What if introspection isn’t an inner eye watching your own mind, but simply what rationality requires of you?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, and his work has focused on philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaethics, metaphysics, and metaphilosophy.
Check out his recent book, "The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness"!
https://academic.oup.com/book/63008
2. Book Summary
Daniel Stoljar’s The Introspection Principle: Rationalism about Knowledge of Consciousness sets out to explain what introspection is — defined nominally as the distinctive way we come to know or reasonably believe that we’re in psychological states that are conscious — and to defend a single unified theory of it. The theory is the rationalist account, built around the titular principle: if you are in a conscious state, you should believe that you are, ceteris paribus and given background conditions. Two theses do the work. First, that this is a genuine principle of rationality, on a par with principles enjoining you to believe the obvious consequences of your beliefs, to coordinate belief with perception, and to act on your beliefs. Second, that you have a capacity for introspection iff you abide by it. Introspective belief is thus the manifestation of a rational disposition, and introspective knowledge is introspective belief that amounts to knowledge — so consciousness turns out to be built into the content of rationality.
The first four chapters lay the groundwork. Chapter 2 defends an inclusive notion of a conscious state — one having enough of phenomenal character, awareness, attention, cerebral celebrity, and poise — against the more familiar exclusive (phenomenal, higher-order, access) definitions, while allowing rival theories to help themselves to exclusive notions if useful. Chapter 3 states the principle and fields twenty preliminary questions; chapter 4 contrasts it with the perceptual/inner-sense tradition, endorsing Shoemaker’s critique. The diagnostic offered there structures the whole book: rivals divide into those that accept the principle but embellish it unnecessarily (acquaintance theories, perceptual theories, the “simple” account of Smithies and Peacocke), and those that reject it and thereby become implausible (Shoemaker’s constitutivism, inferentialism). Stoljar positions himself as a synthesis of Armstrong and Shoemaker that departs from both — the connection between conscious state and introspective belief is normative necessity, not metaphysical or natural necessity, and the principle is wide-scope rather than narrow-scope, so it doesn’t collapse into the truth principle.
The remaining thirteen chapters function as a case book, each applying the account to a standing problem: Dretske’s evidence problem (solved via a warrant/evidence distinction), Evans on transparency and Moore on diaphanousness (both accommodated by taking introspectable states to be access conscious), acquaintance, the truth principle, Shoemaker on necessity, privileged access (accepting Byrne’s “different from” thesis while rejecting “better than”), Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument (defused by distinguishing exceptionless from generic luminosity, with only the latter required), Sosa on negative introspection (handled via second-order total-state contents), McKinsey’s externalism incompatibility (rebutted by treating externalism as a posteriori and contingent), Nisbett and Wilson on inference, revelation — which Stoljar rejects, and uses to argue against Kammerer and Frankish’s illusionism — and finally the cogito, where he claims both Descartes and Hume come out partly right, against Cassam’s triviality charge. The concluding argument is abductive rather than direct: the rationalist account earns its place by explaining this whole cluster of puzzles at once, where rivals were each engineered for one.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
00:50 - Introspection
03:42 - Perceptual accounts
09:44 - Mental objects
13:34 - Conscious states
16:43 - Inference
23:56 - Consciousness
32:34 - Vagueness
38:31 - Theories of consciousness
39:23 - Illusionism
47:53 - Rejoinder 54:10 - Theory-laden?
56:32 - Rationality
1:06:18 - How broad is rationality?
1:14:34 - Dretske challenge
1:21:53 - No evidence by introspection?
1:25:14 - Rationality of perception
1:30:28 - Acquaintance accounts
1:39:13 - Response
1:41:31 - Undergeneration worry
1:45:56 - Unified account
1:54:54 - Future development
1:57:32 - Value of philosophy
1:59:19 - Conclusion
