an externalist account of introspective knowledge

358

AN EXTERNALISTACCOUNT OF

INTROSPECTIVEKNOWLEDGE

BY

SARAH SAWYER

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1999) 358–378 0279–0750/99/0400–0000© 1999 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Published by

Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Abstract: The Content Skeptic argues that a subject could not have intro-spective knowledge of a thought whose content is individuated widely. Thisclaim is incorrect, relying on the tacit assumption that introspective knowledgediffers significantly from other species of knowledge. The paper proposes areliabilist model for understanding introspective knowledge according towhich introspective knowledge is simply another species of knowledge, andaccording to which claims to introspective knowledge are not, as suggestedby the Content Skeptic, defeated by the mere possibility of error. This wayof understanding introspective knowledge affords a robust theory of privilegedaccess consistent with semantic externalism.

1. Introduction

Descartes’ writing provides a classic example of a position which pre-supposes that at least some propositional mental events can be known bythe subject in a direct, authoritative, non-empirical manner. If a subjectknows a given propositional mental event in this non-empirical way, Iwill refer to that subject as having privileged access to that thought. I takeit to be an intuitively compelling presupposition that we do indeed haveprivileged access to at least some of our thoughts. However, the recentemergence of semantic externalism, according to which a subject’s set ofpossible and actual thoughts is dependent upon, and restricted by, rela-tions that subject bears to her environment, has been taken to threatenthis intuitively compelling presupposition.

INTROSPECTIVE KNOWLEDGE 359

© 1999 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

In this paper I discuss an argument, henceforth known as the ContentSkeptic’s Argument, designed to bring out the alleged tension. In responseto this argument I propose a model for understanding privileged accesswhich assimilates knowledge of one’s thoughts with the exercising of a recognitional capacity, and according to which the evidence upon whicha subject bases her claims to self knowledge is both introspectively avail-able, and yet defeasible. This way of understanding knowledge of one’sthoughts affords a robust theory of privileged access consistent with seman-tic externalism. In the penultimate section I briefly discuss what has beenthought to be the correct response to the argument, according to whichbeliefs about one’s beliefs are self-verifying. I argue against this responseon the grounds that it leads to a deflationary account of privileged access.

2. A Subject and Her Thoughts: Some Clarifications

In order to assess the force of the Content Skeptic’s Argument, it will beimportant to have distinguished the following three claims, which, I main-tain, correctly capture the nature of the relation between a subject andat least some of her propositional mental events.

1. Self Knowledge: a subject can have knowledge of (at least some of)her thoughts.

2. Privileged Access: the knowledge a subject has of (at least some of)her thoughts is a priori, in contrast to the necessarily a posterioriknowledge others have of her thoughts (where a proposition p isknown a priori if and only if the justification for holding that pdoes not depend on sense-perception,1 and a posteriori otherwise).2

3. First Person Authority: there is a presumption in favor of a sub-ject’s claims to self knowledge.

In what follows, introspection is to be understood simply as the means bywhich a subject has privileged access to her thoughts. It follows from thischaracterization that if a subject has privileged access to a thought, sheknows that thought by introspection: her knowledge of that thought isintrospective knowledge. The first claim, then, concerns knowledge ofthought content, but is silent as to the source and status of that knowl-edge; that is, as to whether that knowledge is delivered by introspection,as to whether that knowledge is a priori.

What of the claim of privileged access? There is an asymmetry betweenthe knowledge a subject can have of her own thoughts, and the knowledgeshe can have of another’s thoughts. Typically, Susan knows what she isthinking in a way in which others do not. To find out what Susan is think-ing, others will have to engage in some form of empirical investigation.

360 PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY


They will have to watch her behavior, or interpret her utterances. No suchobservation or interpretation is necessary if Susan wants to find out thecontent of her thoughts. If she has a current belief that time is of theessence, say, she can know that she is thinking that time is of the essencewithout having to observe what she says or what she does.

What of the claim of first person authority? When a speaker assertsthat she has a belief, a desire, a fear, or an intention, there is, typically,a certain presumption that she is correct, a presumption that does notattach to her ascriptions of propositional mental events to others. Thatthere is this presumption is the claim of first person authority. If the claimof first person authority is to be accepted, an explanation of the asym-metry between the authority accorded to attributions of attitudes to ourpresent selves and attributions of the same attitudes to other selves mustbe forthcoming.

It is not my aim to provide such an explanation here, but by way ofclarification I will offer the following brief remarks. Characterizations offirst person authority often invoke the claim of privileged access. Theypoint to the fact that self-attributions are not normally made on the basisof evidence or observation, that it does not normally make sense to ques-tion why a person attributes herself with the propositional mental eventsshe does. However, an explanation of the asymmetry central to first personauthority cannot be given purely by pointing to this distinction concern-ing the existence or absence of an evidential basis for the ascription ofpropositional mental events. Davidson is surely right to maintain thatfirst person authority is not explained by the fact that self-attributionsare not based on evidence, since “claims that are not based on evidencedo not in general carry more authority than claims that are based on evidence, nor are they more apt to be correct”.3 What would be requiredin addition is an account of why in this particular case, the case of attri-butions of thoughts to one’s present self, the lack of evidence supportedthe correctness of the attribution claim; and if this could be given, theinitial appeal to the lack of evidence as an explanation of the asymmetrywould be rendered redundant.4,5

I am sympathetic to the view that much of our self knowledge relieson evidence similar to that required for knowledge of the thoughts ofothers, and is therefore not a priori. I agree, then, that there are instancesof self knowledge which cannot be characterized by the privileged accessclaim. In addition, I agree that there is much that we do not know, orthat we misconstrue, about our own minds. Claims to self-knowledge aredefeasible, and hence the principle of first person authority is ceterisparibus. However, there is a class of thoughts to which we do have priv-ileged access, and about which we are authoritative, and, consequently,any adequate theory of the mind must respect these two truths.



