To know the self as a matrix of maybe: An account of the specialness of self-knowledge
2020 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 30 credits / 45 HE credits
Student thesis
Abstract [en]
The essay is an attempt to make sense of the apparently special relation between self-knowledge and agency. To achieve that goal, the essay translates the account of what it is like to be a human self offered by Sartre into the language of evolutionary psychology. In L’être et le néant, Sartre describes the phenomenology of the self as a series of inescapable choices in a contingent set of circumstances. This essay identifies Sartre’s description with what Baumeister, Maranges and Sjåstad call a matrix of maybe: the mechanism of nonfactual pragmatic prospection found in humans. Consequently, it defines the self as a matrix of maybe operating within a contingency matrix and reflecting on its own operation. Self-knowledge, the essay concludes, seems special because we routinely and erroneously ascribe to the self features of its contingency matrix. Most of our true first-person claims should not be read as I PREDICATE. Instead, they can be explicated as I have to act in a world where C PREDICATE, where C is the relevant part of the contingency matrix.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020. , p. 77
Keywords [en]
the self, self-knowledge, self-reflection, selfhood, choice, Sartre, Being and Nothingness, participant perspective, nonfactual prospection, matrix of maybe, alternative futures
Keywords [fr]
L’être et le néant
National Category
Philosophy
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-413530OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-413530DiVA, id: diva2:1442571
Subject / course
Theoretical Philosophy
Supervisors
Examiners
2020-06-172020-06-172020-06-17Bibliographically approved