Varieties of Self-knowledge

Abstract

In this chapter, we first present the characteristic features of what counts as truly first-personal self-knowledge—namely, groundlessness, transparency and authority (§1). The key idea defended in the following is that they are not contingent but necessary and a priori aspects of what goes by the name of “(first-personal) self-knowledge”. For massive failures at self-knowledge would display either the lack of the relevant psychological concepts or failures at rationality, understood in a “thick” sense, which is accordingly specified. These characteristic traits of first-personal self-knowledge are then defended against possible objections stemming from scepticism about knowledge of the content of our own propositional attitudes deriving from the endorsement of semantic externalism and from recent findings in cognitive sciences (§2). It is argued that none of this shows that we never have essentially first-personal self-knowledge. Rather, it shows that its scope is limited and does not extend to our deep-seated and future dispositions, to the dispositional elements of our feelings and emotions, and to the causal relations among our various mental states, which are known, if and when they are, in a third-personal way. The various modes of third-personal self-knowledge are then presented and discussed (§3). Yet all this is compatible with the fact that we have essentially first-personal knowledge of a wide range of mental states and at least of their “narrow” content, if and when they have it, such as our ongoing sensations, perceptions, basic emotions and propositional attitudes as commitments.