The problem of self-knowledge is one of the most fascinating in all of philosophy and has crucial significance for the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Gertler assesses the leading theoretical approaches to self-knowledge, explaining the work of many of the key figures in the field: from Descartes and Kant, through to Bertrand Russell and Gareth Evans, as well as recent work by Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, William Lycan and Sydney Shoemaker. -/- Beginning with an outline of the distinction between self-knowledge (...) and self-awareness and providing essential historical background to the problem, Gertler addresses specific theories of self-knowledge such as the acquaintance theory, the inner sense theory, and the rationalist theory, as well as leading accounts of self-awareness. The book concludes with a critical explication of the dispute between empiricist and rationalist approaches. (shrink)

Edmund Gettier is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This short piece, published in 1963, seemed to many decisively to refute an otherwise attractive analysis of knowledge. It stimulated a renewed effort, still ongoing, to clarify exactly what knowledge comprises.

Experiences and beliefs are different sorts of mental states, and are often taken to belong to very different domains. Experiences are paradigmatically phenomenal, characterized by what it is like to have them. Beliefs are paradigmatically intentional, characterized by their propositional content. But there are a number of crucial points where these domains intersect. One central locus of intersection arises from the existence of phenomenal beliefs: beliefs that are about experiences.

A self-ascription is a thought or sentence in which a predicate is self-consciously ascribed to oneself. Self-ascriptions are best expressed using the first-person pronoun. Mental self-ascriptions are ascriptions to oneself of mental predicates (predicates that designate mental properties), non-mental self-ascriptions are ascriptions to oneself of non-mental predicates (predicates that designate non-mental properties). It is often claimed that there is a range of self-ascriptions that are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun (IEM for short). What this means, (...) and exactly which self-ascriptions are properly classed as IEM, is a topic hotly disputed. Some claim that only mental self-ascriptions are IEM, others claim that some non-mental self-ascriptions are IEM. Before this question can be decided, it needs to be judged exactly what it means to say that a self-ascription is IEM. And here we stumble across the fact that there are, at least, two non-equivalent ways of defining the phenomenon1. I will be claiming that one of these definitions should be rejected. (shrink)

This is the first in a series of two articles that serve as an introduction to recent debates about cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive phenomenology can be defined as the experience that is associated with cognitive activities, such as thinking, reasoning, and understanding. What is at issue in contemporary debates is not the existence of cognitive phenomenology, so defined, but rather its nature and theoretical role. The first article examines questions about the nature of cognitive phenomenology, while the second article explores the (...) philosophical implications of these questions for the role of consciousness in theories of intentionality, introspective self-knowledge, and knowledge of the external world. (shrink)

Something about this argument sounds funny. As we’ll see, though, it takes some care to identify exactly what Moore has done wrong. Iwill assume that Moore knows premise (2) to be true. One could inquire into how he knows it, and whether that knowledge can be defeated; but Iwon’t. I’ll focus instead on what epistemic relations Moore has to premise (1) and to his conclusion (3). It may matter which epistemic relations we choose to consider. Some philosophers will diagnose Moore’s (...) argument using Contextualist machinery. They’ll say. (shrink)

Consider the skeptic about the external world. Let’s straightaway concede to such a skeptic that perception gives us no conclusive or certain knowledge about our surroundings. Our perceptual justification for beliefs about our surroundings is always defeasible—there are always possible improvements in our epistemic state which would no longer support those beliefs. Let’s also concede to the skeptic that it’s metaphysically possible for us to have all the experiences we’re now having while all those experiences are false. Some philosophers dispute (...) this, but I do not. The skeptic I want to consider goes beyond these familiar points to the much more radical conclusion that our perceptual experiences can’t give us any knowledge or even justification for believing that our surroundings are one way rather than another. (shrink)

Perry argues that certain sorts of indexicals are 'essential', in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of descriptions. This paper also introduces the influential idea that certain sorts of indexicals play a special role in thought, and have a special connection to action.

