A Constructivist Picture of Self-Knowledge

Philosophy ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 71 (277) ◽  
pp. 405-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Tanney
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Good Reason ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
First Person ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

How are we to account for the authority granted to first-person reports of mental states? What accounts for the immediacy of these self-ascriptions; the fact that they can be ascribed without appeal to evidence and without the need for justification? A traditional, Cartesian conception of the mind, which says that our thoughts are presented to us directly, completely, and without distortion upon mere internal inspection, would account for these facts, but there is good reason to doubt the cogency of the Cartesian view. Wittgenstein, in his later writings, offered some of the most potent considerations against the traditional view, and contemporary philosophy of mind is practically unanimous in rejecting some of the metaphysical aspects of Cartesianism. But anyone who repudiates Cartesianism shoulders the burden of finding another way to accommodate its apparent epistemological strengths.

Transparency and Self-Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
First Person ◽  
Unified Theory ◽  
Gareth Evans ◽  
Weak Evidence ◽  
The World ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Emotion Memory

T&SK sets out and defends a theory of self-knowledge—knowledge of one’s mental states. Inspired by Gareth Evans’ discussion of self-knowledge in his The Varieties of Reference, the basic idea is that one comes to know that one is in a mental state M by an inference from a worldly or environmental premise to the conclusion that one is in M. (Typically the worldly premise will not be about anything mental.) The mind, on this account, is “transparent”: self-knowledge is achieved by an “outward glance” at the corresponding tract of the world, not by an “inward glance” at one’s own mind. Belief is the clearest case, with the inference being from ‘p’ to ‘I believe that p.’ One serious problem with this idea is that the inference seems terrible, because ‘p’ is at best very weak evidence that one believes that p. Another is that the idea seems not to generalize. For example, what is the worldly premise corresponding to ‘I intend to ϕ‎,’ or ‘I feel a pain’? T&SK argues that both problems can be solved, and explains how the account covers perception, sensation, desire, intention, emotion, memory, imagination, and thought. The result is a unified theory of self-knowledge that explains the epistemic security of beliefs about one’s mental states (privileged access), as well as the fact that one has a special first-person way of knowing about one’s mental states (peculiar access).

Mental Substances

2003 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Tim Crane
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Semantic Externalism ◽  
Mental Processes ◽  
Independent Entity ◽  
Mental Properties ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Events

Philosophers of mind typically conduct their discussions in terms of mental events, mental processes, mental properties, mental states—but rarely in terms of minds themselves. Sometimes this neglect is explicity acknowledged. Donald Davidson, for example, writes that ‘there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties, which is to say that certain psychological predicates are true of them. These properties are constantly changing, and such changes are mental events’. Hilary Putnam agrees, though for somewhat different reasons:The view I have long defended is that the mind is not a thing, talk of our minds is talk of World-involving capabilities that we have and activities that we engage in. As Dewey succinctly put it, ‘Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously and expressly with the situation in which we find ourseleves. Unfortunately, an influential manner of thinking has changed modes of action into an underlying substance that performs the activities in question. It has treated mind as an independent entity which attends, purposes, cares and remembers’. But the traditional view, by treating mental states as states of the ‘underlying substance’, makes them properties of something ‘inside’, and, if one is a materialist philosopher, that means properties of our brains. So the next problem naturally seems to be: ‘Which neurological properties of our brains do these mental properties “reduce” to?’ For how could our brains have properties that aren't neurological? And this is how materialist philosphers saw the problem until the advent of such new alternatives in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language as Functionalism and Semantic Externalism.

Self-knowledge, Normativity, and Construction

2002 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 37-55
Author(s):  
Julia Tanney
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The State ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
The Status ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
David Wiggins ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Realist View

He tried to look into her face, to find out what she thought, but she was smelling the lilac and the lilies of the valley and did not know herself what she was thinking—what she ought to say or do.OblomovMuch of modern and contemporary philosophy of mind in the ‘analytic’ tradition has presupposed, since Descartes, what might be called a realist view about the mind and the mental. According to this view there are independently existing, determinate items (states, events, dispositions or relations) that are the truth-conferrers of our ascriptions of mental predicates. The view is also a cognitivist one insofar as it holds that when we correctly ascribe such a predicate to an individual the correctness consists in the discovery of a determinate fact of the matter about the state the individual is in—a state which is somehow cognized by the ascriber. Disputes have arisen about the nature of the truth-conferrers (e.g., whether they are physical or not) and about the status and the nature of the individual's own authority about the state he is in. A dissenting position in philosophy of mind would have to be handled carefully. It would, most importantly, need to allow for the objectivity of ascriptions of mental predicates at least insofar as it made sense to reject some and accept others on appropriate grounds. Perhaps such a position in the philosophy of mind can be likened in at least one way to what David Wiggins has characterized as a doctrine of ‘cognitive underdetermination’ about moral or practical judgments.

