Matthew Kinakin

Say you undergo an ankle sprain, or you take a bite of your favourite dessert. In the ankle case, you’re prompted to take a painkiller to eliminate the painfulness. In the dessert case, you’re prompted to continue eating the dessert to get more pleasure. These sorts of experience-directed actions suggest three things. First, that experiences have affective qualities (e.g. unpleasantness and pleasantness). Second, that affective experiences are reason-providing. Third, that we are motivated to end or continue our affective experiences. The standard and currently dominant view of those three facts says that affect, its reason-giving force, and motivationality consists in a frustrated or satisfied second-order desire for the phenomenal quality of your experience (not) to occur. However, there is a highly popular view of the nature of phenomenal character, namely strong representationalism, which is incompatible with such second-order desire (SOD) explanations. I argue that SOD theorists ought to embrace object-involving desires, i.e. desires that constitutively involve the objects they are about. Furthermore, such desires require direct awareness of their objects, i.e. experiences. But representationalists typically embrace what is called ‘the transparency of experience’, the claim that experiences (and the features thereof) cannot be the objects of direct awareness. Hence, representationalists can’t be desire theorists, and desire theorists can’t be representationalists.

Painful pains feel bad. One popular account of the nature of painfulness explains this feeling—i.e. its phenomenal character—in virtue of intentional content. Moreover, painful pains not only feel bad, but intuitively are bad. Hence, why we take painkillers. I argue that intentionalism about painfulness is incompatible with the sort of painkiller- taking behaviour characteristic of being in painful pain. In particular, if you’re an intentionalist, then you can’t invoke four highly plausible motivational views. That leaves intentionalism with the following motivational view: you are motivated to take a painkiller solely in virtue of the intrinsically motivating content of a second-order evaluative belief that pain is bad. I further argue that intentionalists can’t make epistemic sense of such a belief. I consider and reject a recent attempt by Bain (2017) to explain how subjects could know their pains are bad solely in virtue of knowing a conceptual truth about the kind of experience they are having. I end by drawing out some metaethical implications, none of which help the intentionalist.

This thesis comprises three distinct and substantial essays concerning motivation, normativity, and self-knowledge. Generally speaking, this thesis focuses on how agents can access particular facts about themselves—e.g., why they acted the way they acted or that a particular experience is bad-for-them. In particular, I show how the motivational and normative nature of certain mental states like our motivating reasons and unpleasant pains interact in unanticipated ways with foundational questions about the nature of phenomenal consciousness—“what it is like” to undergo this or that experience—with questions of self-knowledge—how we are aware of, and come to know, the mental states we’re in—and with questions concerning moral knowledge—how we come to know moral facts. Take, for instance, the action of taking a painkiller or the formation of a new belief. If I asked you why you took a painkiller or why you formed the belief, you would be able to, in an immediate and direct sense, know why you did those things. Not only do you know what your reasons are, but you seem to know your reasons in a special way, again, in a sense that is immediate and direct. Furthermore, some of our mental states seem to be bad states to be in. Take, again, your unpleasant pain: you want to end it because it’s bad. So, it seems, then, that you also have knowledge of the badness of your unpleasant pain. But these claims are not without controversy. For some deny that we know our own reasons in a special way distinct from how we know of other’s reasons. The first aim of this thesis is to critically assess a recent attempt to defend the claim that we do have some special, direct, and immediate knowledge of our reasons. But insofar as we construe the nature of why we believe and do things—i.e., our reasons—in a specific way, I argue that defending that picture likely fails. Furthermore, turning back to our phenomenal experiences, it turns out that once we understand the nature of our phenomenal experiences—e.g., unpleasant pains—along particular representationalist lines, explaining the motivational and normative facts implicit in our painkiller-taking action becomes increasingly implausible. The second aim of the thesis argues that insofar as we are concerned with accommodating such motivational and normative facts, we ought to abandon a particular brand of representationalism about phenomenal consciousness. And lastly, I argue that once we fully appreciate the normative profile of a certain set of our mental states—e.g., the badness of unpleasant pain and the wrongness of an intention to lie—we are in a position to develop a novel account of moral knowledge. Specifically, I motivate taking seriously the idea that we can introspect normative facts.