Transcript: Episode 127 with Nic Koziolek on self-knowledge

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Episode post here. Thanks once again to Caroline Wall for her transcription efforts!

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Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations. I’m Matt Teichman.

Nora Bradford:
I’m Nora Bradford.

Matt Teichman:
With us today is Nic Koziolek, Lecturer in Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, and he’s here to discuss self-consciousness. I also want to recommend that you check out our earlier episode that we did with Nic, Episode 96, on the role of belief in reasoning. It’s a real treat. Nic Koziolek, welcome back to Elucidations.

Nic Koziolek:
Thanks, Matt.

Matt Teichman:
So, self-consciousness is a topic you will find all over the place if you crack open random philosophy books. And yet it’s also a topic that I think doesn’t always occur to people as something that’s that important. One thing you hear in everyday situations is stuff like: you’ve got to get over your self-consciousness. So if I have a friend who’s going to go tap dance in front of a bunch of people, maybe I’ll try to tell my friend, don’t be self-conscious about it. Just do it the way you do it in front of me. Don’t think about all those people watching. So I feel like ordinarily, we think of being self-conscious as something like an impulse to fight that you have to get over. Is that at all related to what philosophers who work on self-consciousness work on?

Nic Koziolek:
I think it ultimately is. But in a way, it’s good to start by reminding yourself that in that way of talking about self-consciousness, it seems like, as you said, a bad thing—something you want to get over. But in other cases, it’s a good thing. So self-consciousness is also often connected with self-knowledge. And we do think of knowing things about yourself as being a good thing.

Nora Bradford:
And so would we say that self-consciousness, in the normal sense that we use it, saying, ‘Don’t be too self-conscious’, actually means don’t have too much self-knowledge—so be a little bit in the dark about what you actually are doing, or how you’re operating in the world?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. That might be true. And so if you think about it that way, then the thought is that there are at least times in which having too much self-knowledge can be debilitating in some way. I always think about this in terms of when you’re talking in front of a large group of people, you suddenly find this thing that you never find in the rest of your life, which is that you can’t figure out what to do with your hands. And suddenly, you’re very aware of the fact that you have hands, and that you have to make a decision about where to put them, and you don’t know what to do.

Matt Teichman:
Right. Because normally, it’s just automatic. Your hands go wherever they naturally go, and you don’t even think about it. But once you have to think about it, it becomes a problem that you have to solve suddenly.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. Although now, I’m thinking, maybe we should start paying attention to think back on what you were doing with your hands when you were talking with your friends at dinner, and try to figure out what it was that you were doing, and then try to do that when you’re, say, teaching a class. And this would be using self-consciousness to figure out how to do better in these kinds of situations in which we ordinarily think about self-consciousness as being a bad thing.

Matt Teichman:
Hmm. Another thing that fascinates me is that in this everyday use of the word ‘self-conscious’, it often goes with the verb ‘feel’. I don’t like hanging out with Arthur—he makes me feel self-conscious. But based on what we’ve said so far, that seems a little odd. Because if self-consciousness is having self-knowledge, what am I saying? Am I saying that I feel like I have self-knowledge, like that’s a feeling? I guess I’ve just managed to get myself a little puzzled here.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So I think one thing about a lot of these kinds of cases where being self-conscious seems like, in some way, a bad thing, or something to be avoided, is that it often involves a special kind of awareness of your own bodily existence that you don’t normally have. And so one place this comes out really clearly is if you overhear people talking about you in the third person, and they’re using your name in this way that you normally don’t hear your name used, and you suddenly then feel like an object in the world. It’s this rare moment where you’re like, oh, I’m just another person to be talked about by people, just an object of their curiosity, and fun, and the rest of it. And that’s kind of a horrible feeling. Because in your normal life, you feel like you’re the special one.

Matt Teichman:
Or maybe I have a window through which something is viewing the world. First-personal experience is strange in that way.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. And so when you become aware of yourself in this third-personal way, because people are talking about you, or you listen to yourself on a podcast, or you watch yourself on video, it’s really awful. And I think part of it is that you see yourself as just another person in this way that others do. And being aware of this in the moment is itself strange, because you realize people are reading all kinds of things off of what you’re doing that you don’t think of as things you’re normally conveying. And then, you feel alienated from yourself. Like the thing in the world that is you to everyone else is not what you normally think of as you.

