection of the elusiveness of the self.

As a result, I think that we should take seriously the literature on Evans’soriginal antidote to Cartesianism and to abandon the idea that bodily awarenessis a form of self-awareness in a strict sense. So my proposal is that we shouldgive up claim (1), while keeping claims (2) and (3). I have already argued infavour of (2) in the previous section. I also think that (3) is well motivated.It seems phenomenologically right to claim that in perceiving a tree the per-ceiving subject does not show up in perceptual experience as the tree does. Ina materialist conception of the self an open possibility is to invoke bodilyawareness as a reason against the elusiveness of the self. But since we haveabandoned the idea that bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness in a strictsense, this move is also blocked; and there seems to be no other plausiblephenomenological candidate in perceptual experience to which it can beappealed to say that the self shows up in it. So the elusiveness of the self in theperceptual realm seems unavoidable.

If this line of thought is right, we have some reasons for endorsing a viewarticulated around claims (2) and (3). But this still does not give us a very clearpicture of what is involved in such a view for our understanding of theelusiveness of the self and of the type of knowledge we get in perceptualself-location. The rest of this paper is dedicated to spelling out some conse-quences of this proposal for these issues.

In the second section, we observed that in Evans’s implicit story the elusive-ness of the self does not rule out an implicit and non-presentational specificationof the subject’s location in perceptual experience (otherwise, the self-locatingcharacter of perceptual experience would be unexplainable). We also saw that inEvans’s view part of the reason why the self is perceptually elusive is that bodilyawareness—conceived by him as a form of self-awareness—plays no role inperceptual self-location or in our perceptual perspective of the world. However,if my line of thought in this paper is right, in offering a picture of the elusivenessof the self we should keep in mind the role of some forms of bodily awarenessfor perceptual self-location and the perceptual perspective. We need, then, analternative proposal to Evans’s account of the elusiveness of the self in percep-tual experience. My suggestion is that the reason for this elusiveness is thatbodily awareness is not a form of self-awareness in a strict sense. Indeed, it isprecisely because of this that the self can keep its presentational silence inperceptual experience even if some forms of bodily awareness make an impor-tant contribution to perceptual self-location and our perceptual perspective ofthe world.

This does not mean, of course, that the presentational silence of the self in ourperceptual experience of the world, along with the role of bodily awareness in



that experience, should lead us to the conclusion that the body and the self aredifferent entities. We can be as materialist about the self as ever. The claim thatthe self is presentationally silent even if bodily awareness plays a crucial role inour perceptual experience of the world must be read in intensional rather thanextensional terms. It just means that although the self is a bodily being andbodily awareness presents this being as a physical object it does not present itqua self. This is why the self can remain presentationally silent even if it has acorporeal nature and we are aware of this nature through bodily awareness. Thisis also part of the reason why bodily awareness is not a form of self-awarenessin a strict sense.

We should also reconsider Evans’s view about the type of knowledge weobtain through the self-locating character of perceptual experience. As wehave seen, in Evans’s implicit story perceptual self-location is a mode ofknowledge in which we know the self qua spatially located geometrical point ofview. But if it is true that some forms of bodily awareness are crucial factors inthe specification of our current location with respect to the objects we perceive,then perceptual self-location must also include a representation of our body. Asa result, the knowledge we obtain through perceptual self-location is not—asEvans suggests—knowledge of a spatially located but purely geometrical pointof view. Rather we should say that perceptual self-location provides knowledgeof a spatially located embodied point of view, in the sense that it does not onlyspecify the spatial location from which the surrounding world is presented to thesubject, but it also gives a specification of the subject’s body as currentlyoccupying such a location. Even more, we can say that the perceptual specifi-cation of our spatial location with respect to the objects we perceive is giventhrough the specification of the location of our body with respect to them. Thereason for this is implicit in what I said in the third section of this paper. If—asI claimed there—awareness of our body is what yields knowledge of the specificvalues of the egocentric vectors structuring our current experience of the world,then in using those vectors to locate objects around us the location of our bodywith respect to them is also automatically specified. And, since we are notdisembodied selves standing at places other than where our body is, with thespecification of our body’s location we also obtain our location with respect tothe perceived objects.

