Phenomenal Epistemology: What Is Consciousness That We May Know It so Well?

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is different from, perhaps in some sense better than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge. 1 At the same time, self-knowledge has also encountered its share of skeptics—philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one species of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one's concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one's own phenomenal experiences phenomenal knowledge. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other words, phenomenal knowledge is both descriptively and normatively different from non-phenomenal knowledge. It is important to get clear, of course, on the way in which phenomenal knowledge is different from, and the sense in which it is better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. An account of phenomenal knowledge would seek to first articulate the putative (descriptive and normative) differences between phenomenal and non-phenomenal knowledge, then explain them. Accordingly, the paper is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the articulation task, the second the explanation task. In §1, we argue that phenomenal knowledge is different from non-phenomenal knowledge in that, in certain circumstances to be pinpointed in due course, the former is infallible. In §2, we develop a model of phenomenal knowledge acquisition that accounts for this circumstantial infallibility.