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Miscellaneous philosophy of mind :: Self-knowledge

• Observational accounts [7]
• Commitment/expression-based accounts [6]
• Constitutive accounts [4]
• First-person authority and privileged access [11]
• Incorrigibility [0]
• Self-deception [11]
• Self-knowledge, misc [25]

Observational accounts

See also: Knowledge of consciousness, Perception and knowledge, The given, Commitment/expression-based accounts, Constitutive accounts, Self-knowledge, misc.

• Brie Gertler (forthcoming). Introspection.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Alas, things are not quite so simple. As James implies, the term ‘introspection’ literally means ‘looking within’, but of course we do not visually inspect the interiors of our crania. What unites proponents of introspection is the claim that we can recognize our own mental states through some sort of attention—a non-visual ‘looking’—whose immediate objects are thoughts or sensations within oneself, in a non-spatial sense of ‘within’. (The term ‘introspection’ is occasionally given an ecumenical gloss, to refer to any method of knowing one’s own mental states, and not just self-directed attention. But the more restrictive use is standard, and provides the topic of the current entry.) As we will see, some contemporary philosophers and psychologists doubt that any such introspective process underlies self-knowledge
• Amy Kind (2003). Shoemaker, self-blindness and Moore's paradox.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I show how the 'innersense' (quasiperceptual) view of introspection can be defended against Shoemaker's influential 'argument from selfblindness'. If introspection and perception are analogous, the relationship between beliefs and introspective knowledge of them is merely contingent. Shoemaker argues that this implies the possibility that agents could be selfblind, i.e., could lack any introspective awareness of their own mental states. By invoking Moore's paradox, he rejects this possibility. But because Shoemaker's discussion conflates introspective awareness and selfknowledge, he cannot establish his conclusion. There is thirdperson evidence available to the selfblind which Shoemaker ignores, and it can account for the considerations from Moore's paradox that he raises
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://phil-rlst.academic.claremontmckenna.edu/akind/shoemaker.doc
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9213.00294/abs/
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9213.00294
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/phiq/2003/00000053/00000210/art00003
  
• William Larkin (ms). A broad perceptual model of privileged introspective judgments.   (More)
• Eric Lormand (ms). Inner sense until proven guilty.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Can one sense one’s own mind, as one senses nonmental entities in one’s environment and body? According to many contemporary philosophers of mind, the fraudulent commonsense idea of a "mind’s eye" obstructs clearheaded attempts to explain introspection and consciousness. I concede that inner sense cannot directly explain consciousness and introspection in all their forms, but I do think a carefully specified kind of inner sense can account for one very special kind of introspective consciousness. It is special because it is the key to explaining the most puzzling kind of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness—there being "something it is like" to have certain mental states. My aim in this paper is to defend this view against accusations— twenty-two in all!—rather than to argue positively for the view. However, I begin by indicating some of the motivation for the account I defend
• Eric Lormand (2000). Shoemaker and "inner sense".   (More)
• Cynthia MacDonald (1998). Self-knowledge and the "inner eye".   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/782352043.pdf
  
• Cynthia MacDonald (1999). Shoemaker on self-knowledge and inner sense.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(199909)59:3<711:SOSAIS>2.0.CO;2-A
  http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(199909)59:3<711:SOSAIS>2.0.CO;2-A
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2653791.pdf
  

Commitment/expression-based accounts

See also: Observational accounts, Constitutive accounts, Self-knowledge, misc.

