A general trend in recent philosophical and empirical work aims to undermine various traditional claims regarding the distinctive nature of self-knowledge. So far, however, this work has not seriously threatened the Cartesian claim that (at least some) self-knowledge is immune to the sort of sceptical problem that seems to afflict our knowledge of the external world. In this paper I carry this trend further by arguing that the Cartesian claim is false. This is done by showing that a familiar sceptical (...) argument that targets my knowledge of the external world can be adapted to target my belief that I exist, along with any of my self-knowledge that I know entails my own existence. Thus, my self-knowledge and my knowledge of the external world are subject to the same sort of sceptical problem. (shrink)

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics–pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and (...) dynamic semantics. (shrink)

This article will put forward the thesis that self-knowledge should not be seen as a higher level of self-consciousness but rather as separate and independent from the act of self-consciousness. Only in such an account may self-knowledge avoid the problem of errors in self-identification emerging from all sorts of bodily illusions such as BSI, RHI, and FBI, as well as mental ones, based on a misidentification of propositional attitudes. In the light of the considered conception arguments against resting self-knowledge on (...) self-consciousness will be discussed, leading to the depiction of self-knowledge as compatible with externalism and appealing to the distinction between self-others, although this will not be a distinction referring to bodily self-consciousness but rather ascribing beliefs to others. (shrink)