Self-Knowledge

Kant insists that definitions cannot be set in stone at the outset of a metaphysical investigation, but instead must be developed successively over the course of it, and should ideally be finalized only at the end. He even suggests that the task of a critical treatment of metaphysical concepts lies in an infinite approximation towards the essence of what they purport to designate. My focus is on this Kantian idea of approximating essence in definition. I begin with a reading of (...) Kant’s remarks on the methodology of definition in the Doctrines of Method of the Critique of Pure Reason and of the Jäsche Logic. On that basis I develop an account of what I take to be the most crucial application of that methodology, which nonetheless presents a lacuna in recent scholarship: Kant’s successive definition of the concept of the understanding in general, or the overall capacity for thought and cognition. I close by suggesting how this application might matter for Kant’s project of enlightenment. (shrink)

This is an introductory article on the topic of self-knowledge for the forthcoming latest edition of the Blackwell Handbook of Epistemology.

Prima facie, our knowledge of our mental states differs significantly from others’ knowledge of them. This is in some sense correct but fails to provide the whole picture. This paper develops and defends a two explanations account of self-knowledge: that subjects’ capacity for self-knowledge can and should be explained in two ways. Self-knowledge fundamentally differs from other-knowledge, but only at the personal level. This is the level at which we can talk of the subject herself. But the same subpersonal mechanisms (...) underpin self- and other-knowledge alike. In this respect, self-knowledge resembles perception: both are in some way ‘inferential’ at the subpersonal level of explanation but non-inferential at the personal level. (shrink)

An interesting class of intentions is commitments: diachronic intentions that are especially representative of human agency. I argue that the justification conditions for knowing our commitments differ from those for knowing ordinary intentions, and I propose an externalist view according to which knowing one’s own commitments is much like knowing those of others. I discuss Sarah Paul’s transparency view, according to which, we know our intentions by making a conscious decision, even when we do not follow through on them. This (...) is because, as she argues, the function of decisions and intentions is similar, and changing one’s mind in the face of weakness of will does not defeat or undermine that knowledge of intention acquired through a conscious decision. In contrast, I show how the same evidence from weakness of will undermines or outright proves a lack of commitment, as commitments require more than decisions; they demand consistent patterns of action to resist temptations and follow-through over time. Therefore, a conscious decision is not a reliable way to know our commitments in the same way it is for ordinary intentions. I conclude that we cannot justify our commitments merely by referring to a mental item, without also referring to our regular patterns of action. (shrink)

A traditional assumption in the literature on inner speech is that inner speech allows us to have knowledge of our thoughts. I argue that inner speech cannot even be part of an explanation of how we know our propositional states. My argument turns on the existence of unsymbolized thought, and makes the case that whatever explains self-knowledge in the absence of inner speech also explains self-knowledge when inner speech is present. Inner speech is thus ‘screened off’ from explaining the knowledge (...) we have of our propositional states. Nevertheless, inner speech seems to have a reflexive character: in inner speech we seem to represent aspects of ourselves. I argue that inner speech does not allow us to represent our own propositional states, as the tradition holds, but rather our own voices. In representing my own voice in inner speech, I bear a distinctively second-personal relation to myself, addressing myself as a ‘you’. The paper suggests a broader reorientation in theorizing about inner speech: away from questions about how inner speech maps onto mental states and toward questions about its second-personal nature. (shrink)

A traditional assumption in the literature on inner speech is that inner speech allows us to have knowledge of our thoughts. I argue that inner speech cannot even be part of an explanation of how we know our propositional states. My argument turns on the existence of unsymbolized thought, and makes the case that whatever explains self-knowledge in the absence of inner speech also explains self-knowledge when inner speech is present. Inner speech is thus ‘screened off’ from explaining the knowledge (...) we have of our propositional states. Nevertheless, inner speech seems to have a reflexive character: in inner speech we seem to represent aspects of ourselves. I argue that inner speech does not allow us to represent our own propositional states, as the tradition holds, but rather our own voices. In representing my own voice in inner speech, I bear a distinctively second-personal relation to myself, addressing myself as a ‘you’. The paper suggests a broader reorientation in theorizing about inner speech: away from questions about how inner speech maps onto mental states and toward questions about its second-personal nature. (shrink)