While I assume that there is such a class of thoughts, the aim of thispaper is to demonstrate that the Content Skeptic’s Argument fails to estab-lish an inconsistency between semantic externalism and privileged accessto thought content. As such, it need not rely on a thorough defense ofthe claim that we do have privileged access to the contents of our thoughts.

3. Externality

Why, then, should semantic externalism be thought to jeopardize theclaim of privileged access? To answer this question we need to come toa certain understanding of the thesis of semantic externalism. Accordingto semantic externalism, the mind is not as it is independently of the waythe world is. Rather, the concepts a subject has, and hence the thoughtsshe can have, depend essentially on the kinds of things with which herenvironment is populated. For example, demonstrative thoughts may besupposed to require the existence of the objects demonstrated; thoughtsexpressed by sentences using singular terms may be supposed to requirethe existence of the objects referred to by those singular terms; andthoughts expressed by sentences containing natural kind terms may besupposed to require the existence of the natural kinds referred to by thosenatural kind terms. I take these three kinds of thought to be paradigmcases of thoughts with externally individuated contents. (It is not essen-tial that the reader agree with me on this point.) The semantic external-ist thesis can be captured by the following slogan: meaning depends atleast in part on facts external to the subject.

The notion which is in need of explication here is that of externality:and this is how I think we ought to proceed. The notion of externalityis, I think, best explicated by employing Kripke’s notion of an epistemiccounterpart.6 Kripke draws the following contrast between water and pain.There are, according to Kripke, epistemic counterparts of water. That is,a substance other than water (that is, other than H2O) could neverthelesslook, feel, smell, and taste just like water; a substance could have all thesuperficial qualities of water without being water. Let us call such a sub-stance “twin water.” In contrast, according to Kripke, nothing could feellike pain without being pain, which is to say, there are no epistemic coun-terparts of pain. The definition of an epistemic counterpart can be givenas follows.

Facts f and f’ are epistemic counterparts for a subject s at time t if an only if they wouldput s in qualitatively the same epistemic state at t.

There are three immediate points to note. First, epistemic counterpartsare defined in terms of facts. This is unnecessary. Epistemic counterparts



could equally be defined in terms of states of affairs, or perhaps even interms of events, or of objects. Second, the notion of a counterpart pre-cludes anything from being an epistemic counterpart of itself. Third, epis-temic counterparts are subject- and time-relative. The fact that Billoccupies a particular location in space, and the fact that his identical twinBen occupies that particular location in space may be epistemic counter-parts for most subjects. They will not, however, be epistemic counterpartsfor the twins themselves. Neither will they be epistemic counterparts fortheir mother, who, let us suppose, can tell the twins apart at a glance. Inaddition, two facts which are epistemic counterparts for a subject s at onetime need not be epistemic counterparts for that subject at another time.A subject could come to know Bill and Ben to such an extent that factswhich would at time t1 have been epistemic counterparts for her wouldno longer be epistemic counterparts for her at time t2.

The notion of an epistemic counterpart can then be employed in therequisite definition of externality thus.

A fact f is external to a subject s at time t if there is a possible fact f’ which is an epistemiccounterpart of f for s at t.

So, a fact is external to a subject if there is a possible fact which she wouldbe unable at that time to distinguish from it. A fact is internal to a subjectif and only if it is not external to that subject. The notion of externality,just like that of an epistemic counterpart, is subject- and time-relative.According to Kripke’s contrast between water and pain, then, the fact thatwater exists will in general be external to a subject, whereas the fact thatshe is in pain will always be internal to her.7 I say that the fact that waterexists will in general be external to a subject to allow for the relevant relativizations. At the extreme, it is plausible to suppose that no facts wouldbe external to an omniscient being, since an omniscient being would besuch that no two distinct facts would be indistinguishable from his pointof view. The notion of an epistemic counterpart is inherently bound upwith the possibility of error, of which there would of course be no ques-tion for such a being.8

Now consider our subject Susan. Susan currently believes that water iswet. According to semantic externalism, that she has this belief dependsat least in part on facts external to her; in this case on the fact that waterexists. Had water not existed, the contents of Susan’s mind could not beas we suppose them to be.9 According to the above proposal, the fact thatwater exists is external to Susan in virtue of there being a possible factwhich is an epistemic counterpart of the fact that water exists; in this casethe distinct possible fact that twin water exists.

The definitive claim of semantic externalism is that the differencebetween the distinct possible facts is semantically relevant. Being related



to water is a necessary condition for possession of the concept water,whereas being related to twin water is a necessary condition for posses-sion of the concept twin water. Moreover, the imperceptible differencebetween the fact that water exists and its structurally distinct epistemiccounterpart, the fact that twin water exists, is taken to carry over into animperceptible difference between Susan’s actual belief content, that wateris wet, and her distinct possible belief content, that twin water is wet. Theinference from an imperceptible difference between the physical appear-ance of duplicate natural kinds to an imperceptible difference betweenthe concepts referring to such kinds is itself contentious, but for now I am willing to grant this assumption to the proponent of the ContentSkeptic’s Argument. This ensures that the fact that Susan possesses theconcept water is external to her. It may be helpful to provide the fol-lowing definition of the externality of concepts.

A concept c is external to a subject s at time t if there is a possible concept c’ which is anepistemic counterpart of c for s at t.

It follows that the semantic properties of any concept c which is externalto a subject s will be underdetermined by the qualitative nature of s’s epis-temic state with respect to c. This definition provides nothing in additionto that provided by the definition of externality given above; it merelyhelps to emphasize the following. According to semantic externalism, notonly does meaning depend on facts which are external to the subject,meaning facts are themselves external to the subject.

And now we are in a position to consider the Content Skeptic’s Argument.

4. The Content Skeptic Argument

It is the fact that Susan’s concepts, and hence thoughts, are external toher which is taken to undermine the claim of privileged access.

