On today’s post, John Dorsch, a postdoctoral researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences, introduces his new book, Origins and Future of Self-Knowledge . He explores how we come to understand and critically evaluate our own beliefs. John Dorsch How do we know that we know? We routinely distinguish between merely believing something and having good reasons to be confident. Yet the capacity to make these distinctions is remarkable. How did creatures like us acquire it? In Origins and Future of Self-Knowledge , I investigate the bodily, social and cognitive conditions that make this capacity possible. The book examines how we come to understand our own beliefs as beliefs: states that can be mistaken, require justification, and ought to answer to how things actually are. Book Cover Consider an ordinary exchange. Someone asks where the post office is. You point across the street. They ask, “Are you sure?” Here you are being asked to assess your own judgment and possi...
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