Recent works in epistemology have defended the existence of acquaintance knowledge - a non-propositional form of knowledge constituted by the subject's acquaintance with particulars. A significant obstacle to the epistemic legitimacy of acquaintance knowledge lies in the fact that acquaintance is a descriptive psychological phenomenon, whereas knowledge is a normative one. In this paper, I aim to address this challenge by arguing that introspective acquaintance knowledge - the subject's knowledge of their own experiences constituted by acquaintance with them - exhibits (...) a normative dimension. My argument critically hinges on the role of conscious introspective attention. Based on the idea that a distinctive manifestation of the presence of epistemic normativity has to do (at least) with the possibility for a piece of knowledge to be epistemically better or worse, I will argue that we can have epistemically better or worse introspective acquaintance knowledge and that this depends on the degree of attention that is involved in it. By assuming that possibly being epistemically better or worse implies for a piece of knowledge to possibly instantiate different degrees of epistemic goodness, and that conscious introspective attention comes in degrees, I will argue that conscious attention plays a gradual epistemic role in acquaintance knowledge. The paper aims to strengthen the case for introspective acquaintance knowledge as a genuine form of epistemic achievement, governed by attention-based normative standards. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish’s conception of memory has received little scholarly attention. Here, I taxonomize various notions of memory within her system, focusing primarily on a crucial distinction between what she calls ‘memory’ and what she calls ‘remembrance.’ I argue that Cavendish considers remembrance a more general and pervasive action in nature than memory. Memory, an action uniquely associated with animal creatures, refers to the animal’s reason storing past sense perceptions and conceptions such as thoughts, ideas, imaginations, etc. Remembrances, or voluntary repetitions (...) of past motions, manifest in two varieties. In the first, the animal retrieves perceptions or conceptions stored in memory. In the second, which all creatures exhibit, a creature’s parts voluntarily repeat past actions via custom or habit, such as in respiration and photosynthesis. These remembrances do not rely on anything stored in memory but derive directly from what Cavendish calls a creature’s ‘self-knowledge.’. (shrink)

El objetivo de esta investigación es analizar, desde tres dimensiones, los derechos del ser humano, en contraste con los derechos de las má-quinas: (1) la inteligencia natural frente a la inteligencia artificial, (2) el aspecto intelectivo (sense) y el aspecto emotivo (sensibility) de la razón y (3) el aspecto de la corporalidad cibernética de los androides, respecto de la corporalidad orgánica de los seres humanos (incluidos, claro está, los cíborgs). La delimitación implica cuestionar hasta qué punto es plausible predicar derechos (...) (o, si se prefiere, ciberderechos) a la máquina, sobre el fundamento de que ésta posee una razón equi-valente o superior a la del ser humano. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of committed beliefs: beliefs we commit to through reflection and conscious reasoning. To help make sense of committed beliefs, I present a new view of conscious reasoning, one of putting yourself in a position to become phenomenally consciously aware of evidence. By doing this for different pieces of evidence, you begin to make your up mind, making conscious reasoning, as such, a voluntary activity with an involuntary conclusion. The paper then explains how we use conscious (...) reasoning in reflection not just to form and change committed beliefs, but to become aware of existing ones. The paper concludes with an explanation of how the limitations of conscious reasoning require us to maintain committed beliefs in a system. It is our maintenance of this system that allows us to knit together individual episodes of conscious reasoning into one enduring performance as a committed systematic believer. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that we have a duty to know our motives. However, prominent theories of the mind suggest that we can’t. Such scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives is based on psychological evidence. I show that this evidence only mandates scepticism about knowledge of one’s motives if we rely on a mistaken assumption which I call ‘the myth of the one true motive’. If we reject this myth, we see that there is space to plausibly interpret the empirical data (...) such that knowledge of one’s motives is difficult, but not impossible. (shrink)

In Piñeros Glasscock (2020) I presented a version of Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument against the Anscombean thesis that intentional action entails knowledge. I defend this argument from recent criticisms by Beddor and Pavese (2022) and Valaris (2021). I argue that contrary to what my past self and my critics suggest, the conclusion of this anti-luminosity argument does not rest on the existence of essentially intentional actions. The argument can be recast based on the humbler premise that agential cognition must represent actions (...) as intentional. I show that this claim is well motivated by precisely the considerations of control behind the objections. (shrink)

How technology turns every human into an epistemologist.

