VII—On Believing that I am Thinking

Abstract

It is argued that a second-order belief to the effect that I now have some particular propositional attitude is always true (Incorrigibility). This is not because we possess an infallible cognitive faculty of introspection, but because that x believes that he himself now has attitude A to proposition P entails that x has A to P. Incorrigibility applies only to second-order beliefs and not to mere linguistic avowals of attitudes. This view combines a necessary asymmetry between 1 st and 3rd person ascriptions with Objectivism about the propositional attitudes. The epistemic justification of second-order beliefs is shown to be a further question. R eaders of Descartes' Second Meditation are often puzzled by the way that there seem to be two sorts of self-knowledge being discussed but not distinguished. First there is the inference from the cogito to sum res cogitans, which Descartes' appears to defend with a form of logical argument: I could be deceived of anything about myself except that I think, because being deceived is a species of thinking (AT VII 27). Then, when further considering his nature, he helps himself to the claim that he is a being who 'understands some things, who affirms that this one thing is true, denies everything else, desires to know more, is unwilling to be deceived, imagines many things even involuntarily, and is aware of many things which apparently come from the senses' (AT VII 28). These detailed claims about his mind cannot be defended with the sort of logical argument used to defend the less specific claim that he is thinking. That I doubt that I affirm p does not entail that I affirm p. It appears that, in making the detailed claims, Descartes has smuggled in a new faculty of knowledge, call it introspection, distinct from the reason he relies upon before. For Descartes the products of both reason and introspection are indubitable, but this similarity obscures an apparent epistemological difference. In this paper I argue that our detailed beliefs about what we are