Knowing One’s Own Mind

Memory, text and the Greek Revolution

In “Knowing One’s Own Mind” (1987a) Donald Davidson maintains that there is no reason to suppose that mental states like belief and knowing the meaning of a word, ordinarily construed, do not satisfy two controversial conditions: 

(I)

They are ‘inner’ in the sense that they do not presuppose the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom the state is ascribed; and




(II)

They are the very states which we normally identify and individuate as we do beliefs and other propositional attitudes (1987a: 444).

Internalism, Externalism, and Davidson’s Conception of the Mental

The investigation of epistemic virtues, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage and intellectual humility is a growing trend in epistemology. An underexplored question in this context is: what is the relationship between these virtues and other types of virtue, such as moral or prudential virtue? This paper argues that, although there is an intuitive sense in which virtues such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness have something to do with the epistemic domain, on closer inspection it is not clear to what extent they should be understood as genuine epistemic virtues. We draw a distinction between epistemic virtues and virtues with epistemic content and provide reason to believe that the aforementioned virtues are moral virtues with epistemic content rather than bona fide epistemic virtues. The upshot is that there are far fewer epistemic virtues out there than commonly assumed.

Epistemic Virtues and Virtues with Epistemic Content

First‐Person Authority

For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come under scrutiny. Evidence points to two overlapping action pathways: a dorso-dorsal pathway that calculates features of the object to be acted on, and a ventro-dorsal pathway that transmits stored information about skilled object use from the ventral stream to the dorso-dorsal pathway. This evidence suggests that stored information may exert significantly more influence on visually guided action than hitherto assumed. I argue that this, in turn, supports the notion of skilled automatic action that is nonetheless agential. My focus here will be on actions influenced by implicit biases (stereotypes/prejudices). Action that is biased in this way, I argue, is in an important sense intentional and agential.

background

https://philpapers.org/archive/BROIBI.pdf

Knowing One’s Own Mind

Citations

Memory, text and the Greek Revolution

Internalism, Externalism, and Davidson’s Conception of the Mental

Epistemic Virtues and Virtues with Epistemic Content

First‐Person Authority

Implicit biases in visually guided action

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