Self-knowledge as a Result of the Embodied and Social Cognition

摘要

The claim that a cognizer needs to act with the environment to gain knowledge about the world istrivial. No more does the claim sound trivial than when it is said that the cognizer1also needs tointeract with the environment to know himself, i.e., to gain self-knowledge (SK), defined generallyas the subject’s knowledge of his mental states, such as feeling, beliefs, or desires (cf. Peacocke, 1999).But why should the cognizer interact with the external world to know the content of his states ifthey are given to him directly by introspection? In this paper, I support the thesis that to meet therequirements put on SK as knowledge (i.e., as justified, true belief), it must be both embodied andsocial. Otherwise, the subject has no tool to correct his false beliefs about himself since he is simplyunaware that they are false. The vision of such a self-blind subject seems not quite optimistic; hence,in this article, I would like to investigate certain solutions which could help in the argumentationagainst such vision.