Shoemaker (1996) presented a priori arguments against the possibility of ‘self-blindness’, or the inability of someone, otherwise intelligent and possessed of mental concepts, to introspect any of her concurrent attitude states. Ironically enough, this seems to be a position that Gopnik (1993) and Carruthers (2006, 2008, 2009a,b) have proposed as not only possible, but as the actual human condition generally! According to this ‘Objectivist’ view, supposed introspection of one's attitudes is not ‘direct’, but an ‘inference’ of precisely the sort we (...) make about the attitudes of others, an inference that has the advantage in our own case of only our own sensory data and memories, our behavior, and of the context we are in; i.e. we are all substantially self- blind. After sorting out a number of methodological and verbal issues, I argue, first, that the a priori arguments against Objectivism don't succeed, and that Gopnik and Carruthers are right to regard the issue as an empirical one. On the other hand, I think they seriously underestimate the difficulty of establishing Objectivism. It is unlikely there is an inferential procedure from the data of pure sensation, behavior and context to the relevant self-attributions that would be as spectacularly reliable as people manifestly seem to be. Moreover, there is a simpler model: the mind very likely consists of a panoply of sub-routines some of whose outputs are ‘tagged’ for their having been so processed, rather in the way that software ‘documents’ are on standard computers. Introspection plausibly consists in a person's simply attending to distinctive constellations of these tags, even though they may lack phenomenal feels. This draws attention to an important independent fact: that much of phenomenology (or ‘what it's like’ to be in a certain state) may be constituted by facts that are not phenomenal. (shrink)

Several contemporary philosophical theories of introspection have been offered, yet each faces a number of difficulties in providing an explanation of the exact nature of introspection. I contrast the inner-sense view that argues for a causal awareness with the acquaintance view that argues for a non-causal or direct awareness. After critically examining the inner-sense and the acquaintance views, I claim that these two views are complementary and not mutually exclusive, and that both perspectives, conceived of as modes of introspective access, (...) actually broaden the notion of introspection. I then propose a useful distinction between stimuli-induced introspection—i.e., a receptive process whereby some specific mental states induce introspection—and self-triggered introspection—i.e., a selective process whereby the individual’s own interest and volition initiates introspection. I argue that that distinction may eliminate the false dichotomy which claims that only one of those types of awareness, either the causal one or the direct one, is conducive to introspection or is defined as introspection. (shrink)

According to the standard argument from targetless higher-order representations, the possibility of such representations presents a dilemma for higher-order theorists. In this article I argue that there are two theoretically well-motivated replies to the standard argument. Consequently, the standard argument against higher-order theories fails. I then go on to argue that while certain versions of higher-order theory can adequately respond to the standard argument, they both, nevertheless, fail to explain the fineness-of-grain that phenomenally conscious experience appears to have.

Why do we engage in folk psychology, that is, why do we think about and ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, intentions etc. to people? On the standard view, folk psychology is primarily for mindreading, for detecting mental states and explaining and/or predicting people’s behaviour in terms of them. In contrast, McGeer (1996, 2007, 2015), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013) maintain that folk psychology is not primarily for mindreading but for mindshaping, that is, for moulding people’s behavior and minds (e.g., (...) via the imposition of social norms) so that coordination becomes easier. Mindreading is derived from and only as effective as it is because of mindshaping, not vice versa. I critically assess McGeer’s, and Zawidzki’s proposal and contend that three common motivations for the mindshaping view do not provide sufficient support for their particular version of it. I argue furthermore that their proposal underestimates the role that epistemic processing plays for mindshaping. And I provide reasons for favouring an alternative according to which, in social cognition involving ascriptions of propositional attitudes, neither mindshaping nor mindreading is primary but both are complementary in that effective mindshaping depends as much on mindreading as effective mindreading depends on mindshaping. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel puzzle about desire consisting of three independently plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions: all desires are dispositional states, we have privileged access to some of our desires, and we do not have privileged access to any dispositional state. Proponents of the view that all desires are dispositional states might think the most promising way out of this puzzle is to deny. I argue, however, that such attempts fail because the most plausible accounts of self-knowledge of desires (...) do not explain how we possess privileged access to dispositional desires. I conclude by offering what I take to be a more promising solution to the puzzle, one that involves the rejection of on the grounds that some desires possess phenomenology. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

