Self-Knowledge

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-193
Author(s):  
Mattia Riccardi
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Conception ◽  
Reliable Source ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

This chapter is concerned with Nietzsche’s scepticism about introspective knowledge. More precisely, it is claimed that Nietzsche rejects the traditional conception of introspective self-knowledge as something that is direct and privileged. To the contrary, he argues that self-knowledge is interpretive, for it is obtained by applying to oneself the same folk-psychological framework we apply in order to read the mind of other people. Furthermore, and relatedly, Nietzsche claims that introspective self-knowledge involves a falsification of what we actually think and do. Finally, it is argued that Nietzsche does not conclude from this that self-knowledge is impossible, but rather that third-person psychological and genealogical inquiry about oneself is a more reliable source of self-knowledge than introspection.

Who Do You Think You Are?

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-57
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
What Works ◽  
Special Challenge ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Tools And Methods

This chapter explores self-knowledge, which is critical for solving the practical problems involved in getting through life. An awareness of your own quirks, character, and preferences is important for figuring out what works for you. However, self-knowledge is also tricky because it is especially elusive. People commonly learn about themselves only indirectly; often it is only by reading the reactions of others that people can see how harsh, kind, or annoying they are. It is also because when trying to know the self, the thing the individual is trying to see is the very thing that does the looking. Buddhism offers many evocative images to illustrate this special challenge: Just as a knife cannot cut itself, the mind cannot be directed toward itself. This makes knowing the self, especially in a deep way, an especially difficult task. Knowing the self thus requires special kinds of tools and methods. The chapter then considers the concept of Buddha Nature.

How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality

1993 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Gopnik
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Direct Perception ◽  
First Person ◽  
Psychological States ◽  
Developmental Shift ◽  
Representational Model ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Mind

AbstractAs adults we believe that our knowledge of our own psychological states is substantially different from our knowledge of the psychological states of others: First-person knowledge comes directly from experience, but third-person knowledge involves inference. Developmental evidence suggests otherwise. Many 3-year-old children are consistently wrong in reporting some of their own immediately past psychological states and show similar difficulties reporting the psychological states of others. At about age 4 there is an important developmental shift to a representational model of the mind. This affects children's understanding of their own minds as well as the minds of others. Our sense that our perception of our own minds is direct may be analogous to many cases where expertise provides an illusion of direct perception. These empirical findings have important implications for debates about the foundations of cognitive science.

Multiple constraints and the resolution of Korean null subject anaphor

2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sook Whan Cho ◽  
Hyun Jin Hwangbo
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Processing Load ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Person Features ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Syntactic Cues ◽  
Discourse Topic ◽  
Better Than

This study investigates how Korean adults interpret and identify the referent of a null subject in a narrative text, given different types of topic continuity and person features. We have found that the first-person feature was most accessible in the weak topicality condition in resolving the null subjects, and that the target sentences ending with the first-person modal suffix ‘-lay’ were read and responded to faster, and interpreted more correctly than other types of stimuli involving a third-person modal (‘-tay’) and a person-neutral modal (‘-e’). Furthermore, of the two first-person-specific featured types, the null subjects in the topically weak contexts were processed significantly better than those in the topically strong conditions. It was argued that anaphoric dependency would be formed more discursively than morpho-syntactically in the strong discourse continuity contexts involving no extra processing load due to the shift among multiple eligible candidates. It was also argued that, in the absence of discourse topic assigned strongly to more than one eligible referent in advance, morpho-syntactic cues involved in verb modality are likely to become prominent in the mind of the processor. It is concluded that these main findings support a constraint-based approach, but not the Centering-inspired work.

scholarly journals Gregory Skovoroda’s Philosophy of Education: the Difference of a Modern Vision

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Gomilko
Keyword(s):  
Research University ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Philosophy Of Education ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Modern Vision ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
The Mind