Materialism in the philosophy of mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Main Difficulty ◽  
Ordinary Sense ◽  
Causal Dependence ◽  
Physical Relation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Mind

Materialism – which, for almost all purposes, is the same as physicalism – is the theory that everything that exists is material. Natural science shows that most things are intelligible in material terms, but mind presents problems in at least two ways. The first is consciousness, as found in the ‘raw feel’ of subjective experience. The second is the intentionality of thought, which is the property of being about something beyond itself; ‘aboutness’ seems not to be a physical relation in the ordinary sense. There have been three ways of approaching these problems. The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no ‘raw feels’, no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false. Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour. Finally, the materialist may accept the reality and irreducibility of mind, but claim that it depends on matter in such an intimate way – more intimate than mere causal dependence – that materialism is not threatened by the irreducibility of mind. The first two approaches can be called ‘hard materialism’, the third ‘soft materialism’. The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation. Reductionism’s main difficulty is that there seems to be more to consciousness than its contribution to behaviour: a robotic machine could behave as we do without thinking or feeling. The soft materialist has to explain supervenience in a way that makes the mind not epiphenomenal without falling into the problems of interactionism.

Complexity is a cue to the mind

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-586
Author(s):  
George Kampis
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Dynamical Behavior ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Target Article ◽  
The Mind

The relevance of chaotic itinerancy and other types of exotic dynamical behavior described by Tsuda (2001) certainly goes beyond the scope of his target article. These concepts of dynamics may offer a general framework for the understanding of complexity, which could help to restructure the analysis and conceptualization of mental states in novel ways, providing insights for the philosophy of mind.

Metaphysics of Mind

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darragh Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Mental States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intrinsic Properties ◽  
Psychological Phenomena ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Physical Phenomena ◽  
Metaphysics Of Mind

Philosophy of mind addresses fundamental questions about mental or psychological phenomena. The question held by many to be most fundamental of all is a metaphysical one, often labeled the “mind-body problem,” which concerns the relation between minds and material or physical phenomena. Physicalists (and/or materialists) contend that mental phenomena are physical, or at least that they may be accounted for in terms of physical phenomena (brains, for example). Dualists deny this, maintaining that mental phenomena have fundamentally nonphysical natures, so that to account for minds we must assume the existence of nonphysical substances or properties. Nowadays physicalism is more widely espoused than dualism, but physicalists differ over which physical states/properties should be considered relevant, and over the precise nature of the relation between physical and mental phenomena. This is one of four bibliography entries on the philosophy of mind, and this particular entry concentrates on this metaphysical issue of the relation between mental and physical/material phenomena. Inevitably, there is a good deal of overlap between this and topics covered in the other three entries. For example, this entry includes authors who attack physicalism by arguing that it cannot account for the distinctive phenomenal qualities of conscious experiences; but that line of antiphysicalist argument features even more prominently in the entry on consciousness. Moreover, the other entries feature various issues that might perfectly properly be categorized as concerning the metaphysics of mind: for example, the debate between internalists—philosophers who hold that propositional attitudes (mental states such as beliefs and desires, which have representational contents) are intrinsic properties of minds/brains—and externalists, who think of certain attitudes as extrinsic or relational, is surely a question about the metaphysics of mind: but this is discussed in the entry on intentionality instead of here.