We argue for teleology as a description of the way in which we ordinarily understand others’ intentional actions. Teleology starts from the close resemblance between the reasoning involved in understanding others’ actions and one’s own practical reasoning involved in deciding what to do. We carve out teleology’s distinctive features more sharply by comparing it to its three main competitors: theory theory, simulation theory, and rationality theory. The plausibility of teleology as our way of understanding others is underlined by developmental data (...) in its favour. (shrink)

In philosophical inquiry into the mind, the metaphor of ‘transparency’ has been attractive to many who are otherwise in deep disagreement. It has thereby come to have a variety of different and mutually incompatible connotations. The mind is said to be transparent to itself, our perceptual experiences are said to be transparent to the world, and our beliefs are said to be transparent to – a great many different things. The first goal of this essay is to sort out the (...) different uses of the notion of transparency in the context of the philosophy of mind. The remainder of the essay will then be devoted to examining so-called Transparency theories of self-knowledge, or how we know our own minds. This type of theory has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years, but its prospects hinge on answers to unresolved questions concerning the epistemological details of the account and the scope of its ambitions. (shrink)

The attitude of intention is not usually the primary focus in philosophical work on self-knowledge. A recent exception is the so-called “Transparency” theory of self-knowledge, which attempts to explain how we know our own minds by appeal to reflection on non-mental facts. Transparency theories are attractive in light of their relative psychological economy compared to views that must posit a dedicated mechanism of ‘inner sense’. However, it is argued here, focusing on proposals by Richard Moran and Alex Byrne, that the (...) Transparency approach to explaining knowledge of our intentions fails. Considerations of economy therefore recommend an alternative approach: the Rylean Theory Theory. The particular view defended here is that one way of coming to know what we intend is to self-ascribe an intention on the basis of making a conscious decision about what to do. This view requires that there are such things as conscious decisions, and so the existence of conscious decisions is defended against skeptical worries raised by Peter Carruthers. The conclusion is that we know of our intentions by theorizing about ourselves, but that this knowledge can still be first-personally privileged, authoritative, and non-alienated. (shrink)

Several authors have argued that, assuming we have apriori knowledge of our own thought-contents, semantic externalism implies that we can know apriori contingent facts about the empirical world. After presenting the argument, I shall respond by resisting the premise that an externalist can know apriori: If s/he has the concept water, then water exists. In particular, Boghossian's Dry Earth example suggests that such thought-experiments do not provide such apriori knowledge. Boghossian himself rejects the Dry Earth experiment, however, since it would (...) imply that externalism is true of empty concepts as well as non-empty concepts. Yet in this paper I respond by defending empty-concept externalism, from criticisms suggested by Boghossian and Brown, and recently developed further by Besson. My contention is that an externalist can give a non-ad hoc descriptivist account of empty concepts. Accordingly, apriori self-knowledge does not enable an externalist to know contingent features of the external world. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists generally hold that, in light of the empirical data, a subject lacks infallible access to her own mental states. However, while subjects certainly are fallible in some ways, I show that the data fails to discredit that a subject has infallible access to her own occurrent thoughts and judgments. This is argued, first, by revisiting the empirical studies, and carefully scrutinizing what is shown exactly. Second, I argue that if the data were interpreted to rule out all (...) such infallibility, the relevant psychological studies would be self-effacing. For they adopt a methodology where a subject is simply presumed to know her own second-order thoughts and judgments--as if she were infallible about them. After all, what she expresses as her second-order judgment is trusted as accurate without independent evidence — even though such judgments often misrepresent the subject’s first-order states. The upshot is that such studies do not discredit all infallibility hypotheses regarding self-attributions of occurrent states. (shrink)

