forthcoming in Self-Knowledge, ed. Anthony Hatzimoysis, OUP
Knowing that I am Thinking*
Alex Byrne
Soc. …I speak of what I scarcely understand; but the soul when thinking appears to me to be just
talking—asking questions of herlf and answering them, affirming and denying. And when she has
arrived at a decision, either gradually or by a sudden impul, and has at last agreed, and does not
doubt, this is called her opinion. I say, then, that to form an opinion is to speak, and opinion is a word spoken,—I mean, to onelf and in silence, not aloud or to another: What think you?
Theaet. I agree.
Plato, Theaetetus 1.Introduction
We often know that we are thinking, and what we are thinking about. Here ‘thinking’ is not suppod to be an umbrella term for cognition in general, but should be taken in roughly the n of ‘a penny for y
our thoughts’: mental activities like pondering, ruminating, wondering, musing and daydreaming all count as thinking. In the intended n of
‘thinking’, thinking is not just propositional: in addition to thinking that p, there is thinking of (or about) x. Belief is necessary but not sufficient for thinking that p: thinking that p entails believing that p, but not converly.1
三峡课文原文Consider Kylie:
On summer afternoons in Canberra, the baking sun reflects off Lake Burley Griffin,
and the water shimmers. Up behind the university, in the botanical gardens, a
cascading stream of water helps to maintain the humidity of the rainforest gully.
The are just a couple of Kylie’s thoughts on the subject of water, her water
thoughts. Amongst Kylie’s many other thoughts that involve the concept of water are the: that there is water in the lake, that trees die without water, that water is a liquid and, of cour, that water is wet. When Kylie thinks consciously, in a way that
occupies her attention, she is able to know what it is that she is thinking. This is true
for thoughts about water, as for any other thoughts. (Davies 2000: 384-5)
* Thanks to audiences at the University of Melbourne, Monash University, UMass Amherst, the Institute of Philosophy (London), and a reading group at the RSSS, ANU. I am especially indebted to Martin Davies for discussion.
1 In the simple prent and past tens (e.g.), ‘think that p’ is near-enough synonymous with ‘believe that p’, as in ‘I think/thought that the pub is/was open’.
As the watery clue suggests, Davies us Kylie to discuss McKiny’s puzzle, the alleged incompatibility of externalism and the apparent fact that we can obtain lf-knowledge from the armchair. But that is not this paper’s topic. Suppo—if only for the sake of the argument—that McKiny’s puzzle can be solved, and that externalism and armchair lf-knowledge are compatible. How does Kylie know that she is thinking about water “from the armchair”? Just by sitting comfortably and “introspecting”, Kylie can discover that she is thinking about water, and that she is thinking that trees die without water. But what is “introspecting”, exactly? And why is it—as is commonly assumed—a particularly effective way of finding out what one is thinking?
2.Privileged and peculiar access
In his classic paper “Anti-Individualism and Privileged Access”, McKiny starts by saying that
[i]t has been a philosophical commonplace, at least since Descartes, to hold that each
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of us can know the existence and content of his own mental states in a privileged way that is available to no one el. (McKiny 1991: 9, emphasis added)
This “philosophical commonplace” consists of two distinct claims, which McKiny does not clearly distinguish. The first is that we have privileged access to the existence and content of our mental states. Approximately put: beliefs about one’s mental states acquired through the usual route are more likely to amount to knowledge than beliefs about others’ mental states. Kylie’s belief that she is thinking about water is more likely to amount to knowledge than our belief that she is thinking about water. We might judge that Kylie is thinking about water becau we e her gazing pensively at Lake Burley Griffin, or becau we overhear someone we take to be Kylie muttering “Water is a liquid”. We can easily go wrong in an ordinary situation of this kind. Perhaps when gazing at the lake Kylie is not thinking of water, but of the original Canberra Planner, Walter Burley Griffin himlf; or perhaps Kylie is not the person muttering.
Kylie herlf cannot go wrong as easily, or so it is natural to suppo. If we offer Kylie a penny for her thoughts, and she sincerely replies “I was thinking about water”, it would be bizarre for us to doubt Kylie’s claim. And this is not becau we have a blanket policy of taking avowals of mental states to be beyond dispute—we plainly don’t. Setting factive and object-entailing states (e.g. regretting drinking five pints, and eing an echidna)
to one side, we make subtle distinctions between our epistemic access to mental states in ordinary life. It would not be at all unexceptional, for instance, for us to wonder whether Kylie is mistaken about what she wants. Perhaps Kylie fally believes that she wants to join the reading group on Being and Time becau she has a distorted view of the sort of person she is. She isn’t really an excessively sophisticated intellectual with a taste for Teutonic obscurity, but a more straightforward plain-spoken type who prefers A Materialist Theory of the Mind.
