Précis

Authors: Robert Stalnaker

Publish Date: 2010/08/31

Volume: 155, Issue: 3, Pages: 433-435

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Abstract

My topic is the kind of knowledge that the Cartesian tradition takes to be the most basic and unproblematic knowledge of one’s own mind—both of one’s phenomenal experience and of the contents of one’s thought But my strategy is to approach this kind of knowledge from the outside asking what a thing in the objective world must be like to be a subject—to have a point of view on the world and to have the capacity to think about it The aim is to get clearer about the relation between a conception of the world as it is in itself an absolute conception to use Bernard Williams’s term and the perspectives of subjects who have or purport to have such a conceptionAfter a preliminary sketch of the externalist approach illustrated with some examples from recent philosophical debates I begin with a critical discussion of three responses to Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument While I think there is something right about each of these responses I argue first that the notion of

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