Compared to other forms of memory, episodic memory is commonly viewed as special for being distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. There is an inherent ambiguity in these conceptions, however, because “episodic memory” has two closely connected yet subtly distinct uses, one designating the recollective experience and the other designating the underlying neurocognitive system. Since experience and system sit at different levels of theorizing, their disentanglement is not only necessary but also fruitful for generating novel theoretical hypotheses. To show this, (...) I first argue that accepting the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic remembering as metarepresentational does not necessitate a metarepresentational conception of the episodic memory system. In its stead, I sketch an alternative account on which the metarepresentational character of episodic remembering is generated through the interaction of first-order outputs of the episodic memory system with other neurocognitive components of the brain. Complemented with a first-order account of the memory system, the system-experience distinction further supplies a novel understanding of the human uniqueness of episodic recollection, one that is compatible with there being an evolutionarily conserved episodic memory system. Overall, by distinguishing the two equivocal senses of “episodic memory” in our theorizing, we unearth an opportunity to understand how the distinctive phenomenology of our episodic recollection is related to and implemented in the cognitive architecture. (shrink)

Peter Kevern believes that the cognitive science of religion (CSR) provides a justification for the idea of spiritual care in the health services. In this paper, I suggest that he is mistaken on two counts. First, CSR does not entail the conclusions Kevern wants to draw. His treatment of it consists largely of nonsequiturs. I show this by presenting an account of CSR, and then explaining why Kevern's reasons for thinking it rescues ‘spirituality’ discourse do not work. Second, the debate (...) about spirituality‐in‐health is about classification: what shall count as a ‘spiritual need’ and what shall count as ‘spiritual care’. It is about the politics of meaning, an exercise in persuasive definition. The function of ‘spirituality’ talk in health care is to change the denotation of ‘spiritual’, and attach its indelibly religious connotations to as many health‐related concepts and practices as possible. CSR, however plausible it may be as a theory of the origins and pervasiveness of religious belief, is irrelevant to this debate. (shrink)

Proponents of the so-called “interactive turn in social cognition research” maintain that mainstream research on social cognition has been fundamentally flawed by its neglect of social interaction, and that a new paradigm is needed in order to redress this shortcoming. We argue that proponents of the interactive turn (“interactionists”) have failed to properly substantiate their criticisms of existing research on social cognition. Although it is sometimes unclear precisely what these criticisms of existing theories are supposed to target, we sketch two (...) possibilities: interactionists can either accept the primary explanandum addressed by mainstream social cognition research—namely mindreading—and claim that interactionism contributes some hitherto neglected but necessary component of a successful explanans, or they can argue that mainstream research has focused on a misconceived explanandum. We argue that interactionist claims of both sorts are problematic. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism is the methodology of attributing human-like mental states to animals. Zoomorphism is the converse of this: it is the attribution of animal-like mental states to humans. Zoomorphism proceeds by first understanding what kind of mental states animals have and then attributing these mental states to humans. Zoomorphism has been widely used as scientific methodology especially in cognitive neuroscience. But it has not been taken seriously as a philosophical explanatory paradigm: as a way of explaining the building blocks of the (...) human mind. The philosophical explanatory paradigm of zoomorphism may not explain all aspects of human behavior, but if we accept the zoomorphic way of thinking about the human mind, we should only posit new, different kinds of mental states if the zoomorphic attribution of animal mental states fails to explain our behavior. (shrink)

The concept of mental representation has long been considered to be central concept of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. But not everyone agrees. Neo-behaviorists aim to explain the mind without positing any representations. My aim here is not to assess the merits and demerits of neo-behaviorism, but to take their challenge seriously and ask the question: What justifies the attribution of representations to an agent? Both representationalists and neo-behaviorists tend to take it for granted that the real question about (...) representations is whether we should be realist about the theory of representationalism. This paper is an attempt to shift the emphasis from the debate concerning realism about theories to the one concerning realism about entities. My claim is that regardless of whether we are realist about representational theories of the mind, we have compelling reasons to endorse entity realism about mental representations. (shrink)

Action is not always guided by conscious deliberation; in many circumstances, we act intuitively rather than reflectively. Tamar Gendler (2014) contends that because intuitively guided action can lead us away from our reflective commitments, it limits the power of knowledge to guide action. While I agree that intuition can diverge from reflection, I argue that this divergence does not constitute a restriction on the power of knowledge. After explaining my view of the contrast between intuitive and reflective thinking, this paper (...) argues against the conclusions Gendler draws from empirical work on implicit bias. (shrink)

