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Spring 2008
Volume 07, Number 2

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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The Situated Self
J.T. Ismael (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). 248 pages. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-19-517436-6, ISBN 0-19-517436-4.

Reviewed by Karin Susan Fester
University of Wales, karin.fester@tin.it

From the very moment one’s eyes scan the bold colored symbol of self-location on the cover of J.T. Ismael’s book The Situated Self, it will be quite evident that this book would be an exciting read because it is a fresh and vivid challenge to dualist and physicalist views about the mind, language, and the self.

In this book J.T. Ismael rigorously argues for her view of mind, defined thus: “in favor of a view of the mind as a mapkeeper that stores the information coming through the senses in an internal model of self and situation that it uses to steer the body through a complex and changing environment. This view of mind makes self-representation one of its principle tasks and accords central role in the intrinsic dynamics of the body” (201). Ismael is committed to clarifying the cognitive and epistemic gaps (111, 134) that one confronts when attempting to understand how the “coordination of experience across minds” (109) is possible in a structured world of physics. Ismael takes on the challenge that has confronted philosophers for centuries: how human subjective experience relates with the physical universe. Therefore, Ismael’s book is not just another philosophy book—it is feminist scientific theory in the making about mind and language. Alison Jaggar and Sandra Harding, in their respective seminal books Feminist Politics and Human Nature and The Science Question in Feminism, opened our eyes to other ways of understanding the world, that is, understanding it through a non-dualistic lens.[1] A feminist method of inquiry—whether political or scientific—must recognize the human organism as being a part of an organic whole with its social and physical world. Ismael’s work is an example of one who embraces this method of inquiry for the interpretation of the self’s mind-world relationship within the physical universe.

Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. Thereafter, the book is divided into three well-organized parts. Part I, “The Situated Mind,” is comprised of six chapters entitled respectively as “Traditional Representation,” “Confinement,” “The Dynamical Approach,” “Self-Description,” “Context and Coordination,” and “Self-Representation, Objectivity, and Intentionality.” Each chapter expounds on the notion of the mind as being part of a complex dynamic system and addresses various aspects of Ismael’s theory and her criticisms. Chapter 2 starts off with a discussion about the Fregean Model of Thought and its continuous influence. In succeeding chapters, Ismael discusses why we must move away from a representationalist approach and more towards dynamical interfaces which confront thought. She presents her view of the dynamical relation of the mind-world relationship she advocates; the dynamical relation emphasizes not the mind-body relationship, but instead the mind-world relationship. It is first in chapter 4, where Ismael defines mind: “We treat the conscious mind—its introspectively accessible component, which I’ll refer to elliptically as ‘the mind’—as part of a larger dynamical system and focus on the interfaces with other parts of the system; that is experience, on the incoming end, and action or volition, on the outgoing end” (37).

Part II consists of three chapters, respectively entitled “Jackson’s Mary,” “Inverted Spectra,” and “Grammatical Illusions.” Frank Jackson’s arguments for dualism are analyzed using the thought experiment about Mary’s encounter with the tomato and the fact she is supposed to learn and what it is like to see a red thing like a red tomato (96- 97); Ismael takes this very simple appearing example and transforms it into thought-provoking activity for the reader; the terms “intrinsic architecture,” “incomplete content,” and “inexpressable content” are also introduced (94-95). Ismael challenges the idea that physical knowledge sufficiently supplies us with all we need to know about something. Ismael writes it thus: “It comes down to the question of whether any communicable body of knowledge could be complete” (95); and she uses this argument to confront both the dualist and the physicalist (94). Ismael describes how to view the problem about epistemic and cognitive gaps: “The problem is not one about knowing how to map our own experience into a shared description of a common world; it’s a problem about knowing how to establish specifically internal relations between the properties exemplified in disjoint domains” (113). In her exposition about “coordination of experience across minds” (109), Ismael makes us aware of the epistemic and cognitive gaps that need to be accounted for saying,

The problem is not that properties exemplified in either your visual experience or in mine cannot be identified in terms of their role in the production of behavior or causal relations to features of the external landscape, it’s that once we’ve identified the intrinsic properties of my experience by their causal relations to the environment and their role in the production of my behavior, and identified the intrinsic properties of your experience by their causal relations to the environment and role in the production of your behavior, this tells us nothing about the internal relations between properties that play parallel roles in our respective functional architectures. It tells us nothing, in short, about how the kind of experience you have when you see red relates qualitatively to the kind that I do when I see red. And this is a quite general problem. It goes not just for color, but for all of the qualities exemplified in experience: tactual, auditory, gustatory…. (111)

In the final part of the book, “Selves,” Ismael focuses on the identity and individuality of selves; throughout, reference is made to Anscombe, Descartes, Frege, Kant, Locke, Parfit, Strawson, and others. Chapter 11 surveys the views of no-subject theorists, theories of the self, criteria of identity, problems with identity over time. Chapter 12 is devoted to an extensive exposition on Dennett and covers the self as intentional object, the stream of consciousness, and the inner monologue. The final chapter concludes by saying how the mind implements and depends upon “self-description to bridge the gap between its properties and what they represent in precisely the way a map uses self-location to bridge the gap between its parts and what they stand for” (230). Therefore, the epistemic gap could be explained by “reflexive structure” and “self-locating sentences” (231).

The book’s greatest strengths are in Ismael’s systematic approach in articulating her theory. The book is certainly well organized and therefore efficient for teaching purposes. I was quite pleased with the organization of the material and design of each chapter. For those trained in both the scientific and philosophical disciplines, like myself, this work will only enhance our traditional understandings of the self while confronting physicalist objections. Ismael’s writing is a detailed exposition of how the self comes to find its place in the physical world, observing, interacting, and continuously self-locating and self-describing itself within its physical environment. The book has few weaknesses. This elaborate work deserves a more detailed index—in particular if it is to be used by students—especially in light of the consistent and substantial use of terminology that Ismael uses to expound her dynamic theory. Ismael’s writing style is geared toward the philosophical academic audience and it is not necessarily a book for students new to philosophy of mind or philosophy of language. However, it is certainly a book for advanced students. Even though much of the book tends toward analyzing language and self-description, this in no way has limitations for those who seek to work exclusively in philosophy of mind; because of its constant thought-provoking content, it is certainly one that all philosophers of mind—feminist or not—ought to read, especially if they seek out a fresh approach to non-traditionalist views of the mind-body and mind-world relationships. Moreover, The Situated Self is certainly a book for those advanced students who crave reading a profound text of scientific theory focused on language, subjectivity, and philosophy of mind.
Dynamic, thought provoking, and innovative is the only way to describe J.T. Ismael’s The Situated Self. It is a definite must read for those wanting to get their heads into a serious scientific theory driven work in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language.

Endnotes

1. Sandra Harding. The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); and Alison Jaggar. Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanhead Publishers, 1983).

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