I show that from common views about propositions as sets of possible worlds and knowledge requiring a sufficiently strong safety condition one can derive a condition stating that self-knowledge of belief is only possible if the content of that belief is fully understood. I show this by a reductio. If a subject S lacks full understanding of a proposition p, then S’s belief about believing that p cannot amount to knowledge. Even though my argument is based on particular views about (...) propositions and knowledge, I argue that the same kind of argument is also available for other knowledge conditions that rule out relevant luck and other accounts of propositions. However, for many of these other accounts of knowledge the requirement for understanding p will not be full understanding, but only sufficiently high understanding. These results tell us how self-knowledge, ruling out luck and understanding belief contents relate. (shrink)

Resumen: El trabajo pretende esclarecer los motivos filosóficos que subyacen a la ambivalencia endógena que persigue a las éticas de la autorrealización, repasando para ello el debate que suscitó el uso del ideal ético de la «autorrealización» patente en los ensayos «La autorrealización como el ideal moral» (1893), de John Dewey, y «Autorrea-lización -una crítica» (1896), de Alfred Edward Taylor. Tras revisar las inconsistencias del principio ético de la autorrealización advertidas por estos filósofos en el siglo xix, se busca rastrear (...) las huellas de este ideal moral y su pervivencia en nuestro tiempo presente. Palabras clave: autorrealización, éticas idealistas, John Dewey, Alfred Edward Taylor. Abstract: This article seeks to clarify the philosophical problems that underlie the endogenous ambivalence of the ethics of self-realization, reviewing the debate raised by the moral ideal of «self-realization» as it is found in Dewey’s «Self-realization as the moral ideal» (1893), and Alfred Edward Taylor’s «Self-realization -a critique» (1896). After showing the philosophical inconsistencies around «self-realization», as described during the 19th century by both philosophers, the text proposes to find the traces of this moral ideal in our present time. Keywords: self-realization, idealistic ethics, John Dewey, Alfred Edward Taylor. (shrink)

This paper offers a new take on Avicenna's Flying Man, one that explains why it's better than its Cartesian counterpart.

Contemporary proponents of modern Buddhism argue that the Buddha’s teaching, in contrast to later Buddhist-inspired philosophies and folklore, is of a fundamentally therapeutic or experiential character. In response, other scholars have objected that this amounts to an inadequate protestantization that neglects soteriology and the broader religious or cultural context. In this paper, by critically engaging with therapeutic readings (as proposed by Stephen Batchelor) and experiential readings (as proposed by Alan Wallace and D. T. Suzuki) and by drawing from a few (...) significant early Pāli discourses, I reconstruct the Buddha’s teaching in a way that, like many modern interpretations, does not rely on belief in magical powers and spirits but that, unlike many modern interpretations, does not exhaust itself in mere therapeutics or experiential knowledge. My interpretation is grounded in a notion of negative self-knowledge that takes two distinct forms. On the one hand, there is the self-knowledge of not-self as an antecedent recognition of the possibility of awakening that defines the Buddhist seeker. On the other hand, there is the acquired self-knowledge of not-self of the awakened. The latter—that is, the completed insight into what we are not—is not just one experience among others but the transformation of any possible experience. Thus, the Buddha speaks to us of his self-knowledge that exceeds experiential knowledge. This imbalance between the Buddha and his real or potential interlocutors explains why his teaching remains inaccessible to many, in spite of modern attempts to rationalize it. (shrink)

This paper presents a deductive proof for the necessary existence of objective truth and reality, addressing core philosophical challenges across multiple frameworks, including modernism, postmodernism, relativism, and radical skepticism. By starting with the undeniable fact of subjective experience, the argument demonstrates that rationality presupposes subjectivity, which in turn relies on the classical laws of logic. These laws cannot be grounded within subjectivity or rationality without falling into circular reasoning. Therefore, the proof establishes that objective reality must serve as the ground (...) for these logical laws, while objective truth provides their validation. This foundational framework resolves key philosophical problems, including infinite regress and self-justification, allowing for coherent philosophical thought. Furthermore, the paper explores conceptual parallels between this proof and elements of mysticism, pragmatism, and religious notions of divinity, suggesting a unified foundation that can empower individual contributions to the collective pursuit of truth. (shrink)

What happens when scholars come together to study Buddhist and German Idealist perspectives on mind and representation? We explore this question and reflect on methodological considerations in what is often referred to as "comparative philosophy.".