Kant holds that the applicability of the moral ‘ought’ depends on a kind of agent-causal freedom that is incompatible with the deterministic structure of phenomenal nature. I argue that Kant understands this determinism to threaten not just morality but the very possibility of our status as rational beings. Rational beings exemplify “cognitive control” in all of their actions, including not just rational willing and the formation of doxastic attitudes, but also more basic cognitive acts such as judging, conceptualizing, and synthesizing.

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view”. On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the (...) mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and the problem of “reactive.. (shrink)

The study of insight problem solving could well become one of the most important topics in the contemporary debate on thought. Dealing with insight problems today requires of necessity reconsidering the concept of bounded rationality. Simon’s work has inspired us to reflect on the specific quality of the type of boundaries which, by limiting the search, allow and guarantee the act of creativity; finding the solution to insight problems is emblematic of this creativity and provides a paradigmatic case. According to (...) Simon, the solution to insight problems requires a search for an alternative space. He considered the “Notice Invariants Heuristic” to be a powerful tool for focusing this search which must always be guided by salience. Therefore, in the case of insight problems the heuristic is not a weak method of solving problems; indeed, it is the only way, an innovative and creative approach to reach the solution. In our view, the solution to these problems is not attained by abstraction, but only by a pertinent interpretation of the context (interpretative heuristic) in the light of the goal, allowing the problem solver to abandon the default representation. We therefore propose that this interpretative heuristic is inherent to all insight problem solving processes and, in more general terms, is an adaptive characteristic of the human cognitive system; this of course implies that the dual process theory will have to be challenged and discussed. (shrink)

A familiar puzzle about self-deception concerns how self-deception is possible in light of the paradoxes generated by a plausible way of defining it. A less familiar puzzle concerns how a certain type of self-deception—being self-deceived about one's own intentional mental state—is possible in light of a plausible way of understanding the nature of self-knowledge. According to this understanding, we ordinarily do not infer our mental states from evidence, but then it's puzzling how this sort of self-deception could occur given that (...) self-deception arises from the mistreatment of evidence. This article argues that to accommodate this kind of self-deception we should accept that sometimes ordinary self-knowledge is inferential, but that this idea needn’t be so unappealing. In particular, by showing that such inferential self-knowledge can be both ‘transparent’ and ‘direct’, the article argues that it need not imply having an abnormal, ‘alienated’ relation to the mental state. (shrink)

Direct perception and theory-theory approaches to social cognition are opposed with respect to whether social cognition is inferential. The latter argues that it is inferential, the former that it is not. This paper argues that the opposition in terms of inference is mistaken. A sense of inference is specified on which social cognition can be inferential and directly perceptual. Arguing for inferential social cognition does not commit to a defense of indirect social cognition if inferential access to other minds can (...) be direct. Contrary convictions are symptomatic of working with too simplistic a notion of inference. The dispute between direct and inferentialist social cognition is one where both sides can be right. The argument, then, is that inferentialism should not be called on to witness in favor or disfavor of advocates of either direct or indirect social cognition. (shrink)

There is good evidence that many people harbour attitudes that conflict with those they endorse. In the language of social psychology, they seem to have implicit attitudes that conflict with their explicit beliefs. There has been a great deal of attention paid to the question whether agents like this are responsible for actions caused by their implicit attitudes, but much less to the question whether they can rightly be described as racist in virtue of harbouring them. In this paper, I (...) attempt to answer this question using three different standards, providing by the three dominant kinds of accounts of racism. I argue that on none of these accounts should agents like this be described as racists. However, it would be misleading to say, without qualification, that they are not racists. On none of these accounts are agents like this entirely off the hook. (shrink)

