文档介绍：THE RELEVANCE OF
DISCRIMINATORY
KNOWLEDGE OF
CONTENT1
BY
SANFORD C. GOLDBERG
Abstract: Those interested in securing patibility of anti-individualism
and introspective knowledge of content (henceforth ‘compatibilists’) typically
make a distinction between knowledge of content proper (KC) and discrim-
inatory knowledge of content (DKC). Following Falvey and Owens (1994),
patibilists allow that anti-individualism is patible with intro-
spective DKC, but maintain that heless anti-individualism patible
with introspective KC. Though I have raised doubts about patibility
of anti-individualism and introspective KC elsewhere (Goldberg, 1997 and
ing), here my aim is to suggest the philosophical relevance of DKC
itself. My thesis is that there are cases in which a thinker’s failing to have DKC
will affect the justification which she takes herself to have in drawing various
inferences in the course of her reasoning, and so will affect that reasoning itself.
After presenting illustrative examples and suggesting why anti-individualists
themselves ought to acknowledge this point, I suggest that the examples indi-
cate further work for anti-individualists: formulating what it takes to have
DKC, and substantiating the view (widely held by anti-individualists) that anti-
individualism’s implication that we (often) lack such knowledge is not to be
taken as an important weakness of anti-individualism itself.
1. Background
Anti-individualism is the thesis that some contents cannot be individuated
in terms of properties of the individual considered in isolation from her
social and physical environment. The doctrine of authoritative self-knowl-
edge of content is the view that, for any thinker S and occurrent thought
that p, S has introspective knowledge of the content of her thought that
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 80 (1999) 136–156 0031–5621/99/0200–0000
© 1999 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Publi