The paper explores the idea that some singular judgements about the natural numbers are immune to error through misidentification by pursuing a comparison between arithmetic judgements and first-person judgements. By doing so, the first part of the paper offers a conciliatory resolution of the Coliva-Pryor dispute about so-called “de re” and “which-object” misidentification. The second part of the paper draws some lessons about what it takes to explain immunity to error through misidentification. The lessons are: First, the so-called Simple Account (...) of which-object immunity to error through misidentification to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds do not feature any identification component fails. Secondly, wh-immunity can be explained by a Reference-Fixing Account to the effect that a judgement is immune to this kind of error just in case its grounds are constituted by the facts whereby the reference of the concept of the object which the judgement concerns is fixed. Thirdly, a suitable revision of the Simple Account explains the de re immunity of those arithmetic judgements which are not wh-immune. These three lessons point towards the general conclusion that there is no unifying explanation of de re and wh-immunity. (shrink)

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it. The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling these (...) apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

What determines the reference of first-person thoughts—thoughts that one would express using the first-person pronoun? I defend a model on which our ways of gaining knowledge of ourselves do, in much the way that our ways of gaining knowledge of objects in the world determine the reference of perceptual demonstrative thoughts. This model—the Demonstrative Model of First-Person Thought—can be motivated by reference to independently plausible general principles about how reference is determined. But it faces a serious objection. There seems to (...) be an explanatory rival to it with a great deal of plausiblility. The rival is The Simple Rule Model, which says that first-person thoughts are governed by the simple rule that any token of one will be about the person whose token it is. I pinpoint a crucial unclarity in The Simple Rule Model, hinging on how we understand the notion of a rule, and argue that no version of the Simple Rule Model is both plausible and a genuine explanatory rival to the Demonstrative Model. I also provide an argument that the Demonstrative Model is extensionally adequate. (shrink)

It is widely held that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification , relative to the first person pronoun. Many have taken such errors to be logically impossible, arguing that the immunity holds as an “absolute” necessity. Here I discuss an actual case of craniopagus twins—twins conjoined at the head and brain—as a means to arguing that such errors are logically possible and, for all we know, nomologically possible. An important feature of the example is that (...) it is one where a person may be said to be introspectively aware of a mental state that occurs outside of her own mind. Implications are discussed for views of the relation between introspection and mental state ownership, and between introspection and epistemic criteria for the “mark of the mental.”. (shrink)

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 35-39 [Access article in PDF] The Ownership of Thoughts John Campbell Keywords: schizophrenia, thought insertion, immunity to error through misidentification. SYDNEY SHOEMAKER FORMULATED a basic point about first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states when he declared that they are, in general, immune to error through misidentification (Shoemaker 1984). Assuming Shoemaker's point to be correct, the puzzle it raises is this: how are we (...) to explain this datum? Why should it be that first-person, present-tense ascriptions of psychological states are immune to error through misidentification? One type of explanation is in terms of the meaning of the first person: that "I" just stands for whoever is the owner of these (demonstrated) psychological states (including any states being self-ascribed). I argued against this account of the first person in a number of places, and in favor of an alternative explanation of Shoemaker's datum. On the alternative explanation, the reason for the immunity is provided by an account of the ownership of psychological states, on which what makes a psychological state mine is the possibility of self-ascription of it by me (Campbell 1986, 1999a). Suppose we call this the Introspectionist explanation of the immunity to error through misidentification of present-tense self-ascriptions of psychological states. I do think, though, that the simple Introspectionist account is too simple an account of Shoemaker's datum (Campbell 1999a, 1999b). The reason is that there is a certain complexity in our notion of the ownership of a token thought. We cannot give a full account of our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought simply in terms of the person who is capable of introspective knowledge of the thought. The reason is that there is another dimension to our ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought. We also think of the possessor of a thought as being the person who generated that very thought; we think of the owner of the thought as being the person who brought that particular token thought into existence, the person who formed it. Of course, that token thought may be a copying of someone else's idea; that other person may have influenced my formation of that particular thought. But the point remains that I play a special role in the production of my thoughts.Suppose we have a document bearing a signature and we ask, "Whose signature is that?" In this case we are asking about the authorship of the signature; we are asking who made those particular marks on that bit of paper. Of course, someone else can copy my signature, trying to make it look as if what they write was written by me. But for a particular piece of writing to be an authentic signature of mine, the thing has to be generated by me personally. I think it is helpful to bear in mind this aspect of the notion of the ownership of a signature, when we consider a certain complexity in the notion of the ownership of a thought—I mean, an occurrent, episodic [End Page 35] thought. There are, I am saying, two strands in the ordinary notion of the ownership of a thought, which we do not ordinarily have any reason to separate. First, there is the notion of the person who generated that particular thought, which we might think of on the model of the person who inscribed a particular signature. Of course, in generating a particular token thought, you may be subject to all sorts of influences. Perhaps your thought is derivative, largely shaped by others. Perhaps your thoughts are sometimes simply echoes of the things other people have said. Nonetheless, when we consider how your individual token thoughts are being brought about, you play a proximal role in their formation that no one else does. To give an analogy, suppose that I am taking notes at your dictation. Then there is a sense in which the contents of my notes are entirely determined by you. But there is also a sense in which the token sentences are being generated by... (shrink)

