Abstract
When you have a conscious experience—such as feeling pain, watching the sunset, or thinking about your loved ones—are you aware of the experience as your own, even when you do not reflect on, think about, or attend to it? Let us say that an experience has “mineness” just in case its subject is aware of it as her own while she undergoes it. And let us call the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness “typicalism.” Recently, Guillot has offered a novel argument for typicalism by leveraging the relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness. She starts by arguing that all ordinary experiences give their subjects immediate justification to believe that their experiences are their own. She then argues that this can be explained by typicalism. In this paper, I argue that her argument fails. I start by clarifying the notion of mineness and giving more details about her argument. I then explain why her argument fails by raising doubts about whether typicalism explains the target explanandum. I close by considering some implications of our discussion for self-knowledge.
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Notes
In principle, one can accept SK and hold that SK is true because you observe E or because you have reason to believe some other propositions that support the proposition that you have E. But this is not the direction defenders of SK go.
The phrase “self-knowledge” standardly means knowledge of one’s mental states in the self-knowledge literature. For uniformity I use “self-awareness” to denote awareness of one’s mental states. By “self-awareness” I do not mean awareness of the self.
Again, in principle, one can accept SA and hold that SA is true because you reflect on, think about, or focally attend to E. But this is not the direction defenders of SA go.
This is not to say that philosophers have neglected the relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness, as opposed to the relation between the two theses. The relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness has received much attention, for example, in the large literature on immunity to error through misidentification. Influential works on this topic include Wittgenstein (1958), Shoemaker (1968), and Evans (1982). For more recent discussion, see the papers in Prosser and Recanati (2012).
For other uses of “mineness,” see, e.g., Zahavi (2005, p. 16; 2014, p. 19), Rowlands (2016, p. 117), Zahavi and Kriegel (2016, p. 38), Nida-Rümelin (2017, p. 71; 2023, p. 213), and Kriegel (2023, p. 180). Philosophers also use other terms to label what is here called “mineness” (or something similar to it), such as “me-ishness” (Block 1995, p. 235), “personal ownership” (Albahari 2006, p. 55), “sense of ownership” (Gallagher 2017, p. 2), “sense of mental ownership” (Millière 2020, p. 5), and “appearance of belongingness to me” (Nida-Rümelin 2023, p. 213).
In her more recent work (2023), Guillot uses “self-experience” and says that her use of “self-experience” coincides with that of “me-ness” (p. 233, fn. 17). But as she characterizes the term in her (2023), self-experience concerns one’s conscious awareness of oneself as oneself. She does not emphasize the “as oneself” bit in her (2017).
Billon (2023, pp. 324–326) and McClelland (2023, pp. 52–54) make similar distinctions. Universalism is often attributed to Zahavi, e.g., by Farrell and McClelland (2017, p. 5), Billon (2023, p. 324), and McClelland (2023, p. 52), but Zahavi (2020, p. 642, fn. 4) denies that he is a universalist about mineness in Guillot’s sense. Absentism is advocated, e.g., by Howell and Thompson (2017), Gennaro (2022), and McClelland (2023).
Salje and Geddes (2023) is a notable exception.
Guillot actually argues for the more ambitious claim that all ordinary experiences have mineness and for-me-ness and me-ness. Here I will only focus on mineness.
By “introspection” I do not mean reflection. Instead, I mean a way you know or make judgments about your minds rather than the external world.
For a sustained critique of the perceptual model of introspection, see Shoemaker (1994).
I am indebted here to an anonymous reviewer.
For a survey, see Weiskrantz (2009).
An alternative hypothesis is that the superblindsight subject has degraded conscious vision. For discussion, see Wu (2018, Sect. 4.2).
Although Guillot focuses on thought insertion, depersonalization, and Cotard’s syndrome, these are not the only conditions that are said to lack mineness. Other conditions include drug-induced ego dissolution, meditation, and lucid dreamless sleep. For discussion, see Millière (2020) and the references therein.
Guillot (p. 45) also emphasizes this point when she introduces the notion of immediate justification.
Guillot argues that all ordinary experiences have for-me-ness and me-ness in basically the same way. So if her argument for mineness fails, so does her argument for for-me-ness and me-ness.
Soldati (2023) offers a different argument for a similar conclusion.
In fact, the scope of asymmetry is often thought to include some unconscious states. Here I will only focus on conscious states.
Philosophers also use other terms to label what is here called “peculiar access” (or something similar to it), such as “privileged access” (Carruthers 2011; Neta 2011) and “special access” (Fernández 2013). In addition, many philosophers (e.g., Alston 1971; McKinsey 1991; Moran 2001; Ryle 2009; Gertler 2011; Fernández 2013; Peterson 2021) use “privileged access” to label what is here called “peculiar access” (or something similar to it) and the idea that self-knowledge is epistemically superior to knowledge of others. To avoid confusion, I will only use “peculiar access.”
For a survey of how widespread this view is among philosophers, see Carruthers (2011, pp. 17–19). Dissenters should be acknowledged. According to some philosophers (e.g., Lawlor 2009; Carruthers 2011; Cassam 2014, 2017; Wikforss 2019), self-knowledge and knowledge of others are both inferential; the difference between them is one in the kinds of evidence that are available in the two cases. According to some philosophers (e.g., McDowell 1982; Smith 2010; McNeill 2012; Spaulding 2015; Westfall 2021), knowledge of others can also be immediate. For more on peculiar access, see my (2022).
According to Musholt (2015, ch. 4; see also Recanati 2007), experiences provide their subjects with information that is necessarily self-related by virtue of their mode of presentation, even though they do not represent the self as an object in their content. On her (2015, pp. 84–86) view, for-me-ness can be seen as nothing over and above the fact that experiences are given in a mode that is specific to their subjects.
A complication I will set aside is that experiences might be shared in the sense that multiple subjects simultaneously have numerically the same experiences. For discussion, see Cochrane (2021).
Will for-me-ness in Zahavi and Kriegel’s sense be the answer? That is left as an exercise.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nico Silins, Shaun Nichols, Derk Pereboom, and Dan Zahavi for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Kang, SP. Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness. Rev.Phil.Psych. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-024-00723-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-024-00723-2