This picture provides us with another illustration of the need for an alter-native to Evans’s story about the basis of the elusiveness of the self in per-ceptual experience. If perceptual self-location gives us knowledge of anembodied point of view about the world, then it is clear that we cannot givean account of the elusiveness of the self by appealing to the idea that throughperceptual self-location we gain knowledge of the self only qua a spatiallylocated geometrical point of view. I think, though, that there is a more impor-tant moral here. If my picture of the role of bodily awareness in perceptualself-location is right, then the key point is that we should drop the very notionof a geometrical point of view from an account of the egocentric structure ofour perceptual experience. Indeed, the considerations of this paper suggest an

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intrinsic connection between our having an egocentrically structured experienceof the world and our being embodied creatures enjoying the relevant forms ofbodily awareness. This is certainly not enough to vindicate Evans’s originalantidote to Cartesianism, since—as we have seen—bodily awareness is not aform of self-awareness in a strict sense. But even so, if we keep in mindthat—as Evans and other philosophers have pointed out—perceptual experi-ence is crucial in self-knowledge for it is only through perceptual experiencethat we get knowledge of our particular route through the world, then theintrinsic connection between bodily awareness and the egocentric structure ofour perceptual experience is not insignificant in itself. This connection points tothe idea that our use of perceptual experience to know our particular routethrough the world is constitutively related with our enjoying certain forms ofbodily awareness. And in this sense we can say that our perceptual capacity tolocate ourselves in the world is not independent of our awareness as bodilycreatures.

To sum up, my discussion in this paper suggests the following diagnosisabout Evans’s implicit story. Evans is right in thinking that the self is elusive inperceptual experience. He is also right in thinking that the elusiveness of the selfdoes not rule out perceptual self-location. Nevertheless, his reasons for theseviews are on the wrong track. In my opinion, there are three closely relatedmistakes here. First, Evans is wrong in thinking that bodily awareness plays norole in perceptual self-location or in the specification of our perceptual perspec-tive. Second, he is wrong in thinking that bodily awareness is a form ofself-awareness. And third, it is a mistake to think that at the basis of theelusiveness of the self is the fact that through perceptual self-location we gainknowledge of the self qua geometrical point of view. By contrast, my own viewis that we should take note of the important role of certain forms of bodilyawareness for perceptual self-location and for our perceptual perspective of theworld, and we should observe that this role does not rule out the elusiveness ofthe self precisely because bodily awareness is not a form of self-awareness in astrict sense.

Appendix: A Brief Note on Peacocke and McDowell

One of the morals of this paper has been that we should drop the notion of aspatially located geometrical point of view in an account of perceptual self-location and the elusiveness of the self. However, Evans is not the onlyphilosopher committed—to my mind erroneously—to this notion. Peacocke tooseems to presuppose the notion of a geometrical point of view in a recentthought about perceptual self-location. He writes:

Suppose, for example, that a thinker makes a judgement, on the basis ofthe scene he visually perceives,

I am in front of a house.



The experience which makes this judgement rational need not involveany perception of his body at all, either by proprioception or by anyother means. There is such a thing as what we may call the subject’s‘point–of–view location’, determined simply by the location from whichhe perceives the world. It is a contingent fact that this coincides with thelocation of his body, or some part thereof. (Peacocke 2008: 101)