The Content Skeptic’s Argument, then, runs as follows. According tosemantic externalism, Susan’s thought is a member of a set of epistemiccounterparts. It follows from the definition of an epistemic counterpartthat if Susan’s thought is a member of a set of epistemic counterparts,she cannot distinguish it a priori from any other member of that set.Hence, she cannot know a priori it’s that thought she has, as opposed toany one of its epistemic counterparts. Hence she cannot know a priorithat it is that thoughts that she has. The Content Skeptic’s Argument,then, demands an answer to the following question: how can a subjecthave privileged access to the contents of her thoughts given that variousdistinct possible thoughts would put her qualitatively in the same epis-temic state? According to the content skeptic, the only way in which Susan



could distinguish the thought she has from the epistemic counterpartthoughts she might have had is by discovering which empirical conditionsdetermine the content of her thought: and this she can do only by rely-ing on sense-perception.

Burge expresses the skeptical worry as follows.

How can one individuate one’s thoughts when one has not, by empirical methods, discrim-inated the empirical conditions that determine those thoughts from empirical conditionsthat would determine other thoughts? (Burge (1988), p. 653)

Falvey and Owens express the same skeptical worry as follows.

[I]s it a consequence of [semantic] externalism that when Susan thinks the thought she wouldexpress using the words “water is [wet],” she does not know directly and authoritativelythat she is thinking that water is [wet]? It might seem that the answer is yes, by virtue ofthe following reasoning. In order for Susan to know that she thinks the thought that wateris [wet], she would have to know that her thought involves the concept water rather thanthe concept [twin water]. But, by hypothesis, there is nothing in her experiential history thatprovides her with the conceptual resources necessary to discriminate between these twoconcepts, and hence she has no introspectively available evidence that her present thoughtinvokes the one concept rather than the other. Therefore, she cannot know by introspectionalone that she is thinking that water is [wet]. She will have to examine her environment inorder to know the content of her thought. (Falvey and Owens (1994), pp. 113–14)

The argument purports to show that if semantic externalism is true, Susanmust undertake some form of empirical investigation in order to knowwhat thought she expresses by the words “water is wet.” This fact is suf-ficient to deny Susan the possibility of privileged access to the content ofher thought, and since the argument, if correct, applies to all thoughtswith externally-individuated contents, semantic externalists appear to beforced to give up the claim of privileged access.

If correct, the argument also undermines the claim of first personauthority with respect to those thoughts whose contents are individuatedin part by facts external to the subject. If knowledge of such thoughtsdepends upon an empirical investigation of the environment, someoneelse may well be in just as good a position as the subject to know thecontent of any of her given thoughts; there are no grounds on which tobase a presumption in favor of a subject’s claims to self knowledge.10

In addition, the argument establishes that semantic externalism under-mines the vast majority of claims to self knowledge simpliciter. Just con-sider Susan. Since things would seem the same to her on Earth as onTwin Earth, she must conduct some form of empirical investigation intothe structure of the liquid before her if she is to know the content of hercurrent thought. This ensures that Susan does not know (with privilege orotherwise) the content of her current thought. She is on this occasion



denied self knowledge. If the Content Skeptic’s Argument is correct, thislack of self knowledge is commonplace. Prior to the discovery of thehidden microstructure of any given natural kind, no one could haveknown that they had a thought with a content which was determined atleast in part by the existence of that natural kind.

5. Relevant Alternatives

The Content Skeptic’s Argument is driven by the thought that knowledgein general requires the ruling out of various relevant alternatives.11 A rele-vant alternative is one the mere possibility of which is enough to defeat anactual claim to knowledge. This is a familiar assumption within the con-text of perceptual knowledge.12 Consider, for instance, Alvin Goldman’sexample of Henry.13 Henry is driving through the countryside, pointing outbarns to his son. Does Henry know, on pointing to a particular barn, thatit is a barn to which he is pointing? The answer, according to Goldman,will depend upon the existence or absence of relevant alternatives whichcould serve to discredit Henry’s claim to knowledge. If Henry is in an areawhere the fields are replete with papier-mâché barns, even though Henryis in fact pointing to a real barn, we would not attribute Henry with knowl-edge that it is a barn to which he is pointing, because that he is pointingto a papier-mâché barn is in this situation a relevant alternative. Henry’sclaim to knowledge is defeated because his evidence is such that, given thehigh frequency of papier-mâché barns in the area, Henry could easily bedeceived into thinking that a papier-mâché barn was a genuine barn.

If, on the other hand, Henry were in an area where there were nothingbut real barns, his pointing to a papier-mâché barn would not be a rele-vant alternative, and his claim to knowledge would not be defeated. Inassessing the Content Skeptic’s Argument, it will be important not to losesight of this crucial point: the mere possibility that the object be a papier-mâché barn is not by itself sufficient to defeat Henry’s claim to knowledge.

We have already seen that the Content Skeptic’s Argument appeals tothe following two related facts. First, a subject would be unable to dis-tinguish water from various other superficially identical yet structurallydistinct substances, such as twin water. Second, a subject would be unableto distinguish the concept water, which refers to water, from various otherhypothetical concepts such as twin water, which would refer to such super-ficially identical yet structurally distinct substances.

The second of these facts is intended by itself to undermine the claimsof privileged access and first person authority. The first is needed if selfknowledge in general is also to be undermined. The relation between thetwo facts is this. It can only be assumed that Susan does not know shehas the concept water if it is assumed she does not know that the watery



stuff in her environment is water. Were she to know the watery stuff inher environment was water, we would have no reason to suppose she didnot know she had the concept water (albeit in an a posteriori manner).The crucial further assumption is that in order to know that the waterystuff in her environment is water, Susan would have to discover the hiddenmicrostructure of that stuff. This is the crucial assumption, since it is onlyon this assumption that it makes sense to suppose that in order to knowshe is entertaining the thought that water is wet, Susan would similarlyhave to discover the hidden microstructure of the watery stuff in her envi-ronment; and hence it is only on this assumption that the Content Skeptic’sArgument undermines the claim of self knowledge.

