CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Donayre Pimentel, Stephania |
|---|---|
| Title | Hiding in Plain Sight: Challenges unconscious mentality places on self-knowledge |
| Summary | Self-knowledge refers to knowledge of one’s own mind: what we feel, think, believe, desire… Since Descartes, it is commonplace to take self-knowledge as categorically distinct from our knowledge of the outside world. This distinctiveness is often put in terms of “privileged access”: I can get to know my own mind in a way which no one else can. Indeed, privileged access has also been championed as the "mark of the mental": the defining criterion of mental phenomena. It is my view that privileged access is not the mark of the mental, but only the mark of the conscious. This is because, first of all, the vast extent of our cognitive and affective processing occurs with little or no conscious effort. Secondly, many quintessential mental phenomena do not depend upon our continued awareness: I can continue to believe and desire something even when I am not conscious of it. If this is right, the notion of privileged access fails to capture all that there is to to know. In particular, it fails to recognise unconscious mental phenomena as proper objects of self-knowledge. Bringing unconscious mental phenomena into the fold calls for a critical reevaluation of the aims and methods of attaining self-knowledge. It is this project that I undertake in this dissertation. In chapter 1, I begin by proposing a basic ontological and epistemic distinction between mental events and mental states. In chapter 2, I build upon this schema by clarifying the nature of unconscious mental states. I go about this by answering two questions: (1) What makes unconscious states mental? and (2) What makes mental states unconscious? In chapter 3, I bring this framework to bear on a philosophical debate concerning whether self-knowledge is a matter of discovery or �making up one’s mind� (interpretivism). While siding mostly with interpretivists such as Crane and Farkas, I caution that we should not overestimate our capacities for articulation. I claim that any faithful representation of our unconscious states must accommodate or negotiate their inherent uncertainty and contradiction, ceding terrain for the mindful wisdom of self-ignorance. |
| Supervisor | Tim Crane |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/donayre_stephania.pdf |
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