Nora Bradford:
That’s really interesting. Because I know that you mentioned that you practice yoga. And a lot of meditation and things like that have to do with thinking of yourself in the third person. And that’s seen as a really healthy thing, even though in normal daily life, that’s a very uncomfortable thing to do. So would you put a normative claim on that, like being more self-conscious is actually a good thing?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah—this is really interesting! I hadn’t thought about this normative dimension of this. I mean, at least thinking about it just for the first time right now, I’m inclined to say there is something good about this becoming self-conscious of yourself as a bodily person amongst others. That’s really healthy, and fights against our natural narcissism. But I hadn’t made the connection to doing yoga or anything like that.

Matt Teichman:
I think this is why so many philosophers really feel liberated by getting serious about some form of physical activity—exercise, hiking, climbing, rowing, I don’t know, getting back in touch with your body—as a way of reminding yourself that you are actually in a world. You’re not just a window.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, although I think of that as getting out of your head. Maybe it is a kind of self-consciousness, in a different way. But it seems different from the kind of thing where you become conscious of yourself as an object to others, in this way that’s alienating potentially. Whereas physical activity, like climbing or running or whatever it is—you do get absorbed in that and become deeply unself-conscious, in a lot of cases.

Nora Bradford:
So it seems like the type of self-consciousness we’ve been talking about might be related to the type of self-consciousness that comes up in philosophy. But could you give us that connection?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So the core case of self-consciousness, as I think of it, as coming up in philosophy has to do with cases in which what you know, is something about your own mind. So I think of self-consciousness as a particular way of knowing your own mental states. And so the basic idea here is one that I originally just picked up from Sebastian Rödl, who in his book Self-Consciousness introduces this formulation, which is occasionally used by other philosophers. He says about things like knowing that you’re in pain: the way that you know that you’re in pain is just by being in pain. And this is very different from other kinds of knowledge. So if you think about perceptual knowledge, if there’s a cat on the couch, and you ask me how I know there’s a cat on the couch, I’ll say, oh, I can see that there’s a cat on the couch. That’s how I know.

And we’re familiar with that kind of answer. If someone asks you how you know something, you can say, ‘I saw it’, or, ‘So-and-so told me’. And we have these ways of knowing, as they’re sometimes called: perception, testimony, inference. And I think what Rödl is suggesting is that there’s another one of these ways of knowing, self-consciousness, which is this initially really funny-looking capacity to know that you’re in a state by being in it. So you know that you’re in pain by being in pain.

Matt Teichman:
So how is the pain case different from the seeing the cat case? Aren’t they both just cases of sensation? I look at the cat, I have a visual experience, I sense the light with my retinas. And similarly, if I have a pain, maybe I sense the feeling in my leg that it’s in pain. So aren’t those just the same?

Nic Koziolek:
I think maybe the fundamental way of distinguishing here is in terms of the nature of what it is that you know. So one thing about perceptual knowledge is that the thing that you know is an object in the world. And it’s a thing that can be known in the same kind of way, perceptually, by other people.

Matt Teichman:
So there’s a fact of the matter about where the cat is in space. But how do I find the analog of that with the pain in my leg?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t want to deny that the pain is objective. The thought is it’s a different kind of thing. And the thing about mental states is that the only person who can know them in this particular way, by self-consciousness or by being in them, is the person who has them. In a way, given the formulation, this is trivial. You can only know that you’re in a state by being in it if you’re in it. And only I can be in my mental states. So only I can know that I’m in them by being in them. The initial thought is, there’s just a difference. So in the case of self-consciousness, what you know is a mental state. In the case of perception, what you know is a physical object.

Matt Teichman:
Okay. And I think that’s fairly intuitive. Because if we take a step back and look at what we said—I know that there’s a cat on the couch, versus I know there’s a pain in my leg—well, the second claim has the word ‘my’ in it, ie. the word ‘I’ in it, whereas the thing about the cat on the couch—that’s just a claim about some cat on some couch somewhere. The word ‘I’ doesn’t play into it at any point. Maybe that’s connected to what you were saying.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. And so it does seem like self-consciousness, then, is–the knowledge you gain in this way is necessarily self-knowledge. I can’t know your mental states in this way.

