Whose Consciousness? Reflexivity and the Problem of Self-Knowledge

If I am aware that p, say, that it is raining, is it the case that I must be aware that I am aware that p? Does introspective or object-awareness entail the apprehension of mental states as being of some kind or another: self-monitoring or intentional? That is, are cognitive events implicitly self-aware or is “self-awareness” just another term for the cognition that takes an immediately preceding instance of cognition for its object? Not surprisingly, intuitions on the matter vary widely, and classical Indian philosophy presents us with three distinct views on the problem of self-knowledge: (1) cognitive events are implicitly or “reflexively self-cognizant”: I am simultaneously aware of the rain and of my awareness of it; (2) awareness of a particular cognitive event occurs through an additional, but immediately following, cognition, most often identified as an “inward” perception (anuvyavasāya); (3) cognitive events become instances of self-knowledge only when taken up inferentially in “reflection”: I know that I was bitten by a spider upon apprehending the spider’s bite mark on my skin. Dignāga and Dharmakīrti defend versions of the first position, Nyāya and some Buddhist philosophers like Candrakīrti versions of the second and third positions. This paper proposes a novel solution to this classical debate by reframing the problem of self-knowledge in terms of the relation between phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge. Concepts of consciousness such as “introspective awareness” (manovijñāna) and “reflexive self-awareness” (svasaṃvedana, svasaṃvitti) are grounded in phenomenal experiences rather than physical events and processes. As such they yield a different kind of self-knowledge than what can be gained by applying externalist conceptual schemas to understanding the mind. I argue that Dharmakīrti’s theory of content, which takes a bottom-up approach to apoha, can thus be seen as endorsing the efficacy of phenomenal experience as a vehicle for self-knowledge

Cognitive science · Consciousness · Epistemology · Reflexivity · Social science · Sociology · Critical Realism in Sociology · Philosophy · Psychology