self knowledge

Question 1

What do the rationalists think it takes to know whether you believe the proposition P?

Answer 1

You believe P if the answer to the question ‘ought you to rationally believe P’ is yes.

Question 2

What is the ‘transparency view’ of self knowledge?

Answer 2

Paradigmatic self knowledge comes from looking out into the world i.e., knowledge about my beliefs comes from conscious deliberation about what the world is like.

Question 3

Who are some advocates of the transparency view?

Answer 3

Moran, Boyle, Byrne

Question 4

What is the intepretationist view of self knowledge?

Answer 4

Self knowledge involves the interpretation of information about oneself (including publicly observable information as well as inner information)

Question 5

Where did the interpretationist view originate?

Answer 5

Gilbert Ryle and Wilfred Sellars

Question 6

What are some contrasts between the features of self-knowledge endorsed by the transparency theorists versus the interpretationists?

Answer 6

(1) immediate versus mediate
(2) reliable versus less reliable
(3) something special about first person knowledge versus self knowledge is gained in a similar way to third person knowledge.

Question 7

Which view is inferentialism typically associated with?

Answer 7

interpretationism

Question 8

What is externalism in phil of mind?

Answer 8

The meaning or content of a thought is partly determined by the environment.

Question 9

What is the traditional assumption that externalism rejects? (and who is the traditional assumption associated with?)

Answer 9

That the content of ones thoughts is fixed independently of the external world.

Descartes.

Question 10

What is the tension that a endorsement of externalism brings? i.e., which two claims are in tension?

Answer 10

(1) Thought content is determined partly by the environment
(2) A subject can know from the armchair what content her thoughts have.

Question 11

When was Gilbert Ryles seminal paper on Self knowledge published, what was it called, and what did he argue?

Answer 11

1966; self knowledge; We learn about ourselves in much the same way that we learn about others. The difference between knowledge of myself and knowledge of others is of degree, not kind i.e., you spend more time with yourself!

Question 12

According to Ryle, what is the partial non-parallelism between ‘you’, ‘he’ and ‘i’?

Answer 12

To concern oneself about oneself is always a higher order act. Thus, my current self seems elusive, since it is constantly out of grasp.

Question 13

What does Donald Davison think of Gilbert Ryles’ view of self knowledge?

Answer 13

He thinks Ryle is wrong to think that we know our own minds in the same way that we know the minds of others. He thinks it is seldom the case that we appeal to evidence or observation in order to find out what we believe.

Question 14

According to Donald Davidson, what is one of the ways in which gaining knowledge of myself is different to gaining knowledge of other people’s metnal states?

Answer 14

I could use the same means that I employ to know other people’s mental states to know myself; however, I cannot use the means I ordinarily use to know myself to know other people’s mental states.

Question 15

What is eliminative materialism?

Who are some endorsers of it?

Answer 15

Our ordinary understanding of the mind is deeply wrong. So wrong that the majority of our concepts in folk psychology have no reference.

Steven Stitch

Question 16

Who endorses some form of externalism?

Answer 16

Fodor, Stitch, Putnam, Burge, Dennett

Question 17

List the ways external factors might affect mental content and who endorse each view way.

Answer 17

(1) a concept has its content in virtue of certain causal relations the concept bears to an environmental referent (Dretske , Millikan, Fodor , Kripke and Evans )

Question 18

What is the structure of paradigmatic thought experiments for externalism?

Answer 18

Two internally identical subjects have different thought content based on purely differing environments.

Question 19

What is narrow content?

Who are some endorsers of it?

Answer 19

mental content that is determined independently of the environment.

Chalmers, Jackson, Mendola

Question 20

According to Quassim cassam what is a Homos Philosophicus?

Answer 20

A model epistemic citizen. Your propositional attitudes are what they rationally ought to be; your propositional attitudes are known to you; you always evaluate your reasons and reasoning.

Question 21

What is the transparency method endorsed by the likes of Moran?

Answer 21

The question of whether I believe P is transparent to the question of whether P is true.

Question 22

What is mental content?

Answer 22

The content of a mental state e.g., thought, belief, desire. The content of a mental state is something like the meaning of the mental state, the way in which that mental state is representing the world.

Question 23

What idea does Davidson think has led to people thinking that the two thoughts are in tension (1) the environment partially determines the content of thought and (2) we always know the content of our thoughts.

Answer 23

The idea that in having a thought one has ‘an object before the mind’. Davidson thinks

Question 24

What does Burge mean when he says that we ‘individuate many thoughts non in-dividuastically?

Answer 24

Individuating many mental kinds, including things such as thoughts about objects and properties, is dependent on relations the person bears to the physical and social environment.