Matt Teichman:
So let’s talk about this idea that you know that you’re in pain by being in pain. What’s the motivation for that idea? It sounds like there’s a record skipping.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So I think the fundamental motivation is just that if we’re going to allow ourselves to talk about knowledge of our own mental states—knowledge of pain in this way—there has to be an answer to the question how you know. And so the formula is kind of identifying that. And it’s true that it is initially a puzzling thing to say. It sounds like you’re just repeating yourself. But I think it’s worth pausing and really thinking about what would happen if this came up in an ordinary conversation. So you tell me that your leg hurts, and I ask you—and there’s something sort of perverse about this—but suppose I did ask you, how do you know that your leg is in pain? What do you say?

Matt Teichman:
What the hell are you talking about, maybe?

Nic Koziolek:
Fair enough. I mean, the way that I like to think about this is that it would not be unreasonable if someone were to respond to that kind of question by looking at you completely incredulously and saying: ‘because I’m in pain’. And this is a reminder of how this works. But the suggestion is something like, look, you’re a human being, too. You know what it’s like to be in pain. You’ve been in pain. And so you know that when you’re in pain, you’re in a position to know that you are.

Matt Teichman:
Okay. So I know that I’m in pain by being in pain. That sounds like if I’m in pain, then I automatically, no matter what, know that I’m in pain. And then that, in turn, sounds like I can’t be mistaken about whether I’m in pain. Is that right? Can I be wrong about whether I’m in pain? It seems kind of counterintuitive.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. I now think that you can. There was a time in my life when I thought you couldn’t. And there are philosophers who have tried to defend this kind of view. Wittgenstein is maybe an example. He in fact says in one place that it doesn’t make sense to say of someone that they know that they’re in pain, except maybe as a joke. I’ve never quite understood what the joke is supposed to be. But anyway, I was pressed on this at some point. And the kind of example that I think is particularly persuasive are these kinds of cases where the pain isn’t very severe. And you’re maybe involved in doing something, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been in pain for a while. And I think in the best kind of case like this, you can actually think back to the experiences you were having moments ago and remember being in pain, even though you didn’t notice it at the time.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. So maybe something like an ache that very slowly sets in, such that when it starts, it’s so faint you’d never notice it. But you’re more likely to notice sudden pains. So if it ramps up really, really slowly, like over four hours, maybe eventually, at the end of it, it’s a very strong pain. But because it built up so gradually, you never noticed it happening. Would that be an example?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, I think so. And then, there are also other cases that are a little bit harder to know exactly what’s going on. So one thing that I think most people have noticed is that if you’re in the process of building something, and you’re really focused on it, you’ll often not notice that you’ve injured yourself. And so you get done with it, and you’re like, I have cuts all over my hands. I’m bleeding profusely. I didn’t notice this. Now, it is, I think, tempting to say, well, yeah, it’s true. You’ve cut yourself. No one’s denying that. But if you didn’t notice that you were in pain, you’re not really in pain.

There’s a question about what exactly would motivate this, especially given these other kinds of cases where it seems like if you have this kind of pain that ramps up really slowly, there’s a first moment at which you notice it. But to try to defend the view, philosophically, that you somehow weren’t in pain until you noticed it in that kind of case seems really unmotivated. And so it just seems better overall to say, no, sometimes you’re in pain and you don’t know it.

Nora Bradford:
So what about a case where you think that you’re in pain when you’re actually not in pain? So an example that you give in your paper is you feel like you’re in pain, but then you actually realize that it was just an itch. Would that have a different explanation?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So I think that the two things work differently. So I actually described self-consciousness before as a capacity to know that you’re in pain (for example) by being in pain. And so, there are two different things that can happen here, and each of them will explain one of these two phenomena. So on the one hand, because it’s a capacity, you can have the capacity without having exercised it. This is why I said that when you’re in a mental state, that might put you in a position to know that you are, if you’re self-conscious. But being in a position to know something and actually knowing it are different things. So this is like: whenever you’re sitting in a room, there are all kinds of things you’re in a position to know that you just don’t notice. I just now noticed that there are two ethernet ports on the wall over there. It’s been in my field of vision for the entire time. I just haven’t registered that in the right way. And so I think the case where you’re in pain but don’t know it is going to work like that. So you’re in a position to know that you’re in pain whenever you’re in pain, but you somehow have to focus your attention on it, however that happens.

The other kind of case is one where you do exercise the capacity, but the exercise of it is defective. Things go badly. And so this is going to be the kind of case where you can mistake an itch for a pain, or vice versa. And there are cases where they’re not so different. Yeah, I did just scratch myself, interestingly. I would say that it was an itch, but who knows. Maybe I got bit by something.

