The Empirical Case against Infallibilism

Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (1):223-242 (2016)
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Abstract

Philosophers and psychologists generally hold that, in light of the empirical data, a subject lacks infallible access to her own mental states. However, while subjects certainly are fallible in some ways, I show that the data fails to discredit that a subject has infallible access to her own occurrent thoughts and judgments. This is argued, first, by revisiting the empirical studies, and carefully scrutinizing what is shown exactly. Second, I argue that if the data were interpreted to rule out all such infallibility, the relevant psychological studies would be self-effacing. For they adopt a methodology where a subject is simply presumed to know her own second-order thoughts and judgments--as if she were infallible about them. After all, what she expresses as her second-order judgment is trusted as accurate without independent evidence — even though such judgments often misrepresent the subject’s first-order states. The upshot is that such studies do not discredit all infallibility hypotheses regarding self-attributions of occurrent states

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Ted Parent
Nazarbayev University

Citations of this work

Externalism and Self-Knowledge.T. Parent - 2012 - In Ed Zalta, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Self-Knowledge in a Predictive Processing Framework.Lukas Schwengerer - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 10 (3):563-585.

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References found in this work

Actions, Reasons, and Causes.Donald Davidson - 1963 - Journal of Philosophy 60 (23):685.
Consciousness and Experience.William G. Lycan - 1996 - Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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