SELF-BLINDNESS AND SELF-AWARENESS - Philosophy

Self-Blindness and Self-Awarenessstand in to her own psychological states. One is a rational subject only on the condition thatshe relates to those states in a first-personal way, in a way that enables her judgments todirectly constitute her attitudes. The nature of this relation, rather than the nature ofpsychological states, is what requires a subject to have immediate access to both hercognitive actions and to her psychological states. However, these states can be distinctexistences without necessary connections between them. What would necessary is that if asubject relates to a psychological state in a first-personal way she will have a special kind ofaccess to it upon which she can base her beliefs about it. 29IVCapacity Dependence is a modal claim stating that rational subjects necessarily have a capacityfor first-person access. One might think that we are hardly justified in saying we have acapacity like this unless we did in fact know about most of our own psychological states.That is, it might seem that if one has a capacity to phi, one actually does phi. 30 So it seems thatany subject of psychological states will be aware of a majority of them and, moreover, thiswill be necessarily true.Thus, from Capacity Dependence, one can reasonably infer:FPA: Necessarily, for any subject a and psychological state M, it is highly probable that if M(a),a knows that M(a).29 For a different view that rejects State Dependence see Chapter 5 of Peacocke (1999). Although I agree withmuch of what Peacocke says, he attempts to explain first-person access by emphasizes the nature of consciousstates over the nature of rational subjects.30 Even this, however, is questionable. See Squires (1969).17