SELF-BLINDNESS AND SELF-AWARENESS - Philosophy

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Self-Blindness and Self-AwarenessBecause Capacity Dependence implies this, we are guaranteed to know about most, even if notall, of our own psychological states. We need only to actualize our capacity for first-personaccess, a capacity we naturally have as rational subjects of psychological states.The inference to FPA may need to be spelled out a bit more carefully. 31 First, wemight need a suitable ceteris paribus clause to rule out inhibitors of the capacity. 32 The elevatorin my building would have the capacity to hold 2,500 pounds even if it someone cut thecables every time more than 2,000 pounds was placed inside. 33 Secondly, when it comes toan agent's capacities (as opposed to an elevator's), the agent in question must try to exercisethe capacity in question. But with these qualifications in mind, it does seem that if a personin the right circumstances does not phi when they are trying to, then they lack the capacity tophi. So if a person who is relates to her psychological states in the ordinary-first personalway has the capacity for first-person access, she will regularly actualize this and thereforeknow about those states. I think this form of reasoning and FPA are both plausible so I willassume they are true. 34From either a pragmatic or epistemic perspective there is not much of a differencebetween constitutive theories and FPA. Either way, it is necessary that most people knowabout the majority of their psychological states. The only significant difference is whether aperson’s psychological states depend on her having beliefs about them. FPA is compatiblewith the Distinct Existence Thesis whereas constitutive theories are not. But does anythingphilosophically important hinge on this difference? Why insist that the Distinct ExistenceThesis is true?31 Ideally, one would like to make the degree of probability more precise.32 There is a risk that a ceteris paribus clause will make the conditional trivial. This is a familiar point fromGoodman. However, since I do not intend FPA to be an analysis of any concept, I will set the concern aside.33 Discussions of “masking” can be found in Johnston (1992) and Lewis (1997).34 I actually think that FPA could reasonably be considered a datum in discussions of self-knowledge.18
Self-Blindness and Self-AwarenessEarly in this essay, I mentioned that our commonsense intuitions favor the DistinctExistence Thesis. I think that this is enough reason to believe it. We should not positnecessary connections between things that seem to be causally discreet. But even if we agreewith Hume that psychological states “may exist separately, and have no need of any thingelse to support their existence," this is not a conclusive argument against constitutive views.Moreover, there may be countervailing theoretical reasons to accept a constitutive theory.For example, some functionalist theories of mind individuate psychological states in terms oftheir causal relations to each other. Thus, for something to be a desire it would need to berelated to other states, including, plausibly, beliefs about it. To the extent that one is drawnto a functional analysis, one may also be drawn to a constitutive view rather than the DistinctExistence Thesis.However, constitutive theories face some difficulties. 35 One of the more serious isthat we are often ignorant or mistaken about our own psychological states. The existence oferrors in this domain strongly suggests that we should be fallibilists about knowledge of ourown psychological states. We should accept that any justification we have for beliefs aboutthem is defeasible. The trouble for constitutive theories is that necessary constitutiveconnections between psychological states do not allow for errors. If the existence of aperson’s psychological state constituted her knowledge of it in some way, it is hard to seehow she could ever be mistaken. A universal constitutive theory is therefore incompatiblewith fallibilism. Since nearly everyone rejects infallibilism, an advocate of a constitutivetheory must allow for exceptions to the necessary relations she thinks normally hold. Shewill typically do so by citing additional conditions on those relations.35 A different objection than the one discussed here has received a fair amount of attention. It is thatconstitutive theories make self-knowledge neither a cognitive nor an epistemic “achievement”. For discussionsee Boghossian (1989), Fricker (1998) and Peacocke (1999). At least some constitutive theorists seem happy toaccept this consequence (cf. Bilgrami (2006)).19
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