It is striking that in this passage Peacocke seems to overlook his own exampleabout the way in which certain variations in our sense of body posture markimportant differences in our visual perspective of Buckingham Palace. HadPeacocke kept in mind this case, he surely would not have concluded that theexperience which makes a self-locating judgement like ‘I am in front of a house’rational ‘need not involve any perception of [the subject’s] body at all’. As Iremarked in the third section, besides the visual experience of the house, ajudgement of this type requires that we know through bodily awareness that weare standing up rather than lying down or upside down, and that our head isaligned with respect to the trunk instead of being turned to one or another side.Peacocke’s omission has consequences for his account of the immunity to errorthrough misidentification of self-locating judgements based on perceptual expe-rience. He claims that ‘the immunity is explicable simply from what is involvedin a place being a subject’s point-of-view location, together with the fundamentalreference rule for I [that is, the rule that a use of I in thought refers to the thinkerof the thought]’ (ibid.: 102). The problem with this view is that we cannot explainwhat it is to be a subject’s point of view just in terms of the location from whichthe subject perceives. We also need some forms of bodily awareness to indi-viduate the relevant point of view and to specify perceptual self-location. As aresult, Peacocke’s account of the immunity to error through misidentification ofself-locating judgements must be complemented by taking into account thoseforms of bodily awareness.

The notion of a geometrical point of view also plays a subtle role inJohn McDowell’s excellent discussion of the persistence of the self. McDowellcriticizes Kant for having a conception in which the self shrinks to a merepoint of view whose continuity through time is purely formal. Part of whatbothers McDowell is that on Kant’s view we cannot identify this temporallyextended point of view with our ordinary empirical self. In this vein McDowellwrites:

If we begin with a free-standing notion of an experiential route throughobjective reality, a temporally extended point of view that might bebodiless so far as the connection between subjectivity and objectivitygoes, there seems to be no prospect of building up from there to thenotion of a substantial presence in the world. If something starts outconceiving itself as a merely formal referent for ‘I’ (which is already apeculiar notion), how could it come to appropriate a body, so that itmight identify itself with a particular living thing? (McDowell 1994:102–3)

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According to McDowell, Kant is led to this conception of the self as a temporallyextended point of view because he still shares with Descartes the assumptionthat in providing an account of the idea of the persistence of the self ‘we mustconfine ourselves within the flow of “consciousness” ’ (ibid.: 101). For McDowell,it is because of this assumption that in the attempt to avoid the Cartesianconception of the self as an immaterial substance, Kant sees no other alternativebut the idea of the self as a mere point of view whose persistence is purelyformal. Thus, McDowell proposes to remove the Cartesian assumption of theconfinement within the flow of consciousness from an account of the idea of thepersistence of the self. ‘If we situate’—he says—‘self-consciousness in a widercontext, we can avoid the Cartesian ego, without needing to say that the idea ofa persistent self that figures in the continuity of “consciousness” is merelyformal’ (ibid.: 102). McDowell suggests, then, that in this wider context we canappeal to the idea of the continuity of life of the subject of experience. His viewis that the persistence of the self is the persistence of a substantial living animalwhose conscious states are just a part of its life story in the world.

I am very sympathetic to McDowell’s general line of thought and only wantto express a minor reservation. It seems to me that in his discussion McDowellsomehow underestimates what we can get within the flow of consciousness, andthat this underestimation is related to a tacit commitment on his side to thenotion of a geometrical point of view. McDowell seems to think that if weconfine ourselves within the flow of consciousness, the most we get is the ideaof a temporally extended point of view ‘that might be bodiless so far as theconnection between subjectivity and objectivity goes’. And here I find hisimplicit commitment to the notion of a geometrical point of view. It is in virtueof this notion that McDowell can think that by staying within the flow ofconsciousness, we are forced—like Kant—to choose between a Cartesian con-ception of the self as an immaterial substance and a conception of the self as apoint of view whose persistence is purely formal. However, it seems to me thateven within the flow of consciousness we get more than the idea of a geometricalpoint of view about the world. If—as I argued in this paper—some forms ofbodily awareness play a crucial role in perceptual self-location and the percep-tual perspective, the idea of a point of view that ‘might be bodiless’ seems to bealien even to what goes on within the flow of consciousness. And it is remark-able that McDowell’s general view can be strengthened by taking this pointseriously. For now we can see that even if—contrary to his advice—we staywithin the flow of consciousness there is still a sense in which an account of thepersistence of the self cannot be dissociated from an account of the persistenceof a bodily being enjoying continuity of life.10

