Title:
"The Value of Privileged Access" European Journal of Philosophy 29.2 (2021): 365-378. Download PDF |
Abstract: It is commonly held that we stand in a special epistemic relationship with respect to certain facts about our minds, a relationship that is known as privileged access. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we either lack privileged access entirely, or that the scope of such access is severely limited. While there have been a number of attempts in the literature to respond to these skeptics, one question that has not been addressed is what, if anything, of value we fail to possess if these skeptics are right. In this paper, I argue that insofar as we lack privileged access, something of significant value would be absent from our cognitive lives. I defend this claim by developing the novel position that privileged access, in most cases, constitutes a type of epistemic control that is both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable to those who possess it.
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Abstract: This paper develops a novel puzzle about desire consisting of three independently plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions: (1) All desires are dispositional states, (2) We have privileged access to at least some of our desires, and (3) We do not have privileged access to any dispositional state. Proponents of the view that all desires are dispositional states might think the most promising way out of this puzzle is to deny (3). I argue, however, that such attempts fail because the most plausible accounts of the self-knowledge of desires do not explain how we possess privileged access to dispositional desires. I then offer a more promising solution to the puzzle, one that involves the rejection of (1) on the grounds that some desires possess phenomenology.
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Title:
"How to Defend the Phenomenology of Attitudes" Philosophical Studies 175 (2018): 2609-2609 Download PDF |
Abstract: This paper develops a novel defense of the non-sensory phenomenology of desires, and more broadly, of attitudes. I argue that the way to defend this type of phenomenology is to: (i) offer a defense of the view that attitudes are states that realize the causal role of attitude types and (ii) argue that what realizes the causal role of attitudes are, in certain cases, states that possess non-sensory phenomenology. I carry out this approach with respect to desires by developing the view that desires play the causal role of motivating action, and in some cases, the states that play this role are states that possess the non-sensory phenomenology of attraction. I proceed to argue that if this way of defending the non-sensory phenomenology of desires, and more broadly, of attitudes, is unsuccessful, we should be eliminativists about this type of phenomenology.
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