Barry C. Smith

Self-knowledge is the focus of considerable attention from philosophers: Knowing Our Own Minds gives a much-needed overview of current work on the subject, bringing together new essays by leading figures. Knowledge of one's own sensations, desires, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, and other attitudes is characteristically different from other kinds of knowledge: it has greater immediacy, authority, and salience. The contributors examine philosophical questions raised by the distinctive character of self-knowledge, relating it to knowledge of other minds, to rationality and agency, externalist theories of psychological content, and knowledge of language. Together these original, stimulating, and closely interlinked essays demonstrate the special relevance of self-knowledge to a broad range of issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.

Barry C. Smith: Quine and Chomsky on the Ins and Outs of Language: W.V.O. Quine's thinking has had a profound and lasting influence on the philosophy of language despite the fact that he remained firmly at odds with the science of linguistics for over thirty years. His rejection of the cognitive revolution ushered in by Noam Chomsky's work on language was rooted in a deeply held philosophical conviction that language was a publicly observable medium. However, Quine's advocacy of naturalized epistemology should have inclined him to defer to advances in empirical linguistics due to generative grammar. Chomsky's review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior provided a devastating critique of behaviorism in the study of language and led to a subsequent mentalism about linguistic phenomena. But Quine did not revise his view about the proper way to study language, or his attendant view about the nature of language. His reasons for resisting Chomsky's position are worth reconsidering since they are in the background to many philosophers' views about the nature of language. The question addressed here is whether the dispute between Quine and Chomsky was a purely philosophical one, or whether it could have been resolved had greater attention been paid to the empirical facts.

The critic Cyril Connolly once pointed out that diarists don’t make novelists. He went on to describe the problem for the would-be writer. “Writing for oneself: no public. Writing for others: no privacy” (Cyril Connolly, Journal). This paper addresses Connolly's worry about the public ad private: how can we reconcile the inner and conscious dimension of speech with its outer and public dimension? For if what people mean by their words involves, or consists in, what they have in mind when they speak then how can what someone has in mind — the meaning she attaches to her words — be at the same time publicly accessible to others on the basis of her behaviour? The issue is whether there is a notion of the linguistic meaning of an expression that can do justice to both speakers’ inner experience of comprehension and to what is outwardly available in their public practice.

Long-standing neglect of the chemical senses in the philosophy of perception is due, mostly, to their being regarded as ‘lower’ senses. Smell, taste, and chemically irritated touch are thought to produce mere bodily sensations. However, empirically informed theories of perception can show how these senses lead to perception of objective properties, and why they cannot be treated as special cases of perception modelled on vision. The senses of taste, touch, and smell also combine to create unified perceptions of flavour. The nature of these multimodal experiences and the character of our awareness of them puts pressure on the traditional idea that each episode of perception goes one or other of the five senses. Thus, the chemical senses, far from being peripheral to the concerns of the philosophy of perception, may hold important clues to the multisensory nature of perception in general.

Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have provided a great deal of evidence showing that perceptual experiences are mostly multimodal. As perceivers, we don’t usually recognize them as such. We think of the experiences we are having as either visual, or auditory or tactile, not realising that they often arise from the fusion of different sensory inputs. The experience of tasting something is one such case. What we call ‘taste’ is the result of the multisensory integration of touch taste and smell. These unified flavour experiences provide a challenge when trying to reconcile the underlying processing story with the conscious experience of subjects, but they also challenge assumptions about our access to our own experiences and whether how we conceive of those experiences plays any in role in accounting for their ultimate nature.