To return to the issue of relevant alternatives, if the Content Skeptic’sArgument is to succeed, the appropriate epistemic counterparts must berelevant alternatives. The pertinent question is whether the argumentestablishes that they are indeed relevant alternatives, as opposed to merepossibilities. That is, if Susan’s claim to know that the watery stuff in herenvironment is water is to be defeated, the possibility that her environ-ment contain twin water must be a relevant alternative, and not a merepossibility. Similarly, if Susan’s claim to know that she is entertaining thethought that water is wet is to be defeated, Susan’s entertaining thethought that twin water is wet must be a relevant alternative, and not a mere possibility.

In the next section I challenge the assumption that the alternatives proposed by the proponent of the Content Skeptic’s Argument are in factrelevant.

6. Recognitional Capacities

In this section I will argue that the Content Skeptic’s Argument confusesmere possibilities with relevant alternatives, and hence fails to demon-strate an incompatibility between semantic externalism and privilegedaccess to thought content. In order to do this, I will focus on recogni-tional capacities, in particular, on a subject’s capacity to identify partic-ular objects, and her capacity to identify natural kinds.

First, consider Susan’s capacity to recognize her colleague Ortcutt.Susan’s recognitional capacity is reliable: she generally forms the beliefthat (pointing) that’s Ortcutt, if and only if it is. The reliability of Susan’srecognitional capacity consists in her ability to discriminate Ortcutt fromher other colleagues, her students, the occasional visiting speaker, thenumerous inanimate objects which surround her, and so on. Since it isreliable, her recognitional capacity for Ortcutt, when it yields a true beliefthat (pointing) that’s Ortcutt, yields knowledge.

It is, of course, possible that Susan be mistaken. She would, by hypoth-esis, be unable to distinguish the genuine Ortcutt from any one of a set



of epistemic counterparts. On the definition of externality given in sec-tion 3 above, this is sufficient to determine that the fact that that’s Ortcuttis external to Susan. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that there be suchduplicates neither undermines Susan’s capacity to recognize Ortcutt, nordefeats her claim to know that that’s Ortcutt, on any particular occasionwhen she has formed the true belief that that’s Ortcutt on the basis ofexercising that recognitional capacity. To undermine her recognitionalcapacity, and hence defeat her claims to knowledge, the possibility thatSusan believe of a duplicate Ortcutt that it is Ortcutt would have to berelevant. In the actual situation, however, the possibility of duplicateOrtcutts is not relevant: Susan’s environment contains no duplicates. Thenotion of a relevant alternative is perhaps vague. However, it is not essen-tial to the point at issue. The point can be easily put employing insteada conditional theory of knowledge.14 Thus, in the nearest possible worldin which that isn’t Ortcutt, Susan doesn’t believe it is, and in the nearestpossible world in which that’s Ortcutt, Susan believes that it is.

What emerges here is a common sense picture of a recognitional capac-ity to identify particulars which can be knowledge-yielding, even thoughthe evidence on which the claim to knowledge is based is defeasible. Thatis to say, the fact which Susan claims to know is a member of a set offacts all of whose members are epistemic counterparts of one another.15

Brown has offered a similar account of natural kind terms upon whichshe bases her claim that a term for a natural kind gains its reference bybeing associated with a recognitional capacity for that kind.16 She writes,

‘[m]embers of a scientifically ignorant community could have a recognitional capacity fora natural kind, say [water], as opposed to a certain kind of appearance, for instance theappearance [water] actually has … despite the actual or possible existence of duplicate kinds,[such as twin water].’ (Brown (1998), p. 275)

Brown’s concern is to offer an account of how natural kind terms gaintheir reference despite the fact that an item will typically instantiate morethan one natural kind (H2O instantiates the natural kind hydrogen as wellas the natural kind water), and the fact that natural kinds often occur innature in impure form. These concerns need not occupy us here.

Focus instead on Susan’s capacity to recognize water. Her recognitionalcapacity is reliable: she generally forms the belief that (pointing) that’swater if and only if it is. The reliability of Susan’s recognitional capacityconsists in her ability to discriminate water from various other items inher environment, such as gin, gold, her colleague Ortcutt, and so on. Sinceit is reliable, her recognitional capacity for water, when it yields a truebelief that (pointing) that’s water, yields knowledge.

It is, of course, possible that Susan be mistaken. She is, by hypothesis,unable to distinguish water from any one of a set of epistemic counterparts.



Again, on the definition of externality given in section 3, and as stated inthat section, this is sufficient to determine that the fact that that’s water isexternal to Susan. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that there be such dupli-cates neither undermines Susan’s capacity to recognize water, nor defeatsher claim to know, on any particular occasion when she has formed thetrue belief that that’s water on the basis of exercizing that recognitionalcapacity, that that’s water. To undermine her recognitional capacity, andhence defeat her claims to knowledge, the possibility that Susan believe ofa duplicate substance that it is water would have to be relevant. In the actualsituation, however, the possibility of duplicate substances is not relevant:there are no duplicates. Once again, this point can be put in terms of a con-ditional theory of knowledge. In the nearest possible world in which that’snot water, Susan doesn’t believe it is, and in the nearest possible world inwhich it is water, Susan believes it is.17

Once again, what emerges is a common sense picture of a recognitionalcapacity, this time to identify natural kinds, which can be knowledge-yielding, even in the face of possible error. And once again, the potentialdefeaters to any given claim to knowledge are external to the subject.That is to say, the fact which Susan claims to know is a member of a setof facts all of whose members are epistemic counterparts of one another.