This paper offers several new insights into the epistemology of immunity to error through misidentification, by refining James Pryor’s distinction between de re misidentification and wh-misidentification. This is crucial for identifying exactly what is at issue in debates over the Immunity thesis that, roughly, all introspection-based beliefs about one’s own occurrent psychological states are immune to error through misidentification. I contend that the debate between John Campbell and Annalisa Coliva over whether the phenomenon of thought insertion provides empirical evidence against (...) claims like Immunity has wrongly focused on de re misidentification and largely overlooked the role of wh-misidentification. I argue that, once we properly distinguish the two notions, subjects of thought insertion can be seen to make an error of wh-misidentification in their judgments. I argue that this disproves the Immunity thesis, properly understood, and show what broader implications this has for our understanding of IEM and the first person. (shrink)

Russian translation of Gettier E. L. Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? // Analysis, vol. 23, 1963. Translated by Lev Lamberov with kind permission of the author.

Inspired by Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’ – first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se – call for special treatment: we need to abandon one of two traditional assumptions on the contents needed to provide rationalizing explanations, their shareability or their absoluteness. Their arguments have been very influential; one might take them as establishing a new ‘effect’ – new philosophical evidence in need of being accounted for. This is (...) questioned by the skeptical arguments in recent work by Cappelen & Dever and Magidor, along lines that a few discrepant voices had already announced earlier. Skeptics content that the evidence does not really call for revising traditional theories of content. I will discuss their challenges – first and foremost, concerning action explanations – aiming to make the case that the ‘De Se effect’ is no illusion: de se attitudes require us to revise one of the two tenets of traditional views. (shrink)

I discuss an aspect of the relation between accounts of de se thought and the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. I will argue that a deflationary account of the latter—the Simple Account, due to Evans —will not do; a more robust one based on an account of de se thoughts is required. I will then sketch such an alternative account, based on a more general view on singular thoughts, and show how it can deal with the problems I (...) raise for the Simple Account. (shrink)

