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You know what someone else is thinking and feeling by observing them. But how do you know what you are thinking and feeling? This is the problem of self-knowledge: Alex Byrne tries to solve it. The idea is that you know this not by taking a special kind of look at your own mind, but by an inference from a premise about your environment.
List of contents
- 1: Problems of Self-Knowledge
- 2: Inner Sense
- 3: Some Recent Approaches
- 4: The Puzzle of Transparency
- 5: Belief
- 6: Perception and Sensation
- 7: Desire, Intention, and Emotion
- 8: Memory, Imagination, and Thought
About the author
Alex Byrne is chair of the philosophy section at MIT. His main interests are philosophy of mind (especially perception and consciousness), epistemology (especially self-knowledge), metaphysics (especially color), and problems concerning sex and gender. He has written a number of papers on color with David Hilbert of the University of Illinois at Chicago; they also edited the two-volume collection Readings on Color for MIT Press. He recently co-edited The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, now on its second edition.
Summary
You know what someone else is thinking and feeling by observing them. But how do you know what you are thinking and feeling? This is the problem of self-knowledge: Alex Byrne tries to solve it. The idea is that you know this not by taking a special kind of look at your own mind, but by an inference from a premise about your environment.
Additional text
Byrne glides easily through the historical and contemporary literature on self-knowledge, and he culminates in an account of self-knowledge that is "uniformly detectivist, inferential, and economical, and the direction of inference is always from world to mind" (from the preview). The bibliography is impressive. Summing up: Highly recommended
