Lynne Rudder Baker
Lynne Rudder Baker was an American philosopher best known for her work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, personal identity, and philosophy of religion. She was born in Atlanta in 1944, earned her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt in 1972, taught at Mary Baldwin College and Middlebury College, and joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1989. She became Distinguished Professor in 2005 and retired in 2013. She died in 2017. UMass describes her major works as including Saving Belief, Explaining Attitudes, Persons and Bodies, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life, and Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective. ([UMass Amherst][1])
Her central philosophical temperament was anti-reductionist but not wildly dualist. She wanted to defend the reality of ordinary things — persons, bodies, artifacts, intentions, beliefs, promises, institutions — without reducing them to physics, brain states, or mere linguistic convenience. In Persons and Bodies, she developed what she called the “constitution view”: a person is constituted by a body, but is not identical with the body, just as a statue may be constituted by a piece of marble without being identical to that marble. UMass’s memorial nicely summarizes this as an attempt to avoid both reductive physicalism and extravagant dualism. ([UMass Amherst][2])
Her view of consciousness is tied to her account of the “first-person perspective.” For Baker, what makes a person a person is not merely having a human organism, nor merely having mental states, but having a first-person perspective essentially. She distinguishes a rudimentary first-person perspective from a robust one. The rudimentary stage involves consciousness and intentionality. The robust stage involves self-consciousness: the ability to think of oneself as oneself, from the inside, using something like the first-person concept “I.”
So when you mention her contention that consciousness requires “instantiated subjectivity,” the key idea is this: consciousness is not just a neutral event occurring in the universe, like rain falling or electricity flowing. Consciousness exists only as consciousness-for-a-subject. A pain, an itch, a color-experience, a fear, a memory, or a thought is not merely an objective item sitting there; it is lived, undergone, or experienced by someone or something. Baker says a person or subject has consciousness as a dispositional property that she “instantiates or exemplifies,” even when she is not actively manifesting a conscious episode — for example, during dreamless sleep.
In plainer language: “instantiated subjectivity” means subjectivity has to be concretely embodied or exemplified in an actual subject. There is no free-floating consciousness in the abstract. There is no “pain” without a bearer of pain; no “experience” without an experiencer; no first-person field without something that occupies the first-person position. Baker is not saying we must always be reflectively self-aware. A baby, an animal, or a sleeping person may lack full reflective self-consciousness, but the subject-capacity is still there in a rudimentary or dispositional way.
This is why her position is stronger than merely saying “consciousness is private.” She is making an ontological claim, not just an epistemological one. Epistemological subjectivity concerns how something is known: “only I know my pain from the inside.” Ontological subjectivity concerns how something exists: the pain itself exists only as experienced by a subject. Baker discusses this distinction by engaging John Searle’s claim that things like tickles and itches have a “subjective mode of existence,” unlike mountains or molecules, whose existence does not depend on being experienced.
This also explains her challenge to naturalism. If naturalism means that reality can be described completely in nonperspectival, third-person terms, Baker thinks it fails to capture the first-person perspective. The world as described from nowhere — impersonal, centerless, objective — leaves out the fact that each conscious subject exists from somewhere, as a center of experience. Her later work argues that our ability to think of ourselves from the first-person point of view cannot be fully captured within a purely naturalistic worldview. ([UMass Amherst][2])
A simple example helps. Suppose a neuroscientist gives a complete third-person description of your brain while you taste green tea. They describe neural firing, chemistry, sensory processing, memory associations, and motor responses. Baker would not deny any of that. But she would say: that description still does not by itself capture the fact that the taste is present to you. The experience has a first-personal mode of existence. It is not merely an event in a nervous system; it is an event instantiated by a subject.
This puts her near Thomas Nagel and John Searle in taking subjectivity seriously, but she gives it a more explicitly metaphysical role. Nagel famously asked what it is like to be a bat. Searle emphasizes ontological subjectivity. Baker goes further into the nature of persons: the subject of experience is unified by a first-person perspective, and personal identity over time is grounded in the continued exemplification of that perspective.
The beautiful thing in Baker, at least to my ear, is that she refuses to let the person vanish. She is not content with saying, “There are just brain processes,” or “There are just bundles of experiences,” or “There are just linguistic conventions.” For her, a person is a real being, essentially embodied, essentially first-personal, and not reducible to subpersonal mechanisms. That is the heart of “instantiated subjectivity”: consciousness is real only where there is a concrete subject whose life is lived from the inside. 🌿
[1]: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/obituary-lynne-baker-retired-distinguished?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Obituary: Lynne Baker, Retired Distinguished Professor of ..."
[2]: https://www.umass.edu/religious-studies-certificate/news/memoriam-lynne-rudder-baker-1944-2017 "In Memoriam: Lynne Rudder Baker (1944-2017) : Religious Studies Certificate Program : UMass Amherst"