Feeling Outwards

The primary claim of Feeling Outwards is that self-knowledge—namely, knowledge of our own mental states, including our beliefs, emotions, desires, and even pain—is usually transparent. That is, it is gained by attending outwardly, rather than by introspecting. While this idea is not new per se, unlike most extant approaches, upon which this idea builds, Lena Lucaj argues that an adequate account can and must be extended to include all mental states, including those we might ordinarily consider phenomenological. The intuitive appeal of the so-called transparency view of self-knowledge, especially in its doxastic aspects, is immense. For, when asked what I believe, it seems entirely natural to attend to and then articulate the content of my beliefs. But what about mental states and attitudes other than our beliefs, namely emotions, desires, and sensations? Lucaj claims that we must ‘look outwards’ to come to know our ‘feelings’. This idea will seem prima facie counterintuitive because phenomenal states are characteristically knowable in virtue of the ways in which they feel to us. And, in the face of dubiety concerning the scope of the longstanding transparency view, many philosophers have accepted that we must know of our phenomenal states (especially our sensations) differently, i.e., not transparently. This leaves open what it is that renders special this ‘other’ kind of self-knowledge. In Feeling Outwards, Lucaj takes a different route. She claims that an adequate account of transparent self-knowledge should encompass an expanded scope. Central to Lucaj’s extension of the transparency view is her claim that we can know of the phenomenology of our occurrent mental states in a way that neither reduces their phenomenal character to their representational content nor implies an inward glance at their qualitative, non-intentional properties.