Self-Knowing Animals: a constitutivist account of self-knowledge for rational minds

This paper articulates and defends a constitutivist account of self-knowledge for rational minds. It is a built-in feature of such states in rational human animals that they are always potentially self-conscious and so potentially self-knowable in explicit reflective consciousness. But independently of whether one explicitly reflects on some mental state or other, such states are always implicitly or unreflectively known. For a rational mind to undergo a mental state is to undergo an essentially knowable condition, because rational minds are self-consciously constituted. In Section 2, I explicate constitutivism by laying out its main philosophical commitments. In Section 3, I elaborate the crucial role of implicit self-knowledge in a constitutive account (as a ‘built-in’ feature of mental states) by critically engaging with Matthew Boyle’s recent account of reflective self-knowledge and pre-reflective self-awareness. In Section 4, I address the worry that a constitutivist account of self-knowledge must have a restricted scope because it cannot explain knowledge of phenomenal states.