Functionalism and consciousness.

The common view that mental states and introspective beliefs about them are only contingently connected is challenged. The paper argues that introspective blindness—being unable to access one's own mental states of a certain type—is impossible for beliefs and sensory states in creatures with sufficient conceptual and cognitive resources. This impossibility arises because introspective access is essential to the functional roles that define such states, as required by rationality. The argument supports a version of the view that these states are necessarily self-intimating and opposes the perceptual model of introspection.

Study at a glance

Abstract

It is widely held that a mental state and the subject's introspective belief about it are always 'distinct existences' and only contingently connected. This suggests that for each sort of mental state there could be a creature that is introspectively 'blind' with respect to states of that sort, meaning that while it is capable of having such states, and of conceiving of itself as having them, it is totally without introspective access to its states of that sort. It is argued here that introspective blindness with respect to many sorts of mental states, in particular beliefs and sensory states, is not a possibility, because it is incompatible with requirements of rationality that are internal to the functional roles that are constitutive of these states. Introspective accessibility is essential to the functional roles of such mental states when the conceptual and cognitive resources of the subject of those states are sufficiently rich to make beliefs and thoughts about them a possibility. This is a version of the view that such states are necessarily self-intimating and is incompatible with the perceptual model of introspection favoured by some functionalists as well as by many non-functionalists.