OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE INTERNAL WORLD

Lines of Thought
Short philosophical books General editors: Peter Ludlow and Scott Sturgeon Published in
association with the Aristotelian Society
Hume Variations Jerry A. Fodor
Perfectionism and the Common Good: Themes in the Philosophy of T. H. Green David O. Brink
Moral Fictionalism Mark Eli Kalderon
Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley
Thought and Reality Michael Dummett
Our Knowledge of the Internal World Robert C. Stalnaker
OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE INTERNAL
WORLD
ROBERT C. STALNAKER
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi 1. Starting in the Middle 1 2. Epistemic Possibilities and the Knowledge Argument
24 3. Locating Ourselves in the World 47 3A. Notes on Models of Self-Locating Belief 69 4. Phenomenal
and Epistemic Indistinguishability 75 5. Acquaintance and Essence 94 6. Knowing What One is Thinking
112 7. After the Fall 132
References 139 Index 145
Acknowledgements
The ideas developed in this book first took shape, in overly compressed form, in the Whitehead Lectures,
given in the spring of 2004 at Harvard University. I am grateful to the Philosophy Department at Harvard
for that opportunity. The invitation to give the John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford in the
spring of 2007 gave me the stimulus to develop the ideas in more detail, and I thank the philosophers at
Oxford, both for the invitation, and for their hospitality during my term there. I was fortunate to give these
lectures at a time when philosophy at Oxford is particularly lively, and I benefited from discussion both
with the faculty and with an excellent group of graduate students, including Brian Ball, Michael
Blome-Tillmann, John Hawthorne, Maria Lasonen-Aarnia, Ofra Magidor, Daniel Morgan, Simon
Saunders, Nick Shea, Ralph Wedgwood, and Tim Williamson.
Philosophy at MIT is also particularly lively these days, and we too are blessed with excellent graduate
students whose comments and questions have helped me to sharpen and clarify my ideas and arguments.
Discussion and correspondence with Rachael Briggs, Sarah Moss, Dilip Ninan and Seth Yalcin about
self-locating atti- tudes were particularly helpful. Suggestions from Robert Fogelin, Agustin Rayo and
Scott Sturgeon each helped me to see things I had missed, and led to what I hope are improvements.
My colleague Alex Byrne read a draft of the entire manuscript and gave me incisive comments on
every chapter that were extremely helpful in the final revision.
 Thanks, once again, to my editor, Peter Momtchiloff for his advice and support. It is a pleasure to work
with him, and with the staff at Oxford Univesity Press.
Finally, thanks to Heather Logue for suggestions and corrections at the last stage of the editorial
process, and for preparing the index.
Cambridge, MA December 2007
Acknowledgements ∼ vii
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 1 Starting in the Middle
Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle.
W. V. Quine1
The Cartesian picture of the mind, and of the world, was under attack from a variety of directions
throughout most of the last century. We were taught to do without private objects, and private languages,
the myth of the given, the ghost in the machine, the Cartesian theater, things present to the mind. We
became materi- alists, or at least functionalists. We naturalized our epistemol- ogy: instead of trying to
build a foundation from the materials we found in our internal worlds, we were advised to start in the
middle of things, to observe how people in fact went about justifying their beliefs, and to explain their
knowledge in terms of the way they interact with the things in the world that we, as theorists, find there.
But the Cartesian beast is a hydra-headed creature that refuses to be slain, and that continues to color our
philosophical pictures and projects. Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine, Sellars, Davidson (not to mention
Heidegger) may have cut off a few Cartesian heads, but they keep growing back. Descartes is not the
bogeyman
1 Quine (1960), 4.