Reflection on the self's way of being "in" consciousness yields two arguments for a theory of self-reference not based in any way all all on self-cognition. First, I show that one theory of self-reference predicts an experience of the self because the theory inadequately analyzes the semantical facts about indexicality. I construct a dilemma for this cognitivism, which it cannot get out of, for it requires even solitary self-reference to be based on some original self-knowledge, which is not available. I (...) describe my "kinetic model" of unspoken self-reference, and I show how it fits the facts of four forms of consciousness, all of which presuppose self-reference, rather than yield it. Second, a speaker uses the first person pronoun in sentences because she is aware of the unmediated role in agency of the beliefs she would express, and not because she is aware of herself in their content. The cognitive model, in contrast, succumbs to a vicious regress and is exposed as an obstacle to an understanding of consciousness. (shrink)

Mainstream analytic metaphysics is a priori metaphysics. It is hemmed in by basic assumptions that rest on no more than a priori intuitions. Jaegwon Kim's arguments about causation are a paradigm example of sophisticated arguments with little or no justification from the world as we know it. And Peter van Inwagen's arguments about material objects are motivated by a question that, I think, has no nontrivial answer: Under what conditions do some x's compose an object y? The trivial answers are (...) "always" and "never." Any other answer, including van Inwagen's, seems to me to be arbitrary—and again based on a priori intuitions. To cite two more examples that I find egregious: The assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction between what is mind-independent and what is not, and the assumption that there is a metaphysically important distinction, among things that are real, between what is fundamental and what is not. A priori intuitions, especially when not shared by philosophers outside a small circle of specially trained people, seem a weak reed on which to hang metaphysical systems. (shrink)