Online research in philosophy

Sydney Shoemaker is one of the most influential philosophers currently writing on philosophy of mind and metaphysics. The essays in this collection deal with the way in which we know our own minds, and with the nature of those mental states of which we have our most direct conscious awareness. Professor Shoemaker opposes the 'inner sense' conception of introspective self-knowledge. He defends the view that perceptual and sensory states have non-representational features - 'qualia' - that determine what it is like to have them. Amongst the other topics covered are the unity of consciousness, and the idea that the 'first-person perspective' gives a privileged route to philosophical understanding of the nature of mind. This major collection is sure to prove invaluable to all advanced students of the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

What is knowledge of one's own current, consciously entertained intentional states a form of inner awareness? If so, what form? In this paper I explore the prospects for a quasi-observational account of a certain class of cases where subjects appear to have self-knowledge, namely, the so-called cogito-like cases. In section one I provide a rationale for the claim that we need an epistemology of self-knowledge, and specifically, an epistemology of the cogito-like cases. In section two I argue that contentful properties in such cases have two features in common with observational properties of objects. In section three, I develop a quasi-observational account of self-knowledge for the cogito-like cases by considering various accounts of the nature of observational properties (specifically, secondary qualities) and by applying them to these cases. I conclude by addressing some important objections to the account.

In a number of papers, Sydney Shoemaker has argued that first-order belief plus rationality implies second-order belief. This paper is a critical discussion of Shoemaker's argument.

In the last of his three Royce Lectures called "Self‑Knowledge and 'Inner Sense'", Sydney Shoemaker attempts to reconcile two commitments: (1) that experiences have "qualia", nonrepresentational features that constitute what it is like to have the experiences, and (2) that perceptual experiences seem "diaphanous", yielding to introspection only the way they represent the environment, not intrinsic or otherwise nonrepresentational qualia. On the idea that we internally sense qualia�that we sense what our experiences are like�one way to explain apparent diaphanousness is to maintain that these qualia are mistakenly "projected" onto the environment, that in perception we erroneously sense qualia as belonging to environmental objects. Shoemaker rejects both the projection view and the existence of inner sense, and develops an alternative reconciliation. I will describe reasons to doubt his positive proposal, and ways to save projection and inner sense from his criticisms.

I show how the 'innersense' (quasiperceptual) view of introspection can be defended against Shoemaker's influential 'argument from selfblindness'. If introspection and perception are analogous, the relationship between beliefs and introspective knowledge of them is merely contingent. Shoemaker argues that this implies the possibility that agents could be selfblind, i.e., could lack any introspective awareness of their own mental states. By invoking Moore's paradox, he rejects this possibility. But because Shoemaker's discussion conflates introspective awareness and selfknowledge, he cannot establish his conclusion. There is thirdperson evidence available to the selfblind which Shoemaker ignores, and it can account for the considerations from Moore's paradox that he raises.