Basic self-knowledge: Answering Peacocke's criticisms of constitutivism

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 128, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 337-379

  Zimmerman, Aaron Zachary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 33746161941     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-004-7797-y     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. To claim that the fact that S believes that p is S's reason for believing that she believes that p is not to claim that S (question-beggingly) infers that she believes that p from the premise that she believes that p. The claim is that facts about one's first-order mental states can provide non-inferential reasons for one's introspective beliefs. This will be made clear in what follows.
2. Being Known, Oxford: Clarendon (1999), p. 232; cf.
3. Paul Boghossian, "Content and Self-Knowledge", Philosophical Topics, 17 (1989), pp. 5-26, at p. 5
4. , and Crispin Wright, "Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy and Intention", Journal of Philosophy, 76 (1989a), pp. 622-634, at p. 631.
5. Colin McGinn is an important exception; see his Wittgenstein on Meaning, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1984). But though McGinn notes the possibility of basic self-knowledge of beliefs, he does not explain the view or defend it against objections. Roderick Chisholm also claims that the fact that S believes that p can justify S in "counting it as evident" that he believes that p, and states further that beliefs (and all the other prepositional attitudes) are "self-presenting";
6. see his Theory of Knowledge, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall (1966), pp. 27-30.
7. In later work, however, Chisholm advocates a view according to which we gain introspective knowledge of our beliefs by observing the self that has them; see his "On the Observability of the Self", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 (1969), pp. 7-21.
8. I will explain what conditional or relative infallibility is below. It will suffice here to note that a constitutivist will want to allow for cases in which a subject adopts a false justified belief about what she believes on the basis of the testimony of a third-party (e.g. a therapist).
9. See The Concept of Mind, New York: Harper and Row (1949), pp. 169&179. Here Ryle writes of our knowledge of our character and personality traits and our knowledge of what we are doing. It is never clear exactly what he thinks about our knowledge of our own beliefs, desires, sensations, and perceptual experiences.
10. There are, however, some who are willing to accept self-directed skepticism. See, e.g., Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon S. Roudiez trans., New York; Columbia UP (1991).
11. Alison Gopnik, in "How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16 (1993), pp. 1-14, argues that our access to our intentional states is inferential, but she waivers over whether the premises of these inferences concern other mental states - e.g. sensations - or behavior. The second (behaviorist) view is a non-starter. I don't need to see what I do to know what I believe, rather I have prior knowledge of what I believe that I can use in deciding what to do. The first sort of inferentialist view will be discussed in what follows.
12. See Donald Davidson, "Knowing One's Own Mind", Proceedings and Addresses of the APA, 60, (1987), pp. 287-310;
13. Fred Dretske, "Introspection", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 94 (1994), pp. 263-278;
14. and John Heil, "Privileged Access", Mind 97 (1988), pp. 238-251. For an attempt to sever the connection between incompatibilism and inner sense
15. see Sven Bernecker, "Davidson on First-Person Authority and Externalism", Inquiry, 39 (1996), pp. 121-139.
16. See Shoemaker, "Self-Knowledge and 'Inner-Sense"', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIV (1994), pp. 249-314,
17. reprinted in his The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays, Cambridge: UP (1996).
18. The notion of a brute error can be found in Tyler Burge's, "Individualism and Self-Knowledge", in Self-Knowledge, ed. Quassim Cassam, Oxford: UP (1994), pp. 65-80.
19. As far as I can tell, Shoemaker was the first to point to the logical impossibility of holding a true belief in a Moore paradoxical proposition. See the amended version of his, "Moore's Paradox and Self-Knowledge", Philosophical Studies, 77 (1995), pp. 211-228, which appears in Shoemaker (1996), pp 74-93.
20. Varieties of Reference, John McDowell (ed.), Oxford: UP (1982), pp. 225-226.
21. See Saul Kripke's weak disquotational principle which states, "If a normal English speaker, on reflection, sincerely assents to 'p' then he believes that p", in "A Puzzle About Belief", in The Philosophy of Language, 3rd Edition, A. P. Martinich (ed.), Oxford: UP (1996), pp. 382-410, at p. 388,
22. reprinted from Meaning and Use, A. Margalit (ed.), Dordrecht: D. Reidel (1979), pp. 239-283.
23. See Crispin Wright, "On Making Up One's Mind: Wittgenstein on Intention", in Logic, Philosophy of Science and Epistemology, Proceedings of the XIth International Wittgenstein Symposium, P. Weingartner and G. Schurz, eds., Vienna: Holder-Pickler Tempsky (1987), pp. 391-404,
24. "Wittgenstein's Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics", in Alexander George, (ed.), Reflections on Chomsky, New York: Blackwell (1989b), and (1989a), p. 632.
