Our Knowledge of the Internal World – Robert Stalnaker

Abstract

Robert Stalnaker has written some of the most important work on intentionality and the nature of content published in the last thirty years. He has established himself as one who thinks deeply about big issues without sacrificing technical rigour, and so any new book by him should be met with interest and excitement. In Our Knowledge of the Internal World Stalnaker further develops his views on self‐locating belief and content ascription, and shows how those views can cast new light on certain persistent debates in the epistemology and metaphysics of mind. In this short book, based on a series of lectures given at Harvard and Oxford, he covers an impressive amount of ground. While his main topic is Frank Jackson's knowledge argument and accompanying issues surrounding phenomenal knowledge, he also offers substantive discussion of Elga's Sleeping Beauty puzzle, Lewis' puzzles of self‐location, Lewis' contextualist epistemology, and Boghossian's arguments concerning the incompatibility of content externalism and privileged access.