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The author develops further the idea, introduced at the end of Ch. 5, that avowals do not involve or require a recognition of one’s own mental state. The notion of ‘ascriptive immunity to error’ is introduced by analogy to the notion of immunity to error though misidentification. So-called ’self-verifying’ avowals of occurrent thoughts best illustrate this idea, where it seems most plausible to say that there is no separate recognition of one’s thought contents. Nevertheless, the author also suggests that all avowals have ‘ascriptive immunity’ as well. This is to be explained by the expressive character of avowals.

This chapter takes the first person as the subject matter for a case study of the thesis of the preceding chapter — the thesis that the fundamental reference rule for a concept contributes essentially to the explanation of the norms distinctive of that concept. There are two aims in this exercise. One is to suggest ways in which the extraordinarily rich and philosophically interesting epistemic phenomena exhibited by such an important concept as that of the first person can be explained by its fundamental reference rule. The other aim is to consider a much more general issue that arises about the individuation of certain concepts — input or output is more fundamental than the other in the individuation of the first-person concept, or is some third position correct, a position that can explain the role of the first person both on the input and on the output sides. It is argued that the reference rule is more fundamental than either the input-oriented or the output-oriented accounts of individuation; and that it can explain phenomena that pose difficulties for those accounts.

A more promising account of the way ‘I’ refers, which derives from the works of Sidney Shoemaker and Gareth Evans, is discussed in Ch. 3. This account, the ’Reference without Identification’ view, preserves Semantic Continuity while explaining various epistemic asymmetries between avowals and other ascriptions. The observation is that uses of ‘I’ are immune to error through misidentifying the referent, and it is so because no identification of the referent is needed when ‘I’ is used. In connection with this view, the author also critiques the alternative explanations of immunity to error through misidentification given by Shoemaker and Evans.

When a memory content involves an indexical reference to the rememberer, the veridicality constraint on memory demands that the rememberer is numerically the same as the one who had the original experience/representation. This chapter investigates how the notion of personal identity is related to the notion of memory. It starts out by discussing the circularity objection to the psychological continuity theory of personal identity. Shoemaker and Parfit suggest solving the circularity objection by substituting the concept of quasi‐memory for the concept of memory. For the concept of quasi‐memory to provide a solution to the circularity objection quasi‐memory must be conceptually independent both from genuine memory and ostensible memory. The conceptual independence of quasi‐memory has come under attack: there are objections from constitutive holism, from the causal theory of memory, and from the immunity to error through misidentification. This chapter argues that the notion of quasi‐memory is indeed coherent and is not a derivative from the concept of memory. The dependence of memory on personal identity of a contingent rather than a logical nature. This chapter also discusses Wollheim's and Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view of personal identity.

The aim of this chapter is to maintain that immunity to error through misidentification is a genuine and interesting property of certain de se judgments in the face of problem cases involving the possibility of “quasi-memories”: apparent memories that may derive from someone else’s past. The most promising existing proposals for how to achieve this aim are examined and rejected, and then a novel approach is offered which involves rejecting a presupposition of the debate so far, namely that the modality implicit in the notion of immunity is to be understood as metaphysical impossibility. The alternative proposal is that immunity to error is a robust kind of safety from error, in a sense familiar from recent debates on knowledge. The chapter argues that this allows space for the possibility of quasi-remembering, while acknowledging that immunity to error through misidentification is a significant epistemic property of certain de se thoughts.

In analogy with external-world skepticism, content skepticism claims that I do not know the content of my present thoughts, given various possible alternatives supplied by content externalism. Yet, as common sense would have it, my belief that, say, I am presently thinking that there’s water in the glass, is much more secure than my belief that there’s a glass in front of me. This paper argues that the analogy relies on a recognitional conception of our ordinary knowledge of content. There are good reasons to reject this conception. The paper’s second aim is to sketch a neo-expressivist alternative, according to which ordinary self-ascriptions of contentful states are protected from skeptical doubt because they enjoy ascriptive immunity to error. What allows such self-ascriptions to represent secure knowledge of content is the fact that they involve the exercise of an expressive ability.