Matt Teichman:
David Finkelstein has an example along these lines that I really like. Imagine you’re really afraid of needles. And then, you go to the doctor. And the doctor walks over to you, and they’re like, I’ve got to give you this vaccination. And you’re like, oh, gosh, I’m really scared of needles. They’re about to do it, and you jump up and yelp. Then the doctor is like: what are you yelping about? I haven’t even stuck you yet with the needle. So it seems like there, you thought that you were experiencing the pokey pain of the needle, but actually, you were just afraid of it—you anticipated it. So you got that wrong.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. That’s a great case. And in a way, the example I was thinking of where you mistake an itch for a pain is a perceptual illusion where there is something there, but you misidentify it. This kind of case of Finkelstein’s is one where it’s more like a hallucination. Plausibly, in that case, there’s no sensation that you mistake for a pain. Instead, you hallucinate the sensation out of fear. One other interesting thing about Finkelstein’s kind of case, I think, is that on the view I was just defending, I guess, there’s no actual pain. And so, there’s an interesting ethical question about how to think about how you should behave towards someone who thinks that they’re in pain when they’re not. I mean, if this view is right, then it’s perfectly coherent for there to be someone who actually doesn’t have any pain, but they think that they have chronic pain all the time. And this deeply affects their life.

One view that you might take is you might say: they’re not in pain. And so we don’t have to have any sympathy for them. And I think for a lot of people, this is going to be a tempting view. I would like to think that it’s open to us to say, look, you should have sympathy for someone who is subject to these kinds of hallucinations of being in pain that arise from some strange defect of self-consciousness. Maybe you don’t need to be sympathetic in quite the same way. Certainly, the treatment of it might be different—they need not painkillers, but therapy. But it seems to demand, in a way, the same personal ethical attention as actual pain does.

Matt Teichman:
Let’s think about some other examples. So the interview goes really badly. You make me angry. Do I know that I’m angry by being angry?

Nic Koziolek:
Typically, I think. I mean, anger is going to be complicated. Things like belief are maybe even trickier. And one of the differences is that—you start with a case like pain. There’s something that it feels like to be in pain. And so when you think about what it means to know that you’re in that kind of state by being in it, you can see, well, okay, it’s like perception in the sense that there’s something that it’s like to be in this state. And it’s maybe on the basis of that feeling, that sensation, that I come to know. Whereas in the case even of certain kinds of anger, and then especially with belief, it doesn’t necessarily involve that same kind of feeling.

And so there are cases of anger that are a lot like the pain case, where anger comes along with these certain sorts of sensations. And it’s maybe partly on the basis of those, plus probably also certain features of the context, that allow you to come to know that you’re in that state. In other kinds of cases, it does seem like you can still know in this way that you’re angry, even if the anger doesn’t really feel like what we think of as the characteristic angry way. And then, with states like belief, again, there’s nothing it feels like to have a belief, I don’t think. Or at least, if it does, it seems like a special case. And so there, it’s even less clear what is the ground of the exercise of this capacity.

Nora Bradford:
So are we saying that self-consciousness and self-knowledge are the same thing, or do we get self-consciousness from self-knowledge? How do those two things relate?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, good. This is important. As far as I can see, self-consciousness is always going to be a kind of self-knowledge, and as I’m thinking about it, it ends up being knowledge of your own mental states. But I think not all self-knowledge is acquired via self-consciousness. So I think you can come to know things about yourself by basing them on what other people tell you about yourself. And this can be a really important source of self-knowledge. As I think about this, self-knowledge extends way beyond just what you get from self-consciousness.

Matt Teichman:
It seems like we’re gravitating towards saying that there’s a significant connection between being in a mental state, like being angry or having a belief, and self-consciousness. So maybe part of having a mental state is being self-conscious about it, or maybe part of having a mental state is that you could be self-conscious about it, or something on those lines. Is that right?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, so the way I’ve been thinking about this increasingly is that it is an essential feature of what a mental state is, that it can be known in this peculiar way. So for a state to be a mental state is for it to be a state that you can know that you’re in by being in it. And this points to an interesting thing to do with the bodily knowledge we were talking about earlier. Earlier, we were talking a bit about this ordinary sense of self-consciousness, where we ended up talking a lot about your consciousness of your body. And I think there’s some reason, actually, to distinguish the knowledge that you have of your own mental states from the knowledge that you have of your bodily states.