Beckett and the Cognitive Method

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Bernini
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Scientific Debate ◽  
Modeling Technology ◽  
Dialogic Interaction ◽  
The Mind

How can literature enhance, parallel or reassess the scientific study of the mind? Or is literature instead limited to the ancillary role of representing cognitive processes? Beckett and the Cognitive Method argues that Beckett’s narrative work, rather than just expressing or rendering cognition and mental states, inaugurates an exploratory use of narrative as an introspective modeling technology (defined as “introspection by simulation”). Through a detailed analysis of Beckett’s entire corpus and published volumes of letters, the book argues that Beckett pioneered a new method of writing to construct (in a mode analogous to scientific inquiry) “models” for the exploration of core laws, processes, and dynamics in the human mind. Marco Bernini integrates models, problems, and interpretive frameworks from contemporary narrative theory, cognitive sciences, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind to make a case for Beckett’s modeling practice of a vast array of processes including: the (narrative) illusion of a sense of self, the hallucinatory quality of inner speech, the dialogic interaction with memories and felt presences, the synesthetic nature of inner experience and mental imagery, the developmental cooperation of language and locomotion, the role of moods and emotions as cognitive drives, the layered complexity of the mind, and the emergent quality of consciousness. Beckett and the Cognitive Method also reflects on how Beckett’s “fictional cognitive models” are transformed into reading, auditory, or spectatorial experiences generating through narrative devices insights on which the sciences can only discursively or descriptively report. As such, the study advocates for their relevance to the contemporary scientific debate toward an interdisciplinary co-modeling of cognition.

The Limits of Self-Knowledge

1974 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Audi
Keyword(s):  
Mental States ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
General View ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

Hume maintained that “since all actions and sensations of the mind are known to us by consciousness, they must necessarily appear in every particular what they are, and be what they appear.” Descartes maintained a very similar doctrine, and Locke and Berkeley held at least part of the doctrine. I shall not try to set out precisely what any of these philosophers thought about self-knowledge; I cite them simply as proponents of the general view which I shall be examining in this paper: namely, that each of us has a special epistemic authority about his own mental life. This view is still widely held, particularly in the form of the thesis that one's sincere avowals of current mental states are incorrigible, i.e., such that, necessarily, no one ever has overriding reason to think them false.

scholarly journals Mente, consciencia y cuerpo en la obra de Friedrich Nietzsche / Mind, Consciousness and the Body in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Opus

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-82
Author(s):  
Mario Colon
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Causal Determinism ◽  
German Philosopher ◽  
The Mind

ABSTRACTThe study of consciousness possess considerable relevance in contemporary philosophy of mind. However, the “scientistic” approach that dominates the aforementioned discipline, although of undisputed usefulness, contributes to the rejection of other approaches whose explanatory value has proven to be illuminating in the study of mind, consciousness and the body. One of these approaches can be found in the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The causal determinism of the mind-body relation proposed by the german philosopher has been posited through similar proposals for renowned neuroscientists and philosophers. Nevertheless, the historical and theoretical importance of Nietzsche’s contributions hasn’t been recognized as such. The purpose of this article is to show the subtleties of the causal determination in the mind-body relation and its implications in the actual discussions about the nature of consciousness.RESUMENEl estudio de la conciencia es de considerable relevancia en la filosofía de la mente contemporánea. Sin embargo, el enfoque “cientificista” imperante en esta disciplina, aunque de indiscutible utilidad, ha contribuido al rechazo de perspectivas cuyo valor explicativo resulta revelador en la investigación sobre la mente, la consciencia y el cuerpo. Una de estas perspectivas la podemos encontrar en la obra filosófica de Friedrich Nietzsche. El determinismo causal de la relación mente-cuerpo que propuso el filósofo alemán ha sido defendido por medio de propuestas similares de neurocientíficos y filósofos de probada pericia. No obstante, la relevancia de la aportación nietzscheana no ha sido reconocida en su importancia histórica y teórica. El propósito de este artículo es señalar las particularidades sobre la determinación causal de la relación mente/cuerpo y sus implicaciones en los debates actuales sobre la naturaleza de la consciencia.

scholarly journals Psychopathology and the Enactive Mind

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giovanna Colombetti
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Specific Structure ◽  
Enactive Approach ◽  
The Mind ◽  
In Virtue Of

According to the "enactive" approach in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, mental states are neither identical with, nor reducible to, brain activity. Rather, the mind is enacted or brought forth by the whole situated living organism in virtue of its specific structure and organization. Although increasingly influential in cognitive science, the enactive approach has had little to do with psychopathology so far. This chapter first outlines this approach in some detail, and then illustrates its conceptual and methodological connections to psychopathology. It also provides some indications on how to develop a more explicitly "enactive psychopathology."

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