Abstract
It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states.
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Notes
The terminology of ‘detective’ and ‘constitutive’ is used by Wright in his 2001 discussion of self-knowledge, and by Finkelstein (2008), though the use of ‘constitutive’ to mark out the constitutivist position is common to many other discussions of self-knowledge (see, for example, Burge 1996; Bilgrami 2006; Bar-On 2004, and Shoemaker 2009). Alternative terminology is used, for example, by Bar-On 2004, and by Zimmerman (2008).
So the theory I am proposing differs both from what Finkelstein (2008) calls ‘old detectivism’ (which takes the sort of detection that yields self-knowledge to be infallible rather like the way Russell (1912) construed subjects’ acquaintance with sense-data) and from what he calls ‘new detectivism’ (which construes self-awareness to be a kind of ordinary perception in the way that e.g., Armstrong 1981 does). Section 2 explains in what ways introspection is and is not like perception.
Block (2007) uses the term ‘same-order’ to refer to the type of constitutivist view held by Burge (1996, 1998) and others (Shoemaker 1996, 2009), according to which first-order thought is literally a constituent of the reflective thought about it (Burge’s paradigmatic examples being the so-called cogito-like cases).
Whether this constitutes an example of introspective knowledge depends on whether there are factive mental states like knowledge (‘remembers that’ being factive), which can be known directly, i.e., non-inferentially. Here I side with Williamson (1995, 2000), who claims that factive states like knowledge are indeed mental states, which can be known in an epistemically immediate, non-inferential way, rather than with his opponents.
That the sorts of cases cited here have a distinctive phenomenology is not to say that the phenomenology is experiential, in the sense in which, for example, the phenomenology of visual or auditory perception, or awareness of pain, is experiential. I expand on this in Sect. 2. The point is also made by Peacocke:
Perceptual experiences and sensations, on the one hand, and so-called “occurrent” conscious propositional attitudes, on the other, differ in many respects. But there is one property they share. They both contribute to what, subjectively, it is like for the person who enjoys them. A person may try to recall who was Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Union invaded. It then occurs to this person that Dubcek was the Prime Minister. Its so occurring to him contributes to the specification of what it’s like for the person then. It would be subjectively different for the person if it occurred to him (falsely) that it was Husak; and subjectively different again if nothing comes to mind about who was Prime Minister. (1998, p. 64)
He extends the point to ordinary thinking more generally.
See, for example, David McNaughton, discussing moral realism:
The realist maintains that we should take the nature of our moral experience seriously.... Moral value is presented as something independent of our beliefs or feelings about it; something which may require careful thought or attention to be discovered. .... The appeal to the nature of our moral experience, to what we might call the moral phenomenology, represents the starting point for an argument... (McNaughton 1988, p. 40).
I take this phenomenological constraint to capture what is common to the two types of situations set out in this section—that the subject’s knowledge of her own current conscious condition comes to be only with her reflective thought. These are both cases of particular reflective thoughts whose coming to be is prompted by particular conscious occurrent propositional states. This is not to say that the subjects of such reflective thoughts do not have other background dispositional states, standing beliefs and knowledge, which can affect conscious knowledge of their current thinkings. But those standing states are not the ones that attract and engage conscious attention in reflection, and they are not the basis for and do not trigger the reflective thoughts. This is particularly clear in the types of situations that form the basis of the second type of example cited in the present section, thoughts about one’s conscious musings, conjectures, speculations, and wonderings, since these are not manifestations of standing knowledge. Further, it may be that a state that is committed to passive short- or long-term memory only comes to be known to a subject by becoming a conscious occurrent memory on which that subject reflects.
It might seem to someone sympathetic to Burgean constitutivism that a more charitably-interpreted version of the ‘same-order’ view is consistent with (PC), as one anonymous referee has suggested. One might concede, for example, that the state reflected upon does precede and is distinct from the reflecting one. But still, one might claim, this leaves open the possibility of meeting PC by maintaining that the previously existing thought becomes, at the moment of reflecting, a constituent of the reflecting state. That is to say, one and the same token state, with its content, is first thought at one time t and then, at a later time t\(^{\prime }\), in reflection, becomes part of the reflecting thought. However, it is difficult to see how this suggestion can meet (PC) if there is just one token state and content. The problem here is a temporal one. In order for that one state and content to exist at two times, t and t\(^{\prime }\), it would need to be construed as ‘spread out’ over and during those times—that is, as existing wholly at t, independently of the reflecting one, and also, at t\(^{\prime }\), as existing wholly as part of the reflecting thought. But on that understanding, the whole of the token state could not be plausibly understood as accommodating the phenomenological fact that the state reflected upon at t\(^{\prime }\) seems independent of and antecedent to the reflecting one. For, at the moment of reflection, the content embedded in that state is part of the very reflective thought itself and presents itself as such. That very content is, and presents itself as, the content of what one is thinking at t\(^{\prime }\), not as the content of a state that is present independently of and antecedently to t\(^{\prime }\). Put another way, there is nothing in the reflecting state to indicate that that the (token) content of that state is the (token) content of a previously and independently existing state. Rather, it seems that, in order to capture the phenomenology of both thinking and thinking about in the non-cogito-like cases in a way that meets (PC), one needs to suppose that there are two token thought contents, not just one—one at t, and another at t\(^{\prime }\), one of which one is the content of the first-order thinking, the other of which one is part of the content of the reflective state. I develop this thought in Sect. 3, and return to the issue of why two token contents are necessary in connection with the discussion of the paratactic analysis of indirect discourse in Sect. 4.