The normal word for the capacity to know about your bodily states is proprioception. I think maybe this refers specifically to knowledge of the position of your limbs. So I’d be tempted to maybe generalize this and say, there’s a special way of knowing about the states of your body. This would possibly include things like hunger, having to go to the bathroom—yeah, that’s even more clearly non-mental. Hunger is a weird in-between case. I’d never thought about this before. I don’t know what to say about hunger. But yeah, we might distinguish these two different ways of knowing. I don’t know what the formula would be for the case of knowledge of your body. But then, you get what seem to be necessary connections between the way of knowing and the objects known, so that it’s somehow a necessary truth about mental states that a mental state is a kind of state that is knowable via self-consciousness. And I think that this applies even to animals that aren’t self-conscious. If they’re in mental states, they’re in states that they could know via self-consciousness if they were self-conscious. These are hard claims to test, but—

Matt Teichman:
Wow.

Nora Bradford:
That’s spicy.

Nic Koziolek:
—I sort of think they’re true. And then, the idea would be, in the case of the body, that there’s a necessary connection between a bodily state and this particular way of knowing, however exactly we think about it. I’ve really not thought much about this, and don’t have a particular view on it. But it has surprising consequences that I think are worth thinking through. Certain things that are part of our biological organism won’t be, strictly speaking, parts of our bodies, because we don’t know them in that kind of way. So this would probably apply to things like—if you think about when you’re moving your hands, you’re doing things like contracting particular muscle fibers. That’s not the kind of thing that you can know in this way. And so, on this way of thinking about it, there’s a sense in which the muscle fibers are not part of your body.

So agreed, this is a crazy-sounding thing to say. But on this way of thinking about it, it becomes kind of tempting. And to go back to the mental case, I think there’s some payoff here for thinking about how a lot of this philosophical work in the philosophy of mind, and maybe especially the stuff that draws on self-consciousness, how that relates to psychology. Because just as you have these sub-bodily things going on, there are also going to be what we might call sub-mental things, like some of the mental processes that psychologists study, maybe. Certainly the neural processes that neuroscientists study. These are not, I think, in the proper sense, part of the mind. And the psychology case is difficult, so I don’t want to commit myself to anything in particular there. But the neural processes, I think—that’s not a mental process. It stands in a different relation to it.

And so we then have a way of carving this stuff up, where we have a way of delineating the mental from the non-mental, or as it’s sometimes put, the personal level from the sub-personal level, where the division is that something is mental/personal, in this kind of sense, just if it’s the kind of thing that you can know via self-consciousness.

Matt Teichman:
So the sub-personal stuff would be, intuitively, whatever my cognitive system is doing automatically that I’m not necessarily aware of, and maybe that I even couldn’t make myself aware of. And the personal part of what the cognitive system is doing is the things that I can be aware of.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah.

Nora Bradford:
And it seems like you’re also splitting it up so there’s this level of the things that we can never be aware of, a level of mental states that we could be aware of if we attended to them, and then another level of things that we are aware of.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah.

Nora Bradford:
And you’re calling those last two levels mental states—one conscious, one not conscious?

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So this is a good question about the conscious/not conscious stuff. I think that this is a really complicated area that people are not careful enough about. So I actually got puzzled recently about what exactly philosophers mean by ‘conscious’. And so I looked this up in my Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy or something. And the standard definition is that a conscious state is a state that you are aware of being in. And I thought to myself, no, that sounds like a self-conscious state. Just explicitly, that’s basically how I would define a self-conscious state. It’s a state that you know that you’re in. So it seems like there are all kinds of philosophers of mind going around just running consciousness and self-consciousness together. And I don’t really know what that’s about, exactly. I would say there’s the conscious states, which are the ones that are such that you could, in principle, know that you were in them via self-consciousness—by being in them. And the self-conscious ones are the ones that you actually know that you’re in, in that way.

