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Introspective Self-Knowledge of Experience and Evidence

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Abstract

The paper attempts to give an account of the introspective self-knowledge of our own experiences which is in line with representationalism about phenomenal consciousness and the transparency of experience. A two-step model is presented. First, a demonstrative thought of the form ‚I am experiencing this’ is formed which refers to what one experiences, by means of attention. Plausibly, this thought is knowledge, since safe. Second, a non-demonstrative thought of the form ‚I am experiencing a pain’ occurs. This second self-ascription is justified inferentially, on the basis of the first, demonstrative thought. Thus, an account of introspective experiential self-knowledge can be developed which is richer and more adequate to the phenomena than pure reliabilism and Dretske’s displaced perception model. There is really such a thing as introspection, but no inner sense.

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Notes

  1. See, for example, Boghossian (1989). There, Boghossian poses the problem for knowledge in the wide sense just introduced, encompassing both knowledge in the strict sense and justified (true) belief.

  2. Interestingly, when discussing the third option, Boghossian mentions the relevance of attention as a general feature of introspective thoughts which is not exhibited by the usual cases of ‘insubstantial’ knowledge without any ground or evidence (cf. ibid., p. 76). Attention will play a crucial role in the account to be presented.

  3. For example, Brie Gertler’s account of introspection and introspective self-knowledge, to which I will refer below, belongs to this class of constitutive accounts of self-knowledge. Cf. Gertler (2001). Similarly, Burge holds a constitutive account of self-knowledge (of one’s thoughts, not of one’s experiences). Cf. Burge (1988).

  4. In this paper, I will use the term ‚thought’ as referring to a conscious propositional state including the belief attitude, i.e., to conscious belief. The phenomenon of merely entertaining a content, and the distinction between merely entertaining and believing, becomes relevant only when it comes to introspective self-knowledge of one’s own propositional attitudes. Concerning this case, see the remark in the last footnote of Sect. 2.

  5. Cf. Dretske (1995), Tye (1995).

  6. See Tye (2000), Chap. 3.2.

  7. It would take another paper to lay out and discuss the other points of disagreement. Let me just mention two more. (1) The account to be proposed does not say that self-knowledge can be certain. (2) I do not think that introspection without introspective belief is possible.

  8. It would be an interesting question to investigate what the account has in common with Moritz Schlick’s observation sentences or ‚Konstatierungen’. One of Schlick’s examples is the observation sentence ‚Here now pain…’ (Schlick 1934, p. 96). It is difficult to understand what exactly Schlick has in mind, and different interpretations may be possible. One interpretation is that the sentence ‚Here now pain’ expresses an introspective thought. Then, Konstatierungen would be expressions of introspective thoughts or beliefs. Another example Schlick mentions, the Konstatierung ‚Here now so and so’, is even closer to the first, demonstrative thought. One might take it as an attempt at formulating a sentence which expresses what I have described as the demonstrative thought ‚I am experiencing this right now’.

  9. To speak of ‚searching for the right conceptualization’ is to be taken with care. It does not imply that some sort of comparison between the content of one’s experience and the content of certain ‘conceptual descriptions’ takes place, as Laurence BonJour suggests. Cf. BonJour (1999).

  10. Cf. Byrne (2005).

  11. In the end, the safety condition has to be reformulated as a condition on the method by which a belief has been arrived at. This is necessary in order to account for knowledge of necessary truths. (I intend to work out such an account in the near future.) But for the present purposes it will suffice to take safety in the more simple version, as a condition directly on the belief in question.

  12. Cf. Sosa (1999, 2002) and Williamson (2000). By now, Sosa has moved away from safety. Cf. Sosa (2007).

  13. Cf. Horgan and Tienson (2002), Kriegel (2002) and Pitt (2004).

  14. Of course, there is another kind of attention, ‘thought attention’, as one could call it. When introspecting, one is paying attention to the question of what one is experiencing, whereas, when forming perceptual beliefs about one’s environment, one is paying attention to the question of what there is out there. This is a different focus of one’s thinking. And of course, there is thought attention in this sense. But this is uncontroversial. No-one needs to deny that there is this further kind of attention, and no-one should. The only relevant question is whether there is another kind of attention, over and above the ordinary attention involved in sense perception and thought attention—a special kind of ‘introspective attention’ which goes to the phenomenal qualities of one’s states ‘directly’. This is what I am denying.

  15. Cf. Tye (2000), Chap. 3, for a detailed discussion of transparency. (There, reference to the other authors can be found).

  16. At this point, the view departs from self-representationalism as proposed by Terry Horgan and Uriah Kriegel. It is part of self-representationalism, as I understand it, that there is a special, further kind of attention, one which is used exclusively in introspection and which yields a transition from a self-representational ‘proto-belief’ (which is constitutive of any experience and which is the inner awareness of, or in, experience) to a fullblooded introspective belief which is self-knowledge. See, for example, Horgan and Kriegel (2008, unpublished manuscript), Kriegel (2008). As Kriegel realizes, this seems to threaten the transparency intuition, at least prima facie. But in the end, Kriegel thinks, transparency does not raise any serious difficulty for self-representationlism. Here, I cannot go into a discussion of self-representationalism, simply for reasons of space. Let me just mention that I am not convinced that self-representationalism is entirely consistent with transparency. The view I am advocating here is in line with first-order representationalism, and it can both preserve the transparency intuition without any reservation and deny the existence of any distinct and special introspective attention. These seem to me to be two important advantages. (For a range of discussions of self-representationalism, see Kriegel and Williford (2006). An interesting criticism of self-representationalism related to the issue of attention can be found in Gennaro (2008)).

  17. How about introspective self-knowledge of one’s own propositional attitudes?—It seems to me that the first step of the model can be extended in order to cover also the case of propositional attitudes. In this case, one comes to think that this is what one is thinking, while being in some conscious propositional state, e.g., the conscious belief that water is wet. One has the thought (that water is wet) and thinks about it, in a demonstrative way, at the same time. The model, thus, provides a way of understanding what Burge has said about what he calls ‚cogito-like thoughts’. The thought expressed by saying ‚I am thinking that water is wet’, understood in the proposed way, is a demonstrative thought about a thought that one is having at the same time. Plausibly, this yields (self-)knowledge. I intend to work out this extension in a further paper in the near future. An interesting and somehow similar analysis can be found in Spicer (2004).

  18. If one takes sensitivity as one’s criterion for knowledge (along the lines of Nozick or Dretske or, in a contextualist vein, David Lewis), knowledge will also not require justification.

  19. Cf. BonJour (1985), Chap. 3, p. 41.

  20. Cf. Conee and Feldman (2004). Let me emphasize that, in contrast to Conee and Feldman, I would like to sketch an evidentialist account wich is externalist. For a convincing critique of Feldman’s internalism, see Greco (2005).

  21. Please note that this is not so say that epistemic externalism is false. The view on offer is still an externalist view, since it takes reliability to be a necessary condition, and reliability need not supervene on intrinsic matters and need not be directly internally accessible. This is reflected in the adequacy condition on evidence necessary for justification: justification requires adequate evidence, and adequacy requires at least reliability. Of course, knowledge is adequate evidence, but intentional states which are not knowledge can also be adequate evidence—in contrast to Williamson’s view (cf. Williamson 2000).

  22. I will use the notion ‘inference’ in a liberal, wide sense. Inferences are just transitions between intentional states that are somehow content-driven. There need not be any significant ‘inference rule’ (like modus ponens) governing these transitions.

  23. There is a complication here. It may be necessary, in the end, to relativize justification to positions in a proposition. One may be justified in believing the proposition that a is F, as opposed to the proposition that a is G, without being justified in believing it as opposed to the proposition that b is F. The evidence is evidence with respect to a propositional position. With introspection, the position for which the experience (as part of the first, demonstrative introspective thought) provides evidence is not the subject position, where the person referred to by the first-person concept is concerned, but the predicate position. The account on offer does not propose that there is experiential evidence for the application of the first-person concept. There is no need for such an experiential evidence, since one starts with the first-person thought that oneself is experiencing this, and this thought is simply knowledge (which does not require evidence or justification) and can, therefore, justify the second, non-demonstrative belief with respect to the subject position.

  24. A further point should be noted. We are not to assume that experience is ontologically transparent to the subject. The subject comes to have the justified belief that she is having a pain in her foot. But introspectively she is not able to discern the nature of the intentional object of her pain experience. She can ascribe the pain experience, by applying her pain concept, and the self-ascription is normally justified (on the basis of the demonstrative thought). But she cannot, by mere introspection, tell or recognize what the nature of the intentional object of her experience is (whether it is a particular kind of tissue damage, for example).—Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing up this issue.

  25. Of course, justification does not exclude knowledge. The second step may lead to standing, non-demonstrative self-knowledge in many cases. I have only left out to investigate whether and when this is so, but I do not want to deny that this may occur often.

  26. To add a ‚no-defeater condition’, as Goldman (1979) did, is ad hoc and calls out for explanation. It is hard to see how the pure reliabilist could come up with a satisfactory explanation.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Wolfgang Barz, Manfred Frank, Thomas Grundmann, Joachim Horvath, Christian Loew, Susanne Mantel and Peter Schulte for valuable discussions.

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Correspondence to Frank Hofmann.

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Hofmann, F. Introspective Self-Knowledge of Experience and Evidence. Erkenn 71, 19–34 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9175-9

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