John Campbell (1999) has recently maintained that the phenomenon of thought insertion as it is manifested in schizophrenic patients should be described as a case in which the subject is introspectively aware of a certain thought and yet she is wrong in identifying whose thought it is. Hence, according to Campbell, the phenomenon of thought insertion might be taken as a counterexample to the view that introspection-based mental selfascriptions are logically immune to error through misidentification (IEM, hereafter). Thus, if Campbell (...) is right, it would not be true that when the subject makes a mental self-ascription on the basis of introspective awareness of a given mental state, there is no possible world in which she could be wrong as to whether it is really she who has that mental state. Notice the interesting interdisciplinary implications of Campbell’s project: on the one hand, a fairly precise notion elaborated in philosophy such as IEM (and the related notion of error through misidentification, EM hereafter) is used to describe a characteristic symptom of schizophrenia.1 On the other hand, such a phenomenon, described in the way proposed, is taken to be a possible counterexample to a sort of “philosophical dogma” such as IEM of introspection-based non-inferential mental self-ascriptions. In the first section of the paper I will point out the characteristic features of EM and explain logical immunity to error through misidentification of introspection-based mental self-ascriptions; in the second section I will consider the case of thought insertion in more detail and show why, after all, it is not a counterexample to the view that introspectionbased mental self-ascriptions are logically IEM. Finally, I will offer a re-description of the phenomenon of thought insertion. (shrink)

About Oneself: De Se Thought and Communication By García-CarpinteroManuel and TorreStephanOxford University Press, 2016, viii + 348 pp.

Ordinarily, if you say something like “I see a comet,” you might make a mistake about whether it is a comet that you see, but you could not be right about whether it is a comet but wrong about who is seeing it. There cannot be an “error of identification” in this case. In making a judgement like, “I see a comet,” there are not two steps, finding out who is seeing the thing and finding out what it is that (...) is being seen, so that you could go wrong at either step. The only place to go wrong is in your description of what is being seen. We usually take it that the same point applies to present-tense ascriptions to oneself of psychological states in general. You can get it wrong about which psychological state you are in, but you cannot get it right about the psychological state but wrong about whose psychological state it is. In contrast, in a room full of people, I might hear a noise and conclude, “Bill sneezed,” and in this case I could be wrong either about who it was that sneezed or about whether it was a sneeze, rather than say a death-rattle. (shrink)

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 41-46 [Access article in PDF] On What There Really Is to Our Notion of Ownership of a Thought Annalisa Coliva JOHN CAMPBELL'S REPLY to my paper aims at reestablishing the point that there are two strands to our notion of ownership of a thought. There are two ways of cashing out this idea. 1 First, one could say that A is the owner (...) of a thought if and only if both the following two independent conditions apply 2 : (1) X is introspectively aware of a token thought and (2) X is the person who formed that token thought. Second, one may hold that there are twodifferent and independent notions of ownership of a thought, call it O1 and O2, corresponding to (1) and (2), respectively. For brevity, I will refer only to the first interpretation. But what I will be saying will apply, mutatis mutandis, to both.On this view, thought insertion would be a case in which someone thinks that (1) is satisfied, while (2) is not and, therefore, denies that the thought she is introspectively aware of is her own. 3 Campbell's explanation of thought insertion is quite clear: the subject has prima facie reasons to think that she is not the person who formed that token thought—maybe because she does not experience that thought as formed by herself—and, therefore, has prima facie reasons to deny that she is its owner, but she is mistaken in identifying the producer of the thought and what she says is false, yet reasonable. 4 Notice, however, an important consequence of Campbell's model. If (1) and (2) are independent conditions, then one could obtain without the other. Hence, it must be conceivable that one is introspectively aware of a thought that one has not produced. Indeed, cases of multiple personality, if taken literally, might be taken as examples of this kind of situation: person A and person B inhabit the same body, A can have access to B's thoughts, yet B remains their producer. So A could actually say something like "I'm thinking (i.e. I am immediately aware) that p, but this is not my thought (it is not the thought I produced), it's B's (the thought that B produced)" and what she would be saying would in fact be true.Yet, a simple-minded reaction one may have toward this line of explanation is this: If the subject is either saying something false, but reasonable, or, indeed, something altogether true, when she says "I'm thinking 'Kill God,' but this isn't my thought, it's Chris'," why should we consider her report as an expression of some kind of cognitive illusion, 5 which we take as a symptom of mental illness, as opposed to, at most, a possible mistake in identifying the producer of the thought? And, connectedly, why should we try to cure her, rather than just, at most, correct her? [End Page 41]Hence, the whole dispute between Campbell and me hinges on whether it is logically possible for one to be introspectively aware of a thought and yet not be its producer. Campbell claims that it is, whereas I deny that this is a genuine possibility. He holds that these are two independent conditions and that the one can obtain without the other, whereas I hold that they are not independent and that they stand or fall together. Campbell is fully aware of being making a surprising claim because, as he points out, "[The two strands in the ordinary notion of ownership of a thought] do not ordinarily even seem to come apart" (Campbell 2002, italics mine). Yet he offers in its support no more than an analogy between being the person who produced a certain signature and being the person who produced a given token thought. Let us look at it closer.Consider the following situation: a person NN looks at a piece of paper with NN written on it and wonders whether she is the... (shrink)

