Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness

Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-18 (forthcoming)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

When you have a conscious experience—such as feeling pain, watching the sunset, or thinking about your loved ones—are you aware of the experience as your own, even when you do not reflect on, think about, or attend to it? Let us say that an experience has “mineness” just in case its subject is aware of it as her own while she undergoes it. And let us call the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness “typicalism.” Recently, Guillot has offered a novel argument for typicalism by leveraging the relation between self-knowledge and self-awareness. She starts by arguing that all ordinary experiences give their subjects immediate justification to believe that their experiences are their own. She then argues that this can be explained by typicalism. In this paper, I argue that her argument fails. I start by clarifying the notion of mineness and giving more details about her argument. I then explain why her argument fails by raising doubts about whether typicalism explains the target explanandum. I close by considering some implications of our discussion for self-knowledge.

Similar books and articles

Mineness without Minimal Selves.M. V. P. Slors & F. Jongepier - 2014 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (7-8):193-219.
The Transcendental Argument for Universal Mineness: A Critique.Daniel Wehinger - 2024 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 15 (1):167-188.
The trivial argument for epistemic value pluralism. Or how I learned to stop caring about truth.Berit Brogaard - 2009 - In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic value. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mineness first: three challenges to contemporary theories of bodily self-awareness.Alexandre Billon - 2017 - In Adrian J. T. Alsmith & Frédérique de Vignemont (eds.), The Subject's Matter: Self-Consciousness and the Body. Boston, USA: MIT Press. pp. 189-216.
Scepticism, relativism and the argument from the criterion.Howard Sankey - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (1):182-190.
'According to' phrases and epistemic modals.Brett Sherman - 2018 - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 36 (2):627-636.

Analytics

Added to PP
2024-01-10

Downloads
133 (#139,067)

6 months
133 (#28,706)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Shao-Pu Kang
Academia Sinica

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

On a confusion about a function of consciousness.Ned Block - 1995 - Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18 (2):227-–247.
The Concept of Mind.Gilbert Ryle - 1949 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 141:125-126.
Knowing One’s Own Mind.Donald Davidson - 1987 - Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 (3):441-458.
The Varieties of Reference.Gareth Evans & John Mcdowell - 1986 - Philosophy 61 (238):534-538.

View all 41 references / Add more references