Sir Carruthers Beattie

Peter Carruthers

Four different accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of them endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. Section 1 introduces the four accou...

Reply to Carruthers

Carruthers Chap13.indd

T is normally the precursor of action. We think fi rst, and then we act. Most models of creative thought and creative activity make a similar assumption. They assume that creative activity is preceded by, and is causally dependent upon, creative thought. This chapter, in contrast, argues for the reverse. It develops a model according to which creative thought is always preceded by, and causally...

Carruthers on the Deficits of Animals

The simple version of the HOT theory of consciousness is easily refuted. Carruthers escapes this refutation because he is actually a closet introspectionist. I agree with Carruthers that the subjective properties of experience are constituted from discriminatory and other cognitive responses, but I disagree that conceptual uptake into a language of thought is the form of uptake that is necessar...

Carruthers and Constitutive Self-Knowledge

In his recent book, The Opacity of Mind, Peter Carruthers advances a skeptical theory of self-knowledge, integrating results from experimental psychology and cognitive science. In this essay, I want to suggest that the situation is not quite as dire as Carruthers makes it out to be. I respond to Carruthers by advancing a constitutive theory of self-knowledge. I argue that self-knowledge, so und...