Self-Knowing Animals
A constitutivist account of self-knowledge for rational minds
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22422662 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Evan Jones (0000-0003-2986-522X, Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-14 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-16 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophical Explorations (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1386-9795 • E-ISSN: 1741-5918 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13869795.2026.2703503 |
| OpenAlex | W7168824456 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This paper articulates and defends a constitutivist account of self-knowledge for rational minds. It is a built-in feature of such states in rational human animals that they are always potentially self-conscious and so potentially self-knowable in explicit reflective consciousness. But independently of whether one explicitly reflects on some mental state or other, such states are always implicitly or unreflectively known. For a rational mind to undergo a mental state is to undergo an essentially knowable condition, because rational minds are self-consciously constituted. In Section 2, I explicate constitutivism by laying out its main philosophical commitments. In Section 3, I elaborate the crucial role of implicit self-knowledge in a constitutive account (as a ‘built-in’ feature of mental states) by critically engaging with Matthew Boyle’s recent account of reflective self-knowledge and pre-reflective self-awareness. In Section 4, I address the worry that a constitutivist account of self-knowledge must have a restricted scope because it cannot explain knowledge of phenomenal states.
Mental state · Rational agent · Rational analysis · Worry · Embodied and Extended Cognition · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy and Theoretical Science
| Highly cited | No |
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