M. A. Parks

The author developed the system of dog training detailed in this book after training many dogs, mostly rottweilers, some of them service and emotional support animals. Some of the dogs trained have visited all 48 contiguous states, assisted with teaching classes, and attended events at nightclubs and weddings. The author would like to share the information they’ve learned through their years working with their many beloved canine companions (years also spent studying philosophy!). Most importantly, the author hopes to share the important role each dog handler plays in training their dog to be ‘good’: almost inevitably, the human must change their own behavior before anything else.

The present paper will be primarily concerned with criticizing the defense of cognitive phenomenology presented by David Pitt’s (2011) self knowledge argument, focusing on his response to Joseph Levine (2011). In this essay, I argue that Pitt’s self-knowledge argument appears to presuppose that a person makes voluntary judgments about their beliefs on the basis of recognition of distinctive phenomenal states, the way we recognize what we see, hear, or smell. However, many of those who reject the existence of cognitive phenomenology (e.g., those who endorse Non-Phenomenal Functional Representationalism) would deny this assumption. Thus, I argue Pitt’s self-knowledge arguments do not seem to be as general as may have been intended, as only a relatively narrow audience who already endorse Pitt’s controversial assumptions will find the arguments convincing. However, while Pitt is unable to argue decisively that there exists a distinctive cognitive phenomenology, the same might be said of Levine’s argument that no cognitive phenomenology is required to explain how a person comes to have knowledge of her thoughts. I attempt to offer a defense of Levine’s account of self-knowledge of one’s thoughts, but I ultimately suggest that the literature surrounding the self-knowledge argument for cognitive phenomenology appears to collapse into an argumentative impasse, as both sides appear to rely on controversial assumptions that their opponents take to be false. In the last section of this essay, I discuss the implications of these conclusions.