Note that if these considerations are correct, Susan can know that thewatery stuff in her environment is water prior to an investigation into itshidden microstructure. The Content Skeptic’s Argument claimed that inorder to know that the watery stuff in her environment is water, Susanwould have to discover the hidden microstructure of that stuff. On theabove proposal, this claim is false. And if Susan can know that the waterystuff in her environment is water prior to an investigation into its hiddenmicrostructure, we no longer have reason to suppose that Susan cannotalso know she possesses the concept water prior to such an investigation.This is not to suppose that knowing the structure of the watery stuff inone’s environment would suffice for knowing that one possesses the con-cept water, it is merely to indicate that it is not necessary, as suggestedby the Content Skeptic’s Argument. Thus the Content Skeptic’s Argumentfails to demonstrate an incompatibility between semantic externalism andself knowledge simpliciter. Nevertheless, privileged access to thought con-tent is still in jeopardy, since Susan’s belief that she has the thought thatwater is wet is still justified by appeal to sense-perception, even ifmicrostructural investigation is not required.

7. Introspectively Available Evidence

The Content Skeptic’s Argument fails to demonstrate that knowledge ofthe contents of externally individuated thoughts requires an investigation



into the hidden microstructure of the natural kinds upon which the con-tents of those thoughts partially depend. This is because it fails to demon-strate that knowledge of the natural kinds in one’s environment requiresan investigation into their hidden microstructure. Nevertheless, it has notbeen shown that semantic externalism is compatible with privileged accessto thought content. If semantic externalism is true, a puzzle remains as tothe relation between introspectively available evidence and introspectiveknowledge. Clarification of this relation is the purpose of this section.

The Content Skeptic’s Argument relies on the claim that introspectivelyavailable evidence, the evidence which grounds a subject’s claims to intro-spective knowledge, supervenes locally on the subject, and hence under-determines thought content. Whether introspectively available evidenceis locally supervenient is a moot issue. Nevertheless, proponents of theContent Skeptic’s Argument clearly maintain that it is. To maintain otherwise would be to maintain that introspectively available evidence byitself determines thought content. It would then follow that things wouldseem different to Susan were she entertaining the distinct possible thoughtthat twin water is wet, and hence the semantic externalist would not evenhave a prima facie problem in accommodating the claim of privilegedaccess.18 But, so the thought goes, if introspectively available evidence islocally supervenient, then whatever account of privileged access is to begiven by the semantic externalist, it cannot be one which relies purelyupon differences in introspectively available evidence to individuatethought-contents. Introspectively available evidence individuates thought-contents too coarsely, and is therefore inadequate by itself for the pur-poses of individuation. Nevertheless, if we are to have privileged accessto the contents of our thoughts, the evidence on which we base our claimsto knowledge of thought content must be introspectively available. If theevidence were not introspectively available, the access would not be priv-ileged. The puzzle, then, is to show how introspectively available evidencecan be regarded as sufficient to ground claims to knowledge of thoughtcontent, even though that evidence fails by itself to individuate the content of the thought a subject claims to know.

What follows is intended as a model for understanding privileged accessconsistent with the underdetermination of thought content by evidencewhich is introspectively available. This model proceeds by extending theaccount of recognitional capacities discussed in section 5, and assimilatingknowledge of thought content with the exercizing of a recognitional capac-ity. Once again consider Susan. This time think of Susan as having thecapacity to recognize her belief that water is wet. Susan’s recognitionalcapacity is reliable: she generally forms the belief that she believes thatwater is wet if and only if she does. The reliability of Susan’s recognitionalcapacity consists in her ability to discriminate her belief that water is wetfrom various other propositional mental events she may have, such as the



belief that that’s Ortcutt, the fear that her car won’t start, the desire for agin and tonic, and so on. Since it is reliable, her recognitional capacity forher belief that water is wet, when it yields a true belief, yields knowledge.

Nevertheless, in line with both the account of Susan’s recognitionalcapacity for particulars and the account of her recognitional capacity fornatural kinds, Susan is not infallible. She is, by hypothesis, unable to dis-tinguish the thought that water is wet from various distinct possiblethoughts which are members of the set of epistemic counterparts, such asthe distinct possible thought that twin water is wet. Again, on the defin-ition of the externality of concepts given in section 3, this is sufficient to determine that Susan’s belief that water is wet is external to her.Nevertheless, the mere possibility that there be such duplicate thoughtsneed neither undermine Susan’s capacity to recognize her thought thatwater is wet, nor defeat her claim to know, on any particular occasionwhen she has formed the true belief that she thinks that water is wet onthe basis of exercizing that recognitional capacity, that she believes thatwater is wet. To undermine her recognitional capacity, and hence defeather claims to knowledge, the possibility that Susan believe of a duplicatethought that it is the belief that water is wet would have to be relevant.In the actual situation, however, the possibility of duplicate thoughts isnot relevant: there are no such duplicates. Once again, to put the pointin terms of a conditional theory of knowledge: in the nearest possibleworld in which Susan doesn’t believe that water is wet, she doesn’t believeshe has that belief, and in the nearest possible world in which Susan doesbelieve that water is wet, she believes she has a belief with that content.

What emerges is a picture of a recognitional capacity for thought con-tent which parallels both that for particulars, and that for natural kinds:a recognitional capacity which can yield knowledge even though the evi-dence on which the claims to knowledge are based is defeasible. To com-plete the analogy, the potential defeaters to any given claim to knowledgeof thought content may not themselves be available a priori. In otherwords, according to this model, Susan’s recognitional capacity yields goodbut defeasible evidence for thought content, and the potential defeatersto her claims to knowledge are not transparent to her. The fact whichSusan claims to know is a member of a set of facts all of whose mem-bers are epistemic counterparts of one another.

This way of understanding knowledge of thought content is consistentwith that knowledge being gained by introspection. Nothing that has beensaid rules out the claim that the recognitional capacity upon which theknowledge claim is based is triggered by evidence which is introspectivelyavailable. Nevertheless, to repeat, it is a consequence of the model thatthe introspectively available evidence be defeasible. Susan’s evidence isnot conclusive, since it would be the same were she entertaining any oneof a range of duplicate thoughts. What is crucial to solving the puzzle is



the realization that evidence which is introspectively available need notbe non-defeasible, and the potential defeaters need not themselves beintrospectively available.