Addiction is almost universally held to be characterized by a loss of control over drug-seeking and consuming behavior. But the actions of addicts, even of those who seem to want to abstain from drugs, seem to be guided by reasons. In this paper, I argue that we can explain this fact, consistent with continuing to maintain that addiction involves a loss of control, by understanding addiction as involving an oscillation between conflicting judgments. I argue that the dysfunction of the mesolimbic (...) dopamine system that typifies addictions causes the generation of a mismatch between the top-down model of the world that reflects the judgment that the addict ought to refrain from drugs, and bottom-up input caused by cues predictive of drug availability. This constitutes a powerful pressure toward revising the judgment and thereby attenuating the prediction error. But the new model is not stable, and shifts under the pressure of bottom-up inputs in different contexts; hence the oscillation of all-things-considered judgment. Evidence from social psychology is adduced, to suggest that a similar process may be involved in ordinary cases of weakness of will. (shrink)

Moral bioenhancement is the attempt to improve human behavioral dispositions, especially in relation to the great ethical challenges of our age. To this end, scientists have hypothesised new molecules or even permanent changes in the genetic makeup to achieve such moral bioenhancement. The philosophical debate has focused on the permissibility and desirability of that enhancement and the possibility of making it mandatory, given the positive result that would follow. However, there might be another way to enhance the overall moral behavior (...) of us humans, namely that of targeting people with lower propensity to trust and altruism. Based on the theory of attachment, people who have a pattern of insecure attachment are less inclined to prosocial behavior. We know that these people are influenced by negative childhood memories: this negative emotional component may be erased or reduced by the administration of propranolol when the bad memory is reactivated, thereby improving prosocial skills. It could be objected that memory-editing might be a threat for the person’s identity and authenticity. However, if the notion of rigid identity is replaced by that of extended identity, this objection loses validity. If identity is understood as something that changes over time, moral bioenhancement through memory-editing seems indeed legitimate and even desirable. (shrink)

This is a contribution to a book symposium on Joelle Proust’s The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (OUP). While there is much to admire in Proust’s book, the legitimacy of her distinction between “procedural” and “analytic” metacognition can be questioned. Doing so may help us better understand the relevance of animal metacognition studies to human self-knowledge.

Many theorists claim that inner speech is importantly linked to human metacognition (thinking about one's own thinking). However, their proposals all rely upon unworkable conceptions of the content and structure of inner speech episodes. The core problem is that they require inner speech episodes to have both auditory-phonological contents and propositional/semantic content. Difficulties for the views emerge when we look closely at how such contents might be integrated into one or more states or processes. The result is that, if inner (...) speech is especially valuable to metacognition, we do not currently understand why it is. The article concludes with two positive proposals for understanding the content and structure of inner speech episodes, which should serve as constraints on future accounts of the metacognitive value of inner speech. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of inner speech in our mental lives, methods for objectively assessing inner speech capacities remain underdeveloped. The most common means of assessing inner speech is to present participants with tasks requiring them to silently judge whether two words rhyme. We developed a version of this task to assess the inner speech of a population of patients with aphasia and corresponding language production deficits. As expected, patients’ performance on the silent rhyming task was severely impaired relative to controls. (...) More surprisingly, however, patients’ performance on this task did not correlate with their performance on a variety of other standard tests of overt language abilities. In particular, patients who were generally unimpaired in their abilities to overtly name objects during confrontation naming tasks, and who could reliably judge when two words spoken to them rhymed, were still severely impaired (relative to controls) at completing the silent rhyme task. This seems to suggest that inner speech was more severely impaired in these patients than outer speech. However, these results should also cause us to critically reflect on the relation between inner speech and silent rhyme judgments more generally. (shrink)

It is widely held that introspection-based self-ascriptions of mental states are immune to error through misidentification , relative to the first person pronoun. Many have taken such errors to be logically impossible, arguing that the immunity holds as an “absolute” necessity. Here I discuss an actual case of craniopagus twins—twins conjoined at the head and brain—as a means to arguing that such errors are logically possible and, for all we know, nomologically possible. An important feature of the example is that (...) it is one where a person may be said to be introspectively aware of a mental state that occurs outside of her own mind. Implications are discussed for views of the relation between introspection and mental state ownership, and between introspection and epistemic criteria for the “mark of the mental.”. (shrink)

