Philosophical Studies

In this paper I develop the idea that, by answering the question whether p, you can answer the question whether you believe that p. In particular, I argue that judging that p is a fallible yet basic guide to whether one believes that p. I go on to defend my view from an important skeptical challenge, according to which my view would make it too easy to reject skeptical hypotheses about our access to our minds. I close by responding to the opposing view on which our beliefs themselves constitute our only source of first-person access to our beliefs.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Introspection has traditionally been defined as a privileged way of obtaining beliefs about one’s occurrent mental states, and the idea that it is psychologically and epistemically different from non-introspective belief formation processes has been widely defended. At the same time, philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have pointed out the unreliability of introspective reports in consciousness research. In this paper, I will argue that this dissonance in the literature can be explained by differentiating between infallible and informative introspective beliefs. I will argue that the latter are formed similarly to beliefs about the external world, and are therefore susceptible to similar success and failure conditions. Understanding introspection as belief-like will help to locate possible sources of error in regular as well as in pathological cases, carrying relevant implications for the relationship between experience, belief, and delusion.

Oxford Handbook Online, 2016

A fundamental puzzle about self-knowledge is this: our spontaneous, unreflective self-attributions of beliefs and other mental states—avowals, as they are often called—appear to be at once epistemically groundless and also epistemically privileged. On the one hand, it seems that our avowals simply do not rely on—nor do they require—justification or evidence. On the other hand, our avowals seem to represent a substantive epistemic achievement: they appear to represent beliefs that are especially apt to constitute genuine knowledge of our own present states of mind. Several authors have recently tried to explain away avowals' groundlessness by appeal to the so-called transparency of present-tense self-attributions—a feature that is best illustrated by considering present-tense self-attributions of beliefs. As observed by Gareth Evans, if asked whether I believe, e.g., that it's raining, I will typically not 'look inward' and attend to my own state of mind, but instead I will look outside, to the world—to see whether it's raining or not. Two recent and divergent construals of transparency agree that it shows avowals of beliefs (and perhaps other mental states) to be only apparently groundless. After a critical discussion of these two construals (Section 2), we present an alternative reading of transparency that explains—rather than explains away—the apparent groundlessness of avowals (Section 3). We then explore (in Section 4) a way of coupling this alternative reading with a plausible account of how it is that our ordinary avowals can represent genuine knowledge of our own present states of mind.

Philosophy invariably starts with the attempt to spell out ideas and beliefs that we already hold, whether on topics like time or causality, colour or value, consciousness or free will, democracy or justice or freedom. It may go well beyond such pre-philosophical assumptions in its further developments, regimenting them in unexpected ways, revising them on novel lines, even discarding them entirely in favour of other views. But philosophy always begins with the articulation of ordinary ideas and beliefs. This is where its ladder starts.

Nous, 2002

The Stalemate Between Causal and Constitutive Accounts of Introspective Knowledge by Acquaintance, 2024

This paper will be concerned with the role acquaintance plays in contemporary theories of introspection. Traditionally, the relation of acquaintance has been conceived in analytic epistemology and philosophy of mind as being only epistemically relevant inasmuch as it causes, or enables, or justifies a peculiar kind of propositional knowledge, i.e., knowledge by acquaintance. However, in recent years a novel account of the role of acquaintance in our introspective knowledge has been offered. According to this novel constitutive approach, acquaintance is, in itself, a sui generisi.e., non-propositional-kind of knowledge. As we will suggest, a stalemate between David Chalmers' account of direct phenomenal concepts-as a prototypical example of a causal view-and Anna Giustina's account of primitive introspection-as a prototypical example of a constitutive view-is looming in the current controversy between the two families of theories. Towards the end of the essay, we will point to some possible ways for a constitutive theorist to break the stalemate.

2000

Self-Knowledge, Hatzimoysis, ed. Oxford University Press, 2011

In this paper, I argue that the method of transparency --determining whether I believe that p by considering whether p -- does not explain our privileged access to our own beliefs. Looking outward to determine whether one believes that p leads to the formation of a judgment about whether p, which one can then self-attribute. But use of this process does not constitute genuine privileged access to whether one judges that p. And looking outward will not provide for access to dispositional beliefs, which are arguably more central examples of belief than occurrent judgments. First, one’s dispositional beliefs as to whether p may diverge from the occurrent judgments generated by the method of transparency. Second, even in cases where these are reliably linked — e.g., in which one’s judgment that p derives from one’s dispositional belief that p — using the judgment to self-attribute the dispositional belief requires an ‘inward’ gaze.

Theoria Revista De Teoria Historia Y Fundamentos De La Ciencia, 2014

Introspection and Consciousness (OUP)