• Robert Allen (online). The subject is qualia: Paronyms and temporary identity.   (More)
• Dorit Bar-On (2000). Speaking my mind.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=cDjIar8QgTYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=1bvckAwokP&sig=WxR58vwC2v-GFBGs-vHJ5G2eGc8
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FOJlYhTsN68C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=4ujnvu2FSR&sig=bSnWkjWaCP8G7aWojW5mcNYCm-I
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FOJlYhTsN68C&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=4uipux5EQR&sig=W4wJ4vIeVNQhnNah6mmdt1RLl7I
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=FOJlYhTsN68C&oi=fnd&pg=RA5-PA1&ots=4uipux5EQR&sig=XUnf6bjT1ga_hx_lpab9h_byDEw
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/981684/2004
  
• Brie Gertler (2008). Do we look outward to determine what we believe?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the method of transparency --determining whether I believe that p by considering whether p -- does not explain our privileged access to our own beliefs. Looking outward to determine whether one believes that p leads to the formation of a judgment about whether p, which one can then self-attribute. But use of this process does not constitute genuine privileged access to whether one judges that p. And looking outward will not provide for access to dispositional beliefs, which are arguably more central examples of belief than occurrent judgments. First, one’s dispositional beliefs as to whether p may diverge from the occurrent judgments generated by the method of transparency. Second, even in cases where these are reliably linked — e.g., in which one’s judgment that p derives from one’s dispositional belief that p — using the judgment to self-attribute the dispositional belief requires an ‘inward’ gaze
• Richard Moran (1997). Self-knowledge: Discovery, resolution, and undoing.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0378.00033
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1468-0378.00033/abs/
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/1997/00000005/00000002/art00003
  
• Lucy O'Brien (2005). Self-knowledge, agency, and force.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: My aim in this paper is to articulate further what may be called an agency theory of self-knowledge. Many theorists have stressed how important agency is to self- knowledge, and much work has been done drawing connections between the two notions.² However, it has not always been clear what _epistemic_ advantage agency gives us in this area and why it does so. I take it as a constraint on an adequate account of how a subject knows her own mental states and acts, that it construe the known mental states and acts realistically and as independent of their self-ascription, and that it deliver genuine epistemic standing to the knower. The main task of the paper will, then, be to explore how our having rational agency with respect to our mental states may be able to secure genuine epistemic warrant for our self-ascriptions of states or acts independent of the ascriptions. This task will be carried out by focussing on the question of what account we should give of our knowledge of what I call our acts of judging. In the remainder of this section, I will do a little to clarify what is meant by that question. Section 2 will attempt to introduce us to elements of the best way to approach the question by considering some alternative strategies. Section 3 is devoted to forming some idea of what _kind_ of warrant we are looking for when considering how agency might give us self-knowledge. Section 4 aims to present a suggestion as to how agency gives us the kind of warrant identified over our acts of judging. Section 5 deals with some objections
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00472.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ips/ppr/2005/00000071/00000003/art00004
  
• David Owens (2003). Knowing your own mind.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: What is it to “know your own mind”? In ordinary English, this phrase connotes clear headed decisiveness and a firm resolve but in the language of contemporary philosophy, the indecisive and the susceptible can know their own minds just as well as anybody else. In the philosopher’s usage, “knowing your own mind” is just a matter of being able to produce a knowledgeable description of your mental state, whether it be a state of indecision, susceptibility or even confusion. What exercises philosophers is the fact that people seem to produce these descriptions of their own mental lives without any pretence of considering evidence or reasons of any kind and yet these descriptions are treated by the rest of us as authoritative, at least in a wide range of cases. How can this be?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/03/49/17/MORAN.pdf
  

Constitutive accounts

See also: Observational accounts, Commitment/expression-based accounts, Self-knowledge, misc.

