Dear all, The CamPoS (Cambridge Philosophy of Science) seminar continues this Wednesday, 27th February, 1-2:30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2. Katharina Kraus (HPS, Cambridge) will give a talk entitled "Does psychological knowledge presuppose self-knowledge? A Kantian perspective". The abstract is below.
All are very welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. Best wishes, Vashka -- The epistemic status of self-knowledge is highly controversial. If it is knowledge at all, it is mostly viewed as a special kind of knowledge with specific phenomenological features, such as privileged access and first-person authority. Therefore, it has been doubted whether self-knowledge claims can be fully grasped in - or even fully reduced to - third-person terms and whether reliable methods can be developed to confirm or test these claims from an external, non-subjective point of view. Nevertheless, in many cases, self-reporting, as expression of one's self-knowledge, seems an indispensible tool to find out about certain internal features of a person and to assess her inner state. Yet, how can we legitimately make use of such knowledge in the setting of a scientific investigation in psychology, a science aiming for objective and universal knowledge claims? In this paper, I will propose an account of self-knowledge that, while preserving its phenomenological characteristics and thus acknowledging its special epistemic status, allows for the use of - and in fact the need for - self-knowledge in scientific psychology. Furthermore, this account indicates a possible explanation for why self-reports can be meaningfully correlated to third-person observations. This account is inspired by Kant's theory of self-consciousness and in particular, relies on his conception of the consciousness of oneself as subject, or more precisely, as agent of thinking. Drawing on Kant's theory, I will argue, first, that there are some aspects of self-knowledge that are not reducible to third-person object knowledge, and second, that those irreducible aspects give rise to substantial knowledge claims that cannot be derived otherwise. _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