This claim is compatible with the view, advanced by Williamson (2000) and others, that when one knows that one is in pain introspectively, the fact that one is in pain is one’s evidence that one is in pain; this is the limiting case of p’s being evidence on which one believes p. The issue here is terminological. When I know that I am wondering whether p via introspection, my knowledge that I am wondering whether p is not based on any evidence distinct from the fact that I am wondering whether p.
Seeing the colour (in this case, green) just is one’s experience of it (on the condition that the subject’s experience is veridical and not deviantly caused by the object’s having that colour), rather than one’s belief that there is a green thing before one. My claim is that perception of the greenness of the lime is no more epistemically mediated by a further mental state than is conscious thinking of what I am thinking via introspection in cases of current, conscious thinking. There is a structural parallel between the two types of case, even though introspecting is not perceiving. (Cf. Peacocke (2009, p. 200), who takes there to be a “significant parallelism of abstract structure” between action awareness (where action awareness includes awareness of mental actions such as conscious judgings and calculatings) and perceptual awareness, while acknowledging that action awareness is not perceptual.)
This is true on at least some accounts of perception. I should note here, however, that there are alternative views of perception according to which my knowledge of the greenness of the lime is not epistemically direct.
This transparency claim is compatible with at least one interpretation of the thesis, often referred to as ‘transparency’, according to which, in determining or discovering what one believes, one ‘looks through’ one’s belief to a state in the world beyond the mind that that belief is about; and one’s reasons for thinking, judging, or believing that one has a given belief are the very reasons one has for having that belief (Evans 1982). In both cases one looks ‘outward’, toward the world, rather than ‘inward’, as the introspectionist would have it. The interpretation with which the present transparency claim is compatible is known as ‘weak transparency’ (cf. Kind 2003), characterized as follows:
Weak Transparency: it is difficult (but not impossible) to attend directly to our experience, i.e., we can most easily attend to our experience by attending to the objects represented by that experience.
It contrasts with a stronger version of the claim, which is incompatible with the view that subjects can have direct epistemic access to certain of their own mental states:
Strong Transparency: it is impossible to attend directly to our experience, i.e., we cannot attend to our experience except by attending to the objects represented by that experience.
However, there are compelling objections to this stronger thesis (cf. Gertler 2011; Block 2003).
But see Horgan and Tienson (2002), and Horgan et al. (2004) for a view that denies that intentional properties lack an experiential aspect. Here we are not talking about whether there is something it is like to have an attitude toward a content, say, to believe, rather than doubt, it, but about whether there is an experiential aspect to the content of the attitude itself: “Intentional states have a phenomenal character, and this phenomenal character is precisely the what-it-is-like of experiencing a specific propositional-attitude type vis-à-vis a specific intentional content.” (Horgan and Tienson 2002, p. 521). I agree with Shoemaker and others who deny that one experiences the contents of one’s current conscious intentional states when one consciously thinks about them in the sense of ‘experience’ that applies to sensory experience and experience of one’s sensations.
For one who does, see Peacocke (2009).
As the claim suggests, there is a third way in which perception and self-knowledge in the core cases cited here are relevantly alike. Elsewhere (Macdonald 1999) I have discussed Shoemaker’s (1994) arguments against the Object Perception Model and the Broad Perception Model. Although I cannot repeat it here, of particular relevance to the points made here is my argument for the claim that the Independence Thesis is not, as Shoemaker maintains, true in the case of perception but false in the case of self-knowledge. Many consider the is/appears distinction to be symptomatic of the independence of objects of perception from perceptual experience. If I am right, it is also symptomatic of the independence of one’s first-order mental states from one’s second-order ones in many cases of self-knowledge. For other reasons for thinking that Shoemaker’s arguments do not succeed, see Peacocke’s (2009) argument for the claim that the case of self-blindness does not establish that the Independence Thesis is false, which is compatible with an introspectionist, detectivist account of the kind I advance here.
This objection was famously pressed by Auguste Comte, who claimed,
James agrees that consciousness cannot be split, not because it is inconceivable but because it is empirically unlikely, and gives a different account of self-knowledge in terms of ‘retrospection’. See also Ten Elshof (2005).