Thinkers who have postulated a transcendental subject of experience have responded to an epistemological insight about first‐person thought with a metaphysical error. The distinctive features of the first person that has produced the illusion is not immunity to error through misidentification, but a certain kind of representational independence. Representationally independent uses of the first person are those in which the thinker rationally forms a present‐tense first‐person belief, but not by endorsing the content of some conscious state, which itself has a first‐person representational content. Mis‐characterization of this phenomenon provides an explanation of the source of the illusion that there is a transcendental subject of experience.

Two ideas have played a prominent role in philosophical discussions of self-knowledge. The first is the idea that we enjoy introspective ways of finding out about ourselves are fundamentally different from our ways of finding out about ordinary physical objects and other psychological subjects. The second is the idea (Hume’s elusiveness thesis) that when we find out about our own properties through introspection we are not acquainted with any object whose properties they are. It is natural to think that these two ideas are related – and, in particular, that it is (at least partly) because we do not encounter the self as an object in introspection that the knowledge of the self gained through introspection is epistemically privileged. This paper explores this idea in the context of awareness of one’s own body in proprioception and in ordinary perceptual awareness.

This chapter discusses in more detail the non-self-representationalist approach, according to which the self is part of the mode rather than the content of perception and bodily experience, and argues for its superiority. It shows how this approach can account for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification and help us to elucidate the notion of prereflective self-consciousness, or the sense of “mineness”. The chapter also discusses how the view defended here relates to similar views put forward by Recanati, Peacocke and O'Brien.

Rocco J. Gennaro defends the HOT theory of consciousness against the charge that it cannot account for somatoparaphrenia, a delusion where one denies ownership of a limb, and the related anosognosia, a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of the existence of the disability. Liang and Lane have argued that somatoparaphrenia threatens HOT theory because it contradicts the notion that according to HOT theory, when I am in a conscious state, I have the HOT that “I am in mental state M.” The ‘I’ is not only importantly self-referential but essential to tying the conscious state to oneself and thus to one’s ownership of M. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how one can have a conscious state but not, at least implicitly, attribute it to oneself. Gennaro argues, for example, that understanding somatoparaphrenia as a delusion leads to a number of replies to Lane and Liang. He also examines the central notions of “mental state ownership” and “self-concepts” to account especially for the depersonalization aspect of somatoparaphrenia. Among other things, Gennaro also discusses to what extent HOT theory can make sense of Shoemaker’s immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) principle.

We need the notion of sense to characterize which inferences involving demonstratives are valid; the account developed so far suggests that this will be when conscious attention uses the same locations in keeping track of the object. This does not mean we have here a descriptivist account of the sense of a demonstrative; rather, the role of the content of the conscious attention emerges in which propositions involving the demonstrative term are immune to error through misidentification. There is a detailed comparison between the present approach and the views of Kaplan and Evans.

This chapter argues for three theses regarding a proposed epistemic route to Essential Indexicality. First, there is no philosophically interesting phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). Second, to the extent that there is an identifiable phenomenon at all, it is not deeply or constitutively an indexical phenomenon — there are numerous examples of non-indexical beliefs that are immune to error through misidentification. Third, even if our examples of non-indexical immunity are unpersuasive, there is no plausible story about the source of the epistemic status of IEM beliefs that derives the epistemic status from any kind of indexical content, so the distinctiveness would not, in any case, be an argument for EI: Epistemic as characterized in Section 1.5 — namely, as a thesis about the explanatory power of some level of indexical content.

Sentences that ascribe knowing how contain the unpronounced pronoun PRO, which has a de se, or first-personal meaning, in such sentences. On the account of knowing how defended in the book, then, knowing how to do something is a kind of first-personal, or de se knowledge. This chapter presents a novel account of the meaning of such uses of PRO, connecting the account of PRO in the theory of controlled PRO to a broader account of the nature of propositions according to which they contain ways of thinking of objects, including first-personal ways of thinking of objects. The propositional view of the de se is defended against the predicational view advocated by David Lewis and others. Various arguments for the predicational theory, for example from the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification, are considered and rejected.

