Self-Knowledge

Brie Gertler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136858116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How do you know your own thoughts and feelings? Do we have 'privileged access' to our own minds? Does introspection provide a grasp of a thinking self or 'I'?

The problem of self-knowledge is one of the most fascinating in all of philosophy and has crucial significance for the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In this outstanding introduction Brie Gertler assesses the leading theoretical approaches to self-knowledge, explaining the work of many of the key figures in the field: from Descartes and Kant, through to Bertrand Russell and Gareth Evans, as well as recent work by Tyler Burge, David Chalmers, William Lycan and Sydney Shoemaker.

Beginning with an outline of the distinction between self-knowledge and self-awareness and providing essential historical background to the problem, Gertler addresses specific theories of self-knowledge such as the acquaintance theory, the inner sense theory, and the rationalist theory, as well as leading accounts of self-awareness. The book concludes with a critical explication of the dispute between empiricist and rationalist approaches.

Including helpful chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary, Self Knowledge is essential reading for those interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and personal identity.

1
INTRODUCTION

1.1 The topic of this book: self-knowledge and self-awareness

The focus of this book is a single question: how does one know one’s own mental states? For instance, how do you determine what you’re feeling or thinking right now? How do you identify your own beliefs and desires? There is little doubt that we do know some of our mental states. Statements like “I feel a tickle,” “I’m thinking about lemonade,” and “I believe that it’s sunny today” sometimes express knowledge. But philosophers disagree about the nature of such knowledge. These disagreements have important consequences for larger disputes about knowledge and the mind.

In the examples just given, knowledge of a mental state involves registering the state as one’s own: e.g. recognizing that I am feeling a tickle. This raises another set of questions, concerning how one conceives of oneself and distinguishes oneself from other things. Most philosophers agree that each of us is aware of an “I” or self, though some deny that there are such things as selves. But there is deep disagreement about how such awareness is achieved and what it consists in. This controversy about self-awareness plays a pivotal role in shaping theories about the self and its relation to the world.

We have distinguished two broad phenomena, which we will call “self-knowledge” and “self-awareness.”

• Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own mental states—e.g., knowledge of one’s own current experiences, thoughts, beliefs, or desires.

• Self-awareness is the ability to identify oneself (the “I”), and to distinguish oneself from other things.

This book is mainly concerned with self-knowledge; self-awareness is a secondary concern.

This chapter lays out the philosophical problems of self-knowledge and self-awareness in detail; briefly sketches the leading theories of self-knowledge and self-awareness, which will occupy us throughout the book; and explains the philosophical significance of these issues. We will see that questions about self-knowledge and self-awareness, and proposed answers to these questions, are critically important to a range of disputes in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. In fact, one’s outlook on self-knowledge and self-awareness can play a foundational role in shaping one’s understanding of the mind, knowledge, and the self. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers continue to argue about the nature of self-knowledge and self-awareness.

The in-depth discussions in later chapters do not presuppose this brief introduction. Readers with a strong background in these areas of philosophy can proceed directly to the final section, Section 1.5, which lays out the plan of the book.

1.2 Self-knowledge

1.2.1 The problem of self-knowledge

It’s pretty clear that, ordinarily, you can know what you’re thinking or feeling, and what you believe or desire. This is not to say that you ordinarily do know this—we rarely pay much attention to our own mental states, so we rarely form judgments like I’m thinking about summertime or I’m having a sensation of warmth. Still, when someone offers a “penny for your thoughts,” you are usually able to determine what you’re thinking about. (Though you may refuse to disclose this for such a paltry amount.) When a doctor asks you how your broken toe feels, you can probably give an accurate, informative description of the sensation. And when a waiter asks whether you’d like milk in your coffee, you can answer with confidence. In each case, you are in a position to arrive at knowledge of your mental state: to know that you’re thinking about summertime, or that you’re feeling a dull ache in your toe, or that you want milk in your coffee.

