The Cognitive Science of Self-Awareness

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The goal of the project is to develop a new psychological model of our access to our own propositional attitudes (our beliefs, desires, intentions, judgments, decisions, supposings, and the rest), integrating a wide range of results from across cognitive science. According to this model, our knowledge of our own attitudes is always interpretative, and is no different in kind from the access that we have to the attitudes of other people. (The model allows, however, that our access to our own experiences and feelings is more direct.) The main result of this research will be an interdisciplinary book. Philosophers have traditionally assumed that we have immediate, non-inferential, ?introspective? access to our own propositional attitudes, and most ordinary folk agree. Even most cognitive scientists believe that this traditional model is partially correct. Yet there is extensive evidence from different areas of cognitive science that people will often confabulate attributions of attitudes to themselves while remaining under the impression that they are introspecting. There is also plenty of scientific data of other sorts that challenges the traditional account of the character of our self-knowledge. These forms of evidence will be surveyed and evaluated, and the proposed model will be developed, compared with a range of relevant alternatives, and defended in the light of the evidence. The project will marshal a wide array of scientific evidence in support of a clearly delineated and bold hypothesis, which is radically in conflict with common sense and with the views of virtually all philosophers (alive or dead). Since few cognitive scientists have appreciated the theoretical significance and revolutionary implications of their own discoveries, the project will also make an important contribution to cognitive science.