25. Though the quotation only mentions intentions, the question is directed at our knowledge of intentional states generally. See Crispin Wright, "Critical Study of Colin McGinn's Wittgenstein on Meaning", in Mind, XCVIII (1989c), pp. 289-305, at p. 293.
26. There actually is a way that avowals could be reliable and groundless without guaranteeing their own truth: pure reliabilism. One might say that as a matter of psychological fact, first-order beliefs reliably cause both avowals of belief and the appropriate range of behaviors, but that the presence of this mechanism does not provide a reason or epistemic ground for one's second-order introspective beliefs. The mechanism might be compared to a hypnotist (or evil-scientist) who causes one to have a true belief that is unsupported by reason. (Of course, after the mechanism has operated for some time, a subject will have inductive grounds for thinking that her self-ascriptions of belief are reliable, but this is surely not how Wittgenstein pictured things.) I think that Wittgenstein doesn't seriously entertain this view because of his scorn for psychological explanations that posit an "underlying mechanism", but I cannot defend that interpretation here. I will, though, address pure reliabilism in what follows.
27. "Asked what constitutes the truth of rule-informed judgment of the kind we isolated, the official Wittgensteinian will reply: 'Bad question, leading to bad philosophy-platonism, for instance, or Kripkean skepticism,'" Wright, (1989b, p. 257).
28. Shoemaker introduces the distinction between core and total realizations in, "Absent Qualia are Impossible: A Reply to Block", Philosophical Review, 90 (1981), pp. 581-599.
29. This is, at least in part, an empirical matter. Perhaps if we were to discover that pain is realized to a large degree in neural activity which is in some physical sense "distinct" from that neural activity that encodes belief, this would count as a falsification of the hypothesis that pain and the belief that one is in pain share the same core realization.
30. On the "partial identity" of wholes with their parts see D. M. Armstrong, Universals and Scientific Realism, vol. II, Cambridge: UP (1978), pp. 37-38; and
31. David Lewis, Parts of Classes, Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1991), pp. 81-88.
32. See, e.g., Peter Unger "An Analysis of Factual Knowledge", Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968), pp. 163-164;
33. Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, London: Routledge (1998), pp. 229-230; and
34. A.J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan (1956), pp. 31-32, though Ayer's view of the situation is subsequently hedged with the suggestion that the rule for applying 'know' may not be clear in this case.
35. For the claim that the psychic would not be justified see Laurence Bonjour, "Externalist Theories of Knowledge", in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr. and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5, Minneapolis: UP (1980);
36. and John Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Totawa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield (1986).
37. Both Audi (1998) and Unger (1968) have this reaction.
38. Surely, one might say, there is a fourth option; for there is a reason for S to believe what she does, namely, the fact that she is an infallible psychic. I agree that this is a reason for S to believe what she does, but I insist that S does not have (or grasp) this reason, and because S does not have this existing reason it cannot ground her particular belief. This is why it is not rational for S to form her premonitory belief. I agree with Peacocke's internalist intuitions to this extent: for one to have or grasp a reason, that reason must be accessible to one (in a sense to be explicated below).
39. To see that Accessibilism is not equivalent to pure reliabilism, note that according to Accessibilism S's premonitory belief is not justified. On plausible assumptions about the structure of reasons, the reasons that prohibit S from believing that E.D. will be deposed on the 25th of October are not defeated by the fact that it has occurred to her that he will then lose office (and, ex hypothesi, nothing else accessible to S bears on the truth of the relevant proposition or has any affect on her belief in its truth).
40. Alternatively, if Peacocke and the constitutivist were to agree that there is a sense of "directly" in which the only sorts of facts that are directly accessible are facts concerning a subject's conscious experience, their conflict would concern whether reasons must be directly accessible to a subject to ground or justify her beliefs. As "directly accessible" is a term of art, neither formulation is clearly superior.
41. The use of "what it is like" in philosophical discussions of subjectivity goes back to Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in Mortal Questions, Cambridge: UP, pp. 165-81. For Peacocke's account of conscious, occurrent attitudes see his (1999, pp. 205-214).
42. I will use "judgment", "occurrent judgment", or "conscious, occurrent judgment" to denote the states of mind in question rather than "conscious belief" or "occurrent belief'', both because of the linguistic oddity of using "belief" to mark an event or action (as with, "He is right now believing that p",) and because "conscious belief" is often used just to denote a belief one knows that one has (and Peacocke wants to allow for introspective knowledge of non-occurrent attitudes).
43. "On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness", in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, N. Block, O. Flanagan and G. Guzeldere (eds.), Cambridge, MA: Bradford, MIT Press (1997), pp. 375-415.
44. On access consciousness see too Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1983).
45. Owen Flanagan suggests this description of blindsight in Consciousness Reconsidered, Cambridge, MA: Bradford, MIT Press (1992). Block thinks this notion of access consciousness too liberal, but admits, "the notion of consciousness that I have framed is just one of a family of access notions" (1997, p. 388).