That we have privileged access to our thoughts has some experimental support. Subjects have been instructed to “think aloud” while performing a variety of cognitive tasks “in their heads”: multiplying numbers, solving the tower of Hanoi puzzle, counting the windows in their living rooms, remembering and recalling a matrix of digits, and so on (Ericsson and Simon 1993). The subjects’ lf-reports can then be checked against theoretical models of problem solving, the subjects’ respon
latencies, and so on. Summarizing, Nichols and Stich write that:
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both commonn and experimental studies confirm that people can sit quietly,
exhibiting next to no overt behaviour, and give detailed, accurate lf-reports about
their mental states. (Nichols and Stich 2003: 158)
The claim of privileged access to our own thoughts is a watered-down version of what is sometimes called infallible, incorrigible, or indubitable access:公务员自我鉴定
俗语有哪些
I N Necessarily, if S believes she is in M, then she is in M/knows that she is in M What is sometimes called lf-intimating access is a near-conver of I N:
S-I Necessarily, if S is in M, she knows/is in a position to know that she is in M2 Privileged access should not be confud with S-I and its watered-down variants, which have little to recommend them, at least unless highly qualified and restricted. Post-Freud, the idea that there are subterranean mental currents not readily accessible to the subject is unexceptionable, even if Freud’s own account of them is not.
2 For the belief-versions of both I N and S-I e Armstrong 1968: 101; as Armstrong notes, the term ‘lf-intimation’ is due to Ryle. In the terminology of Williamson 2000: 95, the knowledge-version of S-I is the thesis that the condition that one is in M is “luminous”.
数独高级解法
Privileged access is the first part of McKiny’s “philosophical commonplace”. The cond part is that we have peculiar access to our mental states: as McKiny says, we know about them “in a…way that is available to no one el”. Kylie knows that she is thinking that trees die without water by “introspection”, but whatever introspection is, she cannot employ it to discover that someone el is thinking that trees die without water. In McKiny’s preferred terminology, Kylie can know “a priori” that she is thinking that trees die without water. (This terminology is hardly apt, since one leading theory of lf-knowledge classifies it as a variety of perceptual knowledge: e §3.)生活就像一首歌
It is important to distinguish privileged and peculiar access becau they can come apart in both directions. Consider Ryle, who holds that we have access to our own minds in the same way that we have access to others’ minds—by obrving behavior—and thus denies that we have peculiar access. “The sorts of things that I can find out about mylf are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same” (Ryle 1949: 149, emphasis added). Yet he thinks that we have privileged access to our mental states (at le
ast sometimes), becau we (sometimes) have better behavioral evidence about ourlves—greater “supplies of the requisite data” (149).3 Ryle’s position shows why privileged access need not be peculiar. For an illustration of the conver, suppo that one often mistakes beeches for elms by sight. Often one’s belief that one es an elm is mistaken, or at any rate not knowledge. One’s access to one’s mental state of eing an elm is nothing to write home about: much knowledge of one’s enviroment and of others’ mental states is considerably easier to atttain. Yet one has peculiar access to the fact that one es an elm: one does not need the usual third person evidence—that one’s eyes are open and pointing towards an elm, one has an unobstructed view of the elm, the lighting is good, and so on.
3 The claim of “Privileged Access”, in Ryle’s n, is this: “(1) ...a mind cannot help being constantly aware of all the suppod occupants of its private stage, and (2) ...it can also deliberately scrutinize by a species of non-nsuous perception at least some of its own states and operations” (Ryle 1949: 158). In the contemporary literature, ‘privileged access’ is often ud approximately for what (in the text) is described as privileged and peculiar access (e, e.g., Alston 1971; Moran 2001: 9-10). Ryle’s characterization of “non-nsuous perception” denies that there are “any counterparts to deafness, astigmatism,…” (1949: 157); this means that Ryle’s Privileged Access implies but is not implied by the conjunction of privileged and peculiar access (in the n of the text).
It should be emphasized that the alleged conflict between lf-knowledge and externalism has its source in peculiar access, not privileged access. Unless privileged access is taken to be something like infallible access, there is not even the appearance of a conflict with externalism. Peculiar access to the existence of water (for example) is the issue. McKiny’s argument gives ri, as Davies says, to the puzzle of armchair knowledge.
3.Inner-n
According to Armstrong:
Kant suggested the correct way of thinking about introspection when he spoke of the awareness of our own mental states as the operation of ‘inner n’. He took n
perception as the model of introspection. By n-perception we become aware of
痣相大全current physical happenings in our environment and our body. By inner n we
become aware of current happenings in our own mind. (Armstrong 1968: 95; e also Armstrong 1981, Lycan 1987: ch. 6, 1996: ch. 2, Nichols and Stich 2003: 160-4.)
By using her outer eye, Kylie knows that there is a lot of water in Lake Burley Griffin; according to the inner-n theory, by using her inner eye, Kylie knows that she is thinking of water.
The inner-n theory does offer a nice explanation of peculiar access: for obvious architectural reasons, the (presumably neural) mechanism of inner-n is only nsitive to the subject’s own mental states. In exactly the same style, our faculty of proprioception explains the “peculiar access” we have to the position of our own limbs (e Armstrong 1968: 307).
But it does not explain privileged access. In fact, it leaves it something of a mystery. Why is inner-n less prone to error than the outer ns? Why are (as we commonly suppo) our opinions about our own desires more error-prone than thoughts? Are desires located in some dark and obscure place in the brain?
And finally, if there is an inner-n, then presumably it might be damaged or abnt, while sparing the rest of a normal subject’s cognitive capacities. In other words, the condition Shoemaker (1988) calls “lf-blindness” could occur, if the inner-n theory is
