No unchallengeable epistemic authority , of any sort , regarding our own conscious experience – Contra Dennett ?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Dennett argues that we can be mistaken about our own conscious experience. Despite this, he repeatedly asserts that we can or do have unchallengeable authority of some sort in our reports about that experience. This assertion takes three forms. First, Dennett compares our authority to the authority of an author over his fictional world. Unfortunately, that appears to involve denying that there are actual facts about experience that subjects may be truly or falsely reporting. Second, Dennett sometimes seems to say that even though we may be mistaken about what our conscious experience is, our reports about “what it’s like to be us” must be correct. That view unfortunately requires a nonstandard and unremarked distinction between facts about consciousness and facts about “what it’s like.” Third, Dennett says that reports about experience may be “incorrigible.” However, that claim stands in tension with evidence, highlighted by Dennett himself, that seems to suggest that people can be demonstrably mistaken about their own experience. Dennett needlessly muddies his case against infallibilism with these unsatisfactory compromises.
منابع مشابه
Self-ascriptions of Belief and Transparency
The access that we have to the contents of our own minds, in contrast with the access that we have to the minds of others, has three main prima facie features. First, it is authoritative: we have a special authority upon what happens in our own minds, in the sense that if we think that we are in a certain mental state it seems that we cannot be challenged. We can indeed make mistakes: our menta...
متن کاملSelf-ascriptions of Beliefs
Prepared for a lecture in Bologna never delivered, unpublished 1997 " Cartesianism " in the philosophy of mind is most often understood as the view that it is of the essence of the mind that each mind has a special, privileged access to its own contents. It is is often called the view according to which there is a " first-person authority " with respect to the contents of our own mental states,...
متن کاملExplorer Physical Instantiation and the Propositional Attitudes
The paper addresses a standard line of criticism of the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), based on the claim that the notion of realizing a computational formalism is overly liberal to the point of vacuity. I argue that even for interesting and powerful cases, realization is essentially a matter of approximation and degree, and interpreting a physical device as performing a computation is alw...
متن کاملEmbodiment or Envatment?: Reflections on the Bodily Basis of Consciousness
Suppose that a team of neurosurgeons and bioengineers were able to remove your brain from your body, suspend it in a life-sustaining vat of liquid nutrients, and connect its neurons and nerve terminals by wires to a supercomputer that would stimulate it with electrical impulses exactly like those it normally receives when embodied. According to this brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, your envat...
متن کاملZombies and the Case of the Phenomenal Pickpocket
A prevailing view in contemporary philosophy of mind is that zombies are logically possible. I argue, via a thought experiment, that if this prevailing view is correct, then I could be transformed into a zombie. If I could be transformed into a zombie, then surprisingly, I am not certain that I am conscious. Regrettably, this is not just an idiosyncratic fact about my psychology; I think you ar...
متن کامل