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Experiencing Ourselves| old_uid | 9315 |
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| title | Experiencing Ourselves |
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| start_date | 2010/11/26 |
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| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | A central question in the philosophy of self-knowledge is how to justify our employment of the first person concept when ascribing mental states to ourselves. My consideration of this issue starts off by arguing against two prominent approaches to this kind of justification. Certain rationalist accounts – which assume that introspective self-reference is solely grounded in our capacity to refer with the concept ‘I’ to the thinker of the respective thought, and not also in our experience of thinking – fail to rule out the reasonableness of questioning our identity with the thinker of that (or any other) thought. But first-personal self-reference does not allow for the reasonableness of such doubt. By contrast, certain empiricist accounts – which assume that self-knowledge is grounded solely in inner or outer experience – face the problem that introspection does not seem to reveal a self over and above the introspected mental episodes.
My alternative proposal is to combine elements of both views and to identify our self-experience as part of our experience of reasons. Mental states can be providers of, or responders to, reasons only within a unified rational net of states, which again means that they form part of a rational self. Hence, our experience of mental episodes as providing or responding to reasons amounts to an experience of them as parts of a self and can therefore ground our introspective self-references. If time allows, I also aim to provide some independent motivation for the resulting view by considering issues in the philosophy of perception and of action; and to point out some connections to the manifestation of subjectivity in the perspectivalness of perception. |
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| responsibles | Pacherie, Dokic, Proust |
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