A central intuition regarding self-knowledge is that if I say (or think) that I believe that it is raining – to use a familiar example – I do not merely state a fact about my mental life but also express my view of the world: I take it to be the case that it is raining. The notion of avowal is supposed to capture this duality of perspectives: whilst occupying one’s first-person perspective, one self-attributes a mental attitude, which is a (...) fact that is supposed to be true independent of one’s own perspective. Another way of putting this is that avowal is a self-attribution of an intentional mental attitude that is first-personal and commissive. Many grant that avowal and its commissive form are essential to the first-person character of self-knowledge – which I call the commitment view. However, only a few argue that avowal remains essential in achieving self-knowledge of one’s substantial mental attitudes, i.e., attitudes that are significant to a person’s life and self-conception, such as one’s values, deeper desires, and cares. In fact, current orthodoxy is skeptical that avowal has any role to play in acquiring substantial self-knowledge. According to this skeptical view of avowal, such attitudes are often distorted in the first-person perspective and are better reflected in someone’s behavior, i.e., in the relevant patterns of action and reaction. Rather than avowing an attitude, interpreting these patterns is supposed to provide substantial self-knowledge. The paper proceeds by first clarifying the commitment view (section 2) and the skeptical view (section 3). I will then offer two arguments against the skeptical view. First, I will show that substantial mental attitudes cannot, as the skeptical view needs to assume, be discovered in patterns of action and reaction (section 4). Secondly, I will inquire the complex relation between avowal and patterns of action and reaction and argue that a gap between the two cannot be determined nor understood without the agent’s perspective, including their avowal (section 5). Both arguments establish that the skeptic cannot deny a necessary role for avowal. This reflects the agential nature of substantial mental attitudes and challenges the dominant skeptical view of substantial self-knowledge. (shrink)

This chapter takes a closer look at the relationship between belief and judgment. It presents an argument for the output thesis—the thesis that conscious judgments give rise to occurrent beliefs. It is then suggested that the output thesis provides independent support for the transparency method and an independent explanation of why Moore’s Paradox arises. The output thesis stands in contrast to other views in the literature which do not posit such a close connection between judgment and belief. Along the way, (...) some of the implications of the output thesis for current characterizations of judgment and belief are discussed. Finally, a significant objection to the output thesis is considered—namely, the set of cases where subjects assert that P but behave in ways that suggest they believe not-P. It is argued that such cases do not undermine the output thesis. (shrink)

Generally, we confidently ascribe valuing states to ourselves. We make statements such as “I value democracy” or “I value my best friend” - our sense of who we are depends on doing so. Yet what justifies that confidence? If you were asked “Do you value philosophy, or are you just doing it for the money?”, how might you go about generating such knowledge? I will operate with the notion that valuing involves, at a minimum, a set of distinctive emotional dispositions (...) toward the valued object. Given this view of valuing, a plausible explanation stemming from Tooming and Miyazono is the following: to know whether we value, we need to predict our potential or future emotional reactions. That is, they suggest that affective forecasting is necessary to generate knowledge of valuing states. I argue that, despite its intuitive appeal, affective forecasting is not necessary. I then consider a more modest claim, namely that affective forecasting is still explanatorily powerful when it comes to self-knowledge of valuing states, as it explains the difficulty of generating such knowledge. I reject this further claim, arguing that there is a stronger available explanation: the use of theories about valuing. (shrink)

