Peacocke's self-knowledge

Ratio

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 13-27

  Coliva, Annalisa ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA   (Italy)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 51249126726     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2007.00381.x     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Christopher Peacocke, Being Known (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 231
2. See Crispin Wright, 'Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy and Intentions', Journal of Philosophy, LXXVI (1989), pp. 622-34 (p. 631 in particular)
3. Paul Boghossian, 'Content and Self-knowledge', Philosophical Topics, XVII (1989), pp. 5-26 (pp. 5, 17 in particular)
4. The traditional forms of observationalism and inferentialism can be traced back to Descartes and Ryle respectively. Recent supporters of the observational model and of the inferential one, however, are David Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968)
5. - author of a reliabilist version of the former - and Alison Gopnik, 'How We Know Our Minds: the Illusion of First-person Knowledge of Intentionality', Brain and Behavioural Science, XVI (1983), pp. 1-14
6. - author of a refined version of the latter. For a criticism of these models and their developments see, for example, Sydney Shoemaker, The First Person Perspective and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) especially at pp. 201-23
7. Crispin Wright, 'Self-knowledge: the Wittgensteinian Legacy', in Crispin Wright, Cynthia Macdonald and Barry Smith (eds.), Knowing Our Own Minds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 13-45
8. Dorit Bar-On, Speaking My Mind. Expression and Self-Knowledge (Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Chs. 2, 4
9. and Akeel Bilgrami, Self-Knowledge and Resentment (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006), Ch. 1
10. Among those broadly in agreement with Wright, beside the already mentioned Shoemaker and Bilgrami, see also Jane Heal, 'On First-person Authority', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, CII (2001), pp. 1-19
11. and Julia Tanney, 'A Constructivist Picture of Self-knowledge', Philosophy, LXXI (1994), pp. 405-22
12. See Peacocke, Being Known, Chs. 5 (and 6)
13. Richard Moran, Authority and Estrangement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 12-27
14. Bar-On, Speaking My Mind, Ch. 9
15. Lucy O'Brien, 'Self-knowledge, Agency and Force', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXXI, (2005), pp. 580-601
16. The label is mine but in keeping with Peacocke's recent pronouncement of being interested in defending a new form of rationalism (see his 'Three Principles of Rationalism', European Journal of Philosophy, X (2002), pp. 375-397
17. Laurence Bonjour, 'A Version of Internalist Foundationalism', in Laurence Bonjour and Ernest Sosa, Epistemic Justification. Internalism vs. Externalism, Foundations vs. Virtues (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 61-8
18. Bonjour, 'A Version of Internalist Foundationalism', p. 62: [Awareness of the kind and content of one's own occurrent mental state is] not in any way apperceptive or reflective in character: [it does] not require or involve a distinct second-order mental act with the propositional content that I have the belief in question. Instead, [it is] partly constitutive of the first-level state of occurrent belief (. . .)
19. This point has been vigorously maintained, for instance, by John McDowell in his Mind and World (Cambridge (Mass.)-London: Harvard University Press, 1994)
20. and by Bill Brewer in his Perception and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
21. For opposite views, see, for instance, James Pryor, 'There Is Immediate Justification', in Matthias Steup and Ernest Sosa (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 181-202
22. At p. 216 of his Being Known Peacocke writes: In cases of consciously based self-ascription of attitudes and experiences, a thinker [. . .] makes a transition not only from the content of some initial state, but also makes it because the initial state is of a certain kind (. . .). In the case of consciously based self-ascription, the distinction between those events which are occurrent attitudes of the right kind to sustain the resulting judgement and those which are not is a distinction which is conceptualised by the thinker. All this clearly implies that the relevant transitions are made on the basis of how the first-order mental states are represented to the subject and not just on the basis of their phenomenology and this seems to ensure their rationality from the subject's own point of view. So, although, as Jim Pryor has brought to my attention, Peacocke (in his 'Does Perception Have a Nonconceptual Content?', Journal of Philosophy, XCVIII (2001), pp. 239-64, pp. 254-5 in particular) maintains that sensations - devoid of any representational content - can immediately justify one's corresponding self-ascriptions, he does not seem to be inclined to offer an analogous account of intentional mental states and of their self-ascriptions
23. Furthermore, for reasons of internal coherence with his earlier work, I think Peacocke should acknowledge that only representational contents - let them be psychological or otherwise - can serve as rationalisers of judgements and, in particular, of self-ascriptions of intentional mental states. Indeed it is only on such an assumption that one can understand why, instead of defending the so-called 'Myth of the Given' against McDowell's attacks, he elaborated a notion of nonconceptual, yet fully representational content for experiences (see Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Boston (Mass.): MIT Press, 1992), Ch. 3)
24. Indeed I think that it is totally unclear how proponents of such a view could solve the problem just mentioned and known as the 'arbitrariness problem' (see Pryor, 'There Is Immediate Justification', pp. 192-193). For instance, Pryor's own attempt to solve it by appealing to a notion of mental events which are themselves logically structured is dubious both from a metaphysical point of view, as Achille Varzi has remarked to me, and from an epistemological one. For an internalist needs a justifier that is given to the subject and which can play a rationalising role for his self-ascription from his own point of view. The fact that an event might be, unbeknownst to him, logically structured and suited, in principle, to rationalise the transition from its occurrence to its self-ascription, is of no use to the development of a sound internalist epistemology of psychological self-ascriptions
25. Christopher Peacocke, The Realm of Reason
26. But I need to emphasise that Peacocke in The Realm of Reason does not explicitly consider the case of self-knowledge. Rather, I am freely extending views he develops with respect to the relation between perceptual experiences and empirical beliefs to the case of transitions from first-order mental states to second-order ones. He might refuse the extension. However, in a more recent paper (' "Another I": Representing Conscious States, Perception and Others', in José Luis Bermúdez (ed.), Thought, Reference and Experience. Themes from the Philosophy of Gareth Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 220-57), Peacocke extends some of these ideas to the case of self-ascriptions of perceptions, i.e. to the transitions from episodes of seeing that p to the judgement 'I see that p'. However instructive that extension might be, our concern here is with self-ascriptions of propositional attitudes only - which is what is usually understood in the literature by 'self-knowledge'. A discussion of Peacocke's treatment of self-ascriptions of perceptions will have to be deferred to another occasion, although one point which will be raised in the following - to anticipate, that his new proposal should best be seen as a form of 'Rational Externalism', contrary to Peacocke's professed internalism - seems to me to apply also to his treatment of self-ascriptions of perceptions
27. Strictly speaking, as Peacocke himself notices (The Realm of Reason, p. 26) the results of these transitions would be only 'relatively a priori' since they would be justified by the occurrence of particular mental states. Still, they wouldn't be inferred from them
28. See Peacocke, The Realm of Reason, p. 11