Ignacio ÁvilaDepartment of PhilosophyUniversidad Nacional de [email protected]



NOTES

1 A philosopher who is explicitly committed to a view akin to the one I am ascribingto Evans is Naomi Eilan. Unfortunately, to my knowledge her interesting work in this arearemains unpublished.

2 On the face of it, Evans’s understanding of the elusiveness of the self is in contrastwith Humean and transcendental views in which the elusiveness of the self is such thatthere does not even seem to be a place for an implicit localization of the self in objectivespace.

3 This passage comes exactly between the two passages that I have quoted above.4 Note that in this quotation Evans gives an even more direct expression of the thesis

of the elusiveness of the self than in the passages I quoted before in which he discussesHume’s remark.

5 In this respect, it is remarkable that once Evans has introduced perceptual self-location as a mode of self-knowledge, he adds in a footnote: ‘It is a symptom of theimportance of this mode of self-knowledge to our conception of ourselves that it, or someshadow of it, is preserved in even the most metaphysical accounts of the self, in whichthe self is regarded as the origin of the perceptual field, or as a point of view on the world’(Evans 1982: 222, n.29).

6 This suggests that—contrary to what is often thought—the egocentricity of percep-tual experience cannot be appropriately captured just in terms of the notion of body-centred frame of reference, for in that case looking straight ahead would always definethe same egocentric spatial relation regardless of our orientation in the gravitational field.For more reasons against the idea that the notion of body-centred frame of referencecaptures the egocentricity of perceptual experience, see Campbell 1994, Ch. 1.

7 Perceptual direction of action can also provide a reason for the idea that we musthave some awareness of our body posture as a whole in our everyday experience of theworld. On this issue see the argument advanced in O’Shaughnessy 2002: 630ff. My viewhere is inspired by him.

8 For some related discussions about Evans’s antidote to Cartesianism, see alsoBrewer 1995, Newstead 2006 and Chen 2011.

9 Needless to say, this does not mean that we cannot have a materialist conception ofthe self, nor that in a purely extensional sense bodily awareness and self-awarenesscannot be forms of awareness of the same entity. The point urged here is rather epistemic,namely, that bodily awareness does not have some crucial epistemic features of self-awareness.

10 I thank Naomi Eilan for many fruitful discussions about the topics of this paper. Myoverall approach to them is deeply influenced by her. I also thank Juliana Gómez formaking me realize an important lacuna in an earlier draft, and Elisa Arond for herassistance with English. Finally, I thank the anonymous European Journal of Philosophyreferee for very helpful suggestions.

REFERENCES

Brewer, B. (1995), ‘Bodily Awareness and the Self’, in J. L. Bermúdez, A. Marcel andN. Eilan (eds), The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Campbell, J. (1994), Past, Space, and Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Chen, C. (2011), ‘Bodily Awareness and Immunity to Error through Misidentification’,European Journal of Philosophy, 19: 21–38.

Evans, G. (1982), The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Martin, M. G. F. (1995), ‘Bodily Awareness: A Sense of Ownership’, in J. L. Bermúdez,

A. Marcel and N. Eilan (eds), The Body and the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.McDowell, J. (1994), Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Newstead, A. (2006), ‘Evans’s Anti-Cartesian Argument: A Critical Evaluation’, Ratio,

19: 214–28.O’Shaughnessy, B. (2002), Consciousness and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Peacocke, C. (1992), A Study of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.—— (2008), Truly Understood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Shoemaker, S. (1984), ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’, in S. Shoemaker, Identity, Cause,

and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



evans on bodily awareness and perceptual self-location

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