The concept of the specious present is due to the work of the psychologist E. R. Clay (quoted by James 1990) but its best known characterisation is due to William James (1890/1981), who said “The prototype of all times is the specious present, the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible”. According to Le Poidevin, the specious present is “...a duration which is perceived both as present and as temporally extended. This present of experience is ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present (if there is such a thing...), it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The real or objective present must be durationless for, as Augustine argued, in an 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 2009). If knowledge of one’s own current conscious states is understood as taking place during an interval that is the specious present (more accurately, during an interval that is a series of overlapping specious presents, since, as Dainton (2004) (citing Pöppel 1985) notes, the shortest interval during which human subjects can detect temporally ordered stimuli appears to be at most approximately a second), 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). Perception of ordinary objects, such as trees, seems to involve the specious present, since the fact that both light and sound, as well as information travelling from receptors to the brain are transmitted at a finite speed seems to have the consequence that we can only perceive what is past, albeit the immediate past. What philosophers have called ‘the specious present’ seems to involve what neuropsychologists call ‘working memory’ (cf. Larner 2008). It is generally acknowledged that the concept of working memory is a descendent of that of the specious present and used by contemporary psychologists to indicate a dynamic temporary information storage system whose contents are available ‘online’ for current complex cognitive processing tasks.
See LePore and Loewer (1989) for an extension of the paratactic analysis to sentences ascribing mental states such as beliefs. One referee has asked for some further explanation of what is involved in demonstration of lower level content. It is difficult to say briefly here what more might be involved than is often claimed by those who say that there are mental demonstratives, conceptual analogues of linguistic demonstratives (see, e.g., Levine 2010). However, Prinz (2007) has argued persuasively for the view that there is good evidence for thinking that there are such demonstratives, “mental pointers”, and that they are required in an explanation of how subjects can think about their own phenomenal mental states. Although he distances himself from the view that these ‘pointers’ are conceptual items, preferring a view that takes them to be mechanisms that control top-down attentional focus, I favour a view that takes such items to be conceptual, taking attentional focus to be a further necessary but not itself a sufficient condition for mental demonstration (as I indicate in the text).
It would seem to be a consequence of this view that when we think we are thinking a thought with content p, we replicate the content p in the second-order thought by both mentioning and using it, since this is the way in which we represent the contents of our first-order thoughts. But do we really notice two thoughts with the relevant contents? In the situation envisaged in the Aida example, am I really thinking ‘I want to see Aida’ twice? If so, is this compatible with the phenomenological constraint (PC) set out in Sect. 1? Yes, I really am thinking ‘I want to see Aida’ twice and notice two thoughts with the relevant contents. And yes, this is compatible with (PC). (PC) tells us that subjects’ conscious thoughts about their current, conscious intentional states typically present those states to their subjects as states that they are thinking about that are independent of and present antecedently to thoughts about them and as attracting and engaging their conscious attention. The phenomenon of thinking and thinking about is something that is part of the phenomenology of reflective thinking about one’s first-order thoughts, and this means both that I notice that the content p (I want to see Aida) is present antecedently to my thought about it and also I am aware that my reflective thought is a thought about that content, i.e, that it presents the content p as the content of my first-order state. According to the paratactic account, the way in which I think about p is by representing it in my reflective thought, and I do this by both mentioning and using p itself. I cannot think the reflective thought without noticing its content, and that thought cannot present the first-order content one I am thinking about without presenting p as independent of and present antecedently to my reflective thought (with its own content). So the phenomenology of thinking and thinking about is consistent with noticing two contents, the content thought (in the reflective thinking) and the content thought about (in the thought reflected upon).
See Jonides (1996). So ‘working memory’ refers to a system that both temporarily stores and processes information. This, amongst other features, distinguishes it from short-term memory (Dehn 2011; Hutton and Towse 2001), which is taken to be a passive storage system. There is a good deal of dispute about how long exactly the period of time is that the information in working memory is available for cognitive processing; views range from 1–2 s, to roughly 15 s, to 30 s.
For examples of the view that the contents of working memory are the contents of consciousness, see Moscovitch and Umiltà (1990) and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1971). For examples of the view that the contents of working memory ‘outstrip’ the contents of consciousness, see Baars’ (1997) Global Workspace theory, according to which only those items in working memory that are the focus of attention can be consciously experienced, and Cowan (1988). This debate is intimately connected with the debate concerning whether there is consciousness outside attention. (Cf. Prinz (2007, 2010, 2012) for the view that attention is both necessary and sufficient for consciousness, Chalmers (1996, 2010) and Block (1995) for the view that consciousness outstrips attention).
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Tim Bayne, Eve Garrard, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin, Ben Jarvis, Lawrence Lombard Graham Macdonald, Asa Wikforss, Daniel Whiting, and audiences at the Universities of Glasgow, Hertfordshire, Southampton, Dublin, Canterbury, New Zealand, and anonymous referees for this journal, for very helpful comments.
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Macdonald, C. In my ‘Mind’s Eye’: introspectionism, detectivism, and the basis of authoritative self-knowledge. Synthese 191, 3685–3710 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0487-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0487-1