This week's post is by Shao-Pu Kang, an assistant professor at National Tsing-Hua University, Graduate Institute of Philosophy, his recent publication Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness in Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
fore you turn your attention to and reflect on them?
This question lies at the heart of live debates about whether experiences come with a built-in sense of ownership, often called mineness: a pre-reflective awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own.
In “Against an Epistemic Argument for Mineness,” I critically examine Marie Guillot’s novel attempt to defend typicalism, the view that all ordinary experiences have mineness.
Guillot starts by pointing out that when you have an experience, such as feeling a cat’s silky fur, you immediately know that your experience is your own. You don’t need to infer the belief from evidence. Your experience itself warrants the belief.
Why is this so? The best explanation, Guillot argues, is that your experience has mineness: it is because you are aware of your experience as your own that you immediately know that it is your own. On this view, the sense of ownership is built into experience rather than added later through reflection.
If Guillot’s explanation works, it would provide a powerful and direct argument for typicalism, one that avoids controversial appeals to pathological cases like thought insertion, depersonalization, and Cotard’s syndrome.
Guillot’s argument gains initial plausibility by comparing introspection with perception. When you touch a cat’s silky fur, you seem to immediately know not only that your experience is your own but also that the cat’s fur is silky. This parallel could be explained by a general principle linking immediacy to awareness: you immediately know that something is a certain way because you are aware of it as being that way.
However, the analogy breaks down under scrutiny. Awareness of the cat’s fur as silky is perceptual and attentive. By contrast, awareness of your experience as your own is supposed to be introspective and pre-reflective, operating in the background rather than at the center of attention. Since these forms of awareness differ, a single principle can’t explain both cases. Guillot needs a version of the principle tailored specifically to introspection, but no such account is provided.
Another issue concerns Guillot’s choice of the contrast case. She appeals to blindsight to show how the absence of experience leads to merely inferential self-knowledge. But blindsight involves unconscious perception, making it a poor comparison. More relevant cases actually put pressure on her view. Depersonalization patients, for example, often report feeling alienated from their experiences, and yet they seem to have no difficulty knowing immediately that their experiences are their own. If that is right, immediacy does not require mineness after all.
A broader upshot is that mineness may not explain what is distinctive about self-knowledge of experience. It is widely thought that we have a distinctively immediate way of knowing our experiences that is unavailable to others. But if immediacy can do without mineness, the distinctiveness of self-knowledge must be grounded in something else, whatever it turns out to be.