Cognitive Experience and Semantic Self-Knowledge: On The Quality of Thought

Abstract

To include conceptual understanding in the phenomenal character of experience is to say there's no sense in which what it's ordinarily like for you to understand what you read or hear could be held completely constant, while switching off all understanding, or switching out all actual differences in understanding for very different ones. Endorsing this sort of inclusion implies at least partial agreement with Pitt's thesis in The Quality of Thought that conceptual content is 'phenomenally determined'. Pitt's epistemological argument for that thesis could, I argue, use further support. I offer this by proposing two arguments of my own. The first is epistemological, similar in basic strategy to Pitt's. The second draws on a conception of consciousness as what is unconditionally suited for subjective understanding or curiosity. In closing, I propose an alternative to Pitt's diagnosis of why some philosophers would say cognitive experience eludes their introspection. What actually eludes them, I suggest, is a conception of phenomenal character that facilitates rather than inhibits their including in it cognitive activity of a kind that does not elude them at all.