critically discuss the no-ownership theory? (about 300-500 words answer)
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try and you can be do your self
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According to Cartesianism, when we speak of a person we are really referring to one or both of two distinct substances of different types, each of which has its own appropriate types of states and properties. States of consciousness belong to one of these substances and not to the other. Strawson rejects this theory because, for him, “The concept of the pure individual consciousness – the pure ego – is a concept that cannot exist; or at least, cannot exist as a primary concept in terms of which the concept of a person can be explained or analysed. It can exist only, if at all, as a secondary, non-primitive concept, which itself is to be explained, analysed in terms of a person”. (Strawson 1959, p.102)
He argues as follows: it is a necessary condition for ascribing any states of consciousness, experiences etc- to oneself, that one should also ascribe them to others. Ascribing to others is not possible if we accept the Cartesian ego as the subject of all experiences or states of consciousness. For, to be the subject of a predication, something must be identified. Identification as we saw presupposes location in space-time. Cartesian Egos can’t be located in space-time; only bodies can be located spatio-temporally. So predicating a state of consciousness to an Ego, presupposes that the state must be predicated to a subject, which is a material body.
In our day-to-day speech we use expressions like ‘I am in pain’, ‘I had a severe pain’, ‘My pain…’ etc-. These expressions somehow suggest that I am the owner of this particular experience of having pain. According to the no-ownership theorist, experiences can be said to have an owner only in the sense of their causal dependence upon the state of some particular body. This causal dependence is sufficient to ascribe one’s experiences to some particular, individual thing. But this causal dependence is not a contingent or logically transferable matter. We can own something only if its ownership is logically transferable. Thus, experiences are not owned by anything except in the dubious sense of being causally dependent on the state of a particular body.
This theory, according to Strawson, is incoherent. The theorist denies the existence of the sense of possession but he is forced to make use of it when he tries to deny its existence. Strawson argues that any attempt to eliminate the ‘my’ (or any possessive expression) in f.i. “my experience” or “my headache” etc. would yield something that is not a contingent fact at all. It is simply wrong to state that all experiences are causally dependent on the state of a single body. But the theorist cannot consistently argue that ‘all experiences of person P means the same thing as all experiences of a certain body B’, for then the proposition would not be contingent, as his theory requires, but analytic. With “my experience” he means a certain class of experiences and this class of experiences are the experiences of a person. It is the sense of this ‘my’ and ‘of’ that he requires to deny. He cannot successfully deny that, because being ‘my experience’ is – for the experience in question - no contingent matter but necessary. That my headache is my headache is – for the headache – no contingent matter.