It is equally clear that you are typically in a better position to identify your own mental states than others are. If others had equally good access to your thoughts, sensations, and desires, they wouldn’t offer even a penny for your thoughts, or bother to consult you about how your toe feels or whether you want milk. So you seem to be authoritative about what you’re thinking or feeling, in the sense that you can determine this by using a method that is different from, and superior to, the methods available to others. More generally, subjects appear to enjoy a first-person authority about their own mental states.

This first-person authority is limited. Some psychological research suggests that we are especially vulnerable to error about certain aspects of our mental life: in particular, subjects are unreliable about their own emotional traits and dispositions, and about what motivates their choices. A close friend might be a more reliable judge of your character and motivations than you yourself are. Chapter 3 discusses these experimental results, and also introduces philosophical considerations suggesting that we lack first-person authority when it comes to certain types of mental states. Taken together, these empirical and conceptual results show that the domain of first-person authority is sharply restricted. We seem to be authoritative about (at most) our current thoughts, sensations, experiences, and propositional attitudes. Most philosophers agree that we have some type of first-person authority about some of our mental states. (A small minority deny even this: see 2.6 and 3.3 below.)

To elucidate the sense in which we are authoritative about our own mental states and to explain the grounds for this authority are the principal goals of most theories of self-knowledge. These theories are especially concerned with the idea that, in grasping one’s own mental states, one uses a method that no one else can use—that is, an exclusively first-personal method. Theorists seek to explain how this method operates, and how it contributes to self-knowledge.

As we will see, even the nature of first-person authority is open to dispute. Some philosophers construe first-person authority as epistemic, ascribing it to the fact that subjects are especially well-positioned to observe their own mental states—that is, they have privileged access to those states. Others reject this construal, and argue that first-person authority stems from our special responsibility for our states, or from how others regard our reports about our own states. Finally, some deny first-person authority altogether, maintaining that the method we use to know our own states is essentially similar to others’ methods, though it may nonetheless seem as if these are different methods.

1.2.2 Theories of self-knowledge

We now turn to briefly consider the leading theories of self-knowledge. The most prominent are the acquaintance theory, the inner sense theory, and the rationalist theory. None of these theories is monolithic; each admits of multiple versions, which differ in some details. But each theory is defined by a set of core claims about the process one uses to arrive at self-attributions (beliefs about one’s own mental states) and how this process contributes to self-knowledge.

We begin with a preliminary sketch of the acquaintance theory, which is the topic of Chapter 4. Acquaintance theorists construe first-person authority as an epistemic phenomenon, and claim that we have an exclusively first-personal method of grasping our own mental states. This method is introspection, inward reflection on the contents of one’s own mind. The definitive claim of the acquaintance theory is that, in introspection, one is directly aware of—that is, “acquainted” with—one’s own mental states.

This idea is best illustrated by a contrast with perceptual awareness. Suppose that you see a table before you. Your awareness of the table depends on certain causal relations: broadly speaking, you are aware of the table only because there is a table which causally shapes your visual experience in the appropriate way. (This will involve how the table’s surface reflects the light that travels to your retina, etc.—we needn’t worry about the details.) According to the acquaintance theory, introspective awareness of a mental state is more direct than perceptual awareness of a table. When you carefully reflect on a sensation you’re now having—say, the slight pain you feel when you bite your lip—that pain does not simply causally shape your introspective experience. Unlike the table, which is merely a cause of your perceptual experience, the pain is part of the introspective experience. On this view, introspective awareness is not mediated by a causal process (such as light bouncing off of a table and striking your retina). In this sense, introspective awareness is metaphysically direct: nothing mediates between one’s awareness of the mental state and the state itself.