• Akeel Bilgrami (2000). Self-knowledge and resentment.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/17388/2000/00000001/00000001/art00008
  
• Jordi Fernandez (2005). Self-knowledge, rationality and Moore's paradox.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I offer a model of self-knowledge that provides a solution to Moore’s paradox. First, I distinguish two versions of the paradox and I discuss two approaches to it, neither of which solves both versions of the paradox. Next, I propose a model of self-knowledge according to which, when I have a certain belief, I form the higher-order belief that I have it on the basis of the very evidence that grounds my first-order belief. Then, I argue that the model in question can account for both versions of Moore’s paradox. Moore’s paradox, I conclude, tells us something about our conceptions of rationality and self-knowledge. For it teaches us that we take it to be constitutive of being rational that one can have privileged access to one’s own mind and it reveals that having privileged access to one’s own mind is a matter of forming first-order beliefs and corresponding second-order beliefs on the same basis
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00470.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ips/ppr/2005/00000071/00000003/art00002
  
• R. Greene (2003). Constitutive theories of self-knowledge and the regress problem.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?id=13994&jid=190&layout=abstract
  
• Karsten Stueber (2002). The problem of self-knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This article develops a constitutive account of self-knowledgethat is able to avoid certain shortcomings of the standard response to the perceived prima facieincompatibility between privileged self-knowledge and externalism. It argues that ifone conceives of linguistic action as voluntary behavior in a minimal sense, one cannot conceive ofbelief content to be externalistically constituted without simultaneously assuming that the agent hasknowledge of his beliefs. Accepting such a constitutive account of self-knowledge does not, however,preclude the conceptual possibility of being mistaken about ones mental states. Rather, self-knowledgehas to be seen as only a general constraint or as the default assumption of interpreting somebodyas a rational and intentional agent. This is compatible with the diagnosis of a localized lack of self-transparency
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/GHC1R2HW9Q4Q545A.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=382428&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/ghc1r2hw9q4q545a/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/erke/2002/00000056/00000003/00382428
  

First-person authority and privileged access

See also: Observational accounts, Commitment/expression-based accounts, Constitutive accounts, Incorrigibility, Self-deception, Self-knowledge, misc.

• Quassim Cassam (2004). Introspection, perception, and epistemic privilege.   (More)
• Jordi Fernandez (2003). Privileged access naturalized.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to account for privileged access or, more precisely, the special kind of epistemic right that we have to some beliefs about our own mental states. My account will have the following two main virtues. First of all, it will only appeal to those conceptual elements that, arguably, we already use in order to account for perceptual knowledge. Secondly, it will constitute a naturalizing account of privileged access in that it does not posit any mysterious faculty of introspection or "inner perception" mechanism
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9213.00317
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9213.00317/abs/
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/phiq/2003/00000053/00000212/art00003
  
• Jordi Fernandez (2005). Privileged access revisited.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Suppose that you form a certain belief on the basis of perception. You believe, say, that your car is black. How can you be entitled to the belief that you believe that your car is black? I have proposed that the perceptual state that normally grounds your belief about your car also grounds your belief about your own perceptual belief. More generally, my suggestion was that, for any proposition p, if a subject believes that p on the basis of her own apparent perceptions or memories, or on the basis of inference or testimony, then she is entitled to believe that she believes that p if she forms that meta-belief on the basis of the state that lead her to believe that p.¹ It will be convenient to coin an expression that abbreviates that someone has formed a meta- belief thus. Let us baptize this procedure of meta-belief formation as ‘extrospection’
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00389.x
  
• Jordi Fernandez (forthcoming). Desire and self-knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: We often form beliefs about our own mental states. I believe that I have political beliefs of a certain kind. Perhaps you believe that you want to eat fish for lunch. Most of us have believed, at some moment or other, that we were in love. Let us call beliefs of this kind ‘self-ascriptions’ of mental states. Self- ascriptions normally enjoy a special kind of epistemic justification when the self-ascribed mental state is of a certain type, such as a belief or a desire. Our justification for self-ascriptions of those mental stases seems to be, in some way, privileged or authoritative. In the philosophical literature, this idea is often expressed by saying that we have privileged access to our own mental states, or that our self-ascriptions constitute self-knowledge. The goal of this discussion will be to account for that fact. I will concentrate on privileged access to our own desires.[ii]
• Kirk Ludwig (1994). First-person knowledge and authority.   (More)
• Mark McCullagh (2002). Self-knowledge failures and first person authority.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.uoguelph.ca/~mmcculla/papers/skf.pdf
  http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205(200203)64:2<365:SFAFPA>2.0.CO;2-1
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00006.x
  http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3071044.pdf
  
• Colin McGinn (2004). Inverted first-person authority.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/870087/2004/00000001/00000001/art00010
  
• Chris Mortensen, Gerard O'Brien & Belinda Paterson (1993). Distinctions: Subpersonal and subconscious.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Puccetti argues that Dennett's views on split brains are defective. First, we criticise Puccetti's argument. Then we distinguish persons, minds, consciousnesses, selves and personalities. Then we introduce the concepts of part-persons and part-consciousnesses, and apply them to clarifying the situation. Finally, we criticise Dennett for some contribution to the confusion
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?article=4.62
  http://www.cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?split-brain.5
  http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?4.62
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (2002). How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of visual imagery.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Imagery.htm
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel & Michael Gordon (2002). How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of human echolocation.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1491
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/Mike_Gordon/EcholocationSchwitz&Gordon.pdf
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/Echo.pdf
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001491/00/Echo000925.pdf
  http://cogprints.org/1491/
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001491/
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/68/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000268-00/Echo000925.pdf
  
• Eric Schwitzgebel (2002). Why did we think we dreamed in Black and white?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: In the 1950s, dream researchers commonly thought that dreams were predominantly a black and white phenomenon, although both earlier and later treatments of dreaming assume or assert that dreams have color. The first half of the twentieth century saw the rise of black and white film media, and it is likely that the emergence of the view that dreams are black and white was connected to this change in film technology. If our opinions about basic features of our dreams can change with changes in technology, it seems to follow that our knowledge of the experience of dreaming is much less secure than we might at first have thought it to be
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/1492/
  http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/DreamB&W020404.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/documents/disk0/00/00/02/67/PITT-PHIL-SCI00000267-00/dreamb&w010430.pdf
  http://eprints1.library.pitt.edu/archive/00000267/00/dreamb&w010430.pdf
  http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000267/00/dreamb&w010430.pdf
  http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?archiveID=oai:cogprints.soton.ac.uk:1492
  http://cogprints.org/1492/00/dreamb&w010430.pdf
  http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001492/
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/00393681/2002/00000033/00000004/art00033
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com//content/els/00393681/2002/00000033/00000004/art00033
  

Incorrigibility

See also: First-person authority and privileged access, Self-knowledge, misc.

Self-deception

See also: Anosognosia, First-person authority and privileged access, Self-knowledge, misc.

• Jose Luis Bermudez (2000). Self-deception, intentions and contradictory beliefs.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8284.00247
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/2000/00000060/00000268/art00247
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/anal/2000/00000060/00000268/art00003
  
• Lisa Bortolotti (2006). Deception in psychology : Moral costs and benefits of unsought self-knowledge.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.philosophy.bham.ac.uk/staff/Bortolotti_deception.pdf
  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17124761&dopt=Citation
  http://www.informaworld.com/index/T75750059L58260M.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tandf/gacr/2006/00000013/00000003/art00004
  
• Rachel Brown (2004). The emplotted self: Self-deception and self-knowledge.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?id=14004
  http://www.ajol.info/viewarticle.php?id=14004&jid=190
  
• Eric Funkhouser (2005). Do the self-deceived get what they want?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://comp.uark.edu/~efunkho/selfdeception.html
  http://comp.uark.edu/~efunkho/selfdeception.doc
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0114.2005.00228.x
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/papq/2005/00000086/00000003/art00001
  
• Tamar Gendler (online). Self-deception as pretense.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Forthcoming, Philosophical Perspectives: Mind [uncorrected proofs]
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2007.00127.x
  
• Steven Hales (1994). Self-deception and belief attribution.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   One of the most common views about self-deception ascribes contradictory beliefs to the self-deceiver. In this paper it is argued that this view (the contradiction strategy) is inconsistent with plausible common-sense principles of belief attribution. Other dubious assumptions made by contradiction strategists are also examined. It is concluded that the contradiction strategy is an inadequate account of self-deception. Two other well-known views — those of Robert Audi and Alfred Mele — are investigated and found wanting. A new theory of self-deception relying on an extension of Mark Johnston's subintentional mental tropisms is proposed and defended
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/k0p636287142281n/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/K0P636287142281N.pdf
  
• Richard Holton (2001). What is the role of the self in self-deception?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: The orthodox answer to my question is this: in a case of self-deception, the self acts to deceive itself. That is, the self is the author of its own deception. I want to explore an opposing idea here: that the self is rather the subject matter of the deception. That is, I want to explore the idea that self-deception is more concerned with the self’s deception about the self, than with the self’s deception by the self. The expression would thus be semantically comparable to expressions like ‘self-knowledge’ (which involves knowledge about the self) rather than to expressions like ‘self-control’ (which involves control by the self).1 On this approach, what goes wrong, when we are self-deceived, is that we lack self-knowledge; or, more accurately, since one can lack knowledge without falling into error, what goes wrong is that we have false beliefs about ourselves. Not any kind of false belief about oneself; I am not self-deceived when I mistake my shoe size. Rather, self-deception requires false beliefs about the kind of subject matter that, were one to get it right, would constitute self-knowledge. It is an interesting fact about current English that, though we talk freely of self-knowledge, we have no common term to designate its absence. Seventeenth century writers talked of self-ignorance; but the term has fallen from use. I suggest that ‘self-deception’ is the nearest we have
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://consc.net/cgi/go.fcgi?id=HOLWIT&free=1&u=http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/~rholton/s-d.pdf
  http://web.mit.edu/holton/www/pubs/s-d.pdf
  http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/~rholton/s-d.pdf
  http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/~rholton/s-d.pdf
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00021.x
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.0066-7372.2003.00021.x
  http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9264.00086
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/paso/2001/00000101/00000001/art00086
  
• Julie Kirsch (online). Ethics and self-deception.   (More)
• Neil Levy (forthcoming). Self-deception without thought experiments.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Theories of self-deception divide into those that hold that the state is characterized by some kind of synchronic tension or conflict between propositional attitudes and those that deny this. Proponents of the latter like Al Mele claim that their theories are more parsimonious, because they do not require us to postulate any psychological mechanisms beyond those which have been independently verified. But if we can show that there are real cases of motivated believing which are characterized by conflicting propositional attitudes, however, the parsimony argument against incongruent mental state accounts is undermined. I argue that anosognosia presents us with a real-life example of motivated belief together with (sub)-doxastic conflict
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://au.geocities.com/neil_levy/Documents/articles/Self-deception.pdf
  
• Alfred Mele (ms). Real self-deception.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Self-deception poses tantalizing conceptual conundrums and provides fertile ground for empirical research. Recent interdisciplinary volumes on the topic feature essays by biologists, philosophers, psychiatrists, and psychologists (Lockard & Paulhus 1988, Martin 1985). Self-deception's location at the intersection of these disciplines is explained by its significance for questions of abiding interdisciplinary interest. To what extent is our mental life present--or even accessible--to consciousness? How rational are we? How is motivated irrationality to be explained? To what extent are our beliefs subject to our control? What are the determinants of belief, and how does motivation bear upon belief? In what measure are widely shared psychological propensities products of evolution?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://cogprints.org/295/0/MELE.html
  http://cogprints.org/295/00/MELE.html
  
• Baljinder Sahdra & Paul Thagard (2003). Self-deception and emotional coherence.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract:   This paper proposes that self-deception results from the emotional coherence of beliefs with subjective goals. We apply the HOTCO computational model of emotional coherence to simulate a rich case of self-deception from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.We argue that this model is more psychologically realistic than other available accounts of self-deception, and discuss related issues such as wishful thinking, intention, and the division of the self
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=641429.641442
  http://www.springerlink.com/content/v31892257w12jr51/fulltext.pdf
  http://www.kluweronline.com/article.asp?PIPS=5112381&PDF=1
  http://www.springerlink.com/index/V31892257W12JR51.pdf
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/klu/mind/2003/00000013/00000002/05112381
  

Self-knowledge, misc

See also: Observational accounts, Commitment/expression-based accounts, Constitutive accounts, First-person authority and privileged access, Incorrigibility, Self-deception.

• Alex Byrne (2005). Introspection.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: I know various contingent truths about my environment by perception. For example, by looking, I know that there is a computer before me; by hearing, I know that someone is talking in the corridor; by tasting, I know that the coffee has no sugar. I know these things because I have some built-in mechanisms specialized for detecting the state of my environment. One of these mechanisms, for instance, is presently transducing electromagnetic radiation (in a narrow band of wavelengths) coming from the computer and the desk on which it sits. How that mechanism works is a complicated story—to put it mildly—and of course much remains unknown. But we can at least produce more-or- less plausible sketches of how the mechanism can start from retinal irradiation, and go on to deliver knowledge of my surroundings. Moreover, in the sort of world we inhabit, specialized detection mechanisms that are causally affected by the things they detect have no serious competition—seeing the computer by seeing an idea of the computer in the divine mind, for example, is not a feasible alternative
• Alex Byrne (online). The puzzle of transparency.   (More)
• Peter Carruthers (ms). Cartesian epistemology: Is the theory of the self-transparent mind innate?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper argues that a Cartesian belief in the self-transparency of minds might actually be an innate aspect of our mind-reading faculty. But it acknowledges that some crucial evidence needed to establish this claim hasn’t been looked for or collected. What we require is evidence that a belief in the self-transparency of mind is universal to the human species. The paper closes with a call to anthropologists (and perhaps also developmental psychologists), who are in a position to collect such evidence, encouraging them to do so
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com//content/imp/jcs/2008/00000015/00000004/art00002
  
• Peter Carruthers (ms). Introspection: Divided and partly eliminated.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: This paper will argue that there is no such thing as introspective access to judgments and decisions. It won’t challenge the existence of introspective access to perceptual and imagistic states, nor to emotional feelings and bodily sensations. On the contrary, the model presented in Section 2 presumes such access. Hence introspection is here divided into two categories: introspection of propositional attitude events, on the one hand, and introspection of broadly perceptual events, on the other. I shall assume that the latter exists while arguing that the former doesn’t (or not in the case of judgments and decisions, at least). Section 1 makes some preliminary points and distinctions, and outlines the scope of the argument. Section 2 presents and motivates the general model of introspection that predicts a divided result. Section 3 provides independent evidence for the conclusion that judgments and decisions aren’t introspectable. Section 4 then replies to a number of objections to the argument, the most important of which is made from the perspective of so-called “dual systems theories” of belief formation and decision making. The upshot is a limited form of eliminativism about introspection, in respect of at least two core categories of propositional attitude
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/330/01/Divided_introspection_-_assc.pdf
  http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/Divided%20introspection.pdf
  
• Annalisa Coliva (2002). Thought insertion and immunity to error through misidentification.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v009/9.1coliva01.pdf
  http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v009/9.1coliva01.html
  
• Daniel Dennett (2000). The case for rorts.   (More)
• Fred Dretske (2004). Knowing what you think vs. knowing that you think it.   (More)
• Jordi Fernandez (online). Desire and self-knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: We often form beliefs about our own mental states. I believe that I have political beliefs of a certain kind. Perhaps you believe that you want to eat fish for lunch. Most of us have believed, at some moment or other, that we were in love. Let us call beliefs of this kind ‘self-ascriptions’ of mental states. Self- ascriptions normally enjoy a special kind of epistemic justification when the self-ascribed mental state is of a certain type, such as a belief or a desire. Our justification for self-ascriptions of those mental stases seems to be, in some way, privileged or authoritative. In the philosophical literature, this idea is often expressed by saying that we have privileged access to our own mental states, or that our self-ascriptions constitute self-knowledge. The goal of this discussion will be to account for that fact. I will concentrate on privileged access to our own desires.[ii]
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/./ftinterface~content=a788337404~fulltext=713240930
  
• Brie Gertler (online). Self-Knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ‘Self-knowledge’ is commonly used in philosophy to refer to knowledge of one's particular mental states, including one's beliefs, desires, and sensations. It is also sometimes used to refer to knowledge about a persisting self -- its ontological nature, identity conditions, or character traits. At least since Descartes, most philosophers have believed that self-knowledge is importantly different from knowledge of the world external to oneself, including others' thoughts. But there is little agreement about what precisely distinguishes self-knowledge from knowledge in other realms. Partially because of this disagreement, philosophers have endorsed competing accounts of how we acquire self-knowledge. These accounts have important consequences for the scope of mental content, for mental ontology, and for personal identity
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/self-knowledge/
  http://www.seop.leeds.ac.uk/entries/self-knowledge/
  http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/stanford/entries/self-knowledge/
  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge/
  http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-knowledge
  
• Brie Gertler (2000). The mechanics of self-knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: It is often said that we can know our own thoughts more directly or with more certainty than anyone else can know them. And this disparity is usually taken to be principled, in that we would not be the rational, reflective beings that we are without it. My aim is to trace the consequences of a principled disparity between self-knowledge and other-knowledge for what may be termed the “mechanics ” of self-knowledge . I use a new thought experiment to show that if introspective states are merely causally related to introspected thoughts, the disparity between self-knowledge and other-knowledge is not truly principled. An account of self-knowledge adequate to a truly principled disparity will allow that thought tokens can be
• P. M. S. Hacker (2005). Of knowledge and knowing that someone is in pain.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: 1. First person authority: the received explanation Over a wide range of psychological attributes, a mature speaker seems to enjoy a defeasible form of authority on how things are with him. The received explanation of this is epistemic, and rests upon a cognitive assumption. The speaker’s word is a authoritative because when things are thus-and-so with him, then normally he knows that they are. This is held to be because the speaker has direct and privileged access to the contents of his consciousness by means of introspection, conceived as a faculty of inner sense. Like perceptual knowledge, introspective knowledge is held to be direct and non-evidential. Accordingly, the first-person utterances ‘I have a pain’, ‘I believe that p’, ‘I intend to V’ are taken to be descriptions of what is evident to inner sense. Many classical thinkers held such subjective knowledge to be not only immediate, but also infallible and indubitable. The challenge to the received conceptions came from Wittgenstein. He denied the cognitive assumption, arguing that it cannot be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know that I am in pain. For what is that supposed to mean — except perhaps that I am in pain?1 If it makes no sense to say that one knows that one is in pain, then the epistemic explanation is a non-starter, since it explains the special authoritative status of a person’s avowal of pain by reference to the putative fact that the subject of pain knows, normally knows, or cannot but know, that he is in pain when he is. It is important to note that Wittgenstein did not mechanically generalize the case of pain across the whole domain of firstperson utterances. The case of pain constitutes only one pole of a range of such utterances. Avowals and averrals of belief and intention approximate the other pole, and require independent analysis and grammatical description..
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Knowledge%20of%20Pain.pdf
  