Thinking of introspection as providing defeasible evidence for thought-content is a plausible model for introspective knowledge. To suppose thatsuch a model is implausible is to suppose that introspective knowledgediffers significantly from other forms of knowledge, in that it alonedemands that all possible alternatives be considered relevant. The claimthat a subject can know that p only if she has ruled out every possiblealternative with which her evidence is consistent is in general false. Theclaim that it is true for cases of introspective knowledge, if it is to bemaintained, requires argument which must amount to more than mereinternalist prejudice. Without argument, we have no reason to believeintrospectively available evidence must be conclusive.

Let me emphasize, however, one crucial aspect of introspective knowl-edge. Even on the externalist model presented, introspective knowledge isa priori. The evidence on which claims to self knowledge are based is intro-spectively available, since the justification for one’s claims about one’sthoughts is independent of sense-perception. That a subject entertaining thethought that water is wet is in qualitatively the same epistemic state as thestate she would be in were she to entertain the thought that twin water iswet does not undermine the fact that that subject can know the content ofher thought by introspection alone. Introspectively available evidence maynot be conclusive, but it is, for all that, introspectively available.19

Thus the puzzle is solved. If semantic externalism is true, introspec-tively available evidence is indeed insufficient to individuate the thoughta subject is entertaining. The individuation of thought content dependsupon introspectively available evidence plus facts about the environment.Nevertheless, in any given world, introspectively available evidence willuniquely determine the thought a subject is entertaining in that world.Thus, introspectively available evidence can be the evidence upon whicha subject’s claims to self knowledge are based, consistent with that evi-dence being defeasible, and consistent with the potential defeaters beingexternal to the subject.

It might be objected that my account of privileged access is significantlyweaker than the intuitively compelling presupposition with which webegan. After all, is it not a consequence of my view that a subject wouldnot have privileged access to her thoughts were she transported betweenqualitatively indistinguishable yet structurally distinct environments?Before concluding this section, therefore, let me offer a few brief remarksconcerning the specification of the conditions which would, on my pro-posal, be taken to defeat a subject’s claims to self knowledge. At firstblush, candidates for such defeaters might be the prevalence of duplicatesubstances in the environment, resulting in a corresponding abundance



of duplicate thoughts in Susan’s mind. But let us look at this proposalfurther.20 The proposal is plausible only if it is assumed that Susan wouldstill be employing natural kind terms and concepts even though her envi-ronment contained multiple duplicates. This assumption could be con-tested on the grounds that the ability to acquire and deploy natural kindterms and concepts may presuppose that the natural kind substances inour environment can be distinguished by and large by their manifest prop-erties. That is, it may be that were duplicates commonplace, our termsand concepts would be purely descriptive, and would not relate to spe-cific natural kinds at all. I do not intend to dwell on these problems inspecifying the potential defeaters for claims to introspective knowledge.I mention them merely to indicate that their specification is not straight-forward, and hence to counter the claim that my account of privilegedaccess diverges significantly from the intuitively compelling presupposi-tion with which we began.21

8. A Deflationary Account of Privileged Access

Responses to the Content Skeptic’s Argument offered on behalf of seman-tic externalism up to now have been uniform. They appeal to the fact thatconcepts available for use in self-ascriptions will be the very same con-cepts available for use in first-order thoughts. Crucially, the conceptswhich figure in higher-order thoughts will vary in tandem with the con-cepts which figure in first-order thoughts. For every difference in thought-content, due purely to a semantically relevant difference in environmentalfactors, there would be a corresponding difference in the content of theassociated second-order self-ascriptive thought. Thus, Wright maintainsthat “the content of my second-order beliefs will … be externally deter-mined … [and] will, as it were, co-vary with externally determined vari-ation in the content of my first-order attitudes.”22 Heil claims that thecontents of second-order thoughts are determined “just as are the con-tents of first-order thoughts, by the obtaining of appropriate conditions.”23

Similarly, Shoemaker claims that “the contents of mental states are fixedholistically … whatever fixes the content of the first-order belief … alsofixes in the same way the embedded content in the second-order belief.”24,25

While I am sympathetic to the above claims, I do not see that they pro-vide the basis for an adequate account of privileged access. To demon-strate this, I will focus on the details of a putative account provided byBurge. Burge appeals to two notions, that of commitment, and that ofself-reference. He writes,

The content of the first-order (contained) thought [that water is wet] is fixed by non-individualistic background conditions. And by its reflexive, self-referential character, the



content of the second-order judgement [that I think that water is wet] is logically locked(self-referentially) onto the first-order content which it both contains and takes as its subjectmatter. (Burge, (1988), pp. 659–60)

The first notion, that of containment, is in itself controversial. That thefirst-order thought is taken to be contained in the second-order thoughtgoes against one interpretation of Frege, according to which instances ofa term contained in a first-order thought and in a second-order thoughtwould differ both in their sense and in their reference.26 In addition, main-taining that a thought can literally contain another thought may be takento commit one to certain metaphysical views about thoughts which onemight otherwise be unwilling to accept. (Perhaps this difficulty could becircumvented by talk of an embedded content rather than an embeddedthought.)27 In any event, it is not so much the containment principle thatconcerns me as the notion of self-reference, to which I now turn.

According to Burge, introspective knowledge is self-referential in thesense that the object of reference just is the thought being thought.

