Carl Montan: Introspection and Identification

Abstract

This thesis concerns key questions in the epistemology and semantics of the mental. How are we to explain the distinctive way in which I know that I am in pain – when I know it, as we might say, 'from the inside'? How should we understand attitude attributions such as 'Sam believes that Anne is Pam'? That is, how should we understand introspection and identification?

Paper I addresses the familiar fact that each person has special access to her own mental states. In introspectively knowing that I am in pain, I know this in a way no one else can. What explains this? Drawing on a framework developed by David Enoch and Joshua Schechter, I argue that introspective de se knowledge – e.g. knowledge that I am in pain – is indispensable, whereas introspective knowledge that Carl is in pain, even if possible, would not be. This difference in indispensability explains why introspective knowledge is necessarily limited to the de se case, and thereby accounts for special access.

Paper II challenges pluralist theories – views that posit multiple capacities for introspection – which distinguish between active and passive forms of introspective knowledge. I argue that such views face serious and under-appreciated difficulties, which ultimately motivate rejecting the very idea of active introspective knowledge. I further show that these problems sharply constrain the overall space of viable pluralist theories.

Paper III examines what I call the asymmetry phenomenon: sentences like 'Sam believes that Anne is Pam' and 'Sam believes that Pam is Anne' can differ in truth-value, despite the symmetry of identity. I develop a revisionary semantic account on which ‘be’ sometimes functions to specify who someone is. I argue that this account better explains the observed asymmetries than standard views, which treat ‘be’ as either predicative or synonymous with numerical identity.