Abstract

Locke and Kant both maintained that introspection, the faculty by means of which we are aware of our own mental states, is akin to ordinary sense perception. Descartes maintained that introspection affords us a kind of omniscience about our own minds. There is a tension between the views of Locke and Kant on one side and the claims Descartes makes on the other. If introspection is really a faculty analogous to perception, then it is not easily explained how we could have the kind of omniscient access to our own minds that Descartes claims for us. In the views of Locke, Kant, and Descartes, we have the beginnings of a debate between a broadly empiricist account and a broadly rationalist account of self-knowledge. I offer a conditional defense of a qualified version of the inner sense model of introspection, and thus come down on the broadly empiricist side of the debate. ;Tyler Burge and Sydney Shoemaker can be fairly described as contemporary proponents of a broadly rationalist account of self-knowledge. They argue that there are certain non-contingent rational relations between thoughts and our privileged self-attributions of them that the inner sense model fails to respect. I argue in response that if we accept an externalist account of propositional thought content, then there cannot be the kind of non-contingent relations between thoughts and privileged self-attributions that Burge and Shoemaker proffer. In this way, I defend an inner sense model of our introspective access to our own thoughts against the rationalist critiques of Burge and Shoemaker