Shoemaker S
Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3201.
Ciba Found Symp. 1993;174:14-21; discussion 21-42. doi: 10.1002/9780470514412.ch2.
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.
人们普遍认为，一种心理状态与主体对它的内省信念总是“不同的存在”，且只是偶然地联系在一起。这表明，对于每一种心理状态，都可能存在一种生物，它对那种状态在内省上是“盲目的”，这意味着虽然它能够拥有那种状态，并能将自己设想为拥有那种状态，但它完全无法通过内省来了解自己的那种状态。本文认为，对于许多种心理状态，尤其是信念和感觉状态，内省盲目是不可能的，因为它与构成这些状态的功能角色所固有的合理性要求不相容。当这些心理状态的主体的概念和认知资源足够丰富，足以使其有可能形成关于这些状态的信念和思想时，内省可及性对于这些心理状态的功能角色至关重要。这是这样一种观点的一个版本，即这些状态必然是自我显明的，并且与一些功能主义者以及许多非功能主义者所青睐的内省的感知模型不相容。
