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Transparency and introspective unification

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Abstract

Gareth Evans has observed that one merely needs to ‘look outward’ to discover one’s own beliefs. This observation of what has become known as belief ‘transparency’ has formed a basis for a cluster of views on the nature of introspection. These views may be well suited to account for our introspective access to beliefs, but whether similar transparency-based accounts of our introspective access to mental states other than belief can be given is not obvious. The question of whether a transparency-based account can be generalized beyond beliefs is part of the larger issue whether introspection of different mental states can receive broadly the same account—whether introspection is unified. My aim is to examine one particularly thorough attempt at generalizing a transparency-based account of introspection due to Alex Byrne. I argue that the resulting view does not offer a unified account of introspection, even across a handful of mental states. In doing so, I highlight two difficulties most views on introspection that try to offer a unified account would have to face, even if they are not based in belief transparency. The subsequent move away from introspective unification has ramifications for several other philosophical debates, such as the architecture of the mind and our rationality.

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Notes

  1. Different proposals concerning the appropriate interpretation of Evans’ observation come from Shoemaker (1988), Dretske (1994), Gallois (1996), Moran (2001), Fernandez (2013), Bar-On (2004), Byrne (2005), Boyle (2009), and Roessler (2013), to name a few.

  2. Byrne (2005, 2011a, b, c, 2012).

  3. For alternative routes to pluralism, see Nichols and Stich (2003), Prinz (2004), Goldman (2006), Zimmerman (2008), Boyle (2009), Hill (2009), and Schwitzgebel (2012).

  4. I will largely avoid this specialized terminology, familiar from Fodor (1983), in order to suppress some commitments that tend to accompany it, such as informational encapsulation and the nature of the inputs and outputs of modular systems.

  5. Some of those who focus on these capacities in the vast literature on cognitive architecture are Fodor (1983), Pylyshyn (1984), Raftapoulos (2001), Carruthers (2006), Prinz (2006), Macpherson (2012), and Siegel (2012).

  6. E.g. Shoemaker (1988), Peacocke (2008).

  7. E.g. Dretske (1994), Gallois (1996), Byrne (2005), Fernandez (2013).

  8. Thorough critique of Byrne’s core view, rather than his attempt at introspective unification, can already be found in Boyle (2011) and was foreshadowed by Bar-On (2004), much of whose critique of Evans’ view can be applied to Byrne’s (2005) view.

  9. Some other promising possibilities for unification come from considering the first-person authority of mental state self-attributions, such as those offered by expressivists (e.g. Bar-On 2004). However, such accounts are not focused on the nature of introspection, as I am, but rather on the broader range of features knowledgeable mental state self-attributions might have.

  10. Alternative interpretations of Evans’ observation of transparency are listed in footnote 1.

  11. As Byrne notes, the self-verifying nature of BEL is largely dependent on its careful formulation as instructions to oneself, rather than for any subject S.

  12. Carruthers (2011) attempts to show that Hurlburt’s method and data are consistent with self-interpretation, which is a kind of inference. However, this sort of inference is made unconsciously by a “mindreading faculty” with built-in assumptions that link behavior with mental states (p. 217)—an interpretation that does not help Byrne’s THINK rule.

  13. Boyle (2011) offers an interesting challenge Byrne’s inferential interpretation of Evans’ transparency observation and its extension to the case of intentions. However, in the interest of examining the question of introspective unification, I grant Byrne his interpretation of transparency, and focus on whether its extension to intentions is complete.

  14. E.g. Simpson et al. (1998), Linney et al. (1998), Simpson and Done (2004).

  15. Kemp et al. (1997).

  16. For an in-depth discussion of pain asymbolia, see Grahek (2007).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Alex Byrne, Richard Heck, Chris Hill, Gregor Hochstetter, Christoph Michel, Krisztina Orban, Ferdinand Pöhlmann, Johannes Roessler, Josh Schechter, Susanna Siegel, Mog Stapleton, Hong Yu Wong, and three anonymous referees for comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Philosophy of Neuroscience Group, Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience, Universty of Tübingen, Otfried-Müller-Str. 25, 72076, Tübingen, Germany

    Kateryna Samoilova

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Samoilova, K. Transparency and introspective unification. Synthese 193, 3363–3381 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0936-5

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