Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by  Fleur Jongepier  (picture below). Starting Autumn 2017 she will be based in Cambridge (UK), working on the role and value of self-knowledge in contemporary liberalism. In the previous blogpost , I introduced some examples that I suggested provide a challenge to what I referred to as the ‘traditional’ approach to the notion of first-person authority, namely, the view according to which first-person authority and self-knowledge always come and go together. I ended the post by mentioning the following three views about the relation between first-person authority and self-knowledge: The Decoupling View. They have first-person authority despite not having self-knowledge. The Negative Traditional ViewThey do not have self-knowledge, therefore do not have first-person authority. The Positive Traditional View. They have self-knowledge and therefore have first-person authority. One reason for thinking the second, Negative Traditional view (‘no self-knowled...

This post is by Fleur Jongepier , a PhD Student at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on self-knowledge and first-person authority. Here Fleur (in the picture above) summarises a paper that she is currently working on with her colleague Derek Strijbos  (in the picture below), psychiatry resident (Dimence) and Postdoctoral Research Fellow in philosophy. Self-knowledge regarding one’s mental states comes in many forms. One can know about one’s mental states in a more or less ‘theoretical’ way, e.g. through reading about it in a psychology book or listening to the folk theories and advice of others, and on that basis make a conjecture about one’s own state of mind. For instance, one may become convinced that one has abandonment issues, and this piece of theoretical self-knowledge might motivate one to seek treatment. An alternative to ‘theoretical’ self-knowledge is deliberative or agential self-knowledge. To use one of Richard Moran’s e...