The central philosophical problem of self‐knowledge is to account for, why, in an important basic class of cases, a subject's impressions of her own mental states are both groundless and authoritative, and for why those mental states are transparent to her. The Cartesian conception of the mind is best diagnosed as one such account, on the basis of the idea that one has a kind of observational access to one's inner states. The chapter reviews Wittgenstein's opposition to the Cartesian conception in philosophical investigations and raises the question: With what did he think it should be replaced? It is argued that the exegetically correct answer is: With nothing. Rather, the very question is a paradigm, in Wittgenstein's view, of what he regards as philosophy's misguided tendency to quest for explanation. The chapter concludes with a resumé of some of the discomforts, which this quietist position provokes. It also includes discussions of the possibilities for a successful expressivist treatment of psychological avowals, of immunity to error through misidentifications, and responds to John McDowell's criticisms of some of the author's earlier writings on self‐knowledge and on Wittgenstein's views.

This chapter presents the traditional model of self-consciousness, according to which self-consciousness is a form of object cognition, and explains why this model is misguided. Based on this, it introduces the notion of prereflective self-consciousness and argues that it needs to be further analyzed. It then examines linguistic approaches to self-consciousness and shows that immunity to error through misidentification is an essential feature of paradigmatic forms of self-consciousness. Finally, it motivates the attempt to provide a theory of self-consciousness that appeals to the notion of nonconceptual content by demonstrating how linguistic approaches remain incomplete.

It is generally assumed that an agent has some form of privileged epistemic access to her own narrowly individuated mental states (e.g., her sensory experiences and her beliefs), but that she does not have this same privileged access to her broadly individuated states (e.g., her perceivings and knowings). It is not easy, however, to give an account of what such privileged access consists in, that can explain why this assumption is true. The present chapter attempts to give an account of privileged access, and the account given helps us to understand why the assumption is at least close to being true.

Epistemic phenomena distinctive of the first person concept should be explained in part by the nature of that concept. This applies to immunity to error through misidentification, which can be explained in part by the thinker-rule. Attempts to explain the phenomenon by normally informative methods of learning about an object are open to counterexamples. We cannot dispense with the first person notion in the explanation and characterization of epistemic phenomena.

This chapter explores philosophical accounts of the sense of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ in the light of what is termed the symmetry constraint upon the sense of ‘I’. The symmetry constraint requires that we preserve the possible token-equivalence of ‘I’ and other personal pronouns with respect to same-saying and relative to a particular context so that it must be possible, in suitable contexts, for you to say using ‘you’ what I would say using ‘I’. The symmetry constraint turns out to be incompatible, for example, with Gareth Evans's proposal to elucidate the sense of ‘I’ in terms of the speaker's sensitivity to forms of self-specifying information that have the property of being immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun. The chapter proposes an alternative way of doing justice to the insight that the sense of ‘I’ reflects a distinctive way of being presented to oneself. On this proposal, the distinctive way in which I am presented to myself can be systematically related to the distinctive way in which I am presented to you. What matters is not that I am in receipt of distinctive types of information about myself, but rather that I have a distinctive ability to locate myself in objective space.

Chapter 6 offers an account of an epistemic feature of memories; their immunity to error through misidentification. When one judges that one experienced something, based on a full and accurate memory, it is not possible for one to be wrong because one has misidentified the person who one remembers to have had the experience as being oneself. Two challenges to the idea that memories have this feature are considered. One employs the notion of quasi-memory. The other one appeals to the phenomenon of observer memory. It is argued that neither challenge is successful and that the self-referential content of memories does suggest that memory judgments are immune to error through misidentification. The key to this immunity concerns the presence of the self in the content of memories. And that presence, in turn, is due to the nature of perceptual content and the relation between perceptual content and mnemonic content.