Extended Rationality: A Hinge Epistemology provides a novel account of the structure of epistemic justification. Its central claim builds upon Wittgenstein's idea in On Certainty that epistemic justifications hinge on some basic assumptions and that epistemic rationality extends to these very hinges. It exploits these ideas to address major problems in epistemology, such as the nature of perceptual justifications, external world skepticism, epistemic relativism, the epistemic status of basic logical laws, of the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, of our (...) belief in the existence of the past and of other minds, and the nature of testimonial justification. Along the way, further technical issues, such as the scope of the Principle of Closure of epistemic operators under known entailment, the notion of transmission failure, and the existence of entitlements are addressed in new and illuminating ways. (shrink)

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, François Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far (...) from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the psychological realm, to the 'narrow' content of mental representations, the lekton is a level intermediate between context-invariant meaning and full propositional content. Recognition of that intermediate level is the key to a proper understanding of context-dependence in language and thought. Going beyond the usual discussions of indexicality and unarticulated constituents in the philosophy of language, Recanati turns to the philosophy of mind for decisive arguments in favour of his approach. He shows, first, that the lekton is the notion of content we need if we are to properly understand the relations between perception, memory, and the imagination, and second, that the psychological 'mode' is what determines the situation the lekton is relative to. In this framework he provides a detailed account of de se thought and the first person point of view. In the last part of the book, Recanati discusses the special freedom we have, in discourse and thought, to shift the situation of evaluation. He traces that freedom to a special mode - the anaphoric mode - which enables us to go beyond the egocentric stage of pre-human thought. (shrink)

Phenomenology is about subjective aspects of the mind, such as the conscious states associated with vision and touch, and the conscious states associated with emotions and moods, such as feelings of elation or sadness. These states have a distinctive first-person ‘feel’ to them, called their phenomenal character. In this respect they are often taken to be radically different from mental states and processes associated with thought. This is the first book to fully question this orthodoxy and explore the prospects of (...) cognitive phenomenology, applying phenomenology to the study of thought and cognition. Does cognition have its own phenomenal character? Can introspection tell us either way? If consciousness flows in an unbroken ‘stream’ as William James argued, how might a punctuated sequence of thoughts fit into it? Elijah Chudnoff begins with a clarification of the nature of the debate about cognitive phenomenology and the network of concepts and theses that are involved in it. He then examines the following topics: • Introspection and knowledge of our own thoughts • Phenomenal contrast arguments • The value of consciousness • The temporal structure of experience • The holistic character of experience and the interdependence of sensory and cognitive states • The relationship between phenomenal character and mental representation -/- Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking a clear and informative introduction to and assessment of cognitive phenomenology, whether philosophy student or advanced researcher. It will also be valuable reading for those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and epistemology. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke presents a new theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation. He identifies three sorts of self-consciousness--perspectival, reflective, and interpersonal--and argues that they are key to explaining features of our knowledge, social relations, and emotional lives.