Kant scholarship often refers to transcendental idealism as a ‘theory.’ Kant’s project, however, is not easily reconciled with that term in its current use. This paper contends that his critique and idealism should be seen as a remedial response against our natural albeit confused prejudice of transcendental realism. Kant’s idealism articulates a ‘metametaphysical’ ethos that is supposed to provide a new grounding of metaphysics by proceeding ‘from the human standpoint:’ it aims to dispel the temptation of transcendental realism in favor (...) of a resolute inhabitation of, and contentment with, our own humanity. This project comes under pressure in post-Kantianism: Fichte is among the first to voice the worry that Kant’s critique is well-intentioned, but not well-executed. His concern is that, while it ‘bring[s] man into harmony with himself,’ this mere contentment with our own humanity will not suffice to achieve the scientificity that, by Kant’s own lights, is the mark of any promising metaphysics. Fichte’s charge is that Kant’s idealism, in its very confinement to the brute facts of the human condition, surrenders itself to unacceptable contingency or ‘facticity.’ The paper explores Kant’s idealist project of grounding metaphysics, Fichte’s facticity charge against it, and whether Kantian idealism can withstand it. (shrink)

According to Perdurantism, persons are identical to maximal aggregates of appropriately interrelated temporal parts. Within the Perdurantist framework, an epistemic concern arises, targeting the perduring persons’ belief that they are persons, suggesting that, ultimately, they are not in a position to know that they are persons as opposed to temporal parts. Despite the consideration it has received over the years, this concern has not yet been converted into a full-fledged objection. This paper aims to address this gap by exploring the (...) possibility of formulating a coherent Epistemic Objection against Perdurantism. We shall examine several epistemological principles around which such an objection might be built, arguing that none of them, in the end, allows a plausible formulation of the objection. As a result, we shall conclude that the burden of proving that in a Perdurantist setting persons are not in a position to know that they are persons rests with the objectors. (shrink)

This paper introduces and motivates the claim that we possess doxastic agent’s awareness. I argue that this is a form of agentive awareness concerning our belief states that we enjoy in virtue of deliberating and judging. Namely, we experience these activities as those of making up our mind and keeping it made up regarding our beliefs. Following related work in the philosophy of action, I understand this awareness as a form of conscious experience which can then ground our self-ascriptions. As (...) such, this enables me to also propose a new account of self-knowledge of belief and the way in which deliberating and concluding that p can warrant us in self-ascribing the belief that p (i.e., employing the so-called ‘transparency method’). Philosophers often appeal to our arguably agentive relation to our beliefs in explaining this. I, though, I extend work in the philosophy of action in a way that is surprisingly flatfooted way given that belief is a state and not an action. (shrink)

The problem of self-knowledge has been thoroughly discussed in the context of traditional epistemology. In parallel to the traditional approach to epistemology, Radically Embodied Cognitive Science (RECS) has emerged in the last 30 years as a genuine contender in its field. According to RECS, the unity of analysis of cognitive processes is the dynamics between brain, body and environment. In this paper, I advance a RECS approach to self-knowledge, which immediately suggests that knowing oneself is a matter of knowing what (...) one’s body can do. I then turn to resistance training, particularly weightlifting, and argue that it offers a paradigmatic case of self-knowledge in RECS’s terms. More precisely, resistance training allows the trainee to achieve knowledge of themselves in a fundamentally practical manner—and doing so is transformative of the kind of actions they are capable of. (shrink)

Recent analytic-philosophical works in the field of situated cognition have proposed to conceptualize the self as deeply entwined with the environment, and even as constituted by it. A common move has been to characterize the self in narrative terms, and then to argue that the narrative self is partly constituted by narratives about the past that are scaffolded (shaped and maintained) by, or distributed over, a variety of objects that can rekindle episodic memories. While we are sympathetic to these approaches, (...) here we propose a different strategy to situate the self—one which can be seen as complementing the narrative one, and which draws from concepts and ideas central to the phenomenological-existentialist tradition. We suggest, first, that the self has a sense of its past not just via narratives and episodic memories, but in virtue of being embodied and thus, importantly, _sedimented_ (in other words, it has, or rather is, a _body memory_). Embodiment and sedimentation, in turn, always necessarily imply an environment or a situation, entailing that the self is also _inherently situated_. Second, we discuss the future-oriented dimension of selfhood, and argue that we understand ourselves as _projected_ into the future, again not necessarily only narratively and reflectively, but also tacitly, in a bodily and inherently situated way. (shrink)

