Reply to Cynthia Macdonald

Abstract

If there were not similarities between introspection and perception, it would be unaccountable that it should have occurred to anyone to former on latter. While I have opposed such modeling, I certainly have never denied that there are such similarities. And contrary to what Cynthia Macdonald supposes, I have no quarrel with her claim that introspective awareness in what she calls cases resembles perceptual observation with respect to epistemic directness and authoritativeness, or with little argument she sets out in support of that claim. But she immediately concludes from that claim that the characteristic of observation properties in case of perception also applies to sensation and intentional ones in cogito-type cases (p. 715), where central features seem to have to do solely with epistemic directness and authoritativeness. And near end of her Macdonald speaks of recognizes only two items, first-order sensation or intentional and second-order, reflective state, and suggests that this provides a basis for an account of authoritative self-knowledge that deploys of direct epistemic awareness, to quasi perceptual of authoritative selfknowledge set forth at outset of this paper (p. 735). If this is which says that introspective self-knowledge consists simply in first-order states giving rise to second-order states in way that yields epistemic directness and authoritativeness, it seems to be we get if we subtract from what I call perceptual model what I call the independence condition, namely requirement that for an epistemically direct way of knowing to count as perceptual existence of things known must be independent of there being this way of knowing them. If perceptual is denuded in this way, I have no quarrel with claim that introspection conforms to it-though I do think it has lost right to be called perceptual model. But Macdonald evidently thinks she is supporting more robust version of perceptual model. She defends not only broad perceptual but version of more demanding object perception model which models introspection on visual perception (I say a version of, because she rejects