A theory of understanding -- Truth's role in understanding -- Critique of justificationist and evidential accounts -- Do pragmatist views avoid this critique? -- A realistic account -- How evidence and truth are related -- Three grades of involvement of truth in theories of understanding -- Anchoring -- Next steps -- Reference and reasons -- The main thesis and its location -- Exposition and four argument-types -- Significance and consequences of the main thesis -- The first person as a case (...) study -- Fully self-conscious thought -- Immunity to error through misidentification relative to the first person -- Can a use of the first-person concept fail to refer? -- Some conceptual roles are distinctive but not fundamental -- Implicit conceptions -- Implicit conceptions : motivation and examples -- Deflationary readings rejected -- The phenomenon of new principles -- Explanation by implicit conceptions -- Rationalist aspects -- Consequences : rationality, justification, understanding -- Transitional -- Applications to mental concepts -- Conceiving of conscious states -- Understanding and identity in other cases -- Constraints on legitimate explanations in terms of identity -- Why is the subjective case different? -- Attractions of the interlocking account -- Tacit knowledge, and externalism about the internal -- Is this the myth of the given? -- Knowledge of others' conscious states -- Communicability : between Frege and Wittgenstein -- Conclusions and significance -- 'Another I' : representing perception and action -- The core rule -- Modal status and its significance -- Comparisons -- The possession-condition and some empirical phenomena -- The model generalized -- Wider issues -- Mental action -- The distinctive features of action-awareness -- The nature and range of mental actions -- The principal hypothesis and its grounds -- The principal hypothesis : distinctions and consequences -- How do we know about our own mental actions? -- Concepts of mental actions and their epistemological significance -- Is this account open to the same objections as perceptual models of introspection? -- Characterizing and unifying schizophrenic experience -- The first person in the self-ascription of action -- Rational agency and action-awareness -- Representing thoughts -- The puzzle -- A proposal -- How the solution treats the constraints that generate the puzzle -- Relation to single-level treatments -- An application : reconciling externalism with distinctive self-knowledge. (shrink)

Lucy O'Brien argues that a satisfactory account of first-person reference and self-knowledge needs to concentrate on our nature as agents. Clearly written, with rigorous discussion of rival views, this book will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of mind and action.

Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers an answer. His aim is a comprehensive theory of the features that all and only conscious mental events have. The key idea is that consciousness arises when self-awareness and world-awareness are integrated in the right way. Conscious mental events differ from unconscious ones in that, whatever else they may represent, they always also represent themselves, and do so in a very specific way. (...) Subjective Consciousness is a fascinating new move forward towards a full understanding of the mind. (shrink)

I elaborate and defend a set of metaphysical and epistemic claims that comprise what I call the acquaintance approach to introspective knowledge of the phenomenal qualities of experience. The hallmark of this approach is the thesis that, in some introspective judgments about experience, (phenomenal) reality intersects with the epistemic, that is, with the subject’s grasp of that reality. In Section 1 of the paper I outline the acquaintance approach by drawing on its Russellian lineage. A more detailed picture of the (...) approach emerges in succeeding sections, which respond to a range of objections. Some critics charge that approaches of this sort are overly idealized, in that they ignore the cognitive flaws and limitations of actual human beings. I begin to address these worries in Section 2, by arguing that the epistemic commitments of the acquaintance approach are in fact relatively modest. In Section 3, I sketch a picture of introspective reference that explains how phenomenal reality can intersect with the epistemic in a phenomenal judgment, as the acquaintance approach requires. Drawing on this picture of introspective reference, Section 4 sets out a practical strategy for achieving knowledge by acquaintance. Some contemporary acquaintance theorists (BonJour 2003, Fumerton 1996) employ demanding epistemic standards for knowledge by acquaintance, standards beyond those mandated by the acquaintance approach. In Section 5 I show that instances of introspective knowledge that meet less demanding standards can satisfy the acquaintance approach’s epistemic commitments. The final sections concern the most direct challenges to the acquaintance approach, which target the claim that phenomenal reality intersects with the epistemic. According to one such challenge, this claim is belied by the fact that possessing a phenomenal concept is a matter of having certain dispositions. Section 6 draws on a discussion by Sosa (2003) to articulate this challenge, and responds to it on behalf of the acquaintance approach. Section 7 addresses Stalnaker’s (2008) worry that, if phenomenal reality intersected with the epistemic, phenomenal information would be incommunicable. (shrink)