The legacy of the Platonic dialogues may well lie, not in any classical idealist “doctrine of forms,” but in an inquisitive stance towards the puzzle behind any such doctrine—how thought can be about anything at all. This Platonic puzzle may, however, yield a different guise of idealism that is recognizably diagnostic: it aims to dispel our worry about thought’s objectivity as a confusion, engendered by a self-alienation of thought. These themes of diagnosis and idealism resurface in Wittgenstein, who in his (...) treatment of rules calls for an understanding of thought’s normativity from within. This is taken up by Cora Diamond, who urges philosophy to attend to thought’s real needs by exorcizing any desire for agreement with something other than itself. I argue that Wittgenstein and Diamond lead us back to Kant’s idealism, which identifies transcendental realism as the deep-seated prejudice at the root of the puzzle. (shrink)

Drawing on three Platonic dialogues (Charmides, Alcibiades I, and Theaetetus) and the epistemology of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti, this chapter argues that the self-knowledge project need not depend on a metaphysics of self if the awareness present in each knowledge episode is taken to exhibit a reflexive dimension. Whatever the ultimate ground for self-knowledge, it must be such as to provide unity and coherence to experience, even if the achieved unity or harmony is not something determinate or fixed (as suggested by (...) some interpretations of the Platonic soul as form-like, hence as impersonal). The chapter argues that an account of self-knowledge that can explain what turns knowledge onto itself, what makes it personal, is better equipped to show how such knowledge can become a vehicle for self-cultivation. Doctrinal commitment to a no-self view notwithstanding, the recognition on the part of certain Buddhist thinkers that an irreflexive view of awareness may fail to capture the phenomenal and subjective dimensions of knowledge episodes further bolsters such an account. (shrink)

Более всего ищите Царствия Божия, и всё остальное приложится вам, ибо Царство Небесное подобно зерну горчичному, которое человек взял и посеял на поле своём, которое, хотя меньше всех семян, но, когда вырастет, бывает больше всех злаков и становится деревом, так что прилетают птицы небесные и укрываются в ветвях его. Лука 12:31, 13:19.

In several places of his work, Kant distinguishes between two senses of self-consciousness: a pure one and an empirical one. The aim of this work is to analyze these two senses of consciousness and show that, for Kant, self-consciousness does not occur unrestrictedly: a relation with something other than consciousness is needed for it to become conscious of itself. I carry out these objectives throughout six sections. In the first one I lay out the Kantian principle of pure apperception. In (...) the second one, I present the limits of pure apperception through Kant’s critique of rational psychology. Then, in the third section, I set the basis to understand the relationship that Kant establishes between the I think and the I exist. In the fourth one I show that pure apperception, despite being pure, is not possible without the opportunity of perception. Next, in the fifth one, I introduce the notion of empirical apperception, establish its relationship with pure apperception, and elucidate its meaning. Finally, in the last section, I explain the way in which empirical self-consciousness is determined, in relation to the knowledge of objects of the external sense. (shrink)

This paper closes a gap in joint acceptance accounts of the mental life of groups by presenting a theory of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework. I start out by presenting desiderata for a theory of group self-knowledge. Any such theory has to explain the linguistic practice of group avowals, and how self-knowledge can play a role in practical and moral considerations. I develop an account of group self-knowledge in the joint acceptance framework that can explain these desiderata. I (...) argue that a group has self-knowledge of its own attitude A if and only if (i) the operative members jointly accept that the group has attitude A; and (ii) that joint acceptance is non-deviantly caused by the operative group members’ belief that the members jointly accepted attitude A; and (iii) the group has attitude A. Together (i) to (iii) give us conditions for a group having a justified, non-lucky, true belief about its own attitude. (shrink)

There have now been a few attempts in trans theory to give an account of trans epistemology (see Radi 2019; Meadow 2016; and Dickson 2021). I will suggest that despite an admirable goal—that of giving an epistemology that provides a methodologically radical and distinctively trans break from other contemporary epistemological theory—thus far no account has been successful. Instead, I suggest that, in the absence of a more satisfactory radical account of trans epistemology, we can think of trans epistemology as a (...) methodologically moderate (though politically radical) extension of mainstream epistemology. (shrink)

