On the traditional Cartesian picture, kwledge of one's own internal world - of one's current thoughts and feelings - is the unproblematic foundation for all kwledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we can move beyond this kwledge, how we can form a conception of an objective world, and how we can kw that the world answers to our conception of it. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation. Robert Stalnaker argues that we can understand our kwledge of our thoughts and feelings only by viewing ourselves from the outside, and by seeing our inner lives as features of the world as it is in itself. He uses the framework of possible worlds both to articulate a conception of the world as it is in itself, and to represent the relation between our objective kwledge and our kwledge of our place in the world. He explores an analogy between kwledge of one's own phemenal experience and self-locating kwledge - kwledge of who one is, and what time it is. He criticizes the philosopher's use of the tion of acquaintance to characterize our intimate epistemic relation to the phemenal character of our experience, and explores the tension between an anti-individualist conception of the contents of thought and the thesis that we have introspective access to that content. The conception of kwledge that emerges is a contextualist and anti-foundationalist one but, it is argued, a conception that is compatible with realism about both the external and internal worlds.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10
0199592039
ISBN-13
9780199592036
eBay Product ID (ePID)
103945829
Additional Product Features
Place of Publication
Oxford
Series Title
Lines of Thought
Author Biography
Robert C. Stalnaker is Professor of Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His teaching and research interests are in philosophical logic, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is the author of Inquiry (Bradford Books, 1984), Context and Content (OUP, 1999), and Ways a World Might Be (OUP, 2003).
