Abstract
In this chapter, we consider epistemically robust accounts of self-knowledge. We start with recent inner sense theories (§1), devoting special attention to Armstrong's. He holds that self-knowledge is the product of a reliable cognitive mechanism that tracks first-order propositional attitudes and produces the corresponding second-order beliefs. The model is found wanting because it severs the connection between self-knowledge and rationality and concepts’ possession. We then move on to Gopnik's theory-theory (§2). According to her, subjects know their minds the same way the know others'--that is by inference to the best explanation involving a real theory they develop around age four. We criticise the model because it either collapses into bahviorism or else offers a circular account of self-knowledge. Finally, we examine simulation theories (§3) and pay special attention to Robert Gordon's. We cast doubts on its soundness as a theory of first-personal self-knowledge, although we find it more promising as a possible account of some instances of third-personal self-knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
Armstrong focuses in particular on self-knowledge of intentional mental states. Although he is not always clear on this point, his proposal is generally taken to be an explanation of how we can form reliable (and therefore knowledgeable) beliefs about first-order mental states. Notice that if it were otherwise—that is, if his theory accounted just for how we can be conscious of our first-order mental states, in a way which does not involve forming beliefs about them—then it should be completed by how such consciousness could give rise to self-knowledge properly so regarded.
- 2.
This, I take it, requires concepts’ possession, since one cannot entertain beliefs if one does not have the concepts necessary to grasp the propositions which figure as their contents. Alas, Armstrong is not always clear on this score.
- 3.
This is indeed the driving thought behind Sydney Shoemaker’s objections to Armstrong’s model. According to Shoemaker, who is a functionalist about mental states, each mental state is individuated by its functional role—that is, its characteristic input and output. He then claims that, contrary to Armstrong’s causal model, there cannot be a given first-order mental state unless certain behavioural outputs are in place. They do, however, require awareness of one’s first-order mental states. For instance, since pain is individuated as the mental state that depends on physical injury and gives rise to characteristic behaviour, involving the attempt to get rid of it, the belief (or the ability to have the belief) that one is in pain is necessary in order to be in pain. Therefore, there cannot be self-blind creatures—that is to say, creatures who are capable of having first-order mental states and yet do not have (or are in principle incapable of having) knowledge of them. Similarly, beliefs as possessed by rational creatures ought to be revisable based on contrary evidence. This, however, requires the ability to know that one has a given belief, which should be revised in light of counter-evidence. Neither objection is decisive though. For Armstrong and Lycan could argue that, on the one hand, pains are possible and can have a distinctive phenomenology even if one is not aware of them qua pains. Infants and animals would indeed seem to be capable of feeling pain without having knowledge of it. Similarly, a subject who lacked the relevant conceptual repertoire could have a first-order belief and even change it on the basis of contrary evidence and yet not be capable of having beliefs about one’s own beliefs or of answering the question “Do you believe that P?”. We discuss Shoemaker’s position in Chap. 7 (§1).
- 4.
One could also toy with the idea that it is a mere contingency that the scanner mechanism, which is a physical one, operates only on our first-order mental states. It should therefore be entirely conceivable that we could be so hard-wired as to have knowledge of first-order mental states originated in someone else’s brain. There would then be a problem of specifying how exactly the model can account for first- rather than third-personal knowledge of mental states.
- 5.
Or, at any rate, behavioural manifestations underdetermine the individuation of precisely that mental state.
- 6.
So, although there may be causal mechanisms that enable self-knowledge, as I presume there must be causal mechanisms that enable thought in the first place, self-knowledge cannot be explained by appealing only to them. Moreover, it may well be the case that the causal mechanisms that enable self-knowledge are not anything like a dedicated faculty or scanner mechanism but the ones which underwrite concepts’ possession and reasoning.
- 7.
Indeed, the experimental evidence on which Gopnik develops her model is precisely pointing to the fact that before a certain age children just make a lot of mistakes both in the ascription of mental states to others and to themselves.
- 8.
See, in this connection, Dokic and Proust 2002, pp. vii–xxi.
- 9.
Or, at any rate, what goes by the name of the Cartesian model, whether or not it was actually held by Descartes.
- 10.
So I wholly agree with Moran (2001), who refers to the talk in terms of “inner vision” as a “misleading metaphor” (p. 13) and writes (p. 14): “While ‘representationalism’ is a controversial thesis about the ordinary perception of objects in the world, on nobody’s view is the awareness of one’s headache mediated by an appearance of the headache. And in the case of attitudes like belief, there is simply nothing quasi-experiential in the offing to begin with. There is nothing it is like to have the belief that Wagner died happy or to be introspectively aware that this is one’s belief, and that difference does not sit well with the perceptual analogy”. Of course, Gopnik might recast her point by saying that just like a seasoned scientist knows immediately—that is, without inference—that there in electron moving about, so does a subject know her own propositional attitudes. Yet this is not her official position, and, even if it were, the following criticisms developed in the main text would apply.
- 11.
This view does not seem to me very plausible, though. For it seems difficult to distinguish feeeling like having an ice cream from feeling like having a sorbet or an ice lolly merely on the basis of phenomenological features.
- 12.
See Cassam 2014, p. 169.
- 13.
See Cassam 2014, pp. 130, 138.
- 14.
That is to say of non-occurrent propositional attitudes, a subject may nevertheless be aware of.
- 15.
See Gordon 1995, p. 62.
- 16.
Gordon 1995, p. 63.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
- 19.
Of course, one may dispute that such a list captures the constitutive inferences of our concept of belief or even that the right account of it is inferential. These possible objections are not relevant to present purposes.
- 20.
- 21.
Gordon 1995, p. 60.
- 22.
We will come back to this procedure in Chap. 5, §3.
- 23.
Gordon 1995, p. 59.
- 24.
Gordon 1995, p. 61.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
See Goldman 1993.
- 28.
Gordon 1995, p. 65, fn. 7.
- 29.
Gordon 2009.
- 30.
As we shall see in Chap. 6 (§2), it is possible to offer an essentially expressivist story as a viable explanation of the possession of at least a rudimentary concept of belief, but further elements will have to be built into the picture, besides the ones Gordon allows for.
Bibliography
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Gopnik, A. (1983). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 1–15. Reprinted in Goldman, A. (ed) (1993). Readings in philosophy and cognitive science. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
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Lycan, W. (1996). Consciousness and experience. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Moran, R. (2001). Authority and estrangement. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Coliva, A. (2016). Epistemically Robust Accounts. In: The Varieties of Self-Knowledge. Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-32613-3_4
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