When one knows that one is thinking that p, one is not taking one’s thought … that p merely as an object. One is thinking that p in the very event of thinking knowledgeablythat one is thinking it. It is thought and thought about in the same mental act. (Burge(1988), pp. 659–60)

Burge’s claim is not merely that second-order beliefs will covary with theenvironmental conditions which are taken to explain the covariation infirst-order thoughts. It is, in addition, that the second-order thought takesitself as its object. Thus, when a subject ascribes a thought to herself, shedoes not have a second-order thought which is directed towards a distinctfirst-order thought (“… one is not taking one’s thought … merely as anobject”).28 Rather, the attribution of a thought to oneself is taken to be amatter of thinking a particular thought in a particular way, namely self-ascriptively. Burge maintains that “one knows one’s thought to be whatit is simply by thinking it while exercising second-order, self-ascriptivepowers.”29 This is what Burge takes to provide him with the means torefute the Content Skeptic’s Argument. He writes,

If background conditions are different enough so that there is another object of referencein one’s self-referential thinking, they are also different enough so that there is anotherthought. (Burge (1988), p. 659)

The account proposed is inadequate. It is at once too weak and too strong.It is too weak because Burge’s claim is a claim about the self-verifyingnature of the content given in putative claims to introspective knowledge,and not about the attitude taken towards the content. Thus Burge’s

proposal has no means by which to discount a subject from having priv-ileged access to her thought even when she believes herself to desire thatp when she in fact fears that p.30

More importantly, Burge’s account of privileged access is also toostrong. According to Burge’s proposal, it would be impossible for a sub-ject to believe that she is entertaining the thought that water is wet with-out thereby doing so. The existence of a given first-order content isconditionally guaranteed by the existence of, and therefore guarantees thetruth of, the corresponding second-order belief. In short, putative claimsto introspective knowledge are self-verifying. This leaves us no room tobe in error about the contents of our own minds. On Burge’s proposal,a subject cannot be wrong in an attribution of a thought to herself sinceby thinking a second-order thought she thereby brings it about that shethinks a thought which contains the content of the first-order thought sheattributes to herself. But surely I can mistakenly ascribe a thought tomyself. Just consider the attribution of unconscious beliefs and desires tooneself. This leaves us with the sense that an account of self-ascriptionsaccording to which they are self-verifying tells us nothing about the kindof self knowledge which originally interested us. That is, Burge’s accountaffords no insight into what we standardly think of as self knowledge,and a fortiori no insight into the phenomenon of privileged access.

The intuitive picture of belief ascriptions to oneself is that an ascrip-tion will be correct if it picks out an independent thought that one has,and incorrect if it fails to do so. The account offered by Burge is incom-patible with this intuitive picture. On his view, thinking a second-orderthought is nothing more than thinking a first-order thought in a certainkind of way, namely self-ascriptively. There is no room for error at thesecond-order level. And where there is no room for falsehood, there is noroom for truth either.

But as yet we have no reason to give up the intuitive picture, since analternative model for understanding privileged access consistent with it isavailable – that proposed in section 7 above. The model proposed, accord-ing to which introspectively available evidence provides good but defea-sible grounds for knowledge of thought content has two virtues. First, itallows for the possibility that we could be in error about the contents ofour own minds. Second, and consequently, it allows for a robust accountof privileged access which preserves the intuitive picture described above.

9. Conclusion

The deflationary account of privileged access offered by many external-ists is inadequate. In this paper I have offered an alternative way ofunderstanding privileged access compatible with semantic externalism.According to this alternative proposal, the evidence on which a subject’s



claims to self knowledge are based can be introspectively available, evenwhile it is defeasible, and even while the potential defeaters are externalto the subject’s awareness.

The mistaken presumption has been to suppose that any fact of whicha subject can have a priori knowledge must be internal to that subject.In particular, that any fact of which a subject can have introspectiveknowledge must be internal to that subject. If only those facts which areinternal to a subject can be known a priori by that subject, it would followfrom the definition of internality that only those facts for which there areno epistemic counterparts can be known a priori by that subject. It wouldthen follow directly that what is known a priori cannot be defeasible andopen to error, since nothing could put the subject in qualitatively the sameepistemic state. But this presumption is clearly the Cartesian assumptionof the non-defeasibility of introspection, a view which thorough-goingsemantic externalists can happily reject.

It is perhaps this confusion between a priority and internality whichhas made the Content Skeptic’s Argument seem so plausible. Once the twonotions are separated, the way is clear for an account of thought-contentwhich is both external to the subject, in the sense given above, and yetknown a priori, since known independently of sense perception. Semanticexternalism is compatible with privileged access to thought content: butknowledge of thought-content depends in part on the contribution of the“external” world.31

Department of Logic & MetaphysicsUniversity of St. Andrews

NOTES

1 A full analysis of the concept of a priori knowledge is beyond the scope of this paper.For present purposes it will be sufficient simply to understand the terms “a priori” and “a posteriori” as labelling the asymmetry, if there be such, between the way in which a sub-ject can know her own thoughts and the way in which she can know the thoughts of others.

2 It is the contrast which is of importance here, as opposed to merely the a priori statusof the knowledge in question. Mathematical knowledge may be a priori, but the access anygiven subject has to the truths of mathematics can not be said to be privileged in any epis-temically interesting sense.

3 Davidson (1984a), p. 103.4 Davidson has provided an account of first person authority which does not invoke the

privileged access claim. According to Davidson, if we do not assume a subject knows herthoughts, then we cannot begin the process of radical interpretation. See Davidson (1984a).This explains why the presumption is needed, but it is not clear that this in itself providesa justification for it. For more on the notion of radical interpretation, see Davidson (1973),(1974) and (1976).

5 Ryle, famously, denies the claim of privileged access. That is, he maintains that theknowledge a subject has of her own thoughts is of a piece with the knowledge another hasof her thoughts. Self-attributions are based on behavioral evidence, evidence which is equally



available to others as it is to the subject. Even while Ryle denies the privileged access claim,he nevertheless maintains the claim of first person authority. Any account of first personauthority he offers could not, therefore, commit the mistake mentioned above in connectionwith Davidson. Ryle can make no appeal to the claim that self-attributions are evidence-independent in providing an account of first person authority, since it is his contention thatself-attributions are based on empirical evidence. Ryle’s positive account of first personauthority appeals rather to the fact that a subject spends more time in her own companythan anyone else does, and hence has more evidence – empirical evidence – on which to basepredictions about her behavior. See Ryle (1949).