46. Talk About Beliefs, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (1992), pp. 72-73.
47. But see (1999, p. 215) for some textual support.
48. Peacocke also wants to say that the mechanisms that instantiate first-order beliefs are not wholly distinct from those that realize second-order beliefs (1999, p. 224), and he wants to endorse (or at least be able to endorse) Shoemaker's claim that second-order introspective belief possession supervenes on first-order belief possession plus normal intelligence, rationality and concept possession (1999, p. 233). So the passage at hand cannot be read as objecting to constitutivism on the grounds that a reason (or state of reason-possession) must be entirely distinct from the state of belief it grounds.
49. "Internalism Exposed", The Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999), pp. 271-293, at p. 278.
50. Alvin Plantinga tentatively endorses such a category when he writes "perhaps what we should say is not that there is an experience of forming or holding the belief in question, but rather a phenomenal accompaniment of forming or having the belief in question", Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford: UP (1993), p. 92. Eric Lormand's approval is, however, unequivocal: "There is nothing conscious attitudes themselves are like, although there is often something [that] accompanying states are like . . . perceptual experiences, bodily-sensational experiences, imaginative experiences, and experiences in the stream of thought",
51. "Inner Sense Until Proven Guilty", at http:/www-personal.umich. edu/~lormand/phil/cons/inner_sense.htm, (August, 1983), pp. 1-39, quote on p. 12.
52. See too A. Goldman, "The Psychology of Folk Psychology", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16 (1993), pp. 15-28.
53. One could hold that we have direct, non-perceptual knowledge of our phenomenal states and that we use this knowledge to gain inferential access to our beliefs. This is not Lormand's view as he is anxious to defend an inner sense model of our introspective access to our sensations and experiences, but it might be Peacocke's. I'll discuss this further in what follows.
54. See A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), 2nd Edition, P. H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: UP (1888, 1978), esp. pp. 84-86 and 94-98.
55. There is room for a disjunctive view here. It might be that our true, justified second-order introspective beliefs are grounded in one sort of state: judgments, while our false, justified second-order introspective beliefs are grounded in another: seeming-judgments. But this view if not only forced to answer the criticisms that have been raised against disjunctivist views of perceptual justification (criticisms I will discuss below) it also requires a partial adoption of either a perceptual or inferentialist model of introspection. The seeming-judgments on which the disjunctivist says our false, justified introspective beliefs are based must be thought of as either misleading introspective appearances or inconclusive inferential grounds. Disjunctivism will not help Peacocke escape the spurious trilemma.
56. Perhaps the occurrence of an experience with a certain phenomenal character is not sufficient for the existence of a sensation that typically has that phenomenal character (though I think this implausible). But even if, e.g., a subject could have an experience with the phenomenal character of pain without experiencing pain, this would not help Peacocke, for it would further assimilate sensations to non-occurrent beliefs and so suggest that either both sensations and non-occurrent beliefs can provide direct or non-inferential grounds for introspective beliefs or that neither can.
57. Disjunctivism is discussed by J. M. Hinton, Experiences, Oxford: Clarendon Press (1973);
58. P. Snowdown, "The Objects of Perceptual Experience", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 64, (1990), pp. 121-150;
59. and W. Child, "Vision and Experience: The Causal Theory and the Disjunctive Conception", The Philosophical Quarterly, 42, (1992), pp. 297-316.
60. John McDowell, Mind and World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP (1994) can plausibly be interpreted as defending a version of disjunctivism,
61. as can Bill Brewer, "Foundations of Perceptual Knowledge", American Philosophical Quarterly, (1997), pp. 41-56; esp. p. 51.
62. Scott Sturgeon argues against a "quietist" version of disjunctivism in "Visual Experience", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XCVIII, (1998), pp. 179-200.
63. A disjunctivist can point to "wide" functional differences between hallucinating and veridically perceiving subjects. For example, the veridically perceiving subject will be disposed to grab a glass of water when she is thirsty, and the hallucinating subject won't have that disposition (though she will be disposed to reach for a glass). I won't weigh in on whether this supplies the raw materials for a satisfactory vindication of perceptual disjunctivism, as my aim here is not to argue for or against a disjunctivist account of perceptual justification, but to argue for a disjunctivist account of introspection.
64. I would like to thank C. Anthony Anderson, Anthony Brueckner, David Chalmers, Emily Esch, Kevin Falvey, Matthew Hanser, Benj Hellie, Terence Irwin, Brendan Jackson, Keith McPartland, Christopher Peacocke, Susanna Siegel, Zoltán Gendler Szabo, and Jennifer Whiting for helpful discussions. Carl Ginet, Delia Graff, and Sydney Shoemaker deserve special thanks for written comments and extensive discussion.