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Psychophysical supervenience: Its epistemological foundation

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Abstract

My primary goal in this paper is to focus attention on a certain conception of internal access, on the Cartesian conception that a rational subject's capacity to determine sameness and difference in explicit propositional attitudes is independent of knowledge of the external world. This conception of introspection plays a crucial, if unacknowledged, role in numerous arguments and theoretical positions. In particular, it plays a large role in motivating psychological internalism. I argue in favor of rejecting this epistemology and the internalism it supports.

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Owens, J. Psychophysical supervenience: Its epistemological foundation. Synthese 90, 89–117 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485193

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