Abstract
In this paper I outline and defend an introspectionist account of authoritative self-knowledge for a certain class of cases, ones in which a subject is both thinking and thinking about a current, conscious thought. My account is distinctive in a number of ways, one of which is that it is compatible with the truth of externalism—the view that the contents of subjects’ intentional states are individuation-dependent on factors external to their minds. It is thus decidedly anti-Cartesian, despite being introspectionist. My argument proceeds in three stages. A virtue of the position I develop is that the epistemic features on which it is based also apply to sensations and to non-episodic intentional states, to the extent that one has authoritative knowledge of them. However, despite the appeal to analogies with observable properties of objects of perception, the account is not a ‘perceptual’ model of such knowledge in the sense that those such as Shoemaker, Burge and others have in mind. Because the features on which the analogy is based are abstract and general, they are not tied to cases of observation alone. Those who appeal to such phenomena as ‘intellectual experience’ (Burge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96, 91–116, 1996) or ‘intellectual intuition’ (Bealer, Philosophical perspectives, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 29–55, 1999) in their accounts of authoritative self-knowledge may well appeal to such features. This, amongst other factors, distinguishes the position from other introspectionist ones in a way that makes it immune to standard objections to perceptual models of self-knowledge.
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Notes
Although, as McLaughlin (forthcoming) points out, this is misleading: Introspectionists do not in general suppose that there is such an organ as ‘the mind’s eye,’ nor do they suppose that introspection is literally visual.
‘Generally’ here marks a contrast between self-knowledge and the more typical cases of knowledge of the external world. If, for example, I think that there is an apple before me on the basis of no evidence and you believe that there is an apple before me on the basis of looking in my direction, it is reasonable to suppose that your belief is more likely to be reliable than mine. But if I think I believe that there is an apple before me on the basis of no evidence and you think I believe that there is an apple before me on the basis of my behaviour, it is reasonable to suppose that my thought is more likely to be reliable than yours. Some, like Heil (1988, 1992), emphasize the non-empirically-evidence-based character of certain self-knowledge, whereas others, like Wright (1989), take such knowledge to be non-evidence-based tout court. Alston (1971) gives an illuminating account of the different senses that might attach to the notion of direct or immediate access. He argues that the notion of directness that is relevant to self-knowledge is epistemic, not causal, and is explicable in terms of being non-evidence-based, where this is distinct from being non-inferential. In a similar vein, Gertler (2003) distinguishes two senses of ‘direct’ in ‘direct access,’ one epistemic (what Alston characterizes as ‘non-inferential’) and the other metaphysical (which she characterizes as ‘unmediated’). The core of my account of authoritative self-knowledge relies on this stronger notion of direct and immediate access. For more on it see Macdonald (1998a, b, forthcoming).
See Shoemaker (1994) and Burge (1996, 1998). Moran (2005, p. 16), quoting Peacocke (1998, p. 79), takes a central feature of a perceptual model of intentional states to be that one knows the contents of such states on the basis of presuppositions about or inferences from something else (e.g. an experiential state) that has readily recognizable intrinsic features.
Accounts of the first kind typically go under the name of ‘displaced perception’ views. Those of the second are held in some form by Burge (1996, 1998) and Moran (2005). McDowell (1986, p. 154) seems to suggest a view of the third kind. See also Martin (1998), and Lyons (1986), who talks of introspection in terms of a ‘sideways glance.’
One might object here that our second-order, or reflective, mental states seem not to be independent of the states that they reflect upon, in that our self-monitoring seems intimately connected with the identity of what is monitored, changing and reconfiguring it as well as representing it. This seems most clearly to be true in situations in which one is attempting to make choate a first-order state which is not, antecedent to reflection, choate, as when, for example, in reflection I attempt to work out what my objection is to a line of argument or try to figure out what emotion I am experiencing. However, there are other situations in which one fixes on a determinate first-order state in order to reflect upon it, as when, for example, I am considering whether to accept, reject, or revise a first-order thought of mine. Here I need to know what that state is if I am to make any progress. Wright’s (1987) distinction between extension-determination and extension-reflection might help to distinguish these types of cases (though Wright himself would not do so, since his account of authoritative self-knowledge in the cogito-type cases is an extension-determination one).
A subject’s knowledge of her own propositional state is transparent if she can ‘look through it’ to the world beyond the mind. See, for example, Edgley (1969), who introduced the term, Evans (1982), and, for discussion of the view, see Martin (2002, p. 378), who describes the transparency thesis as the view that ‘introspection of one’s perceptual experience reveals only the mind-independent objects, qualities and relations that one learns about through perception: One’s experience is, so to speak, diaphanous or transparent to the objects of perception, at least as revealed to introspection.’ As Moran (2005) points out, that one’s answer to a question of the form, ‘Do I think that X?’ might be determined by one’s answer to a question of the form ‘Is it the case that X?’ does not show that one cannot distinguish between them, nor show that one cannot see that the facts that make these questions true are not the same. So it is not clear that a transparency thesis need be as strong as that formulated by Martin.
Another well-known example is that of the long-distance truck driver, who arrives at his destination without having been consciously aware of what he has been doing and perceiving along the way (Armstrong 1981). Armstrong draws a distinction between mere ‘reflex’ consciousness, the kind one might have when perceiving things in one’s environment but not attending to (his term is ‘scrutinizing’) them, and the kind of consciousness one has when attending to things in one’s environment for a particular purpose one might have. Correspondingly, he notes, there is a difference between the kind of introspective awareness one has when one is in a state of the mere ‘reflex’ sort, and the kind one has when one is attending to one’s own current state of mind. The ‘reflex’ sort is, perhaps, what those who think that self-knowledge is available to one on the basis of a kind of minimal self-consciousness that is a result of the exercise of one’s perceptual capacities have in mind.
How is ‘aboutness’ or reference to the first-order content, secured? Roughly in the way suggested by Davidson’s (1969/2001) paratactic analysis of sentences involving indirect discourse. Suppose I think to myself, I am currently thinking that water is transparent. This second-order thought can be understood as a compression or abbreviation of something like: I am currently thinking a thought whose content is the same as the following: Water is transparent. When I think this thought, I present my thought as having the same content as that of another current thought of mine—I represent myself as a samethinker (rather than a samesayer as in Davidson’s original suggestion).
The concept of the specious present is due to the work of the psychologist E. R. Clay but its best known characterization is due to James (1891), who said ‘The prototype of all times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.’ (1891, p. 631y). According to Le Poidevin (2004), current discussions of it tend to treat the specious present as ‘the interval of time such that events within that interval are experienced as present. Taking the specious present as defined by this [third] characterization, the doctrine of the specious present holds that the group of events we experience at any one time as present contains successive events spanning an interval. The experienced present is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present, it is an interval and not a durationnless instant. The ‘real’ present, as we might call it, must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in any interval of any duration, there are earlier and later parts. So if any part of that interval is present, there will be another part that is past or future’ (Le Poidevin 2004). If knowledge of one’s own current conscious states is understood as taking place during an interval that is the specious present, then one’s reflective state is reflecting on a state which is, during this interval past in ‘real’ terms. But what matters for the account is that it is experienced as present, and, as Le Poidevin points out, most states that are experienced as such are in the immediate past, and are so for good reasons (see Butterfield 1984).
See Macdonald (1998a, b).
That is to say, typically, in getting to know what an object is, these are the first of its properties that one gets to know that it has.
So, the notion of being non-evidence based of interest here goes beyond that of being non-empirically-evidence-based. My proposal is that the notion of ‘seeing as’ that is in play with respect to observable properties in perception is factive—One cannot, for example, see a as F without seeing a. So, one cannot see an instance of red as an instance of red without seeing that instance (Kvart 1993). Further, the notion of seeing that is in play is that of epistemic seeing (to use Dretske’s (1969) distinction, though not his view of perception). According to this, to see a particular item (an individual object, an instance of redness) is to see it as an instance of some property, F. Seeing is epistemic in the sense that, when a subject has such a perceptual experience, she takes an object a to have some property or other. She does so because the content of her experience represents the world around her as being some way or other.
To accept a view like this is not necessarily to deny that there is much that we see that we do not take ourselves to see. But it is to deny that the idea that in perception we do not take an object X to be any way at all is a genuine possibility. As Heil puts the point,
…it is easy to imagine cases in which, for any given property, P, possessed by X, S sees X without taking X to have P. And we might describe such cases as ones in which S fails to see X under a certain aspect. On the other hand, the plausibility of these cases may well rest at least in part on the tacit assumption that X, if not seen under this aspect, is seen under some other aspect, if not taken to have P, then taken to have some other property, P’. …seeing tout court requires that there be cases in which S encounters X perceptually, but does not take X to be any way at all. It is far from clear, however, that there are any such cases…(Heil 1991, p. 8).
