Chapter 4 - Immunity to error as an artefact of transition between representational media

Summary

It is often claimed that there is a range of self-ascriptions that are immune to error through misidentification (IEM) relative to the first-person pronoun. The more abstract perspective allows us to see IEM as an instance of a much more general phenomenon having to do with the interaction between representational media. There is some dispute about which self-ascriptions are properly classed as IEM. Some claim that only mental self-ascriptions are IEM, others claim that some non-mental self-ascriptions are IEM. Among mental self-ascriptions, we can distinguish self-ascriptions of experiences and self-attribution of intentional states. IEM is a formal product of the translation between media with different representational scope, together with the representationally unmediated character of reflexive identification. It has nothing in particular to do with mental representation and carries no implication of a special ontology for the self.