Introspective Knowledge and Displaced Perception :: science

Introspective Knowledge and Displaced PerceptionDretske remarks that on that point are two important differences between introspective experience and otherwise somas of displaced knowledge (p. 60). What are these differences? Are they enough to call into question his diorama of introspective knowledge as displaced perception? The second chapter of Naturalizing the Mind is in the main an attempt to provide an account of introspective knowledge coherent with the Representational Thesis. Dretske takes introspective knowledge to be a given and speak by trying to beg off how much(prenominal) knowledge is possible without appealing to an inner sense, an idea that seems to conflict with the Thesiss trueness to externalism about the content of mental states. To this end, he proposes that introspection is a species of displaced perception. However, he highlights two important differences between introspective knowledge and other forms of displaced perception that seem to suggest t hat introspective knowledge cannot in any applicable sense be viewed as an instance of displaced perception. As a result, Dretske fails to explain how introspective knowledge is possible and therefore fails to provide a obligate alternative to the inner sense account of introspective knowledge. Introspective knowledge is knowledge the mind has of itself (p. 39). For example, knowing, when I perceive a yellowish box, that I am having a certain experience ( that is to say an experience of a yellow box) is, for Dretske, an instance of introspective knowledge. This knowledge is not about the boxs being yellow or indeed about the box at all, it is knowledge about myself, knowledge that I am having a certain experience (on Dretskes view, knowledge that I am representing a, perceived, box as yellow). Introspective knowledge seems to have some strange properties. Natsoulas defines one form of consciousnessreflective consciousnessas a privileged capacity to be non-inferentially aware of (all or some of ) ones authorized mental occurrences. We seem to have this ability. In telling you what I call back I do not have to figure this out (as you susceptibility have to) from what I say or do. There is nothing from which I infer that A looks longer than B. It just does. (p. 39) Dretske take s the purpose that humans have introspective knowledge as a given. His sideline in the matter arises when one attempts to explain how we come by such knowledge and what gives us this first-person authority(p. 40) Dretske wants to reject one possible explanation, namely the idea that introspective knowledge is garnered by the mind perceiving its own workings.