Heil’s claim is that whatever ‘perceptual experience’ is, for human beings anyway, it is doubtful that it is completely unconceptualized, ‘non-epistemic’ perception. For further discussion of this, see Macdonald (2002). So, the objection that seeing an instance as an instance of brown is evidence-based because it is based on seeing brownness misunderstands the epistemic situation. To see an instance of brown as an instance of brown just is what it is to see brownness.
The distinction I am after can be captured by means of the distinction between seeing x and seeing that p. I can both see that the table is brown and I can see the table’s brownness; but although I can see that the liquid before me is H2O, I cannot see its ‘H2O-ness.’ Only the former counts as a case of direct epistemic access. For discussion of observable properties and predicates, see Wright (1987). See also Peacocke (1983) for discussion of conditions necessary and sufficient for a concept to be observational. Peacocke further elaborates the sense in which the two features I take here to be central to a property’s being observable are features of observational concepts.
But see Horgan and Tienson (2002), and Graham et al. (2004) for a view that denies that intentional properties lack a phenomenal aspect. Here we are not talking about whether there is something it is like to have an attitude towards a content, say, to believe, rather than doubt, it, but about whether there is a phenomenal aspect to the content of the attitude itself.
The metaphysical view of states and events that I am working with here is the Property Exemplification Account (PEA). On this view, events are exemplifications of properties at (or during intervals of) times in objects, and event e is identical with event e′ if and only if e and e′ are exemplifications of exactly the same properties at all the same times in all the same objects. The properties constitutive of events are not properties of events, but rather, properties of their subjects, the objects in whose exemplifications those events just are. On this way of viewing things, an event such as the event of my now thinking that water is transparent might, as it happens, have as its constitutive property a property of me (thinks that water is transparent), and have as a property of it the property of being a thinking that water is transparent (I say ‘might’ here because, if one holds (as I do) that physicalism is true and contingent, one will deny that mental properties of persons are constitutive of the events that are the exemplifyings of them, maintaining instead that such properties supervene (in a sense to be specified) on physical properties of persons. For more on this, see Macdonald and Macdonald (2006)). Given the additional, plausible assumption that the exemplification of a property is the thing that has it (for example, the exemplification of the property, red, is the red bird), the exemplification of the intentional, contentful type or property of being a thinking that water is transparent is the event of thinking that water is transparent. Thus, in accordance with the argument, (1) I typically think about my own state of thinking that water is transparent as a state of a particular intentional, contentful type—the type, that water is transparent; (2) when I do, that type typically is as it appears to me to be—a that water is transparent type; (3) when I think of my state as a state of thinking that water is transparent, I am the only one to whom that intentional, contentful type appears to me in this epistemically direct way; so (4) (barring a special cognitive failure) I am authoritative about the content of my own thought, that water is transparent.
Moran (2005) considers the possibility that how a subject conceives of her first-order state (say, an emotion such as love) can change the state itself, alter it in significant ways, and that this can make an important difference to her other attitudes and behaviour. I do not deny that in reflection one can come to see one’s own mental states in ways that were not apparent to one at another time, and that presenting those states in reflection in these new ways can make a difference to one’s other attitudes and behaviour. But as Moran himself notes, this is not incompatible with a realist view of the nature of such states, which takes claims about them to be made true by facts about those states. Conceiving of one’s own mental states in new ways may simply be a matter of discovering new properties of those states, in which case the states themselves are not thereby changed. Or, one can come to see one’s own states in ways that misrepresent them or are illusory. By this I mean: One can think a second-order thought with the content, I am thinking that p, aiming to target a distinct first-order state that I am also thinking, in the specious present, and misrepresent the content of that first-order thought, as p, when it is in fact q. In this case, although my second-order thought is contextually self-verifying, the content by which I think that thought fallibly represents, if at all, the content of my first-order thought. Conceiving of one’s own mental states in new ways may of course significantly affect one’s other attitudes and behaviour, but not by changing or altering the identity of state itself. One-way to express this thought is to distinguish between a state’s essential properties, and its non-essential ones, and to take the identity of that state to be determined by its essential properties alone.
See Peacocke (1996) for discussion of the way in which the idea of redeployment of content might figure in different cases of self-knowledge. He speaks of identity of content between the reviewing state and the state reviewed, but he extends the discussion beyond the cogito-type cases to ones involving memory, where there are distinct states had at different times involved, and where the identity is best construed (as I construe it) as concerning content types.
This indicates that the view that all that is implicated in cases of self-knowledge where memory is involved is preservative memory cannot be right.
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I would like to thank Eve Garrard, Lawrence Lombard, Graham Macdonald and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Macdonald, C. Introspection and Authoritative Self-Knowledge. Erkenn 67, 355–372 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9072-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-007-9072-z