In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...) to abstract away from both perceptual features and common setting associations corresponding to the target image. The normed materials were then used with a population of people with aphasia to assess the relationship of abstract thought to language. While the language-impaired group with aphasia showed lower overall accuracy and longer response times than controls in general, of special note is that their response times were significantly longer as a function of a trial’s degree of abstractness. Further, the aphasia group’s response times in reporting their degree of confidence (a separate, metacognitive measure) were negatively correlated with their language production abilities, with lower language scores predicting longer metacognitive response times. These results provide some support for the hypothesis that language is an important aid to abstract thought and to metacognition about abstract thought. (shrink)

J. G. Fichte held that a form of intersubjectivity—what he called a ‘summons’—is a condition of possibility of self-consciousness. This thesis is widely taken to be one of Fichte’s most influential contributions to the European philosophy of the last two centuries. But what the thesis actually states is far from obvious; and existing interpretations either are poorly supported by the texts or else render the thesis trivial or implausible. I propose a new interpretation, on which Fichte’s claim is that reflective (...) self-consciousness arises in the context of ad hoc efforts to coordinate action. (shrink)

Ernest Sosa’s Judgment and Agency marks an important change from his earlier work in epistemology. While belief was at the center of his earlier approach to epistemological issues, a far more sophisticated mental state, judgment, plays the central role here. This paper examines the significance of this change in focus, and argues that there is reason to favor the earlier belief-centered approach over this new judgment-centered account.

Recently influential “rationalist” views of self-knowledge about our rational attitudes hold that such self-knowledge is essentially connected to rational agency, and therefore has to be particularly reliable, immediate, and distinct from third-personal access. This approach has been challenged by “theory theory” or “interpretationist” views of self-knowledge: on such views, self-knowledge is based on the interpretation of information about ourselves, and this interpretation involves the same mindreading mechanisms that we use to access other persons’ mental states. Interpretationist views are usually dismissed (...) as implausible and unwarranted by advocates of rationalism. In this article, I argue that rationalists should revise their attitude towards interpretationism: they can, and ought to, accept themselves a form of interpretationism. First, I argue that interpretationism is correct at least for a substantive range of cases. These are cases in which we respond to a question ab.. (shrink)

On a widely held view, episodes of inner speech provide at least one way in which we become conscious of our thoughts. However, it can be argued, on the one hand, that consciousness of thoughts in virtue of inner speech presupposes interpretation of the simulated speech. On the other hand, the need for such self-interpretation seems to clash with distinctive first-personal characteristics that we would normally ascribe to consciousness of one’s own thoughts: a special reliability; a lack of conscious ambiguity (...) and incomprehensibility; and a sense of causal agency. I try to resolve this puzzle by proposing an account for the requisite self-interpretation of inner speech in terms of Bayesian probabilistic inference. Drawing on “perceptual loop” accounts of speech control, I argue that such interpretive probabilistic inferences are used for the control of inner speech, and that as a consequence of this function, they are biased toward the correct interpretations. I conclude by showing how this model can explain the first-personal characteristics of consciousness of one’s own thoughts. In the case of the sense of causal agency, the resulting explanation yields novel accounts for “audible thoughts” and thought insertion. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that confabulation is motivated by the desire to have fulfilled a rational obligation to knowledgeably explain our attitudes by reference to motivating reasons. This account better explains confabulation than alternatives. My conclusion impacts two discussions. Primarily, it tells us something about confabulation – how it is brought about, which engenders lively debate in and of itself. A further upshot concerns self-knowledge. Contrary to popular assumption, confabulation cases give us reason to think we have distinctive access to why (...) we have our attitudes. (shrink)

It is widely held that there is an asymmetry between our access to our minds and our access to others’ minds. Philosophers in the literature tend to focus on the asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states of others that are not shared by us. What if a mental state can have multiple subjects? Is there still an asymmetry between our access to our mental states and our access to those mental states (...) of others that are also ours? In this paper, I discuss the implications of a case of shared consciousness—the case of the Hogan twins—for asymmetry. I start by clarifying the notion of asymmetry. Here I develop a characterization of asymmetry and argue that it is preferable to the standard approaches in the literature. I then present the twins’ case and argue that it does not threaten asymmetry. I close by drawing some lessons. (shrink)

