ABSTRACT
Long before self-knowledge about one’s present mental states became a widely studied topic in the analytic tradition, Wilfrid Sellars developed an elaborate account of the particular self-knowledge that we seem to have with regard to our own present thoughts (i.e., occurrent mental states with conceptual content). I reconstruct Sellars’s theory of such self-knowledge (Section 1) and explore connections with more recent work on the topic. I argue that Sellars’s account undermines Shoemaker’s and Burge’s influential arguments against “perceptual” accounts of self-knowledge (Section 2), and I discuss whether Sellars’s position is apt to give a plausible account of the relation between self-knowledge and phenomenal consciousness (Section 3).