"Self-knowledge" is commonly used in philosophy to refer to knowledge of one's particular mental states, including one's beliefs, desires, and sensations. It is also sometimes used to refer to knowledge about a persisting self -- its ontological nature, identity conditions, or character traits. At least since Descartes, most philosophers have believed that self-knowledge is importantly different from knowledge of the world external to oneself, including others' thoughts. But there is little agreement about what precisely distinguishes self-knowledge from knowledge in other (...) realms. Partially because of this disagreement, philosophers have endorsed competing accounts of how we acquire self-knowledge. These accounts have important consequences for the scope of mental content, for mental ontology, and for personal identity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the method of transparency --determining whether I believe that p by considering whether p -- does not explain our privileged access to our own beliefs. Looking outward to determine whether one believes that p leads to the formation of a judgment about whether p, which one can then self-attribute. But use of this process does not constitute genuine privileged access to whether one judges that p. And looking outward will not provide for access to (...) dispositional beliefs, which are arguably more central examples of belief than occurrent judgments. First, one’s dispositional beliefs as to whether p may diverge from the occurrent judgments generated by the method of transparency. Second, even in cases where these are reliably linked — e.g., in which one’s judgment that p derives from one’s dispositional belief that p — using the judgment to self-attribute the dispositional belief requires an ‘inward’ gaze. (shrink)

[Crispin Wright] Two kinds of epistemological sceptical paradox are reviewed and a shared assumption, that warrant to accept a proposition has to be the same thing as having evidence for its truth, is noted. 'Entitlement', as used here, denotes a kind of rational warrant that counter-exemplifies that identification. The paper pursues the thought that there are various kinds of entitlement and explores the possibility that the sceptical paradoxes might receive a uniform solution if entitlement can be made to reach sufficiently (...) far. Three kinds of entitlement are characterised and given prima facie support, and a fourth is canvassed. Certain foreseeable limitations of the suggested anti-sceptical strategy are noted. The discussion is grounded, overall, in a conception of the sceptical paradoxes not as directly challenging our having any warrant for large classes of our beliefs but as crises of intellectual conscience for one who wants to claim that we do. /// [ Martin Davies] Wright's account of sceptical arguments and his use of the idea of epistemic entitlement are reviewed. His notion of non-transmission of epistemic warrant is explained and a concern about his notion of entitlement is developed. An epistemological framework different from Wright's is described and several notions of entitlement are introduced. One of these, negative entitlement, is selected for more detailed comparison with Wright's notion. Thereafter, the paper shows how the two notions of entitlement have contrasting consequences for non-transmission of warrant and how they go naturally with two conceptions of the presuppositions of epistemic projects. Problems for negative entitlement are explained and solutions are proposed. (shrink)

As an empirical example of introspective conditions in which the normal sense of self is disrupted, the delusion of thought insertion is of special interest to philosophers investigating the epistemic and phenomenological structures of introspection. A common strategy is to use immunity to error through misidentification as a tool with which to pick apart the implications of thought insertion for our understanding of the faculty of introspection. In this paper I turn that strategy on its head: I draw on our (...) understanding of introspection and of thought insertion to make two correctives to the literature on immunity to error through misidentification. The first is the identification of a formal distinction between two phenomena sometimes conflated under the rubric of misidentification errors. The second is a weakening of the presumed significance of claims to immunity to error through misidentification. With these tightenings to the notion of immunity to error through misidentification in hand, we will be in a better position to turn again to questions about the epistemic and phenomenological nature of introspection. (shrink)

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property (...) which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)