9. Self-Attribution

Author: Goldman, Alvin I.

Source: Simulating Minds, August 2006 , pp. 223-258(36)

Publisher: Oxford Scholarship Online Monographs

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Abstract:

Most cognitive scientists and many philosophers of mind resist the traditional notion that the mind has a special method of monitoring or accessing its own current mental states. We review the critiques of both philosophers (Wittgenstein, Burge, Shoemaker) and cognitive scientists (Gazzaniga, Nisbett and Wilson, Gopnik), based on confabulation or self/other parallelism, and find all to be wanting. We then examine the more congenial monitoring account of Nichols and Stich, but find it incapable of handling the problem of attitude-type identification. A nuanced special-method approach is presented that combines introspection (inner recognition) for self-attributing state-types and redeployment for self-attributing attitude contents. The question of what the input-properties are for introspection is addressed at length.

Keywords: Shoemaker; input-properties; monitoring; redeployment; confabulation; introspection; self/other parallelism; attitude types; Nichols and Stich

Document Type: Research article

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