Matt Teichman:
So like the example you had earlier: if it had popped out at you, you might have noticed that there were two ethernet ports in the wall. But it didn’t jump out at you. You didn’t notice it. But you could have. So before it jumped out at you that there were two ethernet ports in the wall, that was something that you were experiencing consciously, but not yet self-consciously.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. That’s the idea. There are, though, more complicated cases where you’re in a state that is of a kind that you could know that you’re in via self-consciousness. I think anger is the stock example of this kind of thing, where you’re deeply angry at your mother in some sense that’s not available to you except through therapy. We want to say this is a mental state, I think, pretty clearly. But some of the things I just said seem to suggest that now, it’s not, if there’s some kind of blockage that keeps you from knowing about it via self-consciousness, or first-personally, as people sometimes put it.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah, intuitively, would say you subconsciously harbor these feelings, or something like that.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. And so it’s tempting, now, to introduce these other kinds of words and say it’s subconscious. Or I kind of prefer unconscious as the word for this kind of thing, although I think there are questions about whether that fits with what Freud was doing, exactly. So maybe subconscious is ultimately the better thing to say here. But this is a special kind of case where the mental state is of the right kind to become self-conscious, but there’s a contingent block to that particular state in these circumstances. In a way, it’s a conscious state. But it’s a conscious state that, for certain complicated reasons, you can’t right now know that you’re in. But here, again, in principle, you can know that you’re in it via self-consciousness. You just have to remove the block.

Matt Teichman:
And then, the thing that was off in the background that you didn’t notice at first—we don’t want to call that subconscious, because there was nothing blocking you from noticing it. You just didn’t happen to notice it at that exact moment.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, exactly.

Nora Bradford:
So I guess mental states that are only accessible through self-knowledge that someone else offers you are special and different from sub-personal cases, because you can actually fit that knowledge into your self-consciousness in a way that is special and different from sub-personal things that you learn about yourself. So if you learn that when you play the piano, your muscles are moving in a certain way, that’s not going to fit into your self-consciousness in the same way that, if you learn that you’re angry at your mother, that will fit in.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah, that all seems right. The piano example is interesting, in a way. Because what seems clear is that even if you learn all of the relevant science about how the muscles work—now, you might have all this knowledge about exactly which muscle fibers you’re moving in which way at what time. But you know that not via self-consciousness, as I keep putting it. Instead, you know that by knowing where your fingers are, and inferring from that, based on all of this scientific knowledge you have, how the muscles must be moving. And it seems like the individual features of the muscle fibers are just inaccessible to us.

Nora Bradford:
I think an even clearer example is: if you learn basic neuroscience, then you know that when you’re reasoning about something, your frontal lobe is activated. But even knowing that can’t really fit into your self-consciousness at all.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah.

Nora Bradford:
So that’s even less accessible.

Nic Koziolek:
I mean, neuroscience would be a lot easier if we could know these kinds of things via self-consciousness, because then, it’s just—if you just pay enough attention, you would know exactly which neurons were firing in exactly which way when you were performing a mental state. And then, we wouldn’t even need all of the technologies to study the neurons.

Matt Teichman:
We’d be our own FMRIs, walking around.

Nic Koziolek:
Of course—except for the part where we would somehow have to check the validity of our self-conscious judgment. So you actually would still need all of the neuroscientific machinery in the end.

Matt Teichman:
So we’ve considered a bunch of different examples of mental states that you know that you’re in by being in them, including anger, maybe belief—we kind of went quickly over belief—maybe belief, being in pain. Another mental state that philosophers are always yapping about is, of course, knowledge. So does the same thing apply to knowledge? Can you know that you know something by knowing it?

Nic Koziolek:
This is actually really important to my view. And in a way, an interesting thing about this is that among the philosophers who I find really helpful as inspiration in these kinds of things, like Sebastian Rödl, who I mentioned before, the case of knowledge is a really important one. So in a way, the whole point of this was to try to figure out how it is that we can have self-conscious knowledge, knowledge of our own knowledge. And this is something that philosophers like Kant and Hegel especially worried a lot about. There is, of course, something—I mean, if it’s puzzling to say that you know that you’re in pain by being in pain, it’s even more puzzling to say that you know that you know by knowing. This just sounds like it can’t possibly go anywhere.

And in a way, I sort of end up agreeing with that. So on the view that I end up taking, the really fundamental things here are going to be particular mental acts of coming to know. So the core case that I’ve written the most about, at this point, is inference. If you think about a case of coming to know something on the basis of other things you already know, inferring, that’s going to be the core case for me. What I want to make sense of is the idea of a self-conscious inference, or perceiving self-consciously. But we can stick to the inference case. So the idea, then, if this is right, is that you will know that you have acquired inferential knowledge by inferring, acquiring knowledge in doing so, and knowing that you did.