The article is devoted to the analysis of the modern character of the Gregory Skovoroda’s philosophy of education. Unlike his contemporaries, he focuses on connections of philosophy and moral virtue. This position contradicts the tendency of a modern institutionalization of philosophy in the way of one more discipline of the modern research university. However, Skovoroda’s critical position does not put into question the modern content of his philosophy. On the contrary, Skovoroda’s understanding of philosophy reveals the salvific ways of its cognitive and practical rehabilitation. It is because his philosophy teaches people to be wise not only the university campus but in all spheres of their own lives. That is why he speaks not just of philosophy, but of the “philosophy of the heart”. Contrary to Christian thought, he believes that human’s transformation is possible not through faith and suffering, but through the discovery a “new body” on the ground of self-knowledge and love for oneself. Unlike the modern classical philosophy, Skovoroda considers self-knowledge, not as a function of mind alone, and the heart as a dichotomy to the mind. In accordance with contemporary educational theories based on the idea of anthropotechnical turn in philosophy, Skovoroda deems the heart an instrument for enhancing the mind. Involving the heart into the sphere of rational increases the thinking of knowledge about the specific situation of its embodiment and the cognitive capabilities of its carrier. According to Skovoroda, an important consequence of such human transformations should be the overcoming of fear and hatred of the “other”.

scholarly journals The holobiont mind: A bridge between 4E-cognition and the microbiome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ismael Palacios-Garcia ◽  
Francisco J. Parada
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Gut Microbiome ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Traditional Conception ◽  
4E Cognition ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
The Mind

All life on earth is intrinsically linked. At the very foundation of everyevolutionary interaction are microorganisms; integral components in thecomposition of both organisms and ecosystems. This perspectivechallenges the traditional conception of monogenetic biologicalindividuals, suggesting living beings are actually composite multi-speciescomplexes; holobionts. In the present article, we introduce the conceptof the holobiont mind; a biogenic conception of cognition. Wefurthermore expand on the idea of the mind as the emerging product ofmulti-genomic morphology of a composite agent, in ever changinginteraction with its ecological niche. We briefly review recent evidence onthe Brain-Gut-Microbiome axis and the Microbiome of the BuiltEnvironment in order to provide a bridge between the Holobiont Mindand the 4E approach to Cognition, two complementary lines of evidencethat have not been linked before, opening novel venues for research withdirect impact on health and disease.

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).

Selbstwissen: Die Grundidee

2015 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Moran
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
First Person ◽  
Object A ◽  
The Third ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
First Person Perspective ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Third Person

AbstractIn philosophy it is widely recognized that a person’s first-person perspective on his own thought and action is importantly different from the third-person perspective we may have on the thought and actions of other people. In daily life it is natural to ask someone what he is doing or what he thinks about something, on the assumption that he knows what he is doing or what he is thinking. Some philosophers, however, argue that it is impossible to speak of knowledge in this context because the idea of knowledge requires a kind of distance between subject and object, a distance that is not present in the first-person context. I argue that this denial of self-knowledge is a paradoxical conclusion that we can resist, while retaining what is distinctive about the first-person.

In the Ruins of Self-Knowledge

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garry L. Hagberg
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Psychology ◽  
Final Point ◽  
Philosophical Significance ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Mind

Oedipus Tyrannus is an exacting study in philosophical psychology, portraying a mind that oscillates between competing conceptions of the sources of knowledge, between layered self-deception and moments of self-knowledge, and between competing self-narratives or self-descriptions. This essay explores the philosophical significance of this play by examining these inner tensions as they manifest in thought, word, and deed. This significance is described in terms of a self gradually becoming able to imagine itself and to describe itself in ways initially believed to be the imagining and describing of an unknown other, where a kind of “spectral presence” by steps becomes ever closer to the mind of Oedipus. This culminates at the final point where that imagined presence comes to correspond identically and tragically with the uncovered self that is the true Oedipus.

Personal Identity and the Idea of a Human Being

1991 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 127-142
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Madell
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Personal Approach ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The One ◽  
The Mind

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. By contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind.

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