This paper will be concerned with the role acquaintance plays in contemporary theories of introspection. Traditionally, the relation of acquaintance has been conceived in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind as being only epistemically relevant inasmuch as it causes, or enables, or justifies a peculiar kind of propositional knowledge, i.e., knowledge by acquaintance. However, in recent years a novel account of the role of acquaintance in our introspective knowledge has been offered. According to this novel constitutive approach, acquaintance is, in (...) itself, a sui generis—i.e., non-propositional—kind of knowledge. As we will suggest, a stalemate between David Chalmers’ account of direct phenomenal concepts—as a prototypical example of a causal view—and Anna Giustina’s account of primitive introspection—as a prototypical example of a constitutive view—is looming in the current controversy between the two families of theories. Towards the end of the essay, we will point to some possible ways for a constitutive theorist to break the stalemate. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers, such as Akeel Bilgrami, Crispin Wright, Christine Korsgaard, and Mrinal Miri, have explicitly discussed the relevance of self-knowledge in relation to the discourse of normativity. This book addresses the notion of self-knowledge as relevant in the formation of moral identity.

This Great Debates volume grew out of exchanges that followed the 2012 publication of a Festschrift volume for Crispin Wright, just over a decade ago (Coliva 2012). As often happens in Philosophy, the process of trying to clarify and iron out apparently local points of disagreement between us has unearthed deeper divergences concerning larger issues in the philosophy of language and mind, in epistemology, and in the theory of action. Such is our profession.

Philosophy is witnessing an “Agential Turn,” characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency––agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self‐knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make (...) appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject's rational point of view on the world. (shrink)

This thesis comprises three distinct and substantial essays concerning motivation, normativity, and self-knowledge. Generally speaking, this thesis focuses on how agents can access particular facts about themselves—e.g., why they acted the way they acted or that a particular experience is bad-for-them. In particular, I show how the motivational and normative nature of certain mental states like our motivating reasons and unpleasant pains interact in unanticipated ways with foundational questions about the nature of phenomenal consciousness—“what it is like” to undergo this (...) or that experience—with questions of self-knowledge—how we are aware of, and come to know, the mental states we’re in—and with questions concerning moral knowledge—how we come to know moral facts. Take, for instance, the action of taking a painkiller or the formation of a new belief. If I asked you why you took a painkiller or why you formed the belief, you would be able to, in an immediate and direct sense, know why you did those things. Not only do you know what your reasons are, but you seem to know your reasons in a special way, again, in a sense that is immediate and direct. Furthermore, some of our mental states seem to be bad states to be in. Take, again, your unpleasant pain: you want to end it because it’s bad. So, it seems, then, that you also have knowledge of the badness of your unpleasant pain. But these claims are not without controversy. For some deny that we know our own reasons in a special way distinct from how we know of other’s reasons. The first aim of this thesis is to critically assess a recent attempt to defend the claim that we do have some special, direct, and immediate knowledge of our reasons. But insofar as we construe the nature of why we believe and do things—i.e., our reasons—in a specific way, I argue that defending that picture likely fails. Furthermore, turning back to our phenomenal experiences, it turns out that once we understand the nature of our phenomenal experiences—e.g., unpleasant pains—along particular representationalist lines, explaining the motivational and normative facts implicit in our painkiller-taking action becomes increasingly implausible. The second aim of the thesis argues that insofar as we are concerned with accommodating such motivational and normative facts, we ought to abandon a particular brand of representationalism about phenomenal consciousness. And lastly, I argue that once we fully appreciate the normative profile of a certain set of our mental states—e.g., the badness of unpleasant pain and the wrongness of an intention to lie—we are in a position to develop a novel account of moral knowledge. Specifically, I motivate taking seriously the idea that we can introspect normative facts. (shrink)

Early in the Phaedrus, Socrates tells his interlocutor that he does not have time to formulate naturalistic reinterpretations of old stories, because he is not yet able, according to the Delphic inscription, to know myself. Indeed, it appears laughable to me for one who is still ignorant of this to examine alien things. … [So] I examine not them but myself: whether I happen to be some wild animal more multiply twisted and filled with desire than Typhon, or a gentler, (...) simpler animal having by nature a share in a divine fate. (shrink)