Now, I think that there are obstacles of sheer incomprehension surrounding some of this. And it’s hard to know exactly what to say about those. So I’ll skip over that. But there are more widely talked about almost technical issues here, which have to do with a potential for a really problematic kind of regress that you get if you start allowing knowledge of knowledge. Historically, one of the things that’s come up in this area is that it often looks like it’s actually a requirement on knowledge itself that you know that you have it. I think this is fundamentally motivated by the thought that if you make a claim, and I ask you how you know it, and you can’t give me an answer, that’s evidence that you don’t even know it. And yet, it seems like to give the answer, you have to not only know, but you also have to know that you know. And you have to know how you know.

So if I say, how do you know that there’s a cat on the couch, and you say, I saw a cat on the couch, that does seem to imply that you saw a cat on the couch, and that, in the best kind of case, you must know that you really did see a cat on the couch, and you came to know that there is one there. But the worry is that if you say that in order to know something, you have to know that you know it, then it looks like you get this regress. Because you just apply the principle over and over again. And it turns out that in order to know that you know something, you have to know that you know that you know it. And now, in order to know anything, you have to know an infinite number of things.

Okay. I think that Sebastian Rödl has a clever response to this. So what he does in his book Self-Consciousness is he just distinguishes two different kinds of knowledge. He says what happens is that when you know something perceptually, that’s one kind of knowledge. He calls it receptive knowledge. When you know that you know something perceptually, you know that in this other way. He calls it spontaneous knowledge. And so then, the idea is when you know that you know something, you have two different kinds of knowledge involved there. And then, the principle won’t iterate. So we say, if you know that some fact is true, then you have to know in this other way that you know it. But we never said that you have to know in the second way, that you know in that way that you know something, in order to know. Okay—all of that’s obviously messy, but hopefully—

Nora Bradford:
So you’re saying that you can’t have multiple iterations of spontaneous knowledge, so you can’t build on that. There’s no regress there; it ends right at one.

Matt Teichman:
Yeah. It’s just two of them—two knowings.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah.

Matt Teichman:
You know that you’re angry, and you know that you know that you’re angry in this second kind of way. And then, that’s that. There’s no third knowing.

Nic Koziolek:
Yeah. So I think the clearest way to put it—it’s easier if you write this all down, of course–but the principle is if you know something receptively, then you know spontaneously that you know it. And that principle fortunately doesn’t apply to itself, like the original one did. So that’s all well and good. The problem is: even if we understand this principle in this way, I think it’s still false. Because, for reasons we were talking about even with pain, just as you can be in pain without knowing that you’re in pain, although you’re in a position to, you can know something without knowing that you know, it, although you’re in a position to. Or you can infer something without knowing that you inferred it, even though you were in a position to when you performed the inference. And maybe you still are, if you can remember, bringing the inference to mind again. So I want to reject this idea that if you know something, you have to know that you know it, because I think there are pretty clear cases where you don’t. You know something without knowing that you know it.

Nora Bradford:
Does the second kind of knowing have to be also in that third level of the self-conscious? Or can it be that you know it subconsciously, but you weren’t really attending to that knowledge? So if someone asks you, then you can tap into it, but you don’t necessarily have it in your self-conscious. It seems like you disagree with that.

Nic Koziolek:
Well, I don’t think I would want to think of it as being subconscious or unconscious. But I think it’s right that there are all kinds of things that, if you ask me the right question, I realize that I knew these things all along in certain kinds of ways. An interesting example of this that happened to me recently is that I was talking to some people who were talking about their children playing piano. And neither of them were native English speakers. So they were talking about the German word for a grand piano, and trying to get me to come up with it. And I didn’t know the German word. So one of them was describing these two kinds of pianos. And he was like, there’s the ones where the strings are vertical, and there are the other ones where the strings are horizontal—so those ones. And I thought, oh, that’s a grand piano.

But I had never reflected on the fact that the distinctive feature of grand pianos is that the strings are vertical. But of course, I was in a position to know this for many, many years. And I know how I know it, which is that I’ve seen grand pianos. I maybe can remember particular ones, but I’m not even sure about that. But I know what they look like generally, and I can use that to gain this new knowledge about them. And so, in fact, if you’d asked me what’s distinctive about a grand piano, I might’ve been able to figure it out. But that doesn’t seem to involve any self-consciousness. I didn’t self-consciously know this all in the past.

Nora Bradford:
That makes sense.

Matt Teichman:
Nic Koziolek, thanks so much for coming back.

Nic Koziolek:
Thanks for having me again.

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