Abstract
In Self-Knowledge for Humans (2014), Cassam defends a quite broad inferentialist theory of substantial third-person self-knowledge, which he promises to extend to virtually all mental states, including the so-called “internal promptings” (Lawlor 2009). Internal promptings are spontaneous, self-intimated experiential episodes that may not always be phenomenologically salient, or conceptually clearly subsumed, to the extent that the subject may not always be able to identify them. According to Cassam, however, their spontaneous surfacing does not preclude our access to them actually being inferential.
I question the claim that internal promptings can really be covered by an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge. While I agree with Coliva (2016) that an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge does not in fact apply to self-knowledge of internal promptings, I show that this failure does not depend on lacking a story about how inferentialism can be extended to first-person self-knowledge, as Coliva diagnoses. Rather, Cassam’s theory is flawed by an independent, and precedent, amphiboly fallacy affecting the concept of self-knowledge he makes use of. That is why Coliva’s objection may not apply immediately, even if her verdict on the non-extensibility of an inferentialist theory of self-knowledge to internal promptings is unaffected.
I also raise and discuss the issue of under-determination of inner experience with respect to conceptual schemes. Finally, by taking stock of the intrinsically elusive nature of a vast portion of our own mental states, I express sympathy for a wider geography of the mental.
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Notes
- 1.
It is common to think that the kind of mental states one can get to know third-personally are dispositional states only. Part of the story I will try to clarify here is that there is an important variety of occurrent mental states that can, and in fact are, known third-personally, in ways to be qualified, and under a certain conception of self-knowledge.
- 2.
The value they put on it may be practical, or even moral. I am not interested here in adjudicating this question, although I think there may be room to defend both kinds of values, depending on the general self-knowing project a person embarks on. Cassam 2014 discusses the topic in Chap.15. Cf. also Renz 2017.
- 3.
Some people are convinced that “ignorance is bliss”. A wide debate tries to adjudicate the question, and I have addressed it in Pedrini 2013. My point here is just that, even if there may be cases in which self-ignorance is beneficial to the individual, either in the short or in the long run, there are certainly cases in which it nonetheless can be highly detrimental to the fulfillment of one’s life projects.
- 4.
As above, it might well be the case that self-understanding is not always necessary to act in our best interest. Again, I am just focusing on cases in which it is.
- 5.
I had drawn this distinction in Pedrini 2009.
- 6.
An excellent presentation of all these features in the literature and a theory of how they are interlocked is Coliva 2016.
- 7.
Cf. Rudder Baker 2013.
- 8.
Cf. Coliva 2016 and elsewhere.
- 9.
There might be reasons to express discontent with such rhetoric. One might perceive Cassam’s discourse as ultimately offering another among the numberless pictures of academic philosophy as too little in touch with the understanding, and self-understanding, needs of non-academic folks. Occupied as it is with subtle investigations, philosophy all too often would prove to be too distant from the kind of engagement society would expect from the discipline and its representatives (Coliva 2015).
- 10.
Cf. Coliva 2016, pp. 1–18.
- 11.
Coliva 2016 explains that inferential self-knowledge does not always use inference to the best explanation, but also induction and abduction. In addition, in the context of presenting the wide variety of methods of getting to know different kinds of mental states, she also discusses how simulation and linguistic substitution of one’s behavior, along the lines described by expressivists, can proficiently be used. Cf. Coliva 2016, pp. 217–240.
- 12.
- 13.
I think it is not entirely obsolete to imagine the possibility of a feeling that “something judgmental” is going on, although this is the topic for another paper.
- 14.
Famously, in the context of emphasizing how bad human beings are at introspecting certain mental states, especially emotions, Schwitzgebel (2008) claimed that a vast arrays of states we have are unclear to us. His discussion was aimed to make a strong case against the reliability of introspection, and brilliantly focused on the very opaque phenomenology of those states that we are unable to introspect correctly. Contrary to Schwitzgebel, as it will be clear to the reader, my project is not to invite any sceptical verdict on self-knowledge. Rather, I invite closer analysis on cases of elusive phenomenology of mental states, with a view to adjudicating metaphysical and epistemological questions that may turn out to be useful to chart more accurately both the mind and the methods of self-knowledge. Also, I do not use those cases at the expenses of the existence of fully conceptually clear mental states that we do have most of the time.
- 15.
I will get back to the sense of ease or settledness in § 4, where I will discuss how we can use it as a track towards the soundness of concepts application.
- 16.
It is obviously important for Cassam to show that there needn’t be a regress, but I don’t think that this is more than an additional reason to adopt the inferentialist model of self-knowledge of internal promptings. Even if he wouldn’t be able to block the regress, and even if some are convinced he does not in fact block it (cf. Coliva 2016, pp. 86–88, and Coliva 2015), his idea that internal promptings are inferentially known is, as I will try to show, based on a discriminative, or identificatory conception of self-knowledge that allows him to defend inferentialism, however things stand about the threat of a regress.
- 17.
In passim, it’s interesting that a defender of the less than ideal nature of human beings such as Cassam has such a faith in there being a positive match between raw promptings and their corresponding standing attitudes. Cf. Cassam’s discussion of how any of us can hardly be thought to be the “homo philosophicus” that has too often been disputably used in philosophy to make theories about self-knowledge right (2014, Chaps. 1 and 2).
- 18.
There is a locus where he gets close to gesturing more clearly towards this distinction, without, however, thematizing it fully. Cf. Cassam 2014, p.168.
- 19.
Whenever one allows for self-knowledge**, there always seems to be a certain risk of conflation between first-person awareness of one’s mental states and first-person self-knowledge of one’s mental states. I have some ultimate sympathy for such view, but I think more should be done to establish to what extent such theoretical move might still be deeply wanting. In particular, if we deny the there is an epistemic relation between a subject and her object of knowledge, something epistemically crucial seems to get lost. Coliva 2016 argues in favor of a view of first-person self-knowledge of some kinds of mental states where such epistemic relation is lacking, and where the term “knowledge” becomes “more the — ‘grammatical’, as Wittgenstein would have it — signal of the absence of room for sensible doubts and ignorance” (p. 15).
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
- 23.
It would take me too far to express a more defined view on the post-McDowellean debate about conceptual vs. non-conceptual content. I just refer to it here as a general issue I think we should explore further in light of the possibilities offered by a more fine-grained geography of the mind.
- 24.
In no way do I wish to assume the superiority of medicine in treating cases like these, as the well-known nocebo effect sometimes renders medical treatments less beneficial than spiritual ones. Of course, when it comes to the efficacy, or non-efficacy of a non-medical, or alternative, medical treatment much depends on the neurological seriousness of the state.
- 25.
Cf. Mele 2001.
- 26.
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I thank Julie Kirsch for comments and revisions on an early draft of this chapter.
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Pedrini, P. (2018). The ‘Crux’ of Internal Promptings. In: Pedrini, P., Kirsch, J. (eds) Third-Person Self-Knowledge, Self-Interpretation, and Narrative. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 96. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98646-3_4
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