Illusionism about phenomenal consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, even though it seems to exist. This thesis is widely judged to be uniquely counterintuitive: the idea that consciousness is an illusion strikes most people as absurd, and seems almost impossible to contemplate in earnest. Defenders of illusionism should be able to explain the apparent absurdity of their own thesis, within their own framework. However, this is no trivial task: arguably, none of the illusionist theories currently on (...) the market is able to do this. I present a new theory of phenomenal introspection and argue that it might deal with the task at hand. (shrink)

On the basis of two thought experiments, I argue that self-building technologies are possible given our current level of technological progress. We could already use technology to make us instantiate selfhood in a more perfect, complete manner. I then examine possible extensions of this thesis, regarding more radical self-building technologies which might become available in a distant future. I also discuss objections and reservations one might have about this view.

This introduction is part of the special issue ‘ Self-knowledge in perspective’ guest edited by Fleur Jongepier and Derek Strijbos. // Papers included in the special issue: Transparency, expression, and self-knowledge Dorit Bar-On -/- Self-knowledge and communication Johannes Roessler -/- First-person privilege, judgment, and avowal Kateryna Samoilova -/- Self-knowledge about attitudes: rationalism meets interpretation Franz Knappik -/- How do you know that you settled a question? Tillmann Vierkant -/- On knowing one’s own resistant beliefs Cristina Borgoni -/- Self-knowledge and imagination (...) Peter Langland-Hassan -/- Transparent emotions? A critical analysis of Moran’s transparency claim Naomi Kloosterboer -/- Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility Victoria McGeer -/- Pluralistic folk psychology and varieties of self-knowledge : an exploration Kristin Andrews -/-. (shrink)

This paper explains what’s wrong with a Hume-inspired argument for skepticism about induction. Hume’s argument takes as a premise that inductive reasoning presupposes that the future will resemble the past. I explain why that claim is not plausible. The most plausible premise in the vicinity is that inductive reasoning from E to H presupposes that if E then H. I formulate and then refute a skeptical argument based on that premise. Central to my response is a psychological explanation for how (...) people judge that if E then H without realizing that they thereby settled the matter rationally. (shrink)

A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a brain in a vat ; but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible (...) epistemologist coming to believe she is not a BIV. I propose she thereby knows that she is not a BIV. The particular belief-forming mechanism employed explains why she overlooks this account of how she knows she is not a BIV, making it seem that there is no way for her to know it. I argue this proposal satisfactorily resolves the skeptical puzzle. (shrink)

This paper argues that mind-reading hypotheses, of any kind, are not needed to best describe or best explain basic acts of social cognition. It considers the two most popular MRHs: one-ToM and two-ToM theories. These MRHs face competition in the form of complementary behaviour reading hypotheses. Following Buckner, it is argued that the best strategy for putting CBRHs out of play is to appeal to theoretical considerations about the psychosemantics of basic acts of social cognition. In particular, need-based accounts that (...) satisfy a teleological criterion have the ability to put CBRHs out of play. Yet, against this backdrop, a new competitor for MRHs is revealed: mind minding hypothesis. MMHs are capable of explaining all the known facts about basic forms of social cognition and they also satisfy the teleological criterion. In conclusion, some objections concerning the theoretical tenability of MMHs are addressed and prospects for further research are canvassed. (shrink)

Many people are attracted to the idea that plants experience phenomenal conscious states like pain, sensory awareness, or emotions like fear. If true, this would have wide-ranging moral implications for human behavior, including land development, farming, vegetarianism, and more. Determining whether plants have minds relies on the work of both empirical disciplines and philosophy. Epistemology should settle the standards for evidence of other minds, and science should inform our judgment about whether any plants meet those standards. We argue that evidence (...) for other minds comes either from testimony, behavior, anatomy/physiology, or phylogeny. However, none of these provide evidence that plants have conscious mental states. Therefore, we conclude that there is no evidence that plants have minds in the sense relevant for morality. (shrink)