• Frank Hofmann (online). The epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Recently, some philosophers have claimed that consciousness has an important epistemological role to play in the introspective self-ascription of one’s own mental states. This is the thesis of the epistemological role of consciousness for introspective self-knowledge. I will criticize BonJour’s account of the role of consciousness for introspection. He does not provide any reason for believing that conscious states are epistemically better off than non-conscious states. Then I will sketch a representationalist account of how the thesis could be true. Conscious states are available to the subject in a very special way in which non-conscious states are not available. This is the first part of the explanation. The crucial further element in the representationalist account is what I would like to call the ‘introspective mode of mind’. A mind can operate in certain ways or modes – modes of mind. Introspection normally takes place in the introspective mode of mind, judgments about one’s environment in the mode of ‘taking one’s appearances at face value’. And there probably are other modes of mind. The introspective mode of mind is characterized by the special way or framework in which cognitive capacities are employed
• Pierre Jacob (ms). Do we know how we know our own minds yet?   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000352
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JWw1wGFt8KUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA401&ots=MWhs5cvsir&sig=B1yKZNLyD89C9YUiuXi3_4LMoAY
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/03/52/ijn_00000352_00/ijn_00000352_00.htm
  http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000352/en/
  http://pierrejacob.hautetfort.com/files/self_ext.pdf
  
• William Lycan (2002). Dretske's ways of introspecting.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: ‘[I]ntrospection’ is just a convenient word to describe our way of knowing what is going on in our own mind, and anyone convinced that we know—at least sometimes—what is going on in our own mind and therefore, that we have a mind and, therefore, that we are not zombies, must believe that introspection is the answer we are looking for. I, too, believe in introspection
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=R6ipHOjEhNIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA15&dq=+Dretske's+ways+of+introspecting+Lycan&ots=GbLSrIyavY&sig=-kzXPAXVEoA4p_Wucj6eT6j1hbw
  
• Cynthia MacDonald (2004). Self-knowledge and the first person.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Self-Knowledge and the First-Person1 It is a familiar view in the philosophy of mind and action is that for a thought or attitude to constitute a reason for an action is for it to render intelligible, in the light of norms of rationality or reason, that action. However, I can make sense of your actions in this way by crediting you with attitudes that I myself do not hold. Equally, you can do this for my actions. So not all reasons for one’s actions are one’s own reasons. What more is involved in a reason’s being one’s own reason for acting?
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.phil.canterbury.ac.nz/personal_pages/cynthia_macdonald/publications/self_knowledge.pdf
  
• Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich (2003). Reading one's own mind: A cognitive theory of self-awareness.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/oso/815960/2003/00000001/00000001/art00004
  
• Shaun Nichols (2000). The mind's "I" and the theory of mind's "I": Introspection and two concepts of self.   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: Introspection plays a crucial role in Modern philosophy in two different ways. From the beginnings of Modern philosophy, introspection has been used a tool for philosophical exploration in a variety of thought experiments. But Modern philosophers (e.g., Locke and Hume) also tried to characterize the nature of introspection as a psychological phenomenon. In contemporary philosophy, introspection is still frequently used in thought experiments. And in the analytic tradition, philosophers have tried to characterize conceptually necessary features of introspection.² But over the last several decades, philosophers have devoted relatively little attention to the cognitive characteristics of introspection. This has begun to change, impelled largely by a fascinating body of work on how children and autistic individuals understand the mind.³ In a pair of recent papers, Stephen Stich and I have drawn on this empirical work to develop an account of introspection or self-awareness.⁴ In this paper, I will elaborate and defend this cognitive theory of introspection further and argue that if the account is right, it may have important ramifications for psychological and philosophical debates over the self
• Lucy O'Brien (2003). On knowing one's own actions.   (More)
  Additional links for this entry:
  http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/handle/10065/636
  
• Baron Reed (ms). Self-knowledge and rationality.   (More)
• William Seager (2000). Introspection and the elementary acts of mind.   (More)
• Joel Smith (2006). Which immunity to error?   (Abstract & more)
  Abstract: A self-ascription is a thought or sentence in which a predicate is self-consciously ascribed to oneself. Self-ascriptions are best expressed using the first-person pronoun. Mental self-ascriptions are ascriptions to oneself of mental predicates (predicates that de