Self-knowledge: An Advantage or an Illusion?

At first, we might think that we are aware of what is going on in our minds. For example, we know that we want our family and friends to be well, that we want to pay the electricity bill for this month, that we think Myanmar was once called Burma, and that we feel something like pain.

For knowing the purported facts in our thoughts, philosophers use the phrase "self-knowledge." Some philosophers believed that we possess self-knowledge and that we also possess something unique about the nature of some of the knowledge we possess, and that we can start to understand the reason by checking our knowledge of other people's minds. This belief dates back at least to the time of the philosopher René Descartes in the seventeenth century.

So consider, for example, how you might know if your friend has a headache. The way you will know this fact is by observing his behavior or by what he says, or perhaps by putting his hands on his head, or by taking some painkillers, or by telling you plainly that he is in pain.

However, it differs from how your friend perceives his own pain. To have this self-knowledge, he doesn't have to take medication, hear himself say, "I'm in pain," or even notice himself holding his head in his hands. Additionally, whatever technique he employs to recognize a sensation—whether it's what philosophers refer to as mindfulness or whatever—seems to give him a more intimate understanding of what is on his mind.

In other words, we have a way of knowing the facts about what is on our minds, such as our feelings or some of our attitudes, through a means that no one else can use to know those same facts. So let's call this feature of our self-knowledge the uniquely first-personal feature.

The importance of self-knowledge

There is another aspect to some of our self-knowledge that philosophers have considered distinctive: it is highly reliable.

Knowing that we experience something firsthand is more reliable than knowledge possessed by anyone else about the same matter. When your friend says they are in pain, there is no reason to doubt it because it is a source of knowledge that affirms it, and they have a high epistemic authority on this matter compared to anyone else. This is the privilege of self-knowledge's epistemic authority. So, what makes possessing this privilege valuable?

Philosophers who believe that we possess something distinctive about some of our self-knowledge have attributed certain variables, either from personal uniqueness, epistemic authority, or a combination of both. They have used the term "privileged access" to discuss this specialization. It's simply a matter of having reliable knowledge about one's own mental states through unique individual means.

Philosophers have debated whether we have privileged access at all and, if so, how much of it we possess. Historically, the most well-known answer has been that we have this kind of access to some facts about our current mental states, such as pain or some of our experiences. In principle, there is no barrier to having privileged access to such states.

Recently, however, there has been increasing skepticism regarding privileged access, and the reasons for this skepticism offered by both philosophers and psychologists are varied, subtle, and sometimes complex. Some, for example, present empirical data from social psychology experiments that purport to prove that people routinely misunderstand the contents of their own minds, while others focus on metaphysical claims about the nature of our attitudes, arguing that, given what these states are, we are unable to have privileged access to most of them.

We will not here investigate whether we have privileged access to certain truths in our minds, but what value would we lose if we had no such privilege? In other words, what value do we fail to have if the access privileges of skeptics are correct?

Control over facts

If we lack privileged access to facts in our minds, we lose something valuable in our epistemic lives. Specifically, we may fail to possess a kind of strong control over facts related to our minds, a control that helps us effectively achieve our goals.

To support this claim, let's engage in a thought experiment. Imagine a future in which neuroscientists figure out a way to implant a chip in your brain with the sole function of providing you with information about the contents of your mind. Let's call this chip Super Siri. Now ask Super Siri whether you think it's raining outside, are afraid of being watched, or hope to win the lottery. Super Siri offers a response: "Yes" or "No."

Unlike Siri on the phone, Super Siri is very reliable. It is constantly presenting facts about your brain when you ask it a question, and you know that it is very reliable, but here is the problem: Super Siri also makes this information available to others, so with a little effort, others can learn the same facts in the same way that you do.

Having very accurate knowledge of facts about your brain via Super Siri involves having knowledge that is not uniquely subjective. This is because others are able to use Super Siri as well to learn the same facts about your brain that you learn through this device. For this reason, you seem to relinquish a great deal of authority over such facts.

Instead of others having to rely on you—that is, on your behavior or your sayings—to know what's on your mind, they can easily check Super Siri. So while you may have a very secure knowledge of Super Siri, the price is that you give up a great deal of control over these realities if Super Siri is your only way to learn about them.

Similarly, imagine that Super Siri is uniquely self-knowledgeable, keeping its information private. However, the problem now is that Super Siri is not widely relied upon to know the facts about your mind. Consequently, it doesn't grant us the secure knowledge we would have if we had privileged access. If this is the case, we have less control over important facts than if we had a more reliable way of knowing them.

This is because others are likely to learn about such facts through alternative third means, which are the ones that provide them with safe, or may be safer, knowledge of such facts. To the extent that others stand in a strong, or may be stronger, epistemological position regarding such facts, our control over who learns and who does not learn about such facts will be more limited.

And if the control I have referred to is diminished by the failure to fulfill the first unique personality feature or the advantage of cognitive authority, then such control will obviously be reduced if the means by which we know our minds lack these two advantages.

Super Siri provides insights into the value of having privileged access and believes that privileged access is valuable. This is because it is necessary to have a certain kind of powerful control over the contents of our minds, which means the ability to keep certain facts about our minds secret or to divulge certain facts to whomever we choose, and this strong control comes only with privileged access.

Privileged access to the facts

When we have privileged access to some truth, we will have cognitive authority at that time, and that authority is likely to remain as well. Only we can use privileged access to obtain those facts, and others can depend on us to obtain knowledge of those truths to which we have privileged access.

Herein lies the importance. As this control is very important to us, we will not be able to achieve what we want unless we control our private information. In the absence of this control, we will not stand a chance. So it will be impossible for poker players to bluff if they cannot control the relevant facts in their minds, and the math teacher will not have more opportunity to motivate weak students to learn if they realize that the teacher thinks that they are not diligent.

You might think that this control is necessary simply because it provides us with a kind of privacy regarding subjective facts, but there are cases in which providing others with reliable knowledge of our thoughts is important to achieving a certain goal. A person who has separated from their partner, for example, finds it difficult to be able to tell them that they still want to be with them. If they cannot communicate such secure knowledge to them, it is unlikely that they will ever get back together.

We humans are naturally inclined to have goals, and having privileged access makes it more likely that we will be able to achieve our goals. If the aforementioned Super Siri technology is the only way we can know what is going on in our minds, then we will have less control over the facts about our minds than if we had privileged access to those facts, and then we will be less successful.

In conclusion

We've concentrated a lot on what some people might consider to be relatively insignificant facts about our minds, such as facts about our feelings and certain situations, but note that these states partly determine why we act the way we do, and it is our actions that shed light on the kind of people we are.

Given this, if we have privileged access to the facts about what we want and desire, then this knowledge increases the likelihood that we will be able to determine why we act the way we do, and privileged access gives us the kind of cognitive control over the facts about our minds that greatly influences the quality of our personality.

These facts are the most private facts we possess, and if the skeptics are right about our lack of privileged access, we will fail to possess something of great value, which in itself is not a reason to believe we have privileged access but a reason to care whether we do or not.