Debating Self-Knowledge

Description

Language users ordinarily suppose that they know what thoughts their own utterances express. We can call this supposed knowledge minimal self-knowledge. But what does it come to? And do we actually have it? Anti-individualism implies that the thoughts which a person's utterances express are partly determined by facts about their social and physical environments. If anti-individualism is true, then there are some apparently coherent sceptical hypotheses that conflict with our supposition that we have minimal self-knowledge. In this book, Anthony Brueckner and Gary Ebbs debate how to characterize this problem and develop opposing views of what it shows. Their discussion is the only sustained, in-depth debate about anti-individualism, scepticism and knowledge of one's own thoughts, and will interest both scholars and graduate students in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and epistemology.

Anthony Brueckner is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Essays on Skepticism (2010). Gary Ebbs is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. He is the author of Rule-Following and Realism (1997) and Truth and Words (2009).

'The Brueckner and Ebbs debate, about whether attitude anti-individualism threatens a subject's authority regarding her own thoughts, is a pleasure to read. This book is a must-read for all who followed the debate over the last decade, and the arguments presented here will also invigorate the debate going forward.' Sanford Goldberg, Northwestern University 'I strongly recommend Brueckner and Ebbs's book to anyone interested in self-knowledge. It is a valuable contribution both in its overall argument and in its specific discussions.' George Lazaroiu, Review of Contemporary Philosophy