Acquaintance theorists contend that this metaphysical feature of introspective awareness has significant epistemic consequences. Perception again provides the relevant contrast. The epistemic status of a perceptual belief will depend on causal matters. Suppose you seem to see a table before you, and on this basis you come to believe that there’s a table before you. Whether this belief qualifies as knowledge will depend on whether your visual experience (seeming to see a table) is appropriately caused by the presence of an actual table. If it is caused by a hallucinogenic drug, then you don’t know that there’s a table before you. But introspective awareness of a mental state does not depend on any such causal matters, according to the acquaintance theory. Self-attributions based on introspection are therefore insusceptible to this type of error. Now acquaintance theorists need not say that judgments based on introspection are infallible; the point is only that perceptual beliefs are vulnerable to sources of error that do not affect introspective beliefs. Moreover, the sources of error that could affect introspective beliefs, such as carelessness or inattention, could equally affect perceptual beliefs. Relative to perceptual beliefs, then, (some) introspective beliefs enjoy an especially high degree of epistemic security or certainty.

Whereas acquaintance theorists emphasize differences between self-knowledge and perceptual knowledge, the inner sense theory (to be discussed in Chapter 5) stresses the similarities between these. As its name implies, the inner sense theory construes the process of introspection on the model of perception or sensing. Its definitive claim is that introspective awareness occurs through a causal process broadly similar to that involved in perceptual awareness. So inner sense theorists reject the core thesis of the acquaintance theory, namely, that introspective awareness involves a special, metaphysically direct—and hence noncausal—relation to one’s own states. The departure from the acquaintance theory on this metaphysical issue yields an epistemic departure as well. Since inner sense theorists believe that knowledge of one’s own mental states occurs through a perception-like process, they deny that there is any profound epistemic difference between this knowledge and knowledge about the external world—e.g. that there is a table before you. In particular, they maintain that introspective justification is analogous to perceptual justification, and that introspective judgments are susceptible to the same types of error as are perceptual judgments.

When contrasted with perception, and characterized as metaphysically or epistemically special, introspection can seem mysterious and obscure. So by assimilating introspection to perception, the inner sense theory helps to defuse this sense of mystery. It thereby lends support to a type of naturalism about the mind, which sees mentality as continuous with other natural phenomena. While naturalism is not part of the inner sense theory, strictly speaking, most of its proponents regard the theory’s naturalistic implications as a significant benefit.

We have noted critical metaphysical and epistemic differences between the acquaintance and inner sense theories. For the acquaintance theorist, introspection yields an immediate, noncausal grasp of one’s own states, and this grasp allows introspective beliefs to be especially well justified. For the inner sense theorist, introspection is a causal process, and introspective beliefs have the same type (and roughly the same degree) of epistemic justification as that possessed by perceptual beliefs.

Yet despite these differences, the acquaintance and inner sense theories share a basic orientation. Both theories see self-knowledge as achieved through observation, consisting in introspective experiences (episodes of introspective awareness). In this sense, they are both empiricist theories of self-knowledge.

The rationalist theory of self-knowledge, which we examine in Chapter 6, rejects this empiricist orientation.¹ Rationalists begin with the idea that we are authoritative about our own states, but they deny that first-person authority derives from a special means of observing our own states. They charge that, by seeing us as mere observers of our own states, the empiricist depicts us as passive. This neglects a deeper sense in which the subject is authoritative: namely, that she is an agent, responsible for shaping her own states.

Rationalists argue that, if self-knowledge were simply a matter of observation, the following situations would be unremarkable.

• I introspectively observe that I believe that it’s a clear sunny day, while being drenched by a torrential rainstorm.

• I introspectively observe that I intend to quit exercising, while realizing that doing so will likely thwart my goal of maintaining good health.

But these situations, while coherent, seem to give rise to a kind of tension. The tension arises from grasping that one has a ce...

Table of contents

• SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• NEW PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
• 3 THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF (PURPORTEDLY) SPECIAL SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• 4 THE ACQUAINTANCE THEORY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• 5 THE INNER SENSE THEORY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• 6 THE RATIONALIST THEORY OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• 7 AWARENESS OF THE SELF
• 8 THE DISPUTE BETWEEN EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX