The VLC Philosophy Lab and the Madrid Philosophy Network are delighted to invite you to the workshop Knowledge and Error about Oneself. The event will be held online via Zoom from 15 to 16 April 2021.

Programme 

15:15 – 15:30 Reception

15:30 – 16:50 Manuel García-Carpintero (University of Barcelona/LOGOS)

Token-Reflexive Self-Concepts and Immunity

17:00 – 18:20 Anna Giustina (University of Liège)

Introspective Acquaintance: An Integration Account

18:30 – 19:50 Michele Palmira (Complutense University of Madrid)

On the Explanatory Aspirations of Thinker-Reflexivity

Friday 16th of April:

15:30 – 16:50 Marta Cabrera (University of Valencia)

The Object of Reflexive Emotions

17:00 – 18:20 Daniel Morgan (University of York)

Knowing Our Occurrent Mental Episodes vs Knowing Our Standing Attitudes

18:30 – 19:50 Annalisa Coliva and Edward Mark (UC-Irvine)

Transparency Over-Extended

19:50 – 20:05 Closing

(CET times)

Abstracts

Marta Cabrera – The Object of Reflexive Emotions

This paper examines the distinction that many philosophers have traced between reflexive and non-reflexive emotions. According to this distinction, the main difference between emotions such as shame, pride, guilt and embarrassment, and the rest of our emotions – such as fear, anger, sadness, envy, joy or gratitude – is that the former are necessarily directed at the self as the intentional object of the experience, while the latter are oriented towards objects, people, states of affairs and events in the world other than the self (Helm 2001, Zinck 2008, Deonna and Teroni 2012, Teroni 2016 and Tietjen 2020). In other words, in the case of the former emotions, “the subject and intentional object of the emotion are identical” (Zinck 2008: 497). I wish to provide some reasons that may hopefully show that such a contrast constitutes an important mischaracterisation. I will be defending the idea that the reflexive/non-reflexive distinction misidentifies the object of shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment and construes such emotions under a narcissistic reconfiguration.

There are paradigmatic cases of shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment which those who defend the reflexive/non-reflexive distinction would identify as being directed at oneself that are, in fact, normatively oriented towards an object in the world – other than the self – and in which the subject’s focus has been narcissistically displaced towards herself. In such cases, it is not only a mistake to think that the self is the object of the subject’s emotion, but also unintelligible. These paradigmatic cases show that the fundamental configuration of shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment is non-narcissistic and non-self-focused, and close to the configuration of the so-called non-reflexive emotions. If these ideas are plausible, it seems that we would have to revise the way such a distinction is drawn, as well as its appropriateness.

Annalisa Coliva and Edward Mark – Transparency Over-Extended

In this paper, we argue that epistemic transparency accounts of the sort put forward by Alex Byrne (2018) and Jordi Fernández (2013) cannot offer a sufficient explanation of the first personal knowledge we have of our own mental states. We begin by rehearsing Paul Boghossian’s trilemma about self-knowledge (§1). We then identify how the two aforementioned accounts purport to be ways out of such a trilemma. We argue against the plausibility of their strategy by noticing that these accounts either (i) fail to present an epistemic account; (ii) assume the very knowledge they are designed to explain – i.e. knowledge of one’s first-order mental states; or, (iii) endorse a dubious inferentialist story of how we move from being in a given first-order mental state to its knowledgeable self-ascription (§2-3). Finally, we close by highlighting the difficulties presenting these accounts as explanatory for states other than belief (§4) and move to promote a pluralist approach to the study of self-knowledge (§5).

Manuel García-Carpintero – Token-Reflexive Self-Concepts and Immunity

Abstract: The paper presents first the central aspects of a view on the nature of the self concept that I have defended in several recent papers, elaborating on previous proposals by Perry and Peacocke. It is a “two-tiered” view, assuming self-knowledge by acquaintance with one’s own conscious states, and a token-reflexive rule of reference for the self-notion; it entails that, strictly speaking, self-thoughts are not shareable. Then the paper goes on to compare the account ir offers of Immunity to Error through Misrepresentation with recent discussions of the topic, focussing on the case of thought insertion.

Anna Giustina – Introspective Acquaintance: An Integration Account

In this paper, I develop a new version of the acquaintance view of the nature of introspection of phenomenal states. On the acquaintance view, when one introspects a current phenomenal state of one’s, one bears to it the relation of introspective acquaintance. Extant versions of the acquaintance view neglect what I call the phenomenal modification problem. The problem, articulated by Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is that drawing introspective attention to one’s current conscious experience may modify its phenomenology. Failing to take phenomenal modification into account affects the adequacy of extant versions of the acquaintance view. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better version, the integration account, that meets the phenomenal modification challenge while preserving the merits of other versions.

Daniel Morgan – Objects of Self-Knowledge

Some theorists of self-knowledge have explored the possibility of taking strikingly different approaches to explaining how we know about our own occurrent mental episodes (e.g. a judgment) vs explaining how we know about our standing states (e.g. a belief). This talk assesses this bifurcated approach.

Michele Palmira – On the Explanatory Aspirations of Thinker-Reflexivity

Several authors (see e.g. Campbell 1999, García-Carpintero 2018, O’Brien 2007, Peacocke 2014) have argued that the first-person concept obeys a rule of reference to the effect that any token first-person thought is about the thinker of that thought. In this talk, I probe the explanatory aspirations of the thinker-reflexive rule. I argue that the thinker-reflexive nature of first-person thought can explain the alleged epistemic specialness of the first person, variously cashed out in terms of notions such as “immunity to error through misidentification” (Pryor 1999, Shoemaker 1968) and the “real guarantee” (Coliva 2003, 2012, 2017), only if we accept an epistemically loaded gloss on the notion of a thinker of a thought featuring the thinker-reflexive rule for ‘I’. I articulate the gloss in terms of the thinker’s ability to gain introspective knowledge by acquaintance of the phenomenal character of their thoughts.

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All welcome. To register, please send an e-mail to victor.verdejo@uv.es or mpalmira@ucm.es.

Organised by Víctor M. Verdejo (University of Valencia) and Michele Palmira (UCM).

Funded by grants EFE-VMN PID2019-106420GA-I00 * and RYC2018-024624-I.

* Grant  PID2019-106420GA-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033.