On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own current inner experience is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we move beyond this knowledge to form a conception of an external world, and to know that the world answers to our conception. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation, arguing that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feeling only by situating ourselves in a conception of an external world. The argument begins with Frank Jackson's famous example of M ... More

On the traditional Cartesian picture, knowledge of one's own current inner experience is the unproblematic foundation for all knowledge. The philosophical problem is to explain how we move beyond this knowledge to form a conception of an external world, and to know that the world answers to our conception. This book is in the anti-Cartesian tradition that seeks to reverse the order of explanation, arguing that we can understand our knowledge of our thoughts and feeling only by situating ourselves in a conception of an external world. The argument begins with Frank Jackson's famous example of Mary, who lacks knowledge of what it is like to see color because she has had no visual experience of color. The framework of possible worlds and a new account of self-locating information are used to clarify Mary's situation, and more generally to represent our knowledge of both our inner experience and the external world. The argument criticizes the use by philosophers of the notion of acquaintance to characterize our epistemic relation to the phenomenal character of our experience, and to attempt to provide a foundation for knowledge, and it explores the tension between an anti-individualist conception of the propositional content of thought and the thesis that we have introspective access to that content. The conception of knowledge that emerges is contextualist and anti-foundationalist, but it is argued that this conception is compatible with realism about both the external and the internal worlds.