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Dewart’s Assertive Speech and Self-Presence
Consciousness as Self-Present Experience Generated by Speech
Leslie Dewart holds that all animals experience but only humans experience consciously, and that speech, not genetic natural selection, produced this difference. Assertive speech, in which a speaker intends to communicate her experience and undergoes the communicating as her own doing, makes experience present to itself: the subject experiences the object, the act of experiencing, and herself as experiencer in one act. Consciousness then develops culturally and historically, and it can develop badly.
Leslie Sutherland Dewart
What consciousness is
Consciousness is self-present experience, in which the act of experiencing is present to itself without any separate act of reflection, made possible by assertive speech.
Mind and body
Consciousness is fully natural and caused by the same biochemical processes humans share with animals, but it is a new way of using those processes and does not reduce to them.
Mechanism
Assertiveness: unlike animal signaling, human speech asserts a thesis about a theme and is experienced by the speaker as her own causal act, which makes experience present to itself.
Core claims
- All animals experience, but only humans experience consciously, in the sense of self-present experience.
- The manner of speaking formats consciousness, which then shapes languages, so grammar does not condition thought.
- Indo-European and Sumerian copular sentences (‘X is Y’) encode a reality insisting on itself, a contested claim Dewart uses to diagnose absent-mindedness.
- Genuine thought and speech require a self-oriented purposive process, so computers can only simulate them.
Criticisms
The linguistic claim about copulas is contested, and the assumption that purposiveness is possible only in living organisms is asserted rather than argued. The stark denial of animal consciousness in the 1989 book sits uneasily with granting animals experience.
Implications
- AI consciousness: No
- Dewart argued that genuine thought and speech require the system to communicate its contents to itself as a self-oriented purposive process, which he held only living organisms can do.
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Since consciousness here is a natural use of an organism’s biochemical processes, the view gives no basis for it continuing after death.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Dewart traces the sense of a Power speaking through the world to a partial development of consciousness that projects human agency outward.
- Virtual immortality: Unlikely
- A digital system would on his view only simulate speech and thought, lacking the self-presence of a living speaker.
Related theories
- Jaynes's Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Overlap)
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness (Overlap)
- Deacon's Symbolic Communication (Human Consciousness) (Compatible)
- Turing’s Imitation, Machine Thought, and the Hidden Mind (Critique)
Sources
- Evolution and Consciousness: The Role of Speech in the Origin and Development of Human Nature, Leslie Dewart (1989)
- The Future of Belief: Theism in a World Come of Age, Leslie Dewart (1966)
- Hume's Challenge and the Renewal of Modern Philosophy, Leslie Dewart (2016)
- Self-Consciousness: A Critical Introduction to a Theory, D. Henrich (1971)
- Education, Consciousness and Negative Feedback: Towards the Renewal of Modern Philosophy of Education, E. Pikkarainen (2021)
- Leslie Dewart (1922–2009): Canada's Forgotten Theological Philosopher, A. M. Savage (2020)