The Evil Demon Inside

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (2):325-343 (2018)
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Abstract

This paper examines how new evil demon problems could arise for our access to the internal world of our own minds. I start by arguing that the internalist/externalist debate in epistemology has been widely misconstrued---we need to reconfigure the debate in order to see how it can arise about our access to the internal world. I then argue for the coherence of scenarios of radical deception about our own minds, and I use them to defend a properly formulated internalist view about our access to our minds. The overarching lesson is that general epistemology and the specialized epistemology of introspection need to talk---each has much to learn from each other.

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Nicholas Silins
Cornell University

Citations of this work

Self-Knowledge.Brie Gertler - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Why we need descriptive psychology.Charles Siewert - 2023 - European Journal of Philosophy 31 (2):341-357.
Reading the bad news about our minds.Nicholas Silins - 2020 - Philosophical Issues 30 (1):293-310.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and its limits.Timothy Williamson - 2000 - New York: Oxford University Press.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans - 1982 - Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by John Henry McDowell.
Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.

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