ABSTRACT

I These lectures have been organized around the question of whether there is any good sense in which our introspective access to our own mental states is a kind of perception, something that can appropriately be called “inner sense.” In my first lecture I distinguished two versions of the perception model of introspection, based on two different stereotypes of sense-perception. One of these, based primarily on the case of vision, is what I called the object-perceptual model-it takes perception to be in the first instance a re­ lation to objects and only secondarily a relation to facts. I argued in my first lecture that introspection does not have non-factual objects of the sort re­ quired to make this model applicable. The other, which does not require per­ ception to have non-factual objects, I called the broad perceptual model; its key tenet is that the existence of the objects of perception, whether they be factual or non-factual, is independent both of their being perceived and of there being the possibility of their being perceived. The view that introspec­ tion conforms to this was my target in my second lecture, where I argued that it is of the essence of various kinds of mental states that they are intro­ spectively accessible.