6 For the notion of an epistemic counterpart, see Kripke (1972), Lecture III. The ter-minology, however, is McGinn’s. See McGinn (1977).

7 It is a consequence of this definition of internality that mathematical facts are inter-nal to all subjects, since the fact that, for example, 2+2=4 has no epistemic counterpart.That is not, of course, to say that our mathematical judgments could not be mistaken, butrather that the nature of the mistakes will not concern the notion of an epistemic counter-part. This will be true independently of the conception of mathematics that one adopts,whether that be realist, fictionalist, or other.

8 The thought that for an omniscient being there would be no epistemic counterparts isrelated to the thought that an omniscient being would know the essential nature, the Lockeanreal essence, of things. The correlative thought that all facts would be internal to an omni-scient being suggests a possible understanding of the claim that all things exist in the mindof God. I do not intend to explore this thought further here.

9 I am ignoring the contentious possibility that a subject could possess the concept watereven though she lived in a world with no water; for instance, if she were part of a linguisticcommunity some of whom theorized about water. Burge appears to be committed to sucha possibility in Burge (1982). It is contentious because it is unclear that being part of a lin-guistic community some of whom theorize about water could serve to equip a subject withthe concept water as opposed to the concept H2O.

10 I am not here assuming that the denial of privileged access entails the denial of firstperson authority. As noted in note 5 above, Ryle maintains the latter while denying theformer. However, there is an important difference between Ryle’s thesis and the ContentSkeptic’s Argument. Ryle could consistently maintain the claim of first person authorityeven while denying privileged access, since according to Ryle the empirical facts known bythe subject would not in general be fewer than the empirical facts known by others. Thisis because the relevant empirical evidence was on the Rylean view behavioral and verbal.In the present case, however, the scientist and the subject would have to cooperate in orderto determine what the subject was thinking. The scientist would contribute evidence con-cerning the underlying structure of natural kind substances in the world, structure whichcannot be inferred from the superficial qualities of those natural kinds, and the subjectwould contribute the introspective evidence, manifested in outward behavior.

11 Falvey and Owens note this point in their (1994). On the notion of relevant alterna-tives, see for example Dretske (1970), and Goldman (1976).

12 I do not here intend that introspective knowledge be assimilated to perceptual knowl-edge. The analogy is instructive in so far as it brings out a difference which is crucial to thefault in the Content Skeptic’s Argument. For criticisms of the perceptual model of intro-spective knowledge, see for example Shoemaker (1985) and (1988), Davidson (1987), andBurge (1988) and (1996). For an interesting account of introspective knowledge as analo-gous to bodily perception, see Armstrong (1968), especially pp. 328–38.

13 Goldman (1976).14 For counterfactual theories of knowledge and justification, see Dretske (1971) and

(1981), Goldman (1976) and (1986), and Nozick (1981).15 That is consistent with the claim that Susan nevertheless knows there are no duplicate

Ortcutts in her environment. Knowledge does not require infallibility.



16 Brown (1998).17 I am assuming here that Susan is able to see, taste, smell, etc. the liquid before she

makes her claim.18 For an account according to which all content is conceptual and hence to be individ-

uated externally, see for example McDowell (1994).19 This suggests the following account of first person authority. Claims to self knowledge

are based on evidence, which brings them in line with claims to other forms of knowledge,thus avoiding Davidson’s worry, but the evidence on which they are based is introspectivelyavailable, hence only available to the subject, which explains why we are justified in accord-ing the authority.

20 It is often likewise assumed that being switched between duplicate environments on afrequent basis would not disrupt Susan’s psychological functions. This is far from obvious.The proper functioning of a mind may require a broadly stable environment. The root ofthe claim that the mind should be seen as extended on to the world is that the mind is notessentially detachable from the world. This seems to have been overlooked by those whomake frequent appeal to so-called “switching cases.”

21 This should serve to warn against sweeping claims such as that were Susan switchedbetween environments, she would lose privileged access to her thoughts. It may be the casethat were Susan switched between such environments she would simply have no determi-nate thoughts, rather than that she would have determinate thoughts to which she had noprivileged access.

22 Wright (1991), p. 76.23 Heil (1988), p. 251.24 Shoemaker (1994), p. 260.25 Davidson has also provided an account of how semantic externalism can accommodate

the claim of privileged access. See Davidson (1987). I will not discuss his account here in anydetail, since I think his response to the problems posed for an account of privileged access bysemantic externalism belies a failure to understand the nature of the problem. Davidson main-tains that the appearance of an incompatibility arises from the following mistaken inference.The fact that a propositional mental event is described by relating it to something outside thehead cannot be used as the basis from which to infer that the thought must itself be outsidethe head, and hence unavailable to privileged access (op. cit., p. 451). There are two pointsof contention I have with this response. First, it is far from clear who, if anyone, makes thismistake. Second, it is implausible to suppose, as Davidson’s response suggests, that a subjectcan be attributed with privileged access to a propositional mental event of hers, even whileshe is unable to provide any relevant description of that propositional mental event.

26 For an interpretation of Frege contrary to this, see Dummett (1973).27 Thus the thought that grass is green or grass is blue contains the content that grass is

blue, but not the thought that grass is blue.28 Burge (1988), pp. 659–60.29 Burge (1988), p. 656.30 For an objection along these lines, see McDonald (1995).31 I would like to thank Fraser MacBride, David Papineau, Mark Sainsbury, and Stewart

Shapiro for comments and encouragement on ideas presented in this paper. I would alsolike to thank an anonymous referee for Pacific Philosophical Quarterly and audiences at theUniversity of Kansas and the University of St. Andrews for forcing further clarification.

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an externalist account of introspective knowledge

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