Our Knowledge of the Internal World

Stalnaker's 2008 Locke Lectures monograph on self-knowledge and introspection

Tradition: Analytic metaphysics / philosophy of mind / epistemology of self-knowledge

Stalnaker's 2008 Locke Lectures — self-knowledge through the same possible-worlds machinery as knowledge of the external world

Published by Oxford University Press in 2008 from Stalnaker's 2006 John Locke Lectures at Oxford, 'Our Knowledge of the Internal World' applies the possible-worlds machinery developed in 'Inquiry' (1984) to questions about self-knowledge, introspection, and the limits of phenomenal concepts. Across six chapters: (I) The Problem of Knowledge — Stalnaker's framing of self-knowledge as an epistemological problem; (II) Self-Knowledge as a Special Case — the proposal that self-knowledge is structurally continuous with knowledge of the external world; (III) Locating Ourselves in the World — on the relation of first-person and third-person perspectives; (IV) Knowing What One Believes — engaging with the broader literature on first-person authority and privileged access (Wright, Davidson, Burge, Tyler); (V) Phenomenal Concepts and the First Person — Stalnaker's critique of the Chalmers-Jackson phenomenal-concept strategy in philosophy of mind; (VI) Possibilities and Phenomenal Concepts — the more constructive Stalnaker position. The central thesis is that there is no special epistemic access to internal states beyond the same possible-worlds reasoning that governs knowledge of the external world; introspective knowledge is neither infallible nor sui generis. The book is Stalnaker's most extensive engagement with the contemporary philosophy of mind (especially with David Chalmers's work on consciousness and on two-dimensional semantics) and one of the major statements of the analytic-naturalist position against the dualist alternatives.