Knowing our own consciousness

pp. 51-74

in: Jesse Butler, Rethinking introspection, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

At the most basic level, our introspective knowledge of our own minds originates with the knowledge we have of our conscious experiences through those very experiences themselves. Simply put, we know ourselves by being ourselves, not as objects but rather through the qualitative character of our experiences as living subjects. Many philosophers have brought attention to the qualitative, experiential character of consciousness, often referred to as phenomenal consciousness, and I will draw on this attention here to explicate an immediate kind of knowledge that we have in virtue of being constituted by our conscious states as embodied beings in the world. In other words, our lived experiences themselves are a kind of knowledge, which may be referred to as "phenomenal knowledge". As a kind of self-knowledge that is intrinsic to lived experience itself, phenomenal knowledge can be understood as an elemental component of introspection, with unique epistemic properties that are distinct from those of other kinds of knowledge, including other kinds of introspective knowledge.