Thus the difference between introspective and other knowledge is only
in our intention and in the degree of certainty. When we say, “I see a
table”, we may intend to know an external object, but if so we may be
mistaken; we are, however, actually knowing the occurrence of a visual
percept. When we describe the same occurrence in the words “a certain
coloured pattern is occurring”, we have changed our intention and are
much more certain of being right. Thus all that differentiates our
reaction when it gives introspective knowledge from our reaction when
it gives knowledge of another kind is the elimination of a possible
source of error.
I come now to the question: Do we know our own thoughts in a more
intimate way than we know anything else? This is a question to which it
is difficult to give precision; it describes something that one _feels_
to be a problem without being able to say exactly what the problem
is. However, some things can be said which may serve to clear up our
feelings, if not our ideas.
Suppose you are asked to repeat after a man whatever he says, as a
test of your hearing. He says “how do you do?” and you repeat “how
do you do?” This is your knowledge-reaction, and you hear yourself
speaking. You can perceive that what you hear when you speak is
closely similar to what you hear when the other man speaks. This makes
you feel that your reaction reproduces accurately what you heard.
Your knowledge-reaction, in this case, is the cause of an occurrence
closely similar to the occurrence that you are knowing. Moreover, our
inveterate naive realism makes us think that what we said was what we
heard while we were speaking. This is, of course, an illusion, since
an elaborate chain of physical and physiological causation intervenes
between speaking and hearing oneself speak; nevertheless, the illusion
re-enforces our conviction that our knowledge, in such a case, is very
intimate. And it is, in fact, as intimate as it can hope to be, when
our knowledge-reaction reproduces the very event we are knowing, or
at least an event extremely similar to it. This _may_ be the case on
other occasions, but we can only know, with any certainty, that it
is the case when what is known is a percept. This accounts for the
fact that our most indubitable and complete knowledge is concerning
percepts, not concerning other mental events or events in the external
world. Our reaction to a sound can be to make a similar sound, and if
we are clever enough we can paint something very like what we see. But
we cannot show our knowledge of a pleasure by creating for ourselves
another very similar pleasure, nor of a desire by creating a similar
desire. Thus percepts are